Tag: Weegee Lovers at the Movies

Exhibition dates: 28th May – 3rd October 2010

 

Many thankx to Rose Dahlsen and the Tate Modern for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

 

 

Harry Callahan (American, 1912-1999)
Untitled (Atlanta)
1984
Dye transfer print 
9 7/16 x 14 5/16 in. (23.97 x 36.35cm)
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
© The Estate of Harry Callahan, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York

 

 

Jonathan Olley (British, b. 1967)
Golf Five Zero watchtower (known to the British Army as ‘Borucki Sanger’), Crossmaglen Security Force Base, South Armagh
1999
Gelatin silver bromide print
Coutesy Diemar/Noble Photography, London
© J.Olley

 

 

Philip-Lorca diCorcia (American, b. 1951)
Head #23
2001
From the Head series

 

Examining photography as an invasive act immediately confronts the complacency with which we accept these invasions, encourage them even in our curiosity, and though it falters in parts and overwhelms in others (this is a huge exhibition), EXPOSED successfully addresses a number of the social, cultural and psychologically motivating factors behind these kinds of images – why we take them and why we look at them. Critical to this engagement is the wall text at the beginning, which states that most of the hundreds of photographs on display were taken without the subject’s knowledge. It is a distinctly creepy start.

Philip-Lorcia diCorcia’s Head series perhaps best embodies this conundrum. Visually they are not terribly shocking or even necessarily interesting. Theatrical lighting catches the head of someone in a crowd and the effect is of a staged encounter. In fact, these people, denominated variously as Head #23 or Head #4, were photographed without their knowledge by a series of hidden cameras, the flash triggering as they walked by. Famously, one of diCorcia’s unwitting targets tried to take legal action against him but the landmark ruling defended the artist and his right to self-expression over any right the subject might have over their own image. It is difficult to know which is worse – to be censored or to be spied upon.

Jo Higgins. “Review: Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance & the Camera, Tate Modern, London,” on the Jo Higgins website, July 5, 2010 [Online] Cited 22/03/2025

 

 

Benjamin Lowy (American, b. 1979)
Iraq Perspective II
2003-2007

 

US soldiers go on a late night raid with Iraqi Sunni Concerned citizens leading the way and identifying potential AQi targets. Due to a high level of IEDs in the area the company size raiding party walked 5 kilometres to the target in complete darkness, raided the target houses, detained questionable suspects and walked 5 kilometres back to waiting humvees.

 

 

Sophie Calle (French, b. 1953)
The Hotel, Room 47 (L’Hôtel, Chambre 47)
1981
2 works on paper, photographs and ink
2140 x 1420 mm
Tate
Presented by the Patrons of New Art through the Tate Gallery Foundation 1999

 

 

This is a two-part framed work comprising photographs and text. In the upper part, the title Room 47 is printed below a colour photograph of elegantly carved wooden twin head-boards behind a bed covered in rich brown satin. Below it, three columns of italic text are diary entries describing findings in the hotel room between Sunday 22 February 1981 and Tuesday 24. In the lower frame a grid of nine black and white photographs show things listed in the text above. This work is part of a project titled The Hotel, which the artist has defined:

“On Monday, February 16, 1981, I was hired as a temporary chambermaid for three weeks in a Venetian hotel. I was assigned twelve bedrooms on the fourth floor. In the course of my cleaning duties, I examined the personal belongings of the hotel guests and observed through details lives which remained unknown to me. On Friday, March 6, the job came to an end.” (Quoted in Calle, pp. 140-141.)

Each of the twelve rooms gave rise to a diptych of similar structure following the occupancy of one or more guests during the period of the artist’s employment at the hotel. Some rooms feature more than once as a second set of guests occupied them, giving rise to a total of twenty-one diptychs in the series. Calle’s descriptions of the hotel rooms and their contents combine factual documentation along with her personal response to the people whose lives she glimpsed by examining their belongings. Each text begins with the chambermaid / artist’s first entry into the room and a notation of which bed or beds have been slept in, with a description of the nightwear the guests have left. A list of objects usually follows, as the artist transcribes her activities in the room. Calle is unashamedly voyeuristic, reading diaries, letters, postcards and notes written or kept by the unknown guests, rummaging in suitcases, and looking into wardrobes and drawers. She sprays herself with their perfume and cologne, makes herself up using the contents of a vanity case, eats food left behind and salvages a pair of women’s shoes left in the bin. Outside the room, she listens at doors, recording the occupants’ conversations or any other sounds she may overhear, and even peers into a room when the floor-waiter opens the door to catch a glimpse of the unknown guests.

The absent occupants described in Room 47 are a family of four – two parents and two children – as revealed by their four pairs of slippers. Calle does not go through their suitcase, commenting: ‘I am already bored’. From their passports she discovers that the parents are a married couple from Geneva and she copies out four postcards one of them has written. Words on one of these hint at problems within the family.

Calle began her artistic projects in 1979 on returning to Paris after seven years’ travel abroad. Disorientated, she felt like a stranger in her own city, not knowing how to occupy her time. She started to follow random passers-by and spend her days as they did. Eventually she picked up the camera she had been experimenting with during her time abroad and photographed the strangers, writing diaristic notes of their movements. From this she has developed a particular way of working, collecting information about people who are absent and investigating her subjects like a detective. The Hotel follows directly from a project the artist undertook the previous year entitled Suite Venetienne 1980, which evolved from a chance encounter with a man she had been following in Paris. He told her he was going to Venice, so she followed him there in disguise, documenting her observations. After a year of planning and waiting, she returned to Venice in 1981 as a chambermaid.

The Hotel diptychs were produced in an edition of four in English and four in French. Tate’s copy of Room 47 (22 February) is the first in the English edition. Another version of Room 47 exists for the period 2-6 March.

Elizabeth Manchester
June 2005

Text from the Tate website [Online] Cited 26/12/2019

 

 

Unknown photographer
Bain News Service, publisher
Mrs. Wm. Thaw, veiled, on street, White Plains, N.Y.
1909
From a glass negative
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C.

 

 

Tom Howard (American, 1894-1961)
[Electrocution of Ruth Snyder, Sing Sing Prison, Ossining, New York]
1928
Gelatin silver print
Collection SFMOMA, Accessions Committee Fund purchase

 

In 1925, Ruth Snyder, a housewife from Queens, New York, took a lover, Judd Gray, a corsetmaker from upstate. Already married to Albert Snyder, an arts editor at MotorBoating magazine, she hid the affair for nearly three years. But on March 12, 1927, she and Gray planned a murder. After taking out a forged insurance policy, the two killed Ruth’s husband and staged a burglary scene. It didn’t take long for law enforcement to connect the dots, and a few months later, Gray and Snyder found themselves charged with first degree murder.
The court case was front page news and both Ruth and Judd found themselves constantly photographed for ever-evolving stories. Sing Sing, not one to change policy for press, reinstated that no photographers were to be present at the execution. But the public wanted to see.

The New York Daily News knew that the prison was familiar with many journalists from their staff, so they hired someone from out of town, Tom Howard, a then-unknown local photographer from the Chicago Tribune. Knowing he would never be allowed in with a camera, Howard strapped a single-use camera to his right ankle and wired a trigger release up his pant leg. Remarkably, he was allowed in. From across the room, Howard pointed his toe at the chair and took but one photo as Snyder took her last breaths.

The camera was rushed to the city and the film developed overnight. Editors and writers marveled at what was to be one of the most shocking photographs ever made: Snyder in the chair, the legs of the prison guard to the right. The image, shot on an angle, was cropped and published immediately with the headline: Dead!

The black-and-white image was shocking to the U.S. and international public alike. There sat a 32-year-old wife and mother, killed for killing. Her blurred figured seemed to evoke her struggle, as one can imagine her last, strained breaths. Never before had the press been able to attain such a startling image – one not made in a faraway war, one not taken of the aftermath of a crime scene, but one capturing the very moment between life and death here at home.

Erica Fahr Campbell. “The First Photograph of an Execution by Electric Chair,” on the TIME website, April 10,2024 [Online] Cited 24/03/2025

 

 

Erich Salomon (German Jewish, 1886-1944)
Hague Conference (Second Hague Conference on Reparations, January 1930, in the early morning hours)
1930
Promised gift of Paul Sack to the Sack Photographic Trust of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

 

 

Henri Cartier Bresson (French, 1908-2004)
Hyeres, France
1932
Gelatin silver print

 

 

Ben Shah (American, 1898-1969)
Post Office, Crossville, Tennesse
1937
Gelatin silver print

 

Ben Shahn visible using his right-angled lens in the window reflection

 

 

Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975)
Subway Passengers, New York
1938
Gelatin silver print

 

 

Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975)
Subway Passengers, New York
1938-1941
Gelatin silver print

 

 

Weegee (Arthur H. Fellig) (American, 1899-1968)
Their First Murder
Before 1945
Gelatin silver print

 

“Brooklyn School Children see Gambler Murdered in Street
Pupils were leaving P.S. 143, [Sixth Ave. and Roebling St.] in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, at 3:15 yesterday when Peter Mancuso, 22, described by police as a small time gambler, pulled up in a 1931 Ford at a traffic light a block from the school. Up to the car stepped a waiting gunman, who fired twice and escaped through the throng of children. Mancuso, shot through the head and heart, struggled to the board and collapsed dead on the pavement. Above are some of the spectators. The older woman is Mancuso’s aunt, who lives in the neighborhood, and the boy tugging at the hair of the girl in front of him is her son, hurrying away from her. Below is what they saw as a priest, flanked by an ambulance doctor and a detective, said the last rites of the Church over the body.”
PM Daily, October 9, 1941, Vol. II, No. 82, p. 15

Text from the International Center of Photography website

 

 

Weegee (Arthur H. Fellig) (American, 1899-1968)
Audience in the Palace Theatre
c. 1943
Gelatin silver print
© Weegee/International Center of Photography/Getty Images

 

 

Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American born Austria, 1899-1968)
[Lovers at the Movies, Times Square]
c. 1953
Gelatin silver print
26.7 × 35.4cm (10 1/2 × 13 15/16 in)
© International Center of Photography

 

 

Robert Frank (American, 1924-2019)
New York City
1955
From The Americans
Gelatin silver print

 

 

Tazio Secchiaroli (Italian, 1925-1998)
Anita Ekberg and Husband Anthony Steel, Vecchia, Roma
1958
Gelatin silver print
SFMOMA, Accessions Committee Fund purchase

 

 

Abraham Zapruder (American born Ukraine, 1905-1970)
Assassination of John F. Kennedy, November 22, 1963
1963
Collection SFMOMA, Accessions Committee Fund purchase
© The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza

 

 

United Press International
Suffolk, Virginia, Race Confrontation, May 6, 1964
1964
Collection SFMOMA, Accessions Committee Fund purchase
© United Press International, Inc. All Rights Reserved

 

 

Lee Friedlander (American, b. 1934)
New York City
1966
Gelatin silver print

 

 

Vito Acconci (Italian, 1940-2017)
Following Piece
1969
Gelatin silver prints

 

 

Exposed offers a fascinating look at pictures made on the sly, without the explicit permission of the people depicted. With photographs from the late nineteenth century to present day, the pictures present a shocking, illuminating and witty perspective on iconic and taboo subjects.

Beginning with the idea of the ‘unseen photographer’, Exposed presents 250 works by celebrated artists and photographers including Brassaï’s erotic Secret Paris of the 1930s images; Weegee’s iconic photograph of Marilyn Monroe; and Nick Ut’s reportage image of children escaping napalm attacks in the Vietnam War. Sex and celebrity is an important part of the exhibition, presenting photographs of Liz Taylor and Richard Burton, Paris Hilton on her way to prison and the assassination of JFK. Other renowned photographers represented in the show include Guy Bourdin, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Philip Lorca DiCorcia, Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Nan Goldin, Lee Miller, Helmut Newton and Man Ray.

The UK is now the most surveyed country in the world. We have an obsession with voyeurism, privacy laws, freedom of media, and surveillance – images captured and relayed on camera phones, YouTube or reality TV.

Much of Exposed focuses on surveillance, including works by both amateur and press photographers, and images produced using automatic technology such as CCTV. The issues raised are particularly relevant in the current climate, with topical debates raging around the rights and desires of individuals, terrorism and the increasing availability and use of surveillance. Exposed confronts these issues and their implications head-on.

Text from the Tate Modern website [Online] Cited 21/09/2010 no longer available online

 

 

Kohei Yoshiyuki (Japan, b. 1946)
Untitled
1971
From the series The Park
Gelatin silver print

 

 

Kohei Yoshiyuki (Japan, b. 1946)
Untitled
1971
From the series The Park
Gelatin silver print

 

 

Sandra Phillips on Surveillance – Exposed at Tate Modern

SFMOMA’s Curator of Photography Sandra Phillips describes how contemporary artists like Sophie Calle and Benjamin Lowry have started to talk back to surveillance.

 

 

Ron Galella (American, 1931-2022)
What Makes Jackie Run? Central Park, New York City, October 4, 1971
1971
Gelatin silver print
7 3/8 in x 9 7/8 in (18.73 x 25.08cm)
© Ron Galella

 

Ronald Edward Galella (January 10, 1931 – April 30, 2022) was an American photographer, known as a pioneer paparazzo. Dubbed “Paparazzo Extraordinaire” by Newsweek and “the Godfather of the U.S. paparazzi culture” by Time magazine and Vanity Fair, he is regarded by Harper’s Bazaar as “arguably the most controversial paparazzo of all time”. He photographed many celebrities out of the public eye and gained notice for his feuds with some of them, including Jacqueline Onassis and Marlon Brando. Despite the numerous controversies and claims of stalking, Galella’s work was praised and exhibited in art galleries worldwide.

Text from the Wikipedia website

 

 

Garry Winogrand (American, 1928-1984)
Couple Kissing, Girl Staring at Camera, Tortilla Factory, New York
1969
Gelatin silver print
© Garry Winogrand/Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

 

 

Nan Goldin (American, b. 1953)
Nan and Brian in Bed, New York City
1983
Chromogenic print
Nan Goldin and Matthew Marks Gallery, NYC

 

 

Denis Beaubois (Mauritian, b. 1970)
In the event of Amnesia the city will recall... (still)
1996-1997
DVD
9 mins 30 secs
Courtesy the artist

 

 

Denis Beaubois (Mauritian, b. 1970)
In the event of Amnesia the city will recall… (still)
1996-1997
DVD
9 mins 30 secs
Courtesy the artist

 

 

Alison Jackson (English, b. 1960)
The Queen plays with her corgis
2007
From the series Confidential
Chromogenic print
Courtesy the artist and Hamiltons Gallery, London
© Alison Jackson, Hamiltons Gallery, London

 

 

Giuseppe Primoli (Italian, 1851-1927)
Edgar Degas emerging from a Parisian public toilet
1889
Gelatin silver print

 

 

Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975)
Street Scene, New York
1928
Gelatin silver print
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
© Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

 

 

Georges Dudognon (French, 1922-2001)
Greta Garbo in the Club St. Germain, Paris
c. 1950s
Gelatin silver print
7 1/16  x 7 1/8 in. (17.94 x 18.1cm)
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Members of Foto Forum, 2005.200
© Estate of Georges Dudognon

 

The face in the paparazzi image above is actually The Face: Greta Garbo. One of the most famous and admired women in the world, Garbo became a New York recluse after retiring from films at the beginning of the 1940s. Sightings of her were rare, and this 1950s image captures the conflict between a movie star’s public persona and private life. Now older and with her face obscured, Garbo is unrecognisable, but once understood to be her it becomes a contrasting reference to all those images of her as an icon of beauty and stardom.

Christian Hayes. “Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance and the Camera,” on The Classic Film Show website, June 15, 2010 [online] Cited 24/03/2025

 

 

Weegee (Arthur H. Fellig) (American, 1899-1968)
[Marilyn Monroe]
c. 1950s
Gelatin silver print
International Center of Photography, New York, Gift of Wilma Wilcox, 1993
© Weegee / International Center of Photography / Getty Images

 

 

Richard Avedon (American, 1923-2004)
And Warhol
1969
Gelatin silver print

 

 

Shizuka Yokomizo (Japanese, b. 1966)
Stranger No. 1
1998
Chromogenic print
50 x 42 1/2 in. (127 x 108 cm)
© Shizuka Yokomizo

 

 

Shizuka Yokomizo (Japanese, b. 1966)
Stranger No. 2
1998
Chromogenic print
SFMOMA, Accessions Committee Fund purchase
© Shizuka Yokomizo

 

 

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