This is an example of one of his shots of an impressive cloud formation. It features the R-100 airship, noted for its more oval, aerodynamic shape in comparison to the traditional Zeppelin. The R-100 embarked on its maiden flight in 1929 but in 1930 it was deflated and removed from service following the crash of her sister ship, the R-101, with the loss of forty-eight lives. Buckham painted the airship into the scene by hand.
Flights of fancy
What a man, what a daredevil, what an artist!
Member of the Royal Photographic Society and lecturer in photography before the First World War.
Joined the Royal Naval Air Service (precursor to the Royal Air Force) in 1916 and taught young recruits the basics of photography before requesting a transfer to active service. He became a pioneer in aerial reconnaissance over France when the pilots and observers/camera operators of biplanes over the trenches had no parachutes.
Invalided out of the service in 1918 after multiple crashes. After his ninth crash he had to undergo a tracheotomy and spent the rest of his life breathing through a tube.
Determined to continue his love affair with flying and photography, he rented planes and, strapping himself in and leaning over the side with his heavy plate camera, he captured romantic, rugged, aerial landscape photographs which combined dramatic, atmospheric shots of the landscape with photographic manipulation inside and outside the darkroom.
Rather than scratching in the original negative and/or making a composite negative (a la the Australian photographer Frank Hurley, 1885-1962) or using photomontage (the cutting and pasting physical photographs together), Buckham used combination printing – the use of multiple negatives to create seamless, “perfect” images, such as adding detailed skies to landscapes and biplanes to the skies, planes that were photographed on the ground – in the final, unique print. He often scratched the final print to emphasise highlights, and then used watercolour paints to blend in the areas where the different negatives overlapped in the print or to paint in details of aircraft wheels or bridge supports.
Buckham’s photographs of the landscape are truly beautiful. I love them.
The final prints are a heady mixture of romantic landscape (with their underlying nod to Pictorialism, emotional, romantic, and atmospheric scenes over realistic documentation) and modernist elements, of cutting edge machines, bridges, aeroplanes, airships and flying boats added through photographic manipulation in the darkroom, further enhanced by hand, through scratching and painting on the actual print.
To finally reveal what Buckham felt of the physical thrill of flying and the deeply felt emotional reaction to the landscape beneath him – can you imagine being him! – creating these photographs with deep, inward feelings impinging on his mind, his imagination, his memory. To perfectly present “so nearly, the effect that I saw” when in the air. Clouds in a sea of air.
These. These were his flights of fancy.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Scottish National Portrait Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“I always stand up to make an exposure and, taking the precaution to tie my right leg to the seat, I am free to move about rapidly, and easily, in any desired direction; and loop the loop, and indulge in other such delights, with perfect safety… If you stand erect you will not have to resist the fatal tendency to rest your arms on the side of the aeroplane whilst making the exposure, for if you do so your photograph will surely be spoiled by the vibration of the engine.”
“Unfortunately, Nature does not always surmount her landscapes with clouds such as will compose well, as a whole, in the picture space, consequently I have provided a store of over 2,000 cloud negatives for such contingencies and from this suitable clouds for combination purposes are selected. And here is just where the hasty or unobservant worker may go badly astray, producing incredible or even appalling results. For the lighting of the landscape must be in correct relation to the light coming down from the sky, and heavy cloud masses insist that they shall have corresponding shapes upon the earth. Selection for the right negative for the purpose may entail the inspection of fifty or more, and on the print some handwork with a chemical reducer and stumping chalk, or other medium, is usually required to bring the whole into harmony. So before venturing upon combination work it is surely wise to serve some years of apprenticeship sketching and painting in the open air, which happens to have been my own way of approach to photography.”
“The open cockpit of a not-too-speedy airplane affords better facilities for working than a cabined plane. When the best weather conditions prevail for pictorial photography, the skyroad is disposed to be bumpy, descending and ascending currents of air moving beneath the big banks of cumulus cloud. A sudden drop of 300 or 400ft may be a little alarming if one is not prepared for it.”
Alfred Buckham
Installation views of the exhibition Alfred Buckham: Daredevil Photographer at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh Photos: Aly Wight
Installation view of the exhibition Alfred Buckham: Daredevil Photographer at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh showing Buckham’s photograph Edinburgh (about 1920, below) Photo: Aly Wight
Buckham had crashed nine times before he was discharged from the Royal Naval Air Service as a hundred per cent disabled. Continuing to indulge his passion for aerial photography, he wrote that ‘If one’s right leg is tied to the seat with a scarf or a piece of rope, it is possible to work in perfect security’. Presumably these were the perilous conditions in which the photographer took this dazzling picture of Edinburgh, one of the city’s most popular aerial views.
Installation view of the exhibition Alfred Buckham: Daredevil Photographer at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh showing Alfred Buckham wearing googles by an unknown photographer (1918, below) Photo: Aly Wight
Take to the skies and discover the world from above the clouds through the remarkable work of Alfred Buckham: Daredevil Photographer.
A trailblazer in his field, Alfred Buckham soared above the realms of what was thought to be possible in 20th century photography and aviation. Meet the man behind some of the most iconic aerial photographs, marvel at the death-defying lengths he took to capture the perfect image and explore how his innovative techniques paved the way for modern technologies such as Photoshop and AI.
Text from the Scottish National Portrait Gallery website
Alfred Buckham’s first ambition was to be a painter, but after seeing JMW Turner’s pictures in the National Gallery in London, he returned home and made a bonfire of his own work. He was the first head of aerial reconnaissance for the Royal Navy in the First World War and later a captain in the Royal Naval Air Service. After crashing nine times he was obliged to undergo a tracheotomy and was discharged as a hundred per cent disabled. While recovering from surgery Buckham started making photo-montages, combining two or three photographs he had taken to compose a single image. He would look for a sky which complemented the city or landscape below, and even add tiny planes to create the look of a one-shot photograph. He continued to take aerial photographs with a heavy plate camera, leaning perilously out of the aeroplane, where his delight in picture making greatly increased the risk of accident.
[This film consists of animations illustrating the photographic techniques described in the narration]
Narrator
How would you have combined multiple photographs into one image in the days before Photoshop? From wartime aerial reconnaissance photographer to intrepid explorer, Alfred Buckham was a true daredevil.
But when he entered the darkroom, he was a meticulous and innovative artist. Let’s take a look at one of his most iconic composite photographs: Edinburgh, which was made using three separate negatives.
The first stage would have been to select one of the negatives he captured while literally dangling from his cockpit at death-defying heights.
He would then select a second negative from his impressive library of over 2,000 negatives of clouds. Selecting the right clouds sometimes required inspecting 50 or more options, and occasionally, he created new cloud formations by taping two negatives together.
He also built up a library of plane negatives, masking each plane from the background. All these planes were photographed from the ground, because it would have been impossible to capture a clear image of a plane, mid-flight, from another moving vehicle.
To make a photographic print, the negative would be placed into a device called an enlarger. Think of it like a top-down projector, shining light through the negative to project its image onto a sheet of light-sensitive photographic paper.
This paper would become a canvas for combining multiple negatives into one image. Buckham would first expose the image of Edinburgh onto the lower half of the paper for just the right amount of time. Next, he would expose the image of the sky onto the upper half. The longer the light projected the negative onto the paper, the darker the final image would be.
Throughout the exposure process, he used dodging and burning techniques to soften the horizon where the two negatives met. Dodging involves using your hand, or a piece of card, to block light on specific areas of the paper during exposure, making them appear lighter in the final print. Burning works in the opposite way, where you block light on the areas you’re happy with, and expose for longer the areas you want to darken.
Buckham used a pin mark to identify his chosen spot for the aeroplane. He would have to adjust the height of the enlarger to change the apparent size of the aeroplane. In this case, he also inserted the negative into the enlarger back to front to reverse the plane’s direction. Did you spot the backwards tail number?
After all three exposures, he would then place the paper into a shallow chemical bath called a developer for a set time. Slowly, as if by magic, the composite image would begin to appear on the paper. Subsequent chemical baths stopped the development process before fixing the image in place.
After washing and drying the paper, the print was ready for final adjustments. Buckham rarely edited negatives directly, as was common for photographers using glass plates. Instead, he made all his final adjustments in the print.
Here, he has used black watercolour to enhance the contrast between the brooding castle and the rest of the city. He would sometimes scratch away dark areas of the print to reveal the lighter colour of the paper beneath. Using this method, he could create the impression of spinning propeller blades or light glinting on key landmarks.
These artistic interventions resulted in each print being truly unique. Buckham’s photographs not only capture breathtaking moments at daring, dizzying heights, but are also the meticulous creations of a pioneering visionary artist.
A negative of The Forth Bridge, looking north towards Fife, was used as the basis for several prints. It was also used to produce this Christmas card for RAF Turnhouse in 1918. Showing an aeroplane flying towards the Forth Bridge, this is probably one of the first composite photographs Buckham created as it was made while he was still serving in the air force.
Alfred Buckham (British, 1879-1956) Cloud Turrets about 1920 Gelatin silver print 38.00 x 45.70cm National Galleries of Scotland Purchased with Art Fund support, 2008
This dramatic, and almost surreal photograph, shows the diversity of cloud formations during a fierce thunderstorm. Over the years Buckham amassed a vast collection of photographs of skies which he could integrate with a separate landscape photograph to enhance the drama and create a more impressive composition. He also often manipulated his images further by adding a hand painted aircraft, such as in this image, which heightens the viewer’s awareness of the dominating power and scale of the natural world.
Alfred Buckham (British, 1879-1956) Clouds Massing Before a Thunderstorm about 1920 Gelatin silver print 37.80 x 30.00cm Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art Purchased with Art Fund support, 2008
Buckham was renowned for his atmospheric shots of the landscape. He felt that the most spectacular cloud formations and theatrical light could be captured on ‘stormy days, with bursts of sunshine and occasional showers of rain’. Over the years Buckham built up a vast collection of photographs of skies which he could integrate with a separate landscape photograph to enhance the drama and create a more impressive composition. This is an example of one of his shots of an impressive cloud formation before a thunderstorm.
Buckham was the leading aerial photographer of his day and was renowned for his atmospheric shots of the landscape. He felt that the most spectacular cloud formations and dramatic light could be captured on “stormy days, with bursts of sunshine and occasional showers of rain”. Over the years Buckham amassed a vast collection of photographs of skies which he could integrate with a separate landscape photograph to enhance the drama and create a more impressive composition. This photograph of the landscape over the Pentlands Hills near Edinburgh demonstrates this technique. It also illustrates another feature of Buckham’s photographs in the perfectly positioned silhouette of a biplane against the broken clouds, which Buckham would have painted on later.
Crafting an image | The photographic techniques of Alfred Buckham
Louise Pearson
Alfred Buckham created some spectacular photographs of the earth from the air. In 2018 curator Louise Pearson looked at how these images were created through a unique combination of daring escapades in the air and clever photographic manipulation on the ground.
Alfred Buckham was a passionate enthusiast of both photography and flight. By 1914 he was already an established photographer and a Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society. During the First World War he was involved in the relatively new discipline of aerial reconnaissance, both as a teacher and a practitioner. It was a dangerous occupation and his military career ended as a result of the injuries sustained to his throat during his ninth crash. Despite this, his wartime activities had sparked a love of flying and on leaving the Royal Naval Air Service it seemed natural that he would continue to take photographs from the sky. Buckham subsequently created an astonishing series of photographs, ranging in subject from the Forth Bridge to the skyscrapers of New York and the volcanoes of South America.
The National Galleries of Scotland holds a group of Buckham’s photographs including Edinburgh, which has become one of the most popular works of art in the collection. When we decided to have a photography exhibition on the theme of transport it was clear that Buckham’s aerial photographs would take centre stage. I selected several of Buckham’s photographs for inclusion, including Edinburgh and The Forth Bridge, and started to look at the photographs in more detail with conservator James Berry. We also started planning a blog to explain how Buckham was able to create such dramatic images.
From previous research, and the work James was doing on conserving the photographs ahead of the exhibition, we knew that Buckham was using a technique called combination printing. This is when a photographer uses a number of different negatives to create a single photographic print. In order to fully understand his working methods, we needed to see the negatives he was using. Fortunately, Alfred Buckham’s entire archive of around 1400 negatives, nearly 300 prints, camera and associated archive material has remained with his family and is currently in the care of his grandsons Richard and John Buckham. Richard kindly allowed me to spend a day at his home in London, looking through this fascinating collection. Being able to compare the negatives to the prints in our collection, and read Buckham’s accounts of his photographic work, helped us to piece together how he would have made the atmospheric photograph Edinburgh.
The first stage in taking an aerial photograph is to select the right plane. Buckham took photographs around the world and would have used a number of different planes flown by various pilots to take his photographs. However he recorded that he always preferred to use older planes with open cockpits that travelled at the fairly sedate speed of 60 to 80 miles per hour. Through trial and error he discovered that flying between 1,000 and 2,000 ft gave the best results, as at that height the landscape could be captured with just the right level of detail. …
The other essential piece of equipment was the camera. Happily, as Buckham’s camera survives, we know exactly what he was using to make his exposures. In an article written for the benefit of prospective aerial photographers, he advised using the kind of cameras used by newspaper reporters, which operated at eye-level, rather than the cumbersome cameras which had originally been developed for aerial photography. ‘The camera best suited to the purpose and the one I usually employ has a F4.5 lens and a large direct vision view-finder the same size as the plate, fitted on the top of the lens panel’. He cautioned however that the leather bellows needed to be reinforced with cardboard or aluminium, as the otherwise delicate bellows could not withstand the force of the winds encountered at altitude.
The kind of camera favoured by Buckham used glass plate negatives, which was a conscious decision by Buckham at a time when photographic film was becoming readily available. He favoured double-coated panchromatic plates made in the USA, with dimensions of 10.0cm x 12.5cm. Throughout his career he reiterated that despite their bulk and delicacy, plates gave a far superior result to film.
Buckham built up a library of negatives depicting only aeroplanes, where the original background was masked out. This meant that when the negative was exposed on top of an existing print the plane would appear to be part of the chosen landscape. Buckham would have also been able use an enlarger to match the scale of the plane to the landscape, making the scene appear realistic. While in most cases this technique produces a believable, if slightly incredible, final image there are examples where the planes appear too close together, or at impossible angles.
For Buckham, the final stage of creating a finished image was to use watercolour paints and sometimes ink to add detail to the final print and soften the areas where the two negatives meet. In some of his photographs these hand-drawn elements are easily visible, though in the case of Edinburgh they are more subtle. The clouds on the horizon have been softened to make the join where the two negatives meet less noticeable in the finished print, highlights have been added to the clouds to make them more dramatic and the light below Arthur’s Seat has been adjusted to better match the clouds above. In addition, some areas have been highlighted and others darkened to sharpen the details of key landmarks and make them more recognisable. The use of black watercolour or ink to strengthen and define specific areas of the photographs shows Buckham’s ingenuity. Whilst other photographers would alter the negatives and perhaps scratch out an area that they wished to appear darker, Buckham added the darker tone to the photographic print itself. He also used a scratching out technique, similar to Turner, where a dark area of the photograph is scratched revealing the lighter colour of the paper beneath. This artistic intervention results in each photograph being a unique piece of work. No two can be exactly the same.
It is clear then that Buckham’s photographs are not the result of a single, breath-taking moment in time but instead are a carefully crafted piece of art. He was using known photographic techniques, but created a style which was very much his own. As a result it is easy to see why Edinburgh has become one of the most popular artworks in the collection.
In this image the undulations of the snow covered hills are mirrored in the cloudy sky. Buckham introduces a sense of scale through the lone plane silhouetted against a cloud.
Buckham felt that the most spectacular cloud formations and theatrical light could be captured on ‘stormy days, with bursts of sunshine and occasional showers of rain’. This creativity led to him being regarded as the leading aerial photographer of his day and he was renowned for his atmospheric shots of the landscape. Over the years he amassed a vast collection of photographs of skies which he integrated with a separate landscape photograph to enhance the drama and create an imposing composition. This image over the Firth of Forth, Scotland, encapsulates the romantic fusion of man’s engineering achievements against the dramatic beauty of nature. The three steel arches of the Forth Rail Bridge are mirrored in the three biplanes, which Buckham added later by hand, silhouetted against the spectacular sky.
This image shows Captain Jordan flying his Black Camel biplane at very close proximity to Buckham’s aircraft. Taken over the landscape around Rosyth, Fife, Scotland this was near to where Buckham crashed for the ninth time in 1918 and sustained serious injuries.
This autumn at the Portrait gallery in Edinburgh, take to the skies and see the world from above the clouds through the remarkable work of Alfred Buckham: Daredevil Photographer. From 18 October 2025 – 19 April 2026, meet the man behind some of the most iconic aerial photographs ever taken, marvel at the death-defying lengths he took to capture the perfect image and explore how his innovative techniques in the darkroom paved the way for modern technologies such as Photoshop and AI. Free to visit at the National Galleries Scotland: Portrait, this will be the first major exhibition dedicated to Alfred Buckham and can only be seen in Scotland.
This exhibition will bring together over 100 photographs and objects including popular works from the Scottish national collection, alongside extensive archival material generously loaned by Alfred Buckham’s grandsons, Richard and John Buckham. Thanks to the support of the Buckham family, personal objects including letters, photographs and even the passport Alfred Buckham used will be put on public display for the first time.
A maverick of early aviation, Alfred Buckham (1879-1956) created his own unique style of photography by combining daring exploits in the air with innovation in the darkroom. Born in London, Buckham learned his craft by teaching photography before joining the Royal Naval Air Service in 1916, a predecessor to the Royal Air Force. Hailed as an exceptionally skilled flyer, he combined his talent for aviation with his passion for photography, resulting in remarkable endeavours and trailblazing images. Based for most of his military career at RAF Turnhouse, now Edinburgh Airport, central Scotland became a natural playground for Buckham to refine his photographic techniques and let his imagination soar. Daredevil Photographer will chart his phenomenal story from his early photographic experiments in Scotland to exciting adventures in South America and look closer at the skilled and inventive ways he created his work.
Explore Scotland from the air and get a new perspective of well-known sights, just as Buckham himself would have. Daredevil Photographer celebrates the impact Scotland had on Buckham’s work through his images of recognisable landmarks including St Andrews Golf Links, Linlithgow Palace and the Wallace Monument in Stirling. The exhibition will also feature several images of the Forth Rail Bridge, Buckham’s most photographed landmark. The iconic bridge was the subject of one of his first composite photographs and appeared on the 1918 RAF Turnhouse Christmas card, which will go on display alongside the original photography.
Daredevil Photographer will delve into the darkroom and uncover more about the creative processes used to bring Buckham’s unique images to life. After the First World War, Buckham began experimenting with composite photography; a technique where several negatives are used to create one photographic print. While this wasn’t a new concept, composite photography added a layer of creative freedom to Buckham’s work, much like a very early form of Photoshop. From his vast collection of glass negatives – he had over 2000 cloud images alone in his ‘cloud library’ – Buckham had the means to create images which became immersive, giving a unique sense of flying alongside these incredible aircraft while viewing the world below.
It was through the technique of composite photography that some of Buckham’s most famous works were born, including the iconic aerial view of Edinburgh (about 1920). This striking photograph shows a bi-plane hovering amongst wispy clouds above Edinburgh Castle, with Arthur’s Seat visible through the mist in the background, and the bustling city below. For the first time, Edinburgh will be displayed alongside the camera and original glass negatives Buckham used to capture and create this much-loved image. Visitors will also be encouraged to get inspired and try their hand at creating their own composite creations through interactive exhibits.
Telling Buckham’s story through his own words and memories, Daredevil Photographer allows visitors to meet the courageous and humorous man behind the camera. Firsthand accounts of his incredible exploits in the air and ingenious creative methods on the ground will enhance his story and highlight his adventurous spirit: Ah! One was a rare daredevil in those days! (Alfred Buckham, The New York Times, 1930). A free and unique immersive audio experience will bring Buckham’s world of flight and imagination to life through his own words. Hear Buckham’s grandson Richard give a voice to his grandfather’s memories and reflections on his daredevil persona.
Daredevil in every sense of the word, Buckham went to incredible feats to capture the perfect shot, which the exhibition will explore. His preferred methods included standing in an open cockpit while mid-air, with his leg tied to the seat as a nod to safety. As a result, he experienced no less than nine crashes in his lifetime, one ending in a serious throat injury that cut his military career short. However, he would not be deterred, describing his eccentric photography methods in a surprisingly relaxed way:
“It is not easy to tumble out of an aeroplane, unless you really want to, and on considerably more than a thousand flights I have used a safety belt only once, and then it was thrust upon me. I always stand up to make an exposure and, taking the precaution to tie my right leg to the seat, I am free to move rapidly, and easily, in any desired direction; and loop the loop; and indulge in other such delights, with perfect safety” – Alfred Buckham, The Camera, January 1927.
Daredevil Photographer will celebrate Buckham’s skill in the air through a range of his mesmerising photographs. Encounter stunning images of the leading aircraft of the day, such as the Bristol Fighter, a two seated bi-plane designed for aerial reconnaissance, and the bizarre airships of the 1920s. See them soaring through the skies in all weathers, amongst an array of remarkable landscapes. The exhibition will include one of his most well-known works, The Heart of the Empire (1923), on loan from the V&A Museum in London and displayed in Edinburgh for the first time. The photograph follows a bi-plane as it glides across the London skyline, with landmarks such as Tower Bridge and the River Thames in view. Exhibited by the Royal Photographic Society in 1925, The Heart of the Empire secured Buckham’s position as one of Britain’s leading aerial photographers.
Experience the golden age of travel through Buckham’s portfolio of images spanning across the globe. In 1931, a commission from Fortune Magazine took Buckham on an epic fifteen-week trip across the Americas, covering 19,000 miles and setting a world record. Starting in New York City and taking the opportunity to capture the newly built Empire State Building, Buckham photographed his intrepid journey from the United States to the tip of South America to share with the world. Daredevil Photographer will chart Buckham’s incredible journey, from expansive views of Christ the Redeemer in Rio De Janeiro and the snowy caps of the Andes Mountains to perilous scenes of smoking volcanic creators in Guatemala and Mexico. Through his death-defying adventures and stunning photographs, Buckham expanded public understanding of the world, creating an exciting legacy which continues to capture imaginations today.
Louise Pearson, curator of photography at the National Galleries of Scotland says: “Alfred Buckham’s eye-catching photograph of Edinburgh is one of the most popular artworks in the National Galleries of Scotland collection. This enthralling image becomes even more intriguing when you learn that it is a darkroom jigsaw – a composite photograph made through a combination of technical skill and creative vision. Alfred Buckham: Daredevil Photographer tells the remarkable story of this maverick of early aviation whose adventures took him from aerial reconnaissance photographer to intrepid explorer via numerous loop the loops.”
This photograph of Castle Island, where Mary, Queen of Scots was imprisoned in 1567, shows the vast expanse of the rolling countryside around Loch Leven, Scotland. The cloudy sky enhances the depth of the image and the small biplanes, which Buckham added later by hand, reinforce the dramatic scale.
Alfred Buckham (British, 1879-1956) Flying Boat Over Sea 1930 Gelatin silver print 45.5 x 37.6cm National Galleries of Scotland Purchased with Art Fund support, 2008
This photograph captures the stormy ocean with its swelling crests of the waves illuminated white. Silhouetted against the threatening sky is a flying boat. This specialised form of aircraft was purposely designed to take off from, and land on, water. This feature was exploited during the World Wars but its use rapidly declined thereafter. Buckham was aware of the flying boat from his time in the Royal Naval Air Service and, specifically, his involvement in photographing the alterations required that allowed planes to take off from, and land on, a ship.
In 1930 Buckham was commissioned by Fortune magazine to produce a portfolio of aerial photographs of his chosen area of the Americas. Buckman opted for central and South America and this dramatic photograph captures the centre of Mexican volcano, Popocatepetl. The snow covered edge of the crater contrasts against the ominous dark sky, creating a shot which captures the awe-inspiring power of an active volcano. Buckham described the journey of the flight as his aeroplane turned down into the crater: ‘Almost at once the aeroplane dropped about two hundred feet… Beneath us the circular lake of boiling lava emitted numerous spouts of smoke and steam, whilst round its edge played occasional fires which, suddenly springing up and flickering awhile, as suddenly disappeared.’
Alfred Buckham: Daredevil Photographer
Paperback – 12 Nov. 2025 by Louise Pearson (Author), James Crawford (Other Contributor)
An exhibition on an eclectic subject that I knew nothing about before assembling this posting: 19th century Belgian photography.
In order to give a better understanding of the life of the photographers I have added their dates and bibliographic information where possible.
My favourite photograph in the posting is the mysterious and atmos/pheric Portrait of Marguerite Khnopff by the artist Fernand Khnopff (c. 1900, below), where “atmos” are the “atoms” of energy and mood that surround the subject, the vapour that envelopes the body.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to FOMU for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
The Early Gaze exhibition documents the birth of Belgian photography, from the very first mug shots to groundbreaking imagery in the arts, medical science and justice. It shows how an elite pastime grew out to become a powerful tool for capturing, controlling and constructing identity.
Early Gaze casts a fresh light on the rise and development of photography in 19th-century Belgium. The invention of photography did not only bring technological novelty, but also changed the way we see ourselves and the world. What began as a marvel of innovation quickly expanded into an instrument for control and image-building.
You will get a new perspective on the photographic pioneers who co-wrote the story of a young nation. You will discover forgotten portraits and unknown stories, and experience how the first photographic gaze still continues to influence our contemporary visual culture through phenomena such as agency, and consent.
Early Gaze illustrates that from the very start, photography was not a neutral registration of reality but a powerful instrument that helped shape the story of the ruling class.
The exhibition is accompanied by the book Early Gaze, published by Hannibal Books. With numerous unique photos by François Braga, Joseph Pelizarro, Guillaume Claine, Joseph Ernest Buschmann, Edmond Fierlants and others. Hardcover, Dutch/English, 304 pages, available for €55 in the FOMU shop.
Early Gaze casts a fresh light on the rise of photography in 19th-century Belgium.
In 1839 the world was changed forever by the invention of photography. For the first time it was possible to capture reality with the use of light. Whereas France and England introduced this revolutionary technique, Belgium quickly followed.
In the young nation of Belgium – independent since 1830 – photography soon came to play a key role in the shaping of a national identity. Embracing the new medium, Belgian pioneers captured people, cities, landscapes and historical events. But what they didn’t show is just as telling. Not everyone had access to photography, and that is why photos also expose 19th-century power relations.
Countless unknown images and stories have come to light over the past years. At the same time there was a change in mindset about photography and cultural heritage. Early Gaze considers the questions these photos invoke today. Who was depicted, and who was not? Who took the pictures, and why? Which photos were kept? For one thing very soon became clear: photography was more than a technical novelty. It is a way of seeing, capturing and remembering.
This exhibition shows rare and never-seen-before images, original cameras and the earliest photographic techniques. Themes such as art, science, reportage, propaganda and colonialist image-making showcase photography’s versatility and force.
Early Gaze invites you to discover the first sixty years of Belgian photography: not as a closed chapter, but rather as a story that continues to evolve.
1/ A Magic Moment
The invention of photography in 1839 was a magical event: for the first time you could truly capture a moment from real life!
Two different techniques arose in France and England in this period. Frenchman Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre developed the daguerreotype: a unique image on a metal plate. In England, William Henry Fox Talbot invented the calotype: a negative- to-positive process using paper.
Not only did the techniques differ, so did the way in which these inventions were marketed. Daguerre, a clever businessman, immediately distributed a manual that made the technique gain popularity. Talbot decided on a patent: whoever wanted to use his method, would have to pay. This limited the popularity of the calotype.
In Belgium it was mainly the daguerreotype that found immediate success. Unfortunately, most early photographs were lost. Only a few examples were preserved, including two daguerreotypes of Saint Nicholas Church in Ghent, made by François Braga and Joseph Pelizzaro.
2/ From Experiment to Industry
Photography evolved at a rapid pace in the 19th century: from experiment to profession, from studio to industry.
In its pioneer years (1839-1842) photography was expensive, technically complex, and at times dangerous due to the use of chemical substances. Scientists, artists and optics professionals experimented, presented their results to academies, and applied for patents.
From 1842 a new profession arose: the portrait photographer. The high demand for portraits caused many engravers and miniature painters to switch to photography. Most of them did not yet have permanent photo studios, but travelled around. New techniques, such as wet collodion plates and the carte de visite, made the medium become more affordable and popular from around 1850. The number of photo studios – both small enterprises and larger ateliers – then grew quickly. The profession offered financial independence to many, as well as a chance at social advancement. Women were also active in the field, even if they often remained invisible or worked only under their initials.
Photography became a modern industry towards the end of the century. Belgian pioneers were internationally successful with their ready-made photographic materials. The introduction of simple devices by Kodak and Van Neck allowed even amateurs to document their lives. Photography became an everyday and personal medium.
Travelling photographers
In the early years of photography, many portrait photographers went from town to town. There were not enough customers yet to support a studio in a fixed location. Photographers advertised in newspapers, mentioning when they would be staying at a certain location or hotel. These pioneers often came from abroad. One Madame Guyard, for instance, was a travelling daguerreotypist. Her advertisement made her appear to be Parisian, though she was actually from Brussels and named Elisabeth Vandenplas. Were the French name and the reference to Paris meant to heighten her credibility as a photographer?
The democratising impact of the carte de visite
Photography underwent a major change in the second half of the 19th century. In 1854, Frenchman André-Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri introduced the carte de visite: a small-sized portrait (6 by 9 cm) on cardboard. He designed a multi-lens camera that allowed for multiple exposures to be registered on a single photographic plate. The photographs were then cut and separately glued onto cardboard: this way you could get multiple poses at the price of a single take. The photographer’s name and specialisation were listed on the back of the image. Cartes de visite made portrait photography quicker, cheaper and more accessible, especially to the middle class. Collecting these portraits of family, friends and acquaintances became all the rage. Countless commercial portrait studios appeared in Belgium, such as those of Adèle Daams, Ghémar Frères and François Deron.
Belgian camera manufacturers
In the 19th century’s final decades, Belgium saw a small scale, artisan production of cameras. Belgian manufacturers, often furniture makers by trade, built cameras locally as well as importing foreign models. France, England and Germany dominated the market, but Belgium as well had some well-known producers like Van Neck (Antwerp), the Drayé brothers (Merksem), Le Docte (Brussels) and Hofmans (Elsene). This era of camera production, however, was short-lived. Around 1900, increasing foreign competition put an end to this Belgian camera manufacturing.
Photo industry
Belgium initially was mostly a consumer of photographic technology. Between 1879 and 1900, small photochemical companies appeared in Ghent, Kortrijk and Brussels. Only some enterprises, such as that of Van Monckhoven and Beernaert Dry Plate from Ghent and that of Lieven Gevaert from Antwerp, truly achieved a breakthrough. They met the growing demand by professional and amateur photographers for faster and more user-friendly methods such as gelatin dry plates, optics, light-sensitive emulsions and photographic paper.
First female photo studio: Dorothée Detournay
In 1864 Dorothée J. Louise Detournay opened her own photo studio in Brussels, which was unusual for a woman. Specialising in ladies’ portraits, she herself stood behind the camera: a unique selling point that she accentuated in her advertising. After marrying Henri Dupont she worked at the Dupont studio, which was sometimes referred to as ‘Mr & Mme Henri Dupont’. After their divorce in 1877 she remained active in the field, together with her son Georges Dupont. She pioneered the use of electric lighting for her photographic work, displaying it at various exhibitions.
Gevaert Photo-Producten N.V.
In 1882, young Lieven Gevaert began working at the framing studio owned by his mother, Maria-Theresia Bruynseels. Together they opened a photo studio in Antwerp in 1890. Imported photo-paper was expensive and unreliable. That is why Gevaert began producing his own paper in 1894. His first product, Calcium Paper, was an instant success. Dozens of new varieties, such as Blue Star and Gevaluxe, would be added in the following decades – all with particular differences in sheen, texture and thickness. From a small studio, Gevaert Photo-Producten N.V. (later Agfa-Gevaert) grew into a major international player that could compete with companies such as Kodak and Ilford.
3/ Visualising Class
Due to the rise of photography, portraiture changed considerably in the 19th century. Initially it was an expensive and technically complex medium, only accessible to nobility and the rising bourgeoisie. Entrepreneurs, industrials and lawyers had their portraits taken or, for example, their castle domains photographed.
About halfway through the century, portrait studios offering a fixed selection of poses to a growing urban middle class came up everywhere. The carte de visite made photographic portraiture affordable. These small portrait pictures give a clear insight into the era’s dominant norms regarding class and gender: dignity, elegance and self- control were important. From 1870 onwards, ferrotype offered a first affordable chance for workers to be photographed.
Around 1890, snapshot photography and user-friendly cameras by companies such as Kodak and the Belgian Van Neck ushered in a new phase. Amateur photographers from the higher middle class would record their surroundings in informal situations.
Still, certain groups stayed largely invisible: people of colour or queer couples were rarely pictured. Photography, then, did not only capture memories, but also deepened social inequalities and notions of identity.
Stereo photography
Stereo photography is a technique in which a two-lens camera takes two photos of the same subject using slightly different angles. The camera simulates the distance between human eyes. When viewed through a stereoscope, the image appears to gain depth. Stereoscopes vary from portable models to large pieces of furniture.
Free time in the family album
Around 1890, a new era arrived with the advent of user-friendly cameras by companies like Kodak and the Belgian Van Neck. Amateur photographers from the higher middle class began photographing their daily lives: family trips, holidays and homely situations. See this album, for example: the image itself of a woman riding a bicycle even seems to have been taken from another bicycle in motion. These playful, spontaneous photos show how photography was coming within the reach of more people. That is how leisure time and personal memories became a fixed presence in a family’s visual memory.
Status in the portrait
In 19th-century photo studios the customers would pose sitting or standing, beautifully dressed and surrounded by prop objects to accentuate their status. Poses and props were often the same, and they were strongly determined by notions regarding social class, gender and current trends. Men and boys took serious poses with books, walking canes or rifles, while women and girls appeared in long dresses with parasols. Deviations, such as a smile, were inappropriate. You were allowed to show yourself, but within the boundaries of bourgeois expectation patterns. The result: stately portraits that resembled paintings and were supposed to radiate the portrayed person’s social status.
4/ From Document to Art
The value of photography as a versatile tool in art and science was recognised early on. In Belgium the medium soon came to play a key role in the systematic documentation of heritage and art objects: think of medieval sculpture, the Flemish primitives and baroque paintings. A small yet lucrative market arose for this type of art reproductions. Artists also turned to photography as a tool for sketches and preparatory drafts.
The end of the 19th century saw the rise of pictorialism. This movement considered photography to be a fully-fledged art form and sought inspiration in painting. Amateur photographers from the higher bourgeoisie in particular created poetic, dreamy images with a central focus on their personal expression. Photography thus became a means of presenting yourself artistically as well as socially. The Belgian state’s purchase of a large collection of photos by Pictorialists marked an important turning point in the recognition of photography as an art form. The medium, which up to then had been mostly connected to the industrial arts, now claimed its position amidst the visual arts.
Between art and eroticism
What is the difference between nude studies for artists and erotic nude photographs? Up to 1867, Belgian law forbade photos that violated ‘good morals’. It was unclear what exactly this meant, and the boundary between art and eroticism was a thin one. Whereas Belgium played an important role in the publication of erotic literature in the late 19th century, saucy photographs typically came from France. In addition there were photo magazines with nude models for artists. These were officially intended as a tool for painters, but attracted other audiences as well.
In the course of the 19th century, erotic imagery changed from being a luxury product to something that was affordable to a large group of people.
Pictorialism
Through the use of photography, the pictorialists sought a personal interpretation of reality. They strove for harmony in line, colour and atmosphere, using techniques such as gum, carbon and platinum printing to achieve a painterly effect. Photographers thus stayed fully in control: they could adjust tone values, add or remove details, and intervene in the printing process using brushes, pens or smudging tools. Pictorialists often printed on texture-rich paper or Japanese silk paper, making each photograph a unique work or art.
5/ National Identity
In the young nation of Belgium, photography played a key role in the representation of social status and the formation of a national entity. Photos of landscapes, monuments and historical figures supported the notion of Belgium as a nation state with a history and heritage of its own. King Leopold I soon understood photography’s potential for depicting the nation, just like other government entities and organisations.
Photographers themselves took initiatives of their own. They submitted project proposals, requested funding, and actively contributed to inventories of heritage. While the interest in the past grew, the lens was also aimed at the present: modernisation, industrial expansion and cities in transformation.
Industrial photography documented impressive infrastructure, such as railroads and factories. Such photographs accentuated Belgium’s image as a progressive industrial state. The easy reproducibility of photos caused photography to spread out quickly and to be used in education, promotional campaigns and propaganda. Thus photography was further shaped as a medium that balances between capturing, imaging and influencing.
Patrimony through the lens of Fierlants
In 1860, the Antwerp city government gave Edmond Fierlants the assignment of photographing city views and monuments just before the advent of drastic changes. Brussels and Louvain followed suit. Fierlants’ photographs, often in large formats, show medieval buildings, baroque churches and endangered urban areas. His monumental series of 165 images made Fierlants a leading figure in Belgian photography. This work aligns with the national ambition of preserving historical heritage in the Flanders and Brabant regions.
Patrimony through the lens of Radoux
As early as 1857, Gilbert Radoux photographed Belgian monuments using collodion negatives on glass. Recent analysis shows that he worked with a photographer from the French company of Bisson Frères in Ghent, Bruges, Louvain and Antwerp. Their images, featuring identical shooting positions and details, were also distributed in Paris. Radoux suddenly ended his practice in 1861. His photos long remained undervalued from a technical perspective, but today he is considered an early pioneer of Belgian architecture photography.
Britons in Belgium
Among the first photographers in Belgium (1840-1860) were a striking amount of Englishmen and Scots. They continued the tradition of travelling and capturing landscapes and monuments. Their images reflect a nostalgic, medieval Belgium. In 1846 William Henry Fox Talbot created one of Mechelen’s oldest calotypes of the city. Egbert Moxham established himself in Bruges in 1857, taking several photos there. His salted paper prints on decorative golden-edged cardboard appear to be intended for sale. Sir William Newton, too, took photographs in Bruges.
6/ Colonial Perspective and World’s Fairs
There was a downside to the splendour of young Belgium. In 1885 Leopold II, king of Belgium, also became the sole ruler and owner of the Congo Free State. Photography played a key role in the promotion of this colonial project. Belgian world’s fairs in 1885, 1894 and 1897 in particular made it painfully clear how deeply the ties ran between ambitions for progress and colonialism.
Without their consent, Congolese people were exhibited and photographed at these international exhibitions in Antwerp and Brussels. Such colonial photography was not neutral: it reflects the inequality and power relations of the colonial system. Mainly produced by white male photographers, the images confirmed the notion of European superiority and reduced the portrayed Congolese persons to objects: dehumanised and voiceless. In addition to photos of Congolese persons in a colonial context, other people of colour were also photographed from a colonial perspective. These images served as propaganda for the so-called ‘civilising mission’, reinforced racist stereotypes, and legitimised colonial domination.
7/ Photography as a Scientific Instrument
Driven by positivist thinking and belief in progress, photography became an essential tool for scientific disciplines in the 19th century. It was regarded as objective proof and used in observation, classification and documentation. In medical science, photography helped with the documentation of illness reports, surgery and anatomical anomalies. Patients are often recognisably pictured without consent or regard for their privacy.
Photographic micrography opened up a whole new world: bacteria, cells and tissue structures could now be studied visually. This marked the start of modern microbiology. In astronomy, photography replaced the eye of the observer, and the first photos of the moon were created. Within the legal domain, photography was used from 1860 onwards for identification purposes, and later also for the documentation of crime scenes.
In this manner the medium evolved into a powerful instrument of knowledge, control and power, but not without ethical consequences.
8/ Photoreporting On The Rise
Over the course of the 19th century, photography evolved into a technique that also allowed for the photographing of moving subjects. Photographers in Belgium documented a variety of subjects, such as processions, disasters, public celebrations and technological spectacles such as air balloon rides.
The options were initially limited by long exposure times and complicated methods such as the wet collodion process. Around 1870, new techniques brought more speed and flexibility. The introduction of the gelatin dry plate negative on glass in 1871, for example, was a turning point: the plate could be prepared in advance and developed afterwards. Thanks to this invention, photographers could work in a more dynamic manner.
Around 1900 photography became more mobile and faster, gaining it a regular presence in the illustrated press. From around 1885 photomechanical techniques such as halftone printing gradually replaced drawings. This allowed for image and text to be printed at the same time. It made photography a modern means of communication, an evolution with a lasting impact on both journalism and our visual culture.
Press release from FOMU
François Braga (Italian active Belgium, c. 1810 – after 1883) & Joseph Pelizzaro (Belgium, 1803- ) Ghent, view of Predikherenlei and Predikherenbrug 1839 Daguerreotype STAM Collection – Ghent City Museum
François Braga was an Italian-born photographer and optician, active in Belgium, who is noted for taking one of the earliest known photographs in Belgium in 1839. In October 1839, Braga and his partner Joseph Pelizzaro created daguerreotypes of the Predikherenbrug and Predikherenlei in Ghent, which are considered the earliest photographic views of the city.
Along with his friend, print and engraving seller Joseph Pelizzaro, Braga captured the scene from the second floor of Judge Philippe Van de Velde’s residence on the Ajuinlei. Out of the four original plates they created, two are preserved in the STAM – Ghent City Museum, while the other two have been lost.
Joseph Pelizzaro (also spelled Pellizzaro) was a Ghent-based print seller, engraver, and a pioneering photographer born on August 29, 1803. He was the first professional daguerreotypist with a fixed abode in Ghent, Belgium.
Louis Ghémar (Belgian, 1820-1873) Portrait of King Leopold I 1856 Salt print Janssens Collection, Antwerp
In 1855 Louis Ghémar (1820-1873) opened a photo studio in Brussels, next to the studio of Jules Géruzet. In the beginning Louis Ghémar worked together with Robert Sévérin. Sévérin took the photos and Ghémar made the retouches and eventually colours the photos. But Sévérin left Brussels and was replaced by Louis Ghémars half-brother, Léon Auverlaux. From then on the name of the studio was changed to Ghémar Frères.
Louis Ghémar died in 1873 but the studio kept the name Ghémar Frères until 1894 when Géruzet takes over the studio, including all the negatives of Ghémar.
Ghémar Frères (Belgian, active 1859-1894) Self portrait Louis Ghémar at a piano c. 1862 Albumen print Collection FOMU
The photo studio of the two brothers Ghémar was the most renowned Belgian photostudio in the period 1855-1870.
Louis Ghémar (Belgian, 1820-1873) The hot air balloon “Le Géant”, by Nadar shortly before takeoff at the Botanical Garden in Brussels 1864 Albumen print Collection Yper Museum
In the 19th century, hot air balloons embodied the promise of progress.
Balloon flights were spectacular events that drew large crowds, and the attention of photographers. Rising into the air symbolised technological ambition, curiosity and modernity. Capturing these moments via photography, however, proved challenging. Long exposure times made it difficult to photograph movement or unpredictable events.
In the exhibition Early Gaze you can see how photographers documented balloon ascents, such as the famous lift-off of Le Géant in Brussels in 1864. While the ascent could be photographed, unexpected moments, like the balloon’s emergency landing near Ypres, were still too fleeting for the camera and had to be represented through drawings instead.
Text from the FOMU Instagram web page
Unknown photographer Hot air balloon 1899 Albumen print Collection Janssens
Adolphe Neyt (Belgian, 1830-1892) ‘View of the Moon’, from Atlas photographique de la lune 1869 Albumen print Collection University Library Ghent bieb
After some uninspired steps in politics, wealthy industrialist Adolphe Neyt decided to dedicate himself to his real interests: the sciences and fine arts. As part of this change in direction, he started to take photographs, convinced that the medium had a vital role to play in scientific research. In 1867, Neyt produced a series of stereoscopic photographs of micro-organisms, earning him international success and a silver medal at the World Exhibition in Paris. After this recognition, he ventured into astronomical photography. Neyt had a private observatory built at his home in Ghent’s Coupure to take shots of the moon. The project led in 1869 to his most impressive publication, the Atlas photographique de la lune. …
Although Neyt was not the first photographer to make recordings of the lunar surface, his results were distinguished from previous examples by their unrivalled clarity and sharpness. They were among the highlights of the Belgian pavilion at the 1873 World Exhibition in Vienna.
Text from the Dominique Somers website
Alexandre (Albert Edouard Drains) (Belgian, 1855-1925) Iguanodon de Bernissart, excavated in 1878 1883 Albumen print FOMU Collection
Born Edouard Albert Drains in Paris (1855-1925), the photographer known professionally as Alexandre moved to Brussels in 1875. His technical bravura, his willingness to try anything and his use of “instantaneous” flash photography attracted the attention of Khnopff. He was in close contact with Les XX, especially Jena Delville, Xavier Mellery and Mellery’s former pupil Khnopff. In 1896 Alexandre executed platinum plates of works by Khnopff, which Khnopff then enhanced with color, creating a series of unique new images. This work earned Alexandre an invitation to join the British Linked Ring Brotherhood (1893-1908), eventually becoming official photographer to the royal family. He died at Nice.
Text from the Anamorfose website
Alexandre (Albert-Édouard Drains) probably took his father’s Christian name as a pseudonym. He was a professional photographer, and member of the Association belge de photographie (ABP)as of 1886. In 1888 Alexandre already had a solo exhibition at the Cercle Artistique et Littéraire in Brussels. He was a prominent member of the Brussels bourgeoisie, and he had been running a professional photographer’s studio with his mother in the popular Marollesquarter since at least 1881. He opened a new studio in a posh uptown part of the city in 1897. He took photographs of a variety of subjects and in several photographic styles. This opened up very different opportunities for him.
An appointment as the official photographer of the Belgian royal family illustrates his prominence in the capital’s bourgeois circles. He was an accomplished portrait photographer but was also involved in the promotion of King Leopold II’s Congo Free State through photographic exhibitions and large-scale projections of photographs taken by the King’s colonial agents. One of these events was in honour of Henry Morton Stanley, the King’s chief agent, returning to Brussels in 1890. These activities may well have made Alexandre the ideal candidate to become the cinematographer of the International Exhibition of Brussels in 1897. His cooperation with L’Optique belge, the Brussels subsidiary of the French company L’Optique, may have made him the first Belgian cinematographer ever.
He produced a substantial number of photographs between 1880 and 1897, both professional commissions and artistic photographs with which he participated in exhibitions in Belgium and abroad. Alexandre was also connected to the Brussels artists association L’Essor and created works of art together with the symbolist painter Fernand Khnopff (1858-1921) in a mixed technique involving photography, pastels and chalk. As a notable professional member of the ABP Alexandre was favourably disposed to the emerging amateur pictorialist movement, and together with his fellow member, Hector Colard, he organised an exhibition of English Pictorialist photographers at the Cercle Artistique et littéraire in 1892. Next to his ABP membership as a professional photographer, Alexandre was a protector-member of the amateur pictorialist group L’Effort.
Alexandre is cited as a prominent pictorialist at the 1899 Berlin Exhibition of Art Photography, in which he participated with several photographs. The fifth issue of 1903 of Art in Photography, an authoritative German journal on Pictorialist photography, puts Alexandre in a category of his own, with nine of his photographs, and he is mentioned with his The Anatomy Lesson in the second issue of 1905. This is illustrative of the impasse Pictorialism was getting into. The photograph was already made before January 1888, at which time it was shown in the Cercle Artistique in Brussels. It could hardly be considered as a prime example of contemporary photography in 1905. In early pictorialist fashion, The Anatomy Lesson mimics painting. It clearly refers to Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp (1632). It also demonstrates his use of the magnesium lightning, an early nineteenth century flash device which could be ignited simultaneously with the opening of the camera’s shutter.
Most of his work after 1897 is inspired by the naturalist and impressionist tendencies of French Pictorialism. In 1907, two years after The Anatomy Lesson appeared in Art in Photography, Alexandre ceased to participate regularly in exhibitions. Although he used techniques which were innovative in his day, such as magnesium lighting and photographic enlargement, his artistic activity was limited in time, as he was increasingly focusing on commercial photography after he opened his studio in 1897. He continued in his capacity as royal photographer but closed his business in 1914.
Anonymous. “Alexandre,” on the Ghent University website Nd [Online] Cited 08/02/2026. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
François Smeesters (Belgian, 1839-1922) Aid for people with reduced mobility 1888-1890 Albumen print FOMU Collection
From 1862 onwards, Smeesters was listed in the population registry as a journeyman photographer at various private addresses.
Ernest Huybrechts (Belgian, 1863- ) ‘L’Explosion’, in La Catastrophe d’Anvers 6 septembre, 1889 Album contenant 18 planches Au profit des victimes (Anvers: Section anversoises de L’Association belge de Photographie / Jos. Maes, 1889), 1889, Lichtdruk Collection FOMU
Disasters, especially their aftermath, were an important theme for early reportage photographers in Belgium. The images are some of the rare early attempts to visually document widely discussed incidents and then distribute them comercially. Some of the photographs were sold to raise funds for victims, reflecting an early fusion of photographic journalism and charitable action.
Images of the disaster at the Corvilain gunpowder factory workshop in Antwerp in 1889, which claimed 95 lives, were compiled in two publications edited by Joseph Maes. One was sold for the benefit of the victims, the others served as a visual record of the tragedy.
Text from the FOMU Instagram web page
Charles E. Hofmans (Brussels) Hofmans Multiphoto camera 1890 Multi-lens camera for 12 exposures, format 2.5 × 3cm on 13 × 18cm plates, twelve meniscus lenses, fixed focus, fixed aperture, camera cover serves as shutter Collection FOMU
Charles Hofmans was a cabinet maker from Brussels, Belgium who became a well known camera manufacturer.
Hugo Piéron was known for photographing Antwerp, including scenes of the city’s gates and the frozen Scheldt River in 1891, and he operated a studio under the name Pieron-Loodts, having taken over a studio around 1867.
Victor Barras (Belgian, 1845-1916) Four women and two dogs, Liège 1894 Collodion printing-out paper 15.9 × 11.4 cm Collection FOMU
Little is known about this image, titled ‘Four women and two dogs’ that is part of the FOMU Collection and currently on show in the exhibition Early Gaze.
Within the FOMU collection, which contains millions of objects, we regularly encounter photographs whose origin or context is unknown. When information is scarce, we look closely at details within the image that might tell us more. In this case, handwritten notes on the back of the photograph (image 2) offer important clues.
The people portrayed are most likely members of the photographer’s personal circle. This can be deduced from a note on the reverse that reads: “… de la famille Duvivier Leys … de l’année 1894 et de ma fille chérie Louise Maes.”
The photograph is a daylight collodion silver print, an early photographic technique in which a collodion-coated glass plate had to be exposed and developed immediately after preparation – a process requiring speed and precision. The photograph was taken in 1894 by photographer Victor Barras in his studio in Liège.
Text from the FOMU Instagram web page
Henri Van Heurck (Belgian, 1838-1909) X-ray of chest deformed by corset 1896-1897 Daylight gelatin silver print Collection GUM – Ghent University Museum
Henri Ferdinand van Heurck (28 August 1838 – 13 March 1909) was a Belgian diatom specialist and microscopist. Born in an industrialist family, he taught himself microscopy and botany and wrote several pioneering works on diatoms, their study under the microscope and their preservation. He pioneered the use of electric lighting and its use in microphotography.
Henri Van Heurck (Belgian, 1838-1909) X-ray from a mummified Egyptian Ibis 1897 Collection FOMU
Fernand Khnopff (Belgian, 1858-1921) Portrait of Marguerite Khnopff c. 1900 Daylight gelatin silver print Collection FOMU
Khnopff’s use of photography highlighted, reflected on and contributed to the exploration of certain subjects and issues that defined European culture in the late nineteenth – early twentieth centuries in general as well as the artist’s œuvre in particular. These include the representations of the city of Bruges and its symbolic meaning in fin-de-siècle literature and visual tradition, the documentation of, and reaction to, Belgian colonialism in the Congo Free State as well as the representation of the colony in the colonising metropolis, and the employment of photographs as a substitute for a preparatory sketch or study at preliminary stage.
Text from the abstract of Fernand Khnopff (1858-1921): art and photography in the nineteenth century 2020
Khnopff’s oeuvre includes a large body of nearly monochromatic works on paper. A somewhat limited palette and restrained way of handling his medium become important features of his art, even when he is working in oils. The tendency towards monochromy in his work becomes an essential element in creating the remote and silent atmosphere of the scene.
Another factor in this aspect of his art, however, is the growing need for the photograph as reference, especially in his depictions of the city of Bruges (a kind of Shangi-la to him, a place he had only visited as a child). If he didn’t visit Bruges as an adult, the only plausible explanation for the accuracy of his later renderings of the town is the use of photography.
In public Khnopff disparaged the artistic merits of this growing medium and throughout his life carefully concealed the role photography played in the creation of some of his paintings.
After his death around forty photographs of Marguerite, who was both his sister and his favourite model, were discovered to remain despite her clearance of his studio and the destruction of much of his work and his personal papers. In them, she adopts poses in décor and costumes often alluding to Antiquity and the Far East, but also in dreamy contemporary scenes. It is clear that he was the photographer. Khnopff often did no more than rework the photographed motif in pastel or oil. …
Khnopff’s works based on photographs produced an image removed one more step from reality; remote, dreamlike, rendered in the shades and shadows of near monochrome which are perfect for conveying the ethereal ideas and themes of his art. This theatrical aspect of his photography makes him heir to slightly earlier photographers who were quite close to the Pre-Raphaelites such as Oscar Reijlander, Julia Margaret Cameron, Lewis Carroll and Lady Harwarden.
Associate Professor James McArdle. “November 12: Artifice,” on the On This Date in Photography website 12/11/2017 [Online] Cited 08/02/2026. Used under fair use for the purposes of education and research
Léon Bovier (Belgian, 1865-1923) Portrait of Madeleine Bovier as a toddler c. 1900 Daylight collodion silver print FOMU Collection
Lambert Léon Bovier, born 6.3.1865. Photographic supplies. “Firm founded in 1889” (L’Echo de Courtrai, 22.8.1897). Already active as an amateur photographer in September 1886 when he was a member of the “Cercle des Touristes” and took views of the area between Spa and Stavelot. Recorded as a watchmaker domiciled in Liège, Rue Hocheporte at the occasion of his wedding in Liège on 6.7.1889.
1894-1914 > Bruxelles, Boulevard Anspach, 166<10-12> or 168<94-09; 14> Partnership with Alphonse Roland (see that name) at this address, 1895-1897. Pictorialist (private address: Rue des Visitandines, 38). First prize winner in the fifth photography competition organised by the “Journal des Voyages” in 1894. Photographs on canvas imitating genre paintings. Corresponding member of the “Société Photographique de Lille” in 1900. Secretary of the “Cercle d’art photographique l’Effort”. Camera manufacturing. “Plates and papers of all makes. Recommended for radiographic laboratories. Construction of plate-holders for radiology” (Journal belge de radiologie, 1909). Reportedly lived in London [GB] from 1914 to 1917 and in Paris [F] from 1917 to 1918. Returned to Brussels after World War I. Bovier published several literary works in the 1920s under the pseudonym Léon Lambert. After his death, Bovier’s widow Antoinette Joséphine Marie Louise Robert (born Spa, 26.6.1868) was listed at this address under photographic suppliers until at least the 1950s. Their daughter “Madeleine” Marie Julie Pauline Bovier (born Brussels, 20.5.1896) would also play an active role in her father’s succession.
Jean Philippe Léon Sneyers, born 23.7.1877; died 24.9.1948. Architect-decorator, designer, art dealer and publicity agent, active from 1894. Also supplies for photographers at this address, according to the Mertens directory. Initiated into photography as an adolescent, when only 17 years old he was the president of a camera club for students, the “Detectiv-Club Belge”. Pictorialist. Landscapes, portraits and nudes. Secretary and leading light of the “Cercle d’art photographique l’Effort” (see that name). Member of the “Club d’amateurs photographes de Belgique”, which published several of his photographs in its “Bulletin”.
Both pupil and emulator of Paul Hankar, he discovered Viennese Secession architecture at the Turin exhibition in 1902. His surviving art nouveau buildings in Brussels include a house-cum-studio for the painter Albert Cortvriendt, Rue de Nancy, 6-8 and a shop front for Majolaine, Rue de la Madeleine, 7 created in 1904.
Commissioned by the government to design and decorate the science installation at the International Exhibitions in Liège, 1905, Brussels, 1910, and Ghent, 1913, and to design the Belgian installation at the exhibitions in Turin, 1902, Milan, 1906 and Venice, 1906-1907. He became a propagator of Viennese art nouveau via “L’Intérieur”, his art studio in Brussels at Rue de Namur, 9 which opened in 1906 and closed in 1918; thereafter Galerie Sneyers, Boulevard de Waterloo, 9 from 1918 to 1926. Collections of drawings and photographs in the “Archives d’Architecture Moderne” (AAM), Brussels. These constitute the small proportion of Sneyers’ archives saved from destruction in 1969.
All the haughtiness of the upper-upper, lower-upper, socialites and high society in Promenade des Anglais, Nice (1934, below) versus all the “colour” and characters of Sammy’s Bar in New York, salt of the earth, dead beat party animals (1940-1944, below).
All the obsequious opulence of the women in Fashion Show, Hotel Pierre, New York (1940-1946, below) versus all the low angle, unbuttoned bulk of a New York bag lady in Lower East Side, New York (1940-1947, below)
Model sure doesn’t pull any punches and, perchance, you know which side of the fence she sits.
Combining social realism and emotional expression Model’s street-life scenes and portraits are shot with a razor sharp mind and eye, honed with emotional insight and social conviction, promoting “a fierce attack on the bourgeoisie of the time.” These images are shot from the gut, felt in the gut! Oooof! Kapow!
This philosophical, libertarian vision is grounded in the everydayness of working people, not in men “who sit at desks as large as thrones, who gather in solemn hemicycles, in splendid and severe seats…”
Her Promenade des Anglais photographs are incisive, cutting to the marrow, evidencing a piercing, core-level truth about the nature of power, money, humility, humanity. Knowing exactly the story she wanted to tell, Model cropped her negatives in the darkroom to get the desired, constructed photographs of the elite, this promenade of the privileged. That she passed on her wisdom to Diane Arbus is only to our benefit.
Model’s photographs in this series are more biting, satirical and oblique than those of Arbus. Direct in one way (in the placement of the camera in front of the subject) but oblique in another … in the asymmetrical placement of the figures within the picture plane, in the sly acknowledgement (or not) and resentment of the camera by the subject. Conversely, her photographs of people in nightclubs, jazz performers and the socially disadvantaged are humanist photographs of the highest order, unorthodox musical compositions that sing with light, movement, and life much more so than the square, formal attributes of the Arbus.
God bless Lisette Model for her glorious irreverence and musical lyricism.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to The Albertina Museum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“As long as man exploits man, as long as humanity is divided into masters and servants, there will be neither normality nor peace. The reason for all the evil of our time is here. Do you see these? Severe, double-breasted, elegant men who get on and off airplanes, who run in powerful cars, who sit at desks as large as thrones, who gather in solemn hemicycles, in splendid and severe seats: these men with the faces of dogs or of saints, of hyenas or eagles, these are the masters.”
Pier Paolo Pasolini
Model’s libertarian philosophy is not easy to classify… it is often stuck in the approximation of street photography… but photography, when it is great, is one! and one only!… Genres only serve to sink it into the language of commerce! The lopsided shots, the deep blacks, the stellar whites… beaded with emotional uniqueness… see the human being as an end and never as a means… they invite us to think that justice is inseparable from beauty, it is a way of doing things well, like a chair-setter, a coalman, or a bricklayer… to flee from the arrogance, imitation, and contempt that accompany social codifications… what is beautiful is naturally right… because photography is not just a linguistic quest, but precisely as a linguistic quest, it is a philosophical vision… that respects no barriers or emulates the gods… it is an original, archetypal desire, that takes precedence over everything and carries it as the absolute value of beauty and justice!
Pino Bertelli. “Lisette Model. Sulla fotografia del disinganno,” on the Phocus Magazine website Nd [Online] Cited 02/02/2026. Translated from the Italian by Google Translate. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
“Visiting her mother in Nice in 1934 Model took her camera out on the Promenade des Anglais and made a series of portraits which to this day are among her most widely reproduced and widely exhibited images. With them Model declared her trademark style: Close-up, biting, satirical – almost like photographic political cartoons. In a nice bit of art history sleuthing, Thomas discovered that this series was published in the communist periodical Regards, a publication led by Ehrenburg, Gide, Gorky and Malreaux in 1935. Model, she says, never denied having published her work in Europe, but neither did she ever precisely acknowledge having done so… Thomas also relates Model’s style to the style of images published in Regards and what was being shown in small galleries – that approach, almost mocking, surely exposing, with the photographer or artist clearly separate/different if not superior from the subject – was in the air. Model perfected it, but she didn’t invent it.”
Elsa Dorfman. “Ann Thomas on Lisette Model,” on the AMERICANSUBURB X: THEORY website, June 14, 2010 [Online] Cited 03/02/2026. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Lisette Model (1901-1983), born into a Viennese Jewish family, is regarded as one of the 20th century’s most influential photographers. This ALBERTINA exhibition presents a broad retrospective covering her most important groups of works created between 1933 and 1959. Alongside iconic photographs such as Coney Island Bather and Café Metropole, the selection will also include seldom-seen works.
Model, following her emigration to New York in 1938, quickly rose to prominence with her pictures for magazines such as Harper’s Bazaar showing facets of urban life: the poverty of the Lower East Side, the upper class at their leisure pursuits, and night life at bars and jazz clubs. Model went on to become an influential teacher during the McCarthy Era. The exhibition features the first-ever public presentation of the original draft of her 1979 monograph, a classic of photo book history.
Text from The Albertina Museum website
Lisette Model (American born Austria, 1901-1983) First Reflection, New York 1939-1940, printed 1976-1981 Gelatin silver print Estate of Gerd Sander, Julian Sander Gallery, Cologne
Lisette Model (American born Austria, 1901-1983) Window, Bonwit Teller, New York 1939-1940, printed 1976-1981 Gelatin silver print Estate of Gerd Sander, Julian Sander Gallery, Cologne
Born into a Viennese family with Jewish roots, Lisette Model (1901-1983) is considered one of the most internationally influential female photographers. The exhibition at the ALBERTINA Museum is the most comprehensive presentation of the artist in Austria to date and brings together her most important groups of works from 1933 to 1959. In addition to iconic photographs such as Coney Island Bather and Singer at the Metropole Café, the exhibition also includes lesser-known works that have never been shown before.
While Lisette Model initially pursued a musical education, it was only in France, where she lived from the mid-1920s, that she found her way to photography: in 1934, the self-taught photographer took her revealing series of portraits of rich idlers in Nice, which caused a sensation as a biting social critique in the heated political climate of the time. After Model emigrated to New York in 1938, she quickly made a name for herself in the vibrant art scene as a freelance photographer for style-setting magazines such as Harper’s Bazaar. She photographed the diverse and contradictory facets of urban life: Model showed the poor population of the Lower East Side district in unsparing shots, the upper class at their pleasures in confrontational portraits and the vibrant nightlife in bars and jazz clubs in dynamic series. In the late 1940s and 1950s, she created extensive groups of works outside New York.
The photos of the west coast of the USA or Venezuela are characterised by a melancholy and gloomy mood without Model losing sight of social conditions. Due to political reprisals during the McCarthy era, Model began her second, enormously influential career as a teacher. After decades of effort, the publishing house Aperture published her first monograph in 1979. The exhibition Lisette Model presents the original design of this publication, which is now a classic among photo books, for the first time.
Lisette Model
Lisette Model (1901-1983) brought about a sudden change in photography with her spectacularly direct pictures. Her immediate, humorous, frequently confrontational, yet sometimes also empathetic style of representation revolutionised traditional documentary photography. Her pictures of street-life scenes and portraits combine social realism and emotional expression: “Shoot from the gut!” was her famous credo. This retrospective brings together Model’s most important groups of works from her nearly thirty-year career, from 1933 to 1959, including works that have never been on view before.
Lisette Model was born as Elise Amelie Felicie Stern (Seybert) into an upper class Viennese family with Jewish roots in 1901. She initially pursued a musical education and from 1919 to 1921 attended courses taught by composer Arnold Schönberg at the progressive Schwarzwald School, which had been founded by Eugenie Schwarzwald. Her contact with Schönberg proved formative for Model’s artistic work. After her father’s death, Lisette Model, together with her mother and sister, moved to France in 1926, where she discovered photography. In 1934 she shot her first extensive portrait series of wealthy idlers in Nice, which caused a furor for betraying social criticism in the heated political climate of the time.
Having emigrated to New York in 1938, Model quickly made a name for herself in the art scene as a freelance photographer for such influential magazines as Harper’s Bazaar. She photographed the contrasts of urban life: in unsparing images, Model presented the impoverished population of the Lower East Side; in scathing portraits, she depicted the upper classes indulging in their pleasures; and in a number of dynamic series, she captured the pulsating nightlife of the metropolis. In the late 1940s and 1950s she created her first series of works outside New York. Due to political reprisals during the McCarthy era, Model’s artistic work stagnated. She embarked on an influential career as a teacher, shaping an entire generation of photographers, including Larry Fink, Diane Arbus, and others.
France
In 1926, Lisette Model moved to France, where she continued her vocal training, which she was forced to discontinue abruptly due to voice problems. In 1933 she turned to photography instead. The threatening political situation in Europe made it necessary for her to learn a profession, and photography offered itself as a modern field of activity especially for women. Model’s sister Olga, a trained photographer, and the artist Rogi André provided important inspiration, including the momentous advice to photograph only what aroused her passionate interest.
The economic crisis and the rise of fascism went hand in hand with a debate among committed left-wing artists about documentary photography. The central question was to what extent photography could expose social injustices and serve as a weapon in social conflicts. It is unclear how closely Model followed these debates; in later years, she remained persistently silent on the subject. Her early photographs from Paris clearly reveal a socially critical approach. Going about her work with distinct directness, she photographed sleeping homeless people and blind beggars, whom she characterised as victims of social circumstances through their bent bodies.
In July 1934, Lisette Model used a Rolleiflex to photograph a series of portraits of wealthy idlers on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice. It was synonymous with glamour and elite tourism and a popular motif at the time. Yet Model portrayed her subjects as caricatures through their facial expressions, postures, and gestures. The narrow cropping of the motifs suggests that the photographer was in close proximity to her subjects, who look condescendingly into the camera. In fact, however, Model achieved this effect in the darkroom, where she selected radically novel perspectives from the negatives.
Regards
Although Lisette Model was only at the beginning of her career, the respected communist magazine Regards published her photographs from the series Promenade des Anglais in 1935. The layout of the article juxtaposed Model’s portraits with an image of a female worker with a fishing net. The accompanying text also embeds the photographs in the ideological rhetoric of class struggle: “The Promenade des Anglais is a zoological garden where the most abominable specimens of the human species lounge in white armchairs. Their faces betray boredom, condescension, impertinent stupidity, and at times malice. These rich people, who spend most of their time dressing, adorning themselves, manicuring their nails, and applying makeup, fail to conceal the decadence and immeasurable emptiness of bourgeois thinking.”
Against the backdrop of the repressive climate of the McCarthy era in the 1950s, Lisette Model would later tone down the political content of her images from Nice. Instead, she emphasised the humour and her intuitive approach to portraiture in public spaces.
New York
In October 1938, Lisette Model emigrated to New York with her husband Evsa Model, a Jewish-Russian painter. Her first series shot there reveal her great fascination with the metropolis. The work Reflection, which makes use of reflections in shop windows, merges motifs and spaces to create an enigmatic collage. For the Running Legs photographs, Model did not point her camera upwards at the skyscrapers as usual, but looked at the feet of passersby at street level. Model experienced New York’s hectic and consumer-oriented culture as ambivalent: the dark shadows in the windows of the department stores seem threatening, and the dense crowds of legs have a claustrophobic effect. In portraits of people on Fifth Avenue and Wall Street photographed from below, Model highlights the arrogance of the pedestrians rushing by.
Shortly after her arrival in New York, Lisette Model attracted the attention of several key figures in the art and media world. Her contacts with Ralph Steiner, editor of the magazine PM’s Weekly, and Alexey Brodovitch, the legendary art director of Harper’s Bazaar, proved momentous. In 1941, Steiner published Model’s biting photographs of the Promenade des Anglais in Nice under the provocative title “Why France Fell” as an explanation for the country’s defeat in World War II. Model’s first commission for Harper’s Bazaar took her to the popular leisure destination of Coney Island, where she shot her iconic photographs of a bather with an empathetic eye. As early as 1940, the Museum of Modern Art in New York acquired one of Model’s pictures and continued to show her works in exhibitions in the following years.
Lower East Side
In one of her most extensive groups of works, Lisette Model focuses on the residents of the Lower East Side. Model’s attention to physical peculiarities and extremes becomes particularly apparent in it. Retrospectively defined cropping detaches the people from their spatial surroundings and emphasises the sitters’ statuesque monumentality.
Lisette Model shared her interest in the socially disadvantaged with photographers from the New York Photo League, an influential left-wing political association dedicated to socially committed photography. Becoming a member, Model actively participated in Photo League events and exhibited on its premises. And yet she distanced herself from her photography being categorised as political or social documentary. She also rejected accusations of portraying her models overly sarcastically, arguing instead for a humanist point-of-view that focuses on the strength and personality of her subjects. Emotional expression and social realism are inextricably linked in these photographs: the expressive bodies clearly display the burden of tough living conditions.
Entertainment
Similar to her photographs from France, Model also explored disparities in urban life in New York. The harsh images of the Lower East Side are juxtaposed with photographs of people indulging in leisure activities and amusing themselves at all kinds of shows. Model captured these scenes with a keen eye for human contradictions and bizarre moments: dressed-up ladies at a fashion show are just as much a part of this as participants in a dog show bearing a striking resemblance to their four-legged friends. Photographs taken in museums do not focus on the artworks intently viewed by visitors, but rather on the act of vision itself. With a few exceptions, the series Dog Show and Museum have only survived as negatives. They can now be presented here in digital form for the first time.
Nightlife
Lisette Model’s intuitive approach to photography reached its peak in her pictures of nightclubs. Using bright flashes, she snatched the celebrating guests and energetic performers from the darkness and in the subsequent post-editing of the images tilted the motifs to render the compositions more dynamic. The depiction of expressive gestures and people in moments of emotional tension recalls the body images of the early Viennese Expressionists, whom Model got to know through her contact with Arnold Schönberg. Model, who always vehemently denied the influence of other artists, acknowledged solely Schönberg’s impact on her work. His theory of the “emancipation of dissonance,” which expands on classical harmony, is echoed both in Model’s unorthodox compositions and in her caricatures.
The traumatic experience of exile left deep traces in Lisette Model’s work. Like the Lower East Side before, nightclubs were places populated by immigrants. They evoked a sense of social belonging and cultural familiarity in the artist.
West Coast
In 1946, Lisette Model accompanied her husband Evsa to San Francisco on an invitation from the California School of Fine Arts (CSFA). She quickly established connections with the lively photography scene on the US West Coast, where famous photographers such as Ansel Adams and Edward Weston were active. Model returned several times and in 1949 taught a course on documentary photography at the CSFA’s photography department; she continued with her teaching in New York from 1951 onward.
Model did her first major groups of works outside New York. The photographs of visitors to the opera of San Francisco rank among her most striking portraits and illustrate her strategy of bringing out individual characters by exaggerating physical peculiarities.
In 1949 an assignment for the Ladies Home Journal took Lisette Model to Reno, Nevada. She photographed women staying at so-called “divorce ranches,” waiting for their divorces to be finalised. Thanks to more liberal laws, divorce was possible in Nevada after a waiting period of just a few weeks – compared to the patriarchal rules of other states, this was an uncomplicated way for women in particular to separate from their spouses. Lisette Model’s sympathy for her sitters becomes palpable. Unlike the pictures taken in San Francisco, these portraits are less expressive, but more melancholic instead.
Venezuela
In the 1950s, in the wake of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s communist witch hunt, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) inquired into Lisette Model’s activities. Neighbours and even her grocer were questioned about the artist. In February 1954 two FBI agents finally interrogated Lisette Model and accused her of alleged membership in the communist party and of her actual affiliation with the Photo League, which had already disbanded in 1951 due to political pressure. The agents were unable to prove any wrongdoing on Model’s part, but classified her as uncooperative and recommended that she be placed on the security watch list. As a result of these accusations, Model lost some of her most important clients and was forced to supplement her income by working as a teacher.
Plagued by financial difficulties, she travelled to Caracas in 1954, accepting an invitation extended by the Venezuelan government. By then, Venezuela had been under the presidency of Marcos Evangelista Pérez Jiménez for two years – a military officer and dictator who modernised Caracas and exploited the country’s rich oil reserves. In photographs that were unusual for her in terms of motif and style, Model captured the technical infrastructure for oil production around Lake Maracaibo. Because of their gloomy atmosphere, the images were unsuitable for use in advertising and propaganda. Unsettled by the paranoia of the McCarthy era, the photographer often found it difficult to relate to her surroundings.
Jazz
As a result of the reprisals during the McCarthy era, Lisette Model photographed significantly less in the 1950s than in the promising decades before. One exception were the photographs she took during a horserace in New York in 1956, where she directed her attention at the audience instead of the competition. Her preoccupation with the subject of jazz was most intense. It is Model’s largest body of work, which developed from her photographs of New York nightclubs in the 1940s. Model was one of the few women to photograph jazz events such as the Newport Jazz Festival or concerts of the Lenox School of Jazz at the Berkshire Music Barn in Massachusetts. Highly musical herself, Model knew how to use her straightforward approach to convey the passion and intensity of the musicians’ playing as an immediate experience. No musician was photographed by her as often as Billie Holiday. One of Lisette Model’s last pictures, taken in 1959, shows the singer lying in her coffin.
In the 1950s, Model planned to publish her jazz photographs. It would have been the first monographic jazz book in history, but the project failed when her former client at Harper’s Bazaar discredited Model as a “troublemaker” and, due to her “political unreliability,” dissuaded potential financial backers.
Starting in the 1970s, Lisette Model was rediscovered in exhibitions and interviews. After years of effort, the first monograph on her work, with an introduction by Berenice Abbott, came out in 1979 with the renowned publisher Aperture. It is now considered an incunabulum within the photo book genre. The Albertina owns the hitherto unpublished dummy with original prints. Originally, the book was to be printed with a comprehensive biography of the artist penned by author Phillip Lopate. Dissatisfied with the text, Model had the manuscript withdrawn and commented on it with scathing remarks: “I thought an introduction was to be written – not that I was to be put on trial,” she noted down on the title page.
Model’s behaviour was indicative of the protective shield she had built around her private life as a result of her threatening encounter with the paranoia of the McCarthy era. In her public statements and interviews she obscured facts and details of her biography. She resisted simplistic interpretations of her work, but also concealed and marginalised references to politically explosive works, such as the publication of her photographs from Nice in the communist publication Regards in the mid-1930s.
Lisette Model (American born Austria, 1901-1983) Albert-Alberta, Hubert’s Forty-second Street Flea Circus, New York 1945, printed 1980s Gelatin silver print Estate of Gerd Sander, Julian Sander Gallery, Cologne
Lisette Model (American born Austria, 1901-1983) Female impersonator c. 1945 Gelatin silver print National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa
Lisette Model (Vienna, 1901 – New York, 1983) was one of the main practitioners of North American direct photography. Born into a Jewish bourgeois family in Vienna, she studied piano and singing with Arnold Schönberg. In 1926 she moved to Paris where she became interested in painting and photography. Due to the oncoming war in Europe and growing anti-Semitism spreading throughout the continent, Model moved to New York in 1938 and began to work as a photographer for the magazine Harper’s Bazaar under the guidance of Alexey Brodovitch. She became a member of the Photo League.
Free of any sort of indoctrination, Model’s work stands out for her use of direct portraiture and for focusing on the peculiarities of the people she portrayed. Her images are full of low-angle shots, radical framings, and powerful black and white contrasts, making them greatly expressive. Some of her most renowned series – Promenade des Anglais, Reflections, and Running Legs – were produced in the French Côte d’Azur and in New York.
At the end of her career Model worked with Gerhard Sander, grandson of the photographer August Sander, who became her art dealer and lab assistant. Her work as an instructor was also notable. She began teaching in 1949 at the California School of Fine Arts and continued to teach throughout her life at other institutions such as the New School for Social Research. Her role as a professor would leave a mark on some of the most important photographers of the following generation, such as Diane Arbus, Larry Fink, and Peter Hujar, to name a few.
Model’s photographs are close. Uncomfortably close. Faces, bodies, gestures fill the frame, often to the limit of what is bearable. The famous tight cropping, often decided only in the darkroom, frees the people from their surroundings and confronts the viewer with full presence. There is no escaping. No decorative surroundings.
And yet there is no voyeurism. No mockery. Despite all the harshness, these images carry a form of respect, often with a good dose of humor or, depending on the subject, social criticism. You sense that someone is looking here, not looking down. There is tension hanging in the air – between ruthlessness and empathy – and it keeps the work relevant to this day.
The base images for this series of work come from a book on the history of St. James’s Gate Brewery in Dublin published in 1931. These images have then been reflected, distorted, overlapped and filters have been used to produce the desired feeling. Each image has a different number of variations depending on this feeling. The 75 images in the series are sequenced as in the book.
The influences on the work were the architecture in Fritz Lang’s 1937 film Metropolis; the surrealist photography of Dora Maar notably her image Le Simulateur (The Pretender) 1936; the modernist photographs of factory machines by artists such as Jakob Tuggener and Albert Renger-Patzsch; and the prisons of Piranesi’s etchings published in Carceri d’invenzione, often translated as Imaginary Prisons, c. 1745 to 1750.
Please click on the photographs to see a larger version of the image. Please view the work on a large computer screen if possible. Please see the whole series on my website. Many thankx to Elizabeth Gertsakis for her invaluable help.
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) No. 2 Brewery 2026 from the series Metropolis
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Boiler House B 2026 from the series Metropolis
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Old Engine A 2026 from the series Metropolis
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Electric Power Station A-B 2026 from the series Metropolis
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Compressor Machines A-B 2026 from the series Metropolis
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Refrigerating Plant A 2026 from the series Metropolis
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Robert St. Malt Store – Exterior A-B 2026 from the series Metropolis
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Robert St. Malt Store – Interior A-B 2026 from the series Metropolis
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Loading Malt Wagons B, D 2026 from the series Metropolis
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Cooke’s Lane Malt House A-C 2026 from the series Metropolis
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Barley in Process of Being Malted 2026 from the series Metropolis
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Malt Train Outside No. 2 Brewery B 2026 from the series Metropolis
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Hops in Store A-C 2026 from the series Metropolis
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Loading Hop Wagons A-B 2026 from the series Metropolis
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Regulating Mash Temperatures B 2026 from the series Metropolis
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Copper Stage A-C 2026 from the series Metropolis
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) “Striking Off” a Copper 2026 from the series Metropolis
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) A Corner of No. 11 Vat House A 2026 from the series Metropolis
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Vat House – Another View A-C 2026 from the series Metropolis
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Cask Making Shop – Blazing A-C 2026 from the series Metropolis
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Cask Magazine A-C 2026 from the series Metropolis
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Cooperage Yard A-B 2026 from the series Metropolis
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Cask Cleansing Shed A-D 2026 from the series Metropolis
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Racking Room, Showing Casks being Filled 2026 from the series Metropolis
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Loading Railway Wagons 2026 from the series Metropolis
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Low Platform Vehicle A-B 2026 from the series Metropolis
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Some of the Delivery Fleet About to Start 2026 from the series Metropolis
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Loading Wharf on River Liffey C-D 2026 from the series Metropolis
Curators: Laurie Hurwitz and Shoair Mavlian in collaboration with Boris and Vita Mikhailov
Installation view of the exhibition Boris Mikhailov: Ukrainian Diary at The Photographers’ Gallery, London showing at left, photographs from his series Luriki (1971-1985, below) and Sots Art (c. 1975-1986, below); and at right, a photograph from the series National Hero (1991, below)
“The world is made up of many worlds. Some are connected and some are not.”
From the film Perfect Days, 2023 directed by Wim Wenders
I love this man’s work. I feel very connected to his worlds. His constructed discontinuities. His ruptures, compressions, ambiguities. His social codifications of rich, poor, haves and have nots, and, as someone said, his portrayal of “the overlooked, the uncomfortable, and the unabashedly human.”
“Mikhailov’s visual pairings deliver unambiguous messages, almost violent in their straightforwardness. Multiple juxtapositions of unconsciously drunk men prostrating under passers-by feet to that of stray dogs, dead or alive, explicitly comment on human’s life disintegration to the state of an animal, its reduction to bare bones – and yes, an animal carcass, a metaphoric sign of abject poverty, is also present in this visual narrative in a scene with two men dragging a piece of spinal vertebrae of a large creature, a cow or, perhaps, a horse. Rotten banana peels sit across the page from infected flaccid limbs and genitalia. A posture of a naked woman reclining on a sullied mattress echoes that of a rubber sex doll staring from the next page. A close-up of a bruised woman’s breast with a crude stitches over a wound parallels gaping cracks of a damaged mail box. Thus the physical body of a homeless person starts speaking about the city as an organism, equally abused and dismembered. Wounds inflected upon flesh are surface manifestations of wounds inflected upon the city and the society at large.”1
“By subverting idealised Soviet imagery, he proposed a raw, ironic, and unremarkable version of reality, always seeking to capture the spirit of his times through the everyday. Or, better yet, to condense that spirit for others, not through words but through a visual semantics of his own making.”2
Experimental, conceptual, staged, performative, his photographs appeal to my subversive nature, prodding as they do at the status quo. His “rebellious visual language” takes us on a journey – his journey, Ukraine’s journey – “a journey through time, loss, and transformation.”
“Mikhailov’s photographs are emotionally powerful, politically astute and uncannily effective conversations with the world… about subjects that should matter to all of us: war, destitution, poverty, oppression, and the power of an authoritarian state to control the thoughts and actions of human beings under its control. They are about the freedom of individual people to live their lives as they choose; and they are about the freedom of a group of people which form a country to not be subjugated under the rule of another country to which they are historically linked.
His photographs are about choice and difference, they are about life.
They perform a task, that is, they bring into consciousness … the ground on which we stand together, against oppression, for freedom. Of course, no country is without its problems, its historical traumas, prejudices and corruption but the alternative is being ruled over without a choice, which is totally unacceptable.
Against the “failed promises of both communism and capitalism” and the “economic history that is written on the flesh” of the poor, Boris Mikhaïlov’s Ukrainian diary documents day after day the dis-ease and fragility, but also resilience, of his subjects and the world in which they live. He uses his art as a visual tool for cultural resistance. And the thing about his images is: you remember them. They are unlike so much bland, conceptual contemporary photography because these are powerful, emotional images. In their being, in their presence, they resonate within you.”
In this earlier posting you will find a longer text that I wrote, descriptions of the each of the artist’s series and more images. I hope you can view the posting.
2/ Kateryna Filyuk. “Recalcitrant Diarist of the Everyday,” on The Photographers’ Gallery website Nd [Online] Cited 05/02/2026
Many thankx to The Photographers’ Gallery, London for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“I chose to focus on ordinary, everyday scenes and the search for formal solutions to translate this mundaneness into photography.”
Boris Mikhailov, “Everyone has became more circumspect…,” in Tea Coffee Cappuccino. Köln: König, 2011, p. 230
“Central themes – heroism, failure, power, the body, identity, absurdity, ideology – recur throughout, not as definitive conclusions but as open-ended provocations that invite sustained contemplation. In this way, the exhibition operates as both a temporal sequence and a constellation of moments – fragmented yet interconnected – that collectively evoke the complexity, contradictions, and richness of Mikhailov’s visionary practice.”
Laurie Hurwitz curator
“The explicit, dramatic and total power of the absolute monarch had given place to what Michel Foucault has called a diffuse and pervasive ‘microphysics of power’, operating unremarked in the smallest duties and gestures of everyday life. The seat of this capillary power was a new ‘technology’: that constellation of institutions – including the hospital, the asylum, the school, the prison, the police force – whose disciplinary methods and techniques of regulated examination produced, trained and positioned a hierarchy of docile social subjects in the form required by the capitalist division of labour for the orderly conduct of social and economic life.”
John Tagg. The Burden of Representation. Essays on Photographies and Histories. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993
From the beginning, we conceived two video works as conceptual bookends. At the entrance, Yesterday’s Sandwich – a seminal project from the late 1960s – presents a hallucinatory sequence of double exposures set to music by Pink Floyd. These psychedelic, surreal images, rejecting Soviet visual orthodoxy, open up a new, rebellious visual language. At the exit, Temptation of Death (2019) offers a quieter, meditative counterpoint. Combining images from a crematorium in Ukraine with intimate portraits and cityscapes, it evokes the myth of Charon, ferryman of the dead, and a journey through time, loss, and transformation. Together, these two works, created nearly fifty years apart, frame the exhibition with a meditation on mortality, reinvention, and the fragile persistence of life.
Installation view of the exhibition Boris Mikhailov: Ukrainian Diary at The Photographers’ Gallery, London showing at left, photographs from his series Salt Lake (1986, below); at at right in the background, photographs from his series I am not I (1992, below)
A major retrospective of work by influential Ukrainian artist Boris Mikhailov (b. 1938, Kharkiv, Ukraine).
Ukrainian Diary is the first major UK retrospective of work by Boris Mikhailov, one of the most influential contemporary artists from Eastern Europe. Mikhailov has explored social and political subjects for more than fifty years through his experimental photographic work.
Described as an outsider, a trickster and ‘a kind of proto-punk’, Mikhailov combines humour, mischief and tragedy in his pioneering practice, ranging from documentary photography and conceptual work, to painting and performance. Since the 1960s, he has been creating a powerful record of the tumultuous changes in Ukraine that accompanied the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Ukrainian Diary brings together work from over twenty of his most important series, up to his more recent projects. Viewed today, against the backdrop of current events and ongoing war in Ukraine, Mikhailov’s work is all the more poignant and enlightening.
“The word ‘red’ in Russian contains the root of the word for beauty. It also means the Revolution and evokes blood and the red flag. Everyone associates red with Communism. Maybe that’s enough. But few people know that red suffused all our lives, at all levels.”
Ukrainian Diary is the first major UK retrospective of work by Boris Mikhailov (b. 1938, Kharkiv). One of the most influential contemporary artists from Eastern Europe, Mikhailov has explored social and political subjects for more than fifty years through his experimental photographic work.
Described as an outsider, a trickster and ‘a kind of proto-punk’, Mikhailov combines humour, mischief and tragedy in his pioneering work, ranging from documentary photography and conceptual work, to painting and performance. Since the 1960s, he has been creating a powerful record of life in the Ukraine and the tumultuous changes that accompanied the collapse of the Soviet Union.
From early underground works and images of everyday life in Kharkiv, to his self-depreciating self-portraits which mock traditional Soviet masculine stereotypes, Mikhailov creates an ambiguous, fragmented view of a world in constant flux. His photographs contradict the onesideness of Soviet ideology, especially during the time when photography was heavily controlled and censored in the Soviet Union.
Ukrainian Diary brings together work from over twenty of Mikhailov’s most important series, including Yesterday’s Sandwich, I am not I, Salt Lake, Red, Sots Art, Luriki, Case History and Theatre of War.
Self-taught and ‘somewhat careless’ (in his words), Yesterday’s Sandwich (1960s-1970s), one of his most important series, began as an accident when a handful of slides stuck together. He was fascinated by the result and continued to randomly layer slides, creating new combinations which ‘reflected the dualism and contradictions of Soviet Society’.
Mikhailov created ‘bad photography’ as a way to undermine official Soviet aesthetics, as introduced in the series Black Archive (1968-1979). Badly printed, damaged or poor-quality productions were an artistic device that Mikhailov described as ‘lousy photography for a lousy reality’.
The series Red (1965-1978) bridges documentary photography and conceptual art – over 70 images taken in the late 1960s and 1970s highlighting the colour red in everyday objects and scenes. His documenting of red reveals the extent to which communist ideology saturated daily life.
Together his uncompromising, subversive work is a powerful photographic narrative on Ukraine’s contemporary history.
The exhibition is organised in collaboration with the MEP – Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris.
About Boris Mikhailov
Born in Kharkiv, Ukraine in 1938, Boris Mikhailov is a self-taught photographer. Having trained as an engineer, he was first introduced to photography when he was given a camera to document the state-owned factory where he worked. With access to a camera, he took advantage of this opportunity to take nude photographs of his first wife – an act forbidden under Soviet norms – which he developed and printed in the factory’s laboratory. He was fired when the photographs were found by KGB agents. From then he pursued photography full time, using it as a subversive tool and operating as part of the underground art scene. His work first gained international exposure in the 1990s with the series Case History, a shockingly direct portrayal of the realities of post-Soviet life in the Ukraine.
Curator and researcher, Kateryna Filyuk, explores the intimate diaristic qualities of Boris Mikhailov’s subversive body of work.
Even before seeing Ukrainian Diary at The Photographers’ Gallery, I found myself thinking about its title. The idea of a diary fits naturally with Mikhailov’s work: instead of creating a grand, official narrative inherent to Soviet photography, he developed an intimate and fragmented way of seeing. The term Ukrainian, however, is less straightforward. Some of his more recent bodies of work that directly address Ukrainian events: Parliament (2015-17); and Temptation of Death (2014-19), which adopts the Kyiv Crematorium as its binding motif, are not included in the exhibition.
Mikhailov began challenging Soviet photographic norms as early as the mid-1960s, working with a circle of like-minded friends. At the time, photographing “for no reason” could be equated with spying; showing Soviet life as anything less than ideal was seen as an attack on communist values; and photographing the naked body could result in prison. Mikhailov did all of this and more. He turned his camera toward mundane subjects, mixed genres freely and questioned photography’s claim to present an ultimate truth. By subverting idealised Soviet imagery, he proposed a raw, ironic, and unremarkable version of reality, always seeking to capture the spirit of his times through the everyday. Or, better yet, to condense that spirit for others, not through words but through a visual semantics of his own making.
Art historian Nadiia Bernard-Kovalchuk reflects on whether Ukrainian is an appropriate label for the Kharkiv School of Photography, of which Mikhailov is a founding figure. She writes that ”the school’s activities stretch between two heterogeneous historical realities: on the one hand, Brezhnev’s ‘stagnation’ and the perestroika fatal to the USSR, and on the other, the economically brutal birth of the Ukrainian state.” [2] This dramatic time span, during which Ukrainians experienced long-awaited yet destabilising transformation, offers a more fitting temporality for understanding Mikhailov’s work in Ukrainian Diary. Geographically, most of his projects take place in what was first Soviet Ukraine and later became independent Ukraine. Temporally, however, they exist within a landscape marked by ruptures, discontinuities, and perpetual new beginnings.
In the preface to one of his most audacious works, Case History (1997-98), Mikhailov reflects on the lack of a photographic record documenting complex historical shifts in Ukraine: ”I was aware that I was not allowed to let it happen once again that some periods of life would be erased.” [3] After returning to Kharkiv from a year in Berlin, he was struck by the stark divide between the newly rich and the newly poor, a process already in full swing. Yet his aim in photographing the homeless did not follow the classic documentary model, such as the USA Farm Security Administration’s work, which sought to highlight a social problem and prompt state intervention. Instead, by showing the everyday lives of those most affected by the collapse, Mikhailov “directly assaults the onlookers’ sensitivity” [4] and “transgresses the acceptable limits of representation,” [5] His goal was not to provoke pity or shock though.
Rather, Mikhailov asserts something more fundamental: the individual’s right to exist and express themselves beyond convention. Through his unwavering attention to ordinary lives, he bears witness to massive transformations unfolding beyond any single person’s control. Ukrainian Diary, then, is not simply a national label or a chronological record. It is a testament to how one artist has persistently documented a world defined by instability, reinvention, and the fragile, but enduring presence, of everyday life.
Kateryna Filyuk
Kateryna Filyuk is a curator and researcher, who holds PhD from the University of Palermo. In 2017-2021 she served as a chief curator at Izolyatsia., a Platform for cultural initiatives in Kyiv. Before joining Izolyatsia, she was co-curator of the Festival of Young Ukrainian Artists at Mystetskyi Arsenal, Kyiv (2017). The co-founder of the publishing house 89books in Palermo, she has participated in curatorial programmes at Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo (Turin, 2017), De Appel (Amsterdam, 2015-16), the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (Seoul, 2014) and the Gwangju Biennale (2012). In 2023 Filyuk was a visiting PhD student at the Central European University (Vienna) and in 2024 a visiting researcher at FOTOHOF Archiv (Salzburg) and the Predoctoral Fellow at the Bibliotheca Hertziana (Rome). Currently she develops a two-year scholarly initiative – the Methodology Seminars for Art History in Ukraine in collaboration with the Bibliotheca Hertziana and the Max Weber Foundation’s Research Centre Ukraine.
Footnotes
1/ Boris Mikhailov, “Everyone has became more circumspect…,” in Tea Coffee Cappuccino (Köln: König, 2011), 230. 2/ Nadiia Bernard-Kovalchuk, The Kharkiv School of Photography: Game Against Apparatus. Kharkiv: Museum of Kharkiv School of Photography, 2020, 17. 3/ Boris Mikhailov, Case History (Zurich: Scalo, 1999), 7. 4/ “Symbolic Bodies, Real Pain: Post-Soviet History, Boris Mikhailov and the Impasse of Documentary Photography,” in The Image and the Witness: Trauma, Memory and Visual Culture (London: Wallflower Press, 2007), 58. 5/ Olena Chervonik, “Urban Opera of Boris Mikhailov,” MOKSOP, accessed November 25, 2025
Text from The Photographers’ Gallery website
Installation view of the exhibition Boris Mikhailov: Ukrainian Diary at The Photographers’ Gallery, London showing photographs from his series Case History (1997-1998, below)
In the [Case History] book preface, Mikhailov explains that already in 1997 he vividly apprehended the rupture of Ukrainian society into new, burgeoning social strata, when the new rich and the new poor began to acquire features of class identities with their own psychology and behavioural modalities. The new rich were already hard to approach, protecting themselves with bodyguards and other social fences. The new poor, however, specifically the bomzhes (homeless people with no social support) could still allow an outsider in their midst – this was “a chance”, according to Mikhailov, that could only last for a short period of time. Most of the book’s protagonists had only recently lost their homes. Their rapidly deteriorating social position was still uncertain, malleable, and flickering with hope. Yet, the transformation was inevitable, which propelled the artist to act: “For me it was very important that I took their photos when they were still like “normal” people. I made a book about the people who got into trouble but didn’t manage to harden so far.” [2] …
Mikhailov’s visual pairings deliver unambiguous messages, almost violent in their straightforwardness. Multiple juxtapositions of unconsciously drunk men prostrating under passers-by feet to that of stray dogs, dead or alive, explicitly comment on human’s life disintegration to the state of an animal, its reduction to bare bones – and yes, an animal carcass, a metaphoric sign of abject poverty, is also present in this visual narrative in a scene with two men dragging a piece of spinal vertebrae of a large creature, a cow or, perhaps, a horse. Rotten banana peels sit across the page from infected flaccid limbs and genitalia. A posture of a naked woman reclining on a sullied mattress echoes that of a rubber sex doll staring from the next page. A close-up of a bruised woman’s breast with a crude stitches over a wound parallels gaping cracks of a damaged mail box. Thus the physical body of a homeless person starts speaking about the city as an organism, equally abused and dismembered. Wounds inflected upon flesh are surface manifestations of wounds inflected upon the city and the society at large. …
The majority of Mikhailov’s photographs provide no emotional crutches to lean on, no mechanism of ennobling or aestheticising infected abused flesh of the homeless. It is presented “as is”: frontal, looming large with all its detailed naturalistic vividness. If there is a visual code that Mikhailov activates in these images, it comes from a clinical rather than an art discourse, from surveilling patents for medical records. It is a discourse that John Tagg described as a nineteenth century record-keeping practice associated with certain disciplinary institutions such as an asylum or a prison that with the help of photography created a new social body of dependent subjects upon whom power could be exercised due to their newly-minted subaltern position.
Art, following Barthes’ dictum, domesticates and tames photography [21]. It generates the level of “studium”, accepted cultural knowledge that veils the trauma, renders it familiar, therefore trivial, therefore easily dismissed. Mikhailov makes his viewers constantly oscillate between images that give themselves for contemplation and images that confront with their clinical nature that can be scrutinised and observed but certainly not contemplated. Not one or the other type of image, but the switch between the two unsettles the viewing process. Mikhailov orchestrates poses and gestures of his subjects to create this visual roller-coster of plunging in and out of the aesthetic.
2/ Boris Mikhailov, Case History (Zurich: Scalo, 1985) 21/ Matthias Christen, “Symbolic Bodies, Real Pain: Post-Soviet History, Boris Mikhailov and the Impasse of Documentary Photography,” in The Image and the Witness. Trauma, Memory and Visual Culture (London: Wallflower Press, 2007), 52-66
Extract from Olena Chervonik, “Urban Opera of Boris Mikhailov,” on the MOKSOP website, 9th April 2020 [Online] Cited 27/01/2026. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Curators: Simon Baker & Laurie Hurwitz, MEP and Polly Fleury & Hope Kingsley, Wilson Centre for Photography
Installation view of the exhibition Edward Weston: Becoming Modern at Maison Européenne de la Photographie (MEP), Paris, 15th October, 2015 – 25th January, 2026 showing at left, Edward Weston’s ‘M’ on the Black Horsehair Sofa, 1921 (below); and at right, Tina Modotti (Nude in Studio), 1922 (below)
Shadow man
You can always learn from the great artists now matter how many times you have seen their work, especially when the photographs are simply, effectively hung ‘on the line’ in a beautiful space.
Here are photographs by Edward Weston I have never seen before: Pictorialist photographs of suffused and intimate beauty. An exhibition of Weston’s Pictorialist work would be magnificent to behold.
And then Weston’s Peppers (1929, below).
I don’t know why I have never seen this photograph before, why his Pepper (1930, below) is more famous, for this is a monstrous image of dark, writhing, semi-abstract figurative forms, just as valid an artistic statement (in a completely different way) than the more famous image.
Can you imagine holding a vintage print of this photograph in your hands!
Gloria virtutem tanquam umbra sequitur
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Maison Européenne de la Photographie (MEP) for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“Only rhythm, form and perfect detail to consider – first conceptions coming straight through unadulterated.”
“What I seek now is simplicity – the form reduced to its essence.”
Edward Weston. Daybooks II: California (1930-1945). Aperture, 1961
“The camera should be used for a recording of life, for rendering the very substance and quintessence of the thing itself.”
“To see the Thing Itself is essential: the Quintessence revealed direct without the fog of impressionism.”
Edward Weston. The Daybooks of Edward Weston, from Edward Weston: The Flame of Recognition. Aperture, 1965
Installation view of the exhibition Edward Weston: Becoming Modern at Maison Européenne de la Photographie (MEP), Paris, 15th October, 2015 – 25th January, 2026 showing at left, Edward Weston’s Shell 1927 (below); and right, Santa Monica (Nude in Doorway) 1936 (below)
Installation views of the exhibition Edward Weston: Becoming Modern at Maison Européenne de la Photographie (MEP), Paris, 15th October, 2015 – 25th January, 2026
The exhibition
The MEP presents Edward Weston: Becoming Modern, the most significant exhibition dedicated to Edward Weston in Paris in nearly thirty years. A pioneering figure of photographic modernism, Weston helped forge a new visual language – marked by clarity, formal rigour, and a profound engagement with the essential qualities of the photographic medium.
Originating from an idea by Michael Wilson – founder of the Wilson Centre for Photography in London and one of the world’s foremost collectors – Becoming Modern brings together a rare selection of vintage prints from his collection, many of which have never been exhibited in France. These works offer an exceptional insight into Weston’s evolving practice and the emergence of a distinctly photographic modernism.
Spanning more than three decades, from 1908 to 1945, the exhibition traces Weston’s artistic trajectory. His early pictorialist photographs, created in California during the 1910s and early 1920s, draw upon 19th-century artistic traditions, employing soft focus, carefully staged settings, and symbolic imagery. Over time, his vision transformed: his images became sharper, compositions more austere, with an increasing emphasis on form, surface, and structure. By the 1920s, many of his photographs approached geometric abstraction – though Weston was never confined to a single style. This transformation unfolded gradually, as motifs intertwined and techniques evolved in a subtle, ongoing dialogue, revealing an artist continuously refining and deepening his vision.
Highlights include works from Weston’s time in Mexico, where, in close collaboration with Tina Modotti – an artist, political activist, and his lover – he created portraits and nudes imbued with a newfound freedom and radicalism These are complemented by evocative landscapes of the dramatic California coastline near Point Lobos and Carmel. At the heart of the exhibition are his most iconic series: sensuous close-up studies of natural forms – peppers, shells, fruits, and vegetables – captured with an almost obsessive intensity; dune and rock landscapes from Point Lobos and Death Valley; and luminous nudes of his muse, Charis Wilson. Throughout, Weston reveals the universal beauty of everyday subjects, transforming them into pure, sculptural forms. Recurring themes – portraiture, the nude, still life, and nature – are placed in dialogue, uncovering deeper connections across his oeuvre. His work displays remarkable strength and variety, with many natural forms taking on subtle anthropomorphic qualities.
Becoming Modern invites audiences to rediscover a bold innovator whose visionary approach helped shape the course of photographic history. The exhibition also includes a selection of rare works by leading Pictorialist photographers, offering a broader context for Weston’s early influences and the artistic milieu from which his modernism emerged.
Edward Weston biography
Widely regarded as one of the masters of 20th-century photography, Edward Henry Weston (March 24, 1886 – January 1, 1958) reshaped the medium through a vision rooted in clarity, form, and a profound sensitivity to the physical world. Over a career spanning more than forty years, he forged a style that was both radically modern and deeply grounded in the landscapes and materials of the American West.
Born in Highland Park, Illinois, Weston spent his early years in the Chicago area, where his fascination with photography first took hold. By 1903, as a teenager, he was already exhibiting his early works. At sixteen, he received his first camera – a gift from his father that marked the beginning of a lifelong creative journey. He studied at the Illinois College of Photography from 1908 to 1911 before relocating to California, where, at age 25, he opened a portrait studio in Tropico, operating from 1911 to 1922. In his early career, Weston worked within the Pictorialist tradition – a popular style of the early 20th century characterised by soft focus and romantic, painterly effects. His portraits from this period brought him recognition from the art community. Yet by the early 1920s, he began to move away from this approach, embracing a sharper, more precise, and abstract visual language that emphasised form and detail.
A turning point in Weston’s artistic journey occurred in 1922 on a trip to New York, where he met influential modernist photographers such as Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, and Charles Sheeler. They recognised the originality of his work and encouraged him to fully embrace this new direction, which soon included close studies of fruits, vegetables, shells, and stones, rendered with astonishing clarity and sculptural intensity. Through close observation and meticulous composition, he revealed the inherent beauty of form, transforming the ordinary into the iconic.
In the mid-1920s, Weston travelled to Mexico with the photographer and political activist Tina Modotti, with whom he shared a studio and a deep creative partnership. Immersed in the vibrant cultural life of Mexico City, he engaged with a dynamic community of artists and thinkers whose ideas further catalysed his break from tradition.
Returning to California in 1928, Weston found new inspiration in the rugged coastal terrain of Point Lobos. The region’s intricate rock formations, windswept trees, and tide pools became a central focus of his work, offering endless opportunities for visual exploration and formal innovation. In 1932, Weston co-founded Group f/64 – a collective of West Coast photographers dedicated to “straight” photography, emphasising sharp focus, rich tonality, and the use of large-format cameras. The group championed an unmanipulated approach to the medium. Weston’s contributions during this period, especially his landscapes, remain among the most enduring images in American photography.
Becoming Modern traces Edward Weston’s evolution from the soft pictorialism of his early years to the clarity and precision that came to define modern photography. Spanning nearly three decades, the exhibition presents more than 100 rare vintage prints from the Wilson Centre for Photography. It invites viewers to rediscover one of photography’s most visionary pioneers through an extraordinary body of work.
The exhibition opens with two emblematic photographs that frame its central theme, reflecting a curatorial concept developed by Michael Wilson to highlight Weston’s extraordinary range and experimentation. On one side hangs M on the Black Horsehair Sofa (1921, above), a quintessential example of the Pictorialist style: a languid pose, softly diffused light, and a painterly atmosphere enriched by symbolic elements – a floral bouquet, a circular mirror. Opposite it, Tina Modotti (Nude in Studio) (1922, above) marks a striking departure. The figure sits upright, smoking, in a bare studio – captured with crisp focus and a stark, modern sensibility. Though created just a year apart, these works embody the transformative arc at the heart of Weston’s career: a restless search for new ways of seeing. From these beginnings, Weston’s exploratory approach soon dissolved strict categories, embracing a practice defined by an ongoing dialogue between subjects and forms.
From here, the exhibition situates Weston’s early work within the broader context of the Pictorialist movement. His prints are shown alongside key images by photographers who shaped or anticipated his early style – Edward Steichen, George Seeley, Anne Brigman, Dorothea Lange, Margrethe Mather, and Alfred Stieglitz. A tireless advocate for photography as a fine art, Stieglitz helped define the medium’s possibilities through his publications Camera Work and 291, and through his influential New York gallery of the same name. Weston’s own early prints – including a striking self-portrait – are exhibited alongside these historic works. These are placed in conversation with later photographs that capture Weston and his creative circle in 1920s California, evoking a distinct artistic atmosphere. Rooted in the landscape and rhythms of the West Coast, Weston’s early vision subtly diverged from that of his East Coast contemporaries.
The exhibition then turns to the pivotal decade of the 1920s, a period of remarkable transformation and experimentation in Weston’s practice. Rather than unfolding in a linear progression, this section reveals how Weston moved fluidly between subjects and styles – returning repeatedly to certain motifs while continually refining his formal vocabulary.
This section opens with works from Weston’s extended stays in Mexico from 1923 to 1926 with photographer and political activist Tina Modotti – his muse, lover, and collaborator – where he encountered a vibrant avant-garde community. Immersed in the artistic and political ferment of 1920s Mexico, Weston developed a bold new visual language focused on form, contrast, and a sense of immediate presence. A striking portrait of Modotti, presented in both gelatin silver and palladium prints, showcases Weston’s ongoing technical experimentation alongside his deepening sensitivity to tonal nuance. Modotti encouraged Weston toward an even more radical vision, challenging him to see the world anew through his camera.
His Mexican experience deepened Weston’s experimental impulse, introducing sharper contrasts and new formal rigor that reverberated through his portraits and nudes. His obsession with natural forms intensified. He photographed them repeatedly, seeking the perfect composition and meticulously refining his prints to reveal the interplay of light, shadow, and volume.
These subjects interact and reflect one another through Weston’s lens. The sinuous curves of a shell echo the lines of a nude; the gleaming porcelain of Excusado (Toilet) (1926) takes on the quiet sensuality of the human body. Shell (1927, above), one of Weston’s most iconic images, exemplifies his singular ability to elevate everyday objects into studies of luminous purity, rendering form, texture, and light with a precision so distilled that they verge on abstraction – not simply photographs of things, but meditations on form itself. During this period, his treatment of the nude also evolved dramatically: the body becomes fragmented and abstracted, its anatomy transformed into sculptural rhythm. This exploration reaches its pinnacle in Charis, Santa Monica (Nude in Doorway) (1936, above), one of Weston’s most celebrated images.
At the heart of the exhibition are many of Weston’s most exceptional works from the late 1920s and 1930s, in which he famously transformed the ordinary into something sensuous and unexpected. In his iconic studies of vegetables – particularly peppers – their curves and folds evoke the flesh and contours of the human torso, recalling both modernist sculpture and the body. Using the camera to express, in his words, “the very substance and the quintessence of the thing itself,” Weston also photographed in close-up what he saw around him: an egg-slicer, the plank from a barley sifter, a gnarled tree.
His portraits from this period grew sharper in focus and more daring in composition, echoing the dynamic perspectives emerging in European Modernist photography. By the late 1920s, after returning to California, his work had begun to appear in major exhibitions linked to the New Objectivity movement, which championed photographic clarity and rejected painterly effects. This evolution is also evident in his treatment of the nude: the body is fragmented and abstracted, its forms studied as sculptural elements.
Weston’s practice moved fluidly between subjects, embracing both the human body and the natural world, constantly refining his vision through intense study and formal innovation. Close-up studies of nature – sand patterns, rocks, and wood – verge on abstraction, including Rock Erosion and Sandstone Erosion (Point Lobos) – photographs made along the dramatic California coastline that Weston returned to repeatedly. Jagged rock formations, knotted seaweed, wind-twisted cypress trees, and bleached driftwood became recurring motifs, offering endless opportunities for formal exploration. These works also include a group of powerful portraits, from images of his future wife, Charis Wilson, and her brother Leon, to Weston’s son Brett and daughter-in-law Elinore Stone.
In my humble opinion Diane Arbus is the best portrait photographer of the 20th century.
As can be seen in the quotation from a 1939 high-school essay on Plato when Arbus was just 19 years old (below), latent inside her was an appreciation of difference, uniqueness, and the importance of life – all awaiting an out, an emanation of her spirit later manifested in her photographs through the picturing of her subjects.
Arbus found her mature voice as an artist, her métier if you like, when in 1962 she switched from a 35mm camera to a 2 1/4 inch twin-lens reflex (TLR) Rolleiflex (later a Mamiyaflex), a square format which became her iconic signature.
In the photograph Nancy Bellamy’s bedroom, N.Y.C. 1961 (1961, below) we therefore have evidence of the early results of the use of this new camera. In this photograph I believe you can feel how Arbus is still getting used to his new way of seeing the world, for you have to approach your visualisation of the world in a completely different way when constructing the image plane in a square format. Here she is still unsure as to where to place the camera. The light is fantastic coming in through the window and flooding the room but the out of focus left wall is weak and simply does not work with the image.
Fast forward to 1963-1965 and we see Arbus in complete control of her physical and emotional environment. In photographs from this period, whether medium distance portraits showing subjects in situ or tightly cropped portraits with minimal backgrounds, we see her undoubted mastery of natural light, flash, construction and tensioning of the image plane but, above all, in control of the feeling that emanates from the photographs that flows to the viewer.
Whether direct / acceptance / this is who I am (Interior decorator at the nudist camp in his trailer, New Jersey, 1963, 1963 below) to contained / introspective (Lucas Samaras, N.Y.C. 1966, 1966 below) – but never the dreaded “dead pan” – and on to the inscrutable / open / closed looks on each of the three faces in the photograph Triplets in their Bedroom, N.J., 1963 (1963, below), Arbus is the master at conjuring, no what is the word I’m looking for … Arbus is the master at materialising the energy of a person or place before our very eyes.
As the press release so eloquently states, “Through her singular combination of intelligence, charisma, intuition, and courage, Diane Arbus was frequently invited into homes and other private realms seldom seen by strangers. Though made in intimate settings, her photographs evidence no sense of intrusion or trespass. Instead, they reveal an unspoken exchange between photographer and subject, a moment of recognition in which confidences emerge freely and without judgment.”
An unspoken exchange between photographer and subject. A moment of revelation, or revelatio, where the curtain is pulled back to reveal our innermost secrets. Visualised by Arbus without judgement.
As the years progress towards 1968-1970 Arbus becomes bolder still. In photographs such as A naked man being a woman, N.Y.C., 1968 (1968, below), Girl sitting on her bed with her shirt off, N.Y.C., 1968 (1968, below) and Mexican Dwarf in his hotel room, N.YC., 1970 (1970, below) we see and feel such an intimate bond between the photographer and the subject – all crap cut out, all extraneous noise gone, just the baring of the soul of the sitter looking directly into the camera. As Minor White used to say, a communication / communion between the photographer and the subject, back through the lens of the camera and onto the film, forming a Zenian circle of energy, hoping for a revelation of spirit in the negative and subsequent print – whether that be from a rock, a landscape or a portrait.
And in two photographs from the same sitting, we can begin to understand how Arbus achieved her aim. In the photograph Transvestite at the birthday party, N.Y.C. 1969 (1969, below) we have the subject in situ, in context, laughing, happy, enjoying her birthday party surrounded by her things. Then things change. In Transvestite with her birthday cake, N.Y.C. 1969 (1969, below) Arbus closes in on this wonderful human being on her bed with her birthday cake. Isolating her from the background through the use of flash, there she is, fag in hand, staring directly into the camera in all her strength and vulnerability. Arbus evinces what it is to be this human being, she has empathy for the subject in these intimate settings.
I believe that Arbus’ empathy for her subjects was greatly enhanced by the waist level engagement with her sitters when using her medium format camera. Instead of bringing the camera up to the eye, Arbus looks down into the viewfinder to locate and ground the energy of her subjects, and the camera is nestled at solar plexus / belly button, with all the connection to mother, blood, energy and water (Amniotic Fluid) from which we all come. When singing and in yoga practice, breathing comes from the stomach and the energy flows in an out of the navel, the Manipura (solar plexus) in yoga, linked to personal power, emotional balance, and metabolism, acting as a hub for energy distribution.1 Having used an old Mamiya twin-lens C220 medium format camera myself I can totally appreciate the unique perspective and energy such a camera position brings to picturing the world.
“These archetypal images have become deeply embedded in the collective conscience where conscience is pre-eminently the organ of sentiments and representations. The snap, snap, snap of the shutter evinces the flaws of human nature, reveals the presence of a quality or feeling to which we can all relate. As Arbus states, the subject of the picture is always more important than the picture. And more complicated. That is why these photographs always capture our attention – because we become, we inhabit, we are the subject.”2
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ The (navel) is seen as a powerful energy centre in many traditions (Yoga, Ayurveda, TCM) and science, representing our origin, core strength, digestion (Agni/digestive fire), self-esteem, and life force (prana).
2/ Marcus Bunyan commenting on the exhibition Diane Arbus at Jeu de Paume, Paris, October 2011 – February 2012
Many thankx to David Zwirner for allowing me to publish the 5 images and installation photographs in the posting. All other photographs are used under fair use conditions for the purposes of eduction and research. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“For me the subject of the picture is always more important than the picture. And more complicated.”
Diane Arbus
“There are and have been and will be an infinite number of things on earth: individuals all different, all wanting different things, all knowing different things, all loving different things, all looking different. Everything that has been on earth has been different from any other thing. That is what I love: the differentness, the uniqueness of all things and the importance of life…. I see something that seems wonderful; I see the divineness in ordinary things.”
Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Installation view of the exhibition Diane Arbus: Sanctum Sanctorum at David Zwirner, London showing at left, Arbus’ Girl sitting on her bed with her shirt off, N.Y.C., 1968; at centre, Interior decorator at the nudist camp in his trailer, New Jersey 1963; at second right, Mrs. T. Charlton Henry in a negligee, Philadelphia, Pa. 1965; and at right, Triplets in their Bedroom, N.J., 1963
Installation view of the exhibition Diane Arbus: Sanctum Sanctorum at David Zwirner, London showing at second left, Arbus’ Two friends at home, N.Y.C., 1965; at second right, Brenda Diana Duff Frazier, 1938 Debutante of the Year, at home, Boston, Mass. 1966; and at right, Transvestite at her birthday party, N.Y.C., 1968
Installation view of the exhibition Diane Arbus: Sanctum Sanctorum at David Zwirner, London showing Arbus’ photograph A naked man being a woman, N.Y.C. 1968
Installation view of the exhibition Diane Arbus: Sanctum Sanctorum at David Zwirner, London showing in the centre distance, Arbus’ Mexican dwarf in his hotel room, N.Y.C. 1970; at second right, Lucas Samaras, N.Y.C. 1966; and at right, Bishop on her bed, Santa Barbara, Cal., 1964
Lucas Samaras (Greek: Λουκάς Σαμαράς; September 14, 1936 – March 7, 2024) was a Greek-born American photographer, sculptor, and painter. …
His “Auto-Interviews” were a series of text works that were “self-investigatory” interviews. The primary subject of his photographic work is his own self-image, generally distorted and mutilated. He worked with multi-media collages, and by manipulating the wet dyes in Polaroid photographic film to create what he calls “Photo-Transformations”.
~ Sanctum Sanctorum: a sacred room or inner chamber; a place of inviolable privacy
Diane Arbus: Sanctum Sanctorum, an exhibition of forty-five photographs made in private places across New York, New Jersey, California, and London between 1961 and 1971, is on view at David Zwirner, London, from 6 November to 17 January 2025, and travels to Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco in spring 2026. The exhibition will be accompanied by a comprehensive monograph reproducing all works in the exhibition, jointly published by both galleries.
Through her singular combination of intelligence, charisma, intuition, and courage, Diane Arbus was frequently invited into homes and other private realms seldom seen by strangers. Though made in intimate settings, her photographs evidence no sense of intrusion or trespass. Instead, they reveal an unspoken exchange between photographer and subject, a moment of recognition in which confidences emerge freely and without judgment.
Arbus’s desire to know people embraced a vast spectrum of humanity. Her subjects in Sanctum Sanctorum include debutantes, nudists, celebrities, aspiring celebrities, socialites, transvestites, babies, widows, circus performers, lovers, female impersonators, and a blind couple in their bedroom.
The exhibition brings together little-known works, such as Girl sitting in bed with her boyfriend, N.Y.C. 1966; Ozzie and Harriet Nelson on their bed, Los Angeles1970; and Interior decorator at the nudist camp in his trailer, New Jersey 1963, alongside celebrated images like Mexican dwarf in his hotel room, N.Y.C. 1970 and A naked man being a woman, N.Y.C. 1968.
While many of Arbus’s photographs have become part of the public’s collective consciousness since her landmark retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1972, seen in this context, viewers may discover aspects of even familiar works that have previously gone unnoticed.
Sanctum Sanctorum follows two recent major exhibitions of the artist’s work: Cataclysm: The 1972 Diane Arbus Retrospective Revisited at David Zwirner New York (2022) and Los Angeles (2025), and Diane Arbus: Constellation at LUMA, Arles (2023–2024) and the Park Avenue Armory, New York (2025).
Exhibition Catalogue
This new title ‘Sanctum Sanctorum’ illuminates Diane Arbus’s singular ability to enter private worlds.
Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research.
One of Arbus’s lesser known pictures, this photograph is of the bedroom of Nancy Bellamy, the wife of Richard Bellamy, a leading gallerist in 1960s New York who influentially championed Pop Art and Minimalism. Before she began her personal projects, Arbus worked in fashion photography with her husband, Allan, and she first met Nancy when she modelled for the Arbuses on a fashion shoot. As well as modelling, Bellamy also worked as a dancer, painter and costume designer, and had a keen interest in spiritualism. Like ‘Xmas Tree in a Living Room in Levittown 1963’, Arbus uses an empty room to create a portrait of the person – the dressmaker’s dummy, the canvas on the wall, the photographs by the mirror and the simple, yet elegant furnishings together create an impression of Arbus’s friend’s personality.
Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research.
The bishop in Diane Arbus’s photograph “Bishop on her bed, Santa Barbara, Cal.” (1964, above) was Bishop Ethel Predonzan, a unique figure who believed she was in Santa Barbara to await the Second Coming of Christ and wore elaborate robes, described by Arbus as a “small lady in damask robes with hair of phosphorescent pink”.
Predonzan was a key subject in Arbus’s exploration of individuals on the fringes, showcasing the artist’s ability to find deep personal connection and reveal inner strangeness.
Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research.
Mrs T. Charlton Henry was a Philadelphia socialite, a philanthropist, and a fashion icon – often top of the ‘best-dressed’ lists. She was the kind of wealthy upper-class woman that Arbus’s father would have hoped to see in his Fifth Avenue department store buying the latest furs.
“Mrs. Henry, born Julia Rush Biddle of Philadelphia’s Main Line, weighs approximately 88 pounds. She will be 82 years old this month. She has been on the best-dressed list so often that she is now a member of fashion’s Hall of Fame. She still lives in Philadelphia, but commutes to New York for luncheon, shopping, theater. She sits, with the posture of another era, on a bound-to-be-seen banquette at La Caravelle restaurant and delves into a curry (“I’ll have jellied soup for dinner tonight”). Her silver and gold “57 varieties” hair is meticulously coifed; the fingernails that blow delicate little kisses of greeting to friends are tinted a deep pink. Her brown and white gingham Mainbocher is perked up with her favorite day jewels. There are marble-size pearls around the neck and one wrist, and massive yellow sapphires at the other wrist, the ears, and flashing away on a ring and a brooch.”
Curators: Stephanie D’Alessandro, Leonard A. Lauder Curator of Modern Art and Senior Research Coordinator in Modern and Contemporary Art at The Met, and Stephen C. Pinson, Curator in the Department of Photographs at The Met, with the assistance of Micayla Bransfield, Research Associate, Modern and Contemporary Art.
“Like the undisturbed ashes of an object consumed by flames these images are oxidized residues fixed by light and chemical elements of an experience, an adventure, not an experiment. They are the result of curiosity, inspiration, and these words do not pretend to convey any information.”
Man Ray1
The rayographs
Although not the inventor of the photogram, a photograph made without the use of a camera by placing objects directly onto sensitised photographic paper and then exposing the paper to light, Man Ray’s rayographs have become the most recognisable and famous form that photograms have taken. This is because of their inventiveness, their subliminal connection to the psyche, and the use of “objects from the real world to make ambiguous dreamscapes.”7
It is interesting that Man Ray called his images rayographs, for a graph implies a topographical mapping, a laying out of statistics, whereas Lucia Moholy and László Moholy-Nagy’s photograms imply in the title of their technique the transmission of some form of message, like a telegram. The paradox is that, as the quotation above states, Man Ray always insisted that his rayographs imparted no information at all; perhaps they are only dreams made (un)stable. Contrary to this the other two artists believed that, “photographic images – cameraless and other – should not deal with conventional sentiments or personal feelings but should be concerned with light and form,”8 quite the reverse of the title of their technique.
After his arrival in Paris Man Ray started experimenting in his darkroom and discovered the technique for his rayographs by accident. With the help of his friend the Surrealist poet Tristan Tzara, he published a portfolio of twelve Rayographs in 1922 called Les champs délicieux (The delicious fields). “This title is a reference to ‘Les champs magnétiques’, a collection of writings by André Breton and Philippe Soupault composed from purportedly random thought fragments recorded by the two authors.”9 The rayographs are visual representations of random thought fragments, “photographic equivalents for the Surrealist sensibility that glorified randomness and disjunction.”10
Man Ray, “denied the camera its simplest joy: the ability to capture everything, all the distant details, all the ephemeral lights and shadows of the world”11 but, paradoxically, the rayographs are the most ephemeral of creatures, only being able to be created once, the result not being known until after the photographic paper has been developed. In fact, for Man Ray to create his portfolio Les champs délicieux (The delicious fields), he had to rephotograph the rayographs in order to make multiple copies.12
Man Ray “insisted in nearly every interview that the rayograph was not a photogram in the traditional sense. He did something that a photogram didn’t; he introduced depth into the images,”13 which denied the images their photographic objectivity by depicting an internal landscape rather than an external one.14 What the rayographs do not deny, however, is the subjectivity of the artist, his skill at placing the objects on the photographic paper, expressed in their dream-like nature, both a subjective ephemerality (because they could only be produced once) and an ephemeral subjectivity (because they were expressions of Man Ray’s fantasies, and therefore had little substance).
Through an alchemical process the latent images emerge from the photographic paper, representations of Man Ray’s fantasies as embodied in the ‘presence’ of the objects themselves, in the surface of the paper. Perhaps these objects offer, in Heidegger’s terms, ‘a releasement towards things’,15 “a coexistence between a conscious and unconscious way of perceiving which sustains the mystery of the object confusing the distinction between real time and sensual time, between inside and outside, input and output becoming neither here nor there.”16
Finally, within their depth of field the rayographs can be seen as both dangerous and delicious, for somehow they are both beautiful and unsettling at one and the same time. As Surrealism revels in randomness and chance these images enact the titles of other Man Ray photographs: Danger-Dancer, Anxiety, Dust Raising, Distorted House. The rayographs revel in chance and risk; Man Ray brings his fantasies to the surface, an interior landscape represented externally that can be (re)produced only once – those dangerous delicious fields.
1/ Man Ray quoted in Janus (trans. Murtha Baca). Man Ray: The Photographic Image. London: Gordon Fraser, 1980, p. 213
7/ Mark Greenberg (ed.,). In Focus: Man Ray: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum. Los Angeles, The J. Paul Getty Museum, 1998, p. 38
8/ Naomi Rosenblum. A World History of Photography. New York: Abbeville Press, 1997, 394
9/ Greenberg, op. cit., p. 28
10/ Jed Perl (ed.,). Man Ray: Aperture Masters of Photography. New York: Aperture, 1997 pp. 11-12
11/ Perl, op. cit., pp. 5-6
12/ Greenberg, op. cit., p. 28
13/ Greenberg, op. cit., p. 112
14/ Greenberg, op. cit., p. 28
15/ “We stand at once within the realm of that which hides itself from us, and hides itself just in approaching us. That which shows itself and at the same time withdraws is the essential trait of what we call the mystery … Releasement towards things and openness to the mystery belong together. They grant us the possibility of dwelling in the world in a totally different way…”
Martin Heidegger. Discourse on Thinking. New York: Harper & Row, 1966, pp. 55-56 quoted in Mauro Baracco. “Completed Yet Unconcluded: The Poetic Resistance of Some Melbourne Architecture,” in Leon van Schaik (ed.,). Architectural Design Vol. 72. No. 2 (‘Poetics in Architecture’). London: John Wiley and Sons, 2002, 74, Footnote 6.
Many thankx to The Metropolitan 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.
“Stepping into the exhibition Man Ray: When Objects Dream at The Metropolitan Museum of Art feels like entering the bellows of an old camera. Through a rectangular frame cut into the entry, the darkened walls unfold, accordion-like, to reveal a visual feast of the artist’s work, as Man Ray’s earliest film, “Retour à la raison (Return to Reason)” (1923), flickers across the screen opposite. Although the exhibition brings together approximately 160 works from an impressive array of lenders, it reveals itself gradually, taking the viewer through several turns before one can grasp its sheer enormity. When Objects Dream proves, thrillingly, that anyone left feeling jaded from the many, many recent exhibitions surrounding Surrealism’s centennial in 2024 can still see the movement’s key photographer with a fresh set of eyes.”
“Objects to touch, to eat, to crunch, to apply to the eye, to the skin, to press, to lick, to break, to grind, objects to lie, to flee from, to honor, things cold or hot, feminine or masculine, objects of day or night which absorb through your pores the greater part of our life. … These are the projections surprised in transparence, by the light of tenderness, of objects that dream and talk in their sleep.”
. Tristan Tzara, “When Objects Dream,” 1934
“One sheet of paper got into the developing tray – a sheet unexposed that had been mixed with those already exposed under the negatives. … Regretting the waste of paper, I mechanically placed a small glass funnel, the graduate, and the thermometer in the tray on the wetted paper. I turned on the light; before my eyes an image began to form, not quite a simple silhouette of the objects as in a straight photograph, but distorted and refracted by the glass more or less in contact with the paper and standing out against a black background. … I remembered when I was a boy, placing fern leaves in a printing frame with proof paper, exposing it to sunlight, and obtaining a white negative of the leaves. This was the same idea, but with an added three-dimensional quality and tone graduation. I made a few more prints … taking whatever came to hand; my hotel-room key, a handkerchief, some pencils, a brush, a candle, a piece of twine … excitedly, enjoying myself immensely. In the morning I examined the results. … They looked startlingly new and mysterious.”
American artist Man Ray (1890-1976) was a visionary known for his radical experiments that pushed the limits of photography, painting, sculpture, and film. In the winter of 1921, he pioneered the rayograph, a new twist on a technique used to make photographs without a camera. By placing objects on or near a sheet of light-sensitive paper, which he exposed to light and developed, Man Ray turned recognisable subjects into wonderfully mysterious compositions. Introduced in the period between Dada and Surrealism, the rayographs’ transformative, magical qualities led the poet Tristan Tzara to describe them as capturing the moments “when objects dream.”
The exhibition will be the first to situate this signature accomplishment in relation to Man Ray’s larger body of work of the 1910s and 1920s. Drawing from the collections of The Met and more than 50 U.S. and international lenders, the exhibition will feature approximately 60 rayographs and 100 paintings, objects, prints, drawings, films, and photographs – including some of the artist’s most iconic works – to highlight the central role of the rayograph in Man Ray’s boundary-breaking practice.
“Before my eyes an image began to form, not quite a simple silhouette of the objects as in a straight photograph, but distorted and refracted … In the morning I examined the results, pinning a couple of the rayographs – as I decided to call them – on the wall. They looked startlingly new and mysterious.” ~ Man Ray
Text from The Metropolitan Museum of Art website
Installation views of the exhibition Man Ray: When Objects Dream at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, September 2025 – February 2026
In the 1923 silent short of the same title, Man Ray filmed barely discernible scenes of Paris at night along with his own enigmatic photograms and conglomerations of spiraling or gyrating objects. The resulting sequence of near-total abstractions seems devoid of sense or purpose. The “return to reason” in the film comes finally in the form of a woman’s torso – modelled by cabaret personality Kiki de Montparnasse – turning to and fro beside a rain-covered windowpane. Man Ray reproduced the seductive finale, as well as other moments from the film, as photographs, singly and in strips. A still from Man Ray’s film, this particular photograph appeared on its own in the first issue of the key avant-garde journal La Révolution surréaliste, in 1924.
Le retour à la raison (Return to Reason), Man Ray, 1923
Emak-Bakia (1926) – directed by Man Ray
Emak-Bakia (Basque for Leave me alone) is a 1926 film directed by Man Ray. Subtitled as a cinépoéme, it features many techniques Man Ray used in his still photography (for which he is better known), including rayographs, double exposure, soft focus and ambiguous features.
Emak-Bakia shows elements of fluid mechanical motion in parts, rotating artifacts showing his ideas of everyday objects being extended and rendered useless. Kiki of Montparnasse (Alice Prin) is shown driving a car in a scene through a town. Towards the middle of the film Jacques Rigaut appears dressed in female clothing and make-up. Later in the film a caption appears: “La raison de cette extravagance” (the reason for this extravagance). The film then cuts to a car arriving and a passenger leaving with briefcase entering a building, opening the case revealing men’s shirt collars which he proceeds to tear in half. The collars are then used as a focus for the film, rotating through double exposures.
The film features sculptures by Pablo Picasso, and some of Man Ray’s mathematical objects both still and animated using a stop motion technique.
Originally a silent film, recent copies have been dubbed using music taken from Man Ray’s personal record collection of the time. The musical reconstruction was by Jacques Guillot.
When the film was first exhibited, a man in the audience stood up to complain it was giving him a headache and hurting his eyes. Another man told him to shut up, and they both started to fight. The theatre turned into a frenzy, the fighting ended up out in the street, and the police were called in to stop the riot.
Emak bakia can also mean “give peace” (“emak” is the imperative form of the verb “eman”, which means “give”) in Basque.
The film was based on Robert Desnon’s surrealist poem L’Étoile de mer.
The Met Presents First Major Exhibition on Man Ray’s Radical Reinvention of Art through the rayograph
Featuring 160 rayographs, paintings, objects, prints, drawings, films, and photographs, Man Ray: When Objects Dream highlights the principal place of the rayograph – a type of cameraless photograph – within the context of many of the artist’s most important works
This exhibition includes thirty-five works by Man Ray which are part of the major promised gift of nearly 200 works of Dada and Surrealist art from Trustee John Pritkzer
Man Ray: When Objects Dream at The Metropolitan Museum of Art is the first major exhibition to examine the radical experimentation of American artist Man Ray (1890-1976) through one of his most significant bodies of work, the rayograph. Man Ray coined the term rayograph to name his version of the 19th-century technique of making photographs without a camera. He created them by placing objects on or near a sheet of light-sensitive paper, which he then exposed to light and developed. These photograms – as they are also called – appear as reversed silhouettes, or negative versions, of their subjects. They often feature recognisable items that become wonderfully mysterious in the artist’s hands. Their transformative nature led the Dada poet Tristan Tzara to describe rayographs as capturing the moments “when objects dream.” While Man Ray acknowledged the photographic origins of his new works, he did not think of them as strictly bound by medium. Taking Man Ray’s lead, this presentation is the first – more than a century since he introduced the rayograph – to situate this signature accomplishment in relation to his larger artistic output. The exhibition is on view September 14, 2025, through February 1, 2026.
“As one of the most fascinating and multi-faceted artists in the avant-garde movements of the early 20th century, Man Ray challenged traditional narratives of modernism through his daring experimentation with diverse artistic mediums,” said Max Hollein, The Met’s Marina Kellen French Director and Chief Executive Officer. “Anchored by Man Ray’s innovative and mesmerising rayographs along with new research and discoveries, this exhibition invites visitors to explore his ground-breaking manipulation of objects, light, and media, which profoundly reframed his artistic practice and impacted countless other artists. We’re so thrilled to include thirty-five works by Man Ray in this exhibition as part of John’s incredible promised gift.”
Drawing from the collections of The Met and more than 50 U.S. and international lenders, the presentation includes more than 60 rayographs, many of which were featured in important publications and exhibitions at the time of their making, and 100 paintings, objects, prints, drawings, collages, films, and photographs to highlight the central role of the rayograph in Man Ray’s boundary-breaking practice. The exhibition marks a collaboration with the recently closed Lens Media Lab, Yale University, under the direction of Paul Messier, and with photography conservators and curators at various lending institutions, to study more than fifty rayographs.
In the winter of 1921, while working late in his Paris darkroom, Man Ray inadvertently produced a photogram by placing some of his glass equipment on top of an unexposed sheet of photographic paper he found among the prints in his developing tray. As he wrote in his 1963 autobiography, “Before my eyes an image began to form, not quite a simple silhouette of the objects as in a straight photograph, but distorted and refracted … In the morning I examined the results, pinning a couple of the rayographs – as I decided to call them – on the wall. They looked startlingly new and mysterious.” This supposed accident, now the stuff of legend, has obscured the fact that rayographs might be seen as the culmination of Man Ray’s work up to 1921 as well as the frame through which he would redefine his work thereafter. They harnessed his interests in working between dimensions, media, and artistic traditions, fittingly at the moment between Dada and Surrealism, which writer Louis Aragon once called the mouvement flou (flou means “hazy, blurry, or out of focus” in French).
Unfolding in a series of spaces that intersect with a central, dramatic presentation of rayographs, the exhibition illuminates their connections with Man Ray’s work in other media, including assemblage, painting, photography, and film. In approaching the rayograph in this expansive way, the exhibition also offers a reappraisal of the most productive and creatively significant period of his long career, beginning in New York around 1915 with his ambitious paintings and concluding in Paris in 1929 with his fine-tuning of the solarization process with Lee Miller. A critical factor across the exhibition is the central role of objects for Man Ray’s career, both in the creation of many of the rayographs and in his work more generally.
At its core, Man Ray: When Objects Dream focuses new attention on some of the artist’s most recognised, but little-studied, works, most particularly the rayograph. The exhibition opens with Champs délicieux (Delicious Fields) (1922), a portfolio of 12 rayographs which marks the first time Man Ray presented his photograms to the public. Critics hailed them for putting photography on the same plane as original pictorial works. The presentation concludes with the working copy of Champs délicieux, which the artist canceled and dedicated to his friend, Dada artist Tristan Tzara, in 1959.
Between these two works, twelve thematic sections of the exhibition explore such concepts as the silhouette, the dream, the body, the object, and the game, which are inspired by Man Ray’s experimentation with the rayograph. Other groupings will focus on specific media and techniques, and the artist’s studio, as well as watershed moments in the artist’s production, such as the years of 1923 and 1929, when Man Ray unexpectedly returned to painting. Three of his newly restored films, Retour à la raison (Return to Reason) (1923), Emak Bakia (1926), and L’étoile de mer (The Starfish) (1928), will be screened within the exhibition.
Highlights include such iconic objects like Man Ray’s iron studded with tacks, known as Cadeau (Gift) (1921), and his metronome, Object to be Destroyed (1923), that keeps time with the swinging eye of his companion, the photographer Lee Miller. Celebrated photographs, including his landmark Le violon d’Ingres (1924), in which the torso of the artist and performer Kiki de Montparnasse (Alice Prin) is depicted as a musical instrument, are also featured. The exhibition brings together some of his boldest but most refined experimental works – compositions like Aerograph (1919), a painting made with an airbrush and pigment sprayed through and around items from his studio. For Man Ray, objects could function as metaphors for the body, as demonstrated in works such as Catherine Barometer (1920) and L’homme (Man). Rarely seen paintings in the exhibition, including Paysage suédois (Swedish Landscape) (1926) record the artist’s great experimentation, working paint without a brush and in an almost sculptural way, building up and scraping down the surface that reflects his experiments in the darkroom.
Man Ray: When Objects Dream is curated by Stephanie D’Alessandro, Leonard A. Lauder Curator of Modern Art and Senior Research Coordinator in Modern and Contemporary Art at The Met, and Stephen C. Pinson, Curator in the Department of Photographs at The Met, with the assistance of Micayla Bransfield, Research Associate, Modern and Contemporary Art.
Installation view of the exhibition Man Ray: When Objects Dream at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, September 2025 – February 2026 showing at centre, Man Ray’s photograph Le violon d’Ingres 1924 (below)
American artist Man Ray (1890-1976) was a visionary known for his radical experimentation that pushed the limits of art. His most iconic works – an iron studded with sharp tacks, a woman’s back reimagined as a violin – combine this boundary-breaking attitude with a singular belief in the transformative potential of everyday things.
In the 1920s, the most significant of Man Ray’s investigations – and the thing that connected much of his work – was what he called the rayograph, a new twist on an old technique for making photographs without a camera. By placing objects on or near a sheet of sensitised paper, which he then exposed to light and developed, he turned recognisable subjects into wonderfully mysterious compositions. This radical art form, inextricably linked to the era’s Dada and Surrealist movements, grew out of his early work in New York and redefined his groundbreaking career in Paris.
Introduction
This exhibition’s subtitle, When Objects Dream, comes from a phrase by Tristan Tzara, a poet, artist, and early champion of Man Ray. Witness to some of the earliest rayographs, Tzara understood perhaps better than anyone else their physical and metaphorical link to objects reimagined through art. In a similar spirit, the current presentation reconsiders the role of the rayograph within Man Ray’s practice, especially its ability to extend his ideas across diverse media. The loosely chronological installation unfolds across a series of interconnected galleries organized around ideas that motivated the artist; to that end, visitors are invited to explore it in any number of ways.
All works in the exhibition are by Man Ray (American, 1890-1976).
Champs délicieux
In April 1922, readers of a French literary journal discovered a curious announcement for an album titled Champs délicieux (Delicious Fields). Its twelve “original photographs” by Man Ray feature objects from his studio – tongs, a comb, string, a hotel room key – composed in groupings. The images are ordered without clear logic or narrative. Instead, as advertised, they mark a “state of mind,” the artist’s free play, alone at night and without work obligations, in his studio darkroom.
Man Ray introduced Champs délicieux in the period between two revolutionary movements that arose in the wake of World War I: Dada and Surrealism. Both challenged conventional art and society by upending traditional subjects, techniques, and expectations. Inspired in part by a collection of unconsciously driven, automatic writings by poets André Breton and Philippe Soupault, Man Ray sought to render everyday objects unfamiliar. As early subscriptions attest, the album found an enthusiastic audience who appreciated the language of the rayograph and its ability to open up a new visual world.
A New Art
Before Man Ray first picked up a camera in 1915, he was focused on painting. He set out to stake his claim in the exhilarating avant-garde scene, his interest fueled by cutting-edge exhibitions at Alfred Stieglitz’s gallery, 291, and thrilling examples of Cubism, Expressionism, Fauvism, and Futurism at the modern art presentation known as The Armory Show in 1913. Unexpectedly, photography offered Man Ray a path forward. Noting the way a camera lens could compress and flatten space, he determined to endow art with a similar “concentration of life” while simultaneously freeing it from the burden of illusionism. “The creative force and the expressiveness of painting,” he wrote at the time, “reside materially in the colour and texture of pigment, in the possibilities of form invention and organisation, and in the flat plane on which these elements are brought to play.” He made paintings using palette knives and other tools instead of brushes and employed patterns, cutouts, and collage to create a self-proclaimed “new art of two dimensions.”
Objects At Hand
NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR GOODS LEFT OVER THIRTY DAYS. So reads a sign in a photo, displayed nearby, of Man Ray’s West Eighth Street studio in New York. It was one of several items the artist discovered in the trash heap at his apartment building and brought up to his top-floor space. He considered retooling the sign to read LEFT OVER GOODS NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR THIRTY DAYS but decided it was perfect as is. This act – of elevating junk to art – is a familiar one in histories of the avant-garde, especially for the Dada movement. Art did not have to be painted or modelled or made with traditional materials and tools; it could be found in the everyday world and appreciated for the idea that it introduced, not for its beauty.
As Man Ray developed his “new art,” he came to see the latent potential of all the objects within his studio. This spurred further investigations that likewise tested the limits of two and three dimensions and blurred the boundaries between media. At the same time, he continued to explore how the camera could be used not only to document his work but to open new perspectives onto ordinary objects and their creative possibilities.
Clichés-verre
While the rayograph is often described as Man Ray’s first experiment with cameraless photography, that moment occurred years earlier. Around 1917 he explored several photographically based techniques, including the cliché-verre, or “glass-plate” print. A nineteenth-century reproductive process that incorporates both photography and printmaking, a cliché-verre is traditionally made by covering a plate of glass with a darkened medium and drawing into it to produce clear lines. When set onto sensitised paper and exposed to a light source, the plate transmits the scratched away areas as dark lines. Man Ray chose to incise directly into the emulsion of an exposed photographic plate, which he then subjected to light again with paper below it to make a contact print.
Photography
Man Ray first picked up a camera in 1915, to document his art. Through this experience, he discovered that the works acquired new qualities when reproduced in black and white. He made photographic portraits, too, which in Paris would become a dependable source of income. Revelling in the camera’s transformative optical abilities, Man Ray soon used it as a tool to facilitate his self-appointed role as a “marvellous explorer of those aspects that our retinas will never record.” He sought to reveal the creative potential of objects in his studio and in 1918 began a series of photographs using specifically arranged everyday items.
Aerographs
Still grappling with how to paint without a brush, Man Ray found inspiration at his day job working for an advertising agency, where he was introduced to an airbrush. He later brought the equipment back to his attic studio and began to experiment. Using an air compressor, the artist directed pigment through stencils and around masked areas and objects, which he rested on the composition board and repositioned as he worked. “It was thrilling,” he would later recount, “to paint a picture, hardly touching the surface – a purely cerebral act.” These works, which he termed “aerographs” were made, in effect, before they hit the paper. Objects were carved, shaped, and modeled in the air. Voids register as substance, and what we see on the paper is residue fused to the surface. “I tried above all,” Man Ray explained, “to create three-dimensional paintings on two-dimensional surfaces.”
Flou
Man Ray introduced his rayographs during a transitional period between the Dada and Surrealism movements that the French writer Louis Aragon called the mouvement flou – flou translating to “blurry” or “out of focus.” The term also suits these works, which viewers initially deemed curious and captivating but difficult to pin down. Rayographs, as cameraless photographs, exist in an indistinct place between photography and painting, the mechanical and the handmade, documentation and dream.
During the 1920s Man Ray also explored blurriness in his camera images. Even as technical improvements facilitated increased focus and detail, and the preference for sharp photographs grew, he generally pursued a flattering, soft-focus technique in his growing business of portrait commissions. At other times, he sought more radical effects, which the director Claude Heymann described as “strange, troubling blurs” produced “through distortions, prolonged poses or special focusing techniques.” The anomalies in the resulting photographs are visible signs of the effort and time Man Ray spent to realise the images – even if he later called them unplanned or accidental.
A New Field of Gravity
In his preface introducing the album Champs délicieux (Delicious Fields), Tristan Tzara remarked that rayographs “present to space an image that exceeds it, and the air, with its clenched fists and superior intelligence, seizes it and holds it next to its heart.” Indeed, objects in Man Ray’s images beckon us in but keep us thrillingly at the edge – or put another way, they test our senses of proximity and location. His experiments in New York expanded the bounds of the photograph, object, painting, and installation, and he developed a novel relationship between object and viewer. These works demonstrate in their construction what the French writer Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes would identify in the artist’s rayographs as a “new field of gravity.”
The rayograph
The term rayograph designates Man Ray’s version of a technique for making photographs without a camera: by setting objects on or near sensitised paper and exposing it to light. In his autobiography, the artist described happening upon the process by chance, late one night, while developing prints in his makeshift darkroom. For subjects, he looked no further than the things in his studio. When exposed to a directed flash of light, they appear as reversed silhouettes – but in Man Ray’s hands they also gained new life. The nature of the image depended on the items’ translucency, reflectivity, density, placement, and distance from the sheet, as well as the source and location of the illumination and the number of exposures. Surfaces could cast unexpected reflections or eclipse elements in darkness. Forms might multiply or transform. Sometimes Man Ray’s objects and the space between them acquired an insistent, compressed volume that registered on the paper. The resulting works present what writer Pierre Migennes described as a “metamorphosis of the most vulgar utensils.” Everyday things became wonderfully unfamiliar as Man Ray wielded light in the darkroom like a brush in paint.
As he prepared to launch his rayographs in Champs délicieux, Man Ray also considered how to disseminate them for reproduction in magazines. On November 1, 1922, he wrote to Harold Loeb, editor of Broom: “Each print is an original, no plate or duplicate exists, as the process is manipulated directly on the paper, like a drawing. If you could assure me that the … originals would be safely handled and returned, I shall gladly send them on [to Berlin]. If, however, you cannot guarantee their safe return, I can re-photograph them … which, while not having the intensity and contrast of the originals, would nevertheless reproduce well.” Loeb offered to transport them personally and published these four in Broom the following March.
Man Ray transformed and energised ordinary objects in his rayographs by tapping their powers of translucency or reflectance. Bodies and their proxies, however, remain stubbornly recognisable. Hands reach out, hold things, and interact with objects; heads turn to kiss and drink, even if the action might be staged. The artist’s rayographs tie the body to a kind of specificity that his objects do not experience; this might explain why there are fewer of these works with bodies than without. As Tristan Tzara explained in his appreciation of the rayographs in 1934, Man Ray approached objects in a manner that allowed them to be free “to dream.”
Dangerous Games
Reactions to Man Ray’s cameraless photographs consistently identified them with the realm of play. The first to comment on the rayograph was French poet Jean Cocteau, who wrote in an open letter, “You, my dear Man Ray, will nourish our minds with those dangerous games it craves.” He was soon joined by Tristan Tzara, who likened the rayograph to a “game of chess with the sun.”
Man Ray had a strong sense of the game as a strategy for producing art. For him, play was a state of readiness to engage. This comes through in the provocative humour of his objects and collages and in the invitation to chance embedded in the rayograph process – the “discovery” of which, he recounted, entailed real amusement. Marcel Duchamp once playfully defined his friend as synonymous with the joy of the game: “MAN RAY, n.m. synon. de joie, jouer, jouir” (joy, to play, to enjoy).
Chemical Paintings
In April 1922, the same month that the Champs délicieux album was announced, Man Ray proudly reported to friends and patrons that he had freed himself “from the sticky medium of paint.” His rayographs claimed a rebellious position aimed at the traditional hierarchy of fine art – and particularly its apex, painting. Critics asserted they had equal status, and New York’s Little Review even called them “chemical paintings.”
Just a year later, however, while his rayograph production remained steady, Man Ray quietly returned to painting. The works here show how his practice had changed. Abstract and relatively small, they were made on commercially available boards, wood, sandpaper, or metal supports. With their overlapping pictorial elements and dramatic contrasts of luminosity and shadow, angled and geometric forms, the compositions emulate aspects of rayographs. Each is a thorough exploration of depth on a flat surface and a bid to make paint reflect its own material reality.
Objects and Bodies
Man Ray’s experience of making rayographs informed his consideration of the human body, which he handled, at times, like an object, devoid of personhood and open for manipulation. Writing about the artist’s portraits and rayographs, André Breton noted that Man Ray considered the bodies of women in his work no different from the objects at hand in his darkroom:
The very elegant, very beautiful women who expose their tresses night and day to the fierce lights in Man Ray’s studios are certainly not aware that they are taking part in any kind of demonstration. How astonished they would be if I told them that they are participating for exactly the same reasons as a quartz gun, a bunch of keys, hoar-frost or fern!
For Man Ray, a body could function as a kind of concentrated equivalence, like the essence represented by an object. This attitude is visible in some of the most iconic works of his career, in which his presentation of female models such as the artist and performer Kiki de Montparnasse (Alice Prin) also involved darkroom manipulation. While his approach to men’s bodies was notably less sexualised, they too were posed and set up like the objects in his rayographs.
Darkroom Manoeuvres
Like other pictures of Kiki de Montparnasse in this gallery, Le violon d’Ingres involved multiple darkroom campaigns. For the version published in Littérature, Man Ray worked on a print to sharpen the contours and smooth the forms; he added f-shaped sound holes directly onto it with dark ink.
The version here, larger than the first, is the result of further experimentation. Man Ray covered the entire print with a mask from which he hand cut two f-shaped forms. He then made a second exposure, which turned the exposed spaces black. Instead of ink shapes that disrupt the surface, these marks read as deep, dark space compressed within the flat surface of the photograph. Man Ray described this version as “a combination of a photo and a rayograph.” As such, the f-holes are eerily – seamlessly – part of the woman’s body. She appears as a kind of dreamlike human-instrument hybrid, a whole object to be visually taken in and possessed.
Dreams
Even before the Surrealist manifesto of 1924 claimed the fertile ground of the unconscious, many poets and artists in Man Ray’s circle focused on dreams. The same group, two years earlier, had followed André Breton’s experiments with hypnosis and trance states. They practiced séances and so‑called sleeping fits, writing down or drawing what came to them in order to reveal hidden desires. The poet Louis Aragon wrote of these slumberous escapades: “Dreams, dreams, dreams, the domain of dreams expands with every step.”
Apart from photographing the sleep sessions, Man Ray remained an independent supporter of the group, explaining, “It has never been my object to record my dreams, just the determination to realise them.” Even so, Aragon included him in his multipage inventory of dreamers, with a nod to the rayographs: “Man Ray … dreams in his own way with knife rests and salt cellars: he gives meaning to light, which now knows how to speak.” The artist found great support among the Surrealist circle in Paris, whose members acquired his work and included him in exhibitions and publications.
Dream Objects
Man Ray’s dreamlike rayographs have counterparts in the new kinds of hybrid objects he began to make at the same time. These mysterious works seize upon unexpected transformations: a fragile soap bubble rendered solid; the taut strings on a musical instrument’s neck turned loose and sensuous; or a budding plant metamorphosed into a pudgy hand.
The strange bundle wrapped with string has long been associated with the power of objects to stir the unconscious. In 1920 Man Ray assembled, photographed, and deconstructed the original object. The Untitled photograph appeared in the first issue of La revolution surréaliste, in 1924, with the text “Surrealism opens the door of the dream to all those for whom night is miserly.” Over the next decade, the image came to embody another phrase popular among the Paris Surrealist group, by the poet Isidore Ducasse: “as beautiful … as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table.”
“Objects to touch, to eat, to crunch, to apply to the eye, to the skin, to press, to lick, to break, to grind, objects to lie, to flee from, to honor, things cold or hot, feminine or masculine, objects of day or night which absorb through your pores the greater part of our life. … These are the projections surprised in transparence, by the light of tenderness, of objects that dream and talk in their sleep.” (Tristan Tzara, “When Objects Dream,” 1934)
Returns
In 1929 Man Ray found himself “longing to touch paint again.” By the fall, he had taken a second Paris studio, near the Luxembourg Gardens, where he painted in the mornings before returning home to oversee photographic portraits and magazine work. In his new compositions, he let paint drip across a canvas from a poured line and squeezed pigment directly from the tube onto a support in a loose, calligraphic manner. Trading on narratives of chance and automatism, he later called these paintings “unpremeditated.”
Another return accompanied the arrival in Paris of Lee Miller, who became Man Ray’s apprentice in photography and then his personal and professional partner. As a result, he again embraced the camera as his primary tool of photographic experimentation, after years of making rayographs without one. Together, Miller and Man Ray discovered a creative synergy that led to their joint development of the solarization process. The same year signalled the near culmination of Man Ray’s exploration of the rayograph: by some accounts, he made one hundred in 1922, but just one in 1929.
Solarization
Together with Lee Miller, Man Ray developed a darkroom technique that complemented his return to painting. Like the rayograph, solarization was not entirely new, and both he and Miller claimed that it similarly resulted from an accident. The process involves exposing a negative a second time during development, which causes a reversal of the expected tonalities. Honed by Miller and Man Ray and applied to their portraits and nudes beginning in fall 1929, the process often endowed subjects with subtly glowing black contours that Miller called “halos.” This feature became so well-known – largely through reproductions of the solarized portrait of Miller shown nearby – that a 1932 article called it both “the beacon and despair of experimenters.” Like the drips and skeins in Man Ray’s 1929 paintings, these lines create a friction between the subject and surface of the image – a noted departure from the artist’s earlier approach to the flat plane.
Revisiting Champs délicieux
Man Ray completed his Champs délicieux project nearly forty years after its debut. A handwritten inscription to Tristan Tzara in the final copy (number 41, displayed here) refers to the sparks set off by their initial exploration of the rayograph; he added an almost identical inscription in his 1922 working copy. This suggests a Dada game between the two artists: the announcement laid out the rules and the inscriptions signified its end.
As promised in the 1922 first announcement of the album, the last copy features the canceled proofs (a practice meant to show that no further prints can be made from the originals). A canceled print edition is not unusual. In this case, however, a purposeful ambiguity was in play from the beginning of the project – when it was presented as an album of “original photographs” copied from unique rayographs – to the end. Only the negatives used to produce the album were canceled, meaning that the primary rayographs might still exist. Ever the prankster, Man Ray ensured that the game continues.
Man Ray (American, 1890-1976) Catherine Barometer 1920 Glass, metal, felt, washboard, tube, wire, wood, steel wool, gouache on paper, and paper stamp 48 1/8 × 12 × 2 1/8 in. (122.2 × 30.5 × 5.4cm) The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Bluff Collection, Promised Gift of John A. Pritzker Photo courtesy of The Bluff Collection, photo by Ian Reeves
Curators: The exhibition is co-curated by Philip Brookman, consulting curator of the department of photographs at the National Gallery of Art, and Deborah Willis, university professor and chair of the department of photography and imaging at the Tisch School of the Arts and director of the Center for Black Visual Culture at New York University.
Thomas Ellis (American, 1963-2025) The Game 1947 Gelatin silver print 21 x 31.8cm (8 1/4 x 12 1/2 in.) Courtesy of the Darrel Ellis Estate, Hannah Hoffman, Los Angeles, and Candice Madey, New York Photo: Adam Reich
Thomas Sayers Ellis (October 5, 1963 – July 17, 2025) was an American poet, photographer, musician, bandleader and teacher.
“There’s nothing like a photograph for reminding you about difference. There it is. It stares you ineradicably in the face”
~ Professor Stuart Hall, 2008
This looks to be a “worthy” exhibition on photography and the Black Arts movement but without having seen it in person there is little specific comment I can make about the exhibition. However, some thoughts on the photographs in this posting are possible.
It is a joy for me to be able to learn more about an important area in photographic history, vis a vis “the role of African American photographers and artists working with photographs in developing and fostering a distinctly Black perspective on art and culture.” (Text from the NGA website)
There are many photographers in the posting who I have never heard of before, whose work I have never seen, and I always like learning, for in learning you may gain some small amount of wisdom and appreciation of different cultures and points of view. I have added biographical information for each artist to their images where possible.
The photographs from the period 1955-1985 mark a shift away from an aesthetic and formalist way of looking at the image where the role of the photographer and the reception of the print was in its primacy (the 1950s-1960s) “towards a more polemical, critical and cultural analysis by Tagg, Sekul, Solomon-Godeau and others in the 1980s and 90s. These shifts from the pictorial to the political … decentre the photographer and bring into focus the photographed and viewing subjects…”1
In these photographs it is not so much the primacy of the artist, the aesthetics of the image, nor the photographs status as art objects, but the people within the images that are the focus of attention. They bring to the forefront of the viewer’s consciousness (or should do) the racial politics at work within photography in the context of discussions around race and representation and the ongoing legacies of Western imperialism.
The photographs demonstrate “that if we do not recognise the historical and political conjunctures of racial politics at work within photography, and their effects on those that have been culturally erased, made invisible or less than human by such images, then we remain hemmed within established orthodoxies of colonial thought concerning the racialised body, the subaltern and the politics of human recognition.”2
They bring to light (aha!) “new ways of seeing that bring the Other into focus”, photographs that challenge us to acknowledge the structural racism that is embedded in daily life which produces adverse outcome for people of color. Through such an acknowledgement we may open up a personally and culturally transformative dialogic space, “a “space of possibilities” where participants listen, engage with, and even transcend their own viewpoints to see issues from multiple angles” – as there can never be a single view point when we “examine” social groups that are subaltern (groups that have been marginalised or oppressed).
From a distance this seems to be one of the problems of the exhibition. It’s all so worthy and righteous, full of the injustice of it all, and perhaps that’s as it should be for those were the times and the culture from which these photographs emerged. But I can’t help but get the feeling that this exhibition seems to feel and read more like a study in cultural anthropology, more a sociological statement than any celebration of Black history and culture from the period. Speaking from the standpoint of a white, middle class artist and writer, there seems to be little joy to be had here – to me one of the essential elements of Black culture, the joy of gospel, jazz, laughter, love – but I’m supposedly on the inside looking out (or is it the outside looking in!). Who am I to say.
What is undeniable is that, as Professor Stuart Hall so succinctly observes, there is nothing like a photograph to remind you of difference, to challenge your perceptions on how you view and interact with the world around you, to open up new ways of seeing. As such, the photographs in this exhibition may allow us deeper insight into the “conditions of our own becoming” (while human beings have agency, the circumstances under which they act and develop their humanity are largely shaped by existing material, social, and historical conditions that they did not choose) of the people that live around us, even as we acknowledge that there is no singular point of view, that cultural forms have no single determinate meaning, and that no one, and “no discipline, whether art- or photo-history, or ethnography or geography, speaks with a single voice.”1
Not one way of seeing, but multiple ways of seeing our fellow human beings.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ Catherine De Lorenzo. “Oceanian imaginings in French photographic archives,” in History of Photography, Issue 2, Volume 28, 2004, pp. 137-184
The book examines how Western photographic practice has been used as a tool for creating Eurocentric and violent visual regimes, and demands that we recognise and disrupt the ingrained racist ideologies that have tainted photography since its inception in 1839.
Many thankx to the National Gallery of Art, Washington for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“The work that was done by artists and photographers before, during, and after the Black Arts Movement establishes a strategy of community engagement. It is that engagement that allows communities to define themselves and also to engage people in new forms of looking.”
Co-curator Philip Brookman
Cultural forms set the wider terms of limitation and possibility for the (re)presentation of particularities and we have to understand how the latter are caught in the former in order to understand why such-and-such gets (re)presented in the way it does. Without understanding the way images function in terms of, say, narrative, genre or spectacle, we don’t really understand why they turn out the way they do.
Secondly, cultural forms do not have single determinate meanings – people make sense of them in different ways, according to the cultural (including sub-cultural) codes available to them. For instance, people do not necessarily read negative images of themselves as negative …
Richard Dyer. The Matter of Images: Essays on Representations. London: Routledge, 1993, pp.2-3
Adger Cowans (American, b. 1936) Coltrane at the Gate 1961 Gelatin silver print National Gallery of Art, Washington Charina Endowment Fund
Adger Cowans (American, b. 1936)
Adger Cowans is a pioneering photographer and one of the founding members of the Kamoinge Workshop, a collective that played a key role in shaping Black photography in the 1960s and beyond.
In 1958 Cowans worked as an assistant to renowned photographer Gordon Parks. Throughout the 1960s Cowans became involved with influential groups associated with the Black Arts Movement, including Group 35 and Afri-COBRA, which he joined in 1968.
His photographic work spans a wide range of approaches and subjects, from street photography in Harlem to documenting major historical events like the rallies and the funeral of Malcolm X. He also captured iconic jazz musicians, including John Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders.
Frank Dandridge is a freelance photojournalist who worked mainly for Life Magazine in the 60’s. He covered numerous assignments, including, The Harlem Riots in 1964, Dr. King’s March on Washington, in 1963, and the terrible Birmingham Bombing in 1963. His photos also appeared in Look, Saturday Evening Post, Pageant, Paris Match, Good Housekeeping, Quick Magazine, the Canadian Film Board, Playboy, and many other national magazines. He won an Art Director’s Award for his photo essay, “The Two Faces of Harlem”, that appeared in Look magazine. His work included photographing many celebrities, including, Bobby Kennedy, Muhammad Ali, President Johnson, Dr. Martin Luther King, Frank Sinatra, The Supremes, Sammy Davis, Jr., and Jimmy Hoffa.
The photos that Frank Dandridge shot for LIFE magazine paint a vivid portrait of violence and race in 1960s America. He reported on riots in Harlem, in Watts, and in Newark,. He was in Selma, Alabama when Martin Luther King marched in the days immediately after Bloody Sunday. Dandridge’s most famous photo is of Sarah Collins, a 12-year-old girl whose eyes were in bandages after the bombing of a Sunday school class at the16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. That bombing killed four girls, including Collins’ sister, while wounding many others and leaving Collins blind in one eye. The image of Collins in her hospital bed made vivid for America the cruelty of this horrific bombing by four men who were members of a splinter group of the Klu Klux Klan.
Used under fair use for the purposes of education and research
Racism
Racism, when it is embedded in the structures, policies and practices of our social and political institutions can be termed “institutional”. Institutional racism, which will be described by the authors more fully below, is reflected in professional practice and working methods that result in racialized disparities. Frantz Fanon, psychiatrist and political philosopher, stands out as one of the earliest academics to explore the nature of racism from a psychosocial perspective. Fanon (1967) talked of “vulgar racism in its biological form”, which was evident for several hundreds of years, being replaced in the mid-20th century by “more subtle forms” (p. 35). In a study of Fanon’s clinical psychology and social theories, McCulloch (1983) refers to this new racism as “cultural racism” – describing this as “a more sophisticated form [of racism] in which the object is no longer the physiology of the individual but the cultural style of a people” (p. 120). Cultural racism believes that the dominant group’s culture is superior to the seemingly “lower” minority groups.
Cultural racism champions the supremacy of cultures. Commonly, some version of European culture or, more specifically, white European culture, rather than the white “race” (Amin, 1989), thereby producing a situation of racism without “races” (Balibar, 1991). It was the American civil leaders Stokely Carmichael (later Kwame Ture) and Charles V. Hamilton in their 1967 book, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation (Carmichael & Hamilton, 1967), who first described institutional racism:
It takes two, closely related forms … we call these individual racism and institutional racism. The first consists of overt acts by individuals … the second type is less overt, far more subtle, less identifiable in terms of specific individuals committing acts … and thus receives far less public condemnation than the first type. (p. 2)
Institutional racism forms an array of broader structural racism processes “that exclude … substantial numbers of members of particular groups from significant participation in major social institutions” (Henry & Tator, 2005, p. 352). According to minority mental health models like the racism-induced reactive negative emotionality cycle (Lazaridou & Heinz, 2021), structural racism and institutional racism result in experiences of rejection and emotional alienation in public spaces for Black people and People of Color (Lentin, 2015).
Structural racism in employment, earnings and credit may mutually limit equal access to quality, affordable accommodation. However, when public spaces are sites of surveillance, intimidation and frequent hostility by the police or by ordinary citizens, then the structure of social situations, such as even leaving one’s house and speaking in public, are filled with stress, anxiety, and fear (Chou et al., 2012; Sibrava et al., 2013). There is pervasive evidence that structural racism has destructive impacts on the health and wellbeing of patients from minority groups, including migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers (Alvarez et al., 2016; Bailey et al., 2017; Graham et al., 2016; Noh & Kaspar, 2003).
Felicia Lazaridou and Suman Fernando. “Deconstructing institutional racism and the social construction of whiteness: A strategy for professional competence training in culture and migration mental health,” in Transcult Psychiatry, 2022 Apr 4; 59(2), pp. 175-187.
Installation view of the exhibition Photography and the Black Arts Movement, 1955-1985 at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, September 2025 – January 2026
In the tradition of Black African photographers such as Malick Sidibé, Seydou Keïta and Sanlé Sory, Barnor’s photographs present people of all ages and all walks of life – whether in Accra, Ghana or in the suburbs of London, England – through direct and honest studio portraits or in more candid documents of the communities that surrounded him. …
Barnor’s photographs plant the seed of equality and happiness as a way of transmitting this knowledge to others. “He is a living archive, a link between the birth of photography in West Africa and the development of the discipline for the modern era.”2 It is his passion and feeling for the practice of photography, the stories that it tells and his engagement with the spirit of the people that he encounters – as a conversation between equals – that intuitively ground his work in the history of photography and the history of Black culture and makes them forever young.
Ralph Arnold (American, 1928-2006) Above this Earth, Games, Games 1968 Collage and acrylic on canvas Overall: 114.3 x 114.3 cm (45 x 45 in.) Collection of Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College, Chicago Photo: P.D. Young / Spektra Imaging
During the tumultuous 1960s and 70s, the prolific artist Ralph Arnold (1928-2006) made photocollages that appropriated and commented upon mass media portrayals of gender, sexuality, race and politics. Arnold’s complex visual arrangements of photography, painting and text were built upon his own multilayered identity as a black, gay veteran and prominent member of Chicago’s art community…
Text from the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago
Ralph Arnold (American, 1928-2006) Soul Box 1969 Assemblage with found objects and collage on Masonite Framed: 71.1 x 56.8 x 14.9cm (28 x 22 3/8 x 5 7/8 in.) Private collection of Courtney A. Moore Photo: Courtesy of the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago
The first exhibition to consider photography’s impact on a cultural and aesthetic movement that celebrated Black history, identity, and beauty.
Uniting around civil rights and freedom movements of the 1960s and 1970s, many visual artists, poets, playwrights, musicians, photographers, and filmmakers expressed hope and dignity through their art. These creative efforts became known as the Black Arts Movement.
Photography was central to the movement, attracting all kinds of artists – from street photographers and photojournalists to painters and graphic designers. This expansive exhibition presents 150 examples tracing the Black Arts Movement from its roots to its lingering impacts, from 1955 to 1985. Explore the bold vision shaped by generations of artists including Billy Abernathy, Romare Bearden, Kwame Brathwaite, Roy DeCarava, Doris Derby, Emory Douglas, Barkley Hendricks, Barbara McCullough, Betye Saar, and Ming Smith.
Text from the NGA website
Photography and the Black Arts Movement, 1955-1985 investigates the role of African American photographers and artists working with photographs in developing and fostering a distinctly Black perspective on art and culture. The Black Arts Movement was a uniquely American creative initiative, closely linked to the civil rights movement and comparable to the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s in its impact. Through new institutions and publications, Black writers, musicians, filmmakers, and visual artists explored ways their art could further the American civil rights movement and communicate messages of Black history and identity. Photography and the Black Arts Movement reveals how studio and street photographers, photojournalists, painters, conceptual artists, graphic designers, and community activists used photography to cut across traditional racial boundaries, express messages of empowerment, and advance social justice.
Bringing together some 150 works by more than 100 artists, Photography and the Black Arts Movement also includes objects from Africa, the Caribbean region, and Great Britain, representing artistic dialogues created through travel, migrations, and international engagement with the social, political, and cultural ideas that propelled the movement. Among the artists included are Billy Abernathy, Anthony Barboza, Romare Bearden, Dawoud Bey, Frank Bowling, Kwame Brathwaite, Ernest Cole, Adger Cowans, Roy DeCarava, Emory Douglas, Louis Draper, David C. Driskell, Samuel Fosso, Charles Gaines, Barkley Hendricks, Danny Lyon, Barbara McCullough, Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe, Gordon Parks, Adrian Piper, Juan Sánchez, Coreen Simpson, Betye Saar, Jamel Shabazz, Lorna Simpson, Ming Smith, Frank Stewart, and Carrie Mae Weems.
The exhibition is organised by the National Gallery of Art, Washington.
Text from the NGA website
Cecil J. Williams (American, b. 1937) During the summer of 1960, the elders of Orangeburg took to the streets as part of ongoing demonstrations and boycotts in support of civil rights. They are standing outside a segregated supermarket where they were allowed to shop but not sit down for lunch 1960, printed 2024 Inkjet print 37.3 x 55.9cm (14 11/16 x 22 in.)
Cecil J. Williams (American, b. 1937)
Cecil J. Williams (born November 26, 1937) is an American photographer, publisher, author and inventor who is best known for his photographs documenting the civil rights movement in South Carolina.
He began his career at an early age, photographing wedding and family parties. He studied art at Claflin University, while also being a photographer for the university. …
At the age of 14, Williams was one of 25 photographers around the world freelancing for JET magazine. JET caught wind of the movement growing in Orangeburg. They needed an onsite correspondent for constant updates, and someone to document the events. The only time Williams’ work appeared on the cover of JET was his picture of Coretta Scott King speaking at the protest during the 1969 Charleston hospital workers’ strike.
Williams has photographed significant desegregation efforts in South Carolina since the 1950s. Some of his most notable pictures are of the activity during the Briggs v. Elliott case in Summerton. It was the first of five desegregation cases pushing to integrate public schools in the United States. The five cases combined into Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court case that declared that having “separate but equal” public schools for whites and blacks was unconstitutional.
Cecil J. Williams (American, b. 1937) Clara White Mission, Jacksonville, Florida 1960s, printed 2024 Inkjet print 45.7 x 45.7cm (18 x 18 in.)
Bob Fletcher (American, b. 1938) Placards of Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner at a Demonstration on the boardwalk during the Democratic National Convention, Atlantic City, New Jersey 1964 Gelatin silver print 33.97 × 22.86cm (13 3/8 × 9 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington Anonymous gift
Bob Fletcher (American, b. 1938)
Robert E. “Bob” Fletcher is a photographer, filmmaker, writer, and educator. Born in 1938 in Detroit, Michigan, Fletcher majored in History and English at Fisk University and Wayne State University. In 1963, Fletcher became active in the civil rights movement, taking photographs for and administering the National Student Association’s Detroit Tutorial Program. After moving to New York City, he worked at the Harlem Education Project and set up a photographic workshop.
In the summer of 1964, Fletcher became a Freedom School teacher in Mississippi and joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) staff as a photographer; he documented the Civil Rights Movement throughout the South, between 1964 and 1968. After returning to New York in 1969, Fletcher set up a photography workshop at the Henry Street Settlement, and taught photography at Antioch College and Brooklyn College Film Studio.
Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006) Ethel Sharrieff in Chicago 1963 Gelatin silver print 14.6 × 15.9cm (5 3/4 × 6 1/4 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington Corcoran Collection (The Gordon Parks Collection)
Robert A. Sengstacke (American, 1943-2017) Dr. Martin Luther King January 1, 1965 Gelatin silver print 35.1 × 27.3cm (13 13/16 × 10 3/4 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
Robert A. Sengstacke (American, 1943-2017)
Robert A. “Bobby” Sengstacke spent more than a half century photographing Chicago’s cultural and political landscape, most notably for the weekly newspaper the Chicago Defender, for which he also worked as an editor. The Defender was founded by Robert’s great-uncle Robert Sengstacke Abbott in 1905, and Robert’s father, John Sengstacke, ran the paper for nearly 60 years. In the mid-1950s, after attending Florida’s Bethune Cookman College, Bobby Sengstacke returned to Chicago and honed his skills with fellow photographers Billy (Fundi) Abernathy, Le Mont Mac Lemore, and Bob Black. In the years that followed, he became a member of a tight-knit network of South Side photojournalists who created intimate documents of Chicago’s Black community, from Civil Rights rallies led by Martin Luther King Jr. to the city’s lively entertainment scene.
Sengstacke was also a founding member of the Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC), which brought together Black artists, writers, intellectuals, and activists on Chicago’s South Side.
Doris A. Derby (American, 1939-2022) Member of Southern Media Photographing a Young Girl, Farish Street, Jackson, Mississippi 1968 Gelatin silver print National Gallery of Art, Washington Gift of David Knaus
Doris A. Derby (American, 1939-2022)
The photography of the US civil rights activist and academic Doris Derby … began through documenting the struggles of black people in the segregated south. However, rather than recording the dramatic events and protests of the nine years from her arrival in Mississippi from New York in 1963, Doris chose to capture the everyday human effort required to live through them.
She went into rural communities to witness the work of children in the fields and women living in wooden shacks trying to care for families. “They were looking to find some help, some way to get out of their horrible poverty and despair,” she said. …
Influenced both by the German expressionist artist Käthe Kollwitz, who was concerned with the effects of poverty, hunger and war on the working class, and the photographer Roy DeCarava, who captured the creativity of the Harlem Renaissance, she also took pictures of children in urban settings, of old and young people attending election events, and those working for the movement, among them the author Alice Walker.
Hannah Collins. “Doris Derby obituary,” on The Guardian website Wed 13 Apr 2022 [Online] Cited 26/11/2025
Darryl Cowherd (American, b. 1940) Stokely Carmichael, Unknown Chicago Church c. 1968 Gelatin silver print 24.8 × 15.5cm (9 3/4 × 6 1/8 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
A key figure in Chicago’s Black Arts Movement, Darryl Cowherd has enjoyed an extensive career ranging from photojournalism to broadcast television. At the age of 20, frustrated with work and school, Cowherd followed the advice of his mentor, Chicago-based photographer Robert Earl Wilson, who encouraged him to travel and photograph abroad. Cowherd had initially studied to become a doctor and then worked for the postal service, but neither role proved a lasting fit. After nearly four years in Europe, during which Cowherd honed his photography skills, he returned to Chicago in 1964 and began taking freelance photography assignments while working at a film processing lab. His return to Chicago coincided with the emergence of the Chicago Freedom Movement (1965-67) and the Black Arts Movement (most active in the years 1965-76). An active participant in both movements, Cowherd frequently photographed the activities surrounding them as they grew and gained momentum.
Cowherd was a founding member of the Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC), a collective that brought together Black artists, writers, intellectuals, and activists on Chicago’s South Side.
Hiram Sebastian Maristany was a Nuyorican American photographer, and director of El Museo del Barrio (a museum in NYC which specialises in Latin American and Caribbean art, with an emphasis on works from Puerto Rico and the Puerto Rican community in New York City) from 1975 to 1977. He was known for his association with, and documentation of, the Young Lords chapter in Harlem, which he co-founded in 1969.
Juan González was a co-founder of the Young Lords, a radical Puerto Rican rights organisation in New York City, where he helped lead the group in protests for social justice. The Young Lords fought for better healthcare, education, and city services, and against police abuse and Puerto Rico’s colonial status. Following his work with the Young Lords, González became a celebrated journalist, co-hosting Democracy Now! and writing for the New York Daily News.
Texts from the Wikipedia website
What Is the Black Arts Movement? Seven Things to Know
Poet Larry Neal, who coined the term Black Arts Movement, described it as “a cultural revolution in art and ideas.” This movement included poets, playwrights, musicians, filmmakers, photographers, and painters. They came together to make art that advanced civil rights and celebrated Black history, identity, and beauty.
This cultural revolution shook up the art world in the 1950s and ’60s. It embodied the struggle for self-determination championed by global freedom movements. New collectives, workshops, and collaborations emerged. Creatives made art that promoted Black dignity, hope, and freedom. They asked, how could art inspire social and political change? And what would it look like?
Photography was a driving force from the beginning, playing a critical role as both a communications tool and art form. Learn more about the movement and photography’s part in it – major themes in our exhibition Photography and the Black Arts Movement, 1955-1985.
1/ Its origins are in the civil rights movement
Our exhibition begins in 1955, more than a decade before Larry Neal named the Black Arts Movement. That year, several events – and photographs of those events – helped catalyse the civil rights movement.
In September, Jet magazine was one of several publications that printed open-casket photographs of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old boy from Chicago who was lynched in Mississippi. Those disturbing images were seen across the country, including by a woman in Montgomery, Alabama: Rosa Parks. That December, Parks sat in the front, “white only” section of a segregated bus. The driver demanded that she give up her seat to a white passenger. She refused. As she later recounted, Emmett Till was on her mind in that moment.
Parks, in turn, was photographed sitting at the front of the segregated bus. Those images, and others like them, brought widespread awareness to the struggles for equal rights. Organisations like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) encouraged photography of their marches, demonstrations, and acts of nonviolent civil disobedience. SNCC even taught some members to use a camera. Lifelong activist Maria Varela became a SNCC photographer after recognising the need for more images of Black life to support the movement.
2/ Poets, writers, and playwrights led the movement
The beginning of the Black Arts Movement is often pinned to poet, playwright, and writer Amiri Baraka founding the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School in New York City’s Harlem neighbourhood in 1965. Nikki Giovanni, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Audre Lorde were among the many writers and poets active in the movement. Some collaborated with visual artists, even forming collectives such as the Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC) in Chicago.
OBAC writers, scholars, painters, and photographers collaborated to create the Wall of Respect community mural in 1967. It commemorated key figures in African American history, including W. E. B. Du Bois, Muhammad Ali, and Nina Simone. The mural was like a two-story collage that covered the facade of a building in the city’s South Side neighbourhood. It incorporated paintings by several artists alongside mounted photographs by Roy Lewis and Darryl Cowherd. At the centre was Amiri Baraka’s poem “SOS,” which opens, “Calling all black people.” The mural was demolished in 1972, but photographs by Roy Lewis and Robert Sengstacke continue to spread its message.
3/ It was inspired by jazz
Music was an equally important part of the Black Arts Movement. Musicians John Coltrane and Sun Ra both performed at a fundraiser for Amiri Baraka’s Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School. Their experimental and expressive jazz inspired Black Arts Movement writers and artists.
In Coltrane at the Gate, photographer Adger Cowans depicted the saxophonist’s energy. Ming Smith captured the magic of a Sun Ra performance. For his homage to saxophonist Charlie Parker (who was commonly known as “Bird”), painter Raymond Saunders embraced the spontaneous spirit of jazz. Saunders collaged a newsprint photograph below the word “bird” written in a chalk-like white script.
4/ It celebrated Black beauty
The Black Arts Movement celebrated the “beauty and goodness of being Black,” as Larry Neal put it. Photographer Kwame Brathwaite helped popularise the phrase “Black is beautiful.” Brathwaite was a pioneer of uplifting Black identity. He helped found groups that challenged conventional standards of beauty and celebrated African heritage. They organised fashion shows, created “Black is beautiful” products, and operated a photography studio.
In Untitled (Portrait, Reels as Necklace), Brathwaite adorned the model with a necklace made from film developing reels to “expose” her beauty. More than a decade later, Carla Williams created a self-portrait that echoed Brathwaite’s work. Showing herself in curlers, Williams challenged popular notions of beauty.
5/ It brought artists together
Small collectives of visual artists and photographers came together around the principles of the Black Arts Movement. In New York, the Kamoinge Workshop photography collective met regularly to critique each other’s work, debate photography’s purpose and aesthetics, and share tips. They created a space for their art by developing their own portfolios and exhibitions. The workshop also produced the groundbreaking Black Photographers Annual between 1973 and 1980.
A group of Chicago artists formed AfriCOBRA. The collective’s founders defined their own aesthetic principles, aimed at creating “images that jar the senses and cause movement” and “images designed for mass production.”
6/ It spread across the Atlantic
The Black Arts Movement made an impact beyond the United States. In Great Britain, Raphael Albert organised and photographed Black beauty pageants in London. James Barnor focused on style, migration, and Black city life in London and in Accra, Ghana. Horace Ové photographed the British Black Power Movement. He also captured scenes of the West African and West Indian communities in London, like his Walking Proud, Notting Hill Carnival.
Samuel Fosso opened his first photography studio in Bangui, Central African Republic, at age 13. After finishing with clients, Fosso would use his studio to experiment with self-portraits. He wore an array of costumes and adopted personas, often taking inspiration from the pictures of Black Americans he saw in magazines shared by American Peace Corps volunteers.
7/ It influenced generations of artists
By the end of the 1970s, the literary arm of the Black Arts Movement had waned, but a new generation of artists and photographers carried on its spirit. Coming out of art school, photographers such as Carrie Mae Weems and Lorna Simpson explored more personal, metaphorical, and conceptual ideas.
In her Family Pictures and Stories series, Weems made her own family the subjects. The intimate photographs presented a counterargument to claims that many Black Americans faced poverty and struggle as a result of weak family structures. Weems paired the photographs with brief stories about each family member.
Herbert Eugene Randall, Jr. is an American photographer who had documented the effects of the Civil Rights Movement. Randall is of Shinnecock, African-American and West Indian ancestry.
Randall studied photography under Harold Feinstein in 1957. From 1958 to 1966, he worked as a freelance photographer for various media organizations. His photographs were used by the Associated Press, United Press International, Black Star, various television stations, and other American and foreign publications. Randall was also a founding member of the Kamoinge Workshop, a collective of African-American photographers, in New York City in 1963.
In 1964, Sanford R. Leigh, the Director of Mississippi Freedom Summer’s Hattiesburg project, persuaded Randall to photograph the effects of the Civil Rights Movement in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. Randall had a Whitney Fellowship for that year, and had been looking for a project. He spent the entire summer photographing solely in Hattiesburg, among the African-American community and among the volunteers in area projects such as the Freedom Schools, Voter Registration, and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party campaign.
Only five of Randall’s photographs were published in the summer of 1964. One seen worldwide was the bloodied, concussed Rabbi Arthur Lelyveld, head of a prominent Cleveland congregation and former conscientious objector to World War II. However, most of his photographs sat in a file at the Shinnecock Reservation, on Long Island, New York.
Billy Abernathy (Fundi) (American, 1939-2016) Mother’s Day from the series “Born Hip” 1962 gelatin silver print 17.5 x 13.3cm (6 7/8 x 5 1/4 in.) The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of the Illinois Arts Council Photo: The Art Institute of Chicago / Art Resource, NY
Billy Abernathy (Fundi) (American, 1939-2016)
Photographer Billy (Fundi) Abernathy was known for creating images that defined Black confidence, elegance, and style. This work extended to his collaborations with his wife, Sylvia (Laini) Abernathy, with whom he designed album covers for Delmark Records in the 1960s. Around that time, the poet and author Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) encountered Abernathy’s photographs of Chicago and proposed a book project that would combine his poetry with Abernathy’s images. The resulting collaboration, In Our Terribleness (Some Elements and Meaning in Black Style), was designed by Laini and published in 1970. In 1971 the New York Times hailed the book as “an example of the new direction that black art is taking.”
Charles “Teenie” Harris (American, 1908-1998) A television playing coverage of James Baldwin at the March for Freedom and Jobs in Washington, DC 1963/2025 Gelatin silver print National Gallery of Art, Washington
African American artist Charles “Teenie” Harris, captured “the essence of daily African-American life in the 20th century. For more than 40 years, Harris – as lead photographer of the influential Pittsburgh Courier newspaper – took almost 80,000 pictures of people from all walks: presidents, housewives, sports stars, babies, civil rights leaders and even cross-dressing drag queens.”
In 1953, he enrolled at the historically Black college in Petersburg, which was not far from his hometown of Richmond. He began working as a reporter for the school paper, and during that time Draper’s father, who was an amateur photographer himself, sent Louis his first camera. By 1956, Draper’s title at the paper had changed to cameraman. After his revelatory first experience with The Family of Man, a catalogue that accompanied the 1955 photography exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, he decided to leave school during his final semester and move to New York City to become a photographer. Once there, Draper enrolled in a photography workshop led by Harold Feinstein, and was mentored by W. Eugene Smith, one of the most prominent American photojournalists.
In 1963, the same year as the March on Washington, Draper became a founding member of the Kamoinge Workshop, a New York-based collective of Black photographers. Workshop members met regularly to discuss one another’s work, produced group portfolios, exhibitions, and publications, and mentored young people all over the city. Draper emerged as one of the group’s teachers, which began his long career as an educator (he worked in numerous teaching roles, including at Pratt Institute and Mercer County Community College). The collective aimed to “create the kind of images of our communities that spoke of the truth we’d witnessed and that countered the untruths we’d all seen in mainline publications.” Kamoinge members wanted to avoid the racial stereotypes prevalent in the media and the violence that was typical of journalistic coverage of the Civil Rights Movement, working instead to represent their communities in a positive light.
Jane Pierce, Carl Jacobs Foundation Research Assistant, Department of Photography, “Louis Draper,” on the MoMA website 2021 [Online] Cited 27/11/2025
Ernest C. Withers (American, 1922-2007) I Am A Man, Sanitation Workers Strike, Memphis, Tennessee March 28, 1968 Gelatin silver print 19 × 32.6cm (7 1/2 × 12 13/16 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
Ernest C. Withers (American, 1922-2007)
Photojournalist Ernest C. Withers was born on August 7, 1922, in Memphis, Tennessee. Withers got his start as a military photographer while serving in the South Pacific during World War II. Upon returning to a segregated Memphis after the war, Withers chose photography as his profession.
In the 1950s, Withers helped spur the movement for equal rights with a self-published photo pamphlet on the Emmitt Till murder. Over the next two decades, Withers formed close personal relationships with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Medgar Evers, and James Meredith. Withers’s pictures of key civil rights events from the Montgomery Bus Boycott to the strike of Memphis sanitation workers are historic. Indeed, Withers was often the only photographer to record these scenes, many of which were not yet of interest to the mainstream press.
Withers photographed more than the southern Civil Rights Movement. Whether Jackie Robinson, Willie Mays, and other Negro League baseball players, or those jazz and blues musicians who frequented Memphis’ Beale Street, Withers photographed the famous and not-so famous. Withers’s collection includes pictures of early performances of Elvis Presley, B.B. King, Ike and Tina Turner, Ray Charles, and Aretha Franklin.
First-of-Its-Kind Exhibition Opening at the National Gallery of Art Explores Photography’s Role in the Black Arts Movement
Never-before-seen photographs alongside images of cultural icons reveal the medium’s central role during a pivotal era of creative expression
The National Gallery of Art presents Photography and the Black Arts Movement, 1955-1985, an exhibition exploring the work of American and Afro-Atlantic diaspora photographers in developing and fostering a distinctly Black visual culture and identity. The first presentation to investigate photography’s role in the Black Arts Movement, a creative initiative comparable to the Harlem Renaissance in its scope and impact, which evolved concurrently to the civil rights and international freedom movements, the exhibition reveals how artists developed strategies to engage communities and encourage self-representation in media, laying a foundation for socially engaged art practices that continue today. Photography and the Black Arts Movement will be on view in the West Building from September 21, 2025, to January 11, 2026, before traveling to California and Mississippi.
Photography and the Black Arts Movement brings together approximately 150 works spanning photography, video, collage, painting, installation, and other photo-based media, some of which have rarely or never been on view. Among the over 100 artists included in the exhibition are Billy Abernathy (Fundi), Romare Bearden, Dawoud Bey, Frank Bowling, Kwame Brathwaite, Roy DeCarava, Louis Draper, David C. Driskell, Charles Gaines, James E. Hinton, Danny Lyon, Gordon Parks, Adrian Piper, Nellie Mae Rowe, Betye Saar, Raymond Saunders, Jamel Shabazz, Lorna Simpson, and Carrie Mae Weems.
This expansive selection of work showcases the broad cultural exchange between writers, musicians, photographers, filmmakers, and other visual artists of many backgrounds, who came together during the turbulent decades of the mid-20th century to grapple with social and political changes, the pursuit of civil rights, and the emergence of the Pan-African movement through art. The exhibition also includes art from Africa, the Caribbean, and Great Britain to contextualize the global engagement with the social, political, and cultural ideas that propelled the Black Arts Movement.
“Working on many fronts – literature, poetry, jazz and new music, painting, sculpture, performance, film, and photography – African American artists associated with the Black Arts Movement expressed and exchanged their ideas through publications, organisations, museums, galleries, community centres, theatres, murals, street art, and emerging academic programs. While focusing on African American photography in the United States, the exhibition also includes works by artists from many communities to consider the extensive interchange between North American artists and the African diaspora. The exhibition looks at the important connections between America’s focus on civil rights and the emerging cultural movements that enriched the dialog,” said Philip Brookman, cocurator of the exhibition and consulting curator of the department of photographs at the National Gallery of Art.
“Photography and photographic images were crucial in defining and giving expression to the Black Arts Movement and the civil rights movement. By merging the social concerns and aesthetics of the period, Black artists and photographers were defining a Black aesthetic while expanding conversations around community building and public history,” said Deborah Willis, guest cocurator, university professor and chair of the department of photography and imaging at the Tisch School of the Arts and founding director of the Center for Black Visual Culture at New York University. “The artists and their subjects helped to preserve compelling visual responses to this turbulent time and their images reflect their pride and determination.”
About the Exhibition
The exhibition draws significantly from the National Gallery’s collection – including more than 50 newly acquired works by Dawoud Bey, Kwame Brathwaite, Louis Draper, Ray Francis, Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe, Horace Ové, Jamel Shabazz, Malik Sidibé, Ming Smith, and Carrie Mae Weems, among others – and from lenders in the US, Great Britain, and Canada. Photography and the Black Arts Movement, 1955–1985 presents the cultural and political titans of the era, including civil rights leaders, artists, and musicians, as well as everyday people, scenes of daily life, and fashion and commercial photography. Structured around nine thematic sections – including explorations of the self, community, fashion and beauty, the media, and ritual – the exhibition weaves a holistic vision of the period and its cultural impact.
Among the works in the first section of the exhibition is a collage by Romare Bearden, 110th Street Harlem Blues (1972). A dynamic mixture of painted paper and photographs, the work illustrates the ongoing vitality of Harlem’s community, echoing the vibrancy and social content of the Harlem Renaissance, which Bearden was exposed to in his early life. Moving into the section titled Picturing the Self / Picturing the Movement, self-portraits by Coreen Simpson, Alex Harsley, and Barkley L. Hendricks underscore a central theme of the exhibition: artists asserting their presence within the broader narrative of the movement and the era, along with the importance of self-representation in their art. A highlight of Representing the Community – a section filled with everyday scenes of people at work and at rest – is Ralph Arnold’s Soul Box (1969), a mixed-media assemblage of found objects and collage, serving as a time capsule that captures stories of the Black Arts Movement.
Photographs were a crucial tool used to communicate the events of the civil rights movement to a national audience. Artists and news media understood the power of photographs to address inequality and advocate for civil and human rights, and some works in the exhibition are by photojournalists who captured the speeches, marches, and sit-ins that defined the era. A rarely seen 1965 photograph by Frank Dandridge captures Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. watching President Lyndon B. Johnson’s televised address following the Selma, Alabama, marches – events that would ultimately lead to the passage of the Voting Rights Act. Depicting Dr. King in a private, domestic moment, the image underscores not just the personal gravity of the moment but the television’s growing role in shaping public understanding of the era’s historic events. One of several works featured in the In the News section, it reflects how photographers responded to the shifting landscape of news media – from still photography to the rise of television.
The Black Arts Movement was instrumental in reshaping fashion, advertising, and media as tools of self-representation and cultural empowerment. A Kraft Foods advertisement (1977), photographed by Barbara DuMetz and featuring a young Black girl holding her doll, illustrates how the movement prompted advertisers to engage Black audiences more thoughtfully by hiring Black photographers and models in their campaigns. It is among the highlights of the Fashioning the Self section, along with an editorial photograph by Kwame Brathwaite, the photographer who helped coin the “Black is Beautiful” movement, and many depictions of women in beauty shops, showing the importance of these spaces to forming identity and community.
The exhibition’s concluding section, Transformations in Art and Culture, reflects a shift in the Black Arts Movement’s purpose – from its earlier focus on civil rights to a younger generation’s engagement with more historical and conceptual ideas, while still drawing on the movement’s visual language. Highlights include multimedia and time-based works by Ulysses Jenkins, Charles Gaines, and Lorna Simpson, which explore new and experimental ways to explore Black identity.
Exhibition Publication
Published in association with Yale University Press, the fully illustrated catalog accompanying the exhibition examines the vital role photography played in the evolution of the Black Arts Movement, which brought together writers, filmmakers, and artists as they explored ways of using art to advance civil rights and Black self-determination. Edited by Philip Brookman and Deborah Willis, with a preface by Angela Y. Davis and contributions by Makeda Best, Margo Natalie Crawford, Romi Crawford, Cheryl Finley, Sarah Lewis, and Audrey Sands, this book reveals how photographs operated across art, community building, journalism, and political messaging to contribute to the development of a distinctly Black art and culture. Essays by these distinguished scholars focus on topics such as women and the movement, community, activism, and Black photojournalism, and consider the complex connections between American artists and the African diaspora, and the dynamic interchange of Pan-African ideas that propelled the movement.
Harry Adams, also known as “One Shot Harry,” was one of the best-known members of the Los Angeles African American community. Having access to the city’s inner circle, he became known for his images of politicians, entertainers, and society figures. Adams worked as a freelancer for the California Eagle and Los Angeles Sentinel for 35 years and had a number of churches and lawyers as clients. His collection is particularly rich in its documentation of African American social life including images of social organisations, churches, schools, civil rights organisations, protests and cultural events. …
The collection of images for the period 1950-1985 is rich in its depiction of the unique lives of African Americans in and around the Los Angeles area. There are many images of important black political leaders, such as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Rev. Ralph Abernathy, Malcolm X, and many others.
Between the late 1960s and the early 1990s, the cultural promoter, entrepreneur and photographer Raphael Albert organised and documented numerous black beauty pageants and other cultural events in London. His long and successful career as a promoter and chronicler of pageants included the establishment of Miss Black and Beautiful, Miss West Indies in Great Britain, and Miss Grenada.
These competitions celebrated the global ‘Black is Beautiful’ aesthetic in a local west London context: paired with the obligatory bathing costumes and high heels, Albert’s contestants often sported large Afro hairstyles, inventing and reinventing themselves on stage while articulating a particular and multifaceted black femininity as part of a widely contested and ambiguous cultural performance.
Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006) Newsman Being Frisked at Muslim Rally in Chicago 1963, printed 1997 Gelatin silver print 47.3 x 33.7cm (18 5/8 x 13 1/4 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington Corcoran Collection (The Gordon Parks Collection)
Herman Howard (American, 1942-1980) Sweet as a Peach, Harlem, New York City 1963 Gelatin silver print 16 x 23.1cm (6 5/16 x 9 1/8 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
John W. Mosley (American, 1907-1969) View of the crowd as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. addresses civil rights demonstrators at 40th Street and Lancaster Avenue, Philadelphia August 3, 1965 Gelatin silver print 24.8 x 19.7cm (9 3/4 x 7 3/4 in.) John W. Mosley Photograph Collection, Charles L. Blockson Afro-American Collection, Temple University Libraries
John W. Mosley (American, 1907-1969)
John W. Mosley (May 19, 1907 – October 1, 1969) was a self-taught photojournalist who extensively documented the everyday activities of the African-American community in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, for more than 30 years, a period including both World War II and the civil rights movement. His work was published widely in newspapers and magazines including The Philadelphia Tribune, The Pittsburgh Courier and Jet magazine.
Mosley has been called a “cultural warrior” for preserving a record of African-American life in Philadelphia and Pennsylvania, one which combats “negative stereotypes and false interpretations of African-American history and culture”. …
Mosley flourished in his career as a photographer from the 1930s to the 1960s. He was known to photograph as many as four events a day, seven days a week. He traveled around Philadelphia on public transit, carrying his cameras and other equipment.
Mosley shot in black and white film. He used a large-format Graflex Speed Graphic camera. and a medium-format Rollieflex.
Proud of his heritage, Mosley chose to portray the black community positively at family, social, and cultural events that were part of daily life. He photographed individuals and families at weddings, picnics, churches, segregated beaches, sporting events, concerts, galas, and civil rights protests. During a time of racism and segregation, he emphasised the achievements of black celebrities, athletes, and political leaders.
“During the Civil Rights Movement, I was a participant just like everybody else. I just happened to be there with my camera, and I felt and firmly believed that my mission was to photograph and show the side of it that was the right side.”
~ Moneta Sleet Jr.
During Sleet’s 41 years at Ebony, he worked by Martin Luther King Jr.’s side for 13 years, capturing historical moments of the civil rights movement.
Sleet began working for Ebony magazine in 1955. Over the next 41 years, he captured photos of young Muhammad Ali, Dizzy Gillespie, Stevie Wonder, Emperor Haile Selassie I, Jomo Kenyatta, former ambassador Andrew Young in a blue leather jacket and jeans in his office at the United Nations, Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, Liberia’s William Tubman and Billie Holiday. He gained the affection and esteem of many civil rights leaders, many of whom called on him by name. When Coretta Scott King found out that no African American photographers had been assigned to cover her husband’s funeral service, she demanded that Sleet be a part of the press pool. If he was not, she threatened to bar all photographers from the service. Besides his photo of Coretta Scott King, he also captured grieving widow Betty Shabazz at the funeral of her husband Malcolm X.
Kwame Brathwaite (American, 1938-2023) Untitled (Charles Peaker Street Speaker, head of ANPM, after Carlos Cooks passed away, on 125th Street) c. 1968, printed 2016 Inkjet print 37.2 x 37.2 cm (14 5/8 x 14 5/8 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund and Pepita Milmore Memorial Fund
Kwame Brathwaite (American, 1938-2023)
Black Is Beautiful.
From Marcus Garvey to the Black Panther Party, these three words powered the political dreams and material possibilities of generations of Black people living in the United States. Over the course of seven decades, the recently departed photographer Kwame Brathwaite constructed a glorious visual lexicon to articulate a Pan-Africanist argument. Whether through his rhythmic documentation of the jazz scene in Harlem and the Bronx, or his cofounding of the African Jazz-Art Society & Studios (AJASS), Brathwaite positioned photography at the nexus of Black artistic, political, and musical expression. Moving between concert halls and boxing rings, portrait studios and protest movement scenes – his Hasselblad in hand – Brathwaite chronicled self-determination and creativity that celebrated Blackness in all of its forms. Each of his photographs brims with bombastic flare and undeniable elegance. Their narrative potential is still transfixing.
“Black Is Beautiful was my directive,” Brathwaite said. “It was a time when people were protesting injustices related to race, class, and human rights around the globe. I focused on perfecting my craft so that I could use my gift to inspire thought, relay ideas, and tell stories of our struggle, our work, our liberation…. Oppression still exists today, and we must keep fighting, keep on pushing until we are free. A luta continua, a vitória é certa – the struggle continues, victory is certain.”
Oluremi C. Onabanjo, Esther Adler, Roxana Marcoci, Marilyn Nance, David Hartt, Michael Famighetti. “Remembering Kwame Brathwaite (1938-2023),” on the MoMA website, Dec 26, 2023 [Online] Cited 30/11/2025
While the Black Arts Movement is generally pegged to the 1960s and ’70s, the point of departure for Willis and Brookman was the work of photographer Roy DeCarava, who in 1955, on the cusp of the civil rights movement, released a book titled The Sweet Flypaper of Life. The book featured portraits of Black life in Harlem activated by a fictitious character named Mary Bradley, a narrative invention of Harlem Renaissance writer Langston Hughes.
In the book, Sister Mary’s musings unfold within DeCarava’s photographic landscape. The exhibition includes an image from the book featuring bassist Edna Smith, whose face is partially illuminated by a single light in the distance. Her downward gaze conveys a sense of somberness that’s echoed by the shadows that surround her, while the single glint of light coming off her wristwatch draws attention to the bass like the beacon from a lighthouse.
Published decades following the Harlem Renaissance, one year after Brown v. Board of Education and months after the murder of Emmitt Till, DeCarava’s book came at a critical moment in art history, a time when photography became more broadly recognised as fine art through groundbreaking exhibitions like “The Family of Man” at the Museum of Modern Art, also in 1955. With that recognition, Black artists seized an opportunity to compose compelling visual narratives. “The collaboration between Langston Hughes and Roy De Carava was influential for so many photographers and artists, in part because De Carava and Hughes were looking at their respective communities, and they put together a story that was looking inward,” says Brookman.
Ray Francis (American, 1937-2006) Genie 1971 Gelatin silver print 13.97 × 17.78cm (5 1/2 × 7 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
Ray Francis (American, 1937-2006)
Ray Francis was a founding member of the Kamoinge Workshop. He received his first camera in 1952, at the age of 15. In 1961 he met Louis Draper, with whom he formed Group 35. In 1963 Group 35 merged with other photographers to create Kamoinge, where Francis contributed significantly by creating a darkroom for the group and working as a photo editor for the Black Photographers Annual.
His photographic work spanned still life, portraiture, and landscape, often using dramatic light and shadow, influenced by Johannes Vermeer’s use of composition. Francis also made contributions as an educator, teaching at the Bedford-Stuyvesant Neighborhood Youth Corps (1966–1969) and later serving as director of the New York City Board of Education’s photography program for Intermediate School 201 from 1970 to 1974.
Kwame Brathwaite, [was] a photographer, musician and African American activist who was a unique politico-aesthete. With his brother Elombe Brath, he virtually invented the phrase “Black Is Beautiful” in the 1960s by photographing the Grandassa Models in Harlem: young African American women who became the sensational template for beauty, doing away with the usual cosmetic products and the usual white standard of femininity.
Black Is Beautiful became a radical rallying cry, an inspired three-word prose poem and manifesto for change. Simply to assert that black people were beautiful was a liberating force in art, politics and culture, and Brathwaite became a part of Black power’s pan-Africanist movement by photographing Muhammad Ali before his Rumble in the Jungle fight in Zaire in 1974. He was the exclusive photographer for the Jackson 5’s African tour, and became the house photographer for the Apollo theatre, building an amazing archive of black musicians, and with Elombe was the driving force behind bringing Nelson Mandela to speak in Harlem.
African-American artist, activist, and writer Romare Bearden was close friends with film producer and photographer Sam Shaw, and he often drew inspiration from Shaw’s creative projects. The portraits incorporated into this collage feature outtakes of extras from a movie Shaw may have documented as set photographer. Bearden’s work reflects his improvisational approach to his practice. He considered his process akin to that of jazz and blues composers. Starting with an open mind, he would let an idea evolve spontaneously. “You have to begin somewhere,” he once said, “so you put something down. Then you put something else with it, and then you see how that works, and maybe you try something else and so on, and the picture grows in that way.”
Text from the Fraenkel Gallery Facebook page via DC Gallery, New York
Other works of art in the show are a testament to the medium’s lasting influence on established visual artists. Among these was Romare Bearden, who in the mid-1960s began exploring photographic collage; it would become an art form he used to create his most influential works. “Romare Bearden has always been integral to understanding the Black Arts Movement,” says Brookman. “By using photographs in his collages, he makes a direct connection between photography in all of its forms and the Black Arts Movement. That was something I had not seen or thought a lot about before, how much photography is incorporated into his visual art, including painting, during that time.”
Dawoud Bey (American, b. 1953) The Blues Singer, Harlem, NY 1976 Gelatin silver print 22.1 x 32.7 cm (8 11/16 x 12 7/8 in.) National Gallery of Art, Gift of the Charina Endowment Fund in memory of Robert B. Menschel
Barbara DuMetz (American, b. 1947) Kraft Foods advertisement 1977
Barbara DuMetz (American, b. 1947)
Barbara DuMetz (born 1947) is an American photographer and pioneer in the field of commercial photography. She began working in Los Angeles as a commercial photographer in the 1970s, when very few women had established and maintained successful careers in the field, especially African-American women. Over the course of her career, “she made a major contribution to diversifying the landscape of images that defined pop culture in the United States.”
DuMetz is known for her work with African-American celebrities, corporations and images of everyday life in African-American communities. …
DuMetz has been a professional photographer for more than four decades. Over the course of her career, she has produced award-winning images for advertising agencies including Burrell Advertising, J. P. Martin Associates and InterNorth Corporation. Her photographs have appeared in African-American publications including Black Enterprise, Ebony, Essence, Jet and The Crisis. She has taken commercial photographs for corporations including The Coca-Cola Company, Delta Air Lines and McDonald’s Corporation.
DuMetz ran and maintained three different photography studios located in the Los Angeles area where she was contracted by department stores, record companies, graphic design studios, advertising agencies, public relations firms, film production companies, actors and business professionals. DuMetz’s has shot photo layouts of celebrities and artists and personalities including Maya Angelou, Ernie Barnes, Bernie Casey, Pam Grier, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Quincy Jones, Samella Lewis, Ed McMahan, Thelonious Monk, Lou Rawls, Della Reese, Richard Roundtree, Betye Saar, Charles Wilbert White, and Nancy Wilson. Her show The Creators: Photographic Images of Literary, Music and Visual Artists, at the Southwest Arts Center in Atlanta, Georgia, in 2015, included images of over two dozen African-American artists whom she has photographed.
Ming Smith (American, b. 1947) Sun Ra Space II, New York, New York 1978 Gelatin silver print 15.24 × 22.4cm (6 × 8 13/16 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington Charina Endowment Fund
“You don’t make art for money, especially as a Black artist. You do it because there is that need to create – and that has been part of my survival; that has helped me survive.”
“My work as a photographer was to record, culturally, the period of time in which I lived – and I recorded it as an artist.”
“Oh no, it’s all discovery, it’s all improvisation. It’s like when jazz musicians solo. They improvise, and photography is definitely that, for me.”
“Whether I’m photographing a person on the street, someone I know, or on an assignment, I’m doing it because I admire them. I like the sense of exchange – they’re giving and I’m taking, but I’m also giving them something back. There were certain people who would understand what I was looking for and would try to give me a photograph by posing. Whatever I’m shooting, whether it’s a portrait or a place, my intention is to capture the feeling I have about that exchange and that energy.”
Simpson’s career launched when she became editor for Unique New York magazine in 1980, and she began photographing to illustrate her articles. She then became a freelance fashion photographer for the Village Voice and the Amsterdam News in the early 1980s, and covered many African-American cultural and political events in the mid-1980s. She is also noted for her studies of Harlem nightlife. She constructed a portable studio and brought it to clubs in downtown Manhattan, barbershops in Harlem, and braiding salons in Queens. Her work’s ability to present a wide variety of subjects with “depth of character and dignity” has been compared to that of Diane Arbus and Weegee.
Simpson became a photographer after noticing that she could make better images than the ones used to illustrate her stories as a freelance lifestyle writer. She took the chance to start creating the images she wanted to see. In 1976, she contacted her friend Walter Johnson, a street photographer who worked at a photo lab in Manhattan, with whom she had been acquainted from her modeling days, and asked if he could teach her how to use a camera. He showed her how to use it, and as soon as she got a hold of it, she became unstoppable.
She argues that great images are the key to having a successful published story. “You have to feel good about yourself, and good about the article that you’re presenting to the public,” she says. “So what makes it good? It’s the visuals. The visuals make it good.”
Anthony Barboza (American, b. 1944) Grace Jones, New York City 1970s Gelatin silver print 27 × 23.7cm (10 5/8 × 9 5/16 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
Anthony Barboza (American, b. 1944)
Anthony Barboza (born 1944 in New Bedford, Massachusetts) is a photographer, historian, artist and writer. With roots originating from Cape Verde, and work that began in commercial art more than forty years ago, Barboza’s artistic talents and successful career helped him to cross over and pursue his passions in the fine arts where he continues to contribute to the American art scene.
Barboza has a prolific and wide range of both traditional and innovative works inspired by African-American thought, which have been exhibited in public and private galleries, and prestigious museums and educational institutions worldwide. He is well known for his photographic work of jazz musicians from the 1970s – ’80s. Many of these works are in his book Black Borders, published in 1980 with a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. In an article printed in 1984 in The City Sun, he said, “When I do a portrait, I’m doing a photograph of how that person feels to me; how I feel about the person, not how they look. I find that in order for the portraits to work, they have to make a mental connection as well as an emotional one. When they do that, I know I have it.” Many of his photographs achieve his signature effect through the careful use of lighting and shadows, manipulation of the backdrop, measured adjustments to shutter speeds, composition, and many other techniques and mediums at his command.
Nellie Mae Rowe was born in Georgia, in the last year of the nineteenth century – to a once-enslaved father and mother born the year of Emancipation. Rowe laboured as a child, married young, was widowed twice, and worked much of her adult life as a uniformed “domestic” in white households. Although her early life was shaped by segregation and oppression, Rowe’s desire to define herself sparked a joyful and colourful body of art that suffused her home and yard. This undeniable and contagious positivity made Rowe one of the first Black self-taught women to be celebrated for her art.
Rowe saw art-making as a God-given way to convey gratitude and recover a girlhood lost to labor and poverty. She transformed her property into an enriched realm she called her “Playhouse,” embellished with artworks and found objects that brought a heightened animation to her surroundings. Amid a society that rarely featured Black women in works of art and cast them as demeaning stereotypes in popular culture, Rowe took control of the narrative. She depicted friends, neighbours, and herself in drawings and hand-coloured photographs, confident images of Black beauty and free-spirited joy. In a radical act of reclamation, she crafted a world where cultural pride, personal style, and a bit of the unexpected embody the richness of life.
(We Are Made of Stories: Self-Taught Artists in the Robson Family Collection, 2022)
Carrie Mae Weems (American, b. 1953) Mom at Work 1978-1984 Gelatin silver print 60.96 × 92.71cm (24 × 36 1/2 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe (American, b. 1951) Jake with His Boat Arriving on Daufuskie’s Shore, Daufuskie Island, South Carolina 1978, printed 2007 Gelatin silver print 31.1 x 46.6cm (12 1/4 x 18 3/8 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington Gift of Funds from Diana and Mallory Walker
Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe (American, b. 1951)
Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe (b. 1951, USA) is an American photographer, photojournalist and AIDS activist. Beginning photography at the age of 18, she trained with American street photographer Garry Winogrand before graduating from the Cooper Union School of Art with a BFA in 1975, completing a year of independent photographic study in West Africa. Her 1977 photograph ‘Black Man, White Woman, Johannesburg, South Africa’ emblematised the visual narrative of apartheid at that time, recalling the institutionalised racism Jeanne had herself experienced as an African-American photographer.
Jeanne’s experience in South Africa informed her later work, encouraging her to focus on the contemporary experience of Blackness through humanist street photography. More recently, her photobook Daddy and Me: A Photo Story of Arthur Ashe and His Daughter, Camera (1993), which captures the last year of her husband Arthur Ashe’s life, has been praised as a sensitive record of family and mortality which demystifies AIDS. Following the tragedy of Ashe’s death, Jeanne has become a spokesperson for further AIDS research.
Barkley L. Hendricks (American, 1940-2017) Self-Portrait with Red Sweater 1980, printed 2023 Chromogenic print 24.8 × 15.5cm (9 3/4 × 6 1/8 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
Barkley L. Hendricks (American, 1940-2017)
Barkley L. Hendricks (American, 1940-2017) was an American painter and photographer who revolutionised portraiture through his realist and post-modern oil paintings of Black Americans living in urban areas, beginning in the 1960s and 1970s.
Hendricks’ depictions of the Black figure exude attitude and style. The artist culled subjects for his hagiographic portraits from sartorially minded friends and acquaintances he encountered around the world, including travels to Jamaica, his hometown of Philadelphia, and Connecticut where he last lived and worked. He applied intense focus to his subjects while painting, allowing him to capture their unique personalities. Steeped in pop culture and balanced with exquisite detail, the cast of characters in Hendricks’ work inhabits an unconventional realism united by painterly mastery.
While the directness of his subjects’ gaze could be piercing, Hendricks invoked humour through the titling of his pieces, mitigating the gravity of the message and allowing for an opening into the work. His paintings are distinctly of their time, grounded in the style of their contemporary present, and simultaneously emphatically timeless. They are a direct engagement with art history, the tradition of portraiture, and a confrontation of institutional portrayal of the black subject.
Hendricks was first a photographer before taking up painting. Beyond his portraiture, he also made distinct works on paper and painted landscapes and still lifes, including an early series of Basketball paintings that explored abstraction and colour theory. Throughout his career, Hendricks refused to be boxed into a medium, and his practice is commanding, bold, and without limitations to media or form.
Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006) Miles Davis 1981 Gelatin silver print 22.9 x 34.1cm (9 x 13 7/16 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington Corcoran Collection (The Gordon Parks Collection)
Carla Williams (American, b. 1965) Untitled (curlers) #1.2 1984-1985 Gelatin silver print 27.31 × 34.93cm (10 3/4 × 13 3/4 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington Pepita Milmore Memorial Fund
Carla Williams (American, b. 1965)
Los Angeles native Carla Williams is a photographer and curator known for her exploration of identity, race, gender, and representation.
She first encountered photography in 1983 during her sophomore year at Princeton University, studying under Emmet Gowin. Her early work in self-portraiture began at Princeton, where she used the large-format camera to explore her own image. The focus of renewed scholarship, these works reflected on the lack of visibility of African American women in photographic history. Williams earned an MFA in photography from the University of New Mexico in 1991, where her thesis project focused on the themes of self-representation and identity. After graduating, she worked as a curator of photography at institutions in Los Angeles and New York.
Juan Sánchez, the influential Nuyorican visual artist, teacher, writer, and curator once declared “Political art is a medium used as a weapon to hopefully recapture or regain the positive energy of celebration – to regain the goodness of humanity.” Sánchez, the child of Puerto Rican immigrants, was born and raised in Brooklyn. Encompassing a variety of mediums and techniques, including collage, painting, printmaking, photography, and video, his work is informed by his activism and engagement with issues of colonialism and its legacy, race, class, cultural identity, equality, social justice, and self-determination. At the same time, he has maintained a consistent focus on communities, families, and both personal and political histories in his work.
Martin Parr (British, 1952-2025) New Brighton, England From the series The Last Resort 1983-1985 Pigment print
From life, the absurd, the (un)familiar
The death of the English photographer Martin Parr is very sad news 😦
I feel like I have known his intimate photographs from life for a very long time. Through his beautifully observed and humorous photographs Martin Parr became a national treasure.
Incisive and insightful, his best photographs shone a light on the British class system, British rituals and everyday conversations – “candid and often humorous depictions of everyday life” – captured with visual deftness and containing a wry sense of humour mirroring the British character.
“Parr’s work was at its best when he concentrated on the volume of space within the image plane and the details that emerge from such a concentrated visualisation – whether it be the tension points within the image, assemblage of colour, incongruity of dress, messiness of childhood or philistine nature of luxury.” (MB, 2102)
His photographs have a wonderful frisson about them, a genuine love of and resonance with the things he was imaging. The dirt under the fingernails of the child eating a doughnut, the lurid colours of the popsicle and jacket of the kid with dribble on his face, all fantastic. Images full of incongruity, humour, and pathos. The absurd and the (un)familiar.
And so it goes… we loose another great photographer.
Vale Martin Parr and thank you!
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Read my text “Out in the midday sun” on the exhibition Martin Parr. Early Works at Fotografie Forum Frankfurt (FFF), September 2024 – February 2025
“Photography is the simplest thing in the world, but it is incredibly complicated to make it really work.”
“I think the mindset you require is stamina, discipline, and just sheer hard work. There are basically very few shortcuts. You’ve either got that ability to apply yourself to a given situation or a given idea and explore it and resolve it, or you haven’t. Most people are just lazy. The danger with photography is that it looks very easy but in fact, it’s a very difficult medium to really excel well in because basically, people don’t work hard enough – they’re lazy. Don’t be lazy!”
Martin Parr
Martin Parr (British, 1952-2025) New Brighton, England From the series Last Resort 1983-1985 Pigment print
Martin Parr (British, 1952-2025) New Brighton, England From the series The Last Resort 1983-1985 Pigment print
Martin Parr (British, 1952-2025) New Brighton, England From the series The Last Resort 1983-1985 Pigment print
Martin Parr (British, 1952-2025) New Brighton, England From the series The Last Resort 1983-1985 Pigment print
Martin Parr (British, 1952-2025) New Brighton, Merseyside, England 1984 From the series The Last Resort Pigment print
Martin Parr (British, b. 1952) England. Bristol. Car boot sale. 1995 From the series British Food 1994-1995 Traditional C-type print
Martin Parr (British, b. 1952) From A to B. Tales of Modern Motoring series 1994 Pigment print
![Dennis McGuire (American) 'Untitled [Diane Arbus using her medium format Mamiya camera]' Nd](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/dennis-mcguire-diane-arbus.jpg "Dennis McGuire (American) 'Untitled [Diane Arbus using her medium format Mamiya camera]' Nd")
![Man Ray (American, 1890-1976)
'Torse (Retour à la raison)' (Torso [Return to Reason]) 1923, printed c. 1935](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/man-ray-retour-c3a0-la-raison-web.jpg "Man Ray (American, 1890-1976) 'Torse (Retour à la raison)' (Torso [Return to Reason]) 1923, printed c. 1935")
Art Blart _ art and cultural memory archive 
You must be logged in to post a comment.