Exhibition: ‘Lorna Simpson’ at Jeu de Paume, Paris

Exhibition dates: 28th May – 1st September 2013

Lorna Simpson (American, b. 1960)
Five Day Forecast (Prévisions à cinq jours)
1988
5 gelatin silver prints in a frame, 15 plates engraved plastic
24 1/2 x 97 in (62.2 x 246.4cm) overall
Lillian and Billy Mauer Collection
© Lorna Simpson

A fascinating practice!

Identity, memory, gender, representation, the body, the subject, felt, text, images, video, gesture, reenactment, concept and performance, all woven together seamlessly like a good wig made of human hair…

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

Lorna Simpson (American, b. 1960)
Stereo Styles (Styles stéréo)
1988
10 dye-diffusion black-and-white Polaroid prints, 10 engraved plastic plaques
57 3/4 x 125 1/4 x 1 3/8 in (146.7 x 318.1 x 3.5cm) overall
Collection of Melva Bucksbaum and Raymond Learsy
© Lorna Simpson

Lorna Simpson (American, b. 1960)
Wigs II
1994-2006
Serigraph on 71 felt panels (images and text)
98 x 265 in (248.9 x 673.1cm) overall
Courtesy the artist; Salon 94, New York; and Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris/Brussels
© Lorna Simpson

Lorna Simpson surprised her audiences in 1994 when she began to print her photographs on felt, inspired by its materiality after seeing an exhibition of the sculpture of Joseph Beuys in Paris “where the piano and walls were covered for a beautiful installation.” Simpson questioned whether the medium might be appropriate in a far different way for her work given the perspective afforded her by the passage of time. With the felt pieces, Simpson turned away from photography’s traditional paper support, magnified the already larger-than-life-size of the images within her large photo-text pieces to extremely large-scale multi-part works, and, most critically, absented the figure, in particular, the black woman in a white shift facing away from the camera for which she had received critical acclaim.

Ever-present, nevertheless, were her thematic concerns. The first felts offered surrogates for the body in a taxonomy of her own photographs of Wigs, with voicings “in and around gender,” and expanded upon the investigation of the role of coiffure in the construction of identity in Simpson’s photo-texts (such as Stereo Styles, Gallery 1). In the mid-1990s, such felts were succeeded by a series of photographs of interior and exterior scenes that were accompanied by long text passages printed on separate small felts. In these works the figure was replaced, as Okwui Enwezor wrote, “by the rumour of the body.”

Lorna Simpson (American, b. 1960)
Please remind me of who I am (detail)
2009
50 found photo booth portraits, 50 ink drawings on paper, 100 bronze elements
Overall installation dimensions variable
Collection of Isabelle and Charles Berkovic
© Lorna Simpson

For each multi-part photo-booth piece, Simpson sets in bronze frames these small inexpensive shots as well as her drawings of selected details of the photographs. Self-styled and performed, these photographs were used for a variety of purposes by their now anonymous sitters, ranging from sober, formal ID photos to glamorous, often theatrically playful mementos. Encompassing photo booth shots of different sizes from the 1920s to the 1970s (a few in colour), Simpson’s constellations of many images for each work offer a collective portrait of self-portraiture (Gather, 2009) and continue her ongoing explorations of identity and memory, explicitly phrased in the title of one of them: Please remind me of who I am (2009).

Lorna Simpson (American, b. 1960)
Waterbearer (Porteuse d’eau)
1986
Gelatin silver print, vinyl letters
59 x 80 x 2 1/2 in (149.9 x 203.2 x 5.7cm) overall
Courtesy the artist; Salon 94, New York; and Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris / Brussels
© Lorna Simpson

Waterbearer shows a woman from the back, pouring water from an elegant silvery metallic pitcher in one hand and from an inexpensive plastic jug in the other, echoing art historical renderings of women at wells or in the domestic settings of Dutch still-life paintings. As if balancing the scales of justice, this figure also symbolically offers disjunctions of means and class. In the accompanying text, Simpson explicitly addresses memory and the agency of speakers: “She saw him disappear by the river, they asked her to tell what happened, only to discount her memory.”

For her first European retrospective, the Jeu de Paume presents thirty years of Lorna Simpson’s work. For this Afro-American artist, born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1960, the synthesis between image and text is profound and intimate. If one were to consider Lorna Simpson as a writer, the textual element of her works could have an autonomous life as prose poems, very short stories or fragments of scripts. And yet, her texts are inseparable from her images; there is a dynamic between the two that is both fragile and energising, which links them unfailingly. Lorna Simpson became known in the 1980s and 90s for her photographs and films that shook up the conventions of gender, identity, culture and memory.

Throughout her work, the artist tackles the complicated representation of the black body, using different media, while her texts add a significance that always remains open to the spectator’s imagination. In her recent work, Lorna Simpson has integrated archive images, which she reinvents by positioning herself in them as subject. As the artist underlines: “The theme I turn to most often is memory. But beyond this subject, the underlying thread is my relationship to text and ideas about representation.” (Lorna Simpson)

This retrospective reveals the continuity in her conceptual and performative research. In her works linking photography and text, as well as in her video installations, she integrates – while continually shaking them up – the genres of fixed and moving images, using them to ask questions about identity, history, reality and fiction. She introduces complexity through her use of photography and film, in her exploitation of found objects, in the processes she develops to take on the challenges she sets herself and to spectators.

The exhibition gathers her large format photo-texts of the mid 1980s, which brought her to the attention of the critics (Gestures / Reenactments, Waterbearer, Stereo Styles), her work in screenprints on felt panels since the 1990s (Wigs, The Car, The Staircase, Day Time, Day Time (gold), Chandelier), a group of drawings (Gold Headed, 2013), and also her “Photo Booths,” ensembles of found photos and drawings (Gather, Please remind me of who I am…). The exhibition is also an opportunity to discover her video installations: multivalent narratives that question the way in which experience is created and perceived more or less falsely (Cloudscape, 2004, Momentum, 2010), among them, Playing Chess, a new video installation made especially for the occasion.

About the exhibition

Joan Simon

In her critically acclaimed body of work spanning more than thirty years, Lorna Simpson questions identity and memory, gender and history, fact and fiction, playing eye and ear in tandem if not in synchrony to prompt consideration of how meaning is constructed. That she has often described herself as an observer and a listener informs an understanding of both her approach and her subjects. In her earliest black-and-white documentary street photographs (1978-1980), Simpson isolated gestures that bespoke an intimacy between those framed in her viewfinder, recording what was less a decisive moment than one of coming into relation. Some of these photographs seem to capture crossed glances, pauses in an ongoing conversation. Others are glimpses of occasions, transitional events identifiable by a white confirmation or wedding dress, which convey a sense of palpable silence in exchanges between people just out of earshot.

When Simpson began to stage her own photographs in 1985 and to write accompanying texts, she came in closer. She allowed us to see a carefully framed black body, abstracted in gesture and in white clothing, yet also permitted us to read seemingly overheard comments that redirected and recomplicated the view. While her images captured gestures, her narratives imbued these images frozen in a never-changing present with memory, a past. The title of her first photo-text work, made in 1985, and of the exhibition of that year in which it was first exhibited was Gestures / Reenactments, and one can argue that all Simpson’s work is built on the juxtaposition of gestures and reenactments, creating meaning in the resonant gap between the two. It is a gap that invites the viewer / reader to enter, all the while requiring an active reckoning with some inalienable truths: seeing is not necessarily believing, and what we might see is altered not only by our individual experiences and assumptions but also, critically, by what we might hear.

The exhibition

Whether for still or moving picture productions, Lorna Simpson (b. 1960) uses her camera as catalyst to question identity and gender, genres and history, race and class, fact and fiction, memory and meanings. Assumptions of photographic “truth” are challenged and qualified – indeed redirected – by the images she creates that are inseparable from the texts she writes to accompany them, by the soundings she chooses for videos, or by her pairings of vintage photographs with newly made renderings. The Jeu de Paume presents lorna Simpson’s first large-scale exhibition in Europe beginning with her earliest photo-text pieces of the 1980s through her newest video installation, Chess, 2013, which makes its debut in Paris.

Works in the exhibition show the artist drawing on traditional photo techniques such as gelatin silver prints in an intimate synthesis with speakerly texts (Gallery 1). They also show Simpson’s creation of new combines, among them serigraphs on felt with writings and images invoking film noir (Gallery 2), a video installation of three projections based on historic photographs and her own prior still photos (Gallery 3), constellations of recuperated photo-booth photos with her drawings isolating details from them as well as vintage photographs together with those re-staged by the artist (Gallery 4), and a video focusing on performance as well as time itself and its reversal (Gallery 5).

The exhibition’s parcours [route] reveals turning points in Simpson’s oeuvre as well as thematic continuities. The earliest pieces in the show are Simpson’s performative proto-cinematic photo-texts, beginning with the 1985 Gestures/ Reeactments, a title literally evocative of the work’s visual / verbal aspect while also paradigmatically descriptive of what would be her conceptual practice for the next three decades. Simpson herself makes a rare appearance in her work in two related pieces in the show: the 2009 epic still photo work 1957-2009 (Gallery 4), for which the artist re-enacted scenes from vintage photos, and Chess, 2013, (Gallery 3), which features re-enactments of some of the same photos.

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Gallery 1 introduces the artist’s signature, indeed iconic early images of the 1980s – a black figure in white clothing, face turned away from the camera or cropped out of the frame – accompanied by precisely crafted, allusive texts that recomplicate what is seen by what is heard in these voicings. The intention to deny a view of a face, as Simpson says, “was related to the idea that the one thing that people gravitate to in photography is the face and reading the expression and what that says about the person pictured, an emotional state, who they are, what they look like, deciphering and measuring. Who is being pictured, what is actually the subject? Photographing from the back was a way to get viewers’ attention as well as to consciously withdraw what they might expect to see.”

The performative photo-text works in Gallery 1 are Gestures / Reenactments, 1985 (created as part of her thesis project for her MFA at the University of California, San Diego), Waterbearer and Twenty Questions (A Sampler) (the first works that Simpson made when she moved to New York in 1986), as well as Five Day Forecast, 1988, and Stereo Styles, 1988. Beginning with Waterbearer, all of these except Gestures / Reenactments (which features a black male) show a black female in a white shift played by artist Alva Rogers, who was often mistaken for Simpson herself.

Gallery 2 marks important changes the artist made during the ’90s, most notably Simpson’s surprising shift to printing her photographs on felt and absenting the human figure. At first she used surrogates for the body, seen in the many and various wigs she photographed and which she accompanied with texts that continued to address ideas of identity and gender (Wigs, 1994-2006). She used photographs taken during her travels for the next series of felt works, which were interior and exterior scenes (The Car, 1995, The Rock, 1995, The Staircase, 1998) that in both imagery and texts invoked film noir. These works led almost inevitably to the start of Simpson’s film and video work in 1997. (Her earliest photo-texts will be recognised by the viewer as proto-cinematic with their multiple frames and conversational voices.)

This gallery also reveals how Simpson continues to use her felt medium and returns to her own archive of images as well as found objects. Three related works, though no longer using text, nevertheless “comment” on each other: a video of a performance (Momentum, 2010) inspired by an early 1970s performance at Lincoln Center generated felt works based on vintage photographs of this famous New York theatre – Chandelier, 2011, Daytime, 2011, and Daytime (gold), 2011 – as well as the Gold Headed (2013) drawings, based on the dancers costumed head to foot in gold. Drawings are perhaps the least known medium in Simpson’s practice, and while they reveal the fluid gestures of her hand, visitors will recognise in these gold heads turned from the viewer an echo of the position of the figures in Gallery 1.

Gallery 3 is devoted to Simpson’s newest video, Chess, 2013, which is based on historic photos as well as her own earlier photographic piece, 1957-2009 (Gallery 4), in which she restaged found vintage photographs. Chess and 1957-2009 mark the rare instances in which Simpson has herself appeared in her work.

Gallery 4 presents reenactments that use quotidian photographic genres to explore constructions of identity and that offer a collective portrait of photographic portraiture over time. All of the works in this gallery are based on found photographs Simpson purchased on eBay and each depicts anonymous subjects performing for the camera. 1957-2009 is based on photographs in a vintage album; Gather and Please remind me of who I am are constellations of bronze-framed found photo-booth images (from the 1920s to the 1970s) accompanied by Simpson’s similarly framed drawings of details from the photographs.

Gallery 5 offers Simpson’s video installation Cloudscape, 2004, which focuses on performance itself and the soundings of a body, that of artist Terry Adkins whistling a hymn. Embodying memory (and the distortions of it) as she did in her earliest photo-works but playing also with the particularities of video, Simpson loops the video to play forward and backward. In this process a new melody is created even as the stationary figure appears same but different.

Lorna Simpson (American, b. 1960)
Chess (Échecs)
2013
HD video installation with three projections, black & white, sound
10:25 minutes (loop)
Score and performance by Jason Moran
Courtesy the artist; Salon 94, New York; and Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris/Brussels
© Lorna Simpson

“Gestures” and “reenactments” could both be described as the underlying methods of Simpson’s practice for the decades to follow. Whether working with photographs she herself staged, found photographs, or archival film footage, her images captured gestures (as in her earliest documentary photographs of 1978-1980) while her series of multiple images, accompanied by texts, proposed simultaneous (if not synchronous) reenactments. This method also applied to works in which she replicated found images, whether turning images from her films into drawings, or using herself to re-play roles depicted by anonymous figures she had discovered in vintage photographs, either for staged still photographs (as in 1957-2009, 2009), or for moving pictures (as in the video Chess, 2013).

Chess, 2013, Simpson’s video installation made expressly for this exhibition, draws on images from 1957-2009, her still photograph ensemble of 2009 (on view in Gallery 4). For both, in a departure from her earlier videos and prior staged photographs, Simpson herself performs. In 1957-2009, by reenacting scenes from found vintage prints with which they are shown, Simpson is “mirroring both the male and the female character, in dress, pose, expression, and setting. When I would mention the idea of working with mirrors [for the Chess video] people would often mention the famous portraits of Picasso and Picabia taken at a photo studio in New York by an anonymous photographer who placed the subject at a table in front of two mirrored panels at seventy-degree angles. The result is a five-way portrait that includes views that are not symmetrical and that offer slightly different angles: a surrealist trope of trick photography.”

Though the artist first rejected the idea of working with the mirror device used in these historic portraits, which she had seen many times, she decided to take it on fully and reconstruct it in her studio for this new video project after art historian and sociologist Sarah Thornton sent her “a beautiful image of an unknown man of African descent in a white straw hat, which had been in an exhibition at MoMA [catalogue page 61]. It was a five-way portrait probably taken by the same photographer who had taken the portraits of Picasso and Picabia. I could no longer resist or dismiss this idea. I felt that it was demanding my attention.”

Shot in Simpson’s studio over the weekend of December 8, 2012, Chess is comprised of three video projections. For two of them Simpson again plays both female and male chess-players, and with the help of makeup and hair assistants, she now allows her characters to age. The third projection shows pianist Jason Moran performing his improvised score for this project, which was inspired by discussions between artist and composer about “mirroring in music,” especially “in the work of musician Cecil Taylor, who employs mirroring in his compositions.”

Lorna Simpson (American, b. 1960)
The Car
1995
Serigraph on 12 felt panels with felt text panel
102 x 104 in (259.1 x 264.2cm)
Courtesy the artist; Salon 94, New York; and Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris/Brussels
© Lorna Simpson

Lorna Simpson (American, b. 1960)
The Car (detail)
1995
Serigraph on 12 felt panels with felt text panel
102 x 104 in (259.1 x 264.2cm)
Courtesy the artist; Salon 94, New York; and Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris/Brussels
© Lorna Simpson

Lorna Simpson
1957-2009 (detail)
2009
299 gelatin silver prints, framed
5 x 5 in. (12.7 x 12.7cm) each (image size)
Rennie Collection, Vancouver
© Lorna Simpson

While collecting photo booth images on eBay, Simpson found the first of the vintage photographs – a woman in a tight sweater-dress leaning on a car – that would generate 1957–2009 (2009). The artist subsequently bought the entire album and in 2009 restaged these photographs of an anonymous black woman and sometimes a man performing for their camera between June and August 1957 in Los Angeles, which they may have done in the hope of gaining movie work in Hollywood or as an independent project of self-invention. For 1957-2009, Simpson reenacted both female and male roles, and the 299 images are comprised of both the 1957 originals and Simpson’s 2009 remakes. Simpson again reenacted a selection of these vignettes for her video installation Chess, 2013.

Lorna Simpson (American, b. 1960)
Cloudscape (Paysage nuageux)
2004
Video projection, black & white, sound
3:00 minutes (loop)
Centre national des arts plastiques, purchase in 2005
Photo courtesy the artist; Salon 94, New York; and Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris/Brussels
© Lorna Simpson/Centre national des arts plastiques

Lorna Simpson’s video installation Cloudscape (2004) isolates one man, Simpson’s friend, the artist and musician Terry Adkins, in a dark room, spotlighted as he whistles a hymn and is enveloped in fog. Focusing on the ephemerality of performance, the artist employs a technique afforded by her medium to play with time as well. Simpson runs the video forward and then also backward in a continuous loop, creating new visual and oral / aural permutations of gesture and reenactment. In the reversal of the time sequence, the image remains somewhat familiar while the tune turns into something else, a different melody.

Lorna Simpson (American, b. 1960)
Momentum
2010
HD video, color, sound
6:56 minutes
Courtesy the artist; Salon 94, New York; and Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris/Brussels
© Lorna Simpson

As Simpson explored new mediums, such as film and video starting in 1997 or found photographs in the late 1990s, she continued to work in parallel with her felt serigraphs. In this gallery are three related sets of works that, unlike her earlier photo-text pieces, are all based on a personal memory: performing as a youngster, age 12, in gold costume, wig, and body paint in a ballet recital at New York’s Lincoln Center. Simpson re-staged such a performance for her video Momentum (2010).

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Exhibition: ‘Japan’s Modern Divide: The Photographs of Hiroshi Hamaya and Kansuke Yamamoto’ at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Exhibition dates: 26th March – 25th August 2013

Hiroshi Hamaya (Japanese, 1915-1999)
The Village up on a Cay, Aomori Prefecture
1955
Gelatin silver print
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Keisuke Katano

According to the press release, “Hamaya focused inward toward rural life on the back coast of Japan, [while] Yamamoto found inspiration in the art of European Surrealists,” the two artists responding differently to upheaval in their country in two different ways. While Yamamoto is more obviously influenced by the Surrealists, almost becoming the Japanese version of Man Ray, for me Hamaya’s photographs are equally if more subtly influenced by the cultural movement. Observe Woman Planting Rice, Toyama Prefecture (1955, below). I relate this image to the atomisation of bodies during the conflagration of Hiroshima, however subconsciously the artist is expressing this feeling. Similarly, the faceless humans in Rice Harvesting, Yamagata Prefecture (1955, below), blind musicians, disembodied man in a raincoat or poet thinking the void all have an essential quality, that of a disturbing psychological undertow which juxtaposes two more or less distant realities – reality and dream – to form images of great emotional and poetic power.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

Hiroshi Hamaya (Japanese, 1915-1999)
The United States-Japan Security Treaty Protest, Tokyo, May 20, 1960
1960
Gelatin silver print
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Keisuke Katano

Hiroshi Hamaya (Japanese, 1915-1999)
New Year’s Ritual, Niigata Prefecture
1940-1946
Gelatin silver print
30.6 x 20.2cm
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Keisuke Katano

Japan’s Black Coast

“Knowledge of the back coast, along the Sea of Japan, is somewhat vague to those not living there, and in the minds of most people it is a country obscured by snow. In Japan, the back coast is where the old era still lingers on… The supporting industries of this back coast are primitive – agriculture, forestry, and fishing. The work involved is backbreaking physical labor. A narrow land, a heavy population, and climatic drawbacks invite a vicious circle of poverty. The basic Japanese foods are fish and rice. And they are obtained by these people only through hard labor.”

Hiroshi Hamaya, Ura Nihon (Japan’s Back Coast), 1957

A Chronicle of Grief and Anger

In 1959 the proposed ten-year renewal of the United States-Japan Security Treaty of 1952 meant the continuation of the presence of U.S. troops and the persistence of U.S. political and cultural influence. When Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi, with the aid of the police, forced the Japanese parliament to ratify the treaty in May 1960, the public upheaval was immense. Hamaya, a pacifist living outside Tokyo, entered the fray with his camera, chronicling the demonstrations. His pictures were published both individually and in the form of a quickly assembled paperback under the title Ikari to kanashimi no kiroku (A Chronicle of Grief and Anger).

Portraiture

Japanese society had a pronounced respect for artists, authors, craftsmen, and scholars. As a freelance photographer, Hamaya was often enlisted to make portraits of them for publication. He compiled a selection of these portraits made since the 1940s for the 1983 book Japanese Scholars and Artists, which included the renowned poet, art historian, and calligrapher Yaichi Aizu. Hamaya also produced a series of genre studies that featured his wife, Asa Hamaya, who was a skilled master of the tea ceremony. After her death in 1985 Hamaya prepared a memorial to her in the form of a portfolio of prints, titled Calendar Days of Asa Hamaya, following the earlier ukiyo-e tradition of woodblock series such as bijin-ga (pictures of beautiful women).

Observing Nature

“I spent three years and four months on an extended walking tour to observe nature in Japan, from the drifting ice packs off the Shiretoko Peninsula to the coral reefs of Okinawa … Nature breathed, sometimes deeply and sometimes violently, with the climatic changes of the seasons, and with the changing face of daily weather, humidity, seasonal winds, and typhoons. In particular, the distribution of plants from the subarctic to the subtropical zones, and of lichen and mosses, was both complex and varied… I came to realise that natural features in Japan, like the nature of its people, were extremely diversified and complex. I intended to investigate this conclusion with my own eyes.”

Hiroshi Hamaya, My Fifty Years of Photography, 1982

Hiroshi Hamaya (Japanese, 1915-1999)
Woman Planting Rice, Toyama Prefecture
1955
Gelatin silver print
42.1 x 28cm
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Keisuke Katano

Hiroshi Hamaya (Japanese, 1915-1999)
Rice Harvesting, Yamagata Prefecture
1955
Gelatin silver print print
29.5 x 19.7cm (11 5/8 x 7 3/4 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Keisuke Katano

Hiroshi Hamaya (Japanese, 1915-1999)
Blind Musicians, Niigata Prefecture
1956
Gelatin silver print print
30.1 x 20cm (11 7/8 x 7 7/8 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Keisuke Katano

Hiroshi Hamaya (Japanese, 1915-1999)
Man in a Traditional Minobashi Raincoat, Niigata Prefecture
1956
Gelatin silver print print
30.6 x 19.8cm (12 1/16 x 7 13/16 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Keisuke Katano

Hiroshi Hamaya (Japanese, 1915-1999)
Yaichi Aizu, Poet, Calligrapher, and Japanese Art Critic
1947
Gelatin silver print print
24 x 16cm (9 7/16 x 6 5/16 in.)
Estate of Hiroshi Hamaya, Oiso, Japan
© Keisuke Katano

The Taishō era (1912-1926) was a brief but dynamic period in Japan’s history that ushered in a modern state with increased industrialisation, shifting political parties, radical fashions, and liberal thinking in many areas. However, this era of heightened experimentation ended with the arrival of an international depression, the promotion of ultranationalism, and the country’s entry into what would become the Greater East Asia War.

Reflecting both sides of this dramatic transition, two disparate representations of modern Japan will be displayed together in Japan’s Modern Divide: The Photographs of Hiroshi Hamaya and Kansuke Yamamoto, on view March 26 – August 25, 2013, at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Getty Center. Curated by Judith Keller, senior curator of photographs, and Amanda Maddox, assistant curator of photographs, the exhibition includes photographs from the Getty Museum’s permanent collection, the Toyko Metropolitan Museum of Photography, the estate of Hiroshi Hamaya, the Nagoya City Art Museum, and other public and private lenders.

Born during the Taishō era, photographers Hiroshi Hamaya (1915-1999) and Kansuke Yamamoto (1914-1987) responded to Japan’s rapidly-changing sociopolitical climate in very different ways. While Hamaya focused inward toward rural life on the back coast of Japan, Yamamoto found inspiration in the art of European Surrealists. As the ebb and flow of Japan’s political, economic, and social structures persisted across the 20th century, Hamaya and Yamamoto continued to pursue divergent paths, thus embodying both sides of modern Japanese life: the traditional and the Western, the rural and the urban, the oriental and the occidental.

“Much is known about the Surrealists living and working in Europe, as well as the celebrated documentary tradition of 20th-century photography, but the Japanese artists who embraced these movements remain relatively unknown in the West,” says Timothy Potts, director of the J. Paul Getty Museum. “This exhibition illuminates the extraordinary work of two artists who responded to upheaval in their country in two different, but equally powerful ways.”

Hiroshi Hamaya

The son of a detective, Hamaya grew up in Tokyo’s Ueno neighbourhood during the rise and decline of the Taishō era. After attending Kanto Junior College, he began his photographic career by taking aerial images for the Practical Aeronautical Institute. He later photographed downtown Tokyo from street level, and provided images of daily city life and local events to a number of magazines. In 1939, an assignment that took him to Ura Nihon, or the rural back coast of the Sea of Japan, changed his view of photography and society.

Known for its unforgiving winter snowstorms and the difficult lives of its impoverished inhabitants, Ura Nihon was a mystery to most of Japan and the world. Moved by the customs and lifestyles of a much older era, Hamaya shifted from journalism toward a more humanistic and ethnographic approach to photography, capturing the everyday life of the region’s residents. This included documenting labourers in fields and at sea, as fish and rice were the primary sources of nourishment throughout the year.

From 1940 to 1955 Hamaya pursued a long-term personal interest in the region of Echigo (now known as Niigata Prefecture). He recorded the people, traditions, and landscape of a district that was, at the time, Japan’s chief rice-producing region in spite of a four-month long snow season. Among his many subjects, Hamaya focused on the winter in Kuwatoridani, a small agricultural village that practiced elaborate, long-standing New Year’s Eve rituals. In New Year’s Ritual, Niigata Prefecture (1940-1946), boys in the village are seated with their hands clasped and their eyes closed in prayer. The close-up of the boys’ faces in deep concentration emphasises the respect for customs of the region.

In late 1959, the proposed ten-year renewal of the United States-Japan Security Treaty of 1952 raised doubts about Japan’s sovereignty and its future prosperity. When Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi, with the aid of police, forced the Japanese parliament to ratify the treaty in May 1960, the political upheaval was immense. While Hamaya was a pacifist, he felt obligated to return to his journalistic roots and entered the fray with his camera. He chronicled the demonstrations day by day, sometimes hour by hour.

“These demonstrations profoundly affected Hamaya, causing him, in the 1960s, to turn from the social landscape to an investigation of nature,” explains Judith Keller. “His disillusionment with Japan’s political apparatus provoked a rejection of the human subject. Much of the work he created in his late career depicts the volcanoes, seas, mountains, forests, and other natural wonders of Japan and other small island nations.”

Hamaya’s career also included portraiture of noted artists and scholars. As a freelance photographer, he was often enlisted to make portraits of well-known men and women, and in 1983 published Japanese Scholars and Artists, a book that included prominent novelist Junichiro Tanizaki, woodcut artist Shiko Manakata, literary critic Kenichi Yoshida, and renowned poet, art historian, and calligrapher Yaichi Aizu. He also documented the daily life of his beloved wife, Asa, and upon her death in 1985 created a portfolio of these sensitive photographs, Calendar Days of Asa Hamaya.

Kansuke Yamamoto

Kansuke Yamamoto (1914-1987) learned about photography from his father, an amateur pictorialist photographer and owner of the first photo supply store in the city of Nagoya. His interest in photography developed at a time when two movements based on experimentation and new modes of expression – Shinkō Shashin (New Photography) and Zen’ei Shashin (avant-garde photography) – were dominant. However, it was Surrealism – particularly Surrealist artists and writers such as René Magritte, Paul Éluard, Yves Tanguy, and Man Ray that appears to have made the most profound impact on his work.

Yamamoto was an influential figure in the avant-garde photography movement in Japan in the 1930s, helping to establish the group Nagoya Foto Avant-Garde by the end of that decade. In 1938 he created a journal, Yoru no Funsui (The Night’s Fountain), which promoted Surrealist poems, literature, ideas, and art in Japanese.

His first photographs date to the early 1930s and reveal an interest in myriad techniques and subjects, including abstract architectural studies, still life, and collage. From the outset, he created work suffused with mystery, provocation, and humour. He often utilised photography as a means to address controversial issues or express avant-garde ideas. For example, in Buddhist Temple’s Birdcage (1940), the telephone enclosed in the cage is possibly a metaphor for the control exercised by the Japanese government during the Showa Era (1926-1989), a theme that reappears in work produced throughout his career. The experience of being interrogated by the Tokkō (Thought Police) in 1939 for his journal, Yoru no Funsui, and its potentially subversive content made a profound impact on Yamamoto, but never deterred his avant-garde spirit.

Yamamoto remained part of the artistic vanguard in Japan during the 1940s and 1950s. He was a member of VOU, a club founded by poet Katue Kitasono that organised exhibitions and published a journal promoting visual “plastic” poetry, photography, literature, and other arts. In 1947 Yamamoto founded VIVI, a collective in Nagoya that allowed further dissemination and promotion of avant-garde ideologies. Yamamoto continued to produce innovative work during this period, experimenting with colour photography, combination printing, photograms, and sculpture.

“At the end of his career in the 1970s, Yamamoto maintained his ardent nonconformist spirit, employing art as a means of criticism, dialogue, and rebellion,” explains Amanda Maddox. “He never failed to generate provocative imagery in an effort to represent his convictions concerning war, liberty, and avant-garde ideologies.”

Press release from the J. Paul Getty Museum website

Kansuke Yamamoto (Japanese, 1914-1987)
My Thin-aired Room
1956
Gelatin silver print print
34.9 x 42.9cm (13 3/4 x 16 7/8 in.)
Private collection, entrusted to Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography
© Toshio Yamamoto

Kansuke Yamamoto (Japanese, 1914-1987)
Rose and Shovel
1956
Gelatin silver print print
31.9 x 34.9cm (12 9/16 x 13 3/4 in.)
© Toshio Yamamoto
Private collection, entrusted to Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography

Kansuke Yamamoto (Japanese, 1914-1987)
A Forgotten Person
1958
Chromogenic print
46.2 x 33cm (18 3/16 x 13 in.)
© Toshio Yamamoto
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Kansuke Yamamoto (Japanese, 1914-1987)
Stapled Flesh
1949
Gelatin silver print print
31.1 x 24.8cm (12 1/4 x 9 3/4 in.)
© Toshio Yamamoto
From the Collection of Gloria Katz and Willard Huyck

Kansuke Yamamoto (Japanese, 1914-1987)
Buddhist Temple’s Bird Cage
1940
Gelatin silver print
© Toshio Yamamoto
Private collection, entrusted to Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography

Kansuke Yamamoto (Japanese, 1914-1987)
Butterfly
1970
Gelatin silver print print
16.4 x 11.4cm (6 7/16 x 4 1/2 in.)
© Toshio Yamamoto
Private collection, entrusted to Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography

Kansuke Yamamoto (Japanese, 1914-1987)
A Chronicle of Drifting
1949
Collage print
30 x 24.8cm (11 13/16 x 9 3/4 in.)
© Toshio Yamamoto
Private collection, entrusted to Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography

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

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

The J. Paul Getty Museum website

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Exhibition: ‘Herb Ritts: Beauty and Celebrity’ at Oklahoma City Museum of Art, Oklahoma City

Exhibition dates: 9th May – 28th July 2013

Herb Ritts (American, 1952-2002)
Fred with Tires – Bodyshop Series, Hollywood
1984
Gelatin silver print
24 x 20 in. (60.9 x 50.8cm)
Gift of Herb Ritts. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
© Herb Ritts Foundation

I admit that I went through a stage of disliking Herb Ritts photographs – no longer!

In contemplation, his formal aestheticism confirms a serene beauty – spare, refined, erotic.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Fred with Tires became the archetypal photograph of the male body in the 1980s and made the world-wide reputation of its commercial photographer, Herb Ritts. Gay men flocked to buy it, myself included. I was drawn by the powerful, perfectly sculpted body, the butchness of his job, the dirty trousers, the boots and the body placed within a social context. At the time I realised that the image of this man was a constructed fantasy, ie. not the ‘real’ thing, and this feeling of having been deceived has grown ever since. His hair is teased up and beautifully styled, the grease is applied to his body just so, his body twisted to just the right degree to accentuate the muscles of the stomach and around the pelvis. You can just imagine the stylist standing off camera ready to readjust the hair if necessary, the assistants with their reflectors playing more light onto the body. This/he is the seduction of a marketable homoeroticsm, the selling of an image as sex, almost camp in its overt appeal to gay archetypal stereotypes.

Herb Ritts, whether in his commercial work or in his personal images such as those of the gay bodybuilders Bob Paris and Rod Jackson, has helped increase the acceptance of the openly homoerotic photograph in a wider sphere but this has been possible only with an increased acceptance of homosexual visibility within the general population.  Openly gay bodies such as that of Australian rugby league star Ian Roberts or American diver Greg Luganis can become heroes and role models to young gay men coming out of the closet for the first time, visible evidence that gay men are everywhere in every walk of life. This is fantastic because young gay men do need gay role models to look up to but the bodies they possess only conform to the one type, that of the muscular mesomorph and this reinforces the ideal of a traditional masculinity. Yes, the guy in the shower next to you might be a poofter, might be queer for heavens sake, but my God what a body he’s got!”

Marcus Bunyan. “Historical Pressings,” from Pressing the Flesh: Sex, Body Image and the Gay Male (Phd thesis) 2001

Many thankx to Oklahoma City 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.

Herb Ritts (American, 1952-2002)
Djimon with Octopus, Hollywood
1989
Gelatin silver print
44.5 x 38.7cm (17 1/2 x 15 1/4 in.)
© Herb Ritts Foundation

Herb Ritts (American, 1952-2002)
Tony with shadow, Los Angeles
1988
Gelatin silver print
© Herb Ritts Foundation

Herb Ritts (American, 1952-2002)
Jackie Joyner-Kersee, Point Dume
1987
Gelatin silver print
31.9 x 25.4cm (12 9/16 x 10 in.)
Gift of Herb Ritts. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
© Herb Ritts Foundation

Herb Ritts (American, 1952-2002)
Versace Dress, Back View, El Mirage
1990
Gelatin silver print
137.2 x 109.2cm (54 x 43 in.)
Gift of Herb Ritts. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
© Herb Ritts Foundation

The American photographer Herb Ritts produced a body of work in the 1980s and 1990s that seems to embody the outdoor lifestyle and glamour of the southern California beautiful set. This photograph, taken at El Mirage Dry Lake in California, appeared on the cover of Italian designer Gianni Versace’s September 1990 catalogue and incorporates a formalism and contemporary sensuality characteristic of Ritts’s aesthetic. Ritts’s photograph appeals through its boldly contrasting lights and darks.

Herb Ritts (American, 1952-2002)
Versace Veiled Dress, El Mirage
1990
55.8 x 44.6cm (21 15/16 x 17 9/16 in.)
Gift of Herb Ritts. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
© Herb Ritts Foundation

Herb Ritts (American, 1952-2002)
Now and Zen 1, El Mirage
1999
Gelatin silver print
© Herb Ritts Foundation

Herb Ritts: Beauty and Celebrity will be on view at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art from May 9 through July 28, 2013. Organised by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston with the support of the Herb Ritts Foundation and the Oklahoma City Museum of Art, this exhibition will feature over eighty large-scale black-and-white photographs by acclaimed photographer, Herb Ritts (American, 1952-2002). Ranging in scale from intimate portraits to ten foot murals, the exhibition will highlight the diversity of the artist’s work. Known for his innovative approach to fashion, intimate portraiture of celebrities, and the classical treatment of the nude, Ritts emerged in the 1980s to become one of the most successful celebrity and fashion photographers of the late twentieth century and an important part of the history of American photography.

Herb Ritts grew up in Los Angeles and maintained his studio in Hollywood. A self-taught photographer, Ritts first began taking photographs in the late 1970s after studying economics at Bard College. The intimate publicity images that he made of Richard Gere were among his first serious portraits and helped to launch his career. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Ritts built his reputation as a leading celebrity portraitist and fashion photographer, contributing regularly to publications such as GQ, Mademoiselle, Vogue, and Vanity Fair. From 1988, he also made music videos and commercials for which he won numerous awards.

The photographs included in the exhibition represent some of Herb Ritts’s most iconic works which incorporate the natural light of the California sun while emphasising shapes, unusual juxtapositions, and the beauty of the human form. Ritts celebrates nature and the human body in evoking the tactile appeal of surface textures of grains of sand, veiled fabric, drying mud, and cascading water seen in Waterfall 4 (1988), Backflip (1987), and Woman in Sea (1988). Fashion photographs on view include such as Versace Veiled Dress, El Mirage (1990), Stephanie, Cindy, Christy, Tatjana, Naomi, Hollywood (1989), and Djimon with Octopus (1989). Examples of celebrity portraiture include Richard Gere, Jack Nicholson, Madonna, Elizabeth Taylor, Johnny Depp, Bruce Springsteen, Drew Barrymore, David Bowie, Matthew McConaughey, and Mick Jagger. Also included in the exhibition are poetic and eternal images in Ritts’s Africa series, taken in 1993 when he traveled to East Africa, and examples from the rare Corps et Ames (1999) series of photographs, portraying dancers in motion.

This exhibition – drawn from the photography collection at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Herb Ritts Foundation – present Herb Ritts’ style and the range of his career.

Press release from the Oklahoma City Museum of Art website

Herb Ritts (American, 1952-2002)
Male Nude with Bubble, Los Angeles
1987
Gelatin silver print
© Herb Ritts Foundation

Herb Ritts (American, 1952-2002)
Wrapped Torso, Los Angeles
1989
Platinum print
46.4 x 38.4cm (18 1/4 x 15 1/8 in.)
Gift of Herb Ritts. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
© Herb Ritts Foundation

Herb Ritts (American, 1952-2002)
Backflip, Paradise Cove
1987
Gelatin silver print
90 x 70 in. (228.6 x 177.8cm)
© Herb Ritts Foundation

Herb Ritts (American, 1952-2002)
Corp et Âmes – 14, Los Angeles
1999
Gelatin silver print
14 x 11 in. (35.5 x 27.9cm)
© Herb Ritts Foundation

Herb Ritts (American, 1952-2002)
Chrissy Turlington, Versace 3, Milan
1991
Gelatin silver print
© Herb Ritts Foundation

Herb Ritts (American, 1952-2002)
Madonna (True Blue Profile), Hollywood
1986
Gelatin silver print
24 x 20 in. (60.9 x 50.8cm)
Gift of Herb Ritts Foundation. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
© Herb Ritts Foundation

Herb Ritts (American, 1952-2002)
Matthew McConaughey, Palmdale
1996
Gelatin silver print
24 x 20 in. (60.9 x 50.8cm)
Gift of Herb Ritts Foundation. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
© Herb Ritts Foundation

Herb Ritts (American, 1952-2002)
Loriki with Spear, Africa
1993
Gelatin silver print
45 x 41 in. (114.3 x 104.1cm)
© Herb Ritts Foundation

Herb Ritts (American, 1952-2002)
Tony Ward
1986
Gelatin silver print
© Herb Ritts Foundation

Herb Ritts (American, 1952-2002)
Waterfall IV, Hollywood
1988
Platinum print
20 x 16 in. (50.8 x 40.64cm)
© Herb Ritts Foundation

Herb Ritts (American, 1952-2002)
Woman in Sea, Hawaii
1988
Gelatin silver print
24 x 20 in. (60.9 x 50.8cm)
Gift of Herb Ritts. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
© Herb Ritts Foundation

Herb Ritts (American, 1952-2002)
Bill T. Jones VI, Los Angeles
1995
Gelatin silver print
© Herb Ritts Foundation

Herb Ritts (American, 1952-2002)
Man with Chain, Los Angeles
1985
Gelatin silver print
47.8 x 38.4 cm (18 13/16 x 15 1/8 in.)
Gift of Herb Ritts. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
© Herb Ritts Foundation

Oklahoma City Museum of Art
415 Couch Drive
Oklahoma City, OK 73102

Opening hours:
Tuesday – Saturday: 10am – 5pm
Sunday: noon – 5pm
Closed: Mondays and Major Holidays

Oklahoma City Museum of Art website

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Text: ‘Ernest Cole: Journeys through photojournalism, social documentary photography and art’ Dr Marcus Bunyan / Exhibition: ‘Ernest Cole Photographer’ at The Fowler Museum at UCLA, Los Angeles

Exhibition dates: 7th April – 7th July 2013

Ernest Cole (South African, 1940-1990)
Every African must show his pass before being allowed to go about his business. Sometimes check broadens into search of a man’s person and belongings
1960-1966
Gelatin silver print
8 11/16 x 12 5/8 in. (22 x 32cm)
Courtesy of the Hasselblad Foundation, Gothenburg, Sweden
© The Ernest Cole Family Trust

Ernest Cole: Journeys through photojournalism, social documentary photography and art

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Abstract

This text investigates the trajectory of the work of Ernest Cole in order to understand how it developed under the influence of the South African Apartheid system.

Keywords

Ernest Cole, photography, photojournalism, social documentary photography, South Africa, apartheid, The Family of Man, photo book, photo essay, Drum magazine, Life magazine, art, House of Bondage.

“For each individual photographer, there was the struggle to overcome the blind spots resulting from an internalised apartheid ideology. To see what had not hitherto been seen; to make visible what had been invisible; to find ways of articulating through the medium of photography, a reality obscured by government propaganda.”

Joyce Ozynski 1

“The Whites are more oppressed than the blacks in this country. Because they can’t feel. They have lost their humanity.”

Omar Badsha 2

For 43 years (1948-1991) the country of South Africa and its people lived under the racially discriminatory policy of apartheid (separateness), adopted when the National Party (NP) took power and enshrined segregation laws between black and whites into law. Under these laws the rights of the majority black inhabitants of South Africa were curtailed and white supremacy / Afrikaner minority rule was maintained. The population was split into four groups: “native”, “white”, “coloured”, and “Asian”, and residential areas were segregated, sometimes by means of forced removals.3 One man who grew up under this oppressive regime and whose photographic representation of its nature made him a world-renowned photographer was Ernest Cole.

The photographer that we know as Ernest Cole was born Ernest Levi Tsoloane Kole on the 21st March 1940 in humble circumstances, the fourth of sixth children, in Eersterust, an Eastern suburb of Pretoria. Cole suffered from malnutrition growing up, was slight of build (he was only 5′ tall as an adult) but was very intelligent. He took a series of menial jobs after leaving school at the age of 16, all he could find as an unskilled labourer. At the weekends during the 1950s, Cole began taking photographs on a black box camera and obtained a job as a dark room assistant to a Chinese photographer, later becoming photographer at Zonk magazine, a competitor to Drum magazine that he eventually joined as page layout designer and photographer in 1958.4

Drum magazine, founded as The African Drum in 1951, was the most influential magazine for black people during the anti-apartheid era, “A Magazine for Africa by Africa” that was loosely based on the template of the American Life magazine. Cole would have been exposed to international photojournalism through its pages; he also studied photography by correspondence course with the New York Institute of Photography and was always carrying around photography books that he avidly studied.5 Although few photographs by Cole were published to illustrate photo-essays in Drum (the photographs always appearing with accompanying text), he was exposed to the work of other photojournalists who appeared in its pages; he would also have seen the article that appeared in Drum in May 1958 on the international touring exhibition curated by Edward Steichen titled The Family of Man. This exhibition opened in Johannesburg in September 1958, and Cole would have certainly have visited the “no colour bar” post-war humanist photography exhibition.6 Darren Newbury’s chapter on the history of Drum in his excellent book Defiant Images: Photography and Apartheid South Africa (2009) situates the magazine, “in the context of developments in international photojournalism and the rise of picture magazines in Europe and the US, while acknowledging the influence that urban black culture had on its style and content, with its concentration on US sportsmen and jazz music as well as stories on crime and poverty.”7

Here we observe the difference between photojournalism and social documentary photography. Photojournalism differs from social documentary photography in the primacy of text, the limited number of photographs, the more rigid conventions of framing, and the more direct form of highlighting injustice and inhumanity in resistance photojournalism.8

“Photojournalism is a particular form of journalism (the collecting, editing, and presenting of news material for publication or broadcast) that creates images in order to tell a news story… [and] is distinguished from other close branches of photography (eg. documentary photography, social documentary photography, or street photography) by complying with a rigid ethical framework which demands that the work is both honest and impartial whilst telling the story in strictly journalistic terms.”9 When compared to photojournalism, social documentary photography, “is the recording of humans in their natural condition with a camera. Often it also refers to a socially critical genre of photography dedicated to showing the life of underprivileged or disadvantaged people.”10

Cole, eventually unsettled by the piecemeal approach of taking single photographs to illustrate photo-essays in Drum – in other words being a photojournalist – moved towards being a social documentary photographer, inveigling himself of the history of this form of photography through the work of artists such as Jacob Riis, Lewis Hine, Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans and the photographers of the Farm Security Administration (FSA).11 With his two 35mm Nikon cameras slung over his shoulder, Cole accessed areas that were usually restricted to black people because he had been classified as “coloured.” Being a loner, he could move about the city and country more freely than most black people who required identity passes, or “dompas” (“stupid passes”), to enter white areas. The work was dangerous and fraught with difficulty for when photographing in hospitals, prisons and mines, fear of discovery and arrest was ever present: paranoia and adrenalin were always part of this mix. Cole was frequently arrested and had, on occasion, to bury his negatives to hide them from the Secret Police. “He seemed to be able to get in anywhere and shoot anything, short and neat, in sports coat and slacks, he was the invisible man.”12

In one sense Cole’s photographs can be seen to have a relationship to “scene of the crime” photographs (such as those by Weggee),13 for Cole “steals” his images from the continuum of time, whipping out his camera, framing the image, snatching its import and returning the camera to the dark before anyone has noticed. Unlike Weggee, who used flash to capture his nightmarish scenes (making the presence of the photographer part of the psychology of the picture), Cole eschewed the use of flash. He was also an insider photographing a subject matter that was of great importance to him, not an outsider looking in at the subject, like the French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson whose book People of Moscow was a great influence on the construction of his own book (see footnote 15).

Cole had a vested interest in recording the injustices and violence perpetrated on his fellow human beings by the white minority, representing in forensic detail as chronicler the travails of his people, for he was working toward a book that would document the condition of black people under apartheid, ultimately to be titled House of Bondage (1967). “He believed passionately in his mission to tell the world in photographs what it was like and what it meant to be black under apartheid, and identified intimately with his own people in photographs. With imaginative daring, courage, and compassion, he portrayed the full range of experience of black people as they negotiated their lives through apartheid.”14

Cole was like a spy, unobtrusively capturing his images and through the subtleties of composition and framing, making them art. “Considered both compositionally and in terms of the moment that is captured on film, what is most remarkable about them… and it is true of much of Cole’s work – is how elusive Cole, as photographer, remains within the unfolding dramas he documents.”15 He gathered the pictures for his meta-narrative in fourteen parts, House of Bondage,16 by photographing in the midst of the subject, registering “that climate of fear and loathing – the bondage – that is the subject of his work at the deepest level, in the way he goes about making his pictures.”17 His images have a level of documentary detail and narrative point that give them an immediate presence and the spaces within have an inescapable discomfort about them. “The sense is of the specific image as just one moment within a continuum of discomfort, resignation and suffering, encircling the photographs from all sides.”18

You feel what he feels, in the midst of, from inside. For example, look at the photograph Penny baas… (1960-1966, below) and just feel the explosive slap on the face of the boy begging, his right leg raised by the force of the casual yet sadistic blow, the other lad at left still holding his hands out pleading for a few tossed coins, enough to buy a small amount of food to ward off starvation. The photograph makes all right minded people angry but it also makes you complicit as well. The distinction between viewer and the subject being photographed is elided, as the viewer is propelled into the maelstrom of oppression and survival that is the apartheid state (of being).

In 1966, Cole was forced to leave South Africa or face becoming an informer or doing prison time, after being arrested with a gang of petty criminals he was photographing. His work was smuggled out of the country by international photojournalists and friends and his book, House of Bondage, was eventually published in New York in 1967. It was immediately banned in South Africa and Cole was never to return, passing away of cancer, homeless, penniless after more than 23 years of painful exile, leaving few negatives and prints of his monumental work. House of Bondage would expose the daily humiliation of the regime and achieve considerable success in the West, despite being banned in South Africa. Darren Newbury notes in Defiant Images that, “the tone of Cole’s book… was distinct from the photographic humanism which dominated Drum. Despite moments of human intimacy and humour, there is a sense of bitterness and anger.”19

Newbury goes on to observe that in House of Bondage Cole moved away from the photographic humanism that took root in South Africa in the 1950s, and which provided the initial context for Cole’s photographs. “House of Bondage moved in the opposite direction, representing the refraction of these ideas through the lens of apartheid South Africa and their return to the West. Read in this way House of Bondage is an antidote to Steichen’s Family of Man.“20 In other words, Cole was a photographer who transformed one visual language into an artistic language all his own – one not abrogated on Western ideals – as an affirmation of his own existence and his ability to create a body of work in spite of persecution, arrest, harassment and the restrictions of apartheid. He then returned that vision to the West.

Working secretively from inside the system, constantly under surveillance but almost invisible to it, Cole’s art explores the cracks, weaknesses, ambivalences, aporias and hypocrisy of the apartheid system, insinuating himself into the inner duplicities of its rationalisms.21 As he moves deftly through the spaces of the city taking photographs, Cole’s art transcends the inhospitality of that setting.22 As Newbury observes, Cole eschewed the romantic image of Johannesburg focusing instead on apartheid’s distortion of African culture. He created a damning visual critique that can also be read as a commentary on international humanist photojournalism itself. His was no naïve record.23

F(r)ame of reference, point of view

“By repositioning [Roman] Vishniac’s iconic photographs of Eastern Europe within the broader tradition of social documentary photography, and introducing recently discovered and radically diverse bodies of work, this exhibition stakes Vishniac’s claim as a modern master.”

International Center of Photography Adjunct Curator Maya Benton 24

With the current global interest in South African photography (which includes Distance and Desire: Encounters with the African Archive Part 1-3, a major exhibition program focusing on late nineteenth / early twentieth century African photography from The Walther Collection; Rise and Fall of Apartheid: Photography and the Bureaucracy of Everyday Life at Haus der Kunst, Munich; and South Africa in Apartheid and After: David Goldblatt, Ernest Cole, Billy Monk at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art all in 2012-13) – the viewing public has to be made aware of the curatorial interpretation of Ernest Cole’s photographs and seminal work, House of Bondage. As his fame spreads and becomes legendary, we must understand how his photographs can be interpreted across a range of frames of reference – from photojournalism, to social documentary photography and art.

Speaking to Nicholas Henderson, archivist at the Melbourne office of the National Archives of Australia,25 he made the point that the interpretation of Cole’s photographs becomes problematic depending on what frame of reference one applies to them and how their interpretation is negotiated between these multiple, fluid points of view. As can be seen in the quote above by Maya Benton, repositioning an artist’s work within a broader context changes the nature of the interpretation of the work and raises the pertinent question: who is repositioning the work and for what reason(s); who is pushing what agenda and curatorial barrow (in Benton’s case it is because she wants Vishniac’s work to be seen as that of a modern master, to make the import of the exhibition and the artist more than it possibly is).

Personally I believe that Cole’s work moves between all three frames of reference (fields of existence) – photojournalism, social documentary photography and art – with feeling (hence the quote by Omar Badsha at the beginning of this text). His work frames the historical discourse of apartheid in the past, present and future. What we must make ourselves fully aware of is the danger he placed himself in to make the work and the conditions for its initial reception – the era of mid-1960s global politics: the Cold War, civil rights movement in America, Vietnam War, gay liberation, era of free love, etc. “With imaginative daring, courage, and compassion, he portrayed the full range of experience of black people as they negotiated their lives through apartheid.”26

Speaking of the black American photographer Gordon Parks, Dr Henry Louis Gates has said, “Long after the events that he photographed have been forgotten, his images will remain with us, testaments to the genius of his art, transcending time, place and subject matter.”27 The same can be said of the art of Ernest Cole.

Dr Marcus Bunyan
July 2013

Word count 2,316

Endnotes

1/ Ozynski, Joyce quoted in Oliphant, Andries and Vladislavic, Ivan. Ten Years of Staffrider. Johannesburg: Raven Press, 1988, p. 163

2/ Badsha Omar. Transcript of a conversation between Chris Ledechowski and Omar Badsha, 11/1985, 1 on Anon. “Photography and the Liberation Struggle in South Africa,” (academic paper) on South African History Online website [Online] Cited 13/04/2013

3/ Anon. “Apartheid in South Africa,” on the Wikipedia website [Online] Cited 13/04/2013

4/ Robertson, Struan. “Ernest Cole in the House of Bondage,” in Knape. Gunilla (ed.,). Ernest Cole Photographer. Hasselblad Foundation/Steidl, 2010, p. 23

5/ Ibid., p. 24

6/ Newbury, Darren. “‘Johannesburg Lunch-hour’: Photographic Humanism and the Social Vision of Photography,” in Newbury, Darren. Defiant Images: Photography and Apartheid South Africa. Pretoria: Unisa Press, 2009, pp. 55-56

7/ Lowe, Paul. “Review of Defiant Images: Photography and Apartheid South Africa,” on Times Higher Education website, 22nd July 2010 [Online] Cited 13/04/2013

8/ Anon. “Photography and the Liberation Struggle in South Africa,” (academic paper) on South African History Online website [Online] Cited 13/04/2013

9/ Anon. “Photojournalism,” on the Wikipedia website [Online] Cited 13/04/2013

10/ Anon. “Social documentary photography,” on Wikipedia [Online] Cited 13/04/2013

11/ Anon. “Farm Security Administration,” on on Wikipedia [Online] Cited 13/04/2013

12/ Robertson, Struan. “Ernest Cole in the House of Bondage,” in Knape. Gunilla (ed.,). Ernest Cole Photographer. Hasselblad Foundation/Steidl, 2010, p. 35

13/ Powell, Ivor. “A Slight Small Youngster with an Enormous Rosary: Ernest Cole’s Documentation of Apartheid,” in Knape. Gunilla (ed.,). Ernest Cole Photographer. Hasselblad Foundation/Steidl, 2010, p. 41

14/ Press release on the exhibition South Africa in Apartheid and After: David Goldblatt, Ernest Cole, Billy Monk on the SFMOMA website, 1st December 2012 – 5th March 2013

15/ Powell, Op. cit., p. 41

16/ House of Bondage contains 183 photographs organised thematically into 14 sections, each beginning with between two and five pages of text. The section titles give a sense of the underlying political and sociological analysis: ‘The Mines’, ‘Police and Passes’, ‘Black Spots’, ‘Nightmare Rides’, ‘The Cheap Servant’, ‘For Whites Only’, ‘Below Subsistence’, ‘Education for Servitude’, ‘Hospital Care’, ‘Heirs of Property’, ‘Shebeens and Bantu Beer’, ‘The Consolation of Religion’, ‘African Middle Class’ and ‘Banishment’. How the final decision on the number and titles of sections was arrived at may be unknowable, but the idea for a thematic structure of this kind was undoubtedly Cole’s. This is clear not only from the New York Times pieces, but also reflects the book that Cole cited as one of the determining influences on his photography: Cartier-Bresson’s People of Moscow.
Newbury, Darren. “An ‘Unalterable Blackness’: Ernest Cole’s House of Bondage,” in Newbury, Darren. Defiant Images: Photography and Apartheid South Africa. Pretoria: Unisa Press, 2009, pp. 187-188

17/ Powell., p. 41

18/ Ibid., p. 44

19/ Newbury, Darren. “An ‘Unalterable Blackness’: Ernest Cole’s House of Bondage,” in Newbury, Darren. Defiant Images: Photography and Apartheid South Africa. Pretoria: Unisa Press, 2009, p. 174

20/ Ibid., p. 175

21/ Ekpo, Denis. “Any European around to help me talk about myself? The white man’s burden of black Africa’s critical practices,” in Third Text 19(2), 2005, p. 17

22/ See Caldwell, Marc. “Look Again, What Do You See?” in Journal of Southern African Studies 38(1), 2012, pp. 241-243

23/ Newbury Op. cit., p. 207

24/ Press release from the exhibition Roman Vishniac Rediscovered at the International Center of Photography (ICP), New York, January 18, 2013 – May 5, 2013

25/ Conversation with the author, Sunday 7th April 2013

26/ Press release on the exhibition South Africa in Apartheid and After: David Goldblatt, Ernest Cole, Billy Monk on the SFMOMA website, 1st December 2012 – 5th March 2013

27/ Dr Henry Louis Gates quoted in the press release from the Gordon Parks: Centennial exhibition at the Jenkins Johnson Gallery, February 21 – April 27, 2013

Ernest Cole (South African, 1940-1990)
“Penny, baas, please baas, I hungry…” This plaint is part of nightly scene in Golden City, as black boys beg from whites. They may be thrown a coin or, as here, they may get slapped in the face
1960-1966
[Caption from House of Bondage]
From House of Bondage Period
© The Ernest Cole Family Trust Courtesy of the Hasselblad Foundation, Gothenburg, Sweden

Ernest Cole (South African, 1940-1990)
Africans throng Johannesburg station platform during late afternoon rush
1960-1966
Gelatin silver print
8 11/16 x 12 5/8 in. (22 x 32cm)
Courtesy of the Hasselblad Foundation, Gothenburg, Sweden
© The Ernest Cole Family Trust

Ernest Cole (South African, 1940-1990)
After processing they wait at railroad station for transportation to mine. Identity tag on wrist shows shipment of labor to which man is assigned
1960-1966
Gelatin silver print
8 11/16 x 12 5/8 in. (22 x 32cm)
Courtesy of the Hasselblad Foundation, Gothenburg, Sweden
© The Ernest Cole Family Trust

Ernest Cole (1940-1990), one of South Africa’s first black photojournalists, passionately pursued his mission to tell the world what it was like to be black under apartheid. With imaginative daring, courage and compassion, he portrayed the lives of black people as they negotiated apartheid’s racist laws and oppression. Ernest Cole Photographer – on view at the Fowler Museum from April 7 – July 7, 2013 – brings 113 original, extremely rare black-and-white silver gelatin prints from Cole’s stunning archive to the United States for the first time.

Inspired by the photo-essays of French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, Cole documented scenes of life during apartheid from 1958–66. He captured everyday images such as lines of migrant mineworkers waiting to be discharged from labor, a schoolchild studying by candlelight, parks and benches for “Europeans Only,” young men arrested and handcuffed for entering cities without their passes, worshippers in their Sunday best, and crowds crammed into claustrophobic commuter trains. Together with Cole’s own incisive and illuminating captions, these striking photographs bear stark witness to a wide spectrum of experiences during the apartheid era. Ernest Cole Photographer is the first major public presentation of Cole’s work since the publication of his book, House of Bondage, in 1967. A large majority of the images are shown for the first time in the way Cole had originally intended – uncropped and accompanied only by his minimal remarks. These images of apartheid are astonishing not only for their content but also their formal beauty and narrative power.

About the artist

Ernest Cole was born March 21, 1940, in the black freehold township Eersterust, east of Pretoria. The son of a tailor and a laundry woman, Cole grew up in the countryside where he stayed with an aunt. For high school, he re-joined his parents in the township where he was born. He became interested in photography as a teen, and landed a position in Johannesburg as a darkroom assistant at DRUM magazine in 1958. There he began to mingle with other talented young black South Africans – journalists, photographers, jazz musicians, and political leaders in the burgeoning anti-apartheid movement – and became impassioned in his political views.

In the mid-1960s Cole set out at great personal risk to produce a book that would communicate to the rest of the world the corrosive effects of South Africa’s apartheid system. Working in areas continually patrolled by police forced Cole to become covert in his approach: he smuggled his camera into prisons and mines inside a lunch bag, used a long lens to photograph from a distance, and even fooled the apartheid bureaucracy into reclassifying his racial identity as “coloured,” or mixed race, thus providing more freedom to move around towns and cities.

In 1966 Cole was arrested along with a group of petty thieves whom he had befriended in order to document their lives and means of survival. The police discovered Cole’s fraudulent identity and offered him two options: join their ranks as an informer, or be punished for fraud. Cole quickly left South Africa for Europe and took with him little more than the layouts for his book. His photographs and negatives were separately smuggled out of the country shortly after.

Cole’s project was realised in 1967 when Random House in New York published House of Bondage, a graphic and hard-hitting exposé of the racism and economic inequalities that underpinned apartheid. Although House of Bondage was banned in South Africa, contraband copies circulated and played an important role in shaping South Africa’s tradition of activist photography that emerged in the succeeding decades.

Uprooted from his home and community and divorced from the circumstances that had fired his creative imagination, Cole never found his feet in Europe or America. He died homeless in New York in 1990 after more than twenty-three years of painful exile, never having returned to South Africa and leaving no known negatives and few photographic prints.

Tio fotografer, an association of Swedish photographers with whom Cole had worked when he lived for a short time in Stockholm, received a collection of Cole’s work that was later donated to the Hasselblad Foundation. In 2006 eminent South African artist David Goldblatt received a major award from the Hasselblad Foundation and urged them to make their Ernest Cole collection accessible through a book and an exhibition.

Press release from The Fowler Museum at UCLA website

Drum magazine
Shadow over Johannesburg
October 1951

Ernest Cole (South African, 1940-1990)
Earnest boy squats on haunches and strains to follow lesson in heat of packed classroom
1960-1966
[Caption from House of Bondage]
From House of Bondage Period
© The Ernest Cole Family Trust Courtesy of the Hasselblad Foundation, Gothenburg, Sweden

Ernest Cole (South African, 1940-1990)
Handcuffed blacks were arrested for being in white area illegally
1960-1966
[Caption from House of Bondage]
From House of Bondage Period
© The Ernest Cole Family Trust Courtesy of the Hasselblad Foundation, Gothenburg, Sweden

Ernest Cole (South African, 1940-1990)
Pensive tribesmen, newly recruited to mine labour, awaiting processing and assignment
1960-1966
From House of Bondage Period
© The Ernest Cole Family Trust Courtesy of the Hasselblad Foundation, Gothenburg, Sweden

The Fowler Museum at UCLA
North Campus of UCLA, Los Angeles
CA 90024, United States
Phone: +1 310-825-4361

Opening hours:
Monday – Tuesday Closed
Wednesday – Sunday 12.00 – 5.00pm

The Fowler Museum at UCLA website

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Exhibition: ‘Alan Constable: Ten Cameras’ at South Willard, Los Angeles

Exhibition dates: 4th May – 2nd June 2013

Curator: Ricky Swallow

Wow it really happened! Congratulations to Alan Constable, Sim Lutin and Melissa Petty from Arts Project Australia and to Ricky Swallow for curating.

Alan Constable (Australian, b. 1956)
Red NEK SLR
2011
Ceramic
5.5 x 12.25 x 4.75 inches
© Alan Constable

“How would a comb that cannot untangle hair look? You can make the object dangerous, humorous, useless, sinister.”

Christina Ramberg

Alan Constable’s cameras are real ‘things’; they command constant attention from their audience and from their lucky owners. The resemblance of these sculptures to cameras is a starting point more than an end point, in the same way a swelling foot as painted by Phillip Guston behaves unlike any sensible foot, or a collage of a doorway by James Castle exceeds the expectation its structural simplicity presents.

Constable’s sculpture makes malleable mischief of both the form and function of the camera. In his hands it becomes an anthropomorphic character with endless variations and possibility. Specific types are modelled in clay from magazine advertisements with apt abbreviation and gesture, then glazed and fired in solid, sometimes soupy colours that further activate their surfaces and transform their sober dispositions.

The glazed surfaces are embellished with details so specific and beautiful they necessitate a tactile engagement with the object. As ‘things’ they still buzz with the handling and energy Constable employs in their making. Dials formed separately and thumbed into position, viewfinder windows cut directly through surfaces together with an oversized scale give Constable’s cameras the feeling of buildings or vessels. Scribed lines articulate both panels and seams, skewed inscriptions indicate model and make: all this information registers with efficiency to produce compelling objects.

The basic slab built walls forming the camera’s body also conceal one of the most interesting elements about these sculptures – internal chambers and walls have been built during the early stages of the works. Such entombed detail points towards Constable’s dedication to conceive and map a complete object, a total exploration of his subject based on unique invention and interpretation.”

Ricky Swallow, April 2013

South Willard is pleased to present Alan Constable: Ten Cameras as its next Shop Exhibit. Curated by Ricky Swallow in collaboration with Arts Project Australia, this is the first solo presentation of Constable’s ceramic sculptures in the United States. Now in his late 50’s, Constable has been producing his art at Arts Project studio’s in Melbourne since 1987, and has exhibited his camera sculptures in both gallery and institutional exhibitions to critical praise over the past 7 years.

Constable is also participating in Outsiderism curated by Alex Baker at Fleisher Ollman gallery in Philadelphia this month.

Ricky wishes to thank Alex Baker for his introduction to Alan’s work, and Sim Luttin and Melissa Petty at Arts Project Australia for their generous assistance.

Alan Constable (Australian, b. 1956)
Orange AKI SLR
2011
Ceramic
6 x 10 x 4 inches
© Alan Constable

Alan Constable (Australian, b. 1956)
Green SLR
2011
Ceramic
7.75 x 9 x 3 inches
© Alan Constable

South Willard

Arts Project Australia website

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Exhibition: ‘Garry Winogrand’ at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA)

Exhibition dates: 9th March – 2nd June 2013

Garry Winogrand (American, 1928-1984)
Utah (Wyoming)
1964
Silver gelatin photograph
© The Estate of Garry Winogrand

“Every photograph is a battle of form versus content.”

Garry Winogrand

Playing God with his film

Form and content. Form and content.

I don’t like the work of Garry Winogrand. Never have, never will. I think his work is overrated and and somewhat trite. That should stir up all the Winophiles who think that he is one of the best street photographers in the history of the medium!

At best his form is average – technical aspects adequate; composition is pretty basic including dull use of tension points within the picture frame; and framing very bland, tilted angles not withstanding. His content is nothing special either, mainly frontal shots of people walking towards him or voyeuristic shots while mingled in crowds, or a mixture of both. As he himself says, “I don’t have anything to say in any picture. My only interest in photography is to see what something looks like as a photograph.” By letting the medium describe the world around him. And therein lies part of the problem.

Winogrand just looks – and you can’t fault someone for just looking. It’s just a not very interesting looking.

If I really look at Winogrand’s work I can see that he just states what he saw in shot after shot after shot, indiscriminately. Personally, I find there is a real cynicism in his work. The photographs “describe” his own state of mind – as much as he denies that he (or his state of mind) has anything to do with the act of describing the world through photography. You see, it’s all about how the camera sees the world and not how he sees it. Hence, Winogrand hardly embraces his feelings towards the world and if he does, it is only in a half-hearted manner. For example, he goes a certain way towards the dark (as in the photographs Utah (Wyoming), 1964 above, and Los Angeles, 1964, below) and then stops. The other part of the problem is this: what you can also fault is all the hyperbole that is laid over the top of his work by curators and museums – because on close examination the work really doesn’t justify it. It’s actually not that good.

Winogrand states and summarises but doesn’t solve. He just keeps adding to the list occasionally, under duress, ordering it (photographs of women in the book Women are Beautiful, 1975):

“During his Austin years he was preparing two books, Public Relations and Women are Beautiful. Given his method of printing every image on the contact sheet for the selection process, and given his proclivity for the physical act of shooting, no wonder he wasn’t out on the street as much as he’d like. Yes he had to print, select and publish some prints to survive unless he wanted to teach the rest of his life. I don’t believe he wanted to do that. Had there been a way, I believe he would died a blissful death had he been on the streets clicking away and either letting the exposed film rot or letting someone else process and print them, and arrange the books and shows and collect the money. That’s how much he loved the physical act of shooting.

He felt at home out there, looking for the next image to expose. He was also the boss out there, playing God with his film and deciding where to frame that next battle between form and content, then the next and the next.”1

Playing God with his film…

In some ways Winogrand reminds me of both the king and the court jester. King because he could frame the battle between form and content ad infinitum and jester because he was the fool, standing in front of people, laughing, smiling, obsequious, running hither and yon to get every shot, any shot. See the video below to understand what I mean. Unlike the photographs in Robert Frank’s The Americans, his is not a poetic understanding of the world for the difference between Robert Frank and Garry Winogrand is that the former’s photographs are undeniably poetic while the latter’s are prosaic aphorisms about the world. In Winogrand’s “describing” the social landscape he photographed is reduced to lists of things: “the dislocation of urban life, the rise of the suburb with its growing alienation, the skepticism of youth, and the collusion of the press and the powerful,” rarely pursued by any obvious means and certainly not through poetic evocation.

I think that Winogrand struggled with the question – do I add to the list or do I order the list? Obviously he chose the former, for if there is no order in life there can be no order in the archive. Hence we are left with the “Unfinished” Late Work, an archive of 250,000 images that have remained virtually unknown. A boon for researchers and curators wishing to position Winogrand’s legacy “revealing for the first time the full sweep of his career… creating a vivid portrait of the artist.”

Even when the artist could not be bothered (so why should we bother).
Even when the images were never seen or acknowledged.
The artist streetwise in his omnipotent isolation.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

1/ Garza, O. C. Class Time with Garry Winogrand. 2007, p. 19 [Online] Cited 26/05/2013
www.ocgarzaphotography.com/documents/ClassTimewithGarryWinograndfinal2.pdf

“Great photography is always on the edge of failure.”

“I photograph to see what the world looks like in photographs.”

“I like to think of photographing as a two-way act of respect. Respect for the medium, by letting it do what it does best, describe. And respect for the subject, by describing as it is. A photograph must be responsible to both.”

“I don’t have anything to say in any picture. My only interest in photography is to see what something looks like as a photograph. I have no preconceptions.”

Garry Winogrand

“We quickly learned Winogrand’s technique – he walked slowly or stood in the middle of pedestrian traffic as people went by. He shot prolifically. I watched him walk a short block and shoot an entire roll without breaking stride. As he reloaded, I asked him if he felt bad about missing pictures when he reloaded. “No,” he replied, “there are no pictures when I reload.” He was constantly looking around, and often would see a situation on the other side of a busy intersection. Ignoring traffic, he would run across the street to get the picture.”

Mason Resnick

“Form and content are two keys which make a memorable street photograph. Consider “form” as the composition, framing, and technical aspects of a photograph. Consider “content” as what is actually happening in the photograph (whether it be an old couple holding hands, a boy holding two bottles of wine, or a man looking through a peep-hole)… Garry Winogrand shot with a 28mm lens for most of his life [using a Leica M4 35mm and Tri-X film pushed to 1200 ASA], which meant that for the majority of his shots he had to be quite close to his subjects (and in front of them). Therefore Winogrand wasn’t Henri Cartier-Bresson (trying to be invisible) but was actively a part of the action and immersed in the crowds. He would be very obviously taking photographs in the streets and would stick out like a sore thumb.”

Eric Kim

Garry Winogrand – Part 1

Garry Winogrand – Fotograf

Garry Winogrand – The Man In The Crowd

Garry Winogrand (American, 1928-1984)
Albuquerque
1957
Gelatin silver print
Collection SFMOMA, gift of Dr. Paul Getz
© The Estate of Garry Winogrand, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Garry Winogrand (American, 1928-1984)
Park Avenue, New York
1959
Gelatin silver print
© The Estate of Garry Winogrand, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Garry Winogrand (American, 1928-1984)
Central Park Zoo, New York
1967
Gelatin silver print
© The Estate of Garry Winogrand, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Since Winogrand took this photograph of a white woman and a Black man, each holding a chimpanzee dressed in children’s clothing, many critics have noted the picture’s deliberate ambiguity – not only about the circumstances of how these figures came to be here, but also about the way Winogrand chose to frame them with his camera, cutting out most of the surrounding context.

During the 1960s, Winogrand became increasingly reluctant to speak about the “meaning” of his photographs, preferring to focus on their form and technique, in spite of their excessive narrative potential. Perhaps this was a reaction against his photojournalistic and advertising work, which was often illustrative. Winogrand would cite Susan Sontag’s influential essay “Against Interpretation” (1964), which deplored the growing impulse at the time to reduce works of art to their content in order to make them mean something. She argued, like Winogrand, in favor of the pleasure and poetry of seeing.

Anonymous. “Central Park Zoo-New York, New York,” on the Brooklyn Museum website Nd [Online] Cited 14/07/2024

Garry Winogrand (American, 1928-1984)
Fort Worth, Texas
1974
Gelatin silver print
Collection SFMOMA, Accessions Committee Fund: gift of Doris and Donald Fisher and Marion E. Greene
© The Estate of Garry Winogrand, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Garry Winogrand (American, 1928-1984)
Fort Worth, Texas
1975
Gelatin silver print
Collection SFMOMA, gift of Dr. Paul Getz
© The Estate of Garry Winogrand, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Garry Winogrand (American, 1928-1984)
John F. Kennedy, Democratic National Convention, Los Angeles
1960
Posthumous digital reproduction from original negative
Garry Winogrand Archive, Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona
© The Estate of Garry Winogrand, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Garry Winogrand (American, 1928-1984)
Democratic National Convention, Los Angeles
1960
Silver gelatin photograph
© The Estate of Garry Winogrand

Garry Winogrand (American, 1928-1984)
New York
c. 1960
Gelatin silver print
Garry Winogrand Archive, Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona
© The Estate of Garry Winogrand, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Garry Winogrand (American, 1928-1984)
White Sands National Monument, New Mexico
1964
Gelatin silver print
© The Estate of Garry Winogrand, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Garry Winogrand (American, 1928-1984)
New York
1969
Gelatin silver print
© The Estate of Garry Winogrand, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Garry Winogrand (American, 1928-1984)
Elliot Richardson Press Conference, Austin, Texas
1973
Silver gelatin photograph
© The Estate of Garry Winogrand

Elliot Lee Richardson (July 20, 1920 – December 31, 1999) was an American lawyer and politician who was a member of the cabinet of Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. As U.S. Attorney General, he was a prominent figure in the Watergate Scandal, and resigned rather than obey President Nixon’s order to fire special prosecutor Archibald Cox.

Text from Wikipedia website

Garry Winogrand (American, 1928-1984)
Centennial Ball, Metropolitan Museum, New York
1969
Silver gelatin photograph
© The Estate of Garry Winogrand

Garry Winogrand (American, 1928-1984)
Point Mugu Naval Air-Station, California
1979
Silver gelatin photograph
© The Estate of Garry Winogrand

Garry Winogrand (American, 1928-1984)
Untitled
1970
Silver gelatin photograph
© The Estate of Garry Winogrand

Garry Winogrand (American, 1928-1984)
Venice Beach, Los Angeles
1979
Silver gelatin photograph
© The Estate of Garry Winogrand

The first retrospective in 25 years of work by artist Garry Winogrand (1928-1984) – the renowned photographer of New York City and of American life from the 1950s through the early 1980s – will debut at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) from March 9 through June 2, 2013. Jointly organised by SFMOMA and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Garry Winogrand brings together the artist’s most iconic images with newly printed photographs from his largely unexamined archive of late work, offering a rigorous overview of Winogrand’s complete working life and revealing for the first time the full sweep of his career. More than 300 photographs in the exhibition and more than 400 in the accompanying catalogue will create a vivid portrait of the artist – a chronicler of postwar America on a par with such figures as Norman Mailer and Robert Rauschenberg who unflinchingly captured America’s wrenching swings between optimism and upheaval in the decades following World War II.

While Winogrand is widely considered one of the greatest photographers of the 20th century, his overall body of work and influence on the field remains incompletely explored. He was enormously prolific but largely postponed the editing and printing of his work. Dying suddenly at the age of 56, he left behind approximately 6,500 rolls of film (some 250,000 images) that he had never seen, as well as proof sheets from his earlier years that he had marked but never printed. Roughly half of the photographs in the exhibition have never been exhibited or published until now; over 100 have never before been printed.

“There exists in photography no other body of work of comparable size or quality that is so editorially unresolved,” says Rubinfien, who was among the youngest of Winogrand’s circle of friends in the 1970s. “This exhibition represents the first effort to comprehensively examine Winogrand’s unfinished work. It also aims to turn the presentation of his work away from topical editing and toward a freer organisation that is faithful to his art’s essential spirit, thus enabling a new understanding of his oeuvre, even for those who think they know him.”

The exhibition is divided into three parts, each covering a broad variety of subjects found in Winogrand’s art. “Down from the Bronx” presents photographs taken for the most part in New York from his start in 1950 until 1971; “A Student of America” looks at work made in the same period during journeys outside New York; and “Boom and Bust” addresses Winogrand’s late period – from when he moved away from New York in 1971 until his death in 1984 – with photographs from Texas and Southern California, as well as Chicago, Washington, Miami, and other locations. This third section also includes a small number of photographs Winogrand made on trips back to Manhattan, which express a sense of desolation unprecedented in his earlier work.

Winogrand was known as great talker with a flamboyant, forceful personality, and what he said accompanying his slide shows and lectures was often imaginative and very funny. A number of videos edited for presentation in the exhibition will allow visitors to experience the living Winogrand as audiences have rarely been able to do for 30-odd years. A short selection from Winogrand’s experimental 8mm footage taken in the late 1960s will also be on view.

After premiering at SFMOMA in spring 2013 Garry Winogrand will travel to the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (March 2 through June 8, 2014); The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (June 27 through September 21, 2014); the Jeu de Paume, Paris (October 14, 2014 through January 25, 2015); and the Fundacion MAPFRE, Madrid (March 3 through May 10, 2015).

An Epic Chronicler of Postwar America

Born in the Bronx, Winogrand did much of his best-known work in Manhattan during the 1960s, and in both the content of his photographs and his artistic style he became one of the principal voices of that eruptive decade – so much so that influential Museum of Modern Art curator John Szarkowski anointed him “the central photographer of his generation.”

Known primarily as a street photographer, Winogrand, who is often associated with famed contemporaries Diane Arbus and Lee Friedlander, photographed with dazzling energy and incessant appetite, exposing some 20,000 rolls of film in his short lifetime. He photographed business moguls, everyday women on the street, famous actors and athletes, hippies, rodeos, politicians, soldiers, animals in zoos, car culture, airports, and antiwar demonstrators and the construction workers who beat them bloody in view of the unmoved police. Daily life in postwar America – rich with new possibility and yet equally anxious, threatening to spin out of control – seemed to unfold for him in a continuous stream.

Yet if Winogrand was one of New York City’s prime photographers, he was also an avid traveller who roamed widely around the United States, bringing exquisite work out of locations that included Los Angeles, San Francisco, Ohio, Dallas, Houston, Chicago, Colorado, and the open country of the Southwest. “You could say that I am a student of photography,” he said, “and I am; but really I’m a student of America.” Winogrand’s expansive visual catalogue of the nation’s evolving social scene has led to comparisons to Walt Whitman, who also unspooled the world in endless lists of people, places, and things.

Winogrand’s pictures often bulge with twenty or thirty figures, and are fascinating both for their dramatic foregrounds and the sub-events at their edges. Even when crowded with people or at their most lighthearted – he was fond of visual puns and was drawn to the absurd – his pictures can convey a feeling of human isolation, hinting at something darker beneath the veneer of the American dream. Early on, some critics considered his pictures formally “shapeless” and “random,” but admirers and critics later found a unique poetry in his tilted horizons and his love of the haphazard.

“Winogrand was an artistic descendant of Walker Evans and Robert Frank, but differed sharply from them,” says Rubinfien. “He admired Frank’s The Americans, but felt the work missed the main story of its time, which in his mind was the emergence of suburban prosperity and isolation. The hope and buoyancy of middle-class life in postwar America is half of the emotional heart of Winogrand’s work. The other half is a sense of undoing. The tension between these qualities gives his work its distinct character.”

After serving in the military as a weather forecaster, Winogrand first began working as a photographer while studying painting on the G.I. Bill at Columbia University (1948-1951). During that time, he also studied briefly with Alexey Brodovitch at the New School for Social Research. While pursuing his personal work, he began supplying commercial photographs to a number of general-interest magazines such as Life, Look, Sports Illustrated, Collier’s, and Pageant, which were then at the height of their power and reach. His career was further shaped by the decline of those magazines and the rise of a new culture of photography centred in the art world.

“Winogrand worked at a moment when the boundaries between journalistic and artistic photography were less certain than they had ever been, yet it was also a time when the most advanced photographers were consciously abandoning journalistic values,” says Greenough. “The social landscape he photographed – the dislocation of urban life, the rise of the suburb with its growing alienation, the skepticism of youth, and the collusion of the press and the powerful – was of concern to many Americans. Yet Winogrand rarely pursued an obvious means to explicate these ideas, preferring poetic evocation over intelligible journalism.”

Winogrand went on to exhibit widely at prominent museums and achieved renown in his lifetime. Yet despite this recognition, he is perhaps the most inadequately understood of all his contemporaries.

“Unfinished” Late Work Thoroughly Investigated for the First Time

The act of taking pictures was far more fulfilling to Winogrand than making prints or editing for books and exhibitions – he often allowed others to perform these tasks for him. Near the end of his life, he spoke of reviewing and reediting all of his photographs, but never had a chance to oversee the shaping of his legacy, or even to review much of the output of his later years. Because of his working methods and his lack of interest in developing his film toward the end of his life, he left behind more than 2,500 rolls of exposed but undeveloped film, an additional 4,100 rolls that he had processed but never seen – an estimated total of 250,000 images that have remained virtually unknown.

Furthermore, Winogrand published just five modest books during his lifetime – The Animals (1969), Women Are Beautiful (1975), Garry Winogrand (1976), Public Relations (1977), and Stock Photographs (1980) – that represent only a fraction of his work and are mainly confined to narrow topical frames that don’t suggest the full scope of his importance.

“One reason that Winogrand is only now receiving the full retrospective treatment already devoted to peers of his era, including Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander, and Robert Frank, is that any truly comprehensive consideration of his life’s work requires contending with the practical and ethical issues surrounding the vast archive he left behind,” says O’Toole. “In the absence of explicit instructions from him regarding how he wanted his work to be handled after he was gone, its posthumous treatment has been the subject of ongoing debate and raises provocative questions about the creative process and its relationship to issues specific to the medium.”

“Some argue that what was left behind should be left alone, and that no one should intrude upon the intentions of an artist,” adds Rubinfien. “But the quantity of Winogrand’s output, the incompleteness with which he reviewed it, and the suddenness of his death create a special case in which the true scope of an eminent photographer’s work cannot be known without the intervention of an editor.”

Now housed at the Center for Creative Photography of the University of Arizona, Tucson, Winogrand’s “unfinished” work was initially organized in the years just after his death by several colleagues and friends in preparation for the artist’s first major museum retrospective, held at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (MoMA) in 1988. Exhibition curator John Szarkowski felt the quality of Winogrand’s work had significantly deteriorated in the last 15 years of his life, and included only a small group of pictures from the mysterious late work in MoMA exhibition.

Nearly 30 years have elapsed since the last attempt to grapple with the complete arc of Winogrand’s career. Benefiting from new curatorial research undertaken for this project, the current exhibition will provide a long-awaited reevaluation of his accomplishments. As one of the first museums to recognise photography as a legitimate art form, SFMOMA has collaborated with the National Gallery of Art – who, like SFMOMA, is known for its photography scholarship – in a multi-year endeavour to spearhead the presentation of this important exhibition and publication.”

Press release from the SFMOMA website

Garry Winogrand (American, 1928-1984)
New York
1961
Silver gelatin photograph
© The Estate of Garry Winogrand

Garry Winogrand (American, 1928-1984)
New York
1963
Silver gelatin photograph
© The Estate of Garry Winogrand

Garry Winogrand (American, 1928-1984)
San Marcos, Texas
1964
Silver gelatin photograph
© The Estate of Garry Winogrand

Garry Winogrand (American, 1928-1984)
Coney Island, New York
c. 1952
Gelatin silver print
Collection The Museum of Modern Art, New York, purchase and gift of Barbara Schwartz in memory of Eugene M. Schwartz
© The Estate of Garry Winogrand, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco; digital image
© The Museum of Modern Art/ Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY

Garry Winogrand (American, 1928-1984)
Fort Worth, Texas
1974-1977
Gelatin silver print
Garry Winogrand Archive, Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona
© The Estate of Garry Winogrand, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Garry Winogrand (American, 1928-1984)
John F. Kennedy International Airport, New York
1968
Silver gelatin photograph
© The Estate of Garry Winogrand

Garry Winogrand (American, 1928-1984)
New York
1950
Gelatin silver print
Collection SFMOMA, fractional and promised gift of Carla Emil and Rich Silverstein
© The Estate of Garry Winogrand, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Garry Winogrand (American, 1928-1984)
New York
c. 1962
Gelatin silver print
Garry Winogrand Archive, Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona
© The Estate of Garry Winogrand, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Garry Winogrand (American, 1928-1984)
Venice Beach, Los Angeles
1980-1983
Gelatin silver print
Garry Winogrand Archive, Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona
© The Estate of Garry Winogrand, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Garry Winogrand (American, 1928-1984)
Grand Central Station
1968
Silver gelatin photograph
© The Estate of Garry Winogrand

Garry Winogrand (American, 1928-1984)
Los Angeles
1964
Silver gelatin photograph
© The Estate of Garry Winogrand

Garry Winogrand (American, 1928-1984)
New York
1968
Silver gelatin photograph
© The Estate of Garry Winogrand

Garry Winogrand (American, 1928-1984)
New York
c. 1969
Silver gelatin photograph
© The Estate of Garry Winogrand

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
151 Third Street
San Francisco, CA 94103

Opening hours:
Monday – Tuesday: 10am – 5pm
Wednesday: Closed
Thursday: 12 – 8pm
Friday – Sunday: 10am – 5pm

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art website

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Review: ‘Shrouds’ by Mike Reid at the Colour Factory Gallery, Fitzroy, Melbourne

Exhibition dates: 8th March – 30th March 2013

Mike Reid (Australian)
Santa Monica, Los Angeles, USA
Nd

“Any discovery changing the nature, or the destination of an object or phenomenon constitutes a Surrealist achievement. Already the automats are multiplying and dreaming… realism prunes trees, Surrealism prunes life.”

J-A. Boiffard, Paul Ellard and Roger Vitrac, in La Revolution Surréaliste, December 1924, p. 2, quoted in Arturo Schwarz, Man Ray: the rigour of imagination, Thames & Hudson, London, 1977, p. 161.

This is a strong exhibition of documentary photography by Mike Reid at the Colour Factory Gallery. Interesting idea; well seen formal photographs; good use of colour (brown, blue, silver, red and green shrouds); nice sized prints appropriate to the subject matter; and an excellent self published book to accompany the exhibition. This is just what it is – a solid exhibition of documentary photography.

Unfortunately the artist cannot leave it there. In his almost unintelligible artist statement (below), he tries to lever the concept of resurrection onto the work, meandering from Horus and Osiris through The Shroud of Turin, to Jewish Tachrichim (burial shrouds) and onto the commerce of Billabong and the politics of the burqa linking, very tenuously, the covering of Islamic women with the idea of these cars being “old bombs.”

Here I take issue with Reid’s conceptualisation of the word “shroud” vis a vis his photographs of covered cars. One of the definitions of shroud is “A cloth used to wrap a body for burial” but the more pertinent use of the word in relation to this work is “To shut off from sight; something that conceals, protects, or screens” from the Middle English schrud, garment. These are not abandoned, lifeless vehicles awaiting resurrection but loved vehicles that have been protected from the elements by their owners, wrapped and cocooned jewels that are in a state of hibernation. If they were unwanted they would have been abandoned by their owners to the elements, not protected beneath a concealing garment in a state of metamorphosis. The shrouding of the car acts like a Surrealist canvas, hinting at the structure underneath (the Cadillac, the Volkswagen, the Morris Minor) but allowing the viewer to discover the changing nature of the object.

All that was needed to accompany the exhibition and the book was something like the quotation at the top of the posting. Leave the rest up to the strength of the work and the viewer. They have the intelligence and imagination to work out what is going on without all the proselytising that only reveals the artist’s ultimate disconnection from the source. In other words, less is more. Nothing more, nothing less.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

Mike Reid (Australian)
Toorak, Victoria
Nd

Mike Reid (Australian)
South Fremantle, Western Australia
Nd

Mike Reid (Australian)
Richmond, Victoria
Nd

Shrouds, by Mike Reed is a collection of photographs of covered cars. His love of gleaning was inherited from his ‘rag and bone’ father who amassed a metal detritus found on the bicycle route home from the factory where he worked. This assortment was stockpiled in his father’s rusted sheds, which appeared like an ‘Aladdin’s cave’ to a youthful Mike.

“The car was draped with a plastic sheet in the back blocks of Surfers Paradise whilst seeking to photograph decay in the landscape… You start with one and then see another then… over time, the medley plays into a collection… patterns precipitate or idiosyncrasies evolve from within…This is the joy of “seeing”.”

“Within my category of covered cars I began to view these still loved but lifeless vehicles, as if a resurrection was about to take place… for the heavenly roads of restoration or hell.”

Mike equates the car covers to the burial garments adorning the dead in preparation for resurrection. Mike cites the ‘wrapping’ of objects found in the work of artists’ Christo, Jean Claude, Man Ray and Magritte as inspiration. This incredible accumulation of images spans over two decades and 6 countries. A small selection has been chosen for this exhibition and a larger range appears in his book to be launched at the opening of Shrouds.

Press release from the Colour Factory Gallery website

Mike Reid (Australian)
Richmond, Victoria
Nd

Mike Reid (Australian)
Macleod, Victoria
Nd

Shrouds

The resurrection of the dead is a fundamental and central doctrine of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Many religious critics have alleged that even Christ’s resurrection was borrowed from the accounts of Osiris, God of the underworld, and the best-known deity in all of ancient Egyptian history. As a life-death-rebirth deity, Horus, the Sun God, and Osiris became a reflection of the annual cycle of crop harvesting as well as reflecting people’s desires for a successful afterlife. The Masons, Illuminati, Priory De Sion, clandestine government groups, and others believed that on December 22, 2012, Osiris would be resurrected. Nothing happened on that world shattering day but Spam and candle sales most certainly went through the roof. Thus in preparation to meet thy maker, a shroud, burial sheet or winding-cloth, usually cotton or linen but with no pockets, is wrapped around a body after it has been ceremonially washed and readied for burial.

Certainly the most controversial and famous burial garment is the Shroud of Turin. It is now stored in the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist in Turin, Northern Italy after the crusaders stole it and bought it first to France around 1204.

Many believe this 4.3 by 1.1m linen cloth of a rare herringbone weave covered the beaten and crucified body of Jesus of Nazareth when He was laid in a tomb prior to His resurrection. Is it really the cloth that wrapped His bloodstained body, or is it simply a medieval hoax? This has lead to intense scrutiny by forensic experts, scientists, chemists, immunologists, pathologists, believers, historians, and writers regarding the where, when, and how the bloodstain image on the shroud was created. C-14 Carbon dating carried out in 1988, dated the cloth between 1260 and 1390.

In Jewish religious traditions the Tachrichim (burial shrouds) are traditional simple white burial garments, containing no pockets, usually made from 100% pure linen.A shroud or sometimes a prayer shawl for a man, in which Jews are dressed by the Chevra Kadisha for burial after undergoing a taharah (purification ceremony). Burying the departed in a garment is considered a testimony of faith in the resurrection of the body (commentary of Shach). This is a fundamental principle of faith, one of the thirteen principles, which the Rambam enumerates as being essential to Jewish belief. More to the point today we have an insurrection, while not yet violent against the wearing of another kind of covering… the niqab or the burqa. European governments are escalating the introduction of laws on the basis that the face covering, along with ski masks and bikies helmets, encourages female subjugation, lack of communication, non-safety, isolation, female abuse, oppression of freedom and non-conformity to the western culture. In fact the Koran only dictates to modesty in dress. May I say it that Billabong could improve sales with the launch of a ‘Tri-Kini’ on the beaches next summer.

Meanwhile… “The 2012 ban in France is officially the second country in Europe, after Belgium, to introduce a full ban on a garment which immigration minister Eric Besson has called a “walking coffin.””1 Indeed Australian Liberal Cory Bernadi said, “The burqa is no longer simply the symbol of female repression and Islamic culture, it is now emerging as a disguise of bandits and n’er do wells.”2 More so now the government and police authorities in the Netherlands, a usually very tolerant nation, have become anxious regarding security worries that a terrorist could use one for concealment. Well my shrouded cars could be the same, as most do conceal “old bombs.”

The inspiration for my rag tag assortment evolved from the artistes Christo and Jeanne-Claude who have wrapped, covered whole buildings, bridges and landscapes. Other favourites of mine, Man Ray and Rene Magritte have objects and humans covered as well, specifically Magrittes’ Las Amants 1 & II (The Lovers)3 1928. A plastic explanation is that “love is blind” and that the mantles are symbolic to the idea that a devoted lover would identify his soul mate in any form, immortal love. Another interpretation of Magrittes’ shrouds is that the paintings symbolise his mothers’ death. Magritte, when only 14, discovered her lifeless body which was naked apart from her nightdress that had swathed up around her face.

I started recording these morphological images over 20 years ago. The first was draped with a plastic sheet in a paddock in the back blocks of Surfers Paradise while meandering aimlessly, seeking decay in the landscape.

With my wandering and collecting shots I realised I have inherited the trait from my father. In his latter years my father became a rag and bone man in order to supplement the low family income. A bicycle route from his employment at Laminex factory to home lay through the local hard rubbish dump. Copper wire, lead, iron, even an aerial practice bomb, military helmets, a stockless revolver and rifle, rusted tools… festooned from his bike and festooned from his gladstone bag. Two rusting sheds contained somewhat the ever-growing metal waste for selling or keeping… an Aladdins’ cave to a young boy, everyday re-discovering lifes’ discards care of the Dendy Street tip.

Within my category of covered cars I began to view these still loved but lifeless vehicles, as if a resurrection was about to take place… for the heavenly roads of restoration or hell… (a scrap yard)

Mike Reed, 2013

1/ The Telegraph, April 11 , 2011, “Peter Allen In Paris”
2/ Cory Bernadi, SMH, May 6, 2011
3/ “Las Amants” 1 is in the NGA collection, Canberra, NGA

Mike Reid (Australian)
Brunswick East, Victoria
Nd

Mike Reid (Australian)
Fairfield, Victoria
Nd

Man Ray (American, 1890-1976)
L’Enigme d’Isidore Ducasse
1920, remade 1972
Sewing machine, wool and string
355 x 605 x 335 mm

Mike Reid (Australian)
Athens, Greece
Nd

Colour Factory Gallery
409-429 Gore Street
Fitzroy, Victoria 3056
Phone: +61 3 9419 8756

Opening hours:
Closed for refurbishment

Mike Reed Photography website

Colour Factory Gallery website

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Exhibition: ‘Catherine Opie’ at Regen Projects, Los Angeles

Exhibition dates: 23rd February – 29th March 2013

Catherine Opie (American, b. 1961)
Untitled #4
2012
Pigment print
40 x 60 inches (101.6 x 152.4cm)
Edition 1/5, +2 APs

In a nutshell: good presentation, good idea – just needs really good pictures. In fact the presentation is too good for the pictures, so in the end it feels a bit ridiculous.

There IS something here (the relationship between young and old, wisdom and penitence, love and abuse, tondo and ethereal landscape), but it seems a bit of a muddle. For me, too many easy decisions have been made – obvious opposites, too much reliance on “black”, sometimes caricature rather than real observation… but then again there is occasionally something inside that caricature.

This feeling of muddling through is not helped by an abysmal press release. Along with zen and ironic (both of which seem to have any meaning a writer wants today), we now have sublime joining the pack. Maybe if anything is out of focus (such as these forgettable landscapes) it is sublime. As I go through each sentence I get shivers from either how generic or incorrect or meaningless or (especially) SELF-SERVING they are (… and now the new photographs make a trajectory… and now Opie draws on documentary photography AND the history of photography… and seduction, and formalism, and painting, and high aesthetic, and abstraction, and conceptualisation, a(n)d nauseum… )

I have seen “the Unphotographable” … and it is not as good as one hoped!

Dr Marcus Bunyan

PS. When you walk across a room, you can remark about your chiaroscuro.

Many thank to Regen Projects for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image. Courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles © Catherine Opie

Installation views of the exhibition Catherine Opie at Regen Projects, Los Angeles, February 23 – March 29, 2013
Photography by Brian Forrest

Catherine Opie (American, b. 1961)
Jonathan
2012
Pigment print
50 x 38.4 inches (127 x 97.5cm) Oval
Edition 1/5, + 2 APs

Catherine Opie (American, b. 1961)
Idexa
2012
Pigment print
50 x 38.4 inches (127 x 97.5cm) Oval
Edition 1/5, + 2 APs

Regen Projects is pleased to announce an exhibition of new portraits and landscapes by Catherine Opie. These photographs mark both a progression and a departure for the artist. Opie’s work has always investigated the figure in relation to the landscape, disregarding the polarities typically found within these approaches. This new body of work draws upon Opie’s beginnings in documentary photography, the traditions of painting, and the history of photography.

Opie’s new portraits evoke the sublime and the inner psychological space of both the viewer and subject. Utilising techniques of chiaroscuro, colour, and formal composition found in classical 17th century portraiture, Opie arranges her subjects in allegorical poses that suggest an emotional state. Evoking formal classicism, these beautifully elegant and technically masterful compositions immerse and seduce the eye. Opie’s subjects have always been part of her personal community, and the range of individuals in these new works illustrates how this community has shifted and expanded.

Catherine Opie’s work is deeply rooted in the history of photography. The new landscapes draw upon this trajectory – both contemporary and historical. In addition to utilising motifs that informed the California Pictorialists, these works reference the painterly tradition. Images of iconic landscapes float in abstraction and are reduced to elementary blurred light drawings. The viewer no longer relies on traditional markers of recognition of place, but instead on the visceral reaction to the sensate images Opie captures. These painterly, poetic, and lyrical visions resonate with oblivion, the sublime, and the unknown.

Catherine Opie’s complex and diverse body of work is political, personal, and high aesthetic – the formal, conceptual, and documentary are always at play. Her work consistently engages in formal issues and maintains a formal rigour and technical mastery that underscores an aestheticised oeuvre. Visual pleasure can always be found in her arresting and seductive images.

Opie very knowingly engages art-historical conventions of representation like this in order to seduce her viewers: “I have to be interested in art history since so much of my work is related to painting and photography history. It gives me the ability to use a very familiar language that people understand when looking at my work and seduce the viewer into considering work that they might not normally want to look at. It is very classical and formal in so many ways… In a way, it is elegant in the seduction I was talking about earlier, that this device really can draw the viewer in through the perfection of the image. It is like wearing armour for a battle in a way, the battle for people to look into themselves for the prejudices that keep them from having an open mind.”

(Jennifer Blessing. “Catherine Opie: American Photographer” in Catherine Opie: American Photographer, published by The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2008, p. 14).

Press release from the Regen Projects website

Catherine Opie (American, b. 1961)
Diana
2012
Pigment print
33 x 25 inches (83.8 x 63.5cm)
Edition 1/5, + 2 APs

Catherine Opie (American, b. 1961)
Mary
2012
Pigment print
33 x 25 inches (83.8 x 63.5cm)
Edition 1/5, + 2 APs

Catherine Opie (American, b. 1961)
Untitled #5
2012
Pigment print
40 x 60 inches (101.6 x 152.4cm)
Edition 1/5, + 2 APs

Catherine Opie (American, b. 1961)
Oliver & Mrs. Nibbles
2012
Pigment print
33 x 25 inches (83.8 x 63.5cm)
Edition 2/5, + 2 APs

Catherine Opie (American, b. 1961)
Kate & Laura
2012
Pigment print
77 x 58 inches (195.6 x 147.3cm)
Edition 2/5, 2 APs

Catherine Opie (American, b. 1961)
Guinevere
2012
Pigment print
33 x 25 inches (83.8 x 63.5cm)
Edition 1/5, + 2 APs

Catherine Opie (American, b. 1961)
Untitled #2
2012
Pigment print
40 x 60 inches (101.6 x 152.4cm)
Edition 1/5, + 2 APs

Catherine Opie (American, b. 1961)
Friends
2012
Pigment print
24 x 18 inches (61 x 45.7cm)
Edition 1/5, + 2 APs

Catherine Opie (American, b. 1961)
Untitled #1
2012
Pigment print
40 x 60 inches (101.6 x 152.4cm)
Edition 1/5, +2 APs

Regen Projects
6750 Santa Monica Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90038, United States
Phone: +1 310-276-5424

Opening hours:
Tuesday – Saturday 10am – 6pm

Regen Project website

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Exhibition: ‘In Focus: Robert Mapplethorpe’ at The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Exhibition dates: 23rd October 2012 – 24th March 2013

Robert Mapplethorpe  (American, 1946-1989)
Ken Moody and Robert Sherman
1984
Platinum print
Jointly acquired by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, with funds provided by The David Geffen Foundation, and The J. Paul Getty Trust
© Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation

One of the reasons for setting up Art Blart nearly five years ago was the idea of an exhibition archive – the cataloguing of the archive so that featured exhibitions did not ephemerally drift off into virtual space. One of the problems of a blog is its roll-through postings one after the other and I didn’t want this to happen. Thankfully, I recognised the need for a taxonomic ordering of the information early on in the life of the archive, so that Art Blart has now become a form of cultural memory.

The impulse for this idea was the memory of seeing the Robert Mapplethorpe retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) in Sydney in 1995 (and what an outstanding experience it was) and being able to find nothing about this exhibition online (at the time of writing in 2013). Thankfully, there is now a Mapplethorpe Retrospective web page with 7 installation photographs on the MCA website, so at least there is some representation online.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

This exhibition runs concurrently with that of the last posting, Robert Mapplethorpe: XYZ at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). Many thankx to The J. Paul Getty Museum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Robert Mapplethorpe  (American, 1946-1989)
Leatherman #1
1970
Mixed media print
9 7/16 x 6 3/4 in
Jointly acquired by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, with funds provided by The David Geffen Foundation, and The J. Paul Getty Trust
© Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation

Early Work

Born in Queens, New York, Mapplethorpe studied graphic arts at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. His early work included collage, found objects, and jewellery. Before he took up the camera, Mapplethorpe often used pictures he cut out of magazines as collaged elements to explore sexuality and eroticism. By altering this fetishistic image and re-presenting it in a shadow box, Mapplethorpe removed the picture from its original context and elevated it to a homoerotic icon. The five-pointed star is a symbol of religious significance and the plastic mesh covering the figure evokes the metal screens commonly found in confessionals in Roman Catholic churches.

In 1972 Mapplethorpe met two influential curators: John McKendry, who gave him a Polaroid camera, and Samuel Wagstaff Jr., who became the artist’s lover and mentor. By the mid-1970s, Mapplethorpe had acquired a medium format camera and began documenting New York’s gay S&M community.

Robert Mapplethorpe  (American, 1946-1989)
Holly Solomon
Negative 1976; print 2005
Gelatin silver print
35.3 × 35.5 cm (13 7/8 × 14 in.)
Jointly acquired by the J. Paul Getty Trust and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, with funds provided by the J. Paul Getty Trust and the David Geffen Foundation
© Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation

Robert Mapplethorpe  (American, 1946-1989)
Lisa Lyon
1982
Jointly acquired by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, with funds provided by The David Geffen Foundation, and The J. Paul Getty Trust
© Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation

Portraits

Mapplethorpe met writer-musician Patti Smith in 1967, and they lived together as intimate and artistic partners until 1974. This image of Smith was one of his earliest celebrity portraits.   The two collaborated to create this image as the cover for her 1975 debut rock album, Horses. Working in a borrowed apartment, Mapplethorpe suggested using a wall adjacent to a window where a triangle of light fell at a certain time in the afternoon. Smith dressed in men’s clothes and channeled the American entertainer Frank Sinatra with her jacket slung over her shoulder. Her uncombed hair and androgynous air broke radically from the image that the music industry expected women in rock to assume.

Robert Mapplethorpe  (American, 1946-1989)
Patti Smith
Negative 1975; print 1995
Jointly acquired by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, with funds provided by The David Geffen Foundation, and The J. Paul Getty Trust
© Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation

A man’s jacket slung over one shoulder, the cuffs of her shirt cut off with scissors, the Bohemian poet and performer Patti Smith levels her gaze outward with authority and calm. The set of her jaw and lift of her chin suggest she wears confrontation lightly. Simultaneously, a waifish delicacy haunts her tiny body. She touches the ribbon around her neck with long fingers cupped near her heart – a shy gesture and nod to the garb of the 19th-century Romantic poets she admires. With quiet ferocity, the portrait hovers between masculine and feminine, strength and vulnerability.

Intimately bonded in life and work, Mapplethorpe and Smith made this image for the cover of her debut rock album, Horses. It is one of his earliest celebrity portraits, a genre in which he went on to distinguish himself. He often amplified the glamour of his subjects, but modernised conventional portrayals with provocative depictions of race, gender, and sexuality. For example, record executives, concerned that Smith with her lack of makeup and messy hair wasn’t conventionally pretty enough to sell records like other “girl singers,” wanted to airbrush this image. Knowing Mapplethorpe would back her up, Smith refused and the image and album shaped the start of both their iconoclastic careers.

Robert Mapplethorpe  (American, 1946-1989)
Jim, Sausalito
1977
Gelatin silver print
35.2 × 35.3cm (13 7/8 × 13 7/8 in.)
Jointly acquired by the J. Paul Getty Trust and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, with funds provided by the J. Paul Getty Trust and the David Geffen Foundation
© Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation

Robert Mapplethorpe  (American, 1946-1989)
Ken Moody
1983
Gelatin silver print
38.5 × 38.7cm (15 3/16 × 15 1/4 in.)
Jointly acquired by the J. Paul Getty Trust and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, with funds provided by the J. Paul Getty Trust and the David Geffen Foundation
© Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation

The model Ken Moody poses face front, eyes closed, centred in a simple composition characteristic of the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe’s clean aesthetic. His perfectly hairless head, face, and body, the result of alopecia universalis, appear to take on a sculptural weight and dimension. The dark shadows of the background seem to lap at his neck, shoulders and under his arms, as if he emerges from a timeless, dark sea. The sophisticated lighting also sculpts the curves of his face, collarbone, and chest to further heighten their elegant forms.

This figure study is part of a large body of work featuring African-American men. Mapplethorpe was absorbed by the texture and colour of their skin, which he referred to as bronze. He used Agfa’s Portriga 118 paper for its ability to produce the velvety texture and glow discernible in this reproduction. His strong, uncluttered compositions of statuesque male models fused a classical sensibility with homoerotic content at a time when the male nude was not a popular subject among camera artists.

Text from the J. Paul Getty Museum website

Robert Mapplethorpe  (American, 1946-1989)
Ajitto
1981
Gelatin silver print
45.4 × 35.5cm (17 7/8 × 14 in.)
Jointly acquired by the J. Paul Getty Trust and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, with funds provided by the J. Paul Getty Trust and the David Geffen Foundation
© Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation

Robert Mapplethorpe (American, 1946-1989)
Grapes
Negative 1985; print 2004
Gelatin silver print
38.5 × 38cm (15 3/16 × 14 15/16 in.)
Jointly acquired by the J. Paul Getty Trust and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, with funds provided by the J. Paul Getty Trust and the David Geffen Foundation
© Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation

Robert Mapplethorpe  (American, 1946-1989)
Calla Lily
Negative 1988; print 1990
Gelatin silver print
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Jointly acquired by The J. Paul Getty Trust and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Partial gift of The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation; partial purchase with funds provided by The J. Paul Getty Trust and the David Geffen Foundation
© Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation

Flowers and Still Lifes

Mapplethorpe refined his style in the early 1980s, creating images of timeless elegance. After his erotic nudes, his delicate floral still lifes encouraged sexual interpretations. Although floral still lifes have traditionally held these connotations, Mapplethorpe transformed them from a subject that sophisticated collectors were reluctant to display in their homes into an important contemporary theme.   Arranged with his characteristic sense of balance and meticulously lit, this image of a calla lily appears to glow from within. Although preternaturally still, the composition exudes a sense of latent excitement, with the milky white flower almost vibrating against the rich, black background.

“My whole point is to transcend the subject… go beyond the subject somehow, so that the composition, the lighting, all around, reaches a certain point of perfection.”

~ Robert Mapplethorpe

Mapplethorpe’s work, whether in his fashion or fine art photography, is distinguished by a tension between opposites. At the base of this image of a calla lily, he punctuates the wide planes of black and white with what seems a decadent surprise: the three-dimensional, curving lip of the flower’s edge. He explores the effects of light as a painter might experiment with a palette of colours. At the top, the flower glows milky white, reminiscent of light seen through delicate alabaster or porcelain. Mapplethorpe’s spare compositions often showcase familiar subjects in unusual ways. Floral still lifes, for example, have long encouraged sexual interpretations, and especially here, given the artist’s other work with erotic and sadomasochistic subjects. His imagination transformed and energised what some had considered a stale genre.

Robert Mapplethorpe  (American, 1946-1989)
Parrot Tulips
Negative 1988; print 1990
49 × 49cm (19 5/16 × 19 5/16 in.)
Jointly acquired by the J. Paul Getty Trust and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; partial gift of The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation; partial purchase with funds provided by the J. Paul Getty Trust and the David Geffen Foundation
© Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation

Robert Mapplethorpe (American, 1946-1989) is one of the best-known and most controversial photographers of the second half of the 20th century. As a tastemaker and provocateur, his highly stylised explorations of gender, race, and sexuality became hallmarks of the period and exerted a powerful influence on his contemporaries. In recognition of the 2011 joint acquisition of Mapplethorpe’s art and archival materials with the Getty Research Institute and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), the Getty Museum presents In Focus: Robert Mapplethorpe, on view October 23, 2012 – March 24, 2013 at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Getty Center.

Containing 23 images that date from the early 1970s to the late 1980s, the Getty’s exhibition features key last of edition prints, rarely shown early unique mixed-media objects, and PolaroidsTM, as well as a wide range of subject matter including self-portraits, nudes and still lifes.

Before he took up the camera, Mapplethorpe often used pictures he cut out of magazines as collaged elements to explore sexuality and eroticism. In Leatherman #1 (1970), Mapplethorpe alters a fetishistic image and re- presents it in a shadow box, removing the picture from its original context and elevating it to a homoerotic icon. His early work also reflected the influence of his idol, Andy Warhol, and it is perhaps Warhol’s cover art for the band The Velvet Underground’s 1967 debut album featuring a banana that inspired Banana & Keys (1973), a photograph-in-a-box construction. This object marks a transition in Mapplethorpe’s work between his collages and sculpture and his work as a photographer. Much of the tension is contained in the object’s success as a clever trompe l’oeil.

“The mixed-media objects and PolaroidTM snapshots in the exhibition demonstrate the struggle of a budding artist to find his proper medium of expression and develop his aesthetic vision,” said Paul Martineau, associate curator of photographs at the J. Paul Getty Museum. “However, the carefully crafted gelatin silver and platinum prints make evident Mapplethorpe’s mature style as well as his eye for prints of the highest quality and beauty.”

As Mapplethorpe committed his focus to photography, he began to explore the subjects to which he would return throughout his career – portraits, self-portraits, and nudes. Photographs that feature these subjects are among his best-known, and continue to influence artists today. One of his earliest celebrity portraits, Patti Smith (1975), was carefully staged by Mapplethorpe and Smith, his lifelong friend. Dressed in men’s clothes and channeling the American entertainer Frank Sinatra, Smith broke radically from the image that women in rock were expected to assume, and embodies the androgyny often found in Mapplethorpe’s photographs.

Mapplethorpe also evoked classical themes in his work, particularly in his nude figure studies. Using the motif of the three graces as depicted by artists from ancient Greece to the 19th century, Ken and Lydia and Tyler (1985) features one female and two male models of different racial backgrounds. Mapplethorpe chose a range of skin tones from light to dark in order to invite new, non-binary interpretations of gender, race and sexual orientation.

Concurrent to the Getty’s exhibition, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art will present Robert Mapplethorpe: XYZ, from October 21, 2012 – March 24, 2013. The exhibition presents the 39 black and white photographs that make up the X, Y, and Z Portfolios created by Mapplethorpe and published in 1978, 1978, and 1981, respectively. Taken together, the portfolios summarise his ambitions as a fine-art photographer and contemporary artist.

About Robert Mapplethorpe (1946-1989)

Mapplethorpe was a major cultural figure during a period of tumultuous change who contributed to shaping not only the art of photography but the larger social landscape. His international fame derives from his prolific body of almost 2,000 editioned, large format black-and-white and colour photographs, which have been featured in over 200 solo exhibitions around the world since 1977. Extensively exhibited and widely published, Mapplethorpe’s elegant prints representing portraits, nudes, flowers, and erotic and sadomasochistic subjects dominated photography in the late 20th century. Less known are the over 1,500 PolaroidTM works that Mapplethorpe produced in the early 1970s before he took up the Hasselblad 500 camera given to him in 1975 by Sam Wagstaff, the visionary curator who became Mapplethorpe’s benefactor and mentor.

Widely recognised for the role he played in elevating photography to the level of art, Robert Mapplethorpe always considered himself not only a photographer, but an artist. From 1963 to 1969, Mapplethorpe studied for a B.F.A. at the Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, where he majored in graphic arts and took courses in painting and sculpture – but never attended photography courses. In the late 1960s, he started clipping images from magazines to incorporate into collages. While living at the Chelsea Hotel with his friend and muse, Patti Smith, he borrowed a PolaroidTM camera in 1971 from fellow hotel resident Sandy Daley to create his own images for use in collages. Overshadowed by the power of his later large format photographs, Mapplethorpe’s early drawings, collages and assemblages, created between 1968 and 1972, remain largely unfamiliar, despite the importance they hold in understanding the artist’s formative years.

In the mid-1970s, using the Hasselblad 500, he began photographing participants in New York’s S&M subculture and created many of the strikingly powerful studies for which he is most renowned. He refined his style in the early 1980s and began concentrating on elegant figure studies and delicate floral still lifes, as well as glamorous celebrity portraits. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, his work emerged at the centre of a culture war over the use of public money to support art that some deemed obscene or blasphemous. When some of Mapplethorpe’s more controversial works were exhibited at The Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, director Dennis Barrie was arrested and charged with pandering (a charge of which he was ultimately acquitted after a landmark public trial).

Mapplethorpe died in 1989 at age 42 from complications of AIDS.

Press release from the J. Paul Getty Museum website

Nudes

Mapplethorpe often evoked classical themes in his work, particularly in his nude figure studies. In this image, he began with motif of the Three Graces as depicted by artists from the ancient Greeks to the nineteenth century, but took the reference in fresh directions.   He selected one female and two male models of different racial backgrounds to achieve a range of skin tones from light to dark and to invite new, non-binary interpretations of gender, race, and sexual preference. Mapplethorpe trained his lens on the models’ conjoined bodies, purposely excluding their heads from the frame. Although he identified his models by name in the title, instead of a portrait, he created an elegant study of form and tone.

Robert Mapplethorpe  (American, 1946-1989)
Thomas
Negative 1987; print 1994
Jointly acquired by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, with funds provided by The David Geffen Foundation, and The J. Paul Getty Trust
© Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation

Mapplethorpe’s strong, uncluttered compositions of statuesque male models fused a classical sensibility with homoerotic content at a time when the male nude was not a popular subject among camera artists. In this image, the model’s body is taut with compressed energy, his muscled limbs bent in a way that is reminiscent of those seen on ancient Greek figure vases.

Robert Mapplethorpe  (American, 1946-1989)
Ken and Lydia and Tyler
Negative 1985, print 2004
Gelatin silver print
5 1/8 x 15 1/16 in.
Jointly acquired by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, with funds provided by The David Geffen Foundation, and The J. Paul Getty Trust
© Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation

Robert Mapplethorpe  (American, 1946-1989)
Self-Portrait
1980
Gelatin silver print
14 x 14 in.
Jointly acquired by The J. Paul Getty Trust and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Partial gift of The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation; partial purchase with funds provided by The J. Paul Getty Trust and the David Geffen Foundation
© Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation

Self Portraits

From 1970 until his untimely death in 1989, Mapplethorpe continually returned to the self-portrait as a means of expression. Despite his elaborate pompadour and face so attractive as to be almost pretty, the artist’s stare in this self-portrait is forceful and direct. Mapplethorpe’s sophisticated use of lighting gives the outlines of his mouth, nostrils, and earlobes a refined, even sculptural quality. The same elements of glamour and striking simplicity for which he is known in his celebrity and fashion portraiture are visible here, including a tightly cropped composition and uncluttered background that further dramatise the face. Mapplethorpe drew on his early commercial work for magazines, including Vogue. This aspect of his career followed the examples of other noted photographers such as Edward Steichen, Irving Penn, Richard Avedon, and Herb Ritts.

Robert Mapplethorpe  (American, 1946-1989)
Self-Portrait
1985
Gelatin silver print
15 1/4 x 15 3/16 in.
Jointly acquired by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, with funds provided by The David Geffen Foundation, and The J. Paul Getty Trust
© Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation

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

Opening hours:
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Saturday 10am – 8pm
Monday Closed

The J. Paul Getty Museum website

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Exhibition: ‘Robert Mapplethorpe: XYZ’ at The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)

Exhibition dates: 21st October 2012 – 24th March 2013

Robert Mapplethorpe (American, 1946-1989)
Y Portfolio
1978
37.7 x 35.5 x 4.9cm closed
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, jointly acquired by the J. Paul Getty Trust and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Partial Gift of the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation; partial purchase with funds provided by the David Geffen Foundation and the J. Paul Getty Trust
© Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation

“The X Portfolio centers on men engaged in gay sex, including hard-core sadomasochism. The subject wasn’t entirely new. In Greek vase decorations, Indian miniatures and pagan temple sculptures, candid and highly refined sex pictures, heterosexual and homosexual, have been around since before Alexander the Great and the Mahabharata.”

Christopher Knight, Los Angeles Times Art Critic

Robert Mapplethorpe made photographs of hard-core sadomasochistic gay sex. Robert Mapplethorpe made photographs of hard-core sadomasochistic gay sex. Robert Mapplethorpe made photographs of hard-core sadomasochistic gay sex. Robert Mapplethorpe made photographs of hard-core sadomasochistic gay sex.

A fist up an arse, a finger down the penis, a dildo up the bum. These photographs are seminal images in the work of the artist and yet we never get to see them online. Would it be too shocking for the sensibilities of the gallery or the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation that these cause célèbre images, five of which were used as evidence in the obscenity trial of Director Dennis Barrie and the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center in 1990, were actually seen?

Instead we have two tame representations from the X Portfolio in the posting.

If you go to the slick Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation website, what do you find in the portfolio section: tasteful self portraits, male nudes, female nudes, flowers, portraits, statuary. Nothing to suggest that Mapplethorpe was one of the most transgressive artists of the twentieth century, an artist who documented an essential element of gay culture AS ART, who famously said that there was nothing shown in his photographs that he hadn’t done himself. Not an inkling, not a whisper, not a bull whip up the arse to be found. This is the sanitised vision of the artist – the desire, the pleasure, the release of living, re-shackled under the commercialisation of brand Mapplethorpe.

It’s like the Foundation is afraid of the artist’s shadow. On their website they state that the Foundation was set up by Mapplethorpe in part to protect his work and advance his creative vision. The X Portfolio and his early work are part of that vision, deserving to be seen by everyone – online!

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) for allowing me to publish some of the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a a larger version of the image.

Robert Mapplethorpe (American, 1946-1989)
Cedric, N.Y.C. (X Portfolio)
1978
19.5 x 19.5cm
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, jointly acquired by the J. Paul Getty Trust and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Partial Gift of the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation; partial purchase with funds provided by the David Geffen Foundation and the J. Paul Getty Trust
© Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation

Robert Mapplethorpe (American, 1946-1989)
Irises, N.Y.C. (Y Portfolio)
1977
19.5 x 19.5cm
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, jointly acquired by the J. Paul Getty Trust and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Partial Gift of the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation; partial purchase with funds provided by the David Geffen Foundation and the J. Paul Getty Trust
© Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation

Robert Mapplethorpe (American, 1946-1989)
Jim, Sausalito (X Portfolio)
1977
19.5 x 19.5cm
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, jointly acquired by the J. Paul Getty Trust and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Partial Gift of the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation; partial purchase with funds provided by the David Geffen Foundation and the J. Paul Getty Trust
© Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation

Robert Mapplethorpe (American, 1946-1989)
Joe, N.Y.C
1978
Gelatin silver print
7 11/16 × 7 11/16 in
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Jointly acquired by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and The J. Paul Getty Trust; Partial gift of The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation; partial purchase with funds provided by The David Geffen Foundation and The J. Paul Getty Trust
© Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation

Robert Mapplethorpe (American, 1946-1989)
Patrice, N.Y.C.
1977
Gelatin silver print
7 11/16 × 7 11/16 in.
Jointly acquired by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and The J. Paul Getty Trust; Partial gift of The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation; partial purchase with funds provided by The David Geffen Foundation and The J. Paul Getty Trust
© Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation

Robert Mapplethorpe (American, 1946-1989)
Helmut, N.Y.C.
1978
Gelatin silver print
7 3/4 × 7 11/16 in.
Jointly acquired by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and The J. Paul Getty Trust; Partial gift of The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation; partial purchase with funds provided by The David Geffen Foundation and The J. Paul Getty Trust
© Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) presents three portfolios created by American photographer Robert Mapplethorpe (1946-1989). The exhibition, Robert Mapplethorpe: XYZ, features a total of thirty-nine black-and-white photographs, exploring three subject matters: homosexual sadomasochistic imagery (X, published in 1978); flower still lifes (Y, 1978); and nude portraits of African American men (Z, 1981). LACMA’s presentation will showcase the works in three rows – X above, Y in the middle, and Z along the bottom – an idea which was suggested by Mapplethorpe in 1989.

“Robert Mapplethorpe is among the most important photographic artists of the twentieth century,” comments Britt Salvesen, Department Head and Curator of the Wallis Annenberg Photography Department at LACMA. “The X, Y, and Z portfolios not only defined the artist’s career, but also played a role in an important moment of American cultural politics that is still pertinent to us today.”

This is the first presentation of Mapplethorpe’s work since last year’s widely publicised joint acquisition by LACMA, The J. Paul Getty Museum, and The Getty Research Institute of Mapplethorpe’s art and archives – including over 1,900 editioned prints and over 1,000 non-editioned prints, 200 unique mixed-media objects, over 160 Polaroids, 120,000 negatives, and extensive working materials, ephemera, and documents. The majority of the acquisition originated as a generous gift from the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, and the remainder of the funds provided by the David Geffen Foundation and the J. Paul Getty Trust.

Concurrent with the LACMA exhibition, The J. Paul Getty Museum presents In Focus: Robert Mapplethorpe, on view October 23, 2012 – March 24, 2013. This single-gallery exhibition reviews the artist’s work from the early 1970s to the late 1980s, and features editioned prints, rarely seen mixed-media objects, and Polaroids that depict a wide range of subject matter including self-portraits, nudes, and still lifes. A larger Mapplethorpe retrospective, jointly organised by LACMA and the Getty, is planned for 2016.

About the artist

Born in 1946, Robert Mapplethorpe grew up in the suburban area of Floral Park, Queens. As a student at the Pratt Institute in New York, he studied drawing, painting, and sculpture and experimented with various materials in mixed-media collages. When Mapplethorpe acquired a Polaroid camera in 1970, he began incorporating his own photos into his constructions. His first solo gallery exhibition, Polaroids, took place at Light Gallery in New York City in 1973.

Two years later he transitioned from the Polaroid to a Hasselblad medium format camera and began shooting his circle of friends and acquaintances. His subjects – artists, musicians, socialites, pornographic film stars, and members of the S & M underground – came from a variety of backgrounds. Mapplethorpe’s interest in documenting the New York S&M scene was strongest in the late 1970s, when he produced photographs with shocking content but remarkable technique and formal mastery. In 1978, the Robert Miller Gallery in New York City became his exclusive dealer. Throughout the 1980s, Mapplethorpe produced images that challenged and adhered to classical aesthetic standards including stylised compositions of male and female nudes, delicate flower still lifes, and studio portraits of artists and celebrities. He explored and refined different techniques and formats – including colour 20″ x 24″ Polaroids, photogravures, platinum prints on paper and linen, Cibachrome and dye transfer colour processes – but gelatin silver printing remained his primary medium.

In 1986, Robert Mapplethorpe was diagnosed with AIDS. Despite his illness, he accelerated his creative efforts, broadened the scope of his photographic inquiry, and accepted numerous commissions. The Whitney Museum of American Art mounted his first major American museum retrospective in 1988, one year before his death in 1989. Beyond the art historical and social significance of his work, his legacy lives on through the work of Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, which he established in 1988 to promote photography, support museums that exhibit photographic art, and to find medical research in the fight against AIDS and HIV related infection.

Exhibition history

Mapplethorpe’s work has historically provoked strong reactions, most notably during the so-called Culture Wars of the 1980s, a period of conflict between conservative and liberal factions. The traveling retrospective, The Perfect Moment, opened at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia in 1988. Among the 150 photographs and objects in the show were the sadomasochistic imagery of Mapplethorpe’s X portfolio, as well as the Y and Z portfolios; the show appeared in two venues without any incident. When it was due to open at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., during the summer of 1989, politicians who opposed federal funding for the arts became alarmed. The Corcoran canceled the exhibition, resulting in a protest against the gallery’s withdrawal of the show. Controversy ensued further at a subsequent venue, the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, where charges of obscenity were brought against director David Barrie. In this high-profile trial, five images from the X portfolio were used as evidence. Barrie was acquitted, and Mapplethorpe has been linked to debates about censorship ever since.

Press release from The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) website

Robert Mapplethorpe (American, 1946-1989)
Carnation, N.Y.C. (Y Portfolio)
1978
19.5 x 19.5cm
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, jointly acquired by the J. Paul Getty Trust and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Partial Gift of the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation; partial purchase with funds provided by the David Geffen Foundation and the J. Paul Getty Trust
© Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation

Robert Mapplethorpe (American, 1946-1989)
Alistair Butler, N.Y.C. (Z Portfolio)
1980
Gelatin Silver Print
19.5 x 19.5cm
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, jointly acquired by the J. Paul Getty Trust and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Partial Gift of the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation; partial purchase with funds provided by the David Geffen Foundation and the J. Paul Getty Trust
© Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation

Robert Mapplethorpe (American, 1946-1989)
Leigh Lee, N.Y.C. (Z Portfolio)
1980
Gelatin Silver Print
19.5 x 19.5cm
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, jointly acquired by the J. Paul Getty Trust and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Partial Gift of the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation; partial purchase with funds provided by the David Geffen Foundation and the J. Paul Getty Trust
© Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation

Robert Mapplethorpe (American, 1946-1989)
Philip Prioleau, N.Y.C.
1979
Gelatin silver print
7 1/2 × 7 7/16 in. (19.05 × 18.89cm)
Jointly acquired by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and The J. Paul Getty Trust; Partial gift of The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation; partial purchase with funds provided by The David Geffen Foundation and The J. Paul Getty Trust
© Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation

Robert Mapplethorpe (American, 1946-1989)
Rose, N.Y.C. (Y Portfolio)
1977
Gelatin silver print
Image 19.5 x 19.5cm
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, jointly acquired by the J. Paul Getty Trust and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Partial Gift of the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation; partial purchase with funds provided by the David Geffen Foundation and the J. Paul Getty Trust
© Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation

Robert Mapplethorpe (American, 1946-1989)
Tulips
1978
Gelatin silver print
7 11/16 × 7 3/4 in. (19.53 × 19.69cm)
Jointly acquired by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and The J. Paul Getty Trust; Partial gift of The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation; partial purchase with funds provided by The David Geffen Foundation and The J. Paul Getty Trust
© Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation

Robert Mapplethorpe (American, 1946-1989)
Z Portfolio
1978
37.7 x 35.5 x 4.9 cm closed
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, jointly acquired by the J. Paul Getty Trust and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Partial Gift of the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation; partial purchase with funds provided by the David Geffen Foundation and the J. Paul Getty Trust
© Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation

Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)
5905 Wilshire Boulevard (at Fairfax Avenue)
Los Angeles, CA, 90036
Phone: 323 857-6000

Opening hours:
Monday, Tuesday, Thursday: 11am – 5pm
Friday: 11am – 8pm
Saturday, Sunday: 10am – 7pm
Closed Wednesday

LACMA website

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