Exhibition: ‘Photography’s New Vision: Experiments in Seeing’ at the High Museum of Art, Atlanta

Exhibition dates: 13th June, 2025 – 4th January, 2026

Curator: Maria L. Kelly, High Museum of Art assistant curator of photography

Aaron Siskind (American, 1903-1991)
Pleasures and Terrors of Levitation #37
1953
Gelatin silver print
High Museum of Art, Atlanta, gift of Adair and Joe B. Massey in honour of Gus Kayafas

Aaron Siskind was recognised for the ways he rendered his surroundings into often stark shapes and forms, which reflected his fascination with contemporary trends in abstract art. He was an influential teacher at Chicago’s Institute of Design, which was founded by László Moholy-Nagy as the New Bauhaus. This image of a person flying or falling comes from a series Siskind made of the contorted bodies of divers plunging into Lake Michigan. He masterfully created its disorienting effect through tight focus on the floating figure without contextual elements.

Text from the High Museum of Art website

While contemporarily AI-powered technologies are revolutionising the way we interact with and consume media, enabling us to “to process and analyse vast amounts of data quickly, making it easier to find and access the information we need” in the 1920s and 1930s there was also a revolution in the way artists (and their use of the camera) viewed and felt the world – one not based on information, image quality or duplicity in the veracity of the image but one based on the word, perspective – be that point of view, context, close ups, surreality, fragmentation, scale, concept, construction, colour, aesthetics, identity, gender, or radical experimentation.

In this departure from traditional photographic methods, “New Vision photographers foregrounded experimental techniques, including photograms, photomontages and compositions that favoured extreme angles and unusual viewpoints, and these extended to movements such as surrealism and constructivism.” (Press release)

To me, this New Vision is about experiencing different perspectives – experiencing, sensing, feeling and seeing the world in a new light. After the disasters and machine-ations, the destruction of a conservative way of life before the First World War, here was a way to grasp hold of (and picture) the speed of a new world order, the dreams of physiological analysis, the diversity of new identities, and the fluidity of rapidly evolving technological and social cultures.

While today this (r)evolution continues at an ever expanding pace with the consumption of huge amounts of information and images, I believe it may be advantageous to rest for a while on certain experiences and images … so that we let the daggers drop from our eyes, to ‘not make images’ in our minds eye but just to be present in the viewing of a photograph, so that we appreciate and understand every aspect of the great life spirit of this wondrous earth.

Then and now, new vision.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to the High 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.

The New Vision movement of the 1920s and 1930s offered a revolutionary approach to seeing the world. It represented a rebellion against traditional photographic methods and an embrace of avant-garde experimentation and innovative techniques. László Moholy-Nagy, an artist and influential teacher at the Bauhaus in Germany, named this period of expansion the “New Vision.” Today, the term encompasses photographic developments that took place between the two World Wars in Europe, America, and beyond. New Vision photographers foregrounded inventive techniques, including photograms, photomontages, and light studies, and made photographs that favoured extreme angles and unusual viewpoints. These approaches – which also extended to more defined movements like Surrealism – spoke to a desire to find and see different perspectives in the wake of World War I.

Uniting more than one hundred works from the High’s photography collection, the exhibition traces the movement’s impact, from its origins in the 1920s to today, and demonstrates its long-standing effect on subsequent generations.

Text from the High Museum of Art website

Photography’s New Vision: Experiments in Seeing

Named by the influential German artist and teacher László Moholy-Nagy, the “New Vision” comprised an expansive variety of photographic exploration that took place in Europe, America, and beyond in the 1920s and 1930s. The movement was characterised by its departure from traditional photographic methods. New Vision photographers foregrounded experimental techniques, including photograms, photomontages, and light studies, and made photographs that favoured extreme angles and unusual viewpoints.

This exhibition, uniting more than one hundred works from the High’s robust photography collection, will trace the impact of the New Vision movement from its origins in the 1920s to today. Photographs from that era by Ilse Bing, Alexander Rodchenko, Imogen Cunningham, and Moholy-Nagy will be complemented by a multitude of works by modern and contemporary artists such as Barbara Kasten, Jerry Uelsmann, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and Abelardo Morell to demonstrate the long-standing impact of the movement on subsequent generations.

Text from the High Museum of Art website

Installation view of the exhibition 'Photography's New Vision: Experiments in Seeing' at the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, June 2025 - January 2026

Installation views of the exhibition Photography’s New Vision: Experiments in Seeing at the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, June 2025 – January 2026
Photos: Mike Jensen

The High Museum of Art presents “Photography’s New Vision: Experiments in Seeing” (June 13, 2025 – Jan. 4, 2026), an exhibition uniting more than 100 works from the High’s robust photography collection to trace the impact of the New Vision movement from its origins in the 1920s to today. Works include century-old photographs exemplifying themes from the movement and modern and contemporary images that emphasise the relevance of current artistic and social practices as a response to the technological and cultural changes that occurred in the early 20th century.

“This exhibition provides an opportunity to illuminate photographers’ creativity and innovative practices, all inspired by the progression of the medium in the 1920s and 30s,” said High Museum of Art Director Rand Suffolk. “Many of the works are rarely on view, so it will be an exciting experience for visitors to see them and learn about photographers’ abilities as they reflect reality while experimenting with technique and perspective.” Named by the influential German artist and teacher László Moholy-Nagy, the “New Vision” comprised an expansive variety of photographic exploration that took place in Europe, America and beyond in the 1920s and 1930s. The movement was characterised by its departure from traditional photographic methods. New Vision photographers foregrounded experimental techniques, including photograms, photomontages and compositions that favoured extreme angles and unusual viewpoints, and these extended to movements such as surrealism and constructivism.

“Experiments in Seeing” features nearly 100 photographers. It also demonstrates how the New Vision movement revolutionised the medium of photography in the early 20th century in response to the great societal, economic and technological shifts spurred by the upheaval of the two World Wars. Photographs from that era by Ilse Bing, Alexander Rodchenko, Imogen Cunningham and Moholy-Nagy have been complemented by a multitude of photographs by modern and contemporary artists such as Barbara Kasten, Jerry Uelsmann, Hiroshi Sugimoto and Abelardo Morell to demonstrate the long-standing impact of the movement on subsequent generations.

The first section of the exhibition delves into experimental techniques that foreground the light-sensitive aspects of photography, followed by works created through in-camera manipulations or additions to the surfaces of the prints. Subsequent sections explore inventive methods of capturing unexpected views of the world articulated with radical angles or detailed close-ups. Other works showcase surreal approaches to subjects such as humanlike forms and bodies, the use of mirrors and doubling, and everyday scenes heightened by uncanny moments or distorted through the interplay of light, shadow and water.

“Not only does the early 20th century and its art movements continue to be influential, but that time also echoes our current moment – one that feels similarly consequential and innovative with the development of new emerging technologies and methods of communicating,” said Maria L. Kelly, the High’s assistant curator of photography. “The movements and happenings of a century ago are akin to those of today and those shown in the exhibition. There remains a desire for alternative ways to see and approach the world through art, and particularly through photography.”

“Photography’s New Vision: Experiments in Seeing” is on view in the Lucinda W. Bunnen Galleries for Photography located on the Lower Level of the High’s Wieland Pavilion.

Press release from the High Museum of Art

“Light was considered the medium that permits photography. But for me it became the main subject: the protagonist of my photography.”

Ilse Bing, c. 1920s

Light Experimentation

After the trauma of World War I, many artists felt compelled to reconsider conventional art making methods to better reflect and engage with the world. Some photographers turned their attention to the essential element of photography: light. Through innovative visual investigations, cameraless photographs were produced, viewes of the world altered, and scientific discoveries made.

Experimentations with illumination and light-sensitive paper in the darkroom gave rise to photograms, enabling artists to pursue abstraction and to wield light as a sculptural element. The process of solarisation – reversing tones in a print using a flash of light during developing – provided an unconventional view of a subject. Early attempts to capture traces of light on film led to scientific innovations such as using strove lights to freeze movement, depicting magnetic fields, and tracing electrical currents on light sensitive paper.

These processes aim to reveal the invisible, with the elements of change as a constant companion. While artists can insert some control over the elements, the process ultimately shapes the final image. Many artworks in this section exist as unique prints, challenging the assumption of the reproducibility of photography, and emphasising the singularity of the creative moment.

Wall text from the exhibition

Francis Bruguière (American, 1879-1945)
The Light That Never Was on Land or Sea
c. 1925
Gelatin silver print
High Museum of Art, Atlanta, purchase with funds from Georgia-Pacific Corporation

Nathan Lerner (American, 1913-1977)
Light Drawing #8 (Smoke)
1938-1939
Gelatin silver print
High Museum of Art, Atlanta, gift of Hilary Leff and Elliot Groffman

Ilse Bing (American born Germany, 1899-1998)
Untitled [Seated Woman with Necklace, Solarized]
1943
Gelatin silver print
High Museum of Art, Atlanta, gift of the Estate of Ilse Bing Wolff

Harry Callahan (American, 1912-1999)
Camera Movement on Flashlight, Chicago
c. 1949
Gelatin silver print
High Museum of Art, Atlanta, purchase with funds from the H. B. and Doris Massey Charitable Trust, Dr. Robert L. and Lucinda W. Bunnen, Collections Council Acquisition Fund, Jackson Fine Art, Powell, Goldstein, Frazer and Murphy, Jane and Clay Jackson, Beverly and John Baker, Roni and Sid Funk, Gloria and Paul Sternberg, and Jeffery L. Wigbels
© 2018 The Estate of Harry Callahan

Abelardo Morell (American born Cuba, b. 1948)
Still Life with Wine Glass: Photogram on 20″ x 24″ Film
2006
Gelatin silver print
High Museum of Art, Atlanta, purchase with funds from the Friends of Photography
© Abelardo Morell

Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japanese, b. 1948)
Lightning Fields 182
2009
Gelatin silver print
High Museum of Art, Atlanta, purchase through funds provided by patrons of Collectors Evening 2012
© Hiroshi Sugimoto

Inspired by William Henry Fox Talbot, an inventor of photography who was fascinated with electromagnetic conduction, Hiroshi Sugimoto began applying charges of electricity directly to unexposed photographic film. After months of honing his technique in the darkroom, he managed to achieve remarkable results with a handheld wand charged by a generator. His Lightning Fields photographs are made without a camera or lens. Here, the abstract visual trace of an electric charge measuring over 400,000 volts sweeps across the composition, reading like the textures of a human hand, the upward tentacles of a fern, or the stark branches of a tree.

Text from the High Museum of Art website

Hans-Christian Schink (German, b. 1961)
2/26/2010, 7:54 am – 8:54 am, S36° 49.622′ E 175° 47.340′
2010
From the series 1h
© Hans-Christian Schink

Abelardo Morell (American born Cuba, b. 1948)
Camera Obscura: View of Philadelphia from Loews Hotel Room #3013 with Upside Down Bed, April 14th, 2014
2014
Pigmented inkjet print
High Museum of Art Atlanta, gift of Dr. Roger Hartl
© Abelardo Morell

V. Elizabeth Turk (American, b. 1945)
Calaeno
2018
Van Dyke print
High Museum of Art, Atlanta, purchase with funds from Lucinda W. Bunnen for the Bunnen Collection
© Elizabeth Turk

V. Elizabeth Turk is an Atlanta-based photographer whose work explores the connections between the human body and the natural world. To make this print, Turk used an analog process from the 1800s that involves coating a large sheet of paper with light-sensitive chemicals. She then arranged her model on top of the sheet and exposed it to light, creating a ghostly silhouette, before repeating the exposure with plants. The resulting photogram is a unique image in which botanical forms intersect with the body, alluding to bones, veins, and skin and suggesting a visceral bond between humans and the environment.

Text from the High Museum of Art website

“The limits of photography are incalculable; everything is so recent that even the mere act of searching may lead to creative results. […] The illiterate of the future will be the person ignorant of the use of the camera as well as of the pen.”

László Moholy-Nagy 1928

Radical Viewpoints

From photography’s inception in 1839, camera technology involved cumbersome equipment and time-consuming development processes until the advent of lightweight cameras in the 1920s. Photographers were then able to work more nimbly, transforming photography into a medium capable of capturing fleeting moments, unusual viewpoints, and multiple perspectives. The exploration of unexpected angles became a hallmark of New Vision photography. Sharp diagonals, extreme vantage points, and shortened perspectives opened novel pathways of perceiving otherwise commonplace environments.

Alexander Rodchenko, a pioneer in this method, championed the camera’s ability to reveal, stating, “in order to teach man to see from all viewpoints, it is necessary to photograph […] from completely unexpected viewpoints and in unexpected positions […] We don’t see what we are looking at. We don’t see marvellous perspectives.” This approach aimed to provide a fuller impression of subjects, prompting viewers to seek and appreciate what might otherwise be overlooked.

Though these early photographs may not appear groundbreaking today, their makers’ carefully considered methods transferred how photography is used. This is evident in photographers’ creative interpretations of their surroundings over the past century.

Wall text from the exhibition

Alexander Rodchenko (Russian, 1891-1956)
Sbor na demonstratsia (Gathering for a Demonstration)
1928
Gelatin silver print
High Museum of Art, Atlanta, gift of Joseph and Yolandra Alexander, Moscow/VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
© Estate of Alexander Rodchenko/RAO, Moscow/VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Alexander Rodchenko was a key figure in the movements of New Vision and Constructivism – abstract and functional art that reflected an industrial society. Advocating “to achieve a revolution in our visual thought,” he explored various methods, such as photographing from unexpected angles, to capture dynamic views and expose new realities. With a new, lightweight 35 mm camera, he often photographed from his apartment balcony to create dramatic scenes of the street below. The perspective in this photograph flattens the building’s stories into one visual field, giving the image a theatrical quality as an onlooker peers over the railing.

Text from the High Museum of Art website

Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975)
The Bridge
1929
Gelatin silver print
High Museum of Art, Atlanta, gift of Arnold H. Crane
© Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

A central figure among twentieth-century American photographers, Walker Evans created works in his early career that sample from the New Vision aesthetic, which he may have encountered while abroad in Paris in 1926. His photographs of New York City, made after he returned to the United States, feature dramatically angled or cropped scenes of architecture and city life. Evans made numerous photographic studies of the Brooklyn Bridge from both below and on the bridge, portraying it less as a recognisable landmark and more as a hulking expanse whose form fills each tight frame.

Text from the High Museum of Art website

László Moholy-Nagy (Hungarian 1895-1946)
Stage Set for Madame Butterfly
1931
Gelatin silver print
High Museum of Art, Atlanta, purchase with funds from Georgia-Pacific Corporation

Moholy-Nagy, a leader of the New Vision, had an expansive artistic practice that included painting, photography, sculpture, film, and more. As a teacher at the Bauhaus, which connected art and industry, he believed in technology’s potential to advance art and society. In 1929, he became set designer at the Kroll Opera House and created avant-garde sets with translucent and perforated materials, often making light itself a sculptural element. Lucia Moholy, a photographer, writer, teacher, and Moholy-Nagy’s first wife, was commissioned as Kroll’s stage photographer. In this image, which either artist may have made, the sharp angle shot from above complicates the set of Madame Butterfly, emphasising intersecting, moving elements and heightening areas of light and shadow.

Text from the High Museum of Art website

Lucas Foglia (American, b. 1983)
Esme Swimming, Parkroyal on Pickering, Singapore
2014
Pigmented inkjet print
High Museum of Art, Atlanta, gift of Irene Zhou
© Lucas Foglia

Close Ups

Similar to the practice of using unusual angles to offer unexpected perspectives, some photographers began capturing highly detailed, close-up views of objects. This approach affords a study of texture, pattern, and structure that may otherwise go unnoticed by the human eye. By eliminating surroundings that could offer a narrative, the physicality of the object becomes the primary focus, allowing it to transcend beyond its everyday existence.

Practitioners of straight photography in the United States and the concurrent New Objectivity movement in Germany shared a core desire to unearth a balance of the familiar and the foreign within intricate images of forms. While Imogen Cunningham and Edward Weston perfected carefully composed studies of plants and other natural matter, Albert Renger-Patzsch, Alexander Rodchenko, and Ralph Steiner explored scientific and industrial objects. Such images celebrated the technological advancements of the time and revealed how mechanical structures often mimic those found in nature, suggesting a shared framework, and a shared beauty, between humanmade and natural. The emphasis on detail and abstraction invites viewers to reconsider their perceptions of both the ordinary and the extraordinary in the world around them.

Wall text from the exhibition

Imogen Cunningham (American, 1883-1976)
Agave Americanus
1929
Gelatin silver print
High Museum of Art, Atlanta
© The Imogen Cunningham Trust

Imogen Cunningham (American, 1883-1976)
Agave Design I
c. 1920
Gelatin silver print
High Museum of Art, Atlanta, purchase with funds from Georgia-Pacific Corporation
© The Imogen Cunningham Trust

Edward Weston (American 1886-1958)
Palma Cuernavaca II
1925
Palladium print
High Museum of Art, Atlanta, gift of Lucinda W. Bunnen for the Bunnen Collection to mark the retirement of Gudmund Vigtel
© Center for Creative Photography, Arizona Board of Regents

Ralph Steiner (American, 1899-1986)
Electrical Switches
1929
Gelatin silver print
8 x 10 5/16 inches
Purchase with funds from Georgia-Pacific Corporation

Harry Callahan (American, 1912-1999)
Weed Against Sky, Detroit
1948
Gelatin silver print
High Museum of Art, Atlanta, gift of the Callahan and Hollinger Families
© 2018 The Estate of Harry Callahan

Eugenia de Olazabal (Mexican, b. 1936)
Espinas
c. 1985
Gelatin silver print
High Museum of Art, Atlanta, gift of the artist

“Surrealism lies at the heart of the photographic enterprise: in the very creation of a duplicate world, of a reality in the second degree, narrower but more dramatic than the one perceived by natural vision.”

Susan Sontag, 1973

Surreality

Surrealism emerged as an artistic movement in reaction to the horrors of World War I. The often disconcerting imagery and literature of the movement reflected a world that felt disorienting and chaotic and captured how the very foundations of reason and humanity were tested and questioned through the realities of war. In his Surrealist Manifesto (1924), French writer Andre Breton advocates for a rejection of rational ways of approaching the world in four of dreams and imagination as pathways to new creative expressions.

Photography played an important role in the Surrealist movement. Artists valued how the medium could capture spontaneous moments that reveal the unexpected, be manipulated to stage scenes, or be altered with darkroom processes. They harness photography in a multitude of ways to create dreamlike and unconscious associations with reality. In these galleries, artists explore uncanny moments and create links to the human psyche by focusing on humanlike forms and fragmented body parts, mirrored and doubled views, and the impact of light and shadows in space.

Wall text from the exhibition

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927)
Men’s Fashions (Avenue des Gobelins)
1925, printed 1956
Gelatin silver print
Purchase

Eugène Atget was the great chronicler of Paris at the turn of the century. His vast photographic archive captures a city on the precipice of modernisation. Though his photographs of empty city streets were documentary in nature, the Surrealists admired their dreamlike quality and claimed Atget as one of their own despite his protestations. They believed any photograph could shed its original context and intent when viewed with a surrealist sensibility. Atget’s photograph of mannequins peering out of a shop window appealed to the movement by embodying the uncanny valley, where the human likeness of a nonhuman entity evokes both affinity and discomfort in viewers.

Text from the High Museum of Art website

Florence Henri (Swiss born United States, 1893-1982)
Composition
1932, printed 1972
Gelatin silver print
High Museum of Art, Atlanta, gift of Dr. Joe B. Massey in honor of Maria L. Kelly

Florence Henri is well known for her manipulations of light and form that create complex, surrealist scenes. She used angled mirrors to frame, obscure, and replicate portions of scenes to dissolve a sense of perspective and space, as seen in this still life comprising mirrors, pears, and an image of the sea. After only one semester studying under László Moholy-Nagy at the Bauhaus in 1927, Henri shifted her focus from painting to photography and began using various experimental techniques such as photomontage, multiple exposures, photograms, and negative printing.

Text from the High Museum of Art website

Barbara Kasten (American, b. 1936)
Construct NYC
1984
Dye destruction print
High Museum of Art, Atlanta, gift of Lucinda W. Bunnen for the Bunnen Collection
© Barbara Kasten

Barbara Kasten’s art is as much about the process of setting up innovative still life scenes as it is about the photographs she makes of them. Her Constructs series focuses on large-scale complex assemblages that she builds in her studio using a wide variety of materials, including painted wood, plaster, mirrors, screens, and fibers. Her work is not digitally altered; instead, she complicates the scene using mirrors and light, much in the tradition of Florence Henri, whose photograph is also on view in the exhibition.

Text from the High Museum of Art website

Manipulations

This final section features photographers from the New Vision period to the present day who experiment with physically manipulating photographs. Through approaches such as double exposure, photomontage, surface alteration, and multilayering, they challenge and expand our perceptions of reality. The artworks in this section prioritise the creative process through labour, intention, intervention, and theatricality.

Double exposures is the process of photographing multiple images with the same negative within the camera, resulting in layered images that often provide a frenetic, multifaceted view of a scene. In contrast to the in-camera process of double exposure, photomontage combines separate images in the darkroom to produce a final photograph that emphasises the image’s artifice and absurdity. Physically disrupting the surface of photographs with alterations such as adding unnatural colour, drawing connections, stitching into prints, or inscribing texts augments the visual experience and offers emotional and narrative depth. Finally, whether through ancient visual techniques like the camera obscure or new technologies like digital screens, these artists create enigmatic scenes by layering and physically transforming subject, composition, and image.

Wall text from the exhibition

Barbara Morgan (American, 1900-1992)
Protest
1940
Gelatin silver print
High Museum of Art, Atlanta, purchase

Charles Swedlund (American, b. 1935)
31 St. Beach
c. 1955
Gelatin silver print
High Museum of Art, Atlanta, gift of Steven Nordman
© Charles Swedlund

Jerry Uelsmann (American, 1934-2022)
Untitled
1964
Gelatin silver print
High Museum of Art, Atlanta, purchase with funds from a friend of the Museum

Lucinda Bunnen (American, 1930-2022)
Untitled
1974
Gelatin silver print
High Museum of Art, Atlanta, purchase with funds from the Lawrence and Alfred Fox Foundation for the Ralph K. Uhry Collection
© Lucinda Bunnen

Duane Michals (American, b. 1932)
Untitled
1989
From the Indomitable Spirit Portfolio
Gelatin silver print
High Museum of Art, Atlanta

Paul Mpagi Sepuya (American, b. 1982)
Studio (0X5A8180)
2021
Archival pigment print
High Museum of Art, Atlanta, purchase with funds from the Donald and Marilyn Keough Family Foundation
© Paul Mpagi Sepuya

Noémie Goudal (French, b. 1984)
Phoenix V
2021
Dye coupler print
High Museum of Art, Atlanta, purchase through funds provided by patrons of Collectors Evening 2023

Noémie Goudal visualises “deep time” (geological history of the planet) and paleoclimatology (study of past climates) to challenge our perception of the world. Referring to the ancient continental split two billion years ago that formed South America and Africa, this image features the Phoenix atlantica, a palm tree that grows on both sides of the Atlantic. Goudal arranged strips of photographic prints of the palms made on one continent in front of the physical palms on the other and rephotographed the scene. The resulting image interweaves the two continents, creating a glitchy, kaleidoscopic view meant to unsettle our sense of stability and the constancy of the planet.

Text from the High Museum of Art website

Naima Green (American, b. 1992)
It Lingers Sweetly
2022
Pigmented inkjet print
High Museum of Art, Atlanta, purchase with funds from the LGBTQIA+ Photography Centennial Initiative

Naima Green’s practice centres connection and collaboration to cast a tender lens on her own queer community of colour. Her lyrical portraits take shape in intimate domestic spaces and airy outdoor environments that embody havens for the people in those spaces. Through double exposure and serial photographs, she provides what she calls “multiple entry points” into a moment in time, translating movements and emotions into a single image. She explains her interest in double exposure “as a means of capturing things that can’t be held in just one way … ,” allowing her to “play with loosening the narrative and letting go of some control.”

Text from the High Museum of Art website

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Exhibition: ‘Picturing the Border’ at the Cleveland Museum of Art

Exhibition dates: 21st July, 2024 – 5th January, 2025

Miguel Fernández de Castro (Mexican, b. 1986) 'Grammar of Gates' / 'Gramática de las puertas' 2019 from the exhibition 'Picturing the Border' at the Cleveland Museum of Art, July 2024 - January 2025

Miguel Fernández de Castro (Mexican, b. 1986)
Grammar of Gates / Gramática de las puertas
2019
Courtesy of the artist
© Miguel Fernández de Castro

I wrote this philosophical text as a flow of consciousness, a layered exposition of my thoughts on space, photography, identity and belonging. I hope I have done the subject justice… in freedom.

within, bridge and fissure

The struggle for identity, for culture, for nation is a struggle inscribed in space. So observes Wendy Garden.1

The spaces that bodies move in, through and over are fluid spaces, permeable spaces, fragmentary and transitory spaces. They are also spaces of displacement and distance which form a kind of ‘alienation’ which derives from the Latin alienare: to render foreign, other.2

Thus the “border” between one and the other – that fluid penumbra (a peripheral or indeterminate area or group), that oscillation of energy across the line – must be constructed to be legible and fixed by those that seek to control such spaces, through the imposition of a coded representation of space itself.3 The border wall between Mexico and America is one such imposition of a coded representation of space which, seeks to control an/other. It is a “direct translation of ideology and temporality into material and spatial culture”3 which masks as much as it represents, through a selective representation of history and memory.

Through systems of surveillance (e.g. CCTV, aerial surveillance, phone taps) and control (e.g. police, government, the judiciary), in which one reinforces the other in a never ending circle, and in the of naming of the ‘other’ (Foucault) – those with privilege embedded and thus emboldened within colonial and imperial systems seek to confirm hegemonic structures of power: for example, who can travel where, who has access adequate to health care, who is seen as an ill/legal alien. “Although Foucault rarely alludes to it in a clear-cut manner, what he describes in Discipline and Punish is the formation of the discursive regime of surveillance which is a central element in the expression of the modern state.”4

But we can counter this narrative.

In his influential book Thirdspace (Blackwell, 1996), the American postmodern political geographer and urban theorist Edward Soja (1940-2015) proposes the concept of First, Second and Thirdspace to demarcate the various spatial dimensions. Firstspace “is the ‘real’, the concrete materiality of spatial forms of the world, while Secondspace interprets this reality through imagined representations of spatiality.”5 Much early photographic practice is rooted in Firstspace, in the passive representation of an undeniable truth, the veracity of the image and its representation of the referent: this existed because it was captured by the camera.

Thirdspace on the other hand, “contains both real and imagined spaces simultaneously. Thirdspace permits an intermingling of the knowable and the unknowable, the real and the imagined by the experiences, events and political choices that are shaped by the interplay between centres and peripheries (Soja, Thirdspace 1996: 31). According to Soja, Thirdspace is a place where issues of race, class and gender can be addressed simultaneously without privileging one over the other. It is a space which enables an-‘other’ way of understanding and acting to change the spatiality of human life (Soja, Thirdspace 1996: 10). Photographic space, as a Thirdspace, is a site from which to contest the dominant ideologies of Firstspace. This has important ramifications for ‘others,’ especially those disenfranchised by colonialism.”6

Thus photographic Thirdspace as an amorphous space of both the real and imagined is the vibration of energy – doubled – the real and imagined spaces of everyday life, and the real and imagined spaces of photography through which we can contest the contexts of becoming, belonging.

These Thirdspaces of the real and imagined are not spaces of universalising totality which then would be constitutive of history or memory, but in-between spaces in which differences, memories and histories are not denied or negated, hidden, forgotten or repressed. It is not the segregation of black and white, either/or, but the grey areas in-between that interest me: those fluid zones of difference – think Tarkovsky’s film Stalker 1979, in which a guide helps a writer and a professor to infiltrate a restricted area, the Zone.

“The Thirdspace – in which “everything comes together… subjectivity and objectivity, the abstract and the concrete, the real and the imagined, the knowable and the unimaginable, the repetitive and the differential, structure and agency, mind and body, consciousness and the unconscious, the disciplined and the trans-disciplinary, everyday life and unending history”a – allows that none of these couples, such as the phenomenal and the noumenal, can be divided by an either/or attitude. “This… does not mean differences are denied, instead, it most of all means the inevitable reciprocity of any pair of definitions. In such a case both leave a mark on the other. It is a question of both-and – how each of the pair influences the other”b.”7

Both leave a mark on each other. And it is in this marking that social and political relations can be reconfigured, “in such a way as to suspect, neutralise, or invert the set of relations that they happen to designate, mirror or reflect.”8 Thus, the physical aspects as well as the attitudes and habitual practices of ‘space’, the arrangements of space and the socialisation of space, “is an order that is itself always undergoing change from within through the actions and innovations of social agents. In short, all ‘space’ is social space ….”9

Following, we can say that social and spatial relationships are dialectically inter-reactive, interdependent (Soja).

“Social and spatial relationships are dialectically inter-reactive and interdependent. Cultural landscapes reflect social relations and institutions, and they shape subsequent social relations. While elites create spatial inequalities and homogeneity simultaneously through their hegemony, non-elites create counter-hegemonic landscapes which reflect their own values. Behavioural resistance to the dominant culture leads to distinctive cultural landscapes: for example, cultural resistance by Maori.

Indeed, dominant ideologies such as those which are religious, political, economic, ethnic or racial, continually define or redefine ‘deviance’ or ‘otherness’ to maintain their power and landscapes of dominance. Space and place are key factors in the definition of deviance and of order and propriety.”10

But as Wael Salah Fahmi insightfully observes, we must not fall into the idea that juxtapositions of social space are just alternating choices of “either/or” or acts of simple resistance: “But “juxtaposition” might imply alternating choices, an “either/or.” Perhaps instead we might think of Lefebvre’s image of interpenetrating spaces, one violating another, yet rising up from within the very “fundament” of the space that wishes to ignore its existence. Here, perhaps, is a spatial dialectic that does not fall into a binary opposition of simple resistance.”11

Spaces that rise up from within each other!

Change that emanates from within through the actions and innovations of social agents… human beings, artists!

Here, the thoughts of that glorious Cuban-American interdisciplinary artist, writer, and curator Coco Fusco (b. 1960) – quoted by Jean Fisher – whose work explores gender, identity, race, and power through performance, video, interactive installations, and critical writing are particularly cogent.

“Two imperatives are set in motion: to alter the perceptions of those with privileged access to hegemonic structures of power, and to change the sense of disempowerment of those deprived of political agency. “What is more fundamentally at stake than freedom,” Fusco argues, “is power – the power to choose, the power to determine value, and the right of the more powerful to consume without guilt”: entitlements that Eurocentric cultures have assumed for themselves at the expense of others. These aims are advanced through an exploration of the relationship between the politics and practices of cultural difference and social inequity, in which intellectual, experiential, and artistic alliances are built across nationalistic and geographical boundaries …””12

As Wael Salah Fahmi notes, “spaces constantly juxtapose themselves one against the other” – in real life, in art, in photography. The media saturated world of the “total flow” of images is resistant to interpretation, yet in real life – and in this exhibition – the juxta/position (mapping of space), juxta/posing (posing for the camera) of one space against another, “of image to image calls to attention a line of conflict, either fissure or bridge.”13

The images in this posting draw our attention to fissures (George Rodriguez, Susan Meiselas, Ada Trillo) and bridges (Graciela Iturbide, Ronald Rael and Virginia San Fratello with Colectivo Chopeke). They also possess a multivalent narrative, allowing the work to be accessible to different interpretations, meanings, and values: a new door or path opens up on the basis of very diverse needs and objectives. These images, untraceable gifts from photography itself, are marks of candour and authenticity, both descriptions of a stable object and the fleeting glance (Firstspace and Thirdspace) interacting upon each other. They are an investigation into our fluid identity and shifting place in our worlds.14

In spatial dialectics and in the nuances of contradictions we proceed onwards, paying no heed to the dangers which lie ahead, journeying on to fulfil our desires: to be seen, to be heard, in our difference and uniqueness, enacting change from within.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Word count: 1,435

PS. My friend and Melbourne artist Elizabeth Gertsakis insightfully observes, “The philosophical arguments resonate with the vacillation of the photograph meanings/non-meanings. Spaces that implode from within to further generate the unknown which even in definition become dispersed. The photography around the border/wall is beautiful as well as tortuous as well as unspoken.”

Well said Liz 🙂

Footnotes

1/ Wendy Garden. “Photographic Space and the Indian Portrait Studio,” in On Space Issue Seven, Winter 2007

2/ Rob Shields. Lefebvre, Love and Struggle. London: Routledge, 1999, pp. 40-41.

3/ Ibid., pp. 79-80.

4/ Jon Stratton. The Desirable Body. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996, p. 19

5/ Garden, Op cit.,

6/ Garden, Op cit.,

7/ A: Edward W. Soja. Thirdspace. Malden (Mass.): Blackwell, 1996, p. 57; B: Mika Hannula. “Third space – a merry-go-round of opportunity,” on the Kiasma Magazine website No. 12, Vol. 4, 2001 [Online] Cited 01/05/2016. No longer available online quoted in Marcus Bunyan. “Thirdspace,” on the Marcus Bunyan website 2021 [Online] Cited 29/11/2024

8/ Michel Foucault. “Of Other Spaces,” in Diacritics Spring 1986, p. 24

9/ Shields, Op cit., pp. 154-155

10/Alexander Trapeznik. “Introduction,” from Public History Review, Vol. 13, 2006, p. 2

11/ Wael Salah Fahmi. “Reading of Post Modern Public Spaces As Layers Of Virtual Images and Real Events,” from The 37th International Planning Congress “HONEY, I SHRUNK THE SPACE” Planning in the Information Age. Utrecht, The Netherlands, 16-20 September, 2001

12/ Jean Fisher. “Witness for the Prosecution: The Writings of Coco Fusco,” in Coco Fusco. The Bodies That Were Not Ours. London: Routledge, 2001, pp. 226-227

13/ Wael Salah Fahmi, op cit.,

14/ Marcus Bunyan. “Thirdspace,” on the Marcus Bunyan website 2021 [Online] Cited 29/11/2024

Many thankx to the Cleveland 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.

“And do you know what “the world” is to me? Shall I show it to you in my mirror? This world: a monster of energy, without beginning, without end; a firm, iron magnitude of force that does not grow bigger or smaller, that does not expend itself but only transforms itself; as a whole, of unalterable size, a household without expenses or losses, but likewise without increase or income; enclosed by “nothingness” as by a boundary; not something blurry or wasted, not something endlessly extended, but set in a definite space as a definite force, and not a space that might be “empty” here or there, but rather a force throughout, as a play of forces and waves of forces, at the same time one and many, increasing here and at the same time decreasing there […]”

Frederick Nietzsche, The Will to Power

“Edward Soja employs the concept of First, Second and Thirdspace to demarcate the various spatial dimensions. For Soja Firstspace is the ‘real’, the concrete materiality of spatial forms of the world, while Secondspace interprets this reality through imagined representations of spatiality (Soja 1996: 6). Much early photography participated in perpetuating the belief that photographic space was a Firstspace. The camera lens merely passively and objectively recorded all that was placed before it. However even in the nineteenth century, many practitioners acknowledged the ability of photographs to lie or distort reality.

For Soja, Thirdspace contains both real and imagined spaces simultaneously. Thirdspace permits an intermingling of the knowable and the unknowable, the real and the imagined by the experiences, events and political choices that are shaped by the interplay between centres and peripheries (Soja, Thirdspace 1996: 31). According to Soja, Thirdspace is a place where issues of race, class and gender can be addressed simultaneously without privileging one over the other. It is a space which enables an-‘other’ way of understanding and acting to change the spatiality of human life (Soja, Thirdspace 1996: 10). Photographic space, as a Thirdspace, is a site from which to contest the dominant ideologies of Firstspace. This has important ramifications for ‘others,’ especially those disenfranchised by colonialism. It may account for the rise of photography as the preferred medium for many artists today interested in issues of identity and the colonial gaze. …

Photographic space can create a spatial reality which allows those who access it to contest, enlarge or in someway recreate their experiences of Firstspace. It never attempts to close off subjectivity or pin identity down, but rather allows fluid and transitory experiments with other ways of being that can then be carried over and inform experiences of Firstspace.”

Wendy Garden. “Photographic Space and the Indian Portrait Studio,” in On Space Issue Seven, Winter 2007

Ronald Rael (American, b. 1971) and Virginia San Fratello (American, b. 1971) with Colectivo Chopeke
Teeter-Totter Wall
2019
Single-channel video with sound; 4:13 minutes
Courtesy Rael San Fratello/Ronald Rael & Virginia San Fratello
© Ronald Rael & Virginia San Fratello
Photo: Ronald Rael

About the exhibition

Picturing the Border presents photographs of the US-Mexico borderlands from the 1970s to the present taken by both border residents and outsiders. They range in subject matter from intimate domestic portraits, narratives of migration, and proof of political demonstrations to images of border crossings and clashes between migrants and the US Border Patrol. The earliest images in this exhibition form an origin story for the topicality of the US-Mexico border at present, and demonstrate that the issues of the border have been a critical point of inquiry for artists since the 1970s. Many serve as counter-narratives to the derogatory narratives of migration and Latino/as in the US that tend to circulate in the mass media.

Capitalising on the prevalent issues of the border today, Picturing the Border aims to spark vital conversations of what constitutes citizenship, as well as complex negotiations of personal identity as it relates to the border. The exhibition shows through these images that Latinx, Chicano/a, and Mexican photographers have significantly rethought what defines citizenship, nationality, family, migration, and the border beyond traditional frameworks for decades.

Text from the Cleveland Museum of Art website

George Rodriguez (American, b. 1937) 'Los Angeles police arrest a Chicano student protester in the neighbourhood of Boyle Heights' 1970 from the exhibition 'Picturing the Border' at the Cleveland Museum of Art, July 2024 - January 2025

George Rodriguez (American, b. 1937)
Los Angeles police arrest a Chicano student protester in the neighbourhood of Boyle Heights
1970
Gelatin silver print

Susan Meiselas (American, b. 1948)
7.30am Arrest of undocumented worker by U.S. Border Patrol in downtown San Diego, CA
1989
From the series Crossings
Gelatin silver print
44.5 x 73.7cm
Courtesy of and © Susan Meiselas/Magnum Photos

Photojournalism from the US-Mexico border currently emphasises stark, divisive images: walls, fences, surveillance devices, border patrols, “coyotes,” and crossing migrants. Yet some of the most compelling artwork dealing with this region attests to several generations of cross-border familial relationships, personal identities that carry markers of both countries, and hybrid cultures that meld influences from the United States, Mexico, and farther south in Latin America. This more complex work demonstrates how border residents have resisted being defined by the border and its conflicts, concentrating instead on a deterritorialised notion of home, along with a sense of self that often transcends both nationalism and gender politics.

The photographs and video works included in Picturing the Border offer a more nuanced portrayal of life in the borderlands. The exhibition positions the US-Mexico border as a cultural framework and highlights how Latinx photographers – many of whom are border residents themselves – have instead formulated alternative photographic vocabularies with regard to place, identity, and race. Photographs range in subject matter from intimate domestic portraits, extended family gatherings, and political demonstrations to images of border crossings and clashes between migrants and the US border patrol. The earliest images in this exhibition form an origin story for the topicality of the US-Mexico border at the present moment and demonstrate that the issues of the border have been a critical point of inquiry for artists since the 1970s.

The exhibition is accompanied by an important scholarly publication that brings new insights to the subject of Latinx photography and the history of the US-Mexico border. Picturing the Border has also brought about the opportunity to grow our permanent collection in this area, precipitating recent acquisitions by Laura Aguilar and the donation of an important work by Ada Trillo, who has witnessed firsthand the perils of the unbelievably extensive journey migrants have taken from Central America to the United States.

Although Cleveland is far from the southern border, stories of global migration are woven throughout the CMA’s encyclopeadic collection as well as throughout the community in Northeast Ohio. Picturing the Border puts faces on stories and brings to life the various threads that stitch together an ever-growing understanding of, and empathy for, the migrant experience.

Nadiah Rivera Fellah, Associate Curator of Contemporary Art. “Picturing the Border,” on the Cleveland Museum of Art website June 1, 2024 [Online] Cited 19/07/2024

Teddy Cruz (American born Guatemala, b. 1962) and Fonna Forman (American, b. 1968). Installation view of 'Radicalizing the Local: 60_Miles of Trans-Border Urban Conflict' 2008

Teddy Cruz (American born Guatemala, b. 1962) and Fonna Forman (American, b. 1968)
Installation view of Radicalizing the Local: 60_Miles of Trans-Border Urban Conflict
2008
Commissioned by the US Pavilion for the Venice Architecture Biennale of 2008
Prints from a digital file; dimensions variable
© Teddy Cruz + Fonna Forman
Image courtesy the Cleveland Museum of Art

Featuring more than four dozen photographs, Picturing the Border aims to spark vital conversations of what constitutes citizenship, as well as complex negotiations of personal identity as it relates to the border. Through these images the exhibition shows that Latinx, Chicano/a, and Mexican photographers have significantly rethought what defines citizenship, nationality, family, migration, and the border beyond traditional frameworks for decades.

Opening on July 21, 2024, in the Mark Schwartz and Bettina Katz Photography Gallery, this free exhibition will be on view through January 5, 2025. From intimate domestic portraits, narratives of migration, and political demonstrations to images of border crossings and clashes between migrants and the US Border Patrol, this one-of-a-kind exhibition presents photographs taken by both border residents and outsiders, many of whom are Latinx, Chicano/a, and Mexican, and tells the story of the US-Mexico borderlands from the 1970s to the present.

“Borders have long been spaces of contention,” says Nadiah Rivera Fellah, curator of contemporary art. “The mainstream media in the United States tends to present nationalistic narratives about imminent threats at the border. This reductive and divisive narrative does not often portray the identities, languages, cultures, and social ties among communities. The photographs featured in this exhibition tell a different story that can serve as a counter-narrative and timely new perspective on life in this region.”

The earliest images in Picturing the Border form an origin story for the topicality of the US-Mexico border at present and demonstrate that the issues of the border have been a critical point of inquiry for artists since the 1970s. In addition, they showcase artists who were ahead of their time in presenting ideas about spaces and exclusion as they relate to issues of the borderlands and Latinx identities in the United States.

Exhibition catalogue

A beautifully illustrated 134-page exhibition catalogue accompanies Picturing the Border by Nadiah Rivera Fellah, curator of contemporary art, with contributions from Natalie Scenters-Zapico.

The US-Mexico border has undergone dramatic changes over the past six decades, becoming increasingly industrialised, urbanised, and militarised, especially in the aftermath of 9/11 and the War on Terror. Mainstream and conservative news coverage has often reinforced or exacerbated such developments, characterising the border as out of control and describing migrants in derogatory terms, in the process fuelling xenophobic sentiment.

A foil to this reductive and dehumanising narrative, this presentation of Latinx photography offers more nuanced portrayals of life in the borderlands. Ranging from the 1970s to the 2020s, images by Louis Carlos Bernal, Graciela Iturbide, and Laura Aguilar, as well as emerging artists such as Ada Trillo, Guadalupe Rosales, and Miguel Fernández de Castro display alternative photographic vocabularies regarding place, identity, and race. With subject matter spanning from intimate domestic portraits and youth counterculture to border crossings and clashes involving the US Border Patrol, this richly illustrated volume also features scholarly essays and new work by fronteriza poet Natalie Scenters-Zapico, providing new insights on this fraught and misunderstood region.

Press release from the Cleveland Museum of Art

Graciela Iturbide (Mexican, b. 1942) 'Cholos, White Fence, East Los Angeles' 1986 from the exhibition 'Picturing the Border' at the Cleveland Museum of Art, July 2024 - January 2025

Graciela Iturbide (Mexican, b. 1942)
Cholos, White Fence, East Los Angeles
1986
Gelatin silver print
Framed: 57.5 x 42.2cm (22 5/8 x 16 5/8 in.)
Sheet: 35.2 x 27.7cm (13 7/8 x 10 7/8 in.)
Image: 32 x 21.9cm (12 5/8 x 8 5/8 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Gift of Leslie and Judith Schreyer and Gabri Schreyer-Hoffman in honour of Virginia Heckert
© Graciela Iturbide

Graciela Iturbide’s Cholo/as series from 1986 Los Angeles is perhaps the best encapsulation of the show’s thesis. The women in Cholos, White Fence, East Los Angeles told Iturbide that they wanted to be photographed under a mural of some mariachis. In fact, these were images of Emiliano Zapata, Benito Juárez and Pancho Villa. We might as well admire their freedom from context. After all, isn’t America all about freedom?

Dan Duray. “One Fine Show: ‘Picturing the Border’ at the Cleveland Museum of Art,” on the Observer website 09/06/2024 [Online] Cited 01/11/2024

Graciela Iturbide (Mexican, b. 1942)
Rosario y Boo Boo en su casa, Los Angeles (Rosario and Boo Boo in their home, Los Angeles)
1986
Gelatin silver print

“Without the camera you see the world one way, with it, you see the world another way. Through the lens you are composing, dreaming even, with that reality, as if through the camera you are synthesising who you are… So you make your own image, interpreting.”

Graciela Iturbide

Ada Trillo (Mexican American, b. 1976)
Sleeping by the River, Tecun-Uman Guatemala
2020
Digital print
Framed: 54.4 x 79.7cm (21 7/16 x 31 3/8 in.)
Image: 50.8 x 76.2cm (20 x 30 in.)
The Cleveland Museum of Art, Gift of the Artist
© Ada Trillo

As Los Angeles is located over 100 miles north of Mexico, Iturbide’s work demonstrates that while the border is a physical space, its communities defy any single geographical boundary.

This argument echoes in photos made over 1,500 miles away by photographer Ada Trillo, who grew up on the liminal lands between El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. In her photobook on view in the exhibition, titled La Caravana del Diablo (2022), the artist documents three journeys: two alongside migrant people in caravans attempting to cross into Mexico on their way to the US border and a third aboard La Bestia, the infamous freight train that hundreds of thousands of Central American migrants ride each year to the north of Mexico – risking injury and death in the process. Trillo’s works are primarily populated by people from Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala, representing deep friendships the artist formed over days and weeks of gruelling travel. …

Trillo’s works, like those of other artists in the exhibition, capture how the border forces migrants and other communities to weave their stories within a maddening architecture of violence that is both systematic and capricious. “Many of the photographers in this show were inspired by one another,” Rivera Fellah explained. “And many have used their politically engaged photographic practices as a counter-narrative to derogatory images of the border that have circulated in the media since the 1970s and 1980s.”

Kayla Aletha Welch. “Photography Show Aims to Upend Xenophobic Border Narratives,” on the Hyperallergic website July 18, 2024 [Online] Cited 01/11/2024

'Ada Trillo – La Caravana del Diablo' 2021

Ada Trillo – La Caravana del Diablo
Hardcover/Sewn bound
192 pages/30.5 x 24.8cm
Language: English
ISBN: 978-94-91525-93-3
November 2021

Every day, thousands of people leave in processions from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador via Mexico for America because of flaring violence, murder (on women) and poor economic conditions in their own country. A journey covering hundreds of kilometres, often on foot, full of fear of being arrested and sent back. Some people even ‘disappear’. Under the Trump administration, despite fierce opposition, ‘The Wall’ was built to keep these immigrants out of ‘The Northern Triangle’, making their passage into America even more perilous.

Photographer Ada Trillo considers it her mission to portray this distressing situation. In ‘La Caravana del Diablo’ she doesn’t look away but confronts us. Ada shows that each of these thousands of migrants is a human being. A human being with a family, with fear, hope and dreams.

Text from the Houston Centre for Photography website

More than three thousand kilometers of border have unified the United States and Mexico since the mid-nineteenth century. Some 8,000,000 people live, sometimes in suspense, on both shores of a division as arbitrary as it is controversial. A dividing line that has changed throughout history, affecting those who have remained on one side or the other.

This same space, mythical, liminal, polemic, has become, in the last half-century, above all, one of the most watched and controlled landscapes of the entire planet. It has also become one of the most vulnerable: millions of Mexicans, Central Americans, and many other nationalities have crossed – or tried to cross – the border.

Picturing the Border, a photographic exhibition curated by Nadiah Rivera Fellah[2] and open to the public from July 21, 2024, to January 5, 2025, at the Cleveland Museum of Art, shows other aspects of those living there. The exhibition gathers images taken between the 1970s and the present by North American and Mexican artists such as Louis Carlos Bernal, Graciela Iturbide, Laura Aguilar, Ada Trillo, Guadalupe Rosales, and Miguel Fernández de Castro. The photographs present alternative proposals for understanding and reading the border by placing the people who inhabit it in the spotlight, thus challenging fixed and stereotypical conceptions of identity and culture.

In this exhibition, as in real life, the border stands as a third space, in the same sense proposed by Homi Bhabha: that intermediate space of cultural encounters and dis-encounters from which a new site of enunciation emerges and in which the binary is deconstructed[3]. Edward Soja, in an approach similar to Bhabha’s, regarding the ‘hybridity’ of the spaces of encounters of cultures, defines the thirdspace as the place where “everything comes together… subjectivity and objectivity, the abstract and the concrete, the real and the imagined, the knowable and the unimaginable, the repetitive and the differential, structure, and agency, mind and body, consciousness and the unconscious, the disciplined and the transdisciplinary, everyday life and unending history.”[4] According to Gloria Anzaldúa, “the convergence [of Mexico and the United States] has created a shock culture, a border culture, a third country, a closed country”[5].

But, what do the exhibited photos tell us about this ‘third space,’ this ‘third hybrid country’ that exists between the United States and Mexico? That third country is occupied not only by illegal migration and drug trafficking – the primary approach from the media – but also by symbols deeply rooted in Mexican and border life, such as the Virgin of Guadalupe, the Cholo culture, the use and appropriation of iconic North American products (such as cars) by Mexican Americans, the Day of the Dead celebrations. These photos open a window for us to look, with respect and wonder, at the life that goes on in private and public spaces, often in a very different way than that imagined by those of us who are not directly associated with that geography. It also reminds us of the student and labor protests and strikes that have taken place in that region.

Damaris Puñales-Alpízar. “The Border That Unites: Picturing the Border, at the Cleveland Museum of Art,” on the CANJournal website October 29, 2024 [Online] Cited 01/11/2024

[3] See: Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. Routledge, New York, 1994.
[4] See: Soja, Edward W. Thirdspace. Malden (Mass.): Blackwell, 1996, p. 57.
[5] This phrase presides over the exhibition.

Laura Aguilar (American, 1959–2018)
Yrenia Cervantes
1990
Gelatin silver print
Image: 22.9 x 30.5cm (9 x 12 in.)
Paper: 27.9 x 35.6cm (11 x 14 in.)
The Cleveland Museum of Art
Karl B. Goldfield Trust
© Laura Aguilar Trust

Far from being a flash in the proverbial pan, the border has long incarnated questions about the arbitrary nature of insider and outsider dynamics, legality, and citizenship.

Among the works exploring these themes is the late photographer Laura Aguilar’s black-and-white portrait “Yrenia Cervantes” (1990), in which the titular Chicana muralist and artist stares at her reflection in her dresser mirror. Her bedroom is decorated in the elaborate style of an altar: It includes photos, iconography, and handmade objects. Cervantes is simultaneously of the border and beyond it – the viewer can’t easily determine to which side she belongs.

Kayla Aletha Welch. “Photography Show Aims to Upend Xenophobic Border Narratives,” on the Hyperallergic website July 18, 2024 [Online] Cited 01/11/2024

Louis Carlos Bernal (American, 1941-1993)
Albert and Lynn Morales, Silver City, New Mexico
1978

Louis Carlos Bernal (American, 1941-1993)
La Reina de mi Vida (The Queen of my life)
1983
Gelatin silver print

Louis Carlos Bernal (American, 1941–1993)
Untitled [Undocumented worker holding Huelga flag at United Farm Workers Demonstration, El Mirage, Arizona]
Negative 1978, printed 2016
Digital inkjet print
40.6 x 40.6cm (16 x 16 in.)
Collection of the Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, Louis Carlos Bernal Archive, Courtesy of Lisa Bernal Brethour and Katrina Bernal
© Lisa Bernal Brethour and Katrina Bernal

Ricardo Valverde (American/Chicano, 1946-1998) 'Whittier Blvd' 1979 from the exhibition 'Picturing the Border' at the Cleveland Museum of Art, July 2024 - January 2025

Ricardo Valverde (American/Chicano, 1946-1998)
Whittier Blvd
1979
Gelatin silver print

Exhibition catalogue showing on the cover a photograph by Ricardo Valverde titled La Reina (The Queen) 16th September 1976

Cleveland Museum of Art
11150 East Boulevard
Cleveland, Ohio 44106

Opening hours:
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Wednesdays, Fridays 10.00am – 9.00pm
Closed Mondays

Cleveland Museum of Art website

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Exhibition: ‘Tina Modotti’ at Fundación MAPFRE Photography Center (Barcelona)

Exhibition dates: 8th June – 3rd September 2023

Curator: Isabel Tejeda

Johan Hagemeyer (Dutch, 1884-1962) 'Tina Modotti in the role of María de la Guarda in the film 'The Tiger's Coat', Hollywood' 1920 from the exhibition 'Tina Modotti' at Fundación MAPFRE Photography Center (Barcelona), June - Sept 2023

Johan Hagemeyer (Dutch, 1884-1962)
Tina Modotti in the role of María de la Guarda in the film The Tiger’s Coat, Hollywood
1920
Gelatin silver print
© Johan Hagemeyer
Courtesy: Galerie Bilderwelt, Reinhard Schultz

Tina Modotti’s first contact with the performing arts came upon her arrival in San Francisco in 1913, at just 16 years old.

After performing theatre works, in 1920 she will participate in three films: The Tiger’s Coat (1920) by Roy Clements, in which she interpreted the role of the Mexican Jean Ogilvie; Riding with Death (1921) by Jacques Jaccard, in the personage of Rosa Carilla; and I Can Explain (1922) by George D. Baker, with Carmencita Gárdez.

The I of the world

Strong fierce compassionate women! Intelligent, class-conscious human beings who embrace social and political change, with photography being the agent for that change. I would embrace Tina Modotti as this type of artist – her photography a “reflection of her way of seeing life, social sensitivity and revolutionary fervour.”

She was a surrealist/feminist artist who represented the lives and “conditions of workers, women and their role within the community” through both the forms and symbols of working class emancipation and through “honest photography” – eloquent photographs of everyday Mexican life that have a biting directness linked to a surreal reality. Surrealism does not always involve the strange and absurd.

Much as Eugène Atget’s photography “which focussed on seemingly ordinary sights on the streets of Paris – a door knocker, a mannequin, a window rail – is seen as a forerunner of Surrealist and modern approaches to photography…”1 so both Atget and Modotti’s rejection of artistic self-consciousness and “artistic effects” in favour of in Atget’s case, “simple documents”, and in Modotti’s case, “honest photography”, lead to photographs that examine the fleeting nature of material objects and reality itself.

Modotti inserts her/self into these honest photographs through an embodiment of spirit. She brings to her photography how she feels about the world, what she feels passionately about in that world, what she cares deeply about… and in the process of “capturing time, light and memory shapes new states of beings and opens possibilities where by the improbable and the impossible are envisioned as an embodiment of the photographers past, present and future imaginings.”

Through a melding of the artist’s political, social, and aesthetic ideals and through her sur/reality, she becomes the I of the world.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

1/ “Surrealism did not always involve the strange and absurd. For example, the photography of Eugène Atget (1857-1927), which focussed on seemingly ordinary sights on the streets of Paris – a door knocker, a mannequin, a window rail – is seen as a forerunner of Surrealist and modern approaches to photography… Only a year before his death, in 1926, Atget was approached by Man Ray for approval to use his photograph, L’Eclipse – Avril 1912 for the front cover of the publication La Révolution Surréaliste. Despite protestations that, “these are simply documents I make,” Atget’s rejection of artistic self-consciousness combined with his pictures of an old, often hauntingly deserted Paris, appealed to Surrealists.”

Anonymous. “Surrealist photography,” on the V&A website [Online] Cited 07/08/2020

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

“In reality, what I try to produce is not art, but honest photography, without tricks or manipulations, while most photographers still look for “artistic effects” or the imitation of other means of graphic expression, which results a hybrid product and one that fails to impart to the work that they produce the most valuable trait that it should have: PHOTOGRAPHIC QUALITY.”

Tina Modotti quoted in “On Photography,” Mexican Folkways, Vol. 5, No. 4, 1929, reprinted in Robert Miller, Tina Modotti, and Spencer Throckmorton, Tina Modotti : Photographs (New York: Robert Miller Gallery, 1997)

Pure your gentle name, pure your fragile life,
bees, shadows, fire, snow, silence and foam,
combined with steel and wire and
pollen to make up your firm
and delicate being.

Part of the epitaph for Tina Modotti on her tomb by Chilean poet Pablo Neruda

The life of Tina Modotti (Udine, Italy, 1896 – Mexico City, 1942) was marked by some of the most important historical events of the 1920s and 1930s. Born in northern Italy, she soon emigrated to the United States, where she met Edward Weston in 1923, who will significantly influence her career. In that same year they moved together to Mexico where she developed photographic work for almost a decade that started from modernist aesthetics to immediately give way to a very personal look, a reflection of her way of seeing life. Her social sensitivity developed in parallel to her political militancy and her activism within the Communist Party, within which she will treat David Alfaro Siqueiros, Diego Rivera or Frida Kahlo. With her desire to awaken consciences, Modotti made images that denounce injustices and honour the dispossessed. Some of them, with a strong propaganda sense, were made for periodicals and magazines.

After intense research work due to the limited production of the photographer, this exhibition will bring together around 200 photographs, mostly vintage copies, and relevant documentary material. The show will also include works by photographers around her, such as Edward Weston, and one of the films that Modotti starred in in Hollywood.

Text from the Fundación MAPFRE website

'The Tiger's Coat' movie poster 1920 from the exhibition 'Tina Modotti' at Fundación MAPFRE Photography Center (Barcelona), June - Sept 2023

The Tiger’s Coat movie poster
1920
From The Moving Picture World 1920

The Tiger’s Coat is a 1920 American silent drama film directed by Roy Clements and starring Lawson Butt, Tina Modotti and Myrtle Stedman.

Tina Modotti (Udine, 1896 – Mexico City, 1942) lived in the eye of the storm throughout her life. Her interesting life and artistic career were framed by some of the most important historical events of the 1920s and 1930s and by her constant double commitment: artist-photographer and revolutionary-anti-fascist militant.

Born into a working-class family in Udine, in northern Italy, she emigrated and grew up in the United States, where she became a film actress in Hollywood in the 1920s and met Edward Weston, who introduced her to photography and with whom she moved to Mexico in 1923.

Almost all his photographic work was produced between that date and 1930. During these Mexican years, and following her apprenticeship with Weston, Modotti evolved from an interest in abstract forms to a gaze centred on the human being and on denouncing inequality and injustice. The precarious conditions of workers, urban poverty, and the role of women in the community became, among other similar issues, the main themes of a photography conceived as political propaganda.

This exhibition, Tina Modotti’s most extensive to date, is the result of extensive research, which has made it possible to bring together many vintage prints by Modotti. In addition to the nearly 250 photographs on display, grouped chronologically into four sections, the exhibition includes documentary material, one of the films that Modotti starred in in Hollywood and some works by Edward Weston.

Text from the Fundación MAPFRE website

Tina Modotti

Tina Modotti’s life was marked by some of the most important historical events of the 1920s and 1930s. The nomadic life she led and the turbulent political militancy caused Modotti to suddenly leave many of the countries where she lived, which, as the curator of the exhibition, Isabel Tejeda points out, “decontextualizes and disarranges her production from the start, so that it is impossible to accurately date many of her images”, although it can be stated that almost all of his photographic work was produced between 1923 and 1930.

During these Mexican years, and after his apprenticeship with Weston, the artist evolved from the perfection of formalism to a different and personal perspective conditioned by his way of seeing life, as an emigrant, woman and political activist in which his attraction to the human being and social injustices stands out.

He then portrayed the precarious conditions of workers, inequalities and misery in urban areas. It also focused on women and their role within the community, and on the forms and symbols of the emancipation of the working class. In his desire to raise awareness, Modotti made images that denounce injustices and honour the dispossessed, some of which were for propaganda purposes and intended to be printed in magazines and other publications.

The exhibition presented by Fundación MAPFRE is made up of approximately 240 photographs, mostly period copies, which are grouped into four sections: Early years: from Udine to Los Angeles, Mexico on the other side of the camera, Photography and political commitment and The move to political action: Spain at war.

In addition to emphasising her relationship with Spain, the exhibition reconstructs the figure of Modotti, both as an artist / photographer and as a revolutionary / anti-fascist militant. In addition, there is an extensive amount of documentary material and one of the films that Modotti starred in in Hollywood. The tour is completed with works by photographers from his immediate surroundings, such as Edward Weston.

Text from the Fundación MAPFRE website

Tina Modotti (Italian, 1896-1942) 'Circus tent' Mexico, 1924 from the exhibition 'Tina Modotti' at Fundación MAPFRE Photography Center (Barcelona), June - Sept 2023

Tina Modotti (Italian, 1896-1942)
Circus tent
Mexico, 1924
Platinotype
Collection Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona
Acquisition

Tina Modotti (Italian, 1896-1942)
Roses
Mexico, 1924
Paladiotype, period or vintage impression
Fundación Televisa Collection and Archive, Mexico City

Roses, Mexico, is an extreme close-up of four roses. Cropped to fill the frame from edge to edge, this is not a traditional still-life photograph of roses arranged in a vase. Here, the roses lay prone and slightly wilted, just beyond their prime, thus reflecting the passage of time and the ephemerality of delicate blooms. Much like a traditional vanitas still life that asked the viewer to contemplate mortality by reflecting on the fleeting nature of material objects, Roses brings this subject to modern photography. As photography historian Carol Armstrong notes, Roses “calls on the line of figural abstraction identified, not with [Alfred] Stieglitz, [Paul] Strand and the ‘straight’ photograph, but with Georgia O’Keeffe and her blown-up genital flowers, which like [Edward] Weston’s single-object photographs reduced the flora still-life that had been the traditional purview of the female painter to one (or two or four) item(s), expanded to fill the entire field of the image.”

The theme of the still-life preoccupied Modotti throughout much of her brief photography career. A relative newcomer to photography, she made use of the still-life photograph as a means to work through various formal issues including composition, framing, light, pattern, and tone. At this time, she was working with a large-format camera, which was unwieldy, not easy to transport, and forced the photographer to carefully compose the image, rather than creating images on the move with a handheld camera. The still-life, which was easy to set up and did not alter, was the perfect vehicle for mastering the myriad technical complexities of a photograph.

Karen Barber. “Tina Modotti Artist Overview and Analysis,” on The Art Story website 12 Nov 2018 updated 2023 [Online] Cited 06/08/2023

Edward Weston (1886-1958)
Portrait of Tina Modotti
1924
Gelatin silver print
Fundación Televisa Collection and Archive, Mexico City

Tina Modotti (Italian, 1896-1942)
Elisa
1924
Palladium print
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Donation of Edward Weston

Tina Modotti (Italian, 1896-1942)
Telegraph cables
c. 1924-1925
Gelatin silver print
Fundación Televisa Collection and Archive, Mexico City

Tina Modotti (Italian, 1896-1942)
Post with Cables
Mexico City, c. 1925
Gelatin silver print
Fundación Televisa Collection and Archive, Mexico City

In this 1925 photograph of isolated telephone wires, Modotti shifts the perspective, removing any reference to the ground that holds the telephone poles in place. Instead, the carefully composed image focuses on the angles and patterns produced by the wires and clouds, to create a work that mingles modernism and social concerns. During this period Mexico was undergoing increased modernization and industrialization, which Modotti symbolizes in her photograph of telephone wires. Modotti thus presents an optimistic view of Mexico’s modernization and the promise of instant communication brought about by the installation of telephone systems that seemed to open up Mexico to the rest of the world.

Lauded by the Mexican avant-garde group, Estridentistas, who aligned their work with the Mexican Revolution and sought to modernize Mexico, Modotti’s photograph was included in their journal Horizonte because it represented dynamism, technology, and progress. The photograph’s framing and its use of oblique angles and unusual perspective, brought it into alignment with other modernist painters and photographers, including Paul Strand, Charles Sheeler, and Charles Demuth, but also with European avant-garde photographers like László Moholy-Nagy, Man Ray, and Albert Renger-Patzsch. Although the tendency to focus on the subject / object was characteristic of her former mentor Edward Weston’s work, Diego Rivera praised Modotti’s work as “more abstract, more ethereal, and even more intellectual” than Weston’s.

Karen Barber. “Tina Modotti Artist Overview and Analysis,” on The Art Story website 12 Nov 2018 updated 2023 [Online] Cited 06/08/2023

Tina Modotti (Italian, 1896-1942)
Zapotec peasant woman with a jug on her shoulder
1926
Platinotype
Fundación Televisa Collection and Archive, Mexico City

Tina Modotti (Italian, 1896-1942)
Untitled (Indians carrying loads of corn husks for the making of “tamales”)
1926-1929
Gelatin silver print
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco
Art Supporting Foundation donation, John “Launny” Steffens, Sandra Lloyd, Shawn and Brook Byers, Mr. and Mrs. George F. Jewett, Jr., and anonymous donors

Tina Modotti (Italian, 1896-1942)
Untitled
c. 1926-1929
Gelatin silver print
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco
Art Supporting Foundation donation, John “Launny” Steffens, Sandra Lloyd, Shawn and Brook Byers, Mr. and Mrs. George F. Jewett, Jr., and anonymous donors

Tina Modotti (Italian, 1896-1942)
Tank Nr. 1
1927
Gelatin silver print

Tina Modotti (Italian, 1896-1942)
Workers’ Parade
1926
Gelatin silver print
Fundación Televisa Collection and Archive, Mexico City

Workers Parade

A closely cropped image of a sea of sombreros, Workers Parade, much like her earlier photograph Roses, focuses in on the subject by eliminating all extraneous information. The politically charged subject matter, along with the unusual camera angle, attention to light and dark, and the texture and pattern produced by photographing the scene from above recalls the slightly later work of Alexander Rodchenko, and in particular, his Gathering for a Demonstration (1928). The ubiquitous sombrero would have been immediately recognizable to the Mexican viewer for its connection to the campesinos and trabajadores, the Mexican workers, who were gathered for the annual May Day parade in Mexico City. May Day, traditionally celebrated on the first of May, commemorates International Workers’ Day, often with large parades and gatherings as a demonstration of solidarity among workers. This was a calendar event that Modotti had been familiar with since childhood due to her father’s involvement in these very same parades.

Among Modotti’s earliest politically motivated photographs, Workers Parade brings together her formal concerns with her interest in using art to express her political beliefs and her desire to make her photography socially relevant. On a symbolic level, as noted by Sarah Lowe, Workers Parade conveys the power of unity by “suggesting that the source of power to make political changes lies with the peasants.” This photograph signaled a turning point in Modotti’s work toward a new modern form of photography that addressed contemporary issues and events in order to instigate and effect change.

Karen Barber. “Tina Modotti Artist Overview and Analysis,” on The Art Story website 12 Nov 2018 updated 2023 [Online] Cited 06/08/2023

Tina Modotti (Italian, 1896-1942)
Men reading “El Machete”
c. 1927
Gelatin silver print
Fundación Televisa Collection and Archive, Mexico City

In this photograph of a peasant reading El Machete, the newspaper of the Mexican Communist Party, Modotti brings her careful attention surrounding composition, cropping, light and dark, and texture, to a subject with great social and political significance. Modotti had joined the Communist Party of Mexico this same year after learning that Italy had fallen to fascism. She brought her revolutionary zeal to her photographs of the late 1920s, many of which she published in Communist newspaper El Machete, a newspaper for workers and peasants. Whilst many photographers of this period, including Edward Weston and Paul Strand, were focused on a romanticized view of a timeless Mexico, Modotti turned to her camera to its people and to the real effects of its ongoing changes. She often collaborated with workers to produce photographs that were intended to raise class-consciousness and depict their daily lives.

At a moment when new governmental education reforms sought to educate the lower and working classes in Mexico, a seemingly straightforward image of a man reading a newspaper also had subversive undertones, particularly to the middle class. As Sarah Lowe notes: “The young obrero reading El Machete is a reminder that the Revolution’s promise of universal literacy would only be fulfilled by the activism of the people.” Although she viewed photography through the lens of modernism, she also believed that photography was a form of mass communication and an important means of enhancing visual literacy.

Karen Barber. “Tina Modotti Artist Overview and Analysis,” on The Art Story website 12 Nov 2018 updated 2023 [Online] Cited 06/08/2023

Tina Modotti (Italian, 1896-1942)
Bandolier, Corn, Sickle
1927
Gelatin silver print
Fundación Televisa Collection and Archive, Mexico City

A carefully composed photograph of a bandolier, an ear of corn, and a sickle, married Modotti’s interest in the photographic still life with objects symbolic of Mexico and the revolution – the sickle, a popular Communist symbol, corn, a symbol of Mexico and its rural farmers, and the bandolier (a pocketed belt for holding ammunition), the symbol of the Mexican Revolution. Politically active after 1925, Modotti joined the Communist Party of Mexico (CPM) in 1927. Due to her Communist-inflected worldview, her photographs from the late 1920s took a decided turn toward Communist symbolism, in lieu of overt propaganda.

As Sarah Lowe has stated, “her eloquent arrangements – founded on a stringent formal control – relocates the commonplace into the realm of the symbolic. They become potent revolutionary icons, offering a metaphorical union of artista [artist], campesino [farm laborer], and soldado [soldier], thus functioning as both formal still life and propaganda.” Lowe further suggests that in so doing, Modotti created a new kind of political picture. In this respect, Modotti’s relationship with Frida Kahlo becomes more than a shared friendship, and also incorporates shared artistic practice. Kahlo also infused still-lives with political objects and slogans, and as such transforms a seemingly domestic process of making art into a highly charged political statement.

Karen Barber. “Tina Modotti Artist Overview and Analysis,” on The Art Story website 12 Nov 2018 updated 2023 [Online] Cited 06/08/2023

Tina Modotti (Italian, 1896-1942)
Canana, sickle and guitar
1927
Gelatin silver print
Fundación Televisa Collection and Archive, Mexico City

Tina Modotti (Italian, 1896-1942)
Hat, hammer and sickle
México 1927
Gelatin silver print
Fundación Televisa Collection and Archive, Mexico City

Tina Modotti (Italian, 1896-1942)
Committee of the Organisation of the Pioneers of the Communist Party of Mexico
Mexico City, 1928
Gelatin silver print

Tina Modotti (Italian, 1896-1942)
Woman with flag
México City, c. 1928
Gelatin silver print
Fundación Televisa Collection and Archive, Mexico City

The life of Tina Modotti (Udine, August 16th 1896 – Mexico City, January 5th 1942) was influenced by some of the most important historical events of the 1920s and 30s. A citizen of the world – as many have considered her – Modotti’s work and her life have been surrounded by uncertainties that have only been resolved after in depth study, although some gaps still remain.

Modotti lived in several countries, among them Spain, which coupled with her agitated political militancy led to the dispersion of her work. Consequently, as pointed out by the show’s curator Isabel Tejeda, this “decontextualizes and disorients her production, making it impossible to date many of her images with precision.” Nevertheless, one could argue that most of her photographic work was produced between 1923 and 1930 while she was in Mexico. During those years, after her apprenticeship with Edward Weston, Modotti evolved from the perfection of abstract forms to a different and more personal gaze that was conditioned by her outlook on life and her notable attraction to human beings and social injustice. She went on to portray the precarious conditions of workers, inequalities, and misery in urban areas. Likewise, she focused on women and their role within the community as well as the forms and symbols of working class emancipation. In her eagerness to promote awareness, Modotti produced images denouncing injustice, while honouring the dispossessed; some had propagandistic purposes and were intended for publications and magazines.

The exhibition being presented at Fundación MAPFRE is the most comprehensive show dedicated to Tina Modotti to date. Thanks to the work of Isabel Tejeda, we are able to contemplate a large number of the artist’s originals that have been assembled through the curator’s research. Nearly 200 photographs (predominantly vintage prints) have been grouped chronologically into four sections. Furthermore, a wide range of documentary materials will be on display along with the projection of one of the Hollywood films Modotti featured in. The exhibition is completed with works by photographers that were closely related to her, such as Edward Weston. This exhibition reconstructs Modotti’s figure without fissures for the first time, both in terms of her facets as an artist / photographer and as a revolutionary / antifascist militant.

KEYS

Tina Modotti and film

Tina Modotti’s first contact with the performing arts took place in San Francisco, in 1913, when she was only 16 years old. In 1920, after participating in a few plays, she made her way into the world of film. At the time, actresses were sought out to embody heroines, adventurers, or femme fatales. With her dark hair and complexion, Tina seemed to fit the prototype of an exotic woman; a cliché that she would try to distance herself from shortly after. Modotti was cast in three films: Tiger’s Coat (1920) by Roy Clemens, in the role of Jean Ogilvie; Riding with Death (1921) by Jacques Jaccard, as Rosa Carilla; and I Can Explain (1922) by George D. Baker, as Carmencita Gárdez.

Ideal of beauty, social ideal, political ideal

After her instruction with Edward Weston (it should be noted that she did not receive a formal education in photography) Tina Modotti’s work developed within the group that dominated artistic life in Mexico in the 1920s. Between 1926 and 1929 Modotti dissected popular Mexican life; not only were individuals worthy of her attention, but also water tanks, houses, the corn peasants ate and the hats they wore, sickles symbolising communism, machetes, or the woman (appearing like a sculpture) who carried a flag and personified the commitment to the revolutionary struggle. All of her images possess great clarity and substance. They leave no room for rhetoric, while allowing for the artist’s political, social, and aesthetic ideals to fuse into one.

Mexican social landscape

Some authors have pointed to Tina Modotti’s proletariat origins as the basis for her way of confronting social motifs and human figures. If some have defined this part of her work as “reportage photography”, one must point out that the artist’s curiosity and will to capture a person’s life in one image separates her from simple illustrative intent. One could argue that her portrayals of indigenous Mexican people, women, babies, and children are ethnographic photographs, albeit produced in a spontaneous way without an anthropological purpose. Therefore, despite being her point of departure, Modotti distances herself from the travellers who ventured into Mexican lands with a manner of curiosity that lay between science and romanticism.

International Red Aid

The Spanish section of the MOPR (International Red Aid) was established clandestinely in 1923 with the objective of disseminating political propaganda amid the climate of Primo de Rivera’s (1923-1930) dictatorship and had as another of its objectives to defend the Spanish Republic and its anti-fascist ideals. The MOPR spread throughout the entire world after its founding in the Soviet Union in 1922. Politically, the organisation had to follow the directives of the Communist Party, but in its facet dedicated to solidarity it played a key role in humanitarian aid. In Spain, after the October Revolution in Asturias in 1934, it became the main organisation dedicated to helping and aiding political detainees and their families. However, during the Spanish Civil War, the MOPR would constitute the true basis for the medical system of the Republican military.

The exhibition

Tina Modotti’s life was marked by some of the most important historical events decades of the 1920s and 1930s. Citizen of the world, as many have considered her, both her life like her work are surrounded by gaps that only after an in-depth study have could be completed, although not entirely.

The nomadic life that she led and the agitated political militancy caused Modotti to leave with sudden departure from many of the countries where she lived, which, as the curator of the exhibition points out, Isabel Tejeda, “decontextualizes and messes up her production from the start, so it is impossible to accurately date many of her images”, although it can be said that almost all her photographic work was produced between 1923 and 1930. During these Mexican years, and after her apprenticeship with Weston, the artist evolved from the perfection of the abstract forms to a different and personal perspective conditioned by her way of
seeing life, in which her attraction to human beings and social injustices stand out. She then portrayed the precarious conditions of workers, inequalities and misery in urban areas. She also focused on women and their role within the community, and on forms and symbols of the emancipation of the working class. In her eagerness to raise awareness, Modotti goes on to make images that denounce injustices and honour the dispossessed, some of which have a propaganda purpose and are intended to be printed in magazines and other publications.

The exhibition that Fundación MAPFRE is presenting is the most extensive that has been made of Tina Modotti until today. Thanks to the work of Isabel Tejeda, today we can see in our exhibition halls a great number of period prints (vintage copies) by the author, gathered after a deep work of research. There are about two hundred and forty photographs that are grouped together chronologically in four sections. In addition, an extensive amount of documentary material is shown and one of the films Modotti starred in in Hollywood. The selection is completed with works by photographers from her immediate environment, such as Edward Weston.

Text from Fundación MAPFRE

Tina Modotti (Italian, 1896-1942)
Man with log
1928
Gelatin silver print
Fundación Televisa Collection and Archive, Mexico City

Tina Modotti (Italian, 1896-1942)
Woman’s hands washing clothes
1928
Gelatin silver print. Later print, printed by Manuel Álvarez Bravo
Fundación Televisa Collection and Archive, Mexico City

Tina Modotti (Italian, 1896-1942)
Baby Nursing
1926-1927
Gelatin silver print
Fundación Televisa Collection and Archive, Mexico City

Tina Modotti (Italian, 1896-1942)
Mujer con Jicara en la cabeza (Woman with Jicara on her head)
Juchitán, Oaxaca, 1929
Gelatin silver print
Fundación Televisa Collection and Archive, Mexico City

In this iconic black and white photograph, a woman dominates the picture frame. Standing with arm raised holding a large gourd on her head, she gazes off to the right, somewhere out of the picture frame. She wears a circular pendant and earrings, and a traditional Tehuana dress with geometric patterns, the costume that has been so well made visible by the work of Modotti’s friend, Frida Kahlo. The careful framing, cropping, and pose emphasize the image’s angular forms. Shot from below to emphasize the woman’s noble and heroic stature, the photograph was taken during a trip to Tehuantepec in Southern Mexico. Unlike Modotti’s earlier photographs, the photographs taken in Tehuantepec were largely unposed, typically street photographs that captured the daily lives of the women that lived there.

Like other artists and writers in Mexico, Modotti was influenced by Mexicanidad, which embraced native cultures and indigenous subjects as part of the larger renewal in Mexican art and culture in the 1920s. This interest is evident in Woman from Tehuantepec. One of Modotti’s most iconic images, it became a potent symbol of Mexicanidad and an exercise in photographic modernism. As Sarah Lowe has noted, “the image function[s] like still life, precisely because Modotti chose not just any woman, but a well-known Mexican type – the Tehuana – to photograph. As pictured by Modotti, these women of Tehuantepec were an ideal subject, and provided her with an already-given meaning since Tehuantepec is a matriarchal society, there women have a significant voice in the running of the local economy and politics. Modotti uses the Tehuana to make a powerful political point: that women were capable of independent political action.”

Karen Barber. “Tina Modotti Artist Overview and Analysis,” on The Art Story website 12 Nov 2018 updated 2023 [Online] Cited 06/08/2023

Tina Modotti (Italian, 1896-1942)
Tehuantepec woman with jicalpextle
1929
Gelatin silver print
Fundación Televisa Collection and Archive, Mexico City

Tina Modotti (Udine, 1896 – Mexico City, 1942) took part in some of the most relevant historical events of the first half of the 20th century, such as the economic migration of Europeans to America at the turn of the century, the birth of silent film in the West Coast of the United States, post-revolutionary agrarianism in Mexico, political muralism, the vindication of indigenous Mexican culture, the incorporation of women into the public sphere, the battle between Stalinists and Trotskyists after the revolution of 1917, International Red Aid, and the Spanish Civil War. To some degree, despite the abundance of biographies written about her, certain biographical gaps still exist that are slowly being filled. She was one of the pioneers of women’s photography during the 1920s and although nearly 400 images can be attributed to Modotti today, the number continues to rise with each new discovery; this exhibition being one example. Likewise, Tina Modotti exerted a great influence on later Mexican photography, from Manuel Álvarez Bravo to Graciela Iturbide.

Modotti took up photography through Edward Weston, although she exceeded the North American artist’s formalist teachings through the immediate construction of her own autonomous compositions that possess a unique and personal vision.

Modotti arrived in Mexico after spending her teenage years in San Francisco and Los Angeles and was part of the “Mexican Renaissance”; a time of post-revolutionary cultural splendour. Integrated within the circle of Mexican artists and muralists, her work incorporated a type of embodied photography into Weston’s formalism. Her gaze was influenced by her modest upbringing, being an economic immigrant and a woman, and by her sensibility toward social injustice. A member of the Mexican Communist Party since 1927, she denounced the situation of dispossessed people with her camera, focusing on the construction of a new imaginary for Mexican women.

After being expelled from Mexico in 1930 for being a communist, her photographic militancy soon became full-fledged activism. Apparently, Modotti abandoned photography in the 1930s to dedicate herself to political militancy. Mid-way through the decade, she was sent to Spain by the Communist Party where she would have a key role throughout the Civil War. Taking on the coordination of International Red Aid (MOPR), she organised the escape from Spain of the so-called “children of the war”, coordinated the management of military hospitals – where she also worked as a nurse – and carried out propagandistic and political tasks. At the end of the conflict she crossed the Pyrenees along with thousands of political exiles.

She died in Mexico City in 1942.

Early Years: From Udine to Los Angeles

Tina Modotti was born in 1896 into a modest family from Udine. In 1906 her father migrated to the United States in hopes of reuniting the family later. She arrived to San Francisco on her own in 1913, a city that was home to nearly twenty thousand Italians at the time. She worked in the textile industry, but also took part in the amateur theatre scene. In 1915 she met Roubaix de l’Abrie Richey (Robo) who she moved to Los Angeles with. There she met Edward Weston, modelling for him from 1920 onward. She also wrote and published her first poems and tried her luck in film, taking part in three movies. In The Tiger’s Coat, Modotti played the role of a Mexican Woman. Her physical appearance, dark hair, and Mediterranean skin typecast her into the stereotypical roles U.S. audiences associated with the exotic, romantic, and wicked myth of Latina women. Likewise, as can be observed in her family albums, she played with her ability to shift identities through clothing and costume (she posed dressed up as a ballerina in a pair of pants symbolising the empowerment of modern women and as a character from the Arabian Nights).

Mexico: On the Other Side of the Camera

In 1923 Tina Modotti moved to Mexico City with Edward Weston where they opened a portrait studio. The pair explored and took photographs of the country; this can be observed in Convent of Tepotzotlán and in Zuno’s house, the courtyard (whose exact authorship is unknown, as is the case with other photographs in this exhibition). At the time, the nation was experiencing what became known as the “Mexican Renaissance”. Modotti allowed herself to be influenced by this cultural splendour, soon becoming one of its prominent figures and transforming Mexican photography.

Her work evolved rapidly in Mexico. Modotti incorporated a personal gaze into the formalist perfection she learned from Weston that was influenced by her outlook on life and her attraction to human beings and the denouncement of social injustice (for example, in this section one can compare the photographers’ different approaches when depicting the circus tent or portraying the anthropologist Anita Brenner and the champion of the Náhuatl language Luz Jiménez).

During these early years Modotti worked on several still lives composed mainly of flowers, such as lilies, geraniums, roses, and cacti. Nevertheless, the artist also produced portraits in which she captured the powerful bond between a mother and her daughter (An aztec baby or Luz and baby) that went beyond the mere commodification of female bodies. Some of these images were later used in illustrated magazines of the time as examples of a Mexican identity whose origin was grounded in indigenous culture.

She also documented the work of Mexican muralists, such as Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco, among others. Modotti’s photographs were featured in some of the most important publications of the time, including Idols Behind Altars by Anita Brenner and the monograph by Ernestine Evans on muralism in Mexican Folkways magazine.

In late 1926 Weston returned to the United States. Earlier that year Modotti had acquired a new Graflex camera in San Francisco that was lighter than the Corona she previously used. With renewed energy, she set off to photograph Mexico, which for her was embodied in its people.

Photography and Political Commitment. Mexico Is Its People

After becoming affiliated to the Communist Party in 1927, Modotti’s political commitment became more accentuated. She was part of International Red Aid and also collaborated as a translator and a photographer with the newspaper El Machete, whose audience was mainly peasants. Similarly, she attended and photographed demonstrations and participated in political associations such as Manos Fuera de Nicaragua (Hands Off Nicaragua).

She avoided poses and portrayed individuals in real situations, both in the city and in countryside villages; a line of citizens at Monte de Piedad Nacional to pawn their belongings, peasants at agrarian schools, tortilla, cabbage, and hat sellers, corn porters, washerwomen, mothers carrying their children, children at Colonia de la Bolsa living in poverty, popular festivities, etc. Some of them were published in newspapers, such as El Machete, and subsequently in foreign magazines, such as AIZ, Der Arbeiter-fotograf, New Masses, and Put’ Mopr.

Modotti contemplated the dilemma of representation. How to find a visual language that was accessible to the people without betraying her aesthetic principles? She found a formula in symbolic photography. For example, Woman with flag is not merely an image about communism; instead, it expresses the ability of human beings to become empowered through willpower and political ideals. Modotti also produced still lives whose juxtaposed elements represent basic abstract concepts that speak of the people as an emancipated entity and of a communist vision of the future born from the land itself (Sickle, canana and corn cob and Guitar neck, canana and corn cob). In her photographic manifesto of 1929, coinciding with her solo exhibition at the Biblioteca Nacional, Modotti declared that she did not consider herself an “artist”, but rather a “photographer”; a trade she conceived as any other, in consonance with her proletariat ideas.

Toward Political Action: Spain at War

In 1930 Tina Modotti was expelled from Mexico and returned to Europe after having been falsely accused of taking part in an attack against Mexican president Pascual Ortiz Rubio. She spent a short time in Berlin, trying to continue her photographic pursuit unsuccessfully. However, Modotti would soon move to the Soviet Union where she focused on her activities as a member of International Red Aid (MOPR).

The Communist Party sent Modotti to Spain during the Spanish Republic. When the Civil War broke out, she coordinated MOPR under different aliases, reorganizing the Cuatro Caminos Worker’s Hospital (whose purpose was tending to injured militants), supervising, reporting, and writing articles under the names María, Carmen Ruiz, and Vera Martini for MOPR’s newspaper Ayuda. Semanario de la solidaridad [Help. Weekly of Solidarity], and supervising propaganda (in other words, the dissemination of the organisation’s activities). Politically dependent on the Communist Party, MOPR played a major role in humanitarian aid during the war, becoming the main organisation geared toward helping and aiding political detainees and their families, as well as being an important part of the Republican military health system.

In 1937 Modotti participated in the organisation of the Second International Congress for the Defense of Culture in Madrid, Valencia, and Barcelona. Among the participants were André Malraux, Anna Seghers, Ernest Hemingway, Aleksey Tolstoy, Octavio Paz, Elena Garro, Rafael Alberti, María Teresa León, Robert Capa, and Gerda Taro.

There is no trace of the photographs Modotti produced in Spain, although some authors suspect that three of the 17 images found in Viento del pueblo, poesía en la guerra [Wind of the People, Poetry in War] by Miguel Hernández might be hers. What seems to be clear is that the publication of the book of poems as a photobook was Modotti’s idea.

She returned to Mexico with Vittorio Vidali, her partner at the time, and died prematurely in 1942 due to a heart attack. After Modotti’s passing, her Mexican friends and Spanish republican exiles honoured her in Mexico City. The last photograph she produced, which will be on display for the first time in this exhibition, was of her dog Suzi.

Her work was progressively forgotten until the 1970s when it began to be exhibited and studied.

Text from Fundación MAPFRE

Anonymous photographer
Italian photographer, actress and political activist Tina Modotti (1896-1942) at an exhibition of her work at the National Library in Mexico City in December 1929
1929
Gelatin silver print

Tina Modotti (Italian, 1896-1942)
Portrait of a Pregnant Woman
Berlin, Germany, 1930
Gelatin silver print
Fundación Televisa Collection and Archive, Mexico City

Her extensive political activism and bohemian lifestyle earned her enemies. When on January 10, 1929, Julio Antonio Mella was assassinated, and shortly thereafter an assassination attempt was made on Mexican President Pascual Ortiz Rubio, the press suspected Modotti as the perpetrator. Called “the fierce and bloody Tina Modotti,” she was expelled from the country in 1930.

First, she moved to Weimar Berlin, then, after the rise to power of Hitler, she moved to Moscow, Warsaw, Paris, and Madrid, always finding friends in Communist circles. From 1936 she participated in the Spanish Civil War using the pseudonym Maria. She stayed in Spain until the collapse of the Republican government in 1939 when she returned to Mexico. In 1942 she died in a taxi from heart failure which many described as suspicious. Diego Rivera believed that it was her lover Vittorio Vidali who orchestrated her death because Tina Modotti “knew too much.”

Magda Michalska. “Tina Modotti: Photographer Made Revolutionary,” on the Daily Art website 2 October 2022 [Online] Cited 06/08/2023

Tina Modotti exhibition at Fundación MAPFRE catalogue cover

The Legacy of Tina Modotti

Her work was largely unknown until the 1990s, when a cache of her remarkable photographs was discovered in an Oregon farmhouse. Long overshadowed by her extraordinary life and her relationship with Edward Weston, she was viewed as his muse, rather than as a gifted photographer in her right. Despite a remarkably short career in photography – just seven years – she created a body of iconic images that confirmed her place in history. By fusing rigorous formalism with a desire to effect social change, she reconceived revolutionary photography through the language of modernism. Her work is now a touchstone in the history of photography, reflecting equally the tenets of modernist photography and the experience of post-revolutionary Mexico. Modotti’s photographs continue to inspire many, including many women and activists interested in making a socially and politically relevant art.

In the realms of Straight Photography, Modotti’s work is interesting to consider in comparison to that of Dorothea Lange and Imogen Cunningham, three women known to have had a dialogue in 1925 when Modotti returned to San Francisco for a short while. Like Cunningham and Lange, Modotti excelled in formal technique and as such influenced the next generation of highly skilled photographers. In subject matter and energy however, there is also a strong Surrealist and feminist edge to the work of Modotti extending her field of influence even wider. She is one of many European artists, including Leonora Carrington and Leonor Fini, who found freedom of expression in Mexico City; in this respect Modotti’s oeuvre adds to the history of a place as cultural and artistic capital for a time.

Karen Barber. “Tina Modotti Artist Overview and Analysis,” on The Art Story website 12 Nov 2018 updated 2023 [Online] Cited 06/08/2023

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Exhibition: ‘Luces y Sombras: Images of Mexico | Photographs from the Bank of America Collection’ at the Tacoma Art Museum

Exhibition dates: 15th October 2022 – 5th February 2023

Manuel Álvarez Bravo (Mexican, 1902-2002) 'Mr. Municipal President' (Señor presidente municipal) 1947 from the exhibition 'Luces y Sombras: Images of Mexico | Photographs from the Bank of America Collection' at the Tacoma Art Museum, Oct 2022 - Feb 2023

Manuel Álvarez Bravo (Mexican, 1902-2002)
Mr. Municipal President (Señor presidente municipal)
1947 (negative); printed before 1975
Gelatin silver print
Image Overall: 7 3/8 x 9 1/8 inches (18.7 x 23.1cm)
Bank of America Collection
© Archivo Manuel Álvarez Bravo, S.C

After last week’s long piece of writing something more succinct this week…

“Luces y Sombras translates as Lights and Shadows. The exhibition reflects many themes: the landscape, urban life, fantasy and, especially among younger generations, gender and invented situations infused with symbolism. It begins with works by photographers active at the conclusion of the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920), notably Manuel Álvarez Bravo, considered Mexico’s first truly modern photographer. It also includes visiting artists such as the Americans Paul Strand and Edward Weston.

Later works by such figures as Manuel Carrillo, Mariana Yampolsky, and Graciela Iturbide reveal the ongoing emphasis by Mexican photographers on everyday life and Mexico’s Indigenous communities. Recent generations of photographers have found new purpose in documenting how ways of life in Mexico continue to be changed by urbanisation, migration, and the pervasive influence of popular Western culture and mass media.” (Exhibition text from the TAM)

It is interesting to hear British photographer Chris Killip’s thoughts on Mexico through a foreign lens. This quote from an upcoming posting on Killip’s work:

He says he stayed [in Newcastle] because he liked it, and that he might never have left had the Harvard job not come along – but he was also inspired by the Magnum photographer Josef Koudelka, who came to visit him early on and “talked about the importance of being in one place, to get under the surface of things”. He was also interested in how differently Paul Strand and Manuel Alvarez Bravo photographed Mexico, he says, despite Strand’s sympathetic, card-carrying Communist credentials.

“Strand beautifies poverty and simplifies the Mexican people into ‘the poor Mexicans, but isn’t this wonderful visually’,” he says. “But Alvarez Bravo was Mexican, his pictures are very complicated because he was able to accept ambiguities and contradictions, which Strand couldn’t… I think because I lived in Newcastle for so long I was able to accept ambiguities and not worry about them, just accept them and show them. I wanted to be there and be more accepting.”1

As I have said in a previous posting on Mexican photography there is something so essential and grounded, so darkly soulful about Mexican photography. They never pull their punches, not just interested in the beauty of people and place but also the rituals, traditions and politics of Mexican society.

As ever, it is the work of Mexican artist Manuel Álvarez Bravo that steals my heart. His work exudes the spirit of the country through its sensitivity and connection to the earth from which he was born. The light and form in Bravo La Siesta de los Peregrinos; the light and form in Retrato de lo Eterno (1935, below). I have studied his work quite closely. He is the blessed one. Through his music, he captures the light and life of Mexico, the spirit of the eternal, “the sunlight [as] a discreet veil that turns the shadows into velvet.” His work is the art of the People.

Further,

“One of my early heroes in photography was Manuel Alvarez Bravo whom I rate as one of the best photographers that has ever lived, up there with Atget and Sudek. His photograph Parabola optica (Optical Parable, 1931, below) lays the foundation for an inherent language of Mexican photography: that of a parable, a short allegorical story designed to illustrate or teach some truth, religious principle, or moral lesson. Many Mexican photographs tell such stories based on the mythology of the country: there are elements of the absurd, surrealism, macabre, revolution, political and socio-economic issues, also of death, violence, beauty, youth, sexuality and religion to name but a few – a search for national identity that is balanced in the photographs of Bravo by a sense of inner peace and redemption. This potent mix of issues and emotions is what makes Mexican photography so powerful and substantive. In the “presence” (or present, the awareness of the here and now) of Mexican photography there is a definite calligraphy of the body in space in most of the work. This handwriting is idiosyncratic and emotive; it draws the viewer into an intimate narrative embrace.

Unlike most Australian documentary photography where there is an observational distance present in the photographs – a physical space between the camera/photographer and the subject – Mexican documentary photography is imbued with a revolutionary spirit and validated by the investment of the photographer in the subject itself, as though the image is the country is the photographer. There is an essence and energy to the Mexican photographs that seems to turn narrative on its head, unlike the closed loop present in the tradition of Australian story telling. The intimate, swirling narratives of Mexican photography could almost be termed lyrical socio-realist.”2

What is a revelation to me in this posting is work by two Mexican photographers who I have never heard of before and I should have because they are very good: Manuel Carrillo and Flor Garduño. Carillo joined the Club Fotográfico de México at the age of 49. As James McArdle observes the politics of Carrillo’s photographic work is anchored to his own cultural identity as a Mexican by birth and his time spent in America.

“He quickly found his voice by making images of everyday life throughout Mexico, celebrating local culture and the human spirit. His work is an extension of Mexicanidad, a movement begun in the 1920s to forge a Mexican national identity free of foreign influence… His interest in indigenous cultures and his use of bright sunlight to create compositions with dramatic shadows and bold geometric forms has roots in the photographic work of Edward Weston and Paul Strand, American modernist photographers active in Mexico in the 1920s and 1930s. Rather than idealising, aestheticising, or moralising, Carrillo portrays Mexico from the perspective of an affectionate observer, transforming ordinary moments into expressions of quiet eloquence.”3

A certain paradox can be noted here: the wish for a Mexican identity free of foreign influence and photographs forged in the American modernist tradition. Interesting. It doesn’t stop the visceral photographs being very “Mexican” for all that.

“Garduño’s photographs create a bridge between the present and the past by portraying natural elements such as water, trees, earth, animals, and atmosphere. Garduño worked for the Department of Public Education in her native Mexico, traveling to rural areas to work with indigenous communities. From this she developed her style and got to know what she has referred to as the “profound truth” of the countryside in the Americas. Her work was also influenced by artists Kati Horna, who worked in a surrealistic vein, and Manuel Álvarez Bravo, who attended carefully to the tonal qualities of his photographs. Garduño similarly uses compositional and darkroom techniques to achieve moody, evocative images.”4

In the work of Mexican photographers – Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Graciela Iturbide, Manuel Carrillo and Flor Garduño – you can palpably feel the essentialness of the Mexican people and begin to understand their connection to the land from which they come. Much as in the work of Chris Killip in England with his embeddedness5 with the people of North Yorkshire … there is an honesty, integrity and openness to their work which, in the case of Mexican photography, has continuous strands (like a river) running through it: that is, a synthesis of aesthetics, politics, land and spirit. Their work is of the people for the people offering a “profound truth” about the nature of their existence in the countryside in the Americas.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Footnotes

1/ Diane Smyth. “Now Then: Chris Killip and the Making of In Flagrante,“ on the British Journal of Photography website 6 June 2017 [Online] Cited 26/01/2023

2/ Marcus Bunyan. “Photography in Mexico: Selected Works from the Collections of SFMOMA and Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser,” on the Art Blart website 4th July 2012 [Online] Cited 28/01/2023

3/ Anonymous. “Manuel Carrillo: Mexican Modernist,” on the New Mexico Museum of Art website Nd [Online] Cited 28/01/2023. No longer available online

4/ Anonymous. “Get to know the work of Flor Garduño,” on the Getty Twitter website Oct 6, 2021 [Online] Cited 28/01/2023

5/ Embeddedness: an exchange that takes place within and is regulated by society rather than being located in a social vacuum.

Many thankx to the Tacoma Art Museum, Mark I. Chester and Steven Miller for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Manuel Álvarez Bravo (Mexican, 1902-2002) 'In the Temple of Red Tiger' (En el templo del tigre rojo) 1949 from the exhibition 'Luces y Sombras: Images of Mexico | Photographs from the Bank of America Collection' at the Tacoma Art Museum, Oct 2022 - Feb 2023

Manuel Álvarez Bravo (Mexican, 1902-2002)
In the Temple of Red Tiger (En el templo del tigre rojo)
1949 (negative); print before 1975
Gelatin silver print
Image overall: 9 3/4 × 6 3/4 in. (24.8 x 17.1cm)
Bank of America Collection
© Archivo Manuel Álvarez Bravo, S.C

Manuel Álvarez Bravo (Mexican, 1902-2002) 'Portrait of the Eternal' (Retrato de lo eterno) 1935 from the exhibition 'Luces y Sombras: Images of Mexico | Photographs from the Bank of America Collection' at the Tacoma Art Museum, Oct 2022 - Feb 2023

Manuel Álvarez Bravo (Mexican, 1902-2002)
Portrait of the Eternal (Retrato de lo eterno)
1935 (negative); print before 1975
Gelatin silver print
Image Overall: 9 5/8 × 7 3/8in. (24.4 x 18.7cm)
Bank of America Collection
© Archivo Manuel Álvarez Bravo, S.C

Manuel Álvarez Bravo (Mexican, 1902-2002)
The Daydream (El ensueño)
1931 (negative); print before 1975
Gelatin silver print
Image Overall: 9 1/4 × 7 in. (23.5 x 17.8cm)
Bank of America Collection
© Archivo Manuel Álvarez Bravo, S.C

Manuel Álvarez Bravo (Mexican, 1902-2002)
Optic Parable (Parábola óptica)
1931 (negative); print before 1975
Gelatin silver print
Image Overall: 9 1/4 × 7 in. (23.5 x 17.8cm)
Bank of America Collection
© Archivo Manuel Álvarez Bravo, S.C

Manuel Álvarez Bravo (Mexican, 1902-2002)
The Big Fish Eats the Little Ones (El pez grande se come a los chicos)
1932 (negative); print before 1975
Gelatin silver print
Image Overall: 9 × 7 in. (22.9 x 17.8cm)
Bank of America Collection
© Archivo Manuel Álvarez Bravo, S.C

Graciela Iturbide on Manuel Álvarez Bravo

Graciela Iturbide, Hasselblad Award Winner in 2008, talks about her friend and teacher Manuel Álvarez Bravo who received the Hasselblad Award in 1984.

Manuel Alvarez Bravo (Mexican, 1902-2002) 'La Buena Fama Durmiendo (The Good Reputation Sleeping)' 1939, printed c. 1970s

Manuel Álvarez Bravo (Mexican, 1902-2002)
The Good Reputation, Sleeping (La buena fama, durmiendo)
1938 (negative); print before 1975
Gelatin silver print
Image Overall: 7 3/8 × 9 5/8 in. (18.7 x 24.4cm)
Bank of America Collection
© Archivo Manuel Álvarez Bravo, S.C

Manuel Álvarez Bravo (Mexican, 1902-2002)
The Maria (La María)
1972
Gelatin silver print
Image Overall: 7 × 9 1/4 in. (17.8 x 23.5 cm)
Bank of America Collection
© Archivo Manuel Álvarez Bravo, S.C

Manuel Álvarez Bravo. 'Las lavanderas sobreentendidas / The Washerwomen Implied' 1932

Manuel Álvarez Bravo (Mexican, 1902-2002)
The Washerwomen Implied (Las lavanderas sobreentendidas)
1932 (negative); print before 1975
Gelatin silver print
Image Overall: 9 1/2 × 6 in. (24.1 x 15.2cm)
Bank of America Collection
© Archivo Manuel Álvarez Bravo, S.C

Manuel Álvarez Bravo (Mexican, 1902-2002)
The Obstacles (Los obstáculos)
1929 (negative); print before 1975
Gelatin silver print
Image Overall: 7 1/4 × 9 1/4 in. (18.4 x 23.5cm)
Bank of America Collection
© Archivo Manuel Álvarez Bravo, S.C

Manuel Álvarez Bravo (Mexican, 1902-2002)
Frida Kahlo with Globe (Frida Kahlo con globo)
c. 1930s (negative); print before 1992
Gelatin silver print
Image Overall: 9 3/8 × 7 1/4 in. (23.8 x 18.4cm)
Bank of America Collection
© Archivo Manuel Álvarez Bravo, S.C

Manuel Álvarez Bravo (Mexican, 1902-2002)
The Daughter of the Dancers (La hija de los danzantes)
1933
Gelatin silver print
Image Overall: 9 × 6 1/2 in. (22.9 x 16.5cm)
Bank of America Collection
© Archivo Manuel Álvarez Bravo, S.C

More than 100 photographs spanning more than 85 years of Mexican culture and history are coming to Tacoma Art Museum in the exhibition Luces y Sombras: Images of Mexico I Photographs from the Bank of America Collection.

Luces y Sombras reflects a broad span of Mexico’s modern history, beginning with work by photographers active in the 1920s, not long after the conclusion of the Mexican Revolution. A struggle for political power that began with the overthrow in 1911 of Mexico’s authoritarian president, Porfirio Díaz, became the catalyst for a popular uprising of campesinos, agrarian indigenous and mestizo (mixed race) people who fought for agrarian and social reform. Revolutionary leader Emiliano Zapata’s rallying cry, “Tierra y Libertad” (Land and Liberty), not only galvanised the hundreds of thousands of campesinos who joined the revolt but in its wake, came to represent the affirmation of rural people, whose lives were inextricably tied to the land.

Many images in this exhibition manifest the cultural values that came to the fore in the decades following the Revolution, when politicians and intellectuals alike endeavoured to reconstruct and, indeed, re-envision their nation. In the cultural sphere, Mexico’s new leadership sought to purge the nation of the European influence favoured by the Díaz regime. Nationalist ideals and a broad-based exploration of Mexicanidad (the quality of being Mexican) were accompanied by a new reverence for Mexico’s indigenous roots and for everyday men and women. Photographs made throughout the last century of indigenous and mestizo people reflect not only the survival of indigenous communities and traditions, but also the realities of poverty and social marginalisation that persist for a large lower class up to the present day.

Luces y Sombras reflects many other themes embraced by photographers in Mexico, both native and foreign-born – the landscape, urban life and, especially among younger generations, gender and invented situations infused with symbolism. The inclusion of such foreign photographers as Paul Strand, Elliott Erwitt, Aaron Siskind, Danny Lyon, and Nan Goldin speaks to another key component of the history of photography in Mexico – the significance of a nation seen through foreign eyes.

In gathering work by such a diversity of voices, Luces y Sombras provides vivid testimony to the character of life in a nation in the throes of reinvention, modernisation and continued change over the course of the last century.

Text from the TAM website

Ana Casas Broda (Mexican born Spain, b. 1965)
Milk III (2) (Leche III (2))
2010
from the series Kinderwunsch (The Desire to Have Children)(El deseo de tener hijos)
Inkjet print on cotton paper
Image Overall: 23 5/8 × 35 1/2 in. (60 x 90.2cm)
Bank of America Collection

Manuel Carrillo (Mexican, 1906-1989)
Mendicant girl – close up, Guanajuato, Guanajuato (Sin título (Pordiocerita – close up, Guanajuato, Guanajuato))
1930
Gelatin silver print
Image Overall: 7 1/2 × 9 1/4 in. (19.1 x 23.5cm)
Bank of America Collection

Manuel Carrillo (Mexican, 1906-1989)
Untitled (Man inside store, contrasted, baskets on the wall, Zacapoaxtla, Pueblo) (Sin título (Hombre dentro tienda, contrastada, canastas, pared, Zacapoaxtla, Pueblo))
1975
Gelatin silver print
Image Overall: 7 3/4 × 10 in. (19.7 x 25.4cm)
Bank of America Collection

Manuel Carrillo worked in Mexico in the middle of the 20th century, a time in Mexico that witnessed great political changes and social transformations and a moment in the country’s history when it was establishing its strong cultural identity.

Carrillo’s work, along with the well-known Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Tina Modotti and the American photographer Edward Weston, among others, was a contributing force as to how Mexico saw itself and how the rest of the world came to perceive that complex country. A bit of the understanding and empathy for the daily life of the Mexican people seen in Carrillo’s work would be of great help in how Mexico is perceived today.

Manuel Carrillo (Mexican, 1906-1989)
Untitled (Seller of ropes and belts, Oaxaca, Oaxaca) (Sin título (Vendedor reatas y cinturónes, Oaxaca, Oaxaca))
Nd
Gelatin silver print
Image Overall: 7 3/8 × 9 5/8 in. (18.7 x 24.4cm)
Bank of America Collection

Manuel Carrillo (Mexican, 1906-1989)
Untitled (Shawl in the air, Oaxaca, Oaxaca) (Sin título (Rebozo al aire, Oaxaca, Oaxaca))
1958
Gelatin silver print
Image Overall: 9 1/2 × 8 5/8 in. (24.1 x 21.9cm)
Bank of America Collection

Manuel Carrillo (Mexican, 1906-1989)
Untitled (Dog on grave, cemetery, Dolores, Mexico City) (Sin título (Perro sobre tumba, panteon, Dolores, México D.F.)
1930
Gelatin silver print
Image Overall: 8 × 10 3/4 in. (20.3 x 27.3cm)
Bank of America Collection

Mexican photographer Manuel Carrillo (1906-1989) turned to the camera fairly late in life, joining the Club Fotográfico de México at the age of 49. He quickly found his voice by making images of everyday life throughout Mexico, celebrating local culture and the human spirit. His work is an extension of Mexicanidad, a movement begun in the 1920s to forge a Mexican national identity free of foreign influence. Stylistically, however, Carrillo was inspired by Mexican artists trained abroad and international artists who converged on Mexico during that fertile period. His interest in indigenous cultures and his use of bright sunlight to create compositions with dramatic shadows and bold geometric forms has roots in the photographic work of Edward Weston and Paul Strand, American modernist photographers active in Mexico in the 1920s and 1930s. Rather than idealising, aestheticising, or moralising, Carrillo portrays Mexico from the perspective of an affectionate observer, transforming ordinary moments into expressions of quiet eloquence.

Anonymous. “Manuel Carrillo: Mexican Modernist,” on the New Mexico Museum of Art website Nd [Online] Cited 28/01/2023. No longer available online

Manuel Carrillo (Mexican, 1906-1989)
Untitled (Sick woman on bench, San Miguel Allende) (Sin título (Enferma en banca, San Miguel Allende))
1970
Gelatin silver print
Image Overall: 8 × 10 3/4 in. (20.3 x 27.3cm)
Bank of America Collection

Manuel Carrillo (Mexican, 1906-1989)
Untitled (Camila from above, two faces – close up), Mexico City (Sin título (Camila desde arriba, dos cars – close up), México D.F.))
1961
Gelatin silver print
Image Overall: 7 3/4 × 7 in. (19.7 x 17.8cm)
Bank of America Collection

By contrast, one might consider the mobility of framing in the work of Mexican Manuel Carrillo (b. 1906) who died on this date in 1989. The influence of American Modernist photographers and artists of his time, and of his better-known compatriot and contemporary Manuel Álvarez Bravo (1902-2002), is evident in this extreme point of view.

The aerial angle presents the tops of subjects’ heads, but with sufficient offset to allow a reading of the faces; the curiosity of the young boy and the protectiveness of the mother, both enclosed within a continuous ribbon of cloth and embraced by the square camera frame. The top-down view gives privileged entrée into that intense maternal relationship, encompassed by the geometry of the tiled background that contrasts with the cloth, set at an angle that enhances the figures’ complementary emotional impulses.

Aside from aesthetics, the politics of Carrillo’s photographic work is anchored to his own cultural identity as a Mexican by birth and as an American through his crossing into that country at the age of 16, when in 1922 he left Mexico for New York, becoming an Arthur Murray waltz and tango champion. When in 1930 he returned to Mexico City, he remained until his retirement. Taking up photography in 1955, he joined, at age 49, the Club Fotografico de Mexico and the Photographic Society of America, and within 5 years held his first international exhibition titled, Mi Pueblo (“My People”) in 1960 at the Chicago Public Library. Like influential writers, photographers, and artists, such as Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, Carrillo identified with Mexicanidad, a nationalist and anti-colonial cultural movement that emerged in the 1920s after Mexico’s Revolution. He was inducted as an honorary citizen of EL Paso, Texas in 1980 by the Photographic Society of America.

James McArdle. “January 20: Angle,” on the On This Date in Photography website 20/01/2018 [Online] Cited 31/12/2022

Manuel Carrillo (Mexican, 1906-1989)
Untitled (Cross, human shadow, Tepeapulco, Mexico) (Sin título (Cruz, sombra humana, Tepeapulco, México))
1973
Gelatin silver print
Image Overall: 9 × 7 in. (22.9 x 17.8cm)
Bank of America Collection

Manuel Carrillo (Mexican, 1906-1989)
Untitled (Old lady, alley, pyramidal shadows, Guanajuato) (Sin título (Viejita, callejón, sombras piramidales, Guanajuato))
Nd
Gelatin silver print
Image Overall: 9 × 7 in. (22.9 x 17.8cm)
Bank of America Collection

Manuel Carrillo (Mexican, 1906-1989)
Untitled (Toluca pulque bar (Drunken Barrels)), Toluca, Mexico) (Sin título (Pulquería de Toluca Barriles beodos)), Toluca, México))
1970
Gelatin silver print
Image Overall: 7 3/4 × 9 3/4 in. (19.7 x 24.8cm)
Bank of America Collection

The photographs in Luces y Sombras span the post-Revolutionary era of the 1920s up until the present day. With work by 28 photographers, both Mexican and other nationalities, this exhibition provides vivid testimony to the character of life in a nation in the throes of reinvention, modernisation and continued change, over the course of the last century. …

Luces y Sombras reflects a wide range of modern Mexican history, beginning with the works of photographers active in the 1920s, shortly after the conclusion of the Mexican Revolution. A struggle for political power that began with the 1911 overthrow of Mexico’s authoritarian President Porfirio Díaz and became a catalyst for a popular uprising of peasants, agrarian Indians, and mestizos (of mixed race) who fought for land and social reform. The rallying cry of peasant leader Emiliano Zapata, “Land and Liberty,” not only galvanised the hundreds of thousands of peasants who joined the revolt, but became the affirmation of the rural people, whose lives were inextricably linked to the earth.

Many images in this exhibition manifest the cultural values that emerged in the decades after the Revolution, as politicians and intellectuals strove to rebuild, and indeed, disimagine their nation. In the cultural sphere, Mexico’s new leadership sought to purge the nation of the European influence favored by the Díaz regime. Nationalist ideals and a broad exploration of mexicanidad (the quality of being Mexican), were accompanied by a new reverence for Mexico’s indigenous roots and for ordinary men and women. The photographs taken throughout the last century of indigenous and mestizo peoples reflect not only the survival of indigenous communities and traditions, but also the reality of poverty and social marginalisation that persist for a large lower class to this day.

Luces y Sombras translates as Lights and Shadows. The exhibition reflects many themes: the landscape, urban life, fantasy and, especially among younger generations, gender and invented situations infused with symbolism. It begins with works by photographers active at the conclusion of the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920), notably Manuel Álvarez Bravo, considered Mexico’s first truly modern photographer. It also includes visiting artists such as the Americans Paul Strand and Edward Weston.

This exhibition and gallery texts have been provided by the Bank of America Art in our Communities® program.

Luces y Sombras refleja una amplia gama de la historia moderna de México, comenzado con las obras de fotógrafos activos en la década de 1920, poco después de la conclusión de la Revolución Mexicana. Una lucha por el poder político que comenzó con el derrocamiento en 1911 del presidente autoritario de México, Porfirio Díaz, y que se convirtió en catalizador de un levantamiento popular de campesinos, indígenas agrarios y mestizos (de raza mixta) que lucharon por la reforma agraria y social. El grito de guerra del líder campesino Emiliano Zapata, “Tierra y Libertad“, no solo galvanizó a los cientos de miles de campesinos que se unieron a la revuelta, sino que se convirtió en la afirmación de la gente rural, cuyas vidas estaban inextricablemente vinculadas a la tierra.

Muchas imágenes en esta exposición manifiestan los valores culturales que surgieron en las décadas posteriores a la Revolución, cuando políticos e intelectuales se esforzaron por reconstruir, y de hecho, desimaginar su nación. En la esfera cultural, el nuevo liderazgo de México busco purgar la nación de la influencia europea favorecida por el régimen de Díaz. Los ideales nacionalistas y una amplia exploración de la mexicanidad (la cualidad de ser mexicano), fueron acompañados por una nueva reverencia por las raíces indígenas de México y por los hombres y mujeres comunes. Las fotografías realizadas a lo largo del último siglo de los pueblos indígenas y mestizos refleja no solo la supervivencia de las comunidades y tradiciones indígenas, sino también la realidad de la pobreza y marginación social que persisten para una gran clase baja hasta el presente día.

Luces y Sombras refleja muchos otros temas abarcados por los fotógrafos en México, tanto nativos como extranjeros: el paisaje, la vida urbana y, especialmente entre las generaciones mas jóvenes, el género y situaciones inventadas infundidas de simbolismo. La inclusión de fotógrafos extranjeros como Paul Strand, Elliot Erwitt, Aaron Siskind, Danny Lyon y Nan Goldin habla de otro componente clave de la historia de la fotografía en México: el significado de una nación vista a travéz de ojos extranjeros.

Al recopilar las obras de una diversidad de voces, Luces y Sombras brinda un testimonio vívido del carácter de la vida en una nación en pleno proceso de invención, modernización y cambio continuo a lo largo del siglo pasado.

Esta exhibición y los textos de esta galería fueron brindados por el programa Bank of America Art in our Communities®.

Mexico Through a Foreign Lens

Mexico became a magnet for American artists and photographers in the post-Revolutionary era, an idealistic period when artists, musicians, writers and other intellectuals sought to forge a cohesive nationalist identity through the arts. This cultural renaissance, led by such celebrated figures as Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, if not for the country’s sheer exoticism to foreigners, endowed Mexico with an allure similar to that of Paris for earlier generations of artists.

Mexico held great appeal for figures such as Edward Weston and his partner, the Italian Tina Modotti, who arrived in Mexico City in 1923 in search of bohemian freedom and new creative possibilities. During his few years in Mexico, Weston transformed his artistic vision, articulating a modernist aesthetic that veered away from the picturesque, soft-focus style of photography prevalent at the turn of the century, in favour of an approach that emphasised sharp resolution and form. the details, or as he once wrote, “the quintessence of the thing itself.” Both photographers had a lasting impact in Mexico – Weston by promoting an aesthetic that decisively influenced the course of modern photography, and Modotti, as a pioneering photographer and model of the socially and politically engaged artist.

Another key early figure in Mexico is Paul Strand, who took a deeply humanistic approach in photographing indigenous people and their environments while traveling around the country in the 1930s. This exhibition also contains work by American photographers active in the 1950s and 1960s. Mexico remained a destination for artists and free spirits in these years, including members of the Beat Generation, counter-culture writers and musicians active at mid-century who found in Mexico ample opportunity for both creative inspiration and debauchery. Such photographers who are now considered leading figures of this era, including Elliott Erwitt, Aaron Siskind, Harry Callahan and Danny Lyon, spent extended time in Mexico and created significant bodies of work.

México a travéz de una lente extranjera

México se convirtió en un imán para los artistas y fotógrafos americanos en la era posrevolucionaria, un período idealista en el que artistas, músicos, escritores y otros intelectuales buscaron forjar una identidad nacionalista cohesiva a través de las artes. Este renacimiento cultural, liderado por figuras tan célebres como Diego Rivera y Frida Kahlo – sino fuera por el exotismo del país para los extranjeros – dotó a México un atractivo similar al de París para los artistas de generaciones anteriores.

México tuvo un gran atractivo para figuras como Edward Weston y su compañera, la italiana Tina Modotti, que llegaron a la Ciudad de México en 1923 en busca de libertad bohemia y nuevas posibilidades creativas. Durante sus pocos años en México, Weston transformó su visión artística, articulando una estética modernista que se apartó del estilo pintoresco de enfoque suave de la fotografía que prevalecía a principios del siglo, en favor de un enfoque que enfatizaba la forma y la resolución nítida de los detalles, o como escribió una vez, “la quintaesencia de la cosa misma.” Ambos fotógrafos tuvieron un impacto duradero en México – Weston al promover una estética que influyó decisivamente en el curso de la fotografía moderna, y Modotti, como una fotógrafa pionera y modelo del artista social y políticamente comprometido.

Otra figura clave en México es Paul Strand, quien adoptó un enfoque profundamente humanista al fotografiar a los indígenas y sus entornos mientras viajaba por el país en la década de 1930. Esta exposición también contiene las obras de fotógrafos americanos activos en las décadas de 1950 y 1960. México siguió siendo un destino para artistas y espíritus libres en estos años, incluidos los miembros de Beat Generation, escritores de contracultura y músicos activos a mediados de siglo que encontraron en México una gran oportunidad tanto de inspiración creativa. Tales fotógrafos que ahora se consideran figuras destacadas de esta era como Elliott Erwitt, Aaron Siskind, Harry Callahan y Danny Lyon, pasaron mucho tiempo en México y crearon importantes obras.

Contemporary Voices

Photography made in Mexico over the last twenty years or so encompasses distinct tendencies. There exists, on the one hand, the continued vitality of an aesthetic that can be traced as far back as the 1920s, favouring sharp-focus black-and-white photography and a preoccupation with recording everyday life. But especially since the 1980s, photographers have approached the medium with a sense of freedom, embracing forms of image that radically depart from long-established modes. This kind of experimentation with the medium, although a lesser recognised aspect of photography in Mexico, is not new. As early as the 1920s, smaller numbers of photographers created images with unconventional approaches, whether through darkroom manipulation, photomontage or constructing scenes for the camera. Younger generations have extended this spirit of experimentation, deploying the medium in conceptual projects and elaborately staging images to craft pointed statements about race, gender and political issues. As a result, the current photography scene in Mexico is remarkably diverse. Its practitioners respect the medium’s remarkable history in their country while illuminating timely subject matter and devising new modes of working with the camera and with digital means.

This exhibition contains the work of younger photographers whose work examines the complex construction of identity in the millennial era, whether with Ana Casas Broda’s idiosyncratic explorations of childhood, or portrayals of gender by Luis Arturo Aguirre, Nelson Morales and Roberto Tondopó. Photographs by Alejandra Laviada and Humberto Ríos reflect another mode in contemporary photography: to stage scenes, whether with individuals or with objects, for the camera – often a means of evoking dreams, the subconscious and psychological states.

Voces contemporáneas

La fotografía realizada en México durante los últimos veinte años abarca distintas tendencias. Por un lado, existe le vitalidad continúa de una estética que se remonta a la década de 1920, favoreciendo la fotografía en blanco y negro con enfoque nítido y la preocupación por la grabación de la vida cotidiana. Pero especialmente desde la década de 1980, los fotógrafos se ha acercado al medio con un sentido de libertad, abrazando formas de imagen que se alejan radicalmente de los modos establecidos desde hace mucho tiempo. Este tipo de experimentación con el medio, aunque es un aspecto menos reconocido de la fotografía en México, no es nuevo. Ya en la década de 1920, un número menor de fotógrafos crearon imágenes con enfoques no convencionales, ya sea a través de la manipulación en el cuarto oscuro, el fotomontaje o la construcción de escenas para la cámara. Las generaciones más jóvenes han ampliado este espíritu de experimentación, desplegando el medio en proyectos conceptuales y elaborando imágenes para hacer declaraciones puntuales sobre cuestiones de raza, género y problemas políticos. Como resultado, la escena fotográfica actual en México es notablemente diversa. Sus profesionales respetan la extraordinaria historia del medio en su país al tiempo que ilustran temas oportunos y diseñan nuevos modos de trabajar con la cámara y con medios digitales.

Esta exposición contiene las obras de fotógrafos mas jóvenes, que examina la compleja construcción de la identidad en la era del milenio, ya sea con las idiosincrásicas exploraciones de la infancia de Ana Casas Broda, o representaciones del género de Luis Arturo Aguirre, Nelson Morales y Roberto Tondopó. Las fotografías de Alejandra Laviada y Humberto Ríos reflejan otro modo en la fotografía contemporánea: crear escenas, ya sea con individuos o con objetos, para la cámara, a menudo un medio de evocar sueños, estados subconscientes y psicológicos.

Before the Conquest, all art was of the people, and popular art has never ceased to exist in Mexico. The art called popular is fugitive in character, with less of the impersonal and intellectual characteristics of the schools. It is the work of talent nourished by personal experience and that of the community – rather than being taken from the experiences of painters in other times and other cultures. ~ Manuel Álvarez Bravo

The perspective of Mexicanidad, the quality of being Mexican, sought to remove colonial influences from Mexican art. After the Mexican Revolution of 1910–1920, artists and intellectuals came together to forge a new Mexican culture, one that placed new value on Mexico’s indigenous, working-class and agrarian roots as a repudiation of dictator Porfirio Díaz’s focus on wealthy, powerful and often white individuals. Known as the Mexican Cultural Renaissance, this movement gave rise to art that defined a new sense of Mexican identity. Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Latin America’s best-known photographer, made visually sophisticated photographs with a formally complex approach often including symbolic elements. He didn’t identify as such, but many viewers have seen surrealist aspects in his work. His work often looks at Mexico’s traditional cultures as they experience significant and rapid change.

Artists active in the decades after the Mexican Revolution, examined what it meant to be Mexican, without the colonial, European focus of the dictatorship. Manuel Carrillo documented street scenes, workers and children with empathy and care, seeking to record a cultural identity with attention to form and composition. Graciela Iturbide makes documentary photographs that are rich with metaphor and grace, finding spirituality and beauty in traditions and everyday life.

Antes de la Conquista, todo el arte era popular. El arte nunca ha dejado de existir en México. El arte llamado popular es de carácter fugitivo, con menos de las características impersonales e intelectuales de las escuelas. Son obras de talento alimentado por la experiencia personal y la de la comunidad – en lugar de ser tomado de las experiencias de los pintores en otros tiempos y otras culturas. ~ Manuel Álvarez Bravo

La perspectiva de la mexicanidad, la cualidad de ser mexicano, buscaba eliminar las influencias coloniales del arte mexicano. Después de la revolución mexicana de 1910-1920, los artistas e intelectuales se unieron creando una nueva cultura mexicana dieron un nuevo valor a las raíces indígenas, de la clase trabajadora y agrarias de México como un repudio al enfoque del dictador Porfirio Díaz en los individuos ricos, poderosos y a menudo blancos. Este movimiento, conocido como el Renacimiento Cultural Mexicano, dio lugar a un arte que le atribuyó un nuevo sentido a la identidad mexicana. Manuel Álvarez Bravo, el fotógrafo mas conocido de América Latina, hizo fotografías visualmente sofisticadas con un enfoque formalmente complejo que a menudo incluye elementos simbólicos. No se identificó como tal, pero muchos espectadores han visto elementos surrealistas en sus obras. Estas a menudo analizan las culturas tradicionales de México a medida que experimentan un cambio significativo y rápido.

Artistas activos en las décadas posteriores a la Revolución Mexicana, examinaron lo que significaba ser mexicano, sin el enfoque colonial y europeo de la dictadura. Manuel Carrillo documentó escenas callejeras, trabajadores y niños con empatía y cuidado, buscando registrar una identidad cultural con atención a la forma y composición. Graciela Iturbide hace fotografías documentales que son ricas en metáfora y gracia, encontrando espiritualidad y belleza en las tradiciones y en la vida cotidiana.

Exhibition text from the TAM

Elliott Erwitt (American, 1928-2023)
Guanajuato, Mexico
1957
Gelatin silver print
Image Overall: 8 1/2 × 13 1/2 in. (21.6 x 34.3cm)
Bank of America Collection

Flor Garduño (Mexican, b.1957)
Cloud, Mexico (Nube, México)
1982
Gelatin silver print
Image Overall: 13 × 17 in. (33 x 43.2cm)
Bank of America Collection

Flor Garduño (Mexican, b. 1957)
Tree of Life, Mexico (Arbol de la vida, México)
1982
Gelatin silver print
Image Overall: 13 × 17 in. (33 x 43.2cm)
Bank of America Collection

Garduño’s photographs create a bridge between the present and the past by portraying natural elements such as water, trees, earth, animals, and atmosphere. Garduño worked for the Department of Public Education in her native Mexico, traveling to rural areas to work with indigenous communities. From this she developed her style and got to know what she has referred to as the “profound truth” of the countryside in the Americas. Her work was also influenced by artists Kati Horna, who worked in a surrealistic vein, and Manuel Álvarez Bravo, who attended carefully to the tonal qualities of his photographs. Garduño similarly uses compositional and darkroom techniques to achieve moody, evocative images.

Anonymous. “Get to know the work of Flor Garduño,” on the Getty Twitter website Oct 6, 2021 [Online] Cited 28/01/2023

Flor Garduño (Mexican, b. 1957)
Zinacantec Wedding, Mexico (Matrimonio Zinacanteco, México)
1987
Gelatin silver print
Image Overall: 17 5/8 × 13 1/2 in. (44.8 x 34.3cm)
Bank of America Collection

Graciela Iturbide’s Mexico

The photographs of Graciela Iturbide not only bear witness to Mexican society but express an intense personal and poetic lyricism about her native country. One of the most influential photographers active in Latin America today, Iturbide captures everyday life and its cultures, rituals, and religions, while also raising questions about paradoxes and social injustice in Mexican society. Her photographs tell a visual story of Mexico since the late 1970s – a country in constant transition, defined by the coexistence of the historical and modern as a result of the culture’s rich amalgamation of cultures. For Iturbide, photography is a way of life and a way of seeing and understanding Mexico and its beauty, challenges, and contradictions.

In the summer of 2018, Kristen Gresh, Estrellita and Yousuf Karsh Senior Curator of Photographs, and members of the exhibition team visited Graciela Iturbide at her home and studio in Mexico City. In this documentary, produced by the MFA, the artist discusses the different series and themes explored in this exhibition, as well as her creative process.

Graciela Iturbide (Mexican, b. 1942)
Cemetery, Juchitán, Oaxaca (Cementerio, Juchitán, Oaxaca)
1992
Gelatin silver print
Image Overall: 12 1/4 × 8 3/4 in. (31.1 x 22.2cm)
Bank of America Collection

Graciela Iturbide (Mexican, b. 1942) 'Los Pollos, Juchitán, México' (Chickens, Juchitán, Mexico) 1979

Graciela Iturbide (Mexican, b. 1942)
The Chickens, Juchitán, México (Los pollos, Juchitán, México)
1979 (negative); print c. 1992
Image Overall: 11 3/4 × 7 3/4 in. (29.8 x 19.7cm)
Bank of America Collection

Graciela Iturbide (Mexican, b. 1942)
Sponge Vendor, Oaxaca (Vendedora de zacate, Oaxaca)
1974 (negative); print 1992
Gelatin silver print
Image Overall: 18 1/8 × 12 1/2 in. (46 x 31.8cm)
Bank of America Collection

Graciela Iturbide (Mexican, b. 1942)
The Sacrifice, La Mixteca, Oaxaca (El sacrificio, la Mixteca, Oaxaca)
1992
Gelatin silver print
Image Overall: 16 7/8 × 12 1/4 in. (42.9 x 31.1cm)
Bank of America Collection

Graciela Iturbide (Mexican, b. 1942)
Angel Woman, Sonora Desert, Mexico (Mujer ángel, desierto de Sonora, México)
1979 (negative); printed later
Gelatin silver print
Image Overall: 9 1/2 × 13 in. (24.1 x 33cm)
Bank of America Collection

Kenro Izu (Japanese, b. 1949)
Tajín #13
1987 (negative and print)
From the series Sacred Places
Platinum palladium print
Image Overall: 7 3/4 × 9 3/4 in. (19.7 x 24.8cm)
Bank of America Collection

Alejandra Laviada (Mexican, b. 1980)
Stacking (Apilado)
2007
From the series Juarez 56
Pigment print on lustre paper
24 x 20 inches (60.9 x 50.8cm)
Bank of America Collection
© 2022 Alejandra Laviada

Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942)
Truck in Nueva Casas Grandes, Chihuahua, Mexico (Camión en nuevas casas grandes, Chihuahua, México)
1975 (negative and print)
Gelatin silver print
Image Overall: 8 × 12 in. (20.3 x 30.5cm)
Bank of America Collection

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Church, Cuapiaxtla, Mexico (Iglesia, Cuapiaxtla, México)
1933 (negative); print 1967
from The Mexican Portfolio
Photogravure
Image Overall: 6 1/4 × 4 7/8 in. (15.9 x 12.4cm)
Bank of America Collection

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Woman, Pátzcuaro, Michoacán, Mexico (Mujer, Pátzcuaro, Michoacán, México)
1933 (negative); print 1967
from The Mexican Portfolio
Photogravure
Image Overall: 6 3/8 × 5 in. ( 16.2 x 12.7cm)
Bank of America Collection

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Women of Santa Ana, Michoacán, Mexico (Mujeres de Santa Ana, Michoacán, México)
1933 (negative); print 1967
From The Mexican Portfolio
Photogravure
Image Overall: 5 5/8 × 6 1/8 in. (14.3 x 15.6cm)
Bank of America Collection

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Woman and Baby, Hidalgo, Mexico (Mujer y bebe, Hidalgo, México)
1933 (negative); print 1967
from The Mexican Portfolio
Photogravure
Image Overall: 5 1/2 × 6 1/2 in. (14 x 16.5cm)
Bank of America Collection

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Near Saltillo, Mexico (Cerca de Saltillo, Mexico)
1933 (negative); print 1967
From The Mexican Portfolio
Photogravure
Image Overall: 5 3/8 × 6 3/4 in. (13.7 x 17.1cm)
Bank of America Collection

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Young Woman and Boy, Toluca de Lerdo, Mexico (Mujer joven y niño, Toluca de Lerdo, México)
1933 (negative); print 1967
from The Mexican Portfolio
Photogravure
Image Overall: 5 1/2 × 6 1/2 in. (14 x 16.5 cm)
Bank of America Collection

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Men of Santa Ana, Lake Pátzcuaro, Michoacán (Hombres de Santa Ana, Lake Pátzcuaro, Michoacá)
1933 (negative); print 1967
from The Mexican Portfolio
Photogravure
Image Overall: 6 7/8 × 5 1/4 in. (17.5 x 13.3cm)
Bank of America Collection

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
White Plaza, Puebla, Mexico (Plaza blanca, Puebla, México)
1933 (negative); print 1967
from The Mexican Portfolio
Photogravure
Image Overall: 5 1/2 × 6 1/2 in. (14 x 16.5cm)
Bank of America Collection

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Boy, Uruapan, Michoacán, Mexico (Niño, Uruapan, Michoacán, México)
1933 (negative); print 1967
From The Mexican Portfolio
Photogravure
Image Overall: 10 × 7 7/8 in. (25.4 x 20cm)
Bank of America Collection

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Man, Tenancingo de Degollado, Mexico (Hombre, Tenancingo de Degollado, México)
1933 (negative); print 1967
From The Mexican Portfolio
Photogravure
Image Overall: 6 3/8 × 5 in. (16.2 x 12.7cm)
Bank of America Collection

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Boy, Uruapan, Michoacán, Mexico (Niño, Uruapan, Michoacán, México)
1933 (negative); print 1967
From The Mexican Portfolio
Photogravure
Image Overall: 6 1/2 × 5 1/4 in. (16.5 x 13.3cm)
Bank of America Collection

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Virgin San Felipe, Oaxaca, Mexico (Virgen San Felipe, Oaxaca, Mexico)
1933 (negative); print 1967
From The Mexican Portfolio
Photogravure
Image Overall: 10 1/4 × 7 7/8 in. (26 x 20cm)
Bank of America Collection

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Cristo, Oaxaca, Mexico (Cristo, Oaxaca, México)
1933 (negative); print 1967
From The Mexican Portfolio
Photogravure
Image Overall: 11 × 8 1/2 in. (27.9 x 21.6cm)
Bank of America Collection

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Church Gateway, Hidalgo, Mexico (Puerta de iglesia, Hidalgo, México)
1933 (negative); print 1967
From The Mexican Portfolio
Photogravure
Image Overall: 10 1/2 × 8 1/4 in. (26.7 x 21cm)
Bank of America Collection

Paul Strand. 'Cristo with Thorns - Huexotla' 1933

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Cristo with Thorns, Huexotla, Mexico (Cristo con espinas, Huexotla, México)
1933 (negative); print 1967
From The Mexican Portfolio
Photogravure
Image Overall: 10 1/8 × 7 7/8 in. (25.7 x 20cm)
Bank of America Collection

Andrés Juárez Troncoso (Mexicano, b. 1972)
The Virgin of the Heights (La virge n de las alturas)
2016
From the series The Spotless Others
Digital print
Image Overall: 20 1/8 × 29 1/2 in. (51.1 x 74.9cm)
Bank of America Collection

Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958)
Pyramid of the Sun, Mexico (Pirámide del Sol, México)
1923
Gelatin silver print
Image Overall: 7 1/2 × 9 3/8 in. (19.1 x 23.8cm)
Bank of America Collection

Mariana Yampolsky (Mexican, 1925-2002)
Stable (Caballeriza)
1982 (negative); print c. 1992
Gelatin silver print
Image Overall: 13 × 17 3/4 in. (33 x 45.1cm)
Bank of America Collection

Mariana Yampolsky (Mexican, 1925-2002)
Caress, San Simón de la Laguna (Caricia, San Simón de la Laguna)
1989
Gelatin silver print
Image Overall: 9 × 12 1/4 in. (22.9 x 31.1cm)
Bank of America Collection

Mariana Yampolsky (Mexican, 1925-2002)
Head Cover, Pinotepa Nacional, Oaxaca (Huipil de tapar, Pinotepa Nacional, Oaxaca)
1989
Gelatin silver print
Image Overall: 13 1/2 × 13/12 in. (34.3 x 34.3cm)
Bank of America Collection

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1701 Pacific Avenue
Tacoma, WA 98402

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Tacoma Art Museum website

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Exhibition: ‘Clandestine – The Human Body in Focus’ at the Cobra Museum of Modern Art, Amstelveen

Exhibition dates: 16th October, 2021 – 27th March, 2022

Installation view of the exhibition Clandestine – The Human Body in Focus at the Cobra Museum of Modern Art, Amstelveen showing from left to right, Armando Cristeto (Mexico, b. 1957) Apolo urbano, c. 1981; Antonio Reynoso, La Gorda, c. 1960; Herb Ritts, Wrestling Torsos, Hollywood, c. 1987

I’m working from my iPad at the moment as my computer has gone down, so this will be short and sweet.

It’s disappointing, to say the least, that in this day and age a museum provides so few media images on such an important theme that I had to spend many hours digging around trying to find images for this posting. I examined the labels on the installation photographs, and then looked at the museum’s Instagram account where there was much more information, before searching for large enough images online for the posting. Some artists are little known so this proved very difficult.

It’s good to see Arlene Gottfried’s strong, brash, direct photographs of gay icons, Jewish bodybuilders and street urchins but they are standard clubbing / street fare and there is little subtlety in her work.

While Gottfried may have survived to tell her story her own way the work only documents. For a photograph is that ever enough? Here the photographs in no way provide a fresh perspective on a clubbing street aesthetic grounded in the milieu of the mid 70s to early 80s Studio 54, pre-AIDS, groovy, disco party vibe. Nostalgia, history and memory are their appeal today.

Tastes have changed. Personally I find more power and sensitivity in Kike Arnal’s Untitled (Emmanuel, trans man and tattoo artist) (2018, below) than most of Gottfried’s graphic photographs – her subjects caught as if the lights had come up in the club at 6am (believe me this has happened many times, all of us looking like startled rabbits). Strike a pose!

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

Installation view of the exhibition Clandestine – The Human Body in Focus at the Cobra Museum of Modern Art, Amstelveen showing from left to right, Shohei Miyachi, Untitled, c. 2018; Leonard Freed, Handcuffed, New York City, from Police Work series, c. 1978; Larry Clark, Chuck, c. 1981

Arlene Gottfried (American, 1960-2017) 'Angel and Woman on Boardwalk, Brighton Beach' 1976 from the exhibition Exhibition: 'Clandestine – The Human Body in Focus' at the Cobra Museum of Modern Art, Amstelveen, Oct 2021 - March 2022

Arlene Gottfried (American, 1950-2017)
Angel and Woman on Boardwalk, Brighton Beach
1976
Vintage gelatin silver print
Framework: 59.5 x 46.5cm
Photo: 27.9 x 35.5cm
Pedro Slim Collection

How does your gender impact your work as an artist? The candid photographs of Arlene Gottfried have become everlasting memories of New York’s fast-evolving culture(s). For over 40 years, Gottfried photographed the intimate stories of the American domestic life, as well intrepid snapshots of the Puerto Rican community or the wild nights inside Studio 54.

She emphasised that being a female photographer back in the 70s was very different than now:

‘A lot of the male photographers [in the past] felt threatened and didn’t like it. […] It’s changed so much with women working. They’re more visible now. I don’t know the statistics on museums and how many are being collected. But on an everyday level, you see women in jobs that used to be male – bus driver, train conductor – typically male jobs that now have female employees and photography was the same. It used to be only guys, really. And actually, in my first photography class, I was the only young woman in the class and I had a lump in my throat, like I wanted to cry, only guys there. But it wound up being a very supportive environment and I learned a lot.

Unless you’re doing something that’s a very feminine kind of a topic, I don’t think gender is really all that visible.’

Anonymous text from the Cobra Museum of Modern Art Instagram page

Arlene Gottfried (American, 1960-2017) 'Guy With Radio, East 7th Street' 1977 from the exhibition Exhibition: 'Clandestine – The Human Body in Focus' at the Cobra Museum of Modern Art, Amstelveen, Oct 2021 - March 2022

Arlene Gottfried (American, 1950-2017)
Guy With Radio, East 7th Street
1977
Vintage gelatin silver print
Framework: 59.5 x 46.5cm
Photo: 35.5 x 27.9cm
Pedro Slim Collection

Arlene Gottfried (American, 1960-2017) 'Pituka at Bethesda Fountain, Central Park' 1977

Arlene Gottfried (American, 1950-2017)
Pituka at Bethesda Fountain, Central Park
1977
Vintage gelatin silver print
Framework: 59.5 x 46.5cm
Photo: 35.5 x 27.9cm
Pedro Slim Collection

The legendary street photographer who captured more than neutral subjects, but also the living faces and bodies of people along with their memories. Arlene Harriet Gottfried photographs preserve cultural heritage of the urban atmosphere.

One of the most quintessential projects Gottfried produced was a black-and-white series of street photography from the 1970s and 80s in New York. Her work will form part of our exhibition Clandestine. This is a photo exhibition about the human body. One of the most dominant themes in the exhibition is the constant dialogue between culture and bodies. This is something Arlene Gottfried captures particularly well. Arlene Gottfried documented scenes of ordinary daily life. The everyday life from the past that still lives vividly in her photographs. Her work embodied stories and memories of people who although you will never get to know, you can easily feel familiarised.

Anonymous text from the Cobra Museum of Modern Art Instagram page

Arlene Gottfried (American, 1960-2017) 'Disco Sally at Studio 54' 1979

Arlene Gottfried (American, 1950-2017)
Disco Sally at Studio 54
1979
Vintage gelatin silver print
Pedro Slim Collection

Arlene Gottfried (American, 1960-2017) 'Pose' Early 1980s

Arlene Gottfried (American, 1950-2017)
Pose
Early 1980s
Vintage gelatin silver print
Pedro Slim Collection

Arlene Gottfried (American, 1960-2017) 'Le Clique' Early 1980s

Arlene Gottfried (American, 1950-2017)
Le Clique
Early 1980s
Vintage gelatin silver print
Pedro Slim Collection

Installation view of the exhibition Clandestine – The Human Body in Focus at the Cobra Museum of Modern Art, Amstelveen showing Arlene Gottfried’s portrait Marsha P. Johnson c. 1983

Arlene Gottfried (American, 1960-2017) 'Marsha P. Johnson' c. 1983

Arlene Gottfried (American, 1950-2017)
Marsha P. Johnson
c. 1983
Vintage gelatin silver print
Pedro Slim Collection

Marsha P. Johnson was an African-American trans woman who lived in New York and is celebrated for her contribution to the LGBTQI+ movement. She was often referred to as ‘Saint Marsha’ for serving as a “drag mother” aiding and welcoming homeless people as well as young members of the LGBTQ movement.

Marsha P. Johnson was the Rosa Parks of the LGBT+ movement. She was a devoted activist, drag performer, sex worker and at some point she even modelled for Andy Warhol. She established safe spaces for transgender people and was thoroughly dedicated to defending the rights of trans people, sex workers, people with HIV/AIDS and prisoners.

‘You never completely have your rights, one person, until you all have your rights.’ ~ Marsha P. Johnson

Our exhibition, Clandestine – The Human Body in Focus presents stories in black and white photographs about people who have not been recognised yet for their bravery. Today, Marsha lives in the hearts of brave activists as well as many transgender people.

The human body is the central theme of the Clandestine photo exhibition. About a hundred black-and-white photographs express an unreserved love of the body in all its manifestations: perfect, imperfect, elegant, erotic, proud or, on the contrary, very vulnerable. The works come from the extensive collection of photographer and collector Pedro Slim (Beirut, Lebanon, 1950) and are shown in the Netherlands for the first time.

Clandestine showcases photography by some 60 artists, including Diane Arbus, Horst P. Horst, Arlene Gottfried, Graciela Iturbide, Robert Mapplethorpe, Diana Blok, Helmut Newton and Man Ray. The exhibition presents original and contemporary prints (including silver on gelatine, photogravure), collages and photomontages. These photographs are placed in the context of New York in the 1970s and 1980s, where many were taken. Pedro Slim’s photo collection holds a unique place in the field of photography. In 1985, Slim started collecting photographs in which the human body plays a central role. With his collection, Slim highlights the power of images and seeks to transform and break open the paradigm that dictates what is feminine, masculine, non-binary or trans. Pedro Slim’s collection consists of more than 300 vintage prints and has rarely been exhibited.

The beauty of the photographs lies especially in the personal expression of those portrayed. The artists seek to go beyond the prevailing standards and ideals of beauty, and make a plea to appreciate the body in all its manifestations. The photographs are thus an ode to diversity and are still very relevant today.

Three themes

The exhibition revolves around three themes. The first part of the exhibition focuses on past and present ideals of beauty. The photographs show a diversity of body types and invite us to transcend judgements such as ‘beautiful’ and ‘ugly’. The photographs within the second theme show people living on the fringes of society,  many of the recorded scenes are raw, everyday situations. The visitor sees sex work, drug use and indecency. There are painful stories behind the provocative looks and poses.

The third part of the exhibition is entirely devoted to the work of Arlene Gottfried (1915-2017). Gottfried specialised in the genre known as street photography, recording life in the less well-to-do neighbourhoods of New York.  Her themes included gospel, schizophrenia, the Puerto Rican community, and the women in her family. Pedro Slim owns more than twenty original prints by Gottfried. This makes him the most important collector of her work.

About the collector

Photographer and collector Pedro Slim was born in Beirut, Lebanon, in 1950. He studied architecture and photography in Mexico and New York. Since the early 1990s, he has exhibited in various museums and galleries. His most recent exhibition was in 2017 at the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City. His passion for photography led him to start a collection.

Arlene Gottfried (American, 1960-2017) 'Brothers with their Vines, Coney Island, NY' 1976

Arlene Gottfried (American, 1950-2017)
Brothers with their Vines, Coney Island, NY
1976
Vintage gelatin silver print
Pedro Slim Collection

Arlene Gottfried (American, 1960-2017) 'Third Avenue Shopping, El Barrio' 1978

Arlene Gottfried (American, 1950-2017)
Third Avenue Shopping, El Barrio
1978
Vintage gelatin silver print
Pedro Slim Collection

Arlene Gottfried (American, 1960-2017) 'Men's Room at Disco' 1978

Arlene Gottfried (American, 1950-2017)
Men’s Room at Disco
1978
Vintage gelatin silver print
Pedro Slim Collection

Arlene Gottfried (American, 1960-2017) 'Doorway in Soho, NY' 1980

Arlene Gottfried (American, 1950-2017)
Doorway in Soho, NY
1980
Vintage gelatin silver print
Pedro Slim Collection

Arlene Gottfried (American, 1960-2017) 'Savage Riders at The Puertican Day Parade' 1980

Arlene Gottfried (American, 1950-2017)
Savage Riders at The Puertican Day Parade
1980
Vintage gelatin silver print
Pedro Slim Collection

Arlene Gottfried (American, 1960-2017) 'Hassid and Jewish Bodybuilder' 1980

Arlene Gottfried (American, 1950-2017)
Hassid and Jewish Bodybuilder
1980
Vintage gelatin silver print
Pedro Slim Collection

Arlene Gottfried (American, 1960-2017) 'Riis, Nude Bay, Queens' 1980

Arlene Gottfried (American, 1950-2017)
Riis, Nude Bay, Queens
1980
Vintage gelatin silver print
Pedro Slim Collection

After completing a two-year photography program at FIT, Arlene moved to Greenwich Village in 1972, when the community was still an affordable outpost for artists, musicians and bohemians. She took a job as an assistant with an advertising agency. “I did everything: printing, processing, lighting, studio work, on location, a lot of it was for comps and sometimes it was for the ad itself, for sales promotion and point of purchase,” Arlene revealed in her final book, Mommie. “I didn’t always love what it was about but I always took photographs on the weekend and used their fantastic darkroom.”

“It’s nice to be young and be able to run across the beach like wild and be able to meet people and take their picture,” she continued. “That’s what I remember about it: Having a great time, and having a job so I could pay for things, and having a darkroom where I could print everything. You couldn’t ask for anything better. It was like a little grant at a little job, you know, a moderate income but just enough.”

Arlene made “just enough” to carry her through the next 45 years of her life, transforming her home in the West Village’s famed Westbeth Artists Housing into a bohemian palace. Above her kitchen table, she hung her photographs in a plastic carousel designed to air-dry intimate apparel. She entertained visitors, serving cherries and chocolate-covered espresso beans with a bottle of seltzer at the ready. When her cancer treatments stole her brunette curls in the years before her death, Arlene donned a burgundy velvet turban for her nights out.

Although she disliked hustle culture before it was named as such, Arlene maintained resolute faith in the importance of her work and the vitality of her gifts. Where other photographers sought to be a fly on the wall, Arlene was a butterfly in the mix, always aligned with the energy so that her presence only added to the beauty of the images she made. She loved to laugh, to sing, to dance and to celebrate the extraordinary stars in her orbit. In Mommie, Arlene remembers, “The clubs were very provocative then: People putting on these shows, taking their clothes off, acting things out. There’d be a theme and they’d be doing all kinds of crazy things like giving birth to dolls, simulating sex in public. I went in with my camera, took photographs and it was great.”

After the party, Arlene described the feeling of a glorious high that comes from a night on the town, surrounded by people doing what they love. She walked out of the club into the crisp winter air as snowflakes floated down from the sky like confetti in a parade. She then began strolling down Fifth Avenue, heading home, like the final scene of a Hollywood film.

Extract from Miss Rosen. “Sex clubs, Studio 54, Central Park: A portrait of NYC in the 70s & 80s,” on the i-D website 15 October 2021 [Online] Cited 16/10/2021. No longer available online

Arlene Gottfried (American, 1960-2017) 'Giant Dildo, Les Mouches Party, NY' 1979

Arlene Gottfried (American, 1950-2017)
Giant Dildo, Les Mouches Party, NY
1979
Vintage gelatin silver print
Pedro Slim Collection

Arlene Gottfried (American, 1960-2017) 'Miguel Pinero and Friend' 1980

Arlene Gottfried (American, 1950-2017)
Miguel Pinero and Friend
1980
Vintage gelatin silver print
Pedro Slim Collection

As an insider, Gottfried was able to tell the story on her own terms, capturing a slice of life that has vanished forevermore. “Now the only way to know what New York was like is from fleeting glimpses in movies made years ago like Taxi Driver, Death Wish, or Midnight Cowboy,” Gilbert Gottfried observes. “I remember there were neighbourhoods you didn’t want to be in and we lived in a few of those. Arlene had already been living on her own when me, my mother, and my other sister Karen moved to Avenue A. People were saying, ‘You’re nuts.'”

Arlene Gottfried flourished amongst her own, whether palling around with poet Miguel Piñero at the Nuyorican Poets Café, kicking it at Brooklyn’s famed Empire Roller Skating Center, or trooping uptown to the streets of El Barrio. Wherever she went, there she was, ready for whatever would come her way.

“I met Miguel Piñero at the Poet’s Café. I loved to dance and you could really dance over there!” she told me in 2014, roaring with laughter at the memory of her youth. “Salsa. R&B. There was a lot of good energy there. It was rough and raw. Not trendy. And that’s an amazing thing – that the Poet’s Café has lasted so long. I loved it. I stayed there until the sun came up, literally. That doesn’t last forever, these moments in time.”

Though Gottfried and many she photographed have passed, their legacies live on in her warm and loving photographs. Gottfried followed her heart and went with the flow, documenting everything from her years singing gospel with the Eternal Light Community Singers to her long-standing relationship with Midnight, a man suffering from paranoid schizophrenia.

For Gottfried, the camera was her diary and confidant. “I don’t know exactly when Arlene started taking pictures, but I know she got into it and then it was all the time,” her brother says with a laugh. “Sometimes we were both on the bus with my mother. I would be helping my mother off and Arlene was taking pictures. I was thinking, ‘Put down the camera and help me help her out of the bus!'”

Gottfried’s archive holds vast treasures of New York at a time when everyone was a character yet no one would stare because that would suggest you were a tourist, unfit to make it here. Her photographs are a tribute to Old New York, to a city of myth, magic, and madness that many did not survive. Yet in her pictures, their lives are restored to the pantheon of grit, glamour, and glory.

It is a city the lingers like wafts of weed smoke on a warm summer day, a city that still exists if you look for it. Gilbert Gottfried remembers, “A year or two ago I was walking with my wife and we saw these two homeless men. One was fixing the other guy’s hair with his hand, and my wife said, ‘Ahh. That’s an Arlene picture.'”

Extract from Miss Rosen. “Arlene Gottfried photographed the magic and madness of Old New York,” on the Document Journal website June 28, 2019 [Online] Cited 16/10/2021

George Hoyningen-Huene (American-Russian, 1900-1968)
A.E. Sudan
c. 1935
Gelatin silver print
George Hoyningen-Huene Estate Archives

Let’s talk about representation. A Russian man takes a photo of a Sudanese man. Superficially, this might seem problematic, but why?

In our exhibition, Clandestine – The Human Body in Focus, the portrait by the Russian photographer George Hoyningen-Huene, titled A.E. Sudan presents a naked Sudanese.

In a traditional setting, material items like clothes and jewellery help people express their values and beliefs. In this photo, the Sudanese man is alien from any form of expression. In addition, presented in front of a white wall strips the subject away from his situational contexts – such as time and place. This photo shows a person in a blank state, disconnected from any form of cultural or individual expression.

Despite these characteristics (or lack of characteristics), the photographer still opted to include the nationality of the subject in the title – Sudanese. We do not know if the artist understood the semantic power of the title, but by giving us some context, we know this person is not simply a naked model detached from his culture, but rather a ‘Sudanese’ man.

Here is where the questions that concerns representation starts gaining weight. Artists, including photographers, carry tremendous responsibility. Through their medium, they have the power to frame a subject as they please. In the creative process, it is possible that the view of the artist becomes the dominant perception understood by the audience.

For instance, in this case the Sudanese man has no voice concerning how the viewer perceives any of the characteristics that represent his identity, such as his skin colour, nationality, gender or age. It is virtually impossible to discuss all the concerns linked to cultural representation in a post, hence this conversations is far from over. Also, we do not intend to shame the way the artist framed the Sudanese man, but rather our whole aim, inspired by the Cobra movement, is to present new ways to think critically about art, ourselves and society.

Anonymous text from the Cobra Museum of Modern Art Instagram page

Edmund Teske (Chicago, Illinois, 1911 – Los Angeles, California, USA, 1996)
Male Nude, Davenport Iowa
1942
Vintage gelatin silver print
Framework: 59.2 x 48.9cm
Photo: 33 x 23.5cm
Pedro Slim Collection
© Estate of Edmund Teske, Courtesy Gitterman Gallery

Installation view of the exhibition Clandestine – The Human Body in Focus at the Cobra Museum of Modern Art, Amstelveen showing from left to right, Nan Goldin’s Ivy wearing a fall Boston 1973 and Antonio Reynoso’s La Gorda (The Fat Woman) c. 1960

Antonio Reynoso (Mexican, 1919-1996)
La Gorda (The Fat Woman)
c. 1960
Gelatin silver print
Pedro Slim Collection

Beauty lies in the eye of the beholder. This phrase stresses that beauty is thoroughly subjective and only limited by social constructs.

One would argue that beauty is different from sciences like physics or chemistry since it is not quantifiable or measurable. Nonetheless, through non-scientific agreement people still know how to distinguish what is pretty from what is not. For instance, a swampy pond is less pretty than a turquoise ocean. This is the shared opinion, of at least the majority, but is this a view shared by everyone? Even more importantly, is this our view or was it simply bestowed upon us without our prior consent?

Being critical when looking at a work of art, or more frankly when looking at anything, is an exercise to strengthen our own individuality and potential to envision a new beauty. This does not mean one should automatically discredit beauty from something or someone that is socially considered beautiful but to question it. This is a call to acknowledge that the notion of beauty can be challenged, abstracted or even reconstructed.

This is a portrait by Mexican photographer Antonio Reynoso La Gorda (The Fat Woman). It invites us to reconsider the meanings of several attributes including, beauty, sensuality and femininity.

Anonymous text from the Cobra Museum of Modern Art Instagram page

Nan Goldin (American, b. 1953)
Ivy wearing a fall
Boston 1973
Gelatin silver print
Pedro Slim Collection

Allen Frame (American, b. 1951)
Young Man, New York
1974
Gelatin silver print
Framework: 40.5 x 50.5cm
Photo: 27.9 x 35.5cm
Pedro Slim Collection

Leonard Freed (American, 1929-2006)
Handcuffed, New York City
c. 1978
From Police Work series
Gelatin silver print
Pedro Slim Collection

David Wojnarowicz (American, 1954-1992)
Arthur Rimbaud in New York
1978-1979
Gelatin silver print
Pedro Slim Collection

Arthur Rimbaud in New York, one of David Wojnarowicz’s few incursions into photography, is the articulation of a testimony to urban, social and political change in New York.

Wojnarowicz, using the figure of the accursed poet as the only way for an artist to intervene in reality, chronicles his own life and his emotional relationship with New York City in the late 1970s. The artista portrays a number of friends with a life-size mask of the French poet Arthur Rimbaud, thereby taking on his identity and highlighting the parallels in their lives: the violence suffered in their youths, the feeling of being denied freedom, the desire to live far away from the bourgeois environment and the fact of their homosexuality. Wojnarowicz is juxtaposing the historical time of the symbolist poet with the artist’s present.

The series, taken in places that the artist used to frequent with photographer Peter Hujar, represents the emergence of identity politics and queer visibility in contemporary art, and the debates surrounding the public sphere as a space for individual non-conformity that were to shape the 1980s. The series also represents a contemplation of the end of the experimental artists’ collectives on the Lower East Side, as gentrification and urban speculation transformed the neighbourhood, and AIDS had begun to decimate the gay community, also causing the early death of the artist in 1992.

Salvador Nadales. “Arthur Rimbaud in New York,” on the Museo Reina Sofía website Nd [Online] Cited 23/02/2022

George Dureau (American, 1930-2014)
B.J. Robinson
c. 1980
Gelatin silver print
Pedro Slim Collection

What happens when people become labelled as objects of inspiration?

Popular culture often exotifies or objectifies a group of people who are slightly different from the majority. Sayings such as ‘you cannot fail if you have not tried’ accompanied by a photo of a person with a disability, portrays the subject as a source of exceptional inspiration for the viewer. This may objectify the subject in the photo.

This is something that happens in the art world too. For instance, the monumental achievements of artists with a disability, such as Frida Kahlo or Vincent van Gogh, are sometimes phrased as a direct outcome of their condition. By doing so the condition of the artist becomes bigger than the persona. This undermines the different elements that constitute the artist as a whole.

For the photographer George Dureau, whose work is displayed in our exhibition Clandestine, photography is a medium with the potential to empower people with disabilities by simply representing them, without objectifying them. By photographing people with disabilities the same way traditional photographers captured images of models, Dureau reconceptualised the standards of beauty.

The conversation revolving around objectification is far from over. Dureau’s views present an interesting way to think about the topic, but we still need more critical and engaged dialogue and we want to hear your opinion. Where is the boundary between admiration and objectification?

Anonymous text from the Cobra Museum of Modern Art Instagram page

Larry Clark (American, b. 1943)
Chuck
c. 1981
Gelatin silver print
Pedro Slim Collection

Armando Cristeto (Mexican, b. 1957)
Apolo Urbano (Urban Apollo)
Mexico City, 1981
Gelatin silver print
Pedro Slim Collection
© Armando Cristeto

Born in 1957 in Mexico City, photographer and historian Armando Cristeto began to study photography in 1977 at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico. He was a member of the photography collective known as the Grupo de Fotografos Independientes, one of the numerous cooperatives of artists known as ‘Los Grupos’ proliferating during the late 1970s in Mexico.

Founded by Amando Cristeto’s brother Adolfo Patino, the Fotografos Independientes sought to reach new audiences by taking their exhibitions out onto the street, where their works could interact with the urban context and be appreciated by new classes of people. Their exhibitions were installed along the sidewalks of Mexico City, employing clothesline to hang their photographic prints, or were even paraded through the streets on wheeled carts.

Anonymous text. “Armando Cristeto,” on the ultrawolvesunderthefullmoon website June 9, 2020 [Online] Cited 23/03/2022

Duane Michals (American, b. 1932)
The Most Beautiful Part of a Woman’s Body
c. 1986
Gelatin silver print
Pedro Slim Collection

Duane Michals (American, b. 1932)
The Most Beautiful Part of a Man’s Body
c. 1986
Gelatin silver print
Pedro Slim Collection

Graciela Iturbide (Mexican, b. 1942) 'Magnolia with Mirror, Juchitán, México' 1986

Graciela Iturbide (Mexican, b. 1942)
Magnolia, Juchitán, México
1986
Gelatin silver print
Pedro Slim Collection

Is symmetry more beautiful than asymmetry?

The notion of symmetry is occasionally interchanged with the one of beauty as if these would be synonyms. Artists and philosophers from different cultures and times have championed equilibrium and positioned symmetry on an untouchable pedestal, but culturally speaking, asymmetry might be more valuable.

The mathematical notion of symmetry suggests that if an object is changed – say a cube or a sphere is rotated – it stays the same as before it was moved. Aiming for symmetrical forms seems reasonable from the functional standpoint of an architect or a mathematician, but why do our cultures dismiss or shame asymmetry?

Asymmetry presupposes that something, or someone, changes after its circumstances changed. Transforming when situations demand it, is necessary to evolve. One symmetric thought or body would entail that it does not change when it is moved. That said, maybe it is time to reevaluate the way we perceive notions of beauty and reformulate our societal desires. Asymmetric bodies might be much more sexy and beautiful after all.

The exhibition, Clandestine – The Human Body in Focus, presents black and white photographs of the human body. The photographs render asymmetric human bodies.

Anonymous text from the Cobra Museum of Modern Art Instagram page

Herb Ritts (American, 1952-2002)
Wrestling Torsos, Hollywood
c. 1987
Gelatin silver print
Pedro Slim Collection

Merry Alpern (American, b. 1955)
Dirty Windows #16
1994
Gelatin silver print
Pedro Slim Collection

Merry Alpern (American, b. 1955)
Untitled from the series Dirty Windows
1994
Gelatin silver print
Pedro Slim Collection

How to take dramatic photos of strangers? Wait, should you ask for their consent before photographing them?

In most countries, it is legal to take photos of people, including children in public. The question of whether it is morally right or wrong to take photos of strangers remains problematic. Some would say that it depends on the purpose of the photo. Judging a body of work that is intended to be used for profit, such as to promote a product, is different from photojournalism or a photo exhibition.

When seeing the photos exhibited in our exhibition Clandestine- The Human Body in Focus, one wonders if every single body was aware it would end up framed in the museum, or in the Instagram account of the museum itself.

To give this situation a context, consider Merry Alpern’s Dirty Windows series from 1994. Rather than posing her subjects, Alpern captured women (and men) crowded into the tiny bathroom of a sex club in the Wall Street district of Manhattan. Her photos were taken at night, in dim light, from a friend’s apartment, one story higher and about five meters away from the bathroom window. Her obsessive, voyeuristic, and even paranoic project as well as her overtly sexual scenes, caused a national controversy at the time.

With these images, Alpern encapsulated and reduced the identity of her subjects as ‘sex workers’. By taking a single shot of a person and framing it as the complete one, the photo runs the risk of stripping the full identity away from the subject. The women in the Dirty Windows series could be mothers, daughters, great sports players, activists and so on, but not everyone gets to see that part of the story.

Let this be a reminder that when taking a photo of a person, you should make sure the person is aware of the photo’s purpose as well as what part of the story- of their identity – is framed.

Anonymous text from the Cobra Museum of Modern Art Instagram page

Shohei Miyachi (Japanese, b. 1989)
Untitled
c. 2018
Gelatin silver print
Pedro Slim Collection

Kike Arnal (Venezuelan)
Untitled (Emmanuel, trans man and tattoo artist)
2018
From the series Revealing Selves – Transgender Portraits from Argentina
Gelatin silver print
Pedro Slim Collection

When it comes to transgender rights, Argentina is a country rife with contradictions. After being subject to widespread medicalization and incarceration throughout the 20th century, Argentina’s transgender community began to see a number of windfall legal and political wins in the early 21st century that would secure them progress once only dreamed of. These included the Gender Identity Law of 2012, landmark legislation which guarantees transgender Argentinians the right to change their sex in the public record, access free gender reassignment surgery and hormone therapy that doesn’t require medical or psychological diagnoses, and enshrines transgender discrimination protections in law.

But the gulf between legislative gains and reality can be wide in many countries, and Argentina is no exception. Despite these rights, 88 percent of Argentinian trans women have never had a formal job; their average life expectancy is 35, whereas the national average is 77; and only 40 percent graduate from high school. Transgender Argentinians still face massive cultural and social stigma, which can lead to family rejection and poverty.

In Revealing Selves: Transgender Portraits from Argentina … documentary photographer Kike Arnal provides a window into the homes and lives of Argentina’s transgender community, one that captures these contradictions.

Anonymous text. “Revealing Portraits from Argentina’s Transgender Community,” on the Them website April 10, 2018 [Online] Cited 23/02/2022

Cobra Museum of Modern Art
Sandbergplein 1, 1181 ZX Amstelveen

Opening hours:
Tuesday – Sunday 10am – 5pm
Closed Monday

Cobra Museum of Modern Art website

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Exhibition: ‘Under the Mexican Sky: A Revolution in Modern Photography’ at the Palmer Museum of Art, Pennsylvania State University

Exhibition dates: 1st June – 28th July, 2019

Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) 'Dr. Federico Marín, Jean Charlot, and Tina Modotti' 1925 from the exhibition 'Under the Mexican Sky: A Revolution in Modern Photography' at the Palmer Museum of Art, Pennsylvania State University, June - July, 2019

Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958)
Dr. Federico Marín, Jean Charlot, and Tina Modotti
1925
Vintage gelatin silver print
7 1/2 x 9 1/4 inches

Shown with Modotti are Federico Marín, who was Diego Rivera’s brother-in-law and physician, and Jean Charlot, who is here seen making a sketch on Tina’s back.

If there is one period and two countries that I love more than anything else in the history of medium, it is the avant-garde photography of the interwar years in France and the photography of Mexico in the 1920s and 1930s.

American, French and Italian photographers were drawn like bees to a honey pot to the blossoming artistic scene in Mexico City and the country in general. They soaked up the unique Mexican culture, its atmosphere of work, religion, beauty, death, poverty, and sensuality – its churches, religious icons, sculptures, festivals, pottery, and people – the land, the mountains and the inhabitants all photographed in this dazzling light. They photographed in an “international modernism” style (the supposed revolution in modern photography named in the title), expatriate photographers in a hospitable but impoverished land. But this was not their land, for this was not their country.

While Strand “modified his 5 × 7 Graflex camera, adding a special prism extension that enabled him to clandestinely shoot a subject at a 90° angle from the front of his camera”, surreptitiously making portraits as he had done in his New York subway portraits; while Weston documents the murals of Mexican culture at a distance, the clay pots as an abstract composition, and the traditional art and craft Tehuana dress as idealised icon; while Modotti comes closer with her political statements and constructed still life; it is only the Mexican artist Manuel Álvarez Bravo that steals my heart.

His work exudes the spirit of the country through its sensitivity and connection to the earth from which he was born. The light and form in Bravo La Siesta de los Peregrinos; the light and form in Retrato de lo Eterno. I have studied his work quite thoroughly. He is the blessed one. Through his music, he captures the light and life of Mexico, the spirit of the eternal, “the sunlight [as] a discreet veil that turns the shadows into velvet.” His work is the art of the People.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Hands in the Water of the Mind

The water of the mind    has filled with forms.
Come, come closer now,   elusive as
an anemone or a jellyfish    a criminal, a saint;

dip your hand in and pull from the tormented water
angles and profiles, an incessant music,

the murmur of the sky, the mouth of the earth,
the crown of the breeze, the rings of fire,

the bodies of the lynxes, the wings of the bat,
the glasses and the pillow, the brightness of hunger.

David Huerta

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

In the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920), expatriate photographers flocked to the blossoming artistic scene in Mexico City. Los Angelino Edward Weston reinvented his approach to the medium during three years there in the 1920s. In exploring the development of international modernism into the next decades, this exhibition features rare photographs by Italian Tina Modotti, New Yorkers Helen Levitt and Paul Strand, French master Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Mexico’s own Manuel Álvarez Bravo.

“For six months I worked at still photographs of Mexico, made about sixty platinum prints, completed and mounted them. Among other things I made a series of photographs in the churches, of the Christs and Madonnas, carved out of wood by the Indians. They are among the most extraordinary sculptures I have seen anywhere, and have apparently gone relatively unnoticed. These figures so alive with the intensity of the faith of those who made them. That is what interested me, the faith, even if it is not mine; a form of faith, to be sure, that is passing, that has to go. But the world needs a faith equally intense in something else, something more realistic, as I see it. Hence my impulse to photograph these things, and I think the photographs are pretty swell.”

Paul Strand

“At first the brilliance of technique is commented on. Laymen say: What reality! How three-dimensional. Photographers say: What texture! What a scale of values! What print quality! This is a first reaction and the least significant one. All this virtuosity is at the service of what Strand has to express, the felt idea behind the photograph.”

Leo Hurwitz

“Popular Art is the art of the People. A popular painter is an artisan who, as in the Middle Ages, remains anonymous. His work needs no advertisement, as it is done for the people around him. The more pretentious artist craves to become famous, and it is characteristic of his work that it is bought for the name rather than for the work – a name that is built up by propaganda. Before the Conquest all art was of the people, and popular art has never ceased to exist in Mexico.”

Manuel Álvarez Bravo

Charles Betts Waite (American, 1861-1927) 'The Iguana' 1901 from the exhibition 'Under the Mexican Sky: A Revolution in Modern Photography' at the Palmer Museum of Art, Pennsylvania State University, June - July, 2019

Charles Betts Waite (American, 1861-1927)
The Iguana
1901
Vintage gelatin silver print
5 x 7 7/8 inches

In this playful study, the shadows dominate: the bowl of vittles atop the man’s shadow suggest a sombrero shielding a sleeping man’s face during an afternoon siesta.

[Waite] traveled to Mexico City and in May 1897 established a photography studio there, during the Porfirio Díaz government. He became part of Porfirian society, taking photographs of many in the ruler’s circle. He was among a group of expatriate photographers (such as Winfield Scott and fellow San Diegans Ralph Carmichael and Percy S. Cox) working in Mexico in the first decade of the 20th century. Waite traveled throughout Mexico, exploring archaeological sites and the countryside.

[Waite’s life] corresponds with that of adventurers, brave explorers with romantic spirits and materialistic outlooks, who toured the hitherto unknown world, discovering their riches and inventing paradises.” ~ Francisco Montellano, author of C. B. Waite, fotógrafo

His works were published in books, travel magazines, and on post cards, having contracted with the Sonora News Company. He also worked for several Mexican newspapers, and he documented United States scientific expeditions in Mexico. The images often included scenic Mexican images and the country’s native residents. Many of Waite’s photographs depict railroads, parks, archaeological sites, and business enterprises.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Tina Modotti (Italian, 1896-1942)
Experiment in Related Form
1924
Vintage gelatin silver print
7 3/8 x 9 3/8 inches

This is one of only two known photomontages by Modotti, in which a single image of six wine glasses is enlarged and cropped and then superimposed onto itself.

Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958)
Ollas de Oaxaca
1926
Vintage palladium print
8 x 10 inches

An olla is a clay pot or jar. Weston wrote that his first thought of Oaxaca “is always of the market, – and the market means first of all loza – crockery! I bought and bought – dishes, jars, jugettes, – of the dull black or grey-black ware, and of the deep green glaze ware… Very well do these people reproduce, make use of the essential quality of the material, – splendidly do they observe and utilise to advantage the very essence of a form. A race of born sculptors!”

Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958)
Detail of stone frieze, ruins of Mitla, Oaxaca
1926
Vintage gelatin silver print
7 1/2 x 9 1/2 inches

“I was fascinated by the stone mosaics at Mitla, for besides a variation on the Greek fret, there was a unique pattern – oblique lines of dynamic force – flashes of stone lightning, which remain my strongest memory.” ~ Edward Weston, The Daybooks, vol. I.

Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958)
Stone lions in relief, Oaxaca
1926
Vintage gelatin silver print
7 1/2 x 9 1/2 inches

Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958)
Two clay pitchers
1926
Vintage gelatin silver print
7 1/2 x 9 1/4 inches

These studies of pre-Columbian and folk-art statuary and pottery, done for Anita Brenner’s Idols Behind Altars project, taught Weston the art of the table-top still life. As such, they were the direct precursor to the iconic shells, peppers, and cabbages that occupied him immediately upon his return to Los Angeles in December 1926.

Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958)
Tarascan Pottery, Michoacán
1926
Vintage gelatin silver print
7 1/2 x 8 1/4 inches

The Tarascan people flourished from 1100 A.D. to 1530 A.D. After the Spanish Conquest, missionaries organised the Tarascan empire into a series of craft-oriented villages. Their artistic traditions survive today in the Lake Pátzcuaro region.

Tina Modotti (Italian, 1896-1942)
Jean Charlot
1923
Vintage gelatin silver print
9 1/2 x 7 1/2 inches

Anita Brenner and Tina Modotti remained friendly rivals in Mexico City’s close-knit artistic expatriate community throughout the 1920s. Their intertwined social life revolved around the French-Mexican painter Jean Charlot, who had been a principal assistant to Rivera. Charlot was Weston’s closest friend in Mexico as well as Brenner’s paramour and professional collaborator. In a diary entry in 1927, Brenner made a three-column table captioned “Actively Friends; Actively Enemies; and Actively Both.” Modotti’s name appears in the third column.

This sensitive Modotti portrait is inscribed by Charlot to Brenner, “You are bad tempered / I am worst tempered / Does that explain the sweet / Hours we passed together”

Tina Modotti (Italian, 1896-1942)
Elisa Kneeling
1924
Vintage palladium print
8 7/8 x 6 5/8 inches

The power of Modotti’s portrait of her young chambermaid is due to the contrast between her beatific face and her coiled hands, which suggest a lifetime of hard manual labor.

Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958)
Anita (“Pear-Shaped Nude”)
1925
Vintage gelatin silver print
8 5/8 x 7 3/8 inches

“I was shaving when A[nita] came, hardly expecting her on such a gloomy, drizzling day. I made excuses, having no desire, no ‘inspiration’ to work … but she took no hints, undressing while I reluctantly prepared my camera… And then appeared to me the most exquisite lines, forms, volumes – and I accepted, – working easily, rapidly, surely…

Reviewing the new prints, I am seldom so happy as I am with the pear-like nude of A[nita]. I turn to it again and again. I could hug the print in sheer joy. It is one of my most perfect photographs.” ~ Edward Weston, The Daybooks, vol. I

Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958)
Excusado
1926
Gelatin silver print, 1930s
10 x 8 inches

“‘Form follows function.’ Who said this I don’t know, but the writer spoke well! I have been photographing our toilet, that glossy enamelled receptacle of extraordinary beauty. It might be suspicioned that I am in a cynical mood to approach such subject matter… My excitement was absolute aesthetic response to form… I was thrilled! – here was every sensuous curve of the ‘human form divine’ but minus imperfections.” ~ Edward Weston, The Daybooks, vol. I

Weston was particularly amused when his chambermaid placed a bouquet of flowers in the bowl, in a well-meaning effort to create a more fitting subject for her employer’s lens.

Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958)
Casa de Vecindad
1926
Vintage gelatin silver print
7 3/8 x 9 1/2 inches

A casa de vecindad or “neighborhood house” was a community home or tenement. This one had once been “a fine old convent,” wrote Weston. “The light was made perfect by the collective noise of cats and dogs, children laughing and crying, women gabbling and vendors calling.”

Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958)
Arches, Oaxaca
1926
Vintage gelatin silver print
9 1/2 x 7 1/2 inches

Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958)
Guadalajara, Barranca de los Oblatos: Rocky Trail
1925
Vintage palladium print
10 x 8 inches

Mexico City in the 1920s-30s was the scene of one of the great artistic flowerings of the twentieth century. Like Paris in the aftermath of World War I, Mexico City after the decade-long Mexican Revolution served as a magnet for international artists and photographers. Foremost among the expatriate photographers was the Los Angelino, Edward Weston, who embedded himself in the artistic milieu surrounding the muralist painters Rivera, Orozco, and Siqueiros. Weston reinvented his approach to picture-making during his three years in Mexico, 1923-26. The soft-focus painterliness that had characterised his studio portraiture in the ‘teens melted away under the brilliant Mexican sun, to be replaced by crystalline landscapes as well as evocative still life that prefigured his later shells and peppers. Meanwhile his paramour and protégée, the Italian silent film star Tina Modotti, created photographs that would place her in the pantheon of great photographers of the era. This exhibition features rare vintage Mexican masterworks by both Weston and Modotti from the 1920s, as well as stellar photographs from the 1930s by the New Yorker Paul Strand, the Frenchman Henri Cartier-Bresson, and by Mexico’s own self-taught master of the camera, Manuel Álvarez Bravo.

Already in the first two decades of the 20th century, immigrant photographers had played an outsize role in Mexican photography. German-born Hugo Brehme published picturesque views of Mexican life and landscape in local and international tourist magazines, including National Geographic. Brehme’s fellow German émigré, Carl Wilhelm (Guillermo) Kahlo, meticulously photographed Mexico’s colonial architecture; his daughter Frida would marry Diego Rivera and become a legendary painter and personality. A third talented immigrant photographer was the Californian C.B. Waite, who moved to Mexico City in 1897 and opened a photo studio. At their best, as in The Iguana from 1901, seen here, Waite’s genre studies prefigure by a quarter century the exotic Surrealism that would characterise the work of Modotti, Álvarez Bravo, and Cartier-Bresson.

In 1923, C.B. Waite left Mexico and retired to Glendale, California, a suburb of Los Angeles. Coincidentally, within a few months, Glendale’s leading photographer, Edward Weston, would make that same journey in the opposite direction. Weston sought to escape from the personal and professional distractions that he felt were deterring him from an aesthetic breakthrough. His love affair with Tina Modotti made him realise that he would never be a conventional husband. In August, 1923, Weston left the port of Los Angeles and sailed to Mexico on the S.S. Colima, accompanied by Modotti, who agreed to run his studio in exchange for photography lessons.

The Weston-Modotti home in Mexico City became a gathering place for writers, painters and photographers. This was the time of the Mexican Renaissance, a cultural movement that celebrated the country’s modern artists as well as its popular and indigenous arts. Under the presidency of Álvaro Obregón, the education minister José Vasconcelos sponsored an ambitious program of progressive public art, most notably the mural movement which was led by Diego Rivera, who was in all ways a larger-than-life character.

While Weston never second-guessed his decision to give up the steady income from studio portraiture, he and Tina faced constant money problems during their three years together in Mexico. Financial salvation came in the unlikely guise of a brash 19-year-old anthropology student, Anita Brenner. Born to a mercantile family with roots in both Texas and Mexico, Brenner befriended Weston and Modotti in Mexico City and hired them to furnish 400 photographs for her book, Idols Behind Altars. This was to be the first serious art-historical treatise on pre-Columbian art, Spanish Colonial architecture, and contemporary Mexican folk art. Weston and Modotti rose to the task with gusto, criss-crossing southern Mexico from Oaxaca to Guadalajara in search of prime examples of these genres.

Weston was first introduced to pulquerías, or working-class bars, by Diego Rivera, who was writing an article on pulquería mural painting for Mexican Folkways magazine. Weston was impressed by the vitality of these anonymous murals, writing:

“The aspiring young painters of Mexico should study the unaspiring paintings – popular themes – popular art – which adorn the humble pulquería… brave matadores at the kill – white veiled ladies, pensive beside moonlit waters – an exquisitely tender group of Indians … and all the pictured thoughts, nearest and dearest to the heart of the people.”

When Modotti left Mexico in 1930, she gifted her large-format view cameras to her close friend and protégé, Manuel Álvarez Bravo. With a seven-decade career, he is considered Mexico’s greatest photographer. “I was born in the city of Mexico, behind the Cathedral, in the place where the temples of the ancient Mexican gods must have been built, February fourth, 1902,” he wrote, invoking the magical realism that infuses his most iconic photographs. As a teenager he studied painting at the Academia San Carlos, the same art school that Rivera and Orozco had attended. “Interested since always in art, I committed the common error of believing that photography would be the easiest,” he confessed. In addition to Modotti, another important early mentor was the painter Rufino Tamayo, who counselled Álvarez Bravo against the “surface nationalism” of political art, such as that of Rivera, Orozco, or indeed Modotti herself: “Art is a way of expression that has to be understood by everybody, everywhere. It grows out of the earth, the texture of our lives and our experiences.” Tamayo’s words became Álvarez Bravo’s touchstones.

In 1934, Álvarez Bravo befriended the young painter-turned-photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, who had come to Mexico to spend the year photographing in the brilliant natural light not often found in his native Paris. At a technical level their approach to photography diverged: Álvarez Bravo, like Weston and Modotti, favoured traditional large-format view cameras, while Cartier-Bresson, the progenitor of the “decisive moment,” was an early proponent of the hand-held 35mm Leica camera. Yet their common interest in capturing the “accidental theater of the street” outweighed these differences. “Cartier-Bresson and I did not photograph together but we walked the same streets and photographed many of the same things,” Álvarez Bravo recalled. They exhibited together in 1935 in a show entitled Documentary and Anti-Graphic Photographs, first at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City and then at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York. This seminal exhibit was the first time that “street photography” had been placed in a serious fine art setting. Reviewing that show, poet Langston Hughes wrote: “In a photograph by Cartier-Bresson, as in modern music, there is a clash of sunlight and shadow, while in Bravo, the sunlight is a discreet veil that turns the shadows into velvet.”

Text from the Palmer Museum of Art

Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958)
Los Changos Vaciladores (Playful Monkeys), pulquería mural
1926
Vintage gelatin silver print
7 1/2 x 9 1/2 inches

Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958)
Charrito, pulquería mural
1926
Vintage gelatin silver print
7 1/2 x 9 1/2 inches

Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958)
Two children with pulquería mural
1926
Vintage gelatin silver print
9 3/8 x 6 3/4 inches

Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958)
Ceiling of the Church of Santiago, Tupátaro
1926
Vintage gelatin silver print
7 1/2 x 9 1/2 inches

“Few had seen this church of Tupátaro, far from tourist tracks. The ceiling was entirely lacquered, even the beams – a notable achievement in colour, design and craftsmanship. That was a hard day of work. Exposures were prolonged to even fifteen minutes with additional flash light, the while I must remain quite still upon a rickety balcony for fear of jarring the camera, which was real torture with more fleas biting and crawling than I ever knew could jump from a few square feet of space.” ~ Edward Weston, The Daybooks, vol. I

Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) 'Tin roofs, Mexico' 1926

Brett Weston (American, 1911-1993)
Tin roofs, Mexico
1926
Vintage gelatin silver print
7 1/8 x 9 1/2 inches

Edward Weston’s son Brett joined him in his final year in Mexico. Brett was himself a child prodigy photographer, as evidenced by this sensitively balanced and exquisitely printed abstract masterwork, taken when he was fourteen years old.

Theodore Brett Weston (December 16, 1911, Los Angeles – January 22, 1993, Hawaii) was an American photographer. Van Deren Coke described Brett Weston as the “child genius of American photography.” He was the second of the four sons of photographer Edward Weston and Flora Chandler.

Weston began taking photographs in 1925, while living in Mexico with Tina Modotti and his father. He began showing his photographs with Edward Weston in 1927, was featured at the international exhibition at Film und Foto in Germany at age 17, and mounted his first one-man museum retrospective at age 21 at the De Young Museum in San Francisco in January, 1932.

Weston’s earliest images from the 1920s reflect his intuitive sophisticated sense of abstraction. He often flattened the plane, engaging in layered space, an artistic style more commonly seen among the Abstract Expressionists and more modern painters like David Hockney than other photographers. He began photographing the dunes at Oceano, California, in the early 1930s. This eventually became a favourite location of his father Edward and later shared with Brett’s third wife Dody Weston Thompson. Brett preferred the high gloss papers and ensuing sharp clarity of the gelatin silver photographic materials of the f64 Group rather than the platinum matte photographic papers common in the 1920s and encouraged Edward Weston to explore the new silver papers in his own work. Brett Weston was credited by photography historian Beaumont Newhall as the first photographer to make negative space the subject of a photograph. Donald Ross, a photographer close to both Westons, said that Brett never came after anyone. He was a true photographic equal and colleague to his father and “one should not be considered without the other.”

“Brett and I are always seeing the same kinds of things to do – we have the same kind of vision. Brett didn’t like this; naturally enough, he felt that even when he had done the thing first, the public would not know and he would be blamed for imitating me.” Edward Weston – Daybooks – May 24, 1930.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958)
Rosa Covarrubias in Tehuana dress
1926
Vintage gelatin silver print
9 3/8 x 7 1/2 inches

Rosa and Miguel Covarrubias were early promoters of traditional Mexican art and craft; their extensive collection now resides at San Francisco’s Mexican Museum. This striking portrait of Rosa in traditional Zapotec dress was appropriated by Diego Rivera for his painting Tehuana Woman, 1929.

Born in Los Angeles, Rosa Rolanda was a dancer with the Marion Morgan dance troupe and the Ziegfeld Follies. She married the Mexican artist Miguel Covarrubias, who was the leading caricaturist of the jazz age. While Rosa and Miguel were accompanying Edward and Tina on one of their trips for Anita Brenner, they taught Rosa the basics of photography. Later, Man Ray would teach her his technique of cameraless photograms. With such tutelage, it is no surprise that Rosa became a gifted photographer in her own right.

Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958)
Rosa Covarrubias
1926
Vintage gelatin silver print
9 x 6 3/4 inches

Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958)
Palma Bendita
1926
Vintage gelatin silver print
9 1/2 x 7 3/8 inches

The branches of the palma bendita, or “blessed palm,” were believed to have been strewn on the road before Christ during his entry into Jerusalem and are blessed on Palm Sunday, an important Mexican holiday.

Tina Modotti (Italian, 1896-1942)
Campesinos (Workers’ Parade)
1926
Vintage palladium print
8 3/8 x 7 1/2 inches

Modotti’s iconic Campesinos has the same formal structure – circular forms filling the picture frame – as Weston’s Olla Pots of Oaxaca made the same year. But Modotti’s picture adds a political dimension that Weston would by nature recoil from. Modotti’s increasingly fervent politicisation contributed to the dissolution of her relationship with Weston, who was fundamentally apolitical. Weston returned to Los Angeles at the end of 1926; Modotti would remain in Mexico another four years.

Tina Modotti (Italian, 1896-1942)
Bandolier, Corn, Sickle
1927
Vintage gelatin silver print
8 3/4 x 7 1/2 inches

This politically-charged still life, and its companion piece Bandolier, Corn and Guitar, were made the year Modotti formally joined Mexico’s Communist Party. At the time she was modelling for Diego Rivera, a fellow traveler. Modotti’s likeness appears in several of Rivera’s most famous Revolutionary murals; she would also be blamed for the break-up of his marriage to Lupe Marín.

Tina Modotti (Italian, 1896-1942)
Bandolier, Corn and Guitar
1927
Vintage gelatin silver print
9 1/2 x 7 1/2 inches

Tina Modotti (Italian, 1896-1942)
Women of Tehuantepec
1929
Vintage gelatin silver print
9 x 7 1/4 inches

This is one of Modotti’s final masterworks. The following year she would be expelled from Mexico for sedition, due to her work on behalf of the Communist Party. She settled in Russia, giving up photography for relief work with International Red Aid. When the Spanish Civil War erupted in 1936, she joined the fray. She returned to Mexico under a pseudonym in 1939, and died of a heart attack three years later, at age 45, her life the stuff of legend.

Manuel Álvarez Bravo (Mexican, 1902-2002)
La Siesta de los Peregrinos (the siesta of the migrants)
1930s
Vintage gelatin silver print
6 7/8 x 9 3/8 inches

Manuel Álvarez Bravo (February 4, 1902 – October 19, 2002) was a Mexican artistic photographer and one of the most important figures in 20th century Latin American photography. He was born and raised in Mexico City. While he took art classes at the Academy of San Carlos, his photography is self-taught. His career spanned from the late 1920s to the 1990s with its artistic peak between the 1920s and 1950s. His hallmark as a photographer was to capture images of the ordinary but in ironic or Surrealistic ways. His early work was based on European influences, but he was soon influenced by the Mexican muralism movement and the general cultural and political push at the time to redefine Mexican identity. He rejected the picturesque, employing elements to avoid stereotyping. He had numerous exhibitions of his work, worked in the Mexican cinema and established Fondo Editorial de la Plástica Mexicana publishing house. He won numerous awards for his work, mostly after 1970. …

Álvarez Bravo’s photography career spanned from the late 1920s to the 1990s. It formed in the decades after the Mexican Revolution (1920s to 1950s) when there was significant creative output in the country, much of it sponsored by the government wanting to promote a new Mexican identity based on both modernity and the country’s indigenous past.

Although he was photographing in the late 1920s, he became a freelance photographer full-time in 1930, quitting his government job. That same year, Tina Modotti was deported from Mexico for political activities and she left Alvarez Bravo her camera and her job at Mexican Folkways magazine. For this publication, Alvarez Bravo began photographing the work of the Mexican muralists and other painters. During the rest of the 1930s, he established his career. He met photographer Paul Strand in 1933 on the set of the film “Redes”, and worked with him briefly. In 1938, he met French Surrealist artist André Breton, who promoted Alvaréz Bravo’s work in France, exhibiting it there. Later, Breton asked for a photograph for the cover of catalog for an exhibition in Mexico. Alvarez Bravo created “La buena fama durmiendo” (The good reputation sleeping), which Mexican censors rejected due to nudity. The photograph would be reproduced many times after that however.

Alvarez Bravo trained most of the next generation of photographers including Nacho López, Héctor García and Graciela Iturbide. From 1938 to 1939, he taught photography at the Escuela Central de Artes Plásticas, now the National School of Arts (UNAM). In the latter half of the 1960s he taught at the Centro Universitario de Estudios Cinematográficos.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Manuel Álvarez Bravo (Mexican, 1902-2002)
Retrato de lo Eterno (Portrait of the Eternal)
1935
Vintage gelatin silver print
9 1/2 x 7 3/8 inches

Henri Cartier-Bresson (French, 1908-2004)
The Spider of Love, Mexico City
1934
Gelatin silver print c. 1960
6 1/2 x 9 3/4 inches

“I was very lucky. I had only to push the door open. It was so voluptuous, so sensual. I couldn’t see their faces. It was miraculous – physical love in all its fullness. Tonio grabbed a lamp, and I took several shots. There was nothing obscene about it. I could never have got them to pose – a matter of decency.” ~ Cartier-Bresson

Henri Cartier-Bresson (French, 1908-2004)
Calle Cuauhtemoctzin (two prostitutes), Mexico City
1934
Gelatin silver print c. 1960
9 1/8 x 13 3/4 inches

Manuel Álvarez Bravo (Mexican, 1902-2002)
Niña con Leña (Girl with Firewood)
1930s
Vintage gelatin silver print
7 x 9 5/8 inches

Helen Levitt’s photographs of Mexico City, taken in 1941, are a notable exception to her otherwise exclusive focus on New York City during her long career (1930s through 1970s). But the principal subject matter of Levitt’s work was the same in both metropolises: the lives of children in working-class neighbourhoods. In this evocative image, the children’s play is undeterred by their poverty, which is evidenced by their bare feet, the dirt road, and the dilapidated buildings. Levitt studied with the noted photographer Walker Evans; her work was also influenced by the other artists in the present exhibition: like Cartier-Bresson, she favoured the hand-held Leica camera; like Paul Strand, she used a secret sideways lens that enabled her to photograph surreptitiously.

Levitt printed her Mexican photographs only after returning to New York, where they added to her blossoming reputation. Her first one-woman show at the Museum of Modern Art included sixteen photographs from Mexico, including a variant of this image (below).

Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009)
Mexico City
1941
Vintage gelatin silver print
7 1/4 x 9 5/8 inches

Henri Cartier-Bresson (French, 1908-2004)
Mexico
1963
Vintage gelatin silver print
9 3/4 x 6 1/2 inches

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)

Paul Strand achieved early recognition as a protégé of Alfred Stieglitz, the New York photographer and gallerist. In 1917 Stieglitz devoted the final two issues of his Camera Work magazine to Strand’s high modernist photography, which was heavily influenced by avant garde artists such as Paul Cezanne and Pablo Picasso. Stieglitz praised Strand’s work as “brutally direct” and “devoid of all flim-flam.”

By 1932, when Strand drove his Model A Ford from Taos to Mexico, his style had evolved dramatically. Abstraction had given way to humanism, reflecting the influence of his high school photography teacher, the eminent social documentarian Lewis Hine. Strand was now concerned with how people lived, and especially with those aspects of life that “make a place what it is.” Mexico was a logical destination for Strand, whose political concern for the common man intersected with the proletarian goals of the Mexican Revolution.

Over the next several months Strand photographed people and places in rural small towns across southern Mexico, from Michoacán in the West to Oaxaca in the East, unconsciously retracing Edward Weston and Tina Modotti’s footsteps from the 1920s. Strand’s work in Mexico set the tone for the photographic journeys to out-of-the-way destinations in Europe and Africa that would occupy the rest of his long career.

For these Mexican portraits, Strand modified his 5 x 7 Graflex camera, adding a special prism extension that enabled him to clandestinely shoot a subject at a 90° angle from the front of his camera. The subjects of these portraits, absorbedly watching the Yankee photographer at work, were unaware that he was actually aiming his camera at them. Strand had pioneered this technique as a young photographer on the streets of New York.

Strand originally printed his Mexican photographs as platinum prints. The prints shown here are hand-pulled photogravures created for a 1940 portfolio Photographs of Mexico. In his introduction to the portfolio, Strand describes the prints as “a step forward in the art of reproduction processes,” attributing their quality to the production team’s combined two centuries of experience.

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Near Saltillo
1932
Vintage photogravure
5 x 6 3/8 inches

“When you leave the Texas border for about 70 miles – flat desert, it could still be Texas. Then suddenly appear the mountains of the North around Monterrey and Saltillo – amazing mountains. They are a continuation of the American spur – our Rockies I suppose – but how different – utterly fantastic shapes, like mountains in fairy books. And I never saw the forms within each individual mountain – defined – come right at you as those in the North.” ~ Paul Strand to painter John Marin

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Gateway – Hidalgo
1933
Vintage photogravure
10 1/8 x 8 inches

“What have come to be known as ‘Strand clouds’ – heavy, lowering shapes holding rain and threat of storm – appear in a great many of his photographs. A friend of Strand’s remembers him cursing under his breath whenever fluffy, cottony cloud formations, which he referred to as ‘Johnson & Johnson,’ took over the sky; they never appear in his prints.” ~ Calvin Tomkins

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Boy – Hidalgo
1933
Vintage photogravure
6 3/8 x 5 inches

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Man with Hoe – Los Remedios
1933
Vintage photogravure
6 1/4 x 5 inches

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Plaza – State of Puebla
1933
Vintage photogravure
5 x 6 3/8 inches

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Church, Cuapiaxtla
1933
Vintage photogravure
6 3/8 x 5 inches

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Man – Tenancingo
1933
Vintage photogravure
6 1/2 x 5 1/8 inches

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Girl and Child – Toluca
1933
Vintage photogravure
6 1/2 x 5 1/8 inches

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Boy – Uruapan
1933
Vintage photogravure
10 1/8 x 8 1/8 inches

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Cristo – Oaxaca
1933
Vintage photogravure
10 x 8 inches

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Cristo with Thorns – Huexotla
1933
Vintage photogravure
10 1/4 x 8 1/8 inches

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Cristo – Tlacochoaya – Oaxaca
1933
Vintage photogravure
10 1/4 x 8 inches

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Virgin – San Felipe – Oaxaca
1933
Vintage photogravure
10 1/4 x 8 1/8 inches

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Exhibition: ‘Graciela Iturbide’s Mexico’ at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Exhibition dates: 19th January – 12th May, 2019

Curator: Kristen Gresh, Estrellita and Yousuf Karsh Curator of Photographs

Graciela Iturbide (Mexican, b. 1942) 'Desierto de Sonora, México' 1979 from the exhibition 'Graciela Iturbide's Mexico' at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Jan - May, 2019

Graciela Iturbide (Mexican, b. 1942)
Desierto de Sonora, México
1979
Gelatin silver print
35.6 x 35.4cm
Courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
© Graciela Iturbide

From a different world

There’s something consistently awesome about Mexican photography that is so grounded, so essential, and yet at the same time so spiritual.

One of my favourite photographic artists of all time is Manuel Alvarez Bravo, he of the lyrical narrative, the sensual body, the assassinated worker. Iturbide seems to be cut from the same cloth – she was his assistant for two years; he her teacher about photography and life – and his influence is telling in Iturbide’s imaginative and sometimes incongruous images, such as the skull in Mexico… I want to get to know you! (1975, below) or Our Lady of the Iguanas, Juchitán, Mexico (1979, below).

Life, death, violence, sacrifice, beauty, identity and place, mixed with daubs of Surrealism, are constant themes of Mexican photography and this symbology can be seen in Iturbide’s unusual urban geometries and her eye for the unexpected. She is a visionary ethnographer who paints in black and white a story of magical literary realism… seeing through her camera something different than she sees with her eyes directly. She sees, and then feels, a different world.

Octavio Paz, the great Mexican poet, writing about the great Mexican photographer Manuel Alvarez Bravo, said that, “Reality exists, but it is more real in black and white.” And so here. Iturbide feels that black and white is more real than colour – and that reality is in black and white. It is in this tonal space that Graciela Iturbide’s Mexico pictures a place of beauty and contradiction, a place of transformations and interstitial spaces (intermediate, indeterminate spaces), an amalgamation of Indigenous and Spanish traditions. “I always shoot what surprises me,” she says. “My eyes see them, and my heart shoots them.”

Gracia Graciela, oh Graceful Beauty, for your gift to us.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

“Photography is also like life, right? … I think in my case, taking photos as therapy has a lot to do with death with everything I do, with Frida Kahlo, because I like to photograph things in therapy, things that are healing, which is powerful, right?”

Graciela Iturbide

Hear from the Artist | Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Graciela Iturbide (Mexican, b. 1942) 'Mexico City' 1969 from the exhibition 'Graciela Iturbide's Mexico' at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Jan - May, 2019

Graciela Iturbide (Mexican, b. 1942)
Mexico City
1969
Gelatin silver print
Courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
© Graciela Iturbide

Graciela Iturbide (Mexican, b. 1942)
Chalma
1974
Gelatin silver print
Museum purchase with funds donated by John and Cynthia Reed, Charles H. Bayley Picture and Painting Fund, Barbara M. Marshall Fund, Lucy Dalbiac Luard Fund, Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Fund for Photography, Francis Welch Fund, and Jane M. Rabb Fund for Film and Photography
Courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
© Graciela Iturbide

Graciela Iturbide (Mexican, b. 1942)
Casa de la Muerte, Ciudad de México
1975
Gelatin silver print
Museum purchase with funds donated by John and Cynthia Reed, Charles H. Bayley Picture and Painting Fund, Barbara M. Marshall Fund, Lucy Dalbiac Luard Fund, Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Fund for Photography, Francis Welch Fund, and Jane M. Rabb Fund for Film and Photography
Courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
© Graciela Iturbide

Graciela Iturbide (Mexican, b. 1942) 'Volantín, San Martin Tilcajete, Oaxaca, Mexico' (Merry-Go-Round, San Martín Tilcajete, Oaxaca, Mexico) 1976

Graciela Iturbide (Mexican, b. 1942)
Volantín, San Martín Tilcajete, Oaxaca, Mexico (Merry-Go-Round, San Martín Tilcajete, Oaxaca, Mexico)
1976
Gelatin silver print
Museum purchase with funds donated by John and Cynthia Reed, Charles H. Bayley Picture and Painting Fund, Barbara M. Marshall Fund, Lucy Dalbiac Luard Fund, Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Fund for Photography, Francis Welch Fund, and Jane M. Rabb Fund for Film and Photography
Courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
© Graciela Iturbide

Graciela Iturbide (Mexican, b. 1942)
Mujer Ángel, Desierto de Sonora, México (Angel Woman, Sonora Desert, Mexico)
1979
Gelatin silver print
Courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
© Graciela Iturbide

Pedro Meyer. 'Manuel Álvarez Bravo and Graciela Iturbide, Coyoacán (Mexico)' 1983

Pedro Meyer (Spanish, b. 1935)
Manuel Álvarez Bravo and Graciela Iturbide, Coyoacán (Mexico)
1983
Gelatin silver print

When I went to study at the university he was teaching at the university as well and I attended one of his courses; that’s how I got to know him. Then, after a couple of weeks I became his assistant. At that time he was not that famous in Mexico, he was very famous in Europe and the United States. He was known in Mexico but he was not really a big star. So, what I really need to make clear is that he was not just a teacher of photography; he was a teacher about life for me. Because he taught me about everything, he talked about literature, cinematography… so he was more of a teacher of life… he never said this picture is good or this picture is bad, he would never say that flat out. Instead, he would always say something to guide you in the right direction. Yet he would never say, “This is good or this is bad”.

With Álvarez I went to certain little towns but I was only his assistant for two years. After that I made the decision to cut the umbilical cord and make my own way.

Extract from Munem Wasif. “An Interview with Graciela Iturbide,” on the Chobi Mela website, November 24, 2014 [Online] Cited 06/04/2019

Graciela Iturbide (Mexican, b. 1942) 'Festival del Lagarto' 1985

Graciela Iturbide (Mexican, b. 1942)
Festival del Lagarto (Lizard Festival)
1985
Gelatin silver print
Museum purchase with funds donated by John and Cynthia Reed, Charles H. Bayley Picture and Painting Fund, Barbara M. Marshall Fund, Lucy Dalbiac Luard Fund, Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Fund for Photography, Francis Welch Fund, and Jane M. Rabb Fund for Film and Photography
Courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
© Graciela Iturbide

Graciela Iturbide (Mexican, b. 1942)
Dance, Juchitán, México
1986
Gelatin silver print
Courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
© Graciela Iturbide

Graciela Iturbide (Mexican, b. 1942) 'Pajaros en el poste, carretera a Guanajuato, Mexico' 1990

Graciela Iturbide (Mexican, b. 1942)
Pajaros en el poste, carretera a Guanajuato, Mexico (Birds on a post, road to Guanajuato, Mexico)
1990
Gelatin silver print
Museum purchase with funds donated by John and Cynthia Reed, Charles H. Bayley Picture and Painting Fund, Barbara M. Marshall Fund, Lucy Dalbiac Luard Fund, Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Fund for Photography, Francis Welch Fund, and Jane M. Rabb Fund for Film and Photography
Courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
© Graciela Iturbide

Graciela Iturbide (Mexican, b. 1942)
Cayó del Cielo, Chalma, México
1989
Gelatin silver print
Museum purchase with funds donated by John and Cynthia Reed, Charles H. Bayley Picture and Painting Fund, Barbara M. Marshall Fund, Lucy Dalbiac Luard Fund, Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Fund for Photography, Francis Welch Fund, and Jane M. Rabb Fund for Film and Photography
Courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
© Graciela Iturbide

Graciela Iturbide (Mexican, b. 1942)
La danza de la cabrita, antes de la matanza, La Mixteca, Oaxaca, Mexico (The Little Goat’s Dance, Before the Slaughter, La Mixteca, Oaxaca, Mexico)
1992
Gelatin silver print
Museum purchase with funds donated by John and Cynthia Reed, Charles H. Bayley Picture and Painting Fund, Barbara M. Marshall Fund, Lucy Dalbiac Luard Fund, Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Fund for Photography, Francis Welch Fund, and Jane M. Rabb Fund for Film and Photography
Courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
© Graciela Iturbide

A way of life, a way of seeing

This is the first major East Coast presentation of Iturbide’s work, featuring approximately 125 photographs that span her five-decade-long career. Organised into nine sections, the exhibition opens with early photographs, followed by three series focused on three of Mexico’s many indigenous cultures: Juchitán captures the essential role of women in Zapotec culture; Los que viven en la arena (Those Who Live in the Sand) concentrates on the Seri people living in the Sonoran Desert; and La Mixteca documents elaborate goat-slaughtering rituals in Oaxaca, serving as critical commentary on the exploitation of workers. Thematic groupings highlight Iturbide’s explorations of various aspects of Mexican culture, including fiestas, death and mortality, and birds and their symbolism. Her more recent work is presented in two series related to Mexico’s cultural and artistic heritage, featuring plants – mainly cacti – in “intensive care” at the Oaxaca Ethnobotanical Gardens, as well as El baño de Frida (Frida’s Bathroom), depicting personal belongings in Frida Kahlo’s bathroom at the Casa Azul that had been locked away for 50 years after the artist’s death.

Iturbide’s powerful and provocative photographs are anti-picturesque, anti-folkloric. Her work embodies her empathetic approach to photography and her deep connection with her subjects, asking questions through its capacity for imaginary associations. Drawn primarily from Iturbide’s own collection, “Graciela Iturbide’s Mexico” also includes the Museum’s recent acquisition of 37 works by the artist, as well as loans from museums and private collections throughout the US and Mexico. The exhibition is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue produced by MFA Publications.

Text from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston website [Online] Cited 05/04/2019

Graciela Iturbide (Mexican, b. 1942) 'Cementerio de Dolores Hidalgo, Guanajuato, México' 1978

Graciela Iturbide (Mexican, b. 1942)
Cementerio de Dolores Hidalgo, Guanajuato, México (Cemetery of Dolores Hidalgo, Guanajuato, México)
1978
Gelatin silver print
11.3 x 11.3cm
Courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
© Graciela Iturbide

Graciela Iturbide (Mexican, b. 1942)
Jardín Botánico, Oaxaca, México
1998-1999
Gelatin silver print
Courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
© Graciela Iturbide

Graciela Iturbide (Mexican, b. 1942)
Jardín Botánico de Oaxaca, México
2002
Gelatin silver print
35.7 x 32.8cm
Museum purchase with funds donated by John and Cynthia Reed, Charles H. Bayley Picture and Painting Fund, Barbara M. Marshall Fund, Lucy Dalbiac Luard Fund, Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Fund for Photography, Francis Welch Fund, and Jane M. Rabb Fund for Film and Photography
Courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
© Graciela Iturbide

Graciela Iturbide (Mexican, b. 1942)
El Baño de Frida, Coyoacán, Ciudad de México (Frida’s Bathroom, Coyoacán, Mexico City)
2005
Gelatin silver print
35.7 x 35.5cm
Courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
© Graciela Iturbide

Graciela Iturbide (Mexican, b. 1942) 'El Baño de Frida, Coyoacán, Ciudad de México' (prosthetic leg against wall) 2006

Graciela Iturbide (Mexican, b. 1942)
El Baño de Frida, Coyoacán, Ciudad de México (Prosthetic leg against wall, Frida’s Bathroom, Coyoacán, Mexico City)
2006
Gelatin silver print
Museum purchase with funds donated by John and Cynthia Reed, Charles H. Bayley Picture and Painting Fund, Barbara M. Marshall Fund, Lucy Dalbiac Luard Fund, Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Fund for Photography, Francis Welch Fund, and Jane M. Rabb Fund for Film and Photography
Courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
© Graciela Iturbide

Graciela Iturbide (Mexican, b. 1942)
El Baño de Frida, Coyoacán, Ciudad de México (Frida’s Bathroom, Coyoacán, Mexico City)
2006
Gelatin silver print
Courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
© Graciela Iturbide

Nearly 140 Images in Graciela Iturbide’s Mexico Portray Photographer’s Native Country through Her Eyes

Throughout a five-decade-long career, photographer Graciela Iturbide (born 1942) has focused on capturing and understanding the beauty, rituals, challenges and contradictions of her native Mexico. Graciela Iturbide’s Mexico is the first major East Coast presentation of the artist’s work, featuring nearly 140 photographs that tell the visual story of her country since the late 1970s. Going beyond documentary photography, Iturbide’s work reveals Mexico’s complexities through her personal explorations. Focused on the tensions between urban and rural life, human presence and nature, and indigenous and Spanish cultures, her photographs have contributed to Mexico’s visual identity while calling attention to the rich syncretism, diversity and inequalities of Mexican society. The exhibition is drawn primarily from Iturbide’s own collection and also highlights a recent acquisition of her photographs, the first major group of works by the artist to enter the Museum’s collection – 35 purchased by the MFA and two donated by Iturbide. Loans from museums and private collections throughout the U.S., Mexico and France are also included. On view from January 19 through May 12, 2019 in the Henry and Lois Foster Gallery, the exhibition features interpretation in English and Spanish, as well as a documentary video of the artist, produced by the Museum and shot at Iturbide’s studio in Mexico City. Graciela Iturbide’s Mexico is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue produced by MFA Publications, which features more than 100 striking tritone reproductions of evocative photographs alongside essays that invite readers to share in Iturbide’s personal artistic journey. This beautiful volume with a three-piece cloth and printed binding with foil stamping teases out key ideas and visual relationships across different moments in the photographer’s storied career. The exhibition is supported by the Leigh and Stephen Braude Fund for Latin American Art, The Bruce and Laura Monrad Fund for Exhibitions, and the Diane Krane Family and Jonathan and Gina Krane Family Fund. Generous support for the publication was provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Publications Fund.

“I am thrilled to present Graciela’s groundbreaking images to our global audiences, and it has been a pleasure and honour to work closely with her in preparation for this exhibition,” said Kristen Gresh, Estrellita and Yousuf Karsh Curator of Photographs. “Her work has successfully and beautifully brought to the forefront the many untold stories of Mexican culture and history – from the eyes of an insider.”

The exhibition is organised thematically into nine sections and opens with early photographs. One of her first works, Zihuatanejo, México (1969, Collection of Les and Sandy Nanberg), is a pensive portrait of a young girl that marks the beginning of Iturbide’s forays into photographing the diverse peoples of Mexico. Shot during the same year, Mexico City (1969, Collection of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser) portrays a sex worker in what appears to be a cantina or pulquería. In fact, the subject is a figure in a wax museum. The photograph’s graphic background – a mural of a large skull painted on a wall – alludes to both Mexico’s long history of muralism and the country’s fascination with death. Works such as Little Bull / Torito (1982, Collection of Galeria Lopez Quiroga) and Juchitán (1975, MFA) reveal Iturbide’s attraction to unusual urban geometries and her eye for the unexpected. Together, these early images attest to the photographer’s keen observation of Mexican contemporary culture in the 1970s and early 1980s.

The next three sections of the exhibition focus on Iturbide’s deep commitment to photographing different populations throughout Mexico. One of her early projects was to document the way of life of the Seri Indians, a formerly nomadic group of fisherfolk living in the Sonoran Desert in northwestern Mexico. In 1978, Iturbide and anthropologist Luis Barjau immersed themselves within the community, staying for a month and a half on their first trip and another month on the second. The result of their collaboration was the 1981 book Los que viven en la arena ( Those Who Live in the Sand) and a selection of additional photographs that Iturbide printed and exhibited years later. The exhibition features two prints of one of Iturbide’s most well-known works, Angel Woman / Mujer ángel (1979, Collection of Elizabeth and Michael Marcus and Collection of Galeria Lopez Quiroga ), an ethereal image that captures a woman in traditional dress carrying a boom box as she heads down to the empty desert plain. The photograph exemplifies a theme running through the series: the impact of capitalism on the Seri people’s otherwise minimalist culture. This early project confirmed Iturbide’s interests in working thematically, raising her awareness of Mexico’s diversity and building close relationships with her subjects.

Over the course of a decade beginning in 1979, Iturbide traveled regularly to Juchitán, a city in southern Oaxaca. Juchitán is home to the Zapotec culture, in which women are known for their economic, political and sexual independence. Iturbide’s iconic photograph Our Lady of the Iguanas / Nuestra Señora de las Iguanas (1979, Brooklyn Museum) portrays a woman, Zobeida Diaz, wearing a wreath of iguanas on her head as she makes her way to sell them at the market. The iguana has historical importance in Zapotec society, both as a gastronomic delicacy and as an animal believed to have healing properties. Our Lady of the Iguanas, reproduced today on everything from municipal offices to highway signs and murals, has become a symbol for the community of Juchitán and for Zapotec womanhood. Original contact sheets displayed alongside the photograph show a cinematic sequence of Diaz interacting with Iturbide as she poses for the camera. She appears to be overtaken by laughter at certain points – an indication of the artist’s empathetic way of connecting with her subjects. Yellow grease-pencil marks also reveal Iturbide’s working method and creative process, highlighting the image she had chosen to print and how she envisioned cropping it. In her final selection, the iguanas themselves appear to be posing for the camera – an idea that corresponds to Iturbide’s search for the unexpected and the symbolic.

In addition to highlighting the importance of women in Juchitán, Iturbide also captured the society’s openness to muxes – men who dress as women, sometimes referred to as a Zapotec third gender. Her photographs of a muxe named Magnolia – Magnolia with Mirror / Magnolia con espejo (1986, J. Paul Getty Museum) and Magnolia with Sombrero / Magnolia con sombrero (1986, MFA) – demonstrate her ability to connect intimately with the community. Immersing herself in Zapotec culture, Iturbide also recorded the enduring legacy of native traditions – from an annual two-day festival and pilgrimage celebrating an alligator deity to el rapto, a premarital ritual practiced by those in lower and middle classes. Her strong and poetic images of Juchitán not only gained her international recognition, but also became a point of departure for a new vision of Juchitec society that has since been integrated into Mexico’s identity.

Following the Juchitán section are Iturbide’s photographs of the annual goat-slaughtering ritual in the Oaxacan region of La Mixteca, in south-central Mexico. The tradition dates back to colonial times, when Spanish landowners contracted Mixtec workers to butcher animals for sale, and carries on today. Tens of thousands of goats are killed during the month-long festival, which involves ritualistic aspects such as saving a lone animal every year as an act of repentance before the slaughter. Iturbide’s photographs from this series also highlight the exploitation of workers in one of Mexico’s poorest regions, who have created a ritual out of their harsh working conditions as a way of coping with the violence and pain. This experience had a tremendous impact on Iturbide, marking a personal turning point. Her wrenching experience in La Mixteca became the last time she spent extended amounts of time with an indigenous community.

The next three sections focus on themes that recur throughout Iturbide’s oeuvre: fiestas, death and birds. Since the mid-1970s, Iturbide has traveled throughout the country, including Chalma, Oaxaca and Tlaxcala, to observe and record a variety of fiestas – lavish and visually stimulating celebrations, which often include elaborate costumes or disguises. Death is another dominant element of Mexican culture, and Iturbide’s photographs related to the subject reflect both a personal experience and larger cultural manifestations. Her works range from depictions of signs of mortality in everyday life, as seen in the early photograph Mexico… I want to get to know you! / México… Quiero Conocerte! (1975, MFA), to representations of surreal-like funerary rituals and celebrations like the annual Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead). Iturbide’s fascination with birds is intimately linked to her own emotional journey toward overcoming a personal loss. Her photographs of the subject – ranging from spectacular and sublime skies full of birds to close-up portraits of birds in trees and even self-portraits with birds – show her interest in the rites and cycles of the natural world, while also evoking the spiritual world.

In 1998, Iturbide was invited by Francisco Toledo to photograph the newly opened Ethnobotanical Garden of Oaxaca. By design, the garden tells the story of the relationship between the people of Oaxaca and their native plants, which are arranged by ecological and cultural themes. The next section of the exhibition presents these photographs, particularly of cacti undergoing therapeutic treatment. The images, published in her 2004 book Naturata, reflect the caretaking aspect of the garden. A startling view of the tops of several columnar cacti in Botanical Garden / Jardín Botánico (1998-1999) shows them with bundles of newspaper padding and wooden boards as splints, all bound around the plants with rope. In another photograph, Botanical Garden / Jardín Botánico (2002) a thorny treelike plant receives an intravenous treatment as two bags of a cream-coloured liquid drip into lines connected to its limbs.

The final section features the most recent series in the exhibition, El baño de Frida (Frida’s Bathroom), which will be on view from February 27, 2019 through June 16, 2019 in the Museum’s Art of the Americas Wing, alongside another MFA exhibition, Frida Kahlo and Arte Popular. In 2005, Iturbide was commissioned to photograph personal belongings in Frida Kahlo’s bathroom at the Casa Azul, which had been locked away for 50 years following the artist’s death. Iturbide’s stark images provide an emotional narrative about the intimate space within the “Blue House,” where Kahlo was born and died, and the mystery of the objects. Iturbide’s photographs focus primarily on objects related to Kahlo’s pain – from a box of Demerol, an opioid pain medication, to a prosthetic leg. In one photograph, a hospital gown – stained by blood or paint – hangs ominously against the tiled wall, serving as a reminder of Kahlo’s many operations. In another, a self-portrait that depicts Iturbide’s bare feet in Kahlo’s bathtub, the photographer puts herself in the artist’s place and evokes one of Kahlo’s famous paintings, What the Water Gave Me (1938). Iturbide’s images reveal a side of Kahlo that is dramatically different from the colourful magical realist portrayed by her clothes and paintings. In photographing Kahlo’s private space, Iturbide grapples not only with the cultural and symbolic legacy of the painter, but with her own legacy as well. The series reveals a silent dialogue between the two women, two artists of Mexico, who have seen their art as a form of therapy and escape from everyday life.

About Graciela Iturbide

Iturbide was born in 1942 in Mexico City. In 1969, at the age of 27, she enrolled at the film school Centro de Estudios Cinematográficos at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México to become a film director. However, she was soon drawn to the art of still photography as practiced by the Mexican modernist master Manuel Álvarez Bravo, who was teaching at the University. From 1970 to 1971 she worked as Bravo’s assistant, accompanying him on various photographic journeys throughout Mexico. In the early half of the 1970s, Iturbide traveled widely across Latin America – in particular to Cuba and Panama. In 1978, she was commissioned by the Ethnographic Archive of the National Indigenous Institute of Mexico to photograph Mexico’s indigenous population. Iturbide decided to document and record the way of life of the Seri people along the country’s border with Arizona. In 1979, she was invited by the artist Francisco Toledo to photograph the Juchitán people who form part of the Zapotec culture native to Oaxaca in southern Mexico. This series resulted in the publication of her book Juchitán de las Mujeres in 1989. Between 1980 and 2000, Iturbide was invited to work in Cuba, Germany, India, Madagascar, Hungary, France and the U.S., producing a number of important projects. She has enjoyed solo exhibitions at the Centre Pompidou (1982), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1990), J. Paul Getty Museum (2007), MAPFRE Foudation, Madrid (2009), Photography Museum Winterthur (2009) and Barbican Art Gallery (2012), among others. Iturbide is the recipient of the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Foundation Award (1987); the Grand Prize Mois de la Photo, Paris (1988); a Guggenheim Fellowship for the project Fiesta y Muerte (1988); the Hugo Erfurth Award, Leverkusen, Germany (1989); the International Grand Prize, Hokkaido, Japan (1990); the Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie Award, Arles (1991); the Hasselblad Award (2008); the National Prize of Sciences and Arts in Mexico City (2008); an Honorary Degree in photography from Columbia College Chicago (2008); and an Honorary Doctorate of Arts from the San Francisco Art Institute (2009).

Press release from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston website [Online] Cited 05/04/2019

Graciela Iturbide (Mexican, b. 1942)
Señor Enmarcado, Ciudad de México, (Framed Man, Mexico City)
1970
Gelatin silver print
Courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
© Graciela Iturbide

Graciela Iturbide (Mexican, b. 1942)
¡Mexico, Quiero Conocerte!, Chiapas, Mexico (Mexico… I want to get to know you!)
1975
Gelatin silver print
Gift of the artist
Courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
© Graciela Iturbide

Graciela Iturbide (Mexican, b. 1942)
Los Pollos, Juchitán, México (Chickens, Juchitán, Mexico)
1979
Gelatin silver print
Courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
© Graciela Iturbide

“For her, the camera is an instrument of sharing, making visible what, to many, is invisible,” Ms. Gresh said. Ms. Iturbide’s photos, she added, provide “a poetic vision of contemporary culture informed by a sense of life’s surprises and mysteries.”

Graciela Iturbide (Mexican, b. 1942)
Nuestra Señora de las Iguanas, Juchitán, México (Our Lady of the Iguanas, Juchitán, Mexico)
1979
Gelatin silver print
Courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
© Graciela Iturbide

Graciela Iturbide (Mexican, b. 1942)
Iguanas, Juchitán, México
1984
Gelatin silver print
Museum purchase with funds donated by John and Cynthia Reed, Charles H. Bayley Picture and Painting Fund, Barbara M. Marshall Fund, Lucy Dalbiac Luard Fund, Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Fund for Photography, Francis Welch Fund, and Jane M. Rabb Fund for Film and Photography
Courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
© Graciela Iturbide

Graciela Iturbide (Mexican, b. 1942)
Serafina, Juchitán, México
1984
Gelatin silver print
Courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
© Graciela Iturbide

Graciela Iturbide (Mexican, b. 1942)
Magnolia with Mirror, Juchitán, México
1986
Gelatin silver print
Courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
© Graciela Iturbide

Graciela Iturbide (Mexican, b. 1942)
Magnolia (2), Juchitán, México (Magnolia with Sombrero / Magnolia con sombrero)
1986
Gelatin silver print
30 x 47.2cm
Courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
© Graciela Iturbide

“The dark ballast of Iturbide’s photography is a deep knowledge of predation: how humans prey on animals; how multinational corporations subsume developing economies; how modern industry exploits a largely indigenous underclass; how artists wrangle life from their subjects in the name of creation. In one haunting early photograph, a young Cuna woman walks through an open field in Panama, Pepsi-Cola’s logo embroidered on her shirt. The pernicious creep of capitalism, yes, but also its corollary: a vivid reminder that indigenous people, often relegated to an imagined antiquity, are full participants in contemporary life. …

In 1979, the painter Francisco Toledo invited Iturbide to visit his native Juchitán, in southeastern Oaxaca, a town known for its fierce independence and long-standing leftist sympathies. She returned frequently over the next decade, chronicling the public and private life of its largely Zapotec population. As a perpetual guest, Iturbide became a master of the threshold, of doorways and frames, storefront windows and cemeteries, masks and carnival, of the moments preceding and following transformation. …

Contact sheets enclosed in glass vitrines accompany select images, often annotated with grease pencil. According to Iturbide, there are – pace Cartier-Bresson – two “decisive moments” in photography: “One, when you take the photo; and two, when you discover it in the contact sheet, because you often think you took one photo, and another comes out.” In the sheet for Magnolia with Mirror (1986, above), a livewire thread of intimacy is palpable in the sense of giddy experimentation between artist and subject. In the proofs for Our Lady of the Iguanas, Zobeida Díaz shakes the hand of a passerby, adjusts her crown of iguanas, suppresses laughter. The sheets underscore the contingency and providence of any image’s origins, how a slightly upturned lip or shifted frame catapults one into the pantheon while another slips into obscurity.”

Extract from Christopher Alessandrini. “Graciela Iturbide, Visionary Ethnographer,” on The New York Review of Books website [Online] Cited 06/04/2019

Graciela Iturbide (Mexican, b. 1942)
Novia Muerte, Chalma, Mexico
1986
Gelatin silver print
30.5 x 20.5cm (12 x 8 1/8 in.)
Courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
© Graciela Iturbide

Graciela Iturbide (Mexican, b. 1942)
Cuatro Pescaditos, Juchitán, México (Four Little Fishes, Juchitán, Mexico)
1986
Gelatin silver print
Courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
© Graciela Iturbide

Graciela Iturbide (Mexican, b. 1942)
El gallo, Juchitán, México
1986
Gelatin silver print
32 x 47.8cm
Courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
© Graciela Iturbide

Graciela Iturbide (Mexican, b. 1942)
El sacrificio, La Mixteca, Oaxaca, México
1992
Gelatin silver print
35.9 x 64.3cm
Courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
© Graciela Iturbide

Graciela Iturbide (Mexican, b. 1942)
Torito (Little Bull)
1982
Gelatin silver print
Collection of Galeria Lopez Quiroga
Courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
© Graciela Iturbide

Iturbide studied photography at universities in Mexico, where she met her mentor, the teacher, cinematographer, and photographer Manuel Álvarez Bravo. Inspired by Bravo, she developed her particular interest in the daily life of Mexico’s indigenous cultures. Iturbide has photographed things and people found in Mexico City, in her native Juchitán, in Oaxaca, and on the Mexico-U.S. border. Her camera lens often traces Mexico’s rich life of religion and rituals. Torito represents an assemblage of a bicycle frame and a cow’s skull and horn, found in Mexico City, and shows the photographer’s exploration of the relationship between the individual and the broader culture.

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Exhibition: ‘Autophoto’ at Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris

Exhibition dates: 20th April – 24th September, 2017

Artists: Robert Adams • Eve Arnold • Bernard Asset • Éric Aupol • Theo Baart Et Cary Markerink • Sue Barr • Valérie Belin • Martin Bogren • Nicolas Bouvier • David Bradford • Brassaï • Alain Bublex • Edward Burtynsky • Andrew Bush • Ronni Campana • Gilles Caron • Alejandro Cartagena • Kurt Caviezel • Philippe Chancel • Larry Clark • Langdon Clay • Stéphane Couturier • Bruce Davidson • Jean Depara • Raymond Depardon • John Divola • Robert Doisneau • William Eggleston • Elliott Erwitt • Walker Evans • Barry Feinstein • Pierre De Fenoÿl • Alain Fleischer • Robert Frank • Lee Friedlander • Bernhard Fuchs • Paolo Gasparini • Óscar Fernando Gómez • Jeff Guess • Andreas Gursky • Fernando Gutiérrez • Jacqueline Hassink • Anthony Hernandez • Yasuhiro Ishimoto • Peter Keetman • Seydou Keïta • Germaine Krull • Seiji Kurata • Justine Kurland • Jacques Henri Lartigue • O. Winston Link • Peter Lippmann • Marcos López • Alex Maclean • Ella Maillart • Man Ray • Mary Ellen Mark • Arwed Messmer • Ray K. Metzker • Sylvie Meunier Et Patrick Tourneboeuf • Joel Meyerowitz • Kay Michalak et Sven Völker • Óscar Monzón • Basile Mookherjee • Daido Moriyama • Patrick Nagatani • Arnold Odermatt • Catherine Opie • Trent Parke • Martin Parr • Mateo Pérez • Jean Pigozzi • Bernard Plossu • Matthew Porter • Edward Quinn • Bill Rauhauser • Rosângela Rennó • Luciano Rigolini • Miguel Rio Branco • Ed Ruscha • Sory Sanlé • Hans-christian Schink • Antoine Schnek • Stephen Shore • Malick Sidibé • Guido Sigriste • Raghubir Singh • Melle Smets Et Joost Van Onna • Jules Spinatsch • Dennis Stock • Hiroshi Sugimoto • Juergen Teller • Tendance Floue • Thierry Vernet • Weegee • Henry Wessel • Alain Willaume

Jacques Henri Lartigue (French, 1894-1986) 'Une Delage au Grand Prix de l’Automobile Club de France, circuit de Dieppe' June 26, 1912 from the exhibition 'Autophoto' at Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain, Paris, April - Sept, 2017

Jacques Henri Lartigue (French, 1894-1986)
Une Delage au Grand Prix de l’Automobile Club de France, circuit de Dieppe
June 26, 1912
Gelatin silver print
30 x 40cm
Donation Jacques Henri Lartigue, Charenton-le-Pont Photographie Jacques Henri Lartigue
© Ministère de la Culture – France/AAJHL
Exhibition Autophoto from April 20 to September 24, 2017
Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris

I missed this exhibition when I was in Paris recently. A great pity, I would have liked to have seen it. Some rare photographs that I have never laid eyes on before. I especially love Ray K. Metzker’s Washington, DC. The photography in both Paris and London was disappointing during my month overseas. Other than a large exhibition of Gregory Crewdson’s photographs at the Photographers’ Gallery London, there was not much of interest on offer.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

PS. So many more horizontal photographs than vertical, the automobile obviously lending itself to this orientation. I love this observation: “Photography, a tool of immobility, benefited from the automobile, a mobility tool.” And this from Jean Baudrillard: “Riding is a form spectacular amnesia. Everything to discover, everything to be erased.”

Many thankx to Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

“Photographing is a profession. Craftsmanship. A job that one learns, that one makes more or less well, like all trades. The photographer is a witness. The witness of his time. The true photographer is the witness of every day, they are the reporter. “

Germaine Krull

“I think that cars today are almost the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals; I mean the supreme creation of an era, conceived with passion by unknown artists, and consumed in image if not in usage by a whole population which appropriates them as a purely magical object.”

Roland Barthes, Mythologies, Le Seuil, Paris, 1970, p. 150

Thirty years after the exhibition Hommage à Ferrari, the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain will once again focus its attention on the world of cars with the exhibition Autophoto, dedicated to photography’s relationship to the automobile. Since its invention, the automobile has reshaped our landscape, extended our geographic horizons, and radically altered our conception of space and time. The car has also influenced the approach and practice of photographers, providing them not only with a new subject but also a new way of exploring the world and a new means of expression. Based on an idea by Xavier Barral and Philippe Séclier, Autophoto will present over 500 works from the beginning of the 20th century to the present. It will invite us to discover the many facets of automotive culture – aesthetic, social, environmental, and industrial – through the eyes of photographers from around the world. The exhibition will bring together over 90 photographers including both famous and lesser-known figures such as Jacques Henri Lartigue, William Eggleston, Justine Kurland and Jacqueline Hassink, who have shown a fascination for the automobile as a subject or have used it as a tool to take their pictures.

Visite de l’exposition – Autophoto – 2017

Thirty years after the Hommage à Ferrari exhibition which put the spotlight on these legendary cars, the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain presents, on a proposal by Xavier Barral and Philippe Séclier, the Autophoto exhibition devoted to the relationship between photography and the automobile. Since its creation, the automobile has shaped the landscape, allowed the discovery of new horizons and upset our conception of time and space.

Juergen Teller (German, b. 1964) 'OJ Simpson no. 5' Miami 2000 from the exhibition 'Autophoto' at Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain, Paris, April - Sept, 2017

Juergen Teller (German, b. 1964)
OJ Simpson no. 5
Miami 2000
Giclee print
51 x 61cm
Collection of the artist
© Juergen Teller, 2017

Relevé photographique des voies de circulation mondiales réalisé par Michelin
c. 1930
Collection Michelin, Clermont-Ferrand
© Michelin

Studio portraits, 'China' c. 1950, collected by Thomas Sauvin

Seydou Keïta (Malian, 1921-2001) 'Untitled' 1952–1955 from the exhibition 'Autophoto' at Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain, Paris, April - Sept, 2017

Seydou Keïta (Malian, 1921-2001)
Untitled
1952-1955
Gelatin silver print
50 × 60cm
CAAC – The Pigozzi Collection, Geneva
© SKPEAC (The Seydou Keïta Photography Estate Advisor Corporation)

Nicolas Bouvier (Swiss, 1929-1998)
Entre Prilep et Istanbul, Turquie
1953
Musée de l’Élysée, Lausanne
© Fonds Nicolas Bouvier / Musée de l’Élysée, Lausanne

O. Winston Link (American, 1914-2001) 'Hot Shot Eastbound' 1956

Ray K. Metzker (American, 1931-2014)
Washington, DC
1964
Gelatin silver print
20 × 25.5cm
Courtesy Les Douches la Galerie, Paris/Laurence Miller Gallery, New York
© Estate Ray K. Metzker, courtesy Les Douches la Galerie, Paris/Laurence Miller Gallery, New York

Bernard Plossu (French, b. 1945)
Sur la route d’Acapulco, Mexique
1966
From Le Voyage mexicain series
Gelatin silver print
18 × 27cm
Courtesy of the artist/Galerie Camera Obscura, Paris
© Bernard Plossu

Bernard Plossu (French, b. 1945)
Chiapas, Mexique
1966
From Le Voyage mexicain series
Gelatin silver print
18 × 27cm
Courtesy of the artist/Galerie Camera Obscura, Paris
© Bernard Plossu

“A panorama framed by the rectangle of the windshield. A long ribbon of asphalt, a line of flight that stretches towards the horizon. For more than a century, we can capture this image and travel the world by car, this photographic “box”. Automotive and photography, two tools to model the landscape, two mechanics of the traction and attraction, have emerged at the end of the nineteenth century, through new rhythms and new rites, the society of modern times. If the photograph allows multiple views and list them, to memorise the movement and leave a trace, the automobile makes it possible to move in space. Photography, a tool of immobility, benefited from the automobile, a mobility tool. And if the automobile like photography is constantly evolving, these two inventions have parallel paths in order to better, to master space-time. “Riding is a form spectacular amnesia. Everything to discover, everything to be erased,”1 writes Jean Baudrillard.”

From the foreword by commissioners of the exhibition Xavier Barral and Philippe Séclier

1/ Jean Baudrillard, Amérique, Grasset, Paris, 1986, p. 15

Henry Wessel (American, 1942-2018)
Pennsylvania
1968
Courtesy Galerie Thomas Zander, Cologne
© Henry Wessel, courtesy Galerie Thomas Zander, Cologne.

William Eggleston (American, b. 1939)
Los Alamos series
1965-1968
Dye-transfer print
40.5 × 50.5cm
Eggleston Artistic Trust, courtesy David Zwirner, New York/London
© Eggleston Artistic Trust. Courtesy David Zwirner, New York/London

Henry Wessel (American, 1942-2018)
Los Alamos series
c. 1974
Inkjet print
56 × 73.5cm
Eggleston Artistic Trust, Memphis
© Eggleston Artistic Trust, Memphis

Bill Rauhauser (American, 1918-2017)
Detroit Auto Show series
c. 1975
Detroit Institute of Arts, don de l’artiste en mémoire de Doris Rauhauser
© 2007 Rauhauser Photographic Trust. All Rights Reserved

Langdon Clay (American, b. 1949) 'Zizka Cleaners car, Buick Electra' 1976

Langdon Clay (American, b. 1949)
Zizka Cleaners car, Buick Electra
Series Cars, New York City, 1976
Slide-show
Courtesy of the artist
© Langdon Clay

Joel Meyerowitz (American, b. 1938)
Upstate New York
1977
Collection Joel Meyerowitz Photography, New York
© Joel Meyerowitz, courtesy Polka Galerie, Paris

Bernard Asset (French, b. 1955)
Passager d’Alain Prost (Alain Prost au volant d’une Renault RE30B, tests F1 sur le circuit Dijon-Prenois)
1982
Collection de l’artiste
© Bernard Asset

David Bradford (American, b. 1951)
Coaster Ride Stealth
1994
From Drive-By Shootings series
C-print
28 × 35.5cm
Courtesy of the artist
© David Bradford

Andrew Bush (American, b. 1956)
Woman Waiting to Proceed South at Sunset and Highland Boulevards, Los Angeles, at Approximately 11:59 a.m. One Day in February 1997
1997
From Vector Portraits series
C-print
122 × 151cm
Courtesy M+B Gallery, Los Angeles
© Andrew Bush

Rosângela Rennó (Brazilian, b. 1962)
Cerimônia do Adeus series
1997-2003
C-print face-mounted on Plexiglas
50 × 68 cm
Courtesy of the artist/Cristina Guerra Contemporary Art, Lisbon
© Rosângela Rennó

Valérie Belin (French, b. 1964)
Untitled
2002
Gelatin silver print
61 x 71.5cm (framed)
Courtesy of the artist/Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris/Brussels
© Valérie Belin/ADAGP, Paris 2017

Stéphane Couturier (French, b. 1957)
MELT, Toyota No. 8
2005
From Melting Point, Usine Toyota, Valenciennes series
C-print
92 × 137cm
Collection of the artist
Courtesy La Galerie Particulière, Paris/Brussels
© Stéphane Couturier

Óscar Fernando Gómez (Mexican, b. 1970) 'Windows' series, 2009

Óscar Fernando Gómez (Mexican, b. 1970)
Windows series
2009
Slide show
Courtesy Martin Parr Studio, Bristol
© Óscar Fernando Gómez

Alain Willaume (French, b. 1956)
#5069
2012
From the Échos de la poussière et de la fracturation series
Collection de l’artiste
© Alain Willaume (Tendance Floue)

Peter Lippmann (American works Paris, b. 1956)
Citroën Traction 7
2012
From the Paradise Parking series
C-print
75 × 100cm
Collection of the artist
© Peter Lippmann

Justine Kurland (American, b. 1969)
280 Coup
2012
Inkjet Print
47 x 61cm
Courtesy of the artist/Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York
© Justine Kurland

Melle Smets and Joost Van Onna
Turtle 1. Building a Car in Africa
2016
Courtesy des artistes / Paradox, Edam
© Melle Smets et Joost Van Onna

Luciano Rigolini (Swiss, b. 1950)
Tribute to Giorgio de Chirico
2017
Duratrans in lightbox
124 x 154cm
Collection of the artist
© Luciano Rigolini (appropriation – unknown photographer, 1958)

First Visions: A New Subject for Photography

In the early 20th century, the automobile and its impact on the landscape had already become a subject of predilection for many photographers, influencing both the form and content of their work. The exhibition will begin by focusing on early photographers like Jacques Henri Lartigue, Germaine Krull, and Brassaï, who used the automobile to varying degrees in their work. They registered the thrill of speed, the chaos of Parisian traffic or the city’s dramatic car-illuminated nocturnal landscape to represent a society in transition at the birth of the modern age. Other photographers of the time were attracted by the promise of freedom and mobility offered by the automobile. Anticipating the modern road trip, Swiss writers and photographers Ella Maillart and Nicolas Bouvier, travelled throughout Asia in the 1930s and 1950s respectively, using their cars and cameras to record their adventures along the way.

Auto Portraits

The exhibition will also present a series of “auto portraits”* made by a variety of photographers from the mi-twentieth century to the present. Yashuhiro Ishimoto and Langdon Clay’s photographs, for example, are portraits in profile of cars parked on sparsely inhabited city streets, that immerse the viewer in a different eras and atmospheres. Ishimoto’s black and white photographs, taken in Chicago in the 1950s, emphasise their polished, curved silhouettes in a distanced and serial manner, while Langdon Clay’s colour pictures taken in New York in the 1970s, show their decaying and dented chassis in an eerie nocturnal light. Other works in this section, such as the found photographs of Sylvie Meunier and Patrick Tourneboeuf’s American Dream series, or the flamboyant portraits of African photographers Seydou Keïta and Sory Sanlé, focus on the role of the automobile as a emblem of social mobility showing proud owners posing with their cars.

*A play on words in French: auto portrait meaning self-portrait.

The Car as a Medium: New Perspectives on the Landscape

Many photographers have exploited the technical and aesthetic possibilities offered by the automobile, using it like a camera to capture the surrounding landscape through car windows or the reflections in rear-view mirrors.

Cars have determined the framing and composition as well as the serial nature of the photographs of Joel Meyerowitz, Daido Moriyama, John Divola and David Bradford who have all worked from moving cars. From behind their windshields, these photographers capture an amusing store sign, a white car behind a wire fence, a dog running along a dusty road, a highway stretching out into the horizon. Other photographers, including Sue Barr, Robert Adams, Ed Ruscha, and Alex MacLean scrutinise our car-altered environment. Their landscape is no longer one of magnificent mountains, wondrous waterfalls or awe-inspiring canyons, but of a world transformed by the automobile with its suburban housing complexes, parking lots, and highway infrastructure.

Our Car Culture: Industry, History and New Ways of Life

Many photographers have explored other aspects of our car culture, from the car industry and its impact on the environment to its role in history and society. Both Robert Doisneau and Robert Frank registered life in the factory, from the machines and productions lines to the activities of the workers lives, the first at the Renault plant in the 1930s and the second at Ford River Rouge in the 1950s. Their photographs, unique in their attention to individual assembly line workers, contrast with the work of contemporary photographer Stéphane Couturier whose deliberately distanced, impersonal pictures taken at a Toyota factory reflect the increasingly dehumanised nature of contemporary industry. Working in Ghana, far from the automated factory photographed by Stéphane Couturier, Dutch artist Melle Smets, and sociologist Joost Van Onna, put industrial waste from the car industry to good use. Collaborating with local craftsman in a region called Suame Magazine, where cars are disassembled and their parts traded, they created a car specifically for the African market called Turtle 1, using parts from different brands that happened to be available. Their installation, which includes photographs, drawings, and videos, documents the entire fabrication process of this car.

Photographers such as Philippe Chancel, Éric Aupol and Edward Burtynsky are concerned with the car industry’s damage to the environment. Philippe Chancel’s work focuses on the city of Flint and its dismantled General Motors factory, while Éric Aupol’s and Ed Burtynsky’s photographs reveal the sculptural yet apocalyptic beauty of industrial waste sites.

Other photographers reveal how the car plays an important role in historical events, in society and in daily life. Arwed Messmer’s Reenactement series brings together photographs from the archives of the Stasi showing how people used cars in unusual ways to escape from East Germany, and Fernando Gutiérrez work, Secuelas, explores the role of the Ford Falcon, a symbol of Argentina’s military dictatorship, in the collective imaginary of the Argentinean people. Jacqueline Hassink’s immersive projection Car Girls investigates the role and status of women who work in car shows around the world. Martin Parr’s series From A to B chronicles the thoughts dreams and anxieties of British motorists. Still other series by photographers such as Rosângela Rennó, Óscar Monzón, Kurt Caviezel and Bruce Davidson show how the car has become an extension of the home, used for weddings and picnics, living and sleeping, arguments and making love.

The Fondation Cartier has also invited artist Alain Bublex to create for the exhibition a series of 10 model cars that cast a fresh eye on the history of automobile design. His installation combines photographs, drawings and models to explore how the car design has evolved over time incorporating new techniques, forms, and practices.

Despite energy crises, ecology movements, and industrial mismanagement, the car remains essential to our daily lives. At a time when we are questioning the role and the future of the automobile in our society, the Autophoto exhibition reexamines, with nostalgia, humour, and a critical eye, this 20th century symbol of freedom and independence.

The Catalogue

Bringing together over 600 images, the catalogue of the Autophoto exhibition reveals how photography, a tool privileging immobility, benefited from the automobile, a tool privileging mobility. The catalogue features iconic images by both historic and contemporary photographers who have captured the automobile, and transformed this popular accessible object through their passionate and creative vision. Quotes by the artists, and a chronology of automobile design, as well as interviews and texts by specialists provide a deeper understanding of this vast topic through a variety of aesthetic, sociological, and historical perspectives.

Press release from The Fondation Cartier

Peter Keetman (German, 1916-2005) 'Hintere Kotflügel' 1953

Peter Keetman (German, 1916-2005)
Hintere Kotflügel (Rear fenders)
1953
From Eine Woche im Volkswagenwerk (A week at the Volkswagenwerk) series
Gelatin silver print
27 × 24.5cm
Nachlass Peter Keetman/Stiftung F.C. Gundlach, Hamburg
© Nachlass Peter Keetman/Stiftung F.C. Gundlach, Hamburg

Ed Ruscha (American, b. 1937)
7133 Kester, Van Nuys
1967
Thirtyfour Parking Lots series
Chipmunk Collection
© Ed Ruscha, courtesy Gagosian Gallery

Malick Sidibé (Malian, 1935-2016)
Taximan avec voiture
1970
Gelatin silver print
40 x 30cm
Courtesy Galerie Magnin-A, Paris
© Malick Sidibé

Lee Friedlander (American, b. 1934)
Montana
2008
From the America by Car series
Gelatin silver print
37.5 × 37.5cm
Courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
© Lee Friedlander, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Lee Friedlander (American, b. 1934)
California
2008
From the America by Car series
Gelatin silver print
37.5 × 37.5cm
Courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
© Lee Friedlander, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Alejandro Cartagena (Mexican, b. 1977) 'The Carpoolers' series 2011–2012

Alejandro Cartagena (Mexican, b. 1977)
The Carpoolers series
2011-12
Installation of 15 inkjet prints
55.5 × 35.5cm (each)
Courtesy Patricia Conde Galería, Mexico City
© Alejandro Cartagena

Ronni Campana (Italian, b. 1987)
Badly Repaired Cars series
2016
Inkjet print
60 × 40cm
Collection of the artist
© Ronni Campana

Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain
261 Boulevard Raspail, Paris

Opening hours: Every day except Mondays, 11am – 8pm
Opening Tuesday evenings until 10pm

Fondation Cartier website

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Exhibition: ‘Dream States: Contemporary Photographs and Video’ at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Exhibition dates: 16th May – 30th October, 2016

Curators: Mia Fineman, Associate Curator; and Beth Saunders, Curatorial Assistant in the Department of Photographs at The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Manuel Alvarez Bravo (Mexican, 1902-2002) 'La Buena Fama Durmiendo (The Good Reputation Sleeping)' 1939, printed c. 1970s from the exhibition 'Dream States: Contemporary Photographs and Video' at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, May - Oct, 2016

Manuel Alvarez Bravo (Mexican, 1902-2002)
La Buena Fama Durmiendo (The Good Reputation Sleeping)
1939, printed c. 1970s
Gelatin silver print
Mat: 16 × 20 in. (40.6 × 50.8cm)
The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1973

The best fun I had with this posting was putting together the first twelve images. They seem to act as ‘strange attractors’, a feeling recognised by the curators of the exhibition if you view the first installation photograph by Anders Jones, below.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to photographer Anders Jones and the Duggal website for allowing me to publish the installation photographs in the posting.

Artists have always turned to dreams as a source of inspiration, a retreat from reason, and a space for exploring imagination and desire. In the history of photography, dreams have been most closely associated with the Surrealists, who pushed the technical limits of the medium to transform the camera’s realist documents into fantastical compositions. Whereas their modernist explorations were often bound to psychoanalytic theories, more recently contemporary photographers have pursued the world of sleep and dreams through increasingly open-ended works that succeed through evocation rather than description.

This exhibition takes a cue from the artists it features by displaying a constellation of photographs that collectively evoke the experience of a waking dream. Here, a night sky composed of pills, a fragmented rainbow, a sleeping fairy-tale princess, and an alien underwater landscape illuminate hidden impulses and longings underlying contemporary life. Drawn entirely from The Met collection, Dream States features approximately 30 photographs and video works primarily from the 1970s to the present.

Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Anselm Kiefer (German born Donaueschingen, b. 1945) 'Brünnhilde Sleeps' 1980 from the exhibition 'Dream States: Contemporary Photographs and Video' at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, May - Oct, 2016

Anselm Kiefer (German born Donaueschingen, b. 1945)
Brünnhilde Sleeps
1980
Acrylic and gouache on photograph
23 x 32 7/8in. (58.4 x 83.5cm)
Denise and Andrew Saul Fund, 1995
© Anselm Kiefer

Near the end of Wagner’s second opera of the Ring Cycle, Die Walküre (The Valkyrie), the Valkyrie Brünnhilde, having attempted to help the sibling lovers Siegmund and Sieglinde against their father’s wishes, is punished for her betrayal. Wotan puts her to sleep and surrounds her with a ring of fire (she will be awakened in turn by her nephew Siegfried, the incestuous son of Siegmund and Sieglinde, in the third opera of the cycle).

Kiefer portrays the dormant Brünnhilde as French actress Catherine Deneuve in François Truffaut’s film Mississippi Mermaid, using a photograph he snapped in a movie house in 1969. In the film, Deneuve plays a deceitful mail-order bride who comes to the island of Réunion to marry a plantation owner, played by Jean-Paul Belmondo. Aside from the parallels of love and betrayal in both the Ring Cycle and Truffaut’s film, Kiefer thought the choice of Deneuve for Brünnhilde both ironic and amusing: she was for him “the contrary of Brünnhilde. Very slim, very French, very cool, very sexy,” hinting that no man would go through fire to obtain Wagner’s corpulent, armoured Valkyrie.

Eugène Atget (French, Libourne 1857-1927 Paris) 'Versailles' 1924-1925

Eugène Atget (French, Libourne 1857-1927 Paris)
Versailles
1924-25
Salted paper print from glass negative
Image: 17.5 x 21.9cm (6 7/8 x 8 5/8 in.)
Sheet: 18 × 21.9cm (7 1/16 × 8 5/8 in.)
Mat: 40.6 × 50.8cm (16 × 20 in.)
Gilman Collection, Purchase, Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee Gift, 2005

From 1898 until his death in 1927, Atget exhaustively documented the remains of Old Paris: the city’s streets, monuments, interiors, and environs. Among the last entries in this self-directed preservationist effort was a series of images of landscapes and sculpture in the parks of Saint-Cloud and Versailles. Here, the photographer records a statue of a sleeping Ariadne, the mythical Cretan princess abandoned by her lover Theseus on the island of Naxos. Atget’s simultaneously realistic and otherworldly photographs inspired the Surrealist artist Man Ray, who reproduced four of them in a 1926 issue of the journal La Révolution Surréaliste, thus presenting the elder photographer as a modernist forerunner.

Robert Frank (American, 1924-2019)
Fourth of July, Coney Island
1958
Gelatin silver print
Image: 26 x 35.6 cm (10 1/4 x 14 in.)
Mat: 47 × 57.2cm (18 1/2 × 22 1/2 in.)
Purchase, Alfred Stieglitz Society Gifts, 2002
© 2005 Robert Frank

As he traveled around the country in 1955-1956 making the photographs that would constitute his landmark book, The Americans, Frank’s impression of America changed radically. He found less of the freedom and tolerance imagined by postwar Europeans, and more alienation and racial prejudice simmering beneath the happy surface. His disillusionment is poignantly embodied in this image of a disheveled African-American man disengaged from the crowd and asleep in a foetal position amid the debris of an Independence Day celebration on Coney Island.

This was one of the last still photographs Frank made before he devoted his creative energy to filmmaking in the early 1960s. As such, it may be interpreted as an elegy to still photography; the lone figure functions as a surrogate for Frank himself, as he turned his back on Life – like photojournalism to concentrate on the more personal, dreamlike imagery of his films.

Shannon Bool (Canadian, b. 1972)
Vertigo
2015
Gelatin silver print
Image: 7 13/16 × 11 13/16 in. (19.8 × 30cm)
Gift of Shannon Bool and Daniel Faria Gallery, 2015
© Shannon Bool

This photogram – made without a camera by placing a collage of transparencies on a photosensitive sheet of paper and exposing it to light – is part of a series portraying psychoanalysts and their patients. Here, a patient on a Freudian couch is seen from above; the figure, sheathed in patterns of Maori origin, appears to come apart at the seams under the analyst’s scrutiny.

Nan Goldin (American, born Washington, D.C., 1953)
French Chris on the Convertible, NYC
1979
Silver dye bleach print
Image: 50.8 x 61cm (20 x 24in.)
Mat: 63.5 × 81.3cm (25 × 32 in.)
Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 2001
© Nan Goldin Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery

Following in the tradition of Robert Frank and Helen Levitt, Goldin is her generation’s greatest practitioner of the “snapshot aesthetic” in photography – the intimate, diaristic mode that yields images that, in the right hands, are both spontaneous and carefully seen, tossed off and irreducibly right. In this early work, the artist has captured her friend as a Chatterton of the Lower East Side, lying across the back of a blue convertible with shirt open, eyes closed, and an empty can of Schaeffer beer by his side instead of arsenic – a contemporary vision of glamorous surrender for our own time.

Arthur Tress (American, b. 1940)
Boy in Flood Dream, Ocean City, New Jersey
1972
Gelatin silver print
Mat: 18 × 18 in. (45.7 × 45.7cm)
Gift of the artist, 1973

In the late 1960s, Tress began audio-recording children recounting their dreams and nightmares. He then collaborated with the young people, who acted out their tales for the camera, and published the resulting surreal images in the 1972 book The Dream Collector. Many of the children shared common nightmare scenarios such as falling, drowning, and being trapped, chased by monsters, or humiliated in the classroom. Here, a young boy clings to the roof of a home that has washed ashore as if after a flood. The desolate landscape evokes the sort of non-place characteristic of dreams and conveys feelings of loneliness and abandonment.

Installation view of the exhibition 'Dream States: Contemporary Photography and Video' at the Metropolitan Museum of Art Photo by Anders Jones

Installation view of the exhibition Dream States: Contemporary Photography and Video at the Metropolitan Museum of Art featuring at lower right, Nan Goldin’s French Chris on the Convertible, NYC (1979)
Photo: Anders Jones

Sophie Calle (French, born Paris, 1953)
Gloria K., first sleeper. Anne B., second sleeper
1979
Gelatin silver prints
Image: 12.6 x 18.4cm (4 15/16 x 7 1/4in.)
Mat: 35.6 × 43.2cm (14 × 17 in.)
Gift of the artist and Olivier Renaud-Clement, in memory of Gilles Dusein, 2000
© Sophie Calle

While obviously indebted to the deadpan photo-text combinations of Conceptualism, Calle’s art is as purely French at its core as the novels of Marguerite Duras and the films of Alain Resnais – an intimate exploration of memory, desire, and obsessive longing. The artist’s primary method involves a perfectly calibrated interplay between narrative and image, both of which steadily approach their object of desire only to find another blind spot-that which can never be captured through language or representation.

This work is the first segment of Calle’s first work, The Sleepers (1979), in which the artist invited twenty-nine friends and acquaintances to sleep in her bed consecutively between April 1 and April 9, during which time she photographed them once an hour and kept notes recording each encounter. All the elements of Calle’s art-from the voyeuristic inversion of the private sphere (rituals of the bedroom) and the public (the book or gallery wall) to the use of serial, repetitive structures-are present here in embryonic form.

Paul Graham (British, b. 1956)
Senami, Christchurch, New Zealand
2011
Chromogenic print
Image: 44 1/4 in. × 59 in. (112.4 × 149.9cm)
Purchase, Vital Projects Fund Inc. Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel and Hideyuki Osawa Gift, 2015

Graham’s series, Does Yellow Run Forever?, juxtaposes three groups of photographs: rainbows arcing over the Irish countryside, the facades of pawn-and-jewellery shops in New York, and tender studies of his partner asleep. The thematic links between the images (the rainbow’s mythical pot of gold, the sparkling objects in the Harlem window display, and a sleeping dreamer) may seem obvious, even pat, but Graham’s photographs transmute those clichés into a constellation of deep feeling. These luminous vignettes evoke a sense of longing and pathos, the quest for something permanent amid the illusory and devalued.

Peter Hujar (American, Trenton, New Jersey 1934-1987 New York)
Girl in My Hallway
1976
Gelatin silver print
Image: 37 x 37.1cm (14 9/16 x 14 5/8 in.)
Mat: 63.5 × 63.5cm (25 × 25 in.)
Purchase, Alfred Stieglitz Society Gifts, 2006
© The Peter Hujar Archive, L.L.C.

Brassaï (French born Romania, Brașov 1899-1984 Côte d’Azur)
A Vagrant Sleeping in Marseille
1935, printed 1940s
Gelatin silver print
Image: 17.2 x 23.3cm (6 3/4 x 9 3/16in.)
Mat: 43.2 × 35.6cm (17 × 14 in.)
Gift of the artist, 1980
Copyright © Gilberte Brassaï

The inevitable suggestion that the homeless, hungry man sprawled on the sidewalk might be dreaming of a finely dressed and improbably large salad links Brassaï’s photograph to the work of the Surrealists. Although he frequently depicted thugs, vagrants, and prostitutes, he did so without judgment or political motive; his were pictures meant to delight or perplex the eye and mind-not to prompt a social crusade.

Installation view of the exhibition Dream States: Contemporary Photography and Video at the Metropolitan Museum of Art showing at left, Paul Graham’s Gold Town Jewellery, East Harlem, New York (2012); and at right, Paul Graham’s Senami, Christchurch, New Zealand (2011), both from the series Does Yellow Run Forever?
Photo: Anders Jones

The psychological fluidity of the medium has been noted before by the Met. In 1993, to celebrate its purchase of the Gilman Collection, the curator Maria Morris Hambourg chose to call her exhibition The Waking Dream. The title came from Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” and suggested, in Hambourg’s words, “the haunting power of photographs to commingle past and present, to suspend the world and the artist’s experience of it in unique distillations.”

Conceptual latitude can benefit curators, giving them plenty of room to manoeuvre in making their selections, or it can be a detriment if a loose framework has so many sides that it won’t support an argument.

Dream States suffers from the latter, even though the leeway of the title allows splendid pictures in disparate styles to be displayed together. Organised by associate curator Mia Fineman and assistant curator Beth Saunders around a theme that isn’t notably pertinent or provocative, the show has no discernible reason for being. It isn’t stocked with recent purchases – fewer than ten of the works entered the collection in this decade – and it isn’t tightly edited. To quality for inclusion here a photograph need only depict someone lying down or with eyes closed. A “dream state” seems to be loosely defined. It can be as a starry or cloudless sky; a tree-less landscape; inverted or abstract imagery; or something blurry.

Richard B. Woodward. “Dream States: Contemporary Photography and Video @Met,” on the Collector Daily website July 11, 2016 [Online] Cited 06/10/2016

Jack Goldstein (American born Canada, 1945-2003)
The Pull
1976
Chromogenic prints
Frame: 76.2 x 101.6cm (30 x 40 in.) each
Purchase, The Buddy Taub Foundation Gift and Vital Projects Fund Inc. Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 2009
© The Estate of Jack Goldstein

Born in the postwar baby boom, Goldstein grew up surrounded by the products of the rapidly expanding media culture-movies, television, newspapers, magazines, and advertisements of all kinds. Young artists such as Goldstein went on to be educated in the rigorous and reductive principles of Minimal and Conceptual art during the 1970s but knew from personal experience that images shape our sense of the world and who we are, rather than vice versa; they made their art reflect that secondhand relationship to reality.

In this early work, Goldstein has lifted, or “appropriated,” images of a deep sea diver, a falling figure, and a spaceman from unknown printed sources – isolating them from their original contexts and setting them at a very small scale against monochromatic backgrounds (green for sea, blue for sky, and white for space), as if the viewer were seeing them from a great distance. Because the viewer is unlikely to have seen such figures firsthand, that distance is not merely spatial but also epistemological in nature-the images trigger memories based not on original encounters but on reproductions of experience. The Pull – Goldstein’s only photographic work in a career that spanned painting, performance, film, and sound recordings – was included in “Pictures,” a seminal 1977 exhibition at Artist’s Space in New York, which also introduced the public to other young artists making use of appropriation, such as Sherrie Levine, Robert Longo, and Troy Brauntuch.

Sarah Anne Johnson (Canadian, b. 1976)
Glitter Bomb
2012
Chromogenic print with glitter and acrylic paint
Sheet: 29 7/8 in. × 53 in. (75.9 × 134.6cm)
Purchase, Funds from Various Donors in memory of Randie Malinsky, 2016
© Sarah Anne Johnson

Johnson works primarily with photography but also employs a variety of other media – sculpted figurines, dioramas, paint, ink, and bursts of glitter – to amplify the emotional power of her images. Glitter Bomb belongs to a series exploring the bacchanalian culture of summer music festivals. At once ominous and ecstatic, the image evokes the blissed-out mind-set of young revellers taking part in a modern-day rite of passage.

Oliver Wasow (American, b. 1960)
Float
1984-2008, printed 2009
Inkjet prints
Frame: 17.3 x 22.3cm (6 13/16 x 8 3/4 in.)
Overall: 116.8 x 152.4cm (46 x 60 in.)
Purchase, Vital Projects Fund Inc. Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 2010
© Oliver Wasow

Wasow has a long-standing fascination with science fiction, apocalyptic fantasies, and documentation of unidentified flying objects. In his many pictures of mysterious floating disks and orbs, the artist courts doubt by running found images through a battery of processes, including drawing, photocopying, and superimposition, to create distortions. The resulting photographs play with the human propensity to invest form with meaning, offering just enough detail to spur the imagination.

Fred Tomaselli (American born Santa Monica, California, 1956)
Portrait of Laura
2015
Gelatin silver print with graphite
Image: 16 in. × 19 15/16 in. (40.6 × 50.6cm)
Mat: 24 3/4 × 25 3/4 in. (62.9 × 65.4cm)
Purchase, Vital Projects Fund Inc. Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 2016
© Fred Tomaselli

This “portrait” of the artist’s wife, Laura, belongs to an ongoing series he calls “chemical celestial portraits of inner and outer space.” Tomaselli creates likenesses based on each sitter’s astrological sign and the star map for his or her date of birth. Placing sugar and pills on photographic paper and exposing it to light, he produces a photogram of the corresponding constellation and names the stars after the various drugs the subject remembers consuming, from cold medicine to cocaine. The result is an unconventional map of identity that cleverly weds the mystical and the pharmacological.

Bea Nettles (American, born Gainesville, Florida, 1946) 'Mountain Dream Tarot: A Deck of 78 Photographic Cards' 1975

Bea Nettles (American, born Gainesville, Florida, 1946)
Mountain Dream Tarot: A Deck of 78 Photographic Cards
1975
Photographically illustrated tarot cards
Purchase, Dorothy Levitt Beskind Gift, 1977

The idea to create a set of photographic tarot cards came to Nettles in a dream during the summer of 1970, while she was on an artist’s residency in the mountains of North Carolina. She subsequently reinterpreted the ancient symbolism of the traditional tarot deck, enlisting friends and family members as models for photographs that she augmented with hand-painted additions. In 2007 the image Nettles created for the Three of Swords card was used as the disc graphic for Bruce Springsteen’s album Magic.

Installation view of the exhibition 'Dream States: Contemporary Photography and Video' at the Metropolitan Museum of Art Photo by Anders Jones showing Bea Nettles' 'Mountain Dream Tarot: A Deck of 78 Photographic Cards' (1975)

Installation view of the exhibition Dream States: Contemporary Photography and Video at the Metropolitan Museum of Art showing Bea Nettles’ Mountain Dream Tarot: A Deck of 78 Photographic Cards (1975)
Photo: Anders Jones

Artists often turn to dreams as a source of inspiration, a retreat from reason, and a space for exploring imagination and desire. In the history of photography, dream imagery has been most closely associated with the Surrealists, who used experimental techniques to bridge the gap between the camera’s objectivity and the internal gaze of the mind’s eye. While those modernist explorations were often bound to psychoanalytic theories, other photographers have pursued the world of sleep and dreams through deliberately open-ended works that succeed through evocation rather than description. The exhibition Dream States: Contemporary Photographs and Video presents 30 photographs and one video drawn from The Met collection, all loosely tied to the subjective yet universal experience of dreaming. The exhibition is on view at the Museum from May 16 through October 30, 2016.

Many of the works take the surrender of sleep as their subject matter. In photographs by Robert Frank, Danny Lyon, and Nan Goldin, recumbent figures appear vulnerable to the wandering gaze of onlookers, yet their inner worlds remain out of reach. Images of bodies floating and falling conjure the tumultuous world of dreams, and landscapes are made strange through the camera’s selective vision. Highlights include photographs by Paul Graham from his recent series Does Yellow Run Forever (2014); images from Sophie Calle’s earliest body of work, The Sleepers (1979), in which she invited friends and acquaintances to sleep in her own bed while she watched; and Anselm Kiefer’s Brünnhilde Sleeps (1980), a hand-painted photograph featuring French actress Catherine Deneuve recast as a Wagnerian Valkyrie. Also featured are recently acquired works by Shannon Bool, Sarah Anne Johnson, Jim Shaw, and Fred Tomaselli.

Dream States: Contemporary Photographs and Video is organised by Mia Fineman, Associate Curator; and Beth Saunders, Curatorial Assistant in the Department of Photographs at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Grete Stern (Argentinian born Germany, 1904-1999)
Sueño No. 1: “Articulos eléctricos para el hogar” (Dream No. 1: “Electrical Household items”)
c. 1950
Gelatin silver print
Image: 26.6 x 22.9cm (10 1/2 x 9 in.)
Frame: 63.5 x 76.2cm (25 x 30 in.)
Twentieth-Century Photography Fund, 2012

In 1948 the Argentine women’s magazine Idilio introduced a weekly column called “Psychoanalysis Will Help You,” which invited readers to submit their dreams for analysis. Each week, one dream was illustrated with a photomontage by Stern, a Bauhaus-trained photographer and graphic designer who fled Berlin for Buenos Aires when the Nazis came to power. Over three years, Stern created 140 photomontages for the magazine, translating the unconscious fears and desires of its predominantly female readership into clever, compelling images. Here, a masculine hand swoops in to “turn on” a lamp whose base is a tiny, elegantly dressed woman. Rarely has female objectification been so erotically and electrically charged.

Adam Fuss (British, b. 1961)
From the series “My Ghost”
1999
Gelatin silver print
184.9 x 123.3cm (72 13/16 x 48 9/16 in.)
Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 2000
© Adam Fuss

With his large-scale photograms, Fuss has breathed new life into the cameraless technique that became the hallmark of modernist photographers such as Man Ray and László Moholy-Nagy in the 1920s. He created this image by blowing thick clouds of smoke over a sheet of photographic paper and exposing it to a quick flash of light. Evoking the wizardry of a medieval alchemist, Fuss fixes a permanent image of evanescence.

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Phone: 212-535-7710

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Exhibition: ‘Kati Horna’ at Jeu de Paume, Paris

Exhibition dates: 3rd June – 21st September 2014

Kati Horna (Mexican born Hungary, 1912-2000)
Untitled
Paris, 1939
From the Muñecas del miedo series [Dolls of Fear],
Gelatin silver print
15.3 x 22.8cm
Archivo Privado de Fotografía y Gráfica Kati y José Horna
© 2005 Ana María Norah Horna y Fernández

I really love the work of artists such as Kati Horna and Florence Henri “with the production of collages and photomontages inspired by the avant-garde movements of the 1930s (the Bauhaus, Surrealism, German Neue Sachlichkeit, Russian Constructivism).”

Horna’s photographs have more of a political edge than that of Florence Henri, with her unique photographic reportage of the Spanish Civil War between 1937-39 and her Hitler series both having a strong social critique. Here is another politically aware artist who stood up for the cause, who recorded the “everyday life for the civilian population through a vision that was in empathy with the environment and the people.” Again, here is another who was lucky to survive the maelstrom of the Second World War, who would have certainly ended up dead if she and her Andalusian artist husband José Horna had not fled Paris in 1939 for their adopted country Mexico.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

PS I spent hours cleaning up the press images, there were in a really poor state, but the work was so worthwhile… they really sing now!

Many thankx to the 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.

This summer, the Jeu de Paume, which is celebrating 10 years devoted to the image, will be inviting the public to discover Kati Horna (1912-2000), an avant-garde, humanist photographer, who was born in Hungary and exiled in Mexico, where she documented the local art scene.

Robert Capa (Hungarian-American, 1913-1954) (attributed to)
Kati Horna in the Studio of József Pécsi
Budapest, 1933
Gelatin silver print
10.5 x 7.5cm
Archivo Privado de Fotografía y Gráfica Kati y José Horna
© 2005 Ana María Norah Horna y Fernández

In collaboration with the Museo Amparo in Puebla (Mexico), the Jeu de Paume is presenting the first retrospective of the work of photographer Kati Horna (Szilasbalhási, Hungary, 1912-Mexico, 2000), showing more than six decades of work in Hungary, France, Spain and Mexico. Kati Horna, a photographer whose adopted homeland was Mexico, was one of a generation of Hungarian photographers (including André Kertész, Robert Capa, Eva Besnyö, László Moholy-Nagy, Nicolás Muller, Brassaï, Rogi André, Ergy Landau and Martin Munkácsi) forced to flee their country due to the conflicts and social upheaval of the 1930s.

Cosmopolitan and avant-garde, Kati Horna was known above all for her images of the Spanish Civil War, produced at the request of the Spanish Republican government between 1937 and 1939. Her work is characterised by both its adherence to the principles of Surrealist photography and her very personal approach to photographic reportage.

This major retrospective helps to bring international recognition to this versatile, socially committed, humanist photographer, highlighting her unusual artistic creativity and her contribution to photojournalism. It offers a comprehensive overview of the work of this artist, who started out as a photographer in Hungary at the age of 21, in the context of the European avant-garde movements of the 1930s: Russian Constructivism, the Bauhaus school, Surrealism and German Neue Sachlichkeit. Her vast output, produced both in Europe and Mexico, her adopted country, is reflected in a selection of over 150 works – most of them vintage prints, the vast majority of them unpublished or little known.

In Mexico, Kati Horna formed a new family with the émigré artists Remedios Varo, Benjamin Péret, Emerico ‘Chiki’ Weisz, Edward James and, later on, Leonora Carrington. In parallel with her reportages, she took different series of photographs of visual stories, extraordinary creations featuring masks and dolls, motifs that began to appear in her work in the 1930s.

Kati Horna also became the great portraitist of the Mexican literary and artistic avant-garde; her visionary photographs captured the leading artists in Mexico during the 1960s, such as Alfonso Reyes, Germán Cueto, Remedios Varo, Pedro Friedeberg, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Mathias Goeritz and Leonora Carrington.

The exhibition is divided into five periods: her beginnings in Budapest, Berlin and Paris between 1933 and 1937; Spain and the Civil War from 1937 to 1939; Paris again in 1939; then Mexico. The exhibition also presents a number of documents, in particular the periodicals that she contributed to during her travels between Hungary, France, Spain and Mexico. The works come from the Archivo Privado de Fotografía y Gráfica Kati y José Horna, the Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica de España, Salamanca, the Museo Amparo, Puebla, as well as private collections.

Press release from the Jeu de Paume website

Kati Horna (Mexican born Hungary, 1912-2000)
Invierno en el patio [Winter in the Courtyard]
Paris, 1939
Gelatin silver print
18.8 x 18.3cm
Archivo Privado de Fotografía y Gráfica Kati y José Horna
© 2005 Ana María Norah Horna y Fernández

Beginnings: Budapest, Berlin And Paris

Afterwards I returned to Paris, and do you know why I didn’t die of hunger in Paris? Before I left, everyone mocked me, “there’s the photographer”, I was the photographer of eggs. I had this idea of being the first one to do things, not with figurines, but little stories with eggs, and it was that wonderful draughtsman who subsequently committed suicide who did the faces for me… The first was the romantic story of a carrot and a potato. The carrot declared its love to the potato. He always did the faces and I staged the scenes. I took the photos with my big camera with 4 x 5 negatives.

Kati Horna

Born in Hungary to a family of bankers of Jewish origin during a period of political and social instability, Kati Horna would always be deeply marked by the violence, injustice and danger around her. This situation helped to forge her ideological commitment, her perpetual search for freedom, her particular way of denouncing injustice, as well as her compassionate and human vision, like that of Lee Miller and her pictures of the Second World War. As was the case for her great childhood friend Robert Capa, to whom she would remain close throughout her life, photography became a fundamental means of expression.

At the age of 19 she left Budapest to live in Germany for a year, where she joined the Bertolt Brecht collective. She frequented photographer friends and compatriots Robert Capa and ‘Chiki’ Weisz, as well as other major figures in Hungarian photography, such as László Moholy-Nagy – who at the time was a teacher at the Bauhaus school – and Simon Guttman, founder of the Dephot agency (Deutscher Photodienst). On her return from Budapest, she enrolled in the studio of József Pécsi – the famous Hungarian photographer (1889-1956) – before leaving her birth country again, in 1933, to settle in Paris.

It was during this period of apprenticeship that her own aesthetic took shape, which marked her entire career, with the production of collages and photomontages inspired by the avant-garde movements of the 1930s (the Bauhaus, Surrealism, German Neue Sachlichkeit, Russian Constructivism). Paris was a cosmopolitan capital and Surrealism was at its height at the time. This movement heavily influenced Kati Horna’s style, both through its themes and its techniques, be it the narrative collage, superimposition or photomontage. Her photography was closely linked to the arts of the image, used as an illustrative technique and as a support for a poetics of the object. Her taste for stories and staged images are clearly evident. From 1933 she worked for the Lutetia-Press agency, for whom she did her first photo stories: Mercado de pulgas [Flea Market] (1933), which would not be published until 1986 in the Mexican periodical Foto Zoom, and Cafés de París (1934).

Kati Horna (Mexican born Hungary, 1912-2000)
Robert Capa in the Studio of József Pécsi
Budapest, 1933
Gelatin silver print
25.3 x 20.1cm
Archivo Privado de Fotografía y Gráfica Kati y José Horna
© 2005 Ana María Norah Horna y Fernández

Kati Horna (Mexican born Hungary, 1912-2000)
Untitled
Paris, 1937
From the Hitlerei series [Hitler series]
in collaboration with Wolfgang Burger
Gelatin silver print
16.8 x 12cm
Archivo Privado de Fotografía y Gráfica Kati y José Horna
© 2005 Ana María Norah Horna y Fernández

Spain And The Civil War

Photography, with its various possibilities, enables one to show, liberate and develop one’s own sensibility which can be expressed in graphic images.

And at the moment of pressing the shutter you had to keep the image, let your emotion, discovery and visual surprise flow, the moment had to be kept in your head. That’s what I call developing one’s visual memory.

Kati Horna

Between 1937 and 1939, Kati Horna covered the Spanish Civil War with great sensitivity. The Spanish Republican government asked her to produce images on the Civil War. Thus, between 1937 and 1939 she photographed the places where the major events of the war took place, in the Aragon province, in the country’s cities (Valencia, Madrid, Barcelona and Lerida), as well as a number of strategic villages in Republican Spain.

A collection of more than 270 negatives has survived from this period, today conserved in the Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica de España, Salamanca. They bear witness to the reality of the conflict at the front as well as, and above all, everyday life for the civilian population through a vision that was in empathy with the environment and the people. Committed to the anarchist cause, she became the editor of the periodical Umbral, where she would meet her future husband, the Andalusian anarchist José Horna – and worked on the cultural periodical of the National Confederation of Labour, Libre-Studio. She also collaborated on the periodicals Tierra y Libertad, Tiempos Nuevos and Mujeres Libres, publications that are being exhibited for the first time. At the time, her work was distinguished by its photomontages, which have both a symbolic and metaphorical character.

Kati Horna (Mexican born Hungary, 1912-2000)
Untitled, Vélez Rubio, Almeria province, Andalusia, Spanish Civil War
1937
Gelatin silver print
25.5 x 20.5cm
Archivo Privado de Fotografía y Gráfica Kati y José Horna
© 2005 Ana María Norah Horna y Fernández

Kati Horna (Mexican born Hungary, 1912-2000)
Subida a la catedral [Ascending to the Cathedral], Spanish Civil War
Barcelona, 1938
Gelatin silver print (photomontage)
22.2 x 16.6cm
Archivo Privado de Fotografía y Gráfica Kati y José Horna
© 2005 Ana María Norah Horna y Fernández

Kati Horna (Mexican born Hungary, 1912-2000)
Los Paraguas, mitin de la CNT [Umbrellas, Meeting of the CNT], Spanish Civil War
Barcelona, 1937
Gelatin silver print
24.2 x 19.2cm
Archivo Privado de Fotografía y Gráfica Kati y José Horna
© 2005 Ana María Norah Horna y Fernández

Mexico

I am in an existential crisis. Today everyone is running, today everyone is driving. My pictures? They were the product of a creative love, linked to my experiences and the way they were taken. I was never in a hurry.

S.nob was a joy… I don’t know why I enjoyed myself so much, but the facility that Salvador [Elizondo] and the team, and Juan [García Ponce] gave me, a great creativity came out of me.

Kati Horna

Kati Horna returned to Paris in 1939. Her husband, the Andalusian artist José Horna, enlisted in the Ebra division that covered the retreat of the Spanish civilians to France. In October, as soon as he reached Prats-de-Mollo, in the French Pyrenees, he was incarcerated in a camp for Spanish refugees. Kati Horna succeeded in getting him freed. They left for Paris where they were again harassed, obliging them to flee France for Mexico. Mexico would become her final homeland.

During her everyday life she came into contact with some of the extraordinary figures of Surrealism (Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, Benjamin Péret and Edward James) and the Panic movement (Alejandro Jodorowsky), as well as avant-garde Mexican artists, writers and architects (Mathias Goeritz, Germán Cueto, Pedro Friedeberg, Salvador Elizondo, Alfonso Reyes and Ricardo Legorreta).

Kati Horna established herself as a chronicler of the period, leaving for posterity a unique corpus. In Mexico, she worked as a reporter for periodicals such as Todo (1939), Nosotros (1944-1946), Mujeres (1958-1968), Mexico this Month (1958-1965), S.nob (1962) and Diseño (1968-1970). During the last 20 years of her life, she also taught photography at the Universidad Iberoamericana and the San Carlos Academy (Univesidad Nacional Autónoma de México), where she trained an entire generation of contemporary photographers.

Horna’s quotes come from the catalogue, co-published by the Jeu de Paume and the Museo Amparo

Kati Horna (Mexican born Hungary, 1912-2000)
Untitled, La Castañeda psychiatric hospital, Mixcoac
Mexico, 1944
Archivo Privado de Fotografía y Gráfica Kati y José Horna
© 2005 Ana María Norah Horna y Fernández

Kati Horna (Mexican born Hungary, 1912-2000)
Untitled, Carnaval de Huejotzingo, Puebla
1941
Gelatin silver print
19.5 x 21.5cm
Archivo Privado de Fotografía y Gráfica Kati y José Horna
© 2005 Ana María Norah Horna y Fernández

Kati Horna (Mexican born Hungary, 1912-2000)
Untitled
Mexico, 1962
From the Oda a la necrofília series [Ode to Necrophilia]
Gelatin silver print
25.4 x 20.8cm
Museo Amparo Collection
© 2005 Ana María Norah Horna y Fernández

Kati Horna (Mexican born Hungary, 1912-2000)
El botellón [The Bottle]
Mexico, 1962
From the Paraísos artificiales series [Artificial Paradises]
Gelatin silver print
24.4 x 18.9cm
Collection Museo Amparo
© 2005 Ana María Norah Horna y Fernández

Kati Horna (Mexican born Hungary, 1912-2000)
Remedios Varo
Mexico, 1957
Gelatin silver print
25.3 x 20.3cm
Private collection
© 2005 Ana María Norah Horna y Fernández

Kati Horna (Mexican born Hungary, 1912-2000)
Antonio Souza y su esposa Piti Saldivar [Antonio Souza and his Wife Piti Saldivar]
Mexico, 1959
Gelatin silver print
25 x 20.3cm
Archivo Privado de Fotografía y Gráfica Kati y José Horna
© 2005 Ana María Norah Horna y Fernández

Kati Horna (Mexican born Hungary, 1912-2000)
José Horna elaborando la maqueta de la casa de Edward James [José Horna Working on the Maquette for Edward James’s House]
Mexico, 1960
Gelatin silver print
25.3 x 20.3cm
Archivo Privado de Fotografía y Gráfica Kati y José Horna
© 2005 Ana María Norah Horna y Fernández

Kati Horna (Mexican born Hungary, 1912-2000)
Mujer y máscara [Woman with Mask]
Mexico, 1963
Gelatin silver print
25 x 19.7 cm
Archivo Privado de Fotografía y Gráfica Kati y José Horna
© 2005 Ana María Norah Horna y Fernández

Jeu de Paume
1, Place de la Concorde
75008 Paris
métro Concorde
Phone: 01 47 03 12 50

Opening hours:
Tuesday – Sunday: 11.00am – 7.00pm
Closed Monday

Jeu de Paume website

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