Posts Tagged 'Walt Whitman
Text / Exhibition: 'The Unflinching Gaze: photo media and the male figure' at the Bathurst Regional Art Gallery, New South Wales
Categories: American, american photographers, Australian artist, Australian photography, Australian writing, beauty, black and white photography, colour photography, curator, digital photography, documentary photography, exhibition, existence, gallery website, intimacy, light, memory, photographic series, photography, Polaroid photography, portrait, psychological, quotation, reality, space, time, video and works on paper
Tags: 'Allan' from the monologue 'Sadness', AIDS crisis, Altered Image: One Photograph of Andy Warhol, American & Australian Photographic Company, American & Australian Photographic Company Mssrs. Bushley & Young, American poet Walt Whitman and his 'rebel soldier friend' Pete Doyle, Andrea Susan, andy warhol, Andy Warhol Blow Job, Andy Warhol Victor Hugo's Penis, Anthony Sansone, Auschwitz victim, Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden, Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden Untitled c. 1910, Basil Clavering, Basil Clavering and John Parkhurst, Bathurst, Bathurst LGBTI community, Bathurst Regional Art Gallery, Beaufoy Merlin, Beaufoy Merlin & Charles Bayliss, Blanchard Kennedy, Blow Job, Body image and society, Brad Pitt, BRAG, Brenton Heath-Kerr, Brenton Heath-Kerr as Tom of Finland, Casa Susanna, Casa Susanna Lee in white dress, Charles Bayliss, Christopher Makos, Christopher Makos Altered Image: One Photograph of Andy Warhol, Closeted History/Wunderkamera, David Amputation Fetishist, Deborah Kelly, Double hanging, Eadweard Muybridge, Ernst Goffman, Fergus Greer, Fergus Greer Leigh Bowery Session VII, Frank Vickers, Frank Vickers Untitled, Gary Carsley, Gary Carsley YOWL, genocide of homosexuals in concentration camps, George Platt Lynes, George Platt Lynes Blanchard Kennedy, Helmut N.Y.C., homosexuals in concentration camps, Horst P. Horst, Horst P. Horst Male Nude I NY, John Parkhurst, Leigh Bowery Session V, Leigh Bowery Session VII, Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, LGBTI community groups, Liam Benson, Liam Benson The Crusader, Liam Benson The Executioner, Liam Benson The Terrorist, Luke Parker, Luke Parker Double hanging, M. P. Rice, M. P. Rice American poet Walt Whitman and his 'rebel soldier friend' Pete Doyle, male body, male gaze, Male Nude I NY, masculinity, Max Dupain, Milk Teeth, Mr Cullen & Mr Gornall, Mssrs. Bushley & Young, Nikki Johnson, Nikki Johnson David Amputation Fetishist, Owen Leong, Owen Leong Milk Teeth, Owen Leong Resistance Training, Peter Doyle, Peter Elfes, Peter Elfes Brenton Heath-Kerr as Tom of Finland, photo media, photo media and the male figure, Pink Triangle, Queens Guard 3, Resistance Training, Richard Perram, Robert Mapplethorpe, Robert Mapplethorpe Helmut N.Y.C., Robert Mapplethorpe Roger Koch aka Frank Vickers, Robert Wilson, Robert Wilson Brad Pitt, Roger Koch aka Frank Vickers, Royale Hussar, Royale Hussar Queens Guard 3, same-sex marriage postal survey, Samuel J Hood, Samuel J Hood The 9th Field Brigade, social construct, Social construction theory, The 9th Field Brigade, The Crusader, The Executioner, The Invention of Heterosexuality, the male figure, the male gaze, The Terrorist, The Unflinching Gaze, The Unflinching Gaze: photo media and the male figure, They're Only Words, Todd Fuller and Amy Hill, Todd Fuller and Amy Hill They're Only Words, Tony Albert, Tony Albert Brother Our Future, Tony Albert Brother Our Past, Tony Albert Brother Our Present, Tony Sansone, Tony Sansone Untitled, Untitled (Victor Hugo's Penis), Victor Hugo's Penis, video portrait of Brad Pitt, Walt Whitman, Walt Whitman and Peter Doyle, William Yang, William Yang 'Allan' from the monologue 'Sadness', William Yang Sadness, World War II, YOWL
Exhibition dates: 14th October – 3rd December, 2017
Curator: Richard Perram OAM
Todd Fuller and Amy Hill (Australia, 1988-; Australia, 1988-)
They're Only Words
Film, sound duration: 2:42 mins
Courtesy the artists and May Space, Sydney
I must congratulate curator and gallery Director, Richard Perram OAM and the Bathurst Regional Art Gallery for putting on such a fine exhibition, worthy of many a large gallery in a capital city. An incredible achievement, coming at the same time as Latrobe Regional Art Gallery put on the recent René Magritte exhibition. All power to these regional galleries. Now on with the show…
The male body. The female body. The trans body. The gay body. Etc. etc. etc. …
The male gaze. The female gaze. The trans gaze. The gay gaze. Etc. etc. etc. …
I did my Dr of Philosophy, all four and a half years of it, on the history of photography and its depiction of the male body so I know this subject intimately. It is such a complicated subject that after all of time, nothing is ever certain, everything is changeable and fluid.
To start, the definition of masculinity that I used as a determination for the term in my PhD is included as the first quotation below. The quotation is followed by others – on the optic experience and the creation of body image; on body image and our relation to other people; on the anxiety caused by the crisis of looking as it intersects with the crisis of the body; and how we can overcome the passivity of objective truth (accepting dominant images in this case, as they are presented to us) through an active struggle for subjective truth, or an acceptance of difference. A further, longer quote in the posting by Chris Schilling examines Ernst Goffman's theories of body, image and society in which Goffman states that the body is characterised by three main features: firstly, that the body as material property of individuals; secondly, that meanings attributed to the body are determined by 'shared vocabularies of body idiom' such as dress, bearing, movements and position, sound level, physical gestures such as waving and saluting, facial decorations, and broad emotional expressions; and thirdly; that the body plays an important role in mediating the relationship between people's self-identity and their social identity. These quotations just start to scratch the surface of this very complicated, negotiated social area.
What we can say is this: that masculinity is always and forever a construct; that male body image is always and forever a further construct built on the first construct; and that photo media images of the male body are a construct, in fact a double or triple construct as they seek to capture the surface representation of the previous two conditions.
What strikes me with most of the photographs in this posting is that they are about a constructed "performance" of masculinity, performances that challenge cultural signifiers of mainstream and marginalised aspects of Western patriarchal culture. In most the masculine subject position is challenged through complex projections of masculinity, doubled through the construction of images. In fact, spectatorship is no longer male and controlling but polymorphous and not organised along normative gender lines.
Thus, these artists respond to four defined action problems in terms of representation of body usage: "… control (involving the predicability of performance); desire (whether the body is lacking or producing desire); the body's relation to others (whether the body is monadic and closed in on itself or dyadic and constituted through either communicative or dominating relations with others); and the self-relatedness of the body (whether the body associates and 'feels at home' in itself, or dissociates itself from its corporeality)."1 Further, four ideal types of body usage can be defined in terms of these action problems: the disciplined body where the medium is regimentation, the model of which is the rationalisation of the monastic order; the mirroring body where the medium is consumption, the model of which is the department store; the dominating body where the medium is force, the model of which is war; and the communicative body where the medium is recognition, the model of which could be shared narratives, communal rituals (such as sex) and caring relationships.2
As Chris Schilling observes, "The boundaries of the body have shifted away from the natural and on to the social, and the body now has 'a thoroughly permeable "outer layer" through which the reflexive project of the self and externally formed abstract systems enter." In other words, masculinity and male figure can be anything to any body and any time in any context. The male body can be prefigured by social conditions. But the paradox is, the more we know masculinity and the male body, the more knowledge we have, the more we can alter and shape these terms, the less certain we are as to what masculinity and the male body is, and how or if it should be controlled. Taking this a step further, Schilling notes that the photographic image of the body itself has become an abstract system/symbolic token which is traded without question, much as money is, without the author or participants being present.3 You only have to look into some of the gay chats rooms to know this to be true!
The most difficult question I had to ask myself in relation to this exhibition was, what is it to be male? Such a question is almost impossible to answer…
Is being male about sex, a penis, homosociality, homosexuality, heterosexuality, friendship, braveness, dominance, perversity, fantasy, love, attraction, desire, pleasure, Ockerism, respect, loyality, spirituality, joy, happiness etc. etc. It is all of these and more besides. And this is where I find some most of these images to be just surface representations of deeper feelings: I just like dressing in drag; I like pulling a gun on someone; I like holding a knife next to my penis to make my phallus and my armoured body look "butch". It's as though the "other", our difference from ourselves (and others), has been normalised and found wanting. I want to strip them away from this performative, normalising aspect. Most of these photographs are male figures dressed up to the nines, projecting an image, a surface, to the outside world (even though the performative tells us a great deal about the peculiarities of the human imagination). I want them to be more essential, not just a large penis dressed up for show. Only in the image Untitled [Auschwitz victim] (Nd, below), where the performance for the camera and the clothing the man is wearing is controlled by others – does some sense of an inner strength of a male come through. In times of unknown horror and dire circumstances, this man stares you straight in the eye with a calm presence and inner composure.
For me personally, being male is about a spiritual connection – to myself, to the earth and to the cosmos. I hope it is about respect for myself and others. Of course I use the systems above as a projection of myself into the world, as to who I am and who I want people to see through my image. But there is so much more to being male than these defined, representational personas. This is not some appeal to, as David Smail puts it, "a simple relativity of 'truths'" (anything to anybody at anytime in any context), nor a essentialist reductionism to a "single truth" about our sense of being, but an appeal for a 'non-finality' of truth, neither fixed nor certain, that changes according to our values and what we understand of ourselves, what it is to be male. This understanding requires intense, ongoing inner work, something many males have no desire to undertake…
Chris Schilling, The Body and Social Theory, Sage Publications, London, 1993, p.95.
Many thankx to Director Richard Perram, Assistant Curator Julian Woods and the Bathurst Regional Art Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
"The category of "masculinity" should be seen as always ambivalent, always complicated, always dependent on the exigencies (necessary conditions and requirements) of personal and institutional power … [masculinity is] an interplay of emotional and intellectual factors – an interplay that directly implicates women as well as men, and is mediated by other social factors, including race, sexuality, nationality, and class … Far from being just about men, the idea of masculinity engages, inflects, and shapes everyone."
Berger, Maurice; Wallis, Brian and Watson, Simon. 'Constructing Masculinity'. Introduction. New York: Routledge, 1995, pp. 3-7.
"We choose and reject by action … Nietzsche calls the body 'Herrschaftsgebilde' (creation of the dominating will). We may say the same about body-image. Since optic experience plays such an enormous part in our relation to the world, it will also play a dominating role in the creation of the body-image. But optic experience is also experience by action. By actions and determinations we give the final shape to our bodily self. It is a process of continual active development." (My underline)
Schilder, Paul. 'The Image and Appearance of The Human Body'. New York: International Universities Press, 1950, pp. 104-105.
"Body images should not exist in isolation. We desire the relation of our body-images to the body-images of all other persons, and we want it especially concerning all sexual activities and their expression in the body-image. Masturbation is specifically social. It is an act by which we attempt to draw the body-images of others, especially in their genital region, nearer to us."
Schilder, Paul. 'The Image and Appearance of The Human Body'. New York: International Universities Press, 1950, p. 237.
"As the French critic Maurice Blanchot wrote, "The image has nothing to do with signification, meaning, as implied by the existence of the world, the effort of truth, the law and the brightness of the day. Not only is the image of an object not the meaning of that object and of no help in comprehending it, but it tends to withdraw it from its meaning by maintaining it in the immobility of a resemblance that it has nothing to resemble" … It is this severance of meaning and its object, this resemblance of nothing, that the crisis of looking intersects with the crisis of the body. In contemporary culture we promote the body as infinitely extendable and manageable. Indeed, we mediate this concept through the permeation of the photographic image in popular culture – through advertising and dominant discourse that place the young, beautiful, erotic body as the desirable object of social attention. This is a body apparently conditioned by personal control (moral concern). But the splitting apart of image and meaning pointed to by Blanchot suggests that such control is illusory. There is no single truth; there are only competing narratives and interpretations of a world that cannot be wholly, accurately described." (My underline)
Blanchot, Maurice. 'The Gaze of Orpheus'. New York: Barrytown, 1981, p. 85, quoted in Townsend, Chris. 'Vile Bodies: Photography and the Crisis of Looking'. Munich: Prestel, 1998, p. 10.
"Where objective knowing is passive, subjective knowing is active – rather than giving allegiance to a set of methodological rules which are designed to deliver up truth through some kind of automatic process [in this case the construction of the male figure through the image], the subjective knower takes a personal risk in entering into the meaning of the phenomena to be known … Those who have some time for the validity of subjective experience but intellectual qualms about any kind of 'truth' which is not 'objective', are apt to solve their problem by appealing to some kind of relativity. For example, it might be felt that we all have our own versions of the truth about which we must tolerantly agree to differ. While in some ways this kind of approach represents an advance on the brute domination of 'objective truth', it in fact undercuts and betrays the reality of the world given to our subjectivity. Subjective truth has to be actively struggled for: we need the courage to differ until we can agree. Though the truth is not just a matter of personal perspective, neither is it fixed and certain, objectively 'out there' and independent of human knowing. 'The truth' changes according to, among other things, developments and alterations in our values and understandings … the 'non-finality' of truth is not to be confused with a simple relativity of 'truths'." (My underline).
Smail, David. 'Illusion and Reality: The Meaning of Anxiety'. London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1984, pp. 152-153.
Installation views of the exhibition The Unflinching Gaze: photo media and the male figure at the Bathurst Regional Art Gallery, New South Wales
Photos: Sharon Hickey Photography
"In line with current thinking the exhibition posits masculinity, and gender itself, as a kind of performance – a social construct that is acquired rather than biologically determined.
This idea has its limits, with most people happy to accept anatomy as destiny. Nevertheless, there is much we view as 'natural' that might be more accurately described as 'cultural'. In an exceptional catalogue essay, Peter McNeil refers to Jonathan Ned Katz's book, The Invention of Heterosexuality, which notes that the term "heterosexual" was first published in the United States in 1892. This is a remarkably late entry for a concept often viewed as a cornerstone of social orthodoxy.
A condition doesn't require a word to make it a reality but it sure helps. Wittgenstein's famous dictum: "The limits of my language are the limits of my world," reminds us of the power of naming and categorisation.
To establish anything as an unquestionable norm is to stigmatise other views as abnormal. From the perception of abnormality comes the fear and hatred that surfaced during a same-sex marriage postal survey that revealed more about political cowardice than it did about Australian social attitudes. Although Perram has no qualms about celebrating gay sexuality his chief concern is to encourage a broader, more inclusive understanding of masculinity. …
One of the most striking moments in Perram's show is a juxtaposition of Mapplethorpe's 1983 portrait of gay porn star, Roger Koch, aka Frank Vickers, wearing a wig, bra and fishnets, his hands clasped demurely over his groin. The feminine coyness is at odds with Vickers's musclebound torso and biceps which are fully on display in his self-portrait of the same year, along with his semi-erect penis.
The photos may be two versions of camp but the comparison shows how an individual's sexual identity can be reconfigured with the appropriate props and body language. In the case of performance artist, Leigh Bowery, captured in a series of photos by Fergus Greer, the play of fantasy transcended the simple binary opposition of male and female, to create monstrous hybrids that question the limits of what it is to be human."
John McDonald. "The Unflinching Gaze," November 24, 2017
Tony Albert (Australia, 1981-)
Brother (Our Past) 2013
Brother (Our Present) 2013
Brother (Our Future) 2013
Pigment on paper, edition of 3 150 x 100 cm each
Courtesy UTS Art, Corrigan Collection
Andy Warhol (United States, 1928-1987)
Blow Job [still]
16mm film, black and white, silent duration: 41 min at 16 frames per second
© 2017 The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, a museum of Caregie Institute. All rights reserved
Robert Wilson (United States, 1941-)
Video portrait, looped
Dimensions variable
Courtesy the artist and the Byrd Hoffman Water Mill Foundation, New York
Peter Elfes (Australia, 1961-)
Brenton [Heath-Kerr] as Tom of Finland
Courtesy the artist © Peter Elfes
Casa Susanna
Attributed to Andrea Susan
(Lee in white dress)
Digital copy from colour photographs
Collection of Art Gallery of Ontario, purchased with funds generously donated by Martha LA McCain 2015
© Art Gallery of Ontario
Photo: Ian Lefebvre
Nikki Johnson (United States, 1972-)
David Amputation Fetishist
Digital print (from a set of images)
Courtesy the artist
Luke Parker (Australia 1975-)
Double hanging
Photograph, cotton thread, pins
Courtesy the artist and 55 Sydenham Rd
Gregory Collection
Mr Cullen & Mr Gornall
Digital copy from scanned negative
Courtesy the Bathurst Historical Society
Two hundred photos and videos by sixty two leading artists (twenty four Australian and thirty eight international) will be exhibited at Bathurst Regional Art Gallery (BRAG) from Saturday 14 October until Sunday 3 December 2017.
Curated by BRAG Director Richard Perram OAM, an openly gay man, The Unflinching Gaze: photo media and the male figure surveys how the male figure has been depicted by Australian and international artists in photo media over the last 140 years. It includes historic and contemporary fine art photography and film, fashion photography, pop videos and homoerotic art. Images range from the beautiful to the banal to the confounding.
Key artists in the exhibition include iconic American artists Robert Mapplethorpe, Andy Warhol, and avant-garde theatre director Robert Wilson with a video portrait of Brad Pitt; European artists such as Eadweard Muybridge, and Baron Wilhelm Von Gloeden; and historic and contemporary Australian artists including Beaufoy Merlin and Charles Bayliss, Max Dupain, Deborah Kelly, William Yang, Gary Carsley, Owen Leong and Liam Benson. Works have been sourced from Australian and international collections, including a major loan of 60 works from the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, New York.
The exhibition brings an unflinching gaze to how concepts of humanity and the male figure are intertwined and challenged. Themes include the Pink Triangle, which deals with the persecution, torture and genocide of homosexuals in concentration camps during World War II to those in Chechyna today; and the AIDS crisis in the 1980s.
The Unflinching Gaze exhibition is a unique opportunity for audiences in the Bathurst Region to access a world class photo-media exhibition, says Richard Perram OAM. The Unflinching Gaze not only deals with aesthetic concerns but also engages the community in a discussion around social issues. BRAG is working with local Bathurst LGBTI community groups to ensure that one of the most important outcomes of the exhibition will be to inform and educate the general Bathurst community and support and affirm the Bathurst LGBTI community.
The Unflinching Gaze: photo media and the male figure is a Bathurst Regional Art Gallery exhibition in partnership with Leslie Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, New York. Curated by Richard Perram OAM. This exhibition is supported by the Dobell Exhibition Grant, funded by the Sir William Dobell Art Foundation and managed by Museums & Galleries of NSW.
Press release from the Bathurst Regional Art Gallery (BRAG)
American & Australian Photographic Company
(Beaufoy Merlin & Charles Bayliss)
Mssrs. Bushley & Young
Digital reproductions from glass photo negatives, quarter plate
From the Collections of the State Library of NSW
Horst P. Horst (Germany; United States, 1906-1996)
Male Nude I NY
Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay & Lesbian Art, gift of Ricky Horst
Liam Benson (Australia, 1980-)
The Crusader 2015
The Executioner 2015
The Terrorist 2015
Inkjet print on cotton rag paper, edition of 5 90 x 134 cm
Photograph by Alex Wisser
Courtesy of the artist and Artereal Gallery
George Platt Lynes (United States, 1907-1955)
Blanchard Kennedy
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. Purchased 1981
Christopher Makos (United States, 1948-)
Altered Image: One Photograph of Andy Warhol
50.6 x 40.8 cm each
Robert Mapplethorpe (United States, 1946-1989)
Helmut, N.Y.C. (from X Portfolio)
Selenium toned silver gelatin print
Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay & Lesbian Art, Foundation Purchase
© Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. Used by permission
Roger Koch aka Frank Vickers: From the "Roger" Series
Gelatin silver photo
Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay & Lesbian Art, Founders Gift
Body, image and society
"Goffman's approach to the body is characterised by three main features. First, there is a view of the body as material property of individuals. In contrast to naturalistic views … Goffman argues that individuals usually have the ability to control and monitor their bodily performances in order to facilitate social interaction. Here, the body is associated with the exercise of human agency, and it appears in Goffman's work as a resource which both requires and enables people to manage their movements and appearances.
Second, while the body is not actually produced by social forces, as in Foucault's work, the meanings attributed to it are determined by 'shared vocabularies of body idiom' which are not under the immediate control of individuals (E. Goffman, Behaviour In Public Places: Notes on the Social Organisation of Gatherings, The Free Press, New York, 1963, p.35). Body idiom is a conventionalized form of non-verbal communication which is by far the most important component of behaviour in public. It is used by Goffman in a general sense to refer to 'dress, bearing, movements and position, sound level, physical gestures such as waving and saluting, facial decorations, and broad emotional expressions' (Goffman, 1963:33). As well as allowing us to classify information given off by bodies, shared vocabularies of body idiom provide categories which label and grade hierarchically people according to this information. Consequently, these classifications exert a profound influence over ways in which individuals seek to manage and present their bodies.
The first two features of Goffman's approach suggest that human bodies have a dual location. Bodies are the property of individuals, yet are defined as significant and meaningful by society. This formulation lies at the core of the third main feature of Goffman's approach to the body. In Goffman's work, the body plays an important role in mediating the relationship between people's self-identity and their social identity. The social meanings which are attached to particular bodily forms and performances tend to become internalized and exert a powerful influence on an individuals sense of self and feelings of inner worth.
Goffman's general approach to the body is revealed through his more specific analyses of the procedures involved in what he terms the 'interaction order'. Goffman conceptualises the interaction order as somehow autonomous sphere of social life (others include the economic sphere) which should not be seen as 'somehow prior, fundamental, or constitutive of the shape of macroscopic phenomena' (Goffman, 1983:4). His analysis of this sphere of life demonstrates that intervening successfully in daily life, and maintaining a single definition in the face of possible disruptions, requires a high degree of competence in controlling the expressions, movements and communications of the body." (Goffman, 1969).
Schilling, Chris. The Body and Social Theory. London: Sage Publications, 1993, pp.82-83.
Owen Leong (Australia, 1979-)
Archival pigment print on cotton paper, edition of 5 + 2 AP
Courtesy the artist and Artereal Gallery, Sydney Commissioned by BRAG for The Unflinching Gaze: photo media & the male figure with funds from BRAGS Inc. (Bathurst Regional Art Gallery Society Inc.)
Milk Teeth
Archival pigment print on cotton paper, edition of 5 + 2Ap
Courtesy of the artists and Artereal Gallery Sydney
Samuel J Hood (Australia, 1872-1953)
The 9th Field Brigade (four images)
24/2/1938 (Liverpool, NSW)
Photo negative (copied from original nitrate photograph) 35mm
Anthony Sansone (Italy; United States, 1905-1987)
Bromide print
Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay & Lesbian Art, gift of David Aden Gallery
Fergus Greer (United Kingdom, 1961-)
Leigh Bowery, Session V
Look 27 February 1992
Digital reproduction
Courtesy Fergus Greer
Leigh Bowery, Session VII
Look 34, June 1994
Unknown American
Vintage photograph from the Closeted History/Wunderkamera
Tintypes, paper photographs
Collection of Luke Roberts
Frank Vickers (United States, 1948-1991)
Untitled (self-portrait)
Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden (Germany; Italy, 1856-1931)
Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, Founders' gift
Untitled (Victor Hugo's Penis)
Collection of Byrd Hoffman Water Mill Foundation
Gary Carsley (Australia 1957-)
YOWL [still]
Single Channel HD Video on Layered A3 Photocopy substrate
360 x 247 cms
Duration 4.32 min
Videography Ysia Song, Soundscape Tarun Suresh, Art Direction Shahmen Suku
Royale Hussar (Basil Clavering and John Parkhurst)
Queens Guard 3
Digital print from original negative
William Yang (1943- )
'Allan' from the monologue 'Sadness'
19 gelatin silver photographs in the monologue
51.0 x 41.0 each sheet
Photograph: William Yang/Bathurst Regional Art Gallery
A photograph from the Sadness series, which depicts the slow death of his sometime lover, Allan Booth.
Untitled [Auschwitz victim]
This prisoner was sent to Auschwitz under Section 175 of the German Criminal Code, which criminalised homosexuality.
Photograph: Bathurst Regional Art Gallery
"The picture may have been taken by Wilhelm Brasse who was born on this date, 3 December in 1917, who became known as the "photographer of Auschwitz concentration camp", though he was one of several, including Alfred Woycicki , Tadeusz Myszkowski, Józef Pysz, Józef Światłoch, Eugeniusz Dembek, Bronisław Jureczek, Tadeusz Krzysica, Stanisław Trałka, and Zdzisław Pazio whom the Camp Gestapo kept alive for the job of recording thousands of photographs of their fellow prisoners, supervised by Bernhard Walter, the head of Erkenundienst.
The photographs themselves present a transgression of the subject's own self-image. The carte-de-visite format forces a confrontation of the victim (which in this situation, they are) with themselves in a visual interrogation, by placing a profile and a three-quarter view either side of a frontal mug shot. The final image seems to depict the subject beholden to a higher authority.
Brasse had been arrested in 1940, at age 23, for trying to leave German-occupied Poland and sent to KL Auschwitz-Birkenau where because he had been a Polish professional photographer in his aunt's studio his skills were useful. Brasse has estimated that he took 40,000 to 50,000 "identity pictures" from 1940 until 1945.
Brasse and another prisoner Bronisław Jureczek preserved the photographs when in January 1945, during the evacuation of the camp, they were ordered to burn all of the photographs. They put wet photo paper in the furnace first and followed by such a great number of photos and negatives that the fire was suffocated. When the SS-Hauptscharfürer Walter left the laboratory, Brasse and Jureczek swept undestroyed photographs from the furnace, scattering them in the rooms of the laboratory and boarding up the door to the laboratory. 38,916 photographs were saved."
James McCardle. "Ghosts," on the On This Day in Photography website 03/12/2017
M. P. Rice
American poet Walt Whitman and his 'rebel soldier friend', Pete Doyle
Walt Whitman and Peter Doyle, Washington DC.
Charles E. Feinberg Collection, Library of Congress
Photograph: Library of Congress/Library of Congress/Bathurst Regional Art Gallery
"The first extant photo of Whitman with anyone else, here Peter Doyle, Whitman's close friend and companion in Washington. Doyle was a horsecar driver and met Whitman one stormy night in 1865 when Whitman, looking (as Doyle said) "like an old sea-captain," remained the only passenger on Doyle's car. They were inseparable for the next eight years."
Bathurst Regional Art Gallery (BRAG)
70 -78 Keppel St
Tues to Sat 10am – 5pm
Sundays 11am – 2pm
Bathurst Regional Art Gallery website
Exhibition: 'Charles Sheeler from Doylestown to Detroit' at Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Categories: American, american photographers, beauty, black and white photography, documentary photography, exhibition, existence, film, gallery website, landscape, light, memory, New York, photographic series, photography, psychological, reality, sculpture, space, time and works on paper
Tags: 20th-century American art, abstract and avant-garde work, abstract photography, American art, american artist, American avant-garde film, American modernism, american photographer, American photography, avant-garde photography, Boston, Buggy Doylestown, Buildings in Shadows and Smoke, Charles Sheeler, Charles Sheeler Buggy Doylestown, Charles Sheeler Buildings in Shadows and Smoke, Charles Sheeler Doylestown House, Charles Sheeler Ferry Docking, Charles Sheeler Ford Plant, Charles Sheeler Ford Plant - Criss-Crossed Conveyors, Charles Sheeler Ford Plant - Ladle Hooks, Charles Sheeler Ford Plant - Stamping Press, Charles Sheeler from Doylestown to Detroit, Charles Sheeler Manhatta, Charles Sheeler New York, Charles Sheeler Side of White Barn, Charles Sheeler Stairs from Below, Charles Sheeler The Stove, Doylestown House, Doylestown House - Stairs from Below, Doylestown House - Stairwell, Doylestown House - The Stove, Ford Motor Company plant, Ford Plant - Criss-Crossed Conveyors, Ford Plant - Ladle Hooks, Ford Plant - Stamping Press, Leaves of Grass, Lower Manhattan, Machine Age photography, Manhatta, Manhatta - Ferry Docking, Manhatta - Rooftops, Manhatta - Through a Balustrade, Museum of Fine Arts, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, New York City, Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler, Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler Manhatta, Paul Strand White Fence, Paul Strand White Fence Port Kent, River Rouge Michigan, Romanticism, Side of White Barn, Side of White Barn Bucks County, The Stove, visual design, Walt Whitman, Walt Whitman Leaves of Grass, White Fence Port Kent
Exhibition dates: 22nd July – 5th November 2017
Charles Sheeler (American, 1883-1965)
Side of White Barn, Bucks County, Pennsylvania
Photograph, gelatin silver print
© The Lane Collection
Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
White Fence, Port Kent, New York
1916 (negative); 1945 (print)
© Paul Strand Archive, Aperture Foundation
Charles Sheeler is a cracking good photographer who's work has not got the recognition that it deserves – in comparison to, say, Stieglitz, Strand, Steichen or Weston. When you think of those top echelon artists from the early twentieth century, his name is never mentioned. And it should be.
Sheeler's Side of White Barn, Bucks County, Pennsylvania (1915, above) predates one of the most famous early modernist photographs, Strand's White Fence, Port Kent, New York (1916, above) by a year, yet is hardly known. While Strand's image possesses low depth of field, strong lighting and a focus on the fence as physical, geometric, sculptural object within the picture frame, Sheeler's photograph is much more subtle but no less effective in its modernist vocation. The pictorial space is flattened into geometric shapes, the bottom of the photograph grounded by a cracked wall, hay, chickens and a fence, the top of the image foreclosed by the tiled roof of the barn and its attendant shadow (showing that the sun was high in the sky when this image was taken). Within the boundaries of the rectangle are subtle graduations of tone, colour and form, almost like an modernist etching with light, so beautifully does the artist both understand what he is seeing and how to render it through the physicality of the print. Unlike Strand's "knock you over the head with the white picket fence", Sheeler's subtle paean to the modern world requires contemplation on the nature of light, photography and the fine art print. This is a masterpiece in the history of photographic art.
I am similarly convinced by Sheeler's Ford Plant – Criss–Crossed Conveyors (1927, below), in my opinion one of the top ten photographs of all time.
I cannot fault this image. The light falling on the subject is incredible (notice the shadow from the beam mid-upper left, telling us the time of day the photograph was taken), the tonality superb, the framing of the subject admirable – all elements tensioned perfectly within the pictorial plane. The bottom of the photograph is grounded by stacked tyres and the structure ascends to the heavens from there… not just in one element, but in five! The main criss-cross of the conveyors is placed off centre supported by an iron tower, which allows the eye to roam freely across the image. The placement also allows for another elevator to ascend behind the main two, while a set of steps climbs higher and higher eventually exiting the picture stage left. Behind the criss-crossed conveyors the depth of space that must exist in reality is proposed by two tanks, further reinforced by 8 chimney stacks, and yet this photograph evidences no such depth of field. While everything is reduced to flattened shapes in this machine age, modernist, objectified world – and while no human being is presented for scale – the human hand is all over this image: in the construction of such technology, in the presence of the human scale stairs, in the ascension to the sky of the organ pipes of the industrial cathedral, in the comprehending eye of the photographer, and in the presence, the aura, of this magnificent print. While this image may seem the antithesis of humanist photography in one sense, conversely it reaffirms the very act of humanity in another. Or perhaps I'm just an old romantic.
Many thankx to the Museum of Fine Arts Boston for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Doylestown House – The Stove
Doylestown House – Stairs from Below
Negative date: about 1916-1917
Doylestown House – Stairwell
Buggy, Doylestown, Pennsylvania
Manhatta – Ferry Docking
This exhibition celebrates the MFA's unparalleled holdings of works by Charles Sheeler (1883-1965), presenting 40 photographs from three significant series created during the heyday of his career as a founder of American modernism.
After enjoying success as a painter, Sheeler initially took up photography as a way to make a living. His experiments with the medium included the 1916-17 series of photographs capturing various elements of an 18th-century house he rented in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. The sequence of stark, geometric compositions was among the most abstract and avant-garde work being made in the US at the time – created in response to the Cubist art of Picasso and Braque that Sheeler had previously encountered in Europe.
In 1920, Sheeler collaborated with fellow photographer Paul Strand on the short film Manhatta, presenting dramatic views of lower Manhattan. Abstract stills from the 35mm film, which was shot from steep angles, are presented alongside larger prints of Sheeler's cinematic images of New York City, produced shortly after Manhatta – which he used as source material for his paintings. The film Manhatta is on view in the gallery.
Charles Sheeler from Doylestown to Detroit culminates with the 1927 photographs of the Ford Motor Company plant in River Rouge, Michigan, commissioned to celebrate the introduction of Ford's Model A. The cathedral-like scenes convey an optimism for American industry, and are now considered icons of Machine Age photography. All of the photographs in the exhibition are drawn from the Museum's Lane Collection – one of the finest private holdings of 20th-century American art in the world, including Sheeler's entire photographic estate – given to the MFA in 2012. (Text from the MFA website)
Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler
Manhatta
Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art, New York
© Aperture Foundation Inc., Paul Strand Archive
In 1920 Paul Strand and artist Charles Sheeler collaborated on Manhatta, a short silent film that presents a day in the life of lower Manhattan. Inspired by Walt Whitman's book "Leaves of Grass," the film includes multiple segments that express the character of New York. The sequences display a similar approach to the still photography of both artists. Attracted by the cityscape and its visual design, Strand and Sheeler favoured extreme camera angles to capture New York's dynamic qualities. Although influenced by Romanticism in its view of the urban environment, Manhatta is considered the first American avant-garde film.
Manhatta – Rooftops
Manhatta – Through a Balustrade
New York, Buildings in Shadows and Smoke
Ford Plant – Criss–Crossed Conveyors
Ford Plant – Ladle Hooks, Open Hearth Building
Ford Plant – Stamping Press
Monday and Tuesday 10am – 5 pm
Wednesday – Friday 10am – 10 pm
Saturday and Sunday 10am – 5 pm
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston website
Exhibition: 'Dark Fields of the Republic: Alexander Gardner Photographs, 1859-1872' at the National Portrait Gallery, Washington
Categories: American, American Indians, american photographers, black and white photography, documentary photography, exhibition, existence, gallery website, landscape, light, memory, photographic series, photography, photojournalism, portrait, psychological, quotation, reality, space, time and works on paper
Tags: 1859-1872, 1867-1872, A Sharpshooter's Last Sleep, Abraham Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln delivering his second inaugural address, Across the Continent on the Kansas Pacific Railroad, Adjusting the Ropes, Alexander Gardner, Alexander Gardner A Sharpshooter's Last Sleep, Alexander Gardner Abraham Lincoln delivering his second inaugural address, Alexander Gardner Adjusting the Ropes, Alexander Gardner Antietam Bridge Maryland, Alexander Gardner Bridge over the Laramie River near its Junction with the North Platte River, Alexander Gardner Completely Silenced: Dead Confederate Artillerymen, Alexander Gardner Field Where General Reynolds Fell, Alexander Gardner Gardner's Gallery, Alexander Gardner Gathered Together for Burial after the Battle of Antietam, Alexander Gardner General Sheridan and His Staff, Alexander Gardner Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter, Alexander Gardner Ihanktonwan Nakota delegates Long Foot and Little Bird, Alexander Gardner Incidents of the War, Alexander Gardner Incidents of the War: Unfit for Service at the Battle of Gettysburg, Alexander Gardner Indian Peace Commissioners in council with the Northern Cheyenne and Northern Arapaho, Alexander Gardner Lakota delegates Medicine Bull Iron Nation and Yellow Hawk, Alexander Gardner Panorama of Camp Winfield Scott, Alexander Gardner Photographs, Alexander Gardner President Lincoln, Alexander Gardner Rose Greenhow, Alexander Gardner Rose O'Neal Greenhow, Alexander Gardner Ruins of the Arsenal Richmond Virginia, Alexander Gardner Samuel Wilkeson, Alexander Gardner Scouts and Guides, Alexander Gardner Self-Portrait, Alexander Gardner The Drop, Alexander Gardner Ulysses S. Grant, Alexander Gardner View on Battle Field of Antietam, Alexander Gardner Walt Whitman and Party, Alexander Gardner Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way, Allan Pinkerton, American art, american artist, American Civil War, American civil war photography, American Indians, American photography, Antietam Bridge, Antietam Bridge Maryland, Arapaho, Army of the Potomac, Battle Field of Antietam, Battle of Antietam, Battle of Fredericksburg, Bayard Wilkeson, Bishop George Berkeley, Bishop George Berkeley Westward the course of empire takes its way, Bloody Lane, Bridge over the Laramie River near its Junction with the North Platte River, Brulé, c, Civil War Photographs, collodion, collodion glass-plate negatives, Colonel Samuel F. Tappan, Commission Secretary Ashton S. H. White, Completely Silenced, Completely Silenced: Dead Confederate Artillerymen, Confederate troops, conflict with Native American tribes, Crow, Dakota Territory, Dark Fields of the Republic, Dark Fields of the Republic: Alexander Gardner Photographs, David Herold, Devil's Den, domestic dependent nations, Dunker Church, early photographic processes, fiction and truth in the creation of photographs, Field Where General Reynolds Fell, First Battle of Manassas, Fort Laramie, Fort Laramie in Wyoming, Fort Laramie Treaty, Fort Laramie Wyoming, Gardner's Gallery, Gardner's Photographic Sketch Book of the War, Gathered Together for Burial, Gathered Together for Burial after the Battle of Antietam, General Alfred H. Terry, General Christopher C. Augur, General John B. Sanborn, General John Reynolds, General Reynolds, General Sheridan and His Staff, General William S. Harney, General William T. Sherman, George A. Custer, George Atzerodt, George Crook, George McClellan, Gettysburg, Gettysburg photography, glass plate negatives, glass-plate negative, Golden Spike, Golden Spike ceremony, hanging of Lincoln conspirators, Harpers Ferry, Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter, Ihanktonwan Nakota, Ihanktonwan Nakota delegates Long Foot and Little Bird, Imperial glass-plate negatives, Imperial negatives, Imperial photographs, Incidents of the War, Incidents of the War: Unfit for Service at the Battle of Gettysburg, Indian Peace Commissioners in council with the Northern Cheyenne and Northern Arapaho, Indian problem, Iron Nation, Itazipacola Lakota, James Gardner, James Gardner Alexander Gardner, James W. Forsyth, Kansas Pacific, Kansas Pacific Railroad, Lakota, Lakota delegates Medicine Bull Iron Nation and Yellow Hawk, Leaves of Grass, Lewis Powell, Lieutenant Bayard Wilkeson, Lincoln assassination, Lincoln between life and death, Lincoln conspirators, Little Bird, Long Foot, Mary Surrat, Mathew Brady, Mathew Brady's Washington studio, Medicine Bull, military intervention in Indian matters, Miniconjou, National Anthropological Archives, National Portait Gallery, National Portrait Gallery Washington, native american indians, New York City, New York Times, Northern Arapaho, Northern Cheyenne, Oglala, Panorama of Camp Winfield Scott, Peter Doyle, photographs as indexes of character, photojournalism, President Lincoln, Rebel Rose, Robert E. Lee, Rose Greenhow, Rose O'Neal Greenhow, Ruins of the Arsenal Richmond Virginia, Samuel Wilkeson, Scouts and Guides to the Army of the Potomac, Sharpsburg, Sicangu Lakota, Sunken Road, The Dead of Antietam, The Drop, The West 1867-1872, Timothy H. O'Sullivan, Timothy O'Sullivan, Tredegar Iron Works, Ulysses S. Grant, Unfit for Service, Unfit for Service at the Battle of Gettysburg, Union Pacific Railway, Union troops, US military and Indian tribes, US transcontinental railroad, View in Ditch on the Right Wing after the Battle of Antietam, View on Battle Field of Antietam, Walt Whitman, Walt Whitman and Party, Walt Whitman Leaves of Grass, war photography, Wesley Merritt, Westward the course of empire takes its way, William Blackmore, Yanktonai, Yellow Hawk
Exhibition dates: 18th September 2015 – 13th March 2016
THIS IS THE FIRST OF THREE POSTINGS ABOUT (MAINLY AMERICAN) 19th CENTURY PHOTOGRAPHY.
This monster posting is both fascinating and gruesome by turns. They were certainly dark fields, stained crimson with the blood of men of opposing armies, left bloated and rotting in the hot sun. Can you imagine the smell one or two days later when Alexander Gardner arrived to photograph those very fields.
Particularly in the early war years (1861-62)."Gardner has often had his work misattributed to Brady." Gardner worked for Mathew Brady, running his Washington office and working in the field (as many other operatives did) during the early part of the Civil War. Gardner's negatives were published under the banner of the studio of Brady. He finished working for Brady in 1862 before setting up his own studio in May 1863 a few blocks from Brady's Washington studio. This fluidity of authorship continues later in the war when Timothy H. O'Sullivan's photographs, an assistant to Gardner, appeared under the masthead of Gardner's studio. Evidence of this can be observed in the image Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter (July 1863, below) where, at least, Sullivan is credited with the negative at bottom left under the image.
Gardner changed the face of photography. He endowed it with an immediacy and energy that it had previously been lacking. His photographs of the battlefield brought the action "presently" into the lounge rooms of the well-heeled and, by engravings taken from the photographs, into newspapers of the time. His series of photographs of the hanging of the conspirators convicted of Abraham Lincoln's assassination are "considered one of the first examples of photojournalism ever recorded." But he wasn't above rearranging the scene to his liking, as in the moving of the body in Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter (July 1863, below) to make a more advantageous "view" … much like Roger Fenton's moving of the cannonballs in his epic photograph The Valley of the Shadow of Death (1855). Today this would be frowned upon, but in the era these photographs were taken it seemed the most "natural" thing to do, to make a better photograph, and nothing was thought of it.
The exhibition text states, "But his arrangement of the corpse reflects how difficult it was for Gardner and his contemporaries to process the reality of mass casualties in which the dead became anonymous. Caught at a transitional moment, Gardner did not trust the images his camera captured. That this photographic construction would be more marketable to a public still steeped in Victorian sentimentality only adds to Gardner's malfeasance." Malfeasance is a strong word. Malfeasance is defined as an affirmative act, "the performance by a public official of an act that is legally unjustified, harmful, or contrary to law; wrongdoing (used especially of an act in violation of a public trust)." (Dictionary.com) The exhibition text also states that "His actions are unforgivable from both a moral and artistic point of view," and are a blot on Gardner's career.
I don't agree. Of course Gardner trusted the images that his camera captured, he was a photographer! This is a ludicrous statement… it is just that, arriving days after the battle, he wanted compositions that created news and views that were memorable. His affirmative action was not illegal or contrary to the law. Although morally it could be seen as a violation of public trust he was reporting the depravities of war within the first 25 years of the beginning of photography, and he was trying to get across to the general public the lonely desperation of death. In that era, at the very beginning of photographic reportage, who was to tell him it was wrong or illegal? We view these actions through retrospective eyes knowing that this kind of re-arrangement would not be tolerated today (but it is, in the digital manipulation of images!) and the condemnation of today is just a hollow statement. Photography has ALWAYS re-presented reality – through the hand of the author, through the eyes of the viewer.
Other interesting things to note in the posting are:
the mechanical overlaying of colour in the stereograph View on Battle Field of Antietam, Burial party at work (1862, below) where the colour is applied subtly in the left hand photograph while in the right hand image, the colour almost obliterates the figures
the attitude of the participants in Indian Peace Commissioners in council with the Northern Cheyenne and Northern Arapaho, Fort Laramie, Dakota Territory (1868, below). The military and civilian representatives of the government sit at right on boxes, four of them staring directly into the camera aware they are being photographed for prosperity (General William T. Sherman does not, looking pensive with his hands clasped) while on the left, the Native American Indian representatives sit on the ground wrapped in blankets with the backs of two interpreters towards the camera. They do not make eye contact with the camera except for one man, who has turned his head towards the camera and gives it a defiant stare (perhaps I am imagining, but I think not)
The strongest photographs in this posting, other than the masterpiece Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter are not the empirical scenes of the battlefield but two portraits: Ulysses S. Grant (1864, below) and the war weary "cracked plate" image of Abraham Lincoln (1865, below). Both are memorable not just for the low depth of field or the "capture" of remarkable leaders of men during war but for something essentially interior to themselves – their contemplation of self. With Grant you can feel the steely determination (this in the second last year of the war) and, yet, comprehend his statement,
"Though I have been trained as a soldier, and participated in many battles, there never was a time when, in my opinion, some way could not be found to prevent the drawing of the sword"
in this image. What must be done has to be done, but by God I wish it wasn't so. The eyes have it.
With the Lincoln portrait – of which Gardner only pulled one print from the plate before he destroyed it, making this the rarest of images – the charismatic leader is shown with craggy, war weariness. The contextless space around the body is larger than is normal at this time, allowing us to focus on the "thing itself" … and then we have that prophetic crack. "During this sitting, Gardner created this portrait by accident," says the text from the exhibition. How do you create a portrait like this by accident? With the length of the exposure, Lincoln would have had to remain immobile for seconds… not something that you do by accident. No, both Gardner and Lincoln knew that a portrait was being taken. This is previsualisation (depth of field, space around and above the body) at its finest. That the plate was accidentally cracked and then discarded in no way makes this portrait an accident. If this is a portrait of, "Lincoln between life and death, between his role as a historical actor and the mystical figure that he would become with his assassination," it is also the face of a man that you could almost reach out and touch!
Dr Marcus Bunyan for Art Blart
Many thankx to the National Portrait Gallery, Washington for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
"Gardner has often had his work misattributed to Brady, and despite his considerable output, historians have tended to give Gardner less than full recognition for his documentation of the Civil War. Lincoln dismissed McClellan from command of the Army of the Potomac in November 1862, and Gardner's role as chief army photographer diminished. About this time, Gardner ended his working relationship with Brady, probably in part because of Brady's practice of attributing his employees' work as "Photographed by Brady". That winter, Gardner followed General Ambrose Burnside, photographing the Battle of Fredericksburg. Next, he followed General Joseph Hooker. In May 1863, Gardner and his brother James opened their own studio in Washington, D.C, hiring many of Brady's former staff. Gardner photographed the Battle of Gettysburg (July 1863) and the Siege of Petersburg (June 1864-April 1865) during this time.
In 1866, Gardner published a two-volume work, Gardner's Photographic Sketch Book of the Civil War. Each volume contained 50 hand-mounted original prints. The book did not sell well. Not all photographs were Gardner's; he credited the negative producer and the positive print printer. As the employer, Gardner owned the work produced, as with any modern-day studio. The sketchbook contained work by Timothy H. O'Sullivan, James F. Gibson, John Reekie, William Pywell, James Gardner (his brother), John Wood, George N. Barnard, David Knox and David Woodbury, among others. Among his photographs of Abraham Lincoln were some considered to be the last to be taken of the President, four days before his assassination, although later this claim was found to be incorrect, while the pictures were actually taken in February 1865, the last one being on the 5th of February. Gardner would photograph Lincoln on a total of seven occasions while Lincoln was alive. He also documented Lincoln's funeral, and photographed the conspirators involved (with John Wilkes Booth) in Lincoln's assassination. Gardner was the only photographer allowed at their execution by hanging, photographs of which would later be translated into woodcuts for publication in Harper's Weekly."
Text from the Wikipedia website
Dark Fields of the Republic: Alexander Gardner Photographs, 1859-1872
His photographs have "a terrible distinctness." So wrote the New York Times about the work of trailblazing photographer Alexander Gardner (1821-1882). In a career spanning the critical years of the nineteenth century, Gardner created images that documented the crisis of the Union, the Civil War, the United States' expansion into the western territories, and the beginnings of the Indian Wars.
As one of a pioneering generation of American photographers, Gardner helped revolutionize photography, both in his mastery of techniques and by recognizing that the camera's eye could be fluid and mobile. In addition to creating portraits of leaders and generals – he was Abraham Lincoln's favorite photographer – Gardner followed the Union army, taking indelible images of battlefields and military campaigning. His battlefield photographs – including those of the newly dead – created a public sensation, contributing to the change under way in American culture from romanticism to realism, a realism that was the hallmark of his work.
At war's end, Gardner went west. Fascinated, like many artists, by American Indians, he took a series of stunning images of the western tribes, setting set these figures in their native grounds: these photographs are the pictorial evocation of the seemingly limitless western land and sky. He also took images of the Indians in Washington, D.C., where they traveled to negotiate preservation of their way of life. Gardner's portraits of Native Americans are dignified likenesses of a resistant people fighting for their way of life.
In their documentary clarity and startling precision, Alexander Gardner's photographs – taken in the studio, on battlefields, and in the western territories – are a summons back into a darkly turbulent and heroic period in American history."
Text from the exhibition website
Installation views of the exhibition Dark Fields of the Republic: Alexander Gardner Photographs, 1859-1872 at the National Portrait Gallery, Washington with, in the bottom photograph, two people looking at a photograph of Lieutenant General Grant.
Alexander Gardner (1821-1882)
Ulysses S. Grant (1822-1885)
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution
Ulysses S. Grant (detail)
There is a story that when Ulysses S. Grant traveled east in 1864 to take command of all the Union armies, the desk clerk at Washington's Willard Hotel did not recognize him and assigned him to a mean, nondescript room. (When Grant identified himself, he was upgraded to a suite.) The anecdote points out that likenesses were not yet widely distributed, even after the advent of photography. It was possible for famous people to remain unidentified. But fame meant that one had one's photograph taken, as Grant did in this image Gardner took after the western general arrived in Washington. Grant was coming off a string of successes in the West, including the successful siege of Vicksburg, which made him the inevitable choice for overall command. In Grant, Lincoln finally found a general who would consistently engage the enemy's forces. Indicative of Grant's stature, Lincoln bestowed on him the rare title of lieutenant general, a rank previously held only by George Washington. (Text from the exhibition website)
Abraham Lincoln (detail)
This portrait of Abraham Lincoln was taken on February 24, 1861, just before his inauguration on March 4. It has been conjectured that Lincoln is hiding his right hand in his lap because it was swollen from shaking so many hands during his travel from Illinois to Washington. This is also the first studio image depicting Lincoln with a full beard, which he had famously grown between the election and inauguration, purportedly at the behest of a little girl who wrote him from New York that it would improve his appearance. Lincoln was early to recognize the power of the relatively new medium of photography to mold and shape a public persona. He credited a photograph by Mathew Brady, taken when he came to New York City to present himself to Republican Party power brokers, as helping to confirm his suitability for the presidency by showing him well-dressed and dignified. Interestingly, the Brady photograph shows Lincoln standing; in this portrait he is seated, as if ready to begin work as president. (Text from the exhibition website)
Installation view of the exhibition Dark Fields of the Republic: Alexander Gardner Photographs, 1859-1872 at the National Portrait Gallery, Washington showing the "Imperial" glass-plate negative of President Abraham Lincoln from his August 9, 1863, sitting at Gardner's Washington studio, with a print from the negative on the wall behind.
This exhibition provides the rare opportunity to display the means by which a photographic image was produced on paper: the glass-plate negative that was the "film" of early photography. Because of their fragility, surviving glass-plate negatives of this size (the so-called "imperial") are rare: this is one of two of Lincoln that have survived and dates from his August 9, 1863, sitting at Gardner's Washington studio. The process Gardner used was relatively new to America and consisted of hand-coating a glass plate with collodion – a syrupy mixture of guncotton dissolved in alcohol and ether to which bromide and iodine salts had been added. The difficulty for the photographer was that the glass plate had to be coated with collodion, sensitized in a bath of silver nitrate, and exposed in the camera immediately, while the emulsion was still damp. Gardner was acknowledged as a master in evenly coating the plate, which resulted in prints of exceptional clarity. (Text from the exhibition website)
The "cracked-plate" image of Abraham Lincoln, taken by Alexander Gardner on February 5, 1865, is one of the most important and evocative photographs in American history. In preparing for his second inaugural, Lincoln had a series of photographs taken at Gardner's studio. During this sitting, Gardner created this portrait by accident: at some point, possibly when the glass-plate negative was heated to receive a coat of varnish, a crack appeared in the upper half of the plate. Gardner pulled a single print and then discarded the plate, so only one such portrait exists.
The portrait represents a radical departure from Gardner's usual crisp empiricism. The shallow depth of field created when Gardner moved his camera in for a close-up yielded a photograph whose focus is confined to the plane of Lincoln's cheeks, while the remainder of the image appears diffused and even out of focus. Lincoln is careworn and tired, his face grooved by the emotional shocks of war. Yet his face also bears a small smile, perhaps as he contemplates the successful conclusion of hostilities and the restoration of the Union. This is Lincoln between life and death, between his role as a historical actor and the mystical figure that he would become with his assassination. Although Lincoln looked forward to his second term, we know, as he could not, that he will soon be assassinated. This image inextricably links history and myth, creating one of the most powerful American portraits. (Text from the exhibition website)
Smithsonian's First Major Retrospective of Alexander Gardner's Photographs at the National Portrait Gallery
Exhibition Will Highlight Gardner's Civil War Photographs, Including His One-of-a-Kind Image of President Lincoln
"Considered America's first modern photographer, just as the Civil War is considered the first modern war, Alexander Gardner created dramatic and vivid photographs of battlefields and played a crucial role in the transformation of American culture by injecting a sobering note of realism to American photography.
"Gardner's photographs showed how the new medium and art form could develop to meet the challenges of modern society," said Kim Sajet, director of the Portrait Gallery. "These are a record of the sacrifice and loss that occurred in the great national struggle over the Union. Our photograph of Lincoln by him, known as the 'cracked-plate,' is the museum's 'Mona Lisa.'" [see above]
The first section of the exhibition will highlight Gardner's Civil War photographs, and his role as President Abraham Lincoln's preferred photographer. Gardner photographed the president many times, recording the impact of the war on his face. Among these images is the "cracked-plate" portrait, a photograph that is arguably the most iconic image of Lincoln. In addition, the exhibition will encompass Gardner's portraits of other prominent statesmen and generals, as well as private citizens.
Also in the exhibition are Gardner's landscapes of the American West and portraits of American Indians. These document the course of American expansion as postwar settlers moved westward, challenged by geography and Indian tribes resistant to losing their ancestral homelands. Gardner's landscapes are evocative studies of almost limitless horizons, giving a sense of the emptiness of western space. These are contrasted with his detailed portraits of Indian chiefs and tribal delegations.
Curated by David C. Ward, Portrait Gallery senior historian, and guest curator Heather Shannon, former photo archivist at the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian, with research assistance from Sarah Campbell, this exhibition will feature more than 140 objects, including photographs, prints and books. The exhibition will be the finale of the Portrait Gallery's seven-part series commemorating the 150th anniversary of the Civil War."
Press release from the National Portrait Gallery
Samuel Wilkeson (1817-1889)
Salted paper print
Museum purchase from the Charles Isaacs Collection made possible in part by the Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen Endowment
On July 1, 1863, at the Battle of Gettysburg, nineteen-year-old Lieutenant Bayard Wilkeson and his men attempted to slow the Confederate forces. A shell mangled the lieutenant's right knee as his unit, Battery G of the Fourth U.S. Artillery, drew the attention of Confederate cannons. After amputating his leg with a pocket knife and being carried to an almshouse, Wilkeson ordered his men to return to battle. A few days later, his father, Samuel Wilkeson, a journalist, wrote home to say he had found Bayard dead "from neglect and bleeding." On the front page of the July 6 New York Times, Samuel wrote a moving, influential, and widely circulated account of the battle. Bayard's story and his father's grief became symbolic of the North's suffering, sacrifice, and righteousness. The article concludes, "oh, you dead, who at Gettysburg have baptized with your blood the second birth of Freedom in America, how you are to be envied!" (Text from the exhibition website)
Samuel Wilkeson (1817-1889) (detail)
In this self-portrait taken at Mathew Brady's Washington studio, Alexander Gardner presents himself wearing the garb of a mountain man or trapper, sporting buckskins and a fur hat; Gardner's trademark full, ungroomed beard only adds to the frontiersman image. Gardner holds a bow and arrow while standing on Indian rugs. The image captures America's enduring fascination with the West and adopting the garb of Native peoples. It also shows Gardner, a man about whom we know little, in disguise, hiding himself in a fictional frontier persona. Although he is acting a role, Gardner, whose family had bought land in Iowa in the antebellum period, was genuinely interested in the western lands and the fate of the Indians. In the 1860s he began his project of photographing the western tribal delegations when they came to Washington. After the Civil War he went west to photograph Indians on their native grounds. (Text from the exhibition website)
James Gardner
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Larry J. West
Alexander Gardner (detail)
Not as flamboyantly costumed as in his first self-portrait, this image of Alexander Gardner shows him as a workingman, which was his family's heritage back in Scotland. Gardner's proficiency as a photographer was based in part on his manual dexterity; he was a master at coating the glass-plate negatives with collodion, which formed the plate's light-sensitive emulsion. By the beginnings of 1863 James Gardner was working with his brother in Washington. (Text from the exhibition website)
Rose Greenhow (c. 1854-?)
Rose O'Neal Greenhow (c. 1815-1864)
One of the Confederacy's most successful female spies, Rose O'Neal Greenhow was a prominent Washington widow and a staunch southern sympathizer. The Confederacy recruited her as a spy after war erupted in 1861. Most notably, Greenhow is credited with passing along intelligence prior to the First Battle of Manassas, insuring a southern victory. Soon after, her covert activities were uncovered and she was placed under house arrest. Gardner took this photograph after "Rebel Rose" and her daughter, Little Rose, were transferred to the Old Capitol Prison in 1862. Greenhow served five months before being exiled to the South. She then traveled to Europe to promote the Confederate cause. Returning in September 1864, Greenhow drowned attempting to run the federal blockade of Wilmington, N.C. The Confederacy buried her with military honors. (Text from the exhibition website)
View on Battle Field of Antietam, Burial party at work
Coloured Stereograph (Albumen silver print on stereo card)
View on Battle Field of Antietam, Burial party at work (detail)
View on Battle Field of Antietam, Burial party at work (details of left and right photographs)
Antietam Bridge, Maryland
Photograph by Alexander Gardner, from Gardner's Photographic Sketch Book of the War
Records of the War Department General and Special Staffs, Record Group 165, National Archives Still Picture Branch, College Park, Maryland
Antietam Bridge (not to be confused with the more famous Burnside Bridge located to the south, which was the site of a confused Union attack during the Battle of Antietam's third phase) spanned Antietam Creek, roughly in the middle of the battlefield. Before the battle, some Union troops used it to move toward the Confederate lines arrayed just outside the village of Sharpsburg. The bridge was not brought into play during the battle since George McClellan, fearful of overcommitting his troops, kept a large reserve near his headquarters at the Pry House, a reserve that would have used the bridge in its attack if it had been sent against Robert E. Lee's lines. Unlike Burnside Bridge, the original stone Antietam Bridge, with its three arches, has not survived and has been replaced by a modern span. (Text from the exhibition website)
Scouts and Guides to the Army of the Potomac, Berlin, MD, October, 1862
Scouts and Guides to the Army of the Potomac, Berlin, MD, October, 1862 (detail)
Gardner documented specialized units in the Union army, as with the Telegraphic Corps, and here with the so-called "Scouts and Guides," who were part of the intelligence service that Allan Pinkerton ran for the Army of the Potomac. Gardner took this group portrait when he returned to the area around Antietam; Berlin (now Brunswick), Maryland, is on the Potomac, just downstream from Harpers Ferry. In his Sketchbook Gardner wrote about the hardship and dangers faced by men who frequently acted as spies and could be executed if caught: "Their faces are indexes of the character required for such hazardous work." Gardner's statement exemplifies how connections are drawn between appearance and personality; a photograph was seen as particularly informative psychologically. (Text from the exhibition website)
Completely Silenced: Dead Confederate Artillerymen, as they lay around their battery after the Battle of Antietam
Stereograph (Albumen silver print on stereo card)
Collection of Bob Zeller
Completely Silenced: Dead Confederate Artillerymen, as they lay around their battery after the Battle of Antietam (detail)
The Battle of Antietam (Maryland) occurred on September 17, 1862, and it is still America's bloodiest day, with more than 25,000 combined casualties (killed and wounded) on both sides. Despite a nearly three-to-one numerical advantage, the Union forces were unable to score a decisive victory. The heavy casualties did force Robert E. Lee to withdraw, however, ending his first invasion of the North. Gardner probably arrived at the battlefield on September 18. He took this image of dead Confederates near the Dunker Church, a focal point of the Union attack, which began shortly after 7.00 am the day before. (Text from the exhibition website)
Gathered Together for Burial after the Battle of Antietam (View in Ditch on the Right Wing after the Battle of Antietam)
This photograph, probably taken on September 19, graphically exposes the savagery of the fighting that occurred at the "Sunken Road" during the second, midday phase of the Union assault on Lee's defensive line. A worn-down cart path provided perfect cover for Confederate troops, who initially blunted the Union attack, inflicting tremendous casualties. However, once the northerners had flanked the road, southern troops were trapped and exposed to a withering fire that choked the road with their corpses; hereinafter, the "Sunken Road" was known as "Bloody Lane." (Text from the exhibition website)
Alexander Gardner (1821-1882) and Timothy O'Sullivan (1840-1882)
Field Where General Reynolds Fell, Gettysburg, July, 1863
Photograph by Timothy O'Sullivan, from Alexander Gardner's Photographic Sketch Book of the War. Records of the War Department General and Special Staffs, Record Group 165, National Archives Still Picture Branch, College Park, Maryland
General John Reynolds (1820-1863) of Pennsylvania was the highest-ranking casualty at Gettysburg. One of the Union's best generals, Reynolds had been considered a potential replacement for George McClellan. On July 1, commanding the left wing of the Union forces, Reynolds moved his infantry forward to blunt the Confederate advance, bringing on a wholesale engagement of the two armies; his decisiveness bought time for the Union to consolidate its forces at Gettysburg. He was killed leading a charge by the Second Wisconsin just west of the town. Despite its title, it is unlikely that Gardner's photograph depicted this spot since he did not photograph any of the sites from Gettysburg's first day. Instead, documentary evidence indicates that it was probably taken near Rose Farm, south of the battlefield. Initially Gardner published the photograph without reference to Reynolds. That was added later when Gardner realized he had missed an opportunity and sought to capitalize on Reynolds's heroism. (Text from the exhibition website)
Incidents of the War: Unfit for Service at the Battle of Gettysburg
Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA
Gift of David L. Hack and Museum purchase, with funds from Walter P. Chrysler, Jr., by exchange
After the success of his series "The Dead of Antietam," which he had made while working for Mathew Brady, Gardner paid special attention in his Gettysburg photography to concentrate on the casualties, both human and animal. He got to the battlefield quickly, probably by July 7, as the process of burying the dead was just under way. In addition to the more than 7,000 soldiers killed, it has been estimated that more than 1,500 artillery horses died during the battle. Disposal of the horses complicated the task of clearing the land; while attempts were made to deal respectfully with human remains, the horses were collected into piles and burned. Gardner's title for this picture may be taken as ironically low-key: the graphic image needed no rhetorical embellishments. (Text from the exhibition website)
Panorama of Camp Winfield Scott, Yorktown, Virginia
Albumen silver prints from glass negatives
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Gilman Collection, Museum Purchase, 2005
Image copyright: © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY
Gardner and his family immigrated to the United States in 1856. Finding that many friends and family members at the cooperative he had helped to form were dead or dying of tuberculosis, he stayed in New York. He initiated contact with Brady and came to work for him that year, continuing until 1862. At first, Gardner specialized in making large photographic prints, called Imperial photographs, but as Brady's eyesight began to fail, Gardner took on increasing responsibilities. In 1858, Brady put him in charge of his Washington, D.C. gallery. (Wikipedia)
"Before leaving home, he had seen and admired photographs by Mathew Brady, who was already famous and prosperous as a portraitist of American presidents and statesmen. It was Brady that likely paid Gardner's passage to New York and soon after arriving, he went to visit the famous photographer's studio and decided to stay.
Gardner was so successful there that Brady sent him to manage his Washington, D.C., studio, and soon after that, he was photographing Abraham Lincoln as the owner of his own studio [May 1863], and about to produce his historic images of the nation's struggle. But there was more – after Appomattox, unknown to most of those who have praised his groundbreaking photographs of the war, he went on to record the westward march of the railroads and the Native American tribes scattering around them.
When the Civil War began, Mathew Brady sent more than 20 assistants into the field to follow the Union army. All of their work, including that of Gardner and the talented Timothy O'Sullivan, was issued with the credit line of the Brady studio. Thus the public assumed that Brady himself had lugged the fragile wagonload of equipment into the field, focused the big boxy camera and captured the images. Indeed, sometimes he had. But beginning with the battle of Antietam in September 1862, Gardner determined to take a step beyond his boss and his colleagues.
It pictured a dead Confederate soldier in a rocky den [see above], with his weapon propped nearby. Photographic historian William Frassanito has compared it to other images and believes that Gardner moved that body to a more dramatic hiding place to make the famous photo. Taking such license would blend with the dramatic way his album mused over the fallen soldier: "Was he delirious with agony, or did death come slowly to his relief, while memories of home grew dearer as the field of carnage faded before him? What visions, of loved ones far away, may have hovered above his stony pillow?"
Significantly, as illustrated by that image and description, Gardner's book spoke of himself as "the artist." Not the photographer, journalist or artisan, but the artist, who is by definition the creator, the designer, the composer of a work. But of course rearranging reality is not necessary to tell a gripping story, as he showed conspicuously after the Lincoln assassination. First he made finely focused portraits that caught the character of many of the surviving conspirators (much earlier in 1863, he had done the slain assassin, the actor John Wilkes Booth). Then, on the day of execution, he pictured the four – Mary Surrat, David Herold, Lewis Powell and George Atzerodt – standing as if posing on the scaffold, while their hoods and ropes were adjusted. Then their four bodies are seen dangling below while spectators look on from the high wall of the Washington Arsenal – as fitting a last scene as any artist might imagine.
After all Gardner had seen and accomplished, the rest of his career was bound to be anticlimax, but he was only 43 years old, and soon took on new challenges. In Washington, he photographed Native American chieftains and their families when they came to sign treaties that would give the government control over most of their ancient lands. Then he headed west.
In 1867, Gardner was appointed chief photographer for the eastern division of the Union Pacific Railway, a road later called the Kansas Pacific. Starting from St. Louis, he traveled with surveyors across Kansas, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona and on to California. In their long, laborious trek, he and his crew documented far landscapes, trails, rivers, tribes, villages and forts that had never been photographed before. At Fort Laramie in Wyoming, he pictured the far-reaching treaty negotiations between the government and the Oglala, Miniconjou, Brulé, Yanktonai, and Arapaho Indians. This entire historic series was published in 1869 in a portfolio called Across the Continent on the Kansas Pacific Railroad (Route of the 35th Parallel).
Those rare pictures and the whole expanse of Gardner's career are now on display at the National Portrait Gallery in a show entitled Dark Fields of the Republic: Alexander Gardner Photographs, 1859-1872. Among the dozens of images included are not only his war pictures and those of the nation's westward expansion, but the famous "cracked-plate" image that was among the last photographs of a war-weary Abraham Lincoln. With this show, which will run into next March, the gallery is recognizing a body of photography – of this unique art – unmatched in the nation's history."
Ernest B. Furgurson. "Alexander Gardner Saw Himself as an Artist, Crafting the Image of War in All Its Brutality," on the Smithsonian.com website October 8, 2015 [Online] Cited 27/02/2016.
Gardner's Gallery
c. 1863-65
DeGolyer Library, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas
The nation's capital was a center for photography during the war, and Alexander Gardner set up his new studio in May 1863 at Seventh and D Streets, just a few blocks from that of his former employer, Mathew Brady. Gardner split with Brady after the success of his Antietam photographs. The signage gives a full range of Gardner's services, showing how he catered to the market for photographic images; the main sign reads "News of the War." (Text from the exhibition website)
Walt Whitman and Party
The Western Reserve Historical Society, Cleveland, Ohio
"This picture comes from a time when materials worked for each other. If pictures from these times were enlarged we would find their sharpness to be disappointing … but as this concept was not imagined, it shouldn't be considered. The lens, the paper, the chemistry, the contact process all worked together. It is a superb image. If it were possible to make images like this, it is no wonder that highly talented people wanted to be photographers. And with talent, there were some with this level of sensitivity.
Note how the enlargement shows us some details that were not easily visible, but the tonality of the original has not carried over. Look at how the tonality of the curved branch combines with the figure of Whitman in the original, but it has crumbled in the enlargement … it is probably not possible to scan the original and keep the tonality without spending a squillion. Anyhow, it is a moment that has not been lost. It is almost too big a step of faith to believe that this much of the "air" of the original scene could be preserved."
Dr Marcus Bunyan, March 2016
Walt Whitman and Party (detail)
Walt Whitman (1819-1892) came to Washington from New York City in search of his brother George, who had been wounded on December 13, 1862, at the Battle of Fredericksburg. Whitman found his brother, whose wound was not serious, and decided to stay in Washington. Whitman had been in a funk in New York: Leaves of Grass was not selling, and he was finding it difficult to write or revise his poetry. In Washington, Whitman assumed the role of a hospital visitor, comforting wounded soldiers, bringing them small treats, and, most important, writing their letters. He observed Abraham Lincoln, whom he idolized, from afar. And he began a relationship with Peter Doyle, a former Confederate soldier, whom he met on a streetcar and lived with for eight years. The other people in this photograph cannot be identified. The leaves on the trees would indicate that it was taken in late spring or summer of 1863. (Text from the exhibition website)
Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter
Collection of Ron Perisho
Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter (detail)
Gardner's manipulation of this Confederate casualty to create a narrative vignette about the soldier's fate indicates how unstable the line was between fiction and truth in the creation of photographs. Gardner's intrusion shows that he thought he had to improve his images so that they would function as a sentimental narrative that could be more easily read by his audience. His actions are unforgivable from both a moral and artistic point of view. But his arrangement of the corpse reflects how difficult it was for Gardner and his contemporaries to process the reality of mass casualties in which the dead became anonymous. Caught at a transitional moment, Gardner did not trust the images his camera captured. That this photographic construction would be more marketable to a public still steeped in Victorian sentimentality only adds to Gardner's malfeasance.
In his Sketchbook Gardner created an elaborate story around his photographs of a dead Confederate "sharpshooter" who apparently had fallen during fighting at the Devil's Den. Gardner claimed that he took photographs when he returned to the battlefield in the fall of 1863 and "discovered" the corpse, along with the rifle propped against the stone wall, still undisturbed where the soldier had fallen. The story isn't credible: four months after the battle, the body would have long since decayed, and souvenir hunters would have picked up the rifle. The truth, untangled by photographic historian William Frassanito, is a blot on Gardner's career: Gardner and his assistants moved a dead soldier [below] from a nearby line of bodies being readied for burial. Shortly after the battle they posed it amid the boulders, including the carefully positioned rifle. The soldier was a regular infantryman, not a sharpshooter or sniper. (Text from the exhibition website)
A Sharpshooter's Last Sleep, Gettysburg, July 1863
National Archives, Washington, D.C.
Ruins of the Arsenal, Richmond, Virginia, April 1863
Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, Maine, Museum Purchase, Lloyd O. and Marjorie Strong Coulter Fund
Ironically, destruction of the major Confederate armory occurred not from a Union assault but by an accidental fire that started in Richmond after the government began to evacuate the city on April 1, 1865, leaving it vulnerable. Chaos and confusion reigned as panicked residents faced the prospect of being occupied by the invading northerners; looting and destruction of property occurred as well. In the breakdown of order, fires broke out and quickly spread, destroying as many as fifty city blocks, until Union soldiers acting as firefighters extinguished them in part. Among the major buildings destroyed were the Tredegar Iron Works and the Arsenal. The Arsenal had been built earlier in the century but had fallen into disuse. It was made operative again when the war broke out; among the weapons it housed were those taken from the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry in 1861. (Text from the exhibition website)
Abraham Lincoln delivering his second inaugural address as President of the United States, Washington, D.C.
Prints & Photographs Division, Library of Congress
Abraham Lincoln delivering his second inaugural address as President of the United States, Washington, D.C. (detail)
Abraham Lincoln's major speeches as president – at both inaugurals and at Gettysburg – focused on large themes, in particular human nature and God's will, as well as the character of the nation. The hard politics of formulating and implementing the details of, for instance, emancipation, civil rights, and reconstruction, were kept offstage in the day-to-day process of governing. So at his second inaugural on March 4, 1865, Lincoln delivered a moral homily on how neither side, North or South, could know God's will for mankind, and that the war had unintended consequences. Both parties now had to accept living with those consequences, namely the end of slavery and the beginning of civil equality for African Americans, Lincoln hinted. He ended with his majestic call to move on from war to civic peace: "With malice toward none, with charity for all," let us "bind up the nation's wounds" to "achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace." Flush with victory, many in the North were puzzled or displeased by the president's conciliatory words. (Text from the exhibition website)
Adjusting the Ropes
Indiana Historical Society (P0409)
Daniel R. Weinberg Lincoln Conspirators Collection
Adjusting the Ropes (detail)
Of the eight Booth conspirators tried for their role in the assassination plot, four were sentenced to death: Mary Surratt, David Herold, Lewis Powell, and George Atzerodt. While the men had been major participants in the plot (even if Herold and Atzerodt had failed at their assignments), Mary Surratt sentence was more controversial, as it was argued that her boardinghouse was simply where the conspirators had met; that her son John was part of the conspiracy did not help her cause. The jury was also uneasy about the federal government executing a woman for the first time. Convicted and sentenced on June 30, the conspirators were executed on July 7 at Washington's Old Arsenal Prison, out of public view. In a macabre display of chivalry, a man holding an umbrella shielded Mary Surratt from the sun before the traps were sprung.
Gardner was the only photographer allowed to document the executions, a recognition of his prominence as a documentarian. His camera position on the wall of the prison allowed him a panoramic view. (Text from the exhibition website)
The date was July 7, 1865. Alexander Gardner and his assistant Timothy O'Sullivan took a series of ten photographs using both a large format camera with collodion glass-plate negatives and a stereo camera (used to make 3D stereoscope pictures). This series of photographs are considered one of the first examples of photojournalism ever recorded.
Mary Surratt, Lewis Powell, David Herold and Georg Atzerodt. The four conspirators are now standing (Mrs. Surratt is supported by two soldiers) and is being bound. A hood has already been placed over Lewis Powell's head by Lafayette Baker's detective John H. Roberts. The nooses are being fitted around the necks of David Herold and George Atzerodt.
"On July 7, 1865, at 1.15 pm., a procession led by General Hartranft escorted the four condemned prisoners through the courtyard and up the steps to the gallows. Each had their ankles and wrists bound by manacles. Mary Surratt led the way, wearing a black bombazine dress, black bonnet, and black veil. More than 1,000 people – including government officials, members of the U.S. armed forces, friends and family of the accused, official witnesses, and reporters – watched. General Hancock limited attendance to those who had a ticket, and only those who had a good reason to be present were given a ticket. (Most of those present were military officers and soliders, as fewer than 200 tickets had been printed.) Alexander Gardner, who had photographed the body of Booth and taken portraits of several of the male conspirators while they were imprisoned aboard naval ships, photographed the execution for the government. Hartranft read the order for their execution. Surratt, either weak from her illness or swooning in fear (perhaps both), had to be supported by two soldiers and her priests. The condemned were seated in chairs, Surratt almost collapsing into hers. She was seated to the right of the others, the traditional "seat of honor" in an execution. White cloth was used to bind their arms were bound to their sides, and their ankles and thighs together. The cloths around Surratt's legs were tied around her dress below the knees. Each person was ministered to by a member of the clergy. From the scaffold, Powell said, "Mrs. Surratt is innocent. She doesn't deserve to die with the rest of us". Fathers Jacob and Wiget prayed over Mary Surratt, and held a crucifix to her lips. About 16 minutes elapsed from the time the prisoners entered the courtyard until they were ready for execution.
A white bag was placed over the head of each prisoner after the noose was put in place. Surratt's bonnet was removed, and the noose put around her neck by a Secret Service officer. She complained that the bindings about her arms hurt, and the officer preparing said, "Well, it won't hurt long." Finally, the prisoners were asked to stand and move foward a few feet to the nooses. The chairs were removed. Mary Surratt's last words, spoken to a guard as he moved her forward to the drop, were "Please don't let me fall." Surratt and the others stood on the drop for about 10 seconds, and then Captain Rath clapped his hands. Four soldiers of Company F of the 14th Veteran Reserves knocked out the supports holding the drops in place, and the condemned fell. Surratt, who had moved forward enough to barely step onto the drop, lurched forward and slid partway down the drop – her body snapping tight at the end of the rope, swinging back and forth. Surratt's death appeared to be the easiest. Atzerodt's stomach heaved once and his legs quivered, and then he was still. Herold and Powell struggled for nearly five minutes, strangling to death.
Each body was inspected by a physician to ensure that death had occurred. The bodies of the executed were allowed to hang for about 30 minutes. The bodies began to be cut down at 1.53 pm. A corporal raced to the top of the gallows and cut down Atzerodt's body, which fell to the ground with a thud. He was reprimanded, and the other bodies cut down more gently. Herold's body was next, followed by Powell's. Surratt's body was cut down at 1.58 pm. As Surratt's body was cut loose, her head fell forward. A soldier joked, "She makes a good bow" and was rebuked by an officer for his poor use of humor.
Upon examination, the military surgeons determined that no one's neck had been broken by the fall, as intended. The manacles and cloth bindings were removed (but not the white execution masks), and the bodies were placed into the pine coffins. The name of each person was written on a piece of paper by acting Assistant Adjutant R. A. Watts, and inserted in a glass vial (which was placed into the coffin). The coffins were buried against the prison wall in shallow graves, just a few feet from the gallows."
"Mary Surratt" text from the Wikipedia website
General Sheridan and His Staff
Another in Alexander Gardner's valedictory series of the major Union commanders in each theater of the war, this photograph groups four of the figures from the 1864 campaign in the Shenandoah Valley under the command of Philip Sheridan (1831-1888). Sheridan is standing to the left; at the table are cavalry officer Wesley Merritt (1834-1910); George Crook (1830-1890), who had an independent force in western Virginia before joining Sheridan's army; Sheridan's chief of staff, James W. Forsyth (1835-1906); and perhaps America's most famous cavalryman, George A. Custer (1839-1876).
This photograph brings together the men who would be major figures in the settlement of the Great Plains and the Indian Wars – none more emblematic than Custer. As such, it provides the bridge between the first half of Gardner's career during the Civil War and the images of western land and people on which he focused during the rest of his photographic career. One war had ended; another was beginning. (Text from the exhibition website)
General Sheridan and His Staff (detail)
" … Gardner was born in Paisley in 1821 and trained as a jeweller before moving into the world of newspapers. An idealist and socialist, he formed the left-leaning newspaper the Glasgow Sentinel in 1851. His keen interest in photography led to him emigrating across the pond in the hope of furthering his career. He was headhunted by [Matthew] Brady and at the outbreak of the war was well-positioned in Washington.
He was recruited as a staff photographer by General George B. McClellan, commander of the Army of the Potomac, and made history on 19 September 1862 when he took the first photographs of casualties on the battlefield at Antietam. In 1863, Gardner split from Brady and formed his own gallery in Washington with his brother James [May 1863]. In July of that year, he photographed the aftermath of the Battle of Gettysburg, developing images in his travelling darkroom.
Author Keith Steiner said: 'Gardner was essentially a photojournalist. He had to process and develop the photographs on the move and in the middle of a battlefield which was not easy. He was highly regarded and Walt Whitman once said that he 'saw beyond his camera'… 'He was an artist, in some ways a scientist and a publisher. He was the complete package.'
Gardner was also the official photographer to President Abraham Lincoln. He captured him seven times, including before his inauguration in March 1861 and in February 1865, just weeks before he was assassinated. The war-time leader personally visited Gardner to have his photograph taken every year instead of the Scotsman visiting the White House.
Keith said: 'Most of the photographs you see of Lincoln were taken by Gardner and chart how he aged physically. He was pictured in 1861 then a few years later and it is like a different man. In February 1865, he is a broken man and has aged about 20 years through the stress of the civil war. It is an incredibly revealing photograph'."
Anonymous. "How Abraham Lincoln's Scottish photographer became the first man to capture the horrors of the Civil War but was robbed of the credit… until now," on the Daily Mail Australia website 25 January 2014 [Online] Cited 27/02/2016.
The West, 1867-1872
After the war, Alexander Gardner photographed events and people associated with one of the most abiding preoccupations of the nineteenth century: westward expansion. From 1867 to 1872 he made portraits of American Indian leaders who traveled to Washington to negotiate preservation of their traditional lands and lifeways, even as white Americans flooded the frontier. In 1867, Gardner became the first photographer to document a transcontinental project, making views of the Kansas Pacific Railroad's construction activities, bustling frontier towns and settlements, Army forts, Indian villages, and magnificent empty landscapes.
The federal government then hired Gardner to photograph the spring 1868 treaty negotiations between the Indian Peace Commission and leaders of the Crow, Northern Cheyenne, Northern Arapaho, and Lakota in the Dakota Territory. The Fort Laramie Treaty established reservations on the northern Plains, marking a watershed moment in the relationship between Native peoples and the government. Gardner's images are the only photographs of treaty negotiations ever commissioned by the U.S. government. (Text from the exhibition website)
"Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way." Laying track, 300 miles west of Missouri River, 19th October, 1867
William T. Sherman Collection of Alexander Gardner Photographs, National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution (P10134)
"Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way." Laying track, 300 miles west of Missouri River, 19th October, 1867 (detail)
Alexander Gardner quoted from the final stanza of a 1726 poem by Bishop George Berkeley for the title of this photograph. The Anglo-Irish philosopher had originally offered his verse as a lamentation on the decline of British influence in North America, but after the Civil War, as the United States turned with determination to its expansionist agenda, Americans found particular resonance in Berkeley's line, "Westward the course of empire takes its way." Constructing a transcontinental railroad was central to the achievement of these ambitions. Although the company survived into the 1870s, the Kansas Pacific Railroad was unable to rally federal support for a transcontinental route along the southerly thirty-fifth and thirty-second parallels. On May 10, 1869, at Promontory Point in the Utah Territory, the "Golden Spike" ceremony joined the more northern tracks of the Union Pacific Railroad with those of the Central Pacific Railroad, marking the completion of the first railroads to link the East and West coasts of the United States. (Text from the exhibition website)
Bridge over the Laramie River near its Junction with the North Platte River, Fort Laramie, Dakota Territory
Indian Peace Commissioners in council with the Northern Cheyenne and Northern Arapaho, Fort Laramie, Dakota Territory
National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution; William T. Sherman Collection of Alexander Gardner Photographs (P15390)
Indian Peace Commissioners in council with the Northern Cheyenne and Northern Arapaho, Fort Laramie, Dakota Territory (details)
Left to right: Colonel Samuel F. Tappan (1831-1913), General William S. Harney (1800-1889), General William T. Sherman (1820-1891), General John B. Sanborn (1826-1904), General Christopher C. Augur (1821-1898), General Alfred H. Terry (1827-1890), and Commission Secretary Ashton S. H. White (lifedates unknown)
In the summer of 1867, when Congress convened the Indian Peace Commission, popular opinion in the eastern United States supported a diplomatic resolution to the so-called "Indian problem" on both the northern and southern Plains. (The negotiations on the southern Plains were not photographed.) Consisting of civilians and army generals, the commission managed to secure treaties with the region's "hostile" tribes and convened its final meeting on October 7, 1868. By then, public sentiment had taken an aggressive turn and demanded increased military intervention in Indian matters. Overruling their more diplomatically minded colleagues, the commission's military members – led by General William T. Sherman – used the shift in the political landscape to advantage. As a body, the commission resolved that the government "should cease to recognize the Indian tribes as 'domestic dependent nations.'" Treaty-making, or diplomacy, was at an end, and in the coming years, military conflict characterized U.S.-Indian relations on the Plains. (Text from the exhibition website)
Lakota delegates Medicine Bull, Iron Nation, and Yellow Hawk with their Agent-Interpreter, Washington, D.C.
Lakota delegates Medicine Bull, Iron Nation, and Yellow Hawk with their Agent-Interpreter, Washington, D.C. (detail)
Left to right: Medicine Bull (lifedates unknown), unidentified interpreter, Iron Nation (1815-1894), and Yellow Hawk (lifedates unknown)
Alexander Gardner made three portraits of each American Indian pictured here: a group portrait and two separate portraits of each delegate, one in his Native and one in his Western attire. (A suit was often among the gifts given to Native delegates to the capital.) It is unknown how Medicine Bull (Sicangu Lakota), Iron Nation (Sicangu Lakota), and Yellow Hawk (Itazipacola Lakota) were dressed when they arrived to sit for their portraits, but Gardner's apparent desire to make two individual portraits of each in many ways anticipates the popular "before and after" photographs of Native people that circulated in the following decades. The photographs were made to document the supposed salutary benefits of the sitter's exposure to American civilization. (Text from the exhibition website)
The Lakȟóta people (pronounced [laˈkˣota]; also known as Teton, Thítȟuŋwaŋ ("prairie dwellers"), and Teton Sioux (from Nadouessioux – 'snake' or 'enemy') are an indigenous people of the Great Plains of North America. They are part of a confederation of seven related Sioux tribes, the Očhéthi Šakówiŋ or seven council fires, and speak Lakota, one of the three major dialects of the Sioux language. The Lakota are the westernmost of the three Siouan language groups, occupying lands in both North and South Dakota. The seven bands or "sub-tribes" of the Lakota are:
Sičháŋǧu (Brulé, Burned Thighs)
Oglála ("They Scatter Their Own")
Itázipčho (Sans Arc, Without Bows)
Húŋkpapȟa ("End Village", Camps at the End of the Camp Circle)
Mnikȟówožu ("Plant beside the Stream", Planters by the Water)
Sihásapa ("Black Feet")
Oóhenuŋpa (Two Kettles)
Notable Lakota persons include Tȟatȟáŋka Íyotake (Sitting Bull) from the Húnkpapȟa band; Touch the Clouds from the Miniconjou band; and, Tȟašúŋke Witkó (Crazy Horse), Maȟpíya Lúta (Red Cloud), Heȟáka Sápa (Black Elk), Siŋté Glešká (Spotted Tail), and Billy Mills from the Oglala band. (Text from the Wikipedia website)
Ihanktonwan Nakota delegates Long Foot and Little Bird, Washington, D.C.
Albumen silver print National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution; William T. Sherman Collection of Alexander Gardner Photographs (P10149)
Ihanktonwan Nakota delegates Long Foot and Little Bird, Washington, D.C. (detail)
In a letter dated February 20, 1867, Smithsonian Institution Secretary Joseph Henry pressed Commissioner of Indian Affairs Lewis V. Bogy to fund a comprehensive effort to photograph Native delegates to Washington. Henry envisioned a kind of archive, a "trustworthy collection of likenesses of the principal tribes of the United States," urgently adding that with the passing of "the Indian" only a few years remained to undertake such a project. Bogy apparently passed on the project, but the Smithsonian found an alternative collaborator in Englishman William Blackmore. (Blackmore posed before Alexander Gardner's camera with Oglala Lakota leader Red Cloud. The portrait of the two men is on display nearby.) Blackmore commissioned local Washington photographers like Gardner to make portraits of visiting delegates such as the Ihanktonwan Nakota delegates Long Foot (lifedates unknown) and Little Bird (lifedates unknown), pictured here. Blackmore made his photographs available to the Smithsonian; they represent the institution's very first photograph collection and are now housed in the National Anthropological Archives. (Text from the exhibition website)
Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery
8th and F Sts NW
11.30 am – 7.00 pm daily
Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery website
Exhibition: 'Eyes on the Street: street photography in the 21st century' at the Cincinnati Art Museum
Categories: American, american photographers, architecture, black and white photography, colour photography, exhibition, existence, film, gallery website, installation art, landscape, light, memory, New York, Paris, photographic series, photography, psychological, reality, sculpture, space, street photography, time, video and works on paper
Tags: actualité films, Architecture of Density, Barbara Probst, Barbara Probst Exposure, Barbara Probst Exposure #106, Brian Sholis, CCTV, Cincinnati Art Museum, cityscape, Control Room, decisive moment, Exposure, Eyes on the Street, Georg Simmel, James Nares, James Nares Street, Jane Jacobs, Jason Evans, Jason Evans NYLPT, Jennifer West, Jennifer West One Mile Film, Jill Magid, Jill Magid Control Room, Mark Lewis, Mark Lewis Beirut, Michael Wolf, Michael Wolf Architecture of Density, Michael Wolf Night, Michael Wolf Night #20, Michael Wolf Transparent City, NYLPT, Olivo Barbieri, Olivo Barbieri site specific, Olivo Barbieri site specific_Istanbul #4, One Mile Film, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Philip-Lorca diCorcia Head #23, Philip-Lorca diCorcia Heads, site specific, site-specific installation, street photography, surveillance, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Transparent City, urban landscape, urban theorist, urbanness, urbanscape, voyeurism, Walt Whitman
Exhibition dates: 11th October 2014 – 4th January 2015
Olivo Barbieri (Italian; lives and works in Modena, Italy)
Philip-Lorca diCorcia (American; lives and works in New York)
Jason Evans (British; lives and works in London)
Paul Graham (British; lives and works in New York)
Mark Lewis (Canadian; lives and works in London)
Jill Magid (American; lives and works in New York)
James Nares (American; lives and works in New York)
Barbara Probst (German; lives and works in New York)
Jennifer West (American; lives and works in Los Angeles)
Michael Wolf (German; lives and works in Paris and Hong Kong)
Watching the watcher watching…
Many thankx to the Cincinnati Art Museum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
"Some of the artists in Eyes on the Street made their work at street level; others sought higher vantage points. Some sharpen our appreciation for individuals, while others underscore universal urban traits. Some work with still images, while others create films and videos. What links them, and binds them to the historical tradition of street photography, is the quality of attention they give these bustling environments. They are watchful. What distinguishes them from the twentieth-century street-photography tradition, however, is that these artists are also acutely conscious of the active roles cameras play in making urban public places today. They know they are part of a greater system of watching."
Brian Sholis, Associate Curator of Photography, Cincinnati Art Museum
Installation views by Rob Deslongchamps
Barbara Probst
Exposure #106: N.Y.C., Broome & Crosby Streets, 04.17.13, 2:29 p.m.
Ultrachrome ink on cotton paper in twelve parts, each 29 x 44 inches
Courtesy of the artist and Murray Guy, New York
On January 7, 2000, Barbara Probst first deployed a photographic technique that has become her signature and which she is still fruitfully exploring. On that night she used a remote-control device to synchronize the shutters of twelve cameras, creating as many perspectives on the same scene. In that work, and the more than one hundred that have followed, Probst dissects the photographic moment. Take, for example, the twelve-panel Exposure #106, exhibited here, which combines color and black-and-white film, multiple photographic genres, staged and unscripted elements, and a patchwork of vantage points. One can't help but "read" these individual images sequentially, creating a false sense of narrative momentum from a collection of pictures taken in the same instant. One likewise builds, as Probst has called it, a "sculpture in the mind" by piecing together a three-dimensional scene from two-dimensional fragments. The process is never perfect, underscoring, as does all of Probst's work, the incompleteness and partiality of any photograph.
"Probst forcefully deconstructs the notion of photographic truth, not by specifically questioning that photographic truth but merely by pointing out its necessary incompleteness." Jens Erdman Rasmussen, Dutch curator.
Untitled from the series NYLPT
Courtesy of the photographer
Jason Evans is a street photographer who, in his words, simply likes to "walk around and look at things, follow people, and get lost." The series exhibited here, NYLPT, was made between 2005 and 2012 in New York, London, Paris, and Tokyo. Evans would expose a roll of 35-mm black-and-white film in one of these cities, then rewind and set aside the roll until his travels brought him to another. There, he would reload the film and re-expose the frames, doing so up to five times without knowing what the results would look like. Sometimes a fragment of language or familiar landmark reveals where part of the picture was made. More often, however, the textures, shapes, and surreal combinations of built environments come together to connote urbanness as a category of experience. Aware that people consume images in myriad ways, Evans not only developed the photographs in a darkroom, but also worked closely with a book publisher and digital programmers to create versions of the series specific to different mediums.
site specific_Istanbul #4
Courtesy of the artist and Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York
Between 2003 and 2013, the Italian artist Olivo Barbieri photographed more than forty of the world's cities from low-flying helicopters. Fascinated by the expanding megalopolises, Barbieri sought a new visual language to present their shifting forms. He hit upon the idea of using a tilt-shift lens – normally used to correct the apparent convergence of parallel lines in pictures of buildings – to render sections of his images out of focus. By also slightly overexposing the photographs, Barbieri created a diorama-like effect; the people and places he captured seemed to inhabit miniature worlds. His pictures contained enormous amounts of information yet placed some of it tantalizingly out of focus.
This visual effect became so popular that Barbieri sought other ways to push photography's language in response to the cities that inspired him. In recent years he has adopted a wide array of digital post-production techniques to modify his images, all in service of representing the dizzying state of cities today.
"Captivated by a vision of the twenty-first-century city as a kind of site-specific installation – temporary, malleable, and constantly in flux – [Barbieri] sought a photographic corollary for the radical mutations of urban form that he saw taking place." Christopher S. Phillips, curator
Installation view by Rob Deslongchamps
"Cameras are an integral part of our lives, and the Cincinnati Art Museum's new exhibition, Eyes on the Street, on view Oct. 11, 2014 – Jan. 4, 2015, examines how they can be used in public spaces. Through a collection of photographs, films and videos by 10 internationally renowned artists – most of whom have never previously exhibited in Cincinnati – the exhibition reimagines street photography and reveals how cameras shape perceptions of cities. Eyes on the Street is the Art Museum's contribution to the region-wide FotoFocus festival and is a celebration of street photography in the twenty-first century.
"Street photography is a perennial subject of museum exhibitions, but by emphasizing the role cameras' technical capabilities play in making these artworks, I hope to broaden our understanding of the genre," said Brian Sholis, associate curator of photography. "At the same time, it's important to recognize that we are not merely subject to faceless surveillance, but can use cameras to amplify the invigorating aspects of city life."
Eyes on the Street reimagines the genre of street photography and demonstrates how cameras shape our perceptions of cities. It features ten internationally renowned artists who work in photography, film, and video, each of whom deliberatively uses the camera's technical capabilities to reveal new aspects of the urban environment. Through high-speed and high-definition lenses, multiple or simultaneous exposures, "impossible" film shots, and appropriated surveillance-camera footage, these artists breathe new life into the genre and remind us that urban public places are sites of creative and imaginative encounters.
The exhibition title comes from influential urban theorist Jane Jacobs, who wrote, in her classic treatise The Death and Life of Great American Cities, of "eyes on the street" being crucial to urban neighborhoods' vitality – and their ability to accommodate different people and activities. Today, discussion of cameras in public spaces often revolves around surveillance tactics or battles over first-amendment rights. Eyes on the Street reflects the diversity of urban experience and shows us how cameras can help us comprehend the complex urban environment.
The show includes artworks made in New York, San Francisco, Paris, Beirut, Tokyo, Istanbul, and elsewhere by artists who have exhibited widely and have received numerous grants, fellowships, and prizes. Most have never before exhibited in the Cincinnati area."
Press release from the Cincinnati Art Museum
Head #23
Fujicolor Crystal Archive print
Courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner, New York/London
To make the photographs exhibited in Eyes on the Street, Philip-Lorca diCorcia affixed a powerful strobe flash to construction scaffolding above a sidewalk in Times Square. He placed his camera some distance away, so as to remain unnoticed, and photographed unwitting strangers bathed in a halo of light. This outdoor "studio" married control and chance, isolating people from their busy surroundings. Their pensive faces reveal complex interior lives it would be easy to miss if we passed them on a busy street.
The resulting series, Heads, comprises a few dozen photographs chosen from the thousands that diCorcia made between 1999 and 2001. Erno Nussenzweig, the subject of Head #13, discovered the photograph of him in 2005. He sued the photographer for using his image without permission. The case went to the New York Court of Appeals, where judges ruled that diCorcia's images qualify as art, not as advertising, thereby exempting him from privacy protections afforded by law. The case has become an important precedent for artists who wish to take pictures in public places.
Still from a two-channel digital video, ten minutes
Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Yvon Lambert, Paris
For more than a decade artist Jill Magid has deliberately worked with institutions of authority to create videos, books, installations, and other artworks. For a series made in Liverpool in 2004, Magid spent thirty-one days in the English port city – the length of time footage from its Citywatch surveillance system is stored. Wearing a red trench coat, she aimed "to use the CCTV system as a film crew, to act as the protagonist, and to be saved in [its] evidence locker."
During the project she developed relationships with the camera operators. In the video Trust, Magid closes her eyes and allows a CCTV operator to verbally guide her safely through the city's busy streets. She has described the interaction as one of the most intimate she has experienced, and wrote the Subject Access Request Forms, used to obtain the footage, in the form of love letters. As she later said, "Only by being watched, and influencing how I was watched, could I touch the system and become vulnerable to it."
Installation view of James Nares's film Street. Photo by Rob Deslongchamps.
James Nares moved to New York during the 1970s and joined the experimental music and art scenes as a filmmaker, painter, sculptor, musician, and performer. Today he is perhaps best known for his beautiful abstract paintings, but he has made still- and moving-image work throughout his career. His 2012 film STREET has drawn renewed attention to his work with cameras. STREET uses the remarkable clarity offered by a high-speed, high-definition camera to mesmerizing effect. Shot from the window of a car, "the camera is moving in one line at a constant speed," he has said. "I take small fragments of time and extend them. […] I just wanted to see the drama in small things that happen all the time, everywhere, the little dramas that become big along the way."
STREET is an unscripted 61-minute high definition video filmed by artist James Nares over one week in September 2011. The final video is a mesmerizing experiment in the nuance and beauty of everyday people and people-watching; providing a global view that extends beyond the streets of New York where it was filmed: from Battery Park to the furthest reaches of Upper Broadway, and West Side to East Side in Nares' personal homage to actualité films. In Nares' words, "I wanted the film to be about people. All it needed were magical moments, and there are enough of those happening every moment of any given day."
The scenes are drawn from more than sixteen hours of material and accompanied by a guitar soundtrack performed by Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth.
Eyes on the Street
Brian Sholis
Associate Curator of Photography
Cincinnati Art Museum
The title of this exhibition comes from the architecture writer and urban activist Jane Jacobs, who, in her classic 1961 treatise The Death and Life of Great American Cities, wrote of eyes on the street being crucial to the vitality of urban neighborhoods, in particular their ability to accommodate different people and activities. She was celebrating her Greenwich Village neighbors, "allies whose eyes help us natives keep the peace of the street," the "lucky possessors of a city order that makes it relatively simple to keep the peace." She was quick to add, "there is nothing simple about that order itself, or the bewildering number of components that go into it." Fifty years later the elements that make urban life vibrant and challenging are even greater in number, and the omnipresence of cameras is one of the greatest changes to the ways we manage a city's order. Today, discussion of cameras in public places often concentrates on issues of surveillance, personal privacy, and first-amendment rights. As the writer Tom Vanderbilt asked in a 2002 essay that touches on Jacobs's legacy, "Why is a police surveillance camera on a public street any more intrusive than a patrolman stationed on the corner? [ . . . ] The real question in all of this is motive, not means: who's doing the watching, and for what purpose?" The artworks brought together in Eyes on the Street offer ways to think about the social, political, legal, and architectural implications of these questions.
The photographs, films, and videos exhibited here also offer ways to reimagine the genre of street photography, which art historians typically associate with Jacobs's mid-twentieth-century era. At the time she was drafting the ideas quoted above, photographers like Robert Frank, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Garry Winogrand prowled Western cities, 35-mm cameras in hand, taking pictures of the daily sidewalk ballet. They worked tirelessly, often photographing rapidly and without introducing themselves to their subjects, whom they corralled into rectangular compositions that expressed some of the dynamism of the passing parade. By contrast, the artists in Eyes on the Street, all working in the twenty-first century, respond to the changed conditions of the city in part by using more deliberative strategies to capture their subjects. They recognize the pervasive influence of cameras on the urban environment by employing their own cameras' special capabilities to show things our eyes may not see or our minds might not notice. For photographers working half a century ago, the lens was a natural extension of their hands and a relatively simple conduit of their artistic sensibilities. The artists in Eyes on the Street work more self-consciously to disclose the forces conditioning the urban environment and to acknowledge cameras' active role in that process. In so doing, they create stunning still- and moving-image artworks that show us such places as New York, Shanghai, Beirut, Paris, Chicago, and Istanbul as we've never seen them before.
Writing more than a century ago, German sociologist Georg Simmel diagnosed the mental life of people living in rapidly modernizing cities, suggesting that our psychological survival depended upon separating ourselves from the many stimulations of the urban environment. The influence of Simmel's thinking upon the social sciences has been profound, but scholars today increasingly identify an inversion of his theory as true: for the survival of the metropolis, we must overcome narrow individualism to empathize with others who share it with us. However, one's capacity to relate to others is necessarily limited, and this cosmopolitan ethics can be difficult to maintain. James Nares's 2012 film Street uses the remarkable clarity offered by a high-speed, high-definition camera to offset the potentially numbing effect of so many encounters. By slowing down his footage of New York sidewalks, taken from the window of a car moving thirty miles per hour, Nares isolates small vignettes unspooling on the sidewalk. Peoples' movements are picked out in fine detail, their individual gestures and expressions heightened into a slow-motion monumentality. A similar effect characterizes the photographs in Philip-Lorca diCorcia's series Heads (1999-2001). To make these works, diCorcia, affixed a flash strobe to construction scaffolding on a sidewalk in Times Square. Placing his camera far enough away to be unnoticed, he pre-focused his lens on the spot illuminated by the flash and captured unwitting strangers bathed in a halo of light. His improvised outdoor studio married control and chance, isolating people from their busy surroundings and catching them in moments of inwardness. Their pensive faces reveal complex interior lives it would be all too easy to ignore should we be strolling past them. The quality of attention afforded by Nares and diCorcia's cameras results in the humanism of their work and grants the dignity we can read in these faces. As the critic Ken Johnson observed of Street, what results is an update of "Walt Whitman's poetic embrace of humanity. The camera gazes at all with the same equanimity and finds each person, in his or her own way, dignified, lovable, and even beautiful."
In his series NYLPT, photographer Jason Evans reverses this penchant for individuation. The acronym stands for "New York London Paris Tokyo." Working over a period of eight years, Evans would expose a roll of 35-mm black-and-white film in one of these cities, then rewind and set aside the roll until his travels brought him to another. There, he would reload the film and re-expose the frames, sometimes doing so up to five times without knowing what the results would look like. As he has said, "The 'decisive moment' was no longer out there waiting to be hunted down," as with traditional street photography. Instead, "it had moved behind the lens, onto the film plane." Sometimes a fragment of language or familiar landmark reveals where part of the picture was made. More often, however, the textures, shapes, and surreal combinations of built environments come together to connote urbanness as a category of experience.
… Exploring the Medium; Senses of Scale; Permission and Authority. Continues…
One Mile Film (5,280 feet of 35mm film negative and print taped to the mile-long High Line walk way in New York City for 17 hours on Thursday, September 13th, 2012 with 11,500 visitors – the visitors walked, wrote, jogged, signed, drew, touched, danced, parkoured, sanded, keyed, melted popsicles, spit, scratched, stomped, left shoe prints of all kinds and put gum on the filmstrip – it was driven on by baby stroller and trash can wheels and was traced by art students – people wrote messages on the film and drew animations, etched signs, symbols and words into the film emulsion lines drawn down much of the filmstrip by visitors and Jwest with highlighters and markers – the walk way surfaces of concrete, train track steel, wood, metal gratings and fountain water impressed into the film; filmed images shot by Peter West – filmed Parkour performances by Thomas Dolan and Vertical Jimenez – running on rooftops by Deb Berman and Jwest – film taped, rolled and explained on the High Line by art students and volunteers)
Still from 35-mm film transferred to high-definition video
Commissioned and produced by Friends of the High Line and the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation
Courtesy of the artist and Marc Foxx, Los Angeles
Jennifer West is resolutely experimental in her approach to film, and is known in particular for the ways she treats her film stock: submerging it in seawater, bathing it in chemicals, or exposing it to different types of radiation, usually to psychedelic effect. Her One Mile Film . . . (2012), commissioned by and for the High Line, an elevated park in New York, documents free-running practitioners – athletes who explore environments without limitations of movement – climbing, jumping, and exploring the park and its environs. Here, though, her "treatment" is an alternative method of recording people in this public space. Once she had completed filming, West affixed her film stock to the High Line's footpaths, inviting park visitors – some 11,500 of them – to walk on, roll over, draw on, and otherwise imprint their presence upon her work. The finished film appears semi-abstract but is in fact a trace of the people who passed through that particular place on that September 2012 day, like the rubbings people make of manholes and headstones.
Night #20
Digital c-print
Courtesy of the artist and Bruce Silverstein Gallery, New York
The number of both people and buildings tucked into Hong Kong's small landmass inspired Michael Wolf to express the verticality and compactness of that unique place. His series Architecture of Density emphasizes the repetition inherent to most large-scale construction by zeroing in on building facades and eliminating the ground, the sky, and all other elements that might reveal the picture's scale. The residential towers seem to stretch on forever; the only variation comes from small human elements, such as laundry hung out to dry. The buildings depicted in the series Transparent City, made in 2007 and 2008 in Chicago, are not quite as close together, and Wolf subsequently created looser compositions. He likewise took advantage of a 300-mm lens and the buildings' glass curtain-wall construction to peer through the windows at the life inside. "I became acutely aware of being a voyeur," Wolf has said.
Still from a high-definition video, 8 minutes 11 seconds
Courtesy of the artist and Daniel Faria Gallery, Toronto
In his short films, Mark Lewis repeatedly isolates the fundamental gestures of cinema, exaggerating a zoom or a tracking shot to reveal the constructedness of a seemingly natural scene. Without sacrificing beauty or mystery, Lewis's meticulously planned works uncover the kinds of artifice that big-budget popular movies aim to conceal. In his eight-minute film Beirut (2011), Lewis crafts a Steadicam shot to explore the multiple cultures and tangled histories represented on a Lebanese street. In a remarkable single take, the camera rounds a corner, proceeds down the street, then lifts magically into the air, floating above roofline to situate these histories in the larger urban fabric. And the end of this short film reminds us of the life that continues around us even as we focus only at street level.
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Exhibition: 'Photography and the American Civil War' at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Categories: american photographers, black and white photography, documentary photography, exhibition, existence, gallery website, landscape, light, memory, New York, photographic series, photography, photojournalism, portrait, printmaking, psychological, quotation, reality, space, time and works on paper
Tags: 11th New York Infantry, 1st Fire Zouaves, 200th Pennsylvania Infantry, A Harvest of Death, abolitionism, abolitionist photographs, Abraham Lincoln, African American, African American slaves, African American soldiers, African-Americans, Alexander Gardner, Alexander Gardner Ruins of Gallego Flour Mills, ambrotypes, american artist, American Civil War, American photographers, American photography, American war, Andersonville Prison, Andrew Joseph Russell Slave Pen Alexandria Virginia, Antietam, antislavery lecture, Appomattox, Appomattox Court House, armed Union and Confederate soldiers, Army of Tennessee, assassination of President Lincoln, Battle of Gaines's Mill, Battlefield of Gettysburg, Bleeding Kansas, Bonaventure Cemetery Four Miles from Savannah, Broadside for the Capture of John Wilkes Booth, Captain Charles A. and Sergeant John M. Hawkins, carte-de-visite, cavalryman, Charles Paxson Wilson Branded Slave from New Orleans, Civil War, Civil War images, Civil War landscape, Civil War-era portraits of slaves, Confederate Captain Charles Hawkins, Confederate General Robert E. Lee, Confederate President Jefferson Davis, Confederates, daguerreotypes, David Herold, destiny, devastation of war, documentation of military activity, Dr Reed Brockway Bontecou, Drummer, Edward Anthony, Eleventh Kansas Volunteer Cavalry, Eleventh Regiment Georgia Volunteer Infantry, Emaciated Union Soldier Liberated from Andersonville Prison, Field Where General Reynolds Fell, Fort Sumter, Frances Clalin Clayton, Franklin and Armfield, Gallego Flour Mills, Gardner Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter, Gardner's Photographic Sketch Book of the War, Gardner's Photographic Sketch Book of War, Gayford & Speidel, Gayford & Speidel Private Louis Troutman, General Robert E. Lee, General Ulysses S. Grant, George Kephart, George N. Barnard, George N. Barnard Bonaventure Cemetery Four Miles from Savannah, George N. Barnard Photographic Views of Sherman's Campaign, George Wertz, George Wertz Private William Henry Lord, Georgia Volunteer Infantry, Gettysburg, harvest of death, Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter, I Sell the Shadow to Support the Substance, J. W. Jones, J. W. Jones Emaciated Union Soldier Liberated from Andersonville Prison, James River, John Emery, John Surratt, John Wilkes Booth, March from Annapolis to Washington, March to the Sea, Mathew B. Brady, Mathew B. Brady 'Abraham Lincoln', Mathew B. Brady General Robert E. Lee, McPherson & Oliver, McPherson & Oliver The Scourged Back, Mississippi River, mortality rate of soldiers during the Civil War, New York Times, Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania Volunteers, Photographic Views of Sherman's Campaign, Photography and the American Civil War, physiognomy, President Jefferson Davis, Presidential Campaign Medal with Portrait of Abraham Lincoln, Private Christopher Anderson, Private Gid White, Private James House with Fighting Knife, Private Louis Troutman, Private Thomas Gaston Wood, Private William Henry Lord, reality of war, Reed Brockway Bontecou, Reed Brockway Bontecou Private Samuel Shoop, Reed Brockway Bontecou Union Private John Parmenter, Richmond, Robert C. Rathbone, Robert C. Rathbone March from Annapolis to Washington, Ruins of Gallego Flour Mills Richmond, Samuel Masury, Samuel Masury Frances Clalin Clayton, Samuel Shoop, Sergeant John M. Hawkins, Shenandoah Valley, Sixteenth Georgia Cavalry Battalion, Sixty-seventh Pennsylvania Volunteers, Sojourner Truth, Southern portraits, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Scourged Back, Thirty-eighth Regiment, Timothy H. O'Sullivan A Harvest of Death, Timothy H. O'Sullivan Field Where General Reynolds Fell, Timothy O'Sullivan, Timothy O'Sullivan A Harvest of Death Gettysburg, tintypes, Tom Cobb Infantry, U.S. Military Railroad Con struction Corps, Union and Confederate soldiers, Union Private John Parmenter, Union Sergent John Emery, utter devastation of war, Virginia, Walt Whitman, Walton Infantry, war, War between the States, William Tecumseh Sherman, Wilson Branded Slave from New Orleans
Exhibition dates: 2nd April – 2nd September 2013
BE WARNED, LIKE "INCIDENTS OF WAR", THIS POSTING IS DISTURBING AND NOT FOR THE FAINT HEARTED!
Andrew Joseph Russell (American, 1830-1902)
Slave Pen, Alexandria, Virginia (detail)
Albumen silver print from glass negative
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gilman Collection, Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 2005
© The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
"It was, indeed, a 'harvest of death.' … Such a picture conveys a useful moral: It shows the blank horror and reality of war, in opposition to its pageantry. Here are the dreadful details! Let them aid in preventing such another calamity falling upon the nation."
"Before the war, a child three years old, would sell in Alexandria, for about fifty dollars, and an able-bodied man at from one thousand to eighteen hundred dollars. A woman would bring from five hundred to fifteen hundred dollars, according to her age and personal attractions."
There are some very poignant and disturbing photographs in this posting. The youth of some of the combatants (Private Wood sits against a blank wall in a photographer's studio. He is sixteen years old and will not see seventeen. An orphan, he joined Company H in Social Circle, Georgia, on July 3, 1861, and before the end of the year died of pneumonia in a Richmond hospital). The sheer brutality and pointlessness of war. Bloated and twisted bodies, inflated like balloons. Starved and beaten human beings.
And yet, you look at the photograph "Slave Pen" – the office of those 'Dealers in Slaves' now guarded by Union soldiers (above) – or the photograph of Wilson, Branded Slave from New Orleans and the photograph of the anonymous African American soldier fighting for the Union cause directly below and you understand just one of the reasons that this was such a bloody conflict: it was about the right of all men to be free, to throw off the bonds of servitude.
To be replaced all these years later by another corrupted power – the power of government, the power of government to surveil its people at any and all times. The power of money, the military and the gun.
Praise be the land of the free.
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.
Alexander Gardner (American, born Scotland, 1821-1882)
Ruins of Gallego Flour Mills, Richmond
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1933
In 1861, at the outset of the Civil War, the Confederate government moved its capital from Montgomery, Alabama, to Richmond, Virginia, to be closer to the front and to protect Richmond's ironworks and flour mills. On April 2, 1865, as the Union army advanced on Richmond, General Robert E. Lee gave the orders to evacuate the city. A massive fire broke out the following day, the result of a Confederate attempt to destroy anything that could be of use to the invading Union army. In addition to consuming twenty square blocks, including nearly every building in Richmond's commercial district, it destroyed the massive Gallego Flour Mills, situated on the James River and seen here. Alexander Gardner, Mathew B. Brady's former gallery manager, then his rival, made numerous photographs of the "Burnt District" as well as this dramatic panorama from two glass negatives. The charred remains have become over time an iconic image of the fall of the Confederacy and the utter devastation of war.
A display of three photographs of American Civil War soldiers in the exhibition, "Photography and the American Civil War" April 1, 2013 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The three albumen silver prints are all by Gayford & Speidel, "Private Christopher Anderson, Company F, 108th Regiment, U.S. Colored Infantry, January-May 1865" (L), "Private Louis Troutman, Company F, 108th Regiment, U.S. Colored Infantry, January-May 1865", (C) and "Private Gid White, Company F, 108th Regiment, U.S. Colored Infantry, January-May 1865", (R).
AFP PHOTO/Stan HONDA
Union Private, 11th New York Infantry (Also Known as the 1st Fire Zouaves)
May-June 1861
One-sixth plate ambrotype
Michael J. McAfee Collection
This melancholy young volunteer was a member of the Eleventh New York Infantry, an early war regiment organised in New York City in May 1861. Primarily composed of volunteers from the city's many fire companies, the men were also known as the First Fire Zouaves. Along with other volunteer units, the Eleventh helped capture Alexandria, Virginia on May 24, 1861, just a day after the state formally seceded from the Union.
Union Private, 11th New York Infantry (Also Known as the 1st Fire Zouaves) (detail)
Timothy H. O'Sullivan (American, born Ireland, 1840-1882)
A Harvest of Death, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania
Printer: Alexander Gardner (American, Glasgow, Scotland 1821-1882 Washington, D.C.)
Publisher: Alexander Gardner (American, Glasgow, Scotland 1821-1882 Washington, D.C.)
17.8 × 22.5cm (7 × 8 7/8 in.)
Gilman Collection, Museum Purchase, 2005
This photograph of the rotting dead awaiting burial after the Battle of Gettysburg is perhaps the best-known Civil War landscape. It was published in Gardner's Photographic Sketch Book of the War (1866), the nation's first anthology of photographs. The Sketch Book features ten photographic plates of Gettysburg – eight by Timothy H. O'Sullivan, who served as a field operator for Alexander Gardner, and two by Gardner himself. The extended caption that accompanies this photograph is among Gardner's most poetic: "It was, indeed, a 'harvest of death.' … Such a picture conveys a useful moral: It shows the blank horror and reality of war, in opposition to its pageantry. Here are the dreadful details! Let them aid in preventing such another calamity falling upon the nation."
Alexander Gardner, printer
Field Where General Reynolds Fell, Gettysburg, July 1863
Plate 37 in Volume 1 of Gardner's Photographic Sketch Book of the War
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gilman Collection, Purchase, Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee Gift, 2005
This photograph of the aftermath of the Battle of Gettysburg appears in the two-volume opus Gardner's Photographic Sketch Book of the War (1865-66). Gardner's publication is egalitarian. Offended by Brady's habit of obscuring the names of his field operators behind the deceptive credit "Brady," Gardner specifically identified each of the eleven photographers in the publication; forty-four of the one hundred photographs are credited to Timothy O'Sullivan. Gardner titled the plate Field Where General Reynolds Fell, Battlefield of Gettysburg. But the photograph, its commemorative title notwithstanding, relates a far more common story: six Union soldiers lie dead, face up, stomachs bloated, their pockets picked and boots stolen. As Gardner described the previous plate, aptly titled The Harvest of Death, this photograph conveys "the blank horror and reality of war, in opposition to its pageantry."
Captain Charles A. and Sergeant John M. Hawkins, Company E, "Tom Cobb Infantry," Thirty-eighth Regiment, Georgia Volunteer Infantry
Quarter-plate ambrotype with applied colour
David Wynn Vaughan Collection
Photo: Jack Melton
The vast majority of war portraits, either cased images or cartes de visite, are of individual soldiers. Group portraits in smaller formats are more rare and challenged the field photographer (as well as the studio gallerist) to conceive and execute an image that would honour the occasion and be desirable – saleable – to multiple sitters. For the patient photographer, this created interesting compositional problems and an excellent opportunity to make memorable group portraits of brothers, friends, and even members of different regiments.
In this quarter-plate ambrotype, Confederate Captain Charles Hawkins of the Thirty-eighth Regiment, Georgia Volunteer Infantry, on the left, sits for his portrait with his brother John, a sergeant in the same regiment. They address the camera and draw their fighting knives from scabbards. Charles would die on June 13, 1863, in the Shenandoah Valley during General Robert E. Lee's second invasion of the North. John, wounded at the Battle of Gaines's Mill in June 1862, would survive the war, fighting with his company until its surrender at Appomattox.
Reed Brockway Bontecou (American, 1824-1907)
Union Private John Parmenter, Company G, Sixty-seventh Pennsylvania Volunteers
5.7 x 9.1 cm (2 1/4 x 3 9/16 in.)
Collection Stanley B. Burns, M.D.
In this remarkable carte de visite, Private Parmenter lies unconscious from anaesthesia on an operating table at Harewood Hospital in Washington, D.C. To save his patient's life, Doctor Bontecou amputated the soldier's wounded, ulcerous foot. Before the discovery of antibiotics, gangrene was a dreaded and deadly infection that greatly contributed to the high mortality rate of soldiers during the Civil War.
Slave Pen, Alexandria, Virginia
Better known for his later views commissioned by the Union Pacific Railroad, A. J. Russell, a captain in the 141st New York Infantry Volunteers, was one of the few Civil War photographers who was also a soldier. As a photographer-engineer for the U.S. Military Railroad Con struction Corps, Russell's duty was to make a historical record of both the technical accomplishments of General Herman Haupt's engineers and the battlefields and camp sites in Virginia. This view of a slave pen in Alexandria guarded, ironically, by Union officers shows Russell at his most insightful; the pen had been converted by the Union Army into a prison for captured Confederate soldiers.
Between 1830 and 1836, at the height of the American cotton market, the District of Columbia, which at that time included Alexandria, Virginia, was considered the seat of the slave trade. The most infamous and successful firm in the capital was Franklin & Armfield, whose slave pen is shown here under a later owner's name. Three to four hundred slaves were regularly kept on the premises in large, heavily locked cells for sale to Southern plantation owners. According to a note by Alexander Gardner, who published a similar view, "Before the war, a child three years old, would sell in Alexandria, for about fifty dollars, and an able-bodied man at from one thousand to eighteen hundred dollars. A woman would bring from five hundred to fifteen hundred dollars, according to her age and personal attractions."
Late in the 1830s Franklin and Armfield, already millionaires from the profits they had made, sold out to George Kephart, one of their former agents. Although slavery was outlawed in the District in 1850, it flourished across the Potomac in Alexandria. In 1859, Kephart joined William Birch, J. C. Cook, and C. M. Price and conducted business under the name of Price, Birch & Co. The partnership was dissolved in 1859, but Kephart continued operating his slave pen until Union troops seized the city in the spring of 1861.
Unknown Artist, after an 1860 carte de visite by Mathew B. Brady
Presidential Campaign Medal with Portraits of Abraham Lincoln and Hannibal Hamlin
Tintypes in stamped brass medallion
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, The Overbrook Foundation Gift, 2012
More than 200 of the finest and most poignant photographs of the American Civil War have been brought together for the landmark exhibition Photography and the American Civil War, opening April 2 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Through examples drawn from the Metropolitan's celebrated holdings of this material, complemented by exceptional loans from public and private collections, the exhibition will examine the evolving role of the camera during the nation's bloodiest war. The "War between the States" was the great test of the young Republic's commitment to its founding precepts; it was also a watershed in photographic history. The camera recorded from beginning to end the heartbreaking narrative of the epic four-year war (1861-1865) in which 750,000 lives were lost. This traveling exhibition will explore, through photography, the full pathos of the brutal conflict that, after 150 years, still looms large in the American public's imagination.
At the start of the Civil War, the nation's photography galleries and image purveyors were overflowing with a variety of photographs of all kinds and sizes, many examples of which will be featured in the exhibition: portraits made on thin sheets of copper (daguerreotypes), glass (ambrotypes), or iron (tintypes), each housed in a small decorative case; and larger, "painting-sized" likenesses on paper, often embellished with India ink, watercolour, and oils. On sale in bookshops and stationers were thousands of photographic portraits on paper of America's leading statesmen, artists, and actors, as well as stereographs of notable scenery from New York's Broadway to Niagara Falls to the canals of Venice. Viewed in a stereopticon, the paired images provided the public with seeming three-dimensionality and the charming pleasure of traveling the world in one's armchair.
Photography and the Civil War will include: intimate studio portraits of armed Union and Confederate soldiers preparing to meet their destiny; battlefield landscapes strewn with human remains; rare multi-panel panoramas of the killing fields of Gettysburg and destruction of Richmond; diagnostic medical studies of wounded soldiers who survived the war's last bloody battles; and portraits of Abraham Lincoln as well as his assassin John Wilkes Booth. The exhibition features groundbreaking works by Mathew B. Brady, George N. Barnard, Alexander Gardner, and Timothy O'Sullivan, among many others. It also examines in-depth the important, if generally misunderstood, role played by Brady, perhaps the most famous of all wartime photographers, in conceiving the first extended photographic coverage of any war. The exhibition addresses the widely held, but inaccurate, belief that Brady produced most of the surviving Civil War images, although he actually made very few field photographs during the conflict. Instead, he commissioned and published, over his own name and imprint, negatives made by an ever-expanding team of field operators, including Gardner, O'Sullivan, and Barnard.
The exhibition will feature Gardner's haunting views of the dead at Antietam in September 1862, which are believed to be the first photographs of the Civil War seen in a public exhibition. A reporter for the New York Times wrote on October 20, 1862, about the images shown at Brady's New York City gallery: "Mr. Brady has done something to bring home to us the terrible reality and earnestness of war. If he has not brought bodies and laid them in our dooryards and along the streets, he has done something very like it… Here lie men who have not hesitated to seal and stamp their convictions with their blood – men who have flung themselves into the great gulf of the unknown to teach the world that there are truths dearer than life, wrongs and shames more to be dreaded than death."
Approximately 1,000 photographers worked separately and in teams to produce hundreds of thousands of photographs – portraits and views – that were actively collected during the period (and over the past century and a half) by Americans of all ages and social classes. In a direct expression of the nation's changing vision of itself, the camera documented the war and also mediated it by memorialising the events of the battlefield as well as the consequent toll on the home front.
Among the many highlights of the exhibition will be a superb selection of early wartime portraits of soldiers and officers who sat for their likenesses before leaving their homes for the war front. In these one-of-a-kind images, a picture of American society emerges. The rarest are ambrotypes and tintypes of Confederates, drawn from the renowned collection of David Wynn Vaughan, who has assembled the country's premier archive of Southern portraits. These seldom-seen photographs, and those by their Northern counterparts, will balance the well-known and often-reproduced views of bloody battlefields, defensive works, and the specialised equipment of 19th-century war.
The show will focus special attention on the remarkable images included in the two great wartime albums of original photographs: Gardner's Photographic Sketch Book of War and George N. Barnard's Photographic Views of Sherman's Campaign, both released in 1866. The former publication includes 100 views commissioned, sequenced, and annotated by Alexander Gardner. This two-volume opus provides an epic documentation of the war seen through the photographs of 11 artists, including Gardner himself. It features 10 plates of Gettysburg, including Timothy O'Sullivan's A Harvest of Death, Gettysburg, and Gardner's Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter, Gettysburg, both of which are among the most well-known and important images from the early history of photography. The second publication includes 61 large-format views by a single artist, George N. Barnard, who followed the army campaign of one general, William Tecumseh Sherman, in the final months of the war – the "March to the Sea" from Tennessee to Georgia in 1864 and 1865. The exhibition explores how different Barnard's photographs are from those in Gardner's Sketch Book, and how distinctly Barnard used the camera to serve a nation trying to heal itself after four long years of war and brother-versus-brother bitterness.
Among the most extraordinary, if shocking, photographs in the exhibition are the portraits by Dr. Reed Brockway Bontecou of wounded and sick soldiers from the war's last battles. Drawn from a private medical teaching album put together by this Civil War surgeon and head of Harewood Hospital in Washington, D.C., and on loan from the celebrated Burns Archive, the photographs are notable for their humanity and their aesthetics. They recall Walt Whitman's words from 1865, that war "was not a quadrille in a ball-room. Its interior history will not only never be written, its practicality, minutia of deeds and passions, will never be suggested." Bontecou's medical portraits offer a glimpse of what the poet thought was not possible.
In addition to providing a thorough analysis of the camera's incisive documentation of military activity and its innovative use as a teaching tool for medical doctors, the exhibition explores other roles that photography played during the war. It investigates the relationship between politics and photography during the tumultuous period and presents exceptional political ephemera from the private collection of Brian Caplan, including: a rare set of campaign buttons from 1860 featuring original tintype portraits of the competing candidates; a carved tagua nut necklace featuring photographic portraits of Confederate President Jefferson Davis and two members of his cabinet; and an extraordinary folding game board composed of photographic likenesses of President Lincoln and his generals. The show also includes an inspiring carte de visite portrait of the abolitionist and human rights activist Sojourner Truth. A former slave from New York State, she sold photographs of herself to raise money to educate emancipated slaves, and to support widows, orphans, and the wounded. And finally the exhibition includes the first photographically illustrated "wanted" poster, a printed broadside with affixed photographic portraits that led to the capture John Wilkes Booth and his fellow conspirators after the assassination of President Lincoln in April 1865.
Press release from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website
Unknown (American)
[Broadside for the Capture of John Wilkes Booth, John Surratt, and David Herold]
Artist: Alexander Gardner (American, Glasgow, Scotland 1821-1882 Washington, D.C.)
Photography Studio: Silsbee, Case & Company (American, active Boston)
Photography Studio: Unknown
Ink on paper with three albumen silver prints from glass negatives
Sheet: 60.5 x 31.3cm (23 13/16 x 12 5/16 in.)
Each photograph: 8.6 x 5.4cm (3 3/8 x 2 1/8 in.)
Gilman Collection, Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 2005
On the night of April 14, 1865, just five days after Lee's surrender to Grant at Appomattox, John Wilkes Booth shot Lincoln at the Ford Theatre in Washington, D.C. Within twenty-four hours, Secret Service director Colonel Lafayette Baker had already acquired photographs of Booth and two of his accomplices. Booth's photograph was secured by a standard police search of the actor's room at the National Hotel; a photograph of John Surratt, a suspect in the plot to kill Secretary of State William Seward, was obtained from his mother, Mary (soon to be indicted as a fellow conspirator), and David Herold's photograph was found in a search of his mother's carte-de-visite album. The three photographs were taken to Alexander Gardner's studio for immediate reproduction. This bill was issued on April 20, the first such broadside in America illustrated with photographs tipped onto the sheet.
The descriptions of the alleged conspirators combined with their photographic portraits proved invaluable to the militia. Six days after the poster was released Booth and Herold were recognised by a division of the 16th New York Cavalry. The commanding officer, Lieutenant Edward Doherty, demanded their unconditional surrender when he cornered the two men in a barn near Port Royal, Virginia. Herold complied; Booth refused. Two Secret Service detectives accompanying the cavalry, then set fire to the barn. Booth was shot as he attempted to escape; he died three hours later. After a military trial Herold was hanged on July 7 at the Old Arsenal Prison in Washington, D.C.
Surratt escaped to England via Canada, eventually settling in Rome. Two years later a former schoolmate from Maryland recognised Surratt, then a member of the Papal Guard, and he was returned to Washington to stand trial. In September 1868 the charges against him were nol-prossed after the trial ended in a hung jury. Surratt retired to Maryland, worked as a clerk, and lived until 1916.
Attributed to McPherson & Oliver (American, active New Orleans and Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 1860s)
The Scourged Back
8.7 x 5.5cm (3 7/16 x 2 3/16 in.)
International Center of Photography, Purchase, with funds provided by the ICP Acquisitions Committee, 2003
Gordon, a runaway slave seen with severe whipping scars in this haunting carte-de-visite portrait, is one of the many African Americans whose lives Sojourner Truth endeavoured to better. Perhaps the most famous of all known Civil War-era portraits of slaves, the photograph dates from March or April 1863 and was made in a camp of Union soldiers along the Mississippi River, where the subject took refuge after escaping his bondage on a nearby Mississippi plantation.
On Saturday, July 4, 1863, this portrait and two others of Gordon appeared as wood engravings in a special Independence Day feature in Harper's Weekly. McPherson & Oliver's portrait and Gordon's narrative in the newspaper were extremely popular, and photography studios throughout the North (including Mathew B. Brady's) duplicated and sold prints of The Scourged Back. Within months, the carte de visite had secured its place as an early example of the wide dissemination of ideologically abolitionist photographs.
J. W. Jones (American, active Orange, Massachusetts, 1860s)
Emaciated Union Soldier Liberated from Andersonville Prison
Image: 9 x 5.5cm (3 9/16 x 2 3/16 in.)
Brian D. Caplan Collection
Most soldiers who survived Andersonville Prison were marked for life. This portrait of an unidentified former prisoner is one of many that document the intense cruelty of prison life during the Civil War. It would be another eighty years, at the end of World War II, before anyone would see comparable pictures of man's inhumanity to man.
George Wertz (American, active Kansas City, Missouri, 1860s)
Private William Henry Lord, Company I, Eleventh Kansas Volunteer Cavalry
W. Bruce and Delaney H. Lundberg Collection
Private William Henry Lord, a cavalryman, sits alert and ready for the next ride. A yet unmuddied enlistee from "Bleeding Kansas," the last state to enter the Union before Fort Sumter, Lord was in the Eleventh Kansas Volunteer Cavalry; he was wounded in the shoulder in October 1864 but rejoined his company and was mustered out in September 1865.
March from Annapolis to Washington, Robert C. Rathbone, Sergeant Major, Seventh Regiment, New York Militia
8.9 x 5.4cm (3 1/2 x 2 1/8 in.)
The Seventh Regiment, New York Militia was among the first military groups to leave for Washington, D.C., after Lincoln's call to arms in April 1861. In or near Annapolis, en route to the nation's capital, Sergeant Major Rathbone posed for his portrait. He annotated his likeness with enough information to suggest that this image might be the first (identifiable) photograph of a soldier made after the fall of Fort Sumter. Representative of thousands of similar portraits, this study of an officer seen against a blank wall with just a hint of a studio column is typical of the simplicity of the earliest war pictures.
Note the stand just visible behind Sergeant Major Rathbone's feet to brace the sitter for the long exposures necessary.
Mathew B. Brady (American, near Lake George, New York 1823? – 1896 New York)
General Robert E. Lee
14 × 9.3 cm (5 1/2 × 3 11/16 in.)
Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered his army to Union General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House, Virginia, on April 9, 1865. The Civil War was over. If not whole, the nation was at least reunited, and the slow recovery of Reconstruction could begin. As soon as he heard that Lee had left Appomattox and returned to Richmond, Mathew B. Brady headed there with his camera equipment. The Lees' Franklin Street residence had survived the fires that had devastated many of the commercial sections of the city. Through the kindness of Mrs. Lee and a Confederate colonel, Brady received permission to photograph the general on April 16, 1865, just two days after President Lincoln's assassination. Brady's portrait of General Lee holding his hat, on his own back porch, is one of the most reflective and thoughtful wartime likenesses. The fifty-eight-year-old Confederate hero poses in the uniform he had worn at the surrender. It would be Brady's last wartime photograph.
Charles Paxson (American, active New York, 1860s)
Wilson, Branded Slave from New Orleans
Private Collection, Courtesy of William L. Schaeffer
On January 30, 1864, to fan the anti-slavery cause and promote the sale of abolitionist photographs, Harper's Weekly published this carte de visite and three others as wood engravings. The newspaper also included stirring bibliographies of the emancipated slaves. The editors noted that Wilson Chinn was about sixty years old. His former master, Volsey B. Marmillion, a sugar planter near New Orleans, "was accustomed to brand his negroes, and Wilson has on his forehead the letters 'V.B.M.'"
Gayford & Speidel (Active Rock Island, Illinois, 1860s)
Private Louis Troutman, Company F, 108th Regiment, U.S. Colored Infantry
January-May 1865
8.8 x 5.4cm (3 7/16 x 2 1/8 in.)
Thomas Harris Collection
Samuel Masury (American, 1818-1874)
Frances Clalin Clayton
9.4 x 5.6cm (3 11/16 x 2 3/16 in.)
Buck Zaidel Collection
Frances Clayton is an exception – a woman who served in the Union army by disguising herself as a man. In a popular carte de visite collected by soldiers at the end of the war, she poses here as Jack Williams and suggestively holds the handle of a cavalry sword between her crossed legs. The facts of her life story and military service are difficult to confirm, but it is believed that she served in the Missouri cavalry (or infantry) beside her husband, who died at the Battle of Stones River in late December 1862.
Private Samuel Shoop, Company F, 200th Pennsylvania Infantry
18.9 × 13.1cm (7 7/16 × 5 3/16 in.)
Gift of Stanley B. Burns, M.D. and The Burns Archive, 1992
The last great battle of the Civil War was the siege of Petersburg, Virginia – a brutal campaign that led to Confederate General Robert E. Lee's surrender on April 9, 1865. Samuel Shoop, a twenty-five-year-old private in Company F of the 200th Pennsylvania Volunteers, received a gunshot wound in the thigh at Fort Steadman on the first day of the campaign (March 25) and was evacuated to Harewood Hospital in Washington, D.C. His leg was amputated by Dr. Reed Brockway Bontecou, surgeon in charge, who also made this clinical photograph. It was intended, in part, to serve as a tool for teaching fellow army surgeons and is an extremely rare example of the early professional use of photography in America.
George N. Barnard (American, 1819-1902)
Bonaventure Cemetery, Four Miles from Savannah
34 x 26.4cm (13 3/8 x 10 3/8 in.)
Gilman Collection, Purchase, Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee Gift, 2005
Sojourner Truth, "I Sell the Shadow to Support the Substance"
Carte-de-visite
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Alfred Stieglitz Society Gifts, 2013
Sojourner Truth (c. 1797 – November 26, 1883) was the self-given name, from 1843 onward, of Isabella Baumfree, an African-American abolitionist and women's rights activist. Truth was born into slavery in Swartekill, Ulster County, New York, but escaped with her infant daughter to freedom in 1826. After going to court to recover her son, she became the first black woman to win such a case against a white man. Her best-known extemporaneous speech on gender inequalities, "Ain't I a Woman?", was delivered in 1851 at the Ohio Women's Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio. During the Civil War, Truth helped recruit black troops for the Union Army; after the war, she tried unsuccessfully to secure land grants from the federal government for former slaves.
Mathew B. Brady (American (born Ireland), 1823/24-1896 New York)
Edward Anthony (American, 1818-1888)
The Meserve-Kunhardt Foundation
Three months before his nomination as the Republican Party candidate for president, Abraham Lincoln went East, stopping in New York City on February 27, 1860, to give a speech at the Cooper Institute (now the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art). Many considered Lincoln's powerful antislavery lecture as his most important to date. The closing words spurred his audience and the country at large: "Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it."
Earlier in the day he sat for this portrait at Mathew B. Brady's gallery on Broadway and Tenth Street, just a few blocks from the lecture hall. Although his visit to the studio could not have lasted long, the result of this first of many portrait sessions with Brady was a simple but powerful image that would alter the visual landscape during the upcoming election. In a single exposure on a silver-coated sheet of glass, Brady captured the odd physiognomy of the man who would change the course of American history.
[Private James House with Fighting Knife, Sixteenth Georgia Cavalry Battalion, Army of Tennessee]
1861-62?
Ambrotype
Sixth-plate; ruby glass
Image: Jack Melton
This portrait of a cavalryman is an excellent example of a well-armed Confederate soldier. Private House wears a slouch hat and a checked battle shirt seen through the gaps in a modified woollen shell jacket with tabbed button closures. He brandishes his fighting knife and for quick use has half removed a pocket revolver from its belted holster. Perhaps the most frightening weapons in House's personal arsenal may be his focused stare and his set jaw.
16th Cavalry Battalion was assembled in May, 1862, at Big Shanty, Georgia, and was composed of six companies. It served in East Tennessee and Southwest Virginia and took part in the engagements at Blue Springs, Bean's Station, Cloyd's Mountain, and Marion. In January, 1865, the battalion merged into the 13th Georgia Cavalry Regiment. Lieutenant Colonels F.M. Nix and Samuel J. Winn, and Major Edward Y. Clarke were its commanding officers.
[Private James House with Fighting Knife, Sixteenth Georgia Cavalry Battalion, Army of Tennessee] (detail)
Unknown photographer (American)
Union Sergent John Emery
Plate: 8.9 x 6.4cm (3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in.)
Case: 10 × 8.9cm (3 15/16 × 3 1/2 in.)
The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Fund, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 2012
The only details presently known about this handsome, young Union sergeant wearing a striped bowtie and an imported English snake belt buckle derive from a small paper note found behind the portrait inside the thermoplastic case: "Uncle John Emery / brother of / Lucy King / buried at E. Concord / died in 1876 / buried at back in right corner."
[Private Thomas Gaston Wood, Drummer, Company H, "Walton Infantry," Eleventh Regiment Georgia Volunteer Infantry]
Plate: 6.4 x 5.1cm (2 1/2 x 2 in.)
Private Wood sits against a blank wall in a photographer's studio. He is sixteen years old and will not see seventeen. An orphan, he joined Company H in Social Circle, Georgia, on July 3, 1861, and before the end of the year died of pneumonia in a Richmond hospital. Wood seems proud of his shell jacket and especially his kepi, which he marked under the brim with his initials. The photographer tipped up the cap to reveal the sitter's handiwork, but the letters are laterally reversed in the tintype. As a musician, he poses without any prop other than his uniform, the buttons touched with gold.
1000 Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street
Tuesday – Thursday: 9.30am – 5.30pm*
Friday and Saturday: 9.30am – 9.00pm*
Sunday: 9.30am – 5.30pm*
Closed Monday (except Met Holiday Mondays**), Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year's Day
The Metropolitan Museum of Art website
Exhibition: 'Edward Weston. Leaves of Grass' at Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Categories: American, american photographers, black and white photography, book, documentary photography, exhibition, existence, gallery website, landscape, light, memory, New York, photographic series, photography, portrait, psychological, quotation, reality, space and time
Tags: 8 x 10 camera, america, American art, American artists, American identity, American landscape, American landscape photography, American photographers, American photography, American poet, American poetry, American suburbia, Americurbana, Arizona, Belle Grove Plantation House, Bessie Jones, Bessie Jones St. Simons Island, Boston, Boulder Dam, Charis Wilson, Clarence John Laughlin, edward weston, Edward Weston Belle Grove Plantation House, Edward Weston Bessie Jones, Edward Weston Boulder Dam, Edward Weston Charis Wilson, Edward Weston From 515 Madison Avenue, Edward Weston Girod Cemetery, Edward Weston Grand Canyon, Edward Weston Mammy's Cupboard, Edward Weston Meraux Plantation House, Edward Weston Mr. and Mrs. W. P. Fry, Edward Weston Schooner Kennebunkport Maine, Edward Weston Shenandoah Valley, Edward Weston Wedding Cake House, Edward Weston Woodlawn Plantation House, Edward Weston. Leaves of Grass, From 515 Madison Avenue New York, Georgia, Girod Cemetery New Orleans, Grand Canyon, Leaves of Grass, Louisiana, Mammy's Cupboard Natchez, Meraux Plantation House, mississippi, Mr. and Mrs. W. P. Fry, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Natchez, New Orleans, New York, Schooner Kennebunkport Maine, Shenandoah Valley Virginia, Song of Myself, United States of America, USA, Virginia, Walt Whitman, Walt Whitman Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman Song of Myself, Wedding Cake House, Woodlawn Plantation House
Exhibition dates: 21st April 2012 – 31st December 2012
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958)
The Lane Collection
"Not I, nor anyone else can travel that road for you,
You must travel it for yourself.
It is not far, It is within reach,
Perhaps you have been on it since you were born, and did not know,
Perhaps it is every where on water and land."
Walt Whitman. Part of Song of Myself from Leaves of Grass. 1855
Very little information about this exhibition on the website which is a pity because the photographs are exceptional, even if some do recall the style of other artists of the same era (Charles Sheeler, Berenice Abbott, Ansel Adams, Clarence John Laughlin, and Walker Evans for example).
In 1941, "Weston was commissioned to take photographs for a pricey two-volume edition of "Leaves of Grass." So over the course of nearly 10 months, Weston and his wife, Charis, drove more than 24,000 miles, through 24 states. Of the nearly 700 photographs he developed, he sent 74 to the publisher. Forty-nine appeared in the book." (Mark Feney) "Over the course of the project Weston managed to produce some of the most compelling images of his later career that took his photography in a new and important direction. Like Whitman's epic poems, they draw us into the history of this nation, the beauty of its landscape and the forthrightness of its ordinary citizens." (Encore)
"Leaves of Grass has its genesis in an essay called The Poet by Ralph Waldo Emerson, published in 1845, which expressed the need for the United States to have its own new and unique poet to write about the new country's virtues and vices. Whitman, reading the essay, consciously set out to answer Emerson's call as he began work on the first edition of Leaves of Grass. Whitman, however, downplayed Emerson's influence, stating, "I was simmering, simmering, simmering; Emerson brought me to a boil."
The first edition was published in Brooklyn at the Fulton Street printing shop of two Scottish immigrants, James and Andrew Rome, whom Whitman had known since the 1840s, on July 4, 1855. Whitman paid for and did much of the typesetting for the first edition himself. Sales on the book were few but Whitman was not discouraged. The first edition was very small, collecting only twelve unnamed poems in 95 pages. Whitman once said he intended the book to be small enough to be carried in a pocket. "That would tend to induce people to take me along with them and read me in the open air: I am nearly always successful with the reader in the open air." About 800 were printed, though only 200 were bound in its trademark green cloth cover.
The title Leaves of Grass was a pun. "Grass" was a term given by publishers to works of minor value and "leaves" is another name for the pages on which they were printed. Whitman sent a copy of the first edition of Leaves of Grass to Emerson, the man who had inspired its creation. In a letter to Whitman, Emerson said "I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom America has yet contributed." He went on, "I am very happy in reading it, as great power makes us happy."" (Amazon website)
Many thankx to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Boulder Dam
From 515 Madison Avenue, New York
Schooner, Kennebunkport, Maine
Courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Wedding Cake House, Kennebunkport, Maine
Shenandoah Valley, Virginia
Mammy's Cupboard, Natchez, Mississippi
Woodlawn Plantation House, Louisiana
In 1941, the Limited Editions Club of New York invited photographer Edward Weston to illustrate its deluxe edition of Walt Whitman's epic poem Leaves of Grass. The commission inspired Weston and his wife, Charis, to take a cross-country trip, throughout the South, the Mid-Atlantic states, New England, and back to California, in their trusty Ford, which they nicknamed "Walt." Weston's photographs from this project – mostly made with large, 8 x 10 camera – are exceptionally wide-ranging, with a particular focus on urban and man-altered landscapes. Although he never wanted his images to literally reflect Whitman's text, Weston did relate to the poet's plainspoken style and his emphasis on the broad spectrum of human experience. Weston wrote of the Whitman book: "I do believe… I can and will do the best work of my life. Of course I will never please everyone with my America – wouldn't try to.
Text from the MFA Boston website
Girod Cemetery, New Orleans, Louisiana
Meraux Plantation House, Louisiana
Belle Grove Plantation House, Louisiana
Bessie Jones. St. Simons Island, Georgia
Mr. and Mrs. W. P. Fry, Burnet, Texas
Walt Whitman (American, 1819-1892)
Part of Song of Myself
from Leaves of Grass
Charis Wilson
Wednesday – Sunday 10am – 5pm
Exhibition: 'Portraits of Renown: Photography and the Cult of Celebrity' at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Categories: American, american photographers, black and white photography, colour photography, designer, digital photography, documentary photography, exhibition, existence, gallery website, light, Marcus Bunyan, memory, New York, photographic series, photography, portrait, psychological, reality, space and time
Tags: 19th century photography, Albumen silver print, Alexander Dumas, Alexander Gardner, Alexander Gardner President Lincoln, Alexander Gardner President Lincoln with Gen. George B. McClellan, Alfred Stieglitz, Alfred Stieglitz Self-portrait 1907, alvin langdon coburn, Alvin Langdon Coburn Mark Twain, Amandine-Aurore-Lucile Dudevant, american artist, American Civil War, american photographer, American photography, American poet, American poetry, André Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri Rosa Bonheur, André Disdéri, Andre-Adolphe Eugene Disderi, andy warhol, Andy Warhol Grace Jones, Anna Pavlowa, Antietam, Arnold Genthe, Arnold Genthe Anna Pavlowa, arts, Australian artist, Australian artist Ian Lobb, Barack and Michelle Obama, Baron Adolf De Meyer, Baron Adolf De Meyer Portrait of Josephine Baker, Beaumont Newall The History of Photography, Beaumont Newhall, Berenice Abbott, Berenice Abbott James Joyce, Cabinet card, Carol Jerrems, Carol Jerrems and Ian Lobb, Carol Jerrems takes a portrait, Carol Jerrrems and Ian Lobb, Charles DeForest Fredricks, Charles DeForest Fredricks Mlle Pepita, Charles Richard Meade, Charles Richard Meade Portrait of Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, Coy Watson Jr, Coy Watson Jr Joe Louis – "The Brown Bomber", Cult of Celebrity, Dye color diffusion, Dye color diffusion print, Edgar Allan Poe, Edward Steichen, Edward Steichen Gloria Swanson, Edward Steichen Rodin – Le Penseur, Edward Steichen Rodin The Thinker, Ellen Terry at Age Sixteen, French art, french artist, French designer, French photography, George Sand, gloria swanson, Grace Jones, Herb Ritts, Herb Ritts caricature, history of photography, Ian Lobb, j. paul getty museum, J. Wood L.P. Federmeyer, James Joyce, Joe Louis, Joe Louis – "The Brown Bomber", John Robert Parsons, John Robert Parsons Portrait of Jane Morris, John Singer Sargent, Josephine Baker, Julia Margaret Cameron, Julia Margaret Cameron Ellen Terry at Age Sixteen, L.P. Federmeyer, los angeles, Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, Man Ray, Man Ray Pablo Picasso, Marcus Bunyan On the Nature of Photography, Marcus Bunyan On the Nature of Photography: the BEYOND the visualisation of a world, Marcus Bunyan the BEYOND the visualisation of a world, Mariana Cook, Mariana Cook Barack and Michelle Obama, Marie Cosindas, Marie Cosindas Andy Warhol, Marie Cosindas Yves Saint Laurent, Marie Cosindas Yves St Laurent, Mark Twain, Mathew B. Brady, Mathew B. Brady Robert E. Lee, Mathew B. Brady Walt Whitman, Melbourne photography in the 1970s, minor white, Minor White Three Canons, Mlle Pepita, Mrs. William Morris, Nadar, Nadar Alexander Dumas, Nadar George Sand, Nadar Sarah Bernhardt as the Empress Theodora, Napoleon III, Napoleon III and the Prince Imperial, On the Nature of Photography, Pablo Picasso, photographs of the Victorian era, Photography and the Cult of Celebrity, Pierre Louis Pierson Napoleon III, Pierre Louis Pierson Napoleon III and the Prince Imperial, Pierre-Louis Pierson, poetic truth in photography, polaroid, Polaroid Polacolor print, Portrait of Edgar Allan Poe, Portrait of Jane Morris, Portrait of Josephine Baker, Portrait of Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, Portraits of Renown, Portraits of Renown: Photography and the Cult of Celebrity, President Lincoln, President Lincoln Antietam, Prince Imperial, Robert E. Lee, Rodin – Le Penseur, Rodin The Thinker, Rosa Bonheur, Sarah Bernhardt, Sarah Bernhardt as the Empress Theodora, Sarah Choate Sears, Sarah Choate Sears John Singer Sargent, the BEYOND the visualisation of a world, The Brown Bomber, the gaze, the proliferation of photography, the transformative power of fame, the tyranny of the visual facts, To get from the tangible to the intangible, Vanity Fair, visual history of famous people in photographs, Walt Whitman, Yves Saint Laurent, Yves St. Laurent
Exhibition dates: 3rd April – 26th August 2012
Marie Cosindas (American, born 1925)
Yves Saint Laurent, Paris
Dye colour diffusion [Polaroid ®] print
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Marie Cosindas
On the Nature of Photography
"To get from the tangible to the intangible (which mature artists in any medium claim as part of their task) a paradox of some kind has frequently been helpful. For the photographer to free himself of the tyranny of the visual facts upon which he is utterly dependent, a paradox is the only possible tool. And the talisman paradox for unique photography is to work "the mirror with a memory" as if it were a mirage, and the camera is a metamorphosing machine, and the photograph as if it were a metaphor… Once freed of the tyranny of surfaces and textures, substance and form [the photographer] can use the same to pursue poetic truth."
Newhall, Beaumont (ed.,). The History of Photography. Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1982, p. 281
"Carol Jerrems and I taught at the same secondary school in the 1970's. In a classroom that was unused at that time, I remember having my portrait taken by her. She held her Pentax to her eye. Carols' portraits all seemed to have been made where the posing of her subjects was balanced by an incisive naturalness (for want of a better description). As a challenge to myself I tried to look "natural", but kept in my consciousness that I was having my portrait taken. Minutes passed and neither she nor her camera moved at all.
Then the idea slipped from my mind for just a moment, and I was straightaway bought back by the sound of the shutter. What had changed in my face? – probably nothing, or 1 mm of muscle movement. Had she seen it through the shutter? Or something else – I don't know."
Australian artist Ian Lobb on being photographed by the late Carol Jerrems
There is always something that you can't quite put your finger on in an outstanding portrait, some ineffable other that takes the portrait into another space entirely. I still haven't worked it out but my thoughts are this: forget about the pose of the person. It would seem to me to be both a self conscious awareness by the sitter of the camera and yet at the same time a knowing transcendence of the visibility of the camera itself. In great portrait photography it is almost as though the conversation between the photographer and the person being photographed elides the camera entirely. Minor White, in his three great mantras, the Three Canons, observes:
Be still with yourself
Until the object of your attention
Affirms your presence
Let the Subject generate its own Composition
When the image mirrors the man
And the man mirrors the subject
Something might take over
Freed from the tyranny of the visual facts something else emerges.
Celebrities know only too well how to "work" the camera but the most profound portraits, even of celebrities, are in those moments when the photographer sees something else in the person being photographed, some unrecognised other that emerges from the shadows – a look, a twist of the head, the poignancy of the mouth, the vibrancy of the dancer Josephine Baker, the sturdiness of the gaze of Walt Whitman with hands in pockets, the presence of the hands (no, not the gaze!) of Picasso. I remember taking a black and white portrait of my partner Paul holding a wooden finial like a baby among some trees, a most beautiful, revealing photograph. He couldn't bear to look at it, for it stripped him naked before the lens and showed a side of himself that he had never seen before: vulnerable, youthful, beautiful.
Why do great portrait photographers make so many great portraits? Why can't this skill be shared or taught? Why can't Herb Ritts (for example) make a portrait that goes beyond a caricature? Why is it that what can be taught is so banal that it has no value?
In photography, maybe we edit out what is expected and then it seems that photography does something that goes beyond language; it goes beyond function that can be described as a part of speech, metonym or metaphor. When this something else takes over I think it is truly "unrecognised" in the best portraits – and it is fantastic and wonderful.
This is the ultimate understanding of perception and vision – when spirit takes over – the ability to see it in the mind, through the viewfinder and be able to reveal it in the physicality of the print. This, I believe, is the reality of photography itself in its absolute essential form – and here I am deliberately forgetting about post-photography, post-modernism, modernism, pictorialism, ism, ism – and getting down to why I really like photography: the BEYOND the visualisation of a world, the transcendence of time and space that leads, in great photographs, to a recognition of the discontinuous nature of life but in the end, to its ultimate persistence.
This is as close as I have got so far…
Many thankx to the J. Paul Getty Museum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photograph for a larger version of the image.
Mariana Cook (American, b. 1955)
Barack and Michelle Obama, Chicago
Selenium-toned gelatin silver print
Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987)
Polaroid Polacolor print
© 2011 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Coy Watson Jr. (American, 1912–2009)
Joe Louis – "The Brown Bomber", Los Angeles, February 1935
Edward Steichen (American, 1879-1973)
27.8 x 21.6 cm (10 15/16 x 8 1/2 in.)
© Permission Joanna T. Steichen
Portraits of Renown surveys some of the visual strategies used by photographers to picture famous individuals from the 1840s to the year 2000. "This exhibition offers a brief visual history of famous people in photographs, drawn entirely from the Museum's rich holdings in this genre," says Paul Martineau, curator of the exhibition and associate curator of photographs at the J. Paul Getty Museum. "It also provides a broad historical context for the work in the concurrent exhibition Herb Ritts: L.A. Style, which includes a selection of Ritts's best celebrity portraits."
Photography's remarkable propensity to shape identities has made it the leading vehicle for representing the famous. Soon after photography was invented in the 1830s, it was used to capture the likenesses and accomplishments of great men and women, gradually supplanting other forms of commemoration. In the twentieth century, the proliferation of photography and the transformative power of fame have helped to accelerate the desire for photographs of celebrities in magazines, newspapers, advertisements, and on the Internet. The exhibition is arranged chronologically to help make visible some of the overarching technical and stylistic developments in photography from the first decade of its invention to the end of the twentieth century.
A wide range of historical figures are portrayed in Portraits of Renown. A photograph by Alexander Gardner of President Lincoln documents his visit to the battlefield of Antietam during the Civil War. Captured by Nadar, a portrait of Alexander Dumas, best known for his novels The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers, shows the author with an energetic expression, illustrating the lively personality that made his writing so popular. Baron Adolf De Meyer's portrait of Josephine Baker, an American performer who became an international sensation at the Folies Bergère in Paris, showcases her comedic charm, a trait that proved central to her popularity as a performer. An iconic portrait of the silent screen actress, Gloria Swanson, created by Edward Steichen for Vanity Fair reveals both the intensity of its sitter and the skill of the artist. A picture of Pablo Picasso by his friend Man Ray portrays the master of Cubism with a penetrating gaze.
Yves St. Laurent, Andy Warhol, and Grace Jones are among the contemporary figures included in the exhibition. Fashion designer Yves St. Laurent was photographed by Marie Cosindas using instant color film by Polaroid. The photograph, made the year his first boutique in New York opened, graced the walls of the store for ten years. A Cosindas portrait of Andy Warhol shows the artist wearing dark sunglasses, which partially conceal his face. Warhol, who was fascinated by celebrity, delighted in posing public personalities like Grace Jones for his camera.
Press release from the J. Paul Getty Museum website
Man Ray (American, 1890-1976)
25.2 x 20cm
© Man Ray Trust ARS-ADAGP
Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Baron Adolf De Meyer (American, born France, 1868-1946)
Portrait of Josephine Baker
Collotype print
In 1925 Josephine Baker, an American dancer from Saint Louis, Missouri, made her debut on the Paris stage in La Revue nègre (The Black Review) at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, wearing nothing more than a skirt of feathers and performing her danse sauvage (savage dance). She was an immediate sensation in Jazz-Age France, which celebrated her perceived exoticism, quite the opposite of the reception she had received dancing in American choruses. American expatriate novelist Ernest Hemingway called Baker "the most sensational woman anybody ever saw – or ever will."
Baron Adolf de Meyer, a society and fashion photographer, took this playful portrait in the year of Baker's debut. Given the highly sexual nature of her stage persona, this portrait is charming and almost innocent; Baker's personality is suggested by her face rather than her famous body.
Text from the J. Paul Getty website
John Barrymore as Hamlet
Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1964-1946)
Georgia O'Keeffe: A Portrait
Arnold Genthe (American, born Germany, 1869-1942)
Anna Pavlowa
33.5 × 25.2cm (13 3/16 × 9 15/16 in.)
The Russian ballerina Anna Pavlowa (or Pavlova) so greatly admired Arnold Genthe's work that she made the unusual decision to visit his studio, rather than have him come to her rehearsals. The resulting portrait of the prolific dancer, leaping in mid-air, is the only photograph to capture Pavlowa in free movement. Genthe regarded this print as one of the best dance photographs he ever made.
Alvin Langdon Coburn (British, born United States, 1882-1966)
Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens)
Negative December 21, 1908; print 1913
20.6 × 14.8cm (8 1/8 × 5 13/16 in.)
[Self-Portrait]
Negative 1907; print 1930
24.8 × 18.4cm (9 3/4 × 7 1/4 in.)
Rodin – Le Penseur (The Thinker)
Gelatin-carbon print
Sarah Choate Sears (American, 1858-1935)
[Julia Ward Howe]
Platinum print
23.5 × 18.6cm (9 1/4 × 7 5/16 in.)
Julia Ward Howe (May 27, 1819 – October 17, 1910) was an American poet and author, known for writing "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" and the original 1870 pacifist Mother's Day Proclamation. She was also an advocate for abolitionism and a social activist, particularly for women's suffrage.
Although John Singer Sargent was the most famous American portrait painter of his time, he apparently did not like to be photographed. The few photographs that exist show him at work, as he is here, sketching and puffing on a cigar. His friend Sarah Choate Sears, herself a painter of some note, drew many of her sitters for photographs from the same aristocratic milieu as Sargent did for his paintings.
Nadar [Gaspard Félix Tournachon] (French, 1820-1910)
[Sarah Bernhardt as the Empress Theodora in Sardou's "Theodora"]
Negative 1884; print and mount about 1889
14.6 × 10.5 cm (5 3/4 × 4 1/8 in.)
J. Wood (American, active New York, New York 1870s-1880s)
L.P. Federmeyer
14.8 × 10 cm (5 13/16 × 3 15/16 in.)
Julia Margaret Cameron (British, born India, 1815-1879)
Ellen Terry at Age Sixteen
Negative 1864; print about 1875
Carbon print
24.1cm (9 1/2 in.)
This image of Ellen Terry (1847-1928) is one of the few known photographs of a female celebrity by Julia Margaret Cameron. Terry, the popular child actress of the British stage, was sixteen years old when Cameron made this image. This photograph was most likely taken just after she married the eccentric painter, George Frederick Watts (1817-1904), who was thirty years her senior. They spent their honeymoon in the village of Freshwater on the Isle of Wight where Cameron resided.
Cameron's portrait echoes Watt's study of Terry titled Choosing (1864, National Portrait Gallery, London). As in the painting, Terry is shown in profile with her eyes closed, an ethereal beauty in a melancholic dream state. In this guise, Terry embodies the Pre-Raphaelite ideal of womanhood rather than appearing as the wild boisterous teenager she was known to be. The round ("tondo") format of this photograph was popular among Pre-Raphaelite artists.
Cameron titled another print of this image Sadness (see 84.XZ.186.52), which may suggest the realisation of a mismatched marriage. Terry's anxiety is plainly evident – she leans against an interior wall and tugs nervously at her necklace. The lighting is notably subdued, leaving her face shadowed in doubt. In The Story of My Life (1909), Terry recalls how demanding Watts was, calling upon her to sit for hours as a model and giving her strict orders not to speak in front of distinguished guests in his studio.
This particular version was printed eleven years after Cameron first made the portrait. In order to distribute this image commercially, the Autotype Company of London rephotographed the original negative after the damage had been repaired. The company then made new prints using the durable, non-fading carbon print process. Thus, this version is in reverse compared to Sadness. Terry's enduring popularity is displayed by the numerous photographs taken of her over the years. Along with the two portraits by Cameron, the Getty owns three more of Terry by other photographers.
Adapted from Julian Cox. Julia Margaret Cameron, In Focus: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1996), 12. ©1996 The J. Paul Getty Museum; with additions by Carolyn Peter, J. Paul Getty Museum, Department of Photographs, 2019.
Charles DeForest Fredricks (American, 1823-1894)
[Mlle Pepita]
9 × 5.4 cm (3 9/16 × 2 1/8 in.)
André Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri (French, 1819-1889)
[Rosa Bonheur]
8.4 × 5.2cm (3 5/16 × 2 1/16 in.)
Rosa Bonheur, born Marie-Rosalie Bonheur (16 March 1822 – 25 May 1899), was a French artist, mostly a painter of animals (animalière) but also a sculptor, in a realist style. Her best-known paintings are Ploughing in the Nivernais, first exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1848, and now at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, and The Horse Fair (in French: Le marché aux chevaux), which was exhibited at the Salon of 1853 (finished in 1855) and is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York City. Bonheur was widely considered to be the most famous female painter of the nineteenth century.
Mathew B. Brady (American, about 1823-1896)
John Robert Parsons (British, about 1826-1909)
[Portrait of Jane Morris (Mrs. William Morris)]
Negative July 1865; print after 1900
22.9 × 19.2cm (9 × 7 9/16 in.)
George Sand (Amandine-Aurore-Lucile Dupin)
Amandine-Aurore-Lucile Dudevant, née Dupin, took the pseudonym George Sand in 1832. She was a successful Romantic novelist and a close friend of Nadar, and during the 1860s he photographed her frequently. Her writing was celebrated for its frequent depiction of working-class or peasant heroes. She was also a woman as renowned for her romantic liaisons as her writing; here she allowed Nadar to photograph her, devoid of coquettish charms but nevertheless a commanding presence.
This portrait is a riot of textural surfaces. The sumptuous satin of Sand's gown and silken texture of her hair have a rich tactile presence. Her shimmering skirt melts into the velvet-draped support on which she leans, creating a visual triangle with the careful centre part of her wavy hair. The portrait details the exquisite laces, beads, and buttons of her gown, but her face, the apex of the triangle, is out of focus. Sand was apparently unable to remain perfectly still throughout the exposure, and the slight blurring of her facial features erases the unforgiving details that the years had drawn upon her.
President Lincoln, United States Headquarters, Army of the Potomac, near Antietam, October 4, 1862
21.9 x 19.7cm (8 5/8 x 7 3/4 in.)
Twenty-six thousand soldiers were killed or wounded in the Battle of Antietam on September 17, 1862, after which Confederate General Robert E. Lee was forced to retreat to Virginia. Just two weeks after the victory, President and Commander-in-Chief Abraham Lincoln conferred with General McClernand and Allan Pinkerton, Chief of the nascent Secret Service, who had organised espionage missions behind Confederate lines.
Lincoln stands tall, front and centre in his stovepipe hat, his erect and commanding posture emphasised by the tent pole that seems to be an extension of his spine. The other men stand slightly apart in deference to their leader, in postures of allegiance with their hands covering their hearts. The reclining figure of the man at left and the shirt hanging from the tree are a reminder that, although this is a formally posed picture, Lincoln's presence did not halt the camp's activity, and no attempts were made to isolate him from the ordinary circumstances surrounding the continuing military conflict.
President Lincoln, United States Headquarters, Army of the Potomac, near Antietam, October 4, 1862 (detail)
Pierre Louis Pierson (French, 1822-1913)
Napoleon III and the Prince Imperial
Albumen silver print from a wet collodion glass negative
21 × 16cm (8 1/4 × 6 5/16 in.)
The Prince Imperial, son of Napoleon III, sits strapped securely into a seat on his horse's back, a model subject for the camera. An attendant at the left steadies the horse so that the little prince remains picture-perfect in the centre of the backdrop erected for the photograph. The horse stands upon a rug that serves as a formalising element, making the scene appear more regal. The Emperor Napoleon III himself stands off to the right in perfect profile, supervising the scene with his dog and forming a framing mirror-image of the horse and attendant on the other side.
Pierre-Louis Pierson placed his camera far enough back from the Prince to capture the entire scene and all the players, but this was not the version sold as a popular carte-de-visite. The carte-de-visite image was cropped so that only the Prince upon his horse was visible.
Alexander Dumas [père] (1802-1870) / Alexandre Dumas
Image (rounded corners): 23.5 x 18.7cm (9 1/4 x 7 3/8 in.)
The writer Alexander Dumas was Nadar's boyhood idol. Nadar's father had published Dumas's first novel and play, and a portrait of Dumas hung in young Nadar's room. The son of a French revolutionary general and a black mother, Dumas arrived in Paris from the provinces in 1823, poor and barely educated. Working as a clerk, he educated himself in French history and began to write. In 1829 he met with his first success; with credits including The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo, published in 1844 and 1845, respectively, his fame and popularity were assured.
Nadar was the first photographer to use photography to enhance the sitter's reputation. Given Dumas's popularity, this mounted edition print, signed and dedicated by him, was likely intended for sale.
Dumas is represented as a lively, vibrant man. The self-restraint of his crossed hands, resting on a chair that disappears into the shadows, seems like an attempt to contain an undercurrent of boundless energy that threatened to ruin the necessary stillness of the pose and appears to have found an outlet through Dumas's hair. Around the time of this sitting, the prolific Dumas and Nadar were planning to collaborate on a theatrical spectacle, which was ultimately never staged.
Unknown maker (American)
Portrait of Edgar Allan Poe
Daguerreotype
"A noticeable man clad in black, the fashion of the times, close-buttoned, erect, forward looking, something separate in his bearing …a beautifully poetic face."
–Basil L. Gildersleeve to Mary E. Phillips, 1915 (his childhood recollection of Poe)
Many of Edgar Allan Poe's contemporaries described him as he appears in this portrait: a darkly handsome and intelligent man who possessed an unorthodox personality. Despite being acknowledged as one of America's greatest writers of poetry and short stories, Poe's life remains shrouded in mystery, with conflicting accounts about poverty, alcoholism, drug use, and the circumstances of his death in 1849. Like his life, Poe's poems and short stories are infused with a sense of tragedy and mystery. Among his best-known works are: The Raven, Annabel Lee, and The Fall of the House of Usher.
This daguerreotype was made several months before Poe's death at age 40. After his wife died two years earlier in 1847, Poe turned to two women for support and companionship. He met Annie Richmond at a poetry lecture that he gave when visiting Lowell, Massachusetts. Although she was married, they developed a deep, mutual affection. Richmond is thought to have arranged and paid for this portrait sitting. Poe is so forcibly portrayed that historians have described his appearance as disheveled, brooding, exhausted, haunted, and melancholic.
For reasons that are not entirely clear, relatively few daguerreotypes of notable poets, novelists, or painters have survived from the 1840s, and some of the best we have are by unknown makers. The art of the daguerreotype was one in which the sitter's face usually took priority over the maker's name, and many daguerreotypists failed to sign their works. This is the case with the Getty's portrait of Poe.
Adapted from getty.edu, Interpretive Content Department, 2009; and Weston Naef, The J. Paul Getty Museum Handbook of the Photographs Collection (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1995), 35. © 1995 The J. Paul Getty Museum.
Charles Richard Meade (American, 1826-1858)
Portrait of Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre
Daguerreotype, hand-coloured
By New Year's Day of 1840 – little more than one year after William Henry Fox Talbot had first displayed his photogenic drawings in London and just four to five months after the first daguerreotypes had been exhibited in Paris at the Palais d'Orsay in conjunction with a series of public demonstrations of the process – Daguerre's instruction manual had been translated into at least four languages and printed in at least twenty-one editions. In this way, his well-kept secret formula and list of materials quickly spread to the Americas and to provincial locations all over Europe. Photography became a gold rush-like phenomenon, with as much fiction attached to it as fact.
Nowhere was the daguerreotype more enthusiastically accepted than in the United States. Charles R. Meade was the proprietor of a prominent New York photographic portrait studio. He made a pilgrimage to France in 1848 to meet the founder of his profession and while there became one of the very few people to use the daguerreotype process to photograph the inventor himself.
A daguerreotype was (and is) created by coating a highly polished silver plated sheet of copper with light sensitive chemicals such as chloride of iodine. The plate is then exposed to light in the back of a camera obscura. When first removed from the camera, the image is not immediately visible. The plate must be exposed to mercury vapours to "bring out" the image. The image is then "fixed" (or "made permanent on the plate") by washing it in a bath of hyposulfite of soda. Finally it is washed in distilled water. Each daguerreotype is a unique image; multiple prints cannot be made from the metal plate.
Adapted from Weston Naef, The J. Paul Getty Museum Handbook of the Photographs Collection (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1995), 33, © 1995 The J. Paul Getty Museum; with additions by Carolyn Peter, J. Paul Getty Museum, Department of Photographs, 2019.
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Text/Exhibition: "George Platt Lynes, Minor White and 'The Temptation of Saint Anthony Is Mirrors' " on the exhibition 'HIDE/SEEK: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture' at the Brooklyn Museum, New York
Categories: American, american photographers, beauty, Berlin, black and white photography, colour photography, digital photography, documentary photography, English artist, exhibition, existence, film, gallery website, intimacy, light, Marcus Bunyan, memory, New York, painting, photographic series, photography, portrait, psychological, quotation, reality, space and time
Tags: A Fire In My Belly, Acrylic on canvas, AIDS, american artist, American gay artist, american photographer, American photography, American Portraiture, Beauford Delaney, Beauford Delaney James Baldwin, Berenice Abbott, Berenice Abbott Janet Flanner, bodily pleasure, Body Image and the Gay Male, Brooklyn Museum, C-type print, Cass Bird, Cass Bird I Look Just Like My Daddy, Charles Demuth, Charles Demuth Dancing Sailors, Cruising and Transcendence in the Photographs of Minor White, Dancing Sailors, David Wojnarowicz, David Wojnarowicz A Fire In My Belly, Der Kries, Der Kries gay pornographic magazine, Desire, difference, Difference and Desire in American Portraiture, Eight Bells Folly, Eight Bells Folly: Memorial to Hart Crane, gay and lesbian artists, gelatin silver print, gender, George Bellows Riverfront No.1, George Platt Lynes, George Platt Lynes photographs in the Kinsey Institute, George Platt Lynes Untitled, George Platt Lynes Untitled (Frontal Male Nude), George Wesley Bellows, Hart Crane, HIDE/SEEK, HIDE/SEEK: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture, HIV/AIDS, I Look Just Like My Daddy, Images 27 and 28 in the bound sequence The Temptation of Saint Anthony Is Mirrors, Images 9 and 10 in the bound sequence The Temptation of Saint Anthony Is Mirrors, James Baldwin, Janet Flanner, Keith Haring, Keith Haring Unfinished Painting, Kevin Moore, Kevin Moore Cruising and Transcendence in the Photographs of Minor White, Lincoln Kirstein, Marcus Bunyan Pressing the Flesh, marginalization, Marsden Hartley, Marsden Hartley Eight Bells Folly: Memorial to Hart Crane, Marsden Hartley Painting No. 47, Michel Foucault, Michel Foucault desire, Michel Foucault pleasure, minor white, Minor White Archive, Minor White Images 27 and 28 in the bound sequence The Temptation of Saint Anthony Is Mirrors, Minor White Images 9 and 10 in the bound sequence The Temptation of Saint Anthony Is Mirrors, Minor White The Temptation of Saint Anthony Is Mirrors, Minor White Tom Murphy (San Francisco), new pleasure, Oil on canvas, Painting No. 47, paper negatives, passing, Pastel on paper, pencil on paper, performance artist, Peter Hujar, Peter Hujar Susan Sontag, pleasures of the flesh, Pressing the Flesh: Sex, princeton university art museum, queer art, queer theory, Research notes on photographs from the Minor White Archive, Riverfront No.1, role of sexual difference in depicting modern Americans, sexual diffrerence, sexual identities, sexuality, Super 8, Super 8mm film, Susan Sontag, temptation of saint anthony, Temptation of Saint Anthony Is Mirrors, The Kinsey Institute, The Temptation of Saint Anthony Is Mirrors, Thomas Eakins, Thomas Eakins Walt Whitman, Tom Murphy (San Francisco), Walker Evans, Walker Evans Lincoln Kirstein, Walt Whitman, Watercolor
Exhibition dates: 18th November 2011 – 12th February 2012
Minor White (American, 1908-1976)
Tom Murphy (San Francisco)
from The Temptation of St Anthony is Mirrors 1948
4 5/8 x 3 5/8 in. (11.7 x 9.2 cm)
The Minor White Archive, Princeton University Art Museum Bequest of Minor White, MWA 48-136
© Trustees of Princeton University
"The possibility of using our bodies as a possible source of very numerous pleasures is something that is very important. For instance, if you look at the traditional construction of pleasure, you see that bodily pleasure, or pleasures of the flesh, are always drinking, eating and fucking. And that seems to be the limit of the understanding of our bodies, our pleasures ….
It is very interesting to note, for instance, that for centuries people generally, as well as doctors, psychiatrists, and even liberation movements, have always spoken about desire, and never about pleasure. "We have to liberate our desire," they say. No! We have to create new pleasure. And then maybe desire will follow." (My bold)
Michel Foucault 1
George Platt Lynes, Minor White and The Temptation of Saint Anthony Is Mirrors
I had the great privilege of visiting The Minor White Archive at Princeton University while I was researching for my PhD. While there I studied the work cards and classic prints of the great photographer, paying particular attention to his photography of the male. What was a great surprise and delight to me were the presence of photographs of explicit sexual acts, men photographed with erections – images that have, to my knowledge, never been published. I don't think that many people would even know that Minor White took such photographs. Although these images would have never been for public consumption it is still very unusual to find a classical photographer with such a public profile taking photographs of erect penises, especially in the 1940s!
Disturbed by having been in battle in the Second World War and seeing some of his best male friends killed, White's early photographs of men (in their uniforms) depict the suffering and anguish that the mental and physical stress of war can cause. He was even more upset than most because he was battling his own inner sexual demons at the same time, his shame and disgust at being a homosexual and attracted to men, a difficulty compounded by his religious upbringing. In his photographs White both denied his attraction to men and expressed it. His photographs of the male body are suffused with both sexual mystery and a celebration of his sexuality despite his bouts of guilt. After the war he started to use the normal everyday bodies of his friends to form sequences of photographs, sometimes using the body as a metaphor for the landscape and vice versa. In the above photograph (Tom Murphy, left), based on a religious theme, we see a dismembered hairy body front on, the hands clutching and caressing the body, the lower hand hovering near the exposed genitalia, the upper hand cupping the breast. We see the agony and ecstasy of a homoerotic desire cloaked in a religious theme.
The image comes from the The Temptation of St Anthony is Mirrors (1948), four pages of which can be seen below. While at The Minor White Archive I looked at the only complete, undamaged book in existence. What an experience!
The book has a powerful and intense presence. It was beautifully sequenced as you would expect from Minor White and features photographs of Tom Murphy. There is a series of his hands over the back of a chair in different positions: hanging, curled, splayed, held slightly upwards, and these are paired with photographs of bare feet and turned up jeans, bare feet and rocks, and three other photographs of Tom Murphy. In an excellent paper Cruising and Transcendence in the Photographs of Minor White (Nd. Later published as an online-only feature accompanying Aperture magazine's Spring 2015 issue, "Queer"), author Kevin Moore observes that the hand-bound volume with images paired on facing pages – "mirrors" to both one another and the artist – is a personal account as well as a meditation on the sins of the flesh.
"Temptation (which was never published or exhibited) begins with a sort of prologue, comprising a single full-length nude of Tom Murphy, White's student and the model most commonly associated with his work. The pose is similar to those found in the beefcake pictures White was producing at this time: Murphy adopts a classical contrapposto stance and is entirely nude, his pale, wiry body positioned against a dark backdrop. A piece of driftwood at the model's feet proposes a theme of innocence – man in his natural state. The sequence then moves to pairings of images describing man in his civilized state, featuring several loving close-ups of Murphy's gesturing hands, a shot of his bare feet, and a single shoulder-length portrait, in which he wears a buttoned shirt and looks intently off to the side. Next, there is an interlude suggesting growing dissolution: an image of Murphy's feet and a petrified stone is paired with a shot of Murphy in full dress slouched on a mass of rocks and staring vacantly off into the distance. The next pairing [images 9 and 10 below] accelerates the descent into temptation. Here, the pose in a second picture of Murphy's feet suggests agitation, while a three-quarterlength portrait of Murphy, crouched in the bushes and looking back over his shoulder, is as emblematic an image of cruising as White ever produced. The photographs that follow descend further into lust and self-recrimination, conveyed through photographs in which Murphy's naked body alternates between expressions of pain and pleasure. The sequence ends with a series of beatific nudes [images 27 and 28 below], which express redemption through nonsexual treatments of the body and in the body's juxtaposition with natural forms – a return to nature.
White may have thought at first that the sequence format would help him transcend the limits of personal biography, that he could use the breadth and fluidity of the sequence to emphasize a universal narrative while exercising control over the potentially explosive and revealing content of individual images. This proved to be overly optimistic, at least in his earliest uses of the form. White's colleagues, for example, immediately understood Temptation for what it really was: an agonized portrayal of White's love for his male student."
Moore goes on to conclude that White obsfucated his sexuality, displacing gay 'cruising' "by a universalized mystical searching – sexual longing setting in motion a heroic search" using photography as his medium, and that his photographs became a dreamscape, perhaps even a dream(e)scape: "in which meanings are obscured, not clarified; signs are effaced, not illuminated; beauty is closeted, not set out for all to see. White was attracted to the ambiguity of the dream because it offered cover and protection but also freedom to maneuver. The dream supported the irrational, maintained a sense of mystery, and beautified frustration."
I have to disagree with Kevin Moore. Anyone who has seen The Temptation of Saint Anthony Is Mirrors in the flesh (so to speak) can feel the absolute presence of these images, their reality, the connection between image and viewer. Maybe White was a Romantic but he was realistically romantic; his images are not dreamscapes, they offer multiple readings and contexts, insights into the human condition. Even though there was anguish and guilt present about his sexuality, channelled through his photography, anyone bold enough to take photographs of erections in 1940 has some ticker. It takes a clear eye and a courageous heart to do this, knowing what was at stake in this era of sexual repression. Beauty is not closeted here, unless I am looking at different images from Kevin Moore. In fact the magic of the photography of Minor White is his ability to modulate space, to modulate bodies so that they are beautiful, ambiguous and mystical whatever their context. Not everything in this world has to be in your face. Like a Glen Gould playing the Goldberg Variations revelation of beauty takes time, concentration and meditation.
Also, an overriding feeling when viewing the images was one of loneliness, sadness and anguish, for the bodies seemed to be observed and not partaken of, to be unavailable both physically and in a strange way, photographically. For a photographer who prided himself on revealing the spirit within, through photography, these are paradoxical photographs, visually accessible and mysteriously (un)revealing, photographs of a strange and wonderful ambivalence. Two great words: obsfucation, ambivalence. Clouded with mixed feelings and emotions, not necessarily anything to do with sexuality. Not everything has to be about sexuality. It is the difference between imbibing Freud or Jung – personally I prefer the more holistic, more inclusive, more spiritual Jung.
And so to the image of George Platt Lynes that I have paired with the nude of Tom Murphy (below).
Platt Lynes was another artist who struggled with is sexuality, but seemingly not to such an extent as Minor White did. GPL worked as a fashion photographer and had his own studio in New York where he photographed dancers, artists and celebrities among others. He undertook a series of mythological photographs on classical themes (which are amazing in composition and feature Surrealist motifs). Privately he photographed male nudes but was reluctant to show them in public for fear of the harm that they could do to his reputation and business with the fashion magazines. Generally his earlier male nude photographs concentrate on the idealised youthful body or ephebe.
As Lynes became more despondent with his career as a fashion photographer his private photographs of male nudes tended to take on a darker and sharper edge. After a period of residence in Hollywood he returned to New York nearly penniless. His style of photographing the male nude underwent a revision. While the photographs of his European colleagues still relied on the sun drenched bodies of young adolescent males evoking memories of classical beauty and the mythology of Ancient Greece the later nudes of Platt Lynes feature a mixture of youthful ephebes and heavier set bodies which appear to be more sexually knowing. The compositional style of dramatically lit photographs of muscular torsos of older men shot in close up (see photograph below for example) were possibly influenced by a number of things – his time in Hollywood with its images of handsome, swash-buckling movie stars with broad chests and magnificent physiques; the images of bodybuilders by physique photographers that George Platt Lynes visited; the fact that his lover George Tichenor had been killed during WWII; and the knowledge that he was penniless and had cancer. There is, I believe, a certain sadness but much inner strength in his later photographs of the male nude that harnesses the inherent sexual power embedded within their subject matter.
When undertaking research into GPL's photographs at The Kinsey Institute as part of my PhD I noted that most of the photographs had annotations in code on the back of them giving details of age, sexual proclivities of models and what they are prepared to do and where they were found. This information gives a vital social context to GPL's nude photographs of men and positions them within the moral and ethical framework of the era in which they were made. The strong image (below) is always quoted as an example of GPL's more direct way of photographing the male nude in the last years of his life. The male is solid, imposing, lit from above, heavy set, powerful, massive. The eyes are almost totally in shadow. Later photos have more chiaroscuro than earlier work, more use of contrasting light (especially down lit or uplit figures) but are they more direct? Yes. The men look straight into camera.
This monumentality of body and form was matched by a new openness in the representation of sexuality. There are intimate photographs of men in what seem to be post-coital revere, in unmade beds, genitalia showing or face down showing their butts off. Some of the faces in these later photographs remain hidden, as though disclosure of identity would be detrimental for fear of persecution. The photograph above is very 'in your face' for the conservative time from which it emerges, remembering it was the era of witch hunts against communists and subversives (including homosexuals). Conversely, this photograph is quite restrained compared to the most striking series of GPL's photographs that I saw at The Kinsey Institute which involves an exploration the male anal area (a photograph from the 1951 series can be found in the book titled 'George Platt Lynes: Photographs from The Kinsey Institute'). This explicit series features other photographs of the same model – in particular one that depicts the male with his buttocks in the air pulling his arse cheeks apart. After Lynes found out he had cancer he started to send his photographs to the German homoerotic magazine 'Der Kries' under the pseudonym Roberto Rolf, and in the last years of his life he experimented with paper negatives, which made his images of the male body even more grainy and mysterious.
I believe that Lynes understood, intimately, the different physical body types that gay men find desirable and used them in his photographs. He visited Lon of New York (a photographer of beefcake men) in his studio and purchased photographs of bodybuilders for himself, as did the German photographer George Hoyningen-Huene. It is likely that these images of bodybuilders did influence his later compositional style of images of men; it is also possible that he detected the emergence of this iconic male body type as a potent sexual symbol, one that that was becoming more visible and sexually available to gay men.
The differences between the White and GPL nudes is instructive. White: introspective, haunted, religious with an unrequited sense of longing – hands clutching self, inward pointing; GPL: more closely cropped, more open, one hand firmly grasping but the other hand open, receptive, presented to the viewer above the available phallic organ. It reminds me for some unknown reason, some quirk of my brain association, of the shell of Botticelli's Birth of Venus (1486) inverted. There is difference between the two artists – one struggling with his sexuality, being realistically romantic, the other physically doing something about it – posting his photographs to one of the first gay magazines in the world. But both were taking photographs of intimate sexual acts that could never have been published in their lifetimes – that are still are hidden from view today. When, oh when, will someone have the courage to publish this work?
My notes on Minor White's photographs and notes on George Platt Lynes photographs can be found on Pressing the Flesh: Sex, Body Image and the Gay Male (2001). The website includes the chapters Historical Pressings (the history of photographic images of the muscular male body) Bench Press (on the gym body), In Press (the photographic representation of the male body in the media including early gay porn magazines) and all my thesis notes. A site map is available.
Many thankx to the Brooklyn Museum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
1. Gallagher, Bob and Wilson, Alexander. "Sex and the Politics of Identity: An Interview with Michel Foucault," in Thompson, Mark. Gay Spirit: Myth and Meaning. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987, p.31.
Images 9 and 10 in the bound sequence The Temptation of Saint Anthony Is Mirrors
9.3 x 11.8 cm; 11.2 x 9.1 cm
(bottom)
Images 27 and 28 in the bound sequence The Temptation of Saint Anthony Is Mirrors
1948. 5.3 x 11.6 cm; 10.6 x 8.9 cm
(left)
(right)
George Platt Lynes (American, 1907-1955)
George Platt Lynes
Untitled (Frontal Male Nude)
Nd (early 1950s)
Thomas Eakins (American, 1844-1916)
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institute
Charles Demuth (American, 1883-1935)
Dancing Sailors
Watercolour and pencil on paper
Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio; Mr and Mrs William H Marlatt Fund
George Wesley Bellows (American, 1882-1925)
Riverfront No.1
Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio: Howald Fund Purchase
Marsden Hartley (American, 1877-1943)
Eight Bells Folly: Memorial to Hart Crane
Gift of Ione and Hudson D. Walker
Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum, University of Minnesota
Harold Hart Crane (July 21, 1899 – April 27, 1932) was an American poet. Finding both inspiration and provocation in the poetry of T. S. Eliot, Crane wrote modernist poetry that is difficult, highly stylised, and very ambitious in its scope. In his most ambitious work, The Bridge, Crane sought to write an epic poem in the vein of The Waste Land that expressed something more sincere and optimistic than the ironic despair that Crane found in Eliot's poetry. In the years following his suicide at the age of 32, Crane has come to be seen as one of the most influential poets of his generation…
Crane visited Mexico in 1931-32 on a Guggenheim Fellowship and his drinking continued as he suffered from bouts of alternating depression and elation … While on board the steamship SS Orizaba enroute to New York, he was beaten after making sexual advances to a male crew member, seeming to confirm his own idea that one could not be happy as a homosexual. Just before noon on April 27, 1932, Hart Crane jumped overboard into the Gulf of Mexico. Although he had been drinking heavily and left no suicide note, witnesses believed his intentions to be suicidal, as several reported that he exclaimed "Goodbye, everybody!" before throwing himself overboard. (The legend among poets is: He walked to the fantail, took off his coat quietly, and jumped.) His body was never recovered. (Wikipedia)
Peter Hujar (American, 1937-1987)
Susan Sontag (American, 1933-2004)
© Estate of Peter Hujar
Keith Haring (American, 1958-1990)
Unfinished Painting
Courtesy of Katia Perlstein, Brussels, Belgium
© Keith Haring Foundation
David Wojnarowicz (American, 1954-1992)
A Fire In My Belly (Film In Progress) (film still)
Super 8mm film
black and white & color (transferred to video)
Courtesy of The Estate of David Wojnarowicz and P.P.O.W Gallery, New York and The Fales Library and Special Collection
One day before World AIDS Day, the renown painter, photographer, writer, filmmaker, performance artist and activist David Wojnarowicz, who died in 1992 at the age of 37 from AIDS-related complications, has had one of his most important works, A Fire In My Belly, pulled from The Smithsonian Institution's National Portrait Gallery's HIDE / SEEK exhibit because of pressure from conservative politicians and the Catholic League."
HIDE/SEEK: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture, the first major museum exhibition to explore how gender and sexual identity have shaped the creation of American portraiture, organised by and presented at the National Portrait Gallery last fall, will be on view at the Brooklyn Museum from November 18, 2011, through February 12, 2012. With the cooperation of the National Portrait Gallery, the Brooklyn Museum has reconstituted the exhibition in concert with the Tacoma Art Museum, where it will be on view from March 17 through June 10, 2012.
HIDE/SEEK includes approximately a hundred works in a wide range of media created over the course of one hundred years that reflect a variety of sexual identities and the stories of several generations. Highlighting the influence of gay and lesbian artists, many of whom developed new visual strategies to code and disguise their subjects' sexual identities as well as their own, HIDE/ SEEK considers such themes as the role of sexual difference in depicting modern Americans, how artists have explored the definition of sexuality and gender, how major themes in modern art – especially abstraction – have been influenced by marginalisation, and how art has reflected society's changing attitudes.
Announcing the Brooklyn presentation, Museum Director Arnold L. Lehman states, "From the moment I first learned about this extraordinary exhibition in its planning stages, presenting it in Brooklyn has been a priority. It is an important chronicle of a neglected dimension of American art and a brilliant complement and counterpoint to 'Youth and Beauty: Art of the American Twenties', a touring exhibition organised by the Brooklyn Museum, also on view this fall."
In addition to its commentary on a marginalised cultural history, HIDE/ SEEK offers an unprecedented survey of more than a century of American art. Beginning with late nineteenth-century portraits by Thomas Eakins and John Singer Sargent, it includes works from the first half of the 1900s by such masters as Romaine Brooks, George Bellows, Marsden Hartley, and Georgia O'Keeffe; the exhibition continues through the postwar period with works by Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Agnes Martin, and Andy Warhol, and concludes with major works by late twentieth-century artists such as Keith Haring, Glenn Ligon, Nan Goldin, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, and Catherine Opie.
The Brooklyn presentation will feature nearly all of the works included in the National Portrait Gallery exhibition. Among them are rarely seen paintings by Charles Demuth, whose better-known industrialised landscapes are on view in the Brooklyn Museum exhibition Youth and Beauty; a poignant portrait of New Yorker writer Janet Flanner wearing two masks, taken by photographer Bernice Abbott; Andrew Wyeth's painting of a young neighbour standing nude in a wheat field, much like Botticelli's Venus emerging from her shell; Robert Mapplethorpe's photograph riffing on the classic family portrait, in which a leather-clad Brian Ridley is seated on a wingback chair shackled to his whip-wielding partner, Lyle Heeter; and Cass Bird's photographic portrait of a friend staring out from under a cap emblazoned with the words "I look Just Like My Daddy." The exhibition will also include David Wojnarowicz's A Fire in My Belly, an unfinished film the artist created between 1986 and 1987.
Press release from the Brooklyn Museum website
Janet Flanner (American, 1892-1978)
Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C
C Berenice Abbott / Commerce Graphics Ltd., Inc.
Salutat
Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts
Gift of anonymous donor
Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975)
Lincoln Kirstein (American, 1907-1996)
The Metropolitan Msuem of Art, Ford Motor Company Collection
© Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Lincoln Edward Kirstein (May 4, 1907 – January 5, 1996) was an American writer, impresario, art connoisseur, philanthropist, and cultural figure in New York City, noted especially as co-founder of the New York City Ballet. He developed and sustained the company with his organising ability and fundraising for more than four decades, serving as the company's general director from 1946 to 1989. According to the New York Times, he was "an expert in many fields," organising art exhibits and lecture tours in the same years.
Painting No. 47, Berlin
39 7/16 x 32 in. (100.1 x 81.3 cm)
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.
Gift of Joseph H. Hirshhorn, 1972
Bates College Museum of Art, Lewiston, ME, Marsden Hartley Memorial Collection
© Estate of George Platt Lynes
Beauford Delaney (American, 1901-1979)
Cass Bird (American, b. 1974)
I Look Just Like My Daddy
C-type print
Collection of the artist, New York
© Cass Bird
Thursday 11am – 10pm
Friday – Sunday 11am – 6pm
Monday and Tuesday closed
Brooklyn Museum website
Vale Dr John Cato (1926-2011)
By Dr Marcus Bunyan 2 Comments
Categories: Australian artist, Australian writing, black and white photography, colour photography, cultural commentator, documentary photography, exhibition, existence, landscape, Melbourne, National Gallery of Victoria, photographic series, photography, psychological, quotation and sculpture
Tags: ... and his forms were without number, a perception of the world, acts of revelation, Alcheringa, Alfred Stieglitz, Another Way of Telling, art, Athol Shmith, Australian black and white photography, Australian fine art photography, Australian landscape photography, Australian teacher and artist, Australian teacher and photographer, Broken Spears, destruction of a culture and spirit, Double Concerto, Double Concerto: An Essay in Fiction, Dr Marcus Bunyan, Dr Marcus Bunyan curator, Earth Song, Edward Steichen, Equivalents, Essay I Landscapes in a Figure, Essay II Figures in a Landscape, Figures in a Landscape, Gael Newton, Geoff Strong, inner landscape, Jack Cato, Jack Cato The Story of the Camera in Australia, John Berger, John Berger Another Way of Telling, John Cato, John Cato Double Concerto, John Cato Earth Song, John Cato Essay I Landscapes in a Figure, John Cato Essay II Figures in a Landscape, John Cato Retrospective, John Cato retrospective The Photographers' Gallery, John Cato: A Retrospective of the Photographic Work 1971 - 1991, Landscapes in a Figure, living in harmony with the land, Mantracks, Marcus Bunyan, Melbourne art, modernism, music, National Gallery of Victoria, National Gallery of Victoria Frontiers exhibition 1971, New Photography, photography, Prahran College of Advanced Education, Prahran College of Advanced Education photography course, Shades of Light: Photography and Australia 1839-1988, Shakespeare, The Dreamtime, The Family of Man, The New Photography, the photographers gallery, The Story of the Camera in Australia, the sublimation of Aboriginal culture by Europeans, the thing in itself, Vietnam war, Walt Whitman, William Blake, William Heimerman
It is with much sadness that I note the death of respected Australian photographer and teacher Dr John Cato (1926-2011). Son of Australian photographer Jack Cato, who wrote one of the first histories of Australian photography (The Story of the Camera in Australia (1955)), John was apprentice to his father before setting up a commercial studio with Athol Shmith that ran from 1950-1971. Dr Cato then joined Shmith at the fledgling Prahran College of Advanced Education photography course in 1974, becoming head of the course when Shmith retired in 1979, a position he held until John retired in 1991.
I was fortunate enough to get to know John and his vivacious wife Dawn. I worked with him and co-curatored his retrospective with William Heimerman, '…and his forms were without number' at The Photographers' Gallery, South Yarra, in 2002. My catalogue essay from this exhibition is reproduced below.
John was always generous with his time and advice. His photographs are sensitive, lyrical renditions of the Australian landscape. He had a wonderful ear for the land and for the word, a musical lyricism that was unusual in Australian photographers of the early 1970s. He understood how a person from European background could have connection to this land, this Australia, without being afraid to express this sense of belonging; he also imaged an Aboriginal philosophy (that all spirits have a physical presence and everything physical has a spiritual presence) tapping into one of the major themes of his personal work: the mirror held up to reveal an'other' world – the language of ambiguity and ambivalence (the dichotomy of opposites e.g. black / white, masculine / feminine) speaking through the photographic print.
His contribution to the art of photography in Australia is outstanding. What are the precedents for a visual essay in Australian photography before John Cato? I ask the reader to consider this question.
It would be fantastic if the National Gallery of Victoria could organise a large exhibition and publication of his work, gathering photographs from collections across the land, much like the successful retrospective of the work of John Davis held in 2010. Cato's work needs a greater appreciation throughout Australia because of it's seminal nature, containing as it does the seeds of later development for Australian photographers. His educational contribution to the development of photography as an art form within Australia should also be acknowledged in separate essays for his influence was immense. His life, his teaching and his work deserves nothing less.
'… and his forms were without number'
John Cato: A Retrospective of the Photographic Work 1971-1991
This writing on the photographic work of Dr John Cato from 1971-1991 is the catalogue essay to a retrospective of his work held at The Photographers' Gallery in Prahran, Melbourne in 2002. Dr Cato forged his voice as a photographic artist in the early 1970s when photography was just starting to be taken seriously as an art form in Australia. He was a pioneer in the field, and became an educator in art photography. He is respected as one of Australia's preeminent photographers of the last century.
With the arrival of 'The New Photography'1 from Europe in the early 1930's, the formalist style of Modernism was increasingly adopted by photographers who sought to express through photography the new spirit of the age. In the formal construction of the images, the abstract geometry, the unusual camera angles and the use of strong lighting, the representation 'of the thing in itself'2 was of prime importance. Subject matter often emphasised the monumentality of the factory, machine or body/landscape. The connection of the photographer with the object photographed was usually one of sensitivity and awareness to an external relationship that resulted in a formalist beauty.
Following the upheaval and devastation of the Second World War, photography in Australia was influenced by the 'Documentary' style. This "came to be understood as involved chiefly with creating aesthetic experiences … associated with investigation of the social and political environment."3 This new movement of social realism, "… a human record intimately bound with a moment of perception,"4 was not dissimilar to Henri Cartier-Bresson's 'decisive moment' (images a la sauvette) where existence and essence are in balance.5
The culmination of the 'Documentary' style of photography was The Family of Man exhibition curated by Edward Steichen that toured Australia in 1959.6 This exhibition, seen many times by John Cato,7 had a theme of optimism in the unity and dignity of man. The structure of the images in 'Documentary' photography echoed those of the earlier 'New Photography'.
Max Dupain "stressed the objective, impersonal and scientific character of the camera; the photographer could reveal truth by his prerogative of selection."8 This may have been an objective truth, an external vocalising of a vision that concerned itself more with exterior influences rather than an internal meditation upon the subject matter.
John Cato (Australian, 1926-2011)
Untitled from the series Essay I, Landscapes in a Figure
In 1971, John Cato's personal photographic work was exhibited for the first time as part of the group show Frontiers at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.9 Earth Song emerged into an environment of social upheaval inflamed by Australian involvement in the Vietnam War. It provided a group of enthusiastic people who were beginning to be interested in photography as art, an opportunity to see the world, and photography, through a different lens. The 52 colour photographic prints in Earth Song, were shown in a sequence that used melodic line and symphonic form as its metaphoric basis, standing both as individual photographs and as part of a total concept.10
In the intensity of the holistic vision, in the connection to the subconscious, the images elucidate the photographers' search for a perception of the world. This involved an attainment of a receptive state that allowed the cracks, creases and angles inherent in the blank slate of creation to become meaningful. The sequence contained images that can be seen as 'acts of revelation',11confirmed and expanded by supporting photographs, and they unearthed a new vocabulary for the discussion of spiritual and political issues by the viewer. They may be seen as a metaphor for life.
The use of sequence, internal meditation and 'revelation', although not revolutionary in world terms,12 were perhaps unique in the history of Australian photography at that time. During the production of Earth Song, John Cato was still running a commercial studio in partnership with the photographer Athol Shmith and much of his early personal work was undertaken during holidays and spare time away from the studio. Eventually he abandoned being a commercial photographer in favour of a new career as an educator, but found this left him with even less time to pursue his personal work.13
Earth Song (1970-1971) was followed by the black and white sequences:
Tree – A Journey 18 images 1971-1973
Petroglyphs 14 images 1971-1973
Seawind 14 images 1971-1975
Proteus 18 images 1974-1977
Waterway 16 images 1974-1979
Together they form the extensive series Essay I, Landscapes in a Figure, parts of which are held in the permanent photography collection of the National Gallery of Victoria.14
The inspiration for Essay I and later personal work came from many sources. An indebtedness to his father, the photographer Jack Cato, is gratefully acknowledged. Cato also acknowledges the influence of literature: William Shakespeare (especially the Sonnets, and As You Like It), William Blake, Walt Whitman (Leaves of Grass), Lewis Carroll (Through the Looking Glass), the Bible; and of music (symphonic form), the mythology of the Dreamtime and Aboriginal rock paintings.15 Each body of work in Essay I was based on an expression of nature, the elements and the Creation. They can be seen as Equivalents16 of his most profound life experiences, his life philosophy illuminated in physical form.
John Cato was able to develop the vocabulary of his own inner landscape while leaving the interpretation of this landscape open to the imagination of the viewer. Seeing himself as a photographer rather than an artist, he used the camera as a tool to mediate between what he saw in his mind's eye, the subjects he photographed and the surface of the photographic negative.17 Photographing 'in attention', much as recommended by the teacher and philosopher Krishnamurti,18 he hoped for a circular connection between the photographer and the subject photographed. He then looked for verification of this connection in the negative and, eventually, in the final print.
Essay II, Figures in a Landscape, had already been started before the completion of Essay I and it consists of three black and white sequences:
Alcheringa 11 images 1978-1981
Broken Spears 11 images 1978-1983
Mantracks 22 images in pairs 1978-1983
The photographs in Essay II seem to express "the sublimation of Aboriginal culture by Europeans"19 and, as such, are of a more political nature. Although this is not obvious in the photographs of Alcheringa, the images in this sequence celebrating the duality of reality and reflection, substance and shadow, it is more insistent in the symbology of Broken Spears and Mantracks. Using the metaphor of the fence post (white man / black man in Broken Spears) and contrasting Aboriginal and European 'sacred' sites (in pairs of images in Mantracks), John Cato comments on the destruction of a culture and spirit that had existed for thousands of years living in harmony with the land.
In his imaging of an Aboriginal philosophy (that all spirits have a physical presence and everything physical has a spiritual presence) he again tapped one of the major themes of his personal work: the mirror held up to reveal an'other' world. Cato saw that even as they are part of the whole, the duality of positive / negative, black / white, masculine / feminine are always in conflict.20 In the exploration of the conceptual richness buried within the dichotomy of opposites, Cato sought to enunciate the language of ambiguity and ambivalence,21 speaking through the photographic print.
The theme of duality was further expanded in his last main body of work, Double Concerto: An Essay in Fiction:
Double Concerto (Pat Noone) 30 images 1984-1990
Double Concerto (Chris Noone) 19 images 1985-1991
Double Concerto may be seen as a critique of the power of witness and John Cato created two 'other' personas, Pat Noone and Chris Noone, to visualise alternative conditions within himself. The Essay explored the idea that if you send two people to the same location they will take photographs that are completely different from each other, that tell a distinct story about the location and their self:
"For the truth of the matter is that people have mixed feelings and confused opinions and are subject to contradictory expectations and outcomes, in every sphere of experience."22
This slightly schizophrenic confusion between the two witnesses is further highlighted by Pat Noone using single black and white images in sequence. Chris Noone, on the other hand, uses multiple colour images joined together to form panoramic landscapes that feature two opposing horizons. The use of colour imagery in Double Concerto, with its link to the colour work of Earth Song, can be seen to mark the closing of the circle in terms of John Cato's personal work. In Another Way of Telling, John Berger states that …
"Photography, unlike drawing, does not possess a language. The photographic image is produced instantaneously by the reflection of light; its figuration is not impregnated by experience or consciousness."23
But in the personal work of John Cato it is a reflection of the psyche, not of light, that allows a consciousness to be present in the figuration of the photographic prints. The personal work is an expression of his self, his experience, his story and t(his) language, is our language, if we allow our imagination to speak.
Dr Marcus Bunyan 2002
1 @ Newton, Gael. Shades of Light: Photography and Australia 1839-1988. Sydney: Australian National Gallery, William Collins, 1988, p. 109.
2 @ Newton, Gael. Max Dupain. Sydney: David Ell Press,1980, p. 34.
3 @ Ibid., p. 32.
4 @ Greenough, Sarah (et al). On the Art of Fixing a Shadow: 150 Years of Photography. Boston: National Gallery of Art, Bullfinch Press, 1989, p. 256.
5 @ Ibid., p. 256.
8 @ Newton, Gael. Max Dupain. Sydney: David Ell Press, 1980, p. 32.
9 @ Only the second exhibition by Australian photographers at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.
10 @ Shmith, Athol. Light Vision No.1. Melbourne: Jean-Marc Le Pechoux (editor and publisher), Sept 1977, p. 21.
11 @ Berger, John and Mohr, Jean. Another Way of Telling. New York: Pantheon Books, 1982, p. 118.
12 @ Hall, James Baker. Minor White: Rites and Passages. New York: Aperture, 1978.
13 @ Conversation with the photographer 29/01/1997, Melbourne, Victoria.
14 @ Newton, Gael. Shades of Light: Photography and Australia 1839-1988. Sydney: Australian National Gallery, William Collins, 1988, p. 135, Footnote 7; p. 149.
16 @ Norman, Dorothy. Alfred Stieglitz. New York: Aperture, 1976, p. 5.
17 @ Ibid.,
18 @ Krishnamurti. Beginnings of Learning. London: Penguin, 1975, p. 131.
19 @ Strong, Geoff. Review. The Age. Melbourne, 28/04/1982.
21 @ The principal definition for ambiguity in Websters Third New International Dictionary is:
"admitting of two or more meanings … referring to two or more things at the same time." That for ambivalence is "contradictory and oscillating subjective states."
Quoted in Davis, Fred. Fashion, Culture and Identity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992, p. 21.
22 @ Levine, Donald. The Flight From Ambiguity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985.
23 @ Berger, John and Mohr, Jean. Another Way of Telling. New York: Pantheon Books, 1982, p. 95.