Exhibition: ‘Richard Avedon ‘In the American West’ 1979-1984′ at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris

Exhibition dates: 30th April – 12th October, 2025

Curator: Clément Chéroux, Director, Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson

Richard Avedon (American, 1923-2004)
Sandra Bennett, twelve year old, Rocky Ford, Colorado, August 23, 1980
1980
Gelatin silver print
© The Richard Avedon Foundation

Myths of the American West

This is a magnificent exhibition of the 103 photographs that form American photographer Richard Avedon’s series and subsequent book of the same name, In The American West 1984.

“Avedon spent the next six years, from 1979 to 1984, traveling to 189 towns in 17 states – Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, and Wyoming – and even up into Canada. He conducted 752 sittings, exposing 17,000 sheets of film through his large-format view camera.”1

“For five years, Avedon photographed miners, drovers, showmen, vendors, and vagabonds, alone or in small groups, in front of his view camera against a white background that enhanced their features, postures, and expressions. He thus created a striking portrait of this region and its residents, a departure from traditional representations and glorifications of the myth of the American West.”2

Using relatively small reference prints (40 x 50cm) not originally intended for exhibition made by the photographer at the time to produce the prints for his book, the hanging of this exhibition “on the line”, “follows the book, from the first to the last image… The blank pages are represented on the wall by a gap equivalent to the width of a frame, like a half-space. We have thus reproduced the rhythm of someone leafing through the book. We can see through this that Richard Avedon and Marvin Israel (1924-1984), artistic director, have constructed the rhythm of these images in a very precise manner”3, one which follows “the dynamics of the photograph on the page, and the inter-relationships, scaling and sequencing of groups of photographs.”

Breaking with the code of social documentary photography, Avedon brings to this project all his undoubted skill as a New York fashion photographer, reassigned to the artistic sphere: clarity of purpose, simplicity of representation, aesthetic beauty, clinical detail and contextless backgrounds.

While there is a long history of the use of plain backgrounds in portrait photography dating back to the infancy of the medium, Avedon was one of the first to employ such a technique in contemporary (I’d like to say postmodern) photo-portraits, where the subject is disassociated from their location, job, culture and is posed by the director of the theatrical show.

Over the five years of the project, Avedon worked closely with his subjects, often advertising for people to be photographed, street-casting his sitters, paying them for their time and providing prints of the resultant photographs. He or one of his assistants “took a Polaroid photograph of each of the models intended to pose. Clément Chéroux (curator of the exhibition) notes that, “Comparing these polaroids with Avedon’s portraits shows his ability to transcend the appearance of his models.”4

During the photographic sessions Avedon shot not from behind his camera but to the side, like the director of a play in rehearsal, front of stage. “He had a strong connection with his subjects, mimicking their position, and asking them to respond to a very small gesture by showing himself moving in one direction or another, and I think a lot of the work is in this relationship that he was establishing with the subject. Photographic literature usually focuses on the framing, the composition, but for me, this kind of interaction he was able to develop with the subject is where the work is, where he’s transforming the people that he met into a Richard Avedon photograph.”5

“A conductor of his own composition, Richard Avedon was able to weave an unparalleled fusional relationship with his models, while implacably directing them through his gaze, gestures or voice.”6

Thus, through his imagination, his direction and his creative experience Avedon conjured a subjective view of the American West every bit as much as myth as those cowboys in John Wayne movies, a kind of counter-mythology undercutting the eulogising of the American West, but a staged, fabricated, youthful, desolate, mysterious mythology none the less – a series which captures the ethos of the era (global recession, disease, dis/ease) counter to the one hoped for, “representing a sad, unsmiling America, which does not correspond to the one dreamed of.”7

Think that damned foreigner Robert Frank and his book The Americans, pointing the bone at the belly of the United States of America, holding a mirror up to their reflection8 and they certainly not liking what they saw. Indeed Avedon, while American and respectful of his subjects, could be seen as an interloper from New York exposing through his photographs the underbelly of this vast country colonised through divine providence and Manifest Destiny.

Avedon, while undercutting the myth of the American West through his storytelling, doesn’t seek to document, exploit or misrepresent his subjects, but to subjectively present them as on a theatrical set devoid of scenery – where their very appearance becomes scene / seen. As he himself said, “My concern is… the human predicament; only what I consider the human predicament may simply be my own.”

“Richard Avedon showed his own America, those we do not see, those we pass by without pausing, those who do the work, those who make America work.”9

Neither the series nor the exhibition are without fault, however.

While I believe that Avedon’s exceptional magnum opus In The American West has become one of the truly iconic photographic portrait series of the 20th century it can also be seen as problematic, not in the photographic sense, but in the sense that the photographs did not reflect the diverse reality of the West’s population. While the series may be Avedon’s subjective mythologising of the American West some people, myself included, find the lack of representation of Black Americans, Asian Americans and other ethnicities that have been integral to the development of the American West a point of contention. Are they not those that also do the work, those who also make America work, as much as those Avedon chose to photograph? Indeed there is a “significant demographic blind spot” in the whole series…

The other blind spot is the inability of commentators such as myself to publish some of the preparatory Polaroids that Avedon and his assistants took before posing his subjects. I asked the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson for some of the Polaroids to illustrate this posting and they said that none were available. Since the exhibition promotes the presence of these unpublished documents and the curator Clément Chéroux notes their importance for their ability to compare them with Avedon’s finished portraits, showing “his ability to transcend the appearance of his models,” they become vital to understanding Avedon’s creative process … and it would have been great to see the visualisation of his subjects from beginning to end.

Examples of these Polaroids are rare online but some can be seen in the article “Before And After: Polaroids then Magic from Richard Avedon, In the American West,” on the Flashbak website June 9, 2025.

Finally, in the juxtaposition of Polaroid and finished portrait we can begin to perceive the magical transformation and artistry and humanism of the man, Avedon, as he visualises his ode to the American West, composing his subjects so that they engage with the viewer directly from the photographic frame – the dynamics of the photographs creating iconic images of memorable characters, collectively constructing the rhythm of these images (from dark to light, from sublime to industrial) into an unforgettable sequence of photographs.

Bravo Richard Avedon!

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Word count: 1,254

1/ Text from the Amon Carter Museum of American Art website [Online] Cited 10/10/2025

2/ Text from the YouTube website translated from the French by Google Translate [Online] Cited 23/09/2025

3/ Nathalie Dassa. “Richard Avedon: The Living Forces of the American West,” on the Blind Magazine website, May 12, 2025 [Online] Cited 22/09/2025

4/ Karen Strike. “Before And After: Polaroids then Magic from Richard Avedon, In the American West,” on the Flashbak website June 9, 2025 [Online] Cited 10/10/2025

5/ Clément Chéroux quoted in Christina Cacouris. “Richard Avedon’s Rugged American West Comes to Paris,” on the Aperture website, June 26, 2025 [Online] Cited 23/09/2025

6/ Justine Grosset. “Richard Avedon, In the American West,” on the Phototrend website May 5, 2025 [Online] Cited 10/10/2025

7/ Nathalie Dassa, op.cit.,

8/ Holding a mirror up to their reflection, i.e. to hold something up to scrutiny, to reveal an unpleasant truth, or to show something for what it truly is, often with the intent of providing insight or understanding.

9/ Nathalie Dassa, op.cit.,

Many thankx to the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

“I don’t think the West in these portraits is any more accurate than John Wayne’s West.”

Richard Avedon at the exhibition opening in 1985

“Avedon’s most compelling photographs are about performance – his performance as well as his subjects’ – and depend on the engagement of their personalities. For this reason it is difficult to separate the photographer from the man. Indeed it is partly owing to the ineluctable presence of Avedon’s own psychology that his portraits transcend the mainstream of cultural history.”

Anonymous. “Body of Evidence,” on the Frieze website, 06 March 1994 [Online] Cited 23/09/2025

“Listen carefully to the stories of others and they may tell us something of ourselves. The story of any person exists first in the mind of its teller, perpetually renewing itself as, like smoke in wind, it is constantly shaped and reshaped in the flux of daily life. Narratives constructed from various facts, memories and rumours are added to, subtracted from, come together and fall apart in a continuous reassembling of experience and imagination. The human mind is a place where fact meets fiction, where reality and fantasy mingle easily and endlessly with fabrication, half-truths and invention. As they say, looking at something is no guarantee you will actually see it.”

Glenn Busch from A Man Holds A Fish 2024

Richard Avedon – In the American West

To mark the 40th anniversary of Richard Avedon’s iconic work, In The American West, the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson presents, from April 30 to October 12, 2025, in collaboration with the Richard Avedon Foundation, an exceptional exhibition entirely dedicated to this iconic series.

Between 1979 and 1984, at the request of the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, Texas, Richard Avedon traveled the American West and photographed more than 1,000 of its inhabitants. For five years, Avedon photographed miners, drovers, showmen, vendors, and vagabonds, alone or in small groups, in front of his view camera against a white background that enhanced their features, postures, and expressions.

He thus created a striking portrait of this region and its residents, a departure from traditional representations and glorifications of the myth of the American West. The sheer power of the 103 works that make up the final series and the book of the same name make In The American West a pivotal moment in Avedon’s work and a major milestone in the history of photographic portraiture.

The exhibition presented at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson from April 30 to October 12, 2025, displays for the very first time in Europe all the images that appear in the original work, accompanied by previously unpublished documents.

Text from the YouTube website translated from the French by Google Translate [Online] Cited 23/09/2025

Richard Avedon photographing for In The American West

“We have some testimonies about the way that Avedon was working, and we know that he was not behind his camera, he was standing next to it. He had a strong connection with his subjects, mimicking their position, and asking them to respond to a very small gesture by showing himself moving in one direction or another, and I think a lot of the work is in this relationship that he was establishing with the subject. Photographic literature usually focuses on the framing, the composition, but for me, this kind of interaction he was able to develop with the subject is where the work is, where he’s transforming the people that he met into a Richard Avedon photograph.”

Clément Chéroux quoted in Christina Cacouris. “Richard Avedon’s Rugged American West Comes to Paris,” on the Aperture website, June 26, 2025 [Online] Cited 23/09/2025

Installation view of the exhibition Richard Avedon ‘In the American West‘ at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris, April – October 2025

“The hanging follows the book, from the first to the last image,” explains Clément Chéroux. “The blank pages are represented on the wall by a gap equivalent to the width of a frame, like a half-space. We have thus reproduced the rhythm of someone leafing through the book. We can see through this that Richard Avedon and Marvin Israel (1924-1984), artistic director, have constructed the rhythm of these images in a very precise manner.”

Nathalie Dassa. “Richard Avedon: The Living Forces of the American West,” on the Blind Magazine website, May 12, 2025 [Online] Cited 22/09/2025

“Here, the works are displayed throughout the building in classic fashion – in a single line – and in unusually small formats (40 × 50 centimetres). “These are the reference prints, made by the photographer at the time, to produce the prints for his book and the enlargements shown in his exhibitions,” explained Clément Chéroux, the foundation’s director. These prints were not intended for exhibition, but nonetheless their remarkable quality allows the public − for the first time in Europe − to discover this exceptional work in its entirety.”

Claire Guillot. “Richard Avedon’s photographs of the American West at Paris’s Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson,” on the Le Monde website, August 13, 2025 [Online] Cited 23/09/2025

Installation views of the exhibition Richard Avedon ‘In the American West‘ at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris, April – October 2025

To mark the 40th anniversary of Richard Avedon’s iconic work In the American West, the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, in collaboration with the Richard Avedon Foundation, presents an exclusive exhibition focused on this emblematic series.

Between 1979 and 1984, commissioned by the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, Texas, Richard Avedon traveled across the American West to photograph over 1,000 of its inhabitants. For five years, Avedon photographed miners, herdsmen, showmen, salesmen and transient people, amongst others with rich histories, alone or in small groups, before his camera, against a white background that enhanced their features, postures and expressions, for a striking portrait of the territory and its residents, in stark contrast to traditional depictions and glorifications of the legend of the American West. The force of the 103 works that compose the book makes In the American West a pivotal event in Avedon’s career, and a milestone in the history of photographic portraits.

For the first time in Europe, the exhibition at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson presents the whole series of images included in the original publication, while also showcasing the stages of its production and reception. The exhibition includes a full selection of engravers prints, which served as reference materials for both the exhibition and the 1985 book, as well as previously unpublished documents, such as preparatory Polaroids, test prints annotated by the photographer, and correspondence between the artist and his models.

To mark this anniversary, Abrams, the book’s original publisher, is reissuing the long out-of-print book.

Richard Avedon short biography

Richard Avedon was born to parents of Russian Jewish heritage in New York City. As a boy, he learned photography, joining the YMHA Camera Club at the age of twelve. Avedon joined the armed forces in 1942 during World War II, serving as Photographer’s Mate Second Class in the Merchant Marine. Making identification portraits of the crewmen with his Rolleiflex twin lens camera – a gift from his father – Avedon advanced his technical knowledge of the medium and began to develop a dynamic style. After two years of service he left the Merchant Marine to work as a photographer, making fashion images and studying with art director Alexey Brodovitch at the Design Laboratory of the New School for Social Research.

In 1945, Avedon set up his own studio and worked as a freelance photographer for various magazines. He quickly became the preeminent photographer used by Harper’s Bazaar.

From the beginning, Avedon made portraits for editorial publication as well: in the pages of Harper’s Bazaar, in Theater Arts, and in Life and Look magazines. From the outset, he was fascinated by photography’s capacity for suggesting the personality and evoking the life of his subjects. Only rarely did he idealize people; instead, he presented the face as a kind of landscape, with total clarity.

Avedon continued to make portraiture and fashion photography for magazine publications throughout his career. After parting ways with Harper’s Bazaar in 1965, he began a long-term relationship with Vogue that continued through 1988. In later years, he established formidable creative partnerships with the French publication Egoiste, and with The New Yorker. In the pages of these periodicals, Avedon reinvigorated his formalist style, investing his imagery with dynamism and theatricality. In addition, he supported his studio by making innovative advertising work for print and broadcast – defining the look of brands like Calvin Klein, Versace, and Revlon.

As his reputation grew and his signature aesthetic evolved, Avedon remained dedicated to extended portraiture projects as a means for exploring cultural, political, and personal concerns. In 1963-1964, he examined the civil rights movement in the American South. During the Vietnam War, he photographed students, countercultural artists and activists, and victims of the war, both in the United States and in Vietnam. In 1976, on a commission for Rolling Stone magazine, he produced The Family, a composite portrait of the American power elite at the time of the country’s Bicentennial election.

In 1985, Avedon created his magnum opus – In the American West. He portrayed members of the working class: butchers, coal miners, convicts, and waitresses, all photographed with precisionist detail, using the large format camera and plain white backdrop characteristic of his mature style. Despite their apparent minimalism and objectivism, however, Avedon emphasised that these portraits were not to be regarded as simple records of people; rather, he said, “the moment an emotion or a fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion.”

Publication

Richard Avedon’s acclaimed work In the American West was first published in 1985 by American publishing house Abrams. For its 40th anniversary, Abrams is republishing the work in its original format.

Text from the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson

Richard Avedon (American, 1923-2004)
Roger Tims, Jim Duncan, Leonard Markley, Don Belak, coal miners, Reliance, Wyoming, August 29, 1979
1979
Gelatin silver print
© The Richard Avedon Foundation

“This was the beginning of his emblematic project “In the American West” that took him across 17 US states, where he photographed nearly 1,000 people from 1979 to 1984 and revealed a poor, hardworking America, far removed from the clichés and the myth of the glorious American West. He carried out this series with neither sociological intent nor a concern for objectivity. “This is a fictional West,” he said. “I don’t think the West of these portraits is any more conclusive than the West of John Wayne.””

Claire Guillot. “Richard Avedon’s photographs of the American West at Paris’s Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson,” on the Le Monde website, August 13, 2025 [Online] Cited 23/09/2025

Richard Avedon (American, 1923-2004)
Ronald Fischer, beekeeper, Davis, California, May 9, 1981
1981
Gelatin silver print
© The Richard Avedon Foundation

“He needed to create disjunctions,” says Clément Chéroux. “The beekeeper remains a great image of the 20th century. After placing an ad, he chose this man suffering from alopecia, who no longer had any hair, no eyebrows. He took him to an entomologist who covered him with queen pheromones to attract bees. Through this staging, he wanted to make the audience understand that nothing is more complex than simplicity.”

Nathalie Dassa. “Richard Avedon: The Living Forces of the American West,” on the Blind Magazine website, May 12, 2025 [Online] Cited 22/09/2025

“The subjective part of the project is clear. And most of the photographs were from encounters where he photographed people he met as they were. He also stated very clearly that a few photographs were set up, and the photograph of the Bee Man is a good example of that. He first published an advertisement in the American Bee Journal to find the type of person he was interested in – we have the advertisement in the exhibition, we found the original magazine where it was published. So, he looked for that person and made some drawings in preparation for the shoot. He clearly had a dream of a specific image that he wanted to realize. And he made clear that he wanted to have this photograph to show the subjective part of the project, that it was not exclusively a documentary project. I think the Bee Man shows us that there isn’t truth on one side and fiction on the other. It’s much more complex.” …

“Just before the Bee Man, we have the coal miners, these very strong dark images and then suddenly you have the white body of Ronald Fisher with all these little bees. We wanted to respect this in the exhibition, the sense that it was not just a collection of twentieth-century photographs of Americans, but it was a group of images, a full sentence.”

Clément Chéroux quoted in Christina Cacouris. “Richard Avedon’s Rugged American West Comes to Paris,” on the Aperture website, June 26, 2025 [Online] Cited 23/09/2025

Richard Avedon (American, 1923-2004)
David Beason, shipping clerk, Denver, Colorado, July 25, 1981
1981
Gelatin silver print
© The Richard Avedon Foundation

“The year after [Glenn Busch’s] Working Men was published came fashion photographer Richard Avedon‘s In the American West (New York: Abrams, 1985), the consistent theme of which, as Richard Bolton in Afterimage argues, sees “human experience as manifested in [no]thing but style,” a quality, less sombre, but equally arch, exoticising and stereotyping that is found also in the Small Trades studio series of 1950-51 by Irving Penn.”

James McArdle. “October 8: Prosopography,” on the On This Date In Photography website 08/10/2025 [Online] Cited 08/10/2025

Richard Avedon (American, 1923-2004)
Jesse Kleinsasser, pig man, Hutterite Colony, Harlowton, Montana, June 23, 1983
1983
Gelatin silver print
© The Richard Avedon Foundation

Richard Avedon (American, 1923-2004)
Ruby Mercer, publicist, Frontier Days, Cheyenne, Wyoming, July 31, 1982
1982
Gelatin silver print
© The Richard Avedon Foundation

“Avedon was aware of the subjectivity of what he presents. He was also very familiar with art history and pictorial references, such as those of Rembrandt. He made carcasses of sheep and cattle appear like hallucinations among the workers. His photography is therefore no more objective than that of John Wayne’s westerns. And that is what he had been criticised for: representing a sad, unsmiling America, which does not correspond to the one dreamed of. These are the people that Walker Evans and the traveling photographers sought out during the conquest of the West. He demonstrated this paradox. And this is the term Roland Barthes uses for him: the paradox of all great art. Richard Avedon showed his own America, those we do not see, those we pass by without pausing, those who do the work, those who make America work.”

Nathalie Dassa. “Richard Avedon: The Living Forces of the American West,” on the Blind Magazine website, May 12, 2025 [Online] Cited 22/09/2025

Richard Avedon (American, 1923-2004)
Petra Alvarado, factory worker, on her birthday, El Paso, Texas, April 22, 1982
1982
Gelatin silver print
© The Richard Avedon Foundation

Richard Avedon (American, 1923-2004)
Boyd Fortin, thirteen year old rattlesnake skinner, Sweetwater, Texas, March 10, 1979
1979
Gelatin silver print
© The Richard Avedon Foundation

Avedon took this portrait in 1979 in Texas during the annual snake hunt in the small town of Sweetwater.

The portraits from In the American West may not be romantic images – no pomp and circumstance – but they are dignified. Coal miners, cotton farmers, and cowboys stand tall and proud. Avedon worked quickly, street-casting his subjects alongside his assistant Laura Wilson, setting up white paper backdrops and shooting instinctively. Post-production was another matter entirely: Chéroux’s exhibition showcases the meticulous care that went into each print, with Avedon’s instructions for dodging and burning scrawled across pictures.

Christina Cacouris. “Richard Avedon’s Rugged American West Comes to Paris,” on the Aperture website, June 26, 2025 [Online] Cited 23/09/2025

Richard Avedon (American, 1923-2004)
Richard Garber, drifter, Interstate 15, Provo, Utah, August 20, 1980
1980
Gelatin silver print
© The Richard Avedon Foundation

Richard Avedon (American, 1923-2004)
Blue Cloud Wright, slaughterhouse worker, Omaha, Nebraska, August 10, 1979
1979
Gelatin silver print
© The Richard Avedon Foundation

Cover of Richard Avedon’s book In The American West

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Exhibition: ‘Street Photography. Lee Friedlander, Joseph Rodríguez, Garry Winogrand’ at Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany

Exhibition dates: 3rd May – 12th October, 2025

Curator: Barbara Engelbach

Lee Friedlander (American, b. 1934)
New York City
1966
Gelatin silver paper, print after 1966
22 x 32.9cm
Museum Ludwig, Köln
© Lee Friedlander, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco and Luhring Augustine, New York and Luhring Augustine, New York
Repro: Historisches Archiv mit Rheinischem Bildarchiv

I know and greatly admire the presence and directness of legendary American photographer Lee Friedlander’s photographs containing fractured planes within the image construction.

I know and appreciate (if not admire) the immediacy and in your face obstinacy (shoot at all costs!) of American photographer Garry Winogrand’s photographs.

What I didn’t know was the excellent 1980s social documentary and humanist work of the American photographer Joseph Rodríguez – for me, the unexpected hero of this exhibition.

Rodríguez’s moody, high contrast photographs of humanity and street scenes pictured from behind the wheel of his taxi in New York proffer an intuitive, empathetic and subjective view of the city and its people at a time of great economic and social upheaval.

“The photographs in the Taxi series are a significant document of the 1980s in New York, a period marked by economic and social upheaval and the AIDS crisis. On his journeys crisscrossing the city, Rodríguez does not depict despair,
but rather shows people maintaining their dignity in the face of difficult and uncertain times.” (Text from Museum Ludwig)

Uncertain times, uncertain angles and perspectives, uncertain light give rise to a powerful body of work made certain by the talent of an impressive photographer. Glorious work.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

Lee Friedlander (American, b. 1934)
New York City
1962
Gelatin silver paper, print after 1962
22 x 32.9cm
Museum Ludwig, Köln
© Lee Friedlander, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco and Luhring Augustine, New York
Repro: Historisches Archiv mit Rheinischem Bildarchiv

Lee Friedlander (American, b. 1934)
New York City
1963
Gelatin silver paper, print after 1963
22 x 32.9cm
Museum Ludwig, Köln
© Lee Friedlander, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco and Luhring Augustine, New York and Luhring Augustine, New York
Repro: Historisches Archiv mit Rheinischem Bildarchiv

Lee Friedlander

(*1934 in Aberdeen, Washington, lives and works in New York City, New York)

Lee Friedlander began photographing at the age of fourteen and studied under Edward Kaminski at the Art Center School in Los Angeles until 1955. In 1956, he moved to New York, where he met Diane Arbus, Robert Frank, and Garry Winogrand. As early as the end of the 1950s, he made his first photographic forays into the streets of New York. His often humorous photographs reveal the complexity of American society, which he documented in thoughtful compositions.

In 1962, Friedlander photographed a parade in which American President John F. Kennedy also participated. His interest, however, was not in the event itself, but in the fleeting moments on the sidelines. One of the photographs taken that day shows a waiter and a boy attentively gazing out the window of a café. Upon closer inspection, it becomes clear that the crowd behind them is actually a reflection of the audience gathered outside for the parade. Due to the reflection, the café’s advertising signs also appear to be on the same plane as the signs on the opposite side of the street. Such interweaving of perspectives through reflections, as well as picture-in-picture constructions and unusual cropping, characterize Friedlander’s work of the 1960s. By focusing his camera on the often unnoticed details of daily life, capturing them with precise focus and exposure, he found a new way to depict contemporary America. His own presence, as a reflection or a shadow, in many of these images draws attention to the process of photography itself.

Friedlander does not create complete series. Each shot stands on its own as a “sharp and crudely amusing, bitterly comic observation” (Walker Evans). He initially used a Leica 35mm, whose wide angle he valued. In the early 1990s, he discovered the depth of field of the Hasselblad camera, which he also used to photograph the suburban towns of San Angelo, Texas. His subjects remained the same, only he continually reinvented them. In the 1990s, Friedlander created his photographs of flower stems trapped in glass containers and surrounded by a veil of condensation, transforming a sober detail of everyday life into a contemporary memento mori – a reminder of transience. The self-portraits, which unvarnishedly depict his ageing body, date from the same period.

Text from Museum Ludwig translated by Google Translate

Lee Friedlander (American, b. 1934)
New York City
1965
Gelatin silver paper, print after 1965
22 x 32.9cm
Museum Ludwig, Köln
© Lee Friedlander, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco and Luhring Augustine, New York and Luhring Augustine, New York
Repro: Historisches Archiv mit Rheinischem Bildarchiv

Lee Friedlander (American, b. 1934)
Philadelphia, PA
1965
Gelatin silver paper, print after 1965
20.5 x 30.6cm
Museum Ludwig, Köln
© Lee Friedlander, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco and Luhring Augustine, New York
Repro: Historisches Archiv mit Rheinischem Bildarchiv

Lee Friedlander (American, b. 1934)
Mount Rushmore
1969
Gelatin silver paper, print after 1969
22 x 32.9cm
Museum Ludwig, Köln
© Lee Friedlander, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco and Luhring Augustine, New York and Luhring Augustine, New York
Repro: Historisches Archiv mit Rheinischem Bildarchiv

The street life of cities has always been a fascinating subject for photographers, who have approached it in a variety of ways, from candid images documenting urban unrest to portraits that shine a spotlight on individuals. Since the nineteenth century, cities and photography have been directly linked through the idea of modernity. With the introduction of compact cameras such as the Leica, street photography developed into its own genre in the mid-twentieth century. Small-format cameras gave photographers greater flexibility and enabled them to respond quickly while remaining discrete. They explored public space without obtruding and, in contrast to staged photography, captured candid and spontaneous moments that had previously been considered unworthy photographic subjects. Influenced by Henri Cartier-Bresson’s concept of the “decisive moment,” these photographers sought to capture the fleeting instant when light, composition, and subject aligned to convey the significance of an event.

This exhibition in the Photography Rooms at the Museum Ludwig is dedicated to three protagonists from two generations of street photography: Garry Winogrand (b. 1928 in New York, d. 1984), Lee Friedlander (b. 1934 in Aberdeen, Washington, based in New York), and Joseph Rodríguez (b. 1951 in Brooklyn, based in New York). Despite all three photographers sharing the same subject matter, each one pursues a singular approach that produces distinct results. Iconic photographs from the 1960s to the 1980s are displayed alongside lesser-known examples from each photographer’s oeuvre. All of the works on display were included in donations made by the Bartenbach Family in 2015 and Volker Heinen in 2018, or have been acquired by the Museum Ludwig since 2001.

The landmark exhibition New Documents at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1967 helped launch the careers of Winogrand and Friedlander. Their striking photographs broke with visual conventions, such as a level horizon line or a centred main subject. Winogrand frequently tilted his viewfinder, producing skewed horizon lines that offer a new view of reality and make his images appear spontaneous, as does his purposeful use of blurriness, overexposure, underexposure, and backlighting. Friedlander, in turn, created compositions in which the viewer’s gaze is hindered by obstructions, such as shadows, signs, architectural elements, and streetlights, or is disoriented by reflections.

Winogrand and Friedlander, who are represented in the exhibition with twenty images each, both use photography in a self-reflective way that brings the formal aspects of photography to the fore. This encourages an analytical gaze, producing an emotional distance between the viewer and the subject, which often results in ambivalent images where the intention of the photographer remains unclear. Winogrand and Friedlander each developed their own distinct style, embracing originality and authorship by merging documentary photography and personal expression. While they attempted to distance themselves from photojournalism and social documentary photography, eschewing event-based, narrative-focused, and emotionally charged imagery, Rodriguez’s work deliberately engages with these genres. He aspires to give visibility to marginalised people by communicating with his subjects and attempting to tell their stories. Many of his photographs are accompanied by short commentaries that provide information about the context in which each image was created. Rodríguez’s pictures employ unusual perspectives and surprising compositions, and his use of reflections emphasises the subjectivity of the photographer’s empathic gaze beyond the momentariness of the shot. The exhibition features around twenty photographs from his Taxi series.

This is the first exhibition in the new Photography Rooms at the Museum Ludwig, centrally located on the second floor.

Text / press release from the Museum Ludwig website

Installation view of the exhibition 'Street Photography. Lee Friedlander, Joseph Rodríguez, Garry Winogrand' at Museum Ludwig, Cologne, May - October, 2025

Installation views of the exhibition Street Photography. Lee Friedlander, Joseph Rodríguez, Garry Winogrand at Museum Ludwig, Cologne, May – October, 2025
Photo: Historisches Archiv mit Rheinischem Bildarchiv/Vincent Quack

Garry Winogrand (American, 1928-1984)
Coney Island, New York
1952
Gelatin silver paper, print after 1973
21.7 x 32.6cm
© The Estate of Garry Winogrand/Courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
Repro: Historisches Archiv mit Rheinischem Bildarchiv

Garry Winogrand (American, 1928-1984)
Utah
1964
Gelatin silver paper, print after 1978
23 x 34cm
© The Estate of Garry Winogrand/Courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
Repro: Historisches Archiv mit Rheinischem Bildarchiv

Garry Winogrand

(*1928 in New York City, New York, d. 1984)

For many years, Garry Winogrand found his subjects right on his doorstep, on the streets of his birthplace and longtime home, New York. Whether they depict individuals or groups of people, his photographs are characterised by a special dynamism, which is also the result of the unusual perspectives of his shots. Often chaotic, sometimes surreal, the images tell stories from everyday life in the big city, but also from mass events such as sporting events or political demonstrations.

Winogrand distanced himself from both the social documentary photography popular in the 1930s and 1940s and from photojournalism, with which he himself earned his living for a long time. He was concerned with shifting the perspective from the object of the photograph to the camera: “I photograph to find out what things look like when photographed.” In his photographs, Winogrand found a formal equivalent for the diverging social forces of the 1960s. He captured passersby on the streets and public squares with a wide-angle lens in such a way that the horizons tilted and a clear center of gravity was missing. His photographs of women in public often deviated from this principle. He dedicated the book Women are Beautiful to this motif, which he returned to repeatedly throughout his career, in 1975. In another project, beginning in 1969, he focused on the media world in order to – as he put it – “study the events produced in the news.” With a distanced perspective, Winogrand captured press conferences, demonstrations, open-air festivals, and the hustle and bustle of the art world – the spectacles and pseudo-events of a society in transition.

Text from Museum Ludwig translated by Google Translate

Garry Winogrand (American, 1928-1984)
New York City
1969
Gelatin silver paper, print after 1978
22.9 x 34.2cm
© The Estate of Garry Winogrand/Courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
Repro: Historisches Archiv mit Rheinischem Bildarchiv

Garry Winogrand (American, 1928-1984)
Circle Line Statue of Liberty Ferry, New York
1971
Gelatin silver paper, print after 1973
21.7 x 32.4cm
© The Estate of Garry Winogrand/Courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
Repro: Historisches Archiv mit Rheinischem Bildarchiv

Garry Winogrand (American, 1928-1984)
Untitled, from: Women are Beautiful
1970
Gelatin silver paper, print after 1981
21.7 x 32.4cm
© The Estate of Garry Winogrand/Courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
Repro: Historisches Archiv mit Rheinischem Bildarchiv

Garry Winogrand (American, 1928-1984)
Untitled, from: Women are Beautiful
1973
Gelatin silver paper, print after 1973
21.7 x 32.4cm
© The Estate of Garry Winogrand/Courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
Repro: Historisches Archiv mit Rheinischem Bildarchiv

Joseph Rodríguez (American, b. 1952)
East Village, New York
1984
Gelatin silver paper, print after 1988
25.3 x 37.4cm
© Joseph Rodríguez, Courtesy Galerie Bene Taschen
Repro: Historisches Archiv mit Rheinischem Bildarchiv

“When I drove a cab, my taxi cab was a rolling psychology office. Everybody had something to say. Sometimes it’s just light conversation like the weather or kids. Baseball. But then you get all kinds of incredible stories. I was learning the foundations of humanism in my cab.”

Joseph Rodríguez

“To drive a cab back then, you either had to have a death wish or come to the job with a biography that inured you to the danger or graced you with such intuitive empathy/curiosity that to see and hear and sometimes engage with the cavalcade of humanity sliding in and out of your backseat trumped the nightly game of Russian roulette.”

Richard Price penned these poignant words that open photographer Joseph Rodríguez’s book, Taxi: Journey Through My Windows 1977-1987

Joseph Rodríguez

(*1951 in Brooklyn, New York City, New York, lives and works there)

Joseph Rodríguez was a teenager when street photography was celebrated in New York with exhibitions such as New Documents at the Museum of Modern Art, which also brought Friedlander and Winogrand to the fore. Rodríguez studied graphic design and photography at the School of Visual Arts in New York and the New York City Technical College. In 1985, he graduated with a degree in photojournalism and documentary photography from the International Center for Photography in New York. During his studies, he worked as a taxi driver, photographing his passengers and street scenes from behind the wheel. The exhibited works are from the Taxi series. They document, on the one hand, Rodríguez’s work as a taxi driver, who has to try to secure well-paid long-distance rides to earn a living and cover the costs of his hired taxi. During his twelve-hour shifts, Rodríguez captures city life in the various neighborhoods at different times of day, from nightlife to the busy hours of the day. His shots of passersby in the rearview mirror, of a sunrise, or of someone urinating in public who believes they are unobserved, testify to the fleeting nature of the moment. Rodríguez also engages directly with his passengers. His portraits convey the openness and respect with which he treats them. Rodríguez sees himself in the tradition of social documentary photography. He advocates the goal of giving visibility to those who are overlooked. He often adds short comments to his images that shed light on what is being photographed. He also uses unusual perspectives, surprising crops, and reflections. However, these emphasize the subjectivity of his empathetic gaze beyond the momentary nature of the moment.

The photographs in the Taxi series are a significant document of the 1980s in New York, a period marked by economic and social upheaval and the AIDS crisis. On his journeys crisscrossing the city, Rodríguez does not depict despair,
but rather shows people maintaining their dignity in the face of difficult and uncertain times.

Text from Museum Ludwig translated by Google Translate

Joseph Rodríguez (American, b. 1952)
220 West Houston Street, New York
1984
Gelatin silver paper, print after 1988
25.3 x 37.2cm
© Joseph Rodríguez, Courtesy Galerie Bene Taschen
Repro: Historisches Archiv mit Rheinischem Bildarchiv

Joseph Rodríguez (American, b. 1952)
I picked him up at a club and I took him to Brooklyn. He was a happy camper, New York
1984
Gelatin silver paper, print after 1988
24.8 x 36.8cm
© Joseph Rodríguez, Courtesy Galerie Bene Taschen
Repro: Historisches Archiv mit Rheinischem Bildarchiv

Joseph Rodríguez (American, b. 1952)
At the Garage, my cab broke down, New York
1984
Gelatin silver paper, print after 1988
25.3 x 37.5cm
© Joseph Rodríguez, Courtesy Galerie Bene Taschen
Repro: Historisches Archiv mit Rheinischem Bildarchiv

Joseph Rodríguez (American, b. 1952)
Meatpacking District, I picked him up from one of the clubs. He was a drag performer and I was taking him home to Brooklyn, New York
1984
Gelatin silver paper, print after 1988
24.8 x 36.6cm
© Joseph Rodriguez, Courtesy Galerie Bene Taschen
Repro: Historisches Archiv mit Rheinischem Bildarchiv

Joseph Rodríguez (American, b. 1952)
Greenwich Village, The Anvil, New Jersey
1984
Gelatin silver paper, print after 1988
25.0 x 36.8cm
© Joseph Rodríguez, Courtesy Galerie Bene Taschen
Repro: Historisches Archiv mit Rheinischem Bildarchiv

“14th Street & West Side Highway. That’s the back of the Anvil. These guys would come outside to take a leak. And of course they’re having a conversation, so who knows what happened after that.” ~ Joseph Rodríguez

The Anvil was a gay BDSM after-hours sex club located at 500 West 14th Street, Manhattan, New York City, that operated from 1974 to 1985.

Joseph Rodríguez (American, b. 1952)
Pulaski Skyway, New Jersey
1984
Gelatin silver paper, print after 1988
24.8 x 36.8cm
© Joseph Rodríguez, Courtesy Galerie Bene Taschen
Repro: Historisches Archiv mit Rheinischem Bildarchiv

Museum Ludwig
Heinrich-Böll-Platz, 50667 Köln, Germany

Opening hours:
Tuesday through Sunday: 10am – 6pm

Museum Ludwig website

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Online exhibition: ‘Stephen Salmieri: Coney Island’ from Joseph Bellows Gallery, La Jolla, California

September 2025

Stephen Salmieri (American, b. 1945)
Coney Island
1968
Vintage gelatin silver print

I love these photographs!

What’s not to like… generously sympathetic photographs that exhibit no pretension, containing interesting backgrounds and wonderful characters. The incongruity of a muscle man in leopard skin bathers in a snowy landscape at Coney Island … no worries!

“In the images, storefront booths, midway games, carnival architecture, and the shoreline provide the backdrop to Salmieri’s descriptive and engaging portraits.”

I particularly like the wonderful photograph of the large gentleman with tattoos in a white singlet sitting at a table surrounded by a halo of light bulbs. I also like how Salmieri gives some of his portraits context by including background information in his photographs.

The artist joins a rite of passage for many American photographers in taking photographs at Coney Island – that is, to capture the magic and mystique of this theatrical, carnivalesque place – one full of history, ceremony, community, tradition, fun, drama, people, sun and sand.1

Luminaries to have photographed there include Diane Arbus, Robert Frank, Weegee, Garry Winogrand, Bruce Davidson, Lisette Model, Walker Evans, Leon Levinstein, Arlene Gottfried, Harold Feinstein and Edward J. Kelty to name just a few.

Stephen Salmieri’s charismatic photographs are strong enough to join this pantheon of stars and the “vaunted tradition” of picturing Coney Island.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

1/ Bakhtin’s idea of the carnivalesque and the carnival paradigm accords to certain patterns of play where “the social hierarchies of everyday life… are profaned and overturned by normally suppressed voices and energies.”

“The carnival offers the chance to have a new outlook on the world, to realise the relative nature of all that exists, and to enter a completely new order of things.”

Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and his World (trans. Hélène Iswolsky). Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984, p. 34.

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

For more information on the history and photography of Coney Island please see the exhibition posting Coney Island: Visions of an American Dreamland, 1861-2008 and Forever Coney: Photographs from the Brooklyn Museum Collection at the Brooklyn Museum, New York, November 2015 – March 2016

“These spare and emotional first images of a forgotten community, now lost in time, allowed me to forge a vision at a pivotal moment in my young life.”

Stephen Salmieri

Stephen Salmieri (American, b. 1945)
Coney Island
1968
Vintage gelatin silver print

Stephen Salmieri (American, b. 1945)
Coney Island
1971
Vintage gelatin silver print

Stephen Salmieri (American, b. 1945)
Coney Island
1968
Vintage gelatin silver print

Stephen Salmieri (American, b. 1945)
Coney Island
1969
Vintage gelatin silver print

Joseph Bellows Gallery is pleased to present an online exhibition of Stephen Salmieri’s photographs of Coney Island. Made between 1967 and 1972 with an array of cameras and black and white film, these images portray a cast of beachgoers and amusement park locals within the surrounding environment of one of America’s earliest and most illustrious seashore amusement parks.

The exhibition showcases Salmieri’s finely crafted vintage black and white prints. In the images, storefront booths, midway games, carnival architecture, and the shoreline provide the backdrop to Salmieri’s descriptive and engaging portraits. In a published statement on the photographs, the artist explains his process and motivation:

“The world of Coney Island has changed dramatically since I made these photographs. It was my first self-assigned project at twenty years of age, having just graduated from the School of Visual Arts. In choosing my subject I gravitated naturally to the familiar destination of my adolescent bike adventures.

I made the hour ride to Coney Island with all my cameras in tow all year round. I carried a 4 x 5 field camera, a 6 x 6 cm and a 35 mm format, and lots of Tri-X film.

In 1969, CAMERA magazine approached me at my first exhibition at the Underground Gallery. In my naivety, I did not realise that Coney Island was also the choice territory for such luminaries as Robert Frank, Lisette Model, Leon Levinstein, and Weegee. It wasn’t until the magazine published these photographs as part of their seminal Coney Island issue in 1971 that I realised I had become part of a vaunted tradition.

These spare and emotional first images of a forgotten community, now lost in time, allowed me to forge a vision at a pivotal moment in my young life.”

Salmieri’s photographs from this body of work were also featured in the exhibition Forever Coney: Photographs from the Brooklyn Museum Collection.

Salmieri’s work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Brooklyn Museum, New York, Smithsonian Institute, Washington D.C., Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, New York, Flint Institute, Michigan, the Museum of the City of New York, the Nelson-Atkins Museum, and the J. Paul Getty Museum. Publications include “American Grilles” (1978, Hartcourt-Brace) and “Cadillac: An American Icon” (1985, Rizzoli).

Text from the Joseph Bellows Gallery website

Stephen Salmieri (American, b. 1945)
Coney Island
1970
Vintage gelatin silver print

Stephen Salmieri (American, b. 1945)
Coney Island
1971
Vintage gelatin silver print

Stephen Salmieri (American, b. 1945)
Coney Island
1972
Vintage gelatin silver print

Stephen Salmieri (American, b. 1945)
Coney Island
1967-1972
Vintage gelatin silver print

Robert Frank (American, 1924-2019)
Coney Island
4th of July, 1958
Gelatin silver print

Edward J. Kelty (American, 1888-1967)
Harlem Black Birds, Coney Island
1930

Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975)
Couple at Coney Island, New York
1928
Gelatin silver print

Weegee (American, 1899-1968) 'Afternoon Crowd at Coney Island, Brooklyn' 1940

Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American born Ukraine, 1899-1968)
Afternoon Crowd at Coney Island
July 21st 1940

Garry Winogrand (American, 1928-1984)
Coney Island, New York City, N.Y.
1952
Gelatin silver print

Leon Levinstein (American, 1910-1988)
Coney Island
1955
Gelatin silver print

Diane Arbus (American, 1923-1971)
Man in hat, trunks, socks and shoes, Coney Island, N.Y. 1960
1960
Gelatin silver print

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933)
Two Youths, Coney Island
1958
From the series Brooklyn Gang

Joseph Bellows Gallery
7661 Girrard Avenue
La Jolla, California
Phone: 858 456 5620

Opening hours:
Tuesday – Saturday 11am – 5pm and by appointment

Joseph Bellows Gallery website

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Exhibition: Anna Malagrida. ‘Opacitas: Veiling Transparency’ at Museu Tàpies, Barcelona

Exhibition dates: 13th March – 28th September, 2025

Curator: Patricia Sorroche, Head of Exhibitions at the Museu Tàpies

Anna Malagrida (Spanish, b. 1970)
Rue de Charenton
2008-2009
Photographic print on Dibond

Contradicting the hobgoblin of little minds

I love the conceptualisation of these photographs: interstitial spaces of the city, liminal spaces that ‘stand between’ one place and another.1

I love the abstract nature of these photographs, abstract paintings of the city which occlude symbols and signs, capture traces and gestures, where nothing is fixed and everything is fluid, up for interpretation through the imagination.

Unfortunately, the digital online reproductions make the spaces seem very flat and one-dimensional, in a liminal and spiritual sense.

I would have loved to have stood in the gallery to breathe in the presences of the photographs, their energy and spirit. Would they have held me? Is there enough for me to hang my hat on? Would they have reverberated in my soul. I don’t know. I can’t feel them through the digital reproductions.

I think of sitting in front of Monet’s massive curved paintings of Water Lillies at the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris and being surrounded by these beautiful, shifting, elemental / alchemical abstract works of art. And being spell bound.

How would I feel surrounded by these representations, surfaces, depths of the city, these whitewashed absences (with all the connotations of race, power, money, and coverups that the name implies) that proffer different ways of seeing the world, places of the visible and the invisible.

“Her work forces us to confront our social and political condition of being, but from a poetic, liminal space, where contradiction is a symbol of the dualities of the human condition in the postmodern world.”2

Contradiction is NEVER a symbol for that would mean contradiction becomes a conventional representation of an object, function, or process. And the human condition in the postmodern world is far more than a duality … it is an intertextual multiplicity of points of view and nexus (the nexus between industry and political power, the nexus between business and government, the nexus between public space and private space, etc…)

“Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)”

~ Walt Whitman from Leaves of Grass

Dr Marcus Bunyan

1/ A liminal space is a transitional place or state, like a hallway or adolescence, that is “in-between” two distinct stages or locations, creating a sense of unease or disorientation. The word comes from the Latin for “threshold,” and these spaces, often devoid of people and eerily familiar yet subtly wrong, can evoke feelings of nostalgia, anxiety, and the potential for creativity or personal growth during periods of uncertainty.

AI summary from Google

2/ Patricia Sorroche. Anna Malagrida. (Trans)gazes of the sensible. Curatorial statement, 2025

Many thankx to Colin Vickery for alerting me to this exhibition. Many thankx to Museu Tàpies for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

“I’m interested in the intuited spaces on the other side, what isn’t in the image, but is imagined. What lies beyond, outside the frame, is the place that activates the imagination, inventing a story or imagining a space. The things we intuit, which are on the other side, belong to the story or to the space itself. Through the metaphor of the window, I’m trying to create a space of in-betweenness and uncertainty.”

Anna Malagrida in Álvaro de la Rica, “Las fronteras transparentes. A propósito de las fotos de Anna Malagrida,” published in Revisiones, No. 7, 2011, p. 129.

Opacitas: Veiling Transparency takes us on a journey through the work of Anna Malagrida (Barcelona, 1970) and presents a project that explores photography, video and installation. Her gaze focuses on the liminal spaces that unite and separate, bringing opposites into conversation.

Malagrida mainly situates us in the city and in a few constructed natural spaces. Through a play of perspectives, from the interior to the exterior and vice versa, her photographs and video installations become windows that reveal and conceal the tensions that run through society. Her polysemic gaze escapes a univocal interpretation of images in order to inhabit certain entropic spaces that she invites us to discover through her work.

Malagrida’s images capture the remnants and the infralight traces, indexes, signs that refer to previous moments, social tensions or simple anonymous gestures. The visual ambiguity in her work is revealed through the texture of her images, which evoke pictorial references and dissolve the limits between appearance and reality. Images of closed shop windows painted with characteristic whitewash, an opaque veil that prevents us from looking inside and transforms these spaces into abstract surfaces, resembling large pictorial canvases. Poetic actions operate in her works with a multiplicity of meanings: the painter’s gesture is also that of the working body, and the city and the landscape are revealed from within. Said gestures are erased, cleansed or simply fixed by the passage of time, cyclical and mutable.

Her work, which transcends photography and painting, immerses the viewer in a visual experience with multiple meanings and invites them to look at the city and natural surroundings from a new perspective, one that reveals the vestiges of a landscape affected by social and economic change. Her practice is a space for reflecting on vulnerability, resistance and the possibility of reconstruction, both of the individual and the environment they inhabit.

Text from the Museu Tàpies website

Installation view of the exhibition Anna Malagrida. 'Opacitas: Veiling Transparency' at Museu Tàpies, Barcelona

Installation views of the exhibition Anna Malagrida. Opacitas: Veiling Transparency at Museu Tàpies, Barcelona, March – September, 2025

Installation view of the exhibition Anna Malagrida. 'Opacitas: Veiling Transparency' at Museu Tàpies, Barcelona showing 'La laveur du carreau' 2010 (video still)

Installation view of the exhibition Anna Malagrida. Opacitas: Veiling Transparency at Museu Tàpies, Barcelona, March – September, 2025 showing La laveur du carreau 2010 (video still)

The Museu Tàpies presents Anna Malagrida’s exhibition Opacitas. Veiling Transparency. Curated by Patricia Sorroche, Head of Exhibitions at the Museu Tàpies, the exhibition offers a survey of the artist’s work through photography, video and installation.

This exhibition provides an opportunity to see, for the first time in Barcelona, the work of this artist, who was born in the city, but has spent most of her career in France.

Anna Malagrida’s project responds to the Museu Tàpies’ current aim of enabling discourses that institutions have left out and that have not found a space for representation in our most immediate reality.

Anna Malagrida (Barcelona, 1970) works with photography to navigate between that which is public and private, based on a play of perspectives and visions that shuns the realistic image to draw us into a game of collective imaginaries. The idea of the city and its significance as a social agent are present in her photographs, which function as archaeological vestiges of the social crises of contemporary city life.

The exhibition Opacitas. Veiling Transparency, curated by Patricia Sorroche, Head of Exhibitions at the Museu Tàpies, offers a survey of Anna Malagrida’s work through projects that explore photography, video and installation. Focusing on the liminal spaces that unite and separate, her gaze brings opposites into conversation.

Malagrida mainly situates us in the city and in a few constructed natural spaces. Through a play of perspectives, from the interior to the exterior and vice versa, her photographs and video installations become windows that reveal and conceal the tensions that run through society. Her gaze escapes a univocal interpretation of images, in order to inhabit certain spaces that she invites us to discover through her work.

Her images capture remnants and traces, signs that refer to previous moments, social tensions or simple anonymous gestures. The visual ambiguity in her work is revealed through the texture of her photographs and videos, which evoke pictorial references and dissolve the limits between appearance and reality. This can be seen, for example, in the images of closed shop windows painted with characteristic whitewash, an opaque veil that prevents us from looking inside and transforms these spaces into abstract surfaces, resembling large pictorial canvases. Poetic actions operate in her works with a multiplicity of meanings: the painter’s gesture is also that of the working body, and the city and the landscape are revealed from within. These gestures are erased, cleaned or simply fixed by the passage of time, cyclical and mutable.

Malagrida’s work, which transcends photography and painting, immerses the spectator in a visual experience with multiple meanings and invites us to look at the city and natural surroundings from a new perspective, one that reveals the vestiges of a landscape affected by social and economic change. Her practice is a space for reflecting on vulnerability, resistance and the possibility of reconstruction, both of the individual and the environment they inhabit.

The exhibition Opacitas. Veiling Transparency allows visitors to explore and delve into Anna Malagrida’s career through a selection of her works. The itinerary of the exhibition begins with the piece Vitrines (Shop Windows, 2008-2009), in which the artist photographs the windows of shops on the streets of Paris that had to close down due to the economic crisis and concealed their interiors by coating their windows with whitewash. The exercise of gazing through shop windows is also present in Le laveur du carreau (The Window Cleaner, 2010), an audiovisual piece that allows us to observe how a worker lathers and cleans the windows, in a visual play between opacity and transparency that also situates us in the intermediate zones.

In Danza de mujer (Woman Dance, 2017), filmed in the Jordanian desert, ‘Malagrida puts into question, through the movement of the veil, certain social policies in relation to specific groups, and how narrow perspectives promote ways of seeing the world that exclude a large part of it,’ in the words of the exhibition’s curator, Patricia Sorroche. Finally, Point de vue (2006), produced in the architectural complex that housed the Club Med tourist resort inaugurated in 1962 in the protected natural area of Cap de Creus, presents the traces of the economic systems that defied sustainability.

Sorroche concludes that ‘operating through opposites, through the decategorisation of traditional forms of representation and the overlapping of different languages, makes Anna Malagrida’s work move between textures, between the places of the visible and the invisible, to immerse us in a dialogue of opposites’. And she continues: ‘Her work multiplies our gazes, our ways of seeing the world, making it more porous, while at the same time enabling other ways of understanding, transmuting and transcending it. Her work forces us to confront our social and political condition of being, but from a poetic, liminal place, where contradiction is a symbol of the dualities of the human condition in a post-modern world. A space where we can come together to understand each other in possible societies of the common, based on a collective and communal view.’

The project Anna Malagrida. Opacitas. Veiling Transparency is completed with an exhibition booklet featuring texts by the curator and by art critic Marta Gili, as well as an interview with the artist. Malagrida and Gili will take part in the inaugural conversation of the exhibition, on 13 March at 6 pm, in an event that forms part of the project’s public programme, along with the talk by Morena Hanbury. Over the next few months, the Museu Tàpies’ Education Department will be offering a programme of tours and activities for all audiences.

Press release from Museu Tàpies

Anna Malagrida (Spanish, b. 1970)
Rue Laffitte I
2008-2009
Photographic print on Dibond

Anna Malagrida (Spanish, b. 1970)
Rue Laffitte II
2008-2009
Photographic print on Dibond

Anna Malagrida (Spanish, b. 1970) 'Vitrines. Boulevard Sébastopol. Aparadors. Boulevard Sébastopol' 2009

Anna Malagrida (Spanish, b. 1970)
Vitrines. Boulevard Sébastopol. Aparadors. Boulevard Sébastopol
2008-2009
Photographic print on Dibond

Curatorial statement

Anna Malagrida. (Trans)gazes of the sensible

Patricia Sorroche

“Photography is, above all, a way of looking, it is not the same look. It is a way of seeing that has become conscious of itself, that has become reflexive.”

~ Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977

What happens when we place ourselves in that intermediate space where the visible and the invisible intertwine? Anna Malagrida invites us to explore this question by delving into the dichotomy of opposites in her work, and by directing our gaze toward the space in-between, where our way of looking is amplified, expanded and transformed, blurring the boundaries between the perceptible and the imperceptible. Revisiting some of Malagrida’s works opens a path, a transmutation of our bodies and our drives as we move around her pieces. Like palimpsests, her works hold layers of memory for us to rewrite. Time, memory and narrative intertwine to confront us with a new perspective from which to observe the world.

Opacitas. Veiling Transparency takes as its starting point an apriorism where the poetic gesture reveals the political gesture. When Jacques Rancière speaks of the ‘distribution of the sensible’, what he offers us is the possibility of the gesture to modify and transform what is seen, felt or said within a society from a poetic space. Along the same lines, Martha Rosler maintains that poetry and art are spaces of resistance, as well as political and social reconfiguration. Based on this axiom, we can understand Malagrida’s photographs and works as a space where the poetic and the political intersect in a subtlety of visual nuances, allowing us to recodify ways of inhabiting space and time.

The journey begins with a hypallage, where the city is transformed into a text that is written and rewritten as we move forward. An accumulation of memories and desires, where each street, each wall, seems to tell a story waiting to be read. In the series Vitrines (Shop Windows, 2008-09), the city is highlighted as a place of tension, wherein Malagrida works on ‘the epidermal space of the city’.1 The financial crisis that devastated the economies of a global north during the early twenty-first century led to the bankruptcy of many businesses. The artist photographed and immortalised the shop windows of Parisian businesses forced to close as a consequence of the economic collapse. To conceal the view, the windows were painted or whitewashed, veiling the interior, creating absences. The photographs of these places, now hidden from view, place the postmodern subject in a liminal space, where the gaze is para-actional: we cannot see, but we can reinterpret the void. Here, the painted and erased surfaces invite us to draw upon the unconscious in order to activate these new visual paraphrases. Walking through those streets highlights the fragilities of being, the contemporary narratives marked by the strong tensions of a system alien to our daily lives.

An enormous pile of rubble in the middle of the gallery prevents the body from moving freely through the space. A ruin activated to challenge us directly, to make us reflect and think about our condition. It questions what remains as a memory of a past that projects us into the future; and it questions a present, as Andreas Huyssen recounted.2 In this way, the ruin takes on a double dimension: both of a past with its scars and wounds, and of a future that is being built, which rises and walks, opening up as a space that enables a society continually emerging and re-emerging.

Continuing with the idea of opposites and dualities, our path takes us to the next space, more intimate, more enclosed, darker. As if we were entering a camera obscura or a lens shutter, the viewer is immersed in darkness; but this is a darkness that reveals a transparency, opening windows and walls to the outside, and placing us in the active condition of looking out.

Danza de mujer (Woman Dance, 2007) invites us to enter into an experience where the body is exposed in its fragile condition, ‘reincorporating a sensitive look at that dialectical movement that, in part, the photographic device itself already deploys without imposing a reification of the world’.3 From a subtle artefact transporting us to a refuge in the Jordanian desert, a veil is swayed by the breeze entering through a small window. This simple poetic action condenses part of the characteristic axioms of Malagrida’s works. The darkness of the refuge, with the light filtering from the desert outside, the black veil fluttering synchronously and asynchronously. These opposites operate with determination, reminding us that what prevents us from looking transparently limits our ways of interpreting and thinking about the world.

The piece was made at a time of tension, when in France the veil was banned in all public places, and thus, Arab women were rendered invisible and blurred in a system that did not recognise the singularities of certain communities. Through the dance of the veil, Malagrida questions and puts into crisis the politics of the social in relation to certain specific groups, and how these narrow visions propose ways of seeing the world while excluding an important part of it.

From the symbolic and the poetic, Malagrida’s work opens up to the post-human condition of being, understood as a relational and concentric existence with its environment and communities. To understand this relational condition, Édouard Glissant referred to the poetics of relation, where the idea of time is cyclical, and societies can only be conceived in a structure of continuous relationships.

Another work encountered by the viewer is Le laveur de carreau (The Window Cleaner, 2010), where Malagrida draws a ‘parallel between the gesture of a sublimated painter and that of a worker carrying out an entrusted task’.4 Here, the idea permeating the artist’s work is established: the gesture becomes the subject of the action, the idea of genius as addressed by Walter Benjamin is made evident. The cleaner is a metaphor for the painter, who becomes blurred in his condition as a worker, in his social condition of being. In this video work, we find ourselves looking from inside a shop, while a worker lathers the window and then proceeds to remove the remains of water and soap with a squeegee. From the passive condition of the onlooker, we attend to the action happening before our eyes. In this way, we witness the moment of creation and also of destruction. The soapy water our cleaner spreads over the glass surface is a metonymy of the act of painting; a fleeting work, which disappearing shortly after, returns to the transparency of glass. As in previous works, Malagrida again operates from opposites, from the concepts of opacity and transparency. Just for an instant, she places us in an intermediate place, just as Marcel Broodthaers did in some of his most renowned films (for instance, in Abb. 1. Projection d’un film du Musée d’Art Moderne, 1971), where the camera was placed at the midpoint between the inside and the outside, in his case the gallery, but aiming at the same idea, at the place where art is conceived as a process in constant movement, a flow transcending the static to become transmutable.

Both the Vitrines series and Le laveur de carreau can be read as trompe l’oeil references to large Informalist canvases. As both John Berger and Antoni Tàpies remarked, art should allow us to discover the unknown, to enter into places where the tangible, the visible, cannot go. Art is the place of transformation, a place where the unknown emerges in its multiple and polysemic condition.

Although there is no set itinerary for the viewer to follow, the last of the pieces in this exhibition is Point de vue (2006), where new agents appear in dialogue with those we have encountered before. This installation was made in Cap de Creus, in the north of Catalonia, in a protected natural area, close to the border with France. Thanks to the Law of Natural Heritage and Biodiversity, after a few decades the tourist complex built here by Club Med was forced to close. Malagrida installed her camera inside this architectural complex, which remained standing as a vestige and trace of economic systems that try to evade certain norms and sustainability policies. In so doing, Malagrida returns us to the intermediate and intersectional space, since we encounter the traces people have left on the windows, full of dust and sand; scratched phrases proclaiming their condition as the poetics of social archaeology. The dust becomes a ‘residue’5 containing the possibility of the new, of what is to come, and of the passage of time.

The piece is also an allusion, a synecdoche where perspective plays a leading role. Composed of three large photographs, the piece reveals a landscape behind the dust, a perspective revealing our form of representation, whose signs are linked to society’s power and knowledge structures. A theory influenced by Erwin Panofsky,6 who studied Renaissance perspective as a structure for representing time, place and society at a certain moment in history: something which structures the worldview. In this way, perspective becomes a space for representing socio-political systems, while in the Renaissance it adopted a homogeneous, infinite and ordered character, in contrast to the medieval or Romanesque vision where space was hierarchical. The classical and orthodox perspective proposed by this work invites us to think about how the forms of representation are ways of making the world visible and reproducing it. This idea points to the manner in which the telling of history is based on a structure, on a certain perspective that determines what is to be highlighted and ignores other events or facts running counter to historical hegemonies. It is also interesting to notice how the different layers are discovered to the viewer: first the dust, then the inscriptions and finally the landscape. And how, returning to the notion of distance and horizon, by way of passing through the glass we are led to reimagine the possibilities of the outside.

In conclusion, operating from opposites, from the decategorisation of traditional forms of representation and the overlapping of different languages, makes Malagrida’s work move between textures, between places of the visible and the invisible, to immerse us in a dialogue of opposites. This dialogical premise with which we enter her works does not seek to block our view or interpretation, but rather opens up the multiplicity of discourse, of the image. Her work leads us to multiply our views, our ways of seeing the world, to make it more porous, while enabling other ways of understanding it, of transmuting it and traversing it. Her work forces us to confront our social and political condition of being, but from a poetic, liminal space, where contradiction is a symbol of the dualities of the human condition in the postmodern world. A place where we can meet and understand each other in possible societies of the common, from a collective and community-based place.

Footnotes

1/ Muriel Barthou, “Entretien à Anna Malagrida,” in L’invisible photographique ; pour une histoire de la photographie, Paris: La lettre volée, 2019.

2/ Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of the Memory. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003.

3/ Marta Dahó, “Espacio de la continuidad. Lugares de la intersección. Algunas notas en torno a los trabajos de Anna Malagrida,” in (In)visibilidad (ex. cat.). La Coruña: Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Gas Natural Fenosa, 2016.

4/ Étienne Hat, “Entretien. Anna Malagrida,” in Anna Malagrida, Vitrines, Paris: Éditions Filigranes, 2025; Paris barricadé, Paris: Éditions Filigranes, 2025; and Los muros hablan, Paris: Éditions Filigranes, 2025. (Author’s translation.)

5/ Nicolas Bourriaud, Estética relacional. Buenos Aires: Adriana Hidalgo, 2006.

6/ Erwin Panofsky, La perspectiva como forma simbólica. Barcelona: Tusquets, 1999 (1927).

Anna Malagrida (Spanish, b. 1970)
Rue Bleue
2008-2009
Photographic print on Dibond

Anna Malagrida (Spanish, b. 1970)
Rue Lecourbe I
2008-2009
Photographic print on Dibond

Anna Malagrida (Spanish, b. 1970)
Rue Riboutté
2008-2009
Photographic print on Dibond

Anna Malagrida (Spanish, b. 1970)
Rue de Châteaudun
2008-2009
Photographic print on Dibond

Museu Tàpies
Carrer d’Aragó 255
08007 Barcelona, Catalonia (Spain)
Phone: +34 934 870 315

Opening hours:
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Sunday 10.00am – 3.00pm

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Exhibition: ‘Elliott Erwitt. Icons’ at Palazzo Bonaparte, Rome, Italy

Exhibition dates: 28th June – 21st September, 2025

Curator: Biba Giacchetti

Elliott Erwitt (American born France, 1928-2023)
England, Birmingham, 1991
1991
40 x 50cm
© Elliott Erwitt
Private Collection

Small intimacies

My apologies that I haven’t been writing that much in recent postings, but I am still recovering from my hip replacement operation and the pain is still ongoing over 6 weeks after the operation. I’m a little exhausted to put it mildly…

With this sumptuous exhibition of photographs by Elliott Erwitt – in a beautiful palazzo with painted ceilings and classical sculptures with the walls painted a glorious colour of green – you get what is says on the tin: Erwitt’s iconic and humanist photographs of dogs, children and celebrities, “visual double-takes and finely tuned one-liners.”

That is all the media images consisted of, his famous photographs.

I know that the exhibition, and the artist’s reputation, rests on his “icons” but I just wish we could see past these to his other photographs, photographs of everyday people, captured in the midst of their ordinary lives; photographs that contain a little more gravitas, a little more depth of poignancy / spirit / energy, revealing small intimacies not readily seen and acknowledged.

That Erwitt is capable of such images can be see in photographs such as Italy, Venice, Gallerie dell’Accademia, 1965 (below), USA, New York City, 1969 (below) and that most gut wrenching, heart breaking of images, USA, Arlington, Virginia, Jacqueline Kennedy at John F. Kennedy’s funeral, November 25, 1963 (below) – where Erwitt reveals the grief of loss and finally touches the marrow of what it is to be human.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

Elliott Erwitt. Icons at Palazzo Bonaparte, Rome, Italy

Installation walk through of the exhibition “Elliott Erwitt. Icons,” dedicated to the late master of visual irony and empathy, Elliott Erwitt. This major show offers an intimate look into the universe of one of contemporary photography’s most significant figures, whose work transformed everyday life into profound visual poetry.

Installation view of the exhibition 'Elliott Erwitt. Icons' at Palazzo Bonaparte, Rome, Italy showing Erwitt's photograph 'France, Paris, 1989'

Installation views of the exhibition Elliott Erwitt. Icons at Palazzo Bonaparte, Rome, Italy showing in the bottom image, the Erwitt’s photograph France, Paris, 1989

Installation view of the exhibition Elliott Erwitt. Icons at Palazzo Bonaparte, Rome, Italy showing at right Erwitt’s photograph USA, New York City, 1953

Installation view of the exhibition Elliott Erwitt. Icons at Palazzo Bonaparte, Rome, Italy showing at left, USA, Santa Monica, California, 1956 (below); at second left, USA, New York City, 1955 (below); at third left, USA, Louisiana, Shreveport, 1962; and at right, USSR, Bratsk, Siberia, 1967 (below)

Elliott Erwitt (American born France, 1928-2023)
USA, Santa Monica, California, 1956
1956
Gelatin silver print
Private Collection
© Elliott Erwitt

Elliott Erwitt (American born France, 1928-2023)
USA, New York City, 1955
1955
Gelatin silver print
50 x 60cm
Private Collection
© Elliott Erwitt

Elliott Erwitt (American born France, 1928-2023)
USSR, Bratsk, Siberia, 1967
1967
Gelatin silver print
Private Collection
© Elliott Erwitt

Starting June 28th, 2025, Palazzo Bonaparte will open its doors to an extraordinary exhibition, “Elliott Erwitt. Icons,” dedicated to the late master of visual irony and empathy, Elliott Erwitt. This major show offers an intimate look into the universe of one of contemporary photography’s most significant figures, whose work transformed everyday life into profound visual poetry.

With over 80 celebrated photographs, “Elliott Erwitt. Icons” invites visitors to experience Erwitt’s distinctive style – irreverent, poetic, and deeply human. He possessed a remarkable ability to capture the lightness of the joy of living, becoming the most insightful and moving chronicler of the human comedy. His lens made us smile, reflect, and feel, turning fleeting moments into unforgettable images.

A Glimpse into Erwitt’s Vision

Erwitt, who passed away in November 2023 at the age of 95, was a master at transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary. His “Icons” are not just photographs; they are symbols of his unique perspective and our shared collective memory. As he once put it, “In the saddest and most wintry moments of life… suddenly the sight of something wonderful can change the aspect of things, your state of mind. The type of photography I like, the one where the instant is caught, is very similar to this break in the clouds. In a flash, a wonderful photo seems to come out of nowhere.”

This exhibition, curated by Biba Giacchetti, a leading international Erwitt expert, along with technical assistance from Gabriele Accornero, offers a comprehensive yet concise overview of his genius. From his anthropomorphic dogs to powerful world leaders, from iconic movie stars like Marilyn Monroe to intimate family moments, Erwitt’s gaze was both incisive and empathetic. He captured not only the irony of daily life but also its underlying complexity.

Beyond the Famous Faces

While the exhibition features renowned portraits of figures such as Che Guevara, Jack Kerouac, Marlene Dietrich, Fidel Castro, and Sophia Loren, it also highlights historical moments like the Nixon-Khrushchev dispute, Kennedy’s funeral, and the Frazier-Ali fight. Yet, Erwitt’s democratic approach to his medium shines through in his focus on everyday people, captured in the midst of their ordinary lives.

A significant portion of Erwitt’s work showcased his love for dogs, whose free-spirited nature he admired. Many photographs are taken from a dog’s-eye view, often revealing only the feet or legs of their owners. Erwitt ingeniously employed playful tactics, like sounding a horn or mimicking a bark, to elicit natural reactions from the animals, resulting in humorous and endearing compositions.

An Unmissable Summer Event

The “Elliott Erwitt. Icons” exhibition, running until September 21st, 2025, marks the opening of Palazzo Bonaparte’s summer exhibition season. Following the success of the recent Edvard Munch retrospective, this show pays homage to a globally beloved master of photography. Visitors will have the unique opportunity to journey through Erwitt’s surreal, romantic, and playful vision of the world, always capable of grasping the essence of things.

Press release from Palazzo Bonaparte

Installation view of the exhibition 'Elliott Erwitt. Icons' at Palazzo Bonaparte, Rome, Italy showing from left to right, 'taly, Venice, Gallerie dell'Accademia, 1965'; 'France, Versailles, 1975'; and 'Spain, Madrid, 1995'

Installation views of the exhibition Elliott Erwitt. Icons at Palazzo Bonaparte, Rome, Italy showing in the bottom image from left to right, Italy, Venice, Gallerie dell’Accademia, 1965; France, Versailles, 1975; and Spain, Madrid, 1995 (below)

Elliott Erwitt (American born France, 1928-2023)
Italy, Venice, Gallerie dell’Accademia, 1965
1965
Gelatin silver print
Private Collection
© Elliott Erwitt

Elliott Erwitt (American born France, 1928-2023)
Spain, Madrid, 1995
1995
Gelatin silver print
Private Collection
© Elliott Erwitt

Installation view of the exhibition Elliott Erwitt. Icons at Palazzo Bonaparte, Rome, Italy showing at left, Erwitt’s photograph USA, New York City, 1969 (below)

“A 1969 scene in Amagansett, New York – a sober, soot-stained Victorian office block with a single storefront whose sign (“Tony’s of Worth Street”) is written in cheerful white paint – somehow combines the austerity of Atget with the irreverent glee of Weegee.”

Andrew Dickson. “Elliott Erwitt’s Visual One-liners,” on The New Yorker website October 14, 2016 [Online] Cited 02/09/2025

Elliott Erwitt (American born France, 1928-2023)
USA, New York City, 1969
1969
Gelatin silver print
Private Collection
© Elliott Erwitt

From June 28 to September 21, 2025, Palazzo Bonaparte welcomes the most ironic and disarming gaze in twentieth-century photography: Elliott Erwitt. An exhibition that is much more than an exhibition: it is an invitation to observe the world with lightness, empathy, and wonder.

An unmissable event, which recounts – through over 80 iconic shots – the long and brilliant career of an artist capable of capturing the soul of the twentieth century and transforming ordinary moments into unforgettable images, with a profoundly human yet always surprising gaze.

On display in Rome are icons of an era, of a way of looking at the world with lightness and intelligence. “Icons” because each of Erwitt’s shots has become a symbol of his poetics and of our collective memory.

Erwitt is more than just a photographer: he is the poet of human comedy, the unerring witness to life’s small and large absurdities, which he recounts with disarming irony, subtle poetry, and timeless grace. His images – famous, unforgettable, often dazzling – manage to be simultaneously light and profound, intimate and universal. They are shots that make you smile, reflect, and move you.

Elliott Erwitt was – and is – a key figure in the visual culture of our time. His images, books, reportages, illustrations, and advertising campaigns have spanned the decades, appearing in international publications and influencing generations of photographers and artists. This exhibition is a journey through his work and an invitation to look at the world with new eyes: with lightness, empathy, and wonder.

A member since 1953 of the historic Magnum agency – founded by Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Capa, among others – Erwitt has chronicled the last sixty years of history and contemporary civilisation with journalistic flair, capturing the most dramatic yet humorous aspects of the life that has passed before his lens.

“In life’s saddest, wintry moments, when a cloud has enveloped you for weeks, suddenly the sight of something wonderful can change the face of things, your state of mind. The kind of photography I like, the one that captures the moment, is very similar to this break in the clouds. In a flash, a wonderful photo seems to come out of nowhere.”

With these words, Erwitt sums up the spirit and poetics with which he filters reality, representing it with his mastery, capturing its sometimes playful, sometimes irreverent, or almost surreal aspects, which make him an undisputed master of the human comedy.

Curated by Biba Giacchetti, one of Erwitt’s leading international experts, with technical assistance from Gabriele Accornero, Elliott Erwitt. Icons is a snapshot of history and customs, a concise and comprehensive journey through his genius and his perspective on the world, from his anthropomorphic dogs to the world’s powerful figures, from the great movie stars – Marilyn Monroe above all – to his children. But it is also a tribute to the man who, with a gentle and disenchanted gaze, was able to portray the world for what it is: tragicomic, tender, absurd, unique.

The exhibition features famous portraits of Marilyn Monroe, Che Guevara, Kerouac, Marlene Dietrich, Fidel Castro, Sophia Loren, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and photographs that have made history, such as the Nixon-Khrushchev quarrel, Kennedy’s funeral, and the great fight between Frazier and Ali. Other iconic photographs, beloved by the public for their romantic power, such as the California Kiss, include more intimate and private ones, such as the snapshot of his newborn firstborn, observed by her mother on the bed.

Above all, Erwitt casts an incisive yet empathetic gaze, revealing not only the irony of everyday life, but also its complexity.

With the same attitude, Erwitt reserves his attention for any other subject, pushing the democratic quality that is typical of his medium to the extreme. His imagery is populated predominantly by ordinary people, men and women, captured in the midst of the normality of their lives.

From portraits of famous people to more ironic and sometimes irreverent images, we move on to some self-portraits where Erwitt no longer leaves anything to chance or intuition, but constructs a self-other, where eccentricity for its own sake is metaphor and pure surreal fun.

Special attention is paid to dogs, whose irreverent, free-spirited attitude Erwitt appreciated, unfettered by the common rules that condition humans, is what Erwitt appreciated.

Many of his shots are “from the dog’s point of view,” allowing only the shoes or parts of their owners’ legs to appear in his compositions. Erwitt wanted these photographs to be comical, and for this reason he employed ingenious strategies, such as blowing a trumpet or emitting a kind of bark, to elicit the most natural reaction from the animals.

The exhibition – on view until September 21st – marks the opening of Palazzo Bonaparte’s summer exhibition season, following the recent resounding success of the Edvard Munch retrospective and paying tribute to one of the world’s most beloved masters of photography. Visitors will have the opportunity to retrace his vision of the world: surreal, romantic, playful, always capable of capturing the essence of things.

The exhibition, “Elliott Erwitt. Icons,” is produced and organised by Arthemisia, in collaboration with Orion57 and Bridgeconsultingpro. The exhibition’s main partner is the Fondazione Terzo Pilastro – Internazionale with Fondazione Cultura e Arte and Poema.

The exhibition’s special partner is Ricola, mobility partner Frecciarossa Treno Ufficiale, and technical sponsor Ferrari Trento.

Text translated from the Italian by Google Translate from the Palazzo Bonaparte website

Installation view of the exhibition Elliott Erwitt. Icons at Palazzo Bonaparte, Rome, Italy showing at right, Erwitt’s photograph USA, Pittsburgh, 1950 (below)

Elliott Erwitt (American born France, 1928-2023) 'Pittsburgh, USA' 1950

Elliott Erwitt (American born France, 1928-2023)
USA, Pittsburgh, 1950
1950
Gelatin silver print
Private Collection
© Elliott Erwitt

Installation view of the exhibition Elliott Erwitt. Icons at Palazzo Bonaparte, Rome, Italy showing at right, Erwitt’s photograph France, Honfleur, 1968

Installation view of the exhibition Elliott Erwitt. Icons at Palazzo Bonaparte, Rome, Italy showing from left to right, France, Honfleur, 1968; USA, New York City, 1977; and USA, New York City, 1955

Installation view of the exhibition Elliott Erwitt. Icons at Palazzo Bonaparte, Rome, Italy showing Erwitt’s photograph Ireland, Ballycotton, 1991

Installation view of the exhibition Elliott Erwitt. Icons at Palazzo Bonaparte, Rome, Italy showing Erwitt’s photograph USA, New York City, Marilyn Monroe (with hand), 1956

Installation view of the exhibition Elliott Erwitt. Icons at Palazzo Bonaparte, Rome, Italy showing at left, USA, New York City, 1953; and at right, USA, NewYork, 1956 (below)

Elliott Erwitt (American born France, 1928-2023)
USA, NewYork, 1956
1956
Gelatin silver print
40 x 50cm
© Elliott Erwitt
Private Collection

Installation view of the exhibition Elliott Erwitt. Icons at Palazzo Bonaparte, Rome, Italy showing at left, USA, Los Angeles, 1960; and at right, USA, Arlington, Virginia, Jacqueline Kennedy at John F. Kennedy’s funeral, November 25, 1963 (below)

Note: wrong title and date underneath the photograph on the right-hand side

Elliott Erwitt (American born France, 1928-2023)
USA, Arlington, Virginia, Jacqueline Kennedy at John F. Kennedy’s funeral, November 25, 1963
1963
Gelatin silver print
© Elliott Erwitt
Private Collection

Elliott Erwitt was not just a photographer, but an unparalleled visual storyteller, capable of transforming the moment into history, the everyday into art, irony into poetry. His images evoke in the viewer emotions that move on different registers, from emotion to laughter, to the most spontaneous amusing. Having passed away in November 2023 at the age of 95, he left us an immense legacy: an archive of photographs that span eras, cultures, and feelings with a universal language, inviting us to look at the world with greater indulgence and wonder, always standing by our side in that profound lightness that he himself defined as “The Art of Observation.”

His lens captured iconic moments in history: the tense confrontation between Nixon and Khrushchev, Kennedy’s funeral, the legendary fight between Frazier and Ali. He portrayed legends of our imagination – Marilyn Monroe, Che Guevara, Marlene Dietrich – but he also captured moments of extraordinary intimacy and summarised universal feelings in a single shot: a stolen kiss in the rearview mirror, the gaze of a mother on her newborn baby, a dog lost in thought. Images that transcend time to become iconic.

What makes Erwitt unique is his ability to intertwine emotion and intelligence, making us laugh and moved, surprising us with his irony and his ability to grasp the profound meaning of existence. He has captured the absurd and the surreal with a sharp and light-hearted gaze, always finding in every scene a spark capable of making it memorable.

His anthropomorphic dogs, the protagonists of entire photographic series, are not just amusing images: they are mirrors of the human condition, ironic and melancholic at the same time, sometimes proud and surprising. His children, portrayed with the most authentic spontaneity, convey the wonder of discovery and freedom, still intact, expressing already defined personalities, still unconstrained. His self-portraits, where he pokes fun at himself, remind us that art – like life – should never take itself too seriously.

Elliott Erwitt was all of this: a master of photography, an interpreter of the human comedy, an artist who left an indelible mark on the history of the image. This exhibition is our homage to his vision of the world: a journey through irony, tenderness, depth, and lightness, just as his art has always been able to convey.

Welcome to the world of this great artist. My master.

Biba Giacchetti
Exhibition curator

Text translated from the Italian by Google Translate

Installation view of the exhibition Elliott Erwitt. Icons at Palazzo Bonaparte, Rome, Italy showing Erwitt’s photograph USA, New York City, 1971 (Muhammad Ali vs Joe Frazier)

Installation view of the exhibition Elliott Erwitt. Icons at Palazzo Bonaparte, Rome, Italy showing at left, USA, Los Angeles, 1960; and at second left, USA, Arlington, Virginia, Jacqueline Kennedy at John F. Kennedy’s funeral, November 25, 1963; at third right, USSR, Moscow, 1959 (below); and at second right, Cuba, Havana, 1964 (below)

Installation view of the exhibition Elliott Erwitt. Icons at Palazzo Bonaparte, Rome, Italy showing Erwitt’s photograph USSR, Moscow, 1959 (below)

Elliott Erwitt (American born France, 1928-2023)
USSR, Moscow, 1959 (Nikita Khruschchev and Richard Nixon)
1959
Gelatin silver print
40 x 50cm
Private Collection
© Elliott Erwitt

Installation view of the exhibition Elliott Erwitt. Icons at Palazzo Bonaparte, Rome, Italy showing Erwitt’s photograph Cuba, Havana, 1964 (Che Guevara)

Installation view of the exhibition Elliott Erwitt. Icons at Palazzo Bonaparte, Rome, Italy showing at left, England, Birmingham, 1991 (top); at third right, USA, New York City, 1946 (below); at second right, France, Paris, 1989 (below); and at right, USA, New York City, 2000 (below)

Elliott Erwitt (American born France, 1928-2023)
USA, New York City, 1946
1946
Gelatin silver print
40 x 50cm
Private Collection
© Elliott Erwitt

Elliott Erwitt (American born France, 1928-2023)
France, Paris, 1989
1989
Gelatin silver print
50 x 60cm
Private Collection
© Elliott Erwitt

Elliott Erwitt (American born France, 1928-2023)
USA, New York City, 2000
2000
Gelatin silver print
50 x 60cm
Private Collection
© Elliott Erwitt

Installation view of the exhibition Elliott Erwitt. Icons at Palazzo Bonaparte, Rome, Italy showing Erwitt’s photograph USA, New York City, 1974 (below)

Elliott Erwitt (American born France, 1928-2023)
USA, New York City, 1974
1974
Gelatin silver print
50 x 60cm
Private Collection
© Elliott Erwitt

Installation view of the exhibition Elliott Erwitt. Icons at Palazzo Bonaparte, Rome, Italy showing Erwitt’s photograph USA, New York City, 1955 (below)

Elliott Erwitt (American born France, 1928-2023)
USA, New York City, 1955
1955
Gelatin silver print
Private Collection
© Elliott Erwitt

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Exhibition: ‘Carrie Mae Weems: The Heart of the Matter’ at Gallerie d’Italia, Turin

Exhibition dates: 17th April – 7th September, 2025

Curator: Sarah Meister

Carrie Mae Weems (American, b. 1953) 'Welcome Home' 1978-1984 From the series 'Family Pictures and Stories' from the exhibition 'Carrie Mae Weems: The Heart of the Matter' at Gallerie d'Italia, Turin, April - Sept, 2025

Carrie Mae Weems (American, b. 1953)
Welcome Home
1978-1984
From the series Family Pictures and Stories 1978-1984
© Carrie Mae Weems and reproduced courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York, Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, and Galerie Barbara Thumm, Berlin

I love artist’s that challenge your point of view, knowledge of the world, prejudices and biases – which we all have.

I love artist’s who make you think about the stories they tell, and how you relate to their intimate, constructed and memorable worlds.

Carrie Mae Weems is one such generational artist.

Weems blends the poetic and conceptual in photographs and bodies of work which investigate history, identity, racism, executive and patriarchal power from the perspectives of female / Black American.

What a fabulous artist, a guide into circumstances seldom seen, now revealed.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to Gallerie d’Italia, Turin for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

“I discovered that I was the reference point, and the point of view, pointing the viewer toward the likes of me in history. Later, I understood this photographic self to be a muse and a guide into the unknown.”

Carrie Mae Weems

“My work endlessly explodes the limits of tradition.”

“Weems was trained as both a dancer and a photographer before enrolling in the folklore studies program at the University of California, Berkeley, in the mid-1980s, where she became interested in the observation methods used in the social sciences. In the early 1990s, she began placing herself in her photographic compositions in an “attempt to create in the work the simultaneous feeling of being in it and of it.”2 She has since called this recurring figure an “alter-ego,” “muse,” and “witness to history” who can stand in for both the artist and audience. “I think it’s very important that as a Black woman she’s engaged with the world around her,” Weems has said, “she’s engaged with history, she’s engaged with looking, with being. She’s a guide into circumstances seldom seen.”3

Caitlin Ryan. “My work endlessly explodes the limits of tradition,” 2021 on the MoMA website [Online] Cited 06/09/2025

Carrie Mae Weems: The Heart of the Matter at Gallerie d’Italia, Turin

Installation walk through of the exhibition 17th April – 7th September, 2025

Installation views of the exhibition Carrie Mae Weems: The Heart of the Matter at Gallerie d’Italia, Turin showing work from the series Roaming, 2006

Transcending medium, chronology, and geography, Carrie Mae Weems: The Heart of the Matter puts the artist – as well as her spiritual and philosophical journeys – at the center of the discourse. Weems is a touchstone artist, renowned for her work investigating history, identity, and power. A comprehensive survey, The Heart of the Matter features generous presentations of landmark bodies of work, from Family Pictures and Stories (1978-1984) to her most recent series on the Black church. Throughout the exhibition and accompanying book, the artist’s spiritual musings provide critical insight into the iconic artist’s mind and eye. Newly commissioned essays and additional contributions from esteemed thinkers and scholars across generations underscore the singular value of Weems’s vision in grappling with the complexities and injustices of the world around us.

Text from the Aperture website

Carrie Mae Weems (American, b. 1953)
The Edge of Time – Ancient Rome
2006
From the series Roaming

Carrie Mae Weems’s “Rome Series,” titled ” Roaming” (2006), features photographs taken during her residency at the American Academy in Rome where she performed “photographic actions” contrasting her presence with grand architecture and monumental surroundings. In these works, Weems, often in her signature long black dress with her back to the camera, challenges viewers to confront power structures and historical contexts associated with the sites of Rome. The series explores themes of history, power, and the individual’s relationship to imposing edifices of authority.

AI generated text from Google

Installation views of the exhibition Carrie Mae Weems: The Heart of the Matter at Gallerie d’Italia, Turin showing work from the series Museums, 2006-ongoing

Carrie Mae Weems (American, b. 1953)
Galleria Nazionale D’Arte Moderna
2006-ongoing
© Carrie Mae Weems and reproduced courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York, Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, and Galerie Barbara Thumm, Berlin

Installation view of the exhibition 'Carrie Mae Weems: The Heart of the Matter' at Gallerie d'Italia, Turin, April - September, 2025

Installation views of the exhibition Carrie Mae Weems: The Heart of the Matter at Gallerie d’Italia, Turin

Gallerie d’Italia – Torino presents the exhibition by American artist Carrie Mae Weems, open to the public from April 17 to September 7, 2025. The exhibition is organised in collaboration with Aperture and curated by Sarah Meister, former curator of the photography department at MoMA in New York. It is part of the main program of the second edition of EXPOSED Torino Foto Festival, titled Beneath The Surface, curated by Menno Liauw and Salvatore Vitale.

A major new exhibition dedicated to the internationally renowned artist Carrie Mae Weems, known for her photographic explorations of cultural identity, sexism, and class belonging.

The exhibition will feature a world premiere of a project commissioned by Intesa Sanpaolo specifically for this occasion, integrated into a powerful retrospective showcasing works from Weems’ most famous photographic series. Visitors will be guided through the artist’s entire career, following a deeply personal and spiritual journey.

The selected works highlight Carrie Mae Weems’ unique ability to address the complexities and injustices of the world around us. Her photography is rooted in spaces often excluded from mainstream narratives: artists’ studios, Southern U.S. plantations, domestic interiors, and the “invisible institutions” that emerged as places of worship for Black communities during times of oppression, juxtaposed with images of monuments and museums that have historically been sites of exclusion.

At the heart of the exhibition is Preach, a new project created specifically for this event as an original commission. This ambitious and intense installation explores religion and spirituality among African American communities across generations. The series celebrates the profound, passionate, and joyful forms of worship that define Weems’ Black Church experience while simultaneously confronting the violence and oppression that are inseparable from this history. In the new poetic text accompanying the installation, Weems writes: “Through flames and bombs, pray wherever and whenever you can, in ports and cabins, in palaces and basements, in theaters and clubs. From your secret hiding place, you have discovered new forms of worship…”. Using herself as both muse and guide, Weems invites us to join in this spiritual awakening and to condemn the persecution that has turned these sacred spaces into sites of refuge and activism. Preach intertwines early images from Harlem, San Diego, and Sea Island, Georgia, with a vast collection of new works that evoke the transcendental and secular realities of Black religious expression today.

The retrospective also includes many of Weems’ early works, such as the historic Kitchen Table Series (1990) and Museums (2006-ongoing); a selection of more recent projects, such as Scenes and Takes (2016) and Painting the Town (2021); as well as significant video installations, including The Shape of Things (2021) and Leave Now! (2022). Together, these works take visitors on a journey spanning Weems’ entire career, showcasing the depth and diversity of her artistic language.

The exhibition also benefits from the collaboration of Fondazione Compagnia di San Paolo, which has developed activities inspired by the values of inclusion and the appreciation of diversity as a source of enrichment, themes that resonate with the exhibition’s content and align with the foundation’s strategic challenges. Photography serves as a tool for storytelling, documentation, and identity-building, contributing to inclusion and community formation. Through widespread urban communication campaigns and collaboration with the public program #Inside, the foundation’s initiatives aim to promote participation and extend the exhibition’s themes to increasingly diverse audiences, particularly in light of the simultaneous presence of the EXPOSED Torino Foto Festival 2025 in the city.

The exhibition Carrie Mae Weems: The Heart of the Matter will be accompanied by a catalogue co-published by Società Editrice Allemandi / Aperture. In addition to numerous images of the American artist’s works, the catalog will feature contributions from scholars of different generations, underscoring the unique value of Weems’ vision in addressing these themes.

Aperture

Aperture is a nonprofit publisher that leads conversations around photography worldwide. From its base in New York, Aperture connects global audiences and supports artists through the acclaimed quarterly magazine, books, exhibitions, digital platforms, public programs, limited-edition prints, and awards. Established in 1952 to advance “creative thinking, significantly expressed in words and photographs,” Aperture champions photography’s vital role in nurturing curiosity and encouraging a more just, tolerant society.

Carrie Mae Weems. Biography

Carrie Mae Weems, a conceptual artist, examines and challenges perceptions of race and femininity in search of new models of life. Rooted in the specificity of her experience as a Black woman yet universal in its exploration of family relationships, cultural identity, power structures, and social hierarchy, her artistic practice is primarily photographic but also incorporates text, textiles, audio, installations, and video.

Informed by storytelling, folklore traditions, and the observational methodologies of social sciences, her approach to image-making ranges from staged and serialised narratives to the appropriation and adaptation of archival and ethnographic imagery. Weems critically addresses photography’s complicity in perpetuating dehumanising representations and the historical omission of Black women from institutions and art canons.

Weems lives in Syracuse, New York, with her husband, Jeffrey Hoone. She is currently an Artist in Residence at Syracuse University.

Text from the Gallerie d’Italia website

Installation view of the exhibition Carrie Mae Weems: The Heart of the Matter at Gallerie d’Italia, Turin showing the work North Star, 2022

In 1936 Carrie Mae Weems’s grandfather Frank Weems traveled 550 miles to Chicago on foot from Earle, Arkansas, partly with the aid of the North Star, which appears in these seven oval photographs as a cold and abstract promise. Frank Weems had been beaten after organising a labour strike to protest abysmal wages and working conditions in the cotton fields. For the artist, the abstracted world holds a tremendous yet distant possibility that her grandfather seized step by step.

Text from the Art Institute of Chicago website

Installation view of the exhibition 'Carrie Mae Weems: The Heart of the Matter' at Gallerie d'Italia, Turin, April - September, 2025 showing at left, work from the series 'Family Pictures and Stories' 1978-1984

Installation view of the exhibition Carrie Mae Weems: The Heart of the Matter at Gallerie d’Italia, Turin showing at left, work from the series Family Pictures and Stories 1978-1984

Installation view of the exhibition Carrie Mae Weems: The Heart of the Matter at Gallerie d’Italia, Turin showing the installation Preach, 2025

At the heart of the exhibition is Preach… this ambitious and intense installation explores religion and spirituality among African American communities across generations. The series celebrates the profound, passionate, and joyful forms of worship that define Weems’ Black Church experience while simultaneously confronting the violence and oppression that are inseparable from this history.

In the new poetic text accompanying the installation, Weems writes: “Through flames and bombs, pray wherever and whenever you can, in ports and cabins, in palaces and basements, in theaters and clubs. From your secret hiding place, you have discovered new forms of worship…”. Using herself as both muse and guide, Weems invites us to join in this spiritual awakening and to condemn the persecution that has turned these sacred spaces into sites of refuge and activism.

Preach intertwines early images from Harlem, San Diego, and Sea Island, Georgia, with a vast collection of new works that evoke the transcendental and secular realities of Black religious expression today.

Text from the Gallerie d’Italia Instagram web page

Carrie Mae Weems (American, b. 1953) 'Untitled' Nd from the series 'Preach' 2025

Carrie Mae Weems (American, b. 1953)
Untitled
Nd
From the series Preach
© Carrie Mae Weems and reproduced courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York, Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, and Galerie Barbara Thumm, Berlin

Carrie Mae Weems (American, b. 1953)
Road Sign
1991-1992
From the series Preach
© Carrie Mae Weems and reproduced courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York, Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, and Galerie Barbara Thumm, Berlin

Installation view of the exhibition Carrie Mae Weems: The Heart of the Matter at Gallerie d’Italia, Turin showing work from the Kitchen Table Series, 1990

Carrie Mae Weems (American, b. 1953) 'Untitled (Man and mirror)' 1990 From the series 'Kitchen Table'

Carrie Mae Weems (American, b. 1953)
Untitled (Man and mirror)
1990
From the Kitchen Table Series
© Carrie Mae Weems and reproduced courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York, Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, and Galerie Barbara Thumm, Berlin

Carrie Mae Weems (American, b. 1953) 'Untitled (Woman and daughter with children)' 1990 From the series 'Kitchen Table'

Carrie Mae Weems (American, b. 1953)
Untitled (Woman and daughter with children)
1990
From the Kitchen Table Series
© Carrie Mae Weems and reproduced courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York, Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, and Galerie Barbara Thumm, Berlin

Carrie Mae Weems (American, b. 1953) 'Untitled (Woman standing alone)' 1990 from the series 'Kitchen Table'

Carrie Mae Weems (American, b. 1953)
Untitled (Woman standing alone)
1990
From the Kitchen Table Series
© Carrie Mae Weems and reproduced courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York, Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, and Galerie Barbara Thumm, Berlin

Carrie Mae Weems (American, b. 1953)
Untitled
1988
From the series Four Women
© Carrie Mae Weems and reproduced courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York, Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, and Galerie Barbara Thumm, Berlin

Carrie Mae Weems (American, b. 1953)
Wilfredo, Laura and Me, I
2002
From the series Dreaming in Cuba
© Carrie Mae Weems and reproduced courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York, Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, and Galerie Barbara Thumm, Berlin

Gallerie d’Italia – Torino
Piazza San Carlo, 156
10121 Turin
Phone number: 800 167 619

Opening hours:
Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday: 9.30 – 19.30
Wednesday: 9.30 – 20.30

Gallerie d’Italia – Torino website

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Photograph: Marcus Bunyan. ‘Corfe Castle and graveyard, Dorset’ 1994

August 2025

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Corfe Castle and graveyard, Dorset
1994
Gelatin silver print

Apologies

There will be no posting on Art Blart this week as I continue to recover from hip replacement surgery last weekend.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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Photographs: Anonymous 1960s medium format Kodak Ektachrome slides of Australia

July 2025

Unknown photographer (Australian)
The Nobbies, Phillip Island, Victoria, Australia
1960s
Ektachrome medium format transparency scanned

Further Australian photographs from scans of 73 medium format Kodak Ektakchrome slides found in a country town in Victoria, Australia taken in Australia, Mexico, United States of America and Canada in the mid-1960s. I believe that the photographer was an Australian who was on holiday in Mexico, United States of America and Canada.

In nearly 40 years of being a photographer I have never seen colour medium format slides from the 1960s. There was no colour fading to the slides. The person who took the photographs was shooting medium format colour in the 1960s so they would have been a photographic aficionado. Just by holding the slides up to the light I could see the photographs were compositionally very interesting. Whoever the photographer was they had a great eye!

There are some beautiful photographs of the Australian landscape here. And the Australian “light” and colour are so different from the rest of the photographs (see part 1 of the posting).

I have also included an example of how incredibly dirty these slides were, see Untitled (Australian landscape) (detail uncleaned and cleaned) 1960s (below), and note how much work and many hours were required to bring these images back into a state of grace … and preservation.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

All photographs © Marcus Bunyan. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image. See Part 1 of the posting.

Unknown photographer (Australian)
Untitled (Australian landscape)
1960s
Ektachrome medium format transparency scanned

The fault at left appears in several other slides in these Ektachromes and must have been in the camera as it’s not in the slide itself…

Unknown photographer (Australian)
Untitled (Australian landscape)
1960s
Ektachrome medium format transparency scanned

There is a Mini panel van on the causeway!

Unknown photographer (Australian)
Untitled (Australian landscape)
1960s
Ektachrome medium format transparency scanned

The same landscape as the two photographs below

Unknown photographer (Australian)
Untitled (Australian landscape)
1960s
Ektachrome medium format transparency scanned

Unknown photographer (Australian) 'Untitled (Australian landscape)' 1960s (detail uncleaned and cleaned)

Unknown photographer (Australian)
Untitled (Australian landscape) (detail uncleaned and cleaned)
1960s
Ektachrome medium format transparency scanned

Unknown photographer (Australian)
Untitled (Man holding his movie camera, Australia)
1960s
Ektachrome medium format transparency scanned

Australian built Ford XR Falcon station wagon

Unknown photographer (Australian)
Unknown woman
1960s
Ektachrome medium format transparency scanned

I don’t know where this is but it feels Australian to me, especially the fashion…

Unknown photographer (Australian)
Untitled (Australian landscape, possibly South Point, Wilson’s Prom, Victoria)
1960s
Ektachrome medium format transparency scanned

Australian coastal she oak and tea tree.

Unknown photographer (Australian)
Untitled (Australian landscape)
1960s
Ektachrome medium format transparency scanned

Wonderful photograph of the Australian landscape…

Unknown photographer (Australian)
Untitled (Australian landscape)
1960s
Ektachrome medium format transparency scanned

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
Silos through windscreen
1935
Gelatin silver print

Unknown photographer (Australian)
Untitled (Australian landscape)
1960s
Ektachrome medium format transparency scanned

The second photograph taken through the windscreen of a car

Unknown photographer (Australian)
Untitled (Australian landscape)
1960s
Ektachrome medium format transparency scanned

Unknown photographer (Australian)
Untitled
1960s
Ektachrome medium format transparency scanned

I’m not sure what they are doing or where this is (possibly Australia) but I like the photo!

Unknown photographer (Australian)
Untitled
1960s
Ektachrome medium format transparency scanned

A geologist hammer in his hand?

Unknown photographer (Australian)
Untitled (Visitors must not leave pathway)
1960s
Ektachrome medium format transparency scanned

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Photographs: Anonymous 1960s medium format Kodak Ektachrome slides of the United States of America, Canada and Mexico

July 2025

Unknown photographer (Australian)
Hawaii
1960s
Ektachrome medium format transparency scanned

State of grace

I was very excited by the discovery in a country town in Victoria, Australia of 73 medium format Kodak Ektakchrome slides taken in Australia, Mexico, United States of America and Canada in the mid-1960s. I believe that the photographer was an Australian who was on holiday in Mexico, United States of America and Canada.

I can date the slides to late 1966 / early 1967. This is because of the unknown photograph of the construction of John F. Kennedy’s grave at Arlington National Cemetery (below). Construction began in 1965 and was completed on July 20, 1967. Since JFK’s grave is 2/3rds complete this would date the photograph to late 1966 / early 1967. This would also help date all the other Ektachrome slides that I have scanned as well.

The has been a journey of (self) discovery.

Firstly, I made the conscious decision not to look at the slides before scanning them but rather to randomly pick up whichever slide came next … then to take us on a journey in time and space from my studio in Melbourne – to Canada, Mexico, United States of America and different parts of Australia, in the mid-1960s.

Together, through these photographs, we can travel the planet, traversing time back to the 1960s where we can witness historic places of that era – John F. Kennedy’s grave under construction; George Washington’s house in Mount Vernon; the White House closer than you can ever get today in our paranoid era of protection.

In some ways it was a more open society in those days, more trusting and available; in others, it was more prejudiced against, for example, women, migrants, colour and difference. War never changes. Not everything changes for the better, but some things do.

Scanning these slides was a journey of self discovery. I immersed myself in their worlds… staring for hours at the scans and at the dots and scratches on the screen – cleaning up the slides and colour balancing them (see Metropolitan Opera House, Lincoln Center, New York City 1960s below for an example) to make them presentable. It was as much a meditative practice and an acceptance of self to keep going that was so rewarding, especially for the peace it brings my bipolar and depression. Peace and self acceptance.

I lived and breathed these images back into existence after nobody had seen them for so many years. I saved them for prosperity, from the eternity of loss of all unseen images – to not have eyes look at them for that moment of recognition, when the language of the image can be decoded and understood. When the feeling of that image impacts the senses.

I hope you enjoy this series of images, that it reaches you in all its wonderful, effervescent glory. Whoever the photographer was I want to thank them for their vision – for they have taken us to places and times we could never have gone.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

PS. Look at the two hands in the photograph Untitled (Mexican scene?) 1960s (below). It perfectly sums up a moment caught through the energy of the photographer, the camera … and the cosmos. The open hand, the shielded hand.

Just a bit about these scans: scanned at 1200dpi, 21.3Mb. Each image takes on average 1.5 hours of cleaning and balancing to achieve the end result. 300dpi jpg made from scans.

All photographs © Marcus Bunyan. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image. See Part 2 of the posting.

“A good image is created by a state of grace. Grace expresses itself when it has been freed from conventions, free like a child in his early discovery of reality. The game is then to organise the rectangle.” [or the square in this case!]

Sergio Larraín Echeñique

Ektachrome transparency box

United States of America

Unknown photographer (Australian)
Grand Canyon
1960s
Ektachrome medium format transparency scanned

Unknown photographer (Australian)
Snow in the Grand Canyon
1960s
Ektachrome medium format transparency scanned

Unknown photographer (Australian?)
Grand Canyon with snow
1960s
Ektachrome medium format transparency scanned

Unknown photographer (Australian)
John looking bored, Father and Sylvia at Aunt Jemima’s Kitchen, Disneyland
1960s
Ektachrome medium format transparency scanned

Unknown photographer (Australian)
Wedding day (USA?)
1960s
Ektachrome medium format transparency scanned

What a wonderful composition from a low vantage point. Not sure where it is but it feels USA to me…

The girl at left looking at the bride and groom, his white gloves one on one off, her yellow bride’s bouquet and the relationship to the yellow of the bridesmaid’s dress, and the two girls at right… one looking at the couple and one at the camera. Magic!

I wonder what happened to them, how long they were together. Was it a happy marriage? Did they had children and where are they now? And now all these years later to see this mnemonic device, this photograph of associations, designed to recover fragmentary memories of a happy time…

Unknown photographer (Australian)
Wedding day (USA?)
1960s
Ektachrome medium format transparency scanned

Unknown photographer (Australian)
Untitled (USA)
1960s
Ektachrome medium format transparency scanned

I am pretty sure this image is connected to the wedding photos above.

Unknown photographer (American)
Hawaii? California? coastline
1960s
Ektachrome medium format transparency scanned

Definitely not Australia…

Unknown photographer (American)
Hawaii? California? coastline
1960s
Ektachrome medium format transparency scanned

Unknown photographer (Australian)
Untitled [coastline]
1960s
Ektachrome medium format transparency scanned

I think this is the Hawaiian or Californian coastline, but unsure… the telephone pole is definitely not Australian!

Unknown photographer (Australian)
Untitled
1960s
Ektachrome medium format transparency scanned

No idea where this is (not Australia!) or what the structures are. Obviously shot out of a moving car or possibly train/bus. An interesting image nonetheless.

Unknown photographer (Australian)
Untitled [Desert scene, California?]
1960s
Ektachrome medium format transparency scanned

A wonderful photograph shot contre-jour which is a photographic technique in which the camera is pointing directly toward a source of light.

Unknown photographer (Australian)
George Washington’s home, Mount Vernon
1960s
Ektachrome medium format transparency scanned

Thank you to Colin Vickery who informed me this is George Washington’s home, Mount Vernon.

Unknown photographer (Australian)
John F. Kennedy’s gravesite under construction at Arlington Cemetery (foreground) with Memorial Bridge and the Lincoln Memorial in the background. View from Arlington House
Late 1966 / early 1967
Ektachrome medium format transparency scanned

An important photograph! An unknown photograph of the construction of John F. Kennedy’s grave at Arlington National Cemetery.

Construction began in 1965 and was completed on July 20, 1967. Since JFK’s grave is 2/3rds complete this would date the photograph to late 1966 / early 1967. This would also help date all the other Ektachrome slides that I am scanning.

Unknown photographer (Australian)
Grave of John F. Kennedy, Arlington National Cemetery, Washington
1960s
Ektachrome medium format transparency scanned

Another important photograph of the temporary grave of John F. Kennedy at Arlington National Cemetery with the construction of Kennedy’s new grave ongoing in the background.

Around the grave are the caps of the services with what I think are dog leads in between? In the background in the centre is a wreath from a Boy Scout Troop. And of course, the flame…

Unknown photographer (Australian)
Arlington National Cemetery, Washington
1960s
Ektachrome medium format transparency scanned

This was a poor exposure and about the best I could do with the scan.

Unknown photographer (Australian)
Arlington National Cemetery, Washington
1960s
Ektachrome medium format transparency scanned

Unknown photographer (Australian)
Road to Arlington National Cemetery, Washington
1960s
Ektachrome medium format transparency scanned

A wonderful vista with Arlington National Cemetery in the distance…

Unknown photographer (Australian)
The White House, Washington, DC
1960s
Ektachrome medium format transparency scanned

Unknown photographer (Australian)
Untitled States Capitol, Washington, D.C.
1960s
Ektachrome medium format transparency scanned

What a great image, shot out of the front of a bus driving towards the United States Capitol, love all the old cars!

Unknown photographer (Australian)
Untitled States Capitol, Washington, D.C.
1960s
Ektachrome medium format transparency scanned

I love the perspective, the shadows of the old cars, the path leading the eye towards the building and the trees framing the vista.

Unknown photographer (Australian)
Abraham Lincoln, Lincoln Memorial, Washington, D.C.
1960s
Ektachrome medium format transparency scanned

Unknown photographer (Australian)
Metropolitan Opera House, Lincoln Center, New York City
1960s
Ektachrome medium format transparency scanned

The top image has not been colour corrected, as scanned.

Unknown photographer (Australian)
1040 Fifth Avenue NY
1960s
Ektachrome medium format transparency scanned

Some photos are winners, some are losers… but they are all interesting. The fifteenth floor of 1040 Fifth Avenue NY was home to Jackie Onassis from 1964 to 1994.

The cars are a Super 88 Oldsmobile, 1965 Plymouth Fury Suburban S/W and 1964/65 Buick Special 4dr.

This slide was so underexposed it was very hard to get a usable scan. Colour correction was difficult.

Unknown photographer (Australian)
Untitled (American landscape)
1960s
Ektachrome medium format transparency scanned

A lovely image. Whoever took these photographs had a really good eye.

Unknown photographer (Australian)
Untitled (American landscape)
1960s
Ektachrome medium format transparency scanned

Unknown photographer (Australian)
Untitled (California)
1960s
Ektachrome medium format transparency scanned

I think this is California?

A classic 1960s photograph. The photographer had a good eye. Los Castillo artesanos on the left hand side, a Kodak sign, and a Chevrolet if I’m not mistaken.

Unknown photographer (Australian)
American landscape with cars, perhaps Malibu, California?
1960s
Ektachrome medium format transparency scanned

Great photo!

Unknown photographer (Australian) 'Main Str Cinema, Disneyland' 1960s

Unknown photographer (Australian)
Main Str Cinema, Disneyland, California
1960s
Ektachrome medium format transparency scanned

I don’t know what the fault is at top left, it’s in the transparency itself – so obviously something inside the camera got ‘recorded’ on film

Unknown photographer (Australian) 'Mickey Mouse, Disneyland'
1960s

Unknown photographer (Australian)
Mickey Mouse, Disneyland, California
1960s
Ektachrome medium format transparency scanned

Unknown photographer (Australian)
General view over Universal Studios including my plane, Tammy’s houseboat, Warner Brothers in background, California
1960s
Ektachrome medium format transparency scanned

The photograph was taken from a “Glamor Tram” travelling around the lot. These were introduced in July, 1964. “The iconic red and white Glamor Trams, with their ruffled awnings, were staged five times a day, each lasting just over two hours, Monday through Friday.”

The handwritten inscription on the slide reads:

“General view over Universal Studios including my plane, Tammy’s houseboat, Warner Brothers in background”

“My plane” seems to be a North American P-51 Mustang. According to John Lovaas on Facebook he is “pretty sure the green space is Lakeside Golf Club, and the plane and cars in the foreground are on Universal Studios property. How many P-51s has Universal ever had on their lot? A finite number!”

He states that the P-51 is most likely the plane 44-72739 N44727 “Man O War” which was the plane at Universal Studios between 1955-1970. I can’t see a houseboat at all!

Unknown photographer (Australian)
‘Battle Hymn’ North American P-51 Mustang
1960s
Ektachrome medium format transparency scanned

A closer look at the North American P-51 Mustang that featured at a distance in the slide above.

The text written on the slide reads: “Me and plane used in “Battle Hymn”.”

“‘Battle Hymn’ is a 1957 American war film directed by Douglas Sirk and starring Rock Hudson as Lieutenant Colonel Dean E. Hess, a real-life United States Air Force fighter pilot in the Korean War who helped evacuate several hundred war orphans to safety… Hess promises her he won’t see combat, since he will be the senior USAF advisor / Instructor Pilot to the Republic of Korea Air Force, only serving as a teacher and flying F-51D Mustangs. …

In order to replicate the ROK unit, the 12 F-51D Mustangs of 182nd Fighter Squadron, 149th Fighter Group of the Texas Air National Guard were enlisted by the USAF to provide the necessary authentic aircraft of the period. During filming, an additional surplus F-51 was acquired from USAF stocks to be used in an accident scene where it would be deliberately destroyed.”

Text from the Wikipedia website

Unknown photographer (Australian)
Sylvia and ship used for McHale’s Navy, Universal Studios
1960s
Ektachrome medium format transparency scanned

The title was written on the slide.

Unknown photographer (Australian) 'San Francisco with Golden Gate Bridge' 1960s

Unknown photographer (Australian)
San Francisco with Golden Gate Bridge (in the background)
1960s
Ektachrome medium format transparency scanned

Unknown photographer (Australian)
View over San Francisco
1960s
Ektachrome medium format transparency scanned

Unknown photographer (Australian)
Untitled (Car and river, USA)
1960s
Ektachrome medium format transparency scanned

Lovely photo, great shadows. I have no idea where this is…

Unknown photographer (Australian) 'Untitled (woman and car)' 1960s

Unknown photographer (Australian)
Untitled (woman and car)
USA, 1960s
Ektachrome medium format transparency scanned

Left hand drive car so this must be the United States of America.

Canada

Unknown photographer (Australian)
Place Ville Marie, Montreal
1960s
Ektachrome medium format transparency scanned

Unknown photographer (Australian)
Cathédrale Basilique Marie Reine du Monde, Montreal
1960s
Ektachrome medium format transparency scanned

Unknown photographer (Australian)
Interior, Cathédrale Basilique Marie Reine du Monde, Montreal
1960s
Ektachrome medium format transparency scanned

Unknown photographer (Australian)
Downtown Montreal, intersection of Blvd de Maisonneuve Ouest and Metcalfe St, looking toward Mont Royal
1960s
Ektachrome medium format transparency scanned

Mexico

Unknown photographer (Australian)
Cuernavaca Cathedral, Morelos, Mexico
1960s
Ektachrome medium format transparency scanned

Unknown photographer (Australian)
Chapultepec Castle, Mexico City
1960s
Ektachrome medium format transparency scanned

This is Chapultepec Castle, site of the National History Museum, México City. The soldiers are wearing Mexican helmets of the M1 pattern with regimental insignia on the front.

Unknown photographer (Australian)
Untitled (Mexico)
1960s
Ektachrome medium format transparency scanned

Unknown photographer (Australian)
Hotel Borda, Cuernavaca
1960s
Ektachrome medium format transparency scanned

A view of the “Hotel Borda” which still exists in Cuernavaca a town just south of Mexico City.

Unknown photographer (Australian)
Untitled (Mexico)
1960s
Ektachrome medium format transparency scanned

I can make out the words “Gloria”, “Dios”, and “Paz” in the sign on the right hand side.

Unknown photographer (Australian)
Untitled (Mexican scene?)
1960s
Ektachrome medium format transparency scanned

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Exhibition: ‘The New Art: American Photography, 1839-1910’ at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Exhibition dates: 11th April – 20th July, 2025

Curators: Jeff L. Rosenheim, Joyce Frank Menschel Curator in Charge of the Department of Photographs. Virginia McBride, Research Associate in the Department of Photographs, provided assistance.

Unknown Maker
Woman Wearing a Tignon
c. 1850
Daguerreotype with applied colour
Case (open): 3 1/8 × 7 1/4 in. (8 × 18.4cm)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, William L. Schaeffer Collection
Promised Gift of Jennifer and Philip Maritz, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary

It’s just nice to be able to post on this eclectic exhibition – to see the installation photographs with vitrines full of the wonders of the age, outdoors, indoors, objects, people, landscapes, daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, tintypes, salted paper prints, albumen silver prints, cyanotypes, platinum prints, and gelatin silver prints, cartes de visite, stereographs, and cabinet cards.

Can you imagine having your photograph taken for the first time?

Entering the photographers studio, com(posing) yourself in front of the camera and the process and performance of doing that, even as the photographer composed you on the glass plate in the camera. A double composition, the constituent parts making the whole, a dance between the sitter, the camera and the photographer.

And there you are, exposed in camera, the latent image revealed by vapour, a talismanic object radiating your spirit.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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.

Installation view of the exhibition 'The New Art: American Photography, 1839-1910' at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, April - July, 2025

Installation views of the exhibition The New Art: American Photography, 1839-1910 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, April – July, 2025

This exhibition presents a bold new history of American photography from the medium’s birth in 1839 to the first decade of the 20th century. Drawn from The Met’s William L. Schaeffer Collection, major works by lauded artists such as Josiah Johnson Hawes, John Moran, Carleton Watkins, and Alice Austen are shown in dialogue with extraordinary photographs by obscure or unknown practitioners made in small towns and cities from coast to coast. Featuring a range of formats, from daguerreotypes and cartes de visite to stereographs and cyanotypes, the show explores the dramatic change in the nation’s sense of itself that was driven by the immediate success of photography as a cultural, commercial, artistic, and psychological preoccupation. In 1835, even before the nearly simultaneous announcement of the invention of the new art in Paris and London, the American philosopher essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson noted with remarkable vision: “Our Age is Ocular.”

Text from The Metropolitan Museum of Art website

Installation views of the exhibition The New Art: American Photography, 1839-1910 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, April – July, 2025

The New Art: American Photography, 1839-1910 will feature more than 250 photographs drawn from the Museum’s William L. Schaeffer Collection

This spring, The Metropolitan Museum of Art will present an adventurous new history of American photography from the medium’s birth in 1839 to the first decade of the 20th century. Drawn from the Museum’s William L. Schaeffer Collection – a magnificent recent promised gift to The Met by trustee Philip Maritz and his wife Jennifer – major works by lauded artists such as Josiah Johnson Hawes, John Moran, Carleton E. Watkins, and Alice Austen, will be presented in dialogue with extraordinary photographs by obscure or unknown practitioners made in small towns and cities from coast to coast. The exhibition’s many photographs by little-studied makers, early practitioners, and intrepid amateurs have been selected to reveal the artists’ ingenuity, aesthetic ambition, and lasting achievement. In some 275 photographs – most never before seen – The New Art: American Photography, 1839-1910 explores the nation’s shifting sense of self, driven by the immediate success of photography as a cultural, commercial, artistic, and psychological preoccupation. The presentation will be on view from April 11 through July 20, 2025.

“Through an impressive array of 19th- and early 20th-century images that capture the complexities of a nation in the midst of profound transformation, this exhibition offers something new even for those well-versed in the history of photography,” said Max Hollein, The Met’s Marina Kellen French Director and Chief Executive Officer. “Thanks to the generosity of Jenny and Flip Maritz, we can study and celebrate these formerly hidden treasures by hundreds of both known and unknown makers finally ready for their close-ups. Our hope is to give these works their rightful place in the ever-expanding history of the medium.”

Jeff L. Rosenheim, Joyce Frank Menschel Curator in Charge of the Department of Photographs, added, “The camera and its myriad democratic products – rivals to the greatest literature of the era – are clearly the origin of modern communication and global image-sharing today. If we want to forge a deeper appreciation of contemporary art and the role of the camera in the lives of today’s picture makers, we must recognise and respect the stunning visual power and authenticity of early American photography.”

Carefully assembled over the last 50 years by the Connecticut collector and private dealer William L. Schaeffer, the collection includes splendid photographs in superb condition from every stage of the medium’s early technical development: daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, tintypes, salted paper prints, albumen silver prints, cyanotypes, platinum prints, and gelatin silver prints. The exhibition also features an extensive display of three types of card-mounted photographs – cartes de visite, stereographs, and cabinet cards – each wildly popular in the mid- to late 19th century. When seen through binocular viewers, all the stereographs in the show will be visible in three dimensions.

This is not the first exhibition at The Met to feature photographs drawn from the famous collection of 19th-century photographs amassed by Schaeffer. In 2013, the Museum included more than a dozen Civil War views in Photography and the American Civil War. These are now part of the Museum’s collection through the direct support of another Museum trustee, Joyce Frank Menschel. The gifts by the Maritzes to The Met, as well as those by Joyce Menschel, mark a pinnacle in the institution’s ongoing effort to build the finest holdings of 19th-century American photography in the nation.

Exhibition Overview

In 1839, the invention of photography transformed the world. In December of that year, when the first daguerreotypes were exhibited in New York, former mayor Philip Hone marvelled in his diary at what he described as “one of the wonders of modern times,” adding that “like other miracles, one may almost be excused for disbelieving it without seeing the very process by which it is created.”

The daguerreotype’s remarkable ability to hold permanently an unimaginably detailed likeness on its surface – an image heretofore only seen fleetingly in a mirror – seemed in equal measure unbelievable and perfectly real, darkly mysterious yet scientifically verifiable, a shadowy fiction and yet a beautiful truth. The supernatural quality of the new art was noted by many around the world. As one reviewer, writing for a Baltimore weekly in January 1840, admitted, “We can find no language to express the charm of these pictures painted by no mortal hand.”

Photography arrived almost simultaneously with the steam locomotive, the steam ship, and the electric telegraph – all inventions that dramatically shortened the distances between people and places and forever changed the way civilisations communicate. The medium developed during the age of the type-crazy broadside, the morning and the evening newspaper, and the illustrated weekly. It was also the time of the birth of mercantile libraries (previously only the wealthy had access to books and libraries), and, not surprisingly, of eye strain. The era saw the medical specialisation in the study of eye maladies and the development of optometry and ophthalmology. In 1835, just before the concurrent announcement of the invention of the new art in Paris and London, the American philosopher and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson noted in his private journal: “Our age is ocular.”

Organised primarily by picture format across three galleries, The New Art illustrates what photography looked like for the average working citizen as well as those at the top of the economic scale. Exhibition visitors can see the clothes individuals wore at work and home, their attitudes to the camera singly and in groups, their ways of sitting or standing or touching, and how they honoured their children and respected their ailing and recently deceased family members. They can look at newly constructed storefronts, see how farmers worked their fields, and measure where new towns met the wilderness. They can observe the near total devastation of Native American communities, especially those living in the Plains, and confront the vicious cruelty of slavery and the influential role of the camera in the Civil War, still the crucible of American history.

In daguerreotypes, tintypes, and paper prints, viewers can also begin to see and comprehend how African Americans during the Civil War, throughout the Reconstruction era, and leading into the 20th century slowly began to replace negative stereotypes with positive self-images. This effort was explicitly nurtured by Frederick Douglass, who had long advocated visits to photography studios. In his nearly constant lecturing circuit across the country, he argued persuasively that no one could be truly free until each individual could sit for and possess their own photographic likeness. In The New Art, men and women of color definitively hold the camera’s attention and the viewer’s as well.

Seen together in The New Art, the subjects in these photographs are not just sitters molded by a camera operator, but the cocreators of their own portraits. One can see this clearly in their eyes and in their many small, seductive gestures. Confronting a photograph that left an artist’s studio more than 150 years ago can be a humbling experience. The magic of photography brings one face to face with the past, and the present is never more vital than it is in these early pictures. That is the medium’s essence, its beauty, and its pathos.

Cameras

The exhibition will also showcase a small selection of 19th-century American cameras to further immerse visitors in the photography process. These have been kindly lent to The Met by Eric Taubman and the Penumbra Foundation.

Press release from The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Unknown Maker (American)
Young Man with Rooster
1850s
Daguerreotype with applied color
Case (open): 3 5/8 × 6 1/4 in. (9.2 × 15.9cm)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, William L. Schaeffer Collection
Promised Gift of Jennifer and Philip Maritz, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary

Josiah Johnson Hawes (American, 1808-1901)
Winter on the Common, Boston
early 1850s
Salted paper print from glass negative
7 5/16 × 9 5/16 in. (18.5 × 23.7cm)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art William L. Schaeffer Collection
Promised Gift of Jennifer and Philip Maritz, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary

Unknown Maker
Studio Photographer at Work
c. 1855
Salted paper print from glass negative
5 1/8 × 3 13/16 in. (13 × 9.7cm)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, William L. Schaeffer Collection
Promised Gift of Jennifer and Philip Maritz, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary

Unknown Maker (American)
Laundress with Washtub
1860s
Ambrotype with applied colour
Case: 4 1/8 x 3 1/4 in. (4.2 x 3.2cm)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, William L. Schaeffer Collection
Promised Gift of Jennifer and Philip Maritz, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary

Unknown Maker (American)
Actor Playing Hamlet, Holding a Skull
1860s
Tintype with applied colour
Case: 6 1/4 × 4 15/16 in. (15.8 × 12.6cm)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, William L. Schaeffer Collection
Promised Gift of Jennifer and Philip Maritz, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary

John Moran (American born England, 1821-1903)
Showing Weather Among the Alleghenies
1861-1862
Albumen silver print from glass negative
4 3/4 × 3 5/8 in. (12.1 × 9.2cm)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, William L. Schaeffer Collection
Promised Gift of Jennifer and Philip Maritz, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary

Unknown Maker
Roller Skate and Boot
1860s
Albumen silver print from glass negative
Mount: 4 1/8 × 2 7/16 in. (10.5 × 6.2cm)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, William L. Schaeffer Collection
Promised Gift of Jennifer and Philip Maritz, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary

Unknown Maker (American)
Published by E. & H. T. Anthony (American, 1862-1880s)
Specimens of New York Bill Posting, No. 897 from the series
“Anthony’s Stereoscopic Views”
1863
Albumen silver print from glass negative
Mount: 3 1/4 × 6 3/4 in. (8.3 × 17.1 cm)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, William L. Schaeffer Collection
Promised Gift of Jennifer and Philip Maritz, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary

Carleton E. Watkins (American, 1829-1916)
View on the Columbia River, from the O.R.R., Cascades, No. 1286 from the series “Pacific Coast”
1867
Albumen silver prints from glass negatives
Mount: 3 1/4 × 6 3/4 in. (8.2 × 17.1cm)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, William L. Schaeffer Collection
Promised Gift of Jennifer and Philip Maritz, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary

Albert Cone Townsend (American, 1827-1914)
A Politician
1865-1867
Albumen silver print from glass negative
Mount: 4 × 2 7/16 in. (10.1 × 6.2cm)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, William L. Schaeffer Collection
Promised Gift of Jennifer and Philip Maritz, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary

The New Art: American Photography, 1839-1910

Introductory panel

The world changed dramatically in September 1839 when photography was introduced to the public and quickly emerged as one of the wonders of modern times. Its invention marks the dawn of our own media-obsessed age in ways that become clear when we explore in depth the special language of daguerreotypes, tintypes, cartes de visite, stereographs, and other early photographic processes and formats.

This exhibition presents an adventurous new history of American photography from the medium’s beginnings to the first decade of the twentieth century. Major works by established artists are shown in dialogue with superb, never-before-seen photographs by obscure or unknown practitioners working in large urban centres and small towns across the expanding country. Tracing technological advancements and the development of picture formats, The New Art charts the remarkable change in the nation’s sense of itself that was driven by the phenomenal success of photography as a cultural, commercial, and artistic preoccupation.

All the works of art on view are drawn from an extraordinary promised gift to The Met of more than seven hundred rare photographs offered by Jennifer and Philip Maritz in celebration of the Museum’s 150th anniversary in 2020. The donors acquired the collection from William L. Schaeffer, a renowned Connecticut private photography dealer who had quietly built it over the last half century.

Daguerreotypes

The daguerreotype is a photographic image formed on the surface of a silver-plated sheet of copper fumed with iodine. Exposed in a wood box camera and developed with hot mercury vapours, each daguerreotype is unique. Invented in France by Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre and announced to the world in August 1839, it was the dominant form of photography in the U.S. for twenty years, until around 1860. The daguerreotype’s ability to permanently hold a detailed image – before then seen only fleetingly in a mirror – was astonishing. The shimmering result seemed in equal measure unbelievable and perfectly real, darkly mysterious yet scientifically verifiable, a shadowy fiction and a beautiful truth. In the U.S. the daguerreotype provided an opportunity for self-representation to many strata of society that were previously excluded from the realm of portraiture.

Ambrotypes

The ambrotype is similar in its process to the daguerreotype, but it uses a sheet of glass rather than copper as the image support. Popular in the U.S. from 1854 to 1870, the technique – invented in England but named by an American – was the predictable next development of photography. Although less visually alluring, it had marked advantages over the daguerreotype: it was cheaper to produce, it was easier to see (without glare) in most lighting conditions, and it eliminated the lateral reversal of the image characteristic of the earlier process. This was especially helpful with certain patrons who were annoyed, for example, by a jacket buttoning backward or a wedding ring appearing on the incorrect hand.

Tintypes

The tintype is a distinctively American style of photograph. Patented in February 1856 by Hamilton Lamphere Smith, the technique was inexpensive and relatively easy to master. It appealed as much to enterprising itinerant picture makers, who traveled to rural communities and made outdoor portraits and views, as it did to artists operating brick-and-mortar galleries. Rather than a coating of silver emulsion on copper (the daguerreotype) or glass (the ambrotype), the tintype’s support is a common sheet of blackened iron. Despite its misleading name, which was not in use until 1863, there is no tin present in a tintype. The process was wildly popular in the U.S. until the end of the nineteenth century.

Paper-print Photographs

From 1839 until the start of the Civil War in 1861, most photographs were made on metal (daguerreotypes and tintypes) or glass (ambrotypes). Beginning in the late 1850s, however, paper was widely adopted as the physical support for photographs. This gallery primarily features paper-print photographs and albums that date from 1850 to 1910. They are known by a variety of names that reflect changes in materiality and date of production: salted paper prints, generally made from paper negatives; albumen silver prints, made from glass negatives; and gelatin silver and platinum prints, made from glass or flexible film negatives. In this era, two formats of card-mounted paper-print photographs enjoyed remarkable success: the small carte-de-visite portrait and the stereographic view.

Cartes de Visite

The carte de visite – commonly known as a “cdv” – is a small photograph, usually an albumen silver print made from a glass negative, affixed to a 4-by-2½-inch stiff paper card. Invented in France in the mid-1850s as a portrait medium, it was the world’s first mass-produced and mass-consumed type of photographic collectible. Most photographers marked the mounts with their gallery names as a means of self-promotion and what today we would call brand-building. Ubiquitous in the U.S. from just before 1860 to 1880, the democratic, Victorian-age novelty was wildly popular with the public. “Cartomania,” as the phenomenon was known, is worthy of attention today as a resonant precursor to our own obsession with sharing images of celebrities and ourselves via social media.

Cabinet Cards

A cabinet card is essentially an oversize carte de visite. In vogue for three decades in the U.S. beginning around 1870, the 6 1/2-by-4 1/2-inch card-mounted photograph offered picture makers significantly more space and freedom to compose their visual narratives. After the deadly seriousness of the Civil War, cabinet cards frequently fulfilled a growing appetite for light-hearted diversion. They often feature elaborate props and accessories, exotic backdrops, and, as the century progressed, increasingly playful indoor and outdoor scenes.

Stereographs

Introduced in the late 1850s and prevalent into the twentieth century, the stereograph was not only a culturally significant invention but also a commercial boon to American photographers. When viewed through a device known as a stereoscope (or stereopticon), a pair of photographs of the same subject – made from two slightly different points of view – are perceived in the brain as a single, seemingly three-dimensional image. The dazzling binocular effect created an immersive experience, offering inexpensive armchair travel and a window on the world to millions of Americans.

Cyanotypes

Invented in 1842 by the British scientist John Herschel, a cyanotype is a naturally blue photograph made with iron salts. Early on, most cyanotypes took the form of nature studies made without a camera by placing botanical specimens (or other objects) directly in contact with sensitised paper and then exposing the composition in the sun. In the 1870s architects and engineers began using the process to duplicate their drawings, resulting in what are generally known as “blueprints.” Both economical and easily developed, the cyanotype reemerged in the late 1880s as a favourite choice of professional photographers and amateurs alike. It was often selected for large municipal documentary projects such as those seen here.

Intro and Section Wall Texts from The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Unknown Maker (American)
Railroad Worker (?) with Wye Level
c. 1870
Tintype with applied color
Case (open): 6 5/16 × 10 3/8 in. (16 × 26.4cm)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, William L. Schaeffer Collection
Promised Gift of Jennifer and Philip Maritz, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary

Unknown Maker (American)
Musician
1870s
Tintype, with lock of hair and cut paper
Case (open): 2 × 3 1/2 in. (5.1 × 8.9cm)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, William L. Schaeffer Collection
Promised Gift of Jennifer and Philip Maritz, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary

Golder & Robinson (American, active 1870s)
Comic Novelty Portrait
1870s
Tintype with applied colour
4 × 2 7/16 in. (10.1 × 6.2cm)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, William L. Schaeffer Collection
Promised Gift of Jennifer and Philip Maritz, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary

Wenderoth, Taylor & Brown (American, active 1864-1871)
The Gallery of Arts & Manufacturers of Philadelphia
1871
Albumen silver prints from glass negative
Open: 13 3/4 x 19 in. (34.9 x 48.3cm)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, William L. Schaeffer Collection
Promised Gift of Jennifer and Philip Maritz, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary

Anna K. Weaver (American, 1847/48-1913)
Welcome
1874
Albumen silver print from glass negative
10 7/8 x 17 1/2 in. (27.8 x 44.5cm)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, William L. Schaeffer Collection
Promised Gift of Jennifer and Philip Maritz, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary

Chauncey L. Moore (American, died 1895)
Young Man Laying on Roof
1880s-1890s
Albumen silver print
Mount: 4 1/4 × 6 1/2 in. (10.8 × 16.5cm)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, William L. Schaeffer Collection
Promised Gift of Jennifer and Philip Maritz, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary

Alice Austen (American, 1866-1952)
Group on Petria, Lake Mahopac
August 9, 1888
Albumen silver print from glass negative
6 × 8 1/8 in. (15.2 × 20.7cm)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, William L. Schaeffer Collection
Promised Gift of Jennifer and Philip Maritz, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary

Unknown Maker (American) '748. Schoolmaster Hill Tobogganing, Franklin Park, Roxbury, Massachusetts' 1905

Unknown Maker (American)
Schoolmaster Hill Tobogganing, Franklin Park, Roxbury, Massachusetts
1905
Cyanotype
7 × 9 1/4 in. (17.8 × 23.5cm)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, William L. Schaeffer Collection
Promised Gift of Jennifer and Philip Maritz, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary

The Metropolitan Museum of Art
1000 Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street
New York, New York 10028-0198
Phone: 212-535-7710

Opening hours:
Thursday – Tuesday 10am – 5pm
Closed Wednesday

The Metropolitan Museum of Art website

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