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Dec

Exhibition: ‘In Focus: The Camera’ at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Getty Center, Los Angeles

Exhibition dates: 30th July 2019 – 5th January 2020

Curator: Paul Martineau

Lisette Model (American born Austria, 1901-1983)
Weegee, New York
1945
Gelatin silver print
34.1 × 27cm (13 7/16 × 10 5/8 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Estate of Lisette Model, courtesy Baudoin Lebon/Keitelman

Apologies. A filler posting from me as I am sick at the moment. Although I love the design of the old cameras – when viewed from the outside, through the media images, the exhibition seems to also be a bit of a filler from the Getty.

Where are the interesting questions?

How can a box of metal and glass, a machine, capture onto film and pixels, something that so transcends time and space that, at its best, it preserves the spirit of our existence, the condition of our becoming?

How does the camera impart its own reality, and how, through looking, do photographers understand how different cameras impart different realities? How do we intimately see what the camera sees, without looking through the machine?

How have digital cameras altered how we use the camera and how we see the world, moving us from a viewfinder and vanishing point, to looking at a flat screen on the back of the camera?

How does the physicality of the camera, from large format to iPhone, affect how we hold the machine, how we interact with it’s ontology and enact its rationale – in particular perspectives of abstraction, becoming, existence, reality, as well as the basic categories of being and their relations: Substance, Relation, Quantity and Quality; Place, Time, Situation, Condition, Action, Passion?

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

Once a simple wooden box with a primitive lens and cap for controlling light, the modern camera has undergone enormous change since its invention in the early nineteenth-century. Flexible film stocks, built-in light meters, motor drives, and megapixels are a few of the advancements that have transformed the way this ingenious device captures and preserves a moment in time. This display explores the evolution of the camera through the Museum’s collection of historic cameras and photographs.

Unknown maker (European)
Camera Obscura
c. 1750-1800
Wood, brass, and glass
Object: H: 7.9 × W: 10.8 × D: 23.5cm (3 1/8 × 4 1/4 × 9 1/4 in.)
Object (Extended): H: 31.1cm (12 1/4 in.)
Lid extended: H: 15.9cm (6 1/4 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Gift of Gloria and Stanley Fishfader

Unknown maker (French)
Daguerreotype/Wet-plate Camera
c. 1851
Wood, brass, and glass
Object: H: 18.1 × W: 21.6 × D: 31.1cm (7 1/8 × 8 1/2 × 12 1/4 in.)
Lens: H: 9.2 × Diam: 7.3cm (3 5/8 × 2 7/8 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Gift of Gloria and Stanley Fishfader

Unknown maker (British)
Camera box
1860
Wood, glass, metal
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Gift of Gloria and Stanley Fishfader

August Semmendinger (American, 1820-1885)
Mammoth Plate Wet-Collodion Camera
1874-1885
wood, metal, fabric, and glass
The J. Paul Getty Museum, gift in memory of Beaumont Newhall

August Semmendinger (1820 – August 6, 1885) was a manufacturer of photographic apparatuses and the inventor of the Excelsior Wet Plate Camera. Semmendinger first made his cameras in New York City. The second factory where he built his cameras was located in Fort Lee, New Jersey.

Kodak (American, founded 1888)
The Kodak
1888
Wood, leather, brass, and glass
Object: H: 9.5 × W: 8.3 × D: 17.1cm (3 3/4 × 3 1/4 × 6 3/4 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Gift of Gloria and Stanley Fishfader

The very first Kodak camera.

John F. Collins (American, 1888-1990, active 1904-1974)
[Kodak Ektra Camera]
c. 1930
Gelatin silver print
38.4 × 48.1cm (15 1/8 × 18 15/16 in.)
Gift of Nina and Leo Pircher

Eastman Kodak Company (American, founded 1888)
Kodak Bantam Special
1936
Metal, enamel, and glass
The J. Paul Getty Museum, gift of Gloria and Stanley Fishfader

Eastman Kodak Company (American, founded 1888)
World War II “Matchbox” Spy Camera
1944
Metal and glass
The J. Paul Getty Museum, gift of Gloria and Stanley Fishfader

Polaroid Corporation (American, founded 1937)
Polaroid Land Camera Model 95
c. 1948-1949
Leather and steel Object (Closed): L: 24.1 × W: 11.4 × D: 5.7cm (9 1/2 × 4 1/2 × 2 1/4 in.)
Case: H: 19.1 × W: 26.7 × D: 7cm (7 1/2 × 10 1/2 × 2 3/4 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Gift of Gloria and Stanley Fishfader

Steineck Kamerawerk (Tutzing, West Germany)
Steineck ABC Wristwatch Camera
1949
Metal, enamel, leather, and glass

Made in Germany by Steineck Kamerawerk. Subminiature camera for discs of film 25mm diameter, 8 exposures 7mm diameter. Steinhetl VI lens F:12.5mm f/2.8 fixed aperture, coated cobir enamel. Two-speed rotary shutter. Refelcting finder – concave mirror and ball and pin sight. Wristwatch shaped. Designed in Germany by Dr R Steineck.

Looks like a large wristwatch. Came with a 12.5mm (f2.5) fixed-focus lens. Single shutter speed. Eight round exposures with a 5.5 mm diameter are produced on a round disk of film 24mm in diameter. Disks can be cut from standard 35mm film. A cassette, with its own exposure counter, is used to hold the film. To load the camera, the cassette is pressed lightly into place in the opening in the back of the camera, and the knurled rim of the cassette is turned firmly to the right until it stops and the red dots on the camera body and cassette are aligned. Film advance is automatic – the film is readied for the next frame immediately after an exposure is made. The lens is a 12.5m f/2.5, made by Steinheil. It is fixed-focus so that everything from 4.25 ft. to infinity is sharp. The lens has a two-point aperture setting: one for bright light (red dot), the other for dim light (blue dot), set by a control knob on the face of the camera. The metal focal-plane shutter has only one speed, 1/125 sec. In making an exposure, the camera is held between the index finger and thumb, the shutter release being depressed by the thumb while the index finger serves to steady the camera by exerting a counter pressure. No separate action is required to advance the film or cock the shutter; as soon as the exposure has been made, the camera is ready to take the next picture. The A-B-C has two parallax-corrected finders: an optical hollow mirror viewfinder, which permits sighting from above when the camera, worn on the wrist, is held in picture-taking position. The other, a direct-vision viewfinder, is used at eye level, requiring that the camera be removed from the wrist. When the direct-vision finder is used, you sight through the hole in the back (cassette) with the camera close to the eye; the camera is held by the straps, both thumbs steadying the body, and the shutter release is operated by the index finger. The original accessories included filters, close-up lenses, and even a special enlarger. Steineck planned an M-sync flash for a future A-B-C, as well as a built-in filter carousel (to be put in front of the aperture control), and even a tripod-mount accessory that fits through the eye-level finder!

Text from Ebay website

Hasselblad AB (Swedish, founded 1841)
Hasselblad wide angle camera
1954-1959
Metal, artificial leather, glass
Object: 13 × 11 × 15cm (5 1/8 × 4 5/16 × 5 7/8 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Gift of Gloria and Stanley Fishfader

Nippon Kogaku K.K. (Japanese, founded 1917)
Nikon “Reporter” large load 35mm camera
after 1959
Plastic, metal, and imitation leather-covered body
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Gift of Gloria and Stanley Fishfader

Canon Inc. (Japanese, founded 1937)
Canon S 35mm camera with rare F2 lens
1946
Metal, glass
Object: 8 × 14.5 × 10cm (3 1/8 × 5 11/16 × 3 15/16 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Gift of Gloria and Stanley Fishfader

Introduced in 1938, the Canon S is the younger sibling of the Hansa Canon. It was developed to compete in quality with the German Leica II, but at a price more accessible to the Japanese public.

Polaroid Corporation (American, founded 1937)
Polaroid SX-70
1972
Metal, plastic, leather, and glass
Private collection

Exhibition includes a selection of rare cameras from the 19th century to present

The camera, once a simple wooden box with a primitive lens and cap for controlling light, has undergone enormous changes since its invention, eventually becoming a tool that is in most people’s back pockets. In Focus: The Camera, on view July 30, 2019 – January 5, 2020 at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Getty Center, explores the evolution of this ingenious device through a selection of historic cameras and photographs.

During the early 19th, the three essential components of photography – a dark chamber, a light-sensitive substrate, and a method of fixing the image – were used in different ways in the experiments of Nicéphore Niépce (French, 1765-1833), Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre (French, 1787-1851), and William Henry Fox Talbot (British, 1800-1877). In subsequent decades, advancements such as flexible film stocks, built-in light meters, motor drives, and megapixels transformed the way the camera captures and preserves a moment in time.

On view in the exhibition will be a number of cameras manufactured in the 19th century to present day, including the simple camera obscura, a daguerreotype camera, a stereo camera, an early roll-film camera, a large portable camera, a miniature spy camera, an early colour camera, and the first digital camera marketed to the general public. The exhibition will include text that explains how photographs are created using each of these cameras and techniques. Cameras produced by well-known brands such as Kodak, Leica, Nikon, Hasselblad, and Canon will be displayed.

The gallery will also include a number of portraits, self-portraits, and images of artists at work by famed photographers such as Imogen Cunningham (American, 1883-1976), Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965), Lisette Model (American, born Austria, 1901-1983), Helmut Newton (German-Australian, 1920-2004), Edward Steichen (American, born Luxembourg, 1879-1973), Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987), and Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958). These images remind the viewer of the inextricable relationship between the camera and the artist.

In Focus: The Camera is curated by Paul Martineau, associate curator of photographs for the J. Paul Getty Museum.

Text from the J. Paul Getty Museum website [Online] Cited 21/12/2019

Capt. Horatio Ross (British, 1801-1886)
[Self-portrait preparing a Collodion plate]
1856-1859
Albumen silver print
Image: 20 × 16.2cm (7 7/8 × 6 3/8 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Underwood & Underwood (American, 1881-1940s)
Photographing New York City – on a slender support 18 stories above pavement of Fifth Avenue
1905
Gelatin silver print
Image (left): 8 × 7.6cm (3 1/8 × 3 in.)
Image (right): 8 × 7.6cm (3 1/8 × 3 in.)
Mount: 8.9 × 17.8cm (3 1/2 × 7 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958)
Self Portrait with Camera
1908
Platinum print
Image: 14.6 × 8.6cm (5 3/4 × 3 3/8 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© 1981 Arizona Board of Regents, Center for Creative Photography

George Watson (American, 1892-1977)
[Camera on 12-foot Tripod]
1920s
Gelatin silver print
Image: 11.7 × 9.1cm (4 5/8 × 3 9/16 in.)
Sheet: 12.2 × 9.8cm (4 13/16 × 3 7/8 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© The Watson Family Photo Collection

Man Ray (American, 1890-1976)
[Self-Portrait with Camera]
1932
Gelatin silver print
Image: 29.2 × 22.9cm (11 1/2 × 9 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Man Ray Trust ARS-ADAGP

Man Ray showed himself in profile in this self-portrait, intently adjusting the focal range on his view camera as if for a portrait session. He directs the camera in the photograph at the audience, while the camera taking his picture remains invisible. The touch of Man Ray’s hand on the focusing ring serves as a reminder of the human artistry required to make photographs, a departure from his more accidental approach to creating works in other media. Man Ray solarised the print, using a process indelibly associated with him.

Text from the J. Paul Getty Museum website

Alma Lavenson (American, 1897-1989)
[Self-Portrait]
1932
Gelatin silver print
20.3 × 25.2cm (8 × 9 15/16 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Alma Lavenson Associates

Employing the sharp focus and close vantage point that were the hallmarks of Group f/64, with which she was associated, Alma R. Lavenson presented her camera as a vital extension of herself as a photographic artist. Her hands delicately and reverently frame the lens, positioning it as her centre and source of inspiration.

Text from the J. Paul Getty Museum website

Unknown photographer (American)
[Portrait of Dorothea Lange]
1937
Gelatin silver print
13.7 × 16.7cm (5 3/8 × 6 9/16 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Gift of the Dixon Family

Walker Evans (1903-1975)
Resort Photographer at Work
Negative 1941; print later
Gelatin silver print
15.9 × 22.4cm (6 1/4 × 8 13/16 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American born Austria, 1899-1968)
Photographer at a Fire
1940-1945
Gelatin silver print
Image: 34.1 × 27.1cm (13 7/16 × 10 11/16 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© International Center of Photography

Andreas Feininger (American born France, 1906-1999)
The Photojournalist
Negative 1951; print later
Gelatin silver print
Image: 32.3 × 26.3cm (12 11/16 × 10 3/8 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser
© Estate of Gertrud E. Feininger

Imogen Cunningham (American, 1883-1976)
Self-Portrait with Grandchildren in a Funhouse
1955
Gelatin silver print
The J. Paul Getty Museum. © Imogen Cunningham Trust

Anthony Friedkin (American, born 1949)
Extras with Film Cameras
1996
Gelatin silver print
Image: 16.3 × 24.3cm (6 7/16 × 9 9/16 in.)
Sheet: 20.1 × 25.2cm (7 15/16 × 9 15/16 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Gift of Sue and Albert Dorskind
© Anthony Friedkin

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

Opening hours:
Daily 10am – 5.30pm

The J. Paul Getty Museum website

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Oct

Exhibition: ‘Aenne Biermann. Intimacy with Things’ at the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich

By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leave a Comment

Exhibition dates: 12th July 2019 – 13th October 2019

Exhibition curators: Dr Simone Förster together with Anna Volz

Aenne Biermann (German, 1898-1933)
Self-Portrait with Silver Ball
1931
Gelatin silver print
Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, Hamburg

Another strong woman, another inspirational female avant-garde 1930s photographer. Just look at the darkness of the pear in her photograph Fruit Basket (1931, below). The photographer proclaims the beauty and decay of nature. Magnificent.

Marcus

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Many thankx to the Pinakothek der Moderne for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on thep hotographs for a larger version of the image.

For the autodidact Aenne Biermann (1898-1933) the camera was a means of closing in on things and situations in her immediate environment. From the mid 1920s onwards she found great pleasure in capturing unfamiliar and unexpected views of everyday experiences and events in her photographs. Although Aenne Biermann worked in relative isolation with regard to the avant-garde developments in larger cities, comprehensive displays of her work were shown at all major modern photographic exhibitions from 1929 onwards. Her oeuvre, created within just a few years – Aenne Biermann died in 1933 following an illness – is now regarded as one of the most important within the Neues Sehen (New Vision) movement in photography and New Objectivity.

The exhibition comprises some 100 original photographs from the holdings of the Ann and Jürgen Wilde Foundation that boasts one of the most extensive collections of Aenne Biermann’s work. Selected works from public and private collections, together with records and archival documents, illuminate the artist’s work and career.

#PinaBiermann

Aenne Biermann (German, 1898-1933)
Gartenkugeln [Garden Balls]
Nd
Silver gelatine print

Aenne Biermann (German, 1898-1933)
Ficus elastica
1926-1928
Silver gelatine print
46.7 x 35cm
Photo: Sibylle Forster
Ann and Jürgen Wilde Foundation, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich

An avid amateur mineralogist, it was through her collection of rocks that in 1926 she met the geologist Rudolf Hundt, who commissioned her to photograph his specimens the following year for his scientific work. Her photographs of minerals transformed her practice from the early personal views of her children to the close-up, direct studies of form that would define her photographs of plants and people that followed and make her a central figure in New Objectivity photography. Thus 1926 began a period of intense productivity for Biermann that lasted until her untimely death, from liver disease, at the age of thirty-five, in 1933.

Mitra Abbaspour on the Museum of Modern Art website Nd [Online] Cited 03/08/2019

Aenne Biermann (German, 1898-1933)
Finale
before October 1928
Silver gelatine print
47.4 x 34.8cm
Photo: Sibylle Forster
Ann and Jürgen Wilde Foundation, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich

Aenne Biermann (German, 1898-1933)
A Child’s Hands
1928
Silver gelatine print
12.3 x 16.6cm
Photo: Sibylle Forster
Ann and Jürgen Wilde Foundation, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich

Aenne Biermann (German, 1898-1933)
Lady with Monocle
1928/1929
Silver gelatine print
17 x 12.6 cm
Photo: Sibylle Forster
Ann and Jürgen Wilde Foundation, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich

Aenne Biermann (German, 1898-1933)
View from my Studio Window
1929
Silver gelatine print
23.6 x 17.3cm
Photo: Sibylle Forster
Ann and Jürgen Wilde Foundation, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich

Today, Aenne Biermann (1898-1933) is considered one of the major proponents of ‘New Photography’. Although she was only active as a photographer for a few years and, unlike her female colleagues Florence Henri, Germaine Krull and Lucia Moholy, for example, had neither an artistic training nor moved within the avant-garde circles of major urban centres, Aenne Biermann developed her own markedly modern pictorial style that established her position as a representative of contemporary avant-garde photography within a very short time. Clear structures, precise compositions with light and shadow, as well as cropped images focussing on specific details are characteristic of Aenne Biermann’s photography. They elicit a unique poetry from the people and objects in her everyday surroundings and establish an ‘intimacy with things’, as Aenne Biermann wrote in 1930.

Growing up in a Jewish factory owner’s family on the Lower Rhine, Aenne Biermann did not move on to higher education; instead, her musical skills were furthered and she was given piano lessons. Following her marriage to the merchant Herbert Biermann in 1920, she moved to Gera / Thuringia and became part of an upper-middle class, intellectual society that was extremely open to modern movements in art and culture and cultivated these within its own local radius. For Aenne Biermann, the starting point for her close involvement with photography was the birth of her children Helga (1920) and Gerd (1923). Initially used merely as a medium to document her children’s progress, from the mid 1920s Aenne Biermann developed her own, creative sphere in her photographic work. She focussed her camera on plants, objects, people and everyday situations and used the medium as an artistic means to access her own personal surroundings.

In 1928 the art critic Franz Roh arranged for the photographer’s first solo exhibition to be held at the Graphisches Kabinett Günther Franke in Munich and presented her work in Das Kunstblatt, a trend-setting monthly magazine for contemporary art in Germany. This led to her participation in numerous major exhibitions of modern photography, such as Film und Foto (1929), and solo exhibitions in Oldenburg, Jena and Gera. Aenne Biermann’s pictures received awards in photographic competitions and were published in books, art magazines and illustrated journals. In 1930 her photographs appeared in Franz Roh’s Fototek series of books: Aenne Biermann. 60 Fotos is one of the rare monographs of a photographer’s work of the time.

As a result of the artist’s early death and the family’s forced emigration in the 1930s, a large part of the photographer’s archive was lost. Its whereabouts remains unknown to this day. In more than forty years of extensive and intense research Ann and Jürgen succeeded in assembling a large number of images that give a representative picture of Aenne Biermann’s œuvre and now form one of the largest collections of the photographer’s work.

The presentation comprises more than 100 original photographs, 73 of which are, in part, large-format exhibition prints from the holdings of the Ann and Jürgen Wilde Foundation. Loans from the Museum Folkwang, Essen, the Museum für Angewandte Kunst Gera, the Museum Ludwig, Cologne, the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin / Kunstbibliothek, the Münchner Stadtmuseum, the Galerie Berinson, Berlin, the Franz Roh Estate and the Dietmar Siegert Collection, Munich, as well as the Ann and Jürgen Wilde Archive, Zülpich, complement the exhibition.

Press release from the Pinakothek der Moderne [Online] Cited 28/07/2019

Aenne Biermann (German, 1898-1933)
Contemplation
1930
Silver gelatine print
58 × 42cm
Photo: Sibylle Forster
Ann and Jürgen Wilde Foundation, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich

Aenne Biermann (German, 1898-1933)
Repair
1930/31
Silver gelatine print
24.8 x 18cm
Photo: Sibylle Forster
Ann and Jürgen Wilde Foundation, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich

Aenne Biermann (German, 1898-1933)
Rail Tracks
1932
Silver gelatine print
24.1 x 17.5cm
Photo: Sibylle Forster
Ann and Jürgen Wilde Foundation, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich

Aenne Biermann (German, 1898-1933)
Fruit Basket
1931
Silver gelatin print
16.6 x 23.6 cm
Photo: Sibylle Forster
Ann and Jürgen Wilde Foundation, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich

Aenne Biermann (German, 1898-1933)
Eggs
1931
Silver gelatin print
17 x 23.9cm
Photo: Sibylle Forster
Ann and Jürgen Wilde Foundation, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich

Pinakothek der Moderne
Barer Strasse 40
Munich

Opening hours:
Daily except Monday 10am – 6pm
Thursday 10am – 8pm

Pinakothek der Moderne website

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May

Exhibition: ‘Dave Heath: Dialogues with Solitudes’ at The Photographers’ Gallery, London

By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leave a Comment

Categories: American, american photographers, beauty, black and white photography, documentary photography, exhibition, existence, gallery website, intimacy, light, memory, New York, photographic series, photography, portrait, psychological, quotation, reality, space and street photography
Tags: Aaron Siskind, absurdities of existence, alienation, American art, American black and white photography, American culture, american photographer, American photography, American social documentary photogaphy, American social documentary photography, anti-Vietnam War movement, Bad Boy's Story, black and white photography, California 1964, Canadian photogaphy, Canadian photographer, Canadian photographer of America, Canadian photography, Canadian social documentary photographer, Canadian social documentary photography, Carl Dean Kipper Korea, Civil Rights movement, Dave Heath, Dave Heath California 1964, Dave Heath Carl Dean Kipper Korea, Dave Heath Elevated in Brooklyn, Dave Heath Erin Freed New York City, Dave Heath Janine Pommy Vega, Dave Heath New York City (Young Couple Kissing), Dave Heath New York City 1958-59, Dave Heath New York City 1960, Dave Heath Philadelphia 1952, Dave Heath Sesco Corée, Dave Heath Untitled c. 1960, Dave Heath Washington Square New York City, Dave Heath Young Couple Kissing, Dave Heath: Dialogues with Solitudes, Dialogues with Solitudes, Elevated in Brooklyn, Erin Freed New York City, fine art photography, Harry Callahan, hope, image sequence, inner landscape, isolation and vulnerability, Janine Pommy Vega, LIFE Magazine, loss, love, multimedia slide presentations, narrative and image sequence, New York City (Young Couple Kissing), New York City 1958-59, New York City 1960, North American society, opposition to the Vietnam War, pain, Philadelphia 1952, photographers of the Chicago School, photographs of American life, poetic photography, post war North American society, psychological photography, Ralph Crane, Ralph Crane Bad Boy's Story, self and the crowd, self-portrait, sense of isolation and vulnerability, Sesco Corée, solitary photographic monologue, terrain of solitude, the community of mankind, the fragility of human connection, the photographers gallery, the worship of modern life, unobtrusive witness, urban landscape, W. Eugene Smith, Washington Square New York City, Young Couple Kissing

Exhibition dates: 8th March – 2nd June 2019

Dave Heath (Canadian born United States, 1931-2016)
California
1964
Gelatin silver print
© Dave Heath / Courtesy of Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York, and Stephen Bulger Gallery, Toronto

The master of what we see / visions of the self

In which the visions (ghosts?) in these haunting photographs live, breathe, and barely exist in a strange closed world. Where the subjects seem so vulnerable.

In which there is little sentimentality. The portraits emit a deep sense of melancholy in their re/pose, in the subjects temporal existence separated out from time. Heath photographs people as they are. He projects himself, not his ego, into this vision of vulnerable humanity.

In which this vision of truth illuminates the complex relationship between human nature and reality through emotional energy.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

“… the conundrum of the title is a reference about how to navigate the terrain of solitude one wishes to experience (to be alone), but also how to make that extend into a conversation with the subjects in front of you that will eventually become a single body of work for many to view (to be of more than one). This is of course conditional to your position within the world at large and how you view your presence within the greater universal ether. You must carry your solipsism like a rusty bucket of dirty brown well water. In Heath’s case, the solitary monologue and the ramble of the flaneur become something of a mantra – an incessant need to repeat, to be part of the cacophony of the worship of modern life in which the self and the crowd / city are forced to adjust to one another, but at safe distance with impassioned and yearning eyes.”

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Extract from Brad Feuerhelm. “David Heath: “Dialogues With Solitudes”,” on the ASX website November 23, 2018 [Online] Cited 26/05/2019

“”A Dialogue with Solitude” is a self-portrait in which the artist himself never really appears, but is revealed and interpreted by every detail. Its revolt is alive with sympathy and acceptance of man’s modern placement in the world, mated with contradictory realization and resistance which deny and combat the absurdities of existence. This is expressed with a sincere poetry which is never shocked out of countenance by reality.”

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Edwards, exh. label for A Dialogue of Solitude, 1963, on file in the Photography Department, Art Institute of Chicago quoted in Hugh Edwards. “Dave Heath,” on the Art Institute of Chicago website [Online] Cited 26/05/2019

The first major UK exhibition dedicated to the work of this hugely influential American photographer.

Predominantly self-taught, Heath was nonetheless extremely informed and versed in the craft, theory and history of photography and taught extensively throughout his life. Although greatly influenced by W. Eugene Smith and the photographers of the Chicago School, including Aaron Siskind and Harry Callahan, Heath cannot be neatly pigeonholed as either a documentary or experimental photographer. His work feels more at home within a narrative or poetic tradition, where an interior reality takes precedence.

Taking his masterwork and first publication, A Dialogue With Solitude, as a point of departure, this exhibition highlights Heath’s preoccupations with solitude and contemplation and further makes explicit the importance of sequencing in his practice. Heath was clear that “the central issue of my work is sequence” and held the belief that the relativity and rhythm of images offered a truer way of conveying a universal psychological state than a single image. He perfected a form of montage, often blending text and image to create visual poems, which captured the mood of the decade in a manner akin to a photographic protest song.

Heath’s photographs are shown in dialogue with cult American films from the 1960s similarly focused on themes of solitude and alienation. These include: Portrait of Jason by Shirley Clarke (1966); Salesman by Albert and David Maysles and Charlotte Mitchell Zwerin (1968); and The Savage Eye by Ben Maddow, Sidney Meyers and Joseph Strick (1960).

“The fact that I never had a family, a place or a story that defined me, inspired a need in me to join the community of mankind. I did so by inventing a poetic form linking this community, at least symbolically, in my imagination, through this form.” ~ Dave Heath

Curated by Diane Dufour, Director of LE BAL. Exhibition conceived by LE BAL with the support of Stephen Bulger Gallery (Toronto), Howard Greenberg Gallery (New York), Archive of Modern Conflict (London) and Les Films du Camélia (Paris).

Text from the Photographers’ Gallery website [Online] Cited 25/05/2019

Dave Heath (Canadian born United States, 1931-2016)
Sesco, Corée
1953-1954
Gelatin silver print
© Dave Heath / Courtesy of Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York, and Stephen Bulger Gallery, Toronto

Dave Heath (Canadian born United States, 1931-2016)
Carl Dean Kipper, Korea
1953-1954
Gelatin silver print
© Dave Heath / Courtesy of Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York, and Stephen Bulger Gallery, Toronto

Dave Heath (Canadian born United States, 1931-2016)
New York City
1958-1959
Gelatin silver print
© Dave Heath / Courtesy of Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York, and Stephen Bulger Gallery, Toronto

Dave Heath (Canadian born United States, 1931-2016)
Janine Pommy Vega, Seven Arts Coffee Gallery, New York
1959
Gelatin silver print
© Dave Heath / Courtesy of Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York, and Stephen Bulger Gallery, Toronto

Dave Heath (Canadian born United States, 1931-2016)
Washington Square, New York City
1960
Gelatin silver print
© Dave Heath / Courtesy of Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York, and Stephen Bulger Gallery, Toronto

Dave Heath (Canadian born United States, 1931-2016)
Erin Freed, New York City
1963
Gelatin silver print
© Dave Heath / Courtesy of Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York, and Stephen Bulger Gallery, Toronto

Dave Heath (Canadian born United States, 1931-2016)
New York City (Young Couple Kissing)
1962
Gelatin silver print
© Dave Heath / Courtesy of Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York, and Stephen Bulger Gallery, Toronto

Dave Heath (Canadian born United States, 1931-2016)
New York City
1960
Gelatin silver print
© Dave Heath / Courtesy of Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York, and Stephen Bulger Gallery, Toronto

The Photographers’ Gallery, in collaboration with LE BAL Paris, presents Dave Heath: Dialogues with Solitudes; the first major UK exhibition dedicated to the work of this hugely influential American photographer (b. 1931 USA, d. 2016 Canada).

Heath’s psychologically charged images both reflect and respond to the alienation particularly prevalent in post war North American society. He was one of the first of a new generation of artists seeking new ways to try and make sense of the increasing sense of isolation and vulnerability that typified the age. Predominantly self-taught, Heath was nonetheless extremely informed and versed in the craft, theory and history of photography and taught extensively throughout his life. Although greatly influenced by W. Eugene Smith and the photographers of the Chicago School, including Aaron Siskind and Harry Callahan, Heath cannot be neatly pigeonholed as either a documentary or experimental photographer. His work feels more at home within a narrative or poetic tradition, where an interior reality takes precedence.

Heath was born in Philadelphia in 1931 and had a turbulent childhood, abandoned by his parents at the age of four and consigned to a series of foster homes before being placed in an orphanage. He first became interested in photography as a teenager, and joined an amateur camera club. He was fascinated by the photo essays in Life Magazine and cites one in particular as having a decisive impact on his future. Bad Boy’s Story by Ralph Crane, charted the emotional landscape of a young orphan. Not only did Heath identify with the protagonist, he immediately recognised the power of photography as a means of self expression and as a way of connecting to others. In the following years he trained himself in the craft, taking courses in commercial art, working in a photo processing lab, and studying paintings at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. While stationed in Korea with the US Army, he began to photograph his fellow soldiers, eschewing the drama of the battlefield for quiet and private moments of subdued reflection.

On his return, Heath dedicated himself to photography, continuing his interest with capturing an “inner landscape” and training his lens on anonymous strangers whom he identified as similarly lost or fragile. Although he photographed in mostly public spaces, on the streets of Chicago and New York (where he moved to in 1957), his subjects seem detached from their physical context, shot in close-up, articulated by their isolation. His frames possess an intensity of concentration, showing single figures or close-knit couples entirely wrapped up in their own world. An occasional sidelong glance conveys a momentary awareness of being photographed, but for the most part Heath is an unobserved, unobtrusive witness. By concentrating on the fragility of human connection, focusing on the personal over the political, Heath gave ‘voice’ to those largely unheard and joined a growing community of artists searching for alternative forms of expression. His work was pivotal in depicting the fractured feeling of societal unease just prior to the rise of the civil rights movement and opposition to the Vietnam War and his ground-breaking approaches to narrative and image sequence, his exquisite printing techniques, handmade book maquettes, multimedia slide presentations culminated in his poetic masterwork, A Dialogue with Solitude, 1965. This sensitive exploration of loss, pain, love and hope reveals Heath as one the most original photographers of those decades.

After 1970, Dave Heath devoted much of his time to teaching (in particular at Ryerson University, Toronto) in Canada, where he later became a citizen. He died in 2016.

Press release from The Photographers’ Gallery website [Online] Cited 25/05/2019

Dave Heath (Canadian born United States, 1931-2016)
Philadelphia
1952
Gelatin silver print
© Dave Heath / Courtesy of Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York, and Stephen Bulger Gallery, Toronto

Dave Heath (Canadian born United States, 1931-2016)
Untitled
c. 1960
Gelatin silver print
© Dave Heath / Courtesy of Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York, and Stephen Bulger Gallery, Toronto

Dave Heath (Canadian born United States, 1931-2016)
Elevated in Brooklyn, New York City
1963
Gelatin silver print
© Dave Heath / Courtesy of Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York, and Stephen Bulger Gallery, Toronto

The Photographers’ Gallery
16-18 Ramillies Street
London
W1F 7LW

Opening hours:
Mon – Wed: 10.00 – 18.00
Thursday – Friday: 10.00 – 20.00
Satuday: 10.00 – 18.00
Sunday: 11.00 – 18.00

The Photographers’ Gallery website

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Sep

Exhibition: ‘Florence Henri. Compositions’ at the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich

By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leave a Comment

Categories: black and white photography, exhibition, gallery website, light, photographic series, photography, portrait, psychological, sculpture, space, surrealism and time
Tags: 1920s avant-garde photography, a way of looking at the world, Académie Moderne Paris, Amédée Ozenfant, artist questions reality, authentic self-being, avant-garde, avant-garde collage, avant-garde European photography, avant-garde photography, Bauhaus, Bauhaus in Dessau, composition in photography, construction of identity evidenced through photography, Constructivist pictorial concepts, Das Lichtbild, Edmund Collein, encompassing, existential philosophy, Existenz, Existenz the realm of authentic being, Fernand Léger, Film und Foto 1929, Florence Henri, Florence Henri A Bunch of Grapes, Florence Henri Abstract Composition, Florence Henri Abstract Composition 1928, Florence Henri Abstract Composition 1929, Florence Henri Abstract Composition 1932, Florence Henri Composition, Florence Henri Composition 1931, Florence Henri Composition 1932, Florence Henri Composition No 10, Florence Henri Little Boot, Florence Henri Little Boot 1931, Florence Henri Paris Window, Florence Henri Paris Window 1929, Florence Henri Parisian Window, Florence Henri Parisian Window 1929, Florence Henri Portrait, Florence Henri Portrait 1928, Florence Henri Rome, Florence Henri Self Portrait, Florence Henri Self Portrait 1928, Florence Henri Self-portrait in a mirror, Florence Henri Self-portrait in a mirror 1928, Florence Henri Still-life with Lemon and Pear, Florence Henri Still-life with Lemon and Pear c.1929, Florence Henri The Forum, Florence Henri The Forum 1934, Florence Henri Untitled USA, Florence Henri. Compositions, Florence Henri. Compositions Pinakothek der Moderne, Florence-Henri Still-Life Composition, Florence-Henri Still-Life Composition 1929, french artist, French Constructivist pictorial concepts, French fashion photography, French mirror abstration, French modernist photography, French photographer, French photography, French Surrealist photography, Georg Muche, Gino Gori, Hans Hofmann, i10, identity, Johann Walter-Kurau, Karl Jaspers, Karl Jaspers Existenz, László Moholy-Nagy, mirrors and their use in photography, Modernist Photography, performance of the self in photography, photo montage, photocollage, photographic collage, photomontage, pictorial collage, Pinakothek Der Moderne, portraiture, self-portrait, subjective existential activity of thought, surrealist photography, the horizon of our knowledge, the limitless horizon of reality, the realm of authentic being, Walter Funkat

Exhibition dates: 21st March – 14th September 2014

Florence Henri (French born USA, 1893-1982)
Composition
Nd

When I started experimenting with a camera in the early 80s, my first experiments were with mirrors, shoes, tripod legs, cotton buds and reflections of myself in mirrors (with bright orange hair). I still have the commercially printed colour photos from the chemist lab!

Henri’s sophisticated, avante-garde, sculptural compositions have an almost ‘being there’ presence: a structured awareness of a way of looking at the world, a world in which the artist questions reality. She confronts the borders of an empirical reality (captured by a machine, the camera) through collage and mirrors, in order to take a leap of faith towards some form of transcendence of the real. Here she confronts the limitless freedom of creativity, of composition, to go beyond objectivity and science, to experience Existenz (Jaspers) – the realm of authentic being.*

These photographs are her experience of being in the world, of Henri observing the breath of being – the breath of herself, the breath of the objects and a meditation on those objects. There is a stillness here, an eloquence of construction and observation that goes beyond the mortal life of the thing itself. That is how these photographs seem to me to live in the world. I may be completely wrong, I probably am completely wrong – but that is how these images feel to me: a view, a perspective, the artist as prospector searching for a new way of authentically living in the world.

I really like them.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

*For his own existential philosophy, [Karl] Jaspers’ aim was to indirectly outline the metaphysical features of human Existenz – which means, what it’s like to experience being human in our full freedom – and to encourage every individual to realise his or her own authentic self-being by a subjective existential activity of thought which isn’t objectively describable.

“Existence in one sense refers to the sum total of reality, and in another sense, the elusive characteristic of being which differentiates real things from fictional ones.7 For Jasper, Existence as it pertains to Being is called Encompassing. It is the form of our awareness of being which underlies all our scientific and common-sense knowledge and which is given expression in the myths and rituals of religion. This awareness is not that of an object, but reflection on the subjective situation of being. Thus existence is about reflection upon the horizon of life, accepting the limitless possibilities in reality and also accepting that even though we can enlarge the extent of our knowledge, we can never escape the fact that it is fragmentary and has a limit.

He says:

“By reflecting upon that course (the limitless horizon of reality) we ask about being itself, which always seems to recede from us, in the very manifestation of all the appearances we encounter. This being we call the encompassing. But the encompassing is not the horizon of our knowledge at any particular moment. Rather, it is the source from which all new horizons emerge, without itself ever being visible even as a horizon.9″”

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Jaspers Karl, Philosophy of Existence. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvanian Press, 1971), p. 18 quoted in Onyenuru Okechukwu. P. “The Theme of Existence in the Philosophy of Karl Jaspers,” No date, pp. 3-4 on the PhilPapers website [Online] Cited 16/06/2021.

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Thankx to the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich for allowing me to publish five of the photographs in the posting. The other images have all been sourced from the internet. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Florence Henri (French born USA, 1893-1982)
Composition
1931

Florence Henri (French born USA, 1893-1982)
Composition No 10
1928

Florence Henri (French born USA, 1893-1982)
Abstract Composition
1928
Stiftung Ann und Jürgen Wilde, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich

The photographs and photo-montages of Florence Henri (1893-1982) attest to her broad artistic education and an unusual openness for new currents in the art of the time.

The artist, who had studied the piano under Ferruccio Busoni in Rome and painting in Paris under Fernand Léger, in Berlin under Johann Walter-Kurau and in Munich under Hans Hofmann, spent a brief semester as a guest at the Bauhaus in Dessau in 1927. Although photography was not part of the curriculum at the Bauhaus at this time, lecturers such as László Moholy-Nagy and Georg Muche, as well as pupils including Walter Funkat and Edmund Collein experimented intensively with this medium. It was here that Florence Henri gained the inspiration to become a photographer herself.

That same year she returned to Paris, stopped painting and devoted herself thoroughly to photography. She created extensive series of still lifes and portrait and self-portrait compositions, in which the artist divided up the pictorial space using mirrors and reflective spheres, expanding it structurally. The fragmented images created this way point to the inspiration Florence Henri gained from Cubist and Constructivist pictorial concepts.

Through her experimental photography Florence Henri swiftly became a highly respected exponent of modern photography and participated in numerous international shows such as the trailblazing Werkbund exhibition ‘Film und Foto’ in 1929. After World War II, however, the artist no longer pursued her photographic interest with the same intensity as before, devoting herself instead almost exclusively to painting. This most certainly also contributed to her photographs largely falling into oblivion after 1945.

The emphasis in the exhibition Florence Henri. Compositions in the Pinakothek der Moderne has been placed on the artist’s compositions using mirrors and her photo-montages, It comprises some 65 photographs, including the portfolio published in 1974, as well as documents and historical publications from the holdings of the Ann and Jürgen Wilde Foundation. As such, Ann and Jürgen Wilde significantly contributed towards the rediscovery of this exceptional artist’s work. Her photographic oeuvre now has a permanent place within the art of the avant-garde.

Press release from the Pinakothek der Moderne website

Florence Henri (French born USA, 1893-1982)
Still-Life Composition
1929

Florence Henri (French born USA, 1893-1982)
Abstract Composition
1932

Florence Henri (French born USA, 1893-1982)
Still-life with Lemon and Pear
c.1929

Florence Henri (French born USA, 1893-1982)
Little Boot
1931

Florence Henri was born in New York on 28 June 1893; her father was French and her mother was German. Following her mother’s death in 1895, she and her father moved first to her mother’s family in Silesia; she later lived in Paris, Munich and Vienna and finally moved to the Isle of Wight in England in 1906. After her father’s death there three years later, Florence Henri lived in Rome with her aunt Anni and her husband, the Italian poet Gino Gori, who was in close touch with the Italian Futurists. She studied piano at the music conservatory in Rome.

During a visit to Berlin, Henri started to focus on painting, after meeting the art critic Carl Einstein and, through him, Herwarth Walden and other Berlin artists. In 1914, she enrolled at the Academy of Art in Berlin, and starting in 1922, trained in the studio of the painter Johannes Walter-Kurau. Before moving to Dessau, Henri studied painting with the Purists Fernand Léger and Amédée Ozenfant at the Académie Moderne in Paris. She arrived at the Bauhaus in Dessau in April 1927. She had already met the Bauhaus artists Georg Muche and László Moholy-Nagy and had developed a passion for Marcel Breuer’s tubular steel furniture. Up to July 1927, Henri attended the preliminary course directed by Moholy-Nagy, lived in the Hungarian artist’s house, and became a close friend of his first wife,Lucia Moholy, who encouraged her to take up photography. From the Moholy-Nagys, Henri learned the basic technical and visual principles of the medium, which she used in her initial photographic experiments after leaving Dessau. In early 1928, she abandoned painting altogether and from then on focused on photography, with which she established herself as a professional freelance photographer with her own studio in Paris – despite being self-taught.

Even during her first productive year as a photographer, László Moholy-Nagy published one of her unusual self-portraits, as well as a still life with balls, tyres, and a mirror, in i10. Internationale Revue. The first critical description of her photographic work, which Moholy-Nagy wrote to accompany the photos, recognises that her pictures represented an important expansion of the entire ‘problem of manual painting’, in which ‘reflections and spatial relationships, overlapping and penetrations are examined from a new perspectival angle’.

Mirrors become the most important feature in Henri’s first photographs. She used them both for most of her self-dramatisations and also for portraits of friends, as well as for commercial shots. She took part in the international exhibition entitled Das Lichtbild [The Photograph] in Munich in 1930, and the following year she presented her images of bobbins at a Foreign Advertising Photography exhibition in New York. The artistic quality of her photographs was compared with Man Ray, László Moholy-Nagy and Adolphe Baron de Mayer, as well as the with winner of the first prize at the exhibition, Herbert Bayer. Only three years after the new photographer had taken her first pictures, her self-portrait achieved the equal status with her male colleagues that she had been aiming for.

Up to the start of the Second World War, Henri established herself as a skilled photographer with her own photographic studio in Paris (starting in 1929). When the city was occupied by the Nazis, her photographic work declined noticeably. The photographic materials needed were difficult to obtain, and in any case Henri’s photographic style was forbidden under the Nazi occupation; she turned her attention again to painting. With only a few later exceptions, the peak of her unique photographic experiments and professional photographic work was in the period from 1927 to 1930.

Even in the 1950s, Henri’s photographs from the Thirties were being celebrated as icons of the avant-garde. Her photographic oeuvre was recognised during her lifetime in one-woman exhibitions and publications in various journals, including N-Z Wochenschau. She also produced photographs during this period, such as a series of pictures of the dancer Rosella Hightower. She died in Compiègne on 24 July 1982.

Text from the Florence Henri web page on the Bauhaus Online website [Online] Cited 06/07/2014. No longer available online

Florence Henri (French born USA, 1893-1982)
Parisian Window
1929

Florence Henri (French born USA, 1893-1982)
The Forum
1934

Florence Henri (French born USA, 1893-1982)
Rome
1933-1934

Florence Henri (French born USA, 1893-1982)
Abstract Composition
1929

Florence Henri (French born USA, 1893-1982)
Self-portrait in a mirror
1928

Florence Henri (French born USA, 1893-1982)
A Bunch of Grapes
c. 1934

Florence Henri (French born USA, 1893-1982)
Composition
1932
Stiftung Ann und Jürgen Wilde, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich

Florence Henri (French born USA, 1893-1982)
Untitled, USA
1940

Florence Henri (French born USA, 1893-1982)
Paris Window
1929
Stiftung Ann und Jürgen Wilde, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich

Florence Henri (French born USA, 1893-1982)
Portrait
1928
Stiftung Ann und Jürgen Wilde, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich

Florence Henri (French born USA, 1893-1982)
Self Portrait
1928
Stiftung Ann und Jürgen Wilde, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich

Pinakothek der Moderne
Barer Strasse 40
Munich

Opening hours:
Daily except Monday 10am – 6pm
Thursday 10am – 8pm

Pinakothek der Moderne website

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Jan

Exhibition: ‘Yasumasa Morimura: Theater of the Self’ at The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leave a Comment

Exhibition dates: 6th October 2013 – 12th January 2014

Yasumasa Morimura (Japanese, b. 1951)
To My Little Sister: for Cindy Sherman
1998
Ilfochrome print mounted on aluminium
55 x 31 inches
Private Collection, New York

Cindy Sherman, eat your actress out…

A fascinating, erudite analysis of the difference between Edouard Manet’s Olympia and Yasumasa Morimura’s Futago can be found on the seemingly anonymous Hoegen: Thoughts About Gender, Sex And Sexuality web page (excerpt below). If you can find an author’s name it would be appreciated!

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

Yasumasa Morimura (Japanese, b. 1951)
Portrait (Futago)
1988
Colour photograph
82 3/4 x 118 inches
Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; A.W. Mellon Acquisition Endowment Fund, 92.108

In Anne D’Alleva’s article concerning reception theory, she draws upon several scholars of art and literature to discuss the importance of not only the artist, but also of the viewer. She discusses the symbiotic relationship that must exist and the merits of the ideal viewer. The two artworks that she mentions to support her arguments are Edouard Manet’s Olympia and Ysumasa Morimura’s Futago. These two artworks are prime examples of works that establish an ideal viewer, or viewers, as well as a mirror stage. These two theories assist the art historian to go beyond the biography of the artist and question the relationship of the image and it’s audience.

Just as Wolfgang Iser believes there is an implied reader for literature, one must believe that there is an implied viewer of Edouard Manet’s Olympia and a different implied viewer for Yasumasa Morimura’s Futago (114). In the case of Manet’s Olympia, one might believe the ideal implied viewer is a white and wealthy man of the upper class. This ideal viewer would appreciate, or maybe question, the bold gaze of Olympia, and possibly even recognize her as the popular courtesan (116)…

The ideal viewer for Morimura’s photograph is not as easy to define. One might make the presumption that Morimura desires the same ideal viewer of Manet, so that they can simply see the work differently. Also, one could assume that he intended his painting to be viewed by Asian, upper class homosexuals who have seen Manet’s Olymia and want to connect on a more personal level. Either of these audiences may be ideal.

According to Ernest Kris, art “requires the participation of both artist and spectator.” (110) Therefore, there must be something that establishes a relationship of the ideal viewer and the photograph of Yasumasa Morimura. Since it is a photograph, and not a painting, there is a humanistic connection that is not present in Manet’s Olympia that ultimately assists the creation of an image-audience relationship. The gaze is not a representation of a gaze but the actual gaze of Morimura establishing a deeper relationship with the ideal viewer of the artist and subject. Since the ideal audience is harder to define for Morimura’s photograph, the establishing element of the relationship between the ideal viewer and the artwork are also hard to define. If the ideal viewer is exactly that of Manet’s: a white, wealthy, upper-class man, then the “shock factor” of the image is multiplied. The ideal viewer has just begun to accept this shocking image of a nude female daring to look at her viewer when Morimura decided to change the race, gender, and possibly the sexual orientation of the subject of the artwork. This assumption, however, provides that the viewer come with “pre-understanding” as described by Roman Ingarden (113); in this case, a memory of Manet’s Olympia. If one assumes that this image is meant for the common man, this relationship is established through the use of photography, the universal and common way to capture images. If one assumes the connection between the inclusive group of Asian, male, homosexuals, then the establishment of the relationship is directly associated with the subject and artist…

The reception theory of Ernest Gombrich states the importance of perception is clearly prevalent within these works (113). The artists have taken their own interpretations of these works, but one must value the fact that their ideal viewers can be similar and have similar perceptions. The differences of their individual perceptions provide for the differences between their viewers. However, the perception of the viewer, whether ideal or not, is the ultimate reflection of the artwork in the culture.

Clearly, the mirror stage is present in these two images. The viewer does not seem to view their self in the artwork directly, but they do feel a connection to the work. Morimura most definitely used Manet’s Olympia as a basis image for his Futago. Although some details are incongruous, the overall effect of Futago is a mirrored image of the whole self of Olympia. There are several differences in these paintings that one may attribute to race and gender that affect the dynamics of the mirror effect. Most obviously, Morimura, who was his own subject in his photographic rendition of Manet’s Olympia, is a man. This affects the mirror image of the body. He is leaner, has no curves and is more muscular. Also, his race affects skin color as well as the some of the details of the picture. He has clearly chosen a kimono to replace the intricate shawl, and a seated, waving cat to replace standing one – both of these depictions have significance in Asian culture (116). Cultural implications are evident.

Overall, these two images reflect Anne D’Avelia’s idea that that two similar artworks can have two different implied viewers. Also, they can mirror each other in certain respects, but diverge in others. These help reinforce D’Avelia notes that gender, expression, details, and race, all play roles in developing the image-audience relationship. They also reflect our class work exploring the troubling of gender norms and the gaze.

Anonymous. “Olympia vs. Futago,” in the article ‘Hoegen: Thoughts about Gender, Sex and Sexuality’ on the Fairfield University website [Online] Cited 19/01/2021

Yasumasa Morimura (Japanese, b. 1951)
Doublonnage (Marcel)
1988
Colour photograph
59 x 47 1/4 inches
Private Collection, New York

Art History

Yasumasa Morimura’s reprisals of European masterpieces are, at once, acts of homage and parody. Painstakingly realised, his photographic reconstructions of paintings by Leonardo da Vinci, Johannes Vermeer, Rembrandt van Rijn and Edouard Manet, among others, bring compositional questions together with those pertaining to race, gender and sexuality. In doing so, they reveal both the aesthetics and the politics embedded in the art historical canon.

Actresses

This section of the exhibition focuses on Morimura’s restaging of scenes from award winning films featuring Marlene Dietrich, Audrey Hepburn, Liza Minnelli, Jodie Foster and many others. It is notable that the artist’s impersonations are not anonymous but well-known stars, archetypes of Hollywood’s leading ladies. As stated in their titles, each work is a self-portrait and together they propose a range of possibilities for the artist’s own identity. Morimura has stated, “My own self-definition includes this entire zone of possibilities. When I apply this way of thinking to making a self-portrait, it becomes what I call an ‘open self-portrait.’

Yasumasa Morimura (Japanese, b. 1951)
M’s Self-portrait No.15
1995
Gelatin silver print
18 1/2 x 21 1/4 inches (framed)
Collection of the artist, on deposit at the Toyota Municipal Museum of Art

Yasumasa Morimura (Japanese, b. 1951)
Self-portrait (Actress)/after Elizabeth Taylor 1
1996
Ilfochrome print mounted to plexiglass
47 1/4 x 37 1/4 inches
Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York

Yasumasa Morimura (Japanese, b. 1951)
M’s self-portrait No. 56/B 9 (or “as Marilyn Monroe”)
1996
Gelatin silver print
Edition 6 of 10
11 3/4 x 14 inches

For more than three decades Japanese artist Yasumasa Morimura has forged an extraordinary body of work that reimagines the visual culture of the West, as well as that of his native Japan. Whether portraying Elizabeth Taylor, Mao Zedong or Andy Warhol, Morimura’s iconic images examine the practice of photography while also claiming a space for the self in historical narratives. The artist inserts himself as the subject(s) in all of his works. The exhibition, Yasumasa Morimura: Theater of the Self, is a retrospective of Morimura’s 30 year career covering his fascination with the self-portrait, celebrity, gay and transgendered life, art history, and popular culture align him closely with the work of Andy Warhol. Morimura has described himself as Warhol’s “conceptual son.”

Developed in close collaboration with the artist, the exhibition focuses on three important bodies of work: his celebrated “Art History” photographs in which he painstakingly restages European masterpieces; “Requiem” in which Morimura recreates iconic photographs relating to political and cultural life; and the “Actors” series in which he assumes the personae of Hollywood luminaries such as Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley and Audrey Hepburn.

Milton Fine Curator of Art, Nicholas Chambers states, “Including almost 100 images, many of which have never before been seen in the United States, Theater of the Self offers audiences an in-depth view of Morimura’s work. His pictures reveal a sophisticated form of engagement with the worlds of celebrity, art and the mass media that is at once celebration and critique, homage and parody, and has the effect of questioning the nature of the individual’s relationship to culture-at-large.””

Press release from The Warhol website

Requiem

The artworks comprising the Requiem Series are derived from photographic sources and depict prominent masculine figures in moments of triumph or transition. Substituting himself for ideologues, dictators and creative thinkers, Morimura reflects on what these figures represent for the broader culture and on the role of photography in celebrating, demonising or memorialising them.

Yasumasa Morimura (Japanese, b. 1951)
A Requiem: Vietnam War 1968-1991
1991-2006
Gelatin silver print

Yasumasa Morimura (Japanese, b. 1951)
A Requiem: Theater of Creativity / Andy Warhol in Motion
2010
Digital video, black and white, silent, 3:58 minutes
Collection of the artist

Yasumasa Morimura (Japanese, b. 1951)
A Requiem: Mishima 1970
2006
Digital video, colour, sound, 7:42 minutes
Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York

Yasumasa Morimura (Japanese, b. 1951)
A Requiem: Red Dream / Mao
2007
C- print mounted on alpolic
59 x 47 1/4 inches
Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York

Yasumasa Morimura (Japanese, b. 1951)
A Requiem: Oswald, 1963
2006
Gelatin silver print
Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York

The Andy Warhol Museum
117 Sandusky Street
Pittsburgh, PA 15212-5890
Phone: 412.237.8300

Opening hours:
Wednesday – Monday 10am – 5pm
Tuesday closed

The Andy Warhol Museum website

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Nov

Exhibition: ‘Lee Friedlander – America by Car’ at Foam, Amsterdam

By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leave a Comment

Categories: American, american photographers, beauty, black and white photography, digital photography, documentary photography, exhibition, existence, gallery website, intimacy, landscape, light, memory, New York, photographic series, photography, portrait, psychological, reality, Robert Frank, space, street photography, surrealism and time
Tags: amateur photography, America and the automobile, America by Car, american artist, American identity, American landscape, american photographer, American photography, American road photography, American street photography, american suburban life, American travel, automobiles, Bettina Katz Cleveland Ohio, cars, cars as illusion factories, cinematic trickery, Denali National Park Alaska, ed ruscha, Eugene Atget, Foam, Harper's Bazaar, John Szarkowski, Lee Friedlander Alaska 2007, Lee Friedlander America by Car, Lee Friedlander Bettina Katz Cleveland Ohio, Lee Friedlander California 2008, Lee Friedlander Cleveland Ohio 2009, Lee Friedlander Denali National Park Alaska, Lee Friedlander Houston Texas 2006, Lee Friedlander Montana 2008, Lee Friedlander Nebraska 1999, Lee Friedlander self-portrait, Lee Friedlander Texas 2006, Lee Friedlander The New Cars, LIVE IN RELATIONSHIP ARE LIKE RENTAL CARS NO COMMITMENT, looking in looking out, looking in: robert franks 'the americans', ME RY RISTMAS, MoMA curator John Szarkowski, Mop's Reaching the Hurting Ministry in Mississippi, New Documents exhibition, New Documents MoMA, Objects in the mirror are closer than they appear, Richard Benson, Robert Frank, Robert Frank The Americans, self-portrait, surveillance technology, the americans, The New Cars, The New Cars 1964, Twentysix Gasoline Stations, typology, urban streetscape, Walker Evans, Walker Evans and Eugène Atget

Exhibition dates: 13th September – 11th December 2013

Lee Friedlander (American, b. 1934)
Bettina Katz, Cleveland, Ohio
2009
From the series America by Car, 1995-2009
Gelatin silver print
15 × 15 in. (38.1 × 38.1cm)
Collection of the artist; courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
© Lee Friedlander, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

“I’m not trying to do something to you, I’m trying to do something with you.”

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American pianist and composer Keith Jarrett at a concert in Melbourne, 1970s

LEE FRIEDLANDER IS ONE OF THE GREATEST PHOTOGRAPHERS THAT HAS EVER LIVED.

The vision of this man is incredible. His complex, classical photographs in such books as Letters from the People (1993), Flowers and Trees (1981), The American Monument (1976) and America by Car (2010) have redefined the (photographic) landscape. The artist is constantly reinventing himself, reinventing pictorial space – cutting, distorting, reflecting it back onto itself – to create layered images (after Eugène Atget and Walker Evans). These self-reflective spaces are as much about the artist and his nature as they are about the world in which he lives. They have become the basis of Friedlander’s visual language. Here is a love of the medium and of the world that is a reflection of Self.

I don’t see these cars (or photographs) as illusion factories. For me, this series of work is akin to a tri-view self-portrait. Instead of the artist painting the sitter (as in the triple portrait of Cardinal Richelieu, 1627 below), a vision, an energy of Self emanates outwards from behind the bulwark of the car steering wheel and dash. It is a Self and its relationship to the world split into multifaceted angles and views. He looks out the left window, the front window, the side window – and then he splits his views between side and front windows using the A pillar of the car as a dividing, framing tool. Sometimes he throws in the reflections of him / self with camera in the rear view mirror for good measure. There is wit, humour and irony in these photographs. There is cinematic panorama and moments of intimacy. There is greatness in these images.

Friedlander is not trying to do something to you, but something with you, for he is showing you something that you inherently know but may not be aware of. Like a Zen master, he asks you questions but also shows you the way. If you understand the path of life and the energy of the cosmos, you understand what a journey this is.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

Philippe de Champaigne (French, 1602-1674)
Triple portrait of Cardinal Richelieu
c. 1640
Oil on canvas
58cm (22.8 in) x 72cm (28.3 in)
The National Gallery, London
This reproduction is in the public domain

Lee Friedlander: America by Car

Published by D.A.P./Fraenkel

Lee Friedlander (American, b. 1934)
Houston, Texas
2006
From the series America by Car, 1995-2009
Gelatin silver print
15 × 15 in. (38.1 × 38.1cm)
Collection of the artist; courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
© Lee Friedlander, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Lee Friedlander (American, b. 1934)
Denali National Park, Alaska
2007
From the series America by Car, 1995-2009
Gelatin silver print
15 × 15 in. (38.1 × 38.1cm)
Collection of the artist; courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
© Lee Friedlander, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Lee Friedlander (American, b. 1934)
Nebraska
1999
From the series America by Car, 1995-2009
Gelatin silver print
15 × 15 in. (38.1 × 38.1cm)
Collection of the artist; courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
© Lee Friedlander, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

The automobile has come to symbolise the American dream and the associated urge for freedom. It is therefore no surprise that cars play a central role in the series America by Car and The New Cars 1964 by renowned American photographer Lee Friedlander (1934, US), now receiving their first showing in the Netherlands.

Road Trip 

America by Car documents Friedlander’s countless wanderings around the United States over the past decade. In this he follows a trail laid down by numerous photographers, film makers and writers like Robert Frank, Stephen Shore and Jack Kerouac. Friedlander nevertheless succeeds in giving the theme of the American road trip his own very original twist, using the cars’ windscreens and dashboards to frame the familiar American landscape, as well as exploiting the reflections found in their wing and rear view mirrors. It is a simple starting point which results in complex and layered images that are typical for Friedlander’s visual language. He also has a sharp eye for the ironic detail. He makes free use of text on billboards and symbols on store signs to add further meaning to his work. His images are so layered that new information continues to surface with every glance, making America by Car a unique evocation of contemporary America.

Car portraits 

The New Cars 1964 is a much older series. Friedlander had been commissioned by Harper’s Bazaar to photograph all the new models of automobile introduced in 1964. Rather than placing them centrally and showing them to best advantage, Friedlander decided to set the cars in the most banal of locations, in front of a furniture store or in a scrap yard for instance. Exploiting reflections, available light and unusual perspectives, his cars are almost completely absorbed into the street scene. Although they were rejected at the time by the magazine’s editorial board on the grounds that the images were not attractive enough, the pictures were put away in a drawer and since forgotten. Friedlander however recently rediscovered this series. The New Cars 1964 has since become a special historical and social document and has in its own right become part of Friedlander’s impressive oeuvre.

Fifty-year career

Lee Friedlander was born in the US in 1934. In a career extending across 5 decades Friedlander has maintained an obsessive focus on the portrayal of the American social landscape. His breakthrough in the eyes of the wider public came with the New Documents exhibition at the MoMA in 1967, where his work was presented alongside that of Diane Arbus and Garry Winogrand. Friedlander accumulated numerous awards during his career, including the MacArthur Foundation Award and three Guggenheim Fellowships. He also published more than twenty books. His work has been shown at many venues around the world, including the Whitney Museum of American Art and the MoMA in New York, San Francisco’s SFMOMA, the MAMM in Moscow and the National Museum of Photography in Copenhagen.

Press release from the FOAM website

Lee Friedlander (American, b. 1934)
Cleveland, Ohio
2009
From the series America by Car, 1995-2009
Gelatin silver print
15 × 15 in. (38.1 × 38.1cm)
Collection of the artist; courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
© Lee Friedlander, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Lee Friedlander (American, b. 1934)
Montana
2008
From the series America by Car, 1995-2009
Gelatin silver print
15 × 15 in. (38.1 × 38.1cm)
Collection of the artist; courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
© Lee Friedlander, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Mr. Friedlander took his black-and-white, square-format photographs entirely from the interior of standard rental cars – late-model Toyotas and Chevys, by the looks of them – on various road trips over the past 15 years. In these pictures our vast, diverse country is buffered by molded plastic dashboards and miniaturized in side-view mirrors…

Mr. Friedlander groups images by subject, not geography: monuments, churches, houses, factories, ice cream shops, plastic Santas, roadside memorials.

So “America by Car,”… is more of an exercise in typology, along the lines of Ed Ruscha’s “Twentysix Gasoline Stations.” But there’s nothing deadpan or straightforward about the way Mr. Friedlander composes his pictures. He knows that cars are essentially illusion factories – to wit: “Objects in the mirror are closer than they appear.”

Some of the illusions on view here exploit the technology of the camera Mr. Friedlander has been using since the 1990s, the square-format Hasselblad Superwide (so named for its extra-wide-angle lens). The Superwide produces crisp and detail-packed images that are slightly exaggerated in perspective, giving the foreground – the car – a heightened immediacy…

Some of the photographs are dizzyingly complex, like one taken in Pennsylvania in 2007. The camera looks out through the passenger-side window, at a man whose feet appear to be perched on the door frame. He is standing in front of a trompe l’oeil mural of a train, which seems to be heading right at the car. In the side-view mirror you can see a woman approaching. It’s a bizarre pileup of early cinematic trickery (as in the Lumière Brothers), amateur photography and surveillance technology.

Mr. Friedlander’s love of such layering can be traced to Walker Evans and Eugène Atget. He also shares, in this series, Evans’s wry eye for signs of all kinds: the matter-of-fact “Bar” advertising a Montana watering hole, or the slightly more cryptic “ME RY RISTMAS” outside a service station in Texas [see image below]. He strikes semiotic gold at Mop’s Reaching the Hurting Ministry in Mississippi: “LIVE IN RELATIONSHIP ARE LIKE RENTAL CARS NO COMMITMENT.”

Cars distance people from one another, this series reminds us over and over. When Mr. Friedlander photographs people he knows – the photographer Richard Benson, or the legendary MoMA curator John Szarkowski (to whom the book is dedicated) – he remains in his seat, shooting through an open window. In just a few instances the subjects poke their heads inside, a gesture that seems transgressive in its intimacy…

Did he ever get out of the vehicle? Just once in this series, for a self-portrait. It’s the last picture, and it shows him leaning into the driver’s-side window, elbow propped on the door, left hand reaching for the steering wheel.

Maybe he was thinking of the last image in “The Americans” – a shot of Mr. Frank’s used Ford taken from the roadside, showing his wife and son huddled in the back seat. In Mr. Frank’s photograph the car is a protective cocoon. Mr. Friedlander seems to see it that way too, but from the inside out.

Excerpts of an excellent review of “America by Car” by Karen Rosenberg published on The New York Times website on September 2, 2010.

Lee Friedlander (American, b. 1934)
Alaska
2007
From the series America by Car, 1995-2009
Gelatin silver print
15 × 15 in. (38.1 × 38.1cm)
Collection of the artist; courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
© Lee Friedlander, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Lee Friedlander (American, b. 1934)
California
2008
From the series America by Car, 1995-2009
Gelatin silver print
15 × 15 in. (38.1 × 38.1cm)
Collection of the artist; courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
© Lee Friedlander, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Lee Friedlander (American, b. 1934)
Texas
2006
From the series America by Car, 1995-2009
Gelatin silver print
15 × 15 in. (38.1 × 38.1cm)
Collection of the artist; courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
© Lee Friedlander, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Foam
Keizersgracht 609
1017 DS Amsterdam
The Netherlands
Phone: + 31 20 5516500

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Dec

Exhibition: ‘The Serial Portrait: Photography and Identity in the Last One Hundred Years’ at the National Gallery of Art, Washington

By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leave a Comment

Categories: American, american photographers, beauty, black and white photography, colour photography, digital photography, documentary photography, English artist, exhibition, gallery website, Gerhard Richter, intimacy, landscape, light, memory, photographic series, photography, portrait, psychological, reality, Sally Mann, space and time
Tags: Alfred Stieglitz, Alfred Stieglitz Georgia O'Keeffe, Alfred Stieglitz Georgia O'Keeffe - Hands and Thimble, Alfred Stieglitz Georgia O'Keeffe 1918, Alfred Stieglitz Georgia O'Keeffe 1930, American art, American artists, American conceptual photography, American fine art photography, American identity, american photographer, American photographers, American portrait photography, American Portraiture, Ann Hamilton, Ann Hamilton body object series #13, Ann Hamilton body object series #14, Bernd and Hilla Becher, body object series, body object series #13, body object series #14, Danville, Edith and Moth Flight, Edith Danville Virginia, Emmet Gowin, Emmet Gowin Edith, Emmet Gowin Edith 1963, Emmet Gowin Edith 1971, Emmet Gowin Edith and Moth Flight, Francesca Woodman, Francesca Woodman House #3, Francesca Woodman Untitled Providence Rhode Island, Georgia O'Keeffe, Georgia O'Keeffe - Hands and Thimble, Gillian Wearing, Gillian Wearing Me as Mapplethorpe, Haverstraw New York, House #3 Providence Rhode Island, identity, Ilse Bing, Ilse Bing Self portrait with Leica, Lee Friedlander, Lee Friedlander Haverstraw New York, Lee Friedlander Westport Connecticut, love and desire, national gallery of art, Nicholas Nixon, Nicholas Nixon The Brown Sisters, Nixon The Brown Sisters, Nixon The Brown Sisters 1975, Nixon The Brown Sisters 1978, Paul Strand Rebecca, Paul Strand Rebecca 1922, Paul Strand Rebecca 1932, Paul Strand Rebecca New Mexico, performance and self-portraiture, photography, Photography and Identity, Photography and Identity in the Last One Hundred Years, Robert Mapplethorpe Self Portrait 1988, sally mann children, Self portrait with Leica, self-portrait, self-portraits, self-portraits and identity, self-portraiture, self-transformation, serial photography, serial portrait, serial portraits, The Brown Sisters 1975, The Brown Sisters 1978, the portrait, The Serial Portrait, The Serial Portrait: Photography and Identity in the Last One Hundred Years, Virginia, william wegman dogs

Exhibition dates: 30th September 2012 – 31st December 2012

Emmet Gowin (American, b. 1941)
Edith, Danville, Virginia
1971
Gelatin silver print
20.2 x 25.2cm (7 15/16 x 9 15/16 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Patrons’ Permanent Fund
© Emmet and Edith Gowin, Courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York

Alfred Stieglitz / Georgia O’Keeffe
Paul Strand / Rebecca Strand
Emmet Gowin / Edith Gowin
Harry Callahan / Eleanor and Barbara Callahan
Robert Mapplethorpe / Patti Smith
Nicholas Nixon / The Brown Sisters
Andy Warhol / Serial Photography / Photo Booth Portraits
Mario Testino / Kate Moss
Baron Adolf de Meyer / Baroness Olga de Meyer
Edward Weston / Charis Weston
Lee Friedlander / Maria Friedlander
Paul Caponigro / The woods of Connecticut
Bernd and Hilla Becher / grids
Gerhard Richter / Overpainted Photographs
Masahisa Fukase / wife and family
Seiichi Furuya / Christine Furuya-Gößler
Sally Mann / children and husband
William Wegman / dogs

.
Australia?
Nobody that I can think of except Sue Ford.

Notice how all the artists are men except two: Sally Mann and Hilla Becher.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

Emmet Gowin (American, b. 1941)
Edith, Danville, Virginia
1963
Gelatin silver print, printed 1980s
19.7 x 12.7cm (7 3/4 x 5 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Charina Endowment Fund
© Emmet and Edith Gowin, Courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York

Emmet Gowin (American, b. 1941)
Edith and Moth Flight
2002
Digital ink jet print
19 x 19cm (7 1/2 x 7 1/2 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Charina Endowment Fund
© Emmet and Edith Gowin, Courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York

Francesca Woodman (American, 1958-1981)
House #3, Providence, Rhode Island
1976
Gelatin silver print
16.1 x 16.3cm (6 5/16 x 6 7/16 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of the Heather and Tony Podesta Collection

Francesca Woodman (American, 1958-1981)
Untitled, Providence, Rhode Island
1975-1978
Gelatin silver print
10.5 x 10.5cm (4 1/8 x 4 1/8 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of the Collectors
Committee and R. K. Mellon Family Foundation

Ann Hamilton (American, b. 1956)
body object series #13, toothpick suit/chair
1984
Gelatin silver print, printed 1993
11 x 11cm (4 5/16 x 4 5/16 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington,Gift of Heather and Tony Podesta Collection

Ann Hamilton (American, b. 1956)
body object series #14, megaphone
1986
Gelatin silver print, printed 1993
11 x 11cm (4 5/16 x 4 5/16 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington,Gift of Heather and Tony Podesta Collection

The National Gallery of Art explores how the practice of making multiple portraits of the same subjects produced some of the most revealing and provocative photographs of our time in The Serial Portrait: Photography and Identity in the Last One Hundred Years, on view in the West Building’s Ground Floor photography galleries from September 30 through December 31, 2012. Arranged both chronologically and thematically, the exhibition features 153 works by 20 artists who photographed the same subjects – friends, family, and themselves – numerous times over days, months, or years to create compelling portrait studies that investigate the many facets of personal and social identity.

“The Gallery’s photography collection essentially began with the donation of Alfred Stieglitz’s ‘key set,’ so it is fitting that this exhibition opens with portraits by Stieglitz, who understood that a person’s character was best captured through a series of photographs taken over time,” said Earl A. Powell III, director, National Gallery of Art. “Although the exhibition is drawn largely from the Gallery’s significant collection of photographs, we are grateful to the lenders who have allowed us to present more fully the serial form of portraiture that Stieglitz championed.”

Since the introduction of photography in 1839, portraiture has been one of the most widely practiced forms of the medium. Starting in the early 20th century, however, some photographers began to question whether one image alone could adequately capture the complexity of an individual. As Alfred Stieglitz, the era’s leading champion of American fine art photography, argued: “to demand the [single] portrait that will be a complete portrait of any person is as futile as to demand that a motion picture will be condensed into a single still.”

Along with Stieglitz, some of the 20th century’s most prominent photographers – Paul Strand, Harry Callahan, and Emmet Gowin – used the camera serially to transcend the limits of a single image. Each of these photographers made numerous studies of their lovers that sought to redefine the expressive possibilities of portraiture while probing the affective bonds of love and desire. By employing the camera’s capacity to record fluctuating states of being and mark the passage of time, other photographers such as Nicholas Nixon and Milton Rogovin have documented individuals – in families or communities – over four decades. Capturing subtle and dramatic shifts in appearance, demeanour, and situation, these series are poignant and elegiac memorials that remind us of our own mortality.

Other photographers have made serial self-portraits that explore the malleability of personal identity and the possibility of reinvention afforded by the camera. By photographing themselves as shadows, blurs, or partial reflections, Ilse Bing, Lee Friedlander, and Francesca Woodman have created inventive but elusive images that hint at the instability of self-representation. Conceptual artists of the 1970s and 1980s such as Vito Acconci, Blythe Bohnen, and Ann Hamilton have explicitly combined performance and self-portraiture to stage continual self-transformations. The exhibition concludes with work from the last 15 years by artists such as Nikki S. Lee and Gillian Wearing, who take the performance of self to its limits by adopting masquerades to delve into the ways identity is inferred from external appearance.

Press release from the National Gallery of Art website

Lee Friedlander (American, b. 1934)
Haverstraw, New York
1966
Gelatin silver print
21.7 x 32.7cm (8 9/16 x 12 7/8 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Trellis Fund
© Lee Friedlander, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery

Lee Friedlander (American, b. 1934)
Westport, Connecticut
1968
Gelatin silver print
19.8 x 12.3cm (7 13/16 x 4 13/16 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Trellis Fund
© Lee Friedlander, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery

Ilse Bing (German, 1899-1998)
Self-Portrait with Leica
1931
Gelatin silver print, printed c. 1988
26.7 x 29.7cm (10 1/2 x 11 11/16 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Ilse Bing Wolff

Gillian Wearing (English, b. 1963)
Me as Mapplethorpe
2009
Gelatin silver print (based upon Robert Mapplethorpe work: Self Portrait, 1988. © Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation)
149.86 x 121.92cm (59 x 48 in.)
Private Collection
Courtesy the artist; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York; Maureen Paley, London, Regen Projects, Los Angeles

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Rebecca
1922
Platinum print
24.4 x 19.4cm (9 5/8 x 7 5/8 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Southwestern Bell Corporation Paul Strand Collection
© Aperture Foundation Inc., Paul Strand Archive

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Rebecca, New Mexico
1932
Platinum print
14.9 x 11.8cm (5 7/8 x 4 5/8 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Southwestern Bell Corporation Paul Strand Collection
© Aperture Foundation Inc., Paul Strand Archive

Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946)
Georgia O’Keeffe
probably 1918
Platinum print
18.4 x 23.1cm (7 1/4 x 9 1/8 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred Stieglitz Collection

Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946)
Georgia O’Keeffe – Hands and Thimble
1919
Palladium print
24 x 19.4cm (9 7/16 x 7 5/8 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred Stieglitz Collection

Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946)
Georgia O’Keeffe
1930
Gelatin silver print
23.9 x 19.1cm (9 7/16 x 7 1/2 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred Stieglitz Collection

Nicholas Nixon (American, b. 1947)
The Brown Sisters
1975
Gelatin silver print
20.2 x 25.2cm (7 15/16 x 9 15/16 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Patrons’ Permanent Fund
© Nicholas Nixon, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco and Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York

Nicholas Nixon (American, b. 1947)
The Brown Sisters
1978
Gelatin silver print
Promised gift of James and Margie Krebs
© Nicholas Nixon, courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

For more images from this series please see my posting Nicholas Nixon: Family Album

National Gallery of Art
National Mall between 3rd and 7th Streets
Constitution Avenue NW, Washington

Opening hours:
Daily 11.00am – 4.00pm

National Gallery of Art website

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Nov

Marcus Bunyan black and white archive: Circumnavigation, 1992-1994

By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leave a Comment

Categories: black and white photography, existence, intimacy, light, Marcus Bunyan, Marcus Bunyan black and white archive, Melbourne, memory, photographic series, photography, portrait, space and time
Tags: analogue silver gelatin photography, Australian art, Australian black and white photography, Australian fine art photography, Australian photographer, Australian photography, black and white photography, Circumnavigation of the blood, Circumnavigation of the blood is always Circumnavigation of the world, cum), fine art photography, Frederick Sommer, hands, japanese haiku, Madonna and child skull, male body, male nude, male portrait, Marcus Bunyan, Marcus Bunyan artist, Marcus Bunyan black and white archive, Marcus Bunyan Circumnavigation, Marcus Bunyan Circumnavigation of the blood is always Circumnavigation of the world, Marcus Bunyan Doll on chair, Marcus Bunyan Jesus Mary and Joseph, Marcus Bunyan Madonna and child skull, Marcus Bunyan Marcus holding his cock, Marcus Bunyan Paul on the balcony, Marcus Bunyan Paul on the balcony Mcilwrick Street Windsor, Marcus Bunyan Paul resting, Marcus Bunyan Paul Windsor and the city, Marcus Bunyan People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stars, Marcus Bunyan photographer, Marcus Bunyan Post with finial, Marcus Bunyan Release, Marcus Bunyan Release (cock, Marcus Bunyan Self portrait with punk jacket and flanny, Marcus holding his cock, medium format camera, medium format photography, Paul on the balcony Mcilwrick Street Windsor, Paul Windsor and the city, People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stars, photographs of the male body, Release (cock, Self portrait with punk jacket and flanny, self-portrait, sexual nudity, silver gelatin photograph, Windsor Victoria

November 2012

*PLEASE NOTE THIS POSTING CONTAINS ART PHOTOGRAPHS OF MALE SEXUAL NUDITY- IF YOU DO NOT LIKE PLEASE DO NOT LOOK, FAIR WARNING HAS BEEN GIVEN*

The titles from this period tend to be poetic, pragmatic or composed, like Japanese haiku. The photographs are a mixture of personal narrative and universal archetype, hence the affinity to Frederick Sommer’s incantation: Circumnavigation of the blood is always Circumnavigation of the world.

I am scanning my negatives made during the years 1991-1997 to preserve them in the form of an online archive as a process of active memory, so that the images are not lost forever. These photographs were images of my life and imagination at the time of their making, the ideas I was thinking about and the people and things that surrounded me.

All images © Marcus Bunyan. Please click the photographs for a larger version of the image; remember these are just straight scans of the negatives !

Photographs are available from this series for purchase. As a guide, a vintage 8″ x 10″ silver gelatin print costs $700 plus tracked and insured shipping. For more information please see my Store web page.

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Doll on chair
1992-1994
Silver gelatin photograph

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Paul on the balcony, Mcilwrick Street, Windsor
1992-1994
Silver gelatin photograph

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Paul resting
1992-1994
Silver gelatin photograph

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Marcus holding his cock
1992-1994
Silver gelatin photograph

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Post with finial, tree
1992-1994
Silver gelatin photograph

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
People who live
in glass houses
shouldn’t throw stars
1992-1994
Silver gelatin photograph

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Paul, Windsor and the city
1992-1994
Silver gelatin photograph

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Self portrait with punk jacket and flanny
1992-1994
Silver gelatin photograph

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Release
1992-1994
Silver gelatin photograph

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Jesus, Mary and Joseph.
1992-1994
Silver gelatin photograph

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Circumnavigation of the blood is always Circumnavigation of the world (for Frederick Sommer)
1992-1994
Silver gelatin photograph

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Release (cock, hands, cum)
1992-1994
Silver gelatin photograph

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Madonna and child, skull
1992-1994
Silver gelatin photograph

Marcus Bunyan black and white archive 1991-1997

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Nov

Exhibition: ‘The Body as Protest’ at the Albertina, Vienna

By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leave a Comment

Categories: American, american photographers, beauty, black and white photography, colour photography, digital photography, documentary photography, exhibition, existence, gallery website, intimacy, light, memory, photographic series, photography, portrait, psychological, reality, space, surrealism, time and works on paper
Tags: Albertina, Albertina Vienna, american photographer, American photography, Anthony Giddens, art as protest, Back with Arms Above, Block XXX, Body Gender and Knowledge in Protest Movements, Body practices, British photographer, British photography, Bruce Nauman, Bruce Nauman Studies for Holograms, corporeality, corporeality of the body, Craniologia, femininity, femininity body nature and emotion, foucault, gender, Gender & Society, Hannah Villiger, Hannah Villiger Block XXX, Hannah Wilke, Hannah Wilke Gestures, Ishiuchi Miyako, Ishiuchi Miyako 1906#38, John Coplans, John Coplans Back with Arms Above, John Coplans Frieze No. 6, John Coplans Self Portrait, John Coplans Self Portrait (Hands), John Coplans Self Portrait Interlocking Fingers No 17, John Coplans Self Portrait Interlocking Fingers No 6, judith butler, Ketty La Rocca, Ketty La Rocca Craniologia, Ketty La Rocca Le mie parole e tu, Le mie parole e tu, masculinity knowledge culture and reason, Michel Foucault, Orna Sasson-Levy, portraiture, protest, Robert Mapplethorpe, Robert Mapplethorpe Thomas, Robert Mapplethorpe Vincent, Self Portrait Interlocking Fingers No 17, Self Portrait Interlocking Fingers No 6, self-portrait, Social construction theory, social institutions and the body, Studies for Holograms, Tamar Rapoport, the body, the body and basic values and themes of society, the body and discourse, the body and self-empowerment, The body as a means for self-expression, the body as an object of social control and discipline, The Body as Protest, the body as site for social subversiveness, the body performs social action, Vienna, Western mind-body dualism

Exhibition dates: 5th September – 2nd December 2012

Ishiuchi Miyako (Japanese, b. 1947)
1906#38
Nd
Courtesy by The Third Gallery Aya

“The past neglect of the body in social theory was a product of Western mind-body dualism that divided human experience into bodily and cognitive realms. The knowledge-body distinction identifies knowledge, culture, and reason with masculinity and identifies body, nature, and emotion with femininity. Viewing human reason as the principal source of progress and emancipation, it perceives “the rational” as separate from, and exalted over, the corporeal. In other words, consciousness was grasped as separate from and preceding the body (Bordo 1993; Davis 1997). Following feminist thinking about women’s bodies in patriarchal societies, contemporary social theories shifted focus from cognitive dimensions of identity construction to embodiment in the constitution of identities (Davis 1997). Social construction theories do not view the body as a biological given but as constituted in the intersection of discourse, social institutions, and the corporeality of the body. Body practices, therefore, reflect the basic values and themes of the society, and an analysis of the body can expose the intersubjective meaning common to society. At the same time, discourse and social institutions are produced and reproduced only through bodies and their techniques (Frank 1991, 91). Thus, social analysis has expanded from studying the body as an object of social control and discipline “in order to legitimate different regimes of domination” (Bordo 1993; Foucault 1975, 1978, 1980) to perceiving it as a subject that creates meaning and performs social action (Butler 1990). The body is understood as a means for self-expression, an important feature in a person’s identity project (Giddens 1991), and a site for social subversiveness and self-empowerment (Davis 1997).”

.
Orna Sasson-Levy and Tamar Rapoport. “Body, Gender, and Knowledge in Protest Movements: The Israeli Case,” in ‘Gender & Society’ 17, 2003, p. 381. For the references in the quotation please see the end of the paper at attached link.

Despite my great admiration for John Coplans photographs of his body, on the evidence of these press photographs and the attached video, this exhibition seems a beautiful if rather tame affair considering the subject matter. Of course these photographs of the body can be understood as a means for self-expression and self-empowerment but there seems little social subversiveness in the choice of work on display. The two Mapplethorpe’s are stylised instead of stonkingly subversive, and could have been taken from his ‘X’ portfolio (the self portrait of him with a bull whip up his arse would have been particularly pleasing to see in this context). The exhibition could have included some of the many artists using the body as protest during the AIDS crisis (perhaps my favourite David Wojnarowicz or William Yang’s Sadness), the famous Burning Monk – The Self-Immolation (1963) by Malcolm Browne, photographs by Stellarc, Arthur Tress, Duane Michals, Nan Goldin, Diane Arbus, Francesca Woodman, Sally Mann, Cindy Sherman to name but a few; even the Farm Security Administration photographs of share cropper families by Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange would have had more impact than some of the photographs on display here. Having not seen the entire exhibition it is hard to give an overall reading, but on the selection presented here it would seem that this was a missed opportunity, an exhibition where the body did not protest enough.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

theartVIEw – The Body as Protest at ALBERTINA

Ketty La Rocca (Italian, 1938-1976)
Le mie parole e tu
1974
Courtesy Private Collection, Austria

John Coplans (British, 1920-2003)
Self Portrait Interlocking Fingers No 6
1999
Silbergelatinepapier
Albertina, Wien

Bruce Nauman (American, b. 1941)
Studies for Holograms
Siebdruck, 1970
© VBK, Wien 2012
Foto: © Rheinisches Bildarchiv Köln

The exhibition The Body as Protest highlights the photographic representation of the human body – a motif that has provided a wide variety of photographers with an often radical means of expression for their visual protest against social, political, but also aesthetic norms.

The show centres on an outstanding group of works by the artist John Coplans from the holdings of the Albertina. In his serially conceived large-format pictures, the photographer focused on the rendering of his own nude body, which he defamiliarised through fragmentation far from current forms of idealisation. Relying on extremely sophisticated lighting, he presented himself in a monumental and sculptural manner over many years. His photographs can be understood as amalgamations of theoretical and artistic ideas, which in the show are accentuated through selective juxtapositions with works by other important exponents of body-related art.

The body also features prominently in the work of other artists such as Hannah Wilke, Ketty La Rocca, Hannah Villiger, Vito Acconci, Bruce Nauman, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Miyako Ishiuchi. By means of these positions, such diverse themes as self-dramatisation, conceptual photography, feminism, body language, and even transience are analysed within an expanded artistic range. Moreover, the exhibition offers a differentiated view of the critical depiction of the human body as it has been practiced since 1970.

Text from the Albertina website

Hannah Wilke (American, 1940-1993)
Gestures
1974-76
Basierend auf der gleichnamigen
Video Performance von 1974
(35:30 min, b&w, sound)
Silbergelatinepapier
12 Blatt je 12,7x 17,8 cm
© Marsie, Emanuelle, Damon and Andrew Scharlatt, The Hannah Wilke Collection & Archive, L.A./ VBK, Wien 2012

John Coplans (British, 1920-2003)
Frieze No. 6
1994
Silbergelatinepapier
Albertina, Wien

John Coplans (British, 1920-2003)
Self Portrait (Hands)
1988
Silbergelatinepapier
Albertina, Wien

Ketty La Rocca (Italian, 1938-1976)
Craniologia
1973
Radiografie mit überblendeter Fotografie
SAMMLUNG VERBUND

John Coplans (British, 1920-2003)
Self Portrait Interlocking Fingers No 17
2000
Silbergelatinepapier
Albertina, Wien

Albertina
Albertinaplatz 1
1010 Vienna, Austria
Phone: +43 (0)1 534 83-0

Opening hours:
Daily 10am – 6pm
Wednesday 10am – 9pm

Albertina website

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Sep

Exhibition: ‘True Stories: American Photography from the Sammlung Moderne Kunst’ at Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich

By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leave a Comment

Categories: American, american photographers, black and white photography, colour photography, Diane Arbus, documentary photography, exhibition, existence, gallery website, landscape, light, memory, New York, photographic series, photography, portrait, psychological, reality, space, street photography, time and William Eggleston
Tags: 19th-century topographical photography, American art, american artist, american photographer, American photography, Appropriation Art, Baryt paper, Bendigo Art Gallery, Boston, California, Chromogenic print, cityscape, colour prints, Dan Graham, Dan Graham View Interior New Highway Restaurant, Diane Arbus, dye transfer print, ed ruscha, EL NEGRITO, Garry Winogrand, Garry Winogrand Los Angeles California, gelatin silver print, Greenbrae, Jersey City, John Baldessari, John Baldessari Man Running/Men Carrying Box, John Gossage, John Gossage EL NEGRITO, John Gossage There and Gone, John Szarkowski, Judith Joy Ross, Judith Joy Ross Untitled from the series Portraits at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, La Brea Avenue & Beverly Boulevard, Larry Clark, Larry Clark Tulsa, Lee Friedlander, Lee Friedlander Route 9W New York, Lewis Baltz, Lewis Baltz Greenbrae, Lewis Baltz The Prototype Works, los angeles, Los Angeles-based artist, Man Running/Men Carrying Box, Mississippi Delta, Munich, Museum of Modern Art, New Documentarians, New Documents, New Topographics, New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape, Nicholas Nixon, Nicholas Nixon View of State Street Boston, Pinakothek Der Moderne, Portraits at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Richard Prince, Robert Adams, Route 9W New York, self-portrait, Southern Suite, state street boston, stephen shore, Stephen Shore La Brea Avenue & Beverly Boulevard, the city, The Prototype Works, There and Gone, Troubled Waters, True Stories, True Stories: American Photography, True Stories: American Photography from the Sammlung Moderne Kunst, Tulsa, View Interior New Highway Restaurant, View of State Street, View of State Street Boston, washington, William Eggleston, William Eggleston Southern Suite, William Eggleston Troubled Waters, William Eggleston Untitled from the series Troubled Waters, William Eggleston's Guide, Zoe Leonard

Exhibition dates: 2nd March – 20th September 2012

Lewis Baltz (American, 1945-2014)
Greenbrae
1968
from the series The Prototype Works
Vintage gelatin silver print
13.1 x 21.4cm
Sammlung Moderne Kunst in the Pinakothek der Moderne Munich, Acquired in 2011 by PIN. Freunde der Pinakothek der Moderne e.V.
© Lewis Baltz

You can’t get much better than this to start a posting: Baltz, Friedlander, Winogrand, Nixon, Baldessari, Eggleston and Shore. I recall seeing my first vintage Stephen Shore at the American Dreams exhibition at the Bendigo Art Gallery last year. What a revelation. At the time I said,

“Two Stephen Shore chromogenic colour prints from 1976 where the colours are still true and have not faded. This was incredible – seeing vintage prints from one of the early masters of colour photography; noticing that they are not full of contrast like a lot of today’s colour photographs – more like a subtle Panavision or Technicolor film from the early 1960s. Rich, subtle, beautiful hues.”

You can get an idea of those colours in the image posted here. Like an early Panavision or Technicolor feature film.

Perhaps there is something to this analogue photography that digital will never be able to capture, let alone reproduce…

Dr Marcus Bunyan

.
Many thankx to Pinakothek der Moderne 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)
Route 9W, New York
1969
Gelatin silver print, Baryt paper (card)
20.4 x 30.5cm
On permanent loan from Siemens AG, Munich, to the Sammlung Moderne Kunst since 2003
© Lee Friedlander

Garry Winogrand (American, 1928-1984)
Los Angeles, California
1969
Gelatin silver print (pre 1984)
21.8 x 32.8cm
On permanent loan from Siemens AG, Munich, to the Sammlung Moderne Kunst since 2003
© Estate of Garry Winogrand

Nicholas Nixon (American, b. 1947)
View of State Street, Boston
1976
from the series Boston Views 1974-1976
Gelatin silver print, Baryt paper (card)
20.3 x 25.2cm
On permanent loan from Siemens AG, Munich, to the Sammlung Moderne Kunst since 2003
© Nicholas Nixon

John Baldessari (American, 1931-2020)
Man Running/Men Carrying Box
1988-1990
Gelatin silver prints, vinyl paint and shading in oil
Part 1: 121.3 x 118.6cm; Part 2: 121.3 x 146.6cm
On permanent loan from Siemens AG, Munich, to the Sammlung Moderne Kunst since 2003
© John Baldessari

William Eggleston (American, b. 1939)
Untitled
1980
The first of 15 works from the portfolio Troubled Waters
Dye transfer print
29.0 x 44.0cm
On permanent loan from Siemens AG, Munich, to the Sammlung Moderne Kunst since 2003
© Eggleston Artistic Trust

Stephen Shore (American, b. 1947)
La Brea Avenue & Beverly Boulevard, Los Angeles, California
1975
Chromogenic print, Kodak professional paper (1998)
20.4 x 25.5cm
On permanent loan from Siemens AG, Munich, to the Sammlung Moderne Kunst since 2003
© Stephen Shore

American photography forms an extensive and simultaneously top-quality focal point in the collection, of which a selected overview is now being exhibited for the first time. The main interest of young photographers, who have been examining changes in political, social and ecological aspects of everyday American life since the late 1960s, has been the American social landscape. They have developed new pictorial styles that define stylistic devices perceived as genuinely American while at the same time being internationally recognised. Whereas Lee Friedlander, Garry Winogrand, Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz and Larry Clark, who are now considered classical modern photographers, have remained true to black-and-white photography, William Eggleston and Stephen Shore in particular have established colour photography as an artistically independent form of expression. The exhibition brings together around 100 works that, thanks to the Siemens Photography Collection and through acquisitions, bequests and donations, are now part of the museum’s holdings. True stories covers a spectrum from the street photography of the late 1960s to New Topographics and pictures by the New York photographer Zoe Leonard, taken just a few years ago.

“A new generation of photographers has directed the documentary approach toward more personal ends. Their work betrays a sympathy for the imperfection and frailties of society. Their aim has been not to reform life but to know it.” With the exhibition New Documents in spring 1967, John Szarkowski, the influential curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, rang in a new era in American photography. Those photographers represented, including Lee Friedlander and Garry Winogrand in addition to Diane Arbus, stood for a change in attitude within documentary photography that was conditioned exclusively by the subjective viewpoint of an individual’s reality. The object of photographic interest lay in the American social landscape and its conditions. It was less concerned with the natural landscape and its increasingly cultural reshaping than with the urban or urbanised space and how people move within it. In so doing, the New Documentarians rejected any obviously explanatory impetus, turning instead to the everyday and commonplace.

The exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape that was staged in the mid 1970s at the International Museum of Photography in Rochester, represented a countermovement to this subjective form of expression. Their protagonists, including Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Nicholas Nixon and Stephen Shore, also pleaded for a documentary approach and were influenced by figures such as Walker Evans und Robert Frank, but considered themselves rooted in the tradition of 19th-century topographical photography in particular. The prime initiator of this working method, that was expressly not governed by style, is the Los Angeles-based artist Ed Ruscha. Their central aim is a distanced and seemingly analytical depicition, free of judgement; their topic, the landscape altered by mankind. It is the image of the American West in particular, so much conditioned by myths and dreams but long since brought back to reality as a result of commercial and ecological exploitation, that is visible in their works.

The decisive quantum leap to establishing the position of colour photography was made by the Southerner William Eggleston in his exhibition in 1976, also held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the publication of the William Eggleston’s Guide. The harsh public criticism of his pictures was not to do with his use of colour but the fact that Eggleston photographed things and everyday situations – on the spur of the moment and in a seemingly careless manner – that, until then, had not been considered worthy of being photographed turning them into exquisite prints using the expensive and complicated dye-transfer process. In Eggleston’s cosmos of images that is strongly influenced by motifs and the light of the Mississippi Delta, colour constitutes the picture. The “rush of colour” championed by this exhibition led to the comprehensive implementation of colour photography in the field of artistic photography in the years that followed, starting in the USA and then in Europe – and especially in Germany.

An artistic attitude became established at the end of the 1970s that, with recourse to existing picture material from art, film, advertising and the mass media, formulated new pictorial concepts and, in the same breath, opened up traditional artistic and art-historical categories such as authorship, originality, uniqueness, intellectual property and authenticity to discussion. Appropriation Art owes its decisive influences to the artist John Baldessari, who lives and teaches in California. One of its most famous representatives is Richard Prince, who became famous in particular as a result of his artistic adaptation of advertising images. Concept art in the 1960s and ’70s similarly makes use of photography, both as part of an artistic practice using the most varied of materials and as a unique medium for documenting campaigns, happenings and performances. As works by Dan Graham and Zoe Leonard clearly show, the previously precisely delineated boundaries between photography that alludes to its own intrinsically, media-related history and the use of photography as an artistic strategy, have become more fluid.

Press release from the Pinakothek der Moderne website

Dan Graham (American, b. 1942)
View Interior, New Highway Restaurant, Jersey City, N.J., (detail)
1967 (printed 1996)
C-prints
Each 50.6 x 76.2cm
On permanent loan from Siemens AG, Munich, to the Sammlung Moderne Kunst since 2003
© Dan Graham

William Eggleston (American, b. 1939)
from Southern Suite (10-part series)
1981
Dye transfer print
25.0 x 38.2cm
Sammlung Moderne Kunst in the Pinakothek der Moderne Munich. Acquired in 2006 through PIN. Freunde der Pinakothek der Moderne e.V.
© Eggleston Artistic Trust

Larry Clark (American, b. 1943)
Tulsa
1972
Gelatin silver print
20.3 x 25.4cm (sheet)
Sammlung Moderne Kunst in the Pinakothek der Moderne Munich. Acquired in 2003 by PIN. Freunde der Pinakothek der Moderne
© Larry Clark

Judith Joy Ross (American, b. 1946)
Untitled
1984
from the series Portraits at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Washington, D.C. 1983-1984
Gelatin silver print on daylight printing-out paper, shading in gold (print 1996)
25.2 x 20.2cm
On permanent loan from Siemens AG, Munich, to the Sammlung Moderne Kunst since 2003
© Judith Joy Ross

John Gossage (American, b. 1946)
EL NEGRITO
1997
from the series There and Gone
Gelatin silver print, Baryt paper, screen print on photo mount card
55.4 x 45.0 cm
On permanent loan from Siemens AG, Munich, to the Sammlung Moderne Kunst since 2003
© John Gossage

Pinakothek Der Moderne
Barer Strasse 40
Munich

Opening hours:
Daily except Monday 10am – 6pm
Thursday 10am – 8pm

Pinakothek der Moderne website

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Dr Marcus Bunyan

Dr Marcus Bunyan is an Australian artist and writer. His art work explores the boundaries of identity and place. He writes Art Blart, an art and cultural memory archive, which posts mainly photography exhibitions from around the world. He holds a Doctor of Philosophy from RMIT University, Melbourne, a Master of Arts (Fine Art Photography) from RMIT University, and a Master of Art Curatorship from the University of Melbourne.