Posts Tagged ‘street photography

May

Exhibition: ‘Projects: Ming Smith’ at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York

Exhibition dates: 4th February – 29th May 2023

Projects: Ming Smith is organised by Thelma Golden, Director and Chief Curator, The Studio Museum in Harlem, and Oluremi C. Onabanjo, Associate Curator, Department of Photography, The Museum of Modern Art, with the assistance of Kaitlin Booher, Beaumont and Nancy Newhall Curatorial Fellow, Department of Photography, The Museum of Modern Art, and Habiba Hopson, Curatorial Assistant, The Studio Museum in Harlem.

Ming Smith (American, b. 1950)
Circular Breathing, Hart Leroy Bibbs, Paris
1980
Vinyl wallpaper
147 1/2 × 262″ (374.7 × 665.5cm)
Courtesy of the artist
© Ming Smith

Free spirit

Another fascinating, stimulating, challenging artist finally getting their due.

Music, spirit, transcendence, light, blur, dreams, improvisation, composition, jamming, joy, rhythm, respect, wonder, emotion, African American culture. Conjoined in a mysterious, reverent wistfulness…

“You don’t make art for money, especially as a Black artist. You do it because there is that need to create – and that has been part of my survival; that has helped me survive.”

I feel that too. Creativity has kept the black dog from the door, creativity has helped me survive. I’m sure it does for many artists.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

“You don’t make art for money, especially as a Black artist. You do it because there is that need to create – and that has been part of my survival; that has helped me survive.”

“My work as a photographer was to record, culturally, the period of time in which I lived – and I recorded it as an artist.”

“Oh no, it’s all discovery, it’s all improvisation. It’s like when jazz musicians solo. They improvise, and photography is definitely that, for me.”

“Whether I’m photographing a person on the street, someone I know, or on an assignment, I’m doing it because I admire them. I like the sense of exchange – they’re giving and I’m taking, but I’m also giving them something back. There were certain people who would understand what I was looking for and would try to give me a photograph by posing. Whatever I’m shooting, whether it’s a portrait or a place, my intention is to capture the feeling I have about that exchange and that energy.”

“I evolved as a photographer with the series Invisible Man [1990-1991], just like a jazz musician who plays the head [the known melody of a song] before they start improvising. Ralph Ellison’s book Invisible Man [1952] was an inspiration, especially the idea of what it means not to be seen, but I didn’t consciously set out to make work about it. I wanted to capture the feeling of painting and make photographs on an artistic scale. Living in a Black environment, the people I photographed didn’t have to put on any airs, they were just living their life. The series was about a feeling, an expression. Anyone could identify it. We were present but we weren’t there. We were visible but also invisible.”

“Living in Harlem was an authentic experience for me, and I was trying to capture that authenticity. I was living and my work came out of my life. I would go out with my camera to shoot events like the Million Youth March [1998] or meet musical figures like Dr. Edward Boatner or academics like Dr. John Henrik Clarke, and even watch Duke Ellington on TV – these people had so much history in them. Some people look at certain areas and only see the depravity and the struggle, but there’s so much love and genius there; there’s warmth. I think that was my motive in photographing Harlem, to communicate that warmth.”

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Ming Smith

The moody magic of a long exposure photograph | Ming Smith | UNIQLO ArtSpeaks

Photography curator Oluremi Onabanjo examines Smith’s 1991 “Invisible Man, Somewhere, Everywhere,” a poignant image from this series inspired by Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel “Invisible Man.”

Installation views of Projects: Ming Smith, on view at The Museum of Modern Art, New York from February 4, 2023 – May 29, 2023
Photos: Robert Gerhardt

The Museum of Modern Art announces Projects: Ming Smith, on view in the Museum’s street-level galleries from February 4 through May 29, 2023. A photographer who has lived and worked in New York since the 1970s, Ming Smith has served as a precedent for a generation of artists engaging the politics and poetics of the photographic image. Through a deep exploration of the artist’s archive, the exhibition will offer a critical reintroduction to Smith’s work through her distinctive approach to movement, light, rhythm, and shadow, highlighting how she transforms the image from a document of photographic capture into a space of emotive expression. Projects: Ming Smith is organised by Thelma Golden, Director and Chief Curator, The Studio Museum in Harlem, and Oluremi C. Onabanjo, Associate Curator, Department of Photography, The Museum of Modern Art, with the assistance of Kaitlin Booher, Beaumont and Nancy Newhall Curatorial Fellow, Department of Photography, The Museum of Modern Art, and Habiba Hopson, Curatorial Assistant, Permanent Collection, The Studio Museum in Harlem.

As Oluremi C. Onabanjo states, “For Ming Smith, the photographic medium is a site where the senses and the spirit collide. Calling attention to the synesthetic range of her photographic approach, this exhibition highlights how her images collapse the senses, encouraging us to attend to the hue of sound, the rhythm of form, and the texture of vision.” Works featured in the exhibition showcase a wide array of subjects, ranging from finely attuned studies of Black avant-garde musicians and dancers to depictions of everyday life in Harlem and Pittsburgh’s Hill District through photographic series made in response to Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man and August Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle of plays.

Projects: Ming Smith is the fourth exhibition in MoMA’s ongoing Projects collaboration with The Studio Museum in Harlem. It takes up the work of a photographer who is important to the history of both museums. MoMA was the first institution to acquire Smith’s work (in 1979), and the Studio Museum has shown Smith’s work since the beginning of her career, when she was the first female member of the trailblazing Black photography collective the Kamoinge Workshop.

Thelma Golden says, “Almost from the day she arrived in New York City, Ming Smith was at the centre of an extraordinary cultural ferment, contributing to the Black Arts Movement while creating a space for herself within Harlem’s legendary Kamoinge Workshop. Working for over five decades, her contribution to modern photography is deeply significant – she continues to influence countless photographers through her singular documentation of, society’s humanity and pageantry. I’m thrilled that audiences who know her work will have the opportunity to revisit and reappraise her many achievements, and that new audiences will have the excitement of discovering her graceful, stunning images through Projects: Ming Smith.”

Projects: Ming Smith is accompanied by Ming Smith: Invisible Man, Somewhere, Everywhere, a new volume in MoMA’s One on One series, written by Oluremi C. Onabanjo. The book provides a sustained meditation on Smith’s photograph Invisible Man, Somewhere, Everywhere (1991) in MoMA’s collection.

Press release from the Museum of Modern Art

Introduction

For Ming Smith, photography is a site where the senses and the spirit collide through the prism of light. “I’m dealing with all these elements, getting that precise moment,” Smith has said. “Getting the feeling, the way the light hits the person – to put it simply, these pieces are like the blues.”

Projects: Ming Smith offers a critical reintroduction to a photographer who has lived in New York since the 1970s, and whose work has served as a precedent for generations of artists engaging the politics and the poetics of the photographic image in relation to experiences of Blackness. Through her skilful deployment of long exposures – which involves slowing the shutter speed of the camera lens to render movement as blur – Smith dissolves the boundaries between her subjects and their surroundings. Her dreamlike, abstract compositions are led by intuition and perfected through repetition.

The result of a deep dive into Smith’s archive, this exhibition reckons with the crucial position of this artist in the history of photography, and in the institutional memories of both The Museum of Modern Art and The Studio Museum in Harlem. MoMA was the first institution to acquire Smith’s work (in 1979), and the Studio Museum has shown Smith’s work since the beginning of her career, when she was the first female member of the trailblazing Black photography collective the Kamoinge Workshop. Bridging the distance between the present and the past, Projects: Ming Smith creates a photographic portal through which to encounter Smith’s images anew. It highlights how her pictures collapse the senses, encouraging us to attend to the hue of sound, the rhythm of form, and the texture of vision.

Text from the Museum of Modern Art

Installation view of Projects: Ming Smith, on view at The Museum of Modern Art, New York from February 4, 2023 – May 29, 2023
Photo: Robert Gerhardt

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Page from Projects: Ming Smith extended labels (photographs below)

3. Ming Smith (American, b. 1950)
Sun Breeze After the Bluing, Hoboken, NJ
1972
UV print on dibond
Sheet: 72 × 47″ (182.9 × 119.4cm)
Courtesy of the artist
© Ming Smith

5. Ming Smith (American, b. 1950)
Black Dance
1981
UV print on dibond
Sheet: 40 × 60″ (101.6 × 152.4cm)
Courtesy of the artist

6. Ming Smith (American, b. 1950)
The Window Overlooking Wheatland Street Was My First Dreaming Place
1979
UV print on dibond
Sheet: 40 × 60″ (101.6 × 152.4cm)
Courtesy of the artist
© Ming Smith

9. Ming Smith (American, b. 1950)
Sun Ra Space II
1978
UV print on dibond
Sheet: 47 × 72″ (119.4 × 182.9cm)
Courtesy of the artist
© Ming Smith

11. Ming Smith (American, b. 1950)
Roxbury Interior, Boston, MA
1978
UV print on dibond
Sheet: 16 × 24″ (40.6 × 61cm)
Courtesy of the artist
© Ming Smith

14. Ming Smith (American, b. 1950)
Pharoah Sanders at the Bottom Line
1977
UV print on dibond
Sheet: 47 × 72″ (119.4 × 182.9cm)
Courtesy of the artist
© Ming Smith

16. Ming Smith (American, b. 1950)
Cascading Light
1981
UV print on dibond
Sheet: 16 × 24″ (40.6 × 61cm)
Courtesy of the artist
© Ming Smith

The stellar photographer Ming Smith remembers walking past the Museum of Modern Art when she was in her early 20s and telling herself, “I’m going to be in that museum one day.”

Anyone hearing her might have thought: Dream on. This was the 1970s. Smith was Black, female, new to New York City, with zero art credentials of the kind demanded by any museum of even the brashest up-and-comer, which Smith – a self-described low-key loner – was not.

But even then some changes were afoot – a few, isolated, sporadic – for artists and institutions alike. In 1979, in response to an open call by MoMA’s photography department for new work, Smith dropped off her portfolio. (The receptionist assumed she was a courier.) The museum bought two pictures, making her the first Black woman photographer to enter MoMA’s collection.

Forty years later came another landmark. In 2019, when MoMA opened its new Geffen Wing and the Studio Museum in Harlem, where Smith had shown over several decades, closed to build its new home, the two institutions began collaborating on exhibitions at MoMA’s Midtown and Long Island City locations.

The current show, called “Projects: Ming Smith,” installed on the ground floor at MoMA on 53rd Street (which has free public access), is the latest of these joint ventures, and it’s a beauty. With 52 pictures, mostly black and white, several being exhibited for the first time anywhere, it gives a good sense of Smith’s subject range and of her distinctive, self-invented style: improvisatory, multilayered, painterly, shadow-soaked, with images blurred as if shot at very high or low velocity, or viewed through retreating memory, or a volcanic rain.

Born in Detroit, raised in Columbus, Ohio, Smith started taking pictures when she was young – her pharmacist father was an amateur photographer – and learned the formal ropes as she went. While majoring in premed biology at Howard University she took a photography class and was told by the teacher that, given her race and gender, her prospects of a career in that field were next to nil. After graduating in 1971, she moved to New York City, where she supported herself as a fashion model, and kept taking pictures.

She soon plugged into a crucial support system. In 1972 she joined the Kamoinge Workshop, a Black photography collective based in Harlem. Kamoinge’s first female member, she participated in their notoriously hard-hitting group crits and for a while worked closely with one of the originating members, Anthony Barboza, accompanying him on a working trip to Senegal.

As was clear from a traveling survey of Kamoinge artists organised by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in 2020 – it later came to the Whitney Museum – the collective’s original members were eclectic in their styles and interests. But almost all their work adhered to the genre loosely known as “street photography,” grounded in a direct capturing of images, candid and unposed, of everyday life, with results that were documentary in effect and humanistic in intent. Smith’s work basically comes out of this aesthetic too, but also radically, romantically departs from it.

Many of her images, including the 1972 “Raise Your Window High,” the show’s earliest entry, are of city life, which became a long-term subject. A selection of Harlem-related pictures includes shots of the Apollo Theater marquee, a church service in progress, Alvin Ailey’s 1989 funeral, and a fist-pumping rally for the 1998 Million Youth March.

At the same time, much of her urban photography is not event-oriented, or even geographically specific. A series of photos taken in Pittsburgh in 1991, conceived as a visual response to a series of plays by August Wilson set there, could, by the look of them, have been shot in almost any city. A woman and child sit pensively on a Greyhound bus. A man in a pool hall practices cue moves. A dark silhouette of a figure trudges at night down a snow-covered street. Mood, not place or even people, is the real subject here. The title of the snowstorm picture, “Invisible Man, Somewhere, Everywhere,” says as much. So does the fact that the image once appeared in a MoMA show devoted to New York City.

Smith is a longtime jazz and blues devotee. She married a musician (saxophonist David Murray) and has photographed many. A visual equivalent of jazz performance has produced her most experimental work. Applied to street photography’s fairly set subject matter, her use of quick, reflexive shooting, manipulated shutter speeds, and multiple exposure printing opens the possibility for perceptual accident, and for improvisation, to be followed wherever it might lead, which is often in an abstracting direction. In addition, her penchant for framing small areas of light in fields of prevailing darkness gives a bluesy cast to all of this.

The show’s organisers — Thelma Golden, director of the Studio Museum in Harlem, and Oluremi C. Onabanjo, an associate curator of photography at MoMA, working with curatorial fellows Kaitlin Booher and Habiba Hopson – provide a chance to consider a wide and varied sampling of work at a glance in a group of 17 photographs from the 1970s and ’80s, printed large and small, and installed up and across a high gallery wall.

Many of Smith’s favoured subjects are here: city life, performance, travel. A white cloth whips in the wind on a tenement clothesline. The moon, a vortex of brightness, hangs tangled in trees in a Tokyo park. Alvin Ailey dancers flicker like vigil lights in a dark theater. Saxophonist Pharoah Sanders looks rock-solid onstage in New York while another musician, Sun Ra, is clearly an ET about to lift off, his sparkling gold scarf streaming like a comet tail behind him.

There’s a street-level mystic at work in Smith’s art. You sense it in her tremorous cityscapes, especially in her images of people – the primary subject, after all, of street photography. She shoots straightforward portraits, sometimes identifying the sitter by name (composer Edward Boatner; dancer Judith Jamison; writer Amiri Baraka), sometimes not. She makes self-portraits, though they’re hard to read. In one from 1992 called “Womb,” which Smith shot on a trip to Egypt, she appears to be emanating, barely materialised, from a pyramid behind her.

And then there are what I can only call holy pictures in which charismatic figures are transcendentally lifted up. In one, from 1979, titled “James Baldwin in Setting Sun Over Harlem,” Smith, using double exposure, overlays very faintly a photo she took of Baldwin onto a skyscape of light-shot dark clouds. In a second picture using the same technique, she floats above the city the visage of the immortal Harlem photographer James Van Der Zee. Sure, these images are just blatant hero worship. They’re also, like so much of Smith’s art, just wow.

Holland Cotter. “Ming Smith’s Poetic Blur,” on The New York Times website 16 February 2023 [Online] Cited 19/02/2023

1970s

Ming Smith (American, b. 1950)
West Indian Parade, Brooklyn
1972
Gelatin silver print
Frame: 21 1/4 × 27 1/4 × 1 1/2″ (54 × 69.2 × 3.8cm)
Sheet: 16 × 20″ (40.6 × 50.8cm)
Image: 12 × 18 1/2″ (30.5 × 47cm)
Courtesy of the artist
© Ming Smith

Ming Smith (American, b. 1950)
Luxembourg Gardens, Paris
1974
Pigment print
Frame: 21 1/4 × 27 1/4 × 1 1/2″ (54 × 69.2 × 3.8cm)
Sheet: 16 × 20″ (40.6 × 50.8cm)
Image: 13 × 18 1/2″ (33 × 47cm)
Courtesy of the artist
© Ming Smith

Ming Smith (American, b. 1950)
Oopdeedoo, Brooklyn
1976
from the series Coney Island
Pigment print
Frame: 27 1/4 × 21 1/4 × 1 1/2″ (69.2 × 54 × 3.8cm)
Sheet: 20 × 16″ (50.8 × 40.6cm)
Image: 17 3/4 × 13″ (45.1 × 33cm)
Courtesy of the artist
© Ming Smith

Ming Smith (American, b. 1950)
Jump, Harlem, New York
1976
Pigment print
Frame: 27 1/4 × 21 1/4 × 1 1/2″ (69.2 × 54 × 3.8cm)
Sheet: 20 × 16″ (50.8 × 40.6cm)
Image: 19 × 13 1/2″ (48.3 × 34.3cm)
Courtesy of the artist
© Ming Smith

Ming Smith (American, b. 1950)
Professor Edward Boatner, New York City, New York
1979
Gelatin silver print
Frame: 21 1/4 × 27 1/4 × 1 1/2″ (54 × 69.2 × 3.8cm)
Sheet: 16 × 20″ (40.6 × 50.8cm)
Image: 12 3/4 × 18 1/4″ (32.4 × 46.4cm)
Courtesy of the artist
© Ming Smith

Ming Smith (American, b. 1950)
James Baldwin in Setting Sun Over Harlem, New York
1979
Pigment print
Frame: 21 1/4 × 27 1/4 × 1 1/2″ (54 × 69.2 × 3.8cm)
Sheet: 16 × 20″ (40.6 × 50.8cm)
Image: 12 1/2 × 18 1/4″ (31.8 × 46.4cm)
Courtesy of the artist
© Ming Smith

Ming Smith (American, b. 1950)
Amina and Amiri Baraka “Lovers,” New York
1980
Pigment print
Frame: 21 1/4 × 27 1/4 × 1 1/2″ (54 × 69.2 × 3.8cm)
Sheet: 16 × 20″ (40.6 × 50.8cm)
Image: 13 × 18 1/2″ (33 × 47cm)
Courtesy of the artist
© Ming Smith

“The image is always moving, even if you’re standing still.”

Ming Smith

“I like catching the moment, catching the light, and the way it plays out,” the photographer Ming Smith has said. “I go with my intuition… it’s about always looking at lines and the quality of the movement. It’s about seeking energy, breath, and light. The image is always moving, even if you’re standing still.”1 For Smith, these are the central tenets of her approach to image-making: a practice attuned to bodily movement and spatial relations that maintains a commitment to the poetry of light and shadow.

In the early 1970s, Smith arrived in New York City after graduating from Howard University. She had studied microbiology and chemistry, but took the university’s only photography class to sustain a passion for the image inculcated in her by her father. Supporting herself as a model while shooting on the city streets, Smith spent time in Anthony Barboza’s studio and met photographers such as Louis Draper and Joe Crawford, swiftly becoming immersed in fiery debates about the stakes of photography as an art form.2 In 1972, Draper invited Smith to join The Kamoinge Workshop, a collective of African American photographers who gathered weekly to review and critique each other’s work. Its name derived from the Kikuyu word for “a group of people acting together,” Kamoinge was founded in 1963 and emerged as a shared political and artistic space for photographic improvement and, especially, self-determination. It was a powerful sentiment at a time of pivotal gains for the US Civil Rights Movement and decolonization across the African continent.

Joining Kamoinge was transformational for Smith’s photography and self-perception as an artist. She cut her teeth as a photographer and sharpened her conceptual focus, mining the structural and psychological tensions that animate experiences of Blackness. By turns dense and diaphanous, Smith’s pictures sustain hefty blacks alongside frothy swirls of gray and white. These mercurial, moody scenes resist spectacular clarity or straightforward interpretation. As historian and curator Maurice Berger has said, “Ms. Smith’s subjects are often suspended between visibility and invisibility: faces turned away, or are blurred or shrouded in shadow, mist or darkness, a potent metaphor of the struggle for African-American visibility in a culture in which black men and women were disparaged, erased or ignored.”3 In this way, Smith gives shape to the quotidian idiosyncrasies of Black life.

In an unending oscillation between light and darkness, Smith revels in the emotive elements of her subjects. Key to this is the photographer’s command of the blur, which critic Jessica Lynne succinctly defines as “the technique by which Smith collapses the boundaries between a photograph’s subject and its background.”4 Executed with rhythmic pacing and maintaining an acuity of vision, her engagement with sonic and lyrical forms is particularly notable. Subjects and captions refer to the plays of August Wilson, the words of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), and the music of Marvin Gaye and Billie Holiday, John Coltrane and David Murray. These intertextual references bring forward recognizable figures while affirming the function of these photographs as speculative compositions, shaped through intuition. “In the art of photography, I’m dealing with light, I’m dealing with all these elements, getting that precise moment,” Smith has said. “Getting the feeling, getting the way the light hits the person – to put it simply, these pieces are like the blues.”5

Oluremi C. Onabanjo, Associate Curator, The Robert B. Menschel Department of Photography, 2022

1/ Ming Smith quoted in “A Portrait of the Artist: Ming Smith in Conversation with Janet Hill Talbert,” in Ming Smith (New York & Dallas: Aperture & Documentary Arts, 2020). 15.

2/ Ibid., 12.

3/ Berger, Maurice. “A Photographer Who Made Ghosts Visible,” The New York Times, January 11, 2017. Accessed online. https://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2017/01/11/a-photographer-who-made-ghosts-visible-ming-smith/

4/ Lynne, Jessica. “Jessica Lynne Revisits Ming Smith’s ‘Amina and Amiri Baraka (Lovers),'” Frieze, August 20, 2020. Accessed online. https://www.frieze.com/article/jessica-lynne-revisits-ming-smiths-amina-and-amiri-baraka-lovers

5/ Ming Smith quoted in “Photographer Ming Smith Shows Just How Much Black Life Matters,” by Siddhartha Mitter. The Village Voice, February 7, 2017. Accessed online. https://www.villagevoice.com/2017/02/07/photographer-ming-smith-shows-just-how-much-black-life-matters/

1990s

Ming Smith (American, b. 1950)
Invisible Man, Somewhere, Everywhere
1991
Oil paint on gelatin silver print
18 11/16 × 12 9/16″ (47.4 × 32cm)
Gift of Kathleen Lingo in memory of Linda McCartney
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
© Ming Smith

Ming Smith (American, b. 1950)
The Black Jewels of the U.S.A. II
c. 1991
Courtesy of the artist
© Ming Smith

Ming Smith (American, b. 1950)
Little Brown Baby Wif Spak’lin’ Eyes, For Paul Laurence Dunbar
1991
Pigment print
Frame: 21 1/4 × 27 1/4 × 1 1/2″ (54 × 69.2 × 3.8cm)
Sheet: 16 × 20″ (40.6 × 50.8cm)
Image: 12 × 18 1/4″ (30.5 × 46.4cm)
Courtesy of the artist
© Ming Smith

Ming Smith (American, b. 1950)
Greyhound Bus, Pittsburgh
1991
Pigment print
Frame: 27 1/4 × 21 1/4 × 1 1/2″ (69.2 × 54 × 3.8cm)
Sheet: 22 1/4 × 17″ (56.5 × 43.2cm)
Image: 18 × 12″ (45.7 × 30.5cm)
Courtesy of the artist
© Ming Smith

Ming Smith (American, b. 1950)
August Blues
1991
From Invisible Man
Pigment print
Frame: 27 1/4 × 21 1/4 × 1 1/2″ (69.2 × 54 × 3.8cm)
Sheet: 20 × 16″ (50.8 × 40.6cm)
Image: 19 × 13 1/2″ (48.3 × 34.3cm)
Courtesy of the artist
© Ming Smith

Ming Smith (American, b. 1950)
African Burial Ground, Sacred Space
1991
From Invisible Man
Pigment print
Frame: 21 1/4 × 27 1/4 × 1 1/2″ (54 × 69.2 × 3.8cm)
Sheet: 20 × 24″ (50.8 × 61cm)
Image: 12 1/2 × 18 1/4″ (31.8 × 46.4cm)
Courtesy of the artist
© Ming Smith

Ming Smith (American, b. 1950)
Mother and Child Deciding, Pittsburgh
1991
Gelatin silver print
Frame: 27 1/4 × 21 1/4 × 1 1/2″ (69.2 × 54 × 3.8cm)
Sheet: 20 × 16″ (50.8 × 40.6cm)
Image: 19 3/4 × 14″ (50.2 × 35.6cm)
Courtesy of the artist
© Ming Smith

In Mother and Child Deciding (1991), a young woman is seated at a diner booth with a child, both bundled in winter jackets. Her body is turned to the right, with her leg hoisted onto the booth’s seat, revealing a worn sneaker; her right elbow is placed on the booth’s table, and her little finger touches her lower lip. Her turned face and her outward gaze into the middle distance indicate that she is contemplating the menu posted on a board, or the photographs hung on the wall above the wood paneling. But her wistful face tells us that her thoughts are occupied by worries that have accompanied her here – worries that she cannot share with the child.

M. Neelika Jayawardane. “Ming Smith’s Photographic Tribute to August Wilson,” on the Aperture website February 4, 2021 [Online] Cited 07/05/2023

Ming Smith (American, b. 1950)
Yes, Immigrants
1991
Pigment print
Frame: 27 1/4 × 21 1/4 × 1 1/2″ (69.2 × 54 × 3.8cm)
Sheet: 20 × 16″ (50.8 × 40.6cm)
Image: 19 × 13 1/2″ (48.3 × 34.3cm)
Courtesy of the artist
© Ming Smith

Ming Smith (American, b. 1950)
Past Any Reason for Song
1991
Gelatin silver print
Frame: 21 1/4 × 27 1/4 × 1 1/2″ (54 × 69.2 × 3.8cm)
Sheet: 16 × 20″ (40.6 × 50.8cm)
Image: 12 1/2 × 18 1/4″ (31.8 × 46.4cm)
Courtesy of the artist
© Ming Smith

Ming Smith (American, b. 1950)
Womb
1992
Gelatin silver print
Frame: 21 1/4 × 27 1/4 × 1 1/2″ (54 × 69.2 × 3.8cm)
Sheet: 16 × 20″ (40.6 × 50.8cm)
Image: 12 × 18″ (30.5 × 45.7cm)
Courtesy of the artist
© Ming Smith

Ming Smith (American, b. 1950)
Khalid Muhammad, Million Youth March, Harlem, New York
1998
Gelatin silver print
Frame: 27 1/4 × 21 1/4 × 1 1/2″ (69.2 × 54 × 3.8cm)
Sheet: 20 × 16″ (50.8 × 40.6cm)
Image: 18 3/4 × 13 1/4″ (47.6 × 33.7cm)
Courtesy of the artist
© Ming Smith

Ming Smith (American, b. 1950)
Million Youth March, Raised Fists, Harlem, New York
1998
Gelatin silver print
Frame: 27 1/4 × 21 1/4 × 1 1/2″ (69.2 × 54 × 3.8cm)
Sheet: 20 × 16″ (50.8 × 40.6cm)
Image: 19 × 13 1/2″ (48.3 × 34.3cm)
Courtesy of the artist
© Ming Smith

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Exhibition: ‘Andy Warhol and Photography: A Social Media’ at the Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide

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Tags: Altered Image, Altered Image photographs, Altered Image: Five Photographs of Andy Warhol, American art, american artist, American photography, American Polaroid photography, American Pop Art, American street photography, Andy taping Christopher Reeves for 'Interview' magazine, andy warhol, Andy Warhol and Liza Minnelli, Andy Warhol and Photography, Andy Warhol and Photography: A Social Media, Andy Warhol Bianca Jagger at Halston's house, Andy Warhol Cream of mushroom soup, Andy Warhol Curiosity Killed the Cat, Andy Warhol Debbie Harry, Andy Warhol Elvis, Andy Warhol Halston at home New York, Andy Warhol Henry Gillespie, Andy Warhol in a row boat, Andy Warhol in American flag, Andy Warhol in Gristedes Supermarket, Andy Warhol Kissing John Lennon, Andy Warhol Liza Minnelli, Andy Warhol Muhammad Ali his infant daughter, Andy Warhol on the red couch at the Factory, Andy Warhol Self-Portrait No. 9, Andy Warhol showing his artistry, Andy Warhol The Factory, Andy Warhol Truman Capote at home, Andy Warhol Woman on the street, art, Art Gallery of South Australia, Bianca Jagger, Bianca Jagger at Halston's house, Billy Name, Bob Adelman, Bob Adelman Andy Warhol in Gristedes Supermarket, Bob Adelman Andy Warhol on the red couch at the Factory, candid images, Christopher Makos, Christopher Makos Altered Image, Christopher Makos Andy taping Christopher Reeves for 'Interview' magazine, Christopher Makos Andy Warhol and Liza Minnelli, Christopher Makos Andy Warhol in a row boat, Christopher Makos Andy Warhol in American flag, Christopher Makos Andy Warhol Kissing John Lennon, Cream of mushroom soup, Curiosity Killed the Cat, Debbie Harry, Edie Sedgwick, Edie Sedgwick Andy Warhol and others at a party, Elvis, Gerard Malanga, Gerard Malanga Andy Warhol, Halston at home New York, Hanna and wife Veronica, Henry Gillespie, Leo Castelli Gallery, Liza Minnelli, Muhammad Ali, Muhammad Ali his infant daughter, Nat Finkelstein, Nat Finkelstein Silver Clouds installation, Oliviero Toscani, Oliviero Toscani Andy Warhol, photography, pictures or it didn't happen, polaroid, Polaroid photography, Pop Art, Robert Mapplethorpe, Robert Mapplethorpe Andy Warhol, Robin Platzer, Robin Platzer Andy Warhol showing his artistry, Self-Portrait No. 9, Silver Clouds installation, Steve Schapiro, Steve Schapiro Edie Sedgwick Andy Warhol and others at a party, street photography, Studio 54, the Factory, Truman Capote at home, unfamous things, Woman on the street

Exhibition dates: 3rd March – 14th May 2023

Curator: Julie Robinson is Senior Curator, Prints, Drawings and Photographs at AGSA

Bob Adelman (American, 1930-2016)
Andy Warhol on the red couch at the Factory, New York
1964
Pigment print
Courtesy of Bob Adelman Estate

LOOK – SOCIAL

CELEBRITY–POLAROID

SELF – PORTRAIT

STUDIO–STREET

SCREEN – PRINT

QUEER – INFLUENCE(R)

CAMP–POP

PHOTO–GRAPHIC – PRODUCTION

PICTURE–ART

the photograph is a vehicle for performance

“In the scopic field, the gaze is outside, I am looked at, that is to say, I am a picture …. The gaze is the instrument through which light is embodied and through which – if you will allow me to use a word, as I often do, in a fragmented form – I am photo-graphed.”

~ Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts, p. 106

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

SEE MORE INTERESTING AND ESSENTIAL PHOTOGRAPHS BY ANDY WARHOL:

1/ Andy Warhol unplugged 2 May 2015
2/ Andy Warhol unplugged December 2014
3/ ‘Andy Warhol: Polaroids / MATRIX 240’ at Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, University of California, January – May 2012

Andy Warhol and Photography: A Social Media reveals an unseen side of celebrated Pop artist Andy Warhol through his career-long obsession with photography. Whether he was behind or in front of the camera, photography formed an essential part of his artistic practice while also capturing an insider’s view of his celebrity social world.

Exclusive to AGSA, this exhibition features photographs, experimental films and paintings by Warhol, including his famed Pop Art portraits of Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley from the 1960s. It also contains works by his photographic collaborators and creative contemporaries such as Christopher Makos, Gerard Malanga, Robert Mapplethorpe, David McCabe, and Duane Michals.

Decades before social media, Warhol’s photography was candid, collaborative and social, attuned to the power of the image to shape his public persona and self-identity. Many of his photographs from the 1970s and 1980s offer behind-the-scenes glimpses into his own life and the lives of friends and celebrities such as Muhammad Ali, Bob Dylan, Debbie Harry, Mick Jagger, John Lennon, Liza Minnelli, Lou Reed and Elizabeth Taylor. This exhibition asks the question, was Warhol the original influencer?

Text from the AGSA website

“A good picture is … of a famous person doing something unfamous. It’s about being in the right place at the wrong time.”

.
Andy Warhol

“Warhol was a famously detached person, and numerous accounts call attention to the verbal, psychological and technological barriers the artist created between himself and the world around him. Yet, here he describes technology as integrated into the social dynamic of the Factory. Photography became a vital tool in the formation and commemoration of this emerging countercultural community, and the photographs of Name, Berlin and other Factory denizens document everything from the making Warhol’s films and paintings to the Factory crowd at lunch at the local diner. Similar to the family reunion, the tourist vacation or a growing child, the Factory seems to realise itself through this kind of documentation. As the saying goes: pictures, or it didn’t happen.”

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Catherine Zuromskis, Associate Professor, School of Photographic Arts and Sciences, College of Art and Design, at Rochester Institute of Technology, USA

“In subtitling the show, A Social Media, Robinson is emphasising the way Warhol surrounded himself with two kinds of people: those who were to be photographed, and those who were photographing him. In the first category there was room for the whole world. In the second, we find a succession of photographers of varying levels of professionalism. Early on there is Billy Name, who took over camera duties when Warhol became bored with the technical stuff. There was David McCabe, whom Warhol paid to follow and photograph him for a whole year in 1964-65. There were long-term friends and colleagues such as Brigid Berlin and Gerard Malanga; and finally, Makos, a constant companion in the latter part of Warhol’s career, who took those startling pictures of the artist made up as a glamorous blonde woman.

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John McDonald. “Fame is power: Andy Warhol’s embarrassing pictures of the rich and famous,” on The Sydney Morning Herald website April 28, 2023 [Online] Cited 03/05/2023

Christopher Makos on Andy Warhol

Henry Gillespie on Andy Warhol

Installation views of the exhibition Andy Warhol and Photography: A Social Media at the Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide
Photos: Saul Steed

“My idea of a good photograph is one that’s in focus and of a famous person doing something unfamous. It’s being in the right place at the wrong time.”

Andy Warhol

The first exhibition in Australia to explore Andy Warhol’s career-long obsession with photography opens at the Art Gallery of South Australia on 3 March 2023, as part of the 2023 Adelaide Festival. Exclusive to Adelaide, Andy Warhol and Photography: A Social Media will reveal an unseen side of the celebrated Pop artist through more than 250 works, spanning photographs, experimental films, screenprints and paintings, many on display in Australia for the first time.

Warhol’s close friend and collaborator, Christopher Makos, will travel from New York City to join Andy Warhol and Photography curator Julie Robinson in conversation as part of the exhibition’s opening weekend program. Speaking about his decade-long friendship with Warhol and his own career as a photographer, Makos will reminisce about his time as part of Warhol’s inner circle, socialising with celebrities at Studio 54 and Warhol’s studio, always with a camera by his side.

Decades before social media, Warhol’s photography was candid, collaborative and social, attuned to the power of the image to shape his public persona and self-identity. Andy Warhol and Photography offers a fresh perspective on the influential artist, as well as behind-the-scenes glimpses into his own life and the lives of friends and celebrities, including Muhammad Ali, Bob Dylan, Debbie Harry, Mick Jagger, John Lennon, Liza Minnelli, Lou Reed and Elizabeth Taylor.

Headlining the 2023 Adelaide Festival’s visual arts program, Andy Warhol and Photography: A Social Media is curated by AGSA’s Senior Curator of Prints, Drawings & Photographs, bringing together works from national and international collections, as well as AGSA’s own extensive collection of 45 Warhol photographs which will be shown together for the first time.

AGSA Director, Rhana Devenport ONZM says, ‘Some 35 years after his death, this exhibition attests to Andy Warhol’s enduring relevance as an artist and cultural figure in an era defined by social media. With cross-generational appeal, this is an exhibition of our times which begs the question, was Warhol the original influencer?’

Revealing Warhol from both in front of and behind the camera, the exhibition will also feature works by his photographic collaborators and creative contemporaries such as Brigid Berlin, Nat Finkelstein, Christopher Makos, Gerard Malanga, Robert Mapplethorpe, Duane Michals and Billy Name. Andy Warhol and Photography will also include iconic Warhol paintings never-before-seen in Adelaide, including his famed Pop Art portraits of Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley from the 1960s, demonstrating how Warhol translated many of his photographs into paintings and screenprints.

Exhibition curator, Julie Robinson says, ‘Photography underpinned Warhol’s whole artistic practice – both as an essential part of his working method and as an end in its own right. He took some 60,000 photographs in his lifetime. His candid images, which capture his own life as well as the lives of his celebrity friends, offer audiences a revealing insight into Warhol the person, taking viewers beneath the veneer of his Pop paintings and persona.’

Adelaide Festival Artistic Director, Ruth Mackenzie CBE, said, ‘It is thrilling to be working with AGSA to explore Andy Warhol’s ground-breaking work which speaks so immediately to everybody. Today more than ever, with the popularity of social media, Warhol’s idea of 15 minutes of fame is incredibly relatable and this exhibition will be a must-see during the festival season next year.’

Press release from the AGSA

Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987)
Elvis
1963
Synthetic polymer paint and screenprint on canvas
208.0 x 91.0cm
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Purchased 1973
© Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. ARS/Copyright Agency

The cultural theorist José Esteban Muñoz gave a name to the process by which those outside a social, racial, or sexual mainstream negotiate majority culture, not by aligning themselves with or against exclusionary representations (staying in their own lane, so to speak), but by transforming mainstream representations for their own purposes. They might do this by identifying with models of aspiration or experience denied to them. Muñoz called this ‘disidentification’; to ‘disidentify’ was ‘to read oneself and one’s own life narrative in a moment, object, or subject’ with which one was ‘not culturally coded to “connect”‘.[7] LGBTQI people have long understood this kind of identification intuitively. (This is not quite the same as drag, though there is similar energy in drag-ball performances of categories like ‘Executive Realness’, for example.[8]) Disidentifying means identifying in spite of, or at an angle to, the model prescribed for you by a dominant culture; it involves the scrambling and reconstructing of coded meanings of cultural objects to expose the encoded message’s universalising – and therefore exclusionary – machinations, recircuiting its workings to include and empower minority identifications.[9]

We see something like this in the early works by Warhol that draw on found photography. Elvis, 1963, [fig1, above] for instance, uses a publicity still from the iconic singer’s role in the Western Flaming Star (1960) as the basis for an image that references the sex idol star’s performative embodiment of a particular mythic trope of US masculinity – the frontiersman caught on the edge of a moral dilemma. The ‘outlaw sensibility’ associated with such a model, Elisa Glick argues, came to signify in gay male culture in a version of what Muñoz would call disidentification.[10] Other examples might include Montgomery Clift in Red River, or James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause (not a Western, but with similar energies).[11] Apparently straight figures, apparently the embodiment of the spirit of liberty, promise and rebellion, a heady (and sometimes internally contradictory) mix in popular US culture, they are also objects of coded identification at an angle (of disidentification) for queer subjects, black subjects (etcetera).

Elvis is emblematic of Warhol’s interest in performance and replication, in other words, but also, viewed as an act of disidentification, deeply transgressive. Most of the celebrities the artist would go on to image in similar serial form would be female, often women who had suffered some kind of trauma. These are disidentificatory subjects too, but they are also perhaps more cautious models for a queer artist (especially one whose sensibilities were formed before the Stonewall Rising), whether models of resilience or of sacrifice, in a hostile, straight-male-dominated world. Or, as Jonathan Katz argues, activating the suggestiveness of Warhol’s most iconic represented commodity, they constitute ‘camp bells’ (perhaps also belles) in Warhol’s oeuvre.[12] They announce something, chiming with popular press adoration of the beautiful, but they do not sound the alarm bells that might have rung had Warhol focused (only) on beautiful men. Perhaps there was something too obviously queer in Elvis more easily hidden in plain sight in representations of women.

Extract from Andrew van der Vlies. “Andy Warhol’s Queer Practice: Disidentification and Utopian Desire,” on the Art Gallery of South Australia website Nd [Online] Cited 03/05/2023

[7] José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1999, p. 12.
[8] One might recall the memorable Harlem Ballroom scenes in Jennie Livingston’s film Paris is Burning (1990).
[9] See Muñoz, Disidentifications, p. 31.
[10] Elisa Glick, Materializing queer desire: Oscar Wilde to Andy Warhol, State University of New York Press, Albany, NY, 2009, 145.
[11] Of course, modern audiences for those films might now know more about both stars’ sexuality, but the point is that they performed a certain kind of sensibility that (closeted) gay men in the 1950s and 1960s did not feel was available to them, or which they performed as cover.
[12] Jonathan D. Katz, ‘From Warhol to Mapplethorpe: postmodernity in two acts’, in Patricia Hickson (ed.), Warhol & Mapplethorpe: guise & dolls, Yale Univ. Press, New Haven, CT, and London, 2015. The allusion is to Campbell’s soup cans, the subject of one of Warhol’s most famous early works. Katz notes the ‘repeated evocation[s] of a historically specific mode of queer political redress spoken in and through the names of iconic female stars’ (p. 22).

Bob Adelman (American, 1930-2016)
Andy Warhol in Gristedes Supermarket, New York City
1965
Pigment print
Courtesy of Bob Adelman Estate

Steve Schapiro (American, 1934-2022)
Edie Sedgwick, Andy Warhol, and others at a party
1965
Gelatin silver photograph
31.5 x 47.1cm (image)
40.0 x 49.9cm (sheet)
Courtesy of Fahey/Klein Gallery
© estate of Steve Schapiro

Nat Finkelstein (American, 1993-2009)
Silver Clouds installation, Leo Castelli Gallery
1966
Pigment print
Private collection
© Nat Finkelstein Estate

Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987)
Cream of mushroom soup
1968
Colour screenprint on paper
81.0 x 47.5cm (image)
88.8 x 58.5cm (sheet)
South Australian Government Grant 1977
Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide
© Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. ARS/Copyright Agency

Curator’s Insight – Andy Warhol and Photography: A Social Media

Julie Robinson

Exclusive to Adelaide, Andy Warhol & Photography: A Social Media is the first Australian exhibition to survey Warhol’s career-long obsession with photography. As the title suggests, the exhibition explores the social aspects of Warhol’s photography, including the collaborative nature of his photographic practice, the role photography had in his social interactions with others, and the candid social media ‘look’ of his images, which were taken decades before today’s obsession with social media.

These concepts apply to the two strands of Warhol’s photographic practice that are brought together in this exhibition – photography as an essential part of his working method and photography as an end in its own right.

From the beginning of Warhol’s career, photographs became important source material and were used by the artist as the basis of his paintings and screenprints. Included were existing photographs from magazines, advertisements, publicity portraits of movie stars, and photographs taken by his friends. Warhol’s painting of Elvis Presley, for instance, is based on a publicity still from the movie Flaming Star (1960); while photographs by Edward Wallowitch, Warhol’s boyfriend at the time, formed the basis of Warhol’s printed imagery in A Gold Book, 1957.

During the 1970s and 1980s, when commissioned portraits became a significant part of his artistic practice, Warhol based these portraits on Polaroid snapshots taken by him during photo shoots in his studio. The instantaneous nature of Polaroid photography allowed Warhol and the sitter to immediately select a favoured image to be transformed into a painting. Warhol’s studio photo shoots were often a social and collaborative affair, with studio assistants and others photographing alongside Warhol, while studio guests watched on. Film and video footage provides rare behind-the-scenes insights into Warhol’s studio practice for several of his portraits, including the excitement in the studio on Friday 17 February 1978, when John Lennon unexpectedly arrived during Liza Minnelli’s photo session, with the two celebrities meeting for the first time.

During the 1960s, in addition to creating his Pop Art paintings, Warhol was a leading underground film maker, making hundreds of experimental films. Some were silent, some were loosely scripted and others were largely improvised; most invariably relied upon friends and acquaintances as ‘actors’, such as in his 1965 film Camp. The exhibition also includes various screentests or ‘stillies’ – three-minute silent portraits of sitters who were instructed to sit motionless and gaze directly at the camera.

Warhol’s engagement with still photography for most of the 1960s was through the myriad of photographers who were drawn into his circle and studio, which was known as the Silver Factory.[1] Their images captured an insider’s view of Warhol’s world and studio practice, as Billy Name, the Factory’s resident photographer explained, ‘Cameras were as natural to us as mirrors. We were children of technology … It was almost as if the Factory became a big box camera – you’d walk into it, expose yourself and develop yourself’.[2] As well as Name, other photographers from this period represented in the exhibition include Duane Michals, David McCabe, Bob Adelman, Nat Finkelstein and Steve Schapiro. In 1969 Warhol’s closest confidante and a fellow artist, Brigid Berlin, bought a Polaroid camera and over the next five years obsessively photographed her life and surroundings. Inspired by her example and attracted to the immediacy of the medium, Warhol himself bought a Polaroid camera and similarly used it to compulsively document his life and social milieu until 1976, when he purchased a new type of camera, which took on this role in his photographic practice.[3] The new camera, a Minox 35 EL, the smallest type of 35 mm camera at that time, facilitated a new direction for him – black-and-white photography – which lasted until his death in 1987 and resulted in many thousands of 8 x 10 inch gelatin-silver photographs, each of which exists as a work of art in its own right.

Warhol took his camera everywhere; it was a constant presence in private and social situations, where he captured his friends and celebrities in candid moments with a ‘snapshot’ aesthetic. The nature of Warhol’s gelatin-silver photographic practice was publicly revealed when he published his first photographic book, Andy Warhol’s Exposures, in 1979. At that time he described his philosophy on photography: ‘My idea of a good picture is one that’s in focus and of a famous person doing something unfamous. It’s being in the right place at the wrong time’.[4] Warhol also stated that his favourite photographer was paparazzi photographer Ron Galella. The pair occasionally found themselves photographing at the same social events – Galella as a press photographer and Warhol as an invited guest, an insider.

In 1980 Warhol’s Swiss-based gallerist, Bruno Bischofberger, published the only two editioned portfolios of Warhol’s photographs. In this exhibition these two portfolios – one comprising twelve photographs and the other, forty photographs – are for the first time in Australia being shown together. Bischofberger, who had a long association with Warhol, considers Warhol’s gelatin-silver photographs to be part of his diaristic tendency to record his life, writing that Warhol’s tape recordings and dictated diaries could be regarded as his verbal memories, while his photographs became his ‘pictorial or visual memory’.[5] Warhol’s contact sheets reveal his daily journeys, the people he meets, and his wry observations of details from everyday life, including shop windows, signage and roadside rubbish.[6] Warhol’s eye was also drawn to serial imagery and abstract patterns, such as a shadow on a sidewalk, images he was collecting for his intended ‘stitched’ photographs.

Most of Warhol’s gelatin-silver photographs were printed by Christopher Makos; each week they would review the contact sheets together and select the images for printing. Makos, one of the young photographers working for Warhol’s Interview magazine, was also art director of the book Andy Warhol’s Exposures, and became a key photographic companion of and collaborator with Warhol. As Makos said, ‘I undoubtably learnt a great deal from him, but he also learnt from me, especially about photography. We were in constant confrontation, continually exchanging impressions and ideas’.[7] They often photographed the same subjects side by side – whether travelling or in the studio – and Makos also took many photographs of his friend. The exhibition includes Makos portraits of Warhol doing everyday or ‘unfamous things’, including rowing a boat on a lake in Paris, having a massage, or posing wearing a clown nose. Perhaps their most enduring collaboration was the suite of Altered Image photographs: Warhol dressed in male attire but with female wigs and make-up. Makos remembers that Warhol ‘didn’t want to look like a beautiful woman, he wanted to show the way it felt to be beautiful’.[8]

Warhol exhibited very few of his photographs during his lifetime, although in January 1987, just weeks before he died, he revealed a new approach to his photography in an exhibition of ‘stitched photographs’ at Robert Miller Gallery, New York. Made by sewing several identical photographs together in a grid formation, these works frequently used photographs with strong abstract qualities in order to enhance the visual impact of the work.

AGSA’s exhibition Andy Warhol & Photography: A Social Media presents a new perspective on Warhol for Australian audiences.[9] Tracing Warhol’s photographic practice both behind and in front of the camera, and focusing primarily on portraiture, the exhibition explores the social nature of Warhol’s photographic practice and in doing so offers new insights into his art and life.

Julie Robinson is Senior Curator, Prints, Drawings and Photographs at AGSA

[1] So called because from 1964 to 1968 Warhol’s studio was on the site of a former hat factory on East 47th Street. Warhol asked Billy Linich, known as Billy Name, to decorate the interior with silver foil and paint, as Billy had done for his own apartment.
[2] Billy Name, All tomorrow’s parties, Frieze, London and D.A.P. New York, 1997, p. 18.
[3] In the studio, however, Warhol continued to use his Polaroid camera for portrait shoots for the rest of his career.
[4] Andy Warhol, with Bob Colacello, ‘Introduction: social disease’ in Andy Warhol’s Exposures, Hutchison, London, 1979, p. 19.
[5] Bruno Bischofberger, ‘Andy Warhol’s visual memory’, 2001, p. 4, https://www.brunobischofberger.com/_files/ugd/d90357_015362edc78746d3b4ec6654231933ef.pdf accessed 23 December 2022.
[6] Warhol’s contact sheets archive is held at the Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University.
[7] Christopher Makos, Andy Warhol, Charta, in collaboration with Edition Bruno Bischofberger, Zurich, 2002, p. 8.
[8] Christopher Makos, ‘Lady Warhol the book, Altered Image’, https://www.makostudio.com/gallery/2717, accessed 23 December 2022.
[9] I am grateful to the many supporters who have made this exhibition possible, including sponsors and donors, lenders in Australia and overseas, artists and artists’ estates, sitters and their families, colleagues at other institutions, and the staff at AGSA.

Gerard Malanga (American, b. 1943)
Andy Warhol
1971
Gelatin silver photograph
33.7 x 22.6cm (image), 35.6 x 27.8cm (sheet)
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Purchased 1973

Oliviero Toscani (Italian, b. 1942)
Andy Warhol
1975
Pigment print
32 x 46cm (image)
40 x 50cm (sheet)
Public Engagement Fund 2021
Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide
© Oliviero Toscani

Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987)
Bianca Jagger at Halston’s house, New York, no. 1 from the portfolio Photographs
1976, published 1980
Gelatin silver photograph
40.8 x 28.8cm (image)
50.5 x 41.0cm (sheet)
Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide
James and Diana Ramsay Fund 2020
© Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. ARS/Copyright Agency

Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987)
Halston at home, New York, no. 7 from the portfolio Photographs
c. 1976-1979, published 1980
Gelatin silver photograph
42.2 x 29.4cm (image)
50.5 x 40.8cm (sheet)
Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide
James and Diana Ramsay Fund 2020
© Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. ARS/Copyright Agency

Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987)
Truman Capote at home, New York, no. 4 from the portfolio Photographs
c. 1976-1979, published 1980
Gelatin silver photograph
30.5 x 42.9cm (image), 41.0 x 50.5cm (sheet)
Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide
James and Diana Ramsay Fund 2020,
© Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. ARS/Copyright Agency

Christopher Makos (American, b. 1948)
Andy taping Christopher Reeves for ‘Interview’ magazine
1977
Gelatin silver photograph
21.2 x 32.2cm (image), 27.5 x 35.3cm (sheet)
Private collection
© Christopher Makos

Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987)
Muhammad Ali, his infant daughter, Hanna, and wife, Veronica at Ali’s training camp in Deer Lake, PA
August 18, 1977
Gelatin silver photograph

Robin Platzer (American)
Andy Warhol showing his artistry
1978
Pigment print
Getty Images Collection
© Robin Platzer/ Images Press
Photo: Images Press

Christopher Makos (American, b. 1948)
Andy Warhol and Liza Minnelli
1978
Gelatin silver photograph
26.9 x 34.1cm (image)
40.6 x 50.3cm (sheet)
Private collection
© Christopher Makos

Christopher Makos (American, b. 1948)
Andy Warhol Kissing John Lennon
1978
Gelatin silver photograph
27.7 x 41.7cm (image)
40.7 x 50.4cm (sheet)
Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide
V.B.F. Young Bequest Fund 2022
© Christopher Makos

Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987)
Liza Minnelli
1978
Polaroid™ Polacolor Type 108
9.5 x 7.3cm (image)
10.8 x 8.5cm (sheet)
V.B.F. Young Bequest Fund 2012
Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide
© Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. ARS/Copyright Agency

Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987)
Debbie Harry
1980
Polaroid™ Polacolor Type 108
10.8 x 8.6cm (sheet)
9.7 x 7.3cm (image)
Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide
V.B. F. Young Bequest Fund and d’Auvergne Boxall Bequest Fund 2018
© Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. ARS/Copyright Agency

Christopher Makos (American, b. 1948)
Andy Warhol in a row boat in Paris’s Bois de Boulogne
1981
Gelatin silver photograph
27.7 x 35.6cm (sheet)
18.3 x 27.9cm (image)
Private collection
© Christopher Makos

Christopher Makos (American, b. 1948)
Altered Image from the portfolio Altered Image: Five Photographs of Andy Warhol
1981; published 1982
Gelatin silver photograph
44.8 x 32.2cm (image)
50.6 x 40.8cm (sheet)
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Purchased 1982
© Christopher Makos

Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987)
Woman on the street
1982
Gelatin silver photograph
25.3 x 20.3cm (sheet)
22.3 x 15.6cm (image)
Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide
V.B. F. Young Bequest Fund and d’Auvergne Boxall Bequest Fund 2018
© Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. ARS/Copyright Agency

Christopher Makos (American, b. 1948)
Andy Warhol in American flag, Madrid
1983
Gelatin silver photograph
32.3 x 21.6cm (image)
35.6 x 27.6cm (sheet)
Private collection
© Christopher Makos

Warhol’s queer practice – what we might, with a nod to the mechanics of repetition at the heart of the project, call his queer ‘technics’ – involved less an embrace of commodification than a recognition of radical difference and equality. These were always mutually dependent in Warhol’s work and the basis for what we might regard as a philosophical commitment, one that informed his entire career.

I believe we see this especially in Warhol’s films and photography, those aspects of artistic practice most overlooked by the critical establishment who rushed to canonise Warhol as the High Prince of affectless serial pop in the 1990s. Warhol’s photographs and films not only attest to the radical collectivism and performance-art culture of his Factory (the name is significant), they are also the most resistant to market logic. The photographs have been reproduced as saleable commodities less often – or to lesser degree – than his work in other media (screenprints, paintings). They also attest to some of the key paradoxes at the heart of Warhol’s whole body of work.

Photographs, after all, are often treated as aide-mémoire ephemera and are (almost) endlessly reproducible: the negative renders theoretically infinite numbers of positives. Warhol’s photographs, however, tended to the singular as well as the serial: polaroids (one of a kind) and silver-gelatin prints (from a negative, able to be multiplied), the ephemeral (throwaway records of a moment) and the auratic (emanating the aura of singularity and originality). They could be both simultaneously, too. Warhol’s photographic subjects are also more varied than the celebrity images that many associate with his screenprint practice: they range from unidentified objects of vicarious desire to glitterati – although Warhol’s celebrity subjects were often represented in ways that subverted or manipulated their mass-produced public image for effect, in line with the radical equality that is the essence of machine reproduction.

Extract from Andrew van der Vlies. “Andy Warhol’s Queer Practice: Disidentification and Utopian Desire,” on the Art Gallery of South Australia website Nd [Online] Cited 03/05/2023

Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987)
Henry Gillespie
1985
Synthetic polymer paint and screenprint on canvas
101.6 x 101.6cm
Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide
South Australian Government Grant 1996
© Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. ARS/Copyright Agency

Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987)
Self-portrait no.9
1986
Synthetic polymer paint and screenprint on canvas
203.5 x 203.7cm
Purchased through The Art Foundation of Victoria with the assistance of the National Gallery Women’s Association, Governor, 1987
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
© Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. ARS/Copyright Agency

Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987)
Curiosity Killed the Cat
1986
Gelatin silver photograph
20.1 x 25.3cm (image & sheet)
Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide
V.B. F. Young Bequest Fund and d’Auvergne Boxall Bequest Fund 2018,
© Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. ARS/Copyright Agency

Nonetheless, the openness to technology and looseness of approach to the medium that Hujar identifies in Warhol’s practice suggest ways in which we might understand much of Warholian photographic work. This is particularly the case if we consider how his practice predicts our own moment of photographic hyperproduction, casualisation, and omnipresence: Warhol’s use of the Polaroid almost has the immediacy of the camera phone – although without the same capacity for taking an image discreetly, even voyeuristically, or the potential for instant global transmission. But like the inundation of images awash on social media today (and the status of digital photograph as virtual ‘object’), the polaroid has the potential for public circulation, as well as total privacy – the image of the beloved, the erotic image that requires no third party to develop and print it. Warhol’s polaroids of male nudes, but also those of him in drag, activate energies of the private-public continuum, teasing the public viewer with imagery that suggests a zone of private erotic fetish as much as an exploration of the limits and mutability of the self.[11] Warhol’s Polaroid nudes also anticipate the social media phenomenon of people trading explicit images of the self (and sometimes of others as deceptive proxies for a fantasy self) as tease, invitation, or souvenir of intimate encounters.

Despite the clear differences in their practice and philosophy of photography, Warhol and Hujar produced bodies of photographic work that are significantly connected and entangled. This is not only attributable to their having in common queer subjects like Factory stars Candy Darling and Jackie Curtis, early reality television icon Lance Loud, theorist and writer Susan Sontag, and poet John Ashbery, each of whom had their image made by both artists to very different effect.

If Hujar left us with hauntingly beautiful – and often painterly – images of such figures, photographs that seem to capture the sitter’s animating spirt, Warhol offers a more direct impression of what his subjects were like as people in the world on a particular day.

The connections and possible dynamics of influence are also evident in Hujar’s and Warhol’s parallel movement between impulses of street photography [fig 1], studio work, celebrity and self-portraiture, documentation and celebration of the male nude (whether eroticised, stylised, or aestheticised), fascination with animal and architectural subjects, as well as their exploration of the performance culture of drag. While Warhol’s images across these genres may not occupy the same category of ‘beauty’ as Hujar’s, there is unmistakable beauty of a different variety; this might be characterised as a beauty of immediacy, of the candid moment and ephemeral gesture, a beauty that takes informality as its impulse, and which does not try to hide its flaws. It is, in a real sense, a very democratic beauty.

Extract from Patrick Flanery. “Queer Influencers: Hujar and Warhol,” on the Art Gallery of South Australia website Nd [Online] Cited 03/05/2023

Robert Mapplethorpe (American, 1946-1989)
Andy Warhol
1986
Gelatin silver photograph
61.0 x 51.0cm
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Purchased 1989

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Mar

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

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, New York, photographic series, photography, portrait, psychological, quotation, space, street photography and time
Tags: A.E. Sudan, Allen Frame, Allen Frame Young Man New York, american photographer, American photography, American social documentary photography, American street photography, Angel and Woman on Boardwalk, Antonio Reynoso, Antonio Reynoso La Gorda, Apolo Urbano, Arlene Gottfried, Arlene Gottfried Angel and Woman on Boardwalk, Arlene Gottfried Brothers with their Vines, Arlene Gottfried Disco Sally at Studio 54, Arlene Gottfried Doorway in Soho, Arlene Gottfried Giant Dildo Les Mouches Party, Arlene Gottfried Guy With Radio, Arlene Gottfried Hassid and Jewish Bodybuilder, Arlene Gottfried Le Clique, Arlene Gottfried Marsha P. Johnson, Arlene Gottfried Men's Room at Disco, Arlene Gottfried Miguel Pinero and Friend, Arlene Gottfried Pituka at Bethesda Fountain, Arlene Gottfried Pose, Arlene Gottfried Riis Nude Bay Queens, Arlene Gottfried Savage Riders at The Puertican Day Parade, Arlene Gottfried Third Avenue Shopping, Armando Cristeto, Armando Cristeto Apolo Urbano, Armando Cristeto Urban Apollo, Arthur Rimbaud in New York, B.J. Robinson, Brothers with their Vines, Clandestine, Clandestine – The Human Body in Focus, clubbing photography, Cobra Museum of Modern Art, David Wojnarowicz, David Wojnarowicz Arthur Rimbaud in New York, dialogue between culture and bodies, Dirty Windows, Disco Sally at Studio 54, documentation of scenes of ordinary daily life, Doorway in Soho, Duane Michals, Duane Michals The Most Beautiful Part of a Man's Body, Duane Michals The Most Beautiful Part of a Woman's Body, Edmund Teske, Edmund Teske Male Nude Davenport Iowa, George Dureau, George Dureau B.J. Robinson, George Hoyningen-Huene, George Hoyningen-Huene A.E. Sudan, Giant Dildo Les Mouches Party, Graciela Iturbide, Graciela Iturbide Magnolia Juchitán México, Guy With Radio, Handcuffed New York City, Hassid and Jewish Bodybuilder, Herb Ritts, Herb Ritts Wrestling Torsos Hollywood, Ivy wearing a fall, japanese photographer, Japanese photography, Kike Arnal, Kike Arnal Emmanuel, Kike Arnal Revealing Selves – Transgender Portraits from Argentina, La Gorda, Larry Clark, Larry Clark Chuck, Le Clique, Leonard Freed, Leonard Freed Handcuffed New York City, Magnolia Juchitán México, Male Nude Davenport Iowa, Marsha P. Johnson, Men's Room at Disco, Merry Alpern, Merry Alpern Dirty Windows, Mexican photographer, Mexican photography, Miguel Pinero, Miguel Pinero and Friend, nan goldin, Nan Goldin Ivy wearing a fall, New York photography, photography and female body, photography and the human body, photography and the male body, photography of New York, Pituka at Bethesda Fountain, Puerto Rican community, Revealing Selves – Transgender Portraits from Argentina, Riis Nude Bay Queens, Savage Riders at The Puertican Day Parade, Shohei Miyachi, street photographer, street photography, Studio 54, the human body and photography, The Human Body in Focus, The Most Beautiful Part of a Man's Body, The Most Beautiful Part of a Woman's Body, Third Avenue Shopping, Urban Apollo, Wrestling Torsos Hollywood, Young Man New York

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anonymous text from the Cobra Museum of Modern Art Instagram page

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

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

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

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

Anonymous text from the Cobra Museum of Modern Art Instagram page

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Three themes

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

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

About the collector

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Extract from Miss Rosen. “Sex clubs, Studio 54, Central Park: A portrait of NYC in the 70s & 80s,” on the i-D website 15 October 2021 [Online] Cited 16/10/2021

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anonymous text from the Cobra Museum of Modern Art Instagram page

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anonymous text from the Cobra Museum of Modern Art Instagram page

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What happens when people become labelled as objects of inspiration?

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

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

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

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

Anonymous text from the Cobra Museum of Modern Art Instagram page

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is symmetry more beautiful than asymmetry?

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

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

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

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

Anonymous text from the Cobra Museum of Modern Art Instagram page

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anonymous text from the Cobra Museum of Modern Art Instagram page

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cobra Museum of Modern Art
Sandbergplein 1, 1181 ZX Amstelveen

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

Cobra Museum of Modern Art website

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Jun

Exhibition: ‘Friedrich Seidenstücker – Life in the City: Photographs from the 1920s to 1940s’ at the Käthe Kollwitz Museum, Cologne

By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leave a Comment

Exhibition dates: 21st May – 15th August 2021

Friedrich Seidenstücker (German, 1882-1966)
Family tandem
1947
© Stiftung Ann und Jürgen Wilde, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, München

Recognising small diversions

A photographer I knew nothing about. Now I do.

The museum supplied me with 15 media images – hardly enough to give an overview of a life’s work – so I have supplemented them with more images, the best I could find, to give a broader idea of this artist’s work. Unfortunately, there are hardly any large photographs of his nudes or his important photographs of the destruction of Berlin directly after the war online.

An anonymous text on the The Wall Street Journal website (see below) observes that Seidenstücker’s pre- and post war photographs of Berlin “can seem a bit like moral disengagement when one recalls that the era saw the Nazis’ rise, World War II and the dismembering of Berlin itself… Even his shots of postwar rubble work hard to avoid the abyss. Kids and picnickers make the best of the ruins, napping amid the broken bricks or heaping them into playful piles.”

This is hardly true from the photographs I have seen. With a twinkle in his eye and a delicious sense of humour, Seidenstücker documents the mass and form of “the hardships and travail, but also of the longings, the small diversions, and the pleasures of life in the city.” Here is hard work and exhaustion, happiness and poverty, beauty and the ungainly. Impoverished Jewish women gather while coal porters trudge… and in the small photographs of his postwar ‘ruins’ work that I have viewed, hardly a picnicker can be observed.

Seidenstücker was a ‘Momentknipser’ (capturer of the moment) who “documents people in the social fabric of the modern metropolis with an attentive eye and keen intuition”. Which poses the question… does every photograph have to be political? Does every photograph have to be reinterpreted many years later for hidden ‘manifestations of will’ in which the artist knowingly or unknowingly made decisions about what, and who, to photograph?

Or can a photograph exist not only in the moment it was taken, but in the extension of that moment into present and future time just as it is? Can we simply accept that the artist captured what he was interested in through a process of Purpose – Aim – Goal – Valuation – Motivation – Intention, in “empathy, that is, the capacity to enter, so to speak, into the skin of others, and by means of intuitive imagination, become aware of the effects our words and acts may produce.”

Photographs are declarative, they make information known. To take a photograph of the world is not to image in reduction, in simplification – everything is political – for this act in itself is a form of interpretive fascism. Thus, we cannot prescribe a way for them to be interpreted much as we cannot prescribe a way for them to be taken.

As he strolls through the city Seidenstücker’s considered urges to action (the taking of photographs) arrive in the form of superconscious “illuminations” of everyday life. Through his intuitions and inspirations he records ostensibly incidental events and occurrences. These incidental events and occurrences, these puddle jumpers, can only be seen if the mind and will of the excursionist (those that run) are attuned and receptive, are empathetic to the wor(l)ds of others.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

Friedrich Seidenstücker (German, 1882-1966)
Stettiner Bahnhof railway station
1930
© Stiftung Ann und Jürgen Wilde, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, München

“Friedrich Seidenstücker (1882-1966) is the flaneur among Berlin photographers. As a 22 year-old trained mechanical engineer, he came to the German capital where he worked as an airplane constructor with Zeppelin AG in Potsdam during the First World War. He cultivated his eye for detail in another regard as well, as a precise chronicler with the camera. At 32, he began another course of studies in sculpture, but always kept turning back to his other passion, photography, which he finally made a profession in 1930 upon signing a contract with Ullstein publishing. From then on, he worked for magazines such as Der Querschnitt (The Profile), Illustrierte Zeitung (Illustrated Newspaper), UHU, Die Neue Linie (The New Line), Die Dame (The Lady) and Die Woche (The Weekly). Above all, Seidenstücker became famous for his awareness of every day life, pictures from the Berliner zoo and nude photographs. Similar to Herbert List in Munich, Richard Peter in Dresden or Hermann Claasen in Cologne, he strikingly documented the post-war ruins of Berlin. What interested him overridingly was the unspectacular, the charm of the second glance.”

Dr Boris von Brauchitsch. “Friedrich Seidenstücker,” on the Lumas website [Online] Cited 20/06/2021

“Friedrich Seidenstücker (1882-1966) didn’t sell his first photograph until he was 46. Trained as a sculptor, he never lost his eye for mass and form. His photographs of Berlin daily life during the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s freeze passersby in poses either accidentally graceful or, more frequently, droll and ungainly. In Shine (1925), four women clamber out of a swimming pool; the title refers to the wet gleam of the fabric on their behinds… Seidenstücker relished confounding man and beast, as in the image of a curious rhino peering at a seemingly captive zookeeper. On a trip to Copenhagen, he snapped a man whose splay-footed waddle evokes nothing so much as a penguin – indeed, he is dragging a box of fish down the sidewalk. But the irony on display … can seem a bit like moral disengagement when one recalls that the era saw the Nazis’ rise, World War II and the dismembering of Berlin itself. ‘This entire period did not agree with me’ was Seidenstücker’s understated explanation – though during the war he sustained a Jewish friend with gifts of food. Even his shots of postwar rubble work hard to avoid the abyss. Kids and picnickers make the best of the ruins, napping amid the broken bricks or heaping them into playful piles.”

Anonymous. “Photo-Op: Zoo View,” on The Wall Street Journal website [Online] Cited 20/06/2021

Friedrich Seidenstücker (1882-1966) is one of the most important chroniclers of everyday life in Berlin during the Weimar Republic. His atmospheric photographs, mostly taken on his strolls through the city, tell of ostensibly incidental events and occurrences: of Sunday fun and everyday work, of children playing in the street and the goings-on at railway stations and in the zoo. Seidenstücker shows – often from a humorous perspective – the people and life in the metropolis. At the same time, his photographs make the hardships of big-city existence visible and, in the background, repeatedly allow the contrasts of social reality in the interwar years to shine through.

The exhibition featuring 100 works from the Ann and Jürgen Wilde Foundation, Bavarian State Painting Collections, Munich, invites you to follow Friedrich Seidenstücker on his walks through Berlin 100 years ago.

The art of the moment

With few exceptions, the ‘Momentknipser’ (capturer of the moment), as he called himself, found his motifs outside on the street. As visual metaphors, his famous photographs of ‘Pfützenspringerinnen’ (puddle-leapers) represent metropolitan modernity and urban life. With a portable camera and a light-sensitive lens, he instinctively documented many other scenes and figures – including small tradesmen such as porters, coachmen, and travelling salesmen, as well as nannies, rubbish collection workers, and newspaper vendors – in their daily activities, but also while waiting or resting.

“I am an excursionist / I’m a day tripper“

Seidenstücker characterised himself thusly and set out to accompany his models to the Wannsee beach or to see the cherry blossoms in Werder. His favourite place, however, was the Berlin Zoological Garden. In his photographs taken here, it is not only the enthusiasm of the zoo visitors that becomes visible – occasionally, the observer and the observed seem to reverse their roles: Are the animals also interested in the people?

Seidenstücker’s photographs from the 1920s to the ’40s are images of everyday life, early street photography that documents people in the social fabric of the modern metropolis with an attentive eye and keen intuition. With a twinkle in his eye, he created images that give us today an idea of the hardships and travail, but also of the longings, the small diversions, and the pleasures of life in the city.

The exhibition was organised in special cooperation and with the scientific support of the Ann and Jürgen Wilde Foundation, Bavarian State Painting Collections, Munich.

Press release from Käthe Kollwitz Museum translated from the German

Friedrich Seidenstücker (German, 1882-1966)
Puddle jumpers
1925
© Stiftung Ann und Jürgen Wilde, Bayerische Staatsgemälde, München

Friedrich Seidenstücker (German, 1882-1966)
Children in the city
1928
© Stiftung Ann und Jürgen Wilde, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, München

Friedrich Seidenstücker (German, 1882-1966)
Dog painter
1928
© Stiftung Ann und Jürgen Wilde, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, München

Friedrich Seidenstücker (German, 1882-1966)
Encounters in the zoo
1926
© Stiftung Ann und Jürgen Wilde, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, München

Friedrich Seidenstücker (German, 1882-1966)
Lastenträger (Load carrier)
1928
© Stiftung Ann und Jürgen Wilde, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, München

Friedrich Seidenstücker (German, 1882-1966)
Hotel servant
1930
© Stiftung Ann und Jürgen Wilde, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, München

Friedrich Seidenstücker (German, 1882-1966)
Potsdamer Platz
After 1931
© Stiftung Ann und Jürgen Wilde,
Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, München

Friedrich Seidenstücker (German, 1882-1966)
Celebrities snapped, Berlin Zoological Garden
1930
© Stiftung Ann und Jürgen Wilde, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, München

Friedrich Seidenstücker (German, 1882-1966)
Photo school, amateur photographers, Berlin
1920-1930s
© Stiftung Ann und Jürgen Wilde, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, München

Friedrich Seidenstücker (German, 1882-1966)
Berlin Nord im Wedding
1923
© Stiftung Ann und Jürgen Wilde, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, München

Friedrich Seidenstücker (German, 1882-1966)
Zebras
1920-1930s
© Stiftung Ann und Jürgen Wilde, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, München

Friedrich Seidenstücker (German, 1882-1966)
In his father’s trousers
c. 1950
© Stiftung Ann und Jürgen Wilde, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, München

Friedrich Seidenstücker (German, 1882-1966)
Self-portrait with camera
c. 1925
© Archiv Ann und

Poster for the special exhibition
Design: Michael Krupp
Motif: Friedrich Seidenstücker, family tandem, 1947
© Ann and Jürgen Wilde Foundation, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Munich

More photographs

Friedrich Seidenstücker (German, 1882-1966)
Untitled (Sch)
1930

Friedrich Seidenstücker (1882-1966)
Untitled
c. 1930
Vintage print
6 15/16 x 5 1/16 in. (17.6 x 12.9cm)
Galerie Berinson, Berlin
Photo: Galerie Berinson, Berlin

Friedrich Seidenstücker (1882-1966) is noted for his atmospheric photographs of everyday life in Berlin during the Weimar Republic. Thanks to his compassionate studies of animals, he has an almost legendary reputation among animal and zoo lovers, and his haunting pictures of Berlin in ruins are a precious source of material for historians. His images seem to be spontaneous, sympathetic examples of the kind of photography that excels at capturing the moment. They are free of any exaggeration or extravagance, and display a sense of humour rarely found in photography. His work is buoyed by a fundamental optimism, yet it does not ignore the harshness, poverty, and suffering that prevailed at that time.

Friedrich Seidenstücker (German, 1882-1966)
Potsdamer Bahnhof, Berlin
1932

Friedrich Seidenstücker (German, 1882-1966)
Alexanderplatz, Berlin
1928

Friedrich Seidenstücker (German, 1882-1966)
Two walruses emerging from water
1925-1935

Friedrich Seidenstücker (German, 1882-1966)
Polar bear, Berlin Zoo
1929

Polar bear perspective: who is actually behind bars here? Photographer Seidenstücker often seemed to have been closer to animals than to humans – this is the impression made by many of his photographs, such as those from 1929 at the Berlin Zoo.

Friedrich Seidenstücker (German, 1882-1966)
Pelican, Berlin Zoo
1928

Friedrich Seidenstücker (German, 1882-1966)
Berlin Zoo
1933

Friedrich Seidenstücker (German, 1882-1966)
Berlin Zoo
1936

Friedrich Seidenstücker (German, 1882-1966)
Curious goat
1920s-1930s

Friedrich Seidenstücker (German, 1882-1966)
Monday morning, Oberbaumbrücke, Berlin
1930

Friedrich Seidenstücker (German, 1882-1966)
Posing javelin thrower
1932-1938

Friedrich Seidenstücker (German, 1882-1966)
Berlin
1925

Friedrich Seidenstücker (German, 1882-1966)
Kleines Mädchen malt mit Kreide auf den Straßenasphalt (Little girl paints with chalk on the asphalt road)
1925-1930

Friedrich Seidenstücker (German, 1882-1966)
Elderly couple in Berlin
1929

Friedrich Seidenstücker (German, 1882-1966)
At the Waterpump
1927

Friedrich Seidenstücker (German, 1882-1966)
Woman Jumping Puddle, Berlin
1925

Friedrich Seidenstücker (German, 1882-1966)
Puddle Jumper
1925

Friedrich Seidenstücker (German, 1882-1966)
Puddle Jumpers
1930

Friedrich Seidenstücker (German, 1882-1966)
Faschingsfigur (Carnival figure)
1925

Friedrich Seidenstücker (German, 1882-1966)
The front stairs are scrubbed
1928

Friedrich Seidenstücker (German, 1882-1966)
Vor dem Bäckerladen
1929

Friedrich Seidenstücker (German, 1882-1966)
Ice cream after school
1931

Friedrich Seidenstücker (German, 1882-1966)
Verarmte Jüdinnnen in de Grenadierstraße (Impoverished Jewish women in de Grenadierstrasse)
c. 1930

Friedrich Seidenstücker (German, 1882-1966)
Konzentration vor dem Abschuß des Pfeils (Concentration before the arrow is fired)
1932

Friedrich Seidenstücker (German, 1882-1966)
Stove-fitter
1930-1935

Friedrich Seidenstücker (German, 1882-1966)
Coal porter
1930

Friedrich Seidenstücker (German, 1882-1966)
Next to Wertheim
c. 1935

Friedrich Seidenstücker (German, 1882-1966)
Jungfernbrücke an der Friedrichsgracht (Maiden Bridge on the Friedrichsgracht)
1946

Friedrich Seidenstücker (1882-1966)
Ein rollstuhlfahrer passiert die ruine des stadtschlosses (A wheelchair user passes the ruins of the city palace)
1947

The Hohenzollern residence, located in the eastern sector, bore the legend, “remove war criminals from all positions!!!”

Friedrich Seidenstücker (German, 1882-1966)
Untitled (Bismark)
1946

Friedrich Seidenstücker (1882-1966)
The Twins, Hilde und Helga Fischer
1948

Friedrich Seidenstücker (German, 1882-1966)
Aufstieg der Begabten, Berlin (Rise of the gifted, Berlin)
1950

Friedrich Seidenstücker (German, 1882-1966)
Pachyderms: Zoo visitors at the elephant enclosure in Berlin
1950

Friedrich Seidenstücker (German, 1882-1966)
Autumn in the Zoo, African Rhinoceros
c. 1955

Friedrich Seidenstücker (German, 1882-1966)
Nude
Nd

Friedrich Seidenstücker (German, 1882-1966)
Untitled (Self-portrait with dove)
1952

Käthe Kollwitz Museum Köln
Neumarkt 18-24 / Neumarkt Passage
50667 Köln
Phone: +49 (0)221 227 2899
Phone: +49 (0)221 227 2602

Opening hours:
Tuesday – Sunday 11am – 6pm

Käthe Kollwitz Museum Cologne website

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Jun

Exhibition: ‘The Human Cost: America’s Drug Plague’ at the Bronx Documentary Center, New York

By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leave a Comment

Categories: American, american photographers, black and white photography, colour photography, digital photography, documentary photography, exhibition, existence, gallery website, intimacy, light, memory, photographic series, photography, photojournalism, portrait, psychological, quotation, space, street photography and time
Tags: A woman who goes by Jen, addiction, Allie and Regina catching snowflakes, Allie crying, Allie freebasing a prescription opioid, Allie in traffic after losing a close friend, America's addicts, America's Drug Plague, American documentary photography, American photojournalism, American photojournalist, American social documentary photography, American street photography, Americurbana, Bronx Documentary Center, Chad Colwell, Cheryl Schmidtchen, conflict photographers, conflict photography, Cooking pills for injection next to dinner, documentary photography, Dorothy Onikute 33 a deputy sheriff, Holly detoxing in the Montgomery County Jail, James Nachtwey, James Nachtwey A woman who goes by Jen, James Nachtwey and Paul Moakley, James Nachtwey and Paul Moakley The Opioid Diaries, James Nachtwey Chad Colwell, James Nachtwey Cheryl Schmidtchen, James Nachtwey Dorothy Onikute 33 a deputy sheriff, James Nachtwey Holly detoxing in the Montgomery County Jail, Jeffrey Stockbridge, Jeffrey Stockbridge Bobby, Jeffrey Stockbridge Carol, Jeffrey Stockbridge Jamie, Jeffrey Stockbridge Kensington Blues, Jeffrey Stockbridge Kevin, Jeffrey Stockbridge Krysta, Jessie injecting Barbie with morphine, Kensington Blues, large format photography, Mark E. Trent Allie and Regina catching snowflakes, Mark E. Trent Allie crying, Mark E. Trent Allie freebasing a prescription opioid, Mark E. Trent Allie in traffic after losing a close friend, Mark E. Trent Cooking pills for injection next to dinner, Mark E. Trent Jessie injecting Barbie with morphine, Mark Trent, opioid addiction, opioid crisis, Paul Moakley, Philadelphia's Kensington neighbourhood, photo story, photojournalism, pillhead, social documentary photogaphy, social documentary photographers, street photography, Surviving Kensington, The Human Cost, The Human Cost: America's Drug Plague, The Opioid Diaries, urban photography

Exhibition dates: 5th June – 5th July 2021

Curators: Michael Kamber and Cynthia Rivera

Artists: James Nachtwey; Jeffrey Stockbridge; Mark Trent

*PLEASE NOTE THIS POSTING CONTAINS PHOTOGRAPHS OF DRUG USE – IF YOU DO NOT LIKE PLEASE DO NOT LOOK, FAIR WARNING HAS BEEN GIVEN*

James Nachtwey (American, b. 1943)
A woman, who goes by Jen, struggling to inject herself in the freezing cold in Boston on Jan. 14. 2018
2018
James Nachtwey for TIME

Nature ∞ nurture

Last year, over 81,000 men, women and children were lost to drug overdoses in America. Visualise that number of people if you can… nearly 4/5ths capacity of the Melbourne Cricket Ground (MCG) in Australia.

According to medical doctors (see quotation below), the causes of addiction “may involve an interaction of environmental effects – for example, stress, the social context of initial opiate use, and psychological conditioning – and a genetic predisposition in the form of brain pathways that were abnormal even before the first dose of opioid was taken.” So both nature and nurture.

Through experience, I understand both strands that lead to possible addiction: a genetic, psychological illness within family members coupled with the need for escape, the need for pleasure, peer group activity and the desire to loose oneself from the world. Luckily, I do not have a personality that easily becomes addicted, but the possibility within people is always there, no matter their background or social position in the world. While the photo stories in this posting concentrate on human beings from lower socio-economic backgrounds, addiction can affect anyone at anytime. Again through experience, I know that lots of high performing professional people suffer from chronic addiction but keep the fact well hidden from the community.

Addiction occurs when dependence interferes with daily life… when independence, that much searched for freedom from outside control or support (you don’t need or accept help, resources, or care from others), morphs into ‘in dependence’ – where the independence of the self, in addiction, opposes the autonomy of the self (meaning that you have free will and that you can stand behind your actions and their values while still exchanging support and care with others). In autonomy, no one is forcing you to do something you disagree with; in addiction, ‘in dependence’, those actions can no longer be justified. These are just my thoughts… but they can be seen to be linked to Self-Determination Theory (STD). “The interplay between the extrinsic forces acting on persons and the intrinsic motives and needs inherent in human nature is the territory of Self-Determination Theory.” Nature and nurture.

The word addicted (adjective) arises in the “mid 16th century: from the obsolete adjective addict ‘bound or devoted (to someone’), from Latin addict- ‘assigned’, from the verb addicere, from ad- ‘to’ + dicere ‘say’.” Its use has diminished from the 18th century until now. Conversely, the word addiction (noun) comes from the same root, but was unknown until 1900 with the use of the word skyrocketing since the 1950s onwards (with a particular spike in the use of the word in the 1960-70s, the era of free love). Perhaps this says a lot about the pressure of living in a high intensity, 24 hour world, a world where the gods of capitalism can write off 81,000 people in a year, in one country, without the blink of an eye.

What all three photo stories in this posting have ad- ‘to’ + dicere ‘say’ is this: every human being has a story worth listening to.

By embedding themselves in the communities they were photographing (instead of being “snatch and grab” photojournalists), all three photographers give their participants an opportunity to have their voice heard. To tell their stories in their own words and have those stories told with dignity and respect, through images and text. (I have linked all three segments to the full stories online).

As Jeffrey Stockbridge comments, “Everyone’s wading through problems that are unique to them, and I think it’s important to tell these stories… Hearing people discuss their past in their own words is something that you can’t ignore. It’s very powerful. I want the general public to forget what they thought they knew about prostitution, drug addiction, homelessness and poverty, and just listen to an actual person explain what they’ve been through. It’s important to remember that life is unpredictable!” James Natchwey observes, “Photography can cut through abstractions and rhetoric to help us understand complex issues on a human level.”

This is the crux of the matter: photography helps us understand these complex issues on a human level.

Every human being is a life, has a life, and is valuable as such. Every story, every breath, every death is connected to Mother Earth. In their indifference, what capitalism and society do to others, we do to ourselves.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

“Brain abnormalities resulting from chronic use of heroin, oxycodone, and other morphine-derived drugs are underlying causes of opioid dependence (the need to keep taking drugs to avoid a withdrawal syndrome) and addiction (intense drug craving and compulsive use). The abnormalities that produce dependence, well understood by science, appear to resolve after detoxification, within days or weeks after opioid use stops. The abnormalities that produce addiction, however, are more wide-ranging, complex, and long-lasting. They may involve an interaction of environmental effects – for example, stress, the social context of initial opiate use, and psychological conditioning – and a genetic predisposition in the form of brain pathways that were abnormal even before the first dose of opioid was taken. Such abnormalities can produce craving that leads to relapse months or years after the individual is no longer opioid dependent.”

.
Thomas R. Kosten, M.D. and Tony P. George, M.D. “The Neurobiology of Opioid Dependence: Implications for Treatment,” in Science & Practice Perspectives. 2002 Jul; 1(1), pp. 13-20.

“Photography can cut through abstractions and rhetoric to help us understand complex issues on a human level. Never is photography more essential than in moments of crisis. To witness people suffering is difficult. To make a photograph of that suffering is even harder. The challenge is to remain open to very powerful emotions and, rather than shutting down, channel them into the images. It is crucial to see with a sense of compassion and to comprehend that just because people are suffering does not mean they lack dignity.”

.
James Natchwey

James Nachtwey (American, b. 1943)
Holly, detoxing in the Montgomery County Jail in Dayton, Ohio, on July 3, 2017
2017
© Photograph by James Nachtwey for TIME

Last year, America lost 81,000 men, women and children to drug overdoses. Driven primarily by the opioid crisis – and abetted by the pill-pushing of pharmaceutical companies – millions of individuals and countless families were devastated by addiction.

The war on drugs has failed: from sea to shining sea, fentanyl, heroin, K2, crystal meth, cocaine and other drugs are available in nearly every town and city. Drug-related violence has endangered many of our streets, including Courtlandt Avenue, home to the Bronx Documentary Center.

After decades of ever changing anti-drug strategies, we are still left with familiar and yet unanswered questions: how to stop the overdoses; how to keep our youth from addiction; how to stop drug-related violence; how to offer humanitarian treatment.

The Bronx Documentary Center’s upcoming photo exhibition, The Human Cost: America’s Drug Plague, explores these issues and portrays the human toll of America’s drug scourge. The deeply personal stories told here – of losing children, families and freedom – provide a stark but compassionate look at a very complex dynamic.

James Nachtwey, the dean of American conflict photographers, reports with visual journalist and editor, Paul Moakley, from New Hampshire, Ohio, Boston, San Francisco and beyond. Jeffrey Stockbridge documents Philadelphia’s Kensington neighbourhood over the course of 6 years. And Mark Trent follows a tight-knit group of friends in West Virginia through cycles of substance abuse and tragic death. The BDC hopes this exhibition will lead to productive discussions about an intractable American problem.

Exhibition curated by Michael Kamber and Cynthia Rivera.

Press release from the Bronx Documentary Center

James Nachtwey (American, b. 1943)
Dorothy Onikute, 33, a deputy sheriff with the Rio Arriba County sheriff’s office, responding to an overdose call on Feb. 4, on the side of the road in Alcalde, N.M.
Nd
© Photograph by James Nachtwey for TIME

‘This sort of thing happens so often, it’s sad to say it’s on to the next once they are out of our care.’

~ Dorothy Onikute

The Opioid Diaries – James Nachtwey and Paul Moakley

The opioid crisis is the worst addiction epidemic in American history. Drug overdoses kill more than 64,000 people per year, and the nation’s life expectancy has fallen for two years in a row. But there is a key part of the story that statistics can’t tell. In 2017, for over the course of a year, photographer James Nachtwey set out to document the opioid crisis in America through the people on its front lines. Alongside TIME‘s deputy director of photography, Paul Moakley, the pair traveled the country gathering stories from users, families, first responders and others at the heart of the epidemic. Here, Nachtwey’s images are paired with quotes from Moakley’s interviews, which have been edited. The voices are a mix of people in the photos and others who are connected to them. The Opioid Diaries is a visual record of a national emergency – and it demands our urgent attention.

Text from the Bronx Documentary Center website

The full text and more images from the series can be found on the TIME website

James Nachtwey (American, b. 1943)
Chad Colwell, 32, being revived by EMS workers after overdosing in his truck in Miamisburg, Ohio, on July 4, 2017. He says this, his fourth overdose, led him to seek treatment
2017
© Photograph by James Nachtwey for TIME

‘Heroin grabs ahold of you, and it won’t let go. It turned me into somebody I never thought I would be.’

~ Chad Colwell

James Nachtwey (American, b. 1943)
Billy, 31, right, preparing to use drugs in Boston on Jan. 14
Nd
© Photograph by James Nachtwey for TIME

James Nachtwey (American, b. 1943)
Cheryl Schmidtchen, 67, being consoled at the funeral for her granddaughter Michaela Gingras in Manchester, N.H., on September 17th, 2017. Gingras, a heroin user, was 24
2017
© Photograph by James Nachtwey for TIME

‘After Michaela died, I saw it clear as day. They’re not only destroying themselves, they’re destroying us.’

~ Cheryl Schmidtchen

What I Saw

James Natchwey

Like most people, I’d heard about the opioid epidemic. It was especially hard to get my mind around a statistic from 2016: almost as many deaths from drug overdoses as in all of America’s recent wars combined. But numbers are an abstraction. I had no idea what it looked like on the ground. The only way to make real sense of it, I told my editors, was to see what happens to individual human beings, one by one.

Photography can cut through abstractions and rhetoric to help us understand complex issues on a human level. Never is photography more essential than in moments of crisis. To witness people suffering is difficult. To make a photograph of that suffering is even harder. The challenge is to remain open to very powerful emotions and, rather than shutting down, channel them into the images. It is crucial to see with a sense of compassion and to comprehend that just because people are suffering does not mean they lack dignity.

Over the past 35 years, my work as a photojournalist has taken me to other countries to document wars, uprisings, natural disasters and global health crises. In revisiting my own country I discovered a national nightmare. But the people living through it aren’t deviants. They are ordinary citizens, our neighbours, our family members. I don’t think I met one user whom I would consider to be a bad person. No one wants to be an addict.

I also saw signs of hope, particularly from the people who are dealing with the crisis at the street level. Some of them are former users who have lifted themselves up and are using their experience to help others. They are refusing to allow our country to be defined by this problem. Instead, they are helping us define ourselves by finding solutions. We must join them.

James Natchwey

Jeffrey Stockbridge (American, b. 1982)
Bobby
2010
© Jeffrey Stockbridge

Kensington Blues – Jeffrey Stockbridge

Kensington Blues by Jeffrey Stockbridge is a decade-long documentary project about the opioid crisis in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Featuring large-format photography, audio interviews, journal entries and video Stockbridge utilises a combination of styles and formats to humanise those suffering from addiction.

“During the 19th century the neighbourhood of Kensington in North Philadelphia was a strong working-class district, a national leader of the textile industry and home to a diverse population of immigrants. Like many rust belt cities, industrial restructuring of the mid twentieth century led to a sharp economic decline including high unemployment and a significant population loss.

Today, half of Kensington residents live at or below the poverty line. The neighbourhood has become an epicentre of the opioid crisis and is infamous for open air drug use, prostitution and violent crime. With the roaring El train overhead, Kensington Avenue (the major business corridor in the neighbourhood) is in a state of perpetual hustle. Heroin, Fentanyl, K-2, Crystal, Crack, Xanax, Subs – just about any drug that exists in the modern world is bought and sold in Kensington. Women, some as young as twenty years old, and others who’ve been working the Avenue for decades, populate the neighbourhood in great numbers. Prostitution has become a social norm. Drug users sell clean packaged needles for a dollar a piece – five needles equals a bag of dope.

Working with a large-format film camera, I chose a slow photographic process in order to literally slow down the rapid speed of life as it happens along the Ave. The focus of my photographic work is portraiture. I want to tap into the state of mind of those who are struggling to survive their addiction. Together my subjects and I have entered into a collaboration of sorts. Through audio recordings, journal entries and video, we are working to highlight the voices of those with lived experience. This work would not be possible without their trust and guidance. By sharing the intimate details of their plight, those I photograph are taking a stand to effectively humanise addiction and challenge the stigma that all drug addicts are morally corrupt. As the opioid crisis has taught us, addiction can happen to anyone.”

Text from the Bronx Documentary Center website

Jeffrey Stockbridge (American, b. 1982)
Jamie
2012
© Jeffrey Stockbridge

Jeffrey Stockbridge (American, b. 1982)
Carol
2010
© Jeffrey Stockbridge

LC: Drug addicts, prostitutes and the homeless are often seen as “the other” in our society. Your photos show a different side of this – a side that people can relate to and empathise with. Can you say more?

JS: There are a million different reasons why people become homeless to begin with. You dehumanise people by lumping them into the lowest common denominator. By looking down on them and saying, “You’re all homeless because you couldn’t get your lives together” – that doesn’t help anybody. Everyone’s wading through problems that are unique to them, and I think it’s important to tell these stories. Alongside the photographs I feature a short bio or quotes; sometimes I’ll also incorporate diary entries written by my subjects, and I’ve recorded audio interviews that I post on my Kensington Blues blog.

Hearing people discuss their past in their own words is something that you can’t ignore. It’s very powerful. I want the general public to forget what they thought they knew about prostitution, drug addiction, homelessness and poverty, and just listen to an actual person explain what they’ve been through. It’s important to remember that life is unpredictable! I could end up on Kensington Avenue if certain circumstances occurred – anybody could.

…

LC: The images are “still” and considered. They communicate a feeling of respect and consent. You don’t seem to shoot from the hip or take the “fearless flashgun” approach like many street photographers. Can you talk about your process?

JS: I shoot with a 4 x 5 view camera. For these photographs to work, there has to be consent! My subjects have to hold still – if they move an inch forward or an inch back, they’ll be out of focus. It’s a slow-moving, old-looking camera, so it’s automatically a topic of conversation. People look at it and think, “Woah, what is that?” But it has certain limitations – you can’t photograph quickly. It takes time. I have to set it up, I have to focus, use the dark cloth, take a meter reading … It’s at least five minutes until I’m ready to go. Meanwhile, my subject has to stand around waiting. So consent is fairly important!

I’m not looking at the back of an LCP screen when I shoot; I’m in the moment. I’m connecting entirely with my subject, not just communicating with a computer. The camera is a trusted friend that’s standing there by my side. In the Kensington project it really grounded me in the neighbourhood. I think it put people at ease, because they knew I wasn’t going to take a photo and run off – I was stuck with a tripod and a big heavy camera!

Jeffrey Stockbridge, interviewed by Francesca Cronan. “Kensington Blues,” on the LensCulture website 2016 [Online] Cited 03/06/2021.

The full text and more images from the series can be found on the LensCulture website.

Jeffrey Stockbridge (American, b. 1982)
Kevin
2011
© Jeffrey Stockbridge

Surviving Kensington: behind the photos of ‘Kensington Blues’

What used to be a proud blue-collar neighbourhood in Philadelphia is now a deteriorating haven for drugs, crime, and prostitution. Kensington is famous for the place to get your fix; and for the place you end up stuck when you’ve let your vices get the best of you.

For the last five years, Philly-based photographer Jeffrey Stockbridge has been taking intimate portraits of current residents (‘survivors’) in Kensington. But the stories he finds here aren’t just about Philly: Jeffrey’s photographs and raw interviews show a side of the desperation, hopelessness, and broken dreams that plague America’s addicts across the country.

Through a walk with Jeffrey on the Avenue, we get a glimpse of what it’s like to survive on Kensington.

Jeffrey Stockbridge (American, b. 1982)
Krysta
2009
© Jeffrey Stockbridge

Mark E. Trent (American)
Allie in traffic after losing a close friend in her recovery group to an overdose
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© Mark E. Trent

Despair, Love and Loss – Mark E. Trent

None of us knew what was happening or how destructive this would be. We began seeing more and more overdoses and suicides in our community. The details were scarce and the stigma that came with drug abuse masked the early deaths until it was so common it didn’t phase us anymore; the word pillhead began being used to describe those people on drugs. This was long before it touched nearly everyone in West Virginia and across the country.

With the help of friends I travelled to interview small time dealers, addicts and local law enforcement in an attempt to understand the scope of it all. I never did. This body of work started taking shape when I was at a softball game with a long time friend. Her name is Allie. I told her what I was trying to do and she said “Stick with me and I will show you what’s going on.”

From there it was a matter of seeing what was right in front of me. I documented Allie and her friends and lovers as they struggled in active addiction and slowly lost themselves and each other. This group of women let me into their lives behind closed doors and gave me access to make this work possible. They didn’t have to. They are the reason this work exists. They were star basketball players, young mothers, and individuals that held jobs and had real dreams. One day a knee injury supplied the prescription opiate that led to the addiction that spread through their group of friends and community.

My goal with this project was longevity. I wanted to follow it through until the end. My hope is that these photographs will tell a story about a small group of individuals that suffered through a crisis few saw coming. Today Allie is six years sober. Peakay is working toward sobriety with medical assisted treatments. Barbie died of an overdose in her bed alongside her lover Kim. Jessie tells me she is “going good,” but to be honest I never know the truth with her.

Text from the Bronx Documentary Center website

Mark E. Trent (American)
Allie freebasing a prescription opioid
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© Mark E. Trent

There were times whenever I was really strung out and I didn’t realise how bad I was. What you always say is, ‘Well at least I’m not doing it to anyone else. At least I’m not hurting anyone. I’m just hurting myself. I’m not sticking needles in anyone else. It’s just me.’ But I didn’t realise how much I’d hurt my family, and my mom.

I don’t know how many people died in the house I was living in, I can’t even – three off the top of my head, because of drugs, overdoses.

But it just didn’t, it just didn’t hit me that way, I didn’t think – I wasn’t ready to see it that way I think. I feel like I had to go through everything I went through to be where I am.

Mark E. Trent (American)
Jessie injecting Barbie with morphine
Nd
© Mark E. Trent

Barbie really was like my big sister.

She told me a year before she died she had to go to the doctor for something. They couldn’t find a vein and she had to make them put it in her neck. And they asked about the scarring on her neck.

They asked her, ‘Do you shoot in your neck? Jesus.’ And she was like, ‘Yeah.’ And they were like, ‘You’re going to be dead in a year anyway.’ But I sort of didn’t believe it. Barbie really was invincible.

Mark E. Trent (American)
Cooking pills for injection next to dinner
Nd
© Mark E. Trent

Mark E. Trent (American)
Allie crying, facing jail time and missing Barbie who died of an overdose, after a long night of using
Nd
© Mark E. Trent

Sometimes I thought it was fine; other times I thought, ‘How did I get here? What did I do?’ I was supposed to be somebody. I was supposed to do something great with my life. I was supposed to go places. I wanted to travel. I wanted to play basketball. I wanted to be all these things.

And instead I was living in a house with no electricity, crying in the bathroom because I can’t find a vein, miserable. Absolutely miserable.

It took me getting sober and being sober for a while to look back and be like, ‘That was all really low, man. That was all really low.’

“Allie Rambo tells her story below in her own words” in ‘Despair, Love and Loss: A Journey Inside West Virginia’s Opioid Crisis’ on the NY Times website Dec. 13, 2018 [Online] Cited 03/06/2021

The full text and more images from the series can be found on the NY Times website.

Mark E. Trent (American)
Allie and Regina catching snowflakes after a close friend’s funeral
Nd
© Mark E. Trent

Bronx Documentary Center Annex Gallery
364 E 151st St, Bronx, NY 10455

Opening hours:
Wednesday – Friday 3 – 7pm
Saturday – Sunday 12 – 5pm

Bronx Documentary Center website

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Dec

Exhibition: ‘Bruce Davidson: Brooklyn Gang’ at Cleveland Museum of Art

By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leave a Comment

Categories: american photographers, beauty, black and white photography, documentary photography, exhibition, existence, gallery website, intimacy, landscape, light, memory, New York, photographic series, photography, photojournalism, portrait, psychological, quotation, reality, space, street photography, time and works on paper
Tags: 1950s American street photography, 1950s lust and love, american photographer, American photography, American photojournalism, American social documentary photographs, American street photography, American youths, an outsider on the inside, Artie Giammarino, bad boy, bad boy image, Beach at Coney Island, blue-collar clothing, Bob Powers, Brooklyn, Brooklyn Gang, Brooklyn Gang photographs, Brooklyn Prospect Park, Bruce Davidson, Bruce Davidson Brooklyn Gang, Bruce Davidson Brooklyn Gang series, Cathy O'Neal, cinematic antiheroes, Cleveland Museum of Art, Coney Island, Coney Island boardwalk, disadvantaged youths, first tattoo, gang members, greasers, James Dean, James Dean Rebel without a Cause, Junior Rice, lust and love, Marlon Brando, Marlon Brando The Wild One, New York City, Park Slope, Park Slope Brooklyn, photojournalism, pompadours, Rebel without a Cause, rebellious youth subculture, sexual vitality, social documentary photogaphy, Statue of Liberty, street photography, tattoos, teenage romance, teenage street gangs, the Jokers, The Wild One, visual and social homogenisation of the 1950s

Exhibition dates: 25th October 2020 – 28th February 2021

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933)
Untitled
1959
Gelatin silver print
Paper: 27.9 x 35.6cm (11 x 14 in.)
Gift of an anonymous donor
© Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos

For a few brief moments, rebels with a cause

This is one of my favourite photo essays of all time. The story Davidson tells of this male-orientated Brooklyn gang and its culture through his photographs is one of brotherhood, friendship, rivalry, love, longing, agony, depression and death at a time of utter poverty and rock ‘n roll rebellion. He produced “unflinchingly honest images of these American youths.” Now, all these years later, the photographs possess a powerful nostalgia for the era mixed with the desolation of destroyed lives and lost youth.

Davidson gets under the skin of his subjects, embeds himself firmly in their milieu. The subjects allow him to photograph their most intimate moments, seemingly free from worry or anxiety. There is an insouciance to their attitude, a knowing insouciance. In one photograph inside Helen’s Candy Store, Bob Powers stares directly and disarmingly at the camera while the girl playing with the yo-yo and the youth in the background also stare directly into the lens, forming a strong compositional triangle of the gaze. Powers said he was voted “most likely to die before I was 21 years old.” He lived with his seven siblings and alcoholic parents in a three-bedroom apartment that had a coal-powered cookstove and no hot water or central heating.

There is a dark undertone to the narrative. While there are moments of joy and happiness, you can sense the isolation and despair of these disaffected youths. Cathy O’Neal, seen in front of a cigarette machine at Coney Island, committed suicide by shotgun. Jimmie and his family were wiped out by drugs. Junior Rice became a heroin dealer. Lefty od’d in bed at 19. “He was the first in the group to die from a drug overdose… within a few years, drugs would claim the lives of many in the gang and in the neighbourhood.” In picturing their lives, the photographs gather moments (in time), enunciating how the gang members railed against the conformity and materialism of 1950s America whilst imbibing its rebellious iconography. Only occasionally does the artist pull back to show us the wider picture, the context of the action, with photographs of New York skyscrapers seen in the distance and the Statue of Liberty.

Davidson does not let his spontaneity slip. He is informed, aware, absent (but present) in all of these photographs waiting for that special moment. In the photograph above, a bird-like creature swoops down on something invisible on the ground. In informal yet tightly focused photographs – of sunbathing or walking the boardwalks of Coney Island, gang members fixing their hair, rolling up their sleeves, dead beat(s) in the back of the bus, making out in the back seat of a car, walking in the park or hooning around on the Metro – Davidson is there to capture the off-beat moments of gang existence and the members relationship to each other.

Through a superb eye, a feeling, a sensibility and connection towards the gang members desperation and isolation, universally acknowledged by the photographer himself, Davidson sets them all on the path to immortality. Do not forget, these photographs seem to be saying. For a few brief moments these people did exist, their lives were valuable, these rebels with a cause.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

One of Davidson’s best-known series, Brooklyn Gang was inspired by a news story he read about a teenage gang called the Jokers.

Davidson contacted the Jokers, one of Brooklyn’s roughest gangs, through their social worker. In the summer of 1959, Davidson roamed the streets of New York with these teens, loitered in stores that the Jokers called their own, and sunbathed with them on the beach at Coney Island. Eventually they allowed him to photograph even their most intimate, private moments. He responded by producing unflinchingly honest images of these American youths.

Gang membership was exclusively male, but the members’ girlfriends appear frequently in Davidson’s photographs. Some of the pictures depict the teenagers exploring lust and love and the boys struggling to define and prove their masculinity. Looking back at the series in 1998, Davidson said that he felt “the reason that body of work has survived is that it’s about emotion. That kind of mood and tension and sexual vitality, that’s what those pictures were really about.”

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933)
Untitled
1959
Gelatin silver print
Paper: 27.9 x 35.6cm (11 x 14 in.)
Gift of an anonymous donor
© Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos

The pleasures and agonies of teenage romance are captured in Bruce Davidson’s photographs of the gang’s dance parties, which were held variously in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, at a neighbourhood school, and in members’ homes. The basement wallpaper seen here – with its fairy-tale figures, including horses, queens, knights, marionettes, and jokers – suggests a domestic setting. The event could have been a farewell party for an older gang member going off to join the army, which was a common occurrence.

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933)
Untitled
1959
Gelatin silver print
Paper: 20.3 x 25.4cm (8 x 10 in.)
Gift of an anonymous donor
© Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933)
Untitled
1959
Gelatin silver print
Image: 16 x 23.9cm (6 5/16 x 9 7/16 in.)
Paper: 20.3 x 25.2cm (8 x 9 15/16 in.)
Gift of an anonymous donor
© Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos

This rooftop view in Park Slope, Brooklyn, was taken from a building in the gang’s “turf,” which was a block anchored by the intersection of 17th Street and 8th Avenue. Davidson spent the summer hanging out with the gang and photographing them. Describing his process, the artist said, “I stay a long time. … I am an outsider on the inside.” Park Slope, now one of New York’s most desirable neighbourhoods, was then a poor, mostly Irish area.

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933)
Untitled
1959
Gelatin silver print
Image: 21.9 x 14.6cm (8 5/8 x 5 3/4 in.)
Paper: 25.1 x 20.2cm (9 7/8 x 7 15/16 in.)
Gift of an anonymous donor
© Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933)
Untitled
1959
Gelatin silver print
Paper: 27.9 x 35.6cm (11 x 14 in.)
Gift of an anonymous donor
© Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933)
Untitled
1959
Gelatin silver print
Image: 16.1 x 24.1cm (6 5/16 x 9 1/2 in.)
Paper: 20.2 x 25.3cm (7 15/16 x 9 15/16 in.)
Gift of an anonymous donor
© Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos

Childhood pastimes like playing yo-yo were a thing of the distant past for 15-year-old Bob Powers, a Joker seen here leaning against a fixture in Helen’s Candy Store. He had already been in and out of the court system numerous times by 1959. Powers stabbed someone when he was 12 and had been incarcerated for bringing zip guns (homemade firearms) and chains to school, where, Powers said, he was voted “most likely to die before I was 21 years old.”

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933)
Untitled
1959
Gelatin silver print
Paper: 27.9 x 35.6cm (11 x 14 in.)
Gift of an anonymous donor
© Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos

The gang members, most of whom were 15 or 16 years old, thought tattoos made them look older and might help them get served at bars. Tattoos were also a demonstration of masculinity and a rite of passage. Bob Powers, seen here at age 15 displaying his first tattoo, recalled years later that “the first time you get a tattoo it’s scary. I was sitting back with a cigarette like it’s nothing. Meanwhile, it was killing me. … I got ‘Bobby’ with stars around it. … They said, ‘Get your name.’ … I hated it forever.”

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933)
Untitled
1959
Gelatin silver print
Paper: 61 x 50.8cm (24 x 20 in.)
Gift of an anonymous donor
© Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos

One of the gang members – Bob Powers – suggested that Davidson follow him to a rooftop on the gang’s block. “I remember thinking,” said Davidson, “‘This kid’s going to throw me off the roof and then rob me,’ but he’s pointing down at the stickball game (an informal form of baseball played in the street) and saying, ‘Get that,’ and saying: ‘Oh, there’s the Statue of Liberty. You can see it through all these television antennas.'”

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933)
Untitled
1959
Gelatin silver print
Paper: 27.9 x 35.6 cm (11 x 14 in.)
Gift of an anonymous donor
© Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos

The gang members were very concerned with their appearance, although they did not have much money to spend on grooming or clothes. “If you see a picture of me,” said former gang member Bob Powers, “the broken tooth, my teeth were green because I didn’t go to the dentist. We never had any money even though my father worked. … We used Vaseline petroleum jelly to make our hair stick like iron in a pompadour. We combed our hair constantly, wore sunglasses, and all thought we were Marlon Brandos.”

The Jokers’ slicked-back pompadours … and their clothing echoed the greaser style, a rebellious youth subculture that was promoted by cinematic antiheroes of the era. Role models included Marlon Brando’s portrayal of a motorcycle gang member in The Wild One (1953) and James Dean as a troubled teen in Rebel without a Cause (1955). The “bad boy” image flouted the aspirational role model of the time, the upwardly mobile white-collar worker in a business suit and short haircut.

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933)
Untitled
1959
Gelatin silver print
Paper: 27.9 x 35.6cm (11 x 14 in.)
Gift of an anonymous donor
© Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos

Petey, a Jokers member who looks out the second-story window here, was injured in that fight. Petey’s best friend, fellow Jokers member Bob Powers, walks by the house. Housing in the gang’s neighbourhood, the then-impoverished Park Slope, Brooklyn, was overcrowded and rundown. Powers lived with his seven siblings and alcoholic parents in a three-bedroom apartment that had a coal-powered cookstove and no hot water or central heating.

One of the most highly respected and influential American documentary photographers of the past half century, Bruce Davidson spent several months photographing the daily lives of a teenage street gang for his 1959 series Brooklyn Gang. A new exhibition in the Cleveland Museum of Art’s Mark Schwartz and Bettina Katz Photography Gallery, Bruce Davidson: Brooklyn Gang features 50 black-and-white photographs from that series, which are part of a recent anonymous gift to the museum of extensive selections from the artist’s archives. The exhibition is on view now through February 28, 2021.

Brooklyn Gang was Davidson’s first major project after joining the distinguished photo agency Magnum and was the fruit of several months spent immersing himself in the daily lives of the Jokers, one of the many teenage street gangs worrying New York City officials at the time. He recorded the teenagers’ pleasures and frustrations as they attempted to define masculinity and mimic adult behaviour. The photographs reflect the group’s camaraderie but also their alienation from societal norms. While many officials and commentators at the time saw the gangs as evidence of social deterioration resulting from poverty, others regarded them as the most visible manifestations of a socially disengaged generation of males – rebels without a cause.

“Bruce Davidson: Brooklyn Gang presents an intimate portrayal of the teens’ lives,” said William Griswold, director of the Cleveland Museum of Art. “Davidson was an outsider, but one who spent so much time with the gang that he became, as he liked to say, ‘an outsider on the inside.’ Davidson offered an independent look at the lives of these disadvantaged youths; this view of society was quite different from the age of visual and social homogenisation of the 1950s presented in mainstream magazines such as Life and Look and predicts the social turmoil of the 1960s.”

The images reflect the time Davidson spent with the teens hanging out on street corners and in the local candy store and accompanying them to the beach at Coney Island with their girlfriends. Included are several sets of variant images, affording a rare glimpse into Davidson’s working process.

“Despite a more than ten-year age difference, Davidson describes recognising his own repression in his subjects and feeling a connection to their desperation,” said Barbara Tannenbaum, the CMA’s chair of prints, drawings, and photographs and curator of photography.

Press release from the Cleveland Museum of Art

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933)
Untitled
1959
Gelatin silver print
Paper: 40.6 x 50.8cm (16 x 20 in.)
Gift of an anonymous donor
© Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos

The museum owns several groups of images from the series taken during the same shoot at Coney Island. They provide a rare glimpse of the artist’s selection process (see 2018.688, 2018.696, 2018.697, 2018.701, 2018.706, and 2018.735). The size of these prints, and the fact that the artist printed them long after they were shot, suggest he considered all four images worthwhile. In an exhibition print, the white marks on the woman’s cheek here, made by dust on the negative, would have been covered up with ink or dye, a process known as spotting. This may be a work print, made to aid in decisions on exactly how to print this picture. It has become one of the better-known images from Brooklyn Gang.

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933)
Untitled
1959
Gelatin silver print
Paper: 20.3 x 25.4cm (8 x 10 in.)
Gift of an anonymous donor
© Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933)
Untitled
1959
Gelatin silver print
Paper: 27.9 x 35.6cm (11 x 14 in.)
Gift of an anonymous donor
© Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos

In this photograph, gang member Bob Powers talks with friends in one of the many Coney Island bathhouses where people could change, shower, or swim in pools. “We’d come down on a Friday and sometimes we’d stay the whole weekend till Monday, down on the beach, me, Lefty, Junior,” Powers recalled. “The girls would stay too… We would light fires and bury all the cans of beer. I remember stealing cars and driving down there. We’d drive the car under the boardwalk and bring it right onto the bay and leave it there.”

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933)
Untitled
1959
Gelatin silver print
Paper: 50.8 x 61cm (20 x 24 in.)
Gift of an anonymous donor
© Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos

Shown here on the Coney Island boardwalk, from left to right, are gang members Junior Rice, Bob Powers, and Lefty, who “was a pretty tough guy in the gang and then he went to jail for about a year,” according to Powers. “He came out and he just lost it. He wasn’t the same guy. Something happened and nobody knew what. … We protected him a bit, but he caught a couple of bad beatings and lost his reputation. He ate a lot of pills one night and never woke up. His mother found him dead. OD’d in bed at 19. He was the first in the group to die from a drug overdose.”

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933)
Untitled
1959
Gelatin silver print
Image: 16.1 x 24.1 cm (6 5/16 x 9 1/2 in.)
Paper: 20.2 x 25.3 cm (7 15/16 x 9 15/16 in.)
Gift of an anonymous donor
© Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos

This print is vintage – made soon after the picture was shot – and its 8 x 10-inch size was typical of the period and preferred for making reproductions for magazines and books. As photography began gaining acceptance into the gallery and museum world in the 1980s, larger prints became the norm. The museum also owns an unusually large print of the same image, made in the 1990s or 2000s, which was created to be exhibited in galleries and museums. The two may look the same on the computer screen, but do not feel the same when viewed in real life.

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933)
Untitled
1959
Gelatin silver print
Image: 15.8 x 24.1 cm (6 1/4 x 9 1/2 in.)
Paper: 20.1 x 25.4 cm (7 15/16 x 10 in.)
Gift of an anonymous donor
© Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos

After a day at the beach at Coney Island, the teens “would take the long bus ride back to their neighbourhood,” remembered Bruce Davidson. “As they sat in the rear of the bus, the sunlight burned through the windows, giving them an angelic glow. They would drift into their dreams and awake alert to the mean streets awaiting them.”

Bruce Davidson

Barbara Tannenbaum

Curator of Photography

A hot topic in the 1950s, gangs were avidly analysed by sociologists, the press, and artists. Gordon Parks’s photographs of a young black Harlem gang leader were published in Life magazine in 1948. The musical West Side Story, which pitted a Polish gang against a Puerto Rican one, debuted on Broadway in 1957. The following year, a seven-part series in the New York Times analysed the social, economic, and psychological causes of this juvenile delinquency.

In the summer of 1959, Bruce Davidson went to Brooklyn to meet and photograph a teenage street gang called the Jokers. Davidson’s series Brooklyn Gang provided an in-depth view into the daily activities of an Irish and Polish gang whose turf was a block in the impoverished Park Slope neighbourhood. The Jokers were teenagers who were mostly students at the neighbourhood Catholic school or dropouts. They shoplifted and fought with members of rival gangs in rumbles that involved bricks, bats, knives, and occasionally zip (homemade) guns.

At age 25, Davidson was an outsider to them. He had been raised in a Jewish family in suburban Chicago and held an MFA in photography from Yale University. His images were being published in major magazines, and he had just joined Magnum, a distinguished, artist-run photographic agency. The Jokers’ role models were the greasers, a rebellious youth subculture promoted by cinematic antiheroes such as Marlon Brando’s motorcycle gang member in The Wild One (1953) and James Dean’s troubled teen in Rebel without a Cause (1955). The gang members’ “bad boy” image, replete with Vaseline-slicked pompadours and blue-collar clothing, flouted the era’s aspirational role model of an upwardly mobile white-collar worker in a business suit and short haircut.

Davidson did not sport a pompadour, but making a living as a freelance photojournalist was itself a rebellion against the nine-to-five office world. He spent the summer with the Jokers, hanging out on street corners, in the local candy store, and on the beach at Coney Island. His images reflect their alienation and anxieties but also their camaraderie. The boys explore male bonding rituals and act out their visions of maleness and adulthood. They may roughhouse, but gang ethics dictated that they were not to hurt each other. Real violence was reserved for rival gangs and, like their criminal acts, was not shown by Davidson.

He did capture the teens’ early experiences with lust and love. The Lothario in the back seat of a car is Lefty, of whom Bob Powers, a gang member who wrote a memoir 40 years later, remarked, “We never thought he was good-looking, but all the girls loved him.” This well-known image of Lefty is joined in the exhibition by three others from that same make-out session. Together they form an almost cinematic progression. Several other groups of related images of events are also included in the exhibition. These rare glimpses into the artist’s shooting and editing processes are all drawn from the recent anonymous gift to the museum of 367 works from Davidson’s archive, selections that span his 70-year career.

Davidson was careful not to pass judgment in his Brooklyn Gang photographs. The youngsters’ hairstyles, tattoos, and underage drinking, smoking, and sex were considered ruinous behaviour at the time. The memoirs of Bob Powers and the reminiscences of other members give the Jokers’ story a dark tone. The best-known image in the series, taken in front of a cigarette machine at Coney Island, shows Artie Giammarino, who later became a transit police detective, and Cathy O’Neal, whom the boys considered “beautiful like Brigitte Bardot.” Cathy is seen here at age 13 or 14, around the time she began dating the “coolest” of the gang, Junior Rice. At 14 she got pregnant. Though they were both under the legal age, they married. They later divorced, and Junior became a heroin dealer and user; within a few years, drugs would claim the lives of many in the gang and in the neighbourhood. Years after their divorce, Cathy committed suicide by shotgun.

Davidson would always remain an outsider to the gang, but his working process allowed for intimacy and trust to grow between the gang members and the photographer. By the end of the summer, Davidson realised that he and the Jokers were all considered outsiders in the conformist, materialistic 1950s. “I could see my own repression in them, and I began to feel a connection to their desperation,” he remembered. “I began to feel their isolation and even my own.”

Cleveland Art, Fall 2020

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933)
Untitled
1959
Gelatin silver print
Paper: 61 x 50.8cm (24 x 20 in.)
Gift of an anonymous donor
© Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos

Although most of the gang members’ time was spent in their neighbourhood of Park Slope, Brooklyn, the Jokers sometimes took excursions. Few had access to cars, so most travel was by bus and subway. The subway fare of 15 cents – the equivalent of $1.33 today – would take them anywhere in New York City. Here a gang member and his girlfriend wait for a train on the neighbourhood subway platform. The beach at Coney Island was a favourite summer destination for the gang.

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933)
Untitled
1959
Gelatin silver print
Paper: 27.9 x 35.6cm (11 x 14 in.)
Gift of an anonymous donor
© Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933)
Untitled
1959
Gelatin silver print
Paper: 20.3 x 25.4cm (8 x 10 in.)
Gift of an anonymous donor
© Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos

“We used to hang out in [Brooklyn’s] Prospect Park all the time,” recalled Jokers member Bob Powers. “We did a lot of drinking and sleeping overnight in the park. … The cops with their bats would push us along, tell us to move. We were very defiant. If we moved, we moved ten feet. Then they had to tell us to move another ten feet. We’d kind of like move around in a circle and come back to where we originally started. The cops were mean at that time, but then we weren’t the best of kids either.”

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933)
Untitled
1959
Gelatin silver print
Paper: 13.9 x 17.6cm (5 1/2 x 6 15/16 in.)
Image: 11.4 x 16.9cm (4 1/2 x 6 5/8 in.)
Gift of an anonymous donor
© Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos

The Jokers roughhoused and fought among themselves but were not allowed to hurt each other. Real violence was reserved for those in other gangs or occasionally for civilians. “Did we fight with chains and pipes and knives? Yeah,” gang member Bob Powers reminisced years later. “Did people get stabbed? Yeah, people got stabbed. And people got their heads cracked open with bats.”

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933)
Untitled
1959
Gelatin silver print
Paper: 20.3 x 25.4cm (8 x 10 in.)
Gift of an anonymous donor
© Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933)
Untitled
1959
Gelatin silver print
Paper: 27.9 x 35.6cm (11 x 14 in.)
Gift of an anonymous donor
© Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos

The gang member making out in the back seat of a car on the way home from Coney Island is Lefty, identifiable by his tattoo. “We always wondered why the girls liked him,” recalled Jokers member Bob Powers. “We never thought he was good-looking, but all the girls loved him. It was amazing.”

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933)
Untitled
1959
Gelatin silver print
Paper: 61 x 50.8 cm (24 x 20 in.)
Gift of an anonymous donor
© Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos

Jimmie, an older member of the gang, watched over the younger members with his brother Johnny. In 1998, Jokers member Bob Powers recalled, “Later, the whole family, all six of them … died, wiped out, mostly from drugs. It’s amazing because at this particular time, if you see Jimmie, he’s like the ‘Fonz,’ like James Dean – handsome. He was good-looking, he had the women, and he was always working on cars.”

Cleveland Museum of Art
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Wednesdays, Fridays 10.00am – 9.00pm
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Nov

Exhibition: ‘Helga Paris, Photographer’ at the Akademie der Künste, Berlin

By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leave a Comment

Categories: beauty, black and white photography, documentary photography, exhibition, existence, gallery website, intimacy, landscape, light, memory, photographic series, photography, portrait, psychological, reality, space, street photography, time and works on paper
Tags: Akademie der Künste, Berlin Pubs, Berliner Jugendliche, Berliner Kneipen, documentary photography, Dog Immanuelkirchstrasse, East Berlin, East German photography, East Germany, East Germany in the postwar period, Erinnerung an Z, everyday lives of an East German resident, female textile mill workers, fine art photography, Frauen im Bekleidungswerk Treff-Modelle, Frauen im Bekleidungswerk VEB Treffmodelle Berlin, Garbage Drivers, German art, German artist, German industrial city of Halle, german photographer, German photography, Gesellschaft für Fotografie im Kulturbund, Grosse Klausstrasse Flutgasse, Häuser und Gesichter Halle, Halle, Helga Paris, Helga Paris Berlin Pubs, Helga Paris Berliner Kneipen, Helga Paris Club, Helga Paris Erinnerung an Z, Helga Paris Fotografie, Helga Paris Frauen im Bekleidungswerk Treff-Modelle, Helga Paris Garbage Drivers, Helga Paris Georgia, Helga Paris Grosse Klausstrasse Flutgasse, Helga Paris Häuser und Gesichter Halle, Helga Paris Hellersdorf, Helga Paris Houses and Faces, Helga Paris Hund Immanuelkirchstr, Helga Paris Jugendweihe René Köstner, Helga Paris Marienburger Strasse, Helga Paris Müllfahrer, Helga Paris Memory of Z, Helga Paris Meteln (Christa and Gerhard Wolf), Helga Paris Moscow, Helga Paris Naira, Helga Paris Pauer, Helga Paris Photographer, Helga Paris Prerow, Helga Paris Ramona, Helga Paris Ramona Kollwitzstrasse, Helga Paris Selbst im Spiegel, Helga Paris Self-Portrait in the Mirror, Helga Paris Self-portraits, Helga Paris Sohn des Architekten Melnikow, Helga Paris Son of the architect Melnikov, Helga Paris Sven, Helga Paris Treffmodelle Berlin, Helga Paris Two Women, Helga Paris Winsstraße mit Taube, Helga Paris Winsstrasse with Pigeon, Helga Paris Zwei Frauen, Hellersdorf, Houses and Faces Halle, Hund Immanuelkirchstr, Jugendweihe René Köstner, Marienburger Strasse, Müllfahrer, Meteln (Christa and Gerhard Wolf), post-war East Germany, postwar East Germany, Prenzlauer Berg, Ramona Kollwitzstrasse, René Köstner, Selbst im Spiegel, Self-Portrait in the Mirror, Sohn des Architekten Melnikow, street photography, Treff-Modelle VEB, Treffmodelle Berlin, VEB Treffmodelle clothing factory, Winsstraße mit Taube, Winsstrasse with Pigeon, Women at the Clothing factory VEB Treffmodelle Berlin, Women at the textile factory VEB Models, Zwei Frauen

Exhibition dates: 8th November 2019 – 12th January 2020

Curator: Inka Schube

Helga Paris (German born Poland, b. 1938)
Prerow
1960s
Gelatin silver print
Photo: © Helga Paris
Source: ifa (Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen)

A couple of years ago I was in Paris, searching for French peasant work clothes of the 1950s in the trendy secondhand shops of the Marais. It took me forever but I eventually found one blue shirt that fitted me… only one. Battered, patched up, but still present after all these years – hard wearing, practical, and tough. But also soft and pliable like a second skin, with its own look and feel, its own distinctive aesthetic. I knew what I wanted, I found it… or it found me. A treasure.

The same could be said of the photographs of Helga Paris. Her photographs picture the tough, hard existence of life in postwar East Germany but there is a fond affection for subject matter in the cameras engagement. Paris approaches her subjects, whether city or people, with directness but it is also a dialogue between the artist and her subjects which “give the viewer an insight into a moment of the everyday lives of an East German resident.”

“Paris opened herself to the worker’s world she found in Prenzlauer Berg, and often took photographs in the immediate surroundings – of friends and neighbours, the area’s old and run-down streets, and the melancholic vitality of the regulars in Berlin’s bars and cafés. The people in her photographs look deeply rooted, as if they had moved to the area with the intention of never going away.”

Misty cobbled corners, people in bars, in clubs, at work, on the street. Much as Ara Güler did for Istanbul (in a more romantic way), Paris captures the essence of an ecosystem, the culture and survival that was the living, behind the Iron Curtain. There is melancholy aplenty, the brooding streets with swooping pigeons and ubiquitous Trabant, all dark in their small sulkiness. There are beautiful boys with Anarchy stencilled on their jumper desiring liberated life, and reflective women deep in their own thoughts. Naira! Naira! Smoking a fag, with drunk-eyed pictures of a child on dirty wall, behind. Oh Naira, of what were you thinking! What brought you to this place?

There is sullenness, compassion, bohemians, students and countercultural intellectuals all pictured with her probing mind. If you could say that a subject finds an artist then this is that aphorism in full technicolor. Engaged and engaging, these essential images stand the test of time – as relevant now in an era of neo-liberal fascism as they ever were in the past.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

Helga Paris (German born Poland, b. 1938)
No title
1974
From the series Müllfahrer (Garbage Drivers)
Gelatin silver print
Photo: © Helga Paris
Source: ifa (Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen)

Helga Paris (German born Poland, b. 1938)
Selbst im Spiegel (Self-Portrait in the Mirror)
1971
Gelatin silver print
Photo: © Helga Paris
Source: ifa (Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen)

Helga Paris (German born Poland, b. 1938)
No title
1975
From the series Berliner Kneipen (Berlin Pubs)
Gelatin silver print
Photo: © Helga Paris
Source: ifa (Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen)

Helga Paris (German born Poland, b. 1938)
Hund, Immanuelkirchstr. (Dog, Immanuelkirchstrasse)
1970s
From Berlin 1974-1982
Gelatin silver print
Photo: © Helga Paris
Source: ifa (Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen)

Helga Paris (German born Poland, b. 1938)
Winsstraße mit Taube (Winsstrasse with Pigeon)
1970s
From Berlin 1974-1982
Gelatin silver print
Photo: © Helga Paris
Source: ifa (Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen)

Helga Paris (German born Poland, b. 1938)
Marienburger Strasse
1970s
From Berlin 1974-1982
Gelatin silver print
Photo: © Helga Paris
Source: ifa (Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen)

Helga Paris (German born Poland, b. 1938)
Jugendweihe René Köstner
1970s
From Berlin 1974-1982
Gelatin silver print
Photo: © Helga Paris
Source: ifa (Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen)

Helga Paris (German born Poland, b. 1938)
Meteln (Christa and Gerhard Wolf)
1977
Gelatin silver print
Photo: © Helga Paris
Source: ifa (Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen)

Helga Paris (born in 1938 in Goleniów, Poland) occupies an outstanding position in German photography. Her oeuvre exhibits the poetry of a Henri Cartier-Bresson as well as the austerity of an August Sander or Renger-Patzsch. Paris, who has lived in Prenzlauer Berg in Berlin since 1966, has chronicled the long history of postwar East Germany. For more than three decades she has directed her gentle yet precise gaze toward the people who live it. Her photographs tell of the melancholy vitality of East Berlin corner pubs and the poetic tristesse of the old streetcars of the seventies. We encounter garbage truck drivers, stubbornly furious or calm teenagers, and proud female textile mill workers. We travel through Georgia and Siebenbürgen, and meander through the central German industrial city of Halle, a “diva in gray.” But these photographs also tell of the end of the postwar era, of the search for images of childhood and their retrieval. (Text from the catalogue to the exhibition)

Helga Paris: Fotografie from arts-news on Vimeo

Fotografie is a retrospective look at the work of German photographer, Helga Paris. Exhibiting a collection of photos taken in East Germany in the postwar period, Paris’s work is considered to be one of the most revealing and compassionate bodies of work reflecting life in Germany at that time. Going beyond a simple ‘social study’, Paris’s technique was simply to engage with her subjects, rather than take on the role of the distant street photographer. In making this connection, the result has been a collection of photos that give the viewer an insight into a moment of the everyday lives of an East German resident.

Starting in the 60s, Helga Paris took an interest in photography and began teaching herself the basics. Paris came from a fashion and art background, but it was her interest in the everyday lives of the East Berlin people, during the postwar period that made her want to capture that on film.

Text from the Vimeo website

Helga Paris (German born Poland, b. 1938)
Club
1981
Gelatin silver print
Photo: © Helga Paris
Source: ifa (Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen)

Helga Paris (German born Poland, b. 1938)
Berliner Kneipen (Berlin pubs)
From the series Berlin 1974-1982
Gelatin silver print
Photo: © Helga Paris
Source: ifa (Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen)

Since 1966 Helga Paris has lived in Berlin’s Prenzlauer Berg, a traditionally working class district that in the DDR days had become a refuge for bohemians, students and countercultural intellectuals, condoned by the authorities. Here she became a chronicler of post-war East Germany. Paris opened herself to the worker’s world she found in Prenzlauer Berg, and often took photographs in the immediate surroundings – of friends and neighbours, the area’s old and run-down streets, and the melancholic vitality of the regulars in Berlin’s bars and cafés. The people in her photographs look deeply rooted, as if they had moved to the area with the intention of never going away. Their faces express both their exhaustion and their lust for life.

Helga Paris (German born Poland, b. 1938)
Sven
1981-1982
From the series Berliner Jugendliche (Berlin Youth)
Gelatin silver print
Photo: © Helga Paris
Source: ifa (Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen)

Helga Paris (German born Poland, b. 1938)
Pauer
From the series Berlin Youth
1981-1982
Gelatin silver print
Photo: © Helga Paris
Source: ifa (Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen)

Helga Paris (German born Poland, b. 1938)
Ramona
1982
Gelatin silver print
Photo: © Helga Paris
Source: ifa (Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen)

Helga Paris (German born Poland, b. 1938)
Ramona, Kollwitzstrasse
1982
Gelatin silver print
Photo: © Helga Paris
Source: ifa (Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen)

Helga Paris (German born Poland, b. 1938)
Naira
1982
From the series Georgien (Georgia)
Gelatin silver print
Photo: © Helga Paris
Source: ifa (Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen)

Helga Paris (German born Poland, b. 1938)
No title
1983-1985
From the series Häuser und Gesichter, Halle / Houses and Faces, Halle 1983-1985
Gelatin silver print
Photo: © Helga Paris
Source: ifa (Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen)

Helga Paris (German born Poland, b. 1938)
Grosse Klausstrasse Flutgasse
1983-1985
From the series Häuser und Gesichter, Halle / Houses and Faces, Halle 1983-1985
Gelatin silver print
Photo: © Helga Paris
Source: ifa (Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen)

Helga Paris (German born Poland, b. 1938)
Zwei Frauen (Two Women)
1983-1985
From the series Häuser und Gesichter, Halle / Houses and Faces, Halle 1983-1985
Gelatin silver print
Photo: © Helga Paris
Source: ifa (Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen)

Helga Paris (German born Poland, b. 1938)
No title
1983-1985
From the series Houses and Faces, Halle 1983-1985
Gelatin silver print
Photo: © Helga Paris
Source: ifa (Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen)

From 8 November 2019 to 12 January 2020 at its exhibition halls at Pariser Platz, the Akademie der Künste will present the photographic work of Helga Paris from 1968 to 2011. Featuring 275 works, including many individual images and series that are to be shown for the first time, this will be her most comprehensive exhibition to date and the first retrospective of the artist in her home city of Berlin in 25 years. Excerpts from the extensive Leipzig, Hauptbahnhof (1981), Moskau (1991/1992) and Mein Alex (2011) series will be seen for the first time, among others.

In addition to the photographer’s special ability to make ever-changing compressed contemporary history tangible in her images and series over the course of decades, it is her tender, graceful and heavily nuanced black-and-white modulations expressing social empathy that make her work unmistakable.

Helga Paris was born in 1938 in Gollnow, Pomerania (today Polish town of Goleniów), and grew up in Zossen near Berlin. She began her work as a self-taught photographer in the 1960s. She became one of the key chroniclers of life in East Berlin with images of her neighbourhood in the Berlin district of Prenzlauer Berg, pictures of pub-goers, sanitation workers, the women from the VEB Treffmodelle clothing factory, artists, punks, children from Hellersdorf and passers-by from Alexanderplatz. Helga Paris also took photographs in Transylvania (1980), Georgia (1982) and the city of Halle (1983-1985), where she produced her Diva in Grau series that was banned from being shown until 1989/1990, as well as in Volgograd (1990), New York (1995) and Poland (1996/1997), among others. Helga Paris has been a member of the Film and Media Art Section of the Akademie der Künste since 1996.

The curator of the exhibition is art historian Inka Schube, who has worked with Helga Paris on numerous occasions. Filmmaker Helke Misselwitz will present an installation involving interviews with Helga Paris on the topics of origin, the changing city and her work as a photographer in East Germany and up into the early 21st century.

On the occasion of the exhibition, the Spector Books publishing house, Leipzig has released the photography book Helga Paris. Leipzig Hauptbahnhof, 1981.

An exhibition by the Akademie der Künste in cooperation with the ifa (Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen), with the kind support of the Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach-Stiftung that allowed the living legacy to be indexed and new prints of three previously unpublished series to be made, as well as the DEFA-Foundation.

Press release from the Akademie der Künste website [Online] Cited 11/11/2019

Helga Paris (German born Poland, b. 1938)
Self-portraits
1981-1989
Gelatin silver print
Photo: © Helga Paris
Source: ifa (Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen)

Helga Paris (German born Poland, b. 1938)
Frauen im Bekleidungswerk Treff-Modelle
1984
Gelatin silver print
Photo: © Helga Paris
Source: ifa (Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen)

In the early 1980s the DDR’s Gesellschaft für Fotografie im Kulturbund gave professional photographers commissions that allowed them to work on projects of their own choosing. These commissions not only gave photographers financial security, but also opened doors to places where, under normal circumstances, only media loyal to the regime had been allowed to work. Helga Paris chose to photograph a clothing factory, Treff-Modelle VEB in Berlin, where she herself had had some work experience during her fashion design studies. There she portrayed the factory’s female workers, eliciting a wide variety of subtle reactions from them: from self-confident and open to confrontational and defensive.

Helga Paris (German born Poland, b. 1938)
No title
1984
Gelatin silver print
From the series Frauen im Bekleidungswerk VEB Treffmodelle Berlin (Women at the Clothing factory VEB Treffmodelle Berlin)
Photo: © Helga Paris
Source: ifa (Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen)

With around 275 photographs from the period of 1968 till 2011 – including numerous single frames and series shown for the first time – the exhibition of Helga Paris at the Akademie der Künste on Pariser Platz is the photographer’s most comprehensive to date. It is the first retrospective of Paris’ work in her home city of Berlin in 25 years.

Having lived in Berlin’s Prenzlauer Berg district since 1966, Helga Paris (born 1938) began taking photos of people in her neighbourhood in the early 1970s. She found her photographic motifs in flats, pubs, break rooms and factory halls, or on the streets and in train stations. With a background in modernist painting, theatre and poetry as well as early Soviet, Italian and French cinema, the autodidact photographer has spent the last four and a half decades developing an extensive oeuvre of delicate, nuanced black-and-white photography.

But she is not only a chronicler of Prenzlauer Berg. Helga Paris also has taken photos in Halle, Leipzig, Transylvania, Georgia, Moscow, Volgograd and New York. There, as in her local neighbourhood, she constantly explores how it feels “to be in history”, and how the respective circumstances are reflected at the most private level. Helga Paris’s imagery has a particular poetic approachability, in part because it forgoes all ideological interpretations; her gaze suggests profound solidarity.

For the exhibition, the director Helke Misselwitz has designed a documentary film triptych, in which she makes it possible to experience how the life and work of Helga Paris are both interwoven and interdependent. Misselwitz traces a wide arc from the photographer’s childhood to the present; from Prenzlauer Berg to sites around the world; and from Paris’ close-ups to her farsighted vision.

Text from the Akademie der Künste website [Online] Cited 11/11/2019

Helga Paris (German born Poland, b. 1938)
Sohn des Architekten Melnikow (Son of the architect Melnikov)
1991-1992
From the series Moskau 1991-1992
Gelatin silver print
Photo: © Helga Paris
Source: ifa (Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen)

Helga Paris (German born Poland, b. 1938)
No title
1991-92
From the series Moscow 1991-92
Gelatin silver print
Photo: © Helga Paris
Source: ifa (Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen)

As a result of the Cold War, the remarkable oeuvre of the German photographer Helga Paris (1938) was long almost unknown west of the Iron Curtain. While Paris enjoyed widespread popularity in East Germany, her photographs rarely reached a public in the West. Although her work, with its quite intimate glimpses of daily life in East Germany, is strongly linked to the course of her own life, its expressiveness is universal. The empathy of her gaze makes it easy for us to imagine ourselves in the people and places she photographed.

Resilience

On one hand Helga Paris’ photographs are about life in the German Democratic Republic (DDR), where the Second World War and the country’s communist regime brought restriction, loss, destruction and decline in their wake. On the other they show the gaze of a photographer who had been born in Pommeren (now in Poland), who grew up close to postwar Berlin, and who faced the world with resilience, curiosity and compassion. In 1966 Paris moved for good to Prenzlauer Berg in East Berlin, a traditionally working-class district that had become a refuge for bohemians, students and countercultural intellectuals, closely watched but condoned by the authorities. Here she became a chronicler of postwar East Germany. She often worked in the immediate surroundings – taking photographs of friends and neighbours, on the street, and in bars and cafés.

Hidden tensions

Although in the 1970s and 1980s Helga Paris also photographed in Romania, Poland and Georgia, the accent in the Huis Marseille exhibition is on East Germany before and after the Wende (1989-1990). She created the series Berliner Jugendliche (Berlin Youth) in 1980-1981, when her own children were teenagers, portraying youngsters who believed in an alternative way of life and who went to the concerts given by independent bands – a sort of East German variant of the Western punk scene. Their anarchic lifestyle did not go unnoticed by the regime, and many of those she portrayed also spent some time in prison. Paris subtly but revealingly captures the hidden tensions of the time in the teenagers’ postures, gestures, and facial expressions. She elicited a similar scale of reactions in the workers she photographed for the series Frauen im Bekleidungswerk VEB Treffmodelle Berlin (Women at the textile factory VEB Models, 1984): from self-confident and open to confrontational and defensive.

Run-down

In the same period Helga Paris documented the decline of the old city centre of Halle, interspersing photos of the city’s long-neglected buildings and streets with portraits of its residents – who only allowed themselves to be photographed if they had a say in how their portraits were taken. The impoverishment of Halle was only partly the result of the faltering East German economy; the government was also deliberately allowing the historic centre of Halle and other East German cities to become rundown in order to compel their populations to move into modern flats on urban peripheries. The exhibition Häuser und Gesichter: Halle 1983-85 was banned by the regime in 1987; it was 1990 before the people of Halle could see the photographs for themselves.

Helga Paris was born Helga Steffens in 1938 in Gollnow, Pommeren, now known as Goleniów in Poland. At the end of the war she fled with her family to Zossen, her father’s native city. She first came into contact with photography through an aunt who worked in a photographic laboratory. Between 1956 and 1960 she studied fashion design at the Fachschule für Bekleidung in Berlin. There she met the artist Ronald Paris, to whom she was married between 1961 and 1974, and with whom she had two children.

Via the Arbeiter- und Studententheater in Berlin, for which she made costumes, Paris came into contact with the later documentary maker Peter Voigt, who encouraged her to take more photographs. To improve her techniques, from 1967 to 1968 she worked in the Deutsche Werbeund Anzeigengesellschaft DEWAG photographic laboratory. She took many photographs in the theatre, such as productions of the Volksbühne, as her husband was also its set designer. In later years she would say that this experience had given her a solid foundation for her attitude to space as a street photographer.

Paris’s work was first exhibited in 1978, in the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Dresden. In 1996 she became a member of the Akademie der Künste in Berlin. Her self-portraits were a great success at the Kunst in der DDR exhibition in the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin (2003), and in 2004 Helga Paris was awarded the prestigious Hannah-Höch-Preis for a lifetime of achievement in the arts.

Press release from Huis Marseille for the exhibition Helga Paris / East Germany 1974-1998 Cited 26/11/2019

Helga Paris (German born Poland, b. 1938)
Erinnerung an Z (Memory of Z)
1994
Gelatin silver print
Photo: © Helga Paris
Source: ifa (Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen)

Helga Paris (German born Poland, b. 1938)
No title
1998
Gelatin silver print
From the series Hellersdorf
Photo: © Helga Paris
Source: ifa (Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen)

Helga Paris (German born Poland, b. 1938)
Hellersdorf #2
1998
Gelatin silver print
From the series Hellersdorf
Photo: © Helga Paris
Source: ifa (Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen)

Helga Paris (German born Poland, b. 1938)
Hellersdorf #7
1998
Gelatin silver print
From the series Hellersdorf
Photo: © Helga Paris
Source: ifa (Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen)

Helga Paris (German born Poland, b. 1938)
Hellersdorf #8
1998
Gelatin silver print
From the series Hellersdorf
Photo: © Helga Paris
Source: ifa (Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen)

Akademie der Künste
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10117 Berlin
Phone: +49 (0)30 200 57-1000

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Akademie der Künste website

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Jul

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

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, photographic series, photography, portrait, psychological, quotation, reality, space, street photography, time and works on paper
Tags: A Revolution in Modern Photography, Academia San Carlos, accidental theater of the street, Anita Brenner, Anita Brenner and Tina Modotti, Arches Oaxaca, Bandolier Corn and Guitar, Bandolier Corn Sickle, Boy - Hidalgo, Boy - Uruapan, Bravo La Siesta de los Peregrinos, Brett Weston Tin Roofs Mexico, C. B. Waite, Calle Cuauhtemoctzin, Campesinos, Casa de Vecindad, Ceiling of the Church of Santiago, Charles Betts Waite, Charles Betts Waite The Iguana, Charrito pulquería mural, Church Cuapiaxtla, Church of Santiago Tupátaro, Cristo - Oaxaca, Cristo - Tlacochoaya - Oaxaca, Cristo with Thorns, Cristo with Thorns - Huexotla, Cuapiaxtla, Detail of stone frieze, Diego Rivera, Documentary and Anti-Graphic Photographs, Dr. Federico Marín, Dr. Federico Marín Jean Charlot and Tina Modotti, Edward Weston Anita, Edward Weston Arches Oaxaca, Edward Weston Casa de Vecindad, Edward Weston Ceiling of the Church of Santiago, Edward Weston Charrito pulquería mural, Edward Weston Detail of stone frieze, Edward Weston Dr. Federico Marín Jean Charlot and Tina Modotti, Edward Weston Excusado, Edward Weston Guadalajara Barranca de los Oblatos, Edward Weston Los Changos Vaciladores, Edward Weston Ollas de Oaxaca, Edward Weston Palma Bendita, Edward Weston Pear-Shaped Nude, Edward Weston Playful Monkeys, Edward Weston Rosa Covarrubias, Edward Weston Rosa Covarrubias in Tehuana dress, Edward Weston Stone lions in relief Oaxaca, Edward Weston Tarascan Pottery, Edward Weston The Daybooks, Edward Weston Two children with pulquería mural, Edward Weston Two clay pitchers, Elisa Kneeling, Excusado, Experiment in Related Form, Form follows function, Gateway - Hidalgo, Girl and Child - Toluca, Girl with Firewood, Graflex camera, Guadalajara Barranca de los Oblatos, Helen Levitt, Helen Levitt Mexico City, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Henri Cartier-Bresson Calle Cuauhtemoctzin, Henri Cartier-Bresson Mexico, Henri Cartier-Bresson The Spider of Love, Henri Cartier-Bresson Two prostitutes, Hidalgo, Huexotla, immigrant photographers, international modernism, Jean Charlot, large-format view camera, Leica camera, Los Changos Vaciladores, Los Remedios, Man - Tenancingo, Man with Hoe - Los Remedios, manuel alvarez bravo, Manuel Álvarez Bravo Bravo La Siesta de los Peregrinos, Manuel Álvarez Bravo Girl with Firewood, Manuel Álvarez Bravo Niña con Leña, Manuel Álvarez Bravo Portrait of the Eternal, Manuel Álvarez Bravo Retrato de lo Eterno, Manuel Álvarez Bravo the siesta of the migrants, Mexican Folkways magazine, Mexican identity, Mexican life and landscape, Mexican muralism, Mexican muralism movement, Mexican photography, Mexico City, Michoacan, Miguel Covarrubias, Near Saltillo, Niña con Leña, Oaxaca, Ollas de Oaxaca, Palma Bendita, Palmer Museum of Art, paul strand, Paul Strand Boy, Paul Strand Boy - Hidalgo, Paul Strand Boy - Uruapan, Paul Strand Church Cuapiaxtla, Paul Strand Cristo, Paul Strand Cristo - Oaxaca, Paul Strand Cristo - Tlacochoaya - Oaxaca, Paul Strand Cristo with Thorns, Paul Strand Cristo with Thorns - Huexotla, Paul Strand Gateway, Paul Strand Gateway - Hidalgo, Paul Strand Girl and Child, Paul Strand Girl and Child - Toluca, Paul Strand Man, Paul Strand Man - Tenancingo, Paul Strand Man with Hoe, Paul Strand Near Saltillo, Paul Strand Plaza, Paul Strand Plaza - State of Puebla, Paul Strand Virgin, Paul Strand Virgin - San Felipe - Oaxaca, Pear-Shaped Nude, Playful Monkeys, Plaza - State of Puebla, political art, Portrait of the Eternal, pulquería, pulquería mural, pulquerías, Retrato de lo Eterno, Rosa Covarrubias, Rosa Covarrubias in Tehuana dress, Rosa Rolanda, Rufino Tamayo, ruins of Mitla, Stone lions in relief, Strand clouds, street photography, surface nationalism, Tarascan Pottery, Tenancingo, The Daybooks, The Iguana, the siesta of the migrants, The Spider of Love, Tin Roofs Mexico, tina modotti, Tina Modotti and Edward Weston, Tina Modotti Bandolier Corn and Guitar, Tina Modotti Bandolier Corn Sickle, Tina Modotti Campesinos, Tina Modotti Elisa Kneeling, Tina Modotti Experiment in Related Form, Tina Modotti Jean Charlot, Tina Modotti Women of Tehuantepec, Tina Modotti Workers Parade, Toluca, traditional Zapotec dress, Tupátaro, Two children with pulquería mural, Two clay pitchers, Two prostitutes, Under the Mexican Sky, Under the Mexican Sky: A Revolution in Modern Photography, Uruapan, Virgin - San Felipe - Oaxaca, Women of Tehuantepec, Workers Parade

Exhibition dates: 1st June – 28th July 2019

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Hands in the Water of the Mind

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

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

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

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

David Huerta

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

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

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

.
Paul Strand

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

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Leo Hurwitz

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

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Manuel Álvarez Bravo

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

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

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

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

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

Text from the Wikipedia website

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Text from the Palmer Museum of Art

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Text from the Wikipedia website

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Text from the Wikipedia website

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Paul Strand

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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