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Apr

Exhibition: ‘The Shape of Things: Photographs from Robert B. Menschel’ at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York

Categories: American, american photographers, beauty, black and white photography, colour photography, digital photography, documentary photography, exhibition, existence, gallery website, landscape, light, Man Ray, memory, photographic series, photography, pictorialism, portrait, psychological, quotation, reality, sculpture, space, street photography, time and works on paper
Tags: 29 Palms: Infantry Platoon (Machine Gunners), 29 Palms: Mortar Impact, Aaron Siskind, Aaron Siskind Chicago 30, Aaron Siskind Jalapa 30 (Homage to Franz Kline), Aaron Siskind Jalapa 38 (Homage to Franz Kline), Aaron Siskind Lima 89 (Homage to Franz Klein), Aaron Siskind North Carolina 30, abstract expressionist, Alfred Stieglitz, Alfred Stieglitz The Terminal, american photographer, American photography, An-My Lê, An-My Lê 29 Palms: Infantry Platoon (Machine Gunners), An-My Lê 29 Palms: Mortar Impact, André Kertész New York, Andre Kertesz, Berenice Abbot Gunsmith, Berenice Abbott, Berenice Abbott George Washington Bridge, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Bernd and Hilla Becher Cooling Towers, Bernd and Hilla Becher Duisburg-Bruckhausen, Bernd and Hilla Becher Hannover Mine 1/2/5, British photographer, British photography, Carrie Mae Weems, Carrie Mae Weems The Shape of Things, Cathedral of Notre Dame, Charles Harry Jones, Charles Harry Jones Onions, Charles Harry Jones Peapods, Charles Marville, Charles Marville Pont Neuf, Charles Marville Rue des Prêtres-Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois, Charles Marville Rue du Cygne, Chicago 1951, Chicago 30, Clarence John Laughlin, Clarence John Laughlin Spectre of Coca-Cola, Contemplating the Bust of Man Ray from the portfolio Man Ray, Cooling Towers, David Levinthal, David Levinthal Hitler Moves East, Design Angles, directorial modes, directorial modes in photography, directorial modes of production, double exposures, Dr. Hortensio Verdeprado, Duisburg-Bruckhausen, Dutch photographer, Dutch photography, Eleanor and Barbara Chicago, Exhibition of the Witch, figures, fine art photography, forms, frame of reference, Frederick Sommer, Frederick Sommer I Adore You, George Washington Bridge, Germaine Krull, Germaine Krull Le Metal Inspirateur d'Art, Germaine Krull Metal Inspiration of Art, Germaine Krull Rails, Giliandria Escoliforcia, Greek Hero, Hannover Mine 1/2/5, Harry Callahan, Harry Callahan Chicago, Harry Callahan Chicago 1951, Harry Callahan Chicago c. 1949, Harry Callahan Chicago c. 1952, Harry Callahan Eleanor and Barbara Chicago, Harry Callahan Providence, Harry Callahan Siena, Hôtel de Douvres, Hitler Moves East, Hugh W. Diamond, Hugh W. Diamond Untitled c. 1852-55, I Adore You, images, Jalapa 30 (Homage to Franz Kline), Jalapa 38 (Homage to Franz Kline), Jan Groover, Jan Groover Untitled 1983, Joan Fontcuberta, Joan Fontcuberta Giliandria Escoliforcia, Joan Fontcuberta Mullerpolis Plunfis, John Coplans, John Coplans Self-Portrait (Back with Arms Above), John Gossage, John Gossage Monumentenbricke, L'Atlas de photographies solaires, Le Metal Inspirateur d'Art, Lee Friedlander, Lee Friedlander Glenwood Springs Colorado, Lima 89 (Homage to Franz Klein), Louis-Auguste Bisson, Louis-Auguste Bisson Cathedral of Notre Dame, Margaret Watkins, Margaret Watkins Design Angles, masks, Metal Inspiration of Art, Michael Spano, Michael Spano Photogram-Michael Spano, MOMA, Monumentenbricke, Mullerpolis Plunfis, Museum of Modern Art, North Carolina 30, Peapods, Personal experiences, Photogram-Michael Spano, photographic image as evidence of truth, photosphere, Robert B. Menschel, Roger Fenton, Roger Fenton Greek Hero, Rue Basse des Remparts, Rue des Prêtres-Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois, Rue du Cygne, Self-Portrait (Back with Arms Above), shapes, space environment, Spectre of Coca-Cola, The Directorial Mode, The Gay Deceiver, The Museum of Modern Art, The Shape of Things, The Shape of Things: Photographs from Robert B. Menschel, The Terminal, totems, Truthful representations, Val Telberg, Val Telberg Exhibition of the Witch, Weegee, Weegee The Gay Deceiver, William Henry Fox Talbot, William Henry Fox Talbot Rue Basse des Remparts, William Wegman, William Wegman Contemplating the Bust of Man Ray from the portfolio Man Ray

Exhibition dates: 29th October 2016 – 7th May 2017

Roger Fenton (British, 1819-1869)
Greek Hero
c. 1857
Salted-paper print from a wet-collodion glass negative
13 7/16 × 10 3/16″ (34.2 × 25.8cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Robert and Joyce Menschel Fund

Photography is … a language for asking questions about the world. The Shape of Things imbues this aphorism with a linear taxonomy in its written material (while the installation “occasionally diverges from a strict chronological progression”), no matter that each “moment” in the history of photography – historical, modern, contemporary – is never self contained or self sufficient, that each overlaps and informs one another, in a nexus of interweaving threads.

Charles Harry Jones’ Peapods (c. 1900) are as modern as Bernd and Hilla Becher’s Cooling Towers (1973); Margaret Watkins’ Design Angles (1919) are as directorial as Jan Groover’s Untitled (1983) or Charles Harry Jones’ Onions (c. 1900). And so it goes…

The ideation “the shape of things” is rather a bald fundamental statement in relation to how we imagine and encounter the marvellous. No matter the era, the country or the person who makes them; no matter the meanings readable in photographs or their specific use value in a particular context – the photograph is still the footprint of an idea and, as John Berger asks, a trace naturally left by something that has past? That flicker of imagination in the mind’s eye which has no time.

As Sartre says in Being and Nothingness, “Temporality is only a tool of vision.”

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

The Shape of Things presents a compact and non-comprehensive history of photography, from its inception to the early twenty-first century, in one hundred images. The exhibition is drawn entirely from the 504 photographs that have entered The Museum of Modern Art’s collection with the support of Robert B. Menschel over the past forty years, including a notable selection of works from his personal collection that were given in 2016 and are being shown here for the first time.

“Photography is less and less a cognitive process, in the traditional sense of the term, or an affirmative one, offering answers, but rather a language for asking questions about the world,” wrote the Italian photographer and critic Luigi Ghirri in 1989. Echoing these words, the exhibition presents the history of the medium in three parts, emphasising the strengths of Menschel’s collection and mirroring his equal interest in historical, modern, and contemporary photography. Each section focuses on a moment in photography’s history and the conceptions of the medium that were dominant then: informational and documentary in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, more formal and subjective in the immediate postwar era, and questioning and self-referential from the 1970s onward. The installation occasionally diverges from a strict chronological progression, fuelled by the conviction that works from different periods, rather than being antagonistic, correspond with and enrich each other.

Installation views of The Shape of Things: Photographs from Robert B. Menschel at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, October 29, 2016 – May 7, 2017
© 2016 The Museum of Modern Art
Photo: John Wronn

The exhibition The Shape of Things: Photographs from Robert B. Menschel presents a compact history of photography, from its inception to the early 21st century, in 100 images. On view from October 29, 2016, through May 7, 2017, the exhibition is drawn entirely from the 504 photographs that have entered The Museum of Modern Art’s collection over the past 40 years with the support of longtime Museum trustee Robert B. Menschel. It includes a notable selection of works from his personal collection that were given in 2016 and are being shown here for the first time. The Shape of Things is organised by Quentin Bajac, the Joel and Anne Ehrenkranz Chief Curator of Photography, with Katerina Stathopoulou, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Photography, MoMA.

Borrowing its title from the eponymous work by Carrie Mae Weems (American, b. 1953), the exhibition presents the history of the medium in three parts, emphasising the strengths of Menschel’s collection and mirroring his equal interest in historical, modern, and contemporary photography. Each section focuses on a moment in photography’s history and the conceptions of the medium that were dominant then: informational and documentary in the 19th and early 20th centuries, more formal and subjective in the immediate postwar era, and questioning and self-referential from the 1970s onward. The installation occasionally diverges from a strict chronological progression, fuelled by the conviction that works from different periods, rather than being antagonistic, correspond with and enrich each other.

Historical

From 1840 to 1900, in photography’s infancy as a medium, artists principally sought to depict truthful representations of their surrounding environments. This primal stage is distinguished by a debate on the artistic-versus-scientific nature of the invention. Photographers engaged with the aesthetic and technical qualities of the medium, experimenting with tone, texture, and printing processes. The exhibition begins with seminal photographs such as William Henry Talbot Fox’s (British, 1800-1877) 1843 picture Rue Basse des Remparts, Paris, taken from the windows of the Hôtel de Douvres. Also on view is the astronomer Jules Janssen’s (French, 1824-1907) masterpiece L’Atlas de photographies solaires (Atlas of solar photographs), published in 1903. Summing up a quarter-century of daily photography at Janssen’s observatory in Meudon, France, the volume on view contains 30 images of the photosphere, demonstrating photography’s instrumental role in advancing the study of science. Other artists included in this section are Louis-August and Auguste-Rosalie Bisson (Bisson brothers), Eugène Cuvelier, Roger Fenton, Hugh W. Diamond, Charles Marville, and Henri Le Secq.

Modern

As photographers grappled with war and its aftermath, they began to turn their focus away from documenting the world around them and toward capturing their own personal experiences in a more formal, subjective way. A selection of works from 1940 to 1960 explores this theme, including works by two artists whose images Menschel collected extensively: Harry Callahan (American, 1912-1999) and Aaron Siskind (American, 1903-1991). A selection from Callahan’s quintessential photographs of urban environments – from Chicago and New York to Aix-en Provence and Cuzco, Peru – double exposures of city views, and portraits of his wife Eleanor and daughter Barbara, underscore the breadth of his oeuvre. In the summer of 1951, while teaching alongside Callahan at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, Siskind began the series of pictures of the surfaces of walls for which he is best known. One of the early works in the series on view, North Carolina 30 (1951), shows the bare legs of a woman framed by the words “IN” and”AND” amid layers of peeling layers of posters. In their planarity and graphic quality, these pictures also have a kinship with paintings by the Abstract Expressionists, alongside whom Siskind began exhibiting in the late 1940s. Other artists in this section include Berenice Abbott, Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander, John Gossage, André Kertész, Clarence John Laughlin, and Dora Maar.

Contemporary

From the 1970s onward, photographers began working in what A. D. Coleman defined as “The Directorial Mode,” wherein the photographer consciously creates events for the sole purpose of making images. John Coplans (British, 1920-2003) took his own body, naked and with the head invisible, as the subject of his work – both carrying on and contradicting the tradition of the self-portrait centred on the face – as seen in Self-Portrait (Back with Arms Above) (1984). Joan Fontcuberta’s (Spanish, b. 1955) series Herbarium appears at first glance to be a collection of botanical studies, depicting plants with new and distinctive contours and rigorously scientific names. However, as revealed by his fictional character Dr Hortensio Verdeprado (“green pasture” in Spanish), the “plants” are actually carefully composed by the photographer using scrap picked up in industrial areas around Barcelona. Made of bits of paper and plastic, small animal bones, and other detritus, these forms are not only non-vegetal – there is almost nothing natural about them at all. Fontcuberta is interested in the way data assumes meaning through its presentation and in the acceptance of the photographic image as evidence of truth. Other artists in this section include Jan Groover, David Levinthal, An-My Lê, Michael Spano, JoAnn Verburg, and William Wegman.

Press release from the Museum of Modern Art

Hugh W. Diamond (British, 1809-1886)
Untitled
c. 1852-55
Albumen silver print from a glass negative
6 1/2 x 5 5/16″ (16.6 x 13.5cm)
Horace W. Goldsmith Fund through Robert B. Menschel

William Henry Fox Talbot (British, 1800-1877)
Rue Basse des Remparts, Paris
May 1843
Salted paper print
6 11/16 × 6 3/4″ (17 × 17.2cm)
Promised gift of Robert B. Menschel

Charles Marville (French, 1816-1879)
Pont Neuf
1870s
Albumen silver print
14 1/8 x 8 1/4″ (36 x 23.5cm)
Horace W. Goldsmith Fund through Robert B. Menschel

Charles Marville (French, 1816-1879)
Rue des Prêtres-Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois
c. 1866
Albumen silver print
11 13/16 × 10 1/2″ (30 × 26.6cm)
Promised gift of Robert B. Menschel

Charles Marville (French, 1816-1879)
Rue du Cygne
c. 1865
Albumen silver print from a glass negative
11 3/4 x 10 9/16″ (29.9 x 26.9cm)
Horace W. Goldsmith Fund through Robert B. Menschel

Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946)
The Terminal
1893
Photogravure mounted to board
10 × 13 3/16″ (25.4 × 33.5cm)
Promised gift of Robert B. Menschel

Truthful representations, 1840-1930

“One advantage of the discovery of the Photographic Art will be, that it will enable us to introduce into our pictures a multitude of minute details which add to the truth and reality of the representation, but which no artist would take the trouble to copy faithfully from nature.

Contenting himself with a general effect, he would probably deem it beneath his genius to copy every accident of light and shade; nor could he do so indeed, without a disproportionate expenditure of time and trouble, which might be otherwise much better employed.

Nevertheless, it is well to have the means at our disposal of introducing these minutiae without any additional trouble, for they will sometimes be found to give an air of variety beyond expectation to the scene represented.”

William Henry Fox Talbot, The Pencil of Nature, 1844-46

“I was interested in a straightforward 19th-century way of photographing an object. To photograph things frontally creates the strongest presence and you can eliminate the possibilities of being too obviously subjective. If you photograph an octopus, you have to work out which approach will show the most typical character of the animal. But first you have to learn about the octopus. Does it have six legs or eight? You have to be able to understand the subject visually, through its visual appearance. You need clarity and not sentimentality.”

Hilla Becher, in “The Music of the Blast Furnaces: Bernhard and Hilla Becher in Conversation with James Lingwood,” Art Press, no. 209 (1996)

Charles Harry Jones (British, 1866-1959)
Peapods
c. 1900
Gelatin silver printing-out-paper print
6 5/16 x 8 1/4″ (16 x 20.9cm)
Promised gift of Robert B. Menschel

Bernd Becher (German, 1931-2007), Hilla Becher (German, 1934-2015)
Cooling Towers
1973
Gelatin silver prints
Each 15 3/4 × 11 13/16″ (40 × 30cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Promised gift of Robert B. Menschel
© 2016 Estate Bernd and Hilla Becher

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
George Washington Bridge, Riverside Drive and West 179th Street, Manhattan
January 17, 1936
Gelatin silver print
9 9/16 x 7 5/8″ (24.3 x 19.3cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Promised gift of Robert B. Menschel
© 2016 Berenice Abbott/Commerce Graphics

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Gunsmith, 6 Centre Market Place, Manhattan
February 4, 1937
Gelatin silver print
9 5/8 x 7 9/16″ (24.4 x 19.1cm)
Gift of the Robert and Joyce Menschel Foundation

Bernd Becher (German, 1931-2007), Hilla Becher (German, 1934-2015)
Hannover Mine 1/2/5, Bochum-Hordel, Ruhr Region, Germany
1973
Gelatin silver print
18 7/16 x 22 11/16″ (46.9 x 57.6cm)
Horace W. Goldsmith Fund through Robert B. Menschel

Bernd Becher (German, 1931-2007), Hilla Becher (German, 1934-2015)
Duisburg-Bruckhausen, Ruhr Region, Germany
1999
Gelatin silver print
19 5/16 x 24″ (49.1 x 60.9cm)
Horace W. Goldsmith Fund through Robert B. Menschel

Louis-Auguste Bisson (French, 1814-1876)
Cathedral of Notre Dame, Paris (detail of facade)
c. 1853
Albumen silver print from a glass negative
14 7/16 x 17 13/16″ (36.6 x 45.3cm)
Acquired through the generosity of Robert B. Menschel

Germaine Krull (Dutch born Germany, 1897-1985)
Rails
c. 1927
Gelatin silver print
15 7/16 x 10 3/8″ (39.2 x 26.3cm)
Horace W. Goldsmith Fund through Robert B. Menschel

Germaine Krull (Dutch born Germany, 1897-1985)
Le Metal Inspirateur d’Art (Metal Inspiration of Art)
1930
Gelatin silver print
6 5/8 x 8 7/16″ (16.8 x 21.5cm)
Promised gift of Robert B. Menschel

Personal experiences, 1940-1960

“As photographers, we must learn to relax our beliefs. Move on objects with your eye straight on, to the left, around on the right. Watch them grow large as you approach, group and regroup themselves as you shift your position. Relationships gradually emerge, and sometimes assert themselves with finality. And that’s your picture.

What I have just described is an emotional experience. It is utterly personal: no one else can ever see quite what you have seen, and the picture that emerges is unique, never made and never to be repeated. The picture – and this is fundamental – has the unity of an organism. Its elements were not put together, with whatever skill or taste or ingenuity. It came into being as an instant act of sight.”

Aaron Siskind, “The Drama of Objects,” Minicam Photography 8, no. 9 (1945)

“The business of making a photograph may be said in simple terms to consist of three elements: the objective world (whose permanent condition is change and disorder), the sheet of paper on which the picture will be realised, and the experience which brings them together. First, and emphatically, I accept the flat plane of the picture surface as the primary frame of reference of the picture. The experience itself may be described as one of total absorption in the object. But the object serves only a personal need and the requirements of the picture. Thus rocks are sculptured forms; a section of common decorated ironwork, springing rhythmic shapes; fragments of paper sticking to a wall, a conversation piece. And these forms, totems, masks, figures, shapes, images must finally take their place in the tonal field of the picture and strictly conform to their space environment. The object has entered the picture in a sense; it has been photographed directly. But it is often unrecognisable; for it has been removed from its usual context, disassociated from its customary neighbours and forced into new relationships.”

Aaron Siskind, “Credo,” Spectrum 6, No. 2 (1956)

Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American born Austria, 1899-1968)
The Gay Deceiver
c. 1939
Gelatin silver print
13 x 10 1/4″ (33 x 26cm)
Promised gift of Robert B. Menschel

Harry Callahan (American, 1912-1999)
Chicago
1951
Dye transfer print
10 5/16 x 15 11/16″ (26.2 x 39.9cm)
Promised gift of Robert B. Menschel

Clarence John Laughlin (American, 1905-1985)
Spectre of Coca-Cola
1962
Gelatin silver print, printed 1981
13 1/4 x 10 3/8″ (33.6 x 26.4cm)
Robert B. Menschel Fund

Harry Callahan (American, 1912-1999)
Siena
1968
Gelatin silver print
9 × 8 7/8″ (22.9 × 22.5cm)
Promised gift of Robert B. Menschel

Harry Callahan (American, 1912-1999)
Chicago
c. 1952
Dye transfer print
8 3/4 × 13 7/16″ (22.3 × 34.1cm)
Promised gift of Robert B. Menschel

Harry Callahan (American, 1912-1999)
Chicago
c. 1949
Gelatin silver print
7 11/16 x 9 9/16″ (19.5 x 24.3cm)
Gift of Robert and Joyce Menschel

Harry Callahan (American, 1912-1999)
Eleanor and Barbara, Chicago
1953
Gelatin silver print
7 11/16 x 9 11/16″ (19.5 x 24.6cm)
Gift of Robert and Joyce Menschel

Harry Callahan (American, 1912-1999)
Providence
1974
Gelatin silver print
6 9/16 × 6 7/16″ (16.6 × 16.3cm)
Promised gift of Robert B. Menschel

André Kertész (American born Hungary, 1894-1985)
New York
August 10, 1969
Gelatin silver print
13 11/16 x 9 3/4″ (34.7 x 24.7cm)
Promised gift of Robert B. Menschel

Directorial modes, 1970s and beyond

“Here the photographer consciously and intentionally creates events for the express purpose of making images thereof. This may be achieved by intervening in ongoing ‘real’ events or by staging tableaux – in either case, by causing something to take place which would not have occurred had the photographer not made it happen.

Here the authenticity of the original event is not an issue, nor the photographer’s fidelity to it, and the viewer would be expected to raise those questions only ironically. Such images use photography’s overt veracity by evoking it for events and relationships generated by the photographer’s deliberate structuring of what takes place in front of the lens as well as of the resulting image. There is an inherent ambiguity at work in such images, for even though what they purport to describe as ‘slices of life’ would not have occurred except for the photographer’s instigation, nonetheless those events (or a reasonable facsimile thereof) did actually take place, as the photographs demonstrate.

… This mode I would define as the directorial.”

A. D. Coleman, “The Directorial Mode: Notes Towards a Definition,” Artforum 15, No. 1 (1976)

Aaron Siskind (American, 1903-1991)
Chicago 30
1949
Gelatin silver print
14 x 17 13/16″ (35.6 x 45.3cm)
Gift of Robert and Joyce Menschel

Aaron Siskind (American, 1903-1991)
North Carolina 30
1951
Gelatin silver print
13 1/16 × 9 11/16″ (33.2 × 24.6cm)
Promised gift of Robert B. Menschel

Lee Friedlander (American, born 1934)
Glenwood Springs, Colorado
1981
Gelatin silver print
8 5/8 x 12 15/16″ (21.9 x 32.8cm)
Horace W. Goldsmith Fund through Robert B. Menschel

Jan Groover (American, 1943-2012)
Untitled
1983
Gelatin silver print
10 3/16 x 13 1/2″ (25.9 x 34.3cm)
Promised gift of Robert B. Menschel

Margaret Watkins (Canadian, 1884-1969)
Design Angles
1919
Gelatin silver print
8 5/16 x 6 3/8″ (21.1 x 16.2cm)
Acquired through the generosity of Robert B. Menschel

Charles Harry Jones (British, 1866-1959)
Onions
c. 1900
Gelatin silver printing-out-paper print
5 7/8 x 8 1/4″ (15 x 21cm)
Promised gift of Robert B. Menschel

Aaron Siskind (American, 1903-1991)
Jalapa 30 (Homage to Franz Kline)
1973
Gelatin silver print
9 1/2 x 9 15/16″ (24.1 x 23.6cm)
Gift of Robert and Joyce Menschel

Aaron Siskind (American, 1903-1991)
Jalapa 38 (Homage to Franz Kline)
1973
Gelatin silver print
9 1/2 x 8 15/16″ (24.1 x 22.8cm)
Gift of Robert and Joyce Menschel

Aaron Siskind (American, 1903-1991)
Lima 89 (Homage to Franz Klein)
1975
Gelatin silver print
10 3/16 × 9 5/8″ (25.9 × 24.4cm)
Promised gift of Robert B. Menschel

John Gossage (American, b. 1946)
Monumentenbricke
1982
Gelatin silver print
12 3/16 x 9 11/16″ (30.9 x 24.6cm)
Promised gift of Robert B. Menschel

Val Telberg (American born Russia, 1910-1995)
Exhibition of the Witch
c. 1948
Gelatin silver print
10 15/16 × 13 3/4″ (27.8 × 35cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Promised gift of Robert B. Menschel
© 2016 Estate of Val Telberg

Frederick Sommer (American born Italy, 1905-1999)
I Adore You
1947
Gelatin silver print
7 9/16 × 9 1/2″ (19.2 × 24.1 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Promised gift of Robert B. Menschel

John Coplans (British, 1920-2003)
Self-Portrait (Back with Arms Above)
1984
Gelatin silver print
19 13/16 × 15″ (50.4 × 38.1cm)
Promised gift of Robert B. Menschel

Joan Fontcuberta (Spanish, b. 1955)
Giliandria Escoliforcia
1983
Gelatin silver print
10 9/16 x 8 1/2″ (26.8 x 21.5cm)
Robert and Joyce Menschel Fund

Joan Fontcuberta (Spanish, b. 1955)
Mullerpolis Plunfis
1983
Gelatin silver print
10 9/16 x 8 1/2″ (26.8 x 21.5cm)
Robert and Joyce Menschel Fund

An-My Lê (American born Vietnam, b. 1960)
29 Palms: Mortar Impact
2003-2004
Gelatin silver print
26 1/2 × 38 1/16″ (67.3 × 96.7cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Robert B. Menschel Fund
© 2016 An-My Lê

An-My Lê (American born Vietnam, b. 1960)
29 Palms: Infantry Platoon (Machine Gunners)
2003-2004
Gelatin silver print
26 1/2 × 38 1/16″ (67.3 × 96.7cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Robert B. Menschel Fund
© 2016 An-My Lê

David Levinthal (American, b. 1949)
Untitled from the series Hitler Moves East
1975
Gelatin silver print
10 9/16 x 13 7/16″ (26.8 x 34.1cm)
The Fellows of Photography Fund and Horace W. Goldsmith Fund through Robert B. Menschel

William Wegman (American, b. 1943)
Contemplating the Bust of Man Ray from the portfolio Man Ray
1976
Gelatin silver print
7 5/16 × 6 7/8″ (18.5 × 17.5cm)
Promised gift of Robert B. Menschel

Michael Spano (American, b. 1949)
Photogram-Michael Spano
1983
Gelatin silver print
57 7/8 x 23 15/16″ (145.2 x 60.8cm) (irregular)
Robert B. Menschel Fund

Carrie Mae Weems (American, b. 1953)
The Shape of Things
1993
Gelatin silver prints
a) 26 7/8 x 26 15/16″ (68.2 x 68.4 cm) b) 26 15/16 x 26 7/8″ (68.5 x 68.3 cm)
Gift of Robert B. Menschel

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Aug

Exhibition: ‘The Memory of the Future. Photographic Dialogues between Past, Present and Future’ at the Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne

By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leave a Comment

Categories: American, american photographers, black and white photography, colour photography, documentary photography, drawing, exhibition, existence, gallery website, installation art, landscape, light, memory, photographic series, photography, portrait, psychological, quotation, space, time and works on paper
Tags: 3D digitization, Adiantum tenerum, Adrien Constant Delessert, ambrotype, ambrotypes, American photography, Andreas Müller-Pohle, Andreas Muller-Pohle Digital scores V, Animal Locomotion, Anna Atkins, Anna Atkins Adiantum tenerum, Anonymous Portrait of a young girl, Ante la Imagen, appearance and disappearance, archeology of the present, artistic value of industrial objects, Óscar Muñoz, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Bernd and Hilla Becher Gas Tank, Bernd And Hilla Becher Gas tank near Wuppertal, Bernd And Hilla Becher Gas Tanks, Bernd And Hilla Becher Gasbehälter bei Wuppertal, Binh Danh, Binh Danh Sphinxes, British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions, camera obscura, carbon printing, Charles and Mathilde Horngascher-Odier, chemigram, chemistry of photography, Christian Marclay, Christian Marclay Memento, Christian Marclay Memento (Survival of the Fittest), collage, cyanotypes, Cyanotypes of British and Foreign Ferns, daguerreotype, daguerreotypes, Dennis Gabor, Digital scores V, Eadweard Muybridge, Eadweard Muybridge Animal Locomotion, early photographic processes, early photography, Every ... Bernd and Hilla Becher Prison Type Gasholder, Every ... Bernd and Hilla Becher Spherical Type Gasholder, ferrotype, ferrotypes, French photography, Gabriel Lippmann, Gabriel Lippmann Selfportrait, Gas tank near Wuppertal, Gas Tanks, Gasbehälter bei Wuppertal, Glass 10/9/12, Heliogravure, heritage value of industrial objects, holograms, Hommage à Muybridge 1972, Idris Khan, Idris Khan Every ... Bernd and Hilla Becher Prison Type Gasholder, Idris Khan Every ... Bernd and Hilla Becher Spherical Type Gasholder, Jean-Gabriel Eynard, Jean-Gabriel Eynard Charles and Mathilde Horngascher-Odier, Jerry Spagnoli, Jerry Spagnoli Glass 10/9/12, Joan Fontcuberta, John Dugdale, John Dugdale Mourning Tulips, John Dugdale The Clandestine Mind, JR, JR UNFRAMED Man Ray, Kristen Stewart, La Mémoire du futur, Lausanne le pont Chauderon, Lippmann prisms, Lippmann wave theory of light, loss and the insecurity of human life, Martin Becka, Martin Becka Le Parc, McDonnell Douglas Corp. / Spindler & Hoyer Portrait of Dennis Gabor, McDonnell Douglas Corporation, Memento, memory and forgetting, memory and time, mise en abyme, Mourning Tulips, multiple narratives, Musée de l'Elysée, optical pilgrimage, Oscar Muñoz Ante la Imagen, past and present, Paul Vionnet, Paul Vionnet La cure d'Etoy, Paul Vionnet Lausanne le pont Chauderon, personal archives, Photo-Chimigramme, photo-collage, photographic memory, Pierre Cordier, Pierre Cordier chemigram, Pierre Cordier Photo-Chimigramme, Portrait of a young girl, Portrait of Dennis Gabor, Rene Burri, roots of the industrial world, Spindler & Hoyer, The Clandestine Mind, The Horse in Motion, The Memory of the Future, The Musée de l’Elysée, trompe l'oeil, UNFRAMED Man Ray, Victoria Will, Victoria Will Kristen Stewart, wave theory of light, wavefront reconstruction

Exhibition dates: 25th May – 28th August 2016

Curator: Tatyana Franck, Musée de l’Elysée, assisted by Lydia Dorner and Emilie Delcambre

Artists: Takashi Arai / Israel Ariño / Anna Atkins / Patrick Bailly-Maître-Grand Pierre Cordier / Bernd and Hilla Becher / Martin Becka / Binh Danh /Jayne Hinds Bidaut John Dugdale / Jean-Gabriel Eynard / Joan Fontcuberta / Dennis Gabor / Loris Gréaud / JR Idris Khan / Laure Ledoux / Gustave Le Gray / Gabriel Lippmann / Vera Lutter / Christian Marclay / Mathew Brady / Vik Muniz / Oscar Muñoz / Eadweard Muybridge / France Scully Osterman and Mark Osterman Andreas / Andreas Müller-Pohle / Florio Puenter Benjamin Recordon / Dino Simonett / Jerry Spagnoli / Joni Sternbach / James Turrell Martial Verdier / Paul Vionnet / Pierre Wetzel / Victoria Will / Nancy Wilson-Pajic

3D Digitisation of Jean-Gabriel Eynard (Swiss, 1775-1863)
Charles and Mathilde Horngascher-Odier
1845
© Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne

Gabriel Lippmann (colour photography) and Dennis Gabor (holograms). Eadweard Muybridge (movement) and Pierre Cordier (chemigrams). Daguerreotypes, calotypes, negatives on dry waxed paper, tintypes, ambrotypes, cyanotypes. Heliogravure, ferrotype, collage and carbon printing. 3D digitisations that “light up” the image from every angle.

What’s old is new again. Then and now, here and there. The memory of future past.

Marcus

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

This exhibition is an odyssey into the history of photography where different eras are juxtaposed and where artists and their methods dialogue with each other. Through a selection of historic photographic processes and the works of contemporary artists, the spectator is encouraged to observe the influence of the past on today’s artistic creations. The exhibition The Memory of the Future proposes a three-pronged vision: that of the past with the works of the pioneers of photographic techniques, that of the present with contemporary works that revive this know-how, and that of the future with technologies that give a new perspective on the works of the past.

Through century-old processes such as daguerreotypes, calotypes, negatives on dry waxed paper, tintypes, ambrotypes, cyanotypes and including holograms, The Memory of the Future celebrates the founding fathers of photographic techniques by establishing a dialogue between them and contemporary artists. From Gabriel Lippmann to James Turrell, including Robert Cornelius and Oscar Muñoz, this exhibition brings together for the first time some one hundred works whose common thread is their ability to withstand time. The Memory of the Future also proposes a selection of works from the Musée de l’Elysée’s collections that have never before been presented to the public.

After having launched a campaign to digitise its photography books in 2014 – 1,500 books have been digitised as of this time – the Musée de l’Elysée continues to explore techniques to dematerialise its visual heritage in order to preserve and enhance it. Consistent with its ambition to not only preserve works of value but to prospect for new ones, the Musée de l’Elysée has undertaken a 3D digitisation project of its works using a prototype developed by the EPFL (Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne). This technology of the future is presented in this exhibition in the form of a touch screen monitor.

Oscar Muñoz (Colombian, b. 1951)
Ante la Imagen
2009
© Oscar Muñoz, courtesy of the artist and Mor charpentier gallery

Oscar Muñoz’s work combines photography, engraving, drawing, installation, video and sculpture, defying all attempts at categorisation. Using non-conventional techniques, his work is a reflection on social concerns and addresses the themes of memory and forgetting, appearance and disappearance, loss and the insecurity of human life. In his work El Coleccionista, the artist uses a triple video projection to show a figure that is sorting, organising and grouping what appears to be personal archives. Oscar Muñoz evokes here the ability of images to be part of multiple narratives, from one image to another, from one context to another. These images propose multiple narrations that overlap and intermingle between the past and present, memory and time.

For Ante la Imagen, Muñoz uses the portrait of the chemist Robert Cornelius (1809-1893), known for having reduced the exposure time of the photographic process of the daguerreotype and for producing one of the first self-portraits, to demonstrate the effectiveness of his method. Muñoz reproduces this portrait by engraving it on a reflecting metallic surface, like a daguerreotype. With each manipulation, the viewer sees the portrait of Cornelius superimposed on his own. The work is composed and decomposed and questions the interior multiplicity of one and the same image. Muñoz replaces this frozen image by a constantly-changing one, vulnerable to deterioration under the effect of air, like life itself.

Gabriel Lippmann (Franco-Luxembourgish, 1845-1921)
Selfportrait
c. 1892
© Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne

Professor of physics at the Sorbonne, a member of the French Academy of Sciences and author of many scientific works, the international renown of Gabriel Lippmann Is mainly due to his invention of colour photography using the interferential method. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics in 1908.

In 1891, he presented his invention, which would revolutionise photography, to the public. Lippmann developed the “wave theory of light”, which held that light bodies vibrate (like sound) and that light is propagated by waves of different speeds. The variations in wavelengths lead to changes in colour. To prove the validity of his theory, Lippmann worked for five years to find a method that would fix these interferences. To do so, he developed a device that made it possible to place a special photographic plate (made of layers proportional to the wavelengths) in contact with a mercury mirror, a very complicated process. The sensitive layer of an average wavelength, green, for example, has 4,000 bright points per millimetre in its thickness, separated by dark intervals. The Musée de l’Elysée has the largest collection of Lippmann prisms in the world.

McDonnell Douglas Corp. / Spindler & Hoyer
Portrait of Dennis Gabor
1975
© Jonathan Ross Hologram Collection

Engineer and physicist, Dennis Gabor is known for having invented the hologram in 1947, for which he was awarded the Holweck prize in 1970, and then the Nobel Prize in physics in 1971. Fascinated by Abbé’s theory of the microscope and Gabriel Lippmann’s method of colour photography, he studied electron optics, which led him to propose the concept of holography that he referred to as “wavefront reconstruction” at the time. The initial project consisted of an electron microscope capable of visualising atom networks and the atoms themselves, but that was not put into practice until 20 years later, whereas the hologram as a photographic process would have to wait for the invention of the laser in the 1960s, the light source necessary for the hologram. Subsequently, Emmett Leith and Juris Upatnieks in the United States and Yuri Denisyuk in Russia contributed to the improvement of Gabor’s invention and presented three-dimensional holograms. Since then, holograms are widely know to the general public through advertising, the production of packaging materials and jewellery items.

The life-size version of the portrait of Gabor can be seen at the offices of the McDonnell Douglas Corporation in the United States, one of the first companies to have attempted to market the holograph. The reduced-size copy presented here was made several years later by Spindler & Hoyer, a German optical company.

Eadweard Muybridge (English, 1830-1904)
Animal Locomotion, Plate 597
1887
© Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne

Christian Marclay (American-Swiss, b. 1955)
Memento (Survival of the Fittest)
2008
© Christian Marclay, courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York

A well-known filmmaker and multimedia artist, Christian Marclay made his mark on the contemporary art scene by combining the visual arts, film and musical culture. In 2007, he began a project that explores the interactions between sound and vision, as well as the manipulation and the conservation of different forms of recordings. He initiated a series together with the Graphicstudio, University of South Florida involving the use of two archaic recording systems – the cyanotype photography process and the audiotape.

He adopted and adapted the subject of the audiotape, which has become just about obsolete as a result of technological developments, and placed it at the center of his visual abstraction to capture the old soundtracks of hundreds of cassette tapes unfurled like so many streamers, using the cyanotype process. “We assume, because we’re able to capture sounds or images, that they will exist forever – when, in fact, obsolescence makes you feel the limit of those assumptions.” By combining these two mediums, the artist brilliantly explores the resonances between the past and present.

JR
UNFRAMED, Man Ray revu par JR, Femme aux cheveux longs, 1929, Vevey, Suisse
2010
© JR / Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne

JR has “the largest art gallery in the world”. Thanks to the technique of photo collage, he freely exhibits his work on walls worldwide, thus attracting the attention of those who rarely or never go to museums. His work is a mixture of art and action and deals with commitment, freedom, identity and limits. After finding a camera in the Paris Metro in 2001, he travelled throughout Europe to meet other people whose mode of artistic expression involved the use of the walls and façades that give form to our cities. After observing the people he met and listening to their message, JR pasted their portraits up in streets and basements and on the roof tops of Paris.

JR thus creates “pervasive art” that he puts up on buildings in the Paris suburbs, on walls in the Middle East, on broken bridges in Africa and in the favelas of Brazil. These artistic actions make no distinction between the actors and the spectators. JR’s approach presented here is a mixture of the reinterpretation and recontextualisation of the icons of the history of photography taken from the collections of the Musée de l’Elysée of Lausanne, which he applies to the façades of buildings in the city of Vevey. He thus crops and enlarges the photos of Robert Capa, Man Ray, Gilles Caron and Helen Levitt so that the city becomes a gigantic open-air museum.

Binh Danh (American born Vietnam, b. 1979)
Sphinxes (by Arthur Putnam, 1912)
2014
Artist and Haines Gallery courtesy, San Francisco
© Binh Danh

“Landscape is what defines me. When I am somewhere new or unfamiliar, I am constantly in dialogue with the past, present and my future self. When I am thinking about landscape, I am thinking about those who have stood on this land before me. Whoever they are, hopefully history recorded their makings on the land for me to study and contemplate.”

Born in Viet Nam, Binh Danh addresses themes of collective and personal memories, history, heritage and mortality. Known for printing his works on unconventional supports such as leaves or grass, he experiments with the photographic process of the daguerreotype in his most recent creations in order to document the history of the city of San Francisco.

Reminiscent of the work of photographic pioneers such as Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904), Charles Marville (1813-1879) and Eugène Atget (1857-1927), Binh Danh explores the complexities of a constantly evolving city, from the first major expansion in recent years of Silicon Valley. He places San Francisco, cliché of the culture of technology and success, in another time space in order to incite the viewer to reflect on the rapid pace of changes in a city. By choosing the daguerreotype, the artist works on the reflecting surface of the process to incorporate the spectator into his work and to thus transform it into a shared experience.

Paul Vionnet (Swiss, 1830-1914)
La cure d’Etoy
1870
Tirage sur papier aristotype
13.4 × 17.8cm
Collection iconographique vaudoise
© Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne

With the exhibition The Memory of the Future. Photographic Dialogues between Past, Present and Future, the Musée de l’Elysée encourages contemporary artists to take a close look at photography as a medium, innovates as it reveals a 3D digitization technology developed by a spin-off from Lausanne’s Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), and displays its unique visual heritage.

The Memory of the Future. Photographic Dialogues between Past, Present and Future is the first exhibition that Director Tatyana Franck has curated at the Musée de l’Elysée. It opens up a dialogue between the work of the pioneers of photographic techniques (the past), those of contemporary artists that breathe new life into these skills (the present), and avant-garde technologies that update these early processes (the future). Works from the museum’s collections, contemporary artists and new technologies come face to face and join forces to give a brand new vision of the history of photography. The Memory of the Future aims to configure the present by reconfiguring the past in order to prefigure the future.

Techniques over time

First of all, early photographic processes such as ambrotypes, daguerreotypes, ferrotypes, cyanotypes, etc. are displayed next to works by contemporary artists who breathe life into them. The technical innovations of the past are fertile ground for contemporary art and design. The exhibition includes a waxed paper negative by Gustave Le Gray in dialogue with those by Martin Becka, while cyanotypes by Anna Atkins and Paul Vionnet converse with those by Christian Marclay, Nancy Wilson-Pajic and John Dugdale. Jean-Gabriel Eynard’s daguerreotypes from the museum’s collections are exhibited next to portraits by Takashi Arai and Patrick Bailly-Maître-Grand and landscapes by Binh Danh and Jerry Spagnoli. And as for contemporary ferrotypes, The Memory of the Future shows the work of Joni Sternbach and Jayne Hinds Bidaut as well as portraits taken by Victoria Will at the Sundance Independent Film Festival in 2014.

Works of two scientists who won a Nobel Prize and invented a photographic technique also have pride of place – a self portrait by Gabriel Lippmann (Nobel Prize in Physics in 1908) who invented color photography using the interferential method and a portrait of Dennis Gabor (Nobel Prize in Physics in 1971), the inventor of the holographic process, a photographic technique in relief – echoing a holographic picture by James Turrell, a contemporary artist primarily concerned with light. Lastly, and as a point of convergence for all these photographic processes to fix an image on to a support, the camera obscura is presented through the works of Florio Puenter, Dino Simonett and Vera Lutter. Loris Gréaud – an artist invited to present an original installation capturing the spirit of the Musée de l’Elysée by recording its shadows and light – also explores this technique.

Homage and metamorphosis

The exhibition also presents the “mise en abyme” of iconic pictures from the history of photography reinterpreted by contemporary artists whose works examine the very notion of time or memory.

The earliest photograph in history – by Nicéphore Niépce and dating back to 1826 – is thus transformed by Joan Fontcuberta (Googlegramme Niépce, 2005) using PhotoMosaïque freeware connected online to the Google search engine, and by Andreas Müller-Pohle (Digital Scores VI). The first photographic self portrait in history – by Robert Cornelius in 1839 – is reproduced on a series of mirrors by Oscar Muñoz in 2009 to examine the paradox of the aging of the photographic support, which is, however, supposed to record an image for eternity. While Pierre Cordier pays homage to Eadweard Muybridge’s photographic breaking down of movement, Idris Khan (who took part in the reGeneration exhibition in 2005) pays homage to the iconic photographs of Bernd and Hilla Becher.

Innovating to preserve and showcase

Having launched a campaign in 2014 to digitise its photography books – 1500 books have been scanned so far – the Musée de l’Elysée is continuing to explore techniques to dematerialise its visual heritage for conservation and promotion purposes. Launched in 2015 thanks to the Engagement Migros development fund, an ambitious three dimensional digitisation project puts the Musée de l’Elysée at the forefront of museum innovation.

A venue for exhibitions, conservation and now an experimentation, as part of the exhibition La Mémoire du futur the Musée de l’Elysée is proposing for the first time a space dedicated to the presentation of digitised virtual objects from its collections. This innovative project aims to introduce new collaborative and interactive experiences using the Museum’s collections to a wide range of audiences – whether they be photography enthusiasts, curators or researchers.

Thanks to the Engagement Migros development fund, Innovation partner of the Musée de l’Elysée, the public is invited to experimentally test the first 3D digitisations carried out in partnership with the start-up Artmyn, created at EPFL’s Audiovisual Communications Laboratory (LCAV) led by Martin Vetterli. It will thus be possible to look at the works in 3D with unprecedented precision, but above all, to make the different textures of which they are composed appear on screen by lighting up the digital replicas from any angle.

This new technology comes in the form of a scanner made up of a dome on which are fixed several small lamps of precisely-adjusted intensity that switch on and off in turn depending on each picture scanned. “We are returning to an ancient theory of vision that imagined the eye’s projection towards the world, allowing the spectator once again to become an actor in the photographic experience,” explains Martin Vetterli in the exhibition catalogue.

Preliminary work was carried out with the Collections Department to select the processes that would most benefit from this scanning technology – heliogravure, ambrotype, ferrotype, collage and carbon printing. The first results will be presented in the exhibition. A tactile device supplemented by a video tour of the work presents a collage by René Burri from the René Burri Foundation housed at the Musée de l’Elysée. Rendered in real time and very high resolution, the images that have been cut out and superimposed by the artist can be freely explored so that the visitor can appreciate the visual richness of the work. Visitor experience appraisal is an integral part of the project to optimise presentation techniques and create a digital experimentation area in the museum.

The active participation of visitors to the Museum is an essential step for this first test phase: the interactions and different perceptions of the benefits of the prototype presented will be taken into account for the purpose of developing teaching and learning tools that will subsequently be used to refine and expand the user’s experience and to develop a digital, educational discovery space within the exhibition areas.

Press release from the Musée de l’Elysée

Paul Vionnet (Swiss, 1830-1914)
Lausanne, le pont Chauderon en construction
1904
Tirage au gélatino-bromure d’argent
39.5 × 23.0cm
Collection iconographique vaudoise
© Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne

Paul Vionnet, a local photographic pioneer, is at the origin of the Iconographic Collection of the Canton of Vaud. This collection, devoted to the history of the Vaud, is at the very foundation of the creation of the Musée de l’Elysée in 1985 as a museum dedicated to the image. During his childhood, Paul Vionnet spent his vacations at his grandparents’ home in Aubonne and was a frequent visitor of Adrien Constant Delessert (1806-1876), a neighbour and renowned Vaud photographer. During his stays there in 1845, Delessert taught him photographic techniques and the calotype.

Fascinated by the sciences, nature and his canton, Paul Vionnet took it upon himself to collect the greatest number of iconographic documents possible concerning the history, landscapes and monuments of the region for the purpose of enriching the collection of the Historical Monuments Service in Lausanne. The documents that he was not able to acquire himself were reproduced using photography. Following in his father’s footsteps, he was ordained pastor in 1856, and assigned to Granges de Sainte-Croix, near Aubonne, and then to Pampigny in 1858. He nevertheless continued to take photographs, having since adopted the wet collodion technique, documenting landscapes and monuments during his free time.

He retired in 1896 and founded the Collection historiographique vaudoise that would house his documents. In 1903, Paul Vionnet bequeathed his private collection to the canton of Vaud, forming the fifth section of the Musée Cantonal des Antiquités. He was named assistant curator, and several years later, the municipality commissioned him to take the photographs for Lausanne à travers les âges.

Anna Atkins (English, 1799-1871)
Adiantum tenerum (Jamaica)
c. 1852
© Wilson Centre for Photography

A British photographer considered to be the first woman to create a photograph, Anna Atkins is also known to have published the first books on botany illustrated with cyanotypes. Passionately interested in science and art, she became a member of the Botanical Society of London in 1839 and realised that the photographic process could be used to obtain precise and detailed botanical images and to provide information at all levels of a society increasingly eager for knowledge.

Anna Atkins drew her inspiration from the inventor of photography, William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-1877), and from a close family friend, John Herschel (1792-1871), a scientist known for the invention and the improvement of the cyanotype. She subsequently developed the process on her own that would allow her to obtain authentic and inexpensive photographic reproductions and that would make her part of the great tradition of her teachers. In 1843, she published her work, British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions, the first volume of which preceded the famous work of Talbot, The Pencil of Nature, by several months. In 1853, she applied the same process to ferns and published Cyanotypes of British and Foreign Ferns, a page of which is presented here.

Anonymous
Portrait of a young girl
1860-1870
© Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne

John Dugdale (American, b. 1960)
The Clandestine Mind
1999
© The John Dugdale Studio

John Dugdale (American, b. 1960)
Mourning Tulips
1999
© The John Dugdale Studio

John Dugdale’s interest in photography goes back to his childhood when he received his first camera at the age of 12 and dreamed of becoming one of the major photographers of the 20th century. After a brilliant career as a fashion photographer, the year 1993 marked the turning point in the life of the artist who lost his sight following a stroke and CMV retinitis. Dugdale nevertheless refused to give up photography and began to take an interest in 19th century photographic techniques, using his family and friends as assistants. He discovered the large format and decided to use the cyanotype process, considering it to be the most direct and the easiest to use.

In his blue works, he portrays his everyday life by reversing the roles. Dugdale poses with a simplistic spirituality that could appear to be in contradiction with the 21st century. Generally posing in the nude, he considers that “life is transient. Once you leave this world, you fly into the universe without clothes. I want people to learn you cannot protect yourself by hiding behind clothes.”

Thanks to its low toxicity, the use of this process allows him to be involved in the printing of his photographs. His sensitivity to historic techniques emphasises the poetry of his work and the transitory nature of time and place. In the hopes of sharing his experience and his healing, Dugdale creates a new body of art by “showing the beauty of life and how one should act around illness.”

Jerry Spagnoli (American, b. 1956)
Glass 10/9/12
2012
© Jerry Spagnoli

When the photographer Jerry Spagnoli discovered a daguerreotype at a flea market, he described it as the most perfect photograph he had ever seen, a discovery that would influence the rest of his work. After familiarising himself with the process in his studio in San Francisco, the artist experimented with it using equipment from the 19th century and studying the effects obtained in order to understand the technical aspects as well as the visual and expressive potential.

By studying the body and the roots of photographic imagination in his series Anatomical Studies, the portrait, objects and contemporary street scenes, events and non-events in his series The Last Great Daguerreian Survey of the Twentieth Century, Spagnoli attempts to highlight the qualities of the daguerreotype – uniqueness, richness of detail – through the four series presented here, in order to allow a contemporary public to rediscover its virtues. It is also a way for him to approach the optical essence of photography. “With other processes the material substrate of the image can be intrusive, but when you look at a daguerreotype, there is a transparency to the depiction as if you were looking through the lens itself.”

Vik Muniz (Brazilian, b. 1961)
The Steerage (After Alfred Stieglitz)
2000
from the Pictures of Chocolate series

Non-conformist reproductions of masterpieces, trompe-l’œil, ephemeral homages… It is difficult to put a label on the work of Vik Muniz. Starting off as a sculptor, he became widely known in 1997 as a result of his series Pictures of Chocolate, an example of which is presented here, and again in 2006 through his series Pictures of Junk and by his film Waste Land that was released in 2014. For the past 20 years, the artist, fascinated by the power of the image and optics, has transformed all sorts of unusual raw materials into works of art. He then uses photography to immortalise the works that he creates with these materials.

In Steerage after Alfred Stieglitz, Muniz uses chocolate as the medium to pay tribute to one of the modern pioneers of photography, Alfred Stieglitz. He involves the spectator and forces him to take a new look at a painting or a photograph that has been seen time and time again and that has become commonplace despite its beauty. Vik Muniz encourages the public to look at and to decipher his compositions, as well as to use their other senses to transform his flat reproductions into original and three-dimensional works.

Pierre Cordier (Belgian, b. 1933)
Photo-Chimigramme 17/6/76 I “Hommage à Muybridge 1972”
1976
© Pierre Cordier

Pierre Cordier is a Belgian artist known as the father of the chemigram and for its development as a means of artistic expression. In 1956, writing a dedication with nail polish on photographic paper to a young German woman, Pierre Cordier discovered what he later called the chemigram. This technique “combines the physics of painting (varnish, oil, wax) and the chemistry of photography (photosensitive emulsion, developer and fixer), without the use of a camera or enlarger, and in full light.”

He worked for 30 years as a lecturer on the history of photography at the École Nationale des Arts Visuels in Brussels. When he gave up photography in 1968 to devote himself exclusively to the chemigram, he wanted to pay tribute to the great photography pioneers – Muybridge in 1972 and Marey in 1975. The Homage to Muybridge presented here was inspired by Allan Porter, chief editor of the Swiss revue Camera, one of the most prominent revues in the history of photography. In the issue of Camera of October 1972, we can read: “Cordier used Muybridge’s famous sequence, The Horse in Motion, which he transformed in three different ways: 1. Still subject and mobile camera. 2. Mobile subject and still camera. 3. Subject and camera, both mobile. He then combined the three sequences into one and treated it according to the photochemigram process.”

Andreas Muller-Pohle (German, b. 1951)
Digital scores V (after Nicephore Niepce)
2001
Inkjet print
10 7/8 in x 11 in; mat: 16 1/8 in x 20 1/8 in; paper: 12 1/8 in x 12 1/8 in

Andreas Müller-Pohle is one of the key figures involved in the ontological as well as the representational nature of photography. Since the 1990s, he has reflected on the radical changes in the essence of technical images. His first artistic project focused on questions of photographic perception and on the recycled photograph.

In the mid-1990s, Müller-Pohle began to explore the use of digital, genetic and political codes. He is one of the first artists to have broken down and translated the analog and the digital codes of images. In his series Digital Scores (after Nicéphore Niépce), he takes us back to the origin of analog photography by translating the photograph of Niépce, View from the Window at Le Gras (taken from a window of his house in 1826), into alphanumeric code. The complete binary transcription of this photograph is then distributed over eight panels.

Martin Becka (Czech, b. 1956)
Le Parc
2002
© Martin Becka

After studying photography, Martin Becka worked as a print developer for the Sepia Agency before becoming an independent news photographer. As of the beginning of the 1980s, he began doing research on the history of photography and the pre-industrial photographic processes that he incorporated into his personal creative work. By using traditional processes to photograph ultramodern cities like Dubai and business districts such as La Défense in Paris, the artist proposes a sort of “archeology of the present”, making the spectator reflect on the period in which he lives, the future, and the multiplication of images at a time when their reproducibility is unlimited. He sees photography as a means to “bend time in every possible direction.”

In his installation Le Parc (the André Citroën Public Park in Paris), Becka establishes a dialogue between the past and the present by paying homage to the photographic work of Alfred-Nicolas Normand (1822-1909) and the dry waxed paper negative process developed in 1851 by Gustave Le Gray (1820-1884). By choosing this century-old technique that requires an approach to work that is radically different from those currently in vogue, he is able to obtain negatives with a density adapted to a presentation by transparency and to create and control movement and unique atmospheres. Becka thus encourages the spectator to reflect on the notion of the photographic object.

Bernd and Hilla Becher
Gas Tank: Essen-Karnap D
1973
Gelatin silver print

Bernd And Hilla Becher
Gasbehälter bei Wuppertal (Gas tank near Wuppertal)
1966
Gelatin silver print

Born during the period of industrial archeology, the Bechers’ work consists, in the words of Pierre Restany, “of an optical pilgrimage at the roots of the industrial world”. The couple proposes a way do see industrial architecture by taking an approach based on inventory methodology. Their work is a reflection on the creation of heritage and raises the question of the heritage value of industrial objects, which is inseparable from their artistic value.

With a focus on archiving and industrial memory, Bernd and Hilla Becher’s approach consists of establishing a detailed inventory and keeping track of industrial structures by photographing sites threatened by obsolescence and often abandoned. The series Gas Tanks includes nine photographs from the period between 1965 and 1973, taken according to the extremely stringent protocol that is characteristic of their work (frontal view, centring of the subject, mid-height, absence of light, etc.). The composition of each portrait is standardised and identical, with emphasis on the frontal aspect and the monumentality of industrial constructions classified according to their functionality and form.

Taking advantage of the extremely reproducible nature of the photograph, the Bechers reveal the massive diffusion and production of images that contribute to erasing our memories of their origins and their authors. In doing so, they observe a civilisation on the decline and highlight the production of an era, vestiges of the human imagination and life.

Idris Khan (British, b. 1978)
Every … Bernd and Hilla Becher Spherical Type Gasholder
One panel triptych, 2003
Lambda Digital C print mounted on aluminium
20 1/2 x 26 1/2 inches

Idris Khan (British, b. 1978)
Every … Bernd and Hilla Becher Prison Type Gasholder
2004
Lambda Digital C print mounted on aluminium
80 × 65 inches

“I try to capture the essence of the building – something that’s been permanently imprinted in someone’s mind, like a memory.”

Idris Khan is fascinated by the photographic medium. Fuelled by images and influential theoretical essays on the history of photography, he re-appropriates the works that had an impact on him and subjects them to a series of transformations in order to see them from a different perspective. His work is a reflection on the passage of time, the accumulation of experiences and, as such, the decrease of unique moments. In his series Homage…, he presents rephotographed works, enlarged and superimposed in multiple layers. He uses digital tools to play with the opacity of the layers so as to strengthen the mystery of the original objects whose layering reveals new details. The work Homage to Bernd Becher shown here reproduces and compiles the photographs that correspond to the Bechers’ typology in order to celebrate the vestiges of these vanished industrial infrastructures.

Fascinated by the ability of the photographic medium to capture the soul as well as the body image, Idris Khan, in his series Rising Series… After Eadweard Muybridge “Human and Animal Locomotion”, pays homage to Muybridge’s early scientific experiments using the camera to sequentially record human and animal movement. Beyond the tribute paid to photography that is defined here as a compilation of knowledge, Idris Khan positions himself with respect to a medium laden with history and with a bright future ahead of it.

Victoria Will (American, b. 1980)
Kristen Stewart
2014
© Victoria Will

Kristen Stewart poses for a tintype (wet collodion) portrait at The Collective and Gibson Lounge, during the 2014 Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. (Photo by Victoria Will/Invision/AP)

Victoria Will began her career as a staff photographer for the New York Post. Specialized at the time in portraits and fashion, her photographs were disseminated worldwide by the magazines W, the New York Times and Vogue. When she was invited for the fourth time to the Sundance Film Festival, an American independent film festival, she decided to try something new and to replace her digital reflex camera with the century-old tintype process to make portraits of movie stars. Following her success, she renewed the experience in the following years and gradually improved this complex technique.

Overcoming the difficulties of the process, its sensitivity to time and the danger of the chemical products involved, the photographer successively made portraits in 7 to 8 minutes of actors such as Vincent Cassel, Robert Redford, Jennifer Connelly, Spike Lee and Ethan Hawke. “What I love about the process is how raw it is,” says Victoria. “We live in an age of glossy magazines and overly retouched skin. But there is no lying with tintypes. You can’t get rid of a few wrinkles like in Photoshop.”

Both the photographer and her public “appreciate the honesty of these photographs. Development leaves a lot of room for the unexpected: we discover a face that we thought was familiar while being the contrary of digital portraits. The stages in the darkroom contribute to the idea of creating something unique and refreshing.”

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Jul

Exhibition: ‘Emanations: The Art of the Cameraless Photograph’ at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery/Len Lye Centre, New Plymouth, New Zealand Part 1

By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leave a Comment

Categories: American, american photographers, Australian photography, beauty, black and white photography, colour photography, curator, digital photography, drawing, exhibition, existence, film, gallery website, installation art, light, memory, painting, photographic series, photography, psychological, reality, space, Thomas Ruff, time and works on paper
Tags: 8-by-10-inch film, Adam Fuss, Adam Fuss Caduceus, Adam Fuss My Ghost, Adam Fuss Untitled 1989, Adam Fuss Untitled 1991, Aldo Tambellini, Aldo Tambellini Videogram, American contemporary photography, American photography, Andrew Beck, Andrew Beck Double Screen, Anna Atkins, Anne Ferran, Anne Ferran Untitled (baby's bonnet), Anne Noble, Australian contemporary photography, Australian photographer, Australian photography, Caduceus, Calotypes, cameraless photographs, cameraless photography, Cannabis sativa, Christian Marclay, Colourwords, curator of photography, daguerreotypes, Desklamp, Double Screen, early photographic processes, Emanations, Emanations: The Art of the Cameraless Photograph, Endings, Endings (Rothko died today), Eucalyptus polyanthemos, Exit (Red State), Fold I, Gavin Hipkins, Gavin Hipkins The Coil, geoffrey batchen, German contemporary photography, german photographer, German photography, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, Hiroshi Sugimoto, ink-jet photographic prints, ΔE2000 1.1, Joan Fontcuberta, Joan Fontcuberta LAMBDA CORONAE AUSTRALIS, Joan Fontcuberta MN 62: OPHIUCUS (NGC 6266), Joyce Campbell, Joyce Campbell LA Bloom, Justine Varga, Justine Varga Desklamp, Justine Varga Exit (Red State), Kodachrome 64, LA Bloom, LAMBDA CORONAE AUSTRALIS, László Moholy-Nagy, Len Lye, Len Lye cameraless photographs, Len Lye Centre, Lisa Clunie Fold I, Liz Deschenes, Lucinda Eva-May, Lucinda Eva-May Unity in light, Man Ray, Marco Breuer, MN 62: OPHIUCUS (NGC 6266), My Ghost, New Zealand, New Zealand contemporary photography, New Zealand photographer, New Zealand photography, passage through terrestrial space and time, Paul Hartigan, Paul Hartigan Colourwords, photocopies, Photogenic Drawings, photograms, r.phg.07_II, readymade chromatic fields, Robert L. Buelteman, Robert L. Buelteman Cannabis sativa, Robert L. Buelteman Eucalyptus polyanthemos, Robert Owen, Robert Owen Endings, Robert Owen Endings (Rothko died today), Shaun Waugh, Shaun Waugh ΔE2000 1.1, technology's rationality, The Art of the Cameraless Photograph, the Cameraless Photograph, The Coil, thermal prints, Thomas Ruff, Thomas Ruff r.phg.07_II, tintypes, Unity in light, Untitled (baby's bonnet), verifax, videograms, Walead Beshty, William Henry Fox Talbot

Exhibition dates: 29th April – 14 August 2016

Curator: Geoffrey Batchen

Installation view of the exhibition Emanations: The Art of the Cameraless Photograph at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery

This is how best a contemporary art exhibition can show the work to advantage. Just gorgeous!

The well curated, comprehensive content is complemented by a beautifully paced hang nestled within stunning contemporary art spaces. Labels are not just plonked on the wall, but are discretely displayed on horizontal shelves next to the work – accessible but so as not to interrupt the flow of the work. Coloured walls add to the ambience of the installation and act as an adjunct to the colours of the art. Beautiful modernist contemporary display cabinets keep the spaces fresh and vibrant.

A discussion of the content of the exhibition to follow in part 2 of the posting.

Marcus

.
Many thankx to the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image. All images are photographed by Bryan James.

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“Exploring the art of cameraless photography, encompassing historical, modern and contemporary works. Emanations: The Art of the Cameraless Photograph is the first comprehensive survey of cameraless photography held anywhere in the world, presenting more than 200 examples, from 1839 – when photography’s invention was announced – through to contemporary artists. We present the most complete study of cameraless photography to date, focusing on the cameraless mode from the 1830s through to today and offering a global perspective on this way of working.

The theme of the exhibition is inspired by artist Len Lye’s cameraless photographs from 1930 and 1947, and it’s the first time all 52 of Lye’s photograms have been seen together. Emanations is an opportunity to put Lye’s photographic work in a suitably global context, surrounded by his predecessors, contemporaries and successors. Emanations includes many masterpieces of photographic art and showcases the talents of some of the world’s leading contemporary photographic artists.

The exhibition has work by photographic pioneers William Henry Fox Talbot and Anna Atkins, important modernist photographers Man Ray and László Moholy-Nagy, and many of today’s most significant photographic artists including Walead Beshty, Marco Breuer, Liz Deschenes, Joan Fontcuberta, Christian Marclay, Thomas Ruff, and Hiroshi Sugimoto. Emanations also includes work by both senior and emerging Australian and New Zealand artists, from Anne Noble and Anne Ferran to Andrew Beck and Justine Varga.

The exhibition presents artwork by more than 50 artists hailing from New Zealand, Australia, Japan, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, France, Germany, Italy, England, Canada and the United States. Almost every photographic process is included in the exhibition – photogenic drawings, calotypes, daguerreotypes, and tintypes, as well as gelatin silver, chromogenic and ink-jet photographic prints, photocopies, verifax and thermal prints.

The exhibition is accompanied by a major book by the same name and on the same theme, co-published by the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery and DelMonico Books/Prestel, based in New York and Munich. The book contains 184 full-page colour plates and a 25,000 word essay by Geoffrey Batchen. The Govett-Brewster is also publishing another book reproducing all the cameraless photographs by Len Lye, along with an essay by Wystan Curnow.

Emanations is curated by Geoffrey Batchen, Professor of Art History at Victoria University of Wellington, and a world-renowned historian and curator of photography.”

Text from the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery website

Installation views of
Andrew Beck (New Zealand, b. 1987)
Double Screen
2016
Glass, acrylic paint, gelatin silver photographs

In the 1930s, László Moholy-Nagy made art that combined a cameraless photograph, plexiglass and paint. New Zealand artist Andrew Beck works in a similar way to produce sculptural installations that complicate our expectations of the relationship between light and shadow, the natural and the artificial, images and objects, art and reality. He forces us to look very closely at what we are seeing, and even to critically reflect on the act of seeing itself.

Installation view of the exhibition Emanations: The Art of the Cameraless Photograph at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery with at left, Anne Ferran and at right, Joyce Campbell

Installation view of
Joyce Campbell (New Zealand, b. 1971)
LA Bloom
2002
Cibachrome photographs
Courtesy of the artist, Auckland

In 2002 the New Zealand photographer Joyce Campbell decided to conduct a microbial survey of Los Angeles, a city in which she lives for part of each year. She swabbed the surfaces of plants and soil from twenty-seven locations chosen out of her Thomas Guide to the city. She then transferred each sample onto a sterilised plexiglass plate of agar and allowed it to grow as a living culture. The Cibachrome positive colour contact prints she subsequently made from these plates resemble abstract paintings and yet also offer a critical mapping of the relative fertility of this particular urban landscape, revealing its dependence on the politics of water distribution.

Installation view of
Aldo Tambellini (Italian-American, 1930-2020)
Videogram, 1969
Videogram, 1969
Videogram, 1969
Videogram, 1969
Gelatin silver photographs

Although raised in Italy, Aldo Tambellini was working in New York in 1969 when he manipulated the cathode ray tube of a TV set into the shape of a spiral (for this artist, a universal sign of energy) and exposed sheets of light-sensitive paper by laying them over its screen. The calligraphic inscriptions that resulted made his paper look as if it had been scorched from the inside out. These ‘videograms,’ as Tambellini called them, highlight the chaos and chance operations that lurk just beneath the surface of technology’s apparent rationality.

Installation views of
Shaun Waugh (New Zealand, b. 1982)
ΔE2000 1.1
2014
24 Agfa boxes with mounted solid colour inkjet photographs

This work by New Zealand artist Shaun Waugh began with the purchase of empty boxes that once held Agfa photographic paper. Waugh then took readings of all four sides of the inside lip of each box lid using a spectrophotometer, employing this data and Photoshop to generate a solid orange-red inkjet print. The box lid is used to frame a two-dimensional version of itself, bringing analogue and digital printing into an uncomfortably close proximity to create a memorial to a kind of photography that is now defunct. Hung salon style, like so many small paintings, Waugh’s work manages to turn the photograph inside out, and thus into something other than itself.

Wall text from the exhibition Emanations: The Art of the Cameraless Photograph at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery

Installation view of the exhibition Emanations: The Art of the Cameraless Photograph at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery with at left, Anne Ferran and at right, Adam Fuss

Installation view of
Anne Ferran (Australian, b. 1949)
Untitled, 1998
Untitled, 1998
Untitled, 1998
Untitled (baby’s petticoat), 1998
Untitled (collar), 1998
Untitled (baby’s bonnet), 1998
Untitled (sailor suit), 1998
Untitled (shirts), 1998

Unique gelatin silver photographs

In 1998 Australian artist Anne Ferran was offered an artist-in-resident’s position at an historic homestead not far from Sydney that had been occupied by successive generations of the same family since 1813. Ferran spent six months systematically making contact prints using the dresses, bodices, skirts, petticoats, and collars still contained in the house. Hovering in a surrounding darkness, softly radiating an inner light, the ghostly traces of these translucent garments now act as residual filaments for a century of absorbed sunshine. Many of them have been patched over the years and their signs of wear and repair are made clear. This allows us to witness a history of the use of each piece of clothing, seeing inside them to those small and skilful acts of home economy – the labour of women – usually kept hidden from a public gaze.

Anne Ferran (Australian, b. 1949)
Untitled (baby’s bonnet)
1998
Unique gelatin silver photograph

Installation view of the exhibition Emanations: The Art of the Cameraless Photograph at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery with at left, Adam Fuss and at right, Lisa Clunie

Installation view of Adam Fuss (UK/Australia/US) Caduceus 2010 (left) and Untitled 1991 (right)

Born in England, raised in Australia, and resident in New York, Adam Fuss has produced a diverse range of large cameraless photographs since the 1980s, asking his light-sensitive paper to respond to the physical presence of such phenomena as light, water, a slithering snake, flocks of birds, and sunflowers.

Adam Fuss (British, b. 1961)
Untitled
1991
Type C photograph

Lisa Clunie (New Zealand)
Fold I
2014
Silver gelatin photograph

The work of New Zealand artist Lisa Clunie looks back to the work of pioneer modernist László Moholy-Nagy in order to manifest the idea that our lives are shaped by a continual play of forces. Like Moholy, she wets her photographic paper and then tightly folds it, before moving the paper back and forth under her enlarger, selectively exposing these folds to the ‘force’ of light. The resulting work reminds us that a photograph has weight, surface, texture, tension and edges.

Installation view of the exhibition Emanations: The Art of the Cameraless Photograph at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery with at right, the work of Robert L. Buelteman

Installation view of
Robert L. Buelteman (American, b. 1954)
Cannabis sativa (left)
2002
Digital chromogenic development photograph

Robert L. Buelteman (American, b. 1954)
Eucalyptus polyanthemos (right)
2002
Digital chromogenic development photograph

The San-Franciscan artist Robert Buelteman takes his leaves and other botanical specimens and slices them into paper-thin sections, before charging them, in a complicated and dangerous process, with a pulse of 40,000 volts of electricity. This leaves behind a colorised trace on his photographic paper, a photogram in which these plants appear to be aflame, as if emitting an energy all their own. Hovering between life and death, this is a nature that seems to be on the cusp of its transmutation into something else entirely.

Installation view of the exhibition Emanations: The Art of the Cameraless Photograph at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery with at centre, Robert Owen and at right, Joan Fontcuberta

Robert Owen (Australian, b. 1937)
Endings (Rothko died today) – Kodachrome 64, No. 21, 26/02/1970
2009
Pigment ink-jet print

The photographic work of Australian artist Robert Owen is part of a broader tendency on the part of contemporary artists to reflect in morbid terms on aspects of photography’s past. Owen has been collecting film stubs since 1968. Although better known as a painter and sculptor, he recently decided to print these end strips of film as a series of large colour photographs, paying homage to this residue of the Kodak era in a chronological sequence of readymade chromatic fields. This one was collected on the day that the American abstract painter Mark Rothko killed himself.

Adam Fuss (British, b. 1961)
Untitled (from the series My Ghost)
2001
Unique gelatin silver photograph

In his series, titled My Ghost, Adam Fuss put together a body of contact photographs of such things as plumes of smoke, patterns of light, a butterfly, a swan and a baptism dress. As his title suggests, Fuss’s work aims to evoke rather than describe; for all their evident tactility, these photographs are meant as metaphors, as prayers, perhaps even as poems.

Installation view of
Adam Fuss (British, b. 1961)
Untitled
1989
Cibachrome photograph

Adam Fuss (British, b. 1961)
Untitled
1989
Cibachrome photograph

Installation views of
Joan Fontcuberta (Spanish, b. 1955)
MN 62: OPHIUCUS (NGC 6266), AR 17 h. 01,2 min. / D -30º 07′ (left)
LAMBDA CORONAE AUSTRALIS (Mags 5,1/9,7 Sepn 29,2″ AP 214º), AR 18 h 43,8 min. / D -38º 19′ (right)
both 1993
From the Constellations series
Cibachrome photographs

Photographs from the Constellations series by Spanish artist Joan Fontcuberta come filled with fields of sparkling blackness, their speckled surfaces redolent of infinite space and twinkling stars. Their titles imply we are looking upwards towards the heavens. But this artist’s prints actually record dust, crushed insects and other debris deposited on the windscreen of his car, a trace of the evidence of his own rapid passage through terrestrial space and time. The artist applied sheets of 8-by-10-inch film directly onto the glass windscreen and shone a light through, creating photograms which were then made into glossy Cibachrome prints.

Installation views and detail of
Paul Hartigan (New Zealand, b. 1939)
Colourwords
1980-1981
Colour photocopy

Consistently defined by a subversive edge and a darkly witty humour, the work of New Zealand artist Paul Hartigan is often subtly permeated by astute social and political perceptions. Shortly after they were introduced into New Zealand in 1980, Hartigan explored the creative possibilities of a colour photocopying machine, making a series of images in which words and found objects ironically refer to each other in an endless loop. With the objects arranged to spell out their own colour, each picture offers an oscillation of word and meaning, flatness and dimension, art and detritus.

Installation view of Gavin Hipkins (left) and Lucinda Eva-May (right) as part of the exhibition Emanations: The Art of the Cameraless Photograph at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery

Installation view of
Gavin Hipkins (New Zealand, b. 1968)
The Coil
1998
Silver gelatin photographs

Inspired by the kinetic films of Len Lye, in the 1990s Gavin Hipkins made a series of cameraless photographs that play with sequence and implied movement. The 32 images that make up The Coil were made by resting polystyrene rings on sheets of photographic paper and then exposing them to light.

Installation view of
Lucinda Eva-May (Australia)
Unity in light #6, 2012 (left)
Unity in light #9, 2012 (right)
C-type prints

Australian artist Lucinda Kennedy has sought to capture a phenomenological representation of the feelings and sensations of sexual intercourse through the direct imprint on sheets of photographic paper of this most primal of human interactions. Turned into a single blurred organism by the extended duration of the exposure, the artist and her partner become an abstraction, thereby aptly conjuring an experience that has always been beyond the capacity of mere description.

Installation view of the exhibition Emanations: The Art of the Cameraless Photograph at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery with at left, Thomas Ruff, and at right, Justine Varga

Installation views of
Thomas Ruff (Germany, b. 1958)
r.phg.07_II
2013
Chromogenic print

Thomas Ruff (Germany, b. 1958)
r.phg.07_II
2013
Chromogenic print

German artist Thomas Ruff uses his computers to construct virtual objects with simulated surfaces and to calculate the lights and shadows they might cast in different compositions. He then prints the results, in colour and at very large scale. Combining variations of spheres, curves, zig-zags and sharp edges, all set within richly coloured surrounds, Ruff’s images are both untethered abstractions and historical ciphers. Although referred to by the artist as photograms, the final prints are perhaps better conceived as being about the photogram, studiously replaying an analogue process in digital terms so as to make a spectacle of its logic.

Installation view of the exhibition Emanations: The Art of the Cameraless Photograph at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery with at left, Shimpei Takeda and at right, Justine Varga

Justine Varga (Australian, b. 1984)
Exit (Red State)
2014-15
Chromogenic photograph

Justine Varga (Australian, b. 1984)
Desklamp
2011-12
Chromogenic photograph

Australian artist Justine Varga creates photographic works from an intimate and often prolonged exchange between a strip of film and the world that comes to be inscribed on it. Desklamp involved the year-long exposure of a large format negative placed on top of the artist’s desk lamp. Exit was derived from a similar piece of film that was scarred and weathered during a three-month exposure on her windowsill during a residency in London. Both were then turned into luscious colour photographs in the darkroom via various printing procedures.

Govett-Brewster Art Gallery/Len Lye Centre
Queen St, New Plymouth, New Zealand
Phone: +64 6 759 6060
Email: info@govettbrewster.com

Opening hours:
Daily 10am – 5pm

Govett-Brewster Art Gallery/Len Lye Centre website

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Apr

Artist in focus: Larry Fink

By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leave a Comment

Categories: American, american photographers, beauty, black and white photography, documentary photography, existence, intimacy, light, memory, New York, photographic series, photography, portrait, psychological, reality, space, time and works on paper
Tags: 2nd Hungarian Ball, 82 Photographs 1974 to 1982, american artist, American celebrities, American documentary photography, American party photographer, american photographer, American photography, Benefit Corcoran Museum, Benefit MoMA New York, ICP Peter Beard Opening, Jean Sabatine and Molly, Joan Fontcuberta, Larry Fink, Larry Fink 2nd Hungarian Ball, Larry Fink 82 Photographs 1974 to 1982, Larry Fink Benefit Corcoran Museum, Larry Fink Benefit MoMA New York, Larry Fink ICP Peter Beard Opening, Larry Fink Jean Sabatine and Molly, Larry Fink John Sabatine and Molly, Larry Fink N.Y.C. Club Cornich, Larry Fink Oslin's Graduation Party, Larry Fink Pat Sabatine's 11th Birthday Party, Larry Fink Pat Sabatine's 8th Birthday Party, Larry Fink Peter Beard's East Hampton, Larry Fink Russian Ball New York City, Larry Fink Skating Rink, Larry Fink Studio 54, Larry Fink Studio 54 New York City, Larry Fink Washington DC, N.Y.C. Club Cornich, New York City, Oslin's Graduation Party, Pat Sabatine's 11th Birthday Party, Pat Sabatine's 8th Birthday Party, Peter Beard's East Hampton, Russian Ball New York City, Studio 54, Studio 54 New York City

April 2015

Larry Fink (American, b. 1941)
Peter Beard’s, East Hampton, from the portfolio 82 Photographs 1974 to 1982 
1982; printed 1983
Silver gelatin print

Hands / Class – Tree, Surface, Root

These are magnificent photographs. Fink’s mastery of the picture plane, ensemble, mise-en-scène, chiaroscuro is outstanding. But for me it is the attitude of the hands that make these photographs. Reaching, holding (usually the bodies of women), clasping, upturned, crotch grabbing, oversized, limp, clenched and gesticulating – in more of less every photograph it is the positioning of the hands that are the focus of my attention, and their relation to the social class of the proponent. The hedonism of Studio 54, the snobbishness of the benefits at MoMA and Corcoran Museum, and the Russian and Hungarian balls with their icy coolness and sidelong glances, all played off against the working class birthday parties of Pat Sabatine.

I spoke to my mentor L about these photographs and we had a lively discussion:

MB: What do you think of the work of Larry Fink:

L: The image of the child holding up his hand was on the cover of the second (?) Larry fink monograph. They are OK, but not great.

I have a rule: “The closer we get to the origin the more options we have.” But Larry is building on heaps of people – Winogrand, Mark Cohen etc, and earlier. And when that happens it really needs to be BUILT to be a success for the viewer. But he is just adding a bit. Its good, OK work. It’s mainly referencing stuff though. I can’t see anyone building on what he has done, a worker would have to go down the tree to a point before him to progress again.

Photography is pretty much fantastic before the fact, so things can look pretty good if it just happens. The process is so different from the reproduction of music that keeps trying to return to an original – photography has done that, but then runs tangential ideas where there can be flash and frozen time and no colour etc…

MB: I can understand what you are saying L … even though I don’t necessarily agree!

There is an essay I have just read as part of a Joan Fontcuberta book (“The Right Distance,” in Joan Fontcuberta. Pandora’s Camera: Photogr@phy after Photography. Mack, 2014, pp. 143-150). It’s interesting what he has to say about the “distance” of the photographer from the object… long distance landscape (in Victorian times… Muybridge, Carelton Watkins), long distance city (Marville) – the infinite sublime I call it – coming closer with Atget (parts of doors, stairs, closer engagement) and Blossfeldt – and then the avant-garde in the 1920s with the dissolution of far near into near far… followed by New Topographics and the griding of space, the regimentation and delineation of an even narrower point of view, both aesthetically and objectively.

I am paraphrasing but that is what he says anyway. It makes sense in one way. But in another we do not have to be either / or – near / far. Nor do we have to be “new” every time we take a photograph.

What I am arguing is that you do not always have to reinvent the wheel, in answer to your observation that you have to go back down the tree. Nothing is ever new and sometimes, as with the photography of Fink, it is the gesture that is enough for me – that human gesture that will never happen again exactly in that form. I am still in wonder of that moment, of the child’s raised hand (Pat Sabatine’s 8th Birthday Party). I don’t really care that people have done it before, they have never captured that moment, that precise gesture before… and it is still beautiful to me. The apple never falls far from the tree.

L: A good term Marcus: the infinite sublime.

Fontcuberta understands it very well – mainly because it could be applied to the best of his pictures in terms of the continual involvement that some of them generate. As I said, the Larry Finks are OK. Have you seen the YouTube about Joel Sternfeld photographing in NY? He is literally right in peoples faces, and yet they don’t even seem to notice him. I’d like to see one of Larry Fink with his flash in these small rooms and intimate spaces.

What I can say is that some smart person will invent the term that distinguishes between the surface aesthetic of the digital and analogue print. There is such “value” in the display here [of Fink’s work], that would not mean the same in a digital print. Why? The analogue look could even be faked to fool everyone I suppose. Even with these, the surface would fall apart @ about 19″ sq and it would all be lost.

MB: It is the surface aesthetic L, but it goes deeper than that. I saw the Richard Avedon exhibition up at The Ian Potter Museum of Art were his negatives were blown up to enormous size and digitally printed… and they just didn’t work. There is a containment of energy within a classical analogue black and white photograph that the surface of a digital print cannot capture, yes, but in a good analogue photograph there is also an emotional depth that seems to transcend surface…. and as yet, digital photographs rarely approach this state of being. What would be a word that evinces surface and psychological depth at one and the same time?

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

Larry Fink is a prominent American photographer who is best known for capturing images of high-profile social events. Fink’s images from the 1970s and 1980s capture individual vignettes within social gatherings, and nod to the development of documentary photography within the image-driven culture of the second half of the twentieth century. Some of the photographs below are from Fink’s series 82 Photographs 1974 to 1982 and Making Out 1957 – 1980 and depict scenes from clubs and parties in and around New York City. Fink’s subjects are caught off-guard by his camera, and their expressions provide windows into their weariness or giddy party euphoria. Capturing groups and individuals at surprisingly intimate and vulnerable moments, his photographs subtly reveal the disconnect often found between a subject’s public image and his or her inner self. For example, in Peter Beard’s, East Hampton, Fink captures a dynamic group of people in various levels of engagement with one another. While some are intertwined, others glance outward to the party beyond, having seemingly lost interest in the gathering at hand.

Larry Fink (American, b. 1941)
John Sabatine and Molly
1980
Silver gelatin print

Larry Fink (American, b. 1941)
Jean Sabatine and Molly
1983
Silver gelatin print

Larry Fink (American, b. 1941)
N.Y.C. Club Cornich, from the portfolio 82 Photographs 1974 to 1982
1977; printed 1983
Silver gelatin print

Larry Fink (American, b. 1941)
Benefit, Corcoran Museum, Washington DC
1975
Silver gelatin print

Larry Fink (American, b. 1941)
Benefit, MoMA, New York
1977
Silver gelatin print

Larry Fink (American, b. 1941)
ICP Peter Beard Opening
1977
Silver gelatin print

Larry Fink (American, b. 1941)
Oslin’s Graduation Party
1977
Silver gelatin print

Larry Fink (American, b. 1941)
Oslin’s Graduation Party
June 1977
Silver gelatin print

Larry Fink (American, b. 1941)
Studio 54
1977
Silver gelatin print

Larry Fink (American, b. 1941)
Studio 54, New York City
May 1977
Silver gelatin print

Shore writes that the four ways, “in which the world in front of the camera is transformed into the photograph” are flatness, frame, time, and focus. Fink was aware of these attributes of photography and used them to define the picture’s content and structure. (The depictive level)

Shore, Stephen. The Nature of Photographs. John Hopkins University Press, 1998 quoted by Tyler Brennan Reiss, October 16, 2013.

Larry Fink (American, b. 1941)
Studio 54, New York City
May 1977
Silver gelatin print

Larry Fink (American, b. 1941)
Washington DC
1975
Silver gelatin print

Larry Fink (American, b. 1941)
2nd Hungarian Ball
1978
Silver gelatin print

Larry Fink (American, b. 1941)
Russian Ball, New York
1976
Silver gelatin print

“Sometimes you’re invited to a big ball and for months you think about how glamorous and exciting it’s going to be. Then you fly to Europe and you go to the ball and when you think back on it a couple of months later what you remember is maybe the car ride to the ball, you can’t remember the ball at all. Sometimes the little times you don’t think are anything while they’re happening turn out to be what marks a whole period of your life. I should have been dreaming for months about the car ride to the ball and getting dressed for the car ride, and buying my ticket to Europe so I could take the car ride. Then, who knows, maybe I could have remembered the ball.”

~ Andy Warhol

Larry Fink (American, b. 1941)
Russian Ball, New York City
1976
Silver gelatin print

Larry Fink (American, b. 1941)
Pat Sabatine’s 8th Birthday Party
1977
Silver gelatin print

Larry Fink (American, b. 1941)
Pat Sabatine’s 11th Birthday Party
1980
Silver gelatin print

Larry Fink. 'Skating Rink' 1980

Larry Fink (American, b. 1941)
Skating Rink
1980
Silver gelatin print

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Jan

Exhibition: ‘Itinerant Languages of Photography’ at the Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton

By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leave a Comment

Categories: American, american photographers, black and white photography, documentary photography, exhibition, existence, gallery website, landscape, light, memory, photographic series, photography, portrait, psychological, space and time
Tags: And yet it moves, Angel woman Sonora Desert, Araucárias, archive noise, Argentinian photographer, Argentinian photography, Brazilian artist, Brazilian photographer, Brazilian photography, Catalonian photographers, Eduardo Gil, Eduardo Gil El siluetazo, Eduardo Gil Silhouettes and cops, Eduardo Gil Siluetas y canas, El migrante, El siluetazo, Elsa Medina, Elsa Medina El migrante, Elsa Medina The migrant, Emiliano Zapata with Rifle, Entrance to Guanabara Bay, Eppur si muove, Fiesta Mayor, Galileo Galilei, Galileo Galilei And yet it moves, Galileo Galilei Eppur si muove, Gente de la calle, Georges Didi-Huberman, Georges Didi-Huberman The image passes us by, Googlegram, Googlegram: Niépce, Graciela Iturbide, Graciela Iturbide Angel woman Sonora Desert, Graciela Iturbide Cementerio, Graciela Iturbide Cemetery, Graciela Iturbide Mujer ángel Desierto de Sonora, H. Delie and E. Bechard, H. Delie and E. Bechard Brazilian Emperor D. Pedro II, homines photographici, Hugo Brehme, Hugo Brehme Emiliano Zapata with Rifle, Itinerant Archives, Itinerant Languages of Photography, Itinerant Photographs, Itinerant Revolutions, Itinerant Subjects, Joan Colom, Joan Colom Fiesta Mayor, Joan Colom Gente de la calle, Joan Colom People on the street, Joan Fontcuberta, Joan Fontcuberta Googlegram: Niépce, Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, Joseph Nicéphore Niépce’s View from the Window at Le Gras, La camiseta, Latin American and Catalonian photographic archives, manuel alvarez bravo, Manuel Alvarez Bravo Striking Worker Assassinated, Manuel Álvarez Bravo Obrero en huelga asesinado, Marc Ferrez, Marc Ferrez Araucárias, Marc Ferrez Entrance to Guanabara Bay, Marc Ferrez Soil Preparation for the Construction of the Railroad Tracks, Marcelo Brodsky, Marcelo Brodsky La camiseta, Marcelo Brodsky The undershirt, Mexican modernist photographers, Mexican photographer, mexican photographs, Mexican photography, Mexican Revolution, Mujer ángel Desierto de Sonora, Obrero en huelga asesinado, Pablo Ortiz Monasterio, Pablo Ortiz Monasterio D.F., Paranaguá-Curitiba Railroad, Paraná, People on the street, Petrópolis’s Mountain Range, photographic archive, photographing the revolution, photography archive, photography's itinerancy, princeton university art museum, Reframing History, Revert Henrique Klumb, Revert Henrique Klumb Petrópolis’s Mountain Range, Rio de Janeiro, Rosângela Rennó, Rosângela Rennó A Última Foto, Rosângela Rennó The Last Photo, Rosângela Rennó The Last Photo: Eduardo Brandão Holga 120, Rurales under Carlos Rincón Gallardo's Command, Rurales under Carlos Rincón Gallardo's Command Boarding Their Horses on Their Way to Aguascalientes, Silhouettes and cops, Siluetas y canas, Soil Preparation for the Construction of the Railroad Tracks, Soldiers Searching Bus Passengers along the Northern Highway, Still from Reframing History, Striking Worker Assassinated, Susan Meiselas, Susan Meiselas Reframing History, Susan Meiselas Soldiers Searching Bus Passengers along the Northern Highway, Susan Meiselas Still from Reframing History, Susan Sontag, Susan Sontag To collect photographs is to collect the world, The image passes us by, the lens as a political instrument, The migrant, To collect photographs is to collect the world, View from the Window at Le Gras

Exhibition dates: 7th September 2013 – 19th January 2014

H. Delie and E. Bechard (French, active 1870s)
Brazilian Emperor D. Pedro II, Empress D. Thereza Christina, and the Emperor’s Retinue next to the Pyramids, Cairo, Egypt
1871
Albumen print
19.8 x 26.3cm
D. Thereza Christina Maria Collection, Archive of the National Library Foundation, Brazil

“The work of memory collapses time.”

Walter Benjamin

Another eclectic posting this time featuring Brazilian, Mexican, Spanish and Argentine work. There are some cracking images from the likes of Marc Ferrez, Graciela Iturbide and Joan Colom. “The Itinerant Languages of Photography begins with a simple axiom: that photography can never remain in a single place or time.” A good starting point because photographs always transcend time and space, conflating past, present and future into a movable, memorable point of departure: “the movement of photographs, as disembodied images and as physical artefacts, across time and space as well as across the boundaries of media and genres, including visual art, literature, and cinema.”

itinerant
ɪˈtɪn(ə)r(ə)nt,ʌɪ-/
adjective
adjective: itinerant

travelling from place to place.

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

Revert Henrique Klumb (c. 1830s – c. 1886, born in Germany, active in Brazil)
Petrópolis’s Mountain Range (Night View), Petrópolis, Rio de Janeiro
c. 1870
Albumen print
24 x 30cm
Gilberto Ferrez Collection, Instituto Moreira Salles Archive, Brazil

Marc Ferrez (Brazilian, 1843-1923)
Soil Preparation for the Construction of the Railroad Tracks, Paranaguá-Curitiba Railroad, Paraná
c. 1882, printed later
Gelatin silver print
23 x 29cm
Gilberto Ferrez Collection, Instituto Moreira Salles Archive, Brazil

This exhibition will examine the movement of photographs, as disembodied images and as physical artefacts, across time and space as well as across the boundaries of media and genres, including visual art, literature, and cinema. The culmination of a three-year interdisciplinary project sponsored by the Princeton Council for International Teaching and Research, the exhibition traces historical continuities from the 19th century to the present by juxtaposing materials from archival collections in Spain, Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico and works by modern and contemporary photographers from museum and private collections including Joan Fontcuberta, Marc Ferrez, Rosâgela Renno and Joan Colom. A fully illustrated catalogue accompanies the exhibition.

The Itinerant Languages of Photography begins with a simple axiom: that photography can never remain in a single place or time. Like postcards, photographs are moving signs that carry any number of open secrets. They travel from one forum to another – from the family album to the museum, from books into digitised forms – and with each recontextualisation they redefine themselves and take on different and expanding meanings.

The project began in the fall of 2010 as an experimental three-year interdisciplinary program, sponsored by the Princeton Council for International Teaching and Research. Its aim was to initiate and develop new forms of international collaboration, across widely varied fields of expertise, that could bring together scholars, curators, photographers, and artists from Latin America, Europe, the United States, and potentially other areas of the world, all of whom are involved in international circuits of image production. Following on symposia held in Barcelona, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, and Mexico City, the project culminates in the exhibition now on view and the catalogue that accompanies it. Through more than ninety works from public and private collections in Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Spain, and the United States, The Itinerant Languages of Photography explores the movement of photographs across different borders, offering a diverse and dynamic history of photography that draws new attention to the work of both well-known masters and emerging artists.

Taking our point of departure from Latin American and Catalonian archives, we sought to study the various means whereby photographs not only “speak” but also move across historical periods, national borders, and different media. In the context of an explosion of “world photography,” Latin America has been at the forefront of the development of new aesthetic paradigms in modern and contemporary photography. Across the Atlantic, Barcelona gave us access to Catalonian photographers with a long history of exchanges with Latin America and Europe. These different “sites” have helped us call attention to significant but often neglected histories of photography beyond the dominant European and American canon and, in particular, to the transnational dimension of image production at a time when photography is at the centre of debates on the role of representation, authorship, and communication in global contemporary art and culture.

The digital revolution has created an explosion in the production, circulation, and reception of photographic images. Despite the many ominous predictions of photography’s imminent and irreversible disappearance, we all have become homines photographici – obsessive archivists taking and storing hundreds and thousands of images, exchanging photographs with other equally frenzied, spontaneous archivists around the globe. From this perspective, the ubiquity and mass circulation of images that describe the present are the latest manifestation of an itinerant condition that has characterised photography from its beginnings. The first image the viewer sees on entering the galleries is Joan Fontcuberta’s Googlegram: Niépce, based on the earliest-known photograph, Joseph Nicéphore Niépce’s View from the Window at Le Gras (c. 1826). By processing the results of a Google image search for the words photo and foto through photomosaic software, Fontcuberta recreated Niépce’s photograph as a composite of ten thousand images from all over the world, what he calls “archive noise.” A meditation on the circulation and itinerancy of images, Fontcuberta’s Googlegram points to the potential for transformation inscribed within every photograph – from the very “first” photograph to all those produced today, made possible by innumerable and ever-changing technologies. Bringing together the past, present, and future of photography, the image sets the stage for the questions raised by the rest of the exhibition.

The first section, “Itinerant Photographs,” offers a glimpse into the global history of early photography by examining the circulation of images in Brazil in the second half of the nineteenth century. The works in this section, many of which have never been exhibited in the United States, are drawn from two important Brazilian collections: the Thereza Christina Maria Collection at the National Library of Brazil, which consists of more than twenty-one thousand images assembled by the Brazilian emperor Pedro II (1925-1891), and the Instituto Moreira Salles’s holdings of early Brazilian photographs. Included are works by the itinerant inventor and photographer Marc Ferrez, whose Brazilian landscapes circulated as postcards and helped define modern Brazil both inside and outside of the country.

The second section, “Itinerant Revolutions,” presents archival materials from Mexico’s Sistema Nacional de Fototecas and representative works by renowned international and Mexican modernist photographers. The notion of itinerancy appears here in two interrelated forms: first, in relation to the explosion of photographic desire ignited by the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920), which produced a massive movement of images across the country and abroad; and, second, in relation to the development of a photographic revolution based on dialogues and exchanges between local photographers, such as Manuel and Lola Alvarez Bravo and their heirs, and an international artistic and political avant-garde of peripatetic photographers represented by Tina Modotti, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Paul Strand.

The third section, “Itinerant Subjects,” reflects on the different ways in which photography approaches moving subjects. It draws materials from the Fundación Foto Colectania in Barcelona and for the first time introduces to the American public the work of the street photographer Joan Colom and features surrealistic cinematic photo-essays by the Mexican photojournalist Nacho López. Photographs by Eduardo Gil, Graciela Iturbide, Elsa Medina, Susan Meiselas, and Pedro Meyer depict various forms of political itinerancy and migration, and others stage the relation between walking and photographic modes of seeing, suggesting that ambulatory subjects represent the movement of photography itself.

“Itinerant Archives,” the last section of the exhibition, explores the ways in which photographs and photographic archives are duplicated and revitalised through quotation and recontextualisation within a selection of works drawn mostly from Argentine and Brazilian experimental photographers. While artists such as Toni Catany and RES use quotation as a means of paying tribute to classic photography and literature, Rosângela Rennó, Esteban Pastorino Díaz, and Bruno Dubner offer conceptual meditations on the photographic condition by resurrecting older photographic technologies and processes, such as the analog camera, gum printing, and the photogram. Citation can also mobilise a recycled photograph’s dormant political meanings, as when, in 2004, Susan Meiselas returned to the sites where she had photographed events of the Nicaraguan revolution twenty-five years earlier and installed mural-size reproductions of her pictures.

Whether as project, symposia, exhibition, or catalogue, The Itinerant Languages of Photography seeks to explore, embody, and enact photography’s essential itinerancy, which defines a medium that, as the German media theorist Walter Benjamin so often told us, has no other fixity than its own incessant transformation, its endless movement across space and time.

Text from the Princeton University Art Museum website

Joan Fontcuberta (Spanish, b. 1955)
Googlegram: Niépce
2005
Inkjet print from a digital file, exhibition copy
120 x 160cm
Courtesy of the artist

Introduction

Photography – as a set of technologies, a series of languages, and an ever-expanding archive – resists being fixed in a single place or time. Like postcards, photographs are moving signs that travel from one context to another. They move from the intimacy of the family album into museums and galleries; they travel in print and in digital form. And as they circulate, they redefine themselves in each new context. This exhibition examines photography’s capacity to be exchanged, appropriated, and moved across different kinds of borders in a transnational, intermedial flow that has characterised the medium since its beginnings in the nineteenth century and that occurs now with unprecedented speed. The works on view come from Latin American and Spanish Catalonian photographic archives, which, touched as they are by regional histories and cultural and ethnic heterogeneity, tell the history of photography from a richly different perspective, offering a counterpoint to canonical accounts. They also suggest the future of the medium, with Latin American photography at the forefront of new aesthetic possibilities.

The exhibition is divided into four permeable sections, each invoking different aspects of photography’s capacity to converse across political, cultural, and temporal boundaries: Itinerant Photographs, Itinerant Revolutions, Itinerant Subjects, and Itinerant Archives. Each section takes as its point of departure, respectively, Brazilian, Mexican, Spanish, and Argentine work but also opens up to other archives in order to evoke photography’s itinerancy as one moves from one gallery to another. The varied ways in which the camera travels and speaks suggest that the only thing fixed about photography is its incessant transformation, its endless movement across space and time.

Itinerant Photographs

“To collect photographs is to collect the world.”

Susan Sontag

Taking and acquiring photographs have long been ways of archiving the world. The works in this section are drawn from two superb Brazilian collections: the Thereza Christina Maria Collection at the National Library of Brazil, assembled by the Brazilian emperor Dom Pedro II (1825-1891), and the Instituto Moreira Salles’s holdings of early Brazilian photographs. These collections offer a glimpse into the transnational history of early photography, as some of the photographs arrived in Rio de Janeiro from Europe, Africa, and North America. Many of them documented scientific advances and the process of modernisation. At the same time the circulation of images of Brazil – its landscape and developing cities – solidified modern perceptions of the country. Even as the photographs on view here capture a nation in images, they also confirm that these Brazilian collections were never just Brazilian but were instead created by the movement of photographs across national and cultural borders.

Marc Ferrez (Brazilian, 1843-1923)
Araucárias, Paraná
c. 1884 (printed later)
Gelatin silver print
29 x 39cm
Gilberto Ferrez Collection, Instituto Moreira Salles Archive, Brazil

Marc Ferrez (Brazilian, 1843-1923)
Entrance to Guanabara Bay
c. 1885
Albumen print, 18 x 35 cm
Gilberto Ferrez Collection, Instituto Moreira Salles Archive, Brazil

Itinerant Revolutions

The Mexican Revolution sparked a transformation of artistic forms and cultural practices. Renowned Mexican photographers and foreign art photographers who travelled to Mexico – including Lola and Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Tina Modotti, and Paul Strand – came together to challenge and transform the medium’s realist conventions. Rejecting the picturesque approach to portraying Mexico and its peoples adopted by traditional photography, they turned the medium into a site of experimentation. Their politically engaged modernist aesthetic – characterised by a strong interest in the popular classes, a taste for the surreal, and an effort to transform the photographic medium itself – persists today in the work of contemporary photographers such as Graciela Iturbide and Pablo Ortiz Monasterio.

Unknown photographer
Rurales under Carlos Rincón Gallardo’s Command Boarding Their Horses on Their Way to Aguascalientes
Nd
Inkjet print from a digital file, exhibition copy
14.6 x 20.3cm
Fondo Casasola, SINAFO-Fototeca Nacional del INAH

Manuel Alvarez Bravo (Mexican, 1902-2002)
Obrero en huelga, asesinado (Striking worker, assassinated) (portfolio #13)
1934
Gelatin silver print
18.8 x 24.5cm
Princeton University Art Museum, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Gerald Levine

Pablo Ortiz Monasterio (Mexican, b. 1952)
D.F.
1987
Gelatin silver print
30.5 x 45.7cm
Princeton University Art Museum, Museum purchase, David L. Meginnity, Class of 1958, Fund

Graciela Iturbide (Mexican, b. 1942)
Cementerio (Cemetery), Juchitán, Oaxaca
1988
Gelatin silver print
32.2 x 22cm
Princeton University Art Museum, Gift of Douglas C. James, Class of 1962

Hugo Brehme (?) (German, 1882-1954, active in Mexico)
Emiliano Zapata with Rifle, Sash, and Saber, Cuernavaca
June 1911
Inkjet print from a digital file, exhibition copy
25.4 x 17.8cm
Fondo Casasola, SINAFO-Fototeca Nacional del INAH

Itinerant Subjects

“The image passes us by. We have to follow its movement as far as possible, but we must also accept that we can never entirely possess it.”

Georges Didi-Huberman

No art has captured such a large number of people as photography. But as the camera wanders, so do its subjects, whether streetwalkers, pedestrians, migrants, or illegal border crossers. This section includes works by some of the most powerful street photographers in Spain and Latin America – including the Catalonian expressionist Joan Colom and the Mexican photographers Elsa Medina and Pablo Ortiz Monasterio, who use the lens as a political instrument to register everyday life and the impact of urban modernisation. They employ a variety of strategies to capture moving subjects, from abstract composition and repetition to the creation of narrative series. Suggesting a relation between walking (or dancing) and photographic modes of seeing, between human movement and the camera’s agility, ambulatory subjects represent the movement of photography itself.

Eduardo Gil (Argentinian, b. 1948)
Siluetas y canas (Silhouettes and cops)
September 21-22, 1983
From the series El siluetazo (The silhouette action), Buenos Aires, 1982-83
Gelatin silver print
31 x 50cm
Princeton University Art Museum, Museum purchase, Philip F. Maritz, Class of 1983, Photography Acquisitions Fund

Graciela Iturbide (Mexican, b. 1942)
Mujer ángel, Desierto de Sonora, México (Angel woman, Sonora Desert, Mexico)
1979 (printed later)
Gelatin silver print
24.8 x 33cm
Private Collection

Elsa Medina (Mexican, b. 1952)
El migrante (The migrant), Cañon Zapata, Tijuana, Baja California, México
1987 (printed 2011)
Gelatin silver print
21.2 x 32cm
Princeton University Art Museum, Museum purchase, David L. Meginnity, Class of 1958, Fund

Susan Meiselas (American, b. 1948)
Soldiers Searching Bus Passengers along the Northern Highway, El Salvador
1980 (printed 2013)
Gelatin silver print
20 x 30cm
Courtesy of the artist

Joan Colom (Spanish, 1921-2017)
Fiesta Mayor
1960
Gelatin silver print
40 x 30cm
Collection Foto Colectania Foundation, Barcelona

Joan Colom (Spanish, 1921-2017)
Gente de la calle (People on the street)
1958-64
Gelatin silver print
24 x 18.5cm
Collection Foto Colectania Foundation, Barcelona

Itinerant Archives

“Eppur si muove (And yet it moves).”

Galileo Galilei

Photographs move not only when they are physically relocated but also when they reference another work or are themselves cited. Some of the works on view quote photography or literature to pay tribute to classic works; others reframe older photographs whose original meanings are vanishing; and still others exploit earlier photographic technologies such as the analog camera or the photogram. Citation can also mobilise a recycled photograph’s dormant political meanings, as when, in 2004, Susan Meiselas returned to the sites where she had photographed events of the Nicaraguan revolution twenty-five years earlier and installed mural-size reproductions of her pictures. The works in this section meditate on the nature of the photographic archive in general and on the relation between different stages in photography’s history. In doing so, they suggest that through different kinds of citation the photographic archive is constantly revived, unsettled, and undermined.

Marcelo Brodsky (Argentinian, b. 1954)
La camiseta (The undershirt)
1979 (printed 2012)
LAMBDA digital photographic print
62 x 53.5cm
Princeton University Art Museum, Museum purchase, Fowler McCormick, Class of 1921, Fund

Susan Meiselas (American, b. 1948)
Still from Reframing History
2004 (printed 2013)
Chromogenic print
60.5 x 76.2cm
Courtesy of the artist

Rosângela Rennó (Born 1962, Belo Horizonte, Brazil; lives and works in Rio de Janeiro)
A Última Foto / The Last Photo: Eduardo Brandão Holga 120
2006
Framed colour photograph and Holga 120S camera (diptych)
Print: 78 x 78 x 9.5cm
Camera: 14.8 x 21.9 x 10cm
Collection of Jorge G. Mora

Princeton University Art Museum
11 Hulfish Street
Princeton, NJ 08544

Opening hours:
Monday – Wednesday 10am – 6pm
Thursday and Saturday 10am – 7pm
Friday 10am – 8pm
Sunday 12 pm – 5pm

Princeton University Art Museum website

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Feb

Exhibition: ‘Joan Fontcuberta: Landscapes without Memory’ at Foam Fotografiemuseum, Amsterdam

By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leave a Comment

Categories: digital photography, exhibition, existence, gallery website, landscape, maps, photographic series, photography, psychological, reality, space and time
Tags: Amsterdam, cartography, constructed landscape, contemporary hallucinations, digital photography, fine art photography, Foam Fotografiemuseum, Foam Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam, Joan Fontcuberta, Joan Fontcuberta Landscapes without Memory, Joan Fontcuberta Orogenesis, Joan Fontcuberta Orogenesis Derain, Joan Fontcuberta Orogenesis Kandinsky, Joan Fontcuberta Orogenesis Le Gray, Joan Fontcuberta Orogenesis Pollock, Joan Fontcuberta Orogenesis Turner, Joan Fontcuberta Orogenesis Weston, Landscapes without Memory, myth of scientific authority, no-man's land, orogenesis, Orogenesis Derain, Orogenesis Kandinsky, Orogenesis Le Gray, Orogenesis Pollock, Orogenesis Turner, post-landscape, post-landscape worlds, post-landscapes, post-memory worlds, Spanish art, Spanish artist, Spanish contemporary photography, Spanish photography, the virtual and the real, three-dimensional image, truth and illusion, virtual photography

Exhibition dates: 26th November 2010 – 27th February 2010

It might be useful to know the meaning and application of the word ‘orogenesis’ in relation to the work of Fontcuberta.

“Orogeny refers to forces and events leading to a severe structural deformation of the Earth’s crust due to the engagement of tectonic plates. Response to such engagement results in the formation of long tracts of highly deformed rock called orogens or orogenic belts. The word “orogeny” comes from the Greek (oros for “mountain” plus genesis for “creation” or “origin”), and it is the primary mechanism by which mountains are built on continents. Orogens develop while a continental plate is crumpled and thickened to form mountain ranges, and involve a great range of geological processes collectively called orogenesis …

An orogenic event may be studied as (a) a tectonic structural event, (b) as a geographical event, and (c) a chronological event. Orogenic events (a) cause distinctive structural phenomena related to tectonic activity, (b) affect rocks and crust in particular regions, and (c) happen within a specific period of time.” (Wikipedia)

In his post-landscape, post-memory worlds constructed by computer technologies there are mediated memories present – of the original paintings, shifting and reinterpreted by the computer and of place interpreted by the original artist – that form a simulated memory of double amnesia. Orogensis is a perfect title for these works as they map such a double memory over time in an future anterior (the death of the past (this has been) and the present (this will have be), pace Barthes); the word and the works also closely align to the word erogenous for these images stimulate the senses and heighten our appreciation and personal memory of the constructed environment. And how beautiful they are!

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

For the project Landscapes without Memory Catalan artist Joan Fontcuberta (b. 1955, Barcelona) used software developed by the US Air Force. It translates two-dimensional cartographic data into a simulated three-dimensional image. Instead of feeding maps into the software, in Landscapes without Memory Fontcuberta inserts painted landscapes: from Gauguin to Van Gogh, from Cezanne to Turner and Constable. The software translates them into new, virtual landscapes that Fontcuberta calls ‘post-landscapes’. They form a no-man’s land between the virtual and the real, between truth and illusion.

Ever since the medium was first invented, photography’s relationship with the real world has been as perplexing as it is fascinating. Far more than a medium such as paint, photography was supposed to have a certain level of truth. In recent decades in particular the idea has taken root that truth and reality are ambiguous concepts in photography. The unprecedented digital revolution has brought the potential for manipulation into focus. How much more reliable is the photographic image of the real world? Who and what can we still believe? This juxtaposition of illusion and reality lies at the heart of Spanish artist Joan Fontcuberta’s oeuvre. At the same time, he also refers to the connection between science and truth. Like photography (itself a product of science), we see science as a way of expanding our knowledge of the real world using rational, objective, verifiable methods. Science has a certain authority: what science proves is true. Fontcuberta turns the myth of scientific authority around and manages to persuade the public in many of his projects of the veracity of a purely fictitious narrative – simply by expressing himself in the language of science.

In recent years, Fontcuberta has been especially fascinated by the influence of the digital revolution on the way we communicate and on our use of image. Landscapes without Memory is one such project. He begins here by subjectively interpreting and portraying a landscape, and then using software to interpret and translate the artificial object. The result is a new reality which Foncuberta calls ‘technologically-defined contemporary hallucinations’.

This exhibition is part of the Life Like platform, a project launched by Foam, EYE Film Institute of the Netherlands and Van Gogh Museum to draw attention to the realist art movement. The three museums join forces from 8 October 2010 to 16 January 2011 to throw light on the different aspects of this multi-disciplinary movement.

Press release from the Foam website

Foam Fotografiemuseum
Keizersgracht 609
1017 DS Amsterdam
The Netherlands
Phone: +31 (0)20 551 6500

Opening hours:
Mon – Wed 10am – 6pm
Thu – Fri 10am – 9pm
Sat – Sun 10am – 6pm

Foam website

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Dr Marcus Bunyan

Dr Marcus Bunyan is an Australian artist and writer. His art work explores the boundaries of identity and place. He writes Art Blart, an art and cultural memory archive, which posts mainly photography exhibitions from around the world. He holds a Doctor of Philosophy from RMIT University, Melbourne, a Master of Arts (Fine Art Photography) from RMIT University, and a Master of Art Curatorship from the University of Melbourne.

Contact

bunyanth@netspace.net.au

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Posts Tagged ‘Joan Fontcuberta

Exhibition dates: 29th October 2016 – 7th May 2017

Historical

Modern

Contemporary

Truthful representations, 1840-1930

Personal experiences, 1940-1960

Directorial modes, 1970s and beyond

Exhibition dates: 25th May – 28th August 2016

Techniques over time

Homage and metamorphosis

Innovating to preserve and showcase

Exhibition dates: 29th April – 14 August 2016

April 2015

Hands / Class – Tree, Surface, Root

Exhibition dates: 7th September 2013 – 19th January 2014

Introduction

Itinerant Photographs

Itinerant Revolutions

Itinerant Subjects

Itinerant Archives

Exhibition dates: 26th November 2010 – 27th February 2010

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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Marcus Bunyan black and white archive: ‘Orphans and small groups’ 1994-96 Part 2

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