Another exhibition on this wonderful artist with additional photographs… one of four large exhibitions that have take place recently in Europe and America. The other three being:
Many thankx to the Museum der Moderne Salzburg 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 Samuel Fosso at the Museum der Moderne Salzburg showing at left, photographs from the Archives from Studio Photo National Photo: Rainer Iglar
Installation view of the exhibition Samuel Fosso at the Museum der Moderne Salzburg showing photographs from the series 70’s Lifestyle Photo: Rainer Iglar
Samuel Fosso (Kumba, CM, 1962 – Bangui, CF; Paris, FR) is one of the most renowned African photographers working today. He has been a key innovator in the great tradition of African studio photography since the mid-1970s, developing and successively refining a distinctive form of explicitly theatrical self-portraiture. Fosso’s self-portraits blend photography with performance and intertwine autobiographical themes and conceptions of the self with political and historical perspectives. The works articulate the complexity and diversity of contemporary identities and explore the relations between Africa and the East and West in the era of post-colonialism and globalisation.
Organised by the Generali Foundation at the Museum der Moderne Salzburg, the retrospective presents a selection from Samuel Fosso’s most important bodies of work. It is the first major exhibition of Fosso’s art in Austria and one of his first solo shows in the German-speaking countries.
Featuring elaborate makeup and lavish costumes, props, and sets, Fosso’s autofictional self-portraits are not so much self-dramatisations as self-transformations. He slips into roles and borrows identities – from pivotal figures in history as well as social archetypes, many of them with deep roots in the globally networked visual memory. Embodying these icons and representations, he interrogates their impact on media, society, and politics, casting himself as a surrogate and catalyst. Fosso’s self-portraits are highly artificial scenic productions on the stage of the photography studio, where he is photographer, performer, and director in one. With analytical acumen and acting skills, he deftly exposes and undercuts social codes around bodies, attire, poses, facial expressions, and gazes and collective assignments of identity based on gender, sexual orientation, and ethnic and social background.
After a brief apprenticeship, Fosso opened his own studio for portrait photography in 1975, when he was thirteen. His business success rested on his flair for fashion and aesthetics and his talent for encouraging his clients to show off their personal style. Having spent his workday taking portraits of paying customers, he switched to the other side of the camera in the evening: taking inspiration from West African and African-American music, youth culture, and political rebellion, he donned tight shirts, extravagant bell-bottoms, platform shoes, and offbeat props to stage himself in unconventional and unconstrained poses. The result was Fosso’s early series of experimental black-and-white self-portraits now known under the title 70’s Lifestyle (1975-1978).
For many years, he shared his self-portraits only with private audiences. At the initiative of the French photographer Bernard Descamps, they made their public debut in 1994 at the inaugural Bamako Encounters – African Biennial of Photography. The self-portraits added an important aspect to the tradition of West African studio photography, which garnered considerable attention in the 1990s. In 70’s Lifestyle, Fosso limns an alternative vision of masculinity by playfully subverting conventions concerning the depiction of bodies, gender, and sexuality. Sustained by a newfound self-confidence, Fosso’s self-portraits reflect a search for fresh conceptions of identity after the early period of postcolonial transformation in the 1960s; they are also a gesture of emancipation from the suffering he experienced as a refugee in Nigeria and under the repressive Bokassa regime in the Central African Republic. Artistic aspects such as theatricality and the appropriation of media imagery that Fosso develops in 70’s Lifestyle become constants in his work.
In 1997, Tati, a French department-store chain, commissioned Fosso to conceive a new body of works. Fosso developed a series of self-portraits in bold colours, some of which became iconic. Hewing to his characteristic style of elaborate and meticulously thought-through masquerade, disguises, and sceneries, now laced with an unmistakable penchant for satire, the Tati series shows him alternating between a number of controversial identities. For instance, he impersonates archetypes of African as well as Western societies like the tribal chieftain, the golfer, and the “liberated” African-American woman. The series’ centrepiece, Le Chef (qui a vendu l’Afrique aux colons) (The Chief [Who Sold Africa to the Colonists]), is both a tribute to African tribal leaders and a critique of the temptations of power in the age of European colonialism.
In later series such as African Spirits (2008) and Emperor of Africa (2003), Fosso’s work takes on a more pronounced political edge. In African Spirits, he embodies historic protagonists of the pan-African independence and civil rights movement including Angela Davis, Patrice Lumumba, Haile Selassie, Martin Luther King Jr., and Muhammad Ali. The large-format self-portraits reenact historic pictures from magazines and newspapers. The satirical-critical element of Tati gives way to a thoroughly serious process of identification: bringing his protagonists to life, Fosso not merely draws a connection between their legacy and his own experience, he seems to positively fuse with them in the strikingly convincing impersonations. The portraits in African Spirits pay homage to the campaigners for civil rights and colonial independence while also suggesting their extraordinary gift for self-dramatisation and media savvy, which helped them frame and disseminate their political ideals.
In the series Emperor of Africa, Fosso grapples with the complexities of the power differential between China and Africa by casting himself in the role of the controversial Chinese revolutionary and Communist Party leader Mao Zedong. In his reenactments, Fosso portrays Mao not only as a liberator, but also as a symbol of a modern imperialism. African leaders initially welcomed China’s growing economic and cultural presence, but the exercise of the power that came with this presence has increasingly prompted concerns. “As a performer, Fosso is both subject and questioner, the man behind the mask, interrogating the imperial and the postcolonial in equal measure.” (Olu Oguibe)
Born in Cameroon, Samuel Fosso spent the first part of his childhood in Nigeria. After the Biafran War, he moved to Bangui, the capital of the Central African Republic. Having completed a brief apprenticeship, the teenaged Fosso opened his own studio for portrait photography in Bangui in 1975, a business he ran until 2014. That year, his home was ransacked during an armed conflict in the Central African Republic, and the photographic archive of his commercial studio was destroyed; some of the material was later reconstructed. The artist lives and works in Bangui, Central African Republic, and Paris, France.
Text from the Museum der Moderne Salzburg
Installation view of the exhibition Samuel Fosso at the Museum der Moderne Salzburg showing photographs from the series Tati Photo: Rainer Iglar
Installation view of the exhibition Samuel Fosso at the Museum der Moderne Salzburg showing at left, photographs from the series Fosso Fashion, 1999; in the centre, photographs from the Archives from Studio Photo National; and at right, photographs from the series Tati 1997
Installation views of the exhibition Samuel Fosso at the Museum der Moderne Salzburg showing photographs from the series African Spirits Photo: Rainer Iglar
Installation view of the exhibition Samuel Fosso at the Museum der Moderne Salzburg showing photographs from the series Emperor of Africa Photo: Rainer Iglar
Many thankx to the Hague Museum of Photography for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
People like us / People we like
I didn’t always dress up the dogs. My first dog Man Ray was spared anthropomorphic adornment. That was left for Fay Ray. Fay and I came to a mutual realisation that she had a desire to be observed. Anyway, I found myself looking at her for long periods of time. Then one day, after some looking, I made her tall. Before long I was blurring the pedestal with fabric and creating the illusion of the anthropomorphic vertical. With the birth of Fay’s puppies, my cast of characters grew. Fay’s puppies – Chundo, Battina and Crooky – grew up watching their famous mother, and when it came their turn they were not taken by surprise. They knew what to do.
Colour fields
I began by ignoring colour, using the colour Polaroid film as though it were black and white. I distrusted colour. Sensuous, romantic, elusive colour. Colour was … well … colourful. In fact, the first few days with the Polaroid camera I made only black-on-black pictures. Man Ray under a black cloth against a black background. Polaroid film is very beautiful within a limited range. Man Ray was too dark for this film but Fay was perfect. With Fay I began to explore colour and light.
Weimaraners
No other breed that I am aware of is as conducive to the illusion of transformation as Weimaraners. Weimaraners are called ‘grey ghosts’. Their fur gives off an almost iridescent glow. They inhabit their forms in a strange way, never appearing to solidify into themselves as, say, a lab, a collie or a bulldog does. When you photograph a collie, you get a collie.
Tales
One day my assistant Andrea stood behind Fay to adjust her dress and she gestured out to me with her hand. Her long human arm appeared as Fay’s. The illusion startled me. A miracle. Kind of creepy. Fay was part human. I thought of cartoons and mythology, superheroes and Egyptian gods. Next thing you know, Batty’s son Chip was playing the flute.
Sit! / Stay!
The dogs have an obvious pride in what they do. They can sense the feeling in the room when they are working. If it’s a great picture or a difficult picture, they can feel what happens because everyone stops and goes ‘Wow!’ Fay was particularly agile and for her I concocted a series of anatomically challenging poses. I came to understand her balance and points of physical tension. Fay liked the challenge of a difficult pose. I think she liked to impress me.
Vogue / Style
I have a very awkward relationship with fashion. I’m a little bit timid about it. This isn’t the attitude of the typical fashion photographer. Fortunately, my Weimaraners are the perfect fashion models. Their slinky elegant forms are covered in grey, and grey, as everyone knows, goes with anything.
Nudes / Physique
Up close, unadorned, standing, sitting or lying before the eye of the big camera, the dogs become landscapes, a forest of trees, a topography of hills and valleys, earth and boulders, in a shoreline of endless interconnectivity.
Cubists
Since 1972 I have had a habit of keeping a white box in the studio. If I can’t think of anything to do, the box is a good place to start. The original work I made with this box alluded to Sol LeWitt’s minimal sculptures of the 1960s, but this is now a fading memory. I use a box the way a philosopher uses a chair, as a physical object representing hypothetical questions: ‘How many ways can a dog fit on a box?’, ‘How many dogs can fit in a box?’, ‘Around a box?’ And on and on. On these square wheels, round questions keep rolling.
Many artists have a muse. Movie directors perfect their craft working repeatedly with their favourite actors, while choreographers create some of their best works for a specific dancer. In some cases, the muse is a silent partner, the object of an artist’s intense and obsessive gaze; in others the work emerges from a partnership so close that it is unclear which is the artist and which is the muse. For the American artist William Wegman (b. 1943), his muses have been generations of the Weimaraner breed. The inspiration came in 1970 when his first dog, Man Ray – named after Wegman’s favourite artist – sat himself in front of the camera. Instead of sending his faithful companion to his bed, Wegman seized the moment, and the rest is history. Wegman was already a well-known artist, but it is his numerous, human-like portraits of his ever-expanding cast of Weimaraners that have brought him worldwide fame. In partnership with renowned guest curator William A. Ewing and the Foundation for the Exhibition of Photography, Fotomuseum Den Haag presents a major survey of no fewer than four decades of Wegman’s wide-ranging collaboration with Man Ray, Fay Wray, Candy and their descendants.
In Mozart’s The Magic Flute, the Queen of the Night persuades Prince Tamino to rescue her daughter Pamina from captivity under the high priest Sarastro; instead, he learns the high ideals of Sarastro’s community and seeks to join it. Separately, then together, Tamino and Pamina undergo severe trials of initiation, which end in triumph, with the Queen and her cohorts vanquished. The earthy Papageno, who accompanies Tamino on his quest, fails the trials completely but is rewarded anyway with the hand of his ideal female companion, Papagena.
Many great artists have a muse. Sometimes this muse is a silent partner, the object of an artist’s obsessive gaze. At other times the relationship is a deeply collaborative act.
The history of photography has its own celebrated cases: Jacques-Henri Lartigue and Renée Perle, for example, or Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O’Keeffe. For William Wegman, whose muses have been all these things and more, inspiration arrived almost half a century ago, when a Weimaraner who had joined the family showed both aptitude and passion for performing before the camera. In honour of one of Wegman’s most admired modern artists, he was named Man Ray, the first in a line of highly spirited performers.
William Wegman is a renowned and versatile American artist who resists an easy classification as he moves adroitly between painting, drawing, photography, film, video, books and performances. Although his famed Weimaraners are not featured in all these media, they reside at the core of his art. In the late 1970s Wegman found, in the large-format Polaroid print, his ideal means of expression – the perfect print size, exquisite colour and an ‘instantaneity’ which allowed for spontaneity and beneficial ‘accidents’. When his Polaroid chapter finally came to an end, the artist shifted to working digitally, rediscovering in this new medium what was essential to him about the Polaroid process: the print size, expressive colour and the studio set-ups.
Wegman’s world may revolve around his dogs, but his choice of sets, costumes and props betray a fascination with art history – Cubism, colour field painting, Abstract Expressionism, Constructivism, Conceptualism and the like. The diverse fields of photography also intrigue the artist, and we find in his work landscapes, nudes, portraits, reportage and fashion.
And yet, is it all really about dogs? Being Human suggests otherwise: these performers are us and we are them: housewife, astronaut, lawyer, priest, farm worker, even a dog walker! Some pose proudly and with confidence, others express doubts or vulnerabilities. It’s all about being human.
Curators: Wim van Sinderen with the assistance of Hanneke Mantel (both of Gemeentemuseum Den Haag and The Hague Museum of Photography)
Erwin Olaf (Netherlands, b. 1959) Squares, Joy
1985 Gelatin silver print
As a storyteller, Erwin Olaf is a contemporary photographer whose work addresses most current concerns of the world – discrimination, gender, sexuality, taboo, climate change, reality, equality, power, racism, freedom of expression and democracy – through staged studio and outdoor photographs of incredible technical and visual skill.
The key to his work is the twist that he gives his cinematic, perfect worlds – the hidden crack in the facade, the unhinging of the link between reality and representation. These not so perfect worlds are often inspired by stories of the past, whether those stories may be present in the works of Vermeer, the still lives of the Dutch painters of the 16th and 17th century, Caravaggio, the Olympic Games of 1936, Norman Rockwell paintings, film noir, or clothes of the 1950s and 1960s.
The stillness and silence of the photographs subjects let the viewer examine the details of the mise en scène… the perfectly placed Coke bottle and apple, the shredded American flag in Palm Springs, The Kite (2018); the bandaged knee, the dripping ice cream in Rain, The Ice Cream Parlour (2004); and also admire the beautiful textures and lighting of the finished “product”, for Olaf’s aesthetic riffs on subverting theatrical performances and magazine fashion shoots.
Olaf let’s the viewer’s eye move without restraint across the terrain of the photographs, letting them soak up the atmosphere of his hyperreal tableau vivant. Both seductive and disturbing, his photographs challenge us to interrogate our own story – who are we, what do we really believe in, and what can we do to change prejudice and bigotry in a hostile world.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Gemeentemuseum den Haag for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“What I want to show most of all is a perfect world with a crack in it. I want to make the picture seductive enough to draw people into the narrative, and then deal the blow.”
Erwin Olaf
“In 1982, I saw an exhibition of Robert Mapplethorpe in Amsterdam that blew me off the socks. I just had a Hasselblad, I was inspired by his craftsmanship and the beautiful prints, and I thought: this is what I want too. In the series ‘Squares’ (1983-1993) you clearly see his influence. I started asking people that I knew from the nightlife if they wanted to pose for me in my studio, which I had decorated in a squat of a friend. For example, the boy with the champagne bottle worked in the wardrobe of my favourite disco.”
Erwin Olaf (excerpt from the book ‘Erwin Olaf – I am’)
“My earliest work reflects my life in that time. I was a moth – I really loved the nightlife. In the late seventies, the early eighties was a hedonistic period: Disco and the beginning of the punk, the sexual revolution. I loved watching people play with gender, the theatrical of the nightlife, all the roles they could take.”
Erwin Olaf
“The camera offered me a possibility to enter a world that was not mine. I was able to hide behind the camera, but also be part of what I saw. As a photographer, you can look at people. You’re observing. I wanted to focus my gaze on groups that were outside the ‘normal’ society. One of my first photography assignments for school had as a theme ‘what’s normal?’. I still ask myself that.”
Erwin Olaf (excerpt from the book ‘Erwin Olaf – I am’)
Gemeentemuseum Den Haag and The Hague Museum of Photography are to honour one of the Netherlands’ most famous photographers, Erwin Olaf (b. 1959), with a double exhibition. Olaf, whose recent portraits of the royal family drew widespread admiration, will turn sixty this year – a good moment to stage a major retrospective. The Hague Museum of Photography will focus on Olaf’s love of his craft and his transition from analogue photojournalist to digital image-maker and storyteller. Olaf will himself bring together some twenty photographs by famous photographers of the past who have been a vital source of inspiration to him. Gemeente Museum Den Haag will show non-commissioned work by Olaf from 2000 to his most recent series, including the work he produced in Shanghai and his most recent series Palm Springs, on display for the first time. Olaf will be showing his photography in the form of installations, in combination with film, sound and sculpture.
Erwin Olaf – Palm Springs: behind the scenes
Erwin Olaf (Netherlands, b. 1959) First Aids Benefit Club Flora Palace Amsterdam, I
1983
Gelatin silver print
Erwin Olaf (Netherlands, b. 1959) First Aids Benefit Club Flora Palace Amsterdam, II
1983
Gelatin silver print
Erwin Olaf (Netherlands, b. 1959) Squares, Pearls
1986
Gelatin silver print
“Chessmen was inspired by a chance meeting with my former photography teacher at the School for Journalism. A few years after I graduated there, I met him on the street. When I showed him my work in my studio, he said, “Say, would you like to publish a book?” He had recently taken over a publishing house for a pittance. The only problem was that I didn’t have enough work for a book. “Oh,” he said, “you only need sixty-four pages. And if you leave a page white next to each photo, you will need thirty-two photos. “At home I thought about it while listening to the radio – a chess program was just going on. At one point the presenter said: “This is an attacking game with thirty-two pieces. A war game. “I knew immediately: I’m going to make chess pieces. Those few words on the radio were all I needed; I had a clear picture in mind. Earlier I had been thinking about how I could do something with the theme of power. Power is something weird. Why do people abuse their power? Or why do you want it? Why do some people allow others to exercise power over them? From those questions came the idea of a power game and the people who play it. ”
Erwin Olaf (excerpt from the book Erwin Olaf – I Am)
“The Blacks series is largely inspired by Janet Jackson’s album Rhythm Nation 1814. In one song, she sings: “In complete darkness we are all the same / It is only our knowledge and wisdom that separates us / Don’t let your eyes deceive you.” A few years earlier I had been hitchhiking to Paris and southern France, together with a friend with an Indonesian background. I was admitted without problems in all kinds of clubs, but they refused him at the door. At that time I became much more aware of the fact that the amount of pigment in your skin can have serious consequences. So when I heard Janet Jackson sing, I thought: this is my theme. I can create a group of people where everyone is equal.”
Erwin Olaf (excerpt from the book Erwin Olaf – I Am)
Journalistic training
Erwin Olaf was studying journalism in Utrecht in the 1980s when, having noticed that he was unhappy, one of his lecturers pressed a camera into his hands. ‘I loved the thing right from the word go,’ says Olaf, ‘the weight, the cool metal in my hand. It felt so natural. And when I took my first photographs, I knew I had found my calling.’ Olaf began taking journalistic photographs of theatre performances, worked for progressive magazines and volunteered for COC Nederland (which represents LGBTI interests). In his early work Olaf often depicted the human body quite graphically, breaching the restrictions on sexuality, the body and gender. He describes himself at that time as an angry adolescent, though his taboo-breaking work was highly significant in terms of visual freedom in the Netherlands.
Early work at The Hague Museum of Photography
The exhibition at The Hague Museum of Photography will start with his early work. Chessmen (1987-1988) was one of Olaf’s first non-commissioned series, which came about when he was given the opportunity to produce a photobook. He had to fill 32 pages and he wanted to focus on the theme of power. He had heard an item on the radio about chess, a game of war consisting of 32 pieces. Olaf portrayed the game in a series of provocative images, featuring visible genitals, small half-naked people with kinky attributes, and extremely fat women in bondage outfits. The series did not go unnoticed. He received criticism for it, but also the Young European Photographers Prize.
Skill
Another early series shows the engagement that has remained important throughout Olaf’s career. Blacks (1990) is based on a song by Janet Jackson with the line, ‘In complete darkness we are all the same. It is only our knowledge and wisdom that separates us’. The series reflects Olaf’s battle for equality, and also his technical skill. In these baroque portraits, literally everything is black as coal, yet Olaf managed to give the images a rich tonality, both with his camera and in the developing process. A self-taught photographer, he has shown himself to be a master, not only of old-fashioned darkroom processes, but also of new techniques that have emerged in rapid succession since the digital revolution. He did pioneering work with Photoshop in the famous series Royal Blood (2000). Thanks to this new technique, he is even better able to experiment to his heart’s delight in his staged photography.
Sources of inspiration
Besides his own work, at The Hague Museum of Photography Erwin Olaf will be bringing together some twenty photographs by photographers who are his most important sources of inspiration, ranging from a vintage still life with roses by the late nineteenth-century photographer Bernard Eilers to self-portraits by Robert Mapplethorpe and Rineke Dijkstra. The work of these photographers inspired him, made him look in a different way at his own artistic practice, or pushed his photography in a new direction. By showing these pictures alongside his early work, which is imbued with his love of his craft, Olaf will give visitors to the Museum of Photography an idea of what has shaped him as a photographer.
Gemeentemuseum Den Haag
The exhibition at the Gemeentemuseum will begin, even before the entrance to the galleries, with the life-sized installation Keyhole (2012). The exterior has two long walls with panelling above which framed photographs hang, as in a classic interior. But visitors can watch two films through the keyhole in the doors on either side of the installation. It will be immediately apparent that the Gemeentemuseum is highlighting a new development in the work of Erwin Olaf. Here, he is going one step further, presenting his photography in exciting combinations of film, sound and sculpture.
Social engagement
Erwin Olaf’s work has always been highly personal and socially engaged. The clearest influence on the development of his work has been the events surrounding 9/11. Since then, the bombastic, baroque staging of his previous work has made way for more vulnerability and serenity. This has produced images that are very popular with the public: highly stylised film scenes staged perfectly down to the smallest detail, often bathed in light as if they were paintings, with an uncomfortable underlying message. As in the series Rain (2004), which appears to capture the moment between action and reaction after a shocking event. The series Grief (2007), shot in a 1960s setting, is about the first moment of response, the first tear.
Recent events are also reflected in Olaf’s work. He made the Tamed & Anger self-portraits (2015) in response to the Charlie Hebdo attack. In other works he addresses issues like the position of the individual in a globalising world, the exclusion and stereotyping of certain groups of people, and taboos associated with gender and nudity. The exhibition at the Gemeentemuseum will thus afford a glimpse inside Olaf’s turbulent and sometimes dark mind. A visit to the exhibition will be like wandering through his head.
Palm Springs: final part of a triptych
Erwin Olaf’s most recent series, Palm Springs (2018), will premiere at the exhibition in the Gemeentemuseum. It is part of a triptych about cities undergoing change, the other two parts being Berlin (2012) and Shanghai (2017). The Berlin series was produced in a period when dark clouds were gathering above Europe. It highlights Olaf’s concerns about freedom of expression and democracy, and the transfer of power from an older to a new generation. Shanghai is a hypermodern metropolis in China with a population of 24 million. The series made in this city explores what happens to the individual in an environment like this. In Palm Springs, Olaf again focuses on topical issues. One of the key themes is climate change, though at the same time the images also recall the America of the 1960s. In a beautiful series of portraits, landscapes – this was the first time Olaf had photographed landscapes – still lifes and filmic scenes he refers to issues like teenage pregnancy, discrimination, religious abuses and polarisation. The series tells the story of people withdrawing into gated communities as reality invades their paradise.
Photographs of royal family
A very special addition to the double exhibition will be Erwin Olaf’s photographs of the Dutch royal family. As part of the exhibition at the Gemeentemuseum he will bring together many of the photographs that the Government Information Service commissioned him to take of the royal family. He also took the picture that the family used as a Christmas greeting last December. ‘I’m proud of the royal family,’ says Olaf, ‘because they are a binding factor in a democracy that is sometimes very divided. I’m happy to be able to contribute to that.’
Successful artist
The double exhibition will show how Erwin Olaf has developed from angry provocateur to one of the Netherland’s most famous and popular photographers. His work now features in the collections and exhibitions of museums the world over, including China, Russia, The United States of America and Brazil. In 2008 The Hague Museum of Photography showed his Rain, Hope, Grief and Fall series. In 2011 he won the prestigious Johannes Vermeer Prize, and in 2018 the Rijksmuseum purchased almost 500 photographs and videos by Erwin Olaf.
Biggest retrospective to date
Together, the exhibitions at the Gemeentemuseum and the Museum of Photography will constitute the biggest retrospective of Olaf’s work ever staged, spanning the period from the early 1980s to his most recent work. In the words of Erwin Olaf: celebrating 40 years of visual freedom.
The double exhibition has been curated by Wim van Sinderen with the assistance of Hanneke Mantel (both of Gemeentemuseum Den Haag and The Hague Museum of Photography), and has come about in close collaboration with Erwin Olaf and his studio.
Press release from the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag website [Online] Cited 04/05/2019
“I made the Royal Blood series to celebrate Photoshop as the new craft. I wanted to make something that was clearly fiction and would be impossible without Photoshop. A theme that was in the air at the time was that violence was suddenly identified with glamor. I never understood why criminals, even murderers, have fans. People worship them! And every cinema is chock full of people watching violence every week. I wanted to expose the attraction of blood, violence and celebrity – that live fast, that young ideal. Now I could no longer do this type of work. The emotion behind it has disappeared – I have already told that story. But it remains an important part of my legacy.”
Erwin Olaf (excerpt from the book Erwin Olaf – I am)
Exhibition dates: 8th November 2018 – 22nd April 2019
Curator: Jo Gilmour
The Photographic Society of Victoria, Melbourne Thomas Pearce (age 18 in 1878)
c. 1878
Albumen paper carte de visite Support: 10.2 x 6.5cm Image: 9.1 x 5.6cm
National Portrait Gallery, Canberra
Purchased 2010
A friend of mine is really ill at the moment in hospital. At 87 years old, she is a fiercely independent woman, possessing amazing intelligence and insight, a wicked sense of humour, stubborn, opinionated, passionate… and one of the most incredible human beings I have met during my life. If I had not met her, my life would have been so much poorer. It is a privilege to know her.
These Australian cartes des visite and cabinet cards give small insight into now largely forgotten lives, of both photographer and sitter. If only for a brief instant, we can pull back the curtain of time and enquire into their lives and existence. In a small way, we can reanimate their earthly spirit.
“Each photograph is like a miniature world of its own with an incredible story embedded in it. The poses, the props and the fashions throw an intriguing light onto the world of the nineteenth-century studio, while the stories of the photographers and their subjects combine to create a rich and vivid archive of Australian society at a precise moment in time. Rich or poor, male or female, famous or infamous, powerful or anonymous: everyone was captured in these tiny photographs.”
It is such a pity that we have to loose the knowledge that age brings, the powerful sages full of wisdom that could stop the human race repeating the mistakes of the past over and over again.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
PS. What is unsaid in these stories and images, is that most riches are built on the back of oppression, built on the bones of the Indigenous people of Australia. Rich whites, buying up land, pastoralists, sending their children to school in the Old Country… just because they can.
Many thankx to the National Portrait Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. All text unless otherwise noted from the National Portrait Gallery, Canberra. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
The Photographic Society of Victoria, Melbourne Thomas Pearce (age 18 in 1878) (detail)
c. 1878
Albumen paper carte de visite Support: 10.2 x 6.5cm Image: 9.1 x 5.6cm
National Portrait Gallery, Canberra
Purchased 2010
Thomas Pearce (c. 1860-1909) was a young apprentice on board the English merchant vessel the Loch Ard, which departed chilly Gravesend, England, for warmer climes in Australia in March 1878. There were 37 crew and sixteen passengers aboard. In stormy weather on 1 June 1878, just days from completing the three-month voyage, the captain of the magnificent iron-hulled clipper mistakenly thought the ship was 50 miles from the coastline when she was dashed by heavy surf onto the rocks of Muttonbird Island. Only two survived the wreckage: eighteen-year-old Pearce and eighteen-year-old Irish emigrant, Eva Carmichael. Supported by the upturned hull of a lifeboat, Pearce was washed ashore in a small cove, now known as Loch Ard Gorge. When he heard Eva Carmichael’s cries and saw her clinging to wreckage, ‘he at once divested himself of his unnecessary clothing, plunged in the sea, swan out to her, and brought her safely to the beach’. Lauded for his brave and gallant act, Pearce was presented with a valuable gold watch and chain by governor George Ferguson Bowen as a ‘slight token of the respect and admiration in which your noble conduct is held by all classes in this colony’. He was also presented with the first gold medal issued by the Royal Humane Society of Victoria. Popular sentiment was for a permanent union; but Eva returned to Ireland having lost her parents and siblings in the wreck. Pearce became a ship’s captain. According to an ‘interview’ published in the Argus in 1934, Carmichael returned Pearce’s favour some years later when, ‘living on the Irish coast’, she and her husband Captain Townsend were called on to help survivors from wrecks and that ‘on one occasion who should fall into her care but Tom Pearce!’.
As sole survivors of the wreck, Tom Pearce and Eva Carmichael experienced a period of celebrity during which the sensational story of the Loch Ard created much fodder for newspapers. The 6 July issue of the Australasian Sketcher featured wood engravings of the scene of the sinking, an engraved portrait of Eva, ‘drawn from life’, and one of Tom based on this carte de visite, which was captioned as being ‘from a photograph by Mr Burman’. There were four photographers named Burman in Melbourne in 1878: brothers Frederick, William and Arthur Burman, and their father, William Insull Burman, all of whom took photographs of Pearce and Carmichael. The Burmans were among the photographers later contracted to produce photographs relating to Ned Kelly’s activities, and many souvenir photos of him, his gang, his captors and the Glenrowan incident bear the Burman stamp. The Photographic Society of Victoria was formed in 1876 to ‘bring photographers together in a friendly spirit, in order to advance the art and science of photography in the colony’. At the time of the first annual meeting on 9 March 1877 there were 61 members, five whom were ladies. Members included well-known Melbourne photographers Charles Hewitt and Charles Nettleton as well as Joseph Turner of Geelong.
The Photographic Society of Victoria was formed in 1876 to ‘bring photographers together in a friendly spirit, in order to advance the art and science of photography in the colony, without any attempt at binding or dictating to members any special trading rules, such as charges for photographs or hours or days for closing or opening their respective establishments.’ At the time of the first annual meeting on 9 March 1877 there were 61 members, five whom were ladies. Members included well-known Melbourne photographers George William Perry, William Hall, Charles Hewitt, Charles Nettleton, and David Wood as well as Joseph Turner of Geelong.
Thomas Pearce (1860-1909)
Thomas Pearce (1860?-1909) was an apprentice on the English merchant vessel the Loch Ard, which embarked for Victoria in March 1878 carrying 37 crew and 16 passengers, many from the Carmichael family. In stormy weather on 1 June 1878, just days from completing the three-month voyage, the Loch Ard wrecked against Muttonbird Island. Supported by an upturned lifeboat, the teenaged Pearce was washed ashore in a small bay, now known as Loch Ard Gorge; but when he spotted eighteen-year-old Eva Carmichael clinging to wreckage in the ocean, he swam out and struggled back to shore with her. As sole survivors of the wreck, Tom Pearce and Eva Carmichael became celebrities and posed for a number of Melbourne photographers after their recuperation. Pearce was presented with the first gold medal of the Royal Humane Society of Victoria. Popular sentiment was for a permanent union; but Eva returned to Ireland, and Pearce became a ship’s captain. Several drowned members of Eva’s family are buried in a clifftop cemetery above Loch Ard Gorge. A porcelain figure of a peacock, made by English pottery Minton, was washed up from the wreck intact. Now on display at Warrnambool’s Flagstaff Hill Maritime Museum, the ‘Loch Ard Peacock’ is Australia’s most valuable shipwreck artefact, valued at $4 million.
Thomas Foster Chuck (Australian born London, 1826-1898) The Burke and Wills Monument
1869
Albumen paper photograph on carte de visite Support: 10.1 x 6.4cm Image: 9.3 x 6.2cm
National Portrait Gallery, Canberra
Purchased 2001
From its outset, the Victorian Exploring Expedition (later renamed the Burke and Wills Expedition) provided much material for artists. William Strutt, for example, made portraits of expedition members and depictions of its preparations at Royal Park, while Burke and Wills both sat for the Melbourne photographer Thomas Adams Hill shortly before their departure in August 1860. Their deaths less than a year later, however, generated a plethora of portraits in a variety of formats. Sculptor Charles Summers (1825-1878) created waxworks of Burke and Wills soon after news of their lamentable deaths became known and was subsequently awarded the commission to create their official memorial. The monument was installed at the intersection of Collins and Russell Streets in 1865 and was the largest bronze casting carried out in Australia to that date. Thomas Foster Chuck, photographer and entrepreneur, also sought to cash in on the epic failure of the expedition. In early 1862, he and several others – including artist William Pitt, a scene painter for George Selth Coppin’s Theatre Royal – devised a ‘Grand Moving Diorama’ which toured south-eastern Australia in 1862 and 1863. Based on first-hand accounts and sketches by Strutt and others, the diorama consisted of sixteen painted scenes – one of which featured ‘Novel and Dioramic Automaton Effects’ in the form of mechanical camels ‘ and was billed as ‘the most interesting and superior Entertainment ever exhibited in Australia’.
Thomas Foster Chuck had studios in Melbourne and Daylesford from the mid-1860s and exhibited examples of his work at the Intercolonial Exhibition in 1866. In Melbourne, he traded as the ‘London Portrait Gallery’ from this address on Collins Street and later from the Royal Arcade on Bourke Street. In 1870, he commenced work on his mammoth Historical Picture of The Explorers and Early Colonists of Victoria, a photographic mosaic of over 700 individual portraits. It was completed in 1872 and was something of a money-spinner for Chuck, who sold individual cartes de visite of the sitters as well as prints of the composite image. A selection of Chuck’s portraits received an honourable mention in the photographic section of the Victorian Intercolonial Exhibition of 1873, and were awarded a gold medal at the London International Exhibition in 1874. In 1876 he moved to Ballarat where he opened his ‘Gallery of Art’ and continued to produce various types of photographic works, including hand-coloured ‘chromatypes’ (he was one of several photographers who claimed to have invented this process) and his much-admired composite portraits.
Thomas Foster Chuck (1826-1898)
Thomas Foster Chuck (1826-1898), photographer and entrepreneur, was born in London and arrived in Victoria in 1861. The following year he produced and toured a ‘Grand Moving Diorama’ of dramatic painted scenes from the Burke and Wills expedition. By 1866 he had established a studio in Daylesford and examples of his work were shown at the Melbourne Intercolonial Exhibition that year. Returning to Melbourne, he occupied a series of studios before opening the ‘London Portrait Gallery’ in rooms in the Royal Arcade on Bourke Street. There, in 1870, he commenced work on his mammoth Historical Picture of The Explorers and Early Colonists of Victoria, a photographic mosaic composed of over 700 individual photographs of prominent citizens. The work was finally completed in 1872 and is said to have been quite a boon for its creator, with Chuck selling individual cartes de visite and enlarged prints of many of the portraits as well as reduced prints of the composite image. Chuck submitted hand-coloured enlargements of his portraits of Justices Redmond Barry and Edward Eyre Williams to the Intercolonial Exhibition; in January 1873, the Argus reported that ‘Photographic portraits, finished in oil, watercolours, and mezzotints’, and an ‘untouched solar enlargement’ by Chuck received an honourable mention in the photographic section of the Victorian Intercolonial Exhibition. Chuck forwarded the same works and a selection of smaller plain and coloured photographs to the London International Exhibition in 1874, winning a gold medal there. In 1872, he was awarded a contract to photograph the National Gallery’s collections; this resulted in eighteen photographs which were issued between 1873 and 1874 and published as Photographs of the Pictures in the National Gallery of Melbourne. In 1876 Chuck sold his Melbourne studio and moved to Ballarat where he opened his ‘Gallery of Art’ and continued to produce various types of photographic works, including hand-coloured ‘chromatypes’ (a process he claimed to have invented) and his much-admired composite portraits.
W & D Downey (William Downey (1829-1915) and Daniel Downey, British photographers) Lillie Langtry (age 32 in 1885)
c. 1885
Albumen silver carte de visite Support: 10.3 x 6.2cm Image: 9.8 x 5.1cm
National Portrait Gallery, Ca
Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program by Malcolm Robertson inberran memory of William Thomas Robertson 2018
Lillie Langtry (1853-1929) was born Emilie Charlotte Le Breton in Jersey in 1853. Aged nineteen she married the son of a Belfast shipowner with whom she moved to London. There, she rose to prominence as a professional beauty and style-setter whose acquaintances included various members of the social and cultural elite. She thus came within the orbit of Albert Edward, Prince of Wales (known as Bertie to his family), Queen Victoria’s eldest son and heir to the throne, whose dalliance with the Irish actress Nellie Clifden in 1861 had already created scandal. His liaison with Langtry commenced in 1877 and lasted three years. It was an open secret, generating notoriety and cachet for Langtry in equal measure. Around 1880 she began a relationship with Prince Louis of Battenberg (Louis Mountbatten), with whom she had a daughter. This precipitated the deterioration of her marriage which ended in 1881. Being without a conventional means of support she decided to earn a living as an actress and made her professional stage debut in London in December 1881. Capitalising on her beauty and reputation, she then formed her own theatre company with which she toured to the United States several times between 1882 and 1889. That year, having established independent wealth through investments in racehorses and real estate, she returned permanently to England. In 1899 she married the heir to an English baronetcy who was eighteen years her junior. She retired to Monaco after World War One and published her memoir The days I knew in 1925.
Brothers William Downey (1829-1915) and Daniel Downey opened their first photographic studio in 1863 in Newcastle-on-Tyne. In 1872 the business expanded to London, William running the new studio in Belgravia while Daniel maintained the business in Newcastle. The firm became known for carte de visite and cabinet card portraits of celebrities and the aristocracy and is said to have been particularly favoured by Queen Victoria, whom they photographed on many occasions from the late 1860s until the 1890s. The Prince of Wales, later King Edward VII, was also a significant patron. W & D Downey’s 1868 carte-de-visite of his wife the Princess of Wales (later Queen Alexandra) piggy-backing her baby daughter Princess Louise was extraordinarily popular, selling some 300,000 copies. William’s son William Edward Downey (1855-1908) also became a photographer.
William H. Bardwell (Australian) Self portrait (age 34 in 1870)
1870
albumen silver carte de visite photograph Support: 10.6 x 6.3cm Image: 9.4 x 6.0cm
National Portrait Gallery, Canberra
Purchased 2015
William H. Bardwell
Photographer William H. Bardwell (life dates unknown), worked at various studios in Ballarat from 1858 until 1895. In 1859, he was in partnership with Saul Solomon; they specialised in portraiture and providing photographs of the town from unusual vantage points, some of which were lithographed for The Ballarat Album (1859). Together, he and Solomon exhibited portraits at the 1862 Geelong Industrial Exhibition, where they received special commendation for their ‘sennotype’ process, a process consisting of two albumen prints, one waxed and one hand-coloured, mounted with glass plate. The two also exhibited their portraits in the 1863 Ballarat Mechanics’ Institute Exhibition. The same year, the Argus reported that Bardwell had captured the laying of the foundation stone of the Sturt Street Burke and Wills memorial from the roof of the Post Office. In the late 1860s he photographed a visiting troupe of Japanese gymnasts, and in 1871 he took photographs of Chang the Chinese Giant and his entourage. Bardwell exhibited photographs of Ballarat at the Intercolonial Exhibition in Sydney in 1870, offering prints at the substantial price of £6 each, and had a photographic panorama of Ballarat among his views of its buildings and streets in the Victorian section of the London International Exhibition of 1873. From his studio at 11 Royal Arcade, Melbourne, William Bardwell exhibited photographs at the Melbourne Centennial International Exhibition 1888-1889. In this self-portrait we see Bardwell in standing pose, dressed in stately attire, his frock coat with lowered waistline and three-piece suit characteristic of the period. Supported by a chair and his walking cane, Bardwell projects a stately figure with his hat tidily atop his head.
In 1866, William Bardwell established the Royal Photographic Studio independently of Solomon, an advertisement in the Clunes Gazette announcing, ‘The studio is every way replete with suitable accommodation for the preparation of toilet and rooms are provided for both ladies and gentlemen. Mr Bardwell’s long and practical example will entitle him to the claim to the first position in Ballarat as a photographer’. Bardwell took advantage of his studio’s close proximity to the Theatre Royal, producing photographs for visiting theatre groups and operatic companies. Along with actresses and actors coming and going, Bardwell catered for the upper echelons of Ballarat society. Boasting the ‘best appointed Studio in the colonies’, one could imagine Bardwell’s studio was flooded with natural light, his darkroom in complete darkness for the meticulous preparation of plates, paper and photographic chemicals used to render surfaces sensitive to light. Bardwell went into partnership with John Beauchamp at Ballarat for some part of 1878, before relocating to open his studio in Melbourne later that year. Bardwell’s Royal Studios at Ballarat remained active throughout the 1880s under the operation of Mr Williams while William Bardwell remained in Melbourne.
Timothy Noble (active 1871-1888) Charles Blondin (age 50 in 1874)
1874
Albumen photograph on carte de visite Support: 10.2 x 6.2cm Image: 9.3 x 5.6cm
National Portrait Gallery, Canberra
Purchased 2018
The famed nineteenth century French tightrope walker and aerial acrobat, Charles Blondin, born Jean Francoix Gravelet (1824-1897), was known for thrilling audiences world-wide with his acrobatic feats. The ‘crazy, bearded little Frenchman’ is said to have crossed Niagara Gorge on over 300 occasions, at first performing simple crossings then amazing onlookers with increasingly bizarre and challenging stunts. Encouraged by Australian entrepreneur and agent Harry (HP) Lyons, ‘The Great Blondin’ followed his North American tour with a visit to Australia in 1874, performing for enthralled onlookers in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne. On 25 July he made his first appearance in Australia, thrilling over 3,500 onlookers when he crossed the Brisbane Botanic Gardens on a tightrope measuring 76 metres in length and suspended 24 metres above the ground. He first danced across the tightrope in knight’s armour before performing several acrobatic stunts including balancing on his head for ten seconds, cooking an omelette on a stove while drinking a glass of champagne, balancing on two legs of a wooden chair, and carrying his assistant, Mr Niaud, pick-a’-back from one end to the other. Blondin’s performance captivated the audience for one hour and 45 minutes, during which time he would consistently toy with the crowd, pretending to stumble and fall to heighten the drama. The Maryborough Chronicle reported that Blondin’s appearance ‘produced the curious effect known as bringing the heart into the mouth’. Blondin’s popularity in Australia was such that to ‘blond’ on the back of the fence was the ambition of every kiddie. He inspired at least five Australians to emulate his feats, the most famed being the funambulist and aeronautical balloonist, Henri L’Estrange, commonly known as ‘the Australian Blondin’.
Photographer Timothy Noble worked from a number of addresses in Melbourne between 1871 and 1884 before relocating to Sydney. At the time of Charles Blondin’s visit to Melbourne in 1874, Noble’s studio was at 135 Bourke Street, not far from George Selth Coppin’s Theatre Royal. It was there that Blondin made his inaugural Victorian appearance, the Age advising readers on 20 October 1874 that ‘Chevalier Blondin, The Hero of Niagara’ would be visiting the Theatre the following evening, and advising that ‘Early application should be made for seats and tickets’. In early November the paper reported that ‘We have received from Mr. Noble, photographer, of Bourke-street, a very good likeness of M. Blondin, with all his honours. The medals shown in the photograph have quite a history attached to them. Among them is the order of her Catholic Majesty the Queen of Spain’. Blondin’s pose likewise suggests his courageous spirit, while the pair of binoculars at his side is perhaps an allusion to the means by which some witnessed his thrilling and spectacular performances. The State Library of Victoria has 30 of Noble’s photographs, including portraits of actresses Hattie Shepparde and Maggie Moore, and impresario J.C. Williamson.
About the exhibition
Drawn from the NPG’s burgeoning collection of cartes de visite, Carte-o-mania! celebrates the wit, style and substance of the pocket-sized portraits that were taken and collected like crazy in post-goldrush Australia.
In May 1860 Queen Victoria and Prince Albert and their children sat for the London photographer John Jabez Edwin Mayall. With Her Majesty’s approval, the resultant photographs were made available to the public as a series of cartes de visite titled ‘The Royal Album’. Sales went crazy, netting Mayall £35,000 and propelling the carte de visite from relative obscurity to fervent, widespread popularity.
The diminutive-format albumen photographs, mounted on cards measuring ten by six centimetres, had been conceived of in Paris in 1854. Yet in the English-speaking world it wasn’t until the Queen saw fit to have herself documented in this way – and in relatable semblances and settings – that the populace began to embrace cartes as a novel, affordable way of collecting images, whether of royals and other luminaries or, increasingly, of themselves.
Cartes enabled people from various strata of society to acquire multiple portraits for a matter of shillings, providing ‘the opportunity of distributing yourself among your friends, and letting them see you in your favourite attitude, and with your favourite expression’.
Occupying a mid-point between the invention of the daguerreotype in 1839 and the advent of the Kodak camera in the 1880s, the carte de visite was the first truly democratic form of portraiture. Collections of cartes, and the outputs of their exponents, thus often constitute the most inclusive of portrait galleries and the most comprehensive archives of a nation’s faces.
Text from the National Portrait Gallery website [Online] Cited 20/03/2019
Unknown artist Thomas Wentworth Wills (age 21 in 1857)
c.1857 or c.1864 (printed c. 1905-1910)
Gelatin silver photograph on grey paper support on card Support: 11 x 9cm Image: 9.6 x 7.4cm
National Portrait Gallery, Canberra
Gift of T S Wills Cooke 2014
Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program
Thomas Wentworth (Tom) Wills (1836-1880)
Thomas Wentworth (Tom) Wills (1836-1880), is popularly thought of as the ‘inventor’ of Australian Rules football. Born in Sydney and named for his father’s good friend (and lawyer), William Charles Wentworth, Tom was not yet four when he took part in the journey by which his father, Horatio Spencer Wills, relocated from New South Wales to the Port Phillip district in 1839. Tom received some of his schooling in Melbourne before, at fourteen, being sent ‘home’ to be educated at Rugby, where he proved an adept sportsman but not much of a scholar. He then attended Cambridge but did not matriculate, once again earning greater distinction for his on-field prowess, particularly in cricket. He later played for Kent and the Marylebone Cricket Club, continuing his cricket career on returning to Victoria in late 1856. In all, between 1857 and 1876, in addition to playing for Richmond, the Melbourne Cricket Club, and several other teams, he represented Victoria in twelve matches against New South Wales, scoring a total of 319 runs and taking 72 wickets at the impressive average of ten for 23. His significance to Australian sporting history, however, arguably resides primarily in his instigating a local code of football as a means of keeping cricketers fit during winter. In 1858, Wills helped establish the Melbourne Football Club; in 1859, he led the group that set down the code of laws for what became known as Victorian or Australian Rules football – elements of which, some historians have argued, may have their origins in marngrook, a traditional game involving a possum-skin ball played by the Aboriginal people of the Western District, and which Wills may have witnessed and played as a boy.
In 1861, Tom along with at least 25 of his father’s employees (and 10,500 sheep), overlanded from Brisbane to Cullin-la-ringo, a property Horatio Wills had leased near Emerald in Queensland. Sent on an errand to another station soon after the party had arrived, Tom was absent from Cullin-la-ringo when a group of Aboriginal people camped nearby mounted a violent raid on the property, killing nineteen people, his father included. Tom remained at Cullin-la-ringo nevertheless, initially making an attempt to run it while resorting increasingly to alcohol as a method of quelling the demons occasioned by the circumstances of his father’s death. Back in Victoria permanently by 1864, he returned to sport, playing football for both Melbourne and Geelong, representing his state again in inter-colonial cricket, and serving in administrative capacities in both sports. In 1866, he was engaged as the captain-coach of a team of Aboriginal players that subsequently played a number of fixtures in Victoria and New South Wales but which disbanded prior to a planned tour to England in 1867. By the mid-1870s, however, the career of the so-called ‘Grace of Australia’ was unravelling, his performances routinely blighted by drunkenness. In his final years, he lived at Heidelberg with his partner, Sarah Barber (whom his family never recognised). Fearful that he would harm himself, in April 1880 Sarah had Tom admitted to the Melbourne Hospital for restraint. He absconded and died soon afterwards, having stabbed himself with a pair of scissors while in a state of delirium tremens.
William Edward Kilburn (British, 1818-1891) William Robertson
1863
Albumen paper carte de visite Support: 10.2 x 6.5cm Image: 8.6 x 5.5cm
National Portrait Gallery, Canberra
Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program by Malcolm Robertson in memory of William Thomas Robertson 2018
William Robertson (1839-1892)
William Robertson (1839-1892), lawyer, politician and pastoralist, was the second eldest son and third child of merchant and landowner William Robertson and his wife Margaret. William senior had emigrated to Van Diemen’s Land in the 1820s, building a successful business in Hobart before relocating to Victoria. William junior was educated in Hobart and then at Wadham College, Oxford. While there ‘he entered with zest into the athletics of the place, and he rowed in the Oxford and Cambridge annual boat race on the Thames in 1861’. He graduated in 1862 and the following year, in Tunbridge Wells, he married Martha Mary Murphy (1844-1909). On returning home William and Martha settled initially in Hobart before William was admitted to the bar in Victoria. He his brothers John, George and James each inherited property on their father’s death in 1874, William acquiring The Hill, ‘a stretch of very rich agricultural and grazing land’ near Colac. As Robertson Brothers the four managed the family’s various pastoral concerns, developing a reputation for their shorthorn cattle. William was a member of the Victorian Legislative Assembly in the 1870s and 1880s, ‘but his interest in politics was not very keen’. ‘He was much better fitted to shine in social life’, his obituary said, ‘being a man of amiable disposition and high private character’. He died while undergoing surgery for cancer in 1892.
William Edward Kilburn (1818-1891)
William Edward Kilburn (1818-1891) was one of London’s earliest exponents of the daguerreotype. He opened his first studio on Regent Street, London, in 1847 and in 1848 Prince Albert acquired Kilburn’s daguerreotypes showing a large Chartist gathering at Kennington. This led to Kilburn being appointed ‘Her Majesty’s Daguerreotypist’ and began an association with the Royal Family that resulted in a number of portraits over the next several years. Leading members of society admired Kilburn’s work, which was often finely hand-coloured or engraved for publication in illustrated newspapers. Kilburn adapted easily to the waning popularity of the daguerreotype and the advent of paper photographs, his studio becoming a leading London supplier of cartes de visite in the late 1850s, and sitters such as Florence Nightingale and Benjamin Disraeli had cartes de visite taken by him. He is perhaps of especial interest to historians of Australian photography as the brother of Douglas Kilburn, who is considered Melbourne’s first professional photographer. Douglas’s early advertisements state that ‘Mr Kilburn, having just received materials and the latest information from his brother, in London (Photographic Artist to the Queen), will be ready next week to TAKE LIKENESSES by the Daguerreotype Process’.
S. Milbourn Jnr (1863-1897) Adam Lindsay Gordon
1890-1894
Albumen silver photograph on cabinet card Support: 16.5 x 10.7cm Image: 13.1 x 10.6cm
National Portrait Gallery, Canberra
Purchased 2008
Adam Lindsay Gordon (1833-1870)
Adam Lindsay Gordon (1833-1870), poet and horseman, arrived in Adelaide in 1853 and joined the South Australian Mounted Police. After two years he resigned and found work as a horse-breaker and also began establishing himself as a steeplechase rider at country race meetings. On his mother’s death in 1859 he came into a £7,000 inheritance, much of which was later squandered in various imprudent investments. Meanwhile, he’d married, served a term in the South Australian parliament, and started writing. Gordon’s poems began appearing in newspapers in 1864 and in 1867 he published his first two volumes of verse. He then moved to Ballarat and joined the Light Horse but suffered a serious horse-riding accident in early 1868 which compounded other misfortunes: the failure of yet another business venture and the death of his infant daughter. He nevertheless built on his reputation for hunting and horsemanship; and continued to publish and garner praise for his poetry, a third volume of which, Bush Ballads and Galloping Rhymes, appeared in 1870. Very shortly after its publication, however, and having failed to secure another inheritance that would have assuaged some of his financial worries, Gordon committed suicide, shooting himself on the beach at Brighton. ‘The bold resolute man, the accomplished scholar in whose heart burned true poetic fire, and the warm-hearted friend’ was buried in the Brighton cemetery, his grave becoming a site of pilgrimage for his admirers for many years to come.
S. Milbourn Jnr (1863-1897)
S. Milbourn Junior is listed as operating as a photographer in Glenelg, South Australia, from 1890 to 1894, though there are scant details of his practice in existing texts on Australian photography. Over the course of the 1890s S. Milbourn Junior wrote various pieces of music, including ‘The Broken Hill Schottische’, ‘Eden-love’, ‘Friends no Longer’, ‘Love’s Guardian’, ‘Love’s Memories’ and the ‘Yacht Club Mazurka’. Milbourn’s music is advertised for sale on the reverse of these photographs, but the music advertised was written many years after the death of the writers depicted. Milbourn is unlikely to have taken the original photographs of Kendall and Gordon, but it is possible that he composed and fabricated the images on offer, using photographs taken many years before.
About the exhibition
The National Portrait Gallery is bringing the Victorian era back to life in a special exhibition exploring the colour and character of post-goldrush Australia.
Opening on Thursday 8 November, Carte-o-mania! celebrates the cute, quirky, intimate medium of the carte de visite – a diminutive style of studio photograph that took portraiture by storm in the 1860s.
Exhibition Curator Jo Gilmour says the National Portrait Gallery has never had an exhibition like this before. ‘When the Portrait Gallery first began, we had very few carte de visite photographs in the collection – but in recent years our collection of them has grown to over 100.
Each photograph is like a miniature world of its own with an incredible story embedded in it. The poses, the props and the fashions throw an intriguing light onto the world of the nineteenth-century studio, while the stories of the photographers and their subjects combine to create a rich and vivid archive of Australian society at a precise moment in time. Rich or poor, male or female, famous or infamous, powerful or anonymous: everyone was captured in these tiny photographs.
What I love about Carte-o-mania! is its wit and its fun factor. All of the portraits in the show will be displayed in showcases and albums, giving viewers the opportunity to get up close and immerse themselves in the photographs, which became part of a widespread collecting fad’.
Text from the National Portrait Gallery website [Online] Cited 20/03/2019
Batchelder and O’Neill (active 1857-1863) Lady Anne Maria Barkly (age 25 in 1863)
1863
Albumen silver carte de visite Support: 10.7 x 6.2cm Image: 9.0 x 5.7cm
National Portrait Gallery, Canberra
Purchased 2014
British botanist, Anne Maria Barkly née Pratt (c. 1838-1932) collected and drew plant specimens while accompanying her husband, Sir Henry Barkly, on his governing duties abroad. Following Sir Henry’s time as Governor of Victoria from 1856 to 1863, Lady Barkly accompanied her husband and his daughter by his first wife, Emily, to South Africa to assume the position of Governor of Mauritius (1863-1870). It was here that Lady Barkly corresponded with Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker at Kew Gardens about the plants of the island. In 1870, she journeyed to South Africa to join her husband in his newly appointed position as the Governor of the Cape of Good Hope. During their seven year stay on the Cape, Lady Barkly along with step daughter Emily Blanche Barkly made drawings of the plants that Sir Henry collected. Copies of their drawings of Stapeliae (odoriferous succulents in which her husband was very interested) were sent with Sir Henry’s descriptions of the living plants to Kew Gardens. Lady Barkly also collected plants herself, mainly pteridophyta. In 1875, she compiled and published A Revised List of the Ferns of South Africa. A set of her ferns was arranged at the Albany Museum in 1890. She is listed in the Dictionary of British and Irish Botanists, as is her step-daughter. In 1860, Nicholas Chevalier designed a fancy-dress costume for the new Lady Barkly, trimmed with sheepskin and gemstone nuggets, appliquéd with fern motifs and accessorised with a lyrebird-inspired fan. In this carte de visite, Lady Barkly is depicted in day dress with double-puff bishop sleeves, her small, elegant hat with frill detail perched on top of her head. The detailing of her fur-trimmed shawl is reflected in the mirror behind, while her hands rest gently on a lace shawl with leaf motif.
The preeminent Melbourne photographic firm Batchelder & O’Neill had its origins in the studio founded on Collins Street in 1854 by the Massachusetts-born photographer Perez Mann Batchelder (1818-1873), who had come to Victoria after several years in California. Batchelder’s brothers Benjamin (1826-1891), Nathaniel (1827-1860) and Freeman (life dates unknown) joined him in Melbourne in February 1856. The firm promised ‘Portraits taken on Glass and Silver Plates by the Collodion and Daguerreotype Process, in the highest perfection of the art’ and ‘in a style surpassed by none in the colonies’. The studio also offered tuition in photography and ‘supplied [the trade] with apparatus and materials of every description’. Perez Batchelder left Victoria in 1857 and another American, Daniel O’Neill, joined the business. By late 1864, Batchelder & O’Neill – with O’Neill as sole partner – had relocated to Swanston Street. O’Neill later moved to Sydney, where in April 1868 he advertised the availability of his carte de visite of the Duke of Edinburgh’s would-be assassin Henry O’Farrell a week before his execution. Meanwhile, Perez Batchelder had returned to Boston, where he died in 1873. By 1866 the old firm no longer existed, but other photographers traded under the names ‘Batchelder’s Portrait Rooms’ and ‘Batchelder & Co.’ from 1866 to 1895.
Johnstone O’Shannessy & Co (Henry James Johnstone and Emily Florence Kate O’Shaughnessy) Martha M. Robertson (age 22 in 1866)
1866
Albumen photograph on carte de visite Support: 10.5 x 6.2cm Image: 9.7 x 6.0cm
National Portrait Gallery, Canberra
Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program by Malcolm Robertson in memory of William Thomas Robertson 2018
Martha Mary Robertson (née Murphy, 1844-1909)
Martha Mary Robertson (née Murphy, 1844-1909) married barrister William Robertson (1839-1892) in England in 1863. Like her husband, Martha was from a fabulously successful colonial family. Her father, John Robert Murphy (1806-1891), was your archetypical self-made man, a brewer by profession, who had emigrated to Van Diemen’s Land and then – like William’s father – availed himself of the opportunities presented by expansion to the Port Phillip district in the 1830s. Murphy, according to his obituary, initially took up land at Warrnambool before moving to Melbourne, opening a brewery, and investing ‘in the purchase of city and suburban lands, all of which proved to be investments of the first class’. By 1850 Murphy was in position to take his children to England to be educated, and it was presumably through their Tasmanian / Victorian connections that Martha and William met there, William having graduated from Oxford in 1862. Their first child, a son, was born in England in 1864. Another four children, three girls and one boy, were born after they’d returned to Victoria. In 1874 the family moved to The Hill, near Colac, one of a number of properties William and his brothers inherited on their father’s death and which they managed in partnership until the early 1890s. William was a keen amateur photographer and his images include those of family life at The Hill, where he died in 1892. Martha outlived him by seventeen years, spending the latter part of her life in Armadale.
Johnstone O’Shannessy & Co
Henry James Johnstone was born in Birmingham in 1835 and studied at the Birmingham School of Design before joining his father’s photographic firm. He arrived in Victoria in 1853 and spent three years on the goldfields before returning to Melbourne and opening a studio in Bourke Street with Emily Florence Kate O’Shaughnessy in 1862. Initially trading as Johnstone & Co, it became Johnstone, O’Shannessy & Co in 1864. They operated in premises next door to the GPO until 1886 and were awarded a medal at the 1866 Intercolonial Exhibition. Johnstone meanwhile continued his art studies, taking lessons from Charles Summers and Louis Buvelot, and later under Thomas Clark at the National Gallery School. According to one historian, Johnstone toured Victoria with HRH Prince Alfred The Duke of Edinburgh during his visit in 1867-1868, by which stage Johnstone, O’Shannessy & Co. was one of Melbourne’s most fashionable photographic studios. O’Shaughnessy – whose name appears always to have been misspelt – is believed to have left the business around 1870, although the studio continued to trade under the Johnstone O’Shannessy name. From 1872 Johnstone exhibited paintings with the Victorian Academy of Arts. He left Melbourne in the late 1870s and was reported to be living in California when four of his paintings were shown at the Victorian Academy of Arts exhibition in 1879. By 1881 he was in England, exhibiting regularly at the Royal Academy until 1900. He died in 1907.
Davies & Co Julia Matthews (age 20 in 1862)
c. 1862
Albumen paper carte de visite Support: 10.5 x 6.4 cm Image: 9.0 x 5.7 cm
National Portrait Gallery, Canberra
Purchased 2010
Julia Matthews (1842-1876)
Legend has it that Julia Matthews (1842-1876) was one of the main reasons why Robert O’Hara Burke signed up for the ill-fated expedition he led to the Gulf of Carpentaria in 1860-1861. An actress and singer twenty-one years his junior, Matthews first encountered Burke in 1858 when she toured to Beechworth, where Burke was police inspector. He reportedly saw all of her performances there and was so enamoured that he asked her to marry him. She refused. Undeterred – and purportedly thinking that the glory he expected to achieve by the expedition would make him an irresistible prospect – he proposed again on evening of the expedition’s departure from Melbourne in August 1860. She declined to give him a definitive answer, but Burke had sufficient inducement to give her a miniature portrait of himself regardless, having two days earlier made her his sole beneficiary in the event of his death. Matthews is said to have urged a search party once rumours of the expedition’s failure began to circulate in Melbourne, and soon after news of her would-be suitor’s demise was confirmed she placed a notice in the newspapers offering a reward to anyone who recovered the portrait of Burke she claimed to have lost while walking in the Botanic Gardens. Whether this was a publicity stunt or arose out of genuine sadness at losing the memento is unclear. Following the end of a six-year marriage to a faithless drunkard husband, Matthews toured the UK and the United States to support her three children. She died in Missouri in May 1876.
Davies & Co
English photographer William Davies had arrived in Melbourne by 1855. He is said to have worked with his friend Walter Woodbury and for the local outpost of the New York firm Meade Brothers before establishing his own business in 1858. By the middle of 1862, ‘Davies & Co’ had rooms at 91 and 94 Bourke Street, from where patrons could procure ‘CARTE de VISITE and ALBUM PORTRAITS, in superior style’. Like several of his contemporaries and competitors, Davies appears to have made the most of his location ‘opposite the Theatre Royal’, subjects of Davies & Co cartes de visite including leading actors such as Barry Sullivan and Gustavus Vaughan Brooke, and comedian Harry Rickards. Examples of the firm’s work – portraits and views – were included in the 1861 Victorian Exhibition and the London International Exhibition of 1862; and at the 1866 Intercolonial Exhibition the firm exhibited ‘Portraits, Plain and Coloured, in Oils and Water Colours’ alongside a selection of views for which they received an honourable mention.
Arthur William Burman (Australian, 1851-1915) Clara Crosbie
c. 1885
Albumen photograph on carte de visite Support: 10.1 x 6.1 cm Image: 8.9 x 5.6 cm
Courtesy of John McPhee
Clara Harriet Crosbie (b. 1873)
Clara Harriet Crosbie was twelve years old when she went missing in the bush near Yellingbo in the Yarra Valley in May 1885. ‘The child had been sent on a visit to a neighbour about a mile from her mother’s house’, reported the Argus, but ‘as a town-bred girl, of warm affections and quick impulses … she resolved to find her way home, although she did not know the way’. Faced with the perilous wilds, Clara took shelter in the hollow of a tree for three weeks, crawling to a nearby creek to drink and trying to cooee her way to safety. Her cries for help were eventually heard – by chance – by two men named Cowan and Smith while they were in the vicinity searching for horses. A low sound, ‘like a young blackbird’s whistle’, had caught the acute ear of the two experienced bushmen and they followed the ‘wailing note borne softly on the breeze’ to its source. With the return of each low and piercing cooee, the men at last caught sight of the little girl, frail and woebegone. ‘The little creature was tottering towards us, in her ulster, without shoes or stockings on, but quite sensible’, they recounted. Following her convalescence in the Melbourne Hospital, Clara’s father leased her to Maximilian Kreitmayer, the proprietor of the waxworks on Bourke Street. From August to November 1885, ‘The Latest Attraction, CLARA CROSBIE’, performed to hordes of intrigued onlookers, explaining ‘How To Live For Three Weeks in the Bush Without Food’. In December 1885 she proceeded to Sydney to repeat the spectacle.
Throughout the nineteenth century there were several accounts of young children from settlements around Melbourne wandering off into the bewildering bush, never to be found again. Several painters of the period, including Frederick McCubbin, William Strutt and S.T. Gill, were inspired by these dramatic, melancholic tales of lost children. The theme also resonated deeply with the populace and became something of a mainstay of nineteenth-century Australian culture. McCubbin’s depiction of a young girl enveloped by bush in Lost (1886) is said to have been inspired by Clara’s story of survival, which McCubbin may well have heard first-hand at Kreitmayer’s Waxworks. In Arthur William Burman’s portrait of Clara, the studio is set up to simulate forbidding bushland, with the lost little girl’s bewildered eyes peering towards the lens. Burman was one of four siblings who followed their father into the photography profession. The various Burmans, and the several studios they operated either individually or in partnership, often sought to cash in on persons of ephemeral celebrity. Among the numerous other subjects of Burman cartes are Eva Carmichael and Tom Pearce, the survivors of the 1878 sinking of the Loch Ard, for example, and Dominick Sonsee, ‘the Smallest Man in the World’, who was exhibiting himself at the Eastern Arcade on Bourke Street in 1880.
Arthur William Burman (1851-1915)
Arthur William Burman was one of the nine children of photographer William Insull Burman (1814-1890), who came to Victoria in 1853. Burman senior worked as a painter and decorator before establishing his own photography business in Carlton around 1863. Arthur and his older brother, Frederick, worked in the family business which, by 1869, operated a number of studios around Melbourne. Arthur is listed as operating businesses under his own name from addresses in East Melbourne, Carlton, Windsor, Fitzroy and Richmond between 1878 and his death in 1890.
Archibald McDonald (Australian born Nova Scotia, 1831-1873) Chang the Chinese Giant with his wife Kin Foo and manager Edward Parlett
c. 1871
Albumen photograph on carte de visite Support: 10.2 x 6.2cm Image: 9.3 x 5.9cm
National Portrait Gallery, Canberra
Purchased 2010
Chang Woo Gow (c. 1846-1893)
Chang Woo Gow (c. 1846-1893), aka ‘Chang the Chinese Giant’, is believed to have been born in either Fuzhou or Beijing and claimed to be from a line of scholarly, similarly proportioned forbears. He first exhibited himself in London in 1865 at the Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly, which functioned as ‘a cluster of speculative showcases for the miscellaneous entertainers who worked the London circuit’. A woman described as his wife, Kin Foo, and a dwarf were part of the spectacle. Hordes of people were reported to have attended Chang’s levées, readily paying for the privilege of looking upon ‘this most splendid specimen of a man’, dressed in his traditional Chinese robes and diverting his audiences with samples of the several languages he spoke fluently. Having fulfilled further engagements in the UK and Paris, Chang travelled to the USA, appearing in New York, Detroit, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago and San Francisco among other cities before making his way to Melbourne in January 1871. Chang’s inaugural Australian levée was conducted at St. George’s Hall, formerly known as Weston’s Opera House. Like the Egyptian Hall, it was a venue that hosted a diverse assortment of ‘attractions’, such as the mesmerist Madame Sibly, who was ‘manipulating heads’ for packed houses nightly in early March 1871. Chang and his party then proceeded throughout country Victoria. By May they were in Sydney, appearing at the School of Arts with the Australian Tom Thumb, and they subsequently appeared in Maitland, Singleton, Scone, Muswellbrook and Newcastle. In November 1871 Chang married Catherine ‘Kitty’ Santley, a native of Liverpool, England, whom he had met in Geelong. In December it was reported that Chang, his ‘sister’ Kin Foo, and his wife had sailed from Auckland for Shanghai. After a stint with Barnum and Bailey’s ‘Greatest Show on Earth’, Chang retired with his family to Bournemouth, where he opened a tearoom with a sideline in Chinese curios and fabrics.
Portraits had a role to play not just in the marketing but in the performances of those in the live exhibit profession, with accounts of Chang’s receptions indicating that the issuing of cartes de visite was part of the whole experience. In Chang’s case, and in keeping with the civility characterising his ‘levees’, the photographs may have been intended to function equally as a memento of having been in his ‘Celestial presence’ and as a miniature conversation piece or quirky, curious souvenir. Among the St George’s Hall tenants when Chang was appearing there in early 1871 was Archibald McDonald (1831-1873), a Canadian-born photographer who had first come to Australia in the late 1840s, working in Melbourne, Geelong, Tasmania and then Melbourne again, and establishing his gallery and studio in St. George’s Hall around 1864. McDonald was consequently among the various photographers to produce cartes of Chang and his entourage. It seems to have been standard to photograph him in either Chinese or English mode; and alongside those of average or dramatically different proportions so as to throw his own into greater relief. Both methods are in evidence in two photographs of Chang bearing McDonald’s studio stamp: one shows Chang and Kin Foo in traditional robes alongside his manager, Edward Partlett – seated atop a pedestal; and the second sees Chang in European clothes, seated, and flanked by four others including a Chinese boy. In April 1871 the Ballarat photographer William Bardwell created a number of cartes of Chang, one of which depicted him with Partlett tucked comfortably underneath his arm.
Batchelder and O’Neill (active 1857-1863) John Pascoe Fawkner (age 75 in 1867)
c. 1867
Albumen silver carte de visite Support: 10.5 x 6.3cm
National Portrait Gallery, Canberra
Purchased 2008
John Pascoe Fawkner (1792-1869)
John Pascoe Fawkner (1792-1869), sometimes called the ‘Founder of Melbourne’ was a pioneer and adventurer. The self-educated son of a convict, he spent his early years in Van Diemen’s Land, pursuing a variety of occupations from baker to builder to bush lawyer, often finding himself in trouble with the law largely because of debts but in 1814 for abetting an attempted escape by convicts. He launched the Launceston Advertiser in 1828 and edited it for the next two years, championing the emancipist class and attacking officialdom. In 1835 he organised an expedition to what is now Melbourne. Landing in Hobson’s Bay, Fawkner soon became a man of property and influence, acquired substantial lots of land, running a hotel and establishing the Port Phillip Patriot and Melbourne Advertiser. A member of the Legislative Council from its introduction in 1851 until his death, Fawkner railed in his Port Phillip Patriot against the privileged squattocracy and was known as ‘the tribune of the people’.
Batchelder & O’Neill (active 1857-1863)
The American brothers Perez Mann, Benjamin and Nathaniel Batchelder worked in Victoria and New South Wales in the 1850s and 1860s. Perez Batchelder had come to the colony from the Californian goldfields, which he had traversed making daguerreotypes. He and Benjamin Batchelder set up the Melbourne studio of PM Batchelder in 1852; the family also opened short-lived enterprises in Sydney in 1858 and Bendigo in 1866. Perez’s business, Batchelder and O’Neill, not only took photographs, but sold ‘photographic materials of every description’ which were illustrated in their free catalogues. The inaugural meeting of the Photographic Society of Victoria took place in Batchelder and O’Neill’s rooms in 1860.
Batchelder & Co. Photo (active 1854 – 1890s) Richard Henry Horne (age 58 in 1860)
mid 1860s
Albumen paper carte de visite Support: 10.5 x 6.3cm Image: 9.4 x 6.2cm
National Portrait Gallery, Canberra
Purchased with funds provided by Graham Smith 2009
Richard Henry Horne (1802-1884)
Poet Richard Henry Horne (1802-1884) arrived in Melbourne in 1852 hoping to make money on the goldfields but ended up instead in a variety of less remunerative prospects. Initially he was appointed to the command of a private gold escort; in 1853 he became assistant gold commissioner for Heathcote and Waranga but by the end of 1854 had been dismissed. In December that year, in the wake of the Eureka rebellion, he published an article defending miners’ grievances with the licensing system and alleging corruption on the part of some goldfields police, ‘especially in relation with sly-grog tents’. Though not exactly a model of propriety in his own life, Horne saw fit to decry colonial society and ‘social evils’ on a number of other occasions. In Australian Facts and Prospects (1859), for instance, he wrote that ‘with regard to drunkenness and prostitution [Melbourne] is far worse than Sydney, or any other city in the world’, citing the bar at the Theatre Royal as a case in point. ‘Between every act it is the custom of the audience to rush out to the bars for a nobbler of brandy, or other drinks. They all think they need it, whatever the weather may be’. Between 1855 and his return to England, disillusioned, in 1869, Horne stood for election to parliament (unsuccessfully); wrote plays, essays, articles and verse; was a member of the Garrick Club; and helped establish the Tahbilk Winery.
Batchelder & Co. (active 1854-1890s)
Batchelder & Co. was the last in a series of names applied to a photography business on Collins Street, Melbourne, that had been established in 1854. Its founder, Perez Mann Batchelder, came to Victoria having run a number of studios – including travelling ones – in California with his brother Benjamin. He and another two Batchelder brothers, Nathaniel and Freeman, came to Melbourne in 1856 to work in the business. Nathaniel Batchelder subsequently opened a branch in Sydney. The Melbourne business became Batchelder & O’Neill when Daniel O’Neill became a partner in 1857. By early 1865 John Botterill, Frederick Dunn and John Wilson had acquired the studio along with ‘all the negatives and other portraits, the accumulation of over 11 years of Batchelder and O’Neill’s business’. They traded as ‘Batchelder’s Portrait Rooms’ until 1867, after which it became known as Batchelder & Co. and continued until the mid-1890s.
National Portrait Gallery
King Edward Terrace
Parkes, Canberra
“As a holistic specimen without fixed parameters, “An informed object,” Zaatari elaborates, “is an object that is conscious of the material and processes that produced it, conscious of its provenance, its morphology and displacement over time, conscious of its history in the sense that it is able to communicate it. An informed object is already materialised, activated.” His self-declared “displacement” of these objects is thusly not about post-colonial uprooting, but rather a deeper, wider recognition of the apparatus that informs the production, circulation and reception of such images in, and beyond their respective context/s. In this expanded field, negatives, contact sheets, glass plates, double exposures, mistakes, erosion and all that is habitually left on the cutting room floor are re-valued as revelatory anomalies with “something to say”.”
Akram Zaatari quoted in Steven Matijcio / 2018
Alternate readings / elisions / a damaged life
This is the first posting of 2019, a new year, a new year of history, memory and life. And what a cracker of an exhibition to post first up!
I have always admired the Lebanese artist Akram Zaatari for the ability of his work to critique the inevitable, referential history of photographs. Anyone who can shine a light on forgotten narratives, histories, contexts and memories, who enlightens the fixed gaze of the camera and the viewer to show the Other, and who empowers the disenfranchised and tells their stories… is excellent in my eyes. For this is what Art Blart has sought to do in the last ten years: build an archive that exposes underrepresented artists and forgotten histories to the world.
Photography, and life, is not all that it seems… and Zaatari implicitly understands the conundrums of the taking, viewing and collecting of photographs in archives. He understands the physical quality of the medium (the presence of the negative, the glass slide, the print and their manipulation by the photographer) as well as the truth of the medium, a kind of truth telling – through history, time, the personal and the collective – that obscures as much as it reveals. As his short biography notes, “Akram Zaatari is an artist whose work is tied to collecting and exploring photographic practices in the making of social codes and aesthetic forms. Regarding the present through a wealth of photographic records from the past… Zaatari investigates notions of desire, pursuit, resistance, memory, surveillance, the shifting nature of political borders and the production and circulation of images in times of war.” Indeed, a rich investigative field which Zaatari makes full use of in his work.
Simply put, the project that Zaatari is undertaking is one of archaeological excavation / re-animation of the many aspects of the cultural geography of Lebanon, his role as auteur in this process combining “image-maker, archivist, curator, filmmaker and critical theorist to examine the photographic record, its making, genealogy and the role photography plays in the production and performance of identity.” (Wall text) “I’m really interested in how the personal and the intimate meet history,” Zaatari says. “What I’m doing is to write history, or [fill in] gaps of history, by using photographic documents.”1
Zaatari “deconstructs the archival impunity of photography to cultivate an expanded architecture of interpretation,” (Wall text) exploring the fold as a catalyst, a narrative, a re-organisation, an enduring obfuscation, and the memory of a material. What a photograph missed and what is present; what an archive catalogues and how, and what it misses, elides or denigrates (the classification system of an archive). As Rebecca Close observes, “The question of what an archive of the image fails to commemorate is particularly relevant in a country marred by decades of civil war and invasion.”2
It is also particularly relevant in a country (and a world) where men are in control. Zaatari interrogates (if I may use that pertinent word) the partitioning of history (between Palestine and Israel), the poses of decorum between male and female, the power of men in marriage, the stigma of homosexuality, male normativity, and “Zaatari’s framing of these photos (particularly as diminutive contact sheets) suggests modern cracks in the visual codification of patriarchal rule…” (Steven Matijcio) The centre cannot hold the weight of these hidden his/stories, as invisible “non-collections” (E. Edwards) in institutions are opened up for critical examination. The damage that accrues through such obfuscation, through such wilful blindness to the stories embedded in photographs is boundless.
What we must remember is that, “photography always lies for the photograph only depicts one version of reality, one version of a truth depending on what the camera is pointed at, what it excludes, who is pointing the camera and for what reasons, the context of the event or person being photographed (which is fluid from moment to moment) and the place and reason for displaying the photograph. In other words all photographs are, by the very nature, transgressive because they have only one visual perspective, only one line of sight – they exclude as much as they document and this exclusion can be seen as a volition (a choice of the photographer) and a violation of a visual ordering of the world (in the sense of the taxonomy of the subject, an upsetting of the normal order or hierarchy of the subject). Of course this line of sight may be interpreted in many ways and photography problematises the notion of a definitive reading of the image due to different contexts and the “possibilities of dislocation in time and space.” As Brian Wallis has observed, “The notion of an autonomous image is a fiction” as the photograph can be displaced from its original context and assimilated into other contexts where they can be exploited to various ends. In a sense this is also a form of autonomy because a photograph can be assimilated into an infinite number of contexts. “This de and re-contextualisation is itself transgressive of any “integrity” the photograph itself may have as a contextualised artefact.” As John Schwartz has insightfully noted, “[Photographs] carry important social consequences and that the facts they transmit in visual form must be understood in social space and real time,” “facts” that are constructions of reality that are interpreted differently by each viewer in each context of viewing.”3
I have no problem with the ethics and politics of the use of photo archives by contemporary artists and the appropriation of archival images as a form of “ironic archivization” to open up new critical insights into culture, and the culture of making, reading and archiving photographs. Zaatari appropriates these images for his own concerns to shine a light on what I call “the space between.” His interdisciplinary practice mines the history of the image while simultaneously expanding its legacy and life. As he observes of his profound and sensitive work, “Every photograph hides parts to reveal others… What a photograph missed and what was present at the time of exposure will remain inaccessible. In those folds lies a history, many histories.” With this powerhouse of an artist, these histories will not remain hidden for long.
Many thankx to Akram Zaatari and the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Acclaimed Lebanese artist Akram Zaatari combines the roles of image-maker, archivist, curator, filmmaker and critical theorist to explore the role photography plays in both instituting and fabricating identity. He is also co-founder of the Arab Image Foundation (AIF), an organisation established in Beirut to preserve, study and exhibit photographs from the Middle East, North Africa and the Arab diaspora from the 19th century to today. Within this endeavour Zaatari discovered the photographs of Hashem El Madani (1928-2017), who recorded the lives of everyday individuals inside and outside his humble studio in the late 1940s and 50s. Zaatari recontextualises this work, along with other archival photos and documents, in an interdisciplinary practice that mines the history of the image while simultaneously expanding its legacy and life. His work is both for and against photography, and the complex histories it cobbles.
For this exhibition he positions the seemingly simple fold as a narrative form, a reorganisation, an enduring obfuscation and the memory of material. In his words, “a photograph captures space and folds it into a flat image, turning parts of a scene against others, covering them entirely. Every photograph hides parts to reveal others… What a photograph missed and what was present at the time of exposure will remain inaccessible. In those folds lies a history, many histories.” The work on display will attempt to uncover and imagine these stories, undertaking a provocative archaeology that peers into the fissures, scratches, erosion and that which archives previously shed.
Presented in partnership with FotoFocus Biennial 2018. Text from the Contemporary Arts Center website
This film is a meditative study of a selection of studio photographs culled from Lebanese photographer Hashem el Madani’s archives. In response to Madani’s maxim that “posing one’s hands on a flat surface such as a table, or a shoulder helps to straighten one’s shoulders,” Zaatari looks closely from one hand to the next, creating a portrait of Lebanese society that implicitly questions the politics embedded in poses of propriety and decorum. Fingers fitted with rings and bodies displaying the comfort and composure of a certain class are juxtaposed with others indicative of manual labor and untrained modelling. The slow, but precise inventory of the video, devoted to the most tactile limb in one’s body, also elicits the ever-present sensuality which circulates throughout Madani’s photographs.
Zaatari says that was normal in the 1950s. “If you had your picture taken you would seize the opportunity to create something different of yourself,” he says. “They wanted to look at themselves as if they were looking at an actor in a film.” It was fun.
Movies were a great source of inspiration for Madani’s sitters. This included acting out a kiss – but only men kissing men and women kissing women. “In a conservative society such as Saida, people were willing to play the kiss between two people of the same sex, but very rarely between a man and a woman,” Madani told Zaatari. He remembers that happening only once.
“If you look at it today you think – is it gay culture? But in fact it is not,” says Zaatari. Social restrictions were different then. “If you wanted to kiss it had to be a same-sex kiss to be accepted.”
Men showed off their photos, but for women a picture was considered intimate and would only be shared with a trusted few. Madani had purposely found a studio space on the first floor, so that women could visit discreetly – seen entering at street level, their destination would not be obvious. Once inside, they could relax – but it did not always end well.
American Psychological Association links ‘masculinity ideology’ to homophobia, misogyny
For the first time in its 127-year history, the American Psychological Association has issued guidelines to help psychologists specifically address the issues of men and boys – and the 36-page document features a warning.
“Traditional masculinity ideology has been shown to limit males’ psychological development, constrain their behaviour, result in gender role strain and gender role conflict and negatively influence mental health and physical health,” the report warns.
The new “Guidelines for the Psychological Practice with Boys and Men” (August 2018) defines “masculinity ideology” as “a particular constellation of standards that have held sway over large segments of the population, including: anti-femininity, achievement, eschewal of the appearance of weakness, and adventure, risk, and violence.” The report also links this ideology to homophobia, bullying and sexual harassment.
The new guidelines, highlighted in this month’s issue of Monitor on Psychology, which is published by the APA, linked this ideology to a series of stark statistics: Men commit approximately 90 percent of all homicides in the U.S., they are far more likely than women to be arrested and charged with intimate partner violence in the U.S., and they are four times more likely than women to die of suicide worldwide. …
The report addresses the “power” and “privilege” that males have when compared to their female counterparts, but it notes that this privilege can be a psychological double-edged sword.
“Men who benefit from their social power are also confined by system-level policies and practices as well as individual-level psychological resources necessary to maintain male privilege,” the guidelines state. “Thus, male privilege often comes with a cost in the form of adherence to sexist ideologies designed to maintain male power that also restrict men’s ability to function adaptively.”
The fold is the pleat that results from turning or bending part of material against another such as in textile, paper or even earth strata. The fold is the trace that such an action leaves on material, the crease that marks the location of turning and pressing.
Inherent in the action of folding, is that material is turned or moved in three dimensions hence engages with space. Folding is the basic and simplest step in creating form or enclosure. It confines space within folds. It covers parts with other parts. Folding is editing. It is a construction that does not look like its original form.
Unfolding is undoing, deconstructing, turning material back to its initial form. The creases in an unfolded material inscribe its history and in a way save it from amnesia. History inscribes itself on material in creases and in other forms. When unfolded, material testifies that history has already found its way to it, through the fold.
The fold is the memory of material.
When the fold is intentional, it aims to reorganise material to reduce its volume, to create form, or confine space. When accidental or natural such as in geology, or due to ageing organic matter, the fold is a permanent deformation of matter the form of which remains little predictable.
When intentional, the fold is a creative action, like folding a paper sheet into a paper airplane or an origami, like folding several sheets into a book, or a sheet of cardboard into a box or even folding clothes to reduce their volume and store them on a shelf or in a box of specific dimensions.
The fold is a narrative form.
In a way every photograph is an exposure of a field of vision, of something somewhere. Like folding confines space, a photograph captures space and folds into a flat image, turning parts of a scene against others covering them entirely. Every photograph hides parts to reveal others. Every photograph reproduces in small what’s much larger in life, or brings close an image of somewhere far and out of sight. The impact of a fold in a photographed space is permanent, in the sense that hidden parts in a picture are irretrievable. What a photograph missed and that was present at the time of exposure will remain inaccessible. In those folds lies a history, many histories.
The fold in a photograph is a detail through which a narrative different from that narrated by the photograph unfolds. It is an element through which the initial construction of a photograph, its making, is undone. It is an element that bears the history of a photograph, its memory.
The fold in time is the representation of time shortened, like in literature, in illustration or typically in film. The fold in time is the ellipsis. The fold within a narrative is the jump-cut or the jump in time. The fold acknowledges the existence of hidden narratives covered by others. In a film, the cut is the fold.
Left Akram Zaatari (Lebanese, b. 1966) [Unlabelled]
Cairo, Egypt 1940s
Inkjet print of gelatin silver negative on cellulose acetate film Photographer: Alban
Courtesy of the Arab Image Foundation
A negative for photography is equivalent to an engraved zinc plate for traditional print-making. Not only does it allow for the reproduction of the image or print but it itself carrier traces of the tricks the photographer has used while making a picture. As such, photographers did not want their negatives to be displayed because they often carried details the studio might not want to share with the public. The portrait of a baby was made by the Cairo based photographer Alban in the 1940s. Access to the negative tells us that the baby was held by his mother and that she was later withdrawn from the picture
Wall text from the exhibition
Right Akram Zaatari (Lebanese, b. 1966) [Unlabelled]
Tripoli, Lebanon 1980s
Inkjet print of gelatin silver negative on cellulose acetate film Photographer: Joseph Avedissian Collection: Joseph Avedissian
Courtesy of the Arab Image Foundation
At at time when going to a photography studio was the only way for people to be photographed for ID or other official purposes, these spaces were shared by a wide spectrum of society. During the Lebanese civil war, they were sometimes employed by opposing militias and certainly by civilians as well. Joseph Avedissian set up his first studio in the late 1950s in al Tell in Tripoli, North Lebanon. Like most inner cities during the civil war in Lebanon, al Tell was the playground of numerous militias ranging from the different Palestinian factions and the Syrian army extending to the Al Tawheed Islamic group in the 1980s. Zaatari visited Avedissian’s with the photographer Randa Saath in 2002. Thousands of negative sheets covered the floor, from where he picked up this sheet that represents one member of the local militia posing with his machine gun. Because of poor preservation, however, a patch of emulsion coming from another exposed negative was accidentally bound to it depicting a woman. The result is an uneasy co-habitation in the shared frame.
Desire for the archive as an unassailable repository of documents, testimony and truth seems to escalate despite, or perhaps because of, the more imminent reality that there is no singular history on which all peoples can agree. And while the “post-truth” era feels pandemic in North America, in other parts of the world this is an all too familiar paradigm where the manipulation of the past is a customary practice to administer the present, and influence the future. This is especially true of Lebanon, where fifteen years of malignant civil war from 1975-1990 has produced a knotty, contested history riddled with sectarian animosities, institutionalised amnesia, and ubiquitous uncertainty. And yet when nothing is solid, codified or certain, everything becomes possible. Across the Middle East where formal archives remain partial and at risk, an increasing number of artists employ the fragments as fodder for new forms of historical preservation and production. Akram Zaatari (b. 1966 Sidon, Lebanon) is a pioneer within this amorphous terrain, marrying personal experiences of the war, an abiding interest in the vernacular performance of identity via photo and film and a quasi-archaeological treatment of lens-based documents as artefacts. Beyond his individual practice, one of Zaatari’s greatest, most enduring contributions in this field may be the Arab Image Foundation (AIF) – an archival institution he co-founded with photographers Fouad Elkoury and Samer Mahdad in 1997 to self-declaredly “preserve, study and exhibit photographs from the Middle East, North Africa and the Arab diaspora from the 19th century to today.” And while the AIF has successfully amassed over 600,000 images from multiple countries and eras, Zaatari adamantly refutes the onset of institutionalisation – shunning the paralysing conservation practices of museums and libraries to double down on a more radical, generative employment of these materials. In his hands, this archive moves beyond a delicate commodity to circulate as a mutable constellation that partakes in an expanded field of histories with cumulative socio-cultural cargo. As such, the archive can be seen as both Zaatari’s medium and subject, and the AIF as both his fuel and foil – collecting and re-presenting photos as “a form,” in his words, “of creative un-making and re-writing that is no less important than the act of taking images.” Ensuing questions of authorship and appropriation yield to more multi-faceted strategies of displacement, where the re-framing of photos and films as living, changing vessels unfurls invigorating new layers and folds to mine and forage.
He does so, not as an iconoclast seeking to condemn archives as cogs in the machine of hegemony, but rather as a revitalising gesture that replaces rhetorical manipulations with emancipated re-assignment. For Zaatari, this frisson happens most intriguingly in the seemingly ordinary and banal, in the snapshots and mistakes archives historically diminish, where he argues, “It is a misconception that photographs testify to the course of history. It is history that inhabits photographs.” As such, Zaatari regularly subverts the canonical treatment of photos as evidentiary relics hidden away in cold storage to slow their inherent / inevitable chemical entropy. He instead treats images as susceptible material objects, and one could argue, as surrogates for the subjects and structures they depict. Much like the wrinkles, scars and repressions that the human body + mind collects, Zaatari reads the folds endemic to photography as a palimpsest of information and suggestion. Whether it be a purposeful edit or crop, an aesthetic gesture to redirect our viewing, or the natural degradation of materials over time, he argues that “The fold in a photograph is a detail through which a narrative different from that narrated by the photograph unfolds.” As fertile superstructures that expand the interpretive constitution of said photos, such folds are less obfuscations than nascent fonts for alternative narratives to percolate. “In these folds lies a history…” according to Zaatari, “many histories.” In this inclusive arena, the micro and macro flow into one another as citizen and state intermingle, and one discovers pockets of collective history in the pictures we have of ourselves and one another. These photos and their attendant folds do not float unattached in clouds, but instead coalesce as archives of their making, and lenses to look backward and forward.
In his position that “the traces that transactions leave on a photographic object become part of it,” Zaatari argues that the physical manufacture and decay of a photograph (or film) is as much a contribution to history as that which it depicts. He calls the ensuing composites “informed objects,” which, while partial or possibly broken, highlight the greater whole “like an exploded view of a machine,” or “a model of the human body used in anatomy class.” As a holistic specimen without fixed parameters, “An informed object,” Zaatari elaborates, “is an object that is conscious of the material and processes that produced it, conscious of its provenance, its morphology and displacement over time, conscious of its history in the sense that it is able to communicate it. An informed object is already materialised, activated.” His self-declared “displacement” of these objects is thusly not about post-colonial uprooting, but rather a deeper, wider recognition of the apparatus that informs the production, circulation and reception of such images in, and beyond their respective context/s. In this expanded field, negatives, contact sheets, glass plates, double exposures, mistakes, erosion and all that is habitually left on the cutting room floor are re-valued as revelatory anomalies with “something to say.” Zaatari’s poignant 2017 series A Photographer’s Shadow is a case in point, presenting a number of historical photos where the cameraman’s shadow has infiltrated the composition, which was historically reason to throw the picture away. In Zaatari’s revised appraisal, however, such discards are instead accentuated as elucidating nexus points where author and subject meet within the frame. A diptych of found photos Zaatari premieres in the CAC exhibition thickens this premise even further, displaying a malfunction in the camera of Hashem el Madani (1928-2017) that led to an in-frame doubling of men (presumably father and son) standing upon the rocks of a swelling shoreline. Evoking past hallmarks of romantic painting, a multiplicity gathers with equal muster across this pairing as the images coagulate with the residue and implication of generational, production and art historical lineage. The cresting physicality of this informed object is pushed even further in the 2017 work Against Photography, which removes the image from the equation to instead detail the natural patterns of environmental decay upon a series of 12 photo plates. By extracting the traditional focal point of the photographic process, Zaatari instead surveys iterations of deterioration that take on an uncanny beauty in multiple media – turning the archival chimera of folds and fracture into a verdant topography of patterns, avenues, and stories untold.
The continued consideration of the photograph as a physical entity with corresponding history, memory and lifespan connects to Zaatari’s ongoing exploration of the human body as it is performed for, and by the camera. As an index of experience and identity, the body and its photographic proxy find a surrogate-like relationship in the images he provocatively re-frames – where intimate narratives are gleaned from voluminous collections and otherwise numbing aggregates. And while we are only sometimes privy to the background and/or the names of those photographed, Zaatari is a long-standing student of the ways in which gender, sexuality and taboo are concurrently codified and obscured by indigenous photographic practices. By re-contextualising private photos in a public arena, Zaatari “frequently composes works,” according to Professor Mark Westmoreland, “that force the photographic medium to comment upon social aesthetics that it has been deployed to produce at different historical moments.” A compelling example is found in Zaatari’s 2011 re-presentation of Madani’s timeworn photographs of male bodybuilders performing feats of both physical strength and acrobatic agility in a showcase of masculine prowess. Inferences to homo-eroticism within this display were comparatively forbidden; and, while we must resist the temptation to define historical images through the lens of today, the entropic folds highlighted in Zaatari’s framing of these photos (particularly as diminutive contact sheets) suggests modern cracks in the visual codification of patriarchal rule, male normativity, and the stigma of homosexuality. Like the photographer’s shadow that interrupts the self-contained world of his subjects in Zaatari’s aforementioned work, the humbling eclipse that befalls many an ideology and monument creep over a pantheon of bravado here. The violent exercise of patriarchal custody is on frightening display in Zaatari’s 2012 diptych Damaged Negatives: Scratched Portraits of Mrs. Baqari and her friend, where otherwise benign photographs of two young women are marred by a flurry of black scratches. These disturbing scars are the product of a controlling husband who demanded Madani lacerate the negatives of a portrait session initiated by his wife before they were married. Years later, after Mrs. Baqari burned herself to death to escape his control, the widowed husband came back to Madani’s studio asking for enlargements of these photos. Their display decades later under the auspices of this exhibition demonstrates the extraordinary valence of the fold, which in this case manifests a tragic relationship, evokes the history of effigies and iconoclasm, embodies the systematic societal violence against women, and opens up a plethora of readings that could not exist without slashes that span both object and subject.
The social life of the informed objects that Zaatari presents thereby opens a larger sociological discourse which, in the case of Lebanon, speaks to the ways love and sexuality have been regulated – and liberated – via photography and film. He traces the visual trajectory of this contested history largely by way of Madani’s studio photography, which pictured thousands of people over the course of almost half a century in Zaatari’s hometown of Saida. The ensuing photos demonstrate a complex spectrum of desire as people moved across both sides of the state-sanctioned line, performing the love they coveted and that which they concealed. As a site of concurrent fantasy and societal uniformity, what genders, professions, events and relationships were prescribed to “look like” created an orthodoxy of both restrictions and their corresponding transgressions. In The End of Love (2013), Zaatari presents over 100 photos of wedding portraits taken in Madani’s studio that collectively illustrate the codes surrounding this classic trope. Kissing was forbidden for such a photo which, in Lebanon, was taken a week after the ceremony with the bride wearing her wedding dress, supplemented by a bouquet of plastic flowers and white gloves provided by the photographer. And while the ensuing images are stiff, sober and highly formulaic, this End of Love is not a cynical farewell to the romantic aura of marriage, but rather a site where ideals collect in the margins, in aspirations that exceed both the subject and frame. Much like Arthur Danto’s post-historical 1984 essay “The End of Art,” Zaatari’s collection implies the exhaustion of a particular lineage of love and the opening of a chaotic, open-ended eddy where de-regulated desire could be performed. Madani’s studio was the site and catalyst for many of these performances; but, in this exhibition Zaatari pairs The End of Love with the aspiration of his 2010 video Tomorrow Everything will be Alright, in which a proposed reunion of estranged lovers is told in the form of typewritten dialogue. The voices here remain anonymous throughout, much like the many couples in The End of Love, and we gradually learn that these contemporary, same-sex lovers speak in prose drawn from popular cinematic clichés. Their conflicted flirtation culminates in the familiar romantic trope of a sunset at seashore, and more specifically that portrayed in the 1986 film Le Rayon Vert in which a disillusioned woman’s faith in love is restored after she sees a green flash at twilight. And yet, despite the overt homage, the time stamp in the bottom corner of Zaatari’s version implies this is his personal footage. And, that amidst many formulae, clichés and the already said, in the seams between The End of Love and Tomorrow Everything will be Alright, something unique and human can be spoken.
In contrast to the charge that photos are moments plucked out of time – slowly staving off death in the airless preservation of archives – Zaatari re-situates photos entrusted to the AIF in a multiplied field that spans origins and invention. Rather than entrenching images with fixed historical assignments, he performs subtle interventions to uncover and suggest alternate readings that inject life into said objects. As a stirring case in point, Un-Dividing History (2017) merges historical images by Khalil Raad (1854-1957), a Palestinian from Jerusalem, and Yacov Ben Dov (1882-1968), a Zionist-Ukrainian filmmaker and photographer, who dually inhabited Jerusalem from 1907-1948 but “belonged,” in Zaatari’s words, “to completely different universes.” Glass photo plates from each of these men had been acquired into a private collection years later and stored against each other for over a half-century in the same position, slowly and mutually “contaminating” one another with the opposing image. Zaatari’s cyanotypes reveal these beautifully compromised hybrids, depicting “traces of one world inscribed into another,” and symbolically de-partitioning the tragic schisms / folds that have long scarred this population and place. This grid of 8 images is not one of easy, idealistic harmony, but rather a complex, messy, fundamentally human portrait of the way lives intersect and overlap, if only they are allowed. A related moment of extraordinary, stirring empathy is found in the 2013 project Letter to a Refusing Pilot, in which Zaatari realises the rumour of Hagai Tamir, an Israeli fighter pilot, who in 1982, during his country’s invasion of Lebanon, disobeyed the order to drop a bomb on what he knew to be a schoolhouse. The legend, and Zaatari’s ensuing interview with Tamir have taken multiple forms in the translation to art, most notably paper planes that have appeared in both video and physical form, floating across terrain that spans real and virtual, truth and myth. What in theory started as a description, or a document, or a letter, has thereby taken flight via multiple folds – transforming this story into a mutable vessel that lands often, but temporarily – its ultimate destination indeterminate. In this lightness of being and itinerant course, the paper plane embodies Zaatari’s affinity for ephemeral records rather than the weighted gravity of archives. These are images, objects, videos, memories and outtakes that bear creases, evince life, and find renewal in each and every reappraisal.
Akram Zaatari (Lebanese, b. 1966) Tomorrow everything will be alright
2010
Akram Zaatari was born in 1966, in Sidon, Lebanon and currently lives in Beirut. Zaatari works in photography, video, and performance to explore issues pertinent to the Lebanese postwar condition, specifically the mediation of territorial conflicts and wars though television and media. Zaatari collects and examines a wide range of documents that testify to the cultural and political conditions of Lebanon’s postwar society. His artistic practice involves the study and investigation of the way these documents straddle, conflate, or confuse notions of history and memory. By analysing and recontextualising found audiotapes, video footage, photographs, journals, personal collections, interviews, and recollections, Zaatari explores the dynamics that govern the state of image-making in situations of war. The strength of Zaatari’s work lies in its ability to capture fractured moments in time, even if these sometimes confuse because of their disconnect from the audience and lack of context. Regardless, the stories hold their own as fascinating narratives, managing to reflect on such universal themes as love and lust, and sweet reminiscence, even amidst turbulent political realities. The indie film was nominated for the teddy award for best short film in 2011.
Akram Zaatari (Lebanese, b. 1966) Letter to a Refusing Pilot 1
2013
Akram Zaatari (Lebanese, b. 1966) Letter to a Refusing Pilot 2
2013
Akram Zaatari (Lebanese, b. 1966) Letter to a Refusing Pilot 3
2013
Akram Zaatari (Lebanese, b. 1966) Letter to a Refusing Pilot4
2013
Akram Zaatari (Lebanese, b. 1966) Letter to a Refusing Pilot 5
2013
In the summer of 1982, a rumour made the rounds of a small city in South Lebanon, which was under Israeli occupation at the time. It was said that a fighter pilot in the Israeli air force had been ordered to bomb a target on the outskirts of Saida, but knowing the building was a school, he refused to destroy it. Instead of carrying out his commanders’ orders, the pilot veered off course and dropped his bombs in the sea. It was said that he knew the school because he had been a student there, because his family had lived in the city for generations, because he was born into Saida’s Jewish community before it disappeared. As a boy, Akram Zaatari grew up hearing ever more elaborate versions of this story, as his father had been the director of the school for twenty years. Decades later, Zaatari discovered it wasn’t a rumour. The pilot was real. Pulling together all of the different strands of Zaatari’s practice for the first time in a single work, Letter to a Refusing Pilot reflects on the complexities, ambiguities, and consequences of refusal as a decisive and generative act. Taking as its title a nod to Albert Camus’ four-part epistolary essay “Letters to a German Friend,” the work not only extends Zaatari’s interest in excavated narratives and the circulation of images in times of war, it also raises crucial questions about national representation and perpetual crisis by reviving Camus’s plea: “I should like to be able to love my country and still love justice.”
In an October 2012 interview with anthropologist Mark Westmoreland, Zaatari further probed whether emotions can be preserved with pictures. The difficulty in resolving the matter perhaps motivated the artist’s move into increasingly abstract terrain. The exhibition’s titular work confirms Zaatari’s current reticent position. Against Photography (2017) – 12 aluminium engravings produced from weathered negatives scanned and then put through a 3D scanner that records only surface texture – withdraws from the image entirely, leaving behind only the shine of relief.
Close, Rebecca. “Akram Zaatari” in ArtAsiaPacific, No. 104, Jul/Aug 2017, p. 108. ISSN: 1039-3625. Cited 07 Dec 18. No longer available online
These cyanotypes merge two bodies of work from a collection which is no longer in the Arab Image Foundation’s custody, and which consisted of glass plates of Khalil Raad, a photographer from Jerusalem, and those of Yacov Ben Dov, a Zionist filmmaker and photographer of Ukrainian descent. Raad and Ben Dov shared the same city, Jerusalem, but belonged to completely different universes. Zaatari conceived this series as a statement against partitioning history. As the glass plates were stored against each other for over 50 years in the same position, each plate was contaminated by the plate it was leaning against. The cyanotypes depict traces of a world impressed onto another and speak of the ineluctable shared history of Palestine and Israel, safeguarded by a passionate collector.
Anonymous text from the Sfeir-Semler Gallery website 2018 [Online] Cited 01/01/2019
Akram Zaatari (Lebanese, b. 1966) Un-Dividing History (details)
2017
History retraces Zaatari’s pursuit of damaged, erased, withdrawn or scrapped off photographic descriptions from the nineties until the present day. The earliest is a self-portrait he made in 1993, and the most recent are part of Photographic Phenomena, 2018 series.
Contemporary Arts Center
Lois & Richard Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art
44 E. 6th Street, Cincinnati, OH 45202 Phone: 513 345 8400
Opening hours:
10am – 4pm
Monday and Tuesday: Closed (shop open 10am – 2.30pm)
Wednesday – Friday: 10am – 7pm
Saturday and Sunday: 10am – 4pm
Unknown American photographers and Daisy Studio (American, active 1940s) Studio Portraits
1940s-1950s
Gelatin silver prints
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Twentieth-Century Photography Fund, 2015, 2017
First of a two-part posting on these mostly 1940s living expressions of past but present people and the African American experience.
In one photograph, I just love the hearts on the pockets of the jeans of one of the young men. Wonderful style and a touching intimacy are evident in many of the images.
“The poignancy of these small photographs lies in the essential respect the camera offers its subjects, who sit for their portraits as an act of self-expression.”
Many thankx to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
This exhibition will present more than one hundred and fifty studio portraits of African Americans from the mid-twentieth century, part of an important recent acquisition by The Met. Produced by mostly unidentified makers, the photographs are a poignant, collective self portrait of the African American experience during the 1940s and 1950s – a time of war, middle-class growth, and seismic cultural change.
Unknown American photographer Studio Portrait
1940s-1950s
Gelatin silver print with hand colouring
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Twentieth-Century Photography Fund, 2015, 2017
Image courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art
“To the eye and spirit, pictures are just what poetry and music are to the ear and heart.”
“With the clear perception of things as they are, must stand the faithful rendering of things as they seem. The dead fact is nothing without the living expression.”
Frederick Douglass. “Pictures and Progress”
“True art, when it happens to us, challenges the ‘I’ that we are.”
Jeanette Winterson. “Art Objects,” in Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery, 1996
Unknown American maker Studio Portrait
1940s-1950s
Gelatin silver print
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Twentieth-Century Photography Fund, 2015, 2017
Image courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Unknown American photographer Studio Portrait
1940s-1950s
Gelatin silver print
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Twentieth-Century Photography Fund, 2015, 2017
Image courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Unknown American photographer Studio Portrait
1940s-1950s
Gelatin silver print with hand colouring
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Twentieth-Century Photography Fund, 2015, 2017
Image courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Unknown American photographer Studio Portrait
1940s-1950s
Gelatin silver print with hand colouring
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Twentieth-Century Photography Fund, 2015, 2017
Image courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Unknown American photographer Studio Portrait
1940s-1950s
Gelatin silver print
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Twentieth-Century Photography Fund, 2015, 2017
Image courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Unknown American photographer Studio Portrait
1940s-1950s
Gelatin silver print
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Twentieth-Century Photography Fund, 2015, 2017
Image courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Unknown American photographer Studio Portrait
1940s-1950s
Gelatin silver print
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Twentieth-Century Photography Fund, 2015, 2017
Image courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Unknown American photographer Studio Portrait
1940s-1950s
Gelatin silver print
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Twentieth-Century Photography Fund, 2015, 2017
Image courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Unknown American photographer Studio Portrait
1940s-1950s
Gelatin silver print
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Twentieth-Century Photography Fund, 2015, 2017
Image courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Unknown American photographer Studio Portrait
1940s-1950s
Gelatin silver print
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Twentieth-Century Photography Fund, 2015, 2017
Image courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Unknown American photographer Studio Portrait
1940s-1950s
Gelatin silver print
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Twentieth-Century Photography Fund, 2015, 2017
Image courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art
African American Portraits: Photographs from the 1940s and 1950s, on view June 26 through October 8, 2018,will present more than 150 studio portraits from the mid-20th century. The exhibition offers a seldom seen view of the African American experience in the United States during World War II and the following decade – a time of war, middle-class growth, and seismic cultural change. Part of an important acquisition made by The Met in 2015 and 2017, these photographs build on and expand the Museum’s strong holdings in portraiture from the beginning of photography in the 1840s to the present. The exhibition is made possible by the Alfred Stieglitz Society.
The portraits on view generally feature sitters in a frontal pose against a painted backdrop – soldiers and sailors model their uniforms, graduates wear their caps and gowns, lovers embrace, and new parents cradle their infants. Both photographers and subjects remain mostly unidentified.
In the wartime economy, photographic studios became hubs of activity for local and regional communities. Some studios were small and transient, others more established and identifiable, such as the Daisy Studio in Memphis, Tennessee. Using waterproof direct positive paper rather than film, the studios were able to offer their clientele high quality, inexpensive portraits in a matter of minutes. The poignancy of these small photographs lies in the essential respect the camera offers its subjects, who sit for their portraits as an act of self-expression.
African American Portraits: Photographs from the 1940s and 1950s is organised by Jeff L. Rosenheim, Joyce Frank Menschel Curator in Charge of the Department of Photographs at The Met.
Press release from the Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Billboard December 4 , 1948 p. 72
Popular Photography May 1948 p. 99
Direct positive paper is primarily suited for use in pinhole cameras where exposure and processing in conventional black and white photo chemistry achieves a unique positive print – without the need for a film negative or inter-negative. The paper can also be successfully used in other applications such as direct exposure in large format cameras or by cutting small sheets for exposure in LOMO type cameras.
Unknown American photographer Studio Portrait
1940s-1950s
Gelatin silver print
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Twentieth-Century Photography Fund, 2015, 2017
Image courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Unknown American photographer Studio Portrait
1940s-1950s
Gelatin silver print
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Twentieth-Century Photography Fund, 2015, 2017
Image courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Unknown American photographer Studio Portrait
1940s-1950s
Gelatin silver print with hand colouring
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Twentieth-Century Photography Fund, 2015, 2017
Image courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Unknown American photographer Studio Portrait
1940s-1950s
Gelatin silver print
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Twentieth-Century Photography Fund, 2015, 2017
Image courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Unknown American photographer Studio Portrait
1940s-1950s
Gelatin silver print
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Twentieth-Century Photography Fund, 2015, 2017
Image courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Unknown American photographer Studio Portrait
1940s-1950s
Gelatin silver print
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Twentieth-Century Photography Fund, 2015, 2017
Image courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Unknown American photographer Studio Portrait
1940s-1950s
Gelatin silver print
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Twentieth-Century Photography Fund, 2015, 2017
Image courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Unknown American photographer Studio Portrait
1940s-1950s
Gelatin silver print
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Twentieth-Century Photography Fund, 2015, 2017
Image courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Unknown American photographer Studio Portrait
1940s-1950s
Gelatin silver print
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Twentieth-Century Photography Fund, 2015, 2017
Image courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Unknown American photographer Studio Portrait
1940s-1950s
Gelatin silver print
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Twentieth-Century Photography Fund, 2015, 2017
Image courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
1000 Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street
New York, New York 10028-0198 Phone: 212-535-7710
Opening hours:
Sunday – Tuesday and Thursday: 10am – 5pm
Friday and Saturday: 10am – 9pm
Closed Wednesday
Poul C Poulsen (Australian born Denmark, 1857-1925) Bushman with a swag
c. 1885
Cabinet photograph
This exhibition looks fascinating. I wish I could have seen it!
Information about some photographers is included in the posting, as much as I could find through research online. Also included is a beautiful photograph of the Cloudland Ballroom (not in the exhibition) which I digitally restored.
I tried to work out the height of the young man in Bushman with a swag (c. 1885, above). If you take the billy can at his feet (bottom left) at about 24cm, measured by my ankles, then his height is around 180cm or 5’9″. What was his name, what did he do in his life?
Also notice the covers on his shoes that hide the laces, and the idyllic, painted pastoral backdrop with bridge. These are the details that fascinate. The studio prop of a rock outcrop against which he stands also appears in another image by the same photographer, Queensland policeman (c. 1885, below). How many days or months were these photographs taken apart? Did they know each other, being of similar age?
The presence of the people in these photographs is incredible. Even though they are posed, they stare back at us from across time and reach out to us to speak of their lives in that moment, in that studio in Brisbane, Australia.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Museum of Brisbane for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Poul C Poulsen (Australian born Denmark, 1857-1925) Bushman with a swag (detail)
c. 1885
Cabinet photograph
The Poulsen Studio was a very important establishment recording Queensland’s development for a considerable period of time.
Poul C. Poulsen, founder of the Poulsen Studios in Brisbane, was born in Denmark in 1857 and arrived in Sydney in 1876. In 1882, he moved to Queensland and was later joined by his sisters and brothers from Denmark. He opened his own studio at no 7 Queen Street in 1885 and later opened branches, run by his brothers in other Queensland towns. Poulsen vigorously advertised constant improvements and modernisation in his studio and in the service he provided. His sons and grandson followed in his footsteps.
Text from the State Library of Queensland website
Installation views of the exhibition Sit. Pose. Snap. Brisbane Portrait Photography 1850-1950 at the Museum of Brisbane
Sit. Pose. Snap. Brisbane Portrait Photography 1850-1950 explores the phenomenon of studio portrait photography in Brisbane, and shows how the process of capturing and sharing a portrait evolved from the formal studio sittings of the 19th century through to candid and relaxed photographs of the mid-20th century.
With the introduction of commercial photography in the mid 1850s, dozens of photographic studios popped up in and around Brisbane capitalising on this popular new technology. Interest in this novel sensation was high, and profitable – with photographers increasingly savvy when it came to selling their service and products.
Featuring hundreds of Brisbane residents captured in original photographs from local studios between 1850-1950, this exhibition draws from the extensive private collection of Marcel Safier – one of Australia’s most significant collectors of portrait photography. Discover the variety, trends and historical progression of photographic types through this period, from the early forms of daguerreotypes through to carte-de-visites and postcards. Woven into the exhibition is an examination of photographic techniques and technologies; the popularisation of photography; and the ever-increasing control that subjects have over their portrayal.
Significant Brisbane photographic houses of the period and their legacies are also featured. Visitors will have the chance to experience what it felt like to visit Mathewson & Co., one of the leading studios of the time, through an immersive Victorian backdrop and a journalist’s account from 1889. They will also have a chance to take a selfie in this recreated 19th century studio space.
From personal portraits capturing life’s most significant milestones, to the curious and often humorous ways in which people presented themselves, Sit. Pose. Snap. is a charming and nostalgic glimpse into a 19th century photographic studio.
Press release from the Museum of Brisbane
Daniel Marquis (Australian born Scotland, 1829-1879) The same woman in a crinoline dress posing with a chair, then a pedestal
1865-1870
Carte de visite
Daniel Marquis (Australian born Scotland, 1829-1879) The same woman in a crinoline dress posing with a chair, then a pedestal
1865-1870
Carte de visite
Daniel Marquis (1829-1879) was an early portrait photographer in Brisbane, Australia. Marquis was born in Glasgow, Scotland, where he had a studio as a professional photographer at 32 King Street, Stirling. Marquis travelled to Australia in 1865 and was given a land grant at Kangaroo Point, Queensland. He set up his photographic studio in 82 George Street, Brisbane, from 1866 to 1880.
Marquis was one of the earliest portrait photographers in Brisbane, working there exclusively until his death in 1879. Marquis had commissions to photograph leading members of society, for example the Governor of Queensland, Samuel Wensley Blackall, and Judge Alfred Lutwyche.
Alan Davies and Peter Stanbury. The mechanical eye in Australia: photography 1841-1900.
“Oscar [Friström] was soon involved in the business of photography, a popular artistic and cultural pursuit of the time; and it was also a ready source of income. By 1885 he had gone into partnership with the established photographer D Hutchison, and later Edward TB Hutchison. The business operated under various names, including Hutchison, Fristrom and Company and Elite Photographic Company.”
Julie K Brown, Versions of reality, PhD thesis, University of Queensland, 1984, pp. 37, 274 cited in W Ross Johnston. “Reviving Oscar Friström: his Aboriginal paintings,” in the Queensland History Journal Volume 22, No. 4, February 2014, p. 272.
Elite Photo Co’s dates and locations from Alan Davies’ and Peter Stanbury’s book The mechanical eye in Australia: photography 1841-1900:
1894-1895: Charters Towers
Brisbane
(Eddie T B Hutchison)
Brisbane
(John S Wiley)
Brisbane
(S E Hill)
Brisbane
(J Brame & Co)
Poul C Poulsen (Australian born Denmark, 1857-1925) Queensland policeman
c. 1885
Carte de visite
In 1885, Poul C. Poulsen opened his photographic studio at No.7 Queen Street in Brisbane and over time established himself as an important and longstanding early Queensland photographer. State Library of Queensland is fortunate to hold a large collection of photographs taken by the Poulsen Studios.
Polsen was born in Denmark in 1857 and travelled to Sydney in 1876. In 1882 he travelled to Brisbane and in 1885 opened the studio in Queen Street, previously occupied by Gove and Allen, photographers. Via advertisements in local newspapers that year Poulsen proclaimed himself “the people’s favourite photographer” and offered “high class work at moderate charges.” Poulsen’s success enabled him to expanded his business, opening studios in regional centres including Gympie, Maryborough and Laidley as well as additional studios in Brisbane. Poulsen retired to Cooran in 1915, passing away in 1925. He is interred at Bulimba Cemetery. His sons and grandsons continued the family business after his death.
Hundreds of images taken by Poulsen Studios have been digitised and can be viewed online. These photographs range from individual or group portraits to external street views. The quality of these images are superb, most likely due to Poulsen’s desire to use the latest photographic equipment available at the time.
Poul C Poulsen (Australian born Denmark, 1857-1925) Unknown couple
c. 1897
Cabinet photograph
Marcel Safier collection
Directly opposite Fegan Studios on Queen Street was the studio of Ada Driver. Driver was one of the successful female photographers in Brisbane in the early 20th century, along with Elsie and Trissie Deazeley, Mary Lambert and Dorothy Coleman.
Before starting her own studio, Coleman had gained experience as a camera operator with Thomas Mathewson. Mathewson, along with Poul C Poulsen, set the standard of quality for portrait photography in Brisbane; between them they trained and inspired future generations of photographers.
Poulsen moved to Brisbane in 1882 and opened a branch of Gove and Allen opposite the Treasury Building on Queen Street.
This studio was later known as the American Photo Co, and then Poulsen Studios (below), and remained at this location until 1918. The studio was considered the major ‘society’ studio in Brisbane; Poulsen established a reputation for taking fine portraits of stars of the stage, including Dame Nellie Melba in 1903, and he secured the patronage of several Queensland governors.
Phil Manning. “Northern Exposure,” in Portrait 57 Winter 2017 on the National Portrait Gallery website 25 July 2017 [Online] Cited 13/12/2021
Poulsen Studio Child with bucket and spade
1920s
Postcard
Albert Lomer & Co., (Albert Lomer Australian, 1862-1899, active c. 1865 – c. 1895) Three children
c. 1885
Cabinet photograph
Professional photographer and colourist of Brisbane, Sydney and Queensland who worked throughout the mid to late 19th century. A one-time partner of Andrew Chandler, Lomer’s later clients included the painter Samuel Elyard.
Lomer worked in Melbourne before 1865 when he opened a studio at Sydney in partnership with Andrew Chandler. They advertised as being from W. Davies & Co. of Melbourne, where both had presumably trained. Their studio, The London Photographic Company, was at 419 George Street, next door to Lassetter’s ironmongery store. By February 1867 Lomer was continuing alone but promising that ‘the business will be conducted in the same efficient manner and under the same liberal principles as hitherto’. He had reduced the old price for cartes-de-visite to two for 5s or 15s a dozen and sold cabinet and other portrait photographs ‘beautifully coloured (on the premises) in oil or water’. Lomer appears to have been his own colourist, regularly advertising as both ‘artist and photographer’ (which this normally signified). In 1872-73 Lomer was working at 57 Bourke Street, Melbourne. He then established a very successful Brisbane studio at 158 Queen Street which lasted from 1874 until 1905, although he apparently no longer ran it after 1880. Branch studios were opened in various parts of the colony: the Lomer studio at Mackay in 1887 (managed by J.P. Kemp), a studio at Toowoomba (1893-96) and one at Ipswich (1898-99). Lomer was again in Sydney in 1880-95. In April 1881 Albert Lomer’s Parlour Studios at 805 George Street opposite the railway terminus,’The Really Popular (and Cheap) Photographer’, was selling cartes-de-visite for 7s 6d a dozen.
1862: Brisbane 1865-1870: 417-419 George Street, Sydney 18??: 775 George Street, Sydney 1872-1873: 57 Bourke Street East, Melbourne 1874-1900: 158 Queen Street, Brisbane 1887: Mackay, Queensland ( J P Kemp) 1893-1896: Toowoomba, Queensland 1894-1895: 158 Queen Street, Brisbane (G A Collins & F T E Keogh) 1896-1897: 158 Queen Street, Brisbane (G A Collins) 1898-1899: Brisbane Street, Ipswich, Queensland
Alan Davies and Peter Stanbury. The mechanical eye in Australia: photography 1841-1900.
Tuttle & Co., Lady in a heavily beaded bodice and skirt
1885-1894
Cabinet photograph
William Nutting Tuttle
died 7 April 1895 at Sydney Hospital, Macquarie Street, Sydney
buried Waverley Cemetery, Sydney
William Nutting Tuttle and Co. was a commercial photographic firm active in Australia in the 1880s and 1890s. The firm had various studios and were active in a variety of areas: Sydney 1883-91; Goulburn 1895; Brisbane 1885-95; Charters Towers 1888; Adelaide 1882-89; Melbourne 1881-94; Hawthorn 1888-89; Perth 1892, Fremantle 1892; Coolgardie 1895-96 (Davies and Stanbury 1985, p. 244).
“The enterprising gentlemen comprising the firm of Tuttle & Co. took the people of Melbourne by surprise some five years ago [1880]. Since then they have established studios and galleries in the principal cities of Australia. By careful attention to, and despatch of business, the elegance and attractiveness of their rooms, and the splendid finish of their work, they have earned a wide-spread reputation on the island continent, and lead the van there in the photographic art.”
Alan Davies and Peter Stanbury. The mechanical eye in Australia: photography 1841-1900, p. 244.
Tosca Studio Couple with child
1896-1900
Cabinet photograph
The management of the “Tosca” studios in Brisbane make it their proud boast that they are thoroughly up to date in every detail, and in this they challenge comparison with any photographic establishment in the Australian colonies. Their head studios, at 67 Queen-street, Brisbane, are known to all local residents, and since the commencement of their business a reputation has been established for high class work not only in the city of Brisbane, but throughout Queensland. Mr. W. T. Farrell, in whose hands is the sole control of the business, is a man of the widest range of experience in his particular line. He has gained his knowledge in the leading studios of Australasia. The high character of the work produced is vouched for by the fact that the chief operator, Mr. Stuart MacQee, was for many years under engagement to Messrs. W. and D. Downoy, Imperial Court photographers, of Ebury street, London, and was also five years with Messrs. Falle and Co., of Sydney. Branches of the “Tosca” studios have already been established at Gympie, Rockhampton, Charters Towers, and Townsville. It is also contemplated to establish branches in other country towns in the near future. As indicating the amount of business transacted, it may be mentioned that during the present year no fewer than 200,000 cabinet mounts have been imported by the firm. This is exclusive of mounts required for Paris panels, for which there is a very large demand. In the head studio alone, as much as £88 has been taken in one day from sitters.
Anonymous text. “The Tosca Portrait Studios,” in The Brisbane Courier Sat 11 Dec 1897, p. 6 on the Trove website [Online] Cited 13/12/2021
Dana Studio Lady wearing gloves with parasol
1897-1898
Cabinet photograph
James Patching & Co., Young lady in feathered hat leaning on bamboo furniture
1897-1901
Cabinet photograph
John Wiley (active 1880s – 1890s) Seated lady holding flowers
1899-1901
Cabinet photograph
John S Wiley’s dates and locations from Alan Davies’ and Peter Stanbury’s book The mechanical eye in Australia: photography 1841-1900:
Thomas Mathewson & Co., (active c. 1854 – c. 1934) Two Salvation Army girls
1910-1915
Postcard
Thomas Mathewson (born Helensburgh, Dumbartonshire, Scotland, UK, 1842 – died Brisbane 12 May 1934; arrived Australia 1853) was a professional photographer, was born in Helensburgh, Dumbartonshire, Scotland. He was orphaned in early adolescence, shortly after his family migrated to Moreton Bay, Queensland, in 1853. For a few months in 1854 he attended the Anglican Church School in Nicholas Street, Ipswich run by Alfred Hazelton, then learnt photography from Rev. Theophilus Beazeley in evening self-improvement classes at Ipswich. After practising as an amateur Mathewson set up as a professional photographer at Toowoomba in 1861. In 1865 he worked his way through the Darling Downs, via Roma, St George and the Gwydir River, reaching Sydney by late 1867. Travelling northwards, he took photographs at Gympie (1868-72), Rockhampton, Bowen, Charters Towers and Townsville.
Thomas’s brother Peter joined him in 1876 and the firm became Mathewson & Co. until the 1890s, operating mainly from Queen Street, Brisbane, but making regular tours to country towns and rural districts. Thomas, the senior partner, was said in 1894 to have made a speciality ‘of children and other pets’. Peter set up on his own in the late 1890s and his son Thomas eventually took over the firm, so the name Thomas Mathewson was associated with two separate Brisbane photographic studios. Thomas senior eventually renamed his business the Regent Studios, where he was assisted by his son Jack. Thomas junior called his father’s business the Austral Studio when he inherited it.
Thomas Mathewson senior died in Brisbane on 12 May 1934, aged ninety-three. Recognised as the ‘Grand Old Man’ of Queensland photography, he was said in 1894 to have left the ‘tracks of his tripod’ in every inhabited place from the Great Barrier Reef to the South Australian border. Before his death he wrote his recollections, depicting the excitement, initiative and hardships of an early cameraman as he trekked through the countryside ‘fully equipped with tents, one in which to photograph sitters, and another in which to live, together with all the needful paraphernalia of wet-plate photography, all packed in a two-wheeled vehicle drawn by two horses’.
Rod Fisher and Joan Kerr. “Thomas Mathewson,” on the Design & Art Australia Online website 1992 last updated 2011 [Online] Cited 13/12/2021
c. 1854: Ipswich, Qld c. 1853 – c. 1854: Moreton Bay, Qld c. 1867: Sydney, NSW c. 1865 – c. 1867: Gwydir River, NSW c. 1865 – c. 1867: St George, Qld c. 1865 – c. 1867: Roma, NSW c. 1868 – c. 1872: Townsville, Qld c. 1868 – c. 1872: Charters Towers, Qld c. 1868 – c. 1872: Bowen, Qld c. 1868 – c. 1872: Rockhampton, Qld c. 1868 – c. 1872: Gympie, Qld c. 1865 – c. 1867: Darling Downs, NSW c. 1861 – c. 1865: Toowoomba, Qld c. 1876 – c. 1900: Queen Street, Brisbane, Qld
Thomas Mathewson & Co., (active c. 1854 – c. 1934) Thomas Mathewson (inset) and his studio on Queen Street
c. 1908
Sandy Barrie collection
Thomas Mathewson is regarded as the father of photography in Queensland, having begun his business in 1864 (the Mathewson family would go on to have a presence in Brisbane’s photographic community until 1940). It is said that Mathewson left the tracks of his tripod in every inhabited place from the Great Barrier Reef to the South Australian border. He returned to Brisbane in 1876, going into partnership with his brother, Peter, in a studio on Queen Street. In 1895 they ended the partnership and Thomas continued on his own, establishing Regent Studios, while Peter established Austral Studios. Both brothers established branches of their respective operations throughout Queensland.
Phil Manning. “Northern Exposure,” in Portrait 57 Winter 2017 on the National Portrait Gallery website 25 July 2017 [Online] Cited 13/12/2021
Thomas Mathewson & Co., (active c. 1854 – c. 1934) Lady in ‘snow’
c. 1880-1885
Cabinet photograph
Marcel Safier collection
Regent Studios (Thomas Mathewson) Jane and Thomas Mathewson
1920s
Card-mounted sepia-toned silver gelatin photograph
Talma Studios (Ferdinand Sturgess) (Brisbane, 1866-1939) Arthur Kean playing a flute
1915
Postcard
John ‘Jack’ Fegan (Australian, 1839-1919) Lady holding flowers
c. 1915
Postcard
Jack Fegan was born John James William Rolling Fegan in 1839 and died in 1919. He operated photographic studios in Gympie and Brisbane. He was the first president of the Professional Photographers of Queensland.
Fegan & Ruddle
1902-1904: Brunswick St. Fortitude Valley
1918-1920: 126 Queen St. Brisbane Fegan Ltd.
126 Queen St. Bris. 1918 -1920. Fegan Studios
Mrs Fegan (wife of “Jack”, manager after Jack’s death in 1922)
126 Queen st,. Bris.
John ‘Jack’ Fegan (Australian, 1839-1919) Family portrait before the father left for the First World War
1914-1918
Postcard
Fegan & Ruddle (1866-1939, Brisbane) Harry Smith Jr dressed as Duke of York for Children’s Hospital Ball
1902
Cabinet photograph
George Brown Girl with fancy buckled shoes
1912-1928
Postcard
Murray Studios (Brisbane & Gympie) The Noonans
1916-1919
Postcard
George Hendry Norma Horniblow in a bathing costume
c. 1920
Parisian Studio Postcard
Norma Gwendoline Horniblow (1904-1977)
Trissie Deazeley Studio (active c. 1924 – c. 1928) Wedding party
c. 1925
Silver gelatin photograph
Trissie Deazeley (active c. 1924 – c. 1928) was an early 20th century Queensland photographer.
One of the first female photographers in Brisbane was Ada Driver, whose Brisbane studio was right in Queen Street Mall along with other female photographers Trissie Deazeley, Dorothy Coleman and Mary Lambert.
c. 1927 – c. 1928: Brisbane, Qld c. 1924 – c. 1927: Toowoomba, Qld
Trissie Deazeley Studio (active c. 1924 – c. 1928) Wedding party (details)
c. 1925
Silver gelatin photograph
Regent Studios (Fred Cherry) Girl holding a toy koala and boy holding a toy car
1940s
Sepia-toned silver gelatin photograph in presentation folder
Anna Lee Group of friends at Cloudland Ballroom, including Mrs Hobson (front left)
1947-1950
Salon Postcard
Read the fascinating history of Brisbane’s most iconic building, the big arch on the hill that was the Cloudland Ballroom.
“Cloudland Dance Hall” at the time, builders declared, “With its private alcoves, upholstered seating, dressing rooms, and perfect ventilation… the ballroom will be the finest of its kind in Australia.” It was no exaggeration, and Cloudland was without doubt one of the best dance and concert venues in the country. The venue was a classic World War II structure. Inside it had hard timber floors, decorative columns, sweeping curtains, domed skylights and chandeliers. Cloudland also had an upper circle of tiered seating which overlooked the floor and stage.
On a commanding hilltop site in the Bowen Hills above Brisbane, Cloudland’s distinctive parabolic laminated roof arch, nearly 18 meters high, was visible for miles, and was illuminated at night. Inside, as the photo clearly shows, it was famed for elegant decoration and its sprung dance floor, reputed to be the best in Australia. Cloudland was significant as a landmark, and as a place where generations of Brisbane residents went for entertainment. It was illegally demolished in 1982.
Unknown photographer Cloudland Ballroom (digitally restored by MB)
Nd
Paragon Portraits Tim, nearly 4 years-old, and Darryl, 2 years-old, at the Caldwell Christmas party
1949
Hand-coloured postcard
Museum of Brisbane
Level 3, Brisbane City Hall
King George Square, Brisbane
Opening hours:
Open 7 days a week, 10am – 5pm daily, and until 7pm Fridays
Irving Penn. The high priest of high modernist photography.
I know a lot of people adore his photography but I am not an acolyte quietly accepting his elevation to sainthood in the high temple of art museums.
I find Penn’s aesthetic aesthetic, his performing photography if you like, unappealing. To me his work is more about the photographer than it is about the subject. His photographs, in whatever style – portraiture, nude, still life – seem cold and lifeless. Like a dead fish. There is little pleasure to be gained from looking at his photographs or the people in them. I find little celebration of photography in his work, as in, this is what the camera does at its best, a dialogue between photographer and subject.
Penn was a commercial photographer who had aspirations of being an artist. As Mark L. Power observes, “One of the characteristics of the Penn style was the expressive silhouette or outline around the figure, a sculptural delineation of form, at once beautiful and austere, whether his subject was a still life, a fashion model or a portrait.” My god did he love silhouette and shadow, usually played off against a plain backdrop.
There is that key word, play. There is no sense of spontaneity in his photographs, no sense of fun, no sense of an understanding of the aura of the subject.
I think of the portraits of August Sander or Richard Avedon’s series In the American West (the latter using a plain backdrop), both with their depth of vision and feeling for the people they were photographing … and then I look at the Cuzco portraits of Penn. I get nothing back about the lives of these people in Penn’s photographs. I think of the distorted nudes of Bill Brandt with their sensuality and sublime angles … and then I look at the nudes of Penn. They just don’t stack up, they feel clumsy, trite. I look at his colour still life, and I imagine the colour work of Paul Outerbridge, the absolute intensity of feeling that I can recall from Outerbridge’s still life in my mind’s eye. No such feeling exists in Penn’s still life.
If you watch the video of Penn at work in Morocco in 1971 (below), everything is controlled to within an inch of its life. A tilt of the head here, a raise of the chin there. This is a commercial studio photographer at work. As I said earlier, the work is not a celebration of photography but about the control of the photographer through the pose of the subject. Jammed into a wedge of scenery the sitters perform for his camera – Schiaparelli, Capote, Charles James et al – flaccid characters, almost caricatures in their positioning. Other than variants such as the intense eye of Pablo Picasso, or the blindness of Ingmar Bergman, I don’t believe that Penn was ever, will ever be, a great portraitist. He has no feeling for his sitters.
Of course, there is “the relationship of content to form – a relationship that underpins all art” at which Penn excels, but he is no Atget, Evans or Eggleston, where we are constantly surprised at where the photographer places the camera, how they place the frame, how they “form the starting point of the image’s visual structure,” how we wonder at the results, how we day dream the narrative. As Victor Burgin observes, “… what the world ‘is’ depends extensively upon how it is described: in a culture where the expression ‘old bag’ is in circulation to describe an ageing woman that is precisely what she is in perpetual danger of ‘being’.”
In Penn’s work the photograph and its representation is never in any danger of “becoming”, it already is. Penn’s “old bag” never changes. By repeating the same trope over and over – the formalist aesthetic, the silhouette, the plain back drop, the controlled pose – his work never evolves, never moves with an illusive quality to a place that the viewer does not feel they already know. The world of murky imperfection, uncertainty and ephemeral juxtapositions to which our mortal senses have access is replaced by a world of perfection and light in which everything has its predestined place.
Perhaps I just long for the fundamental contradictions of life in art, antinomies, options for now and the future.
Many thankx to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Irving Penn on Location in Morocco, 1971
This 8mm film footage, shot by Lisa Fonssagrives-Penn in 1971, shows Irving Penn at work in his portable studio on location in Morocco. Presented in conjunction with the exhibition “Irving Penn: Centennial,” on view at The Met Fifth Avenue from April 24 through July 30, 2017.
Irving Penn Centennial
A preview of the exhibition Irving Penn Centennial April 24 – July 30, 2017 at The Met, featuring Jeff Rosenheim, Curator in Charge, Photographs, The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Maria Morris Hambourg, Independent Curator and Former Curator in Charge, Photographs, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
“As a way of beginning, one might compare the art of photography to the act of pointing. All of us, even the best-mannered of us, occasionally point, and it must be true that some of us point to more interesting facts, events, circumstances, and configurations than others. It is not difficult to imagine a person – a mute Virgil of the corporeal world – who might elevate the act of pointing to a creative plane, a person who would lead us through the fields and streets and indicate a sequence of phenomena and aspects that would be beautiful, humorous, morally instructive, cleverly ordered, mysterious, or astonishing, once brought to our attention, but that had been unseen before, or seen dumbly, without comprehension. This talented practitioner of the new discipline (the discipline a cross between theater and criticism) would perform with a special grace, sense of timing, narrative sweep, and wit, thus endowing the act not merely with intelligence, but with that quality of formal rigor that identifies a work of art, so that we would be uncertain, when remembering the adventure of the tour, how much of our pleasure and sense of enlargement had come from the things pointed to and how much from a pattern created by the pointer.”
John Szarkowski. “Atget, Pointing”
“The word classic is often used about Penn’s work; it entails a certain gravitas characterised by rigour almost to the point of aloofness, an awareness of beauty throughout many genres, a graphic elegance of line and contour that is uniquely his, and a relationship of his work to artists of the past, usually painters rather than photographers. Although it could be said his photography was an advertisement for a haut monde world, his work was sometimes a subtle and somewhat sly subversion of the values of that lifestyle.”
Mark L. Power. “Irving Penn: Beyond Beauty,” at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington, DC.
The most comprehensive retrospective to date of the work of the great American photographer Irving Penn (1917-2009), this exhibition will mark the centennial of the artist’s birth. Over the course of his nearly 70-year career, Penn mastered a pared-down aesthetic of studio photography that is distinguished for its meticulous attention to composition, nuance, and detail.
The exhibition follows the 2015 announcement of the landmark promised gift from The Irving Penn Foundation to The Met of more than 150 photographs by Penn, representing every period of the artist’s dynamic career with the camera. The gift will form the core of the exhibition, which will feature more than 200 photographs by Penn, including iconic fashion studies of Lisa Fonssagrives-Penn, the artist’s wife; exquisite still lifes; Quechua children in Cuzco, Peru; portraits of urban labourers; female nudes; tribesmen in New Guinea; and colour flower studies. The artist’s beloved portraits of cultural figures from Truman Capote, Picasso, and Colette to Ingmar Bergman and Issey Miyake will also be featured. Rounding out the exhibition will be photographs by Penn that entered The Met collection prior to the promised gift.
In Cuzco, Penn photographed both residents and visitors who came to the city from nearby villages with goods to sell or barter at the Christmastime fiestas. Many arrived at the studio to sit for their annual family portraits. Penn later recalled that they “found me instead of him [the local photographer] waiting for them, and instead of paying me for the pictures it was I who paid them for posing.”
In general, daughters from nice families were not encouraged to be in-house models. “Being a studio model was viewed as preferable,” said Régine Debrise, who posed for the photographers Irving Penn and Henry Clarke before becoming an editor at French Vogue, “because the hours were contained and the conditions were better. Being in-house meant sharing the cabine, often a cramped room, with 10 other girls, and it lacked any kind of privacy.”
Anonymous. “Cabine fever: inside Dior’s fitting room,” on The Telegraph website [Online] Cited 14/07/2017. No longer available online
Lisa Fonssagrives (May 17, 1911 – February 4, 1992), born Lisa Birgitta Bernstone was a Swedish fashion model widely credited as the first supermodel.
Before Fonssagrives came to the United States in 1939, she was already a top model. Her image appeared on the cover of many magazines during the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, including Town & Country, Life, Time, Vogue, and the original Vanity Fair. She was reported as “the highest paid, highest praised, high fashion model in the business”. Fonssagrives once described herself as a “good clothes hanger”.
She worked with fashion photographers including George Hoyningen-Huene, Man Ray, Horst, Erwin Blumenfeld, George Platt Lynes, Richard Avedon, and Edgar de Evia. She married Parisian photographer Fernand Fonssagrives in 1935; they divorced and she later married another photographer, Irving Penn, in 1950. She went on to become a sculptor in the 1960s and was represented by the Marlborough Gallery in Manhattan.
Jeanne LaFaurie was a Paris couturiere working from 1925 until 1958. The house was known for dependable, if not spectacular, clothing and fine draping. Courreges worked there as a draftsman in 1947. Michel Goma became the house designer 1950-1958, when he bought the house and renamed it. It closed in 1963.
pastperfectvintage.com. “La Faurie, Jeanne,” on the Vintage Fashion Guild website Jul 17, 2010 [Online] Cited 21/12/2021
Rochas is a fashion, beauty, and perfume house founded in 1925 by French designer Marcel Rochas (born 1902, died 1955) the first designer of 2/3-length coats and skirts with pockets. “His designs could be seen as the polar opposite of Chanel’s simplicity. Dresses were proper gowns and came with the optimum amount of frills, with lace, wide shoulders and nipped-in waists.”
Annemarie Margot “Sunny” Harnett (1924 – May 1987) was an American model in the 1950s and actress. She can be found in fashion magazines throughout that era – including frequently on the cover of Vogue – and was often a model of choice by photographer Edgar de Evia. Harper’s Bazaar ranks her as one of the 26 greatest models of all time.
When Penn arrived at Picasso’s house in the south of France, the artist pretended not to be home. But after Penn’s assistant climbed over the locked gate, Picasso granted the photographer ten minutes. Covering his sweat-shirt with a Spanish cape, Picasso tried to playfully deflect him. Variants of this image show how Penn patiently worked the pose, allowing the artist his costume play while progressively boring in to isolate the riveting gaze of his left eye.
Naomi Ruth Sims (March 30, 1948 – August 1, 2009) was an American model, businesswoman and author. She was the first African-American model to appear on the cover of Ladies’ Home Journal, and is widely credited as being the first African-American supermodel. …
She became one of the first successful black models while still in her teens, and achieved worldwide recognition from the late 1960s into the early 1970s, appearing on the covers of prestigious fashion and popular magazines. The New York Times wrote that (her) “appearance as the first black model on the cover of Ladies’ Home Journal in November 1968 was a consummate moment of the Black is Beautiful movement”. She also appeared on the cover of the October 17, 1969 issue of Life magazine. This made her the first African-American model on the cover of the magazine. The images from the 1967 New York Times fashion magazine cover and the 1969 Life magazine cover were exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in an exhibition entitled The Model as Muse.
Emanuel (Maffeolit) Ungaro (1933-2019) was a French fashion designer, who founded the fashion house called the House of Emanuel Ungaro in 1965. At the age of 22, he moved to Paris. Three years later he began designing for the House of Cristobal Balenciaga for three years before quitting to work for Courrèges. Four years later, in 1965 with the assistance of Swiss artist Sonja Knapp and Elena Bruna Fassio, Emanuel Ungaro opened his own fashion house in Paris.
Vittoria Marisa Schiaparelli Berenson (born February 15, 1947) is an American actress and model. A fashion model who came to prominence in the 1960s – “I once was one of the highest paid models in the world”, she told The New York Times – Berenson appeared on the cover of the July 1970 issue of Vogue as well as the cover of Time on December 15, 1975. She appeared in numerous fashion layouts in Vogue in the early 1970s and her sister Berry was a photographer for the magazine as well. She was known as “The Queen of the Scene” for her frequent appearances at nightclubs and other social venues in her youth, and Yves Saint Laurent dubbed her “the girl of the Seventies”.
Eventually, she was cast in several prominent film roles, including Gustav von Aschenbach’s wife in Luchino Visconti’s 1971 film Death in Venice, the Jewish department store heiress Natalia Landauer in the 1972 film Cabaret, for which she received acclaim (including two Golden Globe nominations, a BAFTA nomination and an award from the National Board of Review), and the tragic beauty Lady Lyndon in the Stanley Kubrick film Barry Lyndon (1975).
Issey Miyake (born 22 April 1938) is a Japanese fashion designer. He is known for his technology-driven clothing designs, exhibitions and fragrances…
In the late 1980s, he began to experiment with new methods of pleating that would allow both flexibility of movement for the wearer as well as ease of care and production. In which the garments are cut and sewn first, then sandwiched between layers of paper and fed into a heat press, where they are pleated. The fabric’s ‘memory’ holds the pleats and when the garments are liberated from their paper cocoon, they are ready-to wear. He did the costume for Ballett Frankfurt with pleats in a piece named “the Loss of Small Detail” choreographed by William Forsythe and also work on ballet “Garden in the setting”.
Many thankx to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
The most comprehensive retrospective to date of the work of the great American photographer Irving Penn (1917-2009), this exhibition will mark the centennial of the artist’s birth. Over the course of his nearly 70-year career, Penn mastered a pared-down aesthetic of studio photography that is distinguished for its meticulous attention to composition, nuance, and detail.
The exhibition follows the 2015 announcement of the landmark promised gift from The Irving Penn Foundation to The Met of more than 150 photographs by Penn, representing every period of the artist’s dynamic career with the camera. The gift will form the core of the exhibition, which will feature more than 200 photographs by Penn, including iconic fashion studies of Lisa Fonssagrives-Penn, the artist’s wife; exquisite still lifes; Quechua children in Cuzco, Peru; portraits of urban labourers; female nudes; tribesmen in New Guinea; and colour flower studies. The artist’s beloved portraits of cultural figures from Truman Capote, Picasso, and Colette to Ingmar Bergman and Issey Miyake will also be featured. Rounding out the exhibition will be photographs by Penn that entered The Met collection prior to the promised gift.
Charles Wilson Brega James (18 July 1906 – 23 September 1978) was a British-born fashion designer known as “America’s First Couturier”. He is widely considered to have been a master of cutting and is known for his highly structured aesthetic. …
James looked upon his dresses as works of art, as did many of his customers. Year after year, he reworked original designs, ignoring the sacrosanct schedule of seasons. The components of the precisely constructed designs were interchangeable, so that James had a never-ending fund of ideas on which to draw. He is most famous for his sculpted ball gowns made of lavish fabrics and to exacting tailoring standards, but is also remembered for his capes and coats, often trimmed with fur and embroidery, and his spiral zipped dresses. He is also famed for a unique, one of a kind white satin quilted jacket made in 1938 and now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, described as the starting point for “anoraks, space man and even fur jackets”.
Tanaquil Le Clercq (October 2, 1929 – December 31, 2000) was a principal dancer with the New York City Ballet. Her dancing career ended abruptly when she was stricken with polio in Copenhagen during the company’s European tour in 1956. Eventually regaining most of the use of her arms and torso, she remained paralysed from the waist down for the rest of her life. …
When she was fifteen years old, George Balanchine asked her to perform with him in a dance he choreographed for a polio charity benefit. In an eerie portent of things to come, he played a character named Polio, and Le Clercq was his victim who became paralysed and fell to the floor. Then, children tossed dimes at her character, prompting her to get up and dance again.
Corrado Cagli (Ancona, 1910 – Rome, 1976) was an Italian painter of Jewish heritage, who lived in the United States during World War II. …
He enlisted in the U.S. Army and was involved in the 1944 Normandy landings, and fought in Belgium and Germany. He was with the forces that liberated the Buchenwald concentration camp, and made a series of dramatic drawings on that subject. In 1948, Cagli returned to Rome to take up permanent residence there. From that time forward, he experimented in various abstract and non-figurative techniques (neo-metaphysical, neo-cubist, informal). He was awarded the Guggenheim prize (1946) and the Marzotto prize (1954).
Vittorio Rieti (January 28, 1898 – February 19, 1994) was a Jewish-Italian composer. Born in Alexandria, Egypt, Rieti moved to Milan to study economics. He subsequently studied in Rome under Respighi and Casella, and lived there until 1940. … He emigrated to the United States in 1940, becoming a naturalised American citizen on the 1st of June 1944. He taught at the Peabody Conservatory of Music in Baltimore (1948-49), Chicago Musical College (1950-54), Queens College, New York (1958-60), and New York College of Music (1960-64).
George Balanchine (January 22 [O.S. January 9] 1904 – April 30, 1983) was a choreographer. Styled as the father of American ballet, he co-founded the New York City Ballet and remained its Artistic Director for more than 35 years.
Balanchine took the standards and technique from his time at the Imperial Ballet School and fused it with other schools of movement that he had adopted during his tenure on Broadway and in Hollywood, creating his signature “neoclassical style”. He was a choreographer known for his musicality; he expressed music with dance and worked extensively with leading composers of his time like Igor Stravinsky. Balanchine was invited to America in 1933 by a young arts patron named Lincoln Kirstein, and together they founded the School of American Ballet. Along with Kirstein, Balanchine also co-founded the New York City Ballet (NYCB).
The Metropolitan Museum of Art will present a major retrospective of the photographs of Irving Penn to mark the centennial of the artist’s birth. Over the course of his nearly 70-year career, Irving Penn (1917-2009) mastered a pared-down aesthetic of studio photography that is distinguished for its meticulous attention to composition, nuance, detail, and printmaking. Irving Penn: Centennial, opening April 24, 2017, will be the most comprehensive exhibition of the great American photographer’s work to date and will include both masterpieces and hitherto unknown prints from all his major series.
Long celebrated for more than six decades of influential work at Vogue magazine, Penn was first and foremost a fashion photographer. His early photographs of couture are masterpieces that established a new standard for photographic renderings of style at mid-century, and he continued to record the cycles of fashions year after year in exquisite images characterised by striking shapes and formal brilliance. His rigorous modern compositions, minimal backgrounds, and diffused lighting were innovative and immensely influential. Yet Penn’s photographs of fashion are merely the most salient of his specialties. He was a peerless portraitist, whose perceptions extended beyond the human face and figure to take in more complete codes of demeanour, adornment, and artefact. He was also blessed with an acute graphic intelligence and a sculptor’s sensitivity to volumes in light, talents that served his superb nude studies and life-long explorations of still life.
Penn dealt with so many subjects throughout his long career that he is conventionally seen either with a single lens – as the portraitist, fashion photographer, or still life virtuoso – or as the master of all trades, the jeweller of journalists who could fine-tool anything. The exhibition at The Met will chart a different course, mapping the overall geography of the work and the relative importance of the subjects and campaigns the artist explored most creatively. Its organisation largely follows the pattern of his development so that the structure of the work, its internal coherence, and the tenor of the times of the artist’s experience all become evident.
The exhibition will most thoroughly explore the following series: street signs, including examples of early work in New York, the American South, and Mexico; fashion and style, with many classic photographs of Lisa Fonssagrives-Penn, the former dancer who became the first supermodel as well as the artist’s wife; portraits of indigenous people in Cuzco, Peru; the Small Trades portraits of urban labourers; portraits of beloved cultural figures from Truman Capote, Joe Louis, Picasso, and Colette to Alvin Ailey, Ingmar Bergman, and Joan Didion; the infamous cigarette still lifes; portraits of the fabulously dressed citizens of Dahomey (Benin), New Guinea, and Morocco; the late “Morandi” still lifes; voluptuous nudes; and glorious colour studies of flowers. These subjects chart the artist’s path through the demands of the cultural journal, the changes in fashion itself and in editorial approach, the fortunes of the picture press in the age of television, the requirements of an artistic inner voice in a commercial world, the moral condition of the American conscience during the Vietnam War era, the growth of photography as a fine art in the 1970s and 1980s, and personal intimations of mortality. All these strands of meaning are embedded in the images – a web of deep and complex ideas belied by the seeming forthrightness of what is represented.
Penn generally worked in a studio or in a traveling tent that served the same purpose, and favoured a simple background of white or light grey tones. His preferred backdrop was made from an old theatre curtain found in Paris that had been softly painted with diffused grey clouds. This backdrop followed Penn from studio to studio; a companion of over 60 years, it will be displayed in one of the Museum’s galleries among celebrated portraits it helped create. Other highlights of the exhibition include newly unearthed footage of the photographer at work in his tent in Morocco; issues of Vogue magazine illustrating the original use of the photographs and, in some cases, to demonstrate the difference between those brilliantly coloured, journalistic presentations and Penn’s later reconsidered reuse of the imagery; and several of Penn’s drawings shown near similar still life photographs.
Exhibition credits
Irving Penn: Centennial is co-curated by Maria Morris Hambourg, independent curator and the founding curator of The Met’s Department of Photographs, and Jeff L. Rosenheim, Joyce Frank Menschel Curator in Charge of the Department of Photographs at The Met.
Bridget Bate Tichenor (born Bridget Pamela Arkwright Bate on November 22, 1917 – died on October 20, 1990), also known as Bridget Tichenor or B.B.T., was a Mexican surrealist painter of fantastic art in the school of magic realism and a fashion editor. Born in Paris and of British descent, she later embraced Mexico as her home. …
Bate Tichenor’s painting technique was based upon 16th-century Italian tempera formulas that artist Paul Cadmus taught her in New York in 1945, where she would prepare an eggshell-finished gesso ground on masonite board and apply (instead of tempera) multiple transparent oil glazes defined through chiaroscuro with sometimes one hair of a #00 sable brush. Bate Tichenor considered her work to be of a spiritual nature, reflecting ancient occult religions, magic, alchemy, and Mesoamerican mythology in her Italian Renaissance style of painting.
The cultures of Mesoamerica and her international background would influence the style and themes of Bate Tichenor’s work as a magic realist painter in Mexico. She was among a group of surrealist and magic realist female artists who came to live in Mexico in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
Jean Patchett (February 16, 1926 – January 22, 2002) was a leading fashion model of the late 1940s, 1950s and early 1960s. She was among the best known models of that era, which included Dovima, Dorian Leigh, Suzy Parker, Evelyn Tripp and Lisa Fonssagrives. Patchett was the subject of two of Vogue Magazine’s most famous covers, both shot in 1950 by Erwin Blumenfeld and Irving Penn. She was famous for being one of the first high-fashion models to appear remote; previously, models had appeared warm and friendly. Irving Penn described her as “a young American goddess in Paris couture”.
Mary Jane Russell (10 July 1926 – 2003) was a successful New York-based American photographic fashion model between 1948 and 1961. She often worked with Louise Dahl-Wolfe and Irving Penn, and appeared on many covers for Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar during the course of her modelling career. …
Russell was … a favourite model of Irving Penn, who remembered her qualities of concentration and tenderness. Two of Penn’s better known images of her were Girl Drinking, published in Vogue in 1949, and the 1951 photograph Girl with Tobacco on Tongue. As Russell did not smoke, the process of taking the latter photograph made her physically sick.
![Irving Penn (American, Plainfield, New Jersey 1917-2009 New York) 'Marchand de Concombres [Cucumber Seller]' 1950, printed 1976](https://artblart.files.wordpress.com/2017/07/penn-marchand-de-concombres-web1.jpg "Irving Penn (American, Plainfield, New Jersey 1917-2009 New York) 'Marchand de Concombres [Cucumber Seller]' 1950, printed 1976")
![Irving Penn (American, Plainfield, New Jersey 1917-2009 New York) 'Ballet Society, New York [Tanaquil Le Clercq with Corrado Cagli, Vittorio Rieti, and George Balanchine]' March 5, 1948, printed November 1976](https://artblart.files.wordpress.com/2017/05/penn-ballet-society-web.jpg "Irving Penn (American, Plainfield, New Jersey 1917-2009 New York) 'Ballet Society, New York [Tanaquil Le Clercq with Corrado Cagli, Vittorio Rieti, and George Balanchine]' March 5, 1948, printed November 1976")
Art Blart _ art and cultural memory archive 
You must be logged in to post a comment.