While I haven’t physically seen this exhibition – according to Rijksmuseum “the Netherlands’ first major survey exhibition of American photography… the first comprehensive survey of American photography in Europe … reflect[ing] the rich and multifaceted history of photography in the United States. The exhibition presents the country as seen through the eyes of American photographers, and shows how the medium has permeated every aspect of our lives: in art, news, advertising and everyday life” – you can glean a lot about an exhibition from the installation photographs.
The feeling I get from the installation photographs is of a particularly meagre offering – gallery halls with minimal photographs, huge empty spaces (just look at the installation photograph Curio box made of cigarette packets with portraits of roommates, late 1960s below) – and to then consider this is supposed to be “the first comprehensive survey of American photography in Europe” and reflect the large photographic holdings of the Rijksmuseum. Really? You wouldn’t really know it from looking at “the show”.
Perhaps the problem stems from the rationale of the exhibition:
“There is no hierarchy to the selection. A sequence of rooms present numerous fields – portraiture, landscape, advertising work, art photography – like chapters in a novel. “We tried to find surprising images and things we’ve never seen before,” says Boom. The result is a broad mix, shaped with co-curator Hans Rooseboom, of anonymous photography, commercial work, news coverage, medical prints and propaganda, presented in tandem with masterpieces such as Robert Frank’s enigmatic picture of a woman watching a New Jersey parade in 1955, her face partially obscured by an unfurled Stars and Stripes.”1 (see below)
The phrase “a broad mix” says it all: a mishmash of anonymous photography, commercial work, fine art photography, the political power of photography, photographs on racism, war, etc., … taking on too much in one exhibition (the American landscape is largely absent from the walls), proclaiming to be a comprehensive survey of American photography. An impossible task.
“The exhibition has deliberately departed from a “top 100” approach, Rooseboom [one of the curators] adds, stating “that would have been too easy”.”2
Easy to say (and move away from) but not easy to do…
What I feel is lacking in this subjective selection (all exhibitions are subjective) is the focused “energy” present in American photography radiating from the wall – the energy that documents and imagines the growth of a nation and the passion of the artists that capture that energy.
Where is, for example, the passion of Sally Mann’s photographs of the American South, the New York buildings of Berenice Abbott, George Dureau’s portraits of friends and amputees in New Orleans, the narrative stories of Duane Michals or the darkness / otherness that has always been present from the very start in American photography. In the selection in the posting, the photographs of Robert Frank (a foreigner, whose photographs of America were reviled when they were first published) and Nan Goldin (photographs of counter culture America) come closest to this alternate perspective, both outsiders from the main stream point of view.
Thus, while there are some interesting photographs in the exhibition it’s all too ho hum for me, perhaps a “vapour” of something almost brought into consciousness.
Many thankx to the Rijksmuseum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Installation view of the exhibition American Photography at Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam showing at right photographs by Robert Frank (below) Photo: Rijksmuseum/Olivier Middendorp
Robert Frank (Swiss, 1924-2019) City fathers – Hoboken, New Jersey 1955 Gelatin silver print
Robert Frank (Swiss, 1924-2019) Parade – Hoboken, New Jersey 1955 Gelatin silver print
Robert Frank (Swiss, 1924-2019) U.S. 91, Leaving Blackfoot, Idaho 1956 Gelatin silver print
Robert Frank (Swiss, 1924-2019) New York City 1955 Gelatin silver print
Rijksmuseum moves you to The American Dream. To the real American. To unexpected recognition. The Rijksmuseum is staging the Netherlands’ first major survey exhibition of American photography.
The more than 200 works on display in American Photography reflect the rich and multifaceted history of photography in the United States. The exhibition presents the country as seen through the eyes of American photographers, and shows how the medium has permeated every aspect of our lives: in art, news, advertising and everyday life.
Over the past decades the Rijksmuseum has been assembling a collection of American photographic work. This is the first time we are exhibiting photographs from the collection, alongside loaned works from American, Dutch and other European collections. This show includes iconic photographs by the likes of Sally Mann, Robert Frank, Lisette Model, Nan Goldin, Richard Avedon, Andy Warhol, Paul Strand, Diane Arbus and James Van Der Zee, as well as surprising images by unknown and anonymous photographers.
Text from the Rijksmuseum website
Installation view of the exhibition American Photography at Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam showing in the bottom image at left, Sally Mann’s Jessie #34 (2004, below); at second left, Chuck Close’s Phil [Photo Maquette of Philip Glass] (1969, below); and at third right, László Moholy-Nagy’s Parking lot in Chicago, 1938 (1938, below) Photo: Rijksmuseum/Olivier Middendorp
Sally Mann (American, b. 1951) Jessie #34 2004 Gelatin Silver enlargement print from 8 x 10 in. collodion wet-plate negative, with Soluvar matte varnish mixed with diatomaceous earth
László Moholy-Nagy (Hungarian, 1895-1946) Parking lot in Chicago, 1938 1938 Gelatin silver photograph 23.8 × 33.8cm
Installation view of the exhibition American Photography at Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam showing the work of Nan Goldin from The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (below) Photo: Rijksmuseum/Olivier Middendorp
Nan Goldin (American, b. 1953) Cookie with Me After Being Hit at the SPE Conference, Baltimore, MD, 1986 1986
Nan Goldin (American, b. 1953) Cookie and Vittorio’s Wedding: The Ring, NYC, 1986 1986
Nan Goldin (American, b. 1953) Cookie in the Bathroom at Hawaii 5.0, NYC, 1986 1986
The Rijksmuseum presents the first comprehensive survey of American photography in Europe. With more than 200 works spanning three centuries, American Photography will be an exploration of the rich and multifaceted history of photography in the United States, showing how the medium has permeated every aspect of our lives: in art, news, advertising and everyday life.
Over the past decade, the Rijksmuseum has built an extensive collection of American Photography. This exhibition is the first ever presentation of Rijksmuseum’s collection, which will be shown together with loans from over 30 collections in the United States, the Netherlands and other European countries. Works by icons including Sally Mann, Robert Frank, Lisette Model, Nan Goldin, Richard Avedon, Andy Warhol, Paul Strand, Diane Arbus and James Van Der Zee will be on view alongside eye-opening photographs by unknown and anonymous photographers.
The exhibition is possible by Rijksmuseum’s major partnership with Baker McKenzie. American Photography runs from 7 February to 9 June 2025. Concurrently with American Photography, Carrie Mae Weems’s 2021 series Painting the Town will be on show in the Rijksmuseum’s photography gallery.
American Photography will give picture of the country through the eyes of American photographers, showing the country in all its complexity. The exhibition takes themes such as the American dream, landscapes and portraiture to trace how photographers increasingly reflected on changes and events in their country. A major topic of the show is photography’s evolution as an art form, from 19th-century daguerreotypes of frost flowers on a window to the work of Paul Strand, Charles Sheeler, Sally Mann, Irving Penn, Dawoud Bey and Sarah Sense. Another important theme is how photography has grown to be a part of everyday life, which is demonstrated by family portraits, advertisements, postcards, gramophone record covers and more.
Press release from Rijksmuseum
Installation view of the exhibition American Photography at Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam showing in the bottom photograph at right, Jocelyn Lee’s Julia in Greenery (2005, below) Photo: Rijksmuseum/Olivier Middendorp
Jocelyn Lee (American, b. 1962) Julia in Greenery 2005 Archival Pigment Print 20 × 24 in | 50.8 × 61cm
Installation view of the exhibition American Photography at Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam showing in the display case, Curio box made of cigarette packets with portraits of roommates, late 1960s (below) Photo: Rijksmuseum/Olivier Middendorp
Curio box made of cigarette packets with portraits of roommates, late 1960s Wood, handwoven cigarette packets, gelatin silver prints 140 x 110 x 195 mm Collection of Daile Kaplan, Pop Photographica, New York Photo: Andy Romer Photography, New York
Installation view of the exhibition American Photography at Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam showing at left, Diane Arbus’ A young man in curlers at home on West 20th St., N.Y.C. 1966 (1966, below); and at second left, Ming Smith’s America Seen Through Stars and Stripes, New York City (1976, below) Photo: Rijksmuseum/Olivier Middendorp
Diane Arbus (American, 1923-1971) A young man in curlers at home on West 20th St., N.Y.C. 1966 1966 Gelatin silver print
Ming Smith (American, b. 1951) America Seen Through Stars and Stripes, New York City 1976 Gelatin silver print 318 x 470 mm Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond (VA) Adolph D. and Wiliams C. Williams Fund
In the post-war years, mass immigration to the US brought new ways of thinking. the US took over from Europe as a cultural trendsetter, and photography was eventually accepted as an art form. Playful approaches to photography emerged, moving beyond documenting people and places to provoking emotion and inviting deep questions. Ming Smith’s America Seen Through Stars and Stripes (1976), created on the bicentenary of the Declaration of Independence, turns again to the flag inviting America to reflect on its history. By placing a figure in mirrored sunglasses in front of a shop window, she creates a disorientating mesh of reflective surfaces. The grid structure suggests incarceration but – in combination with the round glasses and the stars on the flag – also creates an abstract composition reminiscent of modern art. “She’s a careful observer, playing with all these layers in the image,” says Boom.
Smith explores the artistic potential of photography, experimenting with double-exposure, shutter speed and collage. In one version of this image, she paints on bold red stripes, altering this snapshot of the US with marks that resemble blood or flames. Smith’s work builds on the civil rights movement that preceded it and features activists such as James Baldwin and Alvin Ailey. She was the first woman to join the African-American photography collective the Kamoinge Workshop and the first black woman to have her work acquired by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Yet her demographic was largely overlooked by the art world. “I worked to capture black culture, the richness, the love. That was my incentive,” she told the Financial Times in 2019. “It wasn’t like I was going to make money from it, or fame – not even love, because there were no shows.”
Henry Fitz Jnr (American, 1808-1863) Self-portrait 1840 Daguerreotype Smithsonian National Museum of American History, Washington (DC)
In 1840, using a self-made copper plate, Henry Fitz Jnr produced one of the world’s first selfies, his eyes gently closed to prevent any blinking from spoiling the result. In creating this striking blue image, he was doing more than record his appearance; he was also documenting America’s first essays into an art form that would tell its story in radical new ways.
Thomas Martin Easterly (American, 1809-1882) Chief Keokuk (Watchful Fox) 1847 Daguerreotype Missouri History Museum
Anonymous photographer View of a wooden house or barn with a man and a woman in front c. 1870-1875 Tintype 164 x 215 mm Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
A 19th-Century tintype (an image made on a sheet of metal) featuring a man and woman in front of a rustic barn is a case in point. The image was probably sold on the spot by a travelling tin typist “for a modest price”, explains Rooseboom. “Many people had just arrived and were living in the countryside, no big city nearby, so this was the only possibility of having your portrait taken.” The man stands proud, looking at the camera, but the woman’s head is bowed and she is looking away. “Sometimes you can sense that people were simply not used to being photographed,” says Rooseboom. “Nowadays, we’ve seen in magazines and movies how to pose elegantly.” This may be the only time in their whole life that they would be photographed, and the result, adds Boom, “would hang on the wall of the house where they lived forever”.
Detroit Photographic Company Home of Rip Van Nd Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
Bertha E. Jaques (American, 1863-1941) Tree – in Governor Gleghorn’s Place Honolulu 1908 Cyanotype 248 x 152 mm Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, purchased with the support of Baker McKenzie
Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) (photographer) (mentioned on object) A free country? This is America … Keep it Free! Nd Sheldon-Claire Company
United News Company (publisher) 12,000 Employees of the Ford Motor Company, Detroit, Mich. 1913 Postcard, relief halftone and colour lithography 88 × 137 mm Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
… a 1913 postcard featuring 12,000 employees of the Ford Motor Company in Detroit may have been the “most expensive picture that was ever taken”, quipped a newspaper at the time, as the factory had to shut down for two hours to assemble the staff. The image, the company boasted, was “the largest specially posed group picture ever made” and illustrates a turning point where industry saw the value in investing large sums in promotional photography. Taken in the year when Ford introduced America’s first moving assembly line and the US had become the world’s largest economy, the photograph also depicts the mass production that would shape the country.
The image’s reappearance in Ford marketing also made it an early example of photoshopping. While the same tinted faces swarmed in the foreground, the number of employees cited in the caption increased exponentially, and a building to the left was cropped out in one version and acquired extra floors in another. “Apparently, many photographers and their publishers had no qualms about abandoning their medium’s potential for realism,” write Boom and Rooseboom in the exhibition catalogue.
Schadde Brothers Studio Display, sample or trade catalogue photograph for sweet manufacturer Brandle & Smith Co., c. 1915 Gelatin silver print with applied colour 288 x 240 mm Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
Charles Sheeler (American, 1883-1965) Nude #3 1918-1919 Gelatin silver print 127 × 171 mm Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
… the New York portrait photographer James Van Der Zee was also embellishing his work, drawing jewellery on to his subjects and retouching their faces to erase dark lines and wrinkles. “I put my heart and soul into them and tried to see that every picture was better looking than the person,” he said. As a black photographer working from his Harlem studio at the height of the Harlem Renaissance, his work records a period when black migrants fleeing the segregationist South were forging a new life for themselves in the urban North. For the first time, African Americans and other minority groups could be photographed by someone inside their community, and represented in a way that uplifted them. Van Der Zee’s Portrait of an Unknown Man (1938), for example, is carefully posed to suggest confidence. The outfit is elegant and the buttonhole daisy adds a dandyish flourish. It’s an image that reflects the aspirations and upward mobility of African-American people and the pride Van Der Zee had in his culture.
Hy Hirsh (American, 1911-1961) Untitled (abstraction) c. 1950 Chromogenic print, 251 x 200 mm Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam Purchased with the support of Baker McKenzie
Anonymous photographer Family Standing beside their Car c. 1957-1960 Chromogenic print (Kodak Instamatic) 76 x 76 mm Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
It is the Chinese-American community that is the focus of the work of Irene Poon, who grew up in San Francisco’s Chinatown, where her parents, first-generation immigrants from Guanghzou, ran a herbalist store. A 1965 image features Poon’s sister Virginia in a local sweet shop, crowded out by Hershey’s and Nestlé bars. The letters “Nest” peep out from the densely packed shelves, reinforcing a sense that she is enclosed by this mass of graphic lettering. Beside her head a “Look” bar competes for attention, hinting at that other ever-expanding role for American photography: advertising − a sector in which the US was a forerunner. “Many of the 20th-Century artists started in advertising. It’s part of art history,” Boom says. “This whole field already existed, and the arts, and photography as an art form, draws from it.”
Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie (American, b. 1954) This is not a commercial, this is my homeland 1998 Platinum lambda print 476 x 609 mm Courtesy of the artist
The political power of photography is also seen in the work of Native American (Seminole-Muscogee-Navajo) photographer Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie who uses the camera to correct misconceptions about Indigenous populations and to offer an alternative viewpoint on US history. “No longer is the camera held by an outsider looking in, the camera is held with brown hands opening familiar worlds,” she writes in a 1993 essay. “We document ourselves with a humanising eye, we create new visions with ease, and we can turn the camera and show how we see you.”
Tsinhnahjinnie’s captioning of a touristic image of Monument Valley, Arizona with This is not a commercial, this is my homeland highlights the commodification of American land, and uses what she calls “photographic sovereignty” to take us back to the very beginning and reclaim and retell the story of America. In combination with works such as Bryan Schutmaat’s Tonopah, Nevada (2012), which documents mining’s effect on the landscape of the American West, images like Tsinhnahjinnie’s tell a story of a beautiful land that means different things to different people: financial gain, security or a sacred space.
Bryan Schutmaat (American, b. 1983) Tonopah, Nevada 2012 Inkjet print 1017 x 1277 mm (printed 2021) Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam Purchased with the support of Baker McKenzie
John Vachon (American, 1914-1975) Untitled photo [possibly related to Farms of Farm Security Administration clients, Guilford and Beaufort Counties, North Carolina, April 1938] 1938 Negative
Please note: photograph not in the exhibition
Contested ground
This exhibition traces, through the development of documentary photography, the interweaving strands that make up the fluidity of identity, race and culture that is the American South, addressing through a variety of photographic processes and styles across a large time period the concerns that have engaged human beings in this area for decades and now centuries: freedom, equality, liberty, nation, religion and economic subjugation. As the introductory panel says, “A Long Arc” demonstrates “how Southern photography has shaped American concepts of race, place, and history.”
Gregory Harris, curator of photography at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, observes that, “one of the main themes of the exhibition is how race is articulated and how racial hierarchies and racial stereotypes are reinforced through photographs across the history of photography.” “A Long Arc: Photography and the American South since 1845″ shields viewers from nothing, presenting the South as a chilling microcosm of U.S. culture. The region’s history of violence, disenfranchisement and political strife are not censored in the exhibit.”
Periods and themes addressed in the exhibition include but are not limited to the Antebellum South, abolition of slavery, American Civil War, Reconstruction era, Jim Crow era, Farm Security Administration, Southern Gothic, Civil Rights Movement and, “in the most modern section, images dive into Southern femininity, the growing acceptance of interracial relationships in the Deep South and the emergence of a thriving LGBTQIA+ culture.”
This is such a complex and contested field to address in one photographic survey exhibition but it seems to me an admirable way to interrogate the ongoing histories and injustices of the American South. As my friend and fellow photographer Colin Vickery observes, “the sheer variety of images gives a richness of viewing experience that I think goes some way towards illustrating life, in all its complexities and contradictions, of the region.” Well said.
“A Long Arc: Photography and the American South since 1845” succeeds in surveying the South in its most complete form: not as a place that is “backward,” but as a place that has forever been the epicenter of contention and change. Documentary photography thrives in the South because the region has always been ground zero of the social disorder reverberating throughout the nation, a place that seems lost in the past. Modern photographers honor the region’s complicated legacy by accenting even the most idyllic, beautiful scenes with a nod to its brutalistic history. The South is not the South without acknowledgment of the bloodshed on its soil…”1
While I am certainly no American scholar, far from it, to me this opposition of utopian and dystopian seems to reflect the infinite duality of the American psyche: the desire for attainment of money and success (any one can become president, anyone can make good) versus the dark underbelly of a brutal history: puritanical, one nation under god, a nation conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal … except that’s never going to happen, forever and ever amen.
Indeed this richly layered and nuanced exhibition seems to be more fully focused on the dystopic rather than any celebration of American South culture per se and here I am particularly thinking of all the achievements in the areas of arts, literature, food, music – for example the energy of gospel, bluegrass and jazz. Yes, there are poetic photographs in the exhibition but there is little sign of joy or happiness in any of the images.
Margaret Renkl observes that, “The most powerful images capture the beauty and the tenderness and the self-possession of people who are living out their lives mostly invisible to the rest of the world,”2 and the stoicism of these lives, but I have struggled to find but a single photograph that evidences the joy of living among the assembled throng in this posting. Which is why I have included that most singular image at the top of the posting (not in the exhibition) by John Vachon of a Black American smiling and laughing. What a joy!
The Southern landscape can be seen as the repository of memory, history, and trauma but it can also be seen as the repository for families, love, kindness, respect and connection between human beings – not always opposition and conflict. And while the photographs in the exhibition “ask us to contemplate the dark, sublimated aspects of American popular culture, including violence, shame, and fear” they also ask us to share our experiences of who we are across time, race and culture. The photographs are memory containers for (still) living people.
By which I mean
Photographs are containers of, fragments of, memories of, histories of, events – remembrances of events – brought from past into present, informing the future, showing only snippets of the stories of both past and present lives. Parallel to the usual thought that photographs are about death, they are also memory containers for (still) living people.
As we look back into these photographs the people in them look forward to us, and live in us here and now. They expect more from us, to fight still against the further rise of intolerance, racism and right wing fascism, and to grasp that the joys and mysteries of life should be open to all.
Many thankx to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“I have a strong attraction to the American South. People there have a marvellous exterior – wonderful manners, warm friendliness until you touch on things you’re not supposed to touch on. Then you see the hardness beneath the mask of nice manners.”
Elliott Erwitt
“When it comes to the unspeakable facts in the history of America, it’s largely the artists who’ve been willing to show us what others would not.”
“The foundation of this country is built upon speakable tensions – between ideas that we love and hold dear, between liberty, equality, and slavery itself.”
Sarah Lewis
The most powerful images capture the beauty and the tenderness and the self-possession of people who are living out their lives mostly invisible to the rest of the world. Or of the scarred but beautiful landscapes they call home. Or of the ramifications of an unresolved history still unspooling in this history-haunted part of the country. …
The magnificence of a retrospective like this is not just the accounting offered by its historical sweep, but the way it conveys the immense complexity of this region, to inspire a renewed attention to the cruel radiance of what is. Suffering does not always lead to compassion and change, but photographs like these remind us that standing in witness to suffering surely should.
“… no small part of the show’s richness is the allowance it makes for inwardness and mystery. “Southern Gothic,” after all, is no less a part of the region’s cultural baggage than “Lost Cause” or “New South.” Among the most memorable images here, because they’re often the most inscrutable and / or evocative, come from Mann, E.J. Bellocq, Clarence John Laughlin, and Ralph Eugene Meatyard.”
Unidentified photographer Georgian house, with posed African-American family, Norfolk Harbor, Virginia Late 1850s Whole-plate ambrotype Collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg Photo: Steven Paneccasio
Unidentified photographer Young biracial artilleryman Undated Ambrotype High Museum of Art, Atlanta Purchase with funds from the Lucinda Weil Bunnen Fund and the Donald and Marilyn Keough Family
The majority of photographs made during the Civil War were inexpensive, small, portable portraits for soldiers on the field and their families at home. As precious keepsakes, these portraits served as testaments to familial bonds, social relations, economic positions, and political ideologies. In carefully orchestrating their dress, accoutrement, and bearing, sitters signaled their allegiances or staged their transformation from citizen to soldier. The opportunity to reinvent themselves before the camera at times even led to a bit of fakery, as soldiers sometimes gussied themselves up with props and uniforms that did not always fit with their military rank.
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
William Abott Pratt (American born England, 1818, active 1844-1856) View of Main Street, Richmond, Virginia 1847-1851 Half-plate daguerreotype Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Floyd D. and Anne C. Gottwald Fund
One of a handful of known daguerreotypes of the city of Richmond, this view of Main Street looking east toward Church Hill was probably taken from the window of William Pratt’s first “Virginia Daguerriean Gallery,” in the centre of the city’s printing and publishing industry. The distinctive roof of the Richmond Masonic lodge is visible in the distance, as is the three-story City Hotel just beyond the trees to the east. The hotel served as one of the major auction houses for enslaved individuals, as did the firm Pulliam & Davis across the street.
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Take an epic journey through the American South from 1845 to today. In A Long Arc: Photography and the American South since 1845, presented at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, encounterthe everyday lives and ordinary places captured in evocative photos that contemplate the region’s central role in shaping American history and identity and its critical impact on the development of photography. This is the first major exhibition in more than 25 years to explore the full history of photography in and about the South.
A Long Arcexplores the American South’s distinct, evolving, and contradictory character through an examination of photography and how photographers working in the region have reckoned with the South’s fraught history and posed urgent questions about American identity. Organised chronologically, the exhibition traces the South’s shifting identity in more than two hundred photographs made over more than 175 years.
The exhibition’s individual sections delve into the themes of photography before, during, and after the Civil War; documentary photography of the 1930s and ’40s; images of a post-World War II South in economic, racial, and psychic dissonance with the nation; photography as catalyst for change during the civil rights movement; reflective narrative photography of the late 20th century; and contemporary photography examining social, environmental, and economic issues.
A Long Arc presents a richly layered archive that captures the region’s beauty and complexity. Offering a full visual accounting of the South’s role in shaping American history, identity and culture, the exhibition includes photographs by Alexander Gardner, George Barnard, P.H. Polk, Lewis Hine, Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Marion Post Wolcott, Robert Frank, Clarence John Laughlin, Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Bruce Davidson, Danny Lyon, Doris Derby, Ernest Withers, William Eggleston, William Christenberry, Baldwin Lee, Sally Mann, Carrie Mae Weems, Susan Worsham, Carolyn Drake, Sheila Pree-Bright, RaMell Ross, and others.
Text from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts website
Unidentified photographer Woman wearing secession sash c. 1860 Ambrotype High Museum of Art, Atlanta Purchase with funds from the Lucinda Weil Bunnen Fund and the Donald and Marilyn Keough Family
In 1860-61, patriotic fervour (both pro- and anti-secession) was at its height, according to the Creative Cockades website. Women, in particular, wore dresses or other garments festooned with cockades, or they might wear a sash, such as this Southern woman. The reality of a bloody war had not yet set in and many thought the coming conflict would be minimal.
In South Carolina, civilian men and women, and even companies of soldiers, wore palmetto emblems during the Civil War, according to Hinman Auctions.
“Southern cockades were generally all blue, all red, or red and white,” according to Creative Cockades. “Once again, center emblems include stars, military buttons and pictures, but additionally Southern products such as palmetto fronds, pine burs, corn or cotton were used.”
Smith & Vannerson (77 Main St., Richmond, Va) Gilbert Hunt (c. 1780-1863), Virginia freed slave 1861-1863 Salt print on card stock 7 3/8 x 5 1/4 inches print Public domain
Gilbert Hunt was an African-American blacksmith in Richmond who became known in the city for his aid during two fires: the Richmond Theatre fire in 1811 and the Virginia State Penitentiary fire in 1823. Born enslaved in King William County, Hunt trained as a blacksmith in Richmond and remained there most of the rest of his life. After the Richmond Theatre caught fire on December 26, 1811, he ran to the scene and, with the help of Dr. James D. McCaw, helped to rescue as many as a dozen women. He performed a similar feat of courage on August 8, 1823, during the penitentiary fire. Hunt purchased his freedom and in 1829 immigrated to the West African colony of Liberia, where he stayed only eight months. After returning to Richmond, he resumed blacksmithing and served as an outspoken, sometimes-controversial deacon in the First African Baptist Church. In 1848 he helped form the Union Burial Ground Society. In 1859, a Richmond author published a biography of Hunt, largely in the elderly blacksmith’s own words, but portraying him as impoverished and meek, a depiction at odds with the historical record. Hunt died on April 26, 1863, and a notice in the next day’s Richmond Dispatch described him as “a useful and respected resident of Richmond.” He was buried at Phoenix Burying Ground, later Cedarwood Cemetery, and eventually part of Richmond’s Barton Heights Cemeteries.
Dionna Mann. “Gilbert Hunt (ca. 1780-1863),” in Encyclopedia Virginia. Virginia Humanities, 07 December 2020
Gilbert Hunt, a skilled blacksmith from Richmond shown here gripping a hammer, understood the power of photography as a tool for self-creation, especially for the formerly enslaved. Hunt, who was lauded for rescuing numerous people from two blazing fires, one in 1811 and one in 1823, ultimately purchased his freedom for $800 in 1829. Over the next three decades, he led a remarkable life, traveling to Liberia to explore the possibilities for Black resettlement with the American Colonization Society before returning to Richmond and serving as an outspoken pastor and blacksmith. This portrait was commissioned by a benevolent society in Richmond who sold prints to raise funds for the elderly Hunt.
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
McPherson & Oliver, Baton Rouge William D. McPherson (? – October 9, 1867) and J. Oliver (?-?) Peter or The Scourged Back of “Peter” an escaped slave from Louisiana April 2, 1863 Albumen silver print (carte de visite) High Museum of Art, Atlanta Purchase with funds from the Lucinda Weil Bunnen Fund and the Donald and Marilyn Keough Family Public domain
“Overseer Artayou Carrier whipped me. I was two months in bed sore from the whipping. My master come after I was whipped; he discharged the overseer. The very words of poor Peter, taken as he sat for his picture.”
Gordon, a runaway slave seen with severe whipping scars in this haunting carte-de-visite portrait, is one of the many African Americans whose lives Sojourner Truth endeavored to better. Perhaps the most famous of all known Civil War-era portraits of slaves, the photograph dates from March or April 1863 and was made in a camp of Union soldiers along the Mississippi River, where the subject took refuge after escaping his bondage on a nearby Mississippi plantation.
On Saturday, July 4, 1863, this portrait and two others of Gordon appeared as wood engravings in a special Independence Day feature in Harper’s Weekly. McPherson & Oliver’s portrait and Gordon’s narrative in the newspaper were extremely popular, and photography studios throughout the North (including Mathew B. Brady’s) duplicated and sold prints of The Scourged Back. Within months, the carte de visite had secured its place as an early example of the wide dissemination of ideologically abolitionist photographs.
The photograph of “Whipped Peter,” who fled a Louisiana plantation after a savage whipping, was among the most widely circulated images of the 19th century. “Peter barely survived the beating that made his back a map,” writes the scholar Imani Perry in an Aperture monograph that accompanies the exhibit, “and then ran to freedom, barefoot and chased by bloodhounds.”
The raised scars in that photograph were undeniable in a way that other accounts of slavery’s brutality, however powerful, had not been. The image tells the truth about slavery “in a way that even Mrs. [Harriet Beecher] Stowe can not approach,” wrote a journalist of the time, “because it tells the story to the eye.”
During the Civil War, studio photographers produced and disseminated carte de visite portraits, or small format photographs that could be mass produced, of enslaved and emancipated Black individuals to promote abolitionist causes and reinforce support for the Union Army. Some were meant to shock and spur abolitionist outrage, especially among those who may have only heard accounts of cruelty. This portrait was made in a Union camp in the South where a formerly enslaved man named Peter – often misidentified as Gordon – sought refuge after escaping from a plantation. The image of his horrific whipping scars testified to the violence of slavery and contradicted the narrative that slavery was an economic concern rather than a racist institution. After Harper’s Weekly reproduced the image, photography studios throughout the North duplicated and sold prints to raise funds for abolitionist causes.
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Mathew B. Brady Studio (American, active 1844-1873) Slave Pens, Alexandria, VA 1862 Albumen silver print (carte de visite) High Museeum of Art, Atlanta Purchase with funds from the Lucinda Weil Bunnen Fund and the Donald and Marilyn Keough Family
Andrew Joseph Russell (American, 1829-1902) Slave Pen, Alexandria, Virginia 1863 Albumen silver print High Museum of Art Purchased with funds Lucinda Weill Bunnen Fund and the Donald and Marilyn Keogh Family
Better known for his later views commissioned by the Union Pacific Railroad, A. J. Russell, a captain in the 141st New York Infantry Volunteers, was one of the few Civil War photographers who was also a soldier. As a photographer-engineer for the U.S. Military Railroad Con struction Corps, Russell’s duty was to make a historical record of both the technical accomplishments of General Herman Haupt’s engineers and the battlefields and camp sites in Virginia. This view of a slave pen in Alexandria guarded, ironically, by Union officers shows Russell at his most insightful; the pen had been converted by the Union Army into a prison for captured Confederate soldiers.
Between 1830 and 1836, at the height of the American cotton market, the District of Columbia, which at that time included Alexandria, Virginia, was considered the seat of the slave trade. The most infamous and successful firm in the capital was Franklin & Armfield, whose slave pen is shown here under a later owner’s name. Three to four hundred slaves were regularly kept on the premises in large, heavily locked cells for sale to Southern plantation owners. According to a note by Alexander Gardner, who published a similar view, “Before the war, a child three years old, would sell in Alexandria, for about fifty dollars, and an able-bodied man at from one thousand to eighteen hundred dollars. A woman would bring from five hundred to fifteen hundred dollars, according to her age and personal attractions.”
Late in the 1830s Franklin and Armfield, already millionaires from the profits they had made, sold out to George Kephart, one of their former agents. Although slavery was outlawed in the District in 1850, it flourished across the Potomac in Alexandria. In 1859, Kephart joined William Birch, J. C. Cook, and C. M. Price and conducted business under the name of Price, Birch & Co. The partnership was dissolved in 1859, but Kephart continued operating his slave pen until Union troops seized the city in the spring of 1861.
Even before photographs of battle fortifications and mass graves and prison camps and cities in ruin brought home in detail the enormous scale and human cost of the Civil War, images of the realities of enslaved people in the South inspired widespread moral outrage and aided the abolitionist movement. Southern politicians had been lying about both the benevolence of enslavers and the “three-fifths” nature of Black humanity since the founding of this country, but the real truth about slavery began to come clear to most people outside the South only when the first photographs of enslaved people emerged.
“Slave pens at Alexandria,” reads the hand-labeled reproduction of a photo by the celebrated Civil War photographer Mathew B. Brady. Think about the cold fact of that label for a moment. The places where enslaved people were imprisoned before being sold weren’t called jails. They were called pens. Built to contain livestock.
At the start of the Civil War, Northerners arriving in Alexandria, Virginia, were shocked to find a site known as the “old slave pen.” Designed by slave traders, these locations housed enslaved individuals as they awaited auction in the District of Columbia or before being transported south. Mathew Brady’s 1862 photograph of the notorious slave trading firm Price Birch & Company (see nearby case) testified to the utter inhumanity of slavery. Made in 1863, Russell’s photograph captured the site when it served a different function, as a holding cell for Confederate prisoners of war.
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Unidentified photographer “Ram”, 2nd Regiment, United States Colored Light Artillery, Battery A c. 1864 Albumen silver print High Museum of Art, Atlanta Purchase with funds from the Lucinda Weil Bunnen Fund and the Donald and Marilyn Keough Family
Organised in Nashville in 1864 and dispatched until 1866, Battery A of the 2nd regiment of the US Colored Light Artillery accompanied the infantry and cavalry troops into battle with horse-drawn cannons. More than twenty-five thousand Black artillerymen, many of whom were freedmen from Confederate states, served in the Union Army. Artillerymen, including the cannoneers shown here, were required to handle hundreds of pounds of supplies, such as the gun, its limber, a travelling forge, and caissons to store the ammunition. Though many batteries were relegated to everyday garrison duty, Battery A fought in the Battle of Nashville in December 1864, where these photographs chronicling the loading and firing of the gun may have been taken.
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
George N. Barnard (American, 1819–1902) Rebel Works in Front of Atlanta, Ga., No. 1 1864 Albumen silver print High Museum of Art, Atlanta Gift of Mrs. Everett N. McDonnell
On September 1, 1864, the Confederates abandoned Atlanta, and Barnard headed to the evacuated city with his camera to explore its elaborative defenses. Barnard presents nine views of the destruction of Atlanta – half made during the war, half in 1866. Collectively, the series remains among the most celebrated by any nineteenth-century American photographer. This view is one of the most frequently cited and reproduced of all Barnard’s war photographs. The subject is an abandoned Confederate fort with rows of chevaux-de-frise running through the landscape. As he did in one-third of the photographs in Sherman’s Campaign, Barnard used two negatives to produce the print: one for the landscape, one for the sky. The powerful effect seems to have inspired the set designers of many Civil War motion pictures, from Gone with the Wind (1939) to the present.
George Barnard was one of several photographers who worked for Civil War photographer Mathew Brady before setting out on his own in 1863. Barnard’s best-known works are striking images of General Sherman’s March to the Sea as the Union Army burned nearly everything in its path between Atlanta and Savannah. He published sixty-one albumen plates from this project in 1866 as an album titled Photographic Views of Sherman’s Campaign. More than a documentarian, Barnard wanted his landscapes made in the wake of destruction to convey the emotional complexity that followed the end of the war. He carefully retouched his negatives and often combined two negatives – one exposed for the ground and the other for the sky – to create moody, atmospheric images.
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
A.J. Riddle (American, 1825-1893) Union Prisoners of War at Camp Sumter, Andersonville Prison, Georgia. View from the main gate of the stockade, August 17 1864 Albumen print High Museum of Art, Atlanta Purchase with funds from the Lucinda Weil Bunnen Fund and the Donald and Marilyn Keough Family
Andersonville prison was created in February 1864 and served until April 1865. The site was commanded by Captain Henry Wirz, who was tried and executed after the war for war crimes. The prison was overcrowded to four times its capacity, and had an inadequate water supply, inadequate food, and unsanitary conditions. Of the approximately 45,000 Union prisoners held at Camp Sumter during the war, nearly 13,000 (28%) died. The chief causes of death were scurvy, diarrhoea, and dysentery.
Unidentified photographer Picket station of colored troops near Dutch Gap Canal, Dutch Gap, Virginia 1864 Albumen silver print (stereocard) Dimensions High Museum of Art, Atlanta Purchase with funds from the Lucinda Weil Bunnen Fund and the Donald and Marilyn Keough Family
A Long Arc presents the diversity, beauty, and complexity of photography made in the American South since the 1840s. It examines how Southern photography has articulated the distinct and evolving character of the South’s people, landscape, and culture and reckoned with its complex history. It shows the role played by Southern photography at key crisis points in the country’s history, including the Civil War, the Great Depression, and the civil rights movement. And it explores the ways that photographers working in the region have both sustained and challenged its prevailing mythologies.
As both region and concept, the South has long held a central place within American culture. Profoundly influential American musical and literary movements emerged here, and many great political and social leaders hail from the region, yet histories of violence, disenfranchisement, and struggle dating back centuries continue to reverberate and shape it. For these reasons, the South is perhaps the most mythologized, romanticised, and stereotyped place in America.
The many contradictions inherent in this country’s history, ideals, and myths are arguably closer to the surface in the South’s unruly landscape and diverse faces than elsewhere in the United States. This makes it ideal terrain for photographers to critically engage with and examine American identity. Through the pictures in this exhibition, the South – so often dismissed as backward or marginalised as a place of alluring eccentricity – emerges as the fulcrum of both American photography and American history.
1845-1865: To Vex the Nation: Antebellum South and the Civil War
Photography arrived in the American South very soon after its introduction in Europe in 1839. By the early 1840s, numerous portrait studios popped up throughout the region, affording people a way to preserve their likenesses. Portrait photography in the antebellum South was most distinctive for how it projected and channelled racial and social identity at a moment of intense debate over slavery. It was not unusual for Southern slaveholders to commission photographs of their children with enslaved members of their households, a means of reinforcing social hierarchies. Yet, significantly, the medium also offered free Black Americans a means to declare their presence and self-possession in a society that did not regard them as citizens.
With the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, photography emerged as a crucial medium through which Americans witnessed and confronted the horrors of modern warfare and understood the conflict’s significance to themselves and to their country. The mass mobilisation of soldiers coincided with the development of cheaper and faster ways of making pictures, fuelling a vibrant market for Civil War portraits. These precious keepsakes allowed sitters to display their political allegiances and sustain connections between the battlefield and the home front.
While portraiture was the most common form of photography at this time, the demand for photographs of battlefields, military encampments, and sites of conflict grew throughout the course of the war. These pictures circulated widely as both photographs and as newspaper illustrations made from photographs. Images of carnage, ruin, and especially the destruction of Southern cities helped Americans grasp the enormity of loss. They also introduced an enduring photographic trope: the Southern landscape as the repository of memory, history, and trauma.
Organised in Nashville in 1864 and dispatched until 1866, Battery A of the 2nd regiment of the US Colored Light Artillery accompanied the infantry and cavalry troops into battle with horse-drawn cannons. More than twenty-five thousand Black artillerymen, many of whom were freedmen from Confederate states, served in the Union Army. Artillerymen, including the cannoneers shown here, were required to handle hundreds of pounds of supplies, such as the gun, its limber, a traveling forge, and caissons to store the ammunition. Though many batteries were relegated to everyday garrison duty, Battery A fought in the Battle of Nashville in December 1864, where these photographs chronicling the loading and firing of the gun may have been taken.
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
George N. Barnard (American, 1819-1902) Destruction of Hood’s Ordnance Train 1864 From Photographic Views of Sherman’s Campaign Albumen silver print High Museum of Art, Atlanta Purchase
This dramatic bird’s-eye view documents the aftermath of the destruction of a Confederate military train filled with gunpowder. When abandoning Atlanta, Confederate General John Bell Hood ordered his troops to set the boxcars on fire so that the Union army would never be able to make use of the train. The explosion also completely levelled the nearby mill, leaving evidence of only a few rail wheels and axles.
George N. Barnard (American, 1819-1902) Ruins in Charleston, S.C. 1865-1866, printed 1866 Albumen silver print High Museum of Art, Atlanta Purchase
Before the war, landscape photography in the South was rare and usually indicated the social or economic function of a place. But as the war spread throughout the South, photographers not only documented the military encampments on the battlefields but often rendered the landscape itself as an object of contemplation, reverie, and mourning. In this work, Barnard carefully seated two figures amid the rubble, their gazes casting out onto the ruined city. Posed as observers taking in the scope and spectacle of tragedy, they stand in for the viewers who experienced the war from afar. Photographs like these also served rhetorical purposes by making the immense destruction seem like divine retribution. As Sherman himself wrote, “I doubt any city was ever more terribly punished than Charleston, but as her people had for years been agitating for war and discord, and had finally inaugurated the Civil War, the judgment of the world will be that Charleston deserved the fate that befell her.”
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
George Barnard – widely considered one of the most important documentarians of the Civil War – began working with photography only several decades after its invention. The limitations of this burgeoning technology influenced how, when, and where Barnard shot his images. At the time, it was essentially impossible to capture quick motion, so Barnard primarily documented the effects of the war on landscapes and architecture. His richly detailed images are filled with anecdotal details that help tell the story of the Civil War and Sherman’s massive campaign through the South.
Text from the High Museum of Art website
George N. Barnard (American, 1819-1902) The “Hell Hole” New Hope Church, Georgia 1861-1866 Albumen silver print from glass negative Addison Gallery of American Art
The Battle of New Hope Church (May 25-26, 1864) was a clash between the Union Army under Major General William T. Sherman and the Confederate Army of Tennessee led by General Joseph E. Johnston during the Atlanta Campaign of the American Civil War. Sherman broke loose from his railroad supply line in a large-scale sweep in an attempt to force Johnston’s army to retreat from its strong position south of the Etowah River. Sherman hoped that he had outmaneuvered his opponent, but Johnston rapidly shifted his army to the southwest. When the Union XX Corps under Major General Joseph Hooker tried to force its way through the Confederate lines at New Hope Church, its soldiers were stopped with heavy losses.
John Reekie (American, 1829-1885) A Burial Party, Cold Harbor, Virginia 1865, published 1866 Albumen silver print High Museum of Art, Atlanta Purchase with funds from the Lucinda Weil Bunnen Fund and the Donald and Marilyn Keough Family, and the Addison Gallery of American Art
Few of the photographs in the Sketch Book evoke the intense sadness of A Burial Party, Cold Harbor, Virginia, one of the seven photographs Gardner included by the still-obscure field operative John Reekie. It is the only plate in the second volume that shows corpses, here being collected by African American soldiers. Four soldiers with shovels work in the background; in the foreground, a single labourer in a knit cap sits crouched behind a bier that holds the lower right leg of a dead combatant and five skulls – one for each member of the living work crew. Reekie’s atypical low vantage point and tight composition ensure that the foreground soldier’s head is precisely the same size as the bleached white skulls and that the head of one of the workers rests in the sky above the distant tree line. It is a macabre and chilling portrait – literally a study of black and white – that is as memorable as any made during the war.
Isaac H. Bonsall (American, 1833-1909) Bonsil’s Photo Gallery, Chattanooga, TN 1865 Albumen silver print High Museum of Art, Atlanta Purchase with funds from the Lucinda Weil Bunnen Fund and the Donald Marilyn Keough Family
Note the framed photographs at far left on the wooden slat fence advertising the photographer’s work and examples of his carte de visite photographs to the left and right of the entrance. This photograph must have been taken not long after the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln on 15th April 1865 as the president’s image above the door is surrounded by black mourning cloth ~ Marcus
Isaac H. Bonsall was one of many enterprising photographers who took advantage of the public’s growing demand for portraits at the onset of the Civil War. In 1862, the New York Tribune published an observer’s account of the onslaught of travelling portrait studios among the army: “A camp is hardly pitched before one of the omnipresent artists in collodion and amber […] pitches his canvas gallery and unpacks his chemicals.”
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Isaac H. Bonsall (American, 1833-1909) Bonsil’s Photo Gallery, Chattanooga, TN (detail) 1865 Albumen silver print High Museum of Art, Atlanta Purchase with funds from the Lucinda Weil Bunnen Fund and the Donald Marilyn Keough Family
1865-1930: Less Splendid on the Surface
Between 1865 and 1930, the South experienced the abandonment of the promises of Reconstruction and the violent and legal enforcement of racial segregation. Yet this period also witnessed rebuilding of cities and industries, the founding of new institutions (including a significant number of Black schools), continued cultivation of the land, and the development of creative cultures that spread throughout the nation. Photography bore witness to these developments. Some photographers used the camera to sell an idyllic vision of the South that was at odds with the harsh reality, while others documented injustice and poverty with the goal of calling broader attention to the region’s struggles.
During this period, photography also became an increasingly familiar part of everyday life, accelerated by the rise of “penny picture” photography studios, cheap snapshot cameras, and the proliferation of inexpensive stereographs (a form of 3D photography) that brought the wonders of the world – and the South – into nearly every household. The greater accessibility of photography also opened the profession to a growing number of women and Black makers. Community portraiture in particular flourished, giving ordinary people the opportunity to document their lives and envision themselves as modern citizens. Across the South, studio photographers produced thousands of pictures – of public events, private celebrations, city streets, architectural views, and landscapes – that reveal the texture of everyday life and observe the ways people in the South lived, both together and apart from each other.
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
John Horgan Jr. (American, 1859-1926) James Richardson’s Plantation, Jackson, MS 1892 Albumen silver print High Museum of Art, Atlanta Purchase
As Alabama’s “first commercial and industrial specialist,” in the 1890s John Horgan Jr. photographed the vast cotton plantations owned by industrial magnate Edmund Richardson, who also founded the lucrative and exploitative practice of convict labour (leasing prisoners from the state for forced, unpaid labour in exchange for supplying housing). Photographing at a plantation owned by Richardson’s son James, Horgan shows Black labourers, including young children, engaged in the backbreaking toil of harvesting and sorting cotton. Though made almost thirty years after the abolition of slavery, Horgan’s views of antebellum-style labour were a form of propaganda that minimised the conditions of extreme poverty and inequality that shaped African American life in the South.
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
William Henry Jackson (American, 1843-1942) Florida. Tomaka River. The King’s Ferry 1898 Chromolithograph Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Gift of an Anonymous Donor
William Henry Jackson (American, 1843-1942) St. Charles Street, New Orleans 1900 Chromolithograph High Museum of Art, Atlanta Gift of Joshua Mann Pailet in memory of Charlotte Mann Pailet (1924-1999)
The painter, explorer, and survey photographer William Henry Jackson is best known for his images of the American West, many of which he produced as part of the United States Geological Survey. In 1897, Jackson became a director of the Detroit Publishing Company in a venture to publish colour lithographic prints from black-and-white negatives by himself and other photographers. These views were taken across the United States, including the American South, and were widely disseminated as prints and postcards.
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
William Henry Jackson (American, 1843-1942) Cotton on the Levee 1900 Chromolithograph High Museum of Art, Atlanta Gift of Joshua Mann Pailet in memory of Charlotte Mann Pailet (1924-1999)
The first major exhibition of Southern photography in more than 25 years, A Long Arc: Photography and the American South since 1845, will be on display at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond from Oct. 5, 2024, to Jan. 26, 2025.
A Long Arc comprises more than 175 years of photography from a broad swath of the American South – from Maryland to Florida to Arkansas to Texas and places in between. Visitors to the expansive exhibition will encounter everyday lives and ordinary places captured in evocative photos that contemplate the region’s central role in shaping American history and identity. The exhibition also examines the South’s critical impact on the development of photography.
“The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts is excited to present A Long Arc: Photography and the American South since 1845, an astounding exhibition of powerful images of our shared Southern – and American – history by many of this country’s foremost photographers,” said the museum’s Director and CEO Alex Nyerges. “The exhibition also includes a number of captivating images of Richmond and the Commonwealth from the museum’s ever-growing collection of photographs.”
A Long Arc is organised by the High Museum of Art (Atlanta, Georgia) and co- curated by Gregory Harris, the Donald and Marilyn Keough Family curator of photography at the High Museum of Art, and Dr. Sarah Kennel, the Aaron Siskind curator of photography and director of the Raysor Center for Works on Paper at VMFA.
“A Long Arc reckons with the region’s fraught history, American identity and culture at large, asking us to consider the history of American photography with the South as its focal point,” said Dr. Kennel. “The exhibition examines the ways that photographers from the 19th century to the present have articulated the distinct and evolving character of the South’s people, landscape and culture.”
More than 180 works of historical and contemporary photography are featured in A Long Arc, which includes many from VMFA’s permanent collection.
Organised chronologically, A Long Arc opens with an exploration of the years from 1845 to 1865, where visitors will encounter compelling photographs made before and during the American Civil War. Photographers of this time, including Alexander Gardner and George Barnard, transformed the practice of the medium and established visual codes for articulating national identity and expressing collective trauma. Following the war, photographs made from 1865 to 1930 reveal the South’s incomplete project of Reconstruction, including new industries, a rise of community- based photography studios, the erection of white supremacist monuments and scenes conveying social division.
With the emergence of documentary photography in the 1930s, photographs made in the South raised national consciousness around social and racial inequities. During this time, Farm Security Administration photographers working in the region, including Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange and Marion Post Wolcott, defined a kind of documentary approach that dominated American photography for decades and recast a Southern vernacular into a new kind of national style.
During the 25 years following World War II, from 1945 to 1970, photography in the South was characterised by an incongruence between America’s optimistic image of itself and the enduring shadow of Jim Crow-era segregation. Artists like Robert Frank, Clarence John Laughlin and Ralph Eugene Meatyard made jarring and unsettling photographs that revealed economic, racial and psychic dissonance at odds with conventional images of American prosperity, while photographs of the civil rights movements by Bruce Davidson, Danny Lyon, Doris Derby and James Karales galvanised and shocked the nation with raw depictions of violence and the struggle for justice.
Photography in the South exhibits a sense of reflection, return and renewal in the three decades following the tumult of the 1960s, as artists like Sally Mann, William Eggleston and William Christenberry created narrative, self-reflexive bodies of work that simultaneously sustained and interrogated the South’s brutal histories and enduring cultural mythologies.
A Long Arc concludes with a wide-ranging and provocative selection of photographs made in the past two decades. Artists like Richard Misrach, Lucas Foglia, Gillian Laub, An-My Lê, Sheila Pree-Bright, RaMell Ross and Jose Ibarra Rizo explore Southern history and American identity in the 21st century as forged by legacies of slavery and white supremacy, marked by economic inequality and environmental catastrophe and transformed by immigration, technology, urbanisation, globalisation and shifting ethnic, cultural, racial and sexual identities.
A complex and layered archive of the region, A Long Arc captures how the South has occupied an uneasy place in the history of American photography while simultaneously exemplifying regional exceptionalism and the crucible from which American identity has been forged over the past two centuries.
Press release from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
This is an early photograph by the self taught photographer James Van Der Zee when he was only 21 years old, made in Phoebus, Virginia where he had moved with his wife Kate L. Brown. He returned to Harlem in 1916 and became a leading figure in the Harlem Renaissance, his portrait of black New York people and culture becoming the most comprehensive artistic photographs of the period.
In the years following the Civil War, numerous schools were founded throughout the South to educate the emancipated Black population. Literacy, which was strictly forbidden by plantation overseers, became a beacon of hope and accomplishment for Black Americans. This dedication to education was so strong among freed peoples that the literacy gap between white and Black communities in the American South closed within a generation. The Whittier Preparatory School in Phoebus, Virginia, was distinguished among its peer institutions for its expanded curriculum, including classes up to ninth grade that encompassed art and music education and dedicated science facilities.
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Ernest Joseph Bellocq (American, 1873-1949) Storyville prostitute / Storyville Portrait, New Orleans c. 1912, printed 1966 Gelatin silver print Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts Museum purchase
Storyville was born on January 1, 1898, and its bordellos, saloons and jazz would flourish for 25 years, giving New Orleans its reputation for celebratory living. Storyville has been almost completely demolished, and there is strangely little visual evidence it ever existed – except for Ernest J. Bellocq’s other wordly photographs of Storyville’s prostitutes. Hidden away for decades, Bellocq’s enigmatic images from what appeared to be his secret life would inspire poets, novelists and filmmakers. But the fame he gained would be posthumous. …
E. J. Bellocq wasn’t just photographing ships and machines. What he kept mostly to himself was his countless trips to Storyville, where he made portraits of prostitutes at their homes or places of work with his 8-by-10-inch view camera. Some of the women are photographed dressed in Sunday clothes, leaning against walls or lying across an ironing board, playing with a small dog. Others are completely or partially nude, reclining on sofas or lounges, or seated in chairs.
The images are remarkable for their modest settings and informality. Bellocq managed to capture many of Storyville’s sex workers in their own dwellings, simply being themselves in front of his camera – not as sexualised pinups for postcards. If his images of ships and landmark buildings were not noteworthy, the pictures he took in Storyville are instantly recognisable today as Bellocq portraits – time capsules of humanity, even innocence, amid the shabby red-light settings of New Orleans. Somehow, perhaps as one of society’s outcasts himself, Bellocq gained the trust of his subjects, who seem completely at ease before his camera. …
In 1958, 89 glass negatives were discovered in a chest, and nine years later the American photographer Lee Friedlander acquired the collection, much of which had been damaged because of poor storage. None of Bellocq’s prints were found with the negatives, but Friedlander made his own prints from them, taking great care to capture the character of Bellocq’s work. It is believed that Bellocq may have purposely scratched the negatives of some of the nudes, perhaps to protect the identity of his subjects.
From 1898 to about 1923, New Orleans’s legally protected red-light district, known as Storyville, flourished with saloons, jazz clubs, gambling halls, and brothels. The prostitutes of these establishments were the favourite subjects of E. J. Bellocq, a photographer from a wealthy family of creole origins who was better known at the time for his industrial pictures of ships and machinery for local companies. His personal photographs of the women of Storyville do not glamorise or eroticise their subjects but instead show them in their private quarters, often at ease in varying states of dress. Although Bellocq destroyed many of his negatives before his death, in the mid-1960s the photographer Lee Friedlander discovered a cache of Storyville glass plates, made prints from them, and showed them at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1970, launching the once-obscure Bellocq into newfound, posthumous fame.
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Unidentified photographer Keystone View Company (American, 1892-1972) Mining Phosphate and Loading Cars Near Columbia, Tennessee c. 1898 Albumen silver print (stereocard) Addison Gallery of American Art
Unidentified photographer Keystone View Company (American, 1892-1972) Flooding the Rice Fields, South Carolina c. 1904 Albumen silver print (stereocard) Addison Gallery of American Art
Unidentified photographer Keystone View Company (American, 1892-1972) A Turpentine Farm – Dippers and Chippers at Work, Savannah, Georgia 1904 Albumen silver print (stereocard) Addison Gallery of American Art
Unidentified photographer Keystone View Company (American, 1892-1972) Alligator Joe’s Battle with a Wounded Gator, Palm Beach, Florida 1904 Albumen silver print (stereocard) Addison Gallery of American Art
Unidentified photographer Keystone View Company (American, 1892-1972) Hoeing Rice, South Carolina 1904 Albumen silver print (stereocard) Addison Gallery of American Art
Lewis Hine (American, 1874-1940) A Young Oyster Fisher, Apalachicola, Florida 1909 Gelatin silver print Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Museum Arts purchase fund
Lewis Hine (American, 1874-1940) A little spinner in a Georgia Cotton Mill 1909 Gelatin silver print Addison Gallery of American Art
As a member of the National Child Labor Committee, Lewis Hine was an activist who deployed photography as an instrument of social reform. At the turn of the 1900s, there were two million children in the labor force, and Hine traveled to mines, textile mills, and factories to document their dismal working conditions. In order to gain access to these sites, he often posed as a salesman, insurance agent, or other profession. His photographs of children working in textile mills in Georgia appeared in pamphlets and posters throughout the country, contributing to a shift in public perception that ultimately led to child labor laws, many of which are still in effect today.
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Lewis Hine (American, 1874-1940) Cherokee Hosiery Mill, Rome, Georgia 1913 Gelatin silver print High Museum of Art, Atlanta Gift of Murray H. Bring
Doris Ulmann (American, 1884-1934) Laborers, Kingdom Come School House c. 1931 Platinum print High Museum of Art, Atlanta Purchase
Doris Ulmann was an American photographer, best known for her portraits of the people of Appalachia, particularly craftsmen and musicians, made between 1928 and 1934.
Prentice Herman Polk (American, 1898-1984) The Boss c. 1932 Gelatin silver print Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA Kathleen Boone Samuels Memorial Fund
P. H. Polk worked as the official photographer for Alabama’s Tuskegee Institute, a private, historically Black land grant university that was founded in 1881. For more than forty-five years, Polk documented the school’s activities and its illustrious faculty and staff. He made photographs that challenged stereotypical images of Black life in the South by chronicling scientific, industrial, and academic advancements by Black innovators and capturing portraits of nearby residents. At a time when most popular images portrayed Black Southerners as subservient, Polk showed the aptly named “boss” standing self-assured, in full control of her image and addressing the camera confidently.
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Louise Dahl-Wolfe (American, 1895-1989) Black Man In Bijou Theatre, Nashville, Tennessee 1932, printed later Gelatin silver print Addison Gallery of American Art
The Bijou Theatre became the Nashville flagship of the Bijou Amusement Company, one of the first African American theatre chains in the south.
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) Three Generations of Texans (Now Drought Refugees) c. 1935 Gelatin silver print Addison Gallery of American Art
The artwork captures a poignant and compelling scene of three men representing different generations, standing together, likely under difficult circumstances as suggested by the title referencing them as “drought refugees.” The expressions, attire, and the stark composition tell a visual story of resilience and hardship, which is characteristic of Dorothea Lange’s work. The photograph’s detail and the subjects’ piercing gazes evoke a sense of solemn dignity despite their apparent adversities, reflecting the social realism movement’s focus on the lives of everyday people affected by social and economic issues.
Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) House in New Orleans c. 1935 Gelatin silver print Addison Gallery of American Art
Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) West Virginia Living Room 1935 Gelatin silver print High Museum of Art, Atlanta Purchase with funds from the Atlanta Foundation
Evans made this photograph during the first year of the photography division of the Resettlement Administration (later renamed the Farm Security Administration). The mission of this newly formed government agency was to document the hardships of the Great Depression and the positive effects of New Deal policies. The furnishings of this coal miner’s home are spare and worn; the walls are decorated with commercial advertisements that reflect a prosperity this family was not likely to experience. But this photograph transcends its immediate mission as government propaganda. Rather than a condescending look at poverty, “West Virginia Living Room” captures the dignity of the family. The barefoot boy sitting awkwardly in the chair looks straight into the camera and challenges the viewer. His direct stare shows no shame and asks for no pity.
Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) Allie Mae Burroughs, Hale County, Alabama 1936 Gelatin silver print Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts Gift of Norman Selby (PA 1970) and Melissa G. Vail
On assignment for Fortune, Walker Evans collaborated with writer James Agee in Hale County, Alabama, for three weeks, recording the lives of three families of white tenant farmers. The photographs offer a raw, direct perspective on a sharecropper’s life yet also diminish the depth and nuance of their subjects. In the original title, Evans referred to Allie Mae Burroughs as a sharecropper’s wife, anonymising her and negating her role in the farm’s operations. Yet through the photograph, her face has become one of the defining images of the Great Depression. The story never ran in Fortune, whose wealthy readers wanted no reminder of the impoverished conditions of rural America, but it was published in 1941 as the book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and remains one the most influential works of photography and literary nonfiction.
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) Penny Picture Display, Savannah 1936 Gelatin silver print Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Sherritt Art Purchase Fund
Walker Evans was enthralled by the traditional and folk cultures of the South. He developed a direct, often flat manner of photographing that echoed the spareness of the signage and architecture he encountered throughout the region. In his photograph of a portrait photographer’s studio window, he plays on the consonance between the flatness of the window, the plane of his camera, and the resulting photographic print. In photographing the anonymous photographer’s advertisement, he not only condenses time, labor, individuality, and generations but also flattens history. When he made this image, forty percent of Savannah’s population was Black, a fact belied by the over two hundred white faces that make up the image.
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Arthur Rothstein (American, 1915-1985) Weighing Cotton, Texas 1936 Gelatin silver print High Museum of Art, Atlanta Gift of Howard Greenberg
Plantation owner’s daughter checks weight of cotton.
1930-1945: The Cruel Radiance: A New Documentary Tradition
The impact of the Great Depression on the American South – a region that was already poorer than the rest of the nation – was devastating. In addition to economic havoc, many of the other problems convulsing the country – poverty, racism, and the erosion of rural cultures – appeared in their most concentrated and vivid forms in the South. Photographers responded to these crises with indelible images of hardship and injustice that they hoped would spur reform and modernize the region. In this way, the Great Depression changed the course of American photography by cementing the concept and practice of documentary photography as a tool for social reform.
Most of these documentary photographs were produced under the auspices of the federal government as part of a New Deal effort to provide relief to rural areas. From 1935-1942, some two dozen photographers were hired by the government to capture images of rural poverty in order to raise both public sympathy and congressional support for resettlement and other forms of aid. Although there was not a single native Southerner among them, together this group of photographers produced around sixteen thousand photographs of the region and profoundly changed how the nation saw the South, and by extension, itself. Widely reproduced in newspaper articles, magazines, exhibitions, and photo books, these documentary projects brought the South into national focus and debate.
Not all of the photographers who flocked to the South during this time sought to document its stricken conditions. The region’s seeming resistance to progress also seduced photographers who saw vestiges of agrarian life that nurtured distinctive folkways and vernacular architecture – that is to say, buildings based on regional or local traditions. To them, this South – so different from the rapidly changing urban centres in the Northeast and Midwest – resembled a cultural eddy, an alluring place cut off from the flow of time where one could photograph the beautiful remnants of a largely imagined past.
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Margaret Bourke White (American, 1904-1971) Louisville Flood Victims 1937, printed later Gelatin silver print Addison Gallery of American Art
In January 1937, the swollen banks of the Ohio River flooded Louisville, Kentucky, and its surrounding areas. With one hour’s notice, photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White caught the next plane to Louisville. She photographed the city from makeshift rafts, recording one of the largest natural disasters in American history for Life magazine, where she was a staff photographer. The Louisville Flood shows African-Americans lined up outside a flood relief agency. In striking contrast to their grim faces, the billboard for the National Association of Manufacturers above them depicts a smiling white family of four riding in a car, under a banner reading “World’s Highest Standard of Living. There’s no way like the American Way.” As a powerful depiction of the gap between the propagandist representation of American life and the economic hardship faced by minorities and the poor, Bourke-White’s image has had a long afterlife in the history of photography.
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) Displaced Tenant Farmers, Goodlett, Hardeman County, Texas July 1937 Gelatin silver print Collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg
“All displaced tenant farmers, the oldest 33. None able to vote because of Texas poll tax. They support an average of four persons each on $22.80 a month.” ~ Dorothea Lange
Six Tenant Farmers Without Farms exemplifies the best of Lange’s Depression-era photographs from the deep South. The dignity of her subjects – young farmers who had lost their livelihood when tractors replaced horse-and-plow tilling of the land – is immortalised by Lange, who portrays them with clear compassion but no sentimentality.
Text from the Sotheby’s website
Prentice Herman Polk (American, 1898-1984) Mildred Hanson Baker 1937 Gelatin silver print Virginia Museum of Fine Arts John C. and Florence S. Goddin, by exchange
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) Formerly Enslaved Woman, Alabama 1938 Gelatin silver print National Gallery of Art
Dorothea Lange’s Depression-era portrait of a woman who had been born enslaved offers a poignant and understated meditation on the legacy of slavery. Lange’s empathic approach to portraiture was distinct for its ability to express the lasting effects of trauma, poverty, and prejudice in the lives of formerly enslaved people and their descendants. Her photographs demonstrate how the deprivation of the Jim Crow era was compounded by the aftermath of World War I and the Great Depression, making life in the South increasingly turbulent for Black Americans.
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Peter Sekaer (Danish, 1901-1950) Irish Channel, Future Site of St. Thomas Housing Project, New Orleans c. 1938 Gelatin silver print Addison Gallery of American Art Museum purchase
St. Thomas Development was a notorious housing project in New Orleans, Louisiana. The project lay south of the Central City in the lower Garden District area. As defined by the City Planning Commission, its boundaries were Constance, St. Mary, Magazine Street and Felicity Streets to the north; the Mississippi River to the south; and 1st, St. Thomas, and Chippewa Streets, plus Jackson Avenue to the west. In the 1980s and 1990s, St. Thomas was one of the city’s most dangerous and impoverished housing developments. It made national headlines in 1992 after the deadly shooting of Eric Boyd.
It is interesting to compare photographs by Walker Evans and his assistant Peter Sekelear, whose pictures reflect similar interests with different eyes. Both photographers turned their attention to the vernacular, bringing a sense of place into focus. Many of the photographers exhibiting in A Long Arc were neither southern nor poor. This calls into question the contribution that 1930’s depictions of southern poverty had on stereotyping, imploring viewers to feel sorry for the destitute rather than questioning the systems that kept their communities impoverished.
Suzanne Révy and Elin Spring. “A Long Arc,” on the What Will You Remember website March 20, 2024 [Online] Cited 19/12/2024
Russell Lee (American, 1903-1986) Louisiana 1939 Gelatin silver print Addison Gallery of American Art
Marion Post Wolcott (American, 1910-1990) Black Man Using “Colored” Entrance to Movie Theatre, Belzoni, Mississippi 1939, printed later Gelatin silver print High Museum of Art, Atlanta Gift of Ann and Ben Johnson
Marion Post Wolcott (American, 1910-1990) Waiting to be Paid for Picking Cotton, Inside Plantation Store, Marcella 1939 Gelatin silver print Collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg
Mike Disfarmer (American, 1884–1959) Wallace Sloane, Elliot Smith and Brother Homer c. 1940 Gelatin silver print High Museum of Art, Atlanta Purchase with funds from Jane and Clay Jackson
Mike Disfarmer operated the only professional photography studio in Heber Springs, Arkansas, between the 1930s and ’50s. His spare and at times severe portraits offer a plainspoken vision of rural, predominantly white America during and after the Great Depression. For most of his sitters, being photographed was an unusual occurrence, and a visit to the studio marked a milestone. People often posed for Disfarmer in groups, as in his portrait of three young men casually draping their arms around each others’ shoulders, reinforcing their sense of familiarity and friendship, perhaps on their last night together before one of them heads off for military service.
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Clarence John Laughlin (American, 1905-1985) Time Phantasm, Number Six 1941 Gelatin silver print High Museum of Art, Atlanta Gift of Joshua Mann Pailet in honor of his mother, Charlotte Mann Pailet; her family members Josef, Jiri and Alma Beran Mann, all of whom perished in the Holocaust; and Sir Nicholas Winton, the British hero who orchestrated Charlotte’s escape with 669 Czechoslovakian children in 1939
A strong southern penchant for the surreal can be observed in images like those by Clarence John Laughlin, Ralph Eugene Meatyard and Emmet Gowin. Laughlin photographed a decaying antebellum structure alongside Edward Weston in 1941. His soft focus and presence of a ghostly figure in a window create a mysterious mood in contrast to the sharp reality of Weston’s image. And his use of a mask and slight camera shake in “The Masks Grow to Us” transforms a beautiful face into an hypnagogic visage.
Twenty years later, Meatyard photographed his sons in similarly abandoned structures and fields in the countryside surrounding Louisville, Kentucky. Also known for employing masks, Meatyard creates a dreamlike reverence for vanishing rural life in some of the best quality prints of his that we have ever seen. Emmet Gowin’s balmy composition of his multi-generational family splayed around their backyard with two watermelons is, like so many images of the south, both prosaic and magical.
Suzanne Révy and Elin Spring. “A Long Arc,” on the What Will You Remember website March 20, 2024 [Online] Cited 19/12/2024
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Woodland Plantation 1941 Gelatin silver print New Orleans Museum of Art
In 1941, Clarence John Laughlin and Edward Weston photographed alongside one another for a few days as Weston traveled the South making photographs to illustrate a new edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. Both photographers produced images of the same location but in notably different ways. Weston, who is known for his mastery of sharp focus and a rich tonal range, created a precise and balanced view of the scene. Meanwhile, Laughlin, who was dubbed the “Father of American Surrealism” for his atmospheric depictions of decaying antebellum architecture, spun a more ambiguous and haunting tale. He even posed Weston’s collaborator and wife, Charis Wilson, as a ghostly apparition on the second floor.
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Clarence John Laughlin (American, 1905-1985) The Masks Grow to Us 1947 Gelatin silver print High Museum of Art, Atlanta Purchase with funds from Robert Yellowlees
1945-1970: History as Myth, Progress as Peril
Following World War II, two competing visions shaped popular views of the South: one based on the country’s image of itself as optimistic and prosperous and the other grounded in the continued poverty, racial violence, and segregation that marked the region. Photographers grappled with the dissonance between conventional images of American affluence and progress in popular culture and mass media and the reality of life for many in the South by making a startling mix of images, from powerful examples of photojournalism to more subjective pictures that explored psychological and emotional states.
As the first Black staff photographer for LIFE, in 1956 Gordon Parks shocked Americans with lush, colourful pictures made in Mobile, Alabama, that powerfully revealed the ugliness and psychological anguish of segregation. Other photojournalists traveling to the American South – including Elliot Erwitt and Henri Cartier-Bresson – homed in on the contradictions between Southern gentility and the reality of race relations. While these photographers continued to employ the documentary style that had taken shape in the 1930s, with its crisp focus, straightforward compositions, and faith in the possibilities of objectivity, others, like Robert Frank, broke from this tradition to make raw, searing, and idiosyncratic pictures that grasped something elemental about American culture.
Other photographers – especially those who knew the South intimately – turned inward. Some, like Virginia native Emmet Gowin, chose to photograph their families and loved ones, seeking sustenance in what was closest at hand. Others, like the Kentucky optician-turned photographer Ralph Eugene Meatyard, embraced a dreamlike surrealism to create pictures suffused with social and psychological tension, capturing the alienation produced within such a divided society.
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Consuelo Kanaga (American, 1894-1978) Young Girl, Tennessee 1948 Gelatin silver print Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Adolph D. and Wilkins C. Williams Fund
In the late 1940s, many photographers traversed the country with the support of fellowships and grants to capture the spirit of postwar America. Consuelo Kanaga traveled throughout the South, concentrating her lens on communities of color. Rather than dwelling on hardships or poverty, she presents her subjects with dignity, often framed in spare compositions that focus on the emotions conveyed in their facial expressions. Emblematic of this approach, her photograph of this contemplative girl silhouetted against a light sky while gazing upward echoes classical portraiture.
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Marion Palfi (American born Germany, 1907-1978) Josie Hill, Wife of a Lynch Victim, Irwinton, Georgia 1949 Gelatin silver print High Museum of Art, Atlanta Gift of Ben Bivins
Born in Germany, Marion Palfi worked as a freelance photographer and portraitist in Berlin before emigrating to the United States in 1936. Shocked at the racial and economic inequalities she encountered, she devoted her photographic career to documenting various communities to expose the virulent effects of racism and poverty. In 1949, she made this portrait of Josie Hill, widow of Caleb Hill, the victim of the first reported lynching of that year. A father of three, the twenty-eight year old Hill had been arrested for allegedly stabbing a man. After the sheriff left the jail’s front door open and the keys to the cell on his desk, Hill was pulled from jail in the middle of the night and shot to death. Two white men were charged with the crime, but the all-white grand jury did not indict them.
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Leonard Freed (American, 1929-2006) North Carolina (segregation fountain) 1950 Gelatin silver print Addison Gallery of American Art
W. Eugene Smith (American, 1918-1978) Maude at Stove 1951 Gelatin silver print Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Floyd D. and Anne C. Gottwald Fund
In December 1951, LIFE published W. Eugene Smith’s photo essay on Maude Callen, a nurse and midwife who worked in rural South Carolina. Smith’s powerful photographs illuminated Callen’s extraordinary efforts to serve her patients, who were among the poorest and most neglected in the country. As detailed in the magazine, “Callen drives 36,000 miles within the county each year, is reimbursed for part of this by the state, and must buy her own cars, which last 18 months. Her workday is often sixteen hours and she earns $225 a month.” After the article was published, readers sent donations totalling more than $27,000, allowing Callen to build a clinic and train others to become healthcare workers.
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) Trolley, New Orleans 1955 Gelatin silver print Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts Museum purchase
In 1955 and 1956, Switzerland-born photographer Robert Frank travelled across the United States with the support of a Guggenheim Fellowship. With an incisive, unsparing eye, he sought to understand and decode the brutal beauty of his adopted home. Raw, violent, tender, and edgy, his photographs of an America plagued by racial division, economic disparity, consumerism, and wilful ignorance shocked viewers for how they savagely undercut the country’s postwar view of itself as prosperous, peaceful, and progressive. In the South, Frank was keenly attuned to the persistence of segregation. His photograph of a New Orleans trolley, white people up front and Black people behind, succinctly captures the ruthlessness and anguish of racial stratification.
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) Café, Beaufort, South Carolina 1955 Gelatin silver print High Museum of Art, Atlanta
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) Charleston, South Carolina 1955-1956 Gelatin silver print Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts Museum purchase
Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006) Outside Looking In, Mobile, Alabama 1956 Inkjet print High Museum of Art, Atlanta Gift of The Gordon Parks Foundation Courtesy of and copyright The Gordon Parks Foundation
Gordon Parks was the first African American photographer to work for LIFE – the preeminent picture magazine of the day – and published some of the 20th century’s most iconic photo essays about social justice. In 1956, the magazine published Parks’s “Segregation Story,” a photo essay comprising twenty-six colour photographs depicting a multigenerational family in Alabama. Despite the grave danger he faced as a Black photographer working in the South at the height of Jim Crow, Parks firmly believed that photographs could alter a viewer’s perspective and expose a wide readership to the pervasive effects of racial segregation.
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Gordon Parks (American, 1912–2006) Ondria Tanner and Her Grandmother Window-Shopping, Mobile, Alabama 1956, printed 2012 Inkjet print High Museum of Art, Atlanta Gift of The Gordon Parks Foundation Courtesy of and copyright The Gordon Parks Foundation
“Ondria Tanner and Her Grandmother Window-Shopping, Mobile, Alabama”was taken in 1956 by Gordon Parks during the Jim Crow era as part of his 1956 LIFE series “Segregation Story.”
Gene Herrick (American, b. 1926) Rosa Parks Being Fingerprinted, Montgomery, Alabama 1956 Gelatin silver print High Museum of Art, Atlanta Purchase with funds from Sandra Anderson Baccus in loving memory of Lloyd Tevis Baccus, M.D.
Rosa Parks being fingerprinted on February 22, 1956, by Lieutenant D.H. Lackey as one of the people indicted as leaders of the Montgomery bus boycott. She was one of 73 people rounded up by deputies that day after a grand jury charged 113 African Americans for organizing the boycott. This was a few months after her arrest on December 1, 1955, for refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger on a segregated municipal bus in Montgomery, Alabama.
The Montgomery bus boycott was a political and social protest campaign against the policy of racial segregation on the public transit system of Montgomery, Alabama. It was a foundational event in the civil rights movement in the United States. The campaign lasted from December 5, 1955 – the Monday after Rosa Parks, an African-American woman, was arrested for her refusal to surrender her seat to a white person – to December 20, 1956, when the federal ruling Browder v. Gayle took effect, and led to a United States Supreme Court decision that declared the Alabama and Montgomery laws that segregated buses were unconstitutional.
Unidentified Photographer Elizabeth Eckford Entering Central High School, Little Rock, Arkansas 1957 Gelatin silver print High Museum of Art, Atlanta Purchase with funds from Sandra Anderson Baccus in loving memory of Lloyd Tevis Baccus, M.D.
The Little Rock Nine were the first Black students to integrate Arkansas’s Little Rock Central High School on September 25, 1957, three years after the Supreme Court ruled segregation in public schools unconstitutional. After being stopped during multiple attempts to get in the school, they were finally able to enter while escorted by the 101st Airborne Infantry. This press photograph shows Elizabeth Eckford, one of the nine students, resolutely proceeding into the school building flanked by uniformed soldiers while white students jeer at her.
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Charles Moore (American, 1931-2010) Martin Luther King Jr. Arrested, Montgomery, Alabama 1958 Gelatin silver print High Museum of Art, Atlanta Purchase with funds from Lucinda W. Bunnen for the Bunnen Collection
On September 3, 1958, as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. tried to enter the Montgomery courtroom that was hearing a case involving his friend and colleague, the Reverend Ralph David Abernathy, King was arrested and charged with loitering. Charles Moore, a photographer for the Montgomery Advertiser, captured the moment as police officers aggressively placed him in handcuffs. Like many of the most well-known photographers of the civil rights movement, Moore was white, and his race allowed him to photograph many violent incidents involving law enforcement at close range. This photograph contributed to an outpouring of outrage and support for King’s cause after its release nationwide by the Associated Press.
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Henri Cartier-Bresson (French, 1908-2004) The Daughters of the Confederacy, Richmond, Virginia 1960 Gelatin silver print 9 1/2 × 6 1/2 in. (24.13 × 16.51cm) Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Arthur and Margaret Glasgow Endowment
The United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) is a women’s heritage organisation best known for honouring Confederate veterans of the Civil War, memorialising the Confederacy, and promoting the “Lost Cause” interpretation of southern history, which positions Old South slavery as a benevolent institution, Confederate soldiers as heroic defenders of states’ rights, and Reconstruction as a period of northern aggression, through its monuments and educational campaigns. Members are required to prove that they are bloodline descendants of men and / or women who served honourably in the Confederal States of America.
Ralph Eugene Meatyard (American, 1925-1972) Prescience #135 1960 Gelatin silver print Collection of Joe Williams and Tede Fleming
Ralph Eugene Meatyard (American, 1925-1972) Romance (N.) from Ambrose Bierce #3 1962 Gelatin silver print Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts Museum purchase
Leonard Freed (American, 1929-2006) Children in the Mirror, Johns Island, South Carolina 1964 Gelatin silver print Addison Gallery of American Art
Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933) A female protester being arrested and led away by police, Birmingham, Alabama 1963 Gelatin silver print High Museum of Art, Atlanta Anonymous gift
Bill Hudson (American, 1932-2010) An African American high school student, Walter Gadsden, 25, is attacked by a police dog during a civil rights demonstration in Birmingham, Alabama, May 3, 1963 1963 Gelatin silver print High Museum of Art, Atlanta Purchase with funds from Sandra Anderson Baccus in loving memory of Lloyd Tevis Baccus, M.D.
“[Hudson] took a photo on May 3, 1963, of Walter Gadsden, an African-American bystander who had been grabbed by a sunglasses-wearing police officer, while a German Shepherd lunged at his chest. The photo appeared above the fold, covering three columns in the next day’s issue of The New York Times, as well as in other newspapers nationwide. Author Diane McWhorter wrote in her Pulitzer Prize-winning 2001 book Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama, the Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution that Hudson’s photo that day drove “international opinion to the side of the civil rights revolution”.
An experienced photographer of the civil rights movement, Bill Hudson often avoided hostility from the police by keeping his camera hidden under his jacket and only bringing it out at the optimal moment. He was in Birmingham’s Kelly Ingram Park when he captured the moment a police officer grabbed fifteen-year-old protestor Walter Gadsden by the collar and pulled Gadsden toward his police dog. The photograph emblematised police brutality and was published in newspapers and magazines across the country, sparking nationwide support for the civil rights movement.
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
An optician from Lexington, Kentucky, Ralph Eugene Meatyard considered himself a “dedicated amateur.” He became widely known for his enigmatic scenes and dreamlike portraits that infuse the everyday with a sense of mystery and unease. Meatyard often staged his own family as actors, clad in rubber masks and enacting cryptic dramas that reveal the influence of Southern gothic literature. In this photograph of his son Christopher reclining in a bucolic field littered with masks, youthful innocence reckons with intimations of mortality.
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Matt Herron (American, 1931-2020) The March from Selma 1965 Gelatin silver print High Museum of Art, Atlanta Gift of Gloria and Paul Sternberg
Selma to Montgomery marches
The Selma to Montgomery marches were three protest marches, held in 1965, along the 54-mile (87 km) highway from Selma, Alabama, to the state capital of Montgomery. The marches were organized by nonviolent activists to demonstrate the desire of African-American citizens to exercise their constitutional right to vote, in defiance of segregationist repression; they were part of a broader voting rights movement underway in Selma and throughout the American South. By highlighting racial injustice, they contributed to passage that year of the Voting Rights Act, a landmark federal achievement of the civil rights movement. …
The first march took place on March 7, 1965, led by figures including Bevel and Amelia Boynton, but was ended by state troopers and county possemen, who charged on about 600 unarmed protesters with batons and tear gas after they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge in the direction of Montgomery. The event became known as Bloody Sunday. Law enforcement beat Boynton unconscious, and the media publicised worldwide a picture of her lying wounded on the bridge. The second march took place two days later but King cut it short as a federal court issued a temporary injunction against further marches. That night, an anti-civil rights group murdered civil rights activist James Reeb, a Unitarian Universalist minister from Boston. The third march, which started on March 21, was escorted by the Alabama National Guard under federal control, the FBI and federal marshals (segregationist Governor George Wallace refused to protect the protesters). Thousands of marchers averaged 10 mi (16 km) a day along U.S. Route 80 (US 80), reaching Montgomery on March 24. The following day, 25,000 people staged a demonstration on the steps of the Alabama State Capitol.
1956-1968: Civil Rights and the Language of Activism
From the start, photography was both a document of and engine for the civil rights movement. From the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1956 to the Poor People’s Campaign of 1968, photographs of the civil rights movement galvanized and shocked the nation with raw depictions of violence and the struggle for racial justice. Civil rights organisers recognised the power of the medium and ensured that its actions were thoroughly documented. Countless photojournalists, artists, movement photographers, and amateurs documented the marches, sit-ins, and showdowns with counterprotesters and law enforcement, communicating the urgency of these events to the public with an intimate proximity. These photographs appeared in widely circulated publications such as the New York Times, LIFE, Ebony, and Jet and played a crucial role in informing and motivating the public to challenge the complicated and deeply entrenched history of segregation.
On the other side of the camera, activists and organisers skilfully orchestrated their civic actions, knowing the singular power that photographs would have in shaping public opinion. A key tactic of many activists was nonviolent direct action – by refusing to defend themselves even when physically attacked, activists could bring attention to the immorality of the aggressors’ actions and beliefs. Photographs of these violent public scenes lent a sense of martyrdom and principled sacrifice to the protestors’ efforts and sparked a social revolution unlike anything the country had experienced. The photographs gathered here show just a handful of the thousands of selfless acts of courage that helped transform the nation.
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Lee Friedlander (American, b. 1934) New Orleans 1968 Gelatin silver print Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts Museum purchase
Steve Schapiro (American, 1934-2022) Martin Luther King Jr.’s Motel Room Hours After He Was Shot, Memphis, Tennessee 1968 Gelatin silver print High Museum of Art, Atlanta Purchased with funds from the H. B. and Doris Massey Charitable Trust
“When Martin Luther King Jr. was shot, LIFE Magazine asked me to go immediately down to Memphis. I had done much civil rights work and had photographed King preaching in Birmingham and in Selma. In Memphis, I first photographed the third-floor bathroom, in the rooming house from which the shot had been fired. Supposedly, it was James Earl Ray standing in the tub and leaning the barrel of his gun in the windowsill pointing at the Lorraine Motel. There was a black hand print on the wall at the side of the tub which I photographed. LIFE ran it as a full-page picture the following week, assuming it was Ray’s. When I went to what had been King’s room at the motel, the door was closed. There were two photographers already inside with Hosea Williams, a King aide. I knocked on the door. One of the photographer blurted out, “Don’t let him in,” but Williams opened the door for me anyway. The room was as it had been. I photographed King’s briefcase which held books he had written (one with my Selma March photograph on its cover) and a newspaper called Soul Force, along with dirty shirts and a few cans. The television was on. A commentator was talking about King on the TV with King’s ghostly image behind him. I made a wide shot of the table with King’s briefcase and dirty shirts on it, and on the wall, the TV set with King’s image. ‘The man’ had left the room, his human form forever lost – but his incidental material belongings, and more than that, the spirit of his image, remained.”
Steve Schapiro, 2017
Diane Arbus (American, 1923-1971) Mrs. Martin Luther King Jr. on Her Front Lawn, Atlanta, Ga. 1968 Gelatin silver print 20 x 16 inches High Museum of Art, Atlanta Purchase with funds from Wanda Hopkins
Bob Adelman (American, 1930-2016) Mule Wagon for the Poor People’s Campaign, Memphis, Tennessee 1968 Gelatin silver print High Museum of Art, Atlanta Gift of the artist
1970-2000: Returns and Renewals
Following the tumultuous civil rights era, in the 1970s the South grappled as much with its history as with its future. Although the region continued to expand and diversify, particularly in urban centers like Atlanta, Nashville, and Charlotte, many photographers turned their lenses inward, exploring the past and their surroundings in an intimate and subjective manner. This shift in approach can be seen in a strong emphasis on portraiture, especially of family and community members. Meanwhile, the rise of color photography as a widely accepted artistic medium took hold in the South, thanks in no small part to the work of William Eggleston, who merged the casual banality of a snapshot with an enchanting use of color. In the process, he established a new Southern photographic aesthetic: the ordinary rendered extraordinary though lurid, eye-popping colour.
Southern photography in this period was also marked by a new interest in landscape as the nexus of history and place. The impact of the civil rights movement and rise of more inclusive and critical histories of the South prompted a new generation of photographers to interrogate the region’s prevailing myths, particularly those that established and reinforced racial hierarchies. Others bore witness to the ways that histories – of slavery in particular, but also economic and environmental destruction – left their traces on the land itself. Meanwhile, the ever-growing cracks in the image of the New South, with its dream of national reconciliation, prosperity, and racial equality, drew the attention of photographers who sought to understand and convey the disparities they witnessed.
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Diane Arbus (American, 1923-1971) Three Boys on a Porch, Beaufort County, S.C. 1968 Gelatin silver print High Museum of Art, Atlanta Purchase with funds from the Friends of Photography
Diane Arbus made this portrait on assignment from Esquire for a story about a doctor who fought parasitic diseases and hunger in the impoverished parts of Beaufort County, South Carolina. Arbus’s unflinching depiction of rural deprivation recalls Walker Evans’s photographs made three decades earlier of similar conditions in Hale County, Alabama. Her direct style of portraiture combined with the graphic qualities of the clapboard siding in the background echo the social documentary photography of the 1930s, underscoring how little conditions had changed for the South’s rural poor in the years following the Great Depression.
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Doris Derby (American, 1939–2022) Women’s sewing cooperative, Mississippi 1968 Gelatin silver print High Museum of Art, Atlanta Gift of David Knaus
Emmet Gowin (American, b. 1941) Family, Danville 1970 Gelatin silver print High Museum of Art Purchased with funds from the H.B. and Doris Massey Charitable Trust
Since the 1960s, Emmet Gowin has made intimate and poignant photographs of his wife, Edith, and her family at their home in Danville, Virginia. Here, he shows three generations lounging in a yard, and though everyone is within touching distance of one another, all are separate, with their attention turned inward. Gowin’s tender composition masterfully imbues the informality of a family snapshot with a sense of deep trust and precise thought, undermining the common stereotype of rural Southerners as backward and disconnected.
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Paul Kwilecki (American, 1928-2009) Girl, Battle’s Quarters 1971 Gelatin silver print High Museum of Art, Atlanta Gift of the artist
Paul Kwilecki spent his life in Bainbridge, Georgia, running his family’s hardware store and pursuing a decades-long project of documenting the people and events of the area, believing that “insight into a life in Decatur County is insight into lives everywhere.” The homes in Battle’s Quarters, a working-class neighbourhood, were originally built for lumber workers employed by Battle and Metcalf Lumber Company. Decades later, the company had long since closed, and the area declined economically. Perched on the bumper of an old car, the girl in this photograph assertively faces the camera, rebuking any impulse of pity or shame on the part of the viewer.
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Born in Memphis, self-taught photographer William Eggleston photographed everyday life in lush, saturated color. This scene contains nearly all the hues in the colour spectrum, from the violet darkening sky to the boy’s red headscarf. Eggleston made this exposure at dusk, when the waning natural light mixed with the artificial light of streetlamps to dramatic effect. Since the two light sources register differently on film, Eggleston was able to render the scene as strange and fictional, which is fitting as the children masquerade on Halloween.
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
William Eggleston (American, b. 1939) Untitled (Sumner, Mississippi, Cassidy Bayou in Background) 1971 Dye transfer print Collection of Winston Eggleston
Though he began his career working in black and white, by the late 1960s the Memphis-born William Eggleston had mastered the expressive possibilities of colour, photographing ordinary subjects around Memphis and making deeply saturated dye transfer prints, a primarily commercial process. He explored how colour could add psychological depth to his photographs, as in this scene awash in shades of brown aside from the stark white car and two figures – a Black man in a white coat and a White man in a black suit. Eggleston emphasises the familiarity between the chauffeur and his employer through their identical stances, yet their attire and physical and psychological distance underscore the rigid social hierarchy that divides them based on race and class.
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
William Eggleston (American, b. 1939) Jackson, Mississippi (Devoe Money in Jackson, Mississippi) c. 1972 Dye transfer print Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Funds provided by the Museum Purchase Program of the National Endowment for the Arts, matching funds provided by the Volunteer Committees of Art Museums
As a teacher in rural Kentucky, Wendy Ewald worked closely with her students, encouraging and empowering them to tell their own stories through writing and photography. Among her students was a boy named Johnny who created the narratives and staging for the pictures that Ewald would then photograph. In this work, Johnny posed his brother Charles hanging over a clothesline slung with tattered quilts while holding a small revolver in his hand. Yet Charles is careful to point the gun away from the viewer, as if uncomfortable with confrontation or violence – a demeanour echoed in his open, almost tender gaze.
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
William Eggleston (American, b. 1939) Huntsville, Alabama 1978 Dye transfer print 18 5/16 x 12 3/4 inches High Museum of Art, Atlanta Museum purchase
Nicholas Nixon (American, b. 1947) Yazoo City, Mississippi 1979 Gelatin silver print High Museum of Art, Atlanta
William Christenberry (American, 1936-2016) Building, Hale County, Alabama 1980 Dye coupler print High Museum of Art, Atlanta Purchase with funds from Photo Forum
This series of a building in Greensboro stands out among Christenberry’s work due to its clear depiction of time’s cyclical nature. The character of the structure changes so completely from general store to juke joint over the years that it is at first difficult to recognise that the photographs document the same building. With each new name, fresh coat of paint, and architectural modification, the building reflects the surrounding community’s changing economics, culture, and politics through times of decline and rebirth.
Text from the High Museum of Art website
William Christenberry (American, 1936-2016) Red Building in Forest, Hale County, Alabama 1983 Dye coupler prints High Museum of Art, Atlanta Gift of the artist
After encountering a copy of Walker Evans’s and James Agee’s book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, William Christenberry began to photograph vernacular architecture in Hale County, a rural farming area of central Alabama where his family had lived for several generations. Christenberry was one of the first American photographers to harness and popularise colour photography for artistic purposes, and he chronicled the march of time by returning to photograph specific buildings over decades. He exhibited these photographs – often made years apart – in groups to extend the experience of time through the lifespans of buildings and surrounding landscapes.
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Joel Sternfeld (American, b. 1944) Domestic workers waiting for the bus, Atlanta, Georgia 1983 Dye coupler print High Museum of Art, Atlanta Gift of Dr. Judy and Kevin Wolman
Joel Sternfeld’s Domestic workers waiting for the bus, Atlanta, Georgia, April, (1983) might be the most mundane of nearly 200 photographs on view in “A Long Arc: Photography and the American South since 1845.” …
The picture’s title refers to Atlanta, I’d place this as a particular neighborhood in the suburban community of Sandy Springs, where I once lived. If I haven’t been on this exact street, perhaps even in one of these homes, I’ve been within a half mile of it.
That was more like 2003, but whether 1983, 2003, or 2023, I would be willing to bet a dollar to a donut – to use a Southern phrase – the street looks exactly the same today. Lawns uniformly closely clipped. Pine straw covering the landscaping. Everything just so.
Order. Conformity. Genteel. Southern.
There’s no need for a “white’s only” sign, it’s implied.
The women employed dusting and polishing inside the brick mansions wait on the bus because they can’t afford to own a car. I can assure you no one living in any of the houses along the street would be caught dead riding the bus in Atlanta – or even know how to. It’s just not done.
The picture speaks to America’s structural racism and its racial wealth gap with a whisper, not a scream. Doing so reveals how it’s not just the racist sheriffs and brutes who poured milkshakes over the head of sit-in protesters at the Woolworth’s counter back in the day who are complicit in those systems. Doing so reminds us that the struggle for equality extends beyond the dramatic. Beyond the Edmond Pettis Bridge in Selma, or the bus boycotts in Montgomery.
In the tradition of Robert Frank’s book The Americans, Joel Sternfeld embarked on a nationwide road trip for his book American Prospects, which grappled with the state of the country during the Reagan era. Here, three Black women are the only signs of life in the suburban Atlanta neighborhood of Sandy Springs. Driveways segment parcels of land within the seemingly endless subdivision, emphasising the primary mode of transport for the affluent residents. By contrast, the women wait for public transportation to ferry them to and from their jobs maintaining their employers’ homes. Sternfeld’s critical stance lays bare the region’s income and racial inequalities, still present twenty years after the civil rights movement.
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Baldwin Lee (American, b. 1951) Nashville, Tennessee 1983 Gelatin silver print
Beginning in 1983, Baldwin Lee made many road trips from his adopted home of Knoxville, Tennessee, throughout the South to photograph. He was drawn to Black Americans, often poor, at work, about town, or gathering on their yards or front porches. His strikingly dynamic and active compositions feel simultaneously spontaneous and meticulous in the way he arranges numerous people into complex scenes. His photographs offer poignant portrayals of daily life in rural and small towns across the South that are empathic, intimate, and often humorous, without shying away from his subjects’ material and economic challenges.
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Baldwin Lee (American, b. 1951) Montgomery, Alabama 1984 Gelatin silver print High museum of Art, Atlanta
Sally Mann (American, b. 1951) Blowing Bubbles 1987 Gelatin silver print High Museum of Art, Atlanta Purchase with funds from Lucinda W. Bunnen for the Bunnen Collection
From 1985-1994, Sally Mann photographed her three children – Emmett, Jessie, and Virginia – at the family’s rustic cabin in the Shenandoah Valley. The pictures she created evoke the freedom and tranquility of unhurried days spent exploring outdoors but also capture the complexities of childhood, showing it from both the child and adult’s point of view. In this photograph, Mann presents childhood as at once magical and fleeting. While Jessie delights in producing the shimmering bubbles, Virginia faces us with an anxious expression. If the doll on the railing suggests the innocence of childhood, the pair of abandoned women’s shoes and toy shopping cart hint at its inevitable end.
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Deborah Luster (American, b. 1951) Donald Garringer, Angola, Louisiana September 17, 1999 Gelatin silver prints on aluminium Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Eric and Jeanette Lipman Fund
In 1998, Deborah Luster began photographing incarcerated people in Louisiana, aiming to give this population visibility and voice. Some of her sitters posed with objects of importance, while others vividly expressed themselves through gesture and expression. Luster printed the portraits on small metal plates that evoke 19thcentury tintypes, intimate objects meant to be touched and handled. On the back of each plate, she recorded information about the sitter, including name, age, length of sentence, prison job, number of children, and future hopes and dreams. While each photograph commemorates an individual’s existence, the project serves as a disquieting reminder of the dehumanisation, grief, and generational trauma the prison industrial complex produces.
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Deborah Luster (American, b. 1951) “REAL,” Transylvania, Louisiana 1999 Gelatin silver prints on aluminium Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Eric and Jeanette Lipman Fund
Richard Misrach (American, b. 1949) Swamp and Pipeline, Geismar, Louisiana 1998 Pigmented inkjet print High Museum of Art, Atlanta Commissioned with funds from the H. B. and Doris Massey Charitable Trust, Lucinda W. Bunnen, and High Museum of Art Enhancement Fund for the Picturing the South series
In 1998, Richard Misrach produced a detailed and disturbing visual study of the ecological degradation along a 150-mile section of the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans – a stretch indelibly marked by the more than one hundred petrochemical plants that have spewed pollutants into the air, water, and land surrounding them. Through his evocative large-scale colour photographs, Misrach reveals not only the destruction of the Mississippi’s delicate ecosystem but also the layers of history, power, and politics complicit in engineering a system that has both wreaked havoc on the land and covertly exploited and poisoned nearby residents, primarily African Americans.
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Sally Mann (American, b. 1951) Deep South, Untitled (Scarred Tree) 1999 Gelatin silver print High Museum of Art, Atlanta Purchase with funds from Jane and Clay Jackson
Even in today’s “New South,” photography is largely a story of dichotomies: turbulent versus languorous, urban versus rural, privileged versus impoverished, and still, white versus Black. What appears to separate current photographic practice from other eras is that image-makers today seem compelled to address such dual realities with a critical, often indicting interrogation of the south’s legacies. Sally Mann’s “Deep South, Untitled (Scarred Tree)” evokes the brutality of the south’s violent history in the scar on her romantically crafted print of an oak tree.
Suzanne Révy and Elin Spring. “A Long Arc,” on the What Will You Remember website March 20, 2024 [Online] Cited 19/12/2024
In this evocative study of an oak tree, Sally Mann focuses on a dark gash across the trunk, its scarred appearance a metaphor for the South’s traumatic history. The combination of beauty and brutality recalls Mann’s description of the South as “a place extravagant in its beauty, reckless in its fecundity, terrible in its indifference, and dark with memories.” The photograph also reveals Mann’s mastery of the 19th-century wet plate process, which enabled her to materially conjure the past in the present.
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
An-My Lê (American born Vietnam, b. 1960) Explosion, from the Small Wars series 1999-2002 Gelatin silver print Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Adolph D. and Wilkins C. Williams Fund
For her series Small Wars, An-My Lê photographed reenactments of Vietnam War battles in North Carolina and Virginia. In these elaborately staged theatrical events with authentically costumed reenactors, Lê photographed in a manner that mirrors the verisimilitude and immediacy of combat photography, blurring the lines between truth and fiction. The blast of fireworks in Explosion mimics the burst of an ordinance being discharged, illuminating the surrounding pine trees and thereby revealing that the battle is set in a temperate forest rather than in a dense Vietnamese jungle.
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
In the past twenty-five years, the American South has emerged as one of the most dynamic locales for contemporary photographic production and has nurtured both homegrown talents and attracted photographers from across the world who seek to better understand both the region and the nation. For these artists, bearing witness to the people, places, and culture of the American South is crucial to comprehending the United States’ collective ethos, and the images these artists produce are key to renegotiating our foundational myths and present realities.
The abiding preoccupations of photographers intent on articulating and scrutinising the character of the region touch on a range of overlapping topics and themes: the unruly and understated nature of the landscape coupled with the looming threat of climate change; storytelling and myth making, with a penchant for the gothic and unsettling; history’s persistence in the present and the need to challenge conventional narratives; the rapid urbanisation and globalisation of the region and the attendant shifting demographics; increasingly visible cultural and political division; and across all these other leitmotifs, race and the long shadow cast by slavery and Jim Crow.
In their efforts to expand and complicate both the myths and realities of the region, these contemporary photographers prompt us to redefine our concepts of who, and what, counts as American. They also show how the South continues to serve as a crucible of American identity, the uneasy place where our contradictions meet our aspirations.
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Whetstone’s photographs …are drawn from his New Wilderness series, in which he explores contemporary understandings of wilderness and charts ways in which longstanding stories of connection to the natural world around us are encoded in today’s culture. He is interested in the ways in which our identities mediate our relationship with the wild and in our stereotypes relating to rural populations.
For Whetstone the mythical frontier is synonymous with the line between humanity and inexorable nature, and as such, it never disappeared. Instead, it is all around us; indeed, it is in us, underlining as nonsense the idea that we could ever truly tame it. The myth of control over the wilderness animates Whetstone’s photography. Through images made both on his doorstep and across the region in settings from caves to hunting blinds, he explores tenuous moments of human dominance over places in the natural world.
Whetstone finds elements of both human culture and nature in the transitional zone between the two, which for him is the new wilderness… Whetstone’s photographs are a bridge to the inevitable complexity of relationships between humans and nature, which are likely to become ever more pressing as climatological and environmental processes of change weigh heavily in the region over coming decades.
Anonymous. “Jeff Whetstone,” on the Southbound Project website Nd [Online] Cited 23/01/2025
Lucas Foglia (American, b. 1983) Acorn with Possum Stew, Wildroots Homestead, North Carolina 2006 Pigmented inkjet print High Museum of Art, Atlanta Gift of Irene Zhou
In the tradition of photographers such as Walker Evans, William Eggleston, and Stephen Shore, Alec Soth seeks to expose and elevate pedestrian aspects of American life. His poetic images capture the harsh beauty of disenfranchised people and places, underscoring the romantic ideals espoused by American society and the realities of living in such a vast and varied country. Inspired by the writing of Flannery O’Connor, Soth’s project explores spiritual and hermetic life in the South. The photographs include studies that represent a variety of natural subjects such as landscapes, woods, and caves; examples of man-made intervention including tree houses, forts, cabins and tents; and portraits of monks, hermits, and survivalists.
Text from the High Museum of Art website
Traveling through the American South, Alec Soth explored the romantic allure of escape through the hermetic lives of outsiders living in the region. He photographed landscapes, structures (tree houses, forts, cabins), and people, primarily men, who choose to live on the outskirts of organized society. Distanced in their compositional and psychological approaches, Soth’s photographs demonstrate empathic insight with the desire for solitude, without shying away from the potentially nefarious impulses that motivate some people to withdraw from the mainstream.
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Sheila Pree Bright (American, b. 1967) Untitled 28 2007 From the Suburbia series Dye coupler print High Museum of Art, Atlanta, purchase with funds from the Hagedorn Family and the Friends of Photography
In her Suburbia series, Sheila Pree Bright creates narratives that allude to socioeconomic status and racial identity. The arrangement of the rooms and their contents invites the viewer to imagine the lives of their inhabitants. Bright’s inclusion in this well-appointed mid-century living room of titles such as The End of Blackness, books about Frida Kahlo and Pablo Picasso, masks from Africa, and vases from Asia underscore the inhabitant’s refinement and expansive cultural sophistication. Bright’s carefully composed photographs of the interiors of Black-owned homes in suburban Atlanta seek to counter often-stereotyped representations of Black communities in the mainstream media with a more realistic, nuanced view of middle-class African American family life.
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Susan Worsham (American, b. 1969) Marine, Hotel near Airport, Richmond, Virginia 2009 Pigmented inkjet print Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Aldine S. Hartman Endowment Fund
Gillian Laub (American, b. 1975) Prom Prince and Princess Dancing at the Integrated Prom 2011 Pigment print
Although she is from New York and has lived the majority of her life there, Laub spent many years visiting Montgomery County, Georgia, after first learning about its high school’s segregated prom and homecoming dances. Laub became aware of this situation in 2002 when a former student from the school wrote to Spin magazine saying that she, a white student, had not been permitted to take her boyfriend, who was black, to homecoming. Laub took on the assignment of visiting the county to learn more. What she found and began documenting was that two separate proms and homecoming dances were organized by student committees overseen by parents. One set of dances was held exclusively for white students; no students of color were allowed to attend. The other dances were held after the first and could be attended by students of any race but were mostly attended by black students. Separate sets of black and white prom and homecoming kings and queens were crowned for each dance. Laub’s photograph Homecoming Court (2002) captures the only time that the white and black homecoming court appeared together. The white homecoming queen and black homecoming queen were each crowned separately by white and black first graders from the local elementary school, thus reinforcing the teaching of segregation from a young age.
With all her photographic subjects, Laub works carefully to establish strong relationships based on trust. Though members of the community backing the segregated proms met her with hostility, she developed strong bonds with several students and continued to follow up with them over the years during subsequent trips. Julie and Bubba, Mount Vernon (2002) shows two of the students Laub met when she first visited this community. Julie, whose older sister Anna was the young white woman who wrote to Spin, had white friends who were not allowed to socialize with her due to the race of her African American boyfriend, Bubba. Laub captures the couple in a relaxed embrace. They look at the camera openly, without armor or defensiveness. Their relationship, the picture seems to suggest, is something simple and honest that the surrounding community does not support due to entrenched histories of racism.
In 2010, after the community had received national attention because of Laub’s photographs, the school elected to integrate the prom. Although Montgomery County had seen social progress with the integration of the dance, the community was divided once more when one of the school’s former students, twenty-two-year-old African American Justin Patterson, was killed in January of 2011 by a white father who found Patterson in his home with his daughter. In light of this event, Laub began exploring this story and the broader issues of racial violence in the community. Her work resulted not only in a 2015 monograph of photographs, Southern Rites, but also in an HBO documentary film by the same name, as well as a traveling exhibition organized by the International Center of Photography. Her photograph Prom Prince and Princess Dancing at the Integrated Prom (2011, above) shows an interracial couple dancing at the prom, first made possible only the year before. The young princess wraps her arms around her prince, holding him close while they dance. Though enjoying this moment of relaxed intimacy, the young man also seems somewhat anxious, or at least aware, of the continuing dangers of such relationships for men of color in his community. Laub’s intimate photographs dig deeply into the complex emotions of young men and women grappling with the weight of the South’s long history of racism.
Anonymous. “Gillian Laub,” on the Southbound Project Nd website [Online] Cited 23/01/2025
Dawoud Bey’s Birmingham Project bridges gaps of time to foreground how the past continues to resonate in the present. In this diptych, he reframes the tragic events of September 15, 1963, in Birmingham, Alabama – the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church, which killed four African American girls, and in its aftermath, the murder of two African American boys. The series pairs portraits of citizens of contemporary Birmingham: a child the same age as one of the victims with an adult the age the child would have reached had they lived. In this way, Bey memorialises the victims and effectively imagines a future that was never realised.
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
For years, RaMell Ross has immersed himself in Hale County, Alabama, a place made iconic in the history of photography by Walker Evans and William Christenberry. Where Evans and Christenberry studied the white residents and decaying architecture, respectively, Ross focuses on the Black community and their untold stories. In iHome, he intertwines present and past by photographing a cell phone screen that shows a white antebellum house, also shown out of focus in the background. He relishes in the anachronism of employing modern technology to view a structure of the past. His inclusion of the hand holding the phone authors a new perspective on time, place, agency, and who gets to write history and imagine the future.
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Mark Steinmetz (American, b. 1961) International Terminal, Atlanta Airport 2016 Gelatin silver print High Museum of Art, Atlanta Commissioned with funds from the H.B. and Doris Massey Charitable Trust and the Picturing the South Fund for the Picturing the South series
Mark Steinmetz spent two years photographing in, around, and above Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International, the world’s most heavily trafficked airport. He considered the activity and interactions that take place at this crossroads of the contemporary South and masterfully captured the ordinary-yet-fascinating human dramas that play out in a decidedly liminal public place. This image of a young woman relaxing on a luggage cart lends a poignant perspective to how this gateway to the wider world is a place of delightful paradoxes: a massive modern complex sitting in the midst of a sublime natural environment; a bustling global transit hub as the site of solitary experiences; and a stifling bureaucratic tangle as a portal to possibility and opportunity.
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Irina Rozovsky (American born Russia, b. 1981) Untitled (Traditions Highway) 2018 Inkjet print Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Kathleen Boone Samuels Memorial Fund
Rozovsky’s series Traditions Highway takes its name from Georgia’s State Route 15, a road that runs northsouth through the entire state and passes through Sparta and Athens, towns named after ancient Greek cities, the latter of which birthed the concept of democracy. Rozovsky’s photographs explore contemporary ideas and expressions of democracy, especially as they are situated in the American South, and examine the ways that past and present are layered in the region. Here, an abandoned carriage decorated with hearts in the woods conjures myriad ideas and feelings: the romanticism and dilapidation of the Old South, the tension between beauty and destruction and between the natural and built environments, and the blurred lines between fantasy and reality.
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Kris Graves (American, b. 1982) Lee Square, Richmond, Virginia 2020 Pigmented inkjet print High Museum of Art, Atlanta Purchase with funds from the H.B. and Doris Massey Charitable Trust
This was the graffiti covered base to the bronze statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee on horseback in Lee Square, Richmond, Virginia. The statue was part of the Robert E. Lee Monument, which was removed in September 2021.
An-My Lê photographed evidence of the social unrest that emerged in Washington, D.C., in 2020 amid the COVID-19 pandemic and the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd. “It often seems that there are two Americas, left and right, looking at the same place from radically different and irreconcilable perspectives,” she explained. Centered here on the waning moment of a protest, with national monuments and federal buildings as the backdrop, Lê takes a wide view to offer context for a scene. She carefully assembles details that reveal how America’s challenges of the past shape and rhyme with the heated debates of the present.
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Immigrants from Mexico and Latin America living in the United States are often perceived as distrustful. The portraits of Jose Ibarra Rizo, an immigrant, show people with pride and dignity, revealing a strong sense of identity. His series, Somewhere in Between, tells the utterly human story of the migrant community in Georgia.
José Ibarra Rizo’s series Somewhere In Between documents the Latinx immigrant experience in the American South. Rizo’s tender photographs focus on a community that is ubiquitous in the region yet often misrepresented or simply invisible in popular media and political debates. This portrait of a man standing in front of his prized roses – hand tightly grasping a bag of insecticide – was made soon after he retired from a gruelling job at a poultry processing plant in Gainesville. Georgia’s poultry industry employs numerous immigrants, including the photographer’s own parents.
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
A Long Arc: Photography and the American South since 1845 Hardcover – 1 April 2024
The South is perhaps the most mythologized region in the United States and also one of the most depicted. Since the dawn of photography in the nineteenth century, photographers have articulated the distinct and evolving character of the South’s people, landscape, and culture and reckoned with its fraught history. Indeed, many of the urgent questions we face today about what defines the American experience – from racism, poverty, and the legacy of slavery to environmental disaster, immigration, and the changes wrought by a modern, global economy- appear as key themes in the photography of the South. The visual history of the South is inextricably intertwined with the history of photography and also the history of America, and is therefore an apt lens through which to examine American identity.
A Long Arc: Photography and the American South accompanies a major exhibition at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, with more than one hundred photographers represented, including Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Gordon Parks, William Eggleston, Sally Mann, Carrie Mae Weems, Dawoud Bey, Alec Soth, and An-My Le. Insightful texts by Imani Perry, Sarah Kennel, Makeda Best, and Rahim Fortune, among others, illuminate this broad survey of photographs of the Southern United States as an essential American story.
Co-published by Aperture and High Museum of Art, Atlanta
Unidentified photographer (American) Untitled [Two Men in Work Clothes, Wearing Hats, One Standing, One Seated] c. 1880 Tintype New Orleans Museum of Art Gift of Stanley B. Burns, MD
The last posting before Christmas is a valuable photographic exhibition on Black Americans which reveals the importance of photography to their culture.
“Frederick Douglass [that fiery American social reformer, abolitionist, orator, writer, and statesman] wrote multiple essays on the power of photography to shape perceptions about race. He posited that the medium would be a great liberator of Black Americans, allowing them to control their own narrative.”1
Any archive of photographs on a particular culture or subject which is collected and then freely disseminated is an incredible resource for researchers and the uninitiated. Nevertheless, what we must be mindful of is who is taking the photographs and collecting them (institutions) and to what purpose, and from what position, what point of view, are the resulting photographs being viewed – from the point of view of the subjugated or from the point of view of the ruling elite. Are the photographers from within the community, or are they colonial, imperial documenters of (for example), ethnographic status, a vanishing race, or slaves. If a person from outside the community takes the photographs (for example, the photographs of Edward S. Curtis), what was his purpose and what was the constructed, mythical story he wanted to tell… and are the photographs still valuable all these years later to contemporary First Nations people looking back on the people, rituals and customs that were portrayed in them.
The photographs in this posting will have a very different meaning to those that live within the community which is portrayed, I expect bringing mixed feelings of pride and the knowledge of the struggle of Black existence in America. And also the knowledge that “blacks had created their own traditions, rituals, and a history that formed a cohesive and complex culture that was the source of a full sense of identity.”2 The photographs “help reframe the history of American photography and place Black photographers and sitters at the centre of that story.”
Personally, I believe there is no centre and periphery… no inside and outsider art. To believe so is a misnomer, for everything is valuable in and of its own right, and should be acknowledged and appreciated as such.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
PS. I have added bibliographic information where possible to give context to the photographers work.
Many thankx to the New Orleans Museum of Art (NOMA) for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
From photography’s beginnings in the United States, Black studio photographers operated on the developing edge of popular media to produce affirming portraits for their clients, as well as a wide range of photographic work rooted in their communities. Called to the Camera offers a comprehensive history of this work, from the nineteenth-century daguerreotypes of James Presley Ball to the height of Black studios in the mid-twentieth century, and considers contemporary photographers responding to Black studio traditions today. In addition to showcasing famous photographers such as Ball, James Van Der Zee, and Addison Scurlock, this volume brings attention to dozens of other artists across the country, including Florestine Perrault Collins, Austin Hansen, and Henry Clay Anderson. The book features more than one hundred extraordinary vintage photographs, many of them unique objects and some, like those by the Hooks Brothers Studio, published here for the first time. Highlighting Black subjects on both sides of the camera, Called to the Camera presents a broader and more inclusive history of photography.
James Presley Ball (American, 1825-1904) Alexander S. Thomas c. late 1850s Quarter plate daguerreotype Cincinnati Art Museum Gift of James M Marrs, MD
James Presley Ball, Sr. (1825 – May 4, 1904) was a prominent African-American photographer, abolitionist, and businessman.
Ball was born in Frederick County, Virginia, to William and Susan Ball in 1825. He learned daguerreotype photography from John B. Bailey of Boston, who like Ball was “a freeman of color.” Ball opened a one-room daguerreotype studio in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1845. The business did not prosper, so Ball worked as an itinerant daguerreotypist, settling briefly in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, then in Richmond, Virginia in 1846 to develop a more successful studio near the State Capitol building.
In 1847, Ball again departed for Ohio, again as a travelling daguerreotypist. He settled in Cincinnati in 1849 and opened a studio where his brother Thomas Ball became an operator. The gallery, known as “Ball’s Daguerrean Gallery of the West” or “Ball’s Great Daguerrean Gallery of the West,” ascended “from a small gallery to one of the great galleries of the Midwest.” Starting in 1854 and continuing “for about four years,” Robert Seldon Duncanson worked in Ball’s studio retouching portraits and colouring photographic prints. Gleason’s Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion in 1854 described the gallery as displaying 187 photographs by Ball and 6 paintings by Duncanson; furthermore, the gallery was “replete with elegance and beauty,” with walls “bordered with gold leaf and flowers,” “master-piece” furniture, a piano, and mirrors.
Meanwhile, Ball opened the separate Ball and Thomas Gallery with his brother-in-law Alexander Thomas. In 1855, Ball published an abolitionist pamphlet accompanied by a 600-yard-long panoramic painting entitled “Mammoth Pictorial Tour of the United States Comprising Views of the African Slave Trade”; Duncanson probably participated in the production of the painting. During 1855 Ball’s daguerreotypes were shown at the Ohio State Fair and at the Ohio Mechanics Annual Exhibition. In 1856 Ball traveled to Europe. The Ball and Thomas Gallery was destroyed by a tornado in May 1860, but was later rebuilt with assistance from the community.
During the 1870s Ball ended his partnership with Thomas and moved to Greenville, Mississippi; Vidalia, Louisiana; St. Louis, Missouri; and then Minneapolis, Minnesota, where he started a new studio. By 1887, the studio was known as “J. P. Ball & Son, Artistic Photographers”; Ball’s son was named James Presley Ball, Jr. In September 1887, Ball became the official photographer of the 25th anniversary celebration of the Emancipation Proclamation.
In October 1887, Ball again moved, this time to Helena, Montana, where the “J. P. Ball & Son” studio was established. By 1894, Ball had become active in politics in Helena; for example, he was nominated for a county coroner position which he declined. One of the notable series of photographs Ball took his stay in Helena involved William Biggerstaff (an African-American man) before, during, and after he was hanged in 1896 for committing murder.
In 1900, the Ball family probably moved to Seattle, Washington, where Ball opened the Globe Photo Studio. He may have relocated to Portland, Oregon, in 1901. The family moved to Honolulu in 1902, and Ball died there in 1904.
Among the subjects of Ball’s photographic portraits were P.T. Barnum, Charles Dickens, Henry Highland Garnet, the family of Ulysses S. Grant, Jenny Lind, and Queen Victoria. The techniques used for “all the known photographs of J. P. Ball” as of 1993 included mostly daguerreotypes and albumen prints (e.g., as carte de visites).
Alexander S. Thomas (American, 1826-1910) [was] Ball’s brother-in-law, who worked as a steward on the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers. In November 1857, Thomas became a full partner in the [James Presley Ball photographic] business and the name of the studio changed to Ball & Thomas. Three years later the union dissolved for unknown reasons, and Thomas continued in business with Tom Ball, still under the name of Ball & Thomas. Within two months a tornado destroyed that gallery, but many white friends helped them to repair the place, outfitting it more elaborately than before.
Florestine Perrault Collins (American, 1895-1988) Portrait of a young woman dressed in white 1920-1928 Gelatin silver print mounted in folder 4 1/4 x 9 1/4 inches The Historic New Orleans Collection
Florestine Perrault Collins (1895-1988) was an American professional photographer from New Orleans. Collins is noted for having created photographs of African-American clients that “reflected pride, sophistication, and dignity.” instead of racial stereotypes.
In 1909, Collins began practicing photography at age 14. Her subjects ranged from weddings, First Communions, and graduations to personal photographs of soldiers who had returned home. At the beginning of her career, Collins had to pass as a white woman to be able to assist photographers.
Collins eventually opened her own studio, catering to African-American families. She gained a loyal following and had success, due to both her photography and marketing skills. Out of 101 African-American women who identified themselves as photographers in the 1920 U.S. Census, Collins was the only one listed in New Orleans.
She advertised in newspapers, playing up the sentimentality of a well-done photograph. Collins also included her photograph in the ads to appeal to customers who thought a female photographer might take better pictures of babies and children. Collins’ first husband, Eilert Bertrand, believed that women should not have careers and tried to restrain her public appearances. Collins died in 1988.
According to the Encyclopedia of Louisiana, Collins’ career “mirrored a complicated interplay of gender, racial and class expectations”.
“The history of black liberation in the United States could be characterised as a struggle over images as much as it has also been a struggle over rights,” according to bell hooks. Collins’ photographs are representative of that. By taking pictures of black women and children in domestic settings, she challenged the pervasive stereotypes of the time about black women.
Arthur P. Bedou (July 6, 1882 – July 2, 1966) was an African-American photographer based in New Orleans. Bedou was, for a time, the personal photographer of Booker T. Washington, and documented the last decade of Washington’s life. He also documented campus life at Xavier University of Louisiana, the Tuskegee Institute, and the city life of New Orleans, especially the city’s black residents.
Arthur Paul Bedou was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, in 1882, one of five children of Armand Bedou and Marie Celeste Coustaut. His family was poor and he received very little education; as a photographer he was largely self-taught. Bedou worked for a time as a clerk, but by 1899 he was taking pictures, and his career started in earnest when a photograph he took of a solar eclipse in 1900 received wide notice.
In 1903 Bedou documented a conference at Tuskegee Institute in the hope of gaining visibility for his work. Booker T. Washington saw some of his photographs and invited Bedou to accompany him as his personal photographer, preferring Bedou over other candidates like C. M. Battey in part for his ability to produce dynamic images of unfolding events. Most of Bedou’s photographs of Washington were taken between 1908 and 1915, the year of Washington’s death. Among other tasks, he accompanied Washington on his summer tours with the object of producing an album of each trip. To supplement his uncertain income from these travels, he had some of the photographs he took made into postcards, Christmas cards, and calendars. His position brought him further commissions to photograph notables both black and white, including George Washington Carver, Theodore Roosevelt, Andrew Carnegie, and Julius Rosenwald.
Through the connection to Washington, who was the school’s founding principal, Bedou was invited to become official photographer of the Tuskegee Institute. Shortly after Washington’s death, however, he was replaced as the school’s official photographer by Battey, who at the time was favoured by campus officials for various reasons. He was also in demand by other black colleges and schools such as Fisk University to document life on their campuses, and by professional organisations such as the National Negro Business League, the National Medical Association, and the National Baptist Convention.
In the 1920s, Bedou opened his own photography studio in New Orleans, where he photographed everything from black families and their children to the laying of the cornerstone at Corpus Christi Church to the visits of jazz bands and celebrity speakers. His photographs often appeared in both the Louisiana Weekly (a newspaper with a primarily black circulation) and the general-circulation newspaper Louisiana Times-Picayune. His photographs won several awards over the years, including the gold medal at the 1907 Jamestown Tercentennial Exposition.
Bedou prospered and invested in real estate and companies like the People’s Industrial Life Insurance Company of Louisiana, of which he was for many years a director and vice-president.
Bedou photographed numerous events, activities, and portraits around the Xavier University of Louisiana campus from about 1917 to the late 1950s. When he died in 1966, he left much of his fortune to educational institutions, and his wife, Lillia Bedou, founded a scholarship in his honour at Xavier University of Louisiana. Since her death, the scholarship has been known as the Arthur and Lillia Bedou Scholarship. Xavier University Archives & Special Collections also holds an extensive collection of his photographs.
James Augustus Van Der Zee was an American photographer best known for his portraits of black New Yorkers. He was a leading figure in the Harlem Renaissance. Aside from the artistic merits of his work, Van Der Zee produced the most comprehensive documentation of the period.
The New Orleans Museum of Art (NOMA) today announces the fall opening of Called to the Camera: Black American Studio Photographers, a major exhibition focusing on the artistic virtuosity, social significance, and political impact of Black American photographers working in commercial portrait studios during photography’s first century and beyond. Organised by NOMA, the exhibition focuses on a national cohort of professional camera operators, demonstrating the incredible variety of work that they produced and their influence on the broader history of photography. Featuring more than 150 photographs spanning from the 19th century to present day – many of which have never been publicly exhibited and are unique objects – Called to the Camera will be on view at NOMA September 16, 2022 – January 8, 2023.
The exhibition explores how Black studio photographers operated on the developing edge of photographic media from its earliest introduction in the United States. They produced affirming portraits for their clients, while also engaging in other kinds of paid photographic work exemplary of important movements in art like Pictorialism and modernism. Called to the Camera will feature work by over three dozen photographers located across the country, demonstrating how the Black photography studio was a national phenomenon. The exhibition includes an interspersed selection of works by modern and contemporary artists, illustrating connections between the historical legacy of Black photography studios and what we consider to be fine art photography today.
Photographers whose works are featured in Called to the Camera include James Van Der Zee and Addison Scurlock, who worked on a national stage, as well as photographers who were active regionally, among them Florestine Perrault Collins and A.P. Bedou (New Orleans, LA), Reverend Henry Clay Anderson (Greenville, MS), Morgan and Marvin Smith (New York City), and Robert and Henry Hooks (Memphis, TN). Among the contemporary photographers included in the exhibition are Endia Beal, Elliott Jerome Brown Jr., and Polo Silk. The exhibition will feature a range of different types of images, from some of the earliest daguerreotypes of significant Black Americans (such as Frederick Douglass) to early hand-painted gelatin silver prints and panoramic photographs, as well as camera equipment, studio ephemera, and an immersive re-creation of a noted studio’s reception room.
“Chief among NOMA’s goals is to support important projects that amplify the histories of under-represented communities,” said Susan Taylor, Montine McDaniel Freeman Director of the New Orleans Museum of Art. “Called to the Camera does exactly that: it articulates a story that is both local and national, centering the importance of Black photographers in their communities and in the history of photography.”
“As we continue to build our notable photography holdings to make our collection and our exhibition program truly reflect our audiences, this thoughtfully researched national exploration of Black American studio photography is a vital contribution to this work,” added Russell Lord, Freeman Family Curator of Photographs at the New Orleans Museum of Art.
Brian Piper, exhibition curator and Assistant Curator of Photographs at the New Orleans Museum of Art added, “Building on the foundational work of scholars like Dr. Deborah Willis, this exhibition gathers original works by a professional class of Black photographers linked by a shared set of visual and cultural concerns. By bringing these objects – many never before exhibited – into the art museum, we can help reframe the history of American photography and place Black photographers and sitters at the centre of that story. Called to the Camera is, in part, an argument for a reconsideration of how historians and institutions evaluate and display photography.”
The exhibition is organised into five sections across 6,000 square feet that proceed chronologically and thematically from the 1840s to present day. The first section emphasises the pivotal role Black American photographers played in photography during the 19th century, focusing on the establishment of commercial studio practices in the United States by photographers like James Presley Ball and the Goodridge Brothers. The second gallery evokes early 20th century commercial studios and domestic interiors, providing a contextual framework that illustrates the ways in which Black Americans used photography after 1900 to shape both private lives and public expressions of self. From there, the exhibition focuses closely on the practices of a half-dozen photographic studios, providing insights into both similarities and differences across geographies and exploring how these artists used a range of photographic processes and aesthetic styles through the end of the 1960s.
As a whole, the exhibition will consider other work that portrait studio photographers engaged in during this time, including photojournalism, advertising, and event photography. Beyond portraits, Called to the Camera demonstrates how Black American studio photographers worked on the vanguard of fine art photography and argues that the business of the studio cannot be divorced from the rest of these photographers’ practices. Called to the Camera: Black American Studio Photographers is curated by Dr. Brian Piper, NOMA’s Assistant Curator of Photographs. The exhibition draws works from both NOMA’s institutional holdings as well as works loaned from both notable public and private collections including the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture; National Museum of African American History and Culture; the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library at Emory University; and Metropolitan Museum of Art. Called to the Camera will be accompanied by a catalog distributed by Yale University Press featuring over 100 colour plates and essays by leading scholars of photographic and Black American history including Dr. John Edwin Mason, Carla Williams, Russell Lord, and Brian Piper.
The exhibition is sponsored by Catherine and David Edwards; Kitty and Stephen Sherrill; Andrea and Rodney Herenton; Tina Freeman and Philip Woollam; Milly and George Denegre; and Cherye and Jim Pierce. Additional support is provided by Philip DeNormandie; Aimee and Michael Siegel; and the Del and Ginger Hall Photography Fund. This project is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts. Research for this project was funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Press release from New Orleans Museum of Art (NOMA)
Morgan (February 16, 1910 – February 17, 1993) and Marvin Smith (February 16, 1910 – 2003) were identical African-American twin brothers. They were photographers and artists known for documenting the life of Harlem in the 1930s to 1950s. …
The Smiths decided to commit themselves to the media of photography in 1937 and took free art classes taught by sculptor Augusta Savage. There they met numerous other influential artists including Jacob Lawrence and Romare Bearden. Morgan became the first staff photographer for New York Amsterdam News in 1937, the most popular Black newspaper at the time. Two years later they opened their own photography studio, M & M Smith Studios, next to the famed Apollo Theater on 125th Street. The twins were the theatre’s official photographers and through this job met influential models, artists and performers. Their studio became a hub of activity for entertainers and writers, as well as the location of the majority of their portrait photography. They photographed George Washington Carver and Billie Holiday, among other famous Black artists and politicians, as well as street life in Harlem during this time.
The Smiths photographed with the intention of showing the different facets of Black life. Along with capturing the Civil rights movement and anti-lynching demonstrations the brothers were among the first to capture the vibrant lives of Harlem residents.
From the late 1940s into the 1970s, photographer Henry Clay Anderson created a remarkable record of the lively African American community in Greenville, Mississippi. He photographed ordinary people in portraits and at events, including weddings, funerals, baseball games, and school proms and homecomings. Anderson worked as a teacher before serving in the military, and he studied photography on the GI Bill. While working as a photographer, he also served as a minister and helped African Americans pass the literacy test to obtain a voter’s card. Anderson said, “A photographer understands that pictures will show what is in the person… [M]aking pictures is a lot like telling a story.” The story Anderson recorded concerns an aspect of mid-twentieth-century American history that has largely been ignored – the existence of thriving, middle-class African American communities throughout the South.
Reverend Henry Clay Anderson was a pastor, teacher, veteran, and photographer, best known for capturing the lives of the black middle class of Greenville, Mississippi from 1948 to 1986. He was born in Nitta Yuma, Mississippi, in 1911 and spent his childhood in Hollandale outside of Greenville, Mississippi. No information is known about his parents or siblings, except that he had a brother who worked at an insurance company in the same building as his photography studio. Anderson attended the segregated Washington County Schools for his early childhood and high school education. His love for photography began when his family gave him a box camera to play with at nine years old. …
Anderson married Sadie Lee with whom he had no children. His first occupation was as a teacher before he served in World War II. When he returned from the war to Greenville in 1946, the GI Bill of 1944 allowed Anderson to attend Southern University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. There, he studied photography from 1946 to 1948 when he opened the Anderson Photo Service. His photography studio did not earn enough to support him and his wife financially, so he worked several other jobs throughout his photography career. These included being a pastor of King Solomon Baptist Church, a voter education teacher through the Southern Christian Leadership Conference during the late 1950s through the 1960s, and a candidate for the Greenville City Council as a Freedom Democratic Party member in 1965 and for the justice of the peace position in District 2 of Washington County in 1971.
Anderson’s photography is notable because he depicted a middle-class blackness that seemed to exist without much racial strife and violence as other Mississippi communities from the 1940s to the 1970s. His work offers a glimpse into young women’s lives participating in beauty pageants, families relaxing in luxury living rooms and on porches, gentlemen and ladies dressed for elegant occasions, and children celebrating birthdays. He recorded what has been called by many a “hidden” portion of middle-class black lives during this period. However, his most recognised work is also his most upsetting: the funeral of Reverend George Lee, who was murdered while helping blacks register to vote in May of 1955. Anderson’s photos of Lee’s marred face and mourning relatives made it into publications of Jet, Ebony, Life, and Time in 1955.
Austin Hansen (American, 1910-1996) Eartha Kitt Teaching a Dance Class at Harlem YMCA c. 1955 Gelatin silver print 8 x 10 in. Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library Photograph by Austin Hansen used by permission of Joyce Hansen
Austin Hansen (1910 – January 23, 1996) was a Black American photographer known for his chronicling of life in Harlem.
Austin Hansen was born in 1910 in Saint Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands. He began taking photographs at age 12, and was assisted by the island’s official photographer. He served in the United States Navy as a photographer’s mate.
He came to New York City in 1928, but racist attitudes of the time blocked him from employment despite an excellent reference from a naval officer for whom he had worked. He worked instead as a dishwasher and elevator operator, and occasionally played the drums.
Hansen’s first break came when he took a photograph of a young Black woman singing for Eleanor Roosevelt at an uptown hotel, which he sold to the New York Amsterdam News for $2. Building on this small start, he was eventually able to make photography his full-time profession and his portraits and news photographs captured life in Harlem for the next sixty years.
He did portrait work at his studio, as well as freelancing for newspapers such as The Chicago Defender and the Staten Island Advance. In addition to everyday community life such as weddings, street scenes, and Harlem architecture, Hansen captured images of notable political figures (Haile Selassie, Marcus Garvey, Martin Luther King Jr.), authors (Langston Hughes), entertainers (Count Basie, Eartha Kitt), and others.
Hansen was for decades the official photographer for the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, and documented events at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Morningside Heights. For the last five years of his life, he was artist-in-residence at the Photographic Center of Harlem.
Over the course of his life Hansen built a massive collection of over 500,000 portraits of Black Americans, ranging from churchmen and political leaders to everyday working-class people. More than 50,000 of his images are at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.
Hansen was the subject of the film Search for Hansen: A Photographer of Harlem, directed by Justin Bryant.
Through his lens, Mr. Hansen, who began taking pictures as a 12-year-old in the Virgin Islands, captured a vast spectrum of activity in the community he joined in 1928. Among his images were enraptured young couples, David N. Dinkins’s wedding and the street-corner grief when Franklin D. Roosevelt died in 1945. Here was Lena Horne being interviewed in the Hotel Theresa, and there was a man walking a picket line, carrying a sign that read: “Do Not Ride These Buses Until You See Negro Drivers.”
The photographs Mr. Hansen took were also the story of his life. “And it hasn’t all been beautiful,” he said one day in 1994. “Some has been sad, the way they treated black people in those days. And I have been part of the suffering.” …
for the next six decades, his portraits and news photographs captured the ordinary and extraordinary in Harlem. Eventually, he opened a studio on West 135th Street, where he worked for 47 years, with time out for a hitch as a Navy photographer during World War II and a job as a darkroom technician for the Office of War Information.
But most of his career was spent making portraits and freelancing for newspapers like The New York Amsterdam News and The Pittsburgh Courier.
He took photographs for Malcolm X and for Adam Clayton Powell Sr. and Jr. He recorded historical images of Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, Marcus Garvey, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Langston Hughes, Mary McLeod Bethune and Marian Anderson.
For more than 40 years, Mr. Hansen was the official photographer for the Abyssinian Baptist Church, and for more than 20 years Mr. Hansen and his brother, Aubrey, who died before him, documented events at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.
Hooks Brothers Studio (Robert and Henry Hooks) Untitled [Man in Dollar Bill Suit with Congregation] c. 1940 Gelatin silver print Approx. 8 x 10 inches Collection of Andrea and Rodney Herenton (The Hooks Brothers Photograph Collection, consisting of original photographs, negatives, equipment, and ephemera was acquired by the RWS Company, LLC in 2018)
Hooks Brothers Studio (Robert and Henry Hooks) Untitled [Students looking at photographs] c. 1950 Gelatin silver print Approx. 8 x 10 inches Collection of Andrea and Rodney Herenton (The Hooks Brothers Photograph Collection, consisting of original photographs, negatives, equipment, and ephemera was acquired by the RWS Company, LLC in 2018)
Hooks Brothers Studio (Robert and Henry Hooks) Al Green in the Hooks Brothers Studio c. 1968 Gelatin silver print Approx. 8 x 10 inches Collection of Andrea and Rodney Herenton (The Hooks Brothers Photograph Collection, consisting of original photographs, negatives, equipment, and ephemera was acquired by the RWS Company, LLC in 2018)
Robert and Henry Hooks opened a family run photography business that endured in Memphis from 1906 until the 1970s. During the 1940s the studio was taken over by their sons, Charles and Henry Hooks. Hooks Bros. photographs document a rich, in-depth, and complex visual record of African American culture in the Mid-South that no longer exist, for the beautiful images reveal a hidden transcript, the world of segregated Memphis.
Over a period of seventy-six years, the Hooks brothers preserved the totality of black middle-class family life in a large urban setting. Their pictures are stories about schools and graduations, weddings, family occasions, birthday parties, social events, social and fraternal organisations, neighbourhood associations, celebratory events like the Cotton Makers Jubilee, amateur athletes and professional sports, as well as musicians associated with the city’s musical heritage. These images document the significance of the sacred and the social life of the church in black middle-class culture in Memphis. They also record the history of black businesses like Universal Life Insurance Company, Tri-State Bank, as well as the black newspapers, the Memphis World, and the Tri-State Defender.
The local and social history of Memphis preserved in Hooks Bros. photographs includes military history, documenting black Memphians’ military service and participation in World War I and World War II, as well as support of the war effort in Red Cross service and bond drives. The portraits of many prominent leaders is a distinctive category of Hooks Bros. photographs. They developed a manner of capturing the character and social position of black male leaders and celebrities, always picturing the individual in settings, and with objects related to his profession or role in the black community.
It has been said that every black family in Memphis has a Hooks Bros. photograph. The statement is a testament to the visual impact and historical significance of these images. They are extraordinary photographic histories of the black communities in Memphis. However, the astounding depth and breadth of the visual record over a long period of time makes them invaluable as a portrait of the broad spectrum of African American culture at a specific time and place in American history.
Polo Silk (American, b. 1964) Lo Life, Lo Down, Club Detour 1993 Unique Polacolor Print Museum Purchase, Tina Freeman Fund Copyright Polo Silk, Fab 5 Legacy Archive
For more than three decades, Selwhyn Sthaddeus “Polo Silk” Terrell (American, b. 1964) has been photographing Black New Orleans, creating a unique body of work that blends elements of portraiture, fashion, performance, and street photography.
Polo Silk mobilised the traditional portrait studio, taking it to the streets and clubs of New Orleans and transforming it into an adaptable, on-the-spot method of picture making. In the course of his career, Polo perfected the use of instant-photo technology, making dynamic, one of a kind portraits that capitalised on the vibrant colour range and immediacy that is a hallmark of Polaroid and other instant films. Sold on demand to clients who wanted a record of an event like Super Sunday, or to show off their carefully planned outfit on any given Saturday night, Polo’s pictures have become an integral part of how many Black New Orleanians have used photography to represent themselves.
Polo’s pictures are often taken in front of the colourful airbrushed backdrops painted by his cousin Otis Spears (American, b. 1969) that feature figures from hip-hop and bounce music, fashion brands, sports logos, and the hot songs of the day. In bringing photography out of the studio and directly to the people, Polo made it a truly accessible phenomenon. While traditional portrait photographs were often designed to appear timeless and placeless, Polo’s pictures are absolutely fixed in time, and rooted in New Orleans. Together, Polo and his subjects have created one of the most important visual archives of this time and place, an important set of pictures that highlight Black expression, individuality, and ultimately, a collective community identity.
Elliott Jerome Brown Jr. (born 1993) is a queer black American artist and photographer. In 2019 they received an Emerging Visual Arts Grant by The Rema Hort Mann Foundation.
Endia Beal is an African-American visual artist, curator, and educator. She is known for her work in creating visual narratives through photography and video testimonies focused on women of colour working in corporate environments.
Her newest exhibition, “How to Make A Country” builds on these ideas in her prior work. Including a self-portrait of Airitam stitching an American flag with a basket of fresh cotton at her side, the series highlights the stories that weren’t told. “I was thinking about the people who make up this country, and how this country has become so economically prosperous and huge, and what it took in order to have a country like what we have,” she said.
“I was in my living room one day looking at one of the U.S. flags (I say U.S. flag because America as a whole is actually comprised of several countries, not just this one but that’s a whole other topic) we have here in the studio and I started thinking about the story of Betsy Ross and how she made the U.S. flag. It’s one of those awe inspiring, patriotic stories we’re taught in school that never quite sat well with me. I kept thinking, “But where did she get the cotton from?” Then I started thinking about how much Black women contributed to this country with little or no recognition. Without our sweat, blood, and tears we would not have the foundation for the country we know today.
I wanted to create something to honor those women – my ancestors who sacrificed so much for so little. When I ask myself who actually built this country, I have to give credit to all the Black and Brown women and men who struggled and truly believed in what this country is supposed to be even though it was never available to them. They believed in the idea that all men are created equal, that they were endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among those are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.
They were true Americans. And I wanted to honor those spirited women in this photo because they made this country.”
Curators: Mazie Harris, assistant curator, J. Paul Getty Museum, in consultation with Sarah L. Eckhardt, associate curator, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Even though I know the history of photography reasonably well(!) I had never heard of the Kamoinge Workshop (a collective of Black photographers formed in New York in 1963) before I started to assemble this posting. This “group of people acting together… produced powerful images, sensitively registering Black life in the mid-20th century.” Their work “reminds us of the power of both individual creativity and collective action.”
What is notable about the work of Kamoinge artists as evidenced by the vibrant, graphic photographs of high contrast and chiaroscuro presented here is the mainly abstract nature of their representation of Black life.
Through images such as Anthony Barboza’s broken liberty in Pensacola, Florida (1966) and fragmented Street Self-portrait (1970s), Adger Cowans’ distorted Three Shadows (1966), C. Daniel Dawson’s Backscape #1 (1967), Louis Draper’s Untitled (Swing and Shadow) (1967) and Boy and H, Harlem (1961), James Mannas’ desperate No Way Out, Harlem, NYC (1964) and Peeping Sea Wall Beach Boy, Georgetown, Guyana (1972), Herbert Randall’s melancholy Untitled (Hattiesburg, Mississippi, Freedom Summer) (1964), Herb Robinson’s Brother and Sister (1973) and Central Park, Kids (1961), Beuford Smith’s, hanging, Boy on Swing, Lower East Side (1970), Ming Smith’s decaying Untitled (Harlem, NY) (c. 1973) and Shawn Walker’s barricaded Harlem, 117th Street (c. 1960) … the viewer can begin to picture, begin to feel and empathise with – the life of displacement and deprivation, poverty and protest, strength and joy – that was at the centre of Black experiences. The work of the Kamoinge artists offered “an alternative to the mainstream media of the time, which often overlooked Black culture or portrayed it negatively.”
“Through careful cropping, framing, and printing techniques, Kamoinge artists defamiliarised everyday sights such as puddles and clouds, asphalt, and weathered walls. Their images encourage greater attention to commonplace subjects – the reflective glass of shop windows, worn advertisements on city streets, a dirtied pile of salt – that might otherwise be overlooked. Much of their work with shadows and reflections centers Black bodies seeking a place for themselves amid the ebb and flow of daily life.” (Exhibition text)
For me what is so important about this group of artists (or any individual or group of people that represent through art: difference, diversity and the fight for equality and liberty) is that they represent themselves and historically archive their continuing struggle against oppression – so that, as the definition of the word “liberty” states – we can all attain “the state of being free within society from oppressive restrictions imposed by authority on one’s way of life, behaviour, or political views.”
Usually the fight comes not from the top down, but from the grass roots up… from community, from culture and how these begin to influence wider social attitudes and prejudices. Fighting against any injustice, whether it be racism, sexism, ism ism ism, is a fight against ignorance and bigotry. It is a fight against people being unaware of what is going on, what affect their actions have on others, it is a fight against misinformation and misrepresentation, and it is a fight against power residing in the hands of the few. As such, the photographs of the Kamoinge Workshop artists are a vital reflection on the process of change and acceptance, of progress (or the lack of it) and the constant need to be vigilant, to keep fighting against any force that seeks to subjugate us. Their photographs heighten our aesthetic awareness, one of the defining qualities of being human, connecting us to our ability to reflect on and appreciate the world around us in all its mysterious spirit and joyful difference.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the J. Paul Getty Museum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
This is the first major exhibition about the Kamoinge Workshop, a collective of Black photographers formed in New York in 1963. Members of the group produced powerful images, sensitively registering Black life in the mid-20th century. The exhibition explores Kamoinge’s photographic artistry in the 1960s and 1970s, celebrating the group’s collaborative ethos, commitment to community, and centering of Black experiences.
Installation view of the exhibition Working Together: The Photographers of the Kamoinge Workshop at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles showing at centre, the work of Louis Draper.
Anthony Barboza (American, b. 1944) Easter Sunday in Harlem 1974 Gelatin silver print 15.4 x 22.6cm The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Anthony Barboza (American, b. 1944) Street Self-portrait 1970s Gelatin silver print 19.9 x 15.1cm The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
In 1963 a group of Black photographers based in New York formed the Kamoinge Workshop.
Committed to photography’s power as an art form, Kamoinge members depicted Black life as they saw and experienced it. They hoped to offer an alternative to the mainstream media of the time, which often overlooked Black culture or portrayed it negatively.
Working Together: The Photographers of the Kamoinge Workshop, on view at the Getty Museum at the Getty Center July 19 – October 9, is the first major retrospective presenting photographs from the collective during the 1960s and 1970s. Highlighting each photographer’s individual artistry as well as the Workshop’s shared concerns, this exhibition celebrates the group’s self-organising, commitment to community, and centering of Black experiences.
“The work in this exhibition highlights Black Americans behind and in front of the camera. The Museum regularly features individual artists in monographic exhibitions, but it is important also to document and celebrate the importance of collaborative groups such as the Kamoinge Workshop,” says Timothy Potts, Maria Hummer-Tuttle and Robert Tuttle Director of the J. Paul Getty Museum. “Working Together reflects Getty’s continuing efforts to diversify our collection, and thereby represent a more expansive history of photography. To that end, several of the works shown in the exhibition were recently acquired for the Museum’s collection.”
Within their first year as a group, the members of the Kamoinge Workshop (pronounced “kuh-moyn-gay” by the members of the group) made a commitment to portray the communities around them. They chose the name – which means “a group of people acting together” in the Kikuyu language of Kenya – to reflect the collective model they wished to follow as well as their interest in Black communities not just at home but also outside the United States.
The exhibition will focus on the first two decades of the collective, from the founding of the group in 1963 through the various activities of the International Black Photographers association in the early 1980s, and includes photographs by 15 of the organisation’s early members. The artists included in the exhibition are Anthony Barboza, Adger Cowans, Daniel Dawson, Louis Draper, Al Fennar, Ray Francis, Herman Howard, Jimmie Mannas, Herb Randall, Herb Robinson, Beuford Smith, Ming Smith, Shawn Walker, and Calvin Wilson. Also included are several photographs by Roy DeCarava, the first director of the Workshop.
Images in the exhibition capture the experience of urban life at mid-century, the civil rights movement, intimate portraiture, experimental abstraction, jazz musicians, and the Black experience abroad. Though the photographers included in the exhibition produced diverse bodies of work, many of their photographs are printed with dark tones that compellingly evoke the unsettling era in which they were made.
“The Kamoinge vision remains resonant today,” notes Mazie Harris, curator of the installation of Working Together in the Getty Museum’s Center for Photographs. “The photographs in this exhibition offer a glimpse into the artistry and ambition of the workshop members, reminding us of the power of both individual creativity and collective action.”
Working Together: The Photographs of the Kamoinge Workshop is organised by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and curated by Mazie Harris, assistant curator, J. Paul Getty Museum, in consultation with Sarah L. Eckhardt, associate curator, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.
Fannie Lou Hamer (née Townsend; October 6, 1917 – March 14, 1977) was an American voting and women’s rights activist, community organiser, and a leader in the civil rights movement. She was the co-founder and vice-chair of the Freedom Democratic Party, which she represented at the 1964 Democratic National Convention. Hamer also organised Mississippi’s Freedom Summer along with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). She was also a co-founder of the National Women’s Political Caucus, an organisation created to recruit, train, and support women of all races who wish to seek election to government office.
Hamer began civil rights activism in 1962, continuing until her health declined nine years later. She was known for her use of spiritual hymnals and quotes and her resilience in leading the civil rights movement for black women in Mississippi. She was extorted, threatened, harassed, shot at, and assaulted by racists, including members of the police, while trying to register for and exercise her right to vote. She later helped and encouraged thousands of African-Americans in Mississippi to become registered voters and helped hundreds of disenfranchised people in her area through her work in programs like the Freedom Farm Cooperative. She unsuccessfully ran for the U.S. Senate in 1964 and the Mississippi State Senate in 1971. In 1970, she led legal action against the government of Sunflower County, Mississippi for continued illegal segregation.
Hamer died on March 14, 1977, aged 59, in Mound Bayou, Mississippi. Her memorial service was widely attended and her eulogy was delivered by U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Andrew Young. She was posthumously inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 1993.
Louis Draper (American, 1935-2002) Reward MLK Poster, New York 1971 Gelatin silver print 18.1 x 13.3cm The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Community
The Kamoinge Workshop began as a community of photographers who supported and encouraged one another. Within their first year, they also made a commitment to portray the communities around them. They introduced one of their early projects by explaining, “The Kamoinge Workshop represents black photographers whose creative objectives reflect a concern for truth about the world, about the Society, and about themselves.” Years later, member Louis Draper expanded: “Cognizant of the forces for change revolving around Kamoinge, we dedicated ourselves to speak of our lives as only we can. This was our story to tell and we set out to create the kind of images of our communities that spoke of the truth we’d witnessed, and that countered the untruths we’d all seen in mainline publications.”
Mentorship
Kamoinge members taught photography in programs across New York City, from Brooklyn and Harlem to the Bronx, equipping a younger generation with the technical and philosophical knowledge they needed to portray their communities. Louis Draper noted that they were eager for “a sense of purpose other than individual acclaim; we wanted to serve.” In the late 1960s, Draper and Daniel Dawson taught a photography course for teens every summer, and Draper led a youth mentorship program in the Bronx. The photographs in this section of the exhibition document some of their students.
Civil Rights
Although most Kamoinge members resisted being labeled civil rights photographers – a term they felt conjured images of firehoses and attack dogs – oral and written histories of the group emphasise that the collective formed in the midst of the civil rights movement. As Louis Draper described: “Many of the group had been a part of the March on Washington with Reverend King. Others had witnessed southern law brutality brought on by voting rights activity and sit-in demonstrations. Within a year’s time, these same volatile forces would propel many of us into engaged and enraged resistance.” Part of their resistance was to make images of Black Americans that were absent from the national conversation. Some members photographed leading figures and pivotal events of the civil rights movement but not necessarily to provide a journalistic record. Many created images reflected the theme of civil rights on a symbolic level instead.
“Like Jazz”
Music played an enormous role in the art of the Kamoinge Workshop. Jazz was a near-constant soundtrack for the group’s meetings, and musicians and live performances were the subjects of many of their photographs. Jazz also served as a metaphor for photography itself. Rhythm, timing, and improvisation are key elements in street photography as well as experimental abstraction. Innovative musicians such as Miles Davis and John Coltrane inspired Kamoinge artists, as did attending rehearsals and performances by figures as diverse as Mahalia Jackson and Sun Ra. These musicians moved the photographers to experiment and above all to hone their craft. Ming Smith characterised photography as “making something out of nothing,” adding, “I think that’s like jazz.”
A Global Perspective
A significant factor leading to the formation of the Kamoinge Workshop was, as Louis Draper put it, “the emerging African consciousness exploding within us.” Even before most of the members began traveling internationally, their choice of a name from the Kikuyu people of Kenya emphasised their interest in Black experiences outside the United States. Kenya, which gained independence from colonial rule in 1963, the same year Kamoinge was founded, was frequently in the press during the group’s earliest meetings. The decolonisation movement swept across the African continent from the mid-1950s through the 1960s, the same years that the US civil rights movement intensified. Many Kamoinge members traveled to African countries that had recently gained independence, and also to regions with significant diasporic communities. Some worked outside the United States on film projects or on assignments for magazines and in their off-hours made time for their own art. These travels expanded their sense of belonging to a global Black fellowship, however widely dispersed.
Shadows, Reflections, and Abstractions
Kamoinge has often been associated with street photography, but abstraction was also a crucial part of their work. By the time they joined the group, Louis Draper, Al Fennar, and Adger Cowans were already making abstract images in addition to more recognisably documentary pictures. In the late 1960s and into the early 1970s, many of the other members began to follow suit. Workshop photographers pushed themselves and the medium by experimenting with new forms and ideas. Through careful cropping, framing, and printing techniques, Kamoinge artists defamiliarised everyday sights such as puddles and clouds, asphalt, and weathered walls. Their images encourage greater attention to commonplace subjects – the reflective glass of shop windows, worn advertisements on city streets, a dirtied pile of salt – that might otherwise be overlooked. Much of their work with shadows and reflections centers Black bodies seeking a place for themselves amid the ebb and flow of daily life.
Kamoinge’s Legacy
Kamoinge Workshop members supported not just one another but also the broader community of Black photographers. In 1973 Beuford Smith founded the Black Photographers Annual, a publication that helped bring attention to artists outside the Kamoinge circle. In 1978, other members started a group called International Black Photographers, which honoured the work of photography elders and encouraged younger generations. Neither endeavour was part of the workshop’s official activities, but each grew out of the members’ ambition to serve and promote Black artists. Following their exhibitions in the mid-1970s, the Kamoinge Workshop neither organised exhibitions nor produced publications again until the mid-1990s. The group never disbanded, however, and the members remained close. They resumed formal meetings in 1992, applied for nonprofit status, and renamed themselves Kamoinge, Inc. A subsequent influx of new members energised the group as they continued the work that began in 1963.
Exhibition texts adapted from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts publication Working Together: Louis Draper and the Kamoinge Workshop published as “Working Together: The Photographers of the Kamoinge Workshop” on the J. Paul Getty Museum website [Online] Cited 31/08/2022
Herman Howard (American, 1942-1980) March on Washington 1963 Gelatin silver print 14.8 × 23.8cm (5 13/16 × 9 3/8 in.) Collection of Herb Robinson Digital image courtesy Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Herman Howard (American, 1942-1980) New York 1960s Gelatin silver print 16 × 23.3cm (6 5/16 × 9 3/16 in.) Collection of Herb Robinson Digital image courtesy Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Interviewed by video during the pandemic, Kamoinge artists reflect on their experience with the group and the ongoing significance of their work together.
Video includes subtitles/closed captions in English and Spanish. Footage courtesy of the artists and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Adapted by the J. Paul Getty Museum
Exhibition dates: 29th May, 2016 – 2nd January, 2017
Curators: Sarah Greenough, senior curator, department of photographs, and Philip Brookman, consulting curator, department of photographs, both National Gallery of Art, are the exhibition curators.
Louis Stettner (American, 1922-2016) Times Square, New York City 1952-1954 Gelatin silver print Sheet (trimmed to image): 42.1 x 27.5cm (16 9/16 x 10 13/16 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Patrons’ Permanent Fund
The last posting of a fruitful year for Art Blart. I wish all the readers of Art Blart a happy and safe New Year!
The exhibition is organised around five themes – movement, sequence, narrative, studio, and identity – found in the work of Muybridge and Stieglitz, themes then developed in the work of other artists. While there is some interesting work in the posting, the conceptual rationale and stand alone nature of the themes and the work within them is a curatorial ordering of ideas that, in reality, cannot be contained within any one boundary, the single point of view.
Movement can be contained in sequences; narrative can be unfolded in a sequence (as in the work of Duane Michals); narrative and identity have a complex association which can also be told through studio work (eg. Gregory Crewdson), etc… What does Roger Mayne’s Goalie, Street Football, Brindley Road (1956, below) not have to do with identity, the young lad with his dirty hands, playing in his socks, in a poverty stricken area of London; why has Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Oscar Wilde (1999, below) been included in the studio section when it has much more to do with the construction of identity through photography – “Triply removing his portrait from reality – from Oscar Wilde himself to a portrait photograph to a wax sculpture and back to a photograph” – which confounds our expectations of the nature of photography. Photography is nefariously unstable in its depiction of an always, constructed reality, through representation(s) which reject simple causality.
To isolate and embolden the centre is to disclaim and disavow the periphery, work which crosses boundaries, is multifaceted and multitudinous; work which forms a nexus for networks of association beyond borders, beyond de/lineation – the line from here to there. The self-contained themes within this exhibition are purely illusory.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the National Gallery of Art for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“We can no longer accept that the identity of a man can be adequately established by preserving and fixing what he looks like from a single viewpoint in one place.”
John Berger. “No More Portraits,” in New Society August 1967
“Intersections: Photographs and Videos from the National Gallery of Art and the Corcoran Gallery of Art explores the connections between the two newly joined photography collections. On view from May 29, 2016, through January 2, 2017, the exhibition is organised around themes found in the work of the two pioneers of each collection: Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904) and Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946). Inspired by these two seminal artists, Intersections brings together more than 100 highlights of the recently merged collections by a range of artists from the 1840s to today.
Just as the nearly 700 photographs from Muybridge’s groundbreaking publication Animal Locomotion, acquired by the Corcoran Gallery of Art in 1887, became the foundation for the institution’s early interest in photography, the Key Set of more than 1,600 works by Stieglitz, donated by Georgia O’Keeffe and the Alfred Stieglitz Estate, launched the photography collection at the National Gallery of Art in 1949.”
Press release from the National Gallery of Art
Exhibition highlights
The exhibition is organised around five themes – movement, sequence, narrative, studio, and identity – found in the work of Muybridge and Stieglitz.
Movement
Works by Muybridge, who is best known for creating photographic technologies to stop and record motion, anchor the opening section devoted to movement. Photographs by Berenice Abbott and Harold Eugene Edgerton, which study how objects move through space, are included, as are works by Roger Mayne, Alexey Brodovitch, and other who employed the camera to isolate an instant from the flux of time.
Wall text
Eadweard Muybridge (English, 1830-1904) Horses. Running. Phyrne L. No. 40, from The Attitudes of Animals in Motion 1879 Albumen print Image: 16 x 22.4cm (6 5/16 x 8 13/16 in.) Sheet: 25.7 x 32.4cm (10 1/8 x 12 3/4 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Mary and Dan Solomon
In order to analyse the movement of racehorses, farm animals, and acrobats, Muybridge pioneered new and innovative ways to stop motion with photography. In 1878, he started making pictures at railroad magnate Leland Stanford’s horse farm in Palo Alto, California, where he developed an electronic shutter that enabled exposures as fast as one-thousandth of a second. In this print from Muybridge’s 1881 album The Attitudes of Animals in Motion, Stanford’s prized racehorse Phryne L is shown running in a sequential grid of pictures made by 24 different cameras with electromagnetic shutters tripped by wires as the animal ran across the track. These pictures are now considered a critical step in the development of cinema.
Eadweard Muybridge (English, 1830-1904) Internegative for Horses. Trotting. Abe Edgington. No. 28, from The Attitudes of Animals in Motion 1878 Collodion negative Overall (glass plate): 15.3 x 25.4cm (6 x 10 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Mary and Dan Solomon and Patrons’ Permanent Fund
This glass negative shows the sequence of Leland Stanford’s horse Abe Edgington trotting across a racetrack in Palo Alto, California – a revolutionary record of the changes in the horse’s gait in about one second. Muybridge composed the negative from photographs made by eight different cameras lined up to capture the horse’s movements. Used to print the whole sequence together onto albumen paper, this internegative served as an intermediary step in the production of Muybridge’s 1881 album The Attitudes of Animals in Motion.
Étienne Jules Marey (French, 1830-1904) Chronophotograph of a Man on a Bicycle c. 1885-1890 Glass lantern slide Image: 4 x 7.5cm (1 9/16 x 2 15/16 in.) Plate: 8.8 x 10.2cm (3 7/16 x 4 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Mary and David Robinson
A scientist and physiologist, Marey became fascinated with movement in the 1870s. Unlike Muybridge, who had already made separate pictures of animals in motion, Marey developed in 1882 a means to record several phases of movement onto one photographic plate using a rotating shutter with slots cut into it. He called this process “chronophotography,” meaning photography of time. His photographs, which he published in books and showed in lantern slide presentations, influenced 20th-century cubist, futurist, and Dada artists who examined the interdependence of time and space.
William Henry Fox Talbot (English, 1800-1877) The Boulevards of Paris 1843 Salted paper print Image: 16.6 × 17.1cm (6 9/16 × 6 3/4 in.) Sheet: 19 × 23.2cm (7 1/2 × 9 1/8 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, New Century Fund
As soon as Talbot announced his invention of photography in 1839, he realised that its ability to freeze time enabled him to present the visual spectacle of the world in an entirely new way. By capturing something as mundane as a fleeting moment on a busy street, he could transform life into art, creating a picture that could be savoured long after the event had transpired.
David Octavius Hill (Scottish, 1802-1870) and Robert Adamson (Scottish, 1821-1848) Colinton Manse and weir, with part of the old mill on the right 1843-1847 Salted paper print Image: 20.7 x 14.6cm (8 1/8 x 5 3/4 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Paul Mellon Fund
In 1843, only four years after Talbot announced his negative / positive process of photography, painter David Octavius Hill teamed up with engineer Robert Adamson. Working in Scotland, they created important early portraits of the local populace and photographed Scottish architecture, rustic landscapes, and city scenes. Today a suburb southwest of Edinburgh, 19th-century Colinton was a mill town beside a river known as the Water of Leith. Because of the long exposure time required to make this photograph, the water rushing over a small dam appears as a glassy blur.
Thomas Annan (Scottish, 1829-1887) Old Vennel, Off High Street 1868-1871 Carbon print Image: 26.9 x 22.3cm (10 9/16 x 8 3/4 in.) Sheet: 50.8 x 37.9cm (20 x 14 15/16 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Patrons’ Permanent Fund
In 1868, Glasgow’s City Improvements Trust hired Annan to photograph the “old closes and streets of Glasgow” before the city’s tenements were demolished. Annan’s pictures constitute one of the first commissioned photographic records of living conditions in urban slums. The collodion process Annan used to make his large, glass negatives required a long exposure time. In the dim light of this narrow passage, it was impossible for the photographer to stop the motion of the restless children, who appear as ghostly blurs moving barefoot across the cobblestones.
Thomas Annan (Scottish, 1829-1887) Old Vennel, Off High Street (detail) 1868-1871 Carbon print Image: 26.9 x 22.3cm (10 9/16 x 8 3/4 in.) Sheet: 50.8 x 37.9cm (20 x 14 15/16 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Patrons’ Permanent Fund
Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946) Going to the Post, Morris Park 1904 Photogravure Image: 30.8 x 26.4cm (12 1/8 x 10 3/8 in.) Sheet: 38.5 x 30.3cm (15 3/16 x 11 15/16 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred Stieglitz Collection
In the 1880s and 1890s, improvements in photographic processes enabled manufacturers to produce small, handheld cameras that did not need to be mounted on tripods. Faster film and shutter speeds also allowed practitioners to capture rapidly moving objects. Stieglitz was one of the first fine art photographers to exploit the aesthetic potential of these new cameras and films. Around the turn of the century, he made many photographs of rapidly moving trains, horse-drawn carriages, and racetracks that capture the pace of the increasingly modern city.
Harold Eugene Edgerton (American, 1903-1990) Wes Fesler Kicking a Football 1934 Gelatin silver print Image: 11 1/2 x 9 5/8 in. Sheet: 13 15/16 x 11 in. National Gallery of Art, Washington, Corcoran Collection (Museum Purchase with the aid of funds from the National Endowment for the Arts, Washington, D.C., a Federal Agency, and The Polaroid Corporation)
A professor of electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Edgerton in the early 1930s invited the stroboscope, a tube filled with gas that produced high-intensity bursts of light at regular and very brief intervals. He used it to illuminate objects in motion so that they could be captured by a camera. At first he was hired by industrial clients to reveal flaws in their production of materials, but by the mid-1930s he began to photography everyday events… Edgerton captured phenomena moving too fast for the naked eye to see, and revealed the beauty of people and objects in motion.
Alexey Brodovitch (American born Russia, 1898-1971) Untitled from “Ballet” series 1938 Gelatin silver print Overall: 20.4 x 27.5cm (8 1/16 x 10 13/16 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Diana and Mallory Walker Fund
A graphic artist, Russian-born Brodovitch moved to the United States from Paris in 1930. Known for his innovative use of photographs, illustrations, and type on the printed page, he became art director for Harper’s Bazaar in 1934, and photographed the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo during their American tours from 1935 to 1939. Using a small-format, 35 mm camera, Brodovitch worked in the backstage shadows and glaring light of the theatre to produce a series of rough, grainy pictures that convey the drama and action of the performance. This photograph employs figures in motion, a narrow field of focus, and high-contrast effects to express the stylised movements of Léonide Massine’s 1938 choreography for Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony.
Harry Callahan (American, 1912-1999) Detroit c. 1943 Dye imbibition print, printed c. 1980 Overall (image): 18 x 26.7cm (7 1/16 x 10 1/2 in.) Sheet: 27.31 x 36.83cm (10 3/4 x 14 1/2 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of the Callahan Family
Harry Callahan (American, 1912-1999) Camera Movement on Neon Lights at Night 1946 Dye imbibition print, printed 1979 Image: 8 3/4 x 13 5/8 in. Sheet: 10 3/8 x 13 15/16 in. National Gallery of Art, Washington, Corcoran Collection (Gift of Richard W. and Susan R. Gessner)
Frank Horvat (Italian, 1928-2020) Paris, Gare Saint-Lazare 1959 Gelatin silver print Overall: 39.3 x 26.2cm (15 1/2 x 10 5/16 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Patrons’ Permanent Fund
Gare Saint-Lazare is one of the principal railway stations in Paris. Because of its industrial appearance, steaming locomotives, and teeming crowds, it was a frequent subject for 19th-century French painters – including Claude Monet, Édouard Manet, and Gustave Caillebotte – who used it to express the vitality of modern life. 20th-century artists such as Horvat also depicted it to address the pace and anonymity that defined their time. Using a telephoto lens and long exposure, he captured the rushing movement of travellers scattered beneath giant destination signs.
Roger Mayne (English, 1929-2014) Goalie, Street Football, Brindley Road 1956 Gelatin silver print Image: 34.7 × 29.1cm (13 11/16 × 11 7/16 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Patrons’ Permanent Fund
From 1956 to 1961, Mayne photographed London’s North Kensington neighbourhood to record its emergence from the devastation and poverty caused by World War II. This dramatic photograph of a young goalie lunging for the ball during an after-school soccer game relies on the camera’s ability to freeze the fast-paced and unpredictable action. Because the boy’s daring lunge is forever suspended in time, we will never know its outcome.
Shōmei Tōmatsu (Japanese, 1930-2012) Rush Hour, Tokyo (detail) 1981 Gelatin silver print Sheet: 11 5/16 x 9 7/16 in. (28.73 x 23.97 cm) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Corcoran Collection (Gift of Michael D. Abrams)
Best known for his expressive documentation of World War II’s impact on Japanese culture, Tomatsu was one of Japan’s most creative and influential photographers. Starting in the early 1960s, he documented the country’s dramatic economic, political, and cultural transformation. This photograph – a long exposure made with his camera mounted on a tripod – conveys the chaotic rush of commuters on their way through downtown Tokyo. Tomatsu used this graphic description of movement, which distorts the faceless bodies of commuters dashing down a flight of stairs, to symbolise the dehumanising nature of work in the fast-paced city of the early 1980s.
Sequence
Muybridge set up banks of cameras and used electronic shutters triggered in sequence to analyse the motion of people and animals. Like a storyteller, he sometimes adjusted the order of images for visual and sequential impact. Other photographers have also investigated the medium’s capacity to record change over time, express variations on a theme, or connect seemingly disparate pictures. In the early 1920s, Stieglitz began to create poetic sequences of cloud photographs meant to evoke distinct emotional experiences. These works (later known as Equivalents) influenced Ansel Adams and Minor White – both artists created specific sequences to evoke the rhythms of nature or the poetry of time passing.
Wall text
Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946) From My Window at An American Place, Southwest March 1932 Gelatin silver print Sheet (trimmed to image): 23.8 x 18.4cm (9 3/8 x 7 1/4 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred Stieglitz Collection
Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946) From My Window at An American Place, Southwest April 1932 Gelatin silver print Sheet (trimmed to image): 23.8 x 18.8cm (9 3/8 x 7 3/8 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred Stieglitz Collection
Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946) Water Tower and Radio City, New York 1933 Gelatin silver print Sheet: 23.7 x 18.6cm (9 5/16 x 7 5/16 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred Stieglitz Collection
Whenever Stieglitz exhibited his photographs of New York City made in the late 1920s and early 1930s, he grouped them into series that record views from the windows of his gallery, An American Place, or his apartment at the Shelton Hotel, showing the gradual growth of the buildings under construction in the background. Although he delighted in the formal beauty of the visual spectacle, he lamented that these buildings, planned in the exuberance of the late 1920s, continued to be built in the depths of the Depression, while “artists starved,” as he said at the time, and museums were “threatened with closure.”
Ed Ruscha (American, b. 1937) Every Building on the Sunset Strip 1966 Offset lithography book: 7 x 5 3/4 in. (17.78 x 14.61cm) Unfolded (open flat): 7 x 276 in. National Gallery of Art, Washington, Corcoran Collection (Gift of Philip Brookman and Amy Brookman)
Vito Acconci (American, 1940-2017) Step Piece 1970 Five gelatin silver prints and four sheets of type-written paper, mounted on board with annotations in black ink Sheet: 76.2 x 101.6cm (30 x 40 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection
Acconci’s Step Piece is made up of equal parts photography, drawing, performance, and quantitative analysis. It documents a test of endurance: stepping on and off a stool for as long as possible every day. This performance-based conceptual work is rooted in the idea that the body itself can be a medium for making art. To record his activity, Acconci made a series of five photographs spanning one complete action. Like the background grid in many of Muybridge’s motion studies, vertical panels in Acconci’s studio help delineate the space. His handwritten notes and sketches suggest the patterns of order and chaos associated with the performance, while typewritten sheets, which record his daily progress, were given to people who were invited to observe.
Narrative
The exhibition also explores the narrative possibilities of photography found in the interplay of image and text in the work of Robert Frank, Larry Sultan, and Jim Goldberg; the emotional drama of personal crisis in Nan Goldin’s image grids; or the expansion of photographic description into experimental video and film by Victor Burgin and Judy Fiskin.
Wall text
Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946) Judith Being Carted from Oaklawn to the Hill. The Way Art Moves 1920 Gelatin silver print Image: 24.1 x 18.8cm (9 1/2 x 7 3/8 in.) Sheet: 25.2 x 20.1cm (9 15/16 x 7 15/16 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred Stieglitz Collection
In 1920, Stieglitz’s family sold their Victorian summerhouse on the shore of Lake George, New York, and moved to a farmhouse on a hill above it. This photograph shows three sculptures his father had collected – two 19th-century replicas of ancient statues and a circa 1880 bust by Moses Ezekiel depicting the Old Testament heroine Judith – as they were being moved in a wooden cart from one house to another. Stieglitz titled it The Way Art Moves, wryly commenting on the low status of art in American society. With her masculine face and bared breast, Judith was much maligned by Georgia O’Keeffe and other younger family members. In a playful summer prank, they later buried her somewhere near the farmhouse, where she remained lost, despite many subsequent efforts by the perpetrators themselves to find her.
Dan Graham (American, 1942-2022) Homes for America 1966-1967 Two chromogenic prints Image (top): 23 x 34cm (9 1/16 x 13 3/8 in.) Image (bottom): 27.8 x 34cm (10 15/16 x 13 3/8 in.) Mount: 101 x 75cm (39 3/4 x 29 1/2 in.) Framed: 102 x 76.2 x 2.8cm (40 3/16 x 30 x 1 1/8 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Glenstone in honour of Eileen and Michael Cohen
Beginning in the mid-1960s, conceptual artist Dan Graham created several works of art for magazine pages and slide shows. When Homes for America was designed for Arts magazine in 1966, his accompanying text critiqued the mass production of cookie-cutter homes, while his photographs – made with an inexpensive Kodak Instamatic camera – described a suburban world of offices, houses, restaurants, highways, and truck stops. With their haphazard composition and amateur technique, Graham’s pictures ironically scrutinised the aesthetics of America’s postwar housing and inspired other conceptual artists to incorporate photographs into their work. Together, these two photographs link a middle-class family at the opening of a Jersey City highway restaurant with the soulless industrial landscape seen through the window.
Larry Sultan (American, 1946-2009) Thanksgiving Turkey/Newspaper (detail) 1985-1992 Two plexiglass panels with screen printing Framed (Thanksgiving Turkey): 76 × 91cm (29 15/16 × 35 13/16 in.) Framed (Newspaper): 76 × 91cm (29 15/16 × 35 13/16 in.) Other (2 text panels): 50.8 × 76.2cm (20 × 30 in.) Overall: 30 x 117 in. National Gallery of Art, Washington, Corcoran Collection (Gift of the FRIENDS of the Corcoran Gallery of Art)
From 1983 to 1992, Sultan photographed his parents in retirement at their Southern California house. His innovative book, Pictures from Home, combines his photographs and text with family album snapshots and stills from home movies, mining the family’s memories and archives to create a universal narrative about the American dream of work, home, and family. Thanksgiving Turkey/Newspaper juxtaposes photographs of his mother and father, each with their face hidden and with adjacent texts where they complain about each other’s shortcomings. “I realise that beyond the rolls of film and the few good pictures … is the wish to take photography literally,” Sultan wrote. “To stop time. I want my parents to live forever.”
Shimon Attie (American, b. 1957) Mulackstrasse 32: Slide Projections of Former Jewish Residents and Hebrew Reading Room, 1932, Berlin 1992 Chromogenic print Unframed: 20 x 24 in. (50.8 x 60.96cm) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Corcoran Collection (Gift of Julia J. Norrell in honor of Hilary Allard and Lauren Harry)
Attie projected historical photographs made in 1932 onto the sides of a building at Mulackstrasse 32, the site of a Hebrew reading room in a Jewish neighbourhood in Berlin during the 1930s. Fusing pictures made before Jews were removed from their homes and killed during World War II with photographs of the same dark, empty street made in 1992, Attie has created a haunting picture of wartime loss.
Nan Goldin (American, b. 1953) Relapse/Detox Grid 1998-2000 Nine silver dye bleach prints Overall: 42 1/2 x 62 1/8 in. (107.95 x 157.8cm) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Corcoran Collection (Museum Purchase with funds donated by the FRIENDS of the Corcoran Gallery of Art)
Goldin has unsparingly chronicled her own community of friends by photographing their struggles, hopes, and dreams through years of camaraderie, abuse, addiction, illness, loss, and redemption. Relapse/Detox Grid presents nine colourful yet plaintive pictures in a slide show-like narrative, offering glimpses of a life rooted in struggle, along with Goldin’s own recovery at a detox center, seen in the bottom row.
Nan Goldin (American, b. 1953) Relapse/Detox Grid (detail) 1998-2000 Nine silver dye bleach prints Overall: 42 1/2 x 62 1/8 in. (107.95 x 157.8cm) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Corcoran Collection (Museum Purchase with funds donated by the FRIENDS of the Corcoran Gallery of Art)
Victor Burgin (British, b. 1941) Watergate 2000 Video with sound, 9:58 minutes National Gallery of Art, Washington, Corcoran Collection (Museum Purchase, with funds from the bequest of Betty Battle to the Women’s Committee of the Corcoran Gallery of Art)
An early advocate of conceptual art, Burgin is an artist and writer whose work spans photographs, text, and video. Watergate shows how the meaning of art can change depending on the context in which it is seen. Burgin animated digital, 160-degree panoramic photographs of nineteenth-century American art hanging in the Corcoran Gallery of Art and in a hotel room. While the camera circles the gallery, an actor reads from Jean-Paul Satre’s Being and Nothingness, which questions the relationship between presence and absence. Then a dreamlike pan around a hotel room overlooking the nearby Watergate complex mysteriously reveals Niagara, the Corcoran’s 1859 landscape by Frederic Church, having on the wall. In 1859, Niagara Falls was seen as a symbol of the glory and promise of the American nation, yet when Church’s painting is placed in the context of the Watergate, an icon of the scandal that led to Richard Nixon’s resignation, it assumes a different meaning and suggests an ominous sense of disillusionment.
Studio
Intersections also examines the studio as a locus of creativity, from Stieglitz’s photographs of his gallery, 291, and James Van Der Zee’s commercial studio portraits, to the manipulated images of Wallace Berman, Robert Heinecken, and Martha Rosler. Works by Laurie Simmons, David Levinthal, and Vik Muniz also highlight the postmodern strategy of staging images created in the studio.
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Nadar (Gaspard-Félix Tournachon) (French, 1820-1910) Self-Portrait with Wife Ernestine in a Balloon Gondola c. 1865 Gelatin silver print, printed c. 1890 8.6 × 7.7cm (3 3/8 × 3 1/16 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation through Robert and Joyce Menschel
Nadar (a pseudonym for Gaspard-Félix Tournachon) was not only a celebrated portrait photographer, but also a journalist, caricaturist, and early proponent of manned flight. In 1863, he commissioned a prominent balloonist to build an enormous balloon 196 feet high, which he named The Giant. The ascents he made from 1863 to 1867 were widely covered in the press and celebrated by the cartoonist Honoré Daumier, who depicted Nadar soaring above Paris, its buildings festooned with signs for photography studios. Nadar made and sold small prints like this self-portrait to promote his ballooning ventures. The obviously artificial construction of this picture – Nadar and his wife sit in a basket far too small for a real ascent and are posed in front of a painted backdrop – and its untrimmed edges showing assistants at either side make it less of the self-aggrandising statement that Nadar wished and more of an amusing behind-the-scenes look at studio practice.
Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946) Self-Portrait probably 1911 Platinum print Image: 24.2 x 19.3cm (9 1/2 x 7 5/8 in.) Sheet: 25.3 x 20.3cm (9 15/16 x 8 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred Stieglitz Collection
Unlike many other photographers, Stieglitz made few self-portraits. He created this one shortly before he embarked on a series of portraits of the artists who frequented his New York gallery, 291. Focusing only on his face and leaving all else in shadow, he presents himself not as an artist at work or play, but as a charismatic leader who would guide American art and culture into the 20th century.
Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946) 291 – Picasso-Braque Exhibition 1915 Platinum print Image: 18.5 x 23.6 cm (7 5/16 x 9 5/16 in.) Sheet: 20.1 x 25.3 cm (7 15/16 x 9 15/16 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred Stieglitz Collection
291 was Stieglitz’s legendary gallery in New York City (its name derived from its address on Fifth Avenue), where he introduced modern European and American art and photography to the American public. He also used 291 as a studio, frequently photographing friends and colleagues there, as well as the views from its windows. This picture records what Stieglitz called a “demonstration” – a short display of no more than a few days designed to prompt a focused discussion. Including two works by Picasso, an African mask from the Kota people, a wasps’ nest, and 291’s signature brass bowl, the photograph calls into question the relationship between nature and culture, Western and African art.
James Van Der Zee (American, 1886-1983) Sisters 1926 Gelatin silver print Sheet (trimmed to image): 17.6 x 12.5cm (6 15/16 x 4 15/16 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation through Robert and Joyce Menschel
James Van Der Zee was a prolific studio photographer in Harlem during a period known as the Harlem Renaissance, from the end of World War I to the middle of the 1930s. He photographed many of Harlem’s celebrities, middle-class residents, and community organisations, establishing a visual archive that remains one of the best records of the era. He stands out for his playful use of props and retouching, thereby personalising each picture and enhancing the sitter’s appearance. In this portrait of three sisters, clasped hands show the tender bond of the two youngest, one of whom holds a celebrity portrait, revealing her enthusiasm for popular culture.
Wallace Berman (American, 1926-1976) Silence Series #7 1965-1968 Verifax (wet process photocopy) collage Actual: 24 1/2 x 26 1/2 in. (62.23 x 67.31cm) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Corcoran Collection (Museum Purchase, William A. Clark Fund)
An influential artist of California’s Beat Generation during the 1950s and 1960s, Berman was a visionary thinker and publisher of the underground magazine Semina. His mysterious and playful juxtapositions of divers objects, images, and texts were often inspired by Dada and surrealist art. Silence Series #7 presents a cinematic sequence of his trademark transistor radios, each displaying military, religious, or mechanical images along with those of athletes and cultural icons, such as Andy Warhol. Appropriated from mass media, reversed in tone, and printed backward using an early version of a photocopy machine, these found images, pieced together and recopied as photomontages, replace then ew transmitted through the radios. Beat poet Robert Duncan once called Berman’s Verify collages a “series of magic ‘TV’ lantern shows.”
Doug and Mike Starn (American) Double Rembrandt (with steps) 1987-1991 Gelatin silver prints, ortho film, tape, wood, plexiglass, glue and silicone 2 interlocking parts: Part 1 overall: 26 1/2 x 13 7/8 in. Part 2 overall: 26 3/8 x 13 3/4 in. Overall: 26 1/2 x 27 3/4 in. National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Susan and Peter MacGill
Doug and Mike Starn, identical twins who have worked collaboratively since they were thirteen, have a reputation for creating unorthodox works. Using take, wood, and glue, the brothers assembles sheets of photographic film and paper to create a dynamic composition that includes an appropriated image of Rembrandt van Rijn’s Old Man with a Gold Chain (1631). Double Rembrandt (with steps) challenges the authority of the austere fine art print, as well as the aura of the original painting, while playfully invoking the twins’ own double identity.
Martha Rosler (American, b. 1943) Cleaning the Drapes, from the series, House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home 1967-1972 Inkjet print, printed 2007 Framed: 53.5 × 63.3cm (21 1/16 × 24 15/16 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of the Collectors Committee and the Pepita Milmore Memorial Fund
A painter, photographer, video artist, feminist, activist writer, and teacher, Martha Rosler made this photomontage while she was a graduate student in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Frustrated by the portrayal of the Vietnam War on television and in other media, she wrote: “The images were always very far away and of a place we couldn’t imagine.” To bring “the war home,” as she announced in her title, she cut out images from Life magazine and House Beautiful to make powerfully layered collages that contrast American middle-class life with the realities of the war. She selected colour pictures of the idealised American life rich in the trappings of consumer society, and used black-and-white pictures of troops in Vietnam to heighten the contrast between here and there, while also calling attention to stereotypical views of men and women.
Sally Mann (American, b. 1951) Self-Portrait 1974 Gelatin silver print Image: 17 × 14.9cm (6 11/16 × 5 7/8 in.) Sheet: 35 × 27.2cm (13 3/4 × 10 11/16 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Corcoran Collection (Gift of Olga Hirshhorn)
Sally Mann, who is best known for the pictures of her children she made in the 1980s and 1990s, began to photograph when she was a teenager. In this rare, early, and intimate self-portrait, the artist is reflected in a mirror, clasping her loose shirt as she stands in a friend’s bathroom. Her thoughtful, expectant expression, coupled with her finger pointing directly at the lens of the large view camera that towers above her, foreshadows the commanding presence photography would have in her life.
David Levinthal (American, b. 1949) Untitled (from the series Hitler Moves East) 1975 Gelatin silver print Sheet: 15 15/16 x 20 in. (40.48 x 50.8cm) Image: 10 9/16 x 13 7/16 in. (26.83 x 34.13cm) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Corcoran Collection (Gift of the artist)
Levinthal’s series of photographs Hitler Moves East was made not during World War II, but in 1975, when the news media was saturated with images of the end of America’s involvement in the Vietnam War. In this series, he appropriates the grainy look of photojournalism and uses toy soldiers and fabricated environments to stage scenes from Germany’s brutal campaign on the Eastern Front during World War II. His pictures are often based on scenes found in television and movies, further distancing them from the actual events. A small stick was used to prop up the falling soldier and the explosion was made with puffs of flour. Hitler Moves East casts doubt on the implied authenticity of photojournalism and calls attention to the power of the media to define public understanding of events.
Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japanese, b. 1948) Oscar Wilde 1999 Gelatin silver print Image: 148.59 × 119.6cm (58 1/2 × 47 1/16 in.) Framed: 182.25 × 152.4cm (71 3/4 × 60 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Corcoran Collection (Gift of The Heather and Tony Podesta Collection)
Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japanese, b. 1948) Oscar Wilde (detail) 1999 Gelatin silver print Image: 148.59 × 119.6cm (58 1/2 × 47 1/16 in.) Framed: 182.25 × 152.4cm (71 3/4 × 60 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Corcoran Collection (Gift of The Heather and Tony Podesta Collection)
While most traditional portrait photographers worked in studios, Sugimoto upended this practice in a series of pictures he made at Madame Tussaud’s wax museums in London and Amsterdam, where lifelike wax figures, based on paintings or photographs, as is the case with Oscar Wilde, are displayed in staged vignettes. By isolating the figure from its setting, posing it in a three-quarter-length view, illuminating it to convey the impression of a carefully lit studio portrait, and making his final print almost six feet tall, Sugimoto renders the artificial as real. Triply removing his portrait from reality – from Oscar Wilde himself to a portrait photograph to a wax sculpture and back to a photograph – Sugimoto collapses time and confounds our expectations of the nature of photography.
Vik Muniz (Brazilian, b. 1961) Alfred Stieglitz (from the series Pictures of Ink) 2000 Silver dye bleach print Image: 152.4 × 121.92cm (60 × 48 in.) Framed: 161.29 × 130.81 × 5.08cm (63 1/2 × 51 1/2 × 2 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Corcoran Collection (Museum Purchase with funds provided by the FRIENDS of the Corcoran Gallery of Art)
Muniz has spent his career remaking works of art by artists as varied as Botticelli and Warhol using unusual materials – sugar, diamonds, and even junk. He has been especially interested in Stieglitz and has re-created his photographs using chocolate syrup and cotton. Here, he refashioned Stieglitz’s celebrated self-portrait using wet ink and mimicking the dot matrix of a halftone reproduction. He then photographed his drawing and greatly enlarged it so that the dot matrix itself becomes as important as the picture it replicates.
Identity
Historic and contemporary works by August Sander, Diane Arbus, Lorna Simpson, and Hank Willis Thomas, among others, make up the final section, which explores the role of photography in the construction of identity.”
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Witkacy (Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz) (Polish, 1885-1939) Self-Portrait (Collapse by the Lamp/Kolaps przy lampie) c. 1913 Gelatin silver print 12.86 x 17.78cm (5 1/16 x 7 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Foto Fund and Robert Menschel and the Vital Projects Fund
A writer, painter, and philosopher, Witkiewicz began to photograph while he was a teenager. From 1911 to 1914, while undergoing psychoanalysis and involved in two tumultuous relationships (one ending when his pregnant fiancée killed herself in 1914), he made a series of startling self-portraits. Close-up, confrontational, and searching, they are pictures in which the artist seems to seek understanding of himself by scrutinising his visage.
August Sander (German, 1876-1964) The Bricklayer 1929, printed c. 1950 Gelatin silver print Sheet (trimmed to image): 50.4 x 37.5cm (19 13/16 x 14 3/4 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Gerhard and Christine Sander, in honour of the 50th Anniversary of the National Gallery of Art
In 1911, Sander began a massive project to document “people of the twentieth century.” Identifying them by their professions, not their names, he aimed to create a typological record of citizens of the Weimar Republic. He photographed people from all walks of life – from bakers, bankers, and businessmen to soldiers, students, and tradesmen, as well as gypsies, the unemployed, and the homeless. The Nazis banned his project in the 1930s because his pictures did not conform to the ideal Aryan type. Although he stopped working after World War II, he made this rare enlargement of a bricklayer for an exhibition of his photographs in the early 1950s.
Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) Photographer’s Display Window, Birmingham, Alabama 1936 Gelatin silver print Image: 24.1 x 19.3cm (9 1/2 x 7 5/8 in.) Sheet: 25.2 x 20.3cm (9 15/16 x 8 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Harry H. Lunn, Jr. in honor of Jacob Kainen and in Honor of the 50th Anniversary of the National Gallery of Art
Diane Arbus (American, 1923-1971) Triplets in their Bedroom, N.J., 1963 Gelatin silver print Image: 37.7 x 37.8cm (14 13/16 x 14 7/8 in.) Sheet: 50.4 x 40.4cm (19 13/16 x 15 7/8 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, R. K. Mellon Family Foundation
Celebrated for her portraits of people traditionally on the margins of society – dwarfs and giants – as well as those on the inside – society matrons and crying babies – Arbus was fascinated with the relationship between appearance and identity. Many of her subjects, such as these triplets, face the camera, tacitly aware of their collaboration in her art. Rendering the familiar strange and the strange familiar, her carefully composed pictures compel us to look at the world in new ways. “We’ve all got an identity,” she said. “You can’t avoid it. It’s what’s left when you take away everything else.”
Lorna Simpson (American, b. 1960) Untitled (Two Necklines) 1989 Two gelatin silver prints with 11 plastic plaques Overall: 101.6 x 254 cm (40 x 100 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of the Collectors Committee
From the mid-1980s to the present, Simpson has created provocative works that question stereotypes of gender, identity, history, and culture, often by combining photographs and words. Two Necklines shows two circular and identical photographs of an African American woman’s mouth, chin, neck, and collarbone, as well as the bodice of her simple shift. Set in between are black plaques, each inscribed with a single word: “ring, surround, lasso, noose, eye, areola, halo, cuffs, collar, loop.” The words connote things that bind and conjure a sense of menace, yet when placed between the two calm, elegant photographs, their meaning is at first uncertain. But when we read the red plaque inscribed “feel the ground sliding from under you” and note the location of the word “noose” adjacent to the two necklines, we realise that Simpson is quietly but chillingly referring to the act of lynching.
Hank Willis Thomas (American, b. 1976) And One 2011 Digital chromogenic print Framed: 248.29 × 125.73 × 6.35cm (97 3/4 × 49 1/2 × 2 1/2 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Corcoran Collection (Gift of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York)
And One is from Thomas’s Strange Fruit series, which explores the concepts of spectacle and display as they relate to modern African American identity. Popularised by singer Billie Holiday, the series title Strange Fruit comes from a poem by Abel Meeropol, who wrote the infamous words “Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze; Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees” after seeing a photograph of a lynching in 1936. In And One, a contemporary African American artist reflects on how black bodies have been represented in two different contexts: lynching and professional sports. Thomas ponders the connections between these disparate forms through his dramatic photograph of two basketball players frozen in midair, one dunking a ball through a hanging noose.
National Gallery of Art National Mall between 3rd and 7th Streets Constitution Avenue NW, Washington
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