“Evans took photographs worth taking – unadorned, clearly seen, focused, descriptive photographs (of ordinary things) of the utmost beauty and honesty.” Dr Marcus Bunyan
In the medium of photography the work of the American photographer Walker Evans (1903-1975) is rightly exalted, subject to the highest praise. “His work directly inspired photographers like Robert Frank, Helen Levitt, Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander, and Bernd and Hilla Becher.” Some of the most important photographers of the 20th century.
In the near 18 year history of Art Blart his importance can be gauged by the number of exhibition postings he has accumulated over the journey, this being the 8th posting on the artist, joining a select few at the top of the tree: Julia Margaret Cameron, August Sander, Robert Frank, William Eggleston, Robert Mapplethorpe and Andy Warhol.
I have written extensively on Evans’s work in previous postings links to which can be found below. Suffice to say that, through awareness, his personal journey of conscious choice and deliberate self-creation has led to his photographs entering the American vernacular – through a direct pointing to a photographic reality that reflects the time in which they were taken. Which transcend the time in which they were taken.
Evans took photographs worth taking – unadorned, clearly seen, focused, descriptive photographs (of ordinary things) of the utmost beauty and honesty. He was a passionate photographer. You can feel that passion in his images. Today with a world full of AI images, fragmentation, and conceptual hoo-hah, it might do us all well to ponder the stare of this great artist so that we, in our own way, can die knowing something.
To transform your own destiny into awareness!
“When I first looked at Walker Evans’ photographs, I thought of something Malraux wrote: ‘To transform destiny into awareness.’ One is embarrassed to want so much for oneself. But, how else are you going to justify your failure and your effort?” ~ Robert Frank
Many thankx to Fundación Mapfre for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“I was a passionate photographer and, for a time, I carried a certain feeling of guilt. I thought photography was replacing something else: writing. I wanted to write. But I felt deeply committed to everything that could come out of a camera, and I became a compulsive photographer. I was responding to a genuine impulse.”
“Stare. It is the way to educate the eye, and something more. Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long.”
Walker Evans
“Walker Evans is serious and smart and purposeful. He is trying to show you very clearly what he is seeing. It is very unadorned, as if nobody had taken the photograph. He conveys what is in front of him as clearly as possible.”
Interview with Chris Killip about his exhibition Work at Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Renia Sofia, October 2013 [Online] Cited 11/02/2021
”Good clothes and good conversation, wit and erudition, originality and inventiveness, the charms of smart and pretty women – Walker took pleasure in being alive… He photographed objects as if they were people and people as if they were souls. All the while, he never forgot Blind Joe Death. The annihilations of the First War, the extinctions of the epidemic that followed it, the pyres and the pits – these he never forgot. The still silence of his images was, to the very last, transcendental, and always he remembered the skull beneath the skin.”
Michael Levy. Walker Evans: Last Photographs & Life Stories. New York: Blast Books, 2022
Walker Evans. Now and Then offers a renewed look at the career of one of the most influential photographers of the twentieth century. In a broad anthology bringing together images made over more than fifty years, the exhibition invites viewers to rediscover the direct, restrained, and analytical gaze with which Evans documented everyday life in the United States. Far from the theatrical, the artist championed precise and honest photography, always attentive to the cultural and social context.
The exhibition is structured around several essential threads of his work: his interest in the signs of the city (shop signs, storefronts, billboards, etc.), through which Evans captured a compelling reflection of the collective identity of his era; anonymous individuals (pedestrians, subway riders, workers), whom he portrayed with a spontaneity that blends formal precision and deep respect for his subjects; and his fascination with modest environments and small towns, where he found an authenticity that large cities tended to obscure. Alongside these major axes of his oeuvre, the exhibition also presents his late experiments with the Polaroid camera, which reveal a more intimate shift without losing the clarity of his vision.
The photographer Walker Evans (St. Louis, Missouri, 1903 – New Haven, Connecticut, 1975) is an essential figure of modern photography and one of the great visual chroniclers of the United States during the twentieth‑century. His images, seemingly simple yet profoundly complex, lucidly portray everyday life, urban landscapes, and the anonymous faces of a country in transformation. Rooted in the documentary style, Evans combined a direct, austere gaze with an inexhaustible curiosity for the signs of popular culture, which led him to define an era even as he questioned it.
Walker Evans began his work in photography in the 1920s, after a stay in Paris; and over the course of his extensive career, which spanned more than fifty years, he produced some of the most recognized photographs in the medium. He explored a wide range of subjects, from street snapshots taken surreptitiously to meticulous and precise architectural studies, although his best‑known photographs remain those he made in the American South beginning in the 1930s. Evans also embraced new artistic and technical developments, and toward the end of his life he explored the possibilities offered by the Polaroid camera. What unified his entire body of work was a deep interest in and affection for the appearance and essence of everyday life in a society increasingly obsessed with the new and the immediate.
Evans remains, even today, one of the most important and influential photographers of the twentieth century. With a style that is both simple and analytical, his deeply careful way of photographing, resulting in elegant compositions that are free of rigidity, has attracted countless followers. In addition to being an extraordinary photographer, Evans was also an editor, writer, and designer, and he took great care in how his work reached the public through magazines, books, and exhibitions, personally involving himself in the process.
In 2009 Fundación Mapfre launched its photography program with a retrospective dedicated to Walker Evans. Seventeen years later, the institution is pleased to present a new exhibition curated by David Campany, creative director of the International Center of Photography in New York. The show offers an extensive review of his work and of his lasting influence on generations of artists. It brings together key photographs and projects spanning his entire career – from his self‑portraits of the 1920s to his Polaroid experiments in the 1970s – alongside books and publications that reflect his inexhaustible capacity for observation. Through these works, the exhibition reveals a creator who not only documented the world around him, but also invited viewers to question the role of photography.
Key Themes
Signs of the city
Walker Evans stood out for deliberately and systematically incorporating all kinds of urban signage into his photographs – from sophisticated commercial signs to handmade notices, billboards, and shop windows – unlike other photographers of his generation, who often excluded them in pursuit of a supposed aesthetic purity. Evans believed these signs were reflections of society and its values; in this sense, his work resonates with artistic movements such as Pop Art and Postmodernism. His images of signs not only explore the relationship between word and image, but also question the role of photography as art, document, and commercial tool, underscoring the need for dialogue between photography and popular culture.
Anonymous people, anonymous places
Walker Evans showed no interest in portraying celebrities; on the contrary, he was always drawn to the anonymous individuals he encountered on the street or in the subway. He created portraits with a lightweight camera, privileging the spontaneity of isolated figures, crowds, beach scenes, or laborers at work. In this way, the simplicity of what he believed photography should be was reflected in the subjects he chose: a detached, direct, and unadorned kind of photography with carefully composed images that were nonetheless profoundly lyrical.
Tradition and the urban
One of Walker Evans’s core convictions was that the true character of any society was revealed more clearly in small towns than in large cities, which tended to blur individual particularities and traits. This emphasis on the popular and the vernacular set against the standardisation produced by major industries in big cities and metropolitan centers lies at the heart of American culture. Some of Evans’s finest and most celebrated photographs emerged from this belief, resulting in images of small‑town train stations and railcars, wooden buildings, traditional grocery stores and gas stations, as well as quintessential objects such as old pliers, rocking chairs, and fire hydrants.
Walker Evans information and keys from Fundación Mapfre
Sometimes a great photograph is a gift of time and space. Main Street, Saratoga Springs, New York, was taken from the United States Hotel in Saratoga Springs, New York, in 1931. Had Evans asked for a room with a picture perfect view? Or did the view only look perfect in Evans’s picture taken on that day, at the moment? The scene has something of the proportioned urban vistas he would have seen on his European trip in 1926. There is something Parisian here.
Recent rain has presented a dreamy shimmer. The light is coming from the clearing weather in the distance. The slick road looks almost like a canal and blends into the sky. In neat rows the shiny automobiles are all black. The filigree of tree branches doodles across the frame.
Although this is one of Evans’s best known and cherished images, the vision of pictorial and social harmony is unusual. No screeching billboards or shop signs. No tension on the street. Sometimes the modern world does offer a rare moment of equanimity.
The town of Ossining, where Walker Evans lived for a short time, lies up the Hudson River from Manhattan. He made many photographs there. His views of its hillside communities and single building were shot with a large format camera, but he also made a number of snapshots on the street with a 35 mm Leica. He was experimenting, figuring out what could be done with such lightweight and versatile equipment. It was around this time that Henri Cartier-Bresson began to work with a Leica in Europe. Evans took two photographs of this couple in their parked car. In the other exposure the woman is smelling, but Evans preferred the more wary expression he caught here (the stern gaze of women recurs in his work). This photograph was included in his book American Photographs and because a source of inspiration for younger photographers such as Robert Frank and Garry Winogrand.
Of all the celebrated photographers of the last century, the one who remains the most relevant today, and the one with the widest influence, is Walker Evans (St. Louis, Missouri 1903 – New Haven, Connecticut, 1975). His images, made in what he called the “documentary style”, are among the best known in the history of the medium. Direct and generous, analytical yet lyrical, carefully composed but unforced, his ways of photographing left the door open for countless others.
For a while, Evans’ reputation rested on the photographs he had made in the southern parts of the USA in the 1930s, but his achievement was wider than that. He worked with every camera format and photographed many subjects in different ways, from surreptitious street shots, to meticulous and exacting studies of architecture. He embraced new artistic and technical developments, and at the end of his life he explored what could be done with a Polaroid camera. What united it all was a deep interest in, and affection for, the look and feel of everyday life. In a culture increasingly obsessed with the new, Evans cherished things that were standing the test of time, be it a face or the facade of a warehouse.
Evans was also concerned with the ways photographic meaning is related to context, text, and relations between images, whether on the gallery wall, or on the pages of books and magazines. To be in control of one’s photographs means being in control how they are presented and circulated in the world. So, as well as being a remarkable image-maker, Evans was also an editor, writer and designer, shaping the way his work met its public. In this exhibition we see the range of Evans’ themes and approaches, and his understated resistance to the excesses and shallowness of so much American culture becomes clear.
A Young Modernist
Walker Evans spent most of 1926 in Paris, studying at the Sorbonne but struggling to become a writer. Charles Baudelaire and Gustave Flaubert were his models, while he paid attention to contemporaries such as James Joyce and Blaise Cendrars. He made a handful photographs with a pocket camera, notably a series of self-portraits.
Returning to New York, Evans began to take photography seriously. He knew the city photographs of Ralph Steiner, Charles Sheeler, and especially Paul Strand. Their bold compositions presented Manhattan as a quintessentially modern metropolis. Evans was also aware of the ‘New Vision’ in European photography, with its enthusiastic embrace of modernist form, especially in architecture. He published a portfolio in the journal Architectural Record, and supplied three photographs from around the Brooklyn Bridge for a deluxe publication of Hart Crane’s epic poem The Bridge (1930).
The economic crash of October 1929 and the ensuing cultural turmoil sharpened the creative and political minds of all the ambitious artists of Evans’ generation. He soon stepped back from the celebration of the city to look hard at the lives of those who inhabited it.
A Past Without Nostalgia: Nineteenth Century Architecture
In 1931 Evans was commissioned by Lincoln Kirstein, a wealthy friend and supporter of the arts, to photograph Victorian houses in and around Boston. Two years later, the pictures were presented in the architecture room of the recently established Museum of Modern Art, New York. While Evans was credited, the context and display clearly put the emphasis on the architecture rather than Evans’ authorship. Nevertheless, in the press release for the exhibition, Kirstein noted:
Walker Evans’ photographs are perfect. They have been taken during the last four years and form the beginning of a photographic history of American domestic building during its most fantastic, imaginative, and impermanent period. Many of the houses, neglected and despised, have disappeared in the short period since these photographs were made. Evans worked in bright sunlight, forcing the details into utmost clarity. The focus was so sharpened that some of the houses seem to exist in an airless atmosphere such as Edward Hopper suggests in his painting of similar subjects. These houses were photographed in New England and New York.
Cultural artefacts endangered by contemporary tastes were already a key subject matter for Evans, one he would return to at various points.
Signs of Images, Images of Signs
Slick commercial signs, hand-made vernacular signs, street wayfinding signs, billboards, posters and shop fronts: if anything defines the time and place of an urban situation it is signage. While most photographers of Evans’ generation avoided or limited its presence in their images (searching for some kind of ‘purity’), he embraced it whole-heartedly. His fascination with signage, and his conviction that it has much to say about a society and its values, chimed with everything from the Pop Art that emerged at the end of the 1950s to the postmodern arts of quotation and appropriation that were emerging just as Evans was reaching the end of his life in 1975.
Evans’ photographs of signs seem highly reflexive, bringing photography itself into question as a medium of representation, while blurring the distinction between word and image. Photography may be a fine art, but it is also a means to make functional documents, and a vital tool of commerce. Whatever its aesthetic ambitions, Evans understood that serious photography would have to contend with its place in common culture.
Cuba
In 1933 Evans was on commission to photograph Havana and its environs for Carleton Beals’ book The Crime of Cuba. Beals was a journalist committed to exposing the corruption of Gerardo Machado’s brutal rule and America’s complicity with it. Cuba had gained independence back in 1902 but America reserved the right to interfere in its affairs, overseeing its finances and foreign relations.
Evans was not politically naïve. His street shots are a counterpoint to Beals’ high rhetoric of abstract political force and faceless conspiracy. And yet, his wary self-consciousness makes his pictures of people difficult to assess. His Cuba work continues to challenge critics and historians. Should we read it as the snaps of a curious tourist with a great eye for composition and social detail? Or might they register the slight tremors, the “mood on the street” of a tense society watching its back? Evans rarely presented his Cuban pictures after their moment had passed.
Anonymous & Incognito
Evans came into photography just as anonymity was becoming a touchstone of the modern era. Laborers on production lines. Isolated figures in the street. The crowd through which a wanderer might move unnoticed, or subject to the suspicious gaze of others. His early street portraits had much in common with those made by Eugène Atget in France and August Sander in Germany in the 1920s. Lightweight cameras soon made more candid portraits possible and Evans began to experiment, making serial photographs of New York subway passengers, and people on streets in various cities.
Evans worked through a period marked by increasing surveillance, and increasing presence of photography and photographers in daily life. It made him wary of the idea that people could be judged quickly by their appearance. His texts for ‘Labor Anonymous’ (Fortune, October 1946), and ‘The Unposed Portrait’ (Harper’s Bazaar, March 1962) push the reader to think again about the limits of photography.
Car Culture
In 1903 (the year Walker Evans was born) there were 4,000 cars in America. By 1930 there were 26.7 million: one for every 4.5 people. The transformation was breathless. Roadsides were redefined by billboards, gas stations, and motels. Towns and cities were designed or adapted for car use.
Evans enjoyed driving, and much of his photography beyond New York required a car. However, the rapid changes that cars were bringing to the appearance and the functioning of society left him feeling ambivalent. In the mass media at least, cars were the embodiment of optimism and mobility. Waste and despoilment were kept out of site, on the stage wings of progress. Evans’ view of rusting cars in a field (Joe’s Auto Graveyard, 1936) is a glimpse behind the scenes. This theme stayed with him for life. In 1962 he published a photo-essay in Fortune titled ‘The Auto Junkyard’, and in the 1970s, he also made many Polaroid photographs of cars and trucks rusting in fields.
Three Tenant Farmer Families
In the summer of 1936, the writer James Agee was commissioned to make a report on cotton farm tenancy in the American south. He chose Evans as his photographer. They committed to the project with great energy but while at work they barely overlapped. Evans recalled: “We lived with [the three families] for three weeks, as I remember it. We told them exactly what we were doing, and we worked intensely and separately. I didn’t see Agee. He was working all day interviewing and taking notes, and I was photographing.”
When Agee’s text was ten times longer than planned, Fortune dropped the project leaving him and Evans to pursue it as a book. Evans assembled a discrete sequence of thirty-one photos that would be set apart from the text, with no captions. Such radical separation of word and image stood against the tide of more conventional documentary practices. The resulting book, Let us now Praise Famous Men, finally appeared in 1941. Evans’ sequence shows him perfecting a way of seeing that was stoic and inscrutable, associative yet anti narrative, with images that eventually became some of the most famous of the era, and of his career.
Chicago
In late 1946, Evans opened a major solo exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago. In February 1947, Fortune published his ambitious photo-essay ‘Chicago: a camera exploration’. Across ten pages he avoided the city’s “prized and remarkable postcard colossi” to show “sights that meet a leisured and untethered eye,” as he put it in his text for the piece. The layout looked celebratory but its tone was not: “Chicago decays as it does everything else – spectacularly and speedily.” The fourth spread is the most remarkable, showing citizens at the corner of State and Randolph Streets. These are post-war consumers, Caucasian, Asian and African-American. Evans places himself directly in their path. Trapped anxiously in bright sunlight the faces hint at the unrest beneath middle-class decorum.
Beyond street portraits, Evans made a comprehensive study of Chicago’s remarkably mixed architecture, allowing him to resume his ongoing interest in buildings as a kind of indirect portrait of a society. The Chicago photo-essay for Fortune was by far his most significant magazine work to date, giving him the confidence to develop and refine what he wanted to do with the printed page in the coming years.
Small Towns & Neighbourhoods
Although Evans’ photography began in New York and he made a substantial photographic portrait of Chicago, he remained convinced that it was the smaller towns that offered a more accurate sense of the nation. The major cities of the USA are always exceptional, and tend to think of themselves as such. Evans concerned himself with the typical, and with the pragmatic ways small towns work and grow. Away from intense modern progress, artefacts of the past persist until they no longer function, rather than being replaced for the sake of it. Some of Evans’ most loved and complex photographs came out of this commitment to typical places.
Message from the Interior
Evans’ deep interest in rooms was long-lasting, and it suited his slow and careful pace of observation. With no people present, an interior scene can become a portrait of an individual, a family, or a community. Moreover, the way a camera records will allow everything that is present to become significant, as in a still life composition. Details of décor. Treasured objects. Casual objects. Furniture. Fabrics. Even the atmosphere of a room can be communicated.
African Sculpture: an Art of Documentation
In 1935 the Museum of Modern Art, New York, commissioned Evans to document nearly five hundred sculptures gathered for an exhibition of African art. In the museum itself each object was shot separately (with a few objects documented in pairs) in long exposure, during which lights were sometimes moved around to produce an all-over, hyper-factual clarity. Prints were made for extensive teaching folios, and a travelling exhibition. The catalogue for MoMA’s exhibition African Negro Art (in which Evans is not credited) was a serious attempt to look at the origin and complexity of these objects beyond the crude reductions and exoticism of the attitudes of European surrealists and modernist artists of the time. Although it was a free-standing commission, we can view this work in the context of Evans’ earlier commission from the Museum of Modern Art to photograph Victorian architecture, as well commissions to document folk art at New York’s Downtown Gallery, and Diego Rivera’s political murals for the Workers’ School of New York.
Vernacular Designs, Common Objects
Evans took the forces of modernity and modernisation – economic, political, social, aesthetic – as a subject matter to be considered carefully. These forces could be sensed most acutely through objects that had somehow survived the onslaught of modernisation or were about to succumb to it. Even the titles of Evans’ Fortune magazine photo-essays signalled his suspicion of the new: ‘The Wreckers’, ‘These Dark Satanic Mills’, ‘Downtown: A Last Look Backward’, ‘Before they Disappear’, ‘The Last of Railroad Steam’, ‘The Auto-Junkyard’.
Nevertheless, it would be hasty to dismiss this as nostalgia, or a sentimental looking back in the knowledge that the juggernaut of progress could not be stopped. In 1956 Evans observed: “[N]ostalgia has become debased to mean a kind of syrup savoured by self-pitying people conjuring better days, funny hats and an innocence nobody ever had.” In a caption for a series of photographs of antique store window displays he declared: “Nostalgia I disdain: pray keep me forever separated from an atmosphere of moist elderly eyes just about to spill over at the sight of grandmother’s tea set. Design just a little dated will interest any artist. Design current is always terrible. Anyone who has tried to find a good contemporary lamp or clock will know what I mean.”
Walker Evans, ‘Before They Disappear’, Fortune, March 1957
The familiar insignia of the freight cars are like old ditties beating in the back of our heads. Once we knew them all by heart, they were with us like the weather, like the backs of books we collected, and like the streets we walked in.
Brought into focus by selection, you almost expect these brave and naïve emblems to emit the very sound of railroading – the iron whines, the Steely screechers, and the attenuated nocturnal moans of steam transportation.
They don’t quite do that. But they are worth examining, not only for the commemorative thoughts they carry, but because they are going to disappear from the US landscape one day you have only to notice the new, exceedingly distinguished lettering of the New Haven’s car sides, or the redesigned Boston & Maine signature, to see that the fell hand of the contemporary commercial designer is lurking near, T-square poised.
When we can no longer catch sight of the great Chinese red and black double tadpole of the Northern Pacific, or the simple old cross of the Santa Fe, then will a whole world of cherished association have been destroyed. Impiety could go no further.
Walker Evans, ‘The Auto Junkyard’, Fortune, April 1962
The nadir of landscape scenery is the great American auto-junk scrap pile. With the effect of some evil prank, these obscene perversities leer out of the countryside almost anywhere, often in the middle of idyllic rural spots … Pictorially speaking, the result is chaos abstracted, and this has considerable curious interest in itself. There is a secret imp in almost every civilized man that bids him delight in the surprises and in the mockery in the forms of destruction. At times, nothing could be gayer than the complete collapse of our fanciest contrivances. Scenes like these are rich in tragicomic suggestions of the fall of man from his high ride.
Walker Evans, ‘The U.S. Depot’‚ Fortune, February 1953
He who travels by rail over the lesser lines of the USA clangs and shunts straight into his own childhood. Most of the smalltown railroad stations up and down the country are now about fifty years old. Looked at collectively they seem more and more toylike – as model railroad toys grow more and more like the real thing. With only a slight effort of the imagination, these encrusted little buildings turn into miniature stage sets, and the people in them correctly costumed dolls. You feel an old affection for the way a station agent throws the block-signal lever there in his coal-heated office. And what in that green-paper note handed up on its looped stick to the engineer as the 3:52 breaks to a stop? Does it say “Train five Engine eight four nine six delayed at Millerton hot journal box,” or does it say “Tell Jeanie I’ll get pork chops?”
Walker Evans, ‘Beauties of the Common Tool’, Fortune, July 1955
Among the low-priced, factory-produced goods, none is so appealing to the senses as the ordinary hand tool. Hence, a hardware store is a kind of offbeat museum show for the man who responds to good, clear “undesigned” forms. The Swedish steel pliers pictured above, with their somehow swanlike flow, and the objects on the following pages, in all their tough simplicity, illustrate this. Aside from their functions – though they are exclusively wedded to function – each of these tools lures the eye to follow its curves and angles, and invites the hand to test its balance.
Who would sully the lines of the tin-cutting shears on page 105 with a single added bend or whorl? Or clothe in any way the fine naked impression of heft and bite in the crescent wrench on page 107? To be sure, some design-happy manufacturers have tampered with certain tool classics; the beautiful plumb bob, which used to come naively and solemnly shaped like a child’s top, now looks suspiciously like a toy space ship, and is no longer brassy. But not much can be done to spoil a crate opener, that nobly ferocious statement in black steel as may be seen on page 104. In fact, almost all the basic small tools stand, aesthetically speaking, for elegance, candour and purity.
Labor Anonymous is a 1946 photo series by Walker Evans, commissioned by Fortune magazine, documenting 50+ candid, close-up street portraits of Detroit workers. Capturing diverse, unposed facial expressions and postures, the project created a “physiognomy of a nation,” exploring modern anonymity and the dignity of laborers.
Shot on assignment for Fortune magazine in 1946, this Walker Evans photograph of an unknown Detroit office worker is reproduced from Labor Anonymous, just out from D.A.P. Publishing and Walther König. “When I knew him, Evans was beset by troubles of all kinds,” Jerry L Thompson writes, “money troubles, tax troubles, marriage troubles (he divorced a second time in 1972), health troubles, advancing age, declining strength: the full catastrophe that flesh is heir to. As he approached 70, most onlookers would have taken him (even by the standards of that time) to be at least a decade older. Yet every time he walked out to start his day he was ready to be an artist. Every day had some work in it – for Evans, work meant being an artist – and the work got done even if every practical concern – what ordinary people call work – fell by the wayside.”
Evans was in poor health when he began to work with the Polaroid SX-70 in 1973; he was attracted to the camera’s small, elegant design and the instant color prints it generated that required no tedious lab or darkroom work. Like the developing Polaroid print itself, with its miraculous and immediate image, Evans came to life and worked feverishly with the new camera. At the age of seventy, he returned to many of his lifelong themes, including vernacular architecture, domestic interiors, portraiture, and roadside signage.
Text from The Metropolitan Museum of Art website
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“Aesthetically (both pictorially and in exhibition design) there is a wonderful frisson to the grouping of the photographs in these darker, enclosed, tightly curated gallery spaces that is so intoxicating to the senses.” Dr Marcus Bunyan
Exhibition dates: 28th November, 2025 – 3rd May, 2026
Curator: Maggie Finch, Curator of Photography at the NGV
After being introduced to Pablo Picasso in 1935, Dora Maar became his lover, model and muse until their tumultuous liaison ended in 1943. During their time together, Maar famously documented the creation of the monumental painting Guernica in Picasso’s Paris studio. This portrait captures the artist at ease, bathed in an endlessly echoing lineation of shadows from the above reed screen. The portrait Maar took of Picasso a year later, displayed nearby, shows him seated outside, his eyes glinting with intensity. Both images were taken in Mougins, near Cannes, an area that Picasso returned to every summer.
Wall text from the exhibition
The interface of light
For much of its running length this exhibition of cinematic scope at the National Gallery of Victoria curated by the dependable Maggie Finch is a stimulating ride.
The early galleries in particular are a joy to behold, mixing as they do international and Australian female photographers mainly from the period between the two world wars. This placement of Australian photography in an international context (or vice versa) is something I have desired to see for a very long time in an Australian photographic exhibition. One informing the other. And it works so well!
Aesthetically (both pictorially and in exhibition design) there is a wonderful frisson to the grouping of the photographs in these darker, enclosed, tightly curated gallery spaces that is so intoxicating to the senses. Ruth Hollick meets Madame d’Ora, Florence Henri meets Yamawaki Michiko, and Olive Cotton meets Dora Maar on the gallery walls, interwoven into an intertextual conversation on photography that spans identities, countries and continents. Perhaps not a legacy of light rather the interface of light, a shared connection, one nexus to another. I could have breathed in these photographs for hours!
That energy starts to dissipate as the gallery spaces open out in the second half of the exhibition, especially in the section ‘People and Place’ (see below). Poor Farm Security Administration prints of now famous photographs printed very flatly in the mid-1970s and purchased for the gallery in the same time period don’t help the cause – they need to be replaced in the collection with more appropriate prints of these images.
By the time of the final section, ‘New Ways Of Seeing: Portraits, Intimacy, Liberation’ (see below), the international representation has disappeared altogether and all the intoxicating energy has gone. In this section we find strong, eloquent and important Australian photographs from the period – conceptual, feminist, and on liberation – but it would have been great to have seen them paired with photographs from international photographers such as Cindy Sherman, Mary Ellen Mark, and Valie Export for example.
On reflection I can say that this is a strong exhibition from the NGV coherently and intelligently curated by Maggie Finch. It is fantastic to see that the gallery has been “splashing the cash” in recent years – supported by Krystyna Campbell-Pretty AM and the Bowness family – with over 170 new acquisitions for the photographic collection.
However for a public gallery, with most of the photographs already in the collection, to charge $25 entry price is really beyond the pale. I went twice to see the exhibition and $50 is a fair whack of money out of anyone’s budget.
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing from left to right, Lee Miller Nimet Eloui Bey (c. 1930, below); Lee Miller Man Ray (1931, below); Gisele Freund’s Simone de Beauvoir (1952 printed c. 1975, below), Jean-Paul Satre (1939 printed c. 1975, below), Vita Sackville-West (1938 printed c. 1975, below) and Virginia Woolfe (1939 printed c. 1975, below) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light celebrates the wide-ranging photographic practices of more than eighty women artists working between 1900 and 1975. Featuring prints, postcards, photobooks and magazines, the exhibition explores the role of photographers as image-makers, and the ways in which women artists create an image of themselves, of others, of the times – from images of the women’s suffrage movement at the turn of the twentieth century, through to the women’s liberation movement and beyond. From Melbourne to Tokyo, Paris to Buenos Aires, the exhibition showcases the works of trailblazing artists such as Berenice Abbott, Lola Álvarez Bravo, Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, Imogen Cunningham, Mikki Ferrill, Sue Ford, Christine Godden, Ponch Hawkes, Annemarie Heinrich, Ruth Hollick, Florence Henri, Kati Horna, Germaine Krull, Tina Modotti, Lucia Moholy, Toyoko Tokiwa, Yamazawa Eiko and many more.
The exhibition reflects a recent collecting focus on celebrating the contributions of women artists of the early twentieth century in the NGV Photography Collection. Featuring portraiture, photojournalism, landscape photography, photomontage, experimental avant-garde imagery and more, Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light presents the diverse work of women photographers against the backdrop of significant social, political and cultural events.
Text from the NGV website
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing from left to right, Lee Miller Nimet Eloui Bey (c. 1930, below) and Lee Miller Man Ray (1931, below) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
At her Paris studio, Lee Miller photographed this self-assured portrait of Egyptian model Nimet Eloui Bey. The model’s direct, inescapable gaze grips the viewer, perhaps foreshadowing the conflict to come. In the years after Miller took this portrait, she and her subject’s businessman husband, Aziz Eloui Bey, would pursue a passionate affair, resulting in divorce and the explosive end to Miller’s relationship with artist Man Ray. After leaving Paris, Miller set up a successful new studio in New York in 1932, before marrying Aziz and moving with him to Cairo.
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Lee Miller (American, 1907-1977) Man Ray (installation view) 1931 Gelatin silver photograph 23.1 x 17.5cm (image and sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased with funds donated by Joy And
Following a successful modelling career, Lee Miller moved to Paris in 1929. Intending to study under the Surrealist artist and photographer Man Ray, she soon became his assistant, model and lover. This portrait of Man Ray was taken in 1931, when Miller was working out of her small Montparnasse home studio. The artist appears to be lost in thought, his dilated pupils and furrowed brow suggesting an idea revealing itself. While the image shows reverence for the contemplative artist, it also hints at the couple’s domestic ease, with Man Ray appearing comfortable in the presence of Miller’s camera.
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Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing from left to right, Gisèle Freund’s Simone de Beauvoir (1952 printed c. 1975) and Jean-Paul Satre (1939 printed c. 1975) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing from left to right, Gisèle Freund’s Vita Sackville-West (1938 printed c. 1975) and Virginia Woolfe (1939 printed c. 1975) Photos: Marcus Bunyan
In 1933 Gisèle Freund fled Frankfurt for Paris, where she studied photographic portraiture at the Sorbonne. Uniquely for the time, she used Kodachrome and Agfacolor positive film for her colour portraits of writers and artists in Paris – her portrait of James Joyce was selected as the first colour cover of Time magazine in 1939. That same year she photographed Virginia Woolf at her home in Tavistock Square, London. Freund later recalled of her encounter with Woolf, ‘frail, luminous, she was the very incarnation of her prose’.
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In Exchange: Social Milieu and Collaboration
The intertwined lives of avant-garde artists working in the interwar period often played out in works of art depicting friendship and love. Photographers captured these relationships, often revealing both the affection and the complex relations between themselves and their artistic collaborators, muses and subjects.
Paris in the interwar period was a hotbed for artistic exchange. Between 1935 and 1936, Dora Maar photographed her then partner Pablo Picasso in her Paris studio. She also created collaborative images with fellow Surrealists such as Léonor Fini, Jacqueline Lamba and André Breton. Lee Miller, also working in Paris during this period, photographed her lover and artistic partner Man Ray. Miller, in turn, was the subject of many of Man Ray’s own works.
In Mexico, Kati Horna frequently photographed her close friend, British-born painter and writer Leonora Carrington. Lola Álvarez Bravo’s image of the Spanish Surrealist artist Remedios Varo is another example of the playful and experimental collaborations between artists at the time. Such photographs demonstrate the mutual influence between women artists.
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing photographs by Dora Maar including at second right, photographs of Picasso (1935-1936, below) and at right, Self-portrait at the window (c. 1935, below) Photos: Marcus Bunyan
(clockwise from bottom left)
Dora Maar (French, 1907-1997) No title (Pablo Picasso facing left) No title (Pablo Picasso facing right, holding a cigarette) No title (Profile of Pablo Picasso facing left) No title (Pablo Picasso facing left, with left hand to mouth) (installation view) 1935-1936 Gelatin silver photographs National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Gift of Krystyna Campbell-Pretty AM and Family through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2022 Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Dora Maar (French, 1907-1997) Self-portrait at the window (installation view) c. 1935 Gelatin silver print Private collection, Melbourne Promised gift Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Dora Maar (French, 1907-1997) Dawn (installation view) 1935 Reproduced in Minotaure No. 8, 1936 Magazine: offset lithographs and printed text Shaw Research Library Photos: Marcus Bunyan
The framing of Dora Maar’s Self-portrait at the window, Paris, c. 1935, is mired in this portrait taken by Maar of her friend Jacqueline Lamba, published in the Surrealist magazine Minotaure in June 1936. As art historian and theorist
Abigail Solomon-Godeau writes, ‘Lambda might be viewed as contained or imprisoned by the stone wall behind which she stands … Alternately, the photograph might be seen as the space of domesticity, overcome by time and brambles’. For Solomon-Godeau, it is also, importantly, an ‘exchange between two women artists’.
Vitrine text from the exhibition
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing from left to right, Dora Maar’s Pablo Picasso (1938, below); Pablo Picasso standing under reed screening. Mougins, summer, 1937 (1937, top of posting) and Aperitif in the garden of the Hotel Vaste Horizon with Andre Breton, Jacqueline lamb, Paul and Nusch Eluard. Mougins, 1936-1937 (1936-1937) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Dora Maar (French, 1907-1997) Pablo Picasso (installation view) 1938 Gelatin silver print 11.9 x 17.9cm (image and sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Gift of Krystyna Campbell-Pretty AM and Family through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2022 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Dora Maar (French, 1907-1997) Pablo Picasso standing under reed screening, Mougins, summer, 1937 (Pablo Picasso debout sous les cannisses, Mougins, été, 1937) (installation view) 1937 22.0 x 17.2cm (image) 23.1 x 18.2cm (sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Gift of Krystyna Campbell-Pretty AM and Family through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2022 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing at left, Berenice Abbott Eugène Atget (1927, printed c. 1970-1978) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) Janet Flanner 1927 Gelatin silver photograph Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2024
While living in Paris in the 1920s, Berenice Abbott produced an extraordinary body of images featuring the artists, writers and performers in her social circle, such as Eugène Atget, Jean Cocteau and James Joyce. This portrait of American writer Janet Flanner was also captured by Abbott during this time. A journalist who wrote under the pen name ‘Genêt’, Flanner was a long-term contributor to The New Yorker and a prominent member of the expatriate community living in Paris during the interwar period. In this portrait, Flanner is photographed wearing a suit with striped pants and a top hat, upon which are stacked two masks, adding a Surrealist edge to the image.
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Kati Horna (Mexican born Hungary, 1912-2000) Leonora Carrington (installation view) 1957 Gelatin silver photograph 24.2 x 18.2cm (image) 25.3 x 20.2cm (sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2024 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Born to a Jewish family in Hungary, Kati Horna was forced to leave Europe following the rise of Nazism. She belonged to the circle of Surrealist expatriate artists in Mexico producing experimental images. In this photocollage, Horna has superimposed an image of British-born painter and writer Leonora Carrington – a close friend of hers – onto a reproduction of Hans Holbein the Younger’s 1518 painting Portrait of an unknown young man. Created on the occasion of Carrington’s birthday, the humorous merging of the photograph with the painted reproduction, coupled with the clash of genders and time periods, gives the scene a Surrealist tone.
Lola Álvarez Bravo (Mexican, 1903-1993) No title (Remedios Varo) (installation view) c. 1950 Gelatin silver photograph 23.4 x 18.9cm (image and sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2024 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Lola Álvarez Bravo was one of the first artists to produce photomontages in Mexico. At the forefront of artistic experimentation, Álvarez Bravo created this image by layering multiple negatives. The subject is believed to be Remedios Varo, a Spanish Surrealist artist who arrived in Mexico in 1941. Alongside Álvarez Bravo, Kati Horna and Leonora Carrington, Varo was part of a community of expatriate artists and intellectuals active in Mexico during the mid twentieth century. Drawing inspiration from the Surrealist movement, Álvarez Bravo overlaid the portrait with an image of rippling water, creating a tranquil scene in which the subject appears to be floating.
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Unlike in many other countries, in Mexico artists had opportunities to work as long as they did not threaten the locals’ career prospects. Thus, many Spanish-speaking immigrants started teaching in universities, raising a new generation of Mexican creatives and academics. Apart from their jobs, the majority of Europeans did not interact closely with the locals, preferring to keep the company of their fellow refugees. The reason was not the rejection of local customs but the shared experience of war, tragedy, and dramatic flight across ravaged Europe.
The house of the artist Remedios Varo was the central meeting point for the whole community. Anyone in need could find company, shelter, and money raised by all group members. Varo hosted dinners and parties. She also sent party invitations to random addresses taken from a phone book.
Claude Cahun (French, 1894-1854) and Marcel Moore (French, 1892-1872) Disavowals, or Cancelled Confessions (Aveux non avenus) (installation views) 1930 Published by Éditions du Carrefour, Paris Illustrated book: photogravure, letterpress text, 237 pages, 10 heliographs, paper cover, stitched binding Shaw Research Library, acquired through the Friends of the Gallery library Endowment, 2017 Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Born Lucy Schwob, Claude Cahun was a celebrated French artist associated with the Surrealist movement. Aveux non avenus, loosely translated as Cancelled Confessions or Disavowals, is the second book Cajun created with her stepsister, lifelong partner and artistic collaborator, graphic artist Marcel Moore. This subversive semi-autobiographical work couples poems, recollections and aphorisms with dreamlike photomontages. The photomontages include many of Cahun’s performative self-portraits, images that challenge established notions of gender identity.
Vitrine text from the exhibition
Installation views of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing from left to right in the bottom image, Francesca Woodman Untitled (Providence, Rhode Island) (c. 1975-1978 printed after 1981, below); Ellen Auerbach R. Schottelius in New York (1953 printed 1992, below); Barbara Morgan Martha Graham – Letter to the world (1940, below); Lotti Jacobi Dancer #16, Pauline Koner, New York (c. 1937, printed 1992); and two Photogenic drawing (c. 1940 and c. 1950) Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Francesca Woodman (American, 1958-1981) Untitled (Providence, Rhode Island) (installation view) c. 1975-1978, printed after 1981 Gelatin silver photograph 13.7 x 13.8cm (image) 25.3 x 20.3cm (sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Gift of Krystyna Campbell-Pretty AM and Family through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2025 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Francesca Woodman is known for her intimate black-and-white self-portraits and photographs featuring other women sitters. The bodies are often blurred, with faces hidden and appearing to blend into the background. In this self-portrait, Woodman crouches down in the corner of a decrepit room, her patterned gown somehow reflecting – or merging with – the floral wallpaper that peels down in rough remnants behind her. The photograph was created while Woodman was a student at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, where she studied from 1975 to 1978 and which produced the majority of her extant photographs following her untimely death in 1981.
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Ellen Auerbach (German 1906-2004) R. Schottelius in New York (installation view) 1953, printed 1992 Gelatin silver photograph 23.2 x 18.5cm (image) 25.0 x 27.5cm (sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Gift of Krystyna Campbell-Pretty AM and Family through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2023 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
A constant innovator throughout her life, Ellen Auerbach received her first camera in 1928 as a tool to aid her studies in sculpture. The following year, she met her professional and romantic partner Grete Stern in Berlin, where they formed studio ringl+pit. After escaping fascist Germany, Auerbach eventually relocated to the United States and continued her photographic practice, settling among New York’s avant-garde. In this rooftop scene, she captures German dancer Renate Schottelius leaping into the air. In contrast with the surrounding static, imposing skyscrapers, the liberated body in joyous motion serves as a symbol for freedom.
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Barbara Morgan (American, 1900-1992) Martha Graham – Letter to the world (installation view) 1940 Gelatin silver photograph 38.9 x 48.2cm (image and sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2024 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Barbara Morgan met the pioneering American choreographer and dancer Martha Graham in 1935, and their working relationship lasted over six decades. Graham later reflected in 1980: “It is rare that even an inspired photographer possesses the demonic eye which can capture the instant of dance and transform it into timeless gesture. In Barbara Morgan I found that person. In looking at these photographs today, I feel, as I felt when I first saw them, privileged to have been a part of this collaboration. For to me, Barbara Morgan through her art reveals the inner landscape that is a dancer’s world.”
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Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Bodies, Rhythm and Movement
From the very beginnings of photography, the female nude genre remained primarily the domain of the male photographer. However, twentieth-century women artists, particularly those working within the avant-garde scene of the interwar period, reclaimed the male gaze, creatively experimenting with the representation of women’s bodies.
Artists such as Laure Albin Guillot and Germaine Krull produced nudes ranging from the intimate and sensual to the contained and stark. Such experimental compositions were also a vital aspect of the work of Florence Henri, whose images allowed for new readings of the body. In the 1970s artists such as Sue Ford continued this legacy of experimentation, combining depictions of women’s bodies with scenes from nature.
Representations of women’s bodies in motion were another means of artistic and physical liberation. The collaborations between dancers and artists, for example Barbara Morgan and Martha Graham, and Ellen Auerbach and Renate Schottelius, allowed for experimentation and dynamic image-making. These creative partnerships were shaped by movement and a shared response between artist and subject.
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing at left, Germaine Krull Daretha (Dorothea) Albu (c. 1925, below) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing from left to right, Germaine Krull Daretha (Dorothea) Albu (c. 1925, below); Florence Henri Nude composition (c. 1930, below); Florence Henri Line Viala (Nude study), Paris (1934); and Laure Albin Guillot Nude Study (1943) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Germaine Krull (European, 1897-1985) Daretha (Dorothea) Albu (installation view) c. 1925 Gelatin silver photograph 19.7 x 11.7cm (image and sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2020 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
This intimate portrait shows the German dancer Dorothea Albu elegantly draped in a feather boa – possibly a reference to her life in show business. The soft focus of the image, along with Albu’s gently closed eyes, creates a serene scene. The work is believed to be from a series of female nudes that Germaine Krull photographed in her Berlin studio between 1922 and 1925.
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Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing from left to right, Florence Henri Nude composition (c. 1930, below) and Florence Henri Line Viala (Nude study), Paris (1934, below) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Florence Henri (European born USA, 1893-1982) Nude composition (Nu composition) (installation view) c. 1930 Gelatin silver photograph 22.9 x 17.0cm (image and sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Gift of Krystyna Campbell-Pretty AM and Family through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2021 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Florence Henri (European born USA, 1893-1982) Line Viala (Nude study), Paris (installation view) 1934 Gelatin silver photograph 22.9 x 17.2cm (image and sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Gift of Krystyna Campbell-Pretty AM and Family through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2023 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
In the 1930s Florence Henri made numerous photographs of female nudes. These works often feature modern women who appear bold, confident and at ease in their own skin and sexuality. In this photograph, Henri uses dramatic lighting to create deep shadows that contour and highlight the form of actress Line Viala’s body. Henri’s use of a blank canvas as a plain backdrop further accentuates the model as the sole focus of the image. Perhaps Henri’s choice of a blank canvas backdrop is also a subtle reference to the traditionally male-dominated realm of nude female painting.
Another vital aspect of her practice was her nude female compositions, such as Nude composition (Nu composition), 1930. Created in the year after establishing her studio in Paris, it employs her characteristically unique, elevated vantage point and raking lighting to disrupt a sense of visual order and perspective. Henri constructs a scene in which the upper half of a woman’s naked body (her chest, breasts, arms, head and hair) creates an asymmetrical focal point at the top of the photograph. Lying next to the woman, and, seemingly, the subject of her gaze, is a large shell, while plants at the base of the image echo the woman’s flowing hair. While appearing to be set on a bed of sand, on closer inspection the textured base is revealed as a coarse sheet.
The dreamlike image, confident and controlled, which merges the female body with the symbolic shell and forms from nature, creates a scene of sensuousness and self-empowerment that is erotic and modern. Henri’s nude compositions, along with those of peers working in France such as Dora Maar and Nora Dumas, claimed the female body as a subject of their own – a trend that emerged among a number of female photographers, in the interwar period.
Laure Albin Guillot (French, 1879-1962) Nude study (Étude de nu) (installation view) 1943 Gelatin silver photograph 29.5 x 17.9cm (image) 29.5 x 23.1cm (sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2023 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Spanning fashion and portraiture to advertising and landscapes, Laure Albin Guillot’s images were published regularly in magazines and featured in the first independent Salon of Photography in Paris in 1928. Albin Guillot collaborated with French poet Paul Valéry in the 1930s to create male nude images to accompany his poem ‘La Cantate du Narcisse’ (‘The Song of Narcissus’). She continued to produce numerous nude studies of women throughout the 1930s–40s, such as this closely cropped portrait that enhances the angular lines and features of the sitter’s body.
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Installation views of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing from left to right, Laure Albin Guillot Nude study (Étude de nu) (1943, above); Anne Brigman Quest (1931); Olive Cotton Max after surfing (1939, printed 1998); and Louise Dahl-Wolfe Nude in water (1941) Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Installation views of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing Germaine Krull Nude studies (Études de nu) (1930) Photos: Marcus Bunyan
One of the most experimental artists of the 1920s and 30s, Germaine Krull photographed a diverse range of subjects, and her images were published widely in magazines and journals. With publications such Nude Studies, created two years after Metal,she is recognised as a pioneer in the single-author photobook format. Nude Studies consists of twenty-four photogravures of female nudes, published with an accompanying introductory text by the artist Jean Cocteau. Created in Krull’s Paris studio, the intimate studies, in which the faces of the women are often obscured, emphasise the sculptural forms of their bodies.
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Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing from left to right, Bernd Becher and Hilla Becher Coal tipple, Goodspring, Pennsylvania (1975, below); Ilse Bing Self-portrait (1931 printed c. 1993, below); and two Sue Ford photographs, No title (Photogram of two hands and garden path) (c. 1970, below) and No title (Nude montage) (1960s) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Bernd Becher and Hilla Becher (German, 1931-2007/1934-2015) Coal tipple, Goodspring, Pennsylvania (installation view) 1975 From the Artists and photographs folio 1975 Gelatin silver photographs 24.0 x 33.9cm (image and sheet) 40.7 x 49.6cm (support) ed. 9/60 National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased, 1976 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
In 1959 married artists Bernd and Hilla Becher started photographing industrial architecture, a practice that would continue for over four decades. While predominantly documenting structures throughout Germany’s Ruhr region, they occasionally worked overseas – this work was made on their first trip to the United States. The Bechers created a system for comparing structures: photographing them from a consistent angle, under virtually identical lighting conditions, printing images at the same size and often displaying them in grids. According to Hilla Becher, their archive allows for narratives to naturally emerge: “Structural patterns and their transformations … can be proved to exist in the case of such relatively exhaustive comparative series.”
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Ilse Bing (German, 1899-1998) Self-portrait (Autoportrait) (installation view) 1931, printed 1993 Gelatin silver photograph 26.7 x 29.4cm (image) 27.9 x 35.3cm (sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2023 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Ilse Bing began making photographs in the late 1920s, when she purchased one of the first 35 mm cameras produced by the German company Leica. She made use of the camera’s portability, capturing motion, dizzying angles and contrasts of light, shade and shadow – compositional elements that characterised the New Photography movement. Inspired by Florence Henri, Bing used her camera to disrupt the picture plane. In this famed self-portrait, Bing uses mirrors as a fracturing tool. The self-portrait shows Bing’s reflection holding a camera, accompanied by her side profile in another angled mirror. She controls the various gazes: her own, the viewer’s, the camera’s.
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Time and Mirrors
Photography has long been associated with mirrors and time – as a way of remembering, reflecting and retrieving information. As early as 1859, American writer Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr described photography, specifically the daguerreotype, as ‘the mirror with a memory’.
Many artists use the camera to explore identity through portraits and self-portraits. In Ilse Bing’s 1931 self-portrait, captured with her Leica camera, a mirror disrupts the image, disorienting the viewer. Four decades later, Joan Jonas extended this idea, using a video monitor as a mirror to explore reflection, perception and the self.
By the 1970s, repetition and seriality became central to photographic practice. Through sequences of images, artists such as Eve Sonneman, Sue Ford and Bernd and Hilla Becher explored how photography could record and interpret change – both immediate and long-term. Their images reveal the camera’s dual role as an objective instrument and a conceptual recorder of the world.
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing from left to right, two Sue Ford photographs, No title (Photogram of two hands and garden path) (c. 1970, below) and No title (Nude montage) (1960s, below) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Sue Ford (Australian, 1943-2009) No title (Photogram of two hands and garden path) (installation view) c. 1970 Gelatin silver photograph 27.6 x 34.7cm irreg. (image and sheet) 38.5 x 44.8cm (support) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Gerstl Bequest, 2000 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
In the late 1960s and early 70s, Sue Ford created several bodies of highly experimental work. These works involved complex montages, photograms and layered negatives, revealing hours of darkroom experimentation in her Eltham studio in Melbourne’s north-east. Such experiments coincided with Ford’s burgeoning interest in left-wing politics, and her exposure via the media to world events such as the NASA moon landings and the Vietnam War. Ford incorporated imagery and ideas relating to these events, as well as her interest in environmentalism, into these abstracted, Surrealism-inspired works.
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Sue Ford (Australian, 1943-2009) No title (Nude montage) (installation view) 1960s Gelatin silver photograph 25.6 x 19.9cm (image and sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Gerstl Bequest, 2000 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Real Time is composed of paired photographs taken seconds apart, separated by a black-line border. The ordered presentation allows the viewer to consider the relationship between the images, and the small changes and passing of time between them. Eve Sonneman first showed the photographs at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, before publishing them as a book. In 1976 she saw an advertisement in Artforum from newly established press Printed Matter, which was seeking artists’ books to publish. “So I sent [my photographs] in and that work became my first published book, Real Time,” Sonneman recalled. “I was as thrilled as could be!”
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Sue Ford (Australian, 1943-2009) Ross, 1964; Ross, 1974 (installation view) 1964-1974, printed 1974 From the Time series (1962-1974) Gelatin silver photograph 11.1 × 20.1cm National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased with the assistance of the Visual Arts Board and the KODAK (Australasia) PTY LTD Fund, 1974 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Sue Ford (Australian, 1943-2009) Jim, 1964; Jim, 1974 (installation view) 1964-1974, printed 1974 From the Time series (1962-1974) Gelatin silver photograph 11.1 × 20.1cm National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased with the assistance of the Visual Arts Board and the KODAK (Australasia) PTY LTD Fund, 1974 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
“For some time I have been thinking about the camera itself. Trying to explore its particular UNIQUENESS, coming to terms with the fact that I had been trying to ignore for some years, that the camera is actually a MACHINE. … In “Time Series” I tried to use the camera as objectively as possible. It was a time machine. For me it was an amazing experience. It wasn’t until I placed the photograph of the younger face beside the recent photograph that I could fully appreciate the change. The camera showed me with absolute clarity, something I could only just perceive with my naked eye.”
~ Sue Ford, Time Series: An Exhibition of Photographs, Melbourne, 1974
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Installation views of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing in the bottom image a video still of Imogen Cunningham Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Installation views of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing in the bottom image from left to right three photographs by Alice Mills, Hilaire Syme dressed for the Kismit Ball (1912-1915, below); Hilaire Syme (c. 1910, below); and Joan Margaret Syme (c. 1918, below) Photos: Marcus Bunyan
People and Place
Depictions of children, mothers and acts of caregiving have traditionally been recurring subjects in photographs taken by women. According to art historian Naomi Rosenblum, in the early 1900s the photographing of children, particularly children with their mothers, was deemed by commentators at the time to be ‘an especially appropriate assignment for women’.
While stereotyping and gender bias remained significant obstacles for women photographers in the early twentieth century, many still innovated through their image-making, while studio work provided women artists with the opportunity for financial independence. Subjects were portrayed in intensely intimate portraits, making visible the people in domestic settings who were often overlooked in photographs and society more broadly.
In Australia, artists such as Olive Cotton produced landscape photography in the dominant Pictorialist style of nostalgic, softly focused images. Everyday, non-professional photography, or vernacular photography, was also widely produced by women photographers of the period. As shown by Inez McPhee’s photo albums depicting the outdoor adventures of the Melbourne Walking Club and Edna Walling’s albums filled with pictures of friends, animals and plants, photography became an increasingly popular way of documenting daily life.
Alice Mills (attributed to) (Australian, 1870-1929) Hilaire Syme dressed for the Kismit Ball 1912-1915 gelatin silver photograph, coloured dyes 70.5 x 43.3cm (image) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Gift of Dr Veronica Condon, 2005 Public domain
Alice Mills (attributed to) (Australian, 1870-1929) Broothorn Studios, Melbourne Hilaire Syme c. 1910 Gelatin silver photograph, watercolour 185.5 x 74.4cm (image) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Gift of Dr Veronica Condon, Geoffrey Haggard and Jennifer Smyth, descendants of Sir Geoffrey Syme K.B.E., Managing Editor of the Age newspaper (1908-1942), 2004
An almost opaque layer of paint has been applied to this portrait. The paint obscures some of the details while enhancing others, such as the child’s shiny shoes and the satin sash of her dress. Alice Mills’s portrait of the subject’s younger sister, Joan, has a more conventional treatment in the application of translucent pigments. It remains unclear whether Mills did the hand-colouring. However, having trained in the studio of leading Melbourne photographer Johnstone O’Shaughnessy, she would almost certainly have known about the technique of applying oil-based pigments to photographs to create the illusion of naturalistic colour.
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Alice Mills (attributed to) (Australian, 1870-1929) Broothorn Studios, Melbourne Joan Margaret Syme (installation view) c. 1918 Gelatin silver photograph, coloured dyes 243.85 x 91.45cm (approx) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Presented through the NGV Foundation by Michael Hayne, 2005 Public domain Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Alice Mills (attributed to) (Australian, 1870-1929) Broothorn Studios, Melbourne Joan Margaret Syme c. 1918 Gelatin silver photograph, coloured dyes 243.85 x 91.45cm (approx) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Presented through the NGV Foundation by Michael Hayne, 2005 Public domain
Alice Mills, with help from her husband, Tom Humphreys, set up her first photography studio in 1900. Soon after that she was working under her own name in the Centreway Arcade at 259-263 Collins Street, Melbourne. Mills’s portraits were often published in magazines and newspapers, which brought her to the attention of a large audience of prospective clients. Around 1915 she produced a number of large-scale portraits of Hilaire and Joan Syme, the daughters of then managing editor and co-owner of The Age newspaper Geoffrey Syme. The photographs were made in conjunction with Broothorn Studios, which art historians suggest made the extreme enlargements.
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Installation views of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing from left to right in the bottom image two Imogen Cunningham photographs, My mother peeling apples (1910, printed 1979) and My father (1906, printed 1979) and six 1920s photographs by the Australian photographer Ruth Hollick (1883-1977): No title (Seated girl looking over shoulder) (c. 1926); No title (Little girl holding small book) (1920s); No title (Young girl holding a doll) (1920s); No title (Laughing child) (c. 1926); Miss Pamela Ann McKewan (c. 1929); and No title (Laughing girl in cap) (1920s) Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing at left four photographs by Ruth Hollick: Bobby (1927); No title (Baby in striped dress) (1920s); No title (Three children seated on grass) (1920s); and No title (Mother and two children) (1920s) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing four photographs by Ruth Hollick: Bobby (1927); No title (Baby in striped dress) (1920s); No title (Three children seated on grass) (1920s); and No title (Mother and two children) (1920s) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Ruth Hollick (Australian, 1883-1977) Bobby 1927 Gelatin silver photograph 18.8 x 21.4cm (image) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Gift of Mrs Lucy Crosbie Morrison, 1992 Public domain
Ruth Hollick (Australian, 1883-1977) No title (Mother and two children) 1920s Gelatin silver photograph 19.0 x 23.9cm (image) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Gift of Mrs Lucy Crosbie Morrison, 1992 Public domain
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing from left to right three photographs by Ruth Hollick: No title (Young woman in plaid shawl) (1920s); No title (Mother and child) (c. 1926); and Janet Armstrong, Woodbury Estate, Deniliquin, New South Wales (c. 1939) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Ruth Hollick (Australian, 1883-1977) No title (Young girl holding a doll) 1920s Gelatin silver photograph 23.9 x 14.6cm (image) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Gift of Mrs Lucy Crosbie Morrison, 1992
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation views of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing clippings, press releases, brochures, reviews, invitations and other ephemeral material relating to Ruth Hollick and the Ruth Hollick studio Photos: Marcus Bunyan
In 1928 Ruth Hollick and her partner, fellow photographer Dorothy Izard, held an exhibition at their Collins Street studio of more than 150 portraits of children. Lady Eleanor Mary Latham, wife of then attorney-general Sir John Greig Latham, opened the exhibition, encouraging the audience to consider the possibility of career for women, with Hollick as a role model: ‘Everyone has a right to try and make a living for herself in any profession she likes to take up.’ The period in which Hollick and Izard operated the studio in Collins Street was extremely productive and successful. In 1929 Hollick was the only woman to participate in the Melbourne Exhibition of Pictorial Photography.
Ruth Hollick was widely recognised for her skill in photographing children. In an interview published in 1927, Hollick said: ‘I have always found the work well within a woman’s intellectual grasp, and not too hard a strain from the physical point of view. Although one does not, at this period of women’s freedom, talk of any particular work as being her sphere, there is no doubt but that feminine intuition with children may be particularly helpful … After all the big thing is to catch the real child – show him as he is – no wonderful massing of shadow, no illuminating light is worth a lot if it does not reveal the real Pat or Mollie.’ These materials were collected by Hollick and gifted to the NGV’s Shaw Research Library by her niece Lucy Crosbie Morrison.
Vitrine text from the exhibition
Inez McPhee (Australian, 1908-1999) No title (Inez McPhee’s album of ADA river trip) (installation view) 1936 28.1 x 22.4cm (page) 28.5 x 23.0 x 3.1cm (closed) 28.5 x 46.0 x 1.5cm (open) Album: gelatin silver photographs, newspaper, pencil and pen and ink, 62 pages, cardboard and leather cover, stitched binding Presented through the NGV Foundation by John McPhee, Member and Ann Luck, 2004 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Inez McPhee (Australian, 1908-1999) No title (Inez McPhee’s album of a trip to New Zealand) (installation view) 1953 Album: gelatin silver photographs, collage, pencil, 40 pages, cardboard cover, stitched binding 31.0 x 24.1cm (page) 31.1 x 24.8 x 1.4cm (closed) 31.1 x 49.0 x 1.0cm (open) Presented through the NGV Foundation by John McPhee, Member and Ann Luck, 2004 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Inez McPhee was an active member of the Melbourne Women’s Walking Club, founded in 1922. McPhee took her camera on bushwalks with the group and, typical of amateur photographers of the period, compiled albums of the prints. Her albums are filled with images of women engaging in outdoor activities.
Vitrine text from the exhibition
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing at left three photographs by Edna Walling: Doris Oak-Rhind, Edna’s Walling’s sister (1920s); Estelle Thompson (1950s-1960s); and No title (Young woman preparing picnic) (1940s) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing at left to right, three photographs by Edna Walling (Australian born England, 1895-1973) Doris Oak-Rhind, Edna’s Walling’s sister (1920s); Estelle Thompson (1950s-1960s); and No title (Young woman preparing picnic) (1940s) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Edna Walling (Australian born England, 1895-1973) Estelle Thompson (installation view) 1950s-1960s Gelatin silver photograph 25.4 x 20.6cm (image and sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Gift of Mrs Barbara Barnes, 1983 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Many-sided Indeed: Women In Business
“There is more, much more in the photo question than the mere ability to make a technically perfect photo or picture,” wrote New Zealand photographer May Moore in a 1916 essay. “And when it comes to successfully managing a studio of one’s own, one wants to be many-sided indeed … The woman who is to succeed … must make up her mind to equip on all points just as the men do.”
Women-run photography studios emerged as early as the 1850s in places such as England, Japan, Germany and the United States. However, women faced many barriers to operating their own studios well into the twentieth century, and many had to rely on family support. Photographers such as Ruth Hollick, Karimeh Abbud and Hedda Morrison persevered to successfully manage or independently run photography studios in the 1920s-40s. They produced a wide range of images, from those made for commercial and tourist purposes to documentary, artistic and personal photographs.
Edna Walling (Australian born England, 1895-1973) No title (Album) (installation view) 1950s-1960s Album: gelatin silver photographs, 48 pages, cardboard, leather and colour photo-lithograph cover, metal screw binding 24.6 x 32.0cm (page) 25.6 x 34.8 x 3.6cm (closed) 25.6 x 62.8cm (open) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Gift of Mrs Barbara Barnes, 1983 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Landscape designer Edna Walling kept a personal photo album to capture the creative effervescence of the community at her property at Bickleigh Vale Village in Mooroolbark, Victoria. Nicknamed ‘Trouser Lane’, the property was designed by Walling to be a ‘community of connected gardens and cottages. Many people, including many women, shared in Walling’s unique vision for the space, visiting and residing at Trouser lane over the years. Walling’s album features, among others, images of writer Estelle Thompson, landscape designer Daphne Pearson, builder Esme Johnson, violinist Perry Hart and ballet dancers Harcourt Algernoff and Graham Smith. Also interspersed throughout the album are photographic flower studies.
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Edna Walling (Australian born United Kingdom, 1895-1973) No title (Album) 1950s-1960s Album; gelatin silver photographs, 48 pages, cardboard, leather and colour photo-lithograph cover, metal screw binding 24.6 x 32.0cm (page) 25.6 x 34.8 x 3.6cm (closed) 25.6 x 62.8cm (open) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Gift of Mrs Barbara Barnes, 1983
Installation views of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing in the display cases in the lower two images, photographs by Hedda Morrison (Australian born Germany, 1908-1991) Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing three photographs by Dorothy Izard (Australian born England, 1882-1972): Ti-trees (1920s); No title (Dappled tree) (1920s); and No title (Tree in paddock) (1920s) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Dorothy Izard (Australian born England, 1882-1972) Ti-trees 1920s Gelatin silver photograph 22.8 × 18.4cm (image) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Gift of Mrs Lucy Crosbie Morrison, 1992
Dorothy Izard met fellow photographer Ruth Hollick when they were students at the National Gallery of Victoria Art School, and they formed both a romantic and a professional partnership. They travelled extensively around regional Victoria in the 1920s and 1930s. Izard was a landscape photographer and, at Hollick’s home studio, was responsible for printing the orders for Hollick’s photographs.
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Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing Ruth Hollick’s artist book Australian flowers (1950s, below) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Ruth Hollick (Australian, 1883-1977) Australian wildflowers 1950s Artist’s book: hand-coloured gelatin silver photographs on buff paper on brown paper mounts, pen and ink, pencil, (other materials), [5] leaves, brown paper cover, cotton cord binding 33.2 x 25.5cm (page) 34.3 x 26.3 x 1.0cm irreg. (closed) 34.3 x 53.1 x 1.1cm irreg. (open) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Gift of Pamela Jane Green, 2021 Public domain
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing from left to right, four photographs by Hedda Morrison (Australian born Germany, 1908-1991): No title (Hua Shan mountain face) (1935, printed 1970s); No title (The Chessboard Pavilion) (1935, printed 1970s); No title (Step ladder to the nothingness peak ) (1935, printed 1970s); and No title (Lone pine against sunlit cliff face) (1935 printed 1970s, below) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Hedda Morrison (Australian born Germany, 1908-1991) No title (Lone pine against sunlit cliff face) (installation view) 1935 Gelatin silver photograph 22.8 x 30.3cm (image) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased, 1976 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
These photographs were taken in 1935, when Morrison journeyed by train to the Hua Shan mountains in eastern China. She photographed the deep chasms and textures of the mountain ranges, and the Taoist monasteries and monks who assisted the travellers on their journeys.
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Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing photographs by Hedda Morrison (Australian born Germany, 1908-1991) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing from left to right, six photographs by Hedda Morrison: No title (Morning clouds) (1935, printed 1970s); No title (Fairy palm cliff) (1935, printed 1970s); No title (The stone balustrade) (1935, printed 1970s); No title (Three gnarled pines) (1935, printed 1970s); No title (Two Taoist priests below the fiery palm cliff) (1935, printed 1970s); and No title (Pine tree above the Yellow River plain) (1935, printed 1970s) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Hedda Morrison (Australian born Germany, 1908-1991) No title (Pine tree above the Yellow River plain) (installation view) 1935, printed 1970s Gelatin silver photograph 30.3 x 22.7cm (image) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased, 1976 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing from left to right, three photographs by Hedda Morrison: No title (Taoist priest) (1935, printed 1970s); No title (Taoist novice) (1935, printed 1970s); and No title (Taoist priest) (1935, printed 1970s) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation views of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Tina Modotti (Italian, 1896-1942) Girls in shawls 1924-1929 Gelatin silver photograph 13.2 x 16.9cm (image and sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2024
Tina Modotti is known for her socially and politically charged photographs documenting Mexican working life. For Modotti, art, life and politics were inextricably linked. Her photographs show the artist’s commitment to documenting the lives of women and working people. This image is believed to be from a project exploring the popular arts of Mexico, specifically the shawl-like rebozo, and exemplifies Modotti’s humanist style of documentary photography. It is one of the photographs anthropologist Frances Toor commissioned from Modotti and Edward Weston for the magazine Mexican Folkways, published between 1925 and 1937.
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Dora Maar (French 1907-1997) Vendors laughing behind their charcuterie stall, Barcelona (Vendeuses et vendeur riant derrière leur étal de charcuterie, Barcelone) 1933 Gelatin silver photograph 27.2 x 24.0cm (image) 30.3 x 24.0cm (sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Gift of Krystyna Campbell-Pretty AM and Family through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2021 Public domain
In 1933 Dora Maar travelled to Spain, where she documented the extreme poverty of the country’s cities through people she met on the streets. Aligning with her left-wing politics and opposition to fascism, her photographs honour working-class citizens rather than buildings or monuments. Maar was fascinated by the characters she encountered in La Boqueria, the market in the heart of Barcelona. In this image, she captures a joyful moment as the women vendors playfully turn away from her, hiding their gaze, while a man smiles directly into Maar’s lens.
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The Document
The primary aim of social documentary photography is to draw attention to social issues, often to promote social or political change. This style of photography blossomed during the tumultuous period of the 1930s, when photographers were commissioned by the United States government to document the effects of the Great Depression. The increased popularity of illustrated mass media such as newspapers and magazines also allowed for the broad dissemination of social documentary images and texts.
The ability of social documentary photography to present a purely objective representation of people or places continues to be fertile ground for debate today.
Installation views of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing Farm Security Administration photographs by Dorothea Lange Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing clockwise from bottom left, four photographs by Dorothea Lange: Drought-stricken farmers on the shady side of town street while their crops burn up in the fields, Sallisaw, Oklahoma (1936 printed c. 1975, below); Drought refugees from Oklahoma, Blythe, California (1936, printed c. 1975); Real Estate sign along highway, Riverside County, California (1937, printed c. 1975); and Child living in Oklahoma City, Shacktown (1936 printed c. 1975, below) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) Drought-stricken farmers on the shady side of town street while their crops burn up in the fields, Sallisaw, Oklahoma 1936, printed c. 1975 Gelatin silver photograph 26.4 x 25.4cm (image) 28.0 x 35.4cm (sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased, 1975 Public domain
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) Child living in Oklahoma City, Shacktown 1936, printed c. 1975 Gelatin silver photograph 26.9 x 25.5cm (image) 28.0 x 35.4cm (sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased, 1975 Public domain
During the Great Depression, many migrants travelling in search of economic opportunity were forced to create temporary camps along roadsides. For Dorothea Lange, who photographed many such experiences over several years, images like this one were part of a greater project to spark public awareness of the difficulties people were facing. As Lange later said, ‘I had begun to talk to the people I photographed … In the migrant camps, there were always talkers. It gave us a chance to meet on common ground.’
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In Focus: Farm Security Administration Project
The Farm Security Administration (FSA) was established in 1937 as part of United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal economic reforms, which provided relief to farmers left impoverished by the hardships of the Great Depression. Led by Roy Stryker, the FSA’s photography program was to be one of the most influential social documentary projects ever developed. Many images were reproduced in newspapers and periodicals to show the harsh realities of life for those living in poverty, with the aim of encouraging public support for the government’s economic policies.
The program ran as part of several government agencies, including the Resettlement Administration (1935-37), then the Farm Security Administration (1937-42) and the Office of War Information (1942-44). Stryker hired a range of photographers for the project and, despite their being given comparable briefs, the unique eye of each photographer is apparent in the over 175,000 pictures produced by the project.
As well as forming a comprehensive pictorial record of American life from 1935 to 1944, the FSA photography program generated some of the most recognisable documentary photographs of the twentieth century, including images by women such as Dorothea Lange, Marion Post Wolcott and Marjory Collins.
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) Woman of the high plains, near Childress, Texas (installation view) 1938, printed c. 1975 Gelatin silver photograph 49.4 x 39.3cm (image) 50.5 x 40.6cm (sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased, 1975 Public domain
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) Woman of the high plains, near Childress, Texas 1938, printed c. 1975 Gelatin silver photograph 49.4 x 39.3cm (image) 50.5 x 40.6cm (sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased, 1975 Public domain
‘We’ve had no work since March. The worst thing we did was when we sold the car, but we had to sell it to eat, and now we can’t get away from here … This county’s a hard county. They won’t help bury you here. If you die, you’re dead, that’s all.’
~ The subject of this photograph, Nettie Featherston, to Dorothea Lange
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Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) Towards Los Angeles, California 1936, printed c. 1975 Gelatin silver photograph 39.6 x 39.1cm (image) 40.8 x 50.5cm (sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased, 1975
During the Great Depression, the Great Plains of North America became known as the Dust Bowl. A severe drought turned the soil to dust, leading to the migration of thousands of small-scale farmers who could no longer work the land. Dorothea Lange made many road trips to document the plight of migrants heading west in search of work and opportunities. Many of Lange’s photographs, such as this one, show workers travelling in difficult conditions, on foot and by car. This photograph was also used as the basis for a scene in the 1939 film Of Mice and Men, based on John Steinbeck’s story of two migrant ranch workers.
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Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing from top to bottom, two photographs by Dorothea Lange: Plantation Overseer, Mississippi Delta, near Clarksdale, Mississippi (1936, printed c. 1975) and Born a slave, resettled after the Civil War, Carrizo Springs, Texas (1936 printed c. 1975, below) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) Born a slave, resettled after the Civil War, Carrizo Springs, Texas 1936, printed c. 1975 Gelatin silver photograph 26.5 x 25.4cm (image) 28.0 x 35.4cm (sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased, 1975 Public domain
Dorothea Lange witnessed racial segregation in the Southern states and often photographed individuals affected by the resulting social and economic inequalities. This work is also known by an alternate title: ‘Bob Lemmons, Carrizo Springs, Texas. Born a slave about 1850, south of San Antonio. Came to Carrizo Springs during the Civil War with white cattlemen seeking new range. In 1865, with his master was one of the first settlers. Knew Billy the Kid, King Fisher, and other noted bad men of the border.’
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Marion Post Wolcott (American, 1910-1990) Shenandoah Valley, Virginia (installation view) 1941, printed c. 1975 Gelatin silver photograph 25.6 x 34.1cm (image) 28.0 x 35.4cm (sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased, 1975 Public domain Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Marion Post Wolcott (American, 1910-1990) Shenandoah Valley, Virginia 1941, printed c. 1975 Gelatin silver photograph 25.6 x 34.1cm (image) 28.0 x 35.4cm (sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased, 1975 Public domain
Marion Post Wolcott (American, 1910-1990) One of the judges at the horse races, Warrenton, Virginia (installation view) 1941, printed c. 1975 Gelatin silver photograph 39.6 x 39.1cm (image) 40.8 x 50.5cm (sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased, 1975 Public domain Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Marion Post Wolcott (American, 1910-1990) Transportation for hep cats Louisville, Kentucky (installation view) 1940, printed c. 1975 Gelatin silver photograph 25.7 x 34.1cm (image) 36.1 x 44.6cm (sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased, 1975 Public domain Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Marion Post Wolcott (American, 1910-1990) Transportation for hep cats Louisville, Kentucky 1940, printed c. 1975 Gelatin silver photograph 25.7 x 34.1cm (image) 36.1 x 44.6cm (sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased, 1975 Public domain
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing from third left to right, three photographs by Marion Post Wolcott: Near Wadesboro, North Carolina (1938 printed c. 1975, below); Baptismal service, Morehead, Kentucky (1940 printed c. 1975, below); and Jitterbugging in a juke joint on Saturday night, Clarksdale, Mississippi (1939 printed c. 1975, below) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Marion Post Wolcott (American, 1910-1990) Near Wadesboro, North Carolina (installation view) 1938, printed c. 1975 Gelatin silver photograph 26.4 × 26.5cm (image) 28.0 × 35.3cm (sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased, 1975 Public domain Photo: Marcus Bunyan
The people in this photograph are the children of tenant farmers. The older child holds the hand of the younger, whose legs are bowed likely due to rickets, a medical condition caused by malnourishment. This is a vivid image that captures both the intimacy between children and the effects of environmental and economic devastation.
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Marion Post Wolcott (American, 1910-1990) Haircutting in front of plantation store after being paid off on Saturday, Mileston Plantation, Mississippi Delta (installation view) 1939, printed c. 1939 Gelatin silver photograph 27.0 x 34.6cm (image and sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased, 1980 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Marion Post Wolcott (American, 1910-1990) Haircutting in front of plantation store after being paid off on Saturday, Mileston Plantation, Mississippi Delta 1939, printed c. 1939 Gelatin silver photograph 27.0 x 34.6cm (image and sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased, 1980
Marion Post Wolcott (American, 1910-1990) Baptismal service, Morehead, Kentucky 1940, printed c. 1975 Gelatin silver photograph 36.3 X 49.3cm (image) 40.7 X 50.5cm (sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased, 1975
Marion Post Wolcott (American, 1910-1990) Jitterbugging in a juke joint on Saturday night, Clarksdale, Mississippi 1939, printed c. 1975 gelatin silver photograph 36.7 x 49.3cm (image) 40.7 x 50.5cm (sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased, 1975
Marion Post Wolcott had a keen sense of social justice, having lived in Austria in the early 1930s, where she witnessed firsthand the rise of Nazism. On her return home to New York in 1933, she was determined to use her photography to raise awareness of social inequalities. While working for the Farm Security Administration (FSA) in the segregated American South, Wolcott witnessed the bleak economic situation endured by African Americans, which was exacerbated by the Great Depression. With an ‘open eye’, Wolcott captured both the positive effects of the FSA and the difficult realities of daily life. Her candid images of African American communities in the South – such as this joyful shot of people dancing – countered the dominant images of Black lives as they were commonly represented in mainstream media.
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Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing three photographs by Heather George (Australia, 1907-1983): Rawhide bed, Wave Hill Station (1952, printed 1978); Stockyards, Wave Hill Station, Northern Territory (1952, printed 1978); and Stockyards, stockmen in distance. Wave Hill Station, Northern Territory (1952, printed 1978) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Heather George (Australia, 1907-1983) Stockyards, Wave Hill Station, Northern Territory 1952, printed 1978 From The Northern Territory series (1952) Gelatin silver photograph 24.0 x 28.8cm (image) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased, 1980 Public domain
In the 1950s and 1960s Heather George worked as a freelance photographer and photojournalist. In 1952 Walkabout magazine published a series of photographs George made in the Northern Territory outback, including images of Wave Hill Station, a vast pastoral lease on the lands of the Gurindji people. Fourteen years later, it was to go down in history as the location of a turning point in the recognition of land rights for Australia’s First Nations peoples.
Consuelo Kanaga worked at the San Francisco Chronicle from 1915, later joining the California Camera Club, where she met photographers Imogen Cunningham, Dorothea Lange and Edward Weston. Kanaga’s image-making was informed by her involvement in liberal politics and the nascent civil rights movement. In 1950 she stayed in an artists’ colony in Maitland, Florida, and documented the lives of Black field workers living there. This refined portrait of a mother with her children became well known around the world after its inclusion in the touring exhibition The Family of Man, curated by pioneering photographer Edward Steichen.
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Ruth Orkin (American, 1921-1985) American girl in Italy, Florence (installation view) 1951, printed 1980 Gelatin silver photograph 30.2 x 46.9cm (image) 40.3 x 50.6cm (sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Gift of Krystyna Campbell-Pretty AM and Family through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2022 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
In 1950 freelance photographer Ruth Orkin was included in the Young Photographers exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and in 1951 Life magazine sent her on assignment to Israel. Before returning to America, she spent time in Italy, where she met a young American painter, Jinx Allen. The women collaborated on a series of photographs commissioned from Orkin by Cosmopolitan magazine for an article titled ‘Don’t Be Afraid to Travel Alone’. Standing in a Florence intersection, Orkin captured her friend as she manoeuvred through a crowd of men. The resulting image is reminiscent of a movie still – Orkin would go on to co-direct two feature films with her husband in the 1950s.
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Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing from left to right, Maggie Diaz 3AW mobile studio, Elwood Beach (1960s printed 2014, below); Maggie Diaz Ladies at the bar, Tavern Club, Chicago (1957, printed 2014); three photographs by Diane Arbus: Girl with a cigar in Washington Square Park, N.Y.C. (1965, printed later); Blaze Starr in her living room, Baltimore, Md. (1964, printed later); A Couple at a Dance, N.Y.C. (1960, printed later); and Lisette Model Woman with veil, San Francisco (1949, printed c. 1960) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Maggie Diaz (American, 1925-2016, Australia 1961-2016) 3AW mobile studio, Elwood Beach (installation view) 1960s, printed 2014 Pigment print 27.9 x 30.0cm (image) 48.2 x 33.0cm (sheet) ed. 2/25 National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased, Victorian Foundation for Living Australian Artists, 2015 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Moving to Australia in 1961, American photographer Maggie Diaz established her Melbourne studio specialising in advertising, portraiture and social documentary photography. Among her commercial clients was the local radio station 3AW, which displayed her photographs in its new CBD studio. A 1964 article in Melbourne newspaper The Age described the headquarters, noting with apparent surprise that the commissioned photographs are ‘the work of a woman’.
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Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
BOTH
Mikki Ferrill (American, b. 1937) Untitled (installation view) 1970s Gelatin silver photograph 20.7 x 13.6cm (image) 25.5 x 20.2cm (sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2024 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Valeria ‘Mikki’ Ferrill is an African American photographer known for her documentation of the Black community in Chicago’s South Side during the 1960s and 70s. Ferrill studied advertising design and illustration at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She eventually became a photojournalist, joining a group of Black photographers from the area who shot for local periodicals and newspapers. Ferrill worked on assignments in Mexico in the late 1960s, returning to Chicago in 1970.
Throughout
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Collaboration and Change
Many postwar street photographers captured their subjects in the ‘instant’. By embracing close-looking, artists relied on chance to create spontaneous compositions, capturing candid, everyday moments. Photographers such as Diane Arbus worked on the streets of New York City, creating vivid portraits of contemporary American life. Arbus often collaborated with her subjects, producing striking images in the moment or curating compositions for magazine commissions.
Fashion photography was on the rise in the period, with American publications such as Harper’s Bazaar playing a pivotal role in amplifying the art form. Louise Dahl-Wolfe, Lillian Bassman and Toni Frissell were regular contributors to the magazine. Their photographs depicted the idealistic and aspirational modern woman.
Yamazawa Eiko and Tokiwa Toyoko were trailblazing women photographers working in Japan at the same time. Their works reflect the social changes of postwar Japan, expressed through the medium of the photobook.
Installation views of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing at left, three photographs by the photographer Lillian Bassman (American, 1917-2012): Black – with one white glove, Barbara Mullen, Christian Dior, Harper’s Bazaar, New York, 1958 (1958, printed (1994); Toreador and Barbara Mullen (for Harper’s Bazaar) (1950, printed 2006); and More fashion mileage per dress, Barbara Vaughn, Harper’s Bazaar, New York (1956, below) Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing at right, three photographs by the photographer Lillian Bassman (American, 1917-2012): Black – with one white glove, Barbara Mullen, Christian Dior, Harper’s Bazaar, New York, 1958 (1958, printed (1994); Toreador and Barbara Mullen (for Harper’s Bazaar) (1950, printed 2006); and More fashion mileage per dress, Barbara Vaughn, Harper’s Bazaar, New York (1956, below) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Lillian Bassman began her career as a painting assistant at the Works Progress Administration, and studied fashion illustration and textile design at Pratt Institute in the late 1930s. In 1940 the famed art director of Harper’s Bazaar magazine, Alexey Brodovitch, offered her a scholarship to study under him. This led to her role as art director of the magazine’s spinoff Junior Bazaar. There she worked with photographers such as Richard Avedon and Robert Frank, and in 1947 began working as a freelance photographer in fashion and advertising.
Wall text from the exhibition
New Ways Of Seeing: Portraits, Intimacy, Liberation
The 1960s and 1970s saw extraordinary social change around the world. Political activism was on the rise, stemming from the anti-Vietnam War movement. There was an increased consciousness around racial equality, feminism and LGBTQ rights. Photographers also documented the popularisation of alternative ways of living, such as shared housing and collective lifestyles, with images that sometimes appeared in counterculture publications.
Australian women photographers working during this period were among the first to gain access to tertiary photography education. Among the key ideas that emerged through the work of these artists was a focus on community, personal relationships and everyday life.
This exhibition culminates in 1975, a watershed year. It marked the first International Women’s Year, inaugurated through the first UN World Conference on Women, and the height of second-wave feminism. That year the NGV staged the exhibition Six Australian Women Photographers, sometimes referenced as Wimmin, featuring work by Marion Marrison, Melanie Nunn, Fiona Hall, Melanie Le Guay, Ingeborg Tyssen and Jacqueline Mitelman. Fifty years on, many of the images from that exhibition are included here, presented alongside work from the artists’ peers.
Text from the NGV website
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing at left, six photographs by Christine Godden (Australian, b. 1947) Untitled 1973/1974 (below) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing at left, six photographs by Christine Godden (Australian, b. 1947) Untitled 1973/1974 (above); and four photographs by Marion Marrison (Australian, b. 1951) including at right No title (Lady) (1973) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing at right, four 1974 photographs by Fiona Hall (Australian, b. 1953) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Fiona Hall began focusing on photography in the mid 1970s, following her time as an assistant to British landscape photographer Fay Godwin. Taken with a large-format camera, Hall’s early photographs were influenced by late modernism and formalism, the study of art focusing on the visual aspects of a work. In this image, Hall plays with forms and lines, capturing the elements of the room as if they have been layered, and she positions herself so that her reflection appears as though it is hovering in space. Curator and art historian Helen Ennis writes that while we often expect self-portraiture to reveal the artist, Hall’s photograph seems to conceal her.
Wall text from the exhibition
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing at right, four 1974 photographs by Fiona Hall (Australian, b. 1953); and at right, four photographs by Sue Ford (Australian, 1943-2009) (below) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing from left to right, Sue Ford Carmel and Trish (1962, printed 1988) and Sue Ford Sue Pike (1963, printed 1988) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Carmel and Trish (1962, printed 1988) was taken early in Sue Ford’s artistic career, and features her friends Carmel and Trish posing in a paddock. Although Ford approached her photography seriously, her sense of humour comes through in this image, which has been described as both an experiment and a playful critique of photography. Throughout her career, Ford often turned the camera on herself, as well as on her family, friends and acquaintances, using the medium to explore social and political issues. Her work is aligned with the important wave of Australian feminist photographers active during the 1970s
Wall text from the exhibition
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing pages from Carol Jerrems (Australian, 1949-1980) and Virginia Fraser (Australian, 1947-2021) A book about Australian Women Melbourne, Outback Press, 1974 (below) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Carol Jerrems (Australian, 1949-1980) and Virginia Fraser (Australian, 1947-2021) A book about Australian Women Melbourne, Outback Press, 1974 Shaw Research Library
This book features 131 photographs by the Melbourne-based photographer Carol Jerrems, interspersed with interviews and texts edited by Virginia Fraser. Published in 1974, the year before International Women’s Year, it captures a moment in time when many Australian women were deeply engaged in global feminist ideas. Described as a ‘collective portrait’, A Book About Australian Women has become an iconic reference in Australian feminist history. It highlights a diverse group of women involved in cultural life across Australia. Some of those featured include writer Anne Summers, painter Grace Cossington Smith, film director Jennie Boddington and the Wiradjuri tennis champion Evonne Goolagong Cawley.
Carol Jerrems studied photography at Prahran College in Melbourne, winning several student awards before first exhibiting her work in the early 1970s. Jerrems collaborated with Australian artist Virginia Fraser on the 1974 publication A Book About Australian Women, a suite of portraits featuring a diverse range of subjects. This portrait was taken as part of that project, and an edition is included in the book. The work features Oodgeroo Noonuccal, previously known as Kath Walker, who was an Aboriginal rights activist, poet, WWII veteran, environmentalist and educator. Noonuccal is photographed with her pen poised at the learning centre she established on Minjerribah (North Stradbroke Island, Queensland) to teach visitors to the island about Aboriginal culture and Country.
Wall text from the exhibition
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing from left to right, two photographs by Ponch Hawkes (Australian, b. 1946): No title (Helen at Falconer Street) (c. 1975 printed 2018); and No title (In the backyard at Falconer Street) (c. 1975 printed 2018) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Ponch Hawkes began to photograph while working as a journalist for the counterculture magazine The Digger in 1972. In 1973 she moved into a communal house in Melbourne with fellow Digger contributor Helen Garner. Together they produced stories for the broadsheet, documenting new ways of living emerging in inner-city Melbourne in the early 1970s.
Wall text from the exhibition
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing at right, Ponch Hawkes No title (Summer night in the backyard at Falconer Street) (c. 1975 printed 2018, below) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing in the bottom image, top to bottom left to right, six photographs by Ponch Hawkes: No title (Women holding hands in front of graffiti, ‘Lesbians are lovely’) (1973, printed 2018); No title (Graffiti) (1975, printed 2018); No title (Women’s Theatre Group, performing outdoors beneath a Women’s Liberation banner in the City Square) (1975, printed 2018); No title (Two women embracing, ‘Glad to be gay’) (1973, printed 2018); No title (Fitzroy graffiti) (1973, printed 2018); No title (Graffiti, ‘Braddock… not mild, but sexist’) (1973, printed 2018) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Ponch Hawkes captured powerful images of lesbian love and friendship during Melbourne’s early 1970s gay liberation movement. Hawkes worked for the counterculture magazine The Digger alongside Australian writer Helen Garner. The two often collaborated on projects, producing impassioned essays and imagery that platformed communities often excluded from mainstream media. The pride and solidarity shown in these images stand in stark contrast to the extreme discrimination queer people faced during the time.
Wall text from the exhibition
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing at left, Ann Newmarch We must risk unlearning (1975, below) and at second left, Ann Newmarch Two versions (1975, below) with at right, photographs by Ponch Hawkes Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing from left to right, Ann Newmarch We must risk unlearning (1975) and Ann Newmarch Two versions (1975) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009) New York c. 1938 Gelatin silver print
If there is one photographer in the history of the medium that captures the spirit of childhood, the spirit of a single city, and the spirit of life – then that photographer is the incomparable and beloved American photographer Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009).
I have posted on this exhibition before when it was displayed at Fundación MAPFRE, Barcelona but I have now added many more photographs to the exhibition posting. Despite emails to the gallery I have been unable to secure any installation photographs of the exhibition.
It’s worth quoting from my text “Levittation” from the earlier posting on this exhibition for indubitably it holds true:
“In her photographs there is an (in)direct engagement with the people that surrounded her (in her early works “she often hid her camera under her coat to capture candid, unnoticed moments on the streets”), an exchange of energy from the photographer to the subject and back through the camera onto the film… evidencing a generosity of spirit on the part of the artist towards her subjects. Here there is no pressing the camera into the face of the victim a la Garry Winogrand to evince a reaction, but a genuine sense of compassion and empathy towards the people who live in the great city of New York. …
As with any great art, the artist that produced it (even as she is ambitious) seems to be without ego. She lets the picture and the emotions tell the story without the shadow of the artist getting in the way (unlike much contemporary art and photography). For the work of art to have value in itself.
Thus, her photographs speak to us directly, or not at all.”1
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ Marcus Bunyan. “Levittation,” on the Art Blart website, November 28, 2025 [Online] Cited 17/04/2026
Many thankx to Fundación MAPFRE, Madrid for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“Helen Levitt was one of the first women to stand out in the world of photography, especially in the field of urban photojournalism. She always avoided imposing an explicit narrative on her images and preferred not to comment on them, letting them speak for themselves. The commitment to this discretion, far from diminishing the value of her work, is precisely one of the keys that make it so fascinating and unique.”
Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009) New York c. 1939 Gelatin silver print
Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009) New York c. 1938 Gelatin silver print
Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009) New York City c. 1940 Gelatin silver print
Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009) New York c. 1938 Gelatin silver print
Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009) New York c. 1939 Gelatin silver print
Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009) New York c. 1939 Gelatin silver print
Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009) New York c. 1939 Gelatin silver print
Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009) began photographing the streets of New York, her hometown, in the late 1930s, focusing mainly on poor neighbourhoods such as Spanish Harlem or the Lower East Side, where the street is the main stage of daily life. Her camera was directed primarily toward children and their street games. These childhood scenes are the central theme of a body of work that captivates us with its ability to transform everyday situations into images that convey all that life can hold of emotion, mystery, or humour and that, although lacking an explicit narrative, manage to establish an immediate connection with the viewer. Levitt’s work soon received the recognition it deserved, and as early as 1943 the Museum of Modern Art in New York organised her first solo exhibition (Photographs of Children).
In later years, she became deeply interested in film and colour photography. Regarding the former, in 1948 she collaborated on the documentary The Quiet One and co-directed In the Street, another documentary about the streets of Spanish Harlem. Both titles would be highly influential in the subsequent evolution of documentary cinema, inspiring artists such as Jonas Mekas and Andy Warhol. On the other hand, after receiving a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1959 to explore chromatic techniques, she began experimenting with colour photography, a medium in which she would also develop pioneering work.
A socially committed artist, Levitt was one of the first women to forge a professional career in photography. This exhibition is the first to be organised based on the entirety of her work and archives, which have only recently been made available for public consultation.
Text from the Fundación MAPFRE website
Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009) began photographing the streets of New York City, her hometown, in the late 1930s, focusing primarily on poor neighbourhoods like Spanish Harlem and the Lower East Side, where the street plays a central role as the stage for daily life. She documented intimate and fleeting moments of human connection, becoming a key figure in 20th-century photography.
Her training began as an apprentice in a Bronx studio, and in 1934 she acquired her first camera. Shortly after, she joined the New York Film and Photo League, where she met Henri Cartier-Bresson, whose influence was decisive in Levitt’s decision to pursue photography independently.
Between 1938 and 1942, she captured some of her most iconic images, documenting everyday life in working-class neighbourhoods of New York with a spontaneous, empathetic, and unpretentious eye. Her approach, focused especially on childhood and the fleeting moments of urban life, broke with the traditional canons of photojournalism and opened new avenues for photography as a means of poetic and social expression.
In 1943, MoMA dedicated her first solo exhibition to her, solidifying her place in art history.
Although her name is associated with “street photography,” since it was precisely the streets of her hometown that provided the context for her images, throughout her career she ventured into film and visited other countries, such as Mexico.
Levitt also explored colour photography and film, pioneering both fields. She co-directed the documentary In the Street and received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1959 to research new colour techniques. Although a 1970 robbery resulted in the loss of much of her colour work, she resumed her photography, and MoMA screened her slides in 1974. During the following decades, she continued to photograph intermittently, returning to black and white and exploring new settings such as the New York subway. Her work, marked by ambiguity and restrained emotion, has been recognised for its ability to capture fleeting moments of human connection in complex urban environments.
The exhibition, curated by Joshua Chuang, offers a comprehensive overview of Levitt’s career through nine sections and some 220 photographs. It includes previously unseen works, as well as pieces taken in Mexico in 1941 and a significant portion of her colour work, which she began in the 1950s. In addition, her film In the Street, directed by Levitt herself along with Janice Loeb and James Agee, is presented, along with a screening of colour slides taken by the artist.
Press release from Fundación MAPFRE
Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009) New York c. 1939 Gelatin silver print
Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009) Gypsy Boy, Harlem, New York c. 1939 Gelatin silver print
Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009) New York c. 1939 Gelatin silver print
Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009) New York c. 1939 Gelatin silver print
Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009) New York 1939 Gelatin silver print
Information
Dedicated full-time to her artistic activities, the photographer Helen Levitt (New York, 1913-2009) did not begin to gain public recognition until relatively late in life. Although her name has always been associated with “street photography,” as it was precisely the streets of her native city that provided the context for the production of her images, throughout her career Levitt made forays into film, visited other countries such as Mexico, and also focused on colour photography. Her images, almost invariably ambiguous and mysterious although not necessarily at first glance, are also characterised by their spontaneity, warmth and sensitivity. The movements and gestures of the figures captured by her lens and the communication between them transcend that inclination to “photograph children” which many critics pointed out after her first exhibition at the MoMA in 1943, entitled Helen Levitt: Photographs of Children.
Levitt’s work as a whole goes far beyond the latter aspect, revealing her acceptance of the pleasures, terrors and complexity of existence at all ages, traits often overlooked by the viewer when immersed in the harsh reality of the urban landscape.
The exhibition, the first to be devoted to the artist on the basis of the entirety of her work and archives, which have only recently become available for study, offers a broad overview of Levitt’s career through nine sections and around 220 photographs. It includes previously unexhibited images, as well as work produced in Mexico in 1941 and a large proportion of the artist’s work in colour, which she explored from the 1950s onward. It also features her film In the Street, directed by Levitt in collaboration with Janice Loeb and James Agee, and a projection of her colour slides.
Born in Brooklyn to a Russian-Jewish family, Helen Levitt dropped out of high school early and began her photography training in a Bronx studio. Influenced by Henri Cartier-Bresson, she pursued independent photography, capturing everyday life in New York neighbourhoods between 1938 and 1942. Her first solo exhibition was at the MoMA in 1943. She also experimented with film, making In the Street, and with colour photography, which gained her a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1959. Levitt continued to work intermittently, exploring new settings such as the subway and rural areas. Her creative output is recognised for its ability to capture moments of human connection in complex urban environments.
Key themes
Enigmatic photographs
Helen Levitt’s images possess a mysterious quality that transforms them into true visual enigmas. Her unique and highly perceptive gaze turns everyday scenes into compositions that are hard to define, creating an immediate connection with the viewer even when there is no clear narrative to explain them.
A pioneer with her own voice
Helen Levitt was one of the first women to make her way in the world of photography, especially in the field of street photography. She always avoided constructing an explicit narrative in her images and preferred not to talk about them. Far from diminishing its value, that decision is one of the key traits that make her work so interesting. Despite this characteristic of reserve, Levitt’s photographs connect with the viewer through the universal emotions they convey.
Text from Fundación MAPFRE
Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009) New York 1940 Gelatin silver print
Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009) New York c. 1940 Gelatin silver print
Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009) New York c. 1940 Gelatin silver print
Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009) New York c. 1940 Gelatin silver print
Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009) New York c. 1940 Gelatin silver print
Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009) New York c. 1940 Gelatin silver print
Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009) became a photographer in the mid-1930s after meeting Henri Cartier-Bresson and seeing his radical new pictures made with a discreet, handheld camera. By the end of the decade, she had developed a unique sensibility, one informed by Surrealism and a love of avant-garde cinema but focused on the interactions of ordinary people in the streets, sidewalks, stoops, and vacant lots of her native city.
Grounded in gritty realism but brimming with subversive humor, mischief, and pathos, Levitt’s pictures are open-ended and enigmatic, concealing as much as they reveal. Her uncanny photographs of urban children and their games brought Levitt early renown even as she remained attentive to the quiet gestures and movements of a broader swath of humanity observed with her 35mm Leica, especially in Spanish Harlem, where the activity of everyday life often spilled out of doors.
Following a months long foray in Mexico City, Levitt began to work in filmmaking, leading to a long hiatus in her photographic activity. In 1959, advances in the sensitivity colour film spurred her to take to the streets again with her Leica. She continued to photograph in colour throughout the 1970s, reverting to black-and-white film for a series of pictures taken in the New York City subway. Levitt continued to photograph intermittently until the early 1990s, when she became known as the “unofficial poet laureate” of New York and her oeuvre universally acknowledged as one of the most timeless and affecting in the history of the medium.
Joshua Chuang Comisario / Curator
Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009) Mexico City 1941 Gelatin silver print
Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009) New York c. 1942 Gelatin silver print
Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009) New York c. 1942 Gelatin silver print
Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009) New York c. 1945 Gelatin silver print
Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009) New York 1948 Gelatin silver print
In the Street, 1948 – A Film by Helen Levitt, ft. New Musical Score by Ben Model | From the Vault – The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Filmed in East Harlem just after the end of World War II, “In the Street” is a dynamic, tender, and often humorous portrait of life in New York City: children dance and play in alleyways, shopkeepers sweep the sidewalks, onlookers watch from their windows. This captivating film presents the bustling theater of city life, where “every human is a poet, a masker, a warrior, a dancer.” Directed by the renowned photographer Helen Levitt, in collaboration with Janice Loeb and James Agee, and featuring a new musical score written and performed by Ben Model.
Text from the YouTube website
Early Work / Graffiti / Gypsies
Only a few examples survive from Levitt’s first year using a Leica camera. Amid the backdrop of the Great Depression, her pictures of lone figures hunched over or lying on the ground appear documentary in their impulse, while other depictions of people in urban surroundings are notably more ambivalent in their view.
In 1937, while employed by the Federal Art Project to teach at a public school in East (Spanish) Harlem, Levitt noticed the many chalk drawings and messages illicitly scrawled by children on streets and buildings on her way to work, and began to document them in all their variety, innocence, and vulgarity. She sometimes also portrayed the artists themselves posing next to their ephemeral interventions.
Around 1938, on the advice of Walker Evans, Levitt began to use a right-angle viewfinder, a device that allowed her to face one direction while pointing her camera in another. This was particularly effective in recording the uninhibited interactions of the “gypsy” families prevalent in Spanish Harlem and Yorkville. Drawn to their way of life, she also borrowed Evans’s 4 x 5-inch view camera and tripod to make portraits of “gypsy” children in their homes.
1938-1940 / Mexico City / A Way of Seeing
By 1940 Levitt had established her terrain, subject, and approach. In a rare statement, she later described her intent “to seize upon and record those apparently accidental disarrangements that nevertheless and in seeming contradiction provide a more intense apperception of reality.” Uninterested in portraying New York City as a bustling metropolis, Levitt instead saw it as an environment whose “size and varied character constantly forces into the open material for my camera.” The working class, immigrant neighbourhoods she frequented – where adults chatted on stoops, mothers and children leaned out of windows, and children were left to their own devices – proved to be an especially fertile ground for her work.
In 1941, again inspired by Cartier-Bresson’s example, Levitt, a reluctant traveller, went to Mexico City with a friend to photograph there. Initially struggling with the challenge of working in new environment, she was eventually able to find her artistic footing, producing a body of work that at once acknowledged rawer social realities while locating a subtle lyricism unique to the city and its people. It would be her only trip abroad.
Upon her return to New York City, Levitt picked up where she left off, picking up on more sober themes of melancholy, alienation, and what she referred to as “the deep repressions of the unyoung.” After having photographed for a decade, Levitt collaborated with her friend, the writer and critic James Agee, to edit and sequence a book of her New York photographs. Envisioning the project as an urban counterpart to Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, his 1941 collaboration with Walker Evans, Agee wrote an extensive essay to accompany Levitt’s pictures that heralded their lyric qualities, the sum of which presented “unified view of the world, an insistent but irrefutable manifesto.” After a series of setbacks, the book, eventually given the title A Way of Seeing, was not published until nearly two decades later in 1965.
Color / Metro / Anys 1980
In 1959, Levitt was granted a Guggenheim fellowship to experiment with “the latest techniques in colour photography.” Her Leica loaded with colour slide film, she walked some of the same streets she had frequented in the 30s and 40s, newly attentive to the chromatic character of her compositions. After the bulk of her slides were stolen by a burglar in 1970, Levitt redoubled her efforts, photographing throughout the decade with renewed zeal, developing an intuitive system of colour that was at once transporting and transparent. In 1974, a continuous projection of forty of Levitt’s slides were featured at MoMA in New York, after which she began to realise select images as dye transfer prints.
Around the same time, Levitt also decided to revisit the subterranean theater of New York City subway as a site to make pictures, having served as a decoy for Walker Evans’s subway project work more than three decades earlier. With her subjects largely stationary in train cars and platforms, Levitt attended to the nuances of expression and gesture, recording quiet dramas amid unflattering light and cramped quarters.
From the 1980s onwards, Levitt continued to photograph, but only intermittently, working mainly in black and white, both in the city and outside it.
Text from Fundación MAPFRE
Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009) New York 1975 Gelatin silver print
Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009) New York (Woman and taxi) 1982 Gelatin silver print
Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009) New York Nd Gelatin silver print
Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009) New York 1971 Dye transfer print
Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009) New York 1972 Dye transfer print
Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009) New York 1974 Dye transfer print
Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009) Cat next to red car, New York 1973 Type C print 18 x 12 inches
Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009) New York 1976 Dye transfer print
Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009) New York City (phone booth) 1988 Dye transfer print
Fundación MAPFRE Recoletos Exhibition Hall Paseo Recoletos 23, 28004 Madrid Phone: +34 91 581 61 00
Opening hours: Mondays (except holidays): 2pm – 8pm Tuesday to Saturday: 11am – 8pm Sunday and holidays: 11am – 7pm
Helen Levitt’s photographs from 1938-1940 are some of the earliest of her artistic career. “Her interest in photography blossomed when, aged 18, and having dropped out of high school, she began working in the darkroom of a commercial portrait photographer.”1
At the age of 23 she bought a secondhand Leica camera and walked the streets of New York – mainly Manhattan’s Lower East Side, the Bronx and Spanish Harlem – observing the social interactions of children and adults in this teeming metropolis. But she was not a flâneuse,2 strolling around the city observing but not interacting with her surroundings … she was fully engaged in the activity of the city.
What amazes me is that her vision as an artist was so well (in)formed at such a young age. And that the concerns and investigations into the nature of play, love and life in New York as a young, strong, independent “New Woman” remained constant throughout her life and decades long photographic career.
In her photographs there is an (in)direct engagement with the people that surrounded her (in her early works “she often hid her camera under her coat to capture candid, unnoticed moments on the streets”), an exchange of energy from the photographer to the subject and back through the camera onto the film… evidencing a generosity of spirit on the part of the artist towards her subjects. Here there is no pressing the camera into the face of the victim a la Garry Winogrand to evince a reaction, but a genuine sense of compassion and empathy towards the people who live in the great city of New York.
Influenced by social realism and the idea the photography could be an agent for change, avant-garde European film, surrealism and contemporaneous dance and theatre Levitt, “decided I should take pictures of working-class people and contribute to the movements,” Levitt later said of that time. “And then I saw pictures of [Henri] Cartier-Bresson and realised that photography could be an art – and that made me ambitious.”1
Levitt’s photographs are performative and theatrical, an engagement between artist, subject and viewer in the cause of art. “In her photographs, she presents the street as an almost theatrical landscape where the smallest interactions and gestures are incredibly resonant.”1
Levitt was not interested in concept nor didactic narrative. She was interested in the presence of the image before you … in just what you see.
As with any great art, the artist that produced it (even as she is ambitious) seems to be without ego. She lets the picture and the emotions tell the story without the shadow of the artist getting in the way (unlike much contemporary art and photography). For the work of art to have value in itself.
Thus, her photographs speak to us directly, or not at all.
2/ “The flâneuse is not a female flâneur, but she is a version of the flâneur. She does not experience the city in the same way as he does. It is hard to define the archetype of the flâneuse, because the flâneur himself consists of paradoxes and many subcategories. Key concepts for flâneur and flâneuse are the amount of spare time, the aesthetic detachment towards objects, crowd and sceneries they see and their ambiguity about it.”
Akkelies van Nes and Tra My Nguyen. “Gender Differences in the Urban Environment: The flâneur and flâneuse of the 21st Century,” in Daniel Koch, Lars Marcus and Jesper Steen (eds.,). Proceedings of the 7th International Space Syntax Symposium. Stockholm: KTH, 2009
Many thankx to Fundación MAPFRE for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image. See the second, larger posting on this exhibition with many more photographs when it was shown at Fundación MAPFRE, Madrid.
“Levitt was part of a highly intellectual cultural and political milieu in New York in the 1930s and her photography reflected her deep interest in surrealism, cinema, leftwing politics and the new ideas that were then emerging about the role of the body in art.”
Helen Levitt (1913-2009) began photographing the streets of New York, her hometown, in the late 1930s, focusing mainly on poor neighbourhoods such as Hispanic Harlem and the Lower East Side, where the street clearly takes center stage as the setting for everyday life. Her camera was directed mainly at children and their games in the streets. These scenes of children occupy a central place in a body of work that, as a whole, captivates us with its ability to transform everyday scenes into images that convey all the emotion, mystery, and humour that life can contain, and with which the viewer establishes an immediate connection even though they lack an explicit narrative. Her work soon gained the recognition it deserved, and in 1943 the MoMA in New York organised her first solo exhibition (Photographs of Children).
Later in her career, she also became closely interested in film and colour photography. In 1948, she collaborated on the documentary The Quiet One and co-directed In the Street, another documentary about the streets of Hispanic Harlem. Both titles were highly influential in the subsequent evolution of documentary filmmaking by artists such as Jonas Mekas and Andy Warhol.
After receiving a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1959 to explore chromatic techniques, she began experimenting with colour photography, a medium in which she would also develop pioneering work.
A socially committed artist, Levitt was one of the first women to forge a professional career in photography. This exhibition is the first to be based on her entire body of work and archives, which have only recently been made available to the public.
Dedicated full-time to her artistic activities, the photographer Helen Levitt (New York, 1913-2009) did not begin to gain public recognition until relatively late in life. Although her name has always been associated with “street photography,” as it was precisely the streets of her native city that provided the context for the production of her images, throughout her career Levitt made forays into film, visited other countries such as Mexico, and also focused on colour photography. Her images, almost invariably ambiguous and mysterious although not necessarily at first glance, are also characterised by their spontaneity, warmth and sensitivity. The movements and gestures of the figures captured by her lens and the communication between them transcend that inclination to “photograph children” which many critics pointed out after her first exhibition at the MoMA in 1943, entitled Helen Levitt: Photographs of Children.
Levitt’s work as a whole goes far beyond the latter aspect, revealing her acceptance of the pleasures, terrors and complexity of existence at all ages, traits often overlooked by the viewer when immersed in the harsh reality of the urban landscape. The exhibition, the first to be devoted to the artist on the basis of the entirety of her work and archives, which have only recently become available for study, offers a broad overview of Levitt’s career through nine sections and around 220 photographs. It includes previously unexhibited images, as well as work produced in Mexico in 1941 and a large proportion of the artist’s work in colour, which she explored from the 1950s onward. It also features her film In the Street, directed by Levitt in collaboration with Janice Loeb and James Agee, and a projection of her colour slides.
Born in Brooklyn to a Russian-Jewish family, Helen Levitt dropped out of high school early and began her photography training in a Bronx studio. Influenced by Henri Cartier-Bresson, she pursued independent photography, capturing everyday life in New York neighbourhoods between 1938 and 1942. Her first solo exhibition was at the MoMA in 1943. She also experimented with film, making In the Street, and with colour photography, which gained her a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1959. Levitt continued to work intermittently, exploring new settings such as the subway and rural areas. Her creative output is recognised for its ability to capture moments of human connection in complex urban environments.
Key themes
Enigmatic photographs
Helen Levitt’s images possess a mysterious quality that transforms them into true visual enigmas. Her unique and highly perceptive gaze turns everyday scenes into compositions that are hard to define, creating an immediate connection with the viewer even when there is no clear narrative to explain them.
A pioneer with her own voice
Helen Levitt was one of the first women to make her way in the world of photography, especially in the field of street photography. She always avoided constructing an explicit narrative in her images and preferred not to talk about them. Far from diminishing its value, that decision is one of the key traits that make her work so interesting. Despite this characteristic of reserve, Levitt’s photographs connect with the viewer through the universal emotions they convey.
Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, Helen Levitt (1913-2009) became a photographer in the mid-1930s after meeting Henri Cartier-Bresson and seeing his radical new pictures made with a discreet, handheld camera. By the end of the decade, she had developed a unique sensibility, one informed by Surrealism and a love of avant-garde cinema but focused on the interactions of ordinary people in the streets, sidewalks, stoops, and vacant lots of her native city.
Grounded in gritty realism but brimming with subversive humor, mischief, and pathos, Levitt’s pictures are openended and enigmatic, concealing as much as they reveal. Her uncanny photographs of urban children and their games brought Levitt early renown even as she remained attentive to the quiet gestures and movements of a broader swath of humanity observed with her 35mm Leica, especially in Spanish Harlem, where the activity of everyday life often spilled out of doors.
Following a months long foray in Mexico City, Levitt began to work in filmmaking, leading to a long hiatus in her photographic activity. In 1959, advances in the sensitivity colour film spurred her to take to the streets again with her Leica. She continued to photograph in color throughout the 1970s, reverting to black-and-white film for a series of pictures taken in the New York City subway. Levitt continued to photograph intermittently until the early 1990s, when she became known as the “unofficial poet laureate” of New York and her oeuvre universally acknowledged as one of the most timeless and affecting in the history of the medium.
Early Work / Graffiti / Gypsies
Only a few examples survive from Levitt’s first year using a Leica camera. Amid the backdrop of the Great Depression, her pictures of lone figures hunched over or lying on the ground appear documentary in their impulse, while other depictions of people in urban surroundings are notably more ambivalent in their view.
In 1937, while employed by the Federal Art Project to teach at a public school in East (Spanish) Harlem, Levitt noticed the many chalk drawings and messages illicitly scrawled by children on streets and buildings on her way to work, and began to document them in all their variety, innocence, and vulgarity. She sometimes also portrayed the artists themselves posing next to their ephemeral interventions.
Around 1938, on the advice of Walker Evans, Levitt began to use a right-angle viewfinder, a device that allowed her to face one direction while pointing her camera in another. This was particularly effective in recording the uninhibited interactions of the “gypsy” families prevalent in Spanish Harlem and Yorkville. Drawn to their way of life, she also borrowed Evans’s 4 x 5-inch view camera and tripod to make portraits of “gypsy” children in their homes.
1938-1940 / Mexico City / A Way of Seeing
By 1940 Levitt had established her terrain, subject, and approach. In a rare statement, she later described her intent “to seize upon and record those apparently accidental disarrangements that nevertheless and in seeming contradiction provide a more intense apperception of reality.” Uninterested in portraying New York City as a bustling metropolis, Levitt instead saw it as an environment whose “size and varied character constantly forces into the open material for my camera.” The working class, immigrant neighbourhoods she frequented – where adults chatted on stoops, mothers and children leaned out of windows, and children were left to their own devices – proved to be an especially fertile ground for her work.
In 1941, again inspired by Cartier-Bresson’s example, Levitt, a reluctant traveler, went to Mexico City with a friend to photograph there. Initially struggling with the challenge of working in new environment, she was eventually able to find her artistic footing, producing a body of work that at once acknowledged rawer social realities while locating a subtle lyricism unique to the city and its people. It would be her only trip abroad.
Upon her return to New York City, Levitt picked up where she left off, picking up on more sober themes of melancholy, alienation, and what she referred to as “the deep repressions of the unyoung.” After having photographed for a decade, Levitt collaborated with her friend, the writer and critic James Agee, to edit and sequence a book of her New York photographs. Envisioning the project as an urban counterpart to Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, his 1941 collaboration with Walker Evans, Agee wrote an extensive essay to accompany Levitt’s pictures that heralded their lyric qualities, the sum of which presented “unified view of the world, an uninsistent but irrefutable manifesto.” After a series of setbacks, the book, eventually given the title A Way of Seeing, was not published until nearly two decades later in 1965.
In the Street
In the mid-1940s, along with her friend and patron, Janice Loeb, Levitt began to shoot footage around New York City with a home movie camera. They were joined by James Agee, who encouraged them to conceive of an experimental project that would serve as a cinematic extension of Levitt’s still photographs. This led the three of them to collaborate on the pioneering short film that was first screened in 1949 and then released in 1952 under the title In the Street, a forerunner of the cinéma verité style. By the end of the 1940s and for the next two decades, filmmaking became Levitt’s primary occupation.
Color / Subway / 1980s
In 1959, Levitt was granted a Guggenheim fellowship to experiment with “the latest techniques in colour photography.” Her Leica loaded with colour slide film, she walked some of the same streets she had frequented in the 30s and 40s, newly attentive to the chromatic character of her compositions. After the bulk of her slides were stolen by a burglar in 1970, Levitt redoubled her efforts, photographing throughout the decade with renewed zeal, developing an intuitive system of colour that was at once transporting and transparent. In 1974, a continuous projection of forty of Levitt’s slides were featured at MoMA in New York, after which she began to realise select images as dye transfer prints.
Around the same time, Levitt also decided to revisit the subterranean theatre of New York City subway as a site to make pictures, having served as a decoy for Walker Evans’s subway project work more than three decades earlier. With her subjects largely stationary in train cars and platforms, Levitt attended to the nuances of expression and gesture, recording quiet dramas amid unflattering light and cramped quarters.
From the 1980s onwards, Levitt continued to photograph, but only intermittently, working mainly in black and white, both in the city and outside it.
Fundación MAPFRE KBr Photography Center Avenida Litoral, 30 – 08005 Barcelona Phone: +34 93 272 31 80 (Attention only during the opening hours of the exhibition hall)
Curated by Alistair O’Neill, professor of Fashion History and Theory at Central Saint Martins (University of the Arts London)
Please note: This exhibition includes photographs showing nudity and sexually suggestive scenes. There is no age restriction for visitors to the exhibition. We are leaving the decision to visit to the discretion of parents, guardians and carers.
Keith Vaughan (British, 1912-1977) Highgate Men’s Pond Album 1933 Courtesy Aberystwyth University School of Art Museum and Galleries
Nothing hard to see here…
This looks to be a fascinating exhibition albeit with not a single erect penis on show and about half the exhibition showing flaccid examples. The photographs seem particularly asexual. Hardly any of them are what you would call “erotic”, except perhaps the photographs from the earliest album in this posting, Keith Vaughan’s Highgate Men’s Pond Album (1933, above and below). For me, the most sexual photographs are the “rough trade” such as the skins and carnies… an archetype which has existed for centuries.
My Phd research titled Presing the Flesh: Sex, Body Image and the Gay Male (1997-2001) examined in part the history of the male body in photography, including photos of ephebes (young men), the muscular mesomorphic body as featured in the physique magazines and gay male pornography. My history of the male body in photography can be found in the Historical Pressings chapter while the Bench Press chapter investigates the ‘Cult of Muscularity’, the development of gym culture, its ‘masculinity’, ‘lifestyle’, and the images used to represent it.
Much as gay men had to speak ‘Polari’ (gay slang language) when going to pubs such as the Salisbury on St Martin’s Lane in London in the 1970s so that those around us could not understand what we were saying, so physique or ‘beefcake’ magazines of the 1950s and 1960s relied heavily on the iconography of classical Rome and Greece to legitimise and hide from unknowing eyes (in plain sight) their homo-erotic overtones. Use was made of columns, drapery, and sets that presented the male body as the contemporary equivalent of idealised male beauty of ancient times.
While Simon in his excellent post on the exhibition notes that there was a delicate balancing act in the photographs in their subtle aesthetics of constraint and tact and a “self-imposed restraint which made ‘physique photographs’ walk such an exciting fine line between factual depiction of male anatomy and objects of lust from the 1930s to the 80s,” behind the scenes the models were getting boners and having sex all over the place. Purely for private consumption in their day, none of these photographs are ever shown (as in this exhibition) or published today and hardly anyone knows about them. The limp, flaccid penis is all that we get to see for fear of offence and/or moral outrage… for what was covert activity at the time (with a wide underground circulation) is kept impotent today.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to The Photographers’ Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“I think the interest is not so much in the images, per se, as in their variety, and also in the extraordinary density and complexity of the clandestine networks of gay photographers, subjects, printers, publishers and distributors which the wall labels describe and explain. That’s interesting social history.
And then, when you lay the complex mesh of legal and cultural and visual parameters over the images you get, as it were, another layer of complexity beyond the images themselves; you get to see them as varying visual strategies and approaches and sublimations of very powerful male urges of desire and sexuality.”
“The bodies in the ‘beefcake’ magazines of the 1950’s tend to be bigger than that of the ephebe, even when the models were quite young in some cases. As the name ‘beefcake’ implies, the muscular mesomorphic shape was the attraction of these bodies – perfectly proportioned Adonis’s with bulging pectorals, large biceps, hard as rock abdomens and small waists. The 1950’s saw the beginning of the fixation of gay men with the muscular mesomorph as the ultimate ideal image of a male body. The lithe bodies of young dancers and swimmers now gives way to muscle – a built body, large in its construction, solid and dependable, sculpted like a piece of rock. These bodies are usually smooth and it is difficult to find a hirsute body11 in any of the photographs from the physique magazines of this time. According to Alan Berube in his book, Coming Out Under Fire,
“The post-war growth and commercialization of gay male erotica in the form of mail-order 8 mm films, photographic stills, and physique magazines were developed in part by veterans and drew heavily on World War II uniforms and iconography for erotic imagery.”12
Looking through images from the 1940s in the collection at The Kinsey Institute, I did find that uniforms were used as a fetish in some of the explicitly erotic photographs as a form of sexual iconography. These photographs of male2male sex were for private consumption only. I found little evidence of the use of uniforms as sexual iconography in the published photographs of the physique magazines. Here image composition mainly featured classical themes, beach scenes, outdoor and studio settings. …
As the 1950s turned into the 1960s other stereotypes became available to the photographers – for example the imagery of the marine, the sailor, the biker, the boy on a tropical island, the wrestler, the boxer, the mechanic. The photographs become more raunchy in their depiction of male nudity.
In the 1950s, however, classical aspirations were never far from the photographers minds when composing the images as can be seen in the undated photograph Jim Stevens by Lon of New York in London taken from a book called ‘Art in Physique Photography’.14 This book, illustrated with drawings of classical warrior figures by David Angelo, is subtitled: ‘An Album of the world’s finest photographs of the male physique’.
Here we observe a link between art and the body. This connection was used to confirm the social acceptability of physique photographs of the male body while still leaving them open to other alternative readings. One alternative reading was made by gay men who could buy these socially acceptable physique magazines to gaze with desire upon the naked form of the male body. It is interesting to note that with the advent of the first openly gay pornography magazines after the ruling on obscenity by the Supreme Court in America in the late 1960s,15 classical figures were still used to justify the desiring gaze of the camera and viewer upon the bodies of men. Another reason used by early gay pornography magazines to justify photographs of men having sex together was that the images were only for educational purposes! …
As social morals relaxed in the age of ‘free love’, physique photographers such as Bob Mizer from Athletic Model Guild produced more openly homo-erotic images. In his work from the 1970s full erections are not prevalent but semi-erect penises do feature, as do revealing “moon” shots from the rear focusing on the arsehole as a site for male libidinal desires. A less closeted, more open expression of homosexual desire can be seen in the photographs of the male body in the 1970s.17 What can also be seen in the images of gay pornography magazines from the mid 1970s onwards is the continued development of the dominant stereotypical ‘ideal’ body image that is present in contemporary gay male society – that of the smooth, white, tanned, muscular mesomorphic body image.
Marcus Bunyan. “Historical Pressings,” from Presing the Flesh: Sex, Body Image and the Gay Male. PhD thesis, RMIT University, 2001
A Hard Man is Good to Find! celebrates a clandestine visual culture of men’s bodies that emerged in the post-war period, during a time when making and distributing such images was a criminal offence.
This exhibition highlights key areas of London which were a focus for men seeking out men to photograph. It maps out a territory of risk and possibility across Highgate, between Chelsea and Wellington Barracks, in Soho, Brixton, Portobello and Euston. Catalogues, print ordering sheets, personal albums, magazines and publications explore how these photographs were circulated, exchanged and shared.
While the 1955 Wolfenden Report and the 1967 Sexual Offences Act marked the partial decriminalisation of gay sexual activity, prompting gay liberation and the fight for social equality; any depiction of male nudity which suggested homosexuality remained subject to the 1857 Obscene Publications Act.
Including work by John S. Barrington, Cecil Beaton, Guy Burch, Basil Clavering, Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Bill Green, David Gwinnutt, Angus McBean, Patrick Procktor, Ajamu X and many more.
Whilst this is an exhibition of queer pictures, it is important to note that not all the photographers or models can be claimed as queer subjects. It also acknowledges that language evolves and while queer is employed today for its inclusivity, the reclaiming of the derogatory term can sit uneasily for the generation subjected to it; the term homosexual can be similarly problematic for a younger generation.
As a number of the works are historical documents, it has not been possible to identify all individuals represented in the exhibition. We welcome any amendments or additions.
Text from The Photographers’ Gallery website
A Hard Man is Good to Find! Interview with exhibition curator Alistair O’Neill
Alistair O’Neill, professor of Fashion History and Theory at Central Saint Martins (University of the Arts London) talks about curating the exhibition A Hard Man is Good to Find! – a bold new exhibition charting over 60 years of queer photography of the male physique.
Keith Vaughan (British, 1912-1977) Highgate Men’s Pond Album (detail) 1933 Courtesy Aberystwyth University School of Art Museum and Galleries
Keith Vaughan (British, 1912-1977) Highgate Men’s Pond Album (detail) 1933 Courtesy Aberystwyth University School of Art Museum and Galleries
Keith Vaughan (British, 1912-1977) Highgate Men’s Pond Album 1933 Courtesy Aberystwyth University School of Art Museum and Galleries
Keith Vaughan (British, 1912-1977) Highgate Men’s Pond Album, front cover 1933 Courtesy Aberystwyth University School of Art Museum and Galleries
Highgate men’s pond has a history of accommodating physical culturists and queer men as swimmers and sunbathers. At the age of 21, artist Keith Vaughan purchased a Leica camera and set up a darkroom in his bedroom. One of his first projects was a photobook he designed and made charting the climbing temperature of a summer’s day at the pond. This is the first time the album has been exhibited.
Keith Vaughan (British, 1912-1977) Highgate Men’s Pond Album 1933 Courtesy Aberystwyth University School of Art Museum and Galleries
Keith Vaughan (British, 1912-1977) Highgate Men’s Pond Album (detail) 1933 Courtesy Aberystwyth University School of Art Museum and Galleries
Angus McBean (Welsh, 1904-1990) David Dulak 1946 Courtesy Rupert Smith Collection
In a study of Dulak taken in Angus McBean’s Covent Garden studio, an idealised diptych of the naked dancer is created from controlled lighting and double exposure. It was taken after McBean was released from prison, having served two years’ hard labour for gross indecency. During the Blitz, McBean relocated his studio to Bath and it was raided by police in 1941.
Between Chelsea and Wellington Barracks
I.e. Pimlico, an area of boarding houses and rented rooms, an enclave of queer life. Angus McBean opened his photographic studio on Belgrave Road in 1935.
Montague Glover had served in the First World War where he was awarded a medal. He went on to practice as an architect with photography on the side. His military career gave him easy access to the barracks where he recruited like-minded Guards to return to his studio or rented rooms and pose in less than full uniform. Squaddies available for gay sex were known as ‘a bit of scarlet’.
Angus McBean (Welsh, 1904-1990) David Dulak (detail) 1946 Courtesy Rupert Smith Collection
“… by the time of the 1939 National Register he was 35 and living in a Hertfordshire cottage with three other men; his 19 year old photographer’s assistant, a 21 year old theatre clerk, and a 26 year old builder’s carpenter. Because of the London Blitz McBean moved to Bath where he set up a studio in his ground floor flat in Kingston House, Pierrepont Street, which soon became a meeting place for gay men, including servicemen who were stationed nearby.
On 13 November 1941 Bath police raided the flat and arrested McBean and a 16 year old youth. This began a chain of arrests using evidence from letters, diaries and statements to the police. It also resulted in one, and possibly two, suicides.
McBean and five other men were tried “on grave charges” at Winchester Assizes in March 1942 in front of Bristol born and former Clifton College pupil Lord Chief Justice Thomas Inskip, 1st Viscount Caldecote. All six men were found guilty and sent to prison with McBean receiving a 4 year sentence of hard labour for three charges of gross indecency. On hearing the sentence McBean collapsed in the dock. Others convicted were: 25 year old Lt. Tom Gill, in civilian life an actor, who received 15 months in prison; 18 year old Theodore Parker who was found in possession of 36 love letters from Gill and was sent to borstal for three years; 28 year old Arthur Sigmund Politzer, a well known artist and glass designer serving with the Field Security Police who received a 20 month prison sentence; 21 year old Eric Hughes, a civil servant sentenced to three years Borstal; and 22 year old Brian Ball, a soldier stationed in Surrey and sentenced to 15 months imprisonment.
Two other lives were ended by the case, though neither was charged. Alan Farr, a 30 year old Admiralty electrical fitter and draughtsman had been interviewed twice by police in the week after the raid about connections with McBean. On 16 December 1941 a Detective Inspector called at Farr’s office to escort him to the police station, probably to be charged. On the pretext of visiting the cloakroom before leaving, Farr shot himself and died instantly. Also mentioned during the trial was 18 year old Allan Patrick Nottingham, already on probation for indecency charges in Portsmouth, who may have been the catalyst for the initial discovery of Bean’s circle. A week after the trial, the Bath Chronicle of 21 March 1942 reported that Nottingham had been found in a crashed car on the Wiltshire Downs and had died shortly after in Swindon Hospital.
Jonathan Rowe. “Angus McBean,” on the Out Stories Bristol website 2021 [Online] Cited 29/05/2023
Angus McBean (Welsh, 1904-1990) David Dulak Ballet, January 1946 Courtesy Rupert Smith Collection
Dulak was a dancer, found by physique photographer John S Barrington in 1938 on Charing Cross Road. Barrington introduced him to theatre photographer Angus McBean; this study featured on the cover of Richard Buckle’s progressive dance journal, Ballet.
The Photographers’ Gallery presents A Hard Man is Good to Find! – a bold new exhibition charting over 60 years of queer photography of the male physique, on display from 2 March to 11 June 2023.
Bringing together more than 100 works, the exhibition centres on queer photographs of men’s bodies, produced in London in the twentieth century. While the 1955 Wolfenden Report and the 1967 Sexual Offences Act marked the partial decriminalisation of gay sexual activity, prompting gay liberation and the fight for social equality; any depiction of male nudity which suggested homosexuality remained subject to the 1857 Obscene Publications Act, which made making or distributing such images a criminal offence.
A clandestine visual culture emerged, regulated by laws which enforced homosexuality as invisible. In turn, it directly fed the defiant, overt visuality of gay men’s bodies that emerged in the post-war period. The tension between invisibility and visibility was negotiated through ideas about the male body drawn from art, physical culturists, and pornography – both home-grown and imported.
Taking a novel approach, the exhibition highlights key areas of London which were a focus for men seeking out men to photograph. It maps out a territory of risk and possibility across Highgate, between Chelsea and Wellington Barracks, in Soho, Brixton, Portobello and Euston. Within each site it is possible to locate artists of all persuasions, creating work about queer sensibilities and men’s bodies in radical ways. Catalogues, print ordering sheets, personal albums, magazines and publications are also included in the exhibition to explore how these photographs were circulated, exchanged and shared. Drawing together photographs produced for commercial, as well as creative and personal purposes, A Hard Man is Good to Find! dissolves hierarchies, creates non-linear historical narratives and brokers unlikely adjacencies.
Covering the 1930s to early 1990s, many works are exhibited here for the firsttime including Keith Vaughan’s Highgate Men’s Pond album, a modernist photo collage made in 1933; ‘The Portobello Boys’, an anonymous and striking portfolio of young men taken in the late 1950s and early 1960s in North Kensington. A set of archetypes, ‘The Londoners’, documented in the late 1960s by Anthony C Burls (trading as Cain of London) and Martin Spenceley’s street portraits of subcultural men photographed in Euston in the 1980s.
The hinge of this history is the posing pouch, a modest fabric covering for the male genitals developed by gay physique photographers to show as much of the male body as possible. Its origins lie in the US, in the Athletic Model Guild established by Bob Mizer in 1945, although there is evidence of it being worn for sunbathing in London in the early 1930s. An original 1950s posing pouch will on display in the exhibition. Employed to circumvent the ban on full nudity (which included the postal system), the pouch was also painted on mail order reproductions so that customers could rub them off once received in the post. The sighting and dematerialising of the posing pouch is key to thinking through how such images were consumed, and how queer erotics were discursively constructed from imaginative forms of resistance to power and oppression.
The exhibition includes works by: John S Barrington, Cecil Beaton, Guy Burch, Basil Clavering (trading as Royale), Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Bill Green (trading as Vince), David Gwinnutt, Paul Hawker, Angus McBean and Ajamu X.
Press release from the Photographers’ Gallery
Installation view of the exhibition A Hard Man is Good to Find! at The Photographers’ Gallery, London
Mrs Mizer Tangerine Posing Strap 1955 Miles Chapman Collection
In 1945 Bob Mizer started the Athletic Model Guild, a model agency for bodybuilders for the film industry. In 1951 he launched a quarterly magazine, Physique Pictorial. For his photoshoots Mizer developed the skimpiest possible garment which dwindled down to the posing pouch. The exhibition explains that the earliest versions were sewn for him by his mother who, nonetheless, strongly disapproved of his sexuality. …
Slightly spoiling the effect, there is a small mention of the photographic evidence that this kind of super-minimalist covering was, in fact, being worn by sunbathing men in London in the early 1930s. Still. American has to be shoehorned in somehow. [see photographs by Keith Vaughan at the top of the posting]
Bill Green (Vince) catalogue sheet 31949 June 1949
Bill Green set up Vince Studio at 46 Manchester Street, Marylebone in 1946, specialising in photographs of bodybuilders. Prints could be ordered from catalogue sheets advertised in the classifieds of Health and Strength magazine. His catalogue sheets always had a gutter in the middle so they could be folded for discreet posting without creasing any image.
“Vince” had originally been the pseudonym of Bill Green, a photographer for men’s magazines, who shot wrestlers and bodybuilders naked but for nifty briefs he had cut down from chainstore trunks. These were so unlike available mens’ underwear that models and readers wanted to buy them. Green obliged by mail order, later adding to his catalogue the black sweater get-up of intellectual Paris and unshrunk Levis; in 1954 he set up in the Soho premises – described by Richard Benson of the Face magazine as “a CS Lewis of a wardrobe for young men” – they passed through its door into somewhere far out.
Vince and his boys supplied flagrant colour, untweedy texture, tight fit and low cut to a theatrical and artistic clientele, and many followers of camp. But these were not the only customers for that “certain ambiguity”: pink hipsters walked out of the shop on heteros, too.
Veronica Horwell. “John Stephen,” on The Guardian website Mon 9 Feb 2004 [Online] Cited 29/05/2023
Bill Green (Vince) Monotosh Roy c. 1950s Courtesy Rupert Smith Collection
Bill Green – ‘Vince Man’s Shop’
In the 1940s, Bill Green was a local photographer who specialised in artistic images of ‘muscle men’ and male wrestlers. His models wore fairly revealing (for the time) homo-erotic garments that were mainly designed by himself due to the lack of availability of commercial items. He decided to develop this business and by 1950 was selling them through mail-order catalogues appealing mainly to the gay community. Following European trips in the early Fifties he expanded his portfolio to include the ‘existentialist’ look that was popular in France and Italy and was the first to introduce British men to ‘Beatnik’-style fashions.
With the continued success of his mail-order business, and aware of its popularity with the gay community, he opened Vince Man’s Shop in 1954. The establishment was located in Newburgh Street, an intelligent business decision as this was right at the heart of London’s gay community and very close to Marshall Street Public Baths which was a well-known and popular meeting area for gay men. One of the earliest advertisements featured a muscular Sean Connery in a ‘matelot’ vest and skin-tight jeans.
His colourful and unconventional designs, which included velvet and silk materials and pre-faded denim, quickly widened its appeal by attracting younger members of the Bohemian and Thespian fraternities who frequented the West End of London. The window displays were provocative for the time, often featuring mannequins wearing outrageous fashions including briefs and pink hipster-style slacks, and his wide range of clientele included the likes of George Melly, Peter Sellers, Sean Connery, Pablo Picasso and even the King of Denmark!
The fashions in the establishment were not cheap, and were generally out of the normal price range of ordinary teenagers, but this brought a certain ‘respectability’ to the informality and flamboyance of new styles and were certainly one of the catalysts in the major changes that were to take place in the fashions appealing to young males in the Sixties. As the decade progressed, and ’boutiques’ started providing a progressively fast-moving outlet for cheap fashion clothing, Vince’s came under increasing financial pressure and the establishment was forced to move to a less expensive location in North London. Bill Green closed the shop for good in 1969, subsequently becoming the manager of a Soho restaurant.
Anonymous. “Carnaby Street,” on the Sixties City website Nd [Online] Cited 29/05/2023
Montosh Roy (1916-2014)
Monotosh Roy (1916-2014) was an Indian bodybuilder, who held the Mr. Universe title in Group III Amateur Division in 1951. Roy was the first Indian and Asian to be awarded the Mr. Universe title. …
In 1939, he competed in his first bodybuilding competition, but did not fare well. He resolved for success and engaged himself in further practice. In 1939, he won the East Indian Bodybuilding Championship. In 1947, he won the All India Bodybuilding Championship.
In 1951, Roy travelled to the United Kingdom and participated in the Mr. Universe competition. He won the Mr. Universe title in Group III Amateur Division category. The audience at the competition were mesmerised by his muscle display. They queued up for his autograph and even waited up to two and half hours for his autograph. Following his victory at the Mr. Universe competition, he was felicitated at the India House by the Indian High Commissioner.
After his return to India he acted as a trainer in many physical culture clubs. He used to train fitness and yoga to celebrities. He founded the Indian Bodybuilding Federation in 1958. He was also the founding member of Asian Bodybuilding Federation. He also taught at the Calcutta University and the Law College. He became a featured columnist in periodicals on health and fitness. He also wrote a few books on Yoga. He conducted bodybuilding programmes that were telecast in the Doordarshan. He set up several bodybuilding and yoga centres in Kolkata.
Bill Green (Vince) Vince advertisement Health and Strength, 29 May 1952
In 1951, Green was advertising posing briefs in the Daily Mirror. They were made by shortening and over-dyeing Marks & Spencer underwear. This advertisement was shot at the Serpentine Lido. In 1954, Green opened the first men’s fashion boutique, Vince Man’s Shop, on Fouberts Place, Soho; it was the start of the peacock revolution and Carnaby Street as a fashionable retail destination.
Bill Green (Vince) Vince Man’s Shop catalogue, model Sean Connery Spring/Summer 1957 Courtesy Alistair O’Neill Collection
Vince Man’s Shop was the first boutique to sell imported men’s fashion such as American workwear jeans and Italian suiting and shirting. It catered to homosexual men and benefited from its proximity to the Marshall Street gym, Soho’s coffee bars and Piccadilly Circus. The cover model here is aspiring actor Sean Connery, better known at the time as a bodybuilder and artist’s model
Cecil Beaton (British, 1904-1980) ‘Narcissus of 1967’ (Gervase Griffiths) c. 1967 Gelatin silver print
Marylebone
‘The City of Quebec’ pub in Marylebone is supposed to be London’s oldest gay pub. It opened in 1946 and was popular with gay RAF men. Bill Green learned photography and wrestling in the RAF and in 1946 set up Vince Studio at 46 Manchester Street, soon establishing a name for ‘physique photography’. He advised beginners to use a little oil to help highlight the contours of male musculature.
In 1954 Green opened a men’s fashion boutique in Foubert’s Place, Soho. In 1956 his assistant, John Stephen, opened another fashion store. According to the exhibition’s curator, Alistair O’Neill, Professor of Fashion History and Theory at Central Saint Martins, these sparked ‘the peacock revolution’ in men’s fashion. They helped turn Carnaby Street into the centre of modern fashion.
Artist Patrick Prockter also had a studio on Manchester Street. He took photos as preparatory studies for paintings, especially of his boyfriend Gervase Griffiths. He cultivated an artistic circle which included painter David Hockney, fashion designer Ossie Clark, and physique model Peter Hinwood. The veteran photographer Cecil Beaton was attracted to this young group of openly queer men. The exhibition includes sets of colour photos of Griffiths on a beach, and two by Beaton which are among my favourites, not because they’re nude, camp or gay – simply because they’re beautiful.
Basil Clavering (British, 1910-1973) (Royale, Hussar, Dolphin) Mail order Storyette print late 1950s Courtesy Rupert Smith Collection
Basil Clavering ran the Cameo Royal cinema on the Charing Cross Road, and the Cameo Poly (now Regent Street Cinema). He built a studio in the basement of his home on Denbigh Street, Pimlico, with his friend, John Charles Pankhurst, both of whom had served in the navy. In their studio Basil & John recruited military men to model in authentic uniforms, and Clavering innovated the ‘storyette’ where the catalogue sheet of photos available to order would set out a narrative drama like film stills from a motion picture.
Basil Clavering (British, 1910-1973) (Royale, Hussar, Dolphin) Photograph from Storyette EX FJSS 1950s Courtesy Rupert Smith Collection
“Clavering and Parkhurst’s work reflects in both imagery and subject matter the drawings of Tom of Finland (Touko Laaksonen, 1920-1991). Laaksonen met Clavering during a visit to London and Studio Hussar commissioned a series of 17 panel drawings from him entitled The Thieving Cowboy (1957). No other photographers of the time were extracting so much visual drama from the clothed male figure. Other physique photographers were viewing the legal restrictions of the time as a challenge, whereas Royale and Hussar embraced them as an opportunity to produce magnificent risqué images.
Clavering and Parkhurst both served in the Navy, and their experience and connection to their subject matter is evident in the way clothing and partial undress was depicted, reflecting an insider’s comprehension and understanding.
Many of the models were also active military personnel, who Clavering met in public houses close to Hyde Park and the Chelsea barracks. Consequently, the images are not simply of men dressing up in uniforms, but rather men fully aware of both the purpose and symbolism of the uniform.”
Basil Clavering (British, 1910-1973) (Royale, Hussar, Dolphin) Photograph from Storyette EX FJSS 1950s Courtesy Rupert Smith Collection
Clavering was a successful businessman, and owned the Gala-Royale cinema chain. More as a hobby than anything else, he established a photographic studio in the basement of his Pimlico home, with his friend John Charles Parkhurst (1927-2000). Both men had served in the Navy, and they were drawn to the military men around the Hyde Park and Chelsea barracks, whom they paid to model for them.
The studio operated under two names, Royale and Hussar, and Clavering sold the photographs by mail order. The images are profoundly erotic, despite there being no frontal nudity. Models are occasionally depicted solo, but more often in groups, and scenarios involve uniform, military and naval discipline, wrestling, light bondage and spanking – somehow always in a mood of levity and playfulness. Clavering met Tom of Finland, and several images from a biker series echo the Finn’s work; in 1957 Studio Hussar even commissioned a series of drawings from him.
As far as I know this photograph is not in the exhibition but I like it!
Paul Hawker Spencer Churchill 1951 Courtesy Rupert Smith Collection
The Serpentine
In the 1950s British bodybuilding magazines catered for two audiences, straight bodybuilders and a gay readership. As well as the obvious photos and articles, in their back pages these magazines offered discreet mail order services for ‘original physique studies’. This section features the work of mail order publisher William Domenique (trading as Lon of New York) and gay erotic artist Bill Ward.
Paul Hawker came from Bristol, moved to London, and took photos of young men preening and parading at the Serpentine Open Air swimming pool, another well-known gay haunt. He is represented by some of the photos he took of his friend, body builder Spencer Churchill. Apparently Churchill was one of the first to adopt the American fashion for denim workware jeans as regular casual clothing.
And once you knew, you could purchase. Lots of the images here skirt around the legality of the male nude by being available in bodybuilding magazines, or as a catalogue of physiques for fitness buffs to emulate at home. One amazing image shows Spencer Churchill tensed and glistening while wearing a posing pouch that you could scratch off to reveal the goods beneath. It’s a fascinating portrait of hidden mid-century male desire in London.
But there are ethical questions here too. John S Barrington pretended to be a Vogue photographer to persuade men to pose for him. That’s uncomfortable, exploitative and not really dealt with in the show. Also, lots of the subjects in the exhibition wouldn’t have considered themselves gay or queer either, so framing them anonymously in a queer context totally removes the sitters’ agency.
Then there’s the group of photos of young men lounging around in west London bedrooms and living rooms. They’re amazing images, totally unguarded and joyful, but they were purchased as a box of anonymous negatives from Portobello Antiques Market by Emmanuel Cooper. These men have had no say in their private nude moments being plastered across The Photographers’ Gallery decades after they were taken. This was a time when privacy not only mattered, but had a tangible impact on people’s lives, and this has taken the choice away from them.
So there are issues here and some tricky ethical moments, but there’s still a lot to like. At its best, this show is a celebration of the male form in London from a time when that was an incredibly dangerous thing to celebrate. The thing is, men are hot, always have been, and we should be very grateful that these days we can say that without getting put in prison.
Anonymous photogapher The Portobello Boys Early 1960s Courtesy Emmanuel Cooper Archive The Bishopsgate Institute Special Collections and Archives
Emmanuel Cooper purchased a set of negatives from Portobello Antiques Market in the early 1980s. Cooper was a ceramicist, writer, art critic and gay rights activist. He called this anonymous body of work The Portobello Boys, as he believed they were taken in the north Kensington area in the late 1950s to mid-60s. Taken in an era before gay liberation, they document young men posing, in turns uncertainly and assertively, in states of undress.
Notting Hill
Became known after the war for its combination of bachelor housing and growing immigrant community. In the early 1980s ceramics artist Emmanuel Cooper picked up a set of negatives at Portobello Market. It turned out to be a set of studies of nude or partially clothed young men with an obvious queer vibe taken in the late 1950s and early 1960s in North Kensington. Cooper titled it ‘The Portobello Boys’ and arranged for its publication. They are surprisingly homely, unguarded, intimate studies of everyday life.
Anthony C Burls (Cain of London) Catalogue sheet c. 1968-1970 Guy Burch collection
Anthony C Burls was a photographer who engaged young men to model through street casting. He also ran a coffee shop at World’s End in Chelsea in the 1960s, took casual work at Battersea Funfair and regularly attended a gym in Brixton. He used these contexts to find working-class men to photograph.
White Brixton
Anthony C. Burls was an interesting character. In the 1960s he ran a coffee shop at the World’s End in Chelsea, got odd jobs working at funfairs, and attended a gym in Brixton. In all these settings he asked working class men if he could photograph them and the result is a series of full length, mostly fully clothed studies which I think I liked most out of the exhibition. He named the series ‘The Londoners: Official reports’, including not just the photos but the man’s job description and a pen profile. His first business address was Studio 200 on Railton Road, also home to the South London Gay Community Centre. …
I liked Anthony C. Burls’ set of photos of the rough, dirty, tough-looking young men you get working at funfairs and such, swaggering among the dodgems in tight jeans, unbuttoned shirts and rocker brylcreemed hair. [see photograph at bottom of posting]
John S Barrington (British, 1920-1990) John Hamill c. 1966 Courtesy Rupert Smith Collection
John S. Barrington (1920-1991) was a British physique photographer and publisher. Barrington’s photos of nude or semi-nude men appeared widely in British and American physique magazines, sometimes under the pseudonym John Paignton. Barrington published many of his own physique magazines, including Male Model Monthly, the first in Britain. He also published a number of books related to photography and anthropometry. Barrington was a prolific artist and publisher, and by 1984 was said to have published more nude titles than any other individual in Europe or the United States.
Barrington had frequent sexual encounters with men throughout his life, particularly with the men who modeled for him, though he identified as heterosexual.
Barrington began photographing men in 1938 at the men’s bathing pond at Hampstead Heath. He studied at St Martin’s School of Art and L’Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris. In addition to photography, Barrington was also a visual artist and sculptor.
Barrington began working as a physique photographer in 1948. In 1954, he began publishing Male Model Monthly, the first physique magazine in Britain. From 1954 until 1979, he would go on to publish many more physique magazines in Britain and the US, among the best-known being MAN-ifique, FORMosus, Superb Youth, and Youth in the Sun.
Barrington was known to select models in the “boy next door” mold, with average body types. His photographs were mostly taken outdoors, with models appearing in relaxed, natural poses.
In the 1950s and 1960s Barrington published books on anatomy and anthropometry, ostensibly for the benefit of artists.
John S Barrington (British, 1920-1990) Catalogue sheet c. 1970s Courtesy Rupert Smith Collection
John S Barrington (British, 1920-1990) Catalogue sheet (details) c. 1970s Courtesy Rupert Smith Collection
John S Barrington (British, 1920-1990) Catalogue sheet c. 1970s Courtesy Rupert Smith Collection
John S Barrington (British, 1920-1990) Catalogue sheet (details) c. 1970s Courtesy Rupert Smith Collection
Martin Spenceley Untitled 1980s Courtesy of the Michael Carnes Collection
Martin Spenceley photographed young men in Euston in the 1980s, scouting for Teds, punks and skinheads, persuading them to pose by cheekily lying that he worked for Vogue America.
Martin Spenceley Untitled 1980s Courtesy of the Michael Carnes Collection
Rough trade!
The show is split into different geographical areas of London, each of which had a slightly different character, lending themselves to different types of man and images. We start in the bedsit land of Pimlico. In the 1950s this was home to many single young queer men as well as soldiers living in the two nearby army barracks. We see pictures of many of the young fit soldiers who liked being photographed to earn a little extra money.
We then move on to Hampstead Heath the famous cruising area and home to the men-only Highgate Men’s Swimming Pond. A good collection of sunbathing men from the 1930s is included here. Other areas of London shown include a selection of 1950s male physique photography shot in Marylebone and in Hyde Park and ‘The Portobello Boys,’ an interesting selection of men shot at home in Notting Hill and Portobello in the 1960s. This area of West London was very queer back then.
Then we head south of the river to Battersea and Brixton where pictures range from 1960s fairground and other workers through to queer artists and activists in the 70s and 80s.
Anthony C Burls (Cain of London) The Young Londoners late 1960s – early 1970s
“The show is structured through areas of London that were known for attracting queer communities and related imagemaking practices,” he explains.
“This might be open air sites where men could see and be seen, such as Highgate Men’s Pond or the Serpentine Lido, but it also includes areas that offered furnished rooms for rent that were popular with single gay men, such as Pimlico or Notting Hill.”
Interesting adjacencies are revealed, such as the fact that artist Patrick Procktor had a studio in Marylebone in the same street as physique photographer Bill Green (who traded under the name Vince).
Many of the works in the show are being exhibited at the gallery for the first time, including a set of archetypes, ‘The Londoners’, documented in the late 60s by Anthony C Burls (who traded as Cain of London) and Martin Spenceley’s street portraits, photographed in Euston in the 80s.
It also highlights fascinating historical objects such as an original 1950s posing pouch, which has its origins in the US Athletic Model Guild established by Bob Mizer in 1945, but was widely used by gay physique photographers to show as much of the male body as possible.
In bringing the show to life, O’Neill hopes to demonstrate how this fascinating pocket of queer history has gone on to influence visual culture more broadly. “The movement certainly informed the body consciousness of queer visual culture,” he says, “but I would argue that it’s intertwined history with the emergence of men’s fashion in the 1950s and 60s has played a significant role in contemporary queer style positions, both naked and dressed.”
Anthony C Burls (Cain of London) Untitled (Carnie) 1960s
As far as I know this photograph is not in the exhibition but I like it!
A secret history
All this explains why, as the tools of photography became cheaper and more widely available, from the 1920s and 30s onwards a clandestine visual culture emerged. During the 1930s stunning images of athletic male physiques could be associated with the general social trend towards hiking and healthy outdoor activities. During the Second World War photographers were encouraged to take photos of our brave boys looking butch and manly. After the war publishers gained more confidence but were still liable for arrest and confiscation of stock. It was only really in the later 1960s that, along with so many other social movement, gay men felt increasing confidence in depicting their lifestyles and objects of desire openly.
Throughout the period there is a continual interplay and overlap between licit and illicit ways of visualising the male body: the naked athlete trope ultimately derived from statues of ancient Greek and Roman men. Images of tough soldiers could walk a narrow line between being heterosexual propaganda and gay adoration. Young men sunbathing could be following European models of health and fitness. Models and precedents from heterosexual art and culture were continually being subtly reworked, the borderline between legal art and illegal ‘obscenity’ shimmered and wavered within individual images, different definitions of desire fight in single photographs.
Anyway, the repression gay photos were liable to be subject to at any moment explains why a good deal of this visual culture was underground or hidden. Some gay publications were subscription only, others were available as a sideline in otherwise ‘respectable’ book and art shops. In the 60s and 70s more magazines and specialist shops came out of the closet.
Permanet exhibition Visited September 2019 posted November 2019
First gallery
Installation view of the exhibition The Photojournalist Robert Capa II at the Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center, Budapest Photo: Marcus Bunyan
I didn’t have time on my European photographic research tour to post about this exhibition at the Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center, Budapest.
Let me say right off bat, that I’m not a great fan of Capa’s work and the larger, 1990s non-vintage prints presented in this exhibition were unimpressive.
I admire Capa’s courage in order to get the shot (“If your photographs aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough”), but his photographs leave me cold. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but his objectivity, his reportage, is just that. Looking back 80 years later, we must remember how raw, how radical and confronting these photographs would have been when viewed in Life magazine and Picture Post at the time: authentic representations of war and death straight from the front. But in terms of the image, what you see is what you get. The framing is not particularly good, the angles are pretty conventional and front on, the occurrences direct and focused. The immediacy of the image, that is their strength.
For me they don’t leave a lasting impression, never have done. Yes, the D-Day landings because he was there; The death of a Loyalist militiaman because it is so famous; the shaving of the women collaborators heads because they are so vile … but you wonder, does his greatness come from the fact that, time and time again, he got the job done and produced the goods (as in a saleable image). That and the reality that he was a great self promoter: labelled the ‘Greatest War Photographer in the World’ by Picture Post in 1938. But was he a good image maker?
They are what they are. That’s really all you can say.
Installation views of the exhibition The Photojournalist Robert Capa II at the Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center, Budapest Photos: Marcus Bunyan
“La Guerre Civile en Espagne,’ in Vu Magazine No. 445 September 23, 1936
Caption: “Le jarret vif, la poitrine au vent, fusil au poing, il dévalaient la pente couverte d’un chaume raide… Soudain l’essor est brisé, une balle a siffle – une balle fratricide – et leur sang est bu par la terre natale … “
“His step quick, his chest to the wind, his rifle in his hand, he hurtled down the steep slope. Suddenly the boom was broken, a bullet whistled – a fratricidal bullet – and their blood is drunk by the homeland … “
The caption as published in LIFE magazine: “Robert Capa’s camera catches a Spanish soldier the instant he is dropped by a bullet through the head in front of Cordoba.”
Installation views of the exhibition The Photojournalist Robert Capa II at the Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center, Budapest Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Capa (American-Hungarian, 1913-1954) September 5, 1936. The death of a Loyalist militaman 1936 Gelatin silver print
“The Spanish War Kills Its First Woman Photographer,” in LIFE magazine (Gerda Taro, July 1937) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Gerda Taro (1910-1937)
Gerta Pohorylle (1 August 1910 – 26 July 1937), known professionally as Gerda Taro, was a German Jewish war photographer active during the Spanish Civil War. She is regarded as the first woman photojournalist to have died while covering the frontline in a war.
Taro was the companion and professional partner of photographer Robert Capa. The name “Robert Capa” was originally an alias that Taro and Capa (born Endre Friedmann) shared, an invention meant to mitigate the increasing political intolerance in Europe and to attract the lucrative American market. A significant amount of what is credited as Robert Capa’s early work was actually made by Taro.
Coverage of the Spanish Civil War
When the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, Taro travelled to Barcelona, Spain, to cover the events with Capa and David “Chim” Seymour. Taro acquired the nickname of La pequeña rubia (“The little blonde”). They covered the war together in northeastern Aragon and in the southern Córdoba province. Always together under the common and using the bogus signature of Robert Capa, they succeeded in publishing through important publications (the Swiss Zürcher Illustrierte, the French Vu). Their early war photographs are distinguishable since Taro used a Rollei camera which rendered squared photographs while Capa produced rectangular pictures using a Contax camera[citation needed] or a Leica camera. However, for some time in 1937 they each produced similar 35 mm pictures under the label of Capa&Taro.
Subsequently, Taro attained some independence. She refused Capa’s marriage proposal. Also, she became publicly related to the circle of anti-fascist European and intellectuals (such as Ernest Hemingway and George Orwell) who crusaded particularly for the Spanish Republic. fr:Ce Soir, a communist newspaper of France, signed her for publishing Taro’s works only. Then, she began to commercialise her production under the Photo Taro label. Regards, Life, Illustrated London News and Volks-Illustrierte (the exile edition of Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung) were amongst the publications that used her work.
Reporting the Valencia bombing alone, Taro obtained the photographs which are her most celebrated. Also, in July 1937, Taro’s photographs were in demand by the international press when, alone, she was covering the Brunete region near Madrid for Ce Soir. Although the Nationalist propaganda claimed that the region was under its control, the Republican forces had in fact forced that faction out. Taro’s photographs were the only testimony of the actual situation.
“So nobody will forget your unconditional struggle for a better world” (epitaph in French and Catalan on her tomb in Père Lachaise Cemetery, Paris)
“The Spanish War Kills Its First Woman Photographer,” in LIFE Magazine (Gerda Taro, July 1937) Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Capa
(Endre Ernő Friedmann) 22 October 1913, Budapest, Hungary – 25 May 1954, Thái Bình, Vietnam
He never avoided challenges – he brought his restless, adventurous spirit and toughness from Hungary. He hardly had anything else in his luggage when he left his native country in 1931. He made photo-history with his war reportage on the Spanish Civil War, WWII, China, and Vietnam. His stories and, in particular, his slogan – “if your photographs aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough” – made him a legendary person. But he made a mistake in Thái Bình. He went too close.
His brother wrote about him: “He lived a lot and suffered a lot during his short life. He was born poor and died poor. He bequeathed us the chronicle of his unique career along with the visual proof of his conviction: not only can mankind endure a lot but it is able to win every now and then.”
His parents – Júlia Berkovits and Dezső Friedmann – were tailors, who ran a prosperous show-room in Budapest. Their first child was László, followed by Endre and five years later by Kornél. After a Lutheran elementary school, Robert Capa went to study at Madách Secondary School. Inspierd by Lajos Kassák, he became interested in journalism in 1929, one year before his matriculation. After 1930, he was a photographer.
He was a good friend of Suzanne Szász, i.e. Székely Zsuzsa, already in Budapest. He lived at the same house as Éva Besnyő, who was his first childhood love.
He was shortly imprisoned because of his leftist connections and his participation in a leftist demonstration on 1 September 1930. In prison, he learnt the methods of the infamous investigator Péter Hain, who beat him so hard that he lost consciousness. He was released through his parents’ connections and he almost immediately left the country.
According to one of the legends, he only had a stick of salami in his luggage when he left. His train ticket to Vienna was paid by the Jewish Community of Pest, from there he went on to Prague through Brno and somehow he eventually arrived in Berlin. He left in July 1931 and it took him two or three weeks to get to the German capital. He studied journalism at the German Political College (Deutsche Hochschule für Politik). Since his parents were becoming poor and were not able to support him, he went to work as a photo lab assistant at the photo agency Dephot (Deutscher Photodienst). In the beginning, almost everybody spoke Hungarian at Dephot. No wonder since it was founded by Simon Guttmann and its financial manager was László Fekete, known as Ladislaus Glück at that time.
There were László Czigány (Taci) and György Markos among his fellow-workers and friends. He received his first camera at this time, a Voigtländer 6×9 from György Kepes. Later he got a Leica from Guttmann to carry out smaller assignments.
In 1932, he was sent by Guttmann to make the report which made him famous: he took the photo of Leon Trotsky at the Socialist Congress in Copenhagen. He was the only one to succeed in taking a photo of Trotsky, since photography was strictly forbidden at the meeting. The photo was published by Weltspiegel on a full page.
He was assisted in adapting himself to the foreign city and culture by his friends from Budapest, György Kepes and Éva Besnyő. They often invited him for dinner at their home, actively contributing to his subsistence besides his spiritual development. (At this time he stealthily ate the everyday roast-meat chop of his landlady’s dachshund.) He had to leave Berlin in 1933, which became more and more dangerous for left-wing Jewish intellectual immigrants. He went to Vienna and from there to Budapest by boat. He went to court schoolgirls at Lajos Pécsi’s studio in Dorottya Street almost everyday with his friends from the Munka-kör (Work Circle), among them Lajos Kassák. He worked for photographer Ferenc Veres in Budapest, taking photos of Budapest for touristic leaflets and publications. But he did not do it just howsoever! He did it by the metre. The photographer bought the exposed and developed Leica-films by 26 frames, i.e. by the metre from Endre Friedmann. We do not know what happened to these pictures or those he made in 1933 at the World Scout Jamboree in Gödöllő. Some of them were certainly taken to Paris, where a photographer friend of his tried to sell them to French photo agencies – without any success.
He moved to Paris in September 1933, still not as Capa, but neither as Bandi Friedmann any more; he tried to sell his photos under his new name André Friedman – with little success. He was starving more often than eating well. The young Hungarian with many names yet being actually an unknown photographer was helped by André Kertész with work, connections, his friendship and – knowing Capa – certainly with some money, too. (Later – already in America – he designed Capa’s book titled Death in the Making (Így készül a halál) from Gerda Taro’s and Capa’s photos taken in Spain.) He came into contact with Gisèle Freund, Hans Namuth and Chim at this time. Soon after he made friends with Henri Cartier-Bresson.
His first photo report was published in 1934 in Vu Magazine. He changed his name to Capa around this time almost together with his girlfriend Gerda Pohorylle, whose name became Gerda Taro. Foreign literature wrongly put together the name of Robert Capa from those of Robert Taylor and Frank Capra, but, to our knowledge, he was called Cápa (shark) because of his big mouth and pushy behaviour already at secondary school in Budapest. All he did abroad was to make it sound English by dropping the accent. The change of his name was also motivated by financial interests, since Gerda was able to sell the photos of a successful American photographer at a price three times higher than those of André. His appearance was also significantly transformed together with the change of his name. He had his long hair cut and he began to wear well-ironed suits, believing that it would be the seal of his success. However, it was difficult for him to work up the change of his name and the radical transformation of his appearance mentally.
He went to record the Spanish Civil War in 1936/37 together with Gerda Taro (whom he taught photography), assigned by Regards, a leftist French weekly magazine. And why should he not have received accreditation when his commissioner, Regards had a Hungarian editor, Pál Aranyossy writing under the name of Falus? Dezső Hoffmann was also working here at this time. Gerda died during an air-raid, but Spain became the springboard to world-wide fame for Capa since his photo titled “The Falling Soldier” irrevocably became a classic.
He worked in London, Paris and returned to Spain to take photos at the fall of Barcelona. He was everywhere where the sky was resounding. Besides the weekly magazine Regards, his photos were also published in LIFE. A countless number of his photos were published by Stefan Lorant in his journals, in Weekly Illustrated and in Picture Post. Lorant coined the slogan “The Greatest War Photographer in the World: Robert Capa,” which accompanied him all through his life.
He spent six months in China with film director Joris Ivens and cameraman John Fernhout during the Japanese occupation. He learnt English from the Dutch in the middle of China and he taught them songs of Hungarian highwaymen in exchange. By the way, Fernhout was Éva Besnyő’s first husband, whom she met earlier in the Spanish Civil War.
Capa returned to Paris, then went back to Spain again to take the series of photos published on 11 pages in Picture Post, two pages in LIFE and five pages in Regards.
After his father died in Budapest, he had nothing else binding him to Europe, so he moved to the United States in 1939 following his mother and his younger brother. Not only his photography, but also the typical Hungarian “lecho” (lecsó) dish cooked by Júlia Friedmann became a legend in the larger group of their friends. He preserved his Hungarian bonds: in his writing “Why have I left home?” he wrote about the conspiracy with his secondary schoolmates under the pillars of the Chain Bridge in Budapest. At the time, he mostly made reportage for LIFE, for example about the presidential elections in Mexico, where he met Kati Deutsch again, a former pupil of Hungarian photographer Lajos Pécsi.
He authored a book in 1941 together with writer Diana Forbes-Robertson about the air battle of London, entitled The Battle of Waterloo Road. After Hungary’s declaration of war, for being a citizen of an enemy state, he was not allowed to leave a ten-mile range of New York and he was also forbidden to take photos. However, in a rather short time, as perhaps the only alien enemy, he achieved to be accredited by the U. S. Army. He only had these personal documents at that time: U. S. residence permit, a Hungarian passport and letters of assignment from various journals. It did not pose an unsolvable problem to him, since he already succeeded in crossing international borders with an expired passport and a nicely decorated Hungarian restaurant menu – and with his big talk – already ten years earlier.
He took photos in England, North Africa, Sicily and in other parts of Italy. He landed with the first American troops on D-Day. He covered the last German offensive in Belgium and took photos about the fall of Leipzig. In the last day of the war he was asked by the Paris correspondent of the American Army’s radio to read an appeal in Hungarian on the air to persuade the population of besieged Budapest to turn against the Germans. Capa accepted to do it; however, by this time his Hungarian had become so rusty that he had to give it up in disgrace. After this incident, his friends were teasing him unmercifully about being a fake Hungarian. At this time Hemingway’s saying became a classic: “Capa speaks seven languages, but all of them poorly.”
At the end of the war, he was about to have a business-card printed with the title “Robert Capa, war photographer, unemployed.” Being aware of the course of world history since that time and Capa’s life story, he could hardly have distributed a lot of these cards. He received U. S. citizenship after the war, officially under the name of Robert Capa.
He went to the Soviet Union in 1947 with John Steinbeck, who wrote about him: “Capa was able to see and use what he had discovered. He was able to show the whole population’s hatred on a child’s face… Capa’s work is the proof of his great heart and his exuberant compassion… I frequently travelled and worked with Capa. He may have had much closer friends but nobody liked him as much as I did. He liked to seem to be easy and carefree in his work. But he was not. His photos are not accidental.”
In the same year, he founded Magnum in New York with Henri Cartier-Bresson, David Seymour, George Rodger, Maria Eisner, William Vandivert and his wife. Organising the agency, getting clients and making money took much of his time. He wrote to Maria Eisner around 1950: “I enjoy so much to be able to take photos again that I think I will get into to the habit.” After his death, Magnum was taken on and managed by his younger brother, Kornél Friedmann – or as he is better known: Cornell Capa.
In 1947, Robert Capa went to Turkey with a 16 mm film camera. A little bit later he covered the birth of the State of Israel. In Tel Aviv he met a lot of Hungarian acquaintances and then, guided by Paul Goldmann, a photographer of Hungarian origins, he took pictures of the heroic defence at the Kibbutz Negba in the Negev Desert. He also recorded the immigrant Hungarian battalion fighting for the liberation of Jerusalem.
In 1948, he spent six weeks in Hungary, taking photos of the war-torn country with the more and more evident signs of communist influence. At this time reconstruction works were implemented under the first three-year plan. He was accompanied by György Markos, his friend in Berlin and then in Paris. He took photos at the Ganz Shipyard, he recorded the first rice harvest in Békés County and the city of Budapest reviving from the ruins. “The day before I left, I went to get my exit visa. The sergeant who handled foreigners studied my passport very thoroughly. After stamping my exit visa, he asked me which school I went to. I told him the name of my secondary school in Budapest and he promptly listed my teachers and found out the year of my matriculation. He attended the same school, which he finished two years later than me. He gave back my passport and said: “If you had been born two years later with your talent, you either would not be alive today or you would be a secretary of a minister. This way, however, you are only a troubled Western liberal. This is historical materialism.”” This story, entitled “Conversation in Budapest” was published a year later in Holiday Magazine.
Until 1952, he mostly reported about his travels on assignment by Holiday Magazine, often writing the articles as well. Although he never grew rich, he was always full of ideas hiding opportunities to make a lot of money. Once he said: “I will never make millions. You make millions if you have one good idea. When you have twenty a day, you have to share them.” He was proud of his shrewdness that he attributed to being Hungarian. He reversed the well-known slogan from Hollywood, quoted earlier. In his version he said: “It is not enough to have talent, you also have to be Hungarian.”
In 1954, he was sent to Indochina by LIFE to cover the French colonies. On 25 May, he stepped on a land-mine and died. He was honoured with a posthumous Croix de Guerre by General René Cogny.
Capa’s memory has not faded – neither in Hungary, nor abroad. This is, not the least, due to his younger brother who, after the deaths of Capa, Bischof and Chim, felt that he did not have a more important task in his life than ensuring eternal life for these geniuses of photography. His zeal is attested by several exhibitions and books. His work was not without success: almost thirty years after Capa’s death, one of the best Hungarian writers, Ferenc Karinthy wrote about the photographer in his book The End of the World (Vége a világnak). Also András Simor wrote a poem as an homage to the photographer and to the soldier he made immortal. Film director Miklós Jancsó wrote an essay for the fortieth anniversary of Thái Bình. And above all: there is no photographic history or textbook without mentioning both of their names with Robert Capa on the top.
Károly Kincses (2005) “Robert Capa,” on the Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center website [Online] Cited 03/11/2019
Please note: according to Capa’s birth entry his fathers name was Dávid Friedman (one n) and he was named Endre Ernő Friedman (one n). According to my friend György Németh whom this information came from, he later used his name with two N. As György says, it’s a bit of a mess as he used all kind of spelling throughout his life. Thank you György!
Robert Capa’s birth entry
Second gallery
Installation view of the exhibition The Photojournalist Robert Capa II at the Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center, Budapest Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Capa (American-Hungarian, 1913-1954) Fountain rubble in city square, Stalingrad, USSR (installation view) August 1-31, 1947 Gelatin silver print, printed 1990s 50 x 40cm Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Capa (American-Hungarian, 1913-1954) Student civil-defense volunteers assisting the wounded, Guangzhou, China (installation view) July-September 1938 Gelatin silver print, printed 1990s 40 x 50cm Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation views of the exhibition The Photojournalist Robert Capa II at the Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center, Budapest Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Capa (American-Hungarian, 1913-1954) Funeral procession for victim killed on the day of the presidential elections, Mexico City, Mexico (installation view) July 9, 1940 Gelatin silver print, printed 1990s 40 x 50cm Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Capa (American-Hungarian, 1913-1954) Man and cat outside an air-raid shelter, London, UK June-July 1941 Gelatin silver print, printed 1990s 40 x 50cm
Installation views of the exhibition The Photojournalist Robert Capa II at the Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center, Budapest Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Capa (American-Hungarian, 1913-1954) Medical transport craft for men wounded in the first wave of American troops landing on D-Day, off Omaha Beach, near Colelville-sur-Mer, Omaha Beach, Normandy, France (installation view) June 6, 1944 Gelatin silver print, printed 1990s 50 x 40cm Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Capa (American-Hungarian, 1913-1954) German soldiers captured by American forces burying some of the men killed during the D-Day landings, near Colelville-sur-Mer, Omaha Beach, Normandy, France June 1944 Gelatin silver print, printed 1990s 50 x 40cm
Robert Capa (American-Hungarian, 1913-1954) American soldiers guard a group of captured Germans, southwest of Saint-Lð, Normandy, France July 26-30, 1944 Gelatin silver print, printed 1990s 40 x 50cm
Robert Capa (American-Hungarian, 1913-1954) Cow in the middle of a street lined with ruined buildings, Normandy, France (installation view) June-July 1944 Gelatin silver print, printed 1990s 40 x 50cm Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Capa (American-Hungarian, 1913-1954) Soldiers leading a French woman who had collaborated with the Germans to the Préfecture de Police to have her head shaved, Chartres, France (installation view) August 18, 1944 Gelatin silver print, printed 1990s 40 x 50cm Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition The Photojournalist Robert Capa II at the Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center, Budapest Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Capa (American-Hungarian, 1913-1954) German soldiers captured by American forces during the Battle of the Bulge, south of Bastogne, Belgium (installation view) December 23-26, 1944 Gelatin silver print, printed 1990s 50 x 40cm Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center, Budapest 8 Nagymező Street, 1065 Budapest, Hungary Phone: +36 1 413 1310
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Dr. Federico Marín, Jean Charlot, and Tina Modotti 1925 Vintage gelatin silver print 7 1/2 x 9 1/4 inches
Shown with Modotti are Federico Marín, who was Diego Rivera’s brother-in-law and physician, and Jean Charlot, who is here seen making a sketch on Tina’s back.
If there is one period and two countries that I love more than anything else in the history of medium, it is the avant-garde photography of the interwar years in France and the photography of Mexico in the 1920s and 1930s.
American, French and Italian photographers were drawn like bees to a honey pot to the blossoming artistic scene in Mexico City and the country in general. They soaked up the unique Mexican culture, its atmosphere of work, religion, beauty, death, poverty, and sensuality – its churches, religious icons, sculptures, festivals, pottery, and people – the land, the mountains and the inhabitants all photographed in this dazzling light. They photographed in an “international modernism” style (the supposed revolution in modern photography named in the title), expatriate photographers in a hospitable but impoverished land. But this was not their land, for this was not their country.
While Strand “modified his 5 × 7 Graflex camera, adding a special prism extension that enabled him to clandestinely shoot a subject at a 90° angle from the front of his camera”, surreptitiously making portraits as he had done in his New York subway portraits; while Weston documents the murals of Mexican culture at a distance, the clay pots as an abstract composition, and the traditional art and craft Tehuana dress as idealised icon; while Modotti comes closer with her political statements and constructed still life; it is only the Mexican artist Manuel Álvarez Bravo that steals my heart.
His work exudes the spirit of the country through its sensitivity and connection to the earth from which he was born. The light and form in Bravo La Siesta de los Peregrinos; the light and form in Retrato de lo Eterno. I have studied his work quite thoroughly. He is the blessed one. Through his music, he captures the light and life of Mexico, the spirit of the eternal, “the sunlight [as] a discreet veil that turns the shadows into velvet.” His work is the art of the People.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Hands in the Water of the Mind
The water of the mind has filled with forms. Come, come closer now, elusive as an anemone or a jellyfish a criminal, a saint;
dip your hand in and pull from the tormented water angles and profiles, an incessant music,
the murmur of the sky, the mouth of the earth, the crown of the breeze, the rings of fire,
the bodies of the lynxes, the wings of the bat, the glasses and the pillow, the brightness of hunger.
David Huerta
Many thankx to the Palmer Museum of Art for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
In the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920), expatriate photographers flocked to the blossoming artistic scene in Mexico City. Los Angelino Edward Weston reinvented his approach to the medium during three years there in the 1920s. In exploring the development of international modernism into the next decades, this exhibition features rare photographs by Italian Tina Modotti, New Yorkers Helen Levitt and Paul Strand, French master Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Mexico’s own Manuel Álvarez Bravo.
“For six months I worked at still photographs of Mexico, made about sixty platinum prints, completed and mounted them. Among other things I made a series of photographs in the churches, of the Christs and Madonnas, carved out of wood by the Indians. They are among the most extraordinary sculptures I have seen anywhere, and have apparently gone relatively unnoticed. These figures so alive with the intensity of the faith of those who made them. That is what interested me, the faith, even if it is not mine; a form of faith, to be sure, that is passing, that has to go. But the world needs a faith equally intense in something else, something more realistic, as I see it. Hence my impulse to photograph these things, and I think the photographs are pretty swell.”
Paul Strand
“At first the brilliance of technique is commented on. Laymen say: What reality! How three-dimensional. Photographers say: What texture! What a scale of values! What print quality! This is a first reaction and the least significant one. All this virtuosity is at the service of what Strand has to express, the felt idea behind the photograph.”
Leo Hurwitz
“Popular Art is the art of the People. A popular painter is an artisan who, as in the Middle Ages, remains anonymous. His work needs no advertisement, as it is done for the people around him. The more pretentious artist craves to become famous, and it is characteristic of his work that it is bought for the name rather than for the work – a name that is built up by propaganda. Before the Conquest all art was of the people, and popular art has never ceased to exist in Mexico.”
Manuel Álvarez Bravo
Charles Betts Waite (American, 1861-1927) The Iguana 1901 Vintage gelatin silver print 5 x 7 7/8 inches
In this playful study, the shadows dominate: the bowl of vittles atop the man’s shadow suggest a sombrero shielding a sleeping man’s face during an afternoon siesta.
[Waite] traveled to Mexico City and in May 1897 established a photography studio there, during the Porfirio Díaz government. He became part of Porfirian society, taking photographs of many in the ruler’s circle. He was among a group of expatriate photographers (such as Winfield Scott and fellow San Diegans Ralph Carmichael and Percy S. Cox) working in Mexico in the first decade of the 20th century. Waite traveled throughout Mexico, exploring archaeological sites and the countryside.
[Waite’s life] corresponds with that of adventurers, brave explorers with romantic spirits and materialistic outlooks, who toured the hitherto unknown world, discovering their riches and inventing paradises.” ~ Francisco Montellano, author of C. B. Waite, fotógrafo
His works were published in books, travel magazines, and on post cards, having contracted with the Sonora News Company. He also worked for several Mexican newspapers, and he documented United States scientific expeditions in Mexico. The images often included scenic Mexican images and the country’s native residents. Many of Waite’s photographs depict railroads, parks, archaeological sites, and business enterprises.
Tina Modotti (Italian, 1896-1942) Experiment in Related Form 1924 Vintage gelatin silver print 7 3/8 x 9 3/8 inches
This is one of only two known photomontages by Modotti, in which a single image of six wine glasses is enlarged and cropped and then superimposed onto itself.
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Ollas de Oaxaca 1926 Vintage palladium print 8 x 10 inches
An olla is a clay pot or jar. Weston wrote that his first thought of Oaxaca “is always of the market, – and the market means first of all loza– crockery! I bought and bought – dishes, jars, jugettes, – of the dull black or grey-black ware, and of the deep green glaze ware… Very well do these people reproduce, make use of the essential quality of the material, – splendidly do they observe and utilise to advantage the very essence of a form. A race of born sculptors!”
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Detail of stone frieze, ruins of Mitla, Oaxaca 1926 Vintage gelatin silver print 7 1/2 x 9 1/2 inches
“I was fascinated by the stone mosaics at Mitla, for besides a variation on the Greek fret, there was a unique pattern – oblique lines of dynamic force – flashes of stone lightning, which remain my strongest memory.” ~ Edward Weston, The Daybooks, vol. I.
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Stone lions in relief, Oaxaca 1926 Vintage gelatin silver print 7 1/2 x 9 1/2 inches
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Two clay pitchers 1926 Vintage gelatin silver print 7 1/2 x 9 1/4 inches
These studies of pre-Columbian and folk-art statuary and pottery, done for Anita Brenner’s Idols Behind Altars project, taught Weston the art of the table-top still life. As such, they were the direct precursor to the iconic shells, peppers, and cabbages that occupied him immediately upon his return to Los Angeles in December 1926.
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Tarascan Pottery, Michoacán 1926 Vintage gelatin silver print 7 1/2 x 8 1/4 inches
The Tarascan people flourished from 1100 A.D. to 1530 A.D. After the Spanish Conquest, missionaries organised the Tarascan empire into a series of craft-oriented villages. Their artistic traditions survive today in the Lake Pátzcuaro region.
Tina Modotti (Italian, 1896-1942) Jean Charlot 1923 Vintage gelatin silver print 9 1/2 x 7 1/2 inches
Anita Brenner and Tina Modotti remained friendly rivals in Mexico City’s close-knit artistic expatriate community throughout the 1920s. Their intertwined social life revolved around the French-Mexican painter Jean Charlot, who had been a principal assistant to Rivera. Charlot was Weston’s closest friend in Mexico as well as Brenner’s paramour and professional collaborator. In a diary entry in 1927, Brenner made a three-column table captioned “Actively Friends; Actively Enemies; and Actively Both.” Modotti’s name appears in the third column.
This sensitive Modotti portrait is inscribed by Charlot to Brenner, “You are bad tempered / I am worst tempered / Does that explain the sweet / Hours we passed together”
Tina Modotti (Italian, 1896-1942) Elisa Kneeling 1924 Vintage palladium print 8 7/8 x 6 5/8 inches
The power of Modotti’s portrait of her young chambermaid is due to the contrast between her beatific face and her coiled hands, which suggest a lifetime of hard manual labor.
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Anita (“Pear-Shaped Nude”) 1925 Vintage gelatin silver print 8 5/8 x 7 3/8 inches
“I was shaving when A[nita] came, hardly expecting her on such a gloomy, drizzling day. I made excuses, having no desire, no ‘inspiration’ to work … but she took no hints, undressing while I reluctantly prepared my camera… And then appeared to me the most exquisite lines, forms, volumes – and I accepted, – working easily, rapidly, surely…
Reviewing the new prints, I am seldom so happy as I am with the pear-like nude of A[nita]. I turn to it again and again. I could hug the print in sheer joy. It is one of my most perfect photographs.” ~ Edward Weston, The Daybooks, vol. I
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Excusado 1926 Gelatin silver print, 1930s 10 x 8 inches
“‘Form follows function.’ Who said this I don’t know, but the writer spoke well! I have been photographing our toilet, that glossy enamelled receptacle of extraordinary beauty. It might be suspicioned that I am in a cynical mood to approach such subject matter… My excitement was absolute aesthetic response to form… I was thrilled! – here was every sensuous curve of the ‘human form divine’ but minus imperfections.” ~ Edward Weston, The Daybooks, vol. I
Weston was particularly amused when his chambermaid placed a bouquet of flowers in the bowl, in a well-meaning effort to create a more fitting subject for her employer’s lens.
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Casa de Vecindad 1926 Vintage gelatin silver print 7 3/8 x 9 1/2 inches
A casa de vecindad or “neighborhood house” was a community home or tenement. This one had once been “a fine old convent,” wrote Weston. “The light was made perfect by the collective noise of cats and dogs, children laughing and crying, women gabbling and vendors calling.”
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Arches, Oaxaca 1926 Vintage gelatin silver print 9 1/2 x 7 1/2 inches
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Guadalajara, Barranca de los Oblatos: Rocky Trail 1925 Vintage palladium print 10 x 8 inches
Mexico City in the 1920s-30s was the scene of one of the great artistic flowerings of the twentieth century. Like Paris in the aftermath of World War I, Mexico City after the decade-long Mexican Revolution served as a magnet for international artists and photographers. Foremost among the expatriate photographers was the Los Angelino, Edward Weston, who embedded himself in the artistic milieu surrounding the muralist painters Rivera, Orozco, and Siqueiros. Weston reinvented his approach to picture-making during his three years in Mexico, 1923-26. The soft-focus painterliness that had characterised his studio portraiture in the ‘teens melted away under the brilliant Mexican sun, to be replaced by crystalline landscapes as well as evocative still life that prefigured his later shells and peppers. Meanwhile his paramour and protégée, the Italian silent film star Tina Modotti, created photographs that would place her in the pantheon of great photographers of the era. This exhibition features rare vintage Mexican masterworks by both Weston and Modotti from the 1920s, as well as stellar photographs from the 1930s by the New Yorker Paul Strand, the Frenchman Henri Cartier-Bresson, and by Mexico’s own self-taught master of the camera, Manuel Álvarez Bravo.
Already in the first two decades of the 20th century, immigrant photographers had played an outsize role in Mexican photography. German-born Hugo Brehme published picturesque views of Mexican life and landscape in local and international tourist magazines, including National Geographic. Brehme’s fellow German émigré, Carl Wilhelm (Guillermo) Kahlo, meticulously photographed Mexico’s colonial architecture; his daughter Frida would marry Diego Rivera and become a legendary painter and personality. A third talented immigrant photographer was the Californian C.B. Waite, who moved to Mexico City in 1897 and opened a photo studio. At their best, as in The Iguana from 1901, seen here, Waite’s genre studies prefigure by a quarter century the exotic Surrealism that would characterise the work of Modotti, Álvarez Bravo, and Cartier-Bresson.
In 1923, C.B. Waite left Mexico and retired to Glendale, California, a suburb of Los Angeles. Coincidentally, within a few months, Glendale’s leading photographer, Edward Weston, would make that same journey in the opposite direction. Weston sought to escape from the personal and professional distractions that he felt were deterring him from an aesthetic breakthrough. His love affair with Tina Modotti made him realise that he would never be a conventional husband. In August, 1923, Weston left the port of Los Angeles and sailed to Mexico on the S.S. Colima, accompanied by Modotti, who agreed to run his studio in exchange for photography lessons.
The Weston-Modotti home in Mexico City became a gathering place for writers, painters and photographers. This was the time of the Mexican Renaissance, a cultural movement that celebrated the country’s modern artists as well as its popular and indigenous arts. Under the presidency of Álvaro Obregón, the education minister José Vasconcelos sponsored an ambitious program of progressive public art, most notably the mural movement which was led by Diego Rivera, who was in all ways a larger-than-life character.
While Weston never second-guessed his decision to give up the steady income from studio portraiture, he and Tina faced constant money problems during their three years together in Mexico. Financial salvation came in the unlikely guise of a brash 19-year-old anthropology student, Anita Brenner. Born to a mercantile family with roots in both Texas and Mexico, Brenner befriended Weston and Modotti in Mexico City and hired them to furnish 400 photographs for her book, Idols Behind Altars. This was to be the first serious art-historical treatise on pre-Columbian art, Spanish Colonial architecture, and contemporary Mexican folk art. Weston and Modotti rose to the task with gusto, criss-crossing southern Mexico from Oaxaca to Guadalajara in search of prime examples of these genres.
Weston was first introduced to pulquerías, or working-class bars, by Diego Rivera, who was writing an article on pulquería mural painting for Mexican Folkways magazine. Weston was impressed by the vitality of these anonymous murals, writing:
“The aspiring young painters of Mexico should study the unaspiring paintings – popular themes – popular art – which adorn the humble pulquería… brave matadores at the kill – white veiled ladies, pensive beside moonlit waters – an exquisitely tender group of Indians … and all the pictured thoughts, nearest and dearest to the heart of the people.”
When Modotti left Mexico in 1930, she gifted her large-format view cameras to her close friend and protégé, Manuel Álvarez Bravo. With a seven-decade career, he is considered Mexico’s greatest photographer. “I was born in the city of Mexico, behind the Cathedral, in the place where the temples of the ancient Mexican gods must have been built, February fourth, 1902,” he wrote, invoking the magical realism that infuses his most iconic photographs. As a teenager he studied painting at the Academia San Carlos, the same art school that Rivera and Orozco had attended. “Interested since always in art, I committed the common error of believing that photography would be the easiest,” he confessed. In addition to Modotti, another important early mentor was the painter Rufino Tamayo, who counselled Álvarez Bravo against the “surface nationalism” of political art, such as that of Rivera, Orozco, or indeed Modotti herself: “Art is a way of expression that has to be understood by everybody, everywhere. It grows out of the earth, the texture of our lives and our experiences.” Tamayo’s words became Álvarez Bravo’s touchstones.
In 1934, Álvarez Bravo befriended the young painter-turned-photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, who had come to Mexico to spend the year photographing in the brilliant natural light not often found in his native Paris. At a technical level their approach to photography diverged: Álvarez Bravo, like Weston and Modotti, favoured traditional large-format view cameras, while Cartier-Bresson, the progenitor of the “decisive moment,” was an early proponent of the hand-held 35mm Leica camera. Yet their common interest in capturing the “accidental theater of the street” outweighed these differences. “Cartier-Bresson and I did not photograph together but we walked the same streets and photographed many of the same things,” Álvarez Bravo recalled. They exhibited together in 1935 in a show entitled Documentary and Anti-Graphic Photographs, first at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City and then at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York. This seminal exhibit was the first time that “street photography” had been placed in a serious fine art setting. Reviewing that show, poet Langston Hughes wrote: “In a photograph by Cartier-Bresson, as in modern music, there is a clash of sunlight and shadow, while in Bravo, the sunlight is a discreet veil that turns the shadows into velvet.”
Text from the Palmer Museum of Art
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Los Changos Vaciladores (Playful Monkeys), pulquería mural 1926 Vintage gelatin silver print 7 1/2 x 9 1/2 inches
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Charrito, pulquería mural 1926 Vintage gelatin silver print 7 1/2 x 9 1/2 inches
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Two children with pulquería mural 1926 Vintage gelatin silver print 9 3/8 x 6 3/4 inches
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Ceiling of the Church of Santiago, Tupátaro 1926 Vintage gelatin silver print 7 1/2 x 9 1/2 inches
“Few had seen this church of Tupátaro, far from tourist tracks. The ceiling was entirely lacquered, even the beams – a notable achievement in colour, design and craftsmanship. That was a hard day of work. Exposures were prolonged to even fifteen minutes with additional flash light, the while I must remain quite still upon a rickety balcony for fear of jarring the camera, which was real torture with more fleas biting and crawling than I ever knew could jump from a few square feet of space.” ~ Edward Weston, The Daybooks, vol. I
Brett Weston (American, 1911-1993) Tin roofs, Mexico 1926 Vintage gelatin silver print 7 1/8 x 9 1/2 inches
Edward Weston’s son Brett joined him in his final year in Mexico. Brett was himself a child prodigy photographer, as evidenced by this sensitively balanced and exquisitely printed abstract masterwork, taken when he was fourteen years old.
Theodore Brett Weston (December 16, 1911, Los Angeles – January 22, 1993, Hawaii) was an American photographer. Van Deren Coke described Brett Weston as the “child genius of American photography.” He was the second of the four sons of photographer Edward Weston and Flora Chandler.
Weston began taking photographs in 1925, while living in Mexico with Tina Modotti and his father. He began showing his photographs with Edward Weston in 1927, was featured at the international exhibition at Film und Foto in Germany at age 17, and mounted his first one-man museum retrospective at age 21 at the De Young Museum in San Francisco in January, 1932.
Weston’s earliest images from the 1920s reflect his intuitive sophisticated sense of abstraction. He often flattened the plane, engaging in layered space, an artistic style more commonly seen among the Abstract Expressionists and more modern painters like David Hockney than other photographers. He began photographing the dunes at Oceano, California, in the early 1930s. This eventually became a favourite location of his father Edward and later shared with Brett’s third wife Dody Weston Thompson. Brett preferred the high gloss papers and ensuing sharp clarity of the gelatin silver photographic materials of the f64 Group rather than the platinum matte photographic papers common in the 1920s and encouraged Edward Weston to explore the new silver papers in his own work. Brett Weston was credited by photography historian Beaumont Newhall as the first photographer to make negative space the subject of a photograph. Donald Ross, a photographer close to both Westons, said that Brett never came after anyone. He was a true photographic equal and colleague to his father and “one should not be considered without the other.”
“Brett and I are always seeing the same kinds of things to do – we have the same kind of vision. Brett didn’t like this; naturally enough, he felt that even when he had done the thing first, the public would not know and he would be blamed for imitating me.” Edward Weston –Daybooks– May 24, 1930.
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Rosa Covarrubias in Tehuana dress 1926 Vintage gelatin silver print 9 3/8 x 7 1/2 inches
Rosa and Miguel Covarrubias were early promoters of traditional Mexican art and craft; their extensive collection now resides at San Francisco’s Mexican Museum. This striking portrait of Rosa in traditional Zapotec dress was appropriated by Diego Rivera for his painting Tehuana Woman, 1929.
Born in Los Angeles, Rosa Rolanda was a dancer with the Marion Morgan dance troupe and the Ziegfeld Follies. She married the Mexican artist Miguel Covarrubias, who was the leading caricaturist of the jazz age. While Rosa and Miguel were accompanying Edward and Tina on one of their trips for Anita Brenner, they taught Rosa the basics of photography. Later, Man Ray would teach her his technique of cameraless photograms. With such tutelage, it is no surprise that Rosa became a gifted photographer in her own right.
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Rosa Covarrubias 1926 Vintage gelatin silver print 9 x 6 3/4 inches
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Palma Bendita 1926 Vintage gelatin silver print 9 1/2 x 7 3/8 inches
The branches of the palma bendita, or “blessed palm,” were believed to have been strewn on the road before Christ during his entry into Jerusalem and are blessed on Palm Sunday, an important Mexican holiday.
Tina Modotti (Italian, 1896-1942) Campesinos (Workers’ Parade) 1926 Vintage palladium print 8 3/8 x 7 1/2 inches
Modotti’s iconic Campesinos has the same formal structure – circular forms filling the picture frame – as Weston’s Olla Pots of Oaxaca made the same year. But Modotti’s picture adds a political dimension that Weston would by nature recoil from. Modotti’s increasingly fervent politicisation contributed to the dissolution of her relationship with Weston, who was fundamentally apolitical. Weston returned to Los Angeles at the end of 1926; Modotti would remain in Mexico another four years.
Tina Modotti (Italian, 1896-1942) Bandolier, Corn, Sickle 1927 Vintage gelatin silver print 8 3/4 x 7 1/2 inches
This politically-charged still life, and its companion piece Bandolier, Corn and Guitar, were made the year Modotti formally joined Mexico’s Communist Party. At the time she was modelling for Diego Rivera, a fellow traveler. Modotti’s likeness appears in several of Rivera’s most famous Revolutionary murals; she would also be blamed for the break-up of his marriage to Lupe Marín.
Tina Modotti (Italian, 1896-1942) Bandolier, Corn and Guitar 1927 Vintage gelatin silver print 9 1/2 x 7 1/2 inches
Tina Modotti (Italian, 1896-1942) Women of Tehuantepec 1929 Vintage gelatin silver print 9 x 7 1/4 inches
This is one of Modotti’s final masterworks. The following year she would be expelled from Mexico for sedition, due to her work on behalf of the Communist Party. She settled in Russia, giving up photography for relief work with International Red Aid. When the Spanish Civil War erupted in 1936, she joined the fray. She returned to Mexico under a pseudonym in 1939, and died of a heart attack three years later, at age 45, her life the stuff of legend.
Manuel Álvarez Bravo (Mexican, 1902-2002) La Siesta de los Peregrinos (the siesta of the migrants) 1930s Vintage gelatin silver print 6 7/8 x 9 3/8 inches
Manuel Álvarez Bravo (February 4, 1902 – October 19, 2002) was a Mexican artistic photographer and one of the most important figures in 20th century Latin American photography. He was born and raised in Mexico City. While he took art classes at the Academy of San Carlos, his photography is self-taught. His career spanned from the late 1920s to the 1990s with its artistic peak between the 1920s and 1950s. His hallmark as a photographer was to capture images of the ordinary but in ironic or Surrealistic ways. His early work was based on European influences, but he was soon influenced by the Mexican muralism movement and the general cultural and political push at the time to redefine Mexican identity. He rejected the picturesque, employing elements to avoid stereotyping. He had numerous exhibitions of his work, worked in the Mexican cinema and established Fondo Editorial de la Plástica Mexicana publishing house. He won numerous awards for his work, mostly after 1970. …
Álvarez Bravo’s photography career spanned from the late 1920s to the 1990s. It formed in the decades after the Mexican Revolution (1920s to 1950s) when there was significant creative output in the country, much of it sponsored by the government wanting to promote a new Mexican identity based on both modernity and the country’s indigenous past.
Although he was photographing in the late 1920s, he became a freelance photographer full-time in 1930, quitting his government job. That same year, Tina Modotti was deported from Mexico for political activities and she left Alvarez Bravo her camera and her job at Mexican Folkways magazine. For this publication, Alvarez Bravo began photographing the work of the Mexican muralists and other painters. During the rest of the 1930s, he established his career. He met photographer Paul Strand in 1933 on the set of the film “Redes”, and worked with him briefly. In 1938, he met French Surrealist artist André Breton, who promoted Alvaréz Bravo’s work in France, exhibiting it there. Later, Breton asked for a photograph for the cover of catalog for an exhibition in Mexico. Alvarez Bravo created “La buena fama durmiendo” (The good reputation sleeping), which Mexican censors rejected due to nudity. The photograph would be reproduced many times after that however.
Alvarez Bravo trained most of the next generation of photographers including Nacho López, Héctor García and Graciela Iturbide. From 1938 to 1939, he taught photography at the Escuela Central de Artes Plásticas, now the National School of Arts (UNAM). In the latter half of the 1960s he taught at the Centro Universitario de Estudios Cinematográficos.
Manuel Álvarez Bravo (Mexican, 1902-2002) Retrato de lo Eterno (Portrait of the Eternal) 1935 Vintage gelatin silver print 9 1/2 x 7 3/8 inches
Henri Cartier-Bresson (French, 1908-2004) The Spider of Love, Mexico City 1934 Gelatin silver print c. 1960 6 1/2 x 9 3/4 inches
“I was very lucky. I had only to push the door open. It was so voluptuous, so sensual. I couldn’t see their faces. It was miraculous – physical love in all its fullness. Tonio grabbed a lamp, and I took several shots. There was nothing obscene about it. I could never have got them to pose – a matter of decency.” ~ Cartier-Bresson
Henri Cartier-Bresson (French, 1908-2004) Calle Cuauhtemoctzin (two prostitutes), Mexico City 1934 Gelatin silver print c. 1960 9 1/8 x 13 3/4 inches
Manuel Álvarez Bravo (Mexican, 1902-2002) Niña con Leña (Girl with Firewood) 1930s Vintage gelatin silver print 7 x 9 5/8 inches
Helen Levitt’s photographs of Mexico City, taken in 1941, are a notable exception to her otherwise exclusive focus on New York City during her long career (1930s through 1970s). But the principal subject matter of Levitt’s work was the same in both metropolises: the lives of children in working-class neighbourhoods. In this evocative image, the children’s play is undeterred by their poverty, which is evidenced by their bare feet, the dirt road, and the dilapidated buildings. Levitt studied with the noted photographer Walker Evans; her work was also influenced by the other artists in the present exhibition: like Cartier-Bresson, she favoured the hand-held Leica camera; like Paul Strand, she used a secret sideways lens that enabled her to photograph surreptitiously.
Levitt printed her Mexican photographs only after returning to New York, where they added to her blossoming reputation. Her first one-woman show at the Museum of Modern Art included sixteen photographs from Mexico, including a variant of this image (below).
Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009) Mexico City 1941 Vintage gelatin silver print 7 1/4 x 9 5/8 inches
Henri Cartier-Bresson (French, 1908-2004) Mexico 1963 Vintage gelatin silver print 9 3/4 x 6 1/2 inches
Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Paul Strand achieved early recognition as a protégé of Alfred Stieglitz, the New York photographer and gallerist. In 1917 Stieglitz devoted the final two issues of his Camera Work magazine to Strand’s high modernist photography, which was heavily influenced by avant garde artists such as Paul Cezanne and Pablo Picasso. Stieglitz praised Strand’s work as “brutally direct” and “devoid of all flim-flam.”
By 1932, when Strand drove his Model A Ford from Taos to Mexico, his style had evolved dramatically. Abstraction had given way to humanism, reflecting the influence of his high school photography teacher, the eminent social documentarian Lewis Hine. Strand was now concerned with how people lived, and especially with those aspects of life that “make a place what it is.” Mexico was a logical destination for Strand, whose political concern for the common man intersected with the proletarian goals of the Mexican Revolution.
Over the next several months Strand photographed people and places in rural small towns across southern Mexico, from Michoacán in the West to Oaxaca in the East, unconsciously retracing Edward Weston and Tina Modotti’s footsteps from the 1920s. Strand’s work in Mexico set the tone for the photographic journeys to out-of-the-way destinations in Europe and Africa that would occupy the rest of his long career.
For these Mexican portraits, Strand modified his 5 x 7 Graflex camera, adding a special prism extension that enabled him to clandestinely shoot a subject at a 90° angle from the front of his camera. The subjects of these portraits, absorbedly watching the Yankee photographer at work, were unaware that he was actually aiming his camera at them. Strand had pioneered this technique as a young photographer on the streets of New York.
Strand originally printed his Mexican photographs as platinum prints. The prints shown here are hand-pulled photogravures created for a 1940 portfolio Photographs of Mexico. In his introduction to the portfolio, Strand describes the prints as “a step forward in the art of reproduction processes,” attributing their quality to the production team’s combined two centuries of experience.
Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976) Near Saltillo 1932 Vintage photogravure 5 x 6 3/8 inches
“When you leave the Texas border for about 70 miles – flat desert, it could still be Texas. Then suddenly appear the mountains of the North around Monterrey and Saltillo – amazing mountains. They are a continuation of the American spur – our Rockies I suppose – but how different – utterly fantastic shapes, like mountains in fairy books. And I never saw the forms within each individual mountain – defined – come right at you as those in the North.” ~ Paul Strand to painter John Marin
Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976) Gateway – Hidalgo 1933 Vintage photogravure 10 1/8 x 8 inches
“What have come to be known as ‘Strand clouds’ – heavy, lowering shapes holding rain and threat of storm – appear in a great many of his photographs. A friend of Strand’s remembers him cursing under his breath whenever fluffy, cottony cloud formations, which he referred to as ‘Johnson & Johnson,’ took over the sky; they never appear in his prints.” ~ Calvin Tomkins
Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976) Boy – Hidalgo 1933 Vintage photogravure 6 3/8 x 5 inches
Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976) Man with Hoe – Los Remedios 1933 Vintage photogravure 6 1/4 x 5 inches
Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976) Plaza – State of Puebla 1933 Vintage photogravure 5 x 6 3/8 inches
Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976) Church, Cuapiaxtla 1933 Vintage photogravure 6 3/8 x 5 inches
Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976) Man – Tenancingo 1933 Vintage photogravure 6 1/2 x 5 1/8 inches
Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976) Girl and Child – Toluca 1933 Vintage photogravure 6 1/2 x 5 1/8 inches
Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976) Boy – Uruapan 1933 Vintage photogravure 10 1/8 x 8 1/8 inches
Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976) Cristo – Oaxaca 1933 Vintage photogravure 10 x 8 inches
Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976) Cristo with Thorns – Huexotla 1933 Vintage photogravure 10 1/4 x 8 1/8 inches
Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976) Cristo – Tlacochoaya – Oaxaca 1933 Vintage photogravure 10 1/4 x 8 inches
Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976) Virgin – San Felipe – Oaxaca 1933 Vintage photogravure 10 1/4 x 8 1/8 inches
Palmer Museum of Art The Pennsylvania State University Curtin Road University Park, PA 16802
Rare magician, strange alchemist, tells stories through visuals
I am indebted to James McArdle’s blog posting “Work” on his excellent On This Date In Photography website for alerting me to this exhibition, and for reminding me of the work of this outstanding artist, Jakob Tuggener.
The short version: Jakob Tuggener was a draftsman before he became an artist, studying poster design, typography, photography and film. “In 1943, in the middle of the Second World War, Tuggerer’s book Fabrik (Factory) appeared. At first glance, the series of 72 photographs without a text contained therein seems to depict a kind of history of industrialisation – from the rural textile industry to mechanical engineering and high-voltage electrical engineering to modern power plant construction in the mountains. An in-depth reading, however, shows that Tuggener’s film-associative series of photographs simultaneously points to the destructive potential of unrestrained technological progress, as a result of which he sees the then raging World War, and for which the Swiss arms industry produced unlimited weapons. Tuggener was ahead of his time with the book conceived according to the laws of silent film.” (Press release)
Fabrik, subtitled Ein Bildepos der Technik (“Epic of the technological image” or “A picture of technology”) pictures the world of work and industry, and “is considered a milestone in the history of the photo book.” It uses expressive visuals (actions, appearances and behaviours; movements, gestures and details – Tuggener loves the detail) to tell a subjective story, that of the relationship between human and machine. While the book was well ahead of its time, and influenced the early work of that famous Swiss photographer Robert Frank, it did not emerge out of a vacuum and is perhaps not as revolutionary as some people think. Nothing ever appears out of thin air.
“German photographer Paul Wolff, often working in collaboration with Alfred Tritschler, produced a number of exceptional photo books through the 1920s and ’30s, at a time when Constructivism and the Bauhaus influenced many with visions “of an industrialized and socialized society” that placed Germany at “the forefront of European photography” (Martin Parr and Gerry Badger. The Photobook: A History Volume I, Phaidon Press, 2005, p. 86). Arbeit! (1937) is particularly noted for its architectural framing and lighting of massive machinery, its striking portraits of factory workers, and is frequently aligned with works such as Lewis Hine’s Men at Work (1932) and Albert Renger-Patzsch’s Eisen und Stahl (Iron and Steel) (1931).” (Anonymous. “Arbeit!,” on the Bauman Rare Books website [Online] Cited 03/02/2022)
François Kollar’s project La France travail (Working France) (1931-1934), E. O. Hoppé’s Deutsche Arbeit (1930), Heinrich Hauser’s Schwarzes Revier (Black Area) (1930) and Germaine Krull’s Metal (1928) all address the profound social and economic tensions that preceded the Second World War, through an avant-garde photography in the style of “New Vision” and “New Objectivity” – that is, through objective photographs that question common rules of composition, avoiding the more obvious ways subjects would have been photographed at the time. Obscure angles and perspectives abound in these striking photobooks, making their clinical, objective fervour “the great persuaders” of the 1930s and 40s, Modernist and propaganda books of their time.
What made Tuggener so different was the uncompromising subjectiveness of his work, “photographing the two worlds, privilege and labour.” His direct, strong images of factories and high society use wonderful form, light, and shadow to convey their message, never loosing sight of the human dimension, for they shift “our angle from the boss’ POV [point of view] to those unable to get any respite or distance from the situation,” that of the workers. They are a piece of time and human history, which gets closer to the lived reality of the factory floor, than much of the work of his predecessors. Tuggener portrays the mundanity of the “operational sequence” (la chaîne opératoire) of the machine, where the human becomes the oil used to grease the cogs of the ever-demanding “mechanical monsters.” (See Evan Calder Williams’ “Rattling Devils” quotations below)
Tuggener then adds to this new way of seeing which recorded the multiplicity of his points of view – “a modern new style of photography showing not just how things looked, but how it felt to be there” – through the sequencing of the images, which can be seen in the wonderfully combined double pages of the Fabrik book layouts below. Take for example, the photograph that is on the dust jacket, a portrait of a middle-aged worker with a grave look on his face that says, “why the hell are you taking my photograph, why don’t you just f… off.” In the book, Tuggener pairs this image with a whistle letting off steam, a metaphor for the man’s state of being. Tuggener creates these most alien worlds from the inside out, worlds which are grounded in actual lived experience – the little screws lying in the palm of a blackened hand; Navy Cut cigarettes amongst steel artefacts; man being consumed by machine; man being dwarfed by machine; man as machine (the girl paired opposite the counting machine); the Frankenstein scenario of the laboratory (man as monster, machine as man); the intense, feverish eyes of the worker in Heater on electric furnace (the machine human as the devil); and the surrealism of a small doll among the serried ranks of mass destruction, facing the opposition, the opposing lined face of an older worker. This is the stuff of alchemy, the place where art challenges life.
“As Arnold Burgaurer cogently states in his introduction, Tuggener is a jack-of-all-trades: he exhibits, ‘the sharp eye of the hunter, the dreamy eye of the painter; he can be a realist, a formalist, romantic, theatrical, surreal.’ Tuggener’s moves effortlessly between large-format lucidity and grainy, blurred impressionism, in a book that is a decade ahead of its time.” (Martin Parr and Gerry Badger. The Photobook: A History Volume I, Phaidon Press, 2005, p. 144.)
James McCardle observes that, “the meaning of Fabrik is left to the viewer to discover between its pictures, its glimpses of an overwhelming industrial whole; it is essentially filmic on a cryptic film-noir level, a revelation to Frank.” Tuggener’s influence on the early work of Robert Frank can be seen in a sequence from the book Portfolio: 40 Photos 1941/1946 by Robert Frank that was republished by Steidl in 2009 (see below). “Like Tuggener, Frank tackles the task of seemingly incongruous subject matter and finds a harmony through edit and assembly. Again and again throughout this portfolio, Frank is not just trying to show his prowess in making images but in pairing them. They define conflicts in life.” Pace Tuggener. At Frank’s suggestion, Tuggener’s work appeared in both Edward Steichen’s Post-War European Photography and in The Museum of Modern Art’s seminal exhibition, The Family of Man, the latter an essentially humanist exhibition which took the form of a photo essay celebrating the universal aspects of the human experience.
McCardle goes onto suggest that Fabrik, as a photo book, was a model for Frank’s Les Américains: The Americans published fifteen years later in Paris by Delpire, 1958. On this point, we disagree. While his early work as seen in Portfolio: 40 Photos 1941/1946 may have been heavily influenced by Tuggener’s photo book, by the time Frank came to compose Les Américains (for that is what The Americans is, a composition) his point of view had changed, as had that of his camera. While The Americans has many formal elements that can be seen in the construction of the photographs, they also have an element of jazz that would have been inconceivable to Tuggener at that time. Grainy film, strange angles, lighting flare, street lights, night time photography, jukeboxes and American flags portray the American dream not so much from the vantage point of a knowing insider (as Tuggener was) but as a visitor from another planet. Not so much alienating world (man as machine) as alien world, picturing something that has never been recognised before. These are two different models of being. While both are photo books and both pair images together in sequences, Frank had moved on to another point of view, that of an “invalid” outsider, and his photo book has a completely different nature to that of Tuggener’s Fabrik.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Word count: 1,366
Many thankx to Fotostiftung Schweiz for allowing me to publish some of the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
For Jakob Tuggener, whose works can be seen within the context of social documentary photography, the individual and the industrial boom of the 19th and 20th centuries were central themes. His often somber, black and white photographs seem to confront this new world with a sense of fear as well as admiration. Will technology help relieve us of physically hard labour or replace us altogether? Tuggener owes his renown to his photo book Fabrik (Factory) that was published in 1943. With an aesthetic approach that was unique for his time, Tuggener explores in his photographic essay the relationship between humans and the perceived threat as well as progress of technology. The labourers depicted are grave, their faces worn marked by deep folds, while a factory building in the background stands strong, enveloped in a vaporous cloud. This “Pictorial Epic of Technology,” as Tuggener himself described it, is today considered a milestone in the history of photography books.
Jakob Tuggener (1904-1988) Page layout from the book Fabrik 1943
Selection from the book Portfolio: 40 Photos 1941/1946 by Robert Frank (Steidl, 2009)
The ‘weightless’ and the ‘grounded’ are two opposing themes that Frank repeatedly uses to move us through this sequence. Three radio transistors in a product shot float into the sky while a music conductor, his band and a church steeple succumb to gravity on the facing page. Even in this image Frank shifts focus to the sky and beyond – the weightless. When he photographs rural life, the farmers heft whole pigs into the air and another carries a huge bale of freshly cut grain which seems featherlight but for the woman trailing behind with hands ready to assist.
Considering this work was made while fascism was on the move through Europe, external politics is felt through metaphor. A painted portrait of men in uniform among a display of pots and pans for sale faces a brightly polished cog from a machine – its teeth sharp and precise. In another pairing, demonstrators waving flags in the streets of Zurich face a street sign covered with snow and frost, a Swiss flag blows in the background. in yet another of a crowd of spectators face the illuminated march of a piece of machinery – its illusory shadow filling in the ranks. These pairings feel under the influence of Jakob Tuggener, whose work Frank certainly knew. Like Tuggener, Frank tackles the task of seemingly incongruous subject matter and finds a harmony through edit and assembly.
Again and again throughout this portfolio, Frank is not just trying to show his prowess in making images but in pairing them. They define conflicts in life. One boy struggles to climb a rope while a ski jumper is frozen in flight. Fisherman bask in sunlight while two pedestrians are caught in blinding snowfall.
“Above all, the contrast between the brilliantly lit ballroom and the dark factory hall influenced the perception of his artistic oeuvre,” [curator] Martin Gasser explains. “Tuggener also positioned himself between these two extremes when he stated: ‘Silk and machines, that’s Tuggener’. In reality, he loved both: the wasteful luxury and the dirty work, the enchanting women and the sweaty labourers. For him, they were both of equal value and he resisted being categorised as a social critic who pitted one world against the other. On the contrary, these contrasts belonged to his conception of life and he relished experiencing the extremes – and the shades of tones in between – to the most intense degree.”
“Jakob Tuggener’s ‘Fabrik’, published in Zurich in 1943, is a milestone in the history of the photography book. Its 72 images, in the expressionist aesthetic of a silent movie, impart a skeptical view of technological progress: at the time the Swiss military industry was producing weapons for World War II. Tuggener, who was born in 1904, had an uncompromisingly critical view of the military-industrial complex that did not suit his era. His images of rural life and high-society parties had been easy to sell, but ‘Fabrik’ found no publisher. And when the book did come out, it was not a commercial success. Copies were sold at a loss and some are believed to have been pulped. Now this seminal work, which has since become a sought-after classic, is being reissued with a contemporary afterword. In his lifetime, Tuggener’s work appeared – at Robert Frank’s suggestion – in Edward Steichen’s ‘Post-War European Photography’ and in The Museum of Modern Art’s seminal exhibition, ‘The Family of Man’, in whose catalogue it remains in print. Tuggener’s death in 1988 left an immense catalogue of his life’s work, much of which has yet to be shown: more than 60 maquettes, thousands of photographs, drawings, watercolours, oil paintings and silent films.”
Book description on Amazon. The book has been republished by Steidl in January, 2012.
Jakob Tuggener (1904-1988) is one of the exceptional phenomena of Swiss photography. His personal and expressive recordings of glittering celebrations of better society are legendary, and his 1943 book Fabrik (Factory) is considered a milestone in the history of the photo book. At the centre of the exhibition “Machine time” are photographs and films from the world of work and industry. They not only reflect the technical development from the textile industry in the Zurich Oberland to power plant construction in the Alps, but also testify to Tuggener’s lifelong fascination with all sorts of machines: from looms to smelting furnaces and turbines to locomotives, steamers and racing cars. He loved her noise, her dynamic movements and her unruly power, and he artistically transposed them. At the same time, he observed the men and women who keep up the motor of progress with their work – not without hinting that one day machines might dominate people.
Machine time
Jakob Tuggener knew the world of factories like no other photographer of his time, having completed an apprenticeship as a draftsman at Maag Zahnräder AG in Zurich and then worked in their design department. Through the photographer Gustav Maag he was also introduced to the technique of photography. However, as a result of the economic crisis in the late 1920s, he was dismissed, after which he fulfilled his childhood dream of becoming an artist by studying at the Reimannschule in Berlin. For almost a year he dealt intensively with poster design, typography and film and let himself be carried away with his camera by the dynamics of the big city.
After returning to Switzerland in 1932, he began working as a freelancer for the Maschinenfabrik Oerlikon (MFO), especially for their house newspaper with the programmatic title Der Gleichrichter (The Rectifier). Although the company already employed its own photographer, he was entrusted with the task of developing a kind of photographic interior view of the company. This was intended to bridge the gap between workers and office workers on the one hand and management on the other. By the end of the 1930s, in addition to multi-part reports from the production halls, as well as portraits of “members of the MFO family”, one-sided, album-like series of unnoticed scenes from everyday factory life appeared. From 1937 Tuggener also created a series of 16mm short films – always black and white, silent, and representing the tension between fiction and documentation. This includes, for example, the drama about death and transience (Die Seemühle (The Sea mill), 1944), which was influenced by surrealism and staged by Tuggener with amateur actors in a vacant factory on the shores of Lake Zurich. or the cinematic exploration of the subject of man and machine (Die Maschinenzeit (The Machine Time), 1938-1970). This ties in with the earlier book maquette of the same name and transforms it into a moving, immediately perceptible, but also fleeting vision of the Tuggenean machine age.
In 1943, in the middle of the Second World War, Tuggerer’s book Fabrik (Factory) appeared. At first glance, the series of 72 photographs without a text contained therein seems to depict a kind of history of industrialisation – from the rural textile industry to mechanical engineering and high-voltage electrical engineering to modern power plant construction in the mountains. An in-depth reading, however, shows that Tuggener’s film-associative series of photographs simultaneously points to the destructive potential of unrestrained technological progress, as a result of which he sees the then raging World War, and for which the Swiss arms industry produced unlimited weapons. Tuggener was ahead of his time with the book conceived according to the laws of silent film.1 Neither his uncompromisingly subjective photography nor his critical attitude matched the threatening situation in which Switzerland was called to unity and strength under the slogan “Spiritual Defense”.
Although the book was not commercially successful, Tuggener’s Fabrik was a great artistic success and continued to explore the issues of work and industry. He produced two more book maquettes: Schwarzes Eisen (Black Iron) (1950) and Die Maschinenzeit (The Machine Time) (1952). They can be understood as a kind of continuation of the published book, which the journalist Arnold Burgauer described as a “glowing and sparkling factual and accountable report of the world of the machine, of its development, its possibilities and limitations.” In the mid-1950s, on the threshold of the computer age, Tuggener’s classic “machine time” came to an end. On the one hand, the mechanical processes that had so fascinated Tuggener evaded his eyes. On the other hand, he could not or did not want to make friends with the idea that one day even a human heart could be replaced by a machine.
Portrayer of opposites
As early as 1930 in Berlin, Tuggener had begun to take pictures of the then famous Reimannschule balls. He was fascinated by the tingling erotic atmosphere of these occasions, and he found photography in sparsely lit rooms a great challenge. Back in Zurich, he immediately plunged into local nightlife to surrender to the splendour and luxury of mask, artist and New Year’s balls. Again and again he let himself be abducted by elegant ladies with their silk dresses, their necklines, bare back or shoulders in a glittering fairytale world, whose mysterious facets he sought to fathom with his Leica. Although Tuggener’s ball recordings were only perceived by a small insider audience for a long time, many quickly saw him as a “masterful portrayer of our world of stark contrasts,” a world torn between a brightly lit ballroom and gloomy factory hall. Tuggener also positioned himself between these extremes when he stated, “Silk and machines, that’s Tuggener.” Because he loved both the lavish luxury and the dirty work, the jewelled women and the sweaty men. He felt that he was equal and resisted being classified as a social critic.
In whatever world he moved, Jakob Tuggener did it with the elegance of a grand seigneur [a man whose rank or position allows him to command others]. He was an eye man with a casual, loving look for the inconspicuous, the superficial incident; not just a sensitive picture-poet, but the “photographische Dichter römisch I,” as he used to call himself self-confidently. Critic Max Eichenberger wrote of the Fabrik photographs: “Tuggener is able to make factory photographs that reveal not only a painter, but also a poet, and a rare magician and strange alchemist – lead, albeit modestly turned into gold.”
The exhibition Jakob Tuggener – Maschinenzeit includes vintage and later prints from the early 1930s to the late 1950s, which for the most part come from the photographers estate. In an adjoining room the exhibition will also feature a selection of his 16mm short films from the years 1937-1970, which revolve around the topic of “man and machine” in various ways. These films were newly digitised specifically for the exhibition (in collaboration with Lichtspiel / Cinematheque Bern).
Press release from Fotostiftung Schweiz
1/ The story in silent film is best told through visuals (such as actions, appearances and behaviours). Focus on movements and gestures, and borrow from dance and mime. Large, exaggerated motions translate well to silent films, but balance these also with subtlety (ie. a raised eyebrow, a quivering lip – especially when paired with a close-up shot). Karlanna Lewis. “8 Tips for Making Silent Movies,” on the Raindance website June 1, 2014 [Online] Cited 03/02/2022
Jakob Tuggener (1904-1988) Page layouts from the book Fabrik 1943
Extracts from Shard Cinema by Evan Calder Williams London: Repeater Books, 2017
“All gestures are perhaps inhuman, because they enact that hinge with the world, forging a bridge and buffer that can’t be navigated by words or by actions that feel like purely one’s own. In Vilém Flusser’s definition, a gesture is “a movement of the body or of a tool connected to the body for which there is no satisfactory causal explanation” – that is, it can’t be explained on its own isolated terms.26 The factory will massively extend this tendency, because the “explanation” lies not in the literal circuit of production but in the social abstraction of value driving the entire process yet nowhere immediately visible. We might frame the difficulty of this imagining with the concept of “operational sequence” (la chaîne opératoire), posed by French archaeologist André Leroi-Gourhan, which designates a “succession of mental operations and technical gestures, in order to satisfy a need (immediate or not), according to a preexisting project.”25
26. Vilém Flusser, Gestures (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), p. 2. 27. Catherine Perlès, Les Industries Lithiques Taillées de Franchthi, Argolide: Presentation Generate et Industries Paleolithiques (Terre Haute: Indiana University Press, 1987), p. 23.
“Which is to say: we build factories. And in those factories, the process of the exteriorization of memory and muscle becomes almost total, as “the hand no longer intervenes except to feed or to stop” what Leroi-Gourhan, like Larcom, will call “mechanical monsters,” “machines without a nervous system of their own, constantly requiring the assistance of a human partner.”30 But along with engendering the panic of becoming caregiver to the inanimate, this also poses the problem of animation in an unprecedented way. Because if a “technical gesture is the producer of forms, deriving them from inert nature and preparing them for animation,” the factory constitutes us in a different network of the animated and animating.31 It’s a network that can be seen in those writings of factory workers, with their distinct sense of not just preparing those materials but becoming the pivot that eases, smooths, and guides the links of an operational sequence. In particular, a worker functions as the point of compression and transformation between tremendous motive force and products made whose regularity must be assured. The human becomes the regulator of this process, the assurance of an abstract standardization.”
30 André Leroi-Gourhan, Gesture and Speech, trans. Anna Bostock Berger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), p. 246 31. Ibid., p. 313
“… what I’m sketching here in this passage through scattered materials of the century prior to filmed moving images is something simpler, a small corrective to insist that by the time cinema was becoming a medium that seemed to offer a novel form of mechanical time, motion, and vision, one that historians and theorists will fixate on as the unique province and promise of film, many of its viewers had themselves already been enacting and struggling against that form for decades, day in, day out. The point is to place the human operator back in the frame, to ask after those who tended the machine before it was available as a spectacle, and to listen to how they understood what they were tangled in the midst of. But this is neither a humanist gesture of assuring the centrality of the person in the mesh that holds them nor a historical rejoinder to the forgetting and active dismissal of many of these personal accounts. Rather, it’s an effort to show how only with the operator’s experience made central can we see the real historical destruction of such illusions of centrality and, in their place, the novel construction of the human as tender and mender of a flailing inhuman net, the pivot who forms the connective tissue that enacts the lethal animation around her. In short, to see how the real subsumption of labor to capital is not only a systemic or periodizing concept that marks the historical transformation of discrete activities in accordance with the abstractions of value. It also is the granular description of a lived and bitterly contested process by which those abstractions get corporally and mechanically made and unmade, one which we can understand differently if we shift our angle from the boss’ POV to those unable to get any respite or distance from the situation.”
Excerpt from Evan Calder Williams. “Rattling Devils,” on the Viewpoint Magazine website July 13, 2017 [Online] Cited 29/12/2017
NEARLY A WEEK SINCE MY LAST POSTING SO LET’S MAKE THIS A GOOD ONE…
A fabulous posting on the photocollages of that most excellent of artists, Josef Albers, where the selection of images and their pairings “take on questions of duality, time, and narrative…” – to which I might add, questions of perspective and context. These photocollages are a revelation to me.
The complex photo narratives move image across time and space. This can be seen in the photomontage Untitled (Bullfight, San Sebastian) (1930/1932, below) where the multitude of photographs of a bullfight in San Sebastien, “can be read as a short story or experimental film, where we as viewers recognise that we are being transported to a distant time and place…”
Here the visual plane is fragmented, the scale mixed, shape, direction and space / time continuity confused. Structures are repeated; time is overlaid; perspective is shifted; narrative is multiplied. This is complex, New Vision image making, not just the downwards or upward looking objectivity of Russian constructivism, but a more nuanced splicing of time and space. The bullfight is magnificent in its “in the round” picturing … the splitting of the arena in the central images confuses direction, scale and circularity.
There are further “in the round” elements (mimicking Renaissance triple portrait painting such as Triple Portrait of Cardinal de Richelieu (1642) in the National Gallery of Art, London), seen in the work Amédée Ozenfant, summer 1931 (below) which, while objectifying the human countenance, contains that nugget of truth: that portraiture is an expression of humanism. Other photocollages, for example Road, Paznauntal, July 1930; Hotel staircases, Geneva, 1929 (with its Escher-like construction);Flooded trees and forest; and Dessau, end of winter, 1931 (all below), challenge our orientation in the world both physically and spiritually.
These photocollages, 70 of which were made between 1928 and 1932, were never discovered until after Albers was dead. No one ever knew he took photographs, but it was obviously important to him that he did so. Would he be able to say whether he was being serious, or he was having fun? Probably both. What a shame that they are often mutually exclusive in the last 30 -40 years.
It’s all very well to be able to say you are having fun – but what about being in this state (i.e. Albers state when he was compositing the photographs) and not even knowing … not even thinking of the question. Perhaps his was a private form of meditation on the nature of vision.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
(Written using dictation software, the rest all cut and paste)
Many thankx to MoMA for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“Beginning at the Bauhaus in 1928, Albers made hundreds, perhaps thousands, of photographs with his handheld Leica camera, and he made thousands more, mostly while traveling, in the decades following his emigration to the United States in 1933. But we concern ourselves here with a group of seventy photocollages mounted to A3 boards, established as a standard size in Germany in 1922 at 29.7 by 42 centimetres (11 3/4 by 16 1/2 inches). No record exists of Albers ever having exhibited these collages in his lifetime, nor does he appear to have spoken of them. Yet in their rigorous construction and allusive potential, they represent a singularly creative body of work. The images Albers used to make these collages fall rather neatly into four categories – portraits, mannequins, the natural world, and the built environment – and Albers attends to a remarkably narrow subsection within each of these: The portraits feature only people Albers knew well – fellow Bauhäusler, family, and friends. The primary urban motif is the mannequin, which was also featured in the photographs of contemporaries such as Eugène Atget, Bill Brandt, Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Horacio Coppola, and scores of others who were attentive to the figures’ Surrealist echoes. His images of nature consist of mostly waves, some trees, and a few mountains, and there are only a handful of man-made structures. Albers’s limited range of subjects achieves new significance in his collages, where their selection and pairings take on questions of duality, time, and narrative, topics that resist being infused into single images of similar subjects.”
Sarah Hermanson Meister. “Josef Albers: An Open Mind for the Newer and Nearer,” from One and One Is Four: The Bauhaus Photocollages of Josef Albers, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2016, pp. 11-12.
“The abstract language that Albers adopted for the great majority of his oeuvre precludes temporal specificity, which makes the close study of a number of his photocollages all the more compelling, specifically in Albers’s attentiveness to the complexity engendered by incorporating multiple photographs – each captured in a fraction of a second, but inevitably across time – into a single work.”
Sarah Hermanson Meister. “Josef Albers: An Open Mind for the Newer and Nearer,” from One and One Is Four: The Bauhaus Photocollages of Josef Albers, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2016, p. 15.
“The image on the left shows Lissitzky smiling warmly, almost conspiratorially, at Albers. The background divides neatly into three tones – black, white, and gray – each of which corresponds loosely to Lissitzky’s (black) tie, (white) shirt, and the middle shades of the photographic spectrum that echo Lissitzky’s tanned complexion and balding pate. The horizontal image on the right is the same width but half the height of the vertical image, and in it we see Lissitzky almost in profile, looking toward his other likeness. This time the asymmetry of his placement within the frame is even more pronounced: his nose is cropped by the left edge, his forehead by the top, but the right half of the image is virtually empty. While we feel confident that these photographs were captured at the same meeting, the darker background in the right-hand image and the differentiation between Lissitzky’s shirt and collar (which, on the left, seem identical) remind the viewer of the variability of photographic representation. Albers mounted these prints with their top edges roughly aligned and with nearly equivalent space between their outside edges and the sides of the board: there is no evident rhyme or reason in the interstitial spaces. This irregularity draws the viewer’s attention to the geometric forms within each image and to the prints themselves, which might be construed as Albers’s nod to the dynamic geometric vocabulary that Lissitzky employed in his own art and design.”
Sarah Hermanson Meister. “Josef Albers: An Open Mind for the Newer and Nearer,” from One and One Is Four: The Bauhaus Photocollages of Josef Albers, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2016, pp. 13-14.
“Nowhere does Albers change the rules of the game more profoundly than in his collages that feature a multitude of photographs. His collage of a bullfight in San Sebastian can be read as a short story or experimental film, where we as viewers recognise that we are being transported to a distant time and place, no less enchanting for its impossibility.
At the centre we find the nominal subject: a procession of banderilleros, picadors, and matadors. Surrounding this are three views of the arena filled with crowds, whose choreographed disjunction evokes the rhythm of the event they are gathered to see. The sweep of the arcade is plainly elevated in the central view, with a nearly symmetrical relationship to those architectural forms on the left and right, whereas the cropped edge of the ring awkwardly intersects its corresponding form, an oblique allusion, perhaps, to the impossibility of predicting the outcome of this highly ritualised event. The two images that anchor the bottom of the collage show more dramatic vantage points. A plethora of boater hats, caps, and a scattering of bare heads, each precisely described, is juxtaposed against a mass of automobiles presumably parked outside. These horizonless seas of repeated forms were common motifs for avant-garde photographers of the period. It is the tightly woven – but not flawless – relationships between these individual components, akin to cuts in a film, that reward our reconsideration of these elements with respect to the whole.”
Sarah Hermanson Meister. “Josef Albers: An Open Mind for the Newer and Nearer,” from One and One Is Four: The Bauhaus Photocollages of Josef Albers, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2016, pp. 14-15.
“Of the seventy photocollages Albers made at this time, more than half feature but two photographic prints: their placement reveals both formal innovation and a sensitivity to the unique characteristics of the individual photographs. Albers’s photographs of the Eiffel Tower, made during a summer break from teaching, suggest his attentiveness to the range of possibilities offered by his Leica, and the close relationship between his work and that of his contemporaries. Both images in his collage feature plunging perspectives; the sunlight and shadow in the image on the left draw our attention to the diminutive figures below. Albers was not a particularly fastidious printer, yet he was surely attuned to the fact that every tone in the photograph on the right exists on the continuum of tones between the highlights and shadows on the left.Lest the viewer suspect that these are purely mechanical byproducts of the process, Albers trims each image with a subtly but noticeably irregular hand, underscoring the artist’s creative agency. This marriage of industry and craft was a hallmark of the Bauhaus. To further emphasise the aesthetic, non-documentary function of these photographs, Albers anchors them at the top left of his board, pointedly shifting the viewer’s perspective.”
Sarah Hermanson Meister. “Josef Albers: An Open Mind for the Newer and Nearer,” from One and One Is Four: The Bauhaus Photocollages of Josef Albers, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2016, p. 14.
Josef Albers (American, born Germany, 1888-1976) is a central figure in 20th-century art, both as a practitioner and as a teacher at the Bauhaus, Black Mountain College, and Yale University. Best known for his iconic series Homages to the Square, Albers made paintings, drawings, and prints and designed furniture and typography. The least familiar aspect of his extraordinary career is his inventive engagement with photography, which was only discovered after his death. The highlight of this work is undoubtedly the photocollages featuring photographs he made at the Bauhaus between 1928 and 1932. At once expansive and restrained, this remarkable body of work anticipates concerns that Albers would pursue throughout his career: seriality, perception, and the relationship between handcraft and mechanical production.
The first serious exploration of Albers’s photographic practice occurred in a modest exhibition at MoMA in 1988, The Photographs of Josef Albers. In 2015, the Museum acquired 10 photocollages by Albers – adding to the two donated by the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation almost three decades ago – making its collection the most significant anywhere outside the Foundation. This installation celebrates both this landmark acquisition and the publication of One and One Is Four: The Bauhaus Photocollages of Josef Albers, which focuses exclusively on this deeply personal and inventive aspect of Albers’s work and makes many of these photocollages available for the first time.
Book
The Museum of Modern Art announces the release of One and One Is Four: The Bauhaus Photocollages of Josef Albers, the first publication to reproduce all 70 photocollages created by Josef Albers at the Bauhaus using photographs he made between 1928 and 1932. Hailed in his own lifetime as among the most important figures of 20th-century art, both as a practitioner and as a teacher at the Bauhaus, Black Mountain College, and Yale University, Albers (1888-1976) achieved widespread acclaim across a range of mediums, from glassworks and furniture design to printmaking and painting. Yet Albers’s engagement with modernist photography remained largely hidden until after his death, and it is only now that the entire series of unique photocollages the artist produced at the famed art school – before he and his wife fled Nazi Germany for the US – has been published together, many for the first time. At once expansive and restrained, this remarkable body of work anticipates concerns that Albers would pursue throughout his career: seriality, perception, and the relationship between handcraft and mechanical production.
One and One Is Four reveals an Albers at once familiar and unexpected – playful yet disciplined, personal yet enigmatic – through a body of work whose genius becomes fully apparent when considered as a whole. “Albers’s photocollages stand as remarkable contributions to the medium in their own right,” explains Sarah Hermanson Meister, Curator in the Department of Photography and the author of the book, “while they anticipate in important ways key concerns that would animate the artist’s work throughout his career, including his iconic Homages to the Square.” An essay by art historian and Bauhaus scholar Elizabeth Otto underscores the originality of Albers’s achievement through a survey of photocollages by Albers’s fellow Bauhäusler, and a contribution by MoMA conservator Lee Ann Daffner examines the artist’s materials to suggest new insights into these works, the discovery of which has been celebrated as one of the great art finds of the past century. The publication also includes a transcription of a lecture delivered by Albers at Black Mountain College in February 1943 titled “Photos as Photography and Photos as Art” – Albers’s sole public statement about the medium – and a preface by Nicholas Fox Weber, Executive Director of The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation.
The first serious exploration of Albers’s photographic practice occurred in a modest exhibition of 38 photographs organised by John Szarkowski at MoMA in 1988, The Photographs of Josef Albers. At the time, the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation donated two photocollages to the Museum. In 2015, the Museum acquired 10 additional photocollages by Albers, making its collection the most significant anywhere outside the Foundation. A new installation featuring 16 photocollages, on view from November 23, 2016, through April 2, 2017, in the Museum’s fifth-floor galleries, celebrates both the publication and this landmark acquisition. The exhibition is organised by Sarah Meister with Kristen Gaylord, Beaumont and Nancy Newhall Curatorial Fellow, Department of Photography. The exhibition is supported by the Annual Exhibition Fund.
Curators: Rossella Menegazzo, Professor of East Asian Art History at the University of Milan and Takeshi Fujimori, Japanese photographer and Artistic Director of the Ken Domon Museum of Photography
Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) Allenamento degli allievi del corpo della Marina [Students of the Navy training] 1936 Yokosuka 535 x 748mm Ken Domon Museum of Photography
Social Realism
I love most Japanese photography of the post-war period (1950s-1970s) and this artist’s work is no exception. What an absolute master of photography, not just of Japanese photography, he was.
Direct, focused, gritty, unflinching, the work of this initiator of social realist photography lays bare “the direct connection between the camera and the subject” in the most forthright way. While professing that the photographs are “an absolutely non-dramatic snapshot” (just like the Bechers professed that their gridded, ordered photographs were just about form and nothing else), this artist produced quality work that narrates a transcendent story of life in Japan. His images are music, and visions, from the heart of a nation. You only have to look at the photograph Gemella non vedente (1957, below) from the series Hiroshima to understand what I mean. There is just this feeling in your synapses about his pictures, as though you yourself were holding the camera …
In his portrait photographs there is quietness and contemplation; in his other work anger, sadness, joy, humour. A direct connection to reality is at the forefront of his understanding. This connection is miraculously (as in, something that apparently contravenes known laws governing the universe) transformed into other spaces and feelings – the twirling of umbrellas, the lizard on the head, the raised arms and white gloves of the traffic policeman (shot from a crouching position).
While he is not an artist who creates change he certainly documents the results of change in a magnificent way. I love them all.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Museo dell’Ara Pacis for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) Esercitazioni delle crocerossine [Red Cross exercises] 1938 Azabu, Tokyo 535 x 748mm Ken Domon Museum of Photography
For the first time ever outside Japan, an exhibition of work by Ken Domon (1909-1990), recognised as a master of realism and one of the most important figures in the history of modern Japanese photography, is being held in Rome at the Museo dell’Ara Pacis. It features about 150 photographs taken in black and white as well as colour between the 1920s and the 1970s, which illustrate the author’s path towards social realism. From the first shots of the period before and during World War II, which display a vision linked to photojournalism and propaganda, through photography of the social sphere, the exhibit follows Ken Domon’s production up to the crucial work documenting the tragedy of Hiroshima, which the photographer undertook as though in response to a call and a humanitarian duty.
Regarded as an absolute master of Japanese photography and initiator of the realistic movement, Ken Domon marked a pivotal chapter in the history of post-war Japanese photography, laying the foundations for contemporary photographic production and remaining a constant point of reference for Japanese enthusiasts. According to Domon, “The fundamental gift of quality work lies in the direct connection between the camera and the subject.” The master’s aim was indeed always to capture a wholly realistic image devoid of drama. Against the background of the renewed spirit of the post-war period, he focused on society in general and everyday life: “I am immersed in the social reality of today but at the same time in the classical culture and traditions of Nara and Kyoto. This twofold involvement has the common denominator of a search for the point at which the two realities are linked to the destinies of people, the anger, sorrow and joy of the Japanese people.”
The realistic photograph, described as “an absolutely non-dramatic snapshot”, therefore plays the leading part in an exhibition thematically laid out to illustrate the master’s vast production, transversally encompassing the whole of Japanese culture. From the early work of a photojournalistic nature and at the service of pre-war propaganda and the cultural promotion of Japan overseas (Photojournalism and Pre-War Propaganda; The Post-War Period: Towards Social Realism) to a focus on recording everyday life and the city’s transformation and westernisation with ever-greater attention to social themes. His social realismis expressed in particular through two series emblematic of this period, namely Hiroshima (1958), regarded by the Nobel laureate Kenzaburō Ōe as the first great modern work of Japan, and The Children of Chikuhō, a series on poverty in the mining villages of southern Japan with a broad range of lively portraits of children encountered in the streets.
This is followed by Portraits, comprising photographs of famous figures in the worlds of art, literature, culture and science such as Yukio Mishima, Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, Tarō Okamoto and Yusaku Kamekura. The final section is devoted to his most important series, Pilgrimage to Ancient Temples, photographs of Buddhist sculptures, buildings and treasures as well as views of landscapes taken on journeys throughout Japan in search of the beauty of the sacred places of the past. Landscapes that conjure up the fascination of cultural diversity and the exotic.
Ken Domon’s work can be described as autobiographical, documentation that is private rather social, always selected on personal criteria that transform the shot into a moment of dialogue with the subject. His vision of the subject, be it a landscape, a sculpture, a person or an object, is a vehicle of the universal beauty seen through the lens, which does not omit the physical characteristics of the form captured. A multifaceted figure whose photography embraces the whole of Japanese culture before and after the war, Ken Domon is also the first photographer to have a personal museum devoted entirely to his vast work in his hometown of Sakata, inaugurated in 2003. Together with friends and other leading figures in the Japanese world of art, he initiated the cultural renewal that enabled Japan to emerge definitively from the defeat in war and led to the contemporary aesthetic that is still a point of reference for the entire world.
The show is part of a vast programme of eventsthat will represent the cultural and technological world of Japan in Italy all through 2016: major exhibitions of art, productions from the great tradition of Noh and puppet theatre (bunraku), concerts, performances of modern and traditional dance, film festivals, exhibits of architecture, design, comics, literature, sport and so much else. The occasion is the celebration of the 150th anniversary of the first treaty of friendship and trade between Italy and Japan, signed on 25 August 1866, which initiated diplomatic relations between the two countries.
Press release from the Museo dell’Ara Pacis
Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) Pesca all’ayu 1936 Izu, Prefettura di Shizuoka 457 x 560mm Ken Domon Museum of Photography
Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) Bambini che fanno roteare gli ombrelli [Kids twirling umbrellas] c. 1937 Dalla serie Bambini (Kodomotachi) From the series Children (Kodomotachi) Ogōchimura 535 x 748mm Ken Domon Museum of Photography
The pre-war period
From photojournalism to propaganda photography
Domon began to work in photography in 1933 at the age of 24, carrying out the humble duties of an apprentice at Miyauchi Kōtarō’s studio in Ueno. Right from the start he won prizes and began to write for photography magazines and journals, publishing his first photo in Asahi Camera in August 1935. The 10th of October of the same year marked an important turning point in his career. He replied to an advertisement published by the Nippon Kōbō studio in Ginza, which was looking for a photo technician. Founded by Natori Yōnosuke (1910-1962) when he returned from his experience in Berlin at the Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung, the studio spread in Japan for the first time concepts such as editing and reporting and a new system of production based on the collaboration between photographer and graphic designer under the supervision of an art director, which led to the large-scale diffusion of photojournalism.
Domon began his first reportage for the magazine Nippon, published in English in order to promote Japanese culture abroad with a mix of information and propaganda. The first photographic reportage was on the traditional Shichigosan Festival on the occasion of the presentation of children in the Meiji Jingu shrine, realised with his model C Leica. This was followed by services that presented handicrafts, traditions, industrial and military progress and the progressive aspects of Japan, which in the 1930s had become increasingly nationalistic.
The war years and the bunraku puppet theatre
During the years of maximum Japanese expansion in the Pacific, immediately prior to the Second World War, even photography had to comply with the strict rules of military policy. Only few selected professional photographers could obtain photographic materials for assignments deemed to be “essential”, and naturally the “essential” photographic services were subject to the requirements of government propaganda, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the International Tourism Agency and the International Cultural Relations Company.
Thus many photographic publications were discontinued, with economic repercussions for photographers. In fact, Domon had difficulty maintaining a family of seven. He also had the added anxiety of the probable arrival of a “red card” that would have called him to arms and probably to the front in a group of photo-reporters. In response to this critical situation, Domon decided to retire from the public scene, dedicating himself to culture, in particular to Buddhist temples and the bunraku puppet theatre.
On the 8th of December, 1941 he was in the backstage of the Yotsubashi Bunraku Theatre in Osaka when he read the special edition of a newspaper announcing the declaration of war to the United States. It was not easy to gain the respect and collaboration of the master puppeteers – national living treasures such as Yoshida Bungorō, Yoshida Eiza and Kiritake Monjūrō – in the key moment of taking the shot with a camera that did not go unnoticed due to its size and long exposure times. However, by 1943 he had shot about 7,000 negatives, which were collected in the book entitled Bunraku published in 1972.
Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) Esercitazioni delle crocerossine [Red Cross exercises] 1938 Azabu, Tokyo 535 x 748mm Ken Domon Museum of Photography
Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) Foto commemorativa della cerimonia di diploma del corpo della Marina [Commemorative photo of the Marine Corp graduation ceremony] 1944 Tsuchiura, Ibaragi 1047 x 747mm Ken Domon Museum of Photography
Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) Vigile urbano a Ginza 4-chōme [Traffic policeman in Ginza 4-chōme] 1946 Tokyo 457 x 560mm Ken Domon Museum of Photography
The postwar period
The affirmation of realism in photography
The tragic events related to the Second World War and to the defeat of Japan, marked by the atrocities of the atomic bomb, revealed the great deception of the war propaganda. Defeat led to the collapse of the imperial myth and state Shintoism, which had been the basis of military ideology.
If on the one hand, by the end of the 1940s there had been considerable intellectual rebirth leading to a rapid resumption of the diffusion of magazines, publications, exhibitions and artistic circles, on the other hand there was no language that seemed suitable for expressing such a tragic reality. There was a need to document a society undergoing profound change and in this sense Domon became the promoter of realistic photography, becoming a landmark for amateur photographers. He embraced the western trends that had taken over the city, but also the alleys and the poorest sectors of the population.
The high point of the realist tendency was reached around 1953, thanks to the exhibition, Photography Today: Japan and France, held in 1951 at the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo, provided the opportunity to make comparisons with names such as Cartier Bresson, Brassai, Doisneau. Domon’s last word on realism appeared in the magazine Photo Art in 1957 with an article that debated the two fundamental concepts of photography: jijitsu, reality, and shinjitsu, truth.
Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) Pescatrici di perle (ama san) [Pearl fisherwomen] 1948 457 x 559mm Ken Domon Museum of Photography
Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) Donne a passeggio [Women walking] 1950 Sendai 457 x 560mm Ken Domon Museum of Photography
Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) L’attrice Yamaguchi Yoshiko [The actress Yoshiko Yamaguchi] 1952 535 x 748mm Ken Domon Museum of Photography
Yoshiko Yamaguchi (Japanese, 1920-2014)
Yoshiko Yamaguchi (山口 淑子, Yamaguchi Yoshiko, February 12, 1920 – September 7, 2014) was a Japanese singer, actress, journalist, and politician. Born in China, she made an international career in film in China, Hong Kong, Japan and the United States.
Early in her career, the Manchukuo Film Association concealed her Japanese origin and she went by the Chinese name Li Hsiang-lan (李香蘭), rendered in Japanese as Ri Kōran. This allowed her to represent China in Japanese propaganda movies. After the war, she appeared in Japanese movies under her real name, as well as in several English language movies under the stage name, Shirley Yamaguchi.
After becoming a journalist in the 1950s under the name Yoshiko Ōtaka (大鷹 淑子, Ōtaka Yoshiko), she was elected as a member of the Japanese parliament in 1974, and served for 18 years. After retiring from politics, she served as vice president of the Asian Women’s Fund.
Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) Sit-in studentesco a Tachikawa contro l’ampliamento della base americana [Student sit-in in Tachikawa against the expansion of US base] 1955 Tokyo 457 x 560mm Ken Domon Museum of Photography
Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) Sorelline orfane, Rumie e Sayuri [Orphan sisters, Rumie and Sayuri] 1959 Dalla serie I bambini di Chikuhō (Chikuhō no kodomotachi) From the series Children of Chikuhō 457 x 560mm Ken Domon Museum of Photography
Children and miners’ villages
Domon adored children. His first services for Nippon were focused on the Shichigosan Festival and then on children fishing in Izu. But in 1952 he began to photographing children all over Japan, capturing the vitality of the streets and of the poorer neighbourhoods in Tokyo, Ginza, Shinbashi, Nagoya and Osaka and in particular in the Kōtō area where he lived. Probably due to the loss of his second child in 1946 in an accident, Domon moved increasingly toward a realist if not a socialist approach, which allowed him to deal with current themes in an indirect way through the innocent eyes of children.
Several books were dedicated to this theme: The Children of Kōtō (Kōtō no kodomotachi), whose publication was stopped by Domon himself, dissatisfied with his work in 1956; The Children of Chikuhō (Chikuhō no kodomotachi), published in January 1960, and its continuation which followed in November, The Father of Little Rumie is Dead (Rumie chan has otōsan ga shinda), which showed the miserable conditions of children in the villages of the mining area on the island of Kyūshū, and in particular the story of two orphan sisters, whose story moved Japan becoming a best seller. Lastly, the collection Children (Kodomotachi), published in 1976 by master of graphics and friend, Yūsaku Kamekura, and published by Nikkor Club, the amateur photographers’ association linked to Nikon and Domon.
Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) Rumie 1959 Dalla serie I bambini di Chikuhō (Chikuhō no kodomotachi) From the series Children of Chikuhō 457 x 560mm Ken Domon Museum of Photography
Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) Lucertola [Lizard] 1955 Dalla serie I bambini di Kōtō (Kōtō no kodomotachi) From the series Children of Chikuhō Tokyo 457 x 560mm Ken Domon Museum of Photography
Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) Pioggerella [Drizzle] 1952-1954 Dalla serie Bambini (Kodomotachi) From the series Children (Kodomotachi) Atami 457 x 560mm Ken Domon Museum of Photography
Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) Bagno presso il fiume davanti allo Hiroshima Dome [Bath at the river in front of the Hiroshima Dome] 1957 From the series Hiroshima 535 x 748mm Ken Domon Museum of Photography
Hiroshima
Published in March 1958, the year prior to the first brain haemorrhage to strike Domon Ken, the Hiroshima collection presents 180 photographs introduced by a short explanatory essay. The work, completed thirteen years after the dropping of an atomic bomb on Hiroshima and then on Nagasaki, focused the attention of the world once again on the still open but almost forgotten wounds of Hiroshima, with a strong social impact.
The importance of this event in the life of the photographer is also evidenced by Domon’s recording in his notebook in the day and time of his arrival: July 23rd, 1957, 2.40 pm. From then until November he went there six times, for thirty-six days, producing more than 7,800 negatives, of which Hiroshima is only the synthesis. Domon realised that until then he had ignored and been afraid of what Hiroshima had actually meant. With his 35mm camera he revealed the places and people directly and indirectly affected by the atomic bomb, coldly recording with tears in his eyes the material damage, physical injuries, scars, deformations, and the plastic surgery and transplants undergone by the victims of the bomb, dedicating 14 pages at the beginning of the book to the progress made in the field of plastic surgery, which became a real photographic dossier.
The public shock that followed the publication of the dossier made him the object of harsh criticism that, however, failed to undermine his determination to represent reality. In an article published in the magazine Shinchō in 1977 the Nobel Prize winner Ōe Kenzaburō defined Hiroshima as the first work of modern art that dealt with the theme of the atomic bomb, talking about the living instead of the dead.
Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) La morte di Keiji [The death of Keiji] 1957 From the series Hiroshima 457 x 560mm Ken Domon Museum of Photography
Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) Paziente in ospedale [Hospital patient] 1957 From the series Hiroshima 457 x 560mm Ken Domon Museum of Photography
Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) Donna in cura per le lesioni da bomba atomica [Women being treated for injuries from atomic bomb] 1957 From the series Hiroshima 457 x 560 mm Ken Domon Museum of Photography
Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) Gemella non vedente [Blind twin (female)] 1957 From the series Hiroshima 457 x 560mm Ken Domon Museum of Photography
Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) Autoritratto [Self-portrait] Published in the November issue of the magazine Sankei Camera 457 x 560mm Ken Domon Museum of Photography
Portraits (Fūbō)
In 1953 the publication of the Portraits (Fūbō) collection of photographs, which came out in paperback the following year, concluded fifteen years of work dedicated to the portrait that had begun with the first photograph in May 1936 portraying the writer Takeda Rintarō, continuing during the war and until the year in which the collection was published. Domon gathered in a single volume 83 portraits of friends and acquaintances, personalities from the world of entertainment, literature, theatre and politics, stressing in the introduction that they were ” […] people I respect and like and am close to […] The choice of people was surprisingly subjective and random and no claim to any strictly historical or cultural meaning can be made.”
It seems that the initial choice of the faces to be included in the collection was made by Domon with a list written in ink on a sliding door on the second floor of his house in 1948. This list was subjected to the comments and opinions of friends and publishers who went to his house and subsequently underwent substitutions and changes. Through familiar faces and less well-known personalities, Domon bears witness to a crucial era in Japan, one of great writers such as Mishima, Kawabata and Tanizaki, of actors and directors of the caliber of Mifune and Ozu, of great artists who were often his friends and gave rise to a new important artistic trends in the country, such as the sculptor Noguchi, the graph artist Kamekura, the founder of the Ikebana School, Sōgetsu Teshigahara, or painters like Fujita, Umehara, Okamoto. Each picture is accompanied by the name of the subject, their occupation and the date it was taken. There are also short texts describing the relationship between Domon and the person depicted, in addition to the atmosphere created during the shooting.
Sometimes subjects were exasperated by the professional stubbornness of Domon, as is clear in the portrait of Umehara that reveals an air of irritation close to intolerance. Outrightness and instantaneousness, which were always Domon’s objectives, became easier to achieve thanks to technological developments. He passed from a camera assembled for cabinet card portraits – with a dry plate and flash that worked with magnesium powder, used before the war – to a small Leica in the post-war period.
Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) Shiga Naoya (scrittore/writer) 1951 457 x 560mm Ken Domon Museum of Photography
Naoya Shiga (志賀直哉, Shiga Naoya, February 20, 1883 – October 21, 1971) was a Japanese writer active during the Taishō and Shōwa periods of Japan, whose work was distinguished by its lucid, straightforward style and strong autobiographical overtones.
Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) Shiga Kiyoshi (medico ricercatore/medical researcher) 1949 457 x 560mm Ken Domon Museum of Photography
Kiyoshi Shiga (志賀 潔, Shiga Kiyoshi, February 7, 1871 – January 25, 1957) was a Japanese physician and bacteriologist. He had a well-rounded education and career that led to many scientific discoveries. In 1897, Shiga was credited with the discovery and identification of the Shigella dysenteriae microorganism which causes dysentery, and the Shiga toxin which is produced by the bacteria. He conducted research on other diseases such as tuberculosis and trypanosomiasis, and made many advancements in bacteriology and immunology.
Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) Takami Jun (scrittore/writer) 1948 457 x 560mm Ken Domon Museum of Photography
Jun Takami (Japanese, 1907-1965)
Jun Takami (高見 順, Takami Jun, 30 January 1907 – 17 August 1965) was the pen-name of a Japanese novelist and poet active in Shōwa period Japan. His real name was Takami Yoshio.
Takami was interested in literature from youth, and was particularly attracted to the humanism expressed by the Shirakaba writers. On entering Tokyo Imperial University he joined a leftist student arts group, and contributed to their literary journal (Sayoku Geijutsu). After graduation, he went to work for Columbia Records, and continued his activities as a Marxist writer, as part of the proletarian literature movement.
In 1932, he was arrested with other communists and suspected members of the Japan Communist Party under the Peace Preservation Laws, and was released six months later after being coerced into recanting his leftist ideology. An auto-biographical account of his experience appeared in Kokyu Wasureubeki (“Should Auld Acquaintance Be Forgot”, 1935), which, although considered wordy, was nominated for the first Akutagawa Prize. The theme of ironic self-pity over the weakness that led to his “conversion” and his subsequent intellectual confusion were recurring themes in his future works.
He gained a popular following in the pre-war years with Ikanaru Hoshi no Moto ni (“Under Whatever Star”, 1939-1940)., a story set in the Asakusa entertainment district of Tokyo.
During and immediately after World War II, Takami served as Director of the Investigation Bureau of the Japanese Literature Patriotic Association. After the war, he suffered from poor health, but continued to write poetry from his sickbed.
In 1962, Takami helped establish the Museum of Modern Japanese Literature. In 1964, his poetry collection Shi no Fuchi yori (“From the Abyss of Death”, 1964) won the Noma Prize. The same year, he also published, Takami Jun Nikki, (“The Diaries of Takami Jun”), an extremely detailed account of over 3000 pages, in which he described his experiences during the war and immediately afterwards.
Takami Jun lived in Kamakura, Kanagawa prefecture from 1943 until his death of esophageal cancer. His grave is at the temple of Tōkei-ji in Kamakura.
Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) Kuga Yoshiko (attrice/actress) and Ozu Yasujirō (regista/director) 1958 457 x 560mm Ken Domon Museum of Photography
Yoshiko Kuga (Japanese, 1931-2024)
Yoshiko Kuga (久我 美子, Kuga Yoshiko, 1931-2024) is a Japanese actress. Kuga was born in Tokyo, Japan. Her father, Michiaki Koga (久我通顕), was a marquis and a member of the House of Peers.
In 1946, while still attending Gakushuin Junior High School, she became an actress for Toho studios. In June 1946, Toho had sponsored a search for “new faces”, choosing Kuga as one of 48 new actresses and actors from 4,000 applicants. In 1947, she made her debut as one of the lead actresses in the omnibus movie Four Love Stories (四つの恋の物語, Yottsu no Koi no Monogatari). She was one of the actors active in the 1948 union strike at Toho studios. In the 1950s, she started working independently and starred in many productions of the Shochiku studios under the direction of Keisuke Kinoshita. Other important directors include Kenji Mizoguchi (The Woman in the Rumor), Yasujirō Ozu (Equinox Flower), and Tadashi Imai (An Inlet of Muddy Water). In 1954, she co-founded the film production company Ninjin Club (Bungei purodakushon ninjin kurabu) with actresses Keiko Kishi and Ineko Arima to enable better working conditions for actors within the studio system. Since the 1970s, she appeared mainly on television and on stage.
Kuga was married to actor Akihiko Hirata from 1961 until his death in 1984.
Yasujirō Ozu (小津 安二郎, Ozu Yasujirō, 12 December 1903 – 12 December 1963) was a Japanese film director and screenwriter. He began his career during the era of silent films, and his last films were made in colour in the early 1960s. Ozu first made a number of short comedies, before turning to more serious themes in the 1930s. The most prominent themes of Ozu’s work are family and marriage, and especially the relationships between generations. His most widely beloved films include Late Spring (1949), Tokyo Story (1953), and An Autumn Afternoon (1962).
Widely regarded as one of the world’s greatest and most influential filmmakers, Ozu’s work has continued to receive acclaim since his death. In the 2012 Sight & Sound poll, Ozu’s Tokyo Story was voted the third-greatest film of all time by critics world-wide. In the same poll, Tokyo Story was voted the greatest film of all time by 358 directors and film-makers world-wide.
Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) Ushi (Bue), dai dodici guardiani (jūnishinshō) del Murōji [Ushi (Ox), one of the twelve guardians (jūnishinshō) of Muroji] 1941-1943 Murōji, Nara 535 x 748mm Ken Domon Museum of Photography
Pilgrimage to the ancient temples (Kojijunrei)
Murōji
The Murōji temple, small and immersed in the greenery of the Nara mountains, was for Domon the first stage of a “pilgrimage to the ancient temples”, a sort of journey of the soul that accompanied him throughout his life and from which came the encyclopaedic work Kojijunrei (Pilgrimage to the Ancient Temples). It all began in 1939 with a simple excursion, suggested by friend and art historian Mizusawa Sumio (1905-1975): an experience that changed his life. In the first year alone he returned more than forty times and on many more occasions over the course of the following years.
At first Domon focused his photographic work on buildings, from the five-story pagoda – the smallest in Japan – to the architectural details, focusing on the sculptures inside, but also on the imposing profile of the Miroku Buddha of Ōnodera, excavated on the rocky wall facing the river along the road that leads to Murōji. Later he concentrated on wooden statues (kōninbutsu) of the Heian era (794-1185) inside the temple and starting with wide, overall shots he then moved on to capture the most minute details of the wood, so as to emphasize the folds and hems of the vestments and the gestures of the hands and eyes. His favourite statue was of Buddha Shaka, enthroned Mirokudō, who with his “beautiful and compassionate face” was, he claimed, the “most beautiful man on earth.”
For this particular job he used a basic Konishiroku (now Konika) camera made of wood, especially suitable for cabinet card portraits that he had purchased in 1941, but also an Eyemo with a tripod, often carried by his assistants. Evidence of Domon’s numerous pilgrimages and countless photographs can be found in the 1954 Murōji collection. The expanded, definitive edition of this work, Nyonin Takano Murōji, was published in 1978 and includes photographs taken subsequently with the new post-war techniques.
Around the temples
The thousands of shots that Domon took in 39 temples from 1939 to the seventies made up the Pilgrimage to the Ancient Temples (Kojijunrei), the masterpiece of his career for which, even today, he is known worldwide. It consists of five volumes published over a number of years (the first in 1963, the second in 1965, the third in 1968, the fourth in 1971 and the fifth in 1975) which put together 462 colour pictures and 325 photogravures of temples and statues built between the seventh and the sixteenth century, following a subjective criterion and not expecting such large proportions. It is first and foremost a work that documents the beauty of architecture, sculpture, gardens and landscapes around the temples and shrines selected by Domon. And yet it is also a testimony of the progression of photographic technique in those years, such as the transition to colour film of 1958, and of Domon’s health problems that influenced his choices.
In December 1959 he suffered a brain haemorrhage that paralysed the right part of his body, thus making it impossible to hold the camera, even after a long period of rehabilitation. Therefore, he resolved to use a tripod. He suffered a second haemorrhage on the June 22nd, 1968, which this time confined him to a wheelchair. And even with this umpteenth misfortune he did not stop taking photographs. With the help of assistants and by moving his point of view further down, he continued to work. He had a third haemorrhage in 1979, followed by a long stay in hospital and his death on the September 15th, 1990.
Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) Hitsuji (Pecora), dai dodici guardiani (jūnishinshō) del Murōji [Hitsuji (Sheep), one of the twelve guardians (jūnishinshō) of Muroji] 1941-1943 Murōji, Nara 535 x 748mm Ken Domon Museum of Photography
Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) Buddha Shaka ligneo a figura intera presso il Mirokudō del Murōji [Buddha Shaka wooden full-length at the Mirokudō Muroji] c. 1943 Nara 457 x 560mm Ken Domon Museum of Photography
Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) Ōnodera, campana e ciliegi [Onodera, bell and cherry trees] 1977 Nara 535 x 748mm Ken Domon Museum of Photography
Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) Pagoda del Murōji con la neve [Pagoda Muroji with snow] 1978 Nara 535 x 748mm Ken Domon Museum of Photography
![Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) '[Shadow Self-portrait, Juan-les-Pins, France]' 1927 from the exhibition 'Walker Evans. Now and Then' at Fundación Mapfre, Barcelona, February - May, 2026](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/walker-evans-shadow-self-portrait-juan-les-pins-france.jpg "Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) '[Shadow Self-portrait, Juan-les-Pins, France]' 1927 from the exhibition 'Walker Evans. Now and Then' at Fundación Mapfre, Barcelona, February - May, 2026")
![Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975)
'[Subway Passengers, New York]' 1938](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/3428-018-web.jpg "Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) '[Subway Passengers, New York]' 1938")
![Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) '[Boarded-up House, Stonington, Connecticut]' 1974](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/walker-evans-boarded-up-house-stonington-connecticut.jpg "Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) '[Boarded-up House, Stonington, Connecticut]' 1974")
![Marion Post Wolcott (American, 1910–1990) '[Haircutting in Front of General Store and Post Office on Marcella Plantation, Mileston, Mississippi]' 1939](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/wolcott-haircutting.jpg "Marion Post Wolcott (American, 1910–1990) '[Haircutting in Front of General Store and Post Office on Marcella Plantation, Mileston, Mississippi]' 1939")
![Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009) 'New York' [113th Street] c. 1938](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/levitt-new-york-113th-street-c.-1938.jpg "Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009) 'New York' [113th Street] c. 1938")
![Jakob Tuggener (Swiss, 1904-1988) 'Autoritratto, Zurigo [Self-portrait, Zurich]' 1927 from the exhibition Exhibition: 'Jakob Tuggener – Machine time' at Fotostiftung Schweiz, Winterthur, Zurich, Oct 2017 - Jan 2018](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/jakob-tuggener-autoritratto-zurigo-1927-web.jpg "Jakob Tuggener (Swiss, 1904-1988) 'Autoritratto, Zurigo [Self-portrait, Zurich]' 1927 from the exhibition Exhibition: 'Jakob Tuggener – Machine time' at Fotostiftung Schweiz, Winterthur, Zurich, Oct 2017 - Jan 2018")
![Jakob Tuggener (Swiss, 1904-1988) 'Nell'ufficio della fonderia, fabbrica di costruzioni meccaniche Oerlikon' [In the foundry office, Oerlikon mechanical engineering factory] 1937](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/jakob-tuggener-nellufficio-della-fonderia-web.jpg "Jakob Tuggener (Swiss, 1904-1988) 'Nell'ufficio della fonderia, fabbrica di costruzioni meccaniche Oerlikon' [In the foundry office, Oerlikon mechanical engineering factory] 1937")
![Jakob Tuggener (Swiss, 1904-1988) 'Navy Cut, Ateliers de construction mécanique Oerlikon (MFO)' [Navy Cut, Machine Shops Oerlikon (MFO)] 1940](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/tuggener-navy-cut-web.jpg "Jakob Tuggener (Swiss, 1904-1988) 'Navy Cut, Ateliers de construction mécanique Oerlikon (MFO)' [Navy Cut, Machine Shops Oerlikon (MFO)] 1940")
![Jakob Tuggener (Swiss, 1904-1988) 'Laboratorio di ricerca, fabbrica di costruzioni meccaniche Oerlikon' [Research laboratory, Oerlikon mechanical engineering factory] 1941](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/jakob-tuggener-laboratorio-di-ricerca-web.jpg "Jakob Tuggener (Swiss, 1904-1988) 'Laboratorio di ricerca, fabbrica di costruzioni meccaniche Oerlikon' [Research laboratory, Oerlikon mechanical engineering factory] 1941")
![Jakob Tuggener (Swiss, 1904-1988) 'Forgeron dans une fabrique de wagons de Schlieren' [Blacksmith in a Schlieren wagon factory] 1949](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/tuggener-forgeron-dans-une-fabrique-de-wagons-web.jpg "Jakob Tuggener (Swiss, 1904-1988) 'Forgeron dans une fabrique de wagons de Schlieren' [Blacksmith in a Schlieren wagon factory] 1949")
![Jakob Tuggener (Swiss, 1904-1988) 'Ballo ungherese, Grand Hotel Dolder, Zurigo, 1935' [Hungarian dance, Grand Hotel Dolder, Zurich, 1935] 1935](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/tuggener-ballo-ungherese-web.jpg "Jakob Tuggener (Swiss, 1904-1988) 'Ballo ungherese, Grand Hotel Dolder, Zurigo, 1935' [Hungarian dance, Grand Hotel Dolder, Zurich, 1935] 1935")
![Jakob Tuggener (Swiss, 1904-1988) 'Ballo ungherese, Grand Hotel Dolder, Zurigo, 1935' [Hungarian dance, Grand Hotel Dolder, Zurich, 1935] 1935](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/jakob-tuggener-ballo-ungherese-web.jpg "Jakob Tuggener (Swiss, 1904-1988) 'Ballo ungherese, Grand Hotel Dolder, Zurigo, 1935' [Hungarian dance, Grand Hotel Dolder, Zurich, 1935] 1935")
![Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) 'Allenamento degli allievi del corpo della Marina [Students of the Navy training]' 1936 from the exhibition 'Ken Domon: Master of Japanese Realism' at the Museo dell'Ara Pacis, Rome, May - Sept, 2016](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/2-domon-ken-web.jpg "Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) 'Allenamento degli allievi del corpo della Marina [Students of the Navy training]' 1936 from the exhibition 'Ken Domon: Master of Japanese Realism' at the Museo dell'Ara Pacis, Rome, May - Sept, 2016")
![Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) 'Esercitazioni delle crocerossine' [Red Cross exercises] 1938 from the exhibition 'Ken Domon: Master of Japanese Realism' at the Museo dell'Ara Pacis, Rome, May - Sept, 2016](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/3-domon-ken-web.jpg "Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) 'Esercitazioni delle crocerossine' [Red Cross exercises] 1938 from the exhibition 'Ken Domon: Master of Japanese Realism' at the Museo dell'Ara Pacis, Rome, May - Sept, 2016")
![Ken Domon. 'Bambini che fanno roteare gli ombrelli [Kids twirling umbrellas]' c. 1937](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/15-domon-ken-web.jpg "Ken Domon. 'Bambini che fanno roteare gli ombrelli [Kids twirling umbrellas]' c. 1937")
![Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) 'Esercitazioni delle crocerossine [Red Cross exercises]' 1938](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/4-domon-ken-web.jpg "Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) 'Esercitazioni delle crocerossine [Red Cross exercises]' 1938")
![Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-199 'Foto commemorativa della cerimonia di diploma del corpo della Marina' [Commemorative photo of the Marine Corp graduation ceremony] 1944](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/5-domon-ken-web.jpg "Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-199 'Foto commemorativa della cerimonia di diploma del corpo della Marina' [Commemorative photo of the Marine Corp graduation ceremony] 1944")
![Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) 'Vigile urbano a Ginza 4-chōme' [Traffic policeman in Ginza 4-chōme] 1946](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/6-domon-ken-web.jpg "Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) 'Vigile urbano a Ginza 4-chōme' [Traffic policeman in Ginza 4-chōme] 1946")
![Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) 'Pescatrici di perle (ama san)' [Pearl fisherwomen] 1948](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/9-domon-ken-web.jpg "Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) 'Pescatrici di perle (ama san)' [Pearl fisherwomen] 1948")
![Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) 'Donne a passeggio' [Women walking] 1950](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/7-domon-ken-web.jpg "Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) 'Donne a passeggio' [Women walking] 1950")
![Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) 'L'attrice Yamaguchi Yoshiko' [The actress Yoshiko Yamaguchi] 1952](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/8-domon-ken-web.jpg "Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) 'L'attrice Yamaguchi Yoshiko' [The actress Yoshiko Yamaguchi] 1952")
![Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) 'Sit-in studentesco a Tachikawa contro l'ampliamento della base americana' [Student sit-in in Tachikawa against the expansion of US base] 1955](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/10-domon-ken-web.jpg "Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) 'Sit-in studentesco a Tachikawa contro l'ampliamento della base americana' [Student sit-in in Tachikawa against the expansion of US base] 1955")
![Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) 'Sorelline orfane, Rumie e Sayuri' [Orphan sisters, Rumie and Sayuri] 1959](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/12-domon-ken-web.jpg "Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) 'Sorelline orfane, Rumie e Sayuri' [Orphan sisters, Rumie and Sayuri] 1959")
![Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) 'Lucertola [Lizard]' 1955](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/13-domon-ken-web.jpg "Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) 'Lucertola [Lizard]' 1955")
![Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) 'Pioggerella' [Drizzle] 1952-1954](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/14-domon-ken-web.jpg "Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) 'Pioggerella' [Drizzle] 1952-1954")
![Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) 'Bagno presso il fiume davanti allo Hiroshima Dome' [Bath at the river in front of the Hiroshima Dome] 1957](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/16-domon-ken-web.jpg "Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) 'Bagno presso il fiume davanti allo Hiroshima Dome' [Bath at the river in front of the Hiroshima Dome] 1957")
![Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) 'La morte di Keiji' [The death of Keiji] 1957](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/20-domon-ken-web.jpg "Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) 'La morte di Keiji' [The death of Keiji] 1957")
![Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) 'Paziente in ospedale' [Hospital patient] 1957](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/17-domon-ken-web.jpg "Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) 'Paziente in ospedale' [Hospital patient] 1957")
![Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) 'Donna in cura per le lesioni da bomba atomica' [Women being treated for injuries from atomic bomb] 1957](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/18-domon-ken-web.jpg "Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) 'Donna in cura per le lesioni da bomba atomica' [Women being treated for injuries from atomic bomb] 1957")
![Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) 'Gemella non vedente' [Blind twin (female)] 1957](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/19-domon-ken-web.jpg "Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) 'Gemella non vedente' [Blind twin (female)] 1957")
![Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) 'Autoritratto' [Self-portrait] 1958](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/21-domon-ken-web.jpg "Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) 'Autoritratto' [Self-portrait] 1958")
![Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) 'Ushi (Bue), dai dodici guardiani (jūnishinshō) del Murōji' [Ushi (Ox), one of the twelve guardians (jūnishinshō) of Muroji] 1941-1943](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/26-domon-ken-web.jpg "Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) 'Ushi (Bue), dai dodici guardiani (jūnishinshō) del Murōji' [Ushi (Ox), one of the twelve guardians (jūnishinshō) of Muroji] 1941-1943")
![Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) 'Hitsuji (Pecora), dai dodici guardiani (jūnishinshō) del Murōji' [Hitsuji (Sheep), one of the twelve guardians (jūnishinshō) of Muroji] 1941-1943](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/27-domon-ken-web.jpg "Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) 'Hitsuji (Pecora), dai dodici guardiani (jūnishinshō) del Murōji' [Hitsuji (Sheep), one of the twelve guardians (jūnishinshō) of Muroji] 1941-1943")
![Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) 'Buddha Shaka ligneo a figura intera presso il Mirokudō del Murōji [Buddha Shaka wooden full-length at the Mirokudō Muroji]' c. 1943](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/30-domon-ken-web.jpg "Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) 'Buddha Shaka ligneo a figura intera presso il Mirokudō del Murōji [Buddha Shaka wooden full-length at the Mirokudō Muroji]' c. 1943")
![Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) 'Ōnodera, campana e ciliegi [Onodera, bell and cherry trees]' 1977](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/28-domon-ken-web.jpg "Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) 'Ōnodera, campana e ciliegi [Onodera, bell and cherry trees]' 1977")
![Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) 'Pagoda del Murōji con la neve [Pagoda Muroji with snow]' 1978](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/29-domon-ken-web.jpg "Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) 'Pagoda del Murōji con la neve [Pagoda Muroji with snow]' 1978")
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