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WAVES AT MANNEPORTE
Dr Marcus Bunyan. Dr Marcus Bunyan is an Australian artist and writer. His art work explores the boundaries of identity and place. He writes Art Blart, a photographic archive and form of cultural memory, which posts mainly photography exhibitions from around the world. HILMA AF KLINT THE TEN LARGEST ANDY WARHOL VICTOR HUGO’S PENIS Exhibition dates: 14th October – 3rd December, 2017. Curator: Richard Perram OAM. Todd Fuller and Amy Hill (Australia, 1988-; Australia, 1988-) They’re Only Words. 2009. Film, sound duration: 2:42 mins. Courtesy the artists and May Space, Sydney. I must congratulate curator and gallery Director, Richard Perram OAM and theBathurst Regional
ROSALIE GASCOIGNE METROPOLIS DARREN SYLVESTER YOUR FIRST LOVE IS YOUR LAST LOVE Dr Marcus Bunyan. Dr Marcus Bunyan is an Australian artist and writer. His art work explores the boundaries of identity and place. He writes Art Blart, a photographic archive and form of cultural memory, which posts mainly photography exhibitions from around the world. BEN QUILTY CAPTAIN S AFTER AFGHANISTAN Collection of the artist. “Ben Quilty: After Afghanistan is an extraordinary Australian War Memorial Touring Exhibition by one of the nation’s most incisive artists, and is of great relevance to all Australians. The exhibition officially opens at Castlemaine Art Gallery on Friday 15 January 2016. BARBARA KRUGER THE FUTURE BELONGS TO THOSE WHO CAN SEE ITSEE MORE ONARTBLART.COM
APRIL | 2021 | ART BLART Excluded & yet entangled in two dictatorships: The political constructivist Oskar Nerlinger 10/02/2021 . Oskar Nerlinger (1893-1969) was one of the most important artists of the committed art scene in the Weimar Republic. He was a member of the Association of Proletarian Revolutionary Art (ASSO for short), which was founded in 1928 and belonged to the KPD, which cooperated with the PHOTOGRAPHS: ‘WOMEN’ 1960S BRITISH / AUSTRALIAN 35MM February 2021 Unknown photographer (British? Australian?) Nude portrait 1960s? 35mm colour slide This is the second part of my posting on 88 colour slides of nude women that I bought in Daylesford (an hour and a half from Melbourne) at an antique centre. I CY TWOMBLY: CAMINO REAL Dr Marcus Bunyan. Dr Marcus Bunyan is an Australian artist and writer. His art work explores the boundaries of identity and place. He writes Art Blart, a photographic archive and form of cultural memory, which posts mainly photography exhibitions from around the world.WAVES AT MANNEPORTE
Dr Marcus Bunyan. Dr Marcus Bunyan is an Australian artist and writer. His art work explores the boundaries of identity and place. He writes Art Blart, a photographic archive and form of cultural memory, which posts mainly photography exhibitions from around the world. HILMA AF KLINT THE TEN LARGEST ANDY WARHOL VICTOR HUGO’S PENIS Exhibition dates: 14th October – 3rd December, 2017. Curator: Richard Perram OAM. Todd Fuller and Amy Hill (Australia, 1988-; Australia, 1988-) They’re Only Words. 2009. Film, sound duration: 2:42 mins. Courtesy the artists and May Space, Sydney. I must congratulate curator and gallery Director, Richard Perram OAM and theBathurst Regional
ROSALIE GASCOIGNE METROPOLIS DARREN SYLVESTER YOUR FIRST LOVE IS YOUR LAST LOVE Dr Marcus Bunyan. Dr Marcus Bunyan is an Australian artist and writer. His art work explores the boundaries of identity and place. He writes Art Blart, a photographic archive and form of cultural memory, which posts mainly photography exhibitions from around the world. BEN QUILTY CAPTAIN S AFTER AFGHANISTAN Collection of the artist. “Ben Quilty: After Afghanistan is an extraordinary Australian War Memorial Touring Exhibition by one of the nation’s most incisive artists, and is of great relevance to all Australians. The exhibition officially opens at Castlemaine Art Gallery on Friday 15 January 2016. BARBARA KRUGER THE FUTURE BELONGS TO THOSE WHO CAN SEE ITSEE MORE ONARTBLART.COM
SHORTLY BEFORE DAWN
Dr Marcus Bunyan. Dr Marcus Bunyan is an Australian artist and writer. His art work explores the boundaries of identity and place. He writes Art Blart, a photographic archive and form of cultural memory, which posts mainly photography exhibitions from around the world.PARA-PHOTOGRAPHY
Posts about para-photography written by Dr Marcus Bunyan. Dr Marcus Bunyan writes Art Blart: art and cultural memory archive; MarcusBunyan writings
THE NIBELUNGEN
Dr Marcus Bunyan. Dr Marcus Bunyan is an Australian artist and writer. His art work explores the boundaries of identity and place. He writes Art Blart, a photographic archive and form of cultural memory, which posts mainly photography exhibitions from around the world. PHOTOGRAPHS: WALKER EVANS. ‘SUBWAY PORTRAITS 1938-41 Walker Evans was among the photographers who capitalised on this flexibility. Between 1938 and 1941, he took his camera underground, where he photographed subway riders in New York City. “The guard is down and the mask is off,” he wrote, “even more than when inWAVES AT MANNEPORTE
Dr Marcus Bunyan. Dr Marcus Bunyan is an Australian artist and writer. His art work explores the boundaries of identity and place. He writes Art Blart, a photographic archive and form of cultural memory, which posts mainly photography exhibitions from around the world. BARBARA KRUGER WE HAVE RECEIVED ORDERS NOT TO MOVE Barbara Kruger (b. 1945) short biography. Kruger’s higher education began at Syracuse University and continued at Parson’s School of Art and Design in New York, where she studied with Diane Arbus and Marvin Israel in 1966. Beginning in 1967 Kruger worked as a layout editor at Condé Nast for twelve years, including posts at Mademoiselle EXHIBITION | ART BLART | PAGE 81 Posts about exhibition written by Dr Marcus Bunyan. Dr Marcus Bunyan writes Art Blart: art and cultural memory archive; Marcus Bunyanwritings
PHOTOGRAPHERS ON THE MOVE 1970-1975 Posts about Photographers on the move 1970-1975 written by Dr MarcusBunyan
FINE ART PHOTOGRAPHY Posts about fine art photography written by Dr Marcus BunyanDR MARCUS BUNYAN
Australian artist and writer. Dr of Philosophy (RMIT University), Melbourne. Master of Arts (University of Melbourne), Melbourne. Master of Arts (RMIT University), Melbourne. BA (Hons) (RMIT Unive PHOTOGRAPHS: ‘WOMEN’ 1960S BRITISH / AUSTRALIAN 35MM February 2021 Unknown photographer (British? Australian?) Nude portrait 1960s? 35mm colour slide This is the second part of my posting on 88 colour slides of nude women that I bought in Daylesford (an hour and a half from Melbourne) at an antique centre. I MAX BECKMANN ADAM AND EVE The exhibition Max Beckmann: feminine-masculine is a true highlight on the Hamburger Kunsthalle’s agenda for 2020. It represents a further instalment in a series of highly acclaimed exhibitions devoted to Beckmann’s art, including Self-Portraits (1993), Landscape as Stranger (1998) and Max Beckmann: The Still Lifes (2014). CY TWOMBLY: CAMINO REAL Dr Marcus Bunyan. Dr Marcus Bunyan is an Australian artist and writer. His art work explores the boundaries of identity and place. He writes Art Blart, a photographic archive and form of cultural memory, which posts mainly photography exhibitions from around the world. ROSALIE GASCOIGNE METROPOLIS ANDY WARHOL VICTOR HUGO’S PENIS Exhibition dates: 14th October – 3rd December, 2017. Curator: Richard Perram OAM. Todd Fuller and Amy Hill (Australia, 1988-; Australia, 1988-) They’re Only Words. 2009. Film, sound duration: 2:42 mins. Courtesy the artists and May Space, Sydney. I must congratulate curator and gallery Director, Richard Perram OAM and theBathurst Regional
YAYOI KUSAMA THE MOMENT OF REGENERATION Dr Marcus Bunyan. Dr Marcus Bunyan is an Australian artist and writer. His art work explores the boundaries of identity and place. He writes Art Blart, a photographic archive and form of cultural memory, which posts mainly photography exhibitions from around the world. HILMA AF KLINT THE TEN LARGESTMAMIYA C330
It was only when the archive came to The Met that this remarkable early work came to be fully explored. Arbus’s creative life in photography after 1962 is well documented and already the stuff of legend; now, for the first time, we can properly examine its origins. Diane Arbus (1923-1971) Boy above a crowd, N.Y.C., 1957. 1957.ERWIN WURM FAT CAR
Erwin Wurm (Bruck an der Mur, Austria, 1954) Fat Car. 2006. Steel chassis and body; leather interior, with polystyrene and fibreglass. Photo credit: MONA/Leigh Carmichael. Image Courtesy of MONA Museum of Old and New Art. Museum of Old and New Art. 655 Main Road BARBARA KRUGER MONEY CAN BUY YOU LOVE Barbara Kruger (American, b. 1945) Untitled (We will no longer be seen and not heard) 1985. 17.8 x 18.5cm. Courtesy of the artist and Sprüth Magers London Berlin. Sprüth Magers London is delighted to present a survey of early work by acclaimed American artist Barbara Kruger. Using contrasting layers of text and image, Kruger’s work has for PHOTOGRAPHS: ‘WOMEN’ 1960S BRITISH / AUSTRALIAN 35MM February 2021 Unknown photographer (British? Australian?) Nude portrait 1960s? 35mm colour slide This is the second part of my posting on 88 colour slides of nude women that I bought in Daylesford (an hour and a half from Melbourne) at an antique centre. I MAX BECKMANN ADAM AND EVE The exhibition Max Beckmann: feminine-masculine is a true highlight on the Hamburger Kunsthalle’s agenda for 2020. It represents a further instalment in a series of highly acclaimed exhibitions devoted to Beckmann’s art, including Self-Portraits (1993), Landscape as Stranger (1998) and Max Beckmann: The Still Lifes (2014). CY TWOMBLY: CAMINO REAL Dr Marcus Bunyan. Dr Marcus Bunyan is an Australian artist and writer. His art work explores the boundaries of identity and place. He writes Art Blart, a photographic archive and form of cultural memory, which posts mainly photography exhibitions from around the world. ROSALIE GASCOIGNE METROPOLIS ANDY WARHOL VICTOR HUGO’S PENIS Exhibition dates: 14th October – 3rd December, 2017. Curator: Richard Perram OAM. Todd Fuller and Amy Hill (Australia, 1988-; Australia, 1988-) They’re Only Words. 2009. Film, sound duration: 2:42 mins. Courtesy the artists and May Space, Sydney. I must congratulate curator and gallery Director, Richard Perram OAM and theBathurst Regional
YAYOI KUSAMA THE MOMENT OF REGENERATION Dr Marcus Bunyan. Dr Marcus Bunyan is an Australian artist and writer. His art work explores the boundaries of identity and place. He writes Art Blart, a photographic archive and form of cultural memory, which posts mainly photography exhibitions from around the world. HILMA AF KLINT THE TEN LARGESTMAMIYA C330
It was only when the archive came to The Met that this remarkable early work came to be fully explored. Arbus’s creative life in photography after 1962 is well documented and already the stuff of legend; now, for the first time, we can properly examine its origins. Diane Arbus (1923-1971) Boy above a crowd, N.Y.C., 1957. 1957.ERWIN WURM FAT CAR
Erwin Wurm (Bruck an der Mur, Austria, 1954) Fat Car. 2006. Steel chassis and body; leather interior, with polystyrene and fibreglass. Photo credit: MONA/Leigh Carmichael. Image Courtesy of MONA Museum of Old and New Art. Museum of Old and New Art. 655 Main Road BARBARA KRUGER MONEY CAN BUY YOU LOVE Barbara Kruger (American, b. 1945) Untitled (We will no longer be seen and not heard) 1985. 17.8 x 18.5cm. Courtesy of the artist and Sprüth Magers London Berlin. Sprüth Magers London is delighted to present a survey of early work by acclaimed American artist Barbara Kruger. Using contrasting layers of text and image, Kruger’s work has for APRIL | 2021 | ART BLART Excluded & yet entangled in two dictatorships: The political constructivist Oskar Nerlinger 10/02/2021 . Oskar Nerlinger (1893-1969) was one of the most important artists of the committed art scene in the Weimar Republic. He was a member of the Association of Proletarian Revolutionary Art (ASSO for short), which was founded in 1928 and belonged to the KPD, which cooperated with the PHOTOGRAPHS: WALKER EVANS. ‘SUBWAY PORTRAITS 1938-41 Walker Evans was among the photographers who capitalised on this flexibility. Between 1938 and 1941, he took his camera underground, where he photographed subway riders in New York City. “The guard is down and the mask is off,” he wrote, “even more than when inPARA-PHOTOGRAPHY
Posts about para-photography written by Dr Marcus Bunyan. Dr Marcus Bunyan writes Art Blart: art and cultural memory archive; MarcusBunyan writings
CINDY SHERMAN UNTITLED FILM STILL #56 The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Acquired through the generosity of Jo Carole and Ronald S. Lauder in memory of Eugene M. Schwartz. Cindy Sherman (American, b. 1954) Untitled Film Still #56. 1980. Gelatin silver print. 6 3/8 x 9 7/16″ (16.2 x 24cm) The Museum of ModernArt, New York.
HERBERT LIST FIGHT IN TRASTEVERE Dr Marcus Bunyan. Dr Marcus Bunyan is an Australian artist and writer. His art work explores the boundaries of identity and place. He writes Art Blart, a photographic archive and form of cultural memory, which posts mainly photography exhibitions from around the world. AUSTRALIAN SUBURBAN PHOTOGRAPHY Posts about Australian suburban photography written by Dr MarcusBunyan
FINE ART PHOTOGRAPHY Posts about fine art photography written by Dr Marcus Bunyan EXHIBITION | ART BLART | PAGE 80 Posts about exhibition written by Dr Marcus Bunyan. Dr Marcus Bunyan writes Art Blart: art and cultural memory archive; Marcus Bunyanwritings
TIME | ART BLART | PAGE 74 Posts about time written by Dr Marcus Bunyan. Dr Marcus Bunyan writes Art Blart: art and cultural memory archive; Marcus Bunyan writings FORTUNATO DEPERO HEART EATERS Posts about Fortunato Depero Heart Eaters written by Dr Marcus BunyanART BLART
* Dr Marcus Bunyan writes Art Blart: art and cultural memory archive * Marcus Bunyan writings * Marcus Bunyan black & white archive 1991-1997 * Australian artists/exhibitions by name & posting * International artists/exhibitions by name & posting * Marcus Bunyan website -------------------------22
Nov
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EUROPEAN ART RESEARCH TOUR: PINBALL ART AT THE FLIPPERMÚZEUM, BUDAPEST By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leavea Comment
Categories: American , designer , exhibition, illustration
, light
, sculpture
, space
, surrealism
and time
Tags: Apollo 13 , Apollo 13 pinball , arcade game, arcade games
, backglass
, backglass and cabinet art, backglass art
, backglasses
, Beat Time
, Beat Time pinball
, Buckaroo
, Buckaroo pinball
, Budapest Pinball Museum, Capt. Fantastic
and the Dirt Brown Cowboy,
Capt. Fantastic and the Dirt Brown Cowboy pinball,
Capt. Fantastic pinball, Centaur
, Centaur pinball
, circus
, Circus pinball
, Cop Land
, Dancing Lady
, Dancing Lady pinball, Diner pinball
, Dr. Dude And His ExcellentRay , Dr.
Dude pinball , Elivra Mistress of the Dark, Elvira
, Elvira and the Party Monsters, Elvira and
the Party Monsters pinball,
Farfalla , Farfalla pinball, Fathom
, Fathom pinball
, Fish Tales
, Fish Tales pinball, Flippermúzeum
, Flippermúzeum Budapest, flippers
, FunHouse
, FunHouse pinball
, game play
, graphic art
, graphic artist
, graphic design
, Here Comes the Bride!, Humpty Dumpty
, Humpty Dumpty pinball, Hyperball
, Hyperball pinball
, Jalopy
, Jalopy pinball
, knocking
, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Mary Shelley's
Frankenstein pinball,
masquerade , Masquerade pinball, Medusa
, Medusa pinball
, pinball
, pinball art
, pinball artwork
, pinball graphic art, pinball graphic
design , pinball
high score , pinballmachine , Rocky
, Rocky pinball
, Roto Pool
, Roto Pool pinball
, Scared Stiff
, Scared Stiff pinball, Sega Basketball
, Space Invaders
, Space Invaders pinball, Special scores
, The Addams Family
, The Addams Family
pinball , The
Amazing Spider-Man , The Amazing Spider-Man pinball, The
Getaway pinball , The Getaway: High Speed II, The Getaway:
High Speed II pinball, The
Greatest Pinball On Earth!, The Machine
pinball , The Machine:Bride of Pinbot
, The Machine:
Bride of Pinbot pinball, The
Sexiest Vampire this side of Transylvania,
Tic-Tac-Toe , Tic-Tac-Toepinball , Tommy
, translite
, Triple Action
, Triple Action pinball, Wizard!
, Wizard! pinball
, Xenon
, Xenon pinball
VISITED SEPTEMBER 2019 POSTED NOVEMBER 2020 BALLY MANUFACTURING CORPORATION (1931-1983) _Scared Stiff _(detail)1996
PHOTO: Marcus BunyanPINBALL WIZARD
Thanks to playing pinball, I’ve had my name up in lights as “highest scorer” in New York, Paris and London – just like the perfume bottles – and also Melbourne, Mentone (a suburb of the city), Adelaide and various other places around the world. As luck and skill would have it, on my recent trip around Europe, I scored highest score on _Scared Stiff _(1996, above and below) in a gay sauna – where else you might ask! – in Budapest. A surreal experience. Along with my friends Jeff and Woody, I have been an addicted pinball playing wizard for many years. I love the sounds, the colour, the movement; the frenzy of the multiball (during which the flashing lights and noise serve to distract the player from the position of the balls), the exultation of the knocker when you score a replay; and the ultimate elation of becoming the highest scorer on the machine. Good fun is to be had, a test of skill and concentration in order to beat the machine and score a replay. To say that I was in my element at the Flippermúzeum, Budapest is an understatement. Situated in a suitably dark underground cavern, and after paying the entry fee, you can play all the pinballs for free for as long as you want. There are “more than 140 machines, making the venue one of the biggest ongoing pinball collections in Europe… Some of the exhibition’s older pieces qualify as truly unique antiques, like the first pinball machines ever made with flippers, dating back to 1947.” Photographs of this pinball made by D. Gottlieb & Co. named _Humpty Dumpty _can be seen in the posting below. This is the oldest pinball I have ever played. Note that the flippers are not at the bottom of the machine, but in three pairs at the side of the machine. I found it very difficult to play, as the ball was easily lost between the large gap at the bottom, once the ball had made its way past the side mounted flippers. Other early idiosyncrasies were the outward facing flippers on Williams’ _Jalopy_ (1951, below), and the fact that you got 5 balls for your money on the early machines, whereas today you only get 3. The graphic art of the backglass and cabinet art add immeasurably to the playing experience. The art is linked to the theme of the particular machine and is often film, sci-fi, circus or mythically based – innovative, funny and sometimes lascivious – totally un-PC. In games up to the 1980s the eye-catching graphics would often objectify women, depicting them as playthings to be won (Genco’s _Triple Action_ 1948, with graphic roots in the nose art of Second World War bombers), or portray them as available, large-breasted women in skimpy clothing (see Bally’s _Wizard_ 1975; Bally’s _Elvira and the Party Monsters_ 1989; and Bally’s _Dr. Dude And His Excellent Ray_ 1990). In house jokes abound, such as the drum kit being named “The Bootles” in Williams’ _Beat Time_ (1967) and “Gravestone Pizza Dig it!” in Bally’s _Elvira and the Party Monsters_ 1989. My particular favourite graphic in this selection is Williams’ _The Machine: Bride of Pinbot _(1991) where humans work to repair the Metropolis-like robot, her leg lighting up in millions the closer you reach the jackpot. Completely sexist, completely over the top but fantastic, fantasy art nevertheless. Ultimately for me, playing pinball is a complete melding between human and machine, a space where you loose yourself in the moment and movement of the ball(s), and the sights and sounds of the machine. On a good day when I am playing I become one with the machine, lost in time and space. Your concentration is so intense that nothing else matters. I remember playing a pinball up in Circular Quay in Sydney, and I was going so well that I had people two deep watching me play.What a blast!
Dr Marcus Bunyan
.
All iPhone images Dr Marcus Bunyan. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image. > “Two kind of people in this world; pinball people and video game > people. You, Freddy, you’re pinball people.”>
> .
> Gary Figgis (Ray Liotta) in the movie _Cop Land _(1997) BALLY MANUFACTURING CORPORATION (1931-1983) _Scared Stiff _(detail)1996
PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan BALLY MANUFACTURING CORPORATION (1931-1983) _Scared Stiff _(detail)1996
PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan “So fun, It’s Scary!” “Elvira has the features that turn players on.”SPECIAL SCORES
* HIGH SCORE LISTS: If a player attains one of the highest scores ever (or the highest score on a given day), they are invited to add their initials to a displayed list of high-scorers on that particular machine. “Bragging rights” associated with being on the high-score list are a powerful incentive for experienced players to master a newmachine.
Pinball designers also entice players with the chance to win an extra game or replay. Ways to get a replay might include the following: * REPLAY SCORE: An extra game is rewarded if the player exceeds a specified score. Some machines allow the operator to set this score to increase with each consecutive game in which the replay score is achieved, in order to prevent a skilled player from gaining virtually unlimited play on one credit by simply achieving the same replay scorein every game.
* SPECIAL: A mechanism to get an extra game during play is usually called a “special.” Typically, some hard-to-reach feature of the game will light the outlanes (the areas to the extreme left and right of the flippers) for special. Since the outlanes always lose the ball, having “special” there makes it worth shooting for them (and is usually the only time, if this is the case). * MATCH: At the end of the game, if a set digit of the player’s score matches a random digit, an extra game is rewarded. In earlier machines, the set digit was usually the ones place; after a phenomenon often referred to as score inflation had happened (causing almost all scores to end in 0), the set digit was usually the tens place. The chances of a match appear to be 1 in 10, but the operator can alter this probability – the default is usually 7% in all modern Williams and Bally games for example. Other non-numeric methods are sometimes used to award a match. * HIGH SCORE: Most machines award 1-3 bonus games if a player gets on the high score list. Typically, one or two credits are awarded for a 1st – 4th place listing, and three for the Grand Champion. When an extra game is won, the machine typically makes a single loud bang, most often with a solenoid that strikes a piece of metal, or the side of the cabinet, with a rod, known as a knocker, or less commonly with loudspeakers. “Knocking” is the act of winning an extra game when the knocker makes the loud and distinctive noise. Text from the _Wikipedia_ website Bally flyer for the _Scared Stiff _pinball (1996) “The Sexiest Vampire this side of Transylvania” Installation view of the exhibition of pinball art at the Flippermúzeum, Budapest showing from left to right, Williams _Terminator 2: Judgment Day_ (1991); Data East USA, Inc. _Tales from the Crypt_ (1993); Data East USA, Inc. _The Who’s Tommy PinballWizard_ (1994)
PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan Installation view of the exhibition of pinball art at the Flippermúzeum, Budapest showing from left to right, Gottlieb’s _Caveman _(1982); Gottlieb’s _the Amazing Spiderman_ (1980); Gottlieb’s Circus (1980); Gottlieb’s _Pink Panther_ (1981); and Gottlieb’s _Rocky_ (1982) PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan Installation view of the exhibition of pinball art at the Flippermúzeum, Budapest PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan Installation view of the exhibition of pinball art at the Flippermúzeum, Budapest showing at left, Zaccaria’s _FarFalla_ (1983); at second left, Game Plan, Inc. _Attila the Hun_ (1984); and at right back, Bally’s _Rolling Stones_ (1980) PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan Installation view of the exhibition of pinball art at the Flippermúzeum, Budapest showing from left to right, Gottlieb’s _Centigrade 37_ (1977); Recel S. A. _Criterium 75_ (1978); Chicago Coin Machine Mfg. Co. _Sound Stage_ (1976) PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan Installation view of the exhibition of pinball art at the Flippermúzeum, Budapest showing at left, Bally’s _Medusa_ (1981); and at second left, Bally’s _Xenon_ (1980); and at right, Gottlieb’s _Haunted House_ (1982) PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan Installation view of the exhibition of pinball art at the Flippermúzeum, Budapest showing from left to right, Williams _Beat Time_ (1967); Bally’s _Wizard!_ featuring Ann Margret and Roger Daltrey (1975); and Bally’s _Capt. Fantastic and the Dirt Brown Cowboy_ featuring Elton John (1976) PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan Budapest Pinball Museum magnet BUDAPEST PINBALL MUSEUM BUDAPEST PINBALL MUSEUM deploys more than 140 machines (pinball, arcade video cabinets and other games), making the venue one of the biggest ongoing pinball collections in Europe. All of our games are set to free play. Some of the exhibition’s older pieces qualify as truly unique antiques, like the first pinball machines ever made with flippers, dating back to 1947. Some of pinball’s predecessors are also on display, such as the unique bagatelles from the 1880s. It is the most popular museum in Hungary, usually in the top 10 out of some 600 Budapest tourist attractions on Tripadvisor. PINBALLS ARE TIME MACHINES It might as well be the occasion of an anniversary. It was a quarter of a century ago that legendary Data East marketed a pinball called the _Time Machine._ This name has got a symbolic meaning ever since. Today all pinballs have transformed into a time machine, remnants of an old age. Their natural environment, the arcade has been outdated since then, yet we can find an ever increasing number of pinballs atcollectors.
The moment that dwells in our memories will never pass, never fade away: the moment as we were standing in front of the machines or waiting our turn at the arcade. Beyond the lights, colours and sounds of pinballs, a mystical children’s dreamworld is still shaping for us. A dreamworld that is still alive in us adults, even as we readthis.
This dreamworld, these lights, these colours and sounds will be reawaken by our ‘time machines’, at our carefully selected exhibition. Our inner Child is inviting us for an encounter we willnever forget.
It was the 70’s: that’s where my love for pinball has really started, by the way. I have encountered first with these tinkling machines at camp sites and arcades of my childhood. Pinballs have been thrilling me ever since: anytime the opportunity arises, I try new ones out. I have met many people during the last four years who share my passion for pinball. This also encouraged me to set up an ‘institute’, with pinballs playing the main role, offering however, experiences also for those interested in the history of technology and for the pinball rookie. In April 2013 I have finally succeeded in my endeavours: I was granted license to open the museum / exhibition. Pbal Gallery opened at last to the public on April 10th, 2014. You’re welcome to join an unforgettable time travel at the gallery! Balázs Pálfi (owner) Text from the Flippermúzeum, Budapest Cited 03/11/2020 D. GOTTLIEB & CO. (1931-1977)_Humpty Dumpty_
1947
6,500 produced
PHOTOS: Marcus Bunyan “Announcing… The Greatest Triumph in Pin Game History – Sensationally New Player Controlled Flipper Bumpers..The player will Laugh! The Spectator will Roar! The operator will be Thrilled!” The very first FLIPPER Game. Harry Mabs invented the Flipper with thismachine.
This is the oldest pinball I have ever played. Note that the flippers are not at the bottom of the machine, but in three pairs at the side of the machine. I found it very difficult to play, as the ball was easily lost between the large gap. _Humpty Dumpty _flyer WILLIAMS ELECTRONIC GAMES, INC. (1967-1985)_Jalopy_
1951
PHOTOS: Marcus Bunyan Note the outward facing flippers, and the non-central exit lanes. Also, this is a five ball game, whereas later games are only 3 ball games. If you get a replay in 1 ball, you get 10 free replays. YOURJALOPY is a WINNAH!
D. GOTTLIEB & CO. (1931-1977) _Roto Pool _(detail)1958
PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan GENCO MANUFACTURING COMPANY (Chicago, Illinois, USA, 1931-1958)_Triple Action_
1948
PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan WILLIAMS ELECTRONIC GAMES, INC. (1967-1985) _Tic-Tac-Toe _(detail)1959
PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan D. GOTTLIEB & CO. (1931-1977)_Buckaroo_ (detail)
1965
2,600 produced
PHOTO: Marcus BunyanSEGA
_Basketball_
1966
PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan Sega _Basketball_ flyer D. GOTTLIEB & CO. (1931-1977)_Dancing Lady_
1966
2,675 produced
PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan _Dancing Lady_ exists in 2 versions – the Serial-Run had a new, larger Top with a completely new designed Glass in different colours (above). Test-Samples (approximately 100 to 150 Machines) from Summer / Autumn 1966 had slightly different Art on the lower Playboard and a complete different, more colourful and smaller Backglass, because the Serial-Run from December 1966 used the new and much higher Backbox. This new sort of Backbox was used for the Four-Players until 1977 while the Two-Players still used the smaller Backbox. Text from the _Pinside_ website Cited 04/11/2020 D. GOTTLIEB & CO. (1931-1977) _Masquerade_ (detail)1966
3,662 produced
PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan WILLIAMS ELECTRONIC GAMES, INC. (1967-1985) _Beat Time _(detail)1967
2,802 produced
PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan BALLY MANUFACTURING CORPORATION (1931-1983) _Wizard! _(details)1975
10,005 produced
PHOTOS: Marcus Bunyan _Wizard!,_ released in May 1975, was Bally’s highest production flipper game to that date with over 10,000 units produced. The game comes at the tail end of Bally’s electromechanical production schedule, and sets the stage for the company’s solid state success in the years to follow. Widely regarded as one of the first proper licensed games in pinball history, _Wizard!_ features the likenesses of Ann Margret and Roger Daltrey, stars of the 1976 Ken Russell film Tommy (a screen adaptation of the Who’s rock opera of the same name). Other than its classic theme, Wizard! is notable as being the first game to showcase playfield “flip flags”, a feature used on only a handful of other Bally games. Text from the _Pinside_ website Cited 04/11/2020_Wizard! _flyer
PINBALL
PINBALL is a type of arcade game, in which points are scored by a player manipulating one or more metallic balls on a play field inside a glass-covered cabinet called a PINBALL MACHINE. The primary objective of the game is to score as many points as possible. Many modern pinball machines include a “storyline” where the player must complete certain objectives in a certain fashion to complete the story, usually earning high scores for different methods of completing the game. Different numbers of points are earned when the ball strikes different targets on the play field. A drain is situated at the bottom of the play field, partially protected by player-controlled paddles called flippers. A game ends after all the balls fall into the drain a certain number of times. Secondary objectives are to maximise the time spent playing (by earning “extra balls” and keeping the ball in play as long as possible), and to earn bonus credits by achieving a high enough score or through other means.BACKGLASS
The backglass is a vertical graphic panel mounted on the front of the backbox, which is the upright box at the top back of the machine. The backglass contains the name of the machine and eye-catching graphics; in games up to the 1980s the artwork would often portray large-breasted women in skimpy clothing. The score displays (lights, mechanical wheels, an LED display, or a dot-matrix display depending on the era) would be on the backglass, and sometimes also a mechanical device tied to game play, for example, elevator doors that opened on an image or a woman swatting a cat with a broom such as on Williams’ 1989 “Bad Cats”. For older games, the backglass image is screen printed in layers on the reverse side of a piece of glass; in more recent games, the image is imprinted into a translucent piece of plastic-like material called a translite which is mounted behind a piece of glass and which is easily removable. The earliest games did not have backglasses or backboxes and were little more than playfields in boxes. Games are generally built around a particular theme, such as a sport or character and the backglass art reflects this theme to attract the attention of players. Recent machines are typically tied into other enterprises such as a popular film series, toy, or brand name. The entire machine is designed to be as eye-catching as possible to attract players and their money; every possible space is filled with colourful graphics, blinking lights, and themed objects, and the backglass is usually the first artwork the players see from a distance. Since the artistic value of the backglass may be quite impressive, it is not uncommon for enthusiasts to use a deep frame around a backglass (lighted from behind) and hang it as art after the remainder of the game is discarded. Text from the _Wikipedia_ website BALLY MANUFACTURING CORPORATION (1931-1983) _Capt. Fantastic and the Dirt Brown Cowboy _(detail)1976
16,155 produced
PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan ‘Capt. Fantastic’ was inspired by the movie ‘Tommy’ and includes a representation of Elton John, as his character from the movie, playing pinball on the backglass. The game name, however, is the title of Elton John’s 1975 autobiographical song and album where “Captain Fantastic” was Elton and “The Brown Dirt Cowboy” was his then-lyricist Bernie Taupin. Included in the song lyrics are the words “From the end of the world to your town” which appear at the very top center of the backglass. Text from the _The Internet Pinball Machine Database_ websiteCited 04/11/2020
BALLY MANUFACTURING CORPORATION (1931-1983) _Space Invaders _(detail)1980
11,400 produced
PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan The alien depicted on the backglass was deemed an unlicensed use of the one used in the 1979 Hollywood movie Alien. Some playfield art elements and game sounds were borrowed from the 1978 ‘Space Invaders’ video game which was still popular at the time that this pinball machine came out. Text from the _The Internet Pinball Machine Database_ websiteCited 04/11/2020
D. GOTTLIEB & COMPANY, A COLUMBIA PICTURES INDUSTRIES COMPANY(1977-1983)
_The Amazing Spider-Man _(details)1980
7,625 produced
PHOTOS: Marcus Bunyan D. GOTTLIEB & COMPANY, A COLUMBIA PICTURES INDUSTRIES COMPANY(1977-1983)
_Circus _(detail)
1980
1,700 produced
PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan “The Greatest Pinball On Earth!”_Circus_ flyer
BALLY MANUFACTURING CORPORATION (1931-1983)_Xenon_
1980
11,000 produced
PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan BALLY MANUFACTURING CORPORATION (1931-1983)_Centaur _(detail)
1981
3,700 produced
PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan_Centaur _flyer
BALLY MANUFACTURING CORPORATION (1931-1983)_Medusa _(detail)
1981
3,250 produced
PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan “Bally MEDUSA… A Legend of Features” BALLY MANUFACTURING CORPORATION (1931-1983)_Fathom_
1981
3,500 produced
PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan WILLIAMS ELECTRONICS INCORPORATED (1967-1985) _Hyperball _(details)1981
5,000 produced
PHOTOS: Marcus Bunyan D. GOTTLIEB & COMPANY, A COLUMBIA PICTURES INDUSTRIES COMPANY(1977-1983)
_Rocky _(detail)
1982
1,504 produced
PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan ZACCARIA (Bologna, Italy, 1974-1987)_Farfalla_
1983
PHOTOS: Marcus Bunyan Farfalla is Italian for “butterfly” BALLY (MIDWAY MANUFACTURING COMPANY) (Chicago, 1988-1999) _Elvira and the Party Monsters _(details)1989
4,000 produced
PHOTOS: Marcus Bunyan “Monstrous Pinball” “You’re Gonna Have a Ball!” “When They Named a Game After Me, It Had to be Built!” WILLIAMS ELECTRONIC GAMES (1985-1999)_Diner _(detail)
1990
3,552 produced
PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan BALLY (MIDWAY MANUFACTURING COMPANY) (Chicago, 1988-1999) _Dr. Dude And His Excellent Ray _(details)1990
4,000 produced
PHOTOS: Marcus Bunyan “Get Hip! Earn Respect! Be the Envy of your Friends!” _Dr. Dude And His Excellent Ray _flyer WILLIAMS ELECTRONIC GAMES (1985-1999) _FunHouse _(details)1990
10,750 produced
PHOTOS: Marcus Bunyan “Get Hip! Earn Respect! Be the Envy of your Friends!” _FunHouse _backglass_FunHouse _flyer
WILLIAMS ELECTRONIC GAMES (1985-1999) _The Machine: Bride of Pinbot _(details)1991
8,100 produced
PHOTOS: Marcus Bunyan “Here Comes the Bride!” “Watch Her Turn Heads!” Artist John Youssi provided us the following information: “I painted the backglass based on a rough sketch Python gave me. I re-sketched the whole thing, adding detail while tightening it up. Python was the artist for the cabinet while Kevin O’Connor inked only. I remember Python doing all the art except for the backglass. Plus it all looks like his style.” Text from the _The Internet Pinball Machine Database_ websiteCited 04/11/2020
_The Machine: Bride of Pinbot _flyer WILLIAMS ELECTRONIC GAMES (1985-1999) _Fish Tales _(detail)1992
13,640 produced
PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan “Catch Em All – Hook Line and Sinker” BALLY (MIDWAY MANUFACTURING COMPANY) (Chicago, 1988-1999) _The Addams Family _(detail)1992
20,270 produced
PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan WILLIAMS ELECTRONIC GAMES (1985-1999) _The Getaway: High Speed II _(detail)1992
13,259 produced
PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan SEGA PINBALL INCORPORATED (Chicago, Illinois, USA, 1994-1999) _Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein_1995
3,000 produced
PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan SEGA PINBALL INCORPORATED (Chicago, Illinois, USA, 1994-1999)_Apollo 13_
1995
2,000 produced
PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan “I Believe this will be Our Finest Hour.” “`Apollo 13 the Pinball’ is on the Launch Pad with All SystemsGo!”
“The First Game in the Universe with 13 Ball Multiball!”FLIPPERMÚZEUM
Radnóti Miklós utca 18. 1137, Budapest, HungaryOpening hours:
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EXHIBITION: ‘PHOTOGRAPHY’S LAST CENTURY: THE ANN TENENBAUM AND THOMAS H. LEE COLLECTION’ AT THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART,NEW YORK
By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leavea Comment
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EXHIBITION DATES: 10TH MARCH – 30TH NOVEMBER 2020 CURATOR: Jeff L. Rosenheim, Joyce Frank Menschel Curator in Charge of the Department of Photographs ANDRÉ KERTÉSZ (Hungarian, 1894-1985) _Underwater Swimmer, Esztergom, Hungary_1917
Gelatin silver print 1 1/2 in. × 2 in. (3.8 × 5.1cm) Promised Gift of Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary The Metropolitan Museum of Art 2020 Estate of André Kertész/Higher Pictures This tiny but iconic masterpiece of twentieth-century photography is the second earliest work in the exhibition, and a gem in the Tenenbaum and Lee collection. Made while André Kertész was convalescing from a gunshot wound received while serving in the Austro-Hungarian army during World War I, it prefigures by some fifteen years his renowned mirror distortions produced in Paris. Displaying both Cubist and Surrealist influences, the photograph reveals the artist’s commitment to the spontaneous yet analytic observation of fleeting commonplace occurrences – one of the essential and most idiosyncratic qualities of the medium.IT’S A MYSTERY
There are some eclectic photographs in this posting, many of which have remained un/seen to me before. I have never seen the above version of Kertész’s _Underwater Swimmer, Esztergom, Hungary _(1917), with wall, decoration and water flowing into the pool at left. The usual image crops these featuresout
,
focusing on the distortion of the body in the water, and the lengthening of the figure diagonally across the picture frame. That both images are from the same negative can be affirmed if one looks at the patterning of the water. Even as the exhibition of Kertész’s work at Jeu de Paume at the Château de Tours that I saw last year stated that their version was a contact original… this is not possible unless the image has been cropped. Other images by Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Outerbridge Jr., Eugène Atget, Walker Evans, Pierre Dubreuil, Ilse Bing, Bill Brandt, Dora Maar, Joseph Cornell, Nan Goldin, Laurie Simmons, Robert Gober, Rachel Whiteread, Zanele Muholi have eluded my consciousness until now. What I can say after viewing them is this. I am forever amazed at how deep the spirit, and the medium, of photography is… if you give the photograph a chance. A friend asked me the other day whether photographs had any meaning anymore, as people glance for a nano-second at images on Instagram, and pass on. We live in a world of instant gratification was my answer to him. But the choice is yours if you take / time with a photograph, if it possesses the POSSIBILITY of a meditation from its being. If it intrigues or excites, or stimulates, makes you reflect, cry – that is when the photographs pre/essence, its embedded spirit, can make us attest to the experience of its will, its language, its desire. In ourpresence.
The more I learn about photography, the less I find I know. The lake (archive) is deep – full of serendipity, full of memories, stagings, concepts and realities. Full of nuances and light, crevices and dark passages. To understand photography is a life-long study. To an inquiring mind, even then, you may only – scratch the surface to reveal – a sort of epiphany, a revelation, unknown to others. Every viewing is unique, every interpretation different, every context unknowable (possible).Dr Marcus Bunyan
PS. When Minor White was asked, what about photography when he dies? When he is no longer there to influence it? And he simply says – photography will do what it wants to do. This is a magnificent statement, and it shows an egoless freedom on Minor White’s part. It is profound knowledge about photography, about its freedom to change..
Many thankx to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image. This exhibition will celebrate the remarkable ascendancy of photography in the last century, and Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee’s magnificent promised gift of over sixty extraordinary photographs in honour of The Met’s 150th anniversary in 2020. The exhibition will include masterpieces by the medium’s greatest practitioners, including works by Paul Strand, Dora Maar, Man Ray, and László Moholy-Nagy; Edward Weston, Walker Evans, and Joseph Cornell; Diane Arbus, Andy Warhol, Sigmar Polke, and Cindy Sherman. The collection is particularly notable for its breadth and depth of works by women artists, its sustained interest in the nude, and its focus on artists’ beginnings. Strand’s 1916 view from the viaduct confirms his break with the Pictorialist past and establishes the artist’s way forward as a cutting-edge modernist; Walker Evans’s shadow self-portraits from 1927 mark the first inkling of a young writer’s commitment to visual culture; and Cindy Sherman’s intimate nine-part portrait series from 1976 predates her renowned series of “film stills” and confirms her striking ambition and stunning mastery of the medium at the age of twenty-two. Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website ALFRED STIEGLITZ (American, 1864-1946) _Georgia O’Keeffe_1918
Platinum print
9 1/2 × 7 1/2 in. (24.1 × 19.1cm) Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee Collection The Metropolitan Museum of Art This photograph marks the beginning of the romantic relationship between Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O’Keeffe, which transformed each of their lives and the story of American art. The two met when Stieglitz included O’Keeffe, a then-unknown painter, in her first group show at his gallery 291 in May 1916. A year later, O’Keeffe had her first solo show at the gallery and exhibited her abstract charcoal _No. 15 Special,_ seen in the background here. In the coming months and years, O’Keeffe collaborated with Stieglitz on some three hundred portrait studies. In its physical scope, primal sensuality, and psychological power, Stieglitz’s serial portrait of O’Keeffe has no equal in American art. PAUL OUTERBRIDGE JR. (American, 1896-1958)_Telephone_
1922
Platinum print
4 1/2 × 3 3/8 in. (11.4 × 8.5cm) Promised Gift of Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary The Metropolitan Museum of Art A well-paid advertising photographer working in New York in the 1930s, Paul Outerbridge Jr. was trained as a painter and set designer. Highly influenced by Cubism, he was a devoted advocate of the platinum-print process, which he used to create nearly abstract still lifes of commonplace subjects such as cracker boxes, wine glasses, and men’s collars. With their extended mid-tones and velvety blacks, platinum papers were relatively expensive and primarily used by fine-art photographers like Paul Strand, Edward Steichen, and Alfred Stieglitz. This modernist study of a Western Electric “candlestick” telephone attests to Outerbridge’s talent for transforming banal, utilitarian objects into small, but powerful sculptures with formal rigour andstartling beauty.
EDWARD WESTON (American, 1886-1958)_Nude_
1925, printed 1930s
Gelatin silver print 8 1/2 × 7 1/2 in. (21.6 × 19cm) Promised Gift of Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary The Metropolitan Museum of Art Center for Creative Photography, Arizona Board of Regents Edward Weston moved from Los Angeles to Mexico City in 1923 with Tina Modotti, an Italian actress and nascent photographer. They were each influenced by, and in turn helped shape, the larger community of artists among whom they lived and worked, which included Diego Rivera, Jean Charlot, and many other members of the Mexican Renaissance. In fall 1925 Weston made a remarkable series of nudes of the art critic, journalist, and historian Anita Brenner. Depicting her body as a pear-like shape floating in a dark void, the photographs evoke the hermetic simplicity of a sculpture by Constantin Brancusi. Brenner’s form becomes elemental, female and male, embryonic, tightly furled butready to blossom.
EUGÈNE ATGET (French, 1857-1927) _Boulevard de Strasbourg_1926
Gelatin silver print 8 7/8 in. × 7 in. (22.5 × 17.8 cm) Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee Collection The Metropolitan Museum of Art Eugène Atget became the darling of the French Surrealists in the mid-1920s courtesy of Man Ray, his neighbour in Paris, who admired the older artist’s seemingly straight forward documentation of the city. Another American photographer, Walker Evans, also credited Atget with inspiring his earliest experiments with the camera. A talented writer, Evans penned a famous critique of his progenitor in 1930: “ general note is a lyrical understanding of the street, trained observation of it, special feeling for patina, eye for revealing detail, over all of which is thrown a poetry which is not ‘the poetry of the street’ or ‘the poetry of Paris,’ but the projection of Atget’s person.” WALKER EVANS (American, 1903-1975) _Self-portrait, Juan-les-Pins, France, January 1927_1927
Promised Gift of Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary The Metropolitan Museum of Art WALKER EVANS (American, 1903-1975) _Shadow, Self-Portrait (Right Profile, Wearing Hat), Juan-les-Pins, France, January 1927_1927
Film negative
Promised Gift of Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York PIERRE DUBREUIL (French, 1872-1944)_The Woman Driver_
1928
Bromoil print
9 7/16 × 7 5/8 in. (24 × 19.3cm) Promised Gift of Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary The Metropolitan Museum of Art 2019 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris Like many other European and American photographers, Pierre Dubreuil was indifferent to the industrialisation of photography that followed the invention and immediate global success of the Kodak camera in the late 1880s. A wealthy member of an international community of photographers loosely known as Pictorialists, he spurned most aspects of modernism. Instead, he advocated painterly effects such as those offered by the bromoil printing process seen here. What makes this photograph exceptional, however, is the modern subject and the work’s title, _The Woman Driver._ Dubreuil’s wife, Josephine Vanassche, grasps the steering wheel of their open-air car and stares straight ahead, ignoring the attention of her conservative husband and his intrusive camera. FLORENCE HENRI (French, born America 1893-1982)_Windows_
1929
Gelatin silver print 14 1/2 × 10 1/4 in. (36.8 × 26cm) Promised Gift of Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary The Metropolitan Museum of Art A peripatetic French American painter and photographer, Florence Henri studied with László Moholy-Nagy at the Bauhaus in Germany in summer 1927. Impressed by her natural talent, he wrote a glowing commentary on the artist for a small Amsterdam journal: “With Florence Henri’s photos, photographic practice enters a new phase, the scope of which would have been unimaginable before today… Reflections and spatial relationships, superposition and intersections are just some of the areas explored from a totally new perspective and viewpoint.” Despite the high regard for her paintings and photographs in the 1920s, Henri remains largely under appreciated. ILSE BING (German, 1899-1998)__
1932
Gelatin silver print 11 1/8 × 8 3/4 in. (28.3 × 22.2cm) Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee Collection The Metropolitan Museum of Art Estate of Ilse Bing Ilse Bing trained as an art historian in Germany and learned photography in 1928 to make illustrations for her dissertation on neoclassical architecture. In 1930 she moved to Paris, supporting herself as a freelance photographer for French and German newspapers and fashion magazines. Known in the early 1930s as the “Queen of the Leica” due to her mastery of the handheld 35 mm camera, Bing found the old cobblestone streets of Paris a rich subject to explore, often from eccentric perspectives as seen here. She moved to New York in 1941 after the German occupation of Paris and remained here until her death at age ninety-eight. BILL BRANDT (British, 1904-1983)_Soho Bedroom_
1932
Gelatin silver print 8 7/16 × 7 5/16 in. (21.4 × 18.5cm) Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee Collection The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bill Brandt challenged the standard tenets of documentary practice by frequently staging scenes for the camera and recruiting family and friends as models. In this intimate study of a couple embracing, the male figure is believed to be either a friend or the artist’s younger brother; the female figure is an acquaintance, “Bird,” known for her beautiful hands. The photograph appears with a different title, _Top Floor,_ along with sixty-three others in Brandt’s second book, _A Night in London_ (1938). After the book’s publication, Brandt changed the work’s title to _Soho Bedroom_ to reference London’s notorious Red Light district and add a hint of salaciousness to the kiss. DORA MAAR (French, 1907-1997)__
1932-34
Gelatin silver print 11 1/8 × 8 3/8 in. (28.2 × 21.2cm) Promised Gift of Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary The Metropolitan Museum of Art 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris When Dora Maar first traveled to Barcelona in 1932 to record the effects of the global economic crisis, she was twenty-five and still finding her footing as a photographer. To sustain her practice, she opened a joint studio with the film designer Pierre Kéfer. Working out of his parents’ villa in a Parisian suburb, he and Maar produced mostly commercial photographs for fashion and advertising – projects that funded Maar’s travel to Spain. With an empathetic eye, she documents a mother and her child peering out of a makeshift shelter. Adapting an avant-garde strategy, she chose a lateral angle to monumentalise her subjects. EDWARD WESTON (American, 1886-1958)_Nude_
1934
Gelatin silver print3 5/8 in. (9.2cm)
Promised Gift of Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary The Metropolitan Museum of Art Center for Creative Photography, Arizona Board of Regents The nude as a subject for the camera would occupy Edward Weston’s attention for four decades, and it is a defining characteristic of his achievement and legacy. This physically small but forceful, closely cropped photograph is a study of the writer Charis Wilson. Although presented headless and legless, Wilson tightly crosses her arms in a bold power pose. Weston was so stunned by Wilson when they first met that he ceased writing in his diary the day after he made this photograph: “April 22 , a day to always remember. I knew now what was coming; eyes don’t lie and she wore no mask… I was lost and have been ever since.” Wilson and Weston immediately moved in together and married five years later. The exhibition _Photography’s_ _Last Century: The Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee Collection_ celebrates the remarkable ascendancy of photography in the last hundred years through the magnificent promised gift to The Met of more than 60 extraordinary photographs from Museum Trustee Ann Tenenbaum and her husband, Thomas H. Lee, in honour of the Museum’s 150th anniversary in 2020. The exhibition will feature masterpieces by a wide range of the medium’s greatest practitioners, including Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Ilse Bing, Joseph Cornell, Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Andreas Gursky, Helen Levitt, Dora Maar, László Moholy-Nagy, Jack Pierson, Sigmar Polke, Man Ray, Laurie Simmons, Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, Cindy Sherman, Andy Warhol, Edward Weston, and Rachel Whiteread. The exhibition is made possible by Joyce Frank Menschel and the AlfredStieglitz Society.
Max Hollein, Director of The Met, said, “Ann Tenenbaum brilliantly assembled an outstanding and very personal collection of 20th-century photographs, and this extraordinary gift will bring a hugely important group of works to The Met’s holdings and to the public’s eye. From works by celebrated masters to lesser-known artists, this collection encourages a deeper understanding of the formative years of photography, and significantly enhances our holdings of key works by women, broadening the stories we can tell in our galleries and allowing us to celebrate a whole range of crucial artists at The Met. We are extremely grateful to Ann and Tom for their generosity in making this promised gift to The Met, especially as we celebrate the Museum’s 150th anniversary. It will be an honour to share these remarkable works with our visitors.” “Early on, Ann recognised the camera as one of the most creative and democratic instruments of contemporary human expression,” said Jeff Rosenheim, Joyce Frank Menschel Curator in Charge of the Department of Photographs. “Her collecting journey through the last century of picture-making has been guided by her versatility and open-mindedness, and the result is a collection that is both personal and dynamic.” The Tenenbaum Collection is particularly notable for its focus on artists’ beginnings, for a sustained interest in the nude, and for the breadth and depth of works by women artists. Paul Strand’s 1916 view from the viaduct confirms his break with the Pictorialist past and establishes the artist’s way forward as a cutting-edge modernist; Walker Evans’s shadow self-portraits from 1927 mark the first inkling of a young writer’s commitment to visual culture; and Cindy Sherman’s intimate nine-part portrait series from 1976 predates her renowned series of “film stills” and confirms her striking ambition and stunning mastery of the medium at the age of 22. Ms. Tenenbaum commented, “Photographs are mirrors and windows not only onto the world but also into deeply personal experience. Tom and I are proud to support the Museum’s Department of Photographs and thrilled to be able to share our collection with the public.” The exhibition will feature a diverse range of styles and photographic practices, combining small-scale and large-format works in both black and white and colour. The presentation will integrate early modernist photographs, including superb examples by avant-garde American and European artists, together with work from the postwar period, the 1960s, and the medium’s boom in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and extend up to the present moment. _PHOTOGRAPHY’S LAST CENTURY: THE ANN TENENBAUM AND THOMAS H. LEE COLLECTION_ is curated by The Met’s Jeff L. Rosenheim, Joyce Frank Menschel Curator in Charge of the Department of Photographs. Press release from the Metropolitan Museum of Art JOSEPH CORNELL (American, 1903-1972) _Tamara Toumanova (Daguerreotype-Object)_October 1941
Construction with photomechanical reproduction, mirror, rhinestones or sequins, and tinted glass in artist’s frame Dimensions: 5 1/8 × 4 3/16 in. (13 × 10.6 cm) Frame: 9 3/4 × 8 3/4 × 1 7/8 in. (24.8 × 22.2 × 4.8 cm) Promised Gift of Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary The Metropolitan Museum of Art 2020 The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY Joseph Cornell is celebrated for his meticulously constructed, magical shadow boxes that teem with celestial charts, ballet stars, parrots, mirrors, and marbles. Into these tiny theaters he decanted his dreams, obsessions, and unfulfilled desires. Here, his subject is the Russian prima ballerina Tamara Toumanova. Known for her virtuosity and beauty, the dancer captivated Cornell, who met her backstage at the Metropolitan Opera and thereafter saw her as his personal Snow Queenand muse.
TAMARA TOUMANOVA (Georgian 2 March 1919 – 29 May 1996) was a Georgian-American prima ballerina and actress. A child of exiles in Paris after the Russian Revolution of 1917, she made her debut at the age of 10 at the children’s ballet of the Paris Opera. She became known internationally as one of the Baby Ballerinas of the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo after being discovered by her fellow émigré, balletmaster and choreographer George Balanchine. She was featured in numerous ballets in Europe. Balanchine featured her in his productions at Ballet Theatre, New York, making her the star of his performances in the United States. While most of Toumanova’s career was dedicated to ballet, she appeared as a ballet dancer in several films, beginning in 1944. She became a naturalised United States citizen in 1943 in Los Angeles, California. Text from the _Wikipedia_ website RICHARD AVEDON (American, 1923-2004) _Noto, Sicily, September 5, 1947_September 5, 1947
Gelatin silver print 6 × 6 in. (15.2 × 15.2 cm) Promised Gift of Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary The Metropolitan Museum of Art Richard Avedon believed this early street portrait of a young boy in Sicily was the genesis of his long fashion and portrait career. On the occasion of The Met’s groundbreaking 2002 exhibition on the artist, curators Maria Morris Hambourg and Mia Fineman described the work as “a kind of projected self-portrait” in which “a boy stands there, pushing forward to the front of the picture. … He is smiling wildly, ready to race into the future. And there, hovering behind him like a mushroom cloud, is the past in the form of a single, strange tree – a reminder of the horror that split the century into a before and after, a symbol of destruction but also of regeneration.” LEE FRIEDLANDER (American, b. 1934)_Philadelphia_
1961
Gelatin silver print 12 1/16 × 17 15/16 in. (30.7 × 45.5cm) Promised Gift of Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary The Metropolitan Museum of Art Philadelphia is the earliest dated photograph from a celebrated series of television sets beaming images into seemingly empty rooms that Lee Friedlander made between 1961 and 1970. The pictures provided a prophetic commentary on the new medium to which Americans had quickly become addicted. Walker Evans published a suite of Friedlander’s TV photographs in _Harper’s Bazaar_ in 1963 and noted: “The pictures on these pages are in effect deft, witty, spanking little poems of hate… Taken out of context as they are here, that baby might be selling skin rash, the careful, good-looking woman might be categorically unselling marriage and the home and total daintiness. Here, then, from an expert-hand, is a pictorial account of what TV-screen light does to rooms and to the things in them.” EDWARD RUSCHA (American, b. 1937) _Self-Service – Milan, New Mexico_1962
Gelatin silver print 4 11/16 × 4 11/16 in. (11.9 × 11.9cm) Promised Gift of Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary The Metropolitan Museum of ArtEd Ruscha
This intentionally mundane work by the Los Angeles–based painter and printmaker, Ed Ruscha, appears in _Twentysix Gasoline Stations_ (1963), the first of sixteen landmark photographic books he published between 1963 and 1978. The volume established the artist’s reputation as a conceptual minimalist with a mastery of typography, an appreciation for seriality and documentary practice, and a deadpan sense of humour. Early on, he was influenced by the photographs of Walker Evans. “What I was after,” said Ruscha, “was no-style or a non-statement with a no-style.” NAN GOLDIN (American, b. 1953) _Ivy in the Boston Garden: Back_1973
Gelatin silver print SHEET: 20 × 16 in. (50.8 × 40.6 cm) Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee Collection The Metropolitan Museum of Art Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman GalleryNan Goldin
While still in college, Nan Goldin spent two years recording performers at the Other Side, a Boston drag bar that hosted beauty pageants on Monday nights. This black-and-white study of Ivy, Goldin’s friend from the bar, walking alone through the Boston Common is one of the artist’s earliest photographs. The portrait evokes the glamorous world of fashion photography and hints at its loneliness. In all of her photographs, Goldin explores the natural twinning of fantasy and reality; it is the source of their pathos and rhythmic emotional beat. A decade after this elegiac photograph, she conceived the first iteration of her 1985 breakthrough colour series, _The Ballad of Sexual Dependency,_ which was presented as an ever-changing visual diary using a slide projector and synchronisedmusic.
LAURIE SIMMONS (American, b. 1949)_Woman/Interior I_
1976
Gelatin silver print 5 3/4 × 7 1/2 in. (14.6 × 19.1cm) Promised Gift of Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary The Metropolitan Museum of Art 2020 Laurie Simmons Courtesy of the artist and Salon 94, New York Laurie Simmons began her career in 1976 with a series of enchantingly melancholic photographs of toy dolls set up in her apartment. The accessible mix of desire and anxiety in these early photographs resonates with, and provides a useful counterpoint to, Cindy Sherman’s contemporaneous “film stills” such as _Untitled Film Still #48_ seen nearby. Simmons and Sherman were foundational members of one of the most vibrant and productive communities of artists to emerge in the late twentieth century. Although they did not all see themselves as feminists or even as a unified group of “women artists,” each used the camera to examine the prescribed roles of women, especially in the workplace, and in advertising, politics, literature, and film. CINDY SHERMAN (American, b. 1954) _Untitled Film Still #48_1979
Gelatin silver print 6 15/16 × 9 3/8 in. (17.6 × 23.8cm) Promised Gift of Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary The Metropolitan Museum of Art A lone woman on an empty highway peers around the corner of a rocky outcrop. She waits and waits below the dramatic sky. Is it fear or self-reliance that challenges the unnamed traveler? Does she dread the future, the past, or just the present? So thorough and sophisticated is Cindy Sherman’s capacity for filmic detail and nuance that many viewers (encouraged by the titles) mistakenly believe that the photographs in the series are reenactments of films. Rather, they are an unsettling yet deeply satisfying synthesis of film and narrative painting, a shrewdly composed remaking not of the “real” world but of the mediated landscape. ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE (American, 1946-1989)_Coral Sea_
1983
Platinum print
23 1/8 × 19 1/2 in. (58.8 × 49.5cm) Promised Gift of Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary The Metropolitan Museum of Art This study of a Midway-class aircraft carrier shows a massive warship not actually floating on the ocean’s surface but seemingly sunken beneath it. The rather minimal photograph is among the rarest and least representative works by Robert Mapplethorpe, who is known mostly for his uncompromising sexual portraits and saturated flower studies, as well as for his mastery of the photographic print tradition. Here, he chose platinum materials to explore the subtle beauty of the medium’s extended mid-grey tones. By rendering prints using the more tactile platinum process, Mapplethorpe hoped to transcend the medium; as he said it is “no longer a photograph first, firstly a statement that happens to be a photograph.” ROBERT GOBER (American, b. 1954) _Untitled _(detail)1988
Gelatin silver print 6 1/2 × 9 7/16 in. (16.5 × 24cm) Promised Gift of Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary The Metropolitan Museum of Art Robert Gober, Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery Although Robert Gober is not often thought of as a photographer, his conceptual practice has long depended on a camera. From the time of his first solo show in 1984 Gober has documented temporal projects in hundreds of photographs, and today many of his site-specific installations survive as images. His photography resists classification, seeming to split the difference between archival record and independent artwork. Here, across three frames, flimsy white dresses advance and recede into a deserted wood. Gober sewed the garments from fabric printed by the painter Christopher Wool in the course of a related collaboration. Seen together, Gober’s staged photographs record an ephemeral intervention in an unwelcoming, almost fairy-tale landscape. HIROSHI SUGIMOTO (Japanese, b. 1948)_Imperial Montreal_
1995
Gelatin silver print 20 × 24 in. (50.8 × 61cm) Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee Collection The Metropolitan Museum of Art A self-taught expert on the history of photography and Zen Buddhism, Hiroshi Sugimoto posed a question to himself in 1976: what would be the effect on a single sheet of film if it was exposed to all 172,800 photographic frames in a feature-length movie? To visualise the answer, he hid a large-format camera in the last row of seats at St. Marks Cinema in Manhattan’s East Village and opened the shutter when the film started; an hour and a half later, when the movie ended, he closed it. The series (now forty years in the making) of ethereal photographs of darkened rooms filled with gleaming white screens presents a perfect example of yin and yang, the classic concept of opposites in ancient Chinese philosophy. ANDREAS GURSKY (German, b. 1955)_Prada II_
1996
Chromogenic print
65 in. × 10 ft. 4 13/16 in. (165.1 × 317cm) Promised Gift of Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary The Metropolitan Museum of Art Andreas Gursky / Courtesy Sprüth Magers / Artists Rights Society(ARS), New York
To produce this quasi-architectural study of a barren luxury store display, Andreas Gursky used newly available software both to artificially stretch the underlying chemical image and to digitally generate the billboard-size print. At ten feet wide, the work is a Frankensteinian glimpse of what would transform the medium of photography over the next two decades. Gursky seems to have fully understood the Pandora’s box he had opened by using digital tools to manipulate his pictures, which put into question their essential realism: “I have a weakness for paradox. For me… the photogenic allows a picture to develop a life of its own, on a two-dimensional surface, which doesn’t exactly reflect the real object.” RACHEL WHITEREAD (English, b. 1963) _Watertower Project_1998
Screenprint with applied acrylic resin and graphite 20 in. × 15 15/16 in. (50.8 × 40.5cm) Promised Gift of Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary The Metropolitan Museum of ArtRachel Whiteread
How might one solidify water other than by freezing it? In New York in June 1998, a translucent 12 x 9-foot, 4½-ton sculpture created by Rachel Whiteread landed like a UFO atop a roof at the corner of West Broadway and Grand Street. The artist described the work – a resin cast of the interior of one of the city’s landmark wooden water tanks – as a “jewel in the Manhattan skyline.” This print is a poetic trace of the massive sculpture, which was commissioned by the Public Art Fund. The original work of art holds and refracts light just like the acrylic resin applied to the surface of this print. GREGORY CREWDSON (American, b. 1962)_Untitled_
2005
Chromogenic print
57 × 88 in. (144.8 × 223.5cm) Promised Gift of Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary The Metropolitan Museum of Art Gregory Crewdson describes his highly scripted photographs as single-frame movies; to produce them, he engages teams of riggers, grips, lighting specialists, and actors. The story lines in most of his photographs centre on suburban anxiety, disorientation, fear, loss, and longing, but the final meaning almost always remains elusive, the narrative unfinished. In this photograph something terrible has happened, is happening, and will likely happen again. A woman in a nightgown sits in crisis on the edge of her bed with the remains of a rosebush on the sheets beside her. The journey from the garden was not an easy one, as evidenced by the trail of petals, thorns, and dirt. Even so, the protagonist cradles the plant’s rootswith tender regard.
CATHERINE OPIE (American, b. 1961) _Football Landscape #8 (Crenshaw vs. Jefferson, Los Angeles, CA)_2007
Chromogenic print
48 × 64 in. (121.9 × 162.6cm) Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee Collection The Metropolitan Museum of Art High school football is not a conventional subject for contemporary artists in any medium. Neither are freeways nor surfers, each of which are series by the artist Catherine Opie. A professor of photography at the University of California, Los Angeles, Opie spent several years traveling across the United States making close-up portraits of adolescent gladiators as well as seductive, large-scale landscape views of the game itself. Poignant studies of group behaviour and American masculinity on the cusp of adulthood, the photographs can be seen as an extension of the artist’s diverse body of work related to gender performance in the queer communities in Los Angeles and SanFrancisco.
ZANELE MUHOLI (South African, b. 1972)_Vukani II (Paris)_
2014
Gelatin silver print 23 1/2 in. × 13 in. (59.7 × 33cm) Promised Gift of Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary The Metropolitan Museum of Art The South African photographer Zanele Muholi is a self-described visual activist and cultural archivist. In the artist’s hands, the camera is a potent tool of self-representation and self-definition for communities at risk of violence. Muholi has chosen the nearly archaic black-and-white process for most of their portraits “to create a sense of timelessness – a sense that we’ve been here before, but we’re looking at human beings who have never before had an opportunity to be seen.” Challenging the immateriality of our digital age, Muholi has restated the importance of the physical print and connected their work to that of their progenitors. In this recent self-portrait, Muholi sits on a bed, sharing a quiet moment of reflection and self-observation. The title, in the artist’s native Zulu, translates loosely as “wake up.” THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART 1000 Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street New York, New York 10028-0198 PHONE: 212-535-7710Opening hours:
Tuesday – Thursday: 9.30am – 5.30pm* Friday – 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 LIKE ART BLART ON FACEBOOKBACK TO TOP
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PHOTOGRAPHS: MAX DUPAIN (AUSTRALIAN, 1911-1992) PART 1 By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leavea Comment
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Sydney Harbour Crepuscule, Tea Towel Trio
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, vitalising power of sunlightNOVEMBER 2020
MAX DUPAIN (Australian, 1911-1992) _Sydney Harbour Crepuscule_1937
Gelatin silver print32.5 x 47cm
Noun. CRÉPUSCULE m (plural crépuscules) twilight, dusk (the time of the day when the sun sets) Iv’e been saving up these images for some time. This, the first of a two-part posting, features many images that are rare online, especially in a large size. Dupain was a master of the use of LIGHT AND FORM (_Tea Towel Trio, _1934), an early proponent of MODERNIST PHOTOGRAPHY in Australia (_Silos at Pyrmont; Silos through windscreen, _both 1935), an expert in NIGHT PHOTOGRAPHY (_Mosman Bay at dusk, _1937) and the use of CHIAROSCURO (_Passengers Disembarking from Ferry, _1950s; _Newsstand, _Nd). He was an innovator in SURREALIST PHOTOGRAPHY (_Night with her train of stars and her gift of sleep,_ 1936-37), PHOTOMONTAGE (_Nude Figure with Shell Transposed, _1936), and ADVERTISING PHOTOGRAPHY. His NUDE STUDIES evidence an experimentation towards the representation of the human body (_Jean with Wire Mesh, _1938; _Nude Figure behind Wire Mesh, _1930s), his PORTRAITS possess a sensitivity and feeling towards subject matter (_Portrait of Boy in Sunlight, _1936), while his portrayal of AUSTRALIAN CULTURE – the BODY AS ARCHITECTURE (_Bondi, _1939); the MYTH OF THE SURF LIFESAVER (_Life Guards with Flag and Reel March, _Nd); and the BUSTLING METROPOLIS (_Rush Hour, Kings Cross, _1938) address the burgeoning self confidence of the Australian nation in the 1930s. Seemingly, there was nothing that Dupain could not turn his hand too, that he could not photograph. What strikes me most when looking at his photographs is the precision of his visual inquiry. His focus, his previsualisation, in knowing exactly what he wanted to say in that image – even while shifting genres and points of view. Like the subtle camera positioning of Atget where the angles are not what you would expect, Dupain rarely puts his camera where a mere mortal would stand to take a photograph. He looks, down (_Manly, _1940s), up (crouching on his haunches to make the Life Guards and the Bondi couple seem monumental) and across – framing his compositions with diagonals, arches, and waves of people, almost like musical annotation. Everything looks simple and eloquent, elegant, but beneath the surface these are sophisticated images. Far from being nostalgic, I look at Dupain’s body of work, and then at an individual photograph like _Buses, Eddy Avenue _(Nd) – and marvel at Dupain’s contemporary rendition (rending?) of time and space. Placing his camera as far to the right as he dared, Dupain captures the diagonal line of the parked buses in sunlight framed by the dark arch of the tunnel, the tram passing from left to right, the perfectly positioned clocktower and willowy flag giving a sense of movement… and then that man, that man, standing stock still at right with his shadow falling in front of him. IF he was not there, the whole focus of the image, the punctum, would be gone. It would just be a serviceable image. But he IS there and Dupain recognised that! Similarly, in one of my favourite photographs by Dupain, _At Newport _(1952) “Dupain’s viewpoint turns the top of the wall into a taught line across the picture and his five bathers are strung out along it and held in tension like forms on a wire. As one prepares to dive, his counterweight, the sinewy young man, descends on the dry side. At the picture’s edges, the girls in bathing caps counterbalance the boy with hunched shoulders.” Birds on a wire, notes on a musical stave. Can you imagine being Dupain standing there and _RECOGNISING_ that composition and the distorted shadow, in that very instance of its emergence, its flowering, for that ever so brief second in the existence of the cosmos…. Simply put, Max Dupain is the greatest Australian male photographer that has ever lived.Dr Marcus Bunyan
.
All images are used under fair use conditions for the purpose of educational research. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image. MAX DUPAIN (Australian, 1911-1992) _Mosman Bay at dusk_1937
Gelatin silver print28 x 37.5cm
MAX DUPAIN (Australian, 1911-1992) _Night with her train of stars and her gift of sleep_1936-37
Gelatin silver print30 x 36cm
MAX DUPAIN (Australian, 1911-1992)_(Rhythmic Form)_
1935
Gelatin silver print22.5 x 30.5cm
MAX DUPAIN (Australian, 1911-1992) _(Nude Figure with Trombone Shadow)_1930s
Gelatin silver print25 x 17.5cm
MAX DUPAIN (Australian, 1911-1992) _(Nude Figure with Shell Transposed)_1936
Gelatin silver print50 x 35.5cm
MAX DUPAIN (Australian, 1911-1992)_Two forms_
1939
Gelatin silver print50.5 x 38.5cm
This photograph relates conceptually to Dupain’s experiments with photographs of nudes. According to the vitalist philosophies of the time, the spiralling rounded shell being shaped by nature is feminine, while the hard metallic tool is man-made and represents the masculine principle. Photographed on a plain surface and lit with raking light, the sense of space is ambiguous. Dupain retained an interest in still-lifes throughout his career, returning to them particularly towards the end of his life. In the 1930s his most well-known still-life was _Shattered intimacy_ 1936 (AGNSW collection) where an image of broken glass and a broken classical statue has been solarised, producing a powerful narrative. _Two forms_ is a more contemplative image as the shell and the head of a hammer lie side by side and are of similar scale. Interestingly, the two forms are distant from each other, rather than close together, and their scale gives them equality. It is not known whether Dupain necessarily subscribed to the contemporaneous anxiety about the ‘new woman’, but certainly one can read this image as an examination of difference. Art Gallery of New South Wales Photography Collection Handbook,2007
MAX DUPAIN (Australian, 1911-1992)_Tea Towel Trio_
1934
Gelatin silver print29.5 x 22cm
MAX DUPAIN (Australian, 1911-1992)_Still Life_
1935
Gelatin silver print29.5 x 21.5cm
MAX DUPAIN (Australian, 1911-1992)_Blankets_
Nd
Gelatin silver print31 x 24cm
MAX DUPAIN (Australian, 1911-1992) _(Male Nude with Discus)_Nd
Gelatin silver print39 x 32cm
MAX DUPAIN (Australian, 1911-1992)_Dart_
1935
Gelatin silver print50 x 37.5cm
MAX DUPAIN (Australian, 1911-1992)_Dart_
1935
Gelatin silver print MAX DUPAIN (Australian, 1911-1992)_Sleeping Boy_
1941
Gelatin silver print MAX DUPAIN (Australian, 1911-1992) _Portrait of Boy in Sunlight_1936
Gelatin silver print29 x 26cm
MAX DUPAIN (Australian, 1911-1992) _Jean with Wire Mesh_1938
Gelatin silver print49.5 x 39.5cm
In 1937, Bailey posed for Jean with wire mesh, which some experts hail as the single most powerful image ever taken by Max Dupain, generally regarded as Australia’s greatest lensman. It’s more subtle than his most famous image, _Sunbaker,_ also shot in 1937. It’s less frozen in time than his striking scenes of wartime Australians serving in New Guinea. It’s more universal than his evocative tableaux of shearers, cattle drovers, miners and “six o’clock swillers”. And it’s less contrived than the commissioned portraits he took of wealthier women for the equivalent of today’ssocial pages.
Of all the many women who posed for his camera, Bailey was regarded as Dupain’s muse. Even by her own admission, she was not the most beautiful woman in 1930s Sydney. In some pictures, by other photographers, she looks quite plain. … But Dupain saw something special in her, though even Bailey does notknow what it was.
“It’s not enormously erotic,” says Davies. “But it is incredibly sensual, masterful in its use of light and shade. To photograph someone with her forehead in full sunlight and the rest of her figure cloaked in shadow is an extraordinary technical achievement. Most photographers would regard it as professional suicide. They wouldn’t attempt it.” The image, he says, “is an astonishing masterpiece of chiaroscuro”. Unlike so many of Dupain’s images, this – and another outstanding work in the exhibition of an unknown model called _Nude with pole_ – are timeless, betraying none of the nostalgia for which Dupain is so often noted. White, who under Dupain’s tutelage became an accomplished photographer herself, says simply, “I think Jean with wire mesh is his most beautiful image. It leaves _Sunbaker_ for dead.” Anonymous. “Portrait of a lady,” on _The Sydney Morning Herald_ website, July 12, 2003 Cited 24/10/2020 MAX DUPAIN (Australian, 1911-1992) _(Nude Figure behind Wire Mesh)_1930s
Gelatin silver print50.5 x 40 cm
MAX DUPAIN (Australian, 1911-1992)_Hands of a Dancer_
1935
Gelatin silver print29 x 27.5cm
MAX DUPAIN (Australian, 1911-1992)_Artist and Model_
1938
Gelatin silver print35.5 x 30.5cm
MAX DUPAIN (Australian, 1911-1992) _(Super-Imposed Woman and Night Cityscape)_1937
Gelatin silver print46 x 35cm
MAX DUPAIN (Australian, 1911-1992) _Fire Stairs at Bond Street Studio (Solarised)_1935
Gelatin silver print30 x 21.5cm
MAX DUPAIN (Australian, 1911-1992) _Fire Stairs at Bond Street Studio_1930s
Gelatin silver print24.5 x 9cm
MAX DUPAIN (Australian, 1911-1992) _(Olive Cotton in Wheat Fields)_Nd
Gelatin silver print30 x 30cm
MAX DUPAIN (Australian, 1911-1992) _(Fire Stairs at Bond Street)_1934
Gelatin silver print26 x 21cm
Max Dupain is Australia’s most celebrated modernist photographer. Born in the Sydney, Dupain practiced photography as a teenager, receiving his first camera in 1924. In 1929 he joined the New South Wales Photographic Society, and in 1930 was employed in the studio of prominent Pictorialist Cecil Bostock, where he received solid training in all aspects of photography. He established his own studio in Sydney in 1934, servicing commercial clients and producing still lifes, figure photography and portraits. In his personal work, he explored the surrealist aesthetic of Man Ray, experimenting with formal abstraction and montage. With the outbreak of World War II, Dupain worked with the Camouflage Unit in 1941, travelling to New Guinea and the Admiralty Islands. His photography of the 1960s and 70s was shaped by architectural interests and he fostered working relationships with several prominent architects, most notably Harry Seidler. Text from the Art Gallery of New South Wales website Cited24/10/2020
MAX DUPAIN (Australian, 1911-1992) _Silos through windscreen_1935
Gelatin silver print40 x 43cm
While cars and machinery were rarely Max Dupain’s personal choice of forms to photograph, his _Silos through windscreen_ 1935 embraces the new age from a new perspective. It is an uncharacteristically complex composition. The view of the silos from the front seat shows off the car’s smart dashboard; at the same time his camera records a fragment of a brick factory reflected in the rear vision mirror. MAX DUPAIN (Australian, 1911-1992)_Silos at Pyrmont_
1935
Gelatin silver print49 x 37cm
_Pyrmont silos_ is one of a number of photographs that Dupain took of these constructions in the 1930s. In all cases Dupain examined the silos from a modernist perspective, emphasising their monumentality from low viewpoints under a bright cloudless sky. Additionally, his use of strong shadows to emphasise the forms of the silos and the lack of human figures celebrates the built structure as well as providing no sense of scale. Another photograph by Dupain in the AGNSW collection was taken through a car windscreen so that the machinery of transport merges explicitly with industrialisation into a complex hard-edge image of views and mirror reflections. There were no skyscrapers in Sydney until the late 1930s so the silos, Walter Burley Griffin’s incinerators and the Sydney Harbour Bridge were the major points of reference for those interested in depicting modern expressions of engineering and industrial power. Dupain was the first Australian photographer to embrace modernism. One of his photographs of the silos was roundly criticised when shown to the New South Wales Photographic Society but Dupain forged on regardless with his reading, thinking and experimentation. Some Australian painting and writing had embraced modernist principles in the 1920s, but as late as 1938 Dupain was writing to the _SydneyMorning Herald:_
“Great art has always been contemporary in spirit. Today we feel the surge of aesthetic exploration along abstract lines, the social economic order impinging itself on art, the repudiation of the ‘truth to nature criterion’ … We sadly need the creative courage of Man Ray, the original thought of Moholy-Nagy, and the dynamic realism of Edouard Steichen.”1 1. Dupain, M. 1938, ‘Letter to the editor’, _Sydney MorningHerald,_ 30 March
Art Gallery of New South Wales Photography Collection Handbook,2007
MAX DUPAIN (Australian, 1911-1992)_Bondi_
1939
Gelatin silver print37 x 37.5cm
Dupain was one of the first Australian photographers to embrace Modernism. The simplicity of form and unusually low vantage point of this picture reflect the influence of German photography that he saw in the journal Das Deutsche Lichtbild. At first Dupain preferred another version of the image; when it was published in 1948, the photograph shows the woman standing with her arms folded. Here, she leans toward the man, their bodies slightly overlapping. Standing parallel to the picture plane, their bodies and those of the young men at their sides form a pyramid – one of Dupain’s preferred forms atthis time.
Text © National Gallery of Australia, Canberra MAX DUPAIN (Australian, 1911-1992)_At Newport_
1952
Gelatin silver print25 x 29cm
There is a strong sense of masculinity found in many of Dupain’s beach works. In _At Newport_ this is emphasised by the strong, angular lines of the figures, an image that seems to capture the essence of male youth at the beach. In this image, three male swimmers are positioned in the foreground of a beachside pool setting. The long shadows of the late summer sun place further emphasis on the angularity and thus the masculinity that is a feature of this image. Text from the _Annette Larkin Fine Art_ website MAX DUPAIN (Australian, 1911-1992)_At Newport_
1952
Gelatin silver print45.0 x 40.0cm
National Gallery of AustraliaPurchased 1976
Dupain took _At Newport_ in 1952 at the Newport Baths, as it was then known, a sea-water pool next to the Pacific Ocean about 20 miles north of Sydney. It’s an ambiguous photograph in more ways than one because the angle of the shot makes it seem as if the tremendous weight of the sea is being held back by nothing stronger than a low wall, with the water rising almost to the brim. Dupain’s viewpoint turns the top of the wall into a taught line across the picture and his five bathers are strung out along it and held in tension like forms on a wire. As one prepares to dive, his counterweight, the sinewy young man, descends on the dry side. At the picture’s edges, the girls in bathing caps counterbalance the boy with hunched shoulders. The distant pillars along the side of the pool duplicate these intervals. There appears to be some indecision, though, about the crop Dupain intended on the right. A print in his archive shows space between the right-hand girl and the edge, which is better, while a print in a national collection omits her entirely. Losing her disembodied head and intense concentration on the diver weakens the photograph. (There is also a second picture of bathers from the samegroup (below))
_At Newport_ can be straightforwardly construed as another celebration by Dupain the dedicated modernist of the vitalising power of sunlight and the exuberant Australianness of the beach, but there is an alternative way of reading it. An essay in _Dupain’s Sydney_ (1999) notes that the photographer didn’t like people very much, valued solitude, and would rather be doing something than have to talk. (He was remarkably industrious, leaving an archive of more than a million pictures.) This group of bathers is together but disconnected. Two faces are hidden and unknowable, looking down at the water, and the others are half-concealed in shadow, lost in their own thoughts. Then there is the ungainly shape cast by the young man’s long legs, which serves as a foil to the dark tones of the rising land. The shadow introduces an element of discord and adds to the mood of subtledisquiet.
Rick Poynor. “Exposure: Newport Baths by Max Dupain,” on the _Design Observer_ website 23/06/2015 Cited 24/10/2020 MAX DUPAIN (Australian, 1911-1992)_Newport Baths I_
1952
Gelatin silver print23.5 x 25.5cm
MAX DUPAIN (Australian, 1911-1992)_Bondi Couple_
1950s
Gelatin silver print20.5 x 20.5cm
MAX DUPAIN (Australian, 1911-1992)_Manly_
1940s
Gelatin silver print47 x 37.5cm
From 1938, and throughout the late 1940s after his return from the war, Dupain took many photographs of Manly beach from the high vantage point offered by its iconic shark tower. These landscapes often found striking diagonal obliques in the convergence of incoming surf, the activities of lifesavers, the lines of beachgoers, and the surrounding modernist architecture, including promenades. These photographs tell us as much about Dupain’s leisure time as they do his artistic interests: the beach was ‘how I used to spend my weekends’, Dupain later wrote. More than its convenience, Manly offered a very local experience of modernity. Dupain strongly believed in and advocated for a contemporary photography, that it was important to consciously be part of the age into which one was born. Text © National Gallery of Australia, Canberra MAX DUPAIN (Australian, 1911-1992) _(Life Guards with Flag and Reel March)_Nd
Gelatin silver print26 x 26.5 cm
MAX DUPAIN (Australian, 1911-1992) _(Life Savers at Attention in a Row)_1940s
Gelatin silver print25.5 x 30 cm
MAX DUPAIN (Australian, 1911-1992)_Lifesavers_
1940s
Gelatin silver print36.5 x 47.5cm
MAX DUPAIN (Australian, 1911-1992) _(Passengers Disembarking from Ferry)_1950s
Gelatin silver print30.5 x 30.5cm
MAX DUPAIN (Australian, 1911-1992) _(Male Commuters departing Ferry)_Nd
Gelatin silver print27 x 26cm
MAX DUPAIN (Australian, 1911-1992)_(Newsstand)_
Nd
Gelatin silver print36 x 30.5cm
MAX DUPAIN (Australian, 1911-1992) _Meat Queue, Sydney_1946
Gelatin silver print40.5 x 50.5cm
_Meat queue, Sydney_ was one in a series of pictures Sydney photographer Max Dupain undertook for the Department of Information. When interviewed by curator Helen Ennis in 1991 Dupain said: “We were doing a story on queues after the war. They were all over the place – queues for buses, vegetables, fruit. I just happened to come across this butcher shop in Pitt Street, I think it was. Here they were all lined up, and I went around it, took a number of pictures, ultimately ending up with this sort of architectural approach with four of five females all dressed in black with black hats, not looking too happy about the world. Suddenly one of them breaks the queue when I’m focused up all ready to go, pure luck.”1 The solidity of the linear figures taken from mid distance beneath a meat coupon scale which will weigh a proportion of meat with the allowable coupons democratises the women. The picture is given a sudden focus as the central figure decides to move from the queue and unwanted contact is made with the woman ahead. Described as both a documentary photograph, but not necessarily a social comment, the economic food-rationing of postwar Australia is shown in this clear modernist image of black-and-white shapes in shallow space. Form rather than content defines this image. The central figure in a lighter coloured coat is balanced on either side by the darker coats as the black hats, which make a wave along the horizontal, parallel the line of meat hooks. 1. Ennis, H. 1991, _Max Dupain: photographs,_ Australian National Gallery, Canberra p. 18. Art Gallery of New South Wales Photography Collection Handbook,2007
MAX DUPAIN (Australian, 1911-1992) _Morning Commuters, The Kabu, Circular Quay_1938
Gelatin silver print32.5 x 30cm
MAX DUPAIN (Australian, 1911-1992)_Tram Abstraction_
1930
Gelatin silver print23.5 x 20cm
MAX DUPAIN (Australian, 1911-1992) _(Buses, Eddy Avenue)_Nd
Gelatin silver print17.5 x 17cm
MAX DUPAIN (Australian, 1911-1992) _Rush Hour, Kings Cross_1938
Gelatin silver print MAX DUPAIN (Australian, 1911-1992) _Rush Hour, Kings Cross_1938
Gelatin silver print MAX DUPAIN (Australian, 1911-1992) _Rush Hour, Kings Cross_1938
Gelatin silver print40.5 x 42cm
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01
Nov
20
EUROPEAN ART RESEARCH TOUR: VASARELY MUSEUM, BUDAPEST PERMANENT EXHIBITION By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leavea Comment
Categories: beauty , designer, drawing
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Tags: Amir (Rima) , Az Ujság Hirdetés , Bi-Octans, Chess Set
, composition
, Deep kinetic object, Eroed-Pre
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VISITED SEPTEMBER 2019 POSTED NOVEMBER 2020 VICTOR VASARELY (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997) _Zebras. Prekinetic study (Preliminary study for the kinetic theory. Graphic Period, 1929-1939) _(installation view)1939
Gouache, pencil, colour and white chalk on paper PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan While on my European art trip in 2019, I ventured by tram to the deepest suburbs of Budapest to visit the Vasarely Museum on a Sunday – one of only three days the museum is open. The journey was an experience in itself. The reward was that I got to see an artists work I have always admired (I have a Vasarely serigraph in my collection), set in one of the most beautiful art galleries I have ever seen in my life. What’s not too like. Critically, I got to examine Vasarely’s work up close and personal, on a large scale. I noted how _gestural _his work is, even as it is geometric – emerging from his _Gesture Drawings. Ground Plans _of 1946. There is a mesmerising flow to his compositions, even as they are supposedly set, fixed, in their mathematical complexity. Even as Josef Albers explored colour in the belief that colours have no inherent emotional associations, so Vasarely investigated the formula for a “plastic alphabet”, a universal visual language based on the structural interplay of form and colour, a programmed language with an infinite number of form and colour variations. Through serialisation and the processes of re-creation, multiplication and expansion, “in pictures based on the mutual association between forms and colours, he claimed to perceive a ‘grammar’ of visual language, with which a set of basic forms making up a composition could be arranged into a system similar to musical notation… He regarded colour-forms as the cells or molecules out of which the universe was made.” Don’t believe all that is written on the can. While both artists want to euthanise the authenticity of the hand, the feeling of he eye, and the beauty of the object through an investigation of concept, form and replication, when in the presence of these paintings, once, twice, three times, one cannot deny the intimacy of their construction. Unlike flat reproductions of these paintings in books, their serial reproduction, in these installation photographs you can see the ripples in the surface of these paintings. Their meticulous, hand-crafted production. For example, look at the surface of paintingssuch as _Lom-Lan 2
_
(1953, below); _Marsan_(1950 /
1955 / 1958, below); and _Sonora_(1973,
below). From a distance their patterns are stable but optically disturbing. Up close, their surface dis/integrates into swirls and ripples at a molecular level. The musical annotation – colour, form, pattern, repetition – of these optical illusions is subsumed into an aura, an earthly divination of a transient ‘_planetary folklore’._Dr Marcus Bunyan
.
All iPhone images © Dr Marcus Bunyan. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image. DOWNSTAIRS GALLERIES View of the Vasarely Museum Budapest PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan View of the Vasarely Museum, Budapest showing at second left, _Gesture Drawings. Ground Plans_ (1946); and at second right, _Composition_(1948)
PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan VICTOR VASARELY (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997) _Gesture Drawings. Ground Plans _(installation view)1946
Pencil on paper
Vasarely Museum Budapest PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan The Galerie Denise René opened in 1944. Its first exhibition was _Les dessins et composition de Vasarely_ (Vasarely’s drawings and graphic compositions). Surrealism influenced his works, and even caught the attention of André Breton. As Denise René recalled: ‘André Breton was even convinced we had found a Surrealist painter; it was mostly the _trompe l’œils_ that made him think so, which abounded in Vasarely’s graphic innovations. Breton invited me and Vasarely to visit him in rue Fontaine. Éluard and Breton both came to see the exhibition, though on different days because Éluard had broken with Breton and Surrealism.’ Vasarely had a painterly turn. Shortly he made experimentations in gesture painting. (Victor Vasarely, _Jazz,_ 1942, inv. V. 195) Later, despite his artistic discoveries, he described his earliest period as _Les Fausses Routes_ (Wrong Roads). Text from the Vasarely Museum website Cited 26/10/2020 VICTOR VASARELY (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997) _Hombre en movimiento – Estudio del movimiento (El hombre)_ _Man in motion. Study of Motion (The Man)_1943
Tempera on plywood
117 x 132cm
Vasarely Museum Budapest VICTOR VASARELY (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997) _Composition _(installation view)1948
Oil on canvas
Vasarely Museum Budapest PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan Magyar Grafika (Hungarian Graphics) _Az Ujság Hirdetés (The Newspaper is Advertised) _(installationview)
Edition 12
1931
Vasarely Museum Budapest PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan A journal for the development of graphic industries and related professions. Budapest, 1. 1920 – 13. 1932 Installation views of the Vasarely Museum, Budapest with in the last photo at left, _Versant _(1952) PHOTOS: Marcus Bunyan VICTOR VASARELY (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997) _Versant _(installation view)1952
Acrylic on plywood
Vasarely Museum Budapest PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan Installation view of the Vasarely Museum, Budapest with at right,_Lom-Lan 2_ (1953)
PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan VICTOR VASARELY (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997) _Lom-Lan 2_ (installation view)1953
Oil on fibreboard
Vasarely Museum Budapest PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan Installation views of the Vasarely Museum, Budapest showing thepainting
PHOTOS: Marcus Bunyan VICTOR VASARELY (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997) _Amir (“Rima”) _(installation view)1953
Acrylic on plywood
Vasarely Museum Budapest PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan VICTOR VASARELY (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997) _MORA (Oeuvre profonde cinétique) _(installation views) 1954/1960 (?) vagy 1955/1964 (?) Deep kinetic object, silk screen on plexiglas, glass and steel Vasarely Museum Budapest PHOTOS: Marcus Bunyan Installation view of the Vasarely Museum, Budapest showing at left, _Orion noir_ (1970); and at right, _Norma_ (1962-1979) PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan VICTOR VASARELY (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997)_Orion noir_
1970
Acrylic on canvas
Vasarely Museum Budapest VICTOR VASARELY (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997) _Norma _(installation view)1962-1979
Acrylic on canvas
Vasarely Museum Budapest PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan Installation view of the Vasarely Museum, Budapest PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan VICTOR VASARELY (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997)_Chess Set_
1980
Multiple, plexiglass Vasarely Museum Budapest PHOTOS: Marcus Bunyan Installation view of the Vasarely Museum, Budapest showing at left, _Marsan-2_ (1964/1974); at centre, _Gizeh_ (1955/1962); and at right, _Marsan_ (1950/1955/1958) PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan VICTOR VASARELY (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997) _Marsan-2_ (installation views)__1964/1974
Acrylic on canvas
Vasarely Museum Budapest PHOTOS: Marcus Bunyan VICTOR VASARELY (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997) _Gizeh _(installation view)1955/1962
Oil on canvas
Donation of Victor Vasarely, 1970 Vasarely Museum Budapest PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan VICTOR VASARELY (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997) _Marsan _(installation view)1950/1955/1958
Oil on canvas
Donation of Victor Vasarely, 1970 Vasarely Museum Budapest PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan VICTOR VASARELY (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997) _Naissances _(installation view)1954/1960
From the album _Hommage à Johann Sebastian Bach_ (Éd. Pierre belford, Paris, 1973. Éxemplaire XIV/XX), Supplement no. 3. Deep kinetic object, plexiglass, silk screen Vasarely Museum Budapest PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan VICTOR VASARELY (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997) _Zilia _(installation view)1981
Acrylic on canvas
Vasarely Museum Budapest PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan VICTOR VASARELY (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997) _Stridio-Z _(installation view)1976-1977
Acrylic on canvas
Vasarely Museum Budapest PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan VICTOR VASARELY (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997) _Tri-Axo _(installation view)1972/1976
Acrylic on canvas
Vasarely Museum Budapest PHOTO: Marcus BunyanWILLIAM SEITZ
_The responsive eye _(book cover) Museum of Modern Art, 1965 PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan Installation view of the Vasarely Museum, Budapest PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan Installation view of the Vasarely Museum, Budapest showing _Yllus_(1978)
PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan VICTOR VASARELY (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997)_Yllus
_1978
Acrylic on canvas
Vasarely Museum Budapest PHOTO: Marcus BunyanUPSTAIRS GALLERIES
Installation view of the Vasarely Museum, Budapest PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan Installation view of the Vasarely Museum, Budapest showing _V.P. 102_(1979)
PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan VICTOR VASARELY (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997) _V.P. 102 _(installation view)1979
Acrylic on cardboard, mounted on plywood Vasarely Museum Budapest PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan Installation view of the Vasarely Museum, Budapest showing at left in the display cabinet, _KROA-MC_ (1969); and at centre, _Quivar(Ouivar)_ (1974)
PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan Installation view of the Vasarely Museum, Budapest showing at left, _Eroed-Pre_ (1978); and at right, _Quivar (Ouivar)_ (1974) PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan VICTOR VASARELY (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997) _Eroed-Pre _(installation view)1978
Acrylic on canvas
Vasarely Museum Budapest PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan VICTOR VASARELY (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997) _Quivar (Ouivar) _(installation view)1974
Collage, gouache on cardboard, mounted on plywood Vasarely Museum Budapest PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan Installation view of the Vasarely Museum, Budapest showing at right,_Stri-oet_ (1979)
PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan VICTOR VASARELY (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997) _Stri-oet _(installation view)1979
Acrylic on canvas
Vasarely Museum Budapest PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan Installation view of the Vasarely Museum, Budapest showing at left centre, _Stri-oet _(1979); and in the display cabinet, _KROA-MC_ (1969). Love the reflection of the colours on the wall behind! PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan Installation view of the Vasarely Museum, Budapest showing _KROA-MC_(1969)
PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan Installation view of the Vasarely Museum, Budapest showing at left, _Bull _(1973/74); and at centre left, _Orion noir_ (1963) PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan VICTOR VASARELY (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997) _Bull _(installation view)1973/1974
Acrylic on canvas
Vasarely Museum Budapest PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan VICTOR VASARELY (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997) _Vega Mir (Oeuvre profonde cinétique) _(installation view)1954/1960
From the album _Hommage à Johann Sebastian Bach_ (Éd. Pierre belford, Paris, 1973. Éxemplaire XIV/XX), Supplement no. 1. Multiple, silk screen on anodised aluminium Vasarely Museum Budapest PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan VICTOR VASARELY (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997) _Vega Mir (Oeuvre profonde cinétique) _(installation view detail)1954/1960
From the album _Hommage à Johann Sebastian Bach_ (Éd. Pierre belford, Paris, 1973. Éxemplaire XIV/XX), Supplement no. 1. Multiple, silk screen on anodised aluminium Vasarely Museum Budapest PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan. _Self portrait with ‘Vega Mir’_ 2019 Installation view of the Vasarely Museum, Budapest showing at left,_Bi. Octans _(1979)
PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan VICTOR VASARELY (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997) _Bi. Octans _(installation view)1979
Acrylic on canvas
Vasarely Museum Budapest PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan Installation view of the Vasarely Museum, Budapest showing at left, _Kotzka_ (1973-1976); and at right, _Trybox_ (1979) PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan VICTOR VASARELY (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997) _Kotzka _(installation view)1973-1976
Acrylic on canvas
Vasarely Museum Budapest PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan VICTOR VASARELY (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997) _Trybox _(installation view)1979
Acrylic on canvas
Vasarely Museum Budapest PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan Installation view of the Vasarely Museum, Budapest showing at centre right, _Vonal-Ket_ (1972/1977) PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan VICTOR VASARELY (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997) _Vonal-Ket _(installation views)1972/1977
Acrylic on canvas
Vasarely Museum Budapest PHOTOS: Marcus Bunyan Installation view of the Vasarely Museum, Budapest showing at centre left, _Sonora_ (1973) PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan VICTOR VASARELY (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997) _Sonora _(installation view)1973
Acrylic on canvas
Vasarely Museum Budapest PHOTO: Marcus BunyanVASARELY MUSEUM
1033, Budapest Szentlélek tér 6 PHONE: + 36 1 388 7551Opening hours:
Friday 11am – 4.00pm Saturday – Sunday 11am – 4.00pm Vasarely Museum website LIKE ART BLART ON FACEBOOKBACK TO TOP
25
Oct
20
EXHIBITION: ‘THOMAS RUFF’ AT KUNSTSAMMLUNG NORDRHEIN-WESTFALEN,DÜSSELDORF
By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leavea Comment
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Tags: 3D_m.a.r.s 16 , camera-less photography, Captain Linnaeus
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Ruff Tableaux chinois, Thomas Ruff
tripe_12 Seeringham. Munduppum inside gateway,
Thomas Ruff tripe_15 Madura. The Blackburn Testimonial,
Thomas Ruff w.g.l.01 , Thomas Ruff Zeitungsfoto 014, Thomas Ruff
Zeitungsfoto 060
, Thomas Ruff
Zeitungsfotos ,
time-related aesthetics of printed products,
tripe_12 Seeringham. Munduppum inside gateway,
tripe_15 Madura. The Blackburn Testimonial,
use of photographs in political propaganda,
w.g.l. , w.g.l.01
, Zeitungsfoto 014
, Zeitungsfoto 060
, Zeitungsfotos
EXHIBITION DATES: 12TH SEPTEMBER 2020 – 7TH FEBRUARY 2021 THOMAS RUFF (German, b. 1958)_press++01.38_
2015
C-Print
VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2020 Thomas Ruff is the true Renaissance man of contemporary photography. No greater compliment can be given. His career in photography, as evidenced through the numerous bodies of work seen in this posting, has been an inquiry into the conceptualisation, status, presence, presentation, and representation of photographs in different contexts and media, through different technologies. A meditation on, and mediation into, the origins and purposes of photography and the interventions human beings enact to affect their outcomes. His work “explores the most diverse genres and historical varieties of photography…”. For example, in the series _press _he combines front and back of an image, disrupting the reading of the image with contemporary hieroglyphs. In _Zeitungsfotos_ he investigates the power of press photos and their deconstruction through the dot structure of the image. In _Tableaux chinois_ he examines the use of photographs in political propaganda and looks at the artistic stylisation of the image. In one of my favourite series, _jpeg, _Ruff focuses on the pixellation and deconstruction of the image in compressed JPEG format photographs where, at a distance, the whole is more than the sum of the parts. This reminds me of the technique I witnessed when visiting Monet’s huge canvases of waterlilies at the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris – how when you got up close to the canvases, there were huge daubs and mounds of paint accreted on the surface of the paintings which made no sense at close range. It was only when you stepped back that it all made sense. In essence this is what grounds the work of Thomas Ruff: that he digs and unearths the hidden strands, the interweaving, that lies beneath the surface of photographies. He intervenes in the negative, the print, the newspaper photograph, the light, the camera and the physicality of the print. He turns these literally hidden connections into lateral images – side views of the familiar that touch the human and the machine from different points of view. To think of all these ideas, concepts, and then to develop them and bring them together in holistic bodies of work _THAT THE VIEWER REMEMBERS _– and there is the rub, for so much contemporary photography is unremarkable, mortal – lifts Ruff’s photographs beyond the realm of time and space. In their distortions, their sublime beauty, their critical thinking, they become i/mortal. They become the complexity that is us.Dr Marcus Bunyan
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Many thankx to the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image. > “To understand how a pictorial genre actually works, I have to > produce a series; I want to uncover the secret behind image> generation.”
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THOMAS RUFF (b. 1958) is one of the internationally most important artists of his generation. Already as a student in the class of the photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Düsseldorf Academy of Art in the early 1980s, he chose a conceptual approach to photography, which continues to determine his handling of the most diverse pictorial genres and historical possibilities of photography to thisday.
Thomas Ruff’s contribution to contemporary photography thus consists in a special way in the development of a form of photography created without a camera: He uses images that have already been taken and that have already been distributed and optimised for specific purposes in other, largely non-artistic contexts. Ruff’s image sources for these series range from photographic experiments of the nineteenth century to photographs taken by space probes. He examined the archive processes of large image agencies and the pictorial politics of the People’s Republic of China. But also pornographic and catastrophic images from the Internet form starting points for his own series of works created over the past twenty years that have increasingly been developed on the computer. They originate from newspapers, magazines, books, archives, and collections or were simply accessible to everyone on the Internet. In each series, Ruff explores the technical conditions of photography in the confrontation with these different pictorial worlds. At the same time, he focuses on the afterlife of images in publications, archives, databases, and on the Internet. SHORT BIOGRAPHY THOMAS RUFF Thomas Ruff was born in Zell am Harmersbach in 1958 and studied with Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Düsseldorf Academy of Art from 1977 to 1985. From 2000 to 2005, he was himself Professor of Photography there. He first received international attention in 1987 with his series of larger-than-life portraits of friends and acquaintances who, as in passport photographs, gazed apathetically into the camera. In 1995, he represented Germany at the 46th Venice Biennale, together with Katharina Fritsch and Martin Honert. His works are collected internationally and are represented in numerous institutionalcollections.
Press release from the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen CAMERA-LESS PHOTOGRAPHY Thomas Ruff (b. 1958) is one of the internationally most important artists of his generation. Already as a student of the photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Düsseldorf Academy of Art in the early 1980s, he chose a conceptual approach to photography. His work, which explores the most diverse genres and historical varieties of photography, represents one of the most versatile and surprising positions within contemporary art. The comprehensive exhibition at K20 focuses on series of pictures from two decades in which the artist hardly ever used a camera himself. Instead, he appropriated existing photographic material from a wide variety of sources for his often large-format pictures. THOMAS RUFF (German, b. 1958)_Zeitungsfoto 014_
1990
C-Print
16.8 x 42.4cm
VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2020 THE POWER OF PRESS PHOTOS WHERE DO WE USE PHOTOS? WHAT HAPPENS WHEN PHOTOS ARE PRINTED? HOW DO AESTHETICS AND STATEMENTS CHANGE? The artist explores these questions in various series, in which he draws on image material from other photographers, processes this, and thematises contexts. For his series _Zeitungsfotos,_ the artist collected and processed newspaper photos to test the familiarity with the motifs and their reliability as carriers of information. In the series _press++,_ he reveals the work traces of newspaper staff in conflict with the photos that were taken especially for use in the newspaper. In his new series, _Tableaux chinois,_ he examines the use of photographs in political propaganda and reveals the artistic stylisation of the photos with reference to the feasibility and time-related aesthetics of the printed products. THOMAS RUFF (German, b. 1958)_Zeitungsfoto 060_
1990
C-Print
17.3 x 13.4cm
VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2020_ZEITUNGSFOTOS_
The works in the series _Zeitungsfotos (Newspaper Photos)_ were created between 1990 and 1991 as colour prints framed with passe-partouts. They are based on a collection of images which the artist cut out of German-language daily and weekly newspapers between 1981 and 1991. The selected motifs from politics, business, sports, culture, science, technology, history, or contemporary events reflect in their entirety the collective pictorial world of a particular generation. The artist had the selected images reproduced without the explanatory captions and printed in double column width. In this way, he questions the informational value of the photographs and directs our attention to the rasterisation of newspaper print. THOMAS RUFF (German, b. 1958)_press++21.11_
2016
C-Print, Edition 02/04260 x 185cm
VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2020_PRESS++_
Black-and-white press photographs from the 1930s to the 1980s, which were taken primarily from American newspaper and magazine archives, are the source material for the _press++_ series. Thomas Ruff has been working on this series since 2015, scanning the front and back sides of the archive images and combining the two sides so that the partially edited photograph of the front side is fused with all the texts, remarks, and traces of use on the back side. When printed in large format, the often disrespectful handling of this type of photography becomes visible. THOMAS RUFF (German, b. 1958) Kunstsammlung NRW, Düsseldorf 2020 (installation view)WG Bildkunst 2020
PHOTO: WDR / Thomas Köster THOMAS RUFF (German, b. 1958)_press++ 60.10_
2017
C-Print
225 x 185cm
VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2020GOING DIGITAL
HOW ARE PICTURES MADE TODAY? HOW DO PHOTOS PRINTED ON PAPER DIFFER FROM PHOTOS VIEWED ON THE INTERNET? WHERE ARE PHOTOS STORED? The investigation into the various pictorial genres leads to the archives and image stores of the past and present. The Internet offers seemingly inexhaustible sources of images by providing fast access to digitised, originally analog image material from older times and digitally created photographic material. As a researching artist, Thomas Ruff also finds here material for his studies, image production, and reflection. His large-format photos of the series _nudes_ draw on motifs and forms of presentation of thumb nail galleries (compilations of small images as previews) with pornographic images as they can be found on the Internet. By making the coarse pixel structure of the Internet images of the turn of the millennium into a pictorial principle, he thematises the technical conditions of the photographic images in his works. With the series _jpeg,_ he continued these investigations and connected his selection of media images with the question of a collective memory for images and contemporary history. In his latest series of _Tableaux chinois,_ pixel structures create visual tension and irritation alongside the offset screens of the digitised printed products of Chinese propaganda of the Mao era – and suggest the question of the technical conditions of images at the time they werecreated.
THOMAS RUFF (German, b. 1958)_nudes pea10_
1999
C-Print, Edition 1/2AP102 x 129cm
VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2020_NUDES_
An Internet research into the genre of nudes drew Thomas Ruff’s attention to the field of pornography and the images that were freely available on the World Wide Web at the turn of the millennium. The motifs and the special formal features that characterised the state of the art at that time became the starting points for new works. The found pictures had a rough pixel structure, which had already aroused the artist’s interest before. Thomas Ruff processed the found pictures in such a way that their pixel structure was just barely visible in print. By using motion blur and soft focus, by varying the colours and removing details, he gave the “obscene” pictures a painterly appearance and directed the eye to the pictorial structure and composition. The artist selected his source images according to compositional aspects. The choice of motifs shows a broad spectrum of sexual fantasies and practices. THE INTERNET 20 YEARS AGO Thomas Ruff began working on the series _nudes_ in 1999. In the 1990s and early 2000s, the transmission rates of the World Wide Web were still relatively low. Although dial-up modems had been around since the 1970s, devices with a speed of 56 kBit/s did not come onto the market until 1998. Even dial-up via ISDN, which was available at much higher prices from 1989 onwards, only allowed 64 kBit/s. It was not until July 1999 that Deutsche Telekom switched on the first ADSL connections, enabling transmission rates of up to 768 kBit/s. Although two million households were already connected by the end of 2001, slow Internet remained the general rule, above all outside the metropolitan regions. Until well into the 2000s, website operators thus relied on the offering of highly compressed images. As a result, photographic images found wide and rapid distribution, but always initially in a highly compressed, reduced form. Thomas Ruff was one of the first to deal artistically with the question of the status of photography in the age of the Internet, with the series _nudes_ from 1999 onwards and the series _jpeg_ from 2004 onwards. THOMAS RUFF (German, b. 1958) Kunstsammlung NRW, Düsseldorf 2020 (installation view)WG Bildkunst 2020
PHOTO: WDR / Thomas Köster THOMAS RUFF (German, b. 1958)_jpeg ny01_
2004
C-Print, Edition 1/1AP256 x 188 cm
VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2020 THOMAS RUFF (German, b. 1958)_jpeg msh01_
2004
C-Print
VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2020_JPEG_
Images distributed worldwide through the Internet, as well as scanned postcards and illustrations from photobooks, are the visual starting point of the _jpeg_ series, on which Thomas Ruff has been working since 2004. In it, he focuses attention on a feature that determines all images compressed in JPEG format and becomes visible at high magnification. By intensifying the pixel structure and simultaneously enlarging the overall image, he creates a new image that resembles a geometric colour pattern when viewed closely but becomes a photographic image when viewed from a greater distance. Here, Ruff uses ideas from the painting of late Impressionism and combines these with the digital possibilities of the twenty-first century. By using the entire range of images published globally and simultaneously discussed in recent decades, he allows the series to become almost a visual lexicon of media imagery and a reflection of its characteristics determined by the medium. THOMAS RUFF (German, b. 1958) Installation view K20, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-WestfalenFrom series: _jpeg_
PHOTO: Achim Kukulies VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2020PROPAGANDA IMAGES
WHAT ARE PHOTOS USED FOR? WHICH REALITY DO PHOTOS DEPICT? HOW DO PHOTOS AFFECT REALITY? In addition to the motifs and the formal as well as technical possibilities of photography, Thomas Ruff examines the possible uses of photos. With his adaptations of images from Chinese propaganda material, he makes the ideological appropriation and manipulative character of the images his theme. THOMAS RUFF (German, b. 1958) Installation view K20, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen From series: _tableaux chinois_ PHOTO: Achim Kukulies VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2020 THOMAS RUFF (German, b. 1958) _tableau chinois_03_2019
C-Print, Edition 01/04240 x 185cm
VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2020 THOMAS RUFF (German, b. 1958) _tableau chinois_01_2019
C-Print
240 x 185cm
VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2020_TABLEAUX CHINOIS_
For many years, Thomas Ruff has been preoccupied with the subject of propaganda imagery. For _Tableaux chinois,_ the artist scanned images from books on Mao published in China, as well as from the magazine‚ _La Chine,_ published and distributed worldwide by the Chinese Communist Party. He stored them in such a way that the offset raster screen was preserved. He then duplicated the images and converted the offset raster of the duplicates into a large pixel structure. As a result of a long editing process on the computer, a composition is created which brings together the characteristics of the various time-related media and exposes the propaganda image as manipulated. THOMAS RUFF (German, b. 1958) Installation view K20, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen From series: _tableaux chinois_ PHOTO: Achim Kukulies VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2020 THOMAS RUFF (German, b. 1958)_r.phg.07_II_
2013
C-Print
VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2020 ON PAR WITH THE PIONEERS WHAT IS A NEGATIVE? HOW HAVE PHOTOGRAPHIC TECHNIQUES CHANGED IN THE COURSE OF HISTORY? DOES A DIGITAL IMAGE LOOK DIFFERENT FROM AN ANALOGPHOTO?
The transition from analog to digital photography took place in the 1990s, at a time when Thomas Ruff was already successful on an international level. In addition to the characteristics of digitally processed and circulated photos, he examined the special features of the production and processing of analog photography. The exhibited photo series reveal Ruff’s engagement with nearly 170 years of photographic history and technology. The series _Negative_ pays tribute to the function and particular aesthetics of the negative, which recorded the image information in the light-sensitive coating of a transparent plate and had to be exposed again on prepared paper. The works in the series _Tripe_ focus on the specific possibilities of working with the variant of paper negatives. Ruff reconstructs and explores the effect of pseudo-solarisation – as the great image magicians and experimenters of the 1920s and 1930s explored and used this – with analog and digital means in the series _flower.s._ THOMAS RUFF (German, b. 1958)_r.phg.08_II_
2015
C-Print
185 x 281cm
VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2020 THOMAS RUFF (German, b. 1958) Installation view K20, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen From series: _photograms_ PHOTO: Achim Kukulies VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2020 THOMAS RUFF (German, b. 1958) Kunstsammlung NRW, Düsseldorf 2020 (installation view)WG Bildkunst 2020
PHOTO: WDR / Thomas KösterFOTOGRAMME
Fascinated by photograms of the 1920s, Thomas Ruff decided to explore the genre and develop a contemporary version of these camera-less photographs. Beyond the limitations of analog photograms, the artist has been developing his versions of photograms since 2012, using a virtual darkroom to simulate a direct exposure of objects on photosensitive paper. With this, he was able to place objects (lenses, rods, spirals, paper strips, spheres, and other objects) generated with the help of a 3D program on or over a digital paper, correct their position, and in some cases expose them to coloured light. He could thus control the projection of the objects on the background in virtual space and print the image calculated by the computer in the size he wanted. In this way, he succeeded in capturing the concepts and aesthetics of the pioneers of “kameralosen Fotografie” in the 1910s and 1920s, generating images with light and transporting them into the twenty-first century using a technique appropriate to his own time. Digital photograms with many different coloured light sources and transparent objects could not be produced with the equipment available to Thomas Ruff in 2014. The computing process required such high capacities that Ruff’s computers would have needed over a year for each image. In 2014, he was given the opportunity to have photograms calculated by a mainframe computer at the Supercomputing Centre of the Forschungszentrum Jülich. This required roughly eighteen terabytes of data for each image. THOMAS RUFF (German, b. 1958) Kunstsammlung NRW, Düsseldorf 2020 (installation view)WG Bildkunst 2020
PHOTO: WDR / Thomas Köster THOMAS RUFF (German, b. 1958) _neg◊lapresmidi_01_2016
C-Print
23.4 x 31.4cm
VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2020NEGATIVE
In 2014, Thomas Ruff began to work more intensively on the visual appearance of the source material of analog photography, the “negative”. In order to make its photographic reality and pictorial quality visible, he transformed historical photographs into “digital negatives” In the process, not only the light-dark distribution in the image changed; the brownish hue of the photographs printed on albumin paper also became a cool, artificial blue tone. The aim of the processing was to highlight the photographic “negative”, which, in analog photography, was never the object of observation, but always a means to an end. In this series, it is treated as an “original” worth viewing, from which a photographic print is made, and which is in danger of disappearing completely due to digital photography. The series covers the entire spectrum of historical black-and-white photography and is divided into different subgroups. On display are the series _neg◊lapresmidi_ and _neg◊marey._ _L’APRÈS-MIDI D’UN FAUNE_ For more than ten years, Stephane Mallarmé worked on his poem‚ _L’Après-midi d’un faune (The Afternoon of a Faun),_ which was published in 1876. This complex Symbolist poem tells of the encounter of a faun with a group of nymphs. In the end, the nymphs disappear. What remains is their shadow in the form of writing: the poem itself. The work inspired the composer Claude Debussy to write his radical symphonic poem‚ _Prélude à l’Après-midi d’un faune_ in 1894. Debussy did not want to illustrate the poem, but rather to evoke an enraptured mood that corresponds to the drowsiness of Mallarmé’s faun. At the same time, he referred structurally to the 110-line poem: Debussy’s‚ _Prélude_ also has 110 bars. 1912 saw the premiere of‚ _L’Après-midi d’un faune,_ the first scandalous choreography by the ballet dancer Vaslav Nijinsky. The dancers moved to Debussy’s music almost continuously in profile and along particular planes. The movements were consciously intended to be reminiscent of the linear concept of Greek vase painting. For the series _neg◊lapresmidi,_ Thomas Ruff used photographs taken by Adolphe de Meyer during a performance of the ballet in 1912. In a sense, three turning points of the avant-garde culminate in Adolphe de Meyer’s photographs: the Symbolist poetry of Mallarmé, on which the ballet was based, the music of Debussy, and the choreography of Nijinski. Ruff’s inversions of Adolphe de Meyer’s photographs enrapture and alienate this moment and at the same time allow it to shine with particular intensity.CAPTURING TIME
The series _neg◊marey_ focuses on photographs taken by the physician Étienne-Jules Marey in the 1870s. At the time, he tried to take pictures of moving people and animals in order to better understand their movements. Almost simultaneously, the British-American photographer Eadweard Muybridge was working on similar experiments. While Muybridge devised elaborate constructions with which he captured individual moments of movement with several cameras connected in series, Marey developed a process in which movements from a single camera with interrupted exposure could be brought onto a single plate. By placing reflective dots on the test subject or animal, the movements could be captured precisely and in the same proportion as the interrupted exposure. This approach was reminiscent of the graphic method previously invented by Marey, which allowed the first continuous recordings of the pulse and the assignment of individual sections of the pulse curve to the respective heart activities. THOMAS RUFF (German, b. 1958)_neg◊marey_02_
2016
C-Print
22.4 x 31.4cm
VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2020 THOMAS RUFF (German, b. 1958) Installation view K20, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen From series: _flower.s_ PHOTO: Achim Kukulies VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2020 “Actually from time to time I try to take a photograph of a flower or several flowers but it just looks boring, it doesn’t work, so it seems that I cannot take photographs of flowers.”~ Thomas Ruff
_FLOWER.S_
Flower photograms by Lou Landauer (1897-1991), which Thomas Ruff had acquired, as well as the work on the photograms, gave him the idea of working with another photographic technique that has been used since the mid-nineteenth century: pseudo-solarisation (also called the Sabattier effect). This is a technique discovered by chance, in which the negative / positive is subjected to a diffuse second exposure during exposure in the darkroom, resulting in a partial reversal of light and shadow areas in the photographic image. For his series _flower.s,_ which he has been working on since 2018, Ruff first photographs flowers or leaves with a digital camera, which he had arranged on a light table. During the subsequent processing on the computer, he applies the Sabattier effect. THOMAS RUFF (German, b. 1958)_flower.s_10_
2019
C-Print
139 x 119cm
VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2020 THOMAS RUFF (German, b. 1958) _tripe_12 Seeringham. Munduppum inside gateway_2018
C-Print, Edition 02/06123.5 x 159.5cm
VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2020_TRIPE_
Paper negatives, which Captain Linnaeus Tripe (1822-1902) had produced on behalf of the British government in Burma and Madras between 1856 and 1862 and that are now in the archives of the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, were the starting point for the series _Tripe._ Thomas Ruff was able to view the existing negatives and selected several of these for his own work. All of them showed clear signs of ageing or damage. Ruff had the negatives digitally reproduced and then converted them into a positive, inverting the brownish hue of the negative into cyan blue. He duplicated these positives and altered the coloration of the duplicate to the brown tone of the negative. He superimposed the two positive images as digital layers and removed parts of the layer of the brownish image, so that the coloration of the bluish image partially shines through. In a second step, he enlarged the images so that the texture of the paper, as well as all edits, damages, and changes become visible. THOMAS RUFF (German, b. 1958) Installation view K20, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen From series: _tripe_ PHOTO: Achim Kukulies VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2020 THOMAS RUFF (German, b. 1958) _tripe_15 Madura. The Blackburn Testimonial_2018
C-Print
123.5 x 159.5 cm
VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2020 THOMAS RUFF (German, b. 1958)_3D_m.a.r.s 16_
2013
C-Print
255 x 185cm
VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2020 A DIFFERENT DIMENSION HOW DO SCIENTISTS USE PHOTOGRAPHS? DOES THE TRADITION OF TRAVEL PHOTOGRAPHY STILL EXIST? WHO INVENTS NEW PICTORIAL LANDSCAPES? Photographs are used in many different areas. In space research, satellite photos are a basis for scientific knowledge about places that were previously inaccessible to humans. In the processing by the artist Thomas Ruff, these photographs become images of never-seen worlds and studies of the imagination, feasibility, and credibility ofimages.
THOMAS RUFF (German, b. 1958) Installation view K20, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen From series: _ma.r.s _PHOTO: Achim Kukulies VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2020_MA.R.S._
During his research on photographs from outer space, Thomas Ruff came across photographs of Mars. These were taken by a camera within a probe sent into outer space by NASA in August 2005 and has been sending detailed images of the surface of the planet Mars to Earth since March 2006. The images are intended to enable scientists to obtain more precise knowledge of the surface, atmosphere, and water distribution of Mars. For his series, created between 2010 and 2014, the artist processed these very naturalistic yet strange images in several steps; among other things, he transformed the black-and-white transmitted images, which were photographed vertically top-down, into an oblique view and then coloured them so that the surface of the distant planet appears accessible and almost familiar. The works of the subgroup “3D-ma.r.s.” illustrated here are photographs of the surface of Mars which were produced using the so-called anaglyph process. When viewed with red-green glasses, a spatial, three-dimensional image is created in the brain. The raw material for Thomas Ruff’s series _ma.r.s_. is derived from HiRISE (High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment), a high-performance camera on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, a probe that has been transmitting images from the surface of Mars toEarth since 2006.
THOMAS RUFF (German, b. 1958) Kunstsammlung NRW, Düsseldorf 2020 (installation view)WG Bildkunst 2020
PHOTO: WDR / Thomas Köster THOMAS RUFF (German, b. 1958)_Retusche 01-09_
1995
C-Print
14.7 x 10cm
VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2020 RETOUCHING AND COLOUR HOW DO PHOTOS BECOME COLOURFUL? WHY DID PHOTOGRAPHERS IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY RETOUCH THEIR PHOTOS? Since the early days of photography, monochrome and multicolour retouching has been used or images have been coloured. Thomas Ruff explores one possibility in his series _Retusche (Retouching)_ as a form of embellishment and an approach to an ideal. His machines are heightened and isolated by colouring the motifs with typical colours of industrial production. For the work groups _m.n.o.p._ and w.g.l., the artist partially coloured photos of exhibition situations in order to highlight forms of presentation in museums and design intentions in exhibition practice. THOMAS RUFF (German, b. 1958)_Retusche 03_
1995
C-Print, handkoloriert mit pigmentfreier Retuschierfarbe, Edition01/01
14.7 x 10cm
VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2020 _RETUSCHE (RETOUCHING)_ A colour photograph of Sophia Loren, which Thomas Ruff had seen at an exhibition in Venice in 1995, drew his attention to a practice of representation as old as photography itself: the colouring of photographs. Whereas in the photograph of Sophia Loren, a star was “embellished”, by the additional colour, Ruff decided in 1995 to apply this practice to ten portraits he had seen in the medical textbook‚ _Das Gesicht des Herzkranken (The Face of the Cardiac Patient)_ by Jörgen Schmidt-Voigt from the 1950s. He applied “make up” to the faces with a brush and protein glaze paint, applying eye shadow, rouge, and lipstick. THOMAS RUFF (German, b. 1958)_0946_
2003
C-Print
150 x 195cm
VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2020 _MASCHINEN (MACHINERY)_ Around 2000, Thomas Ruff acquired roughly 2,000 photographs on glass negatives from the 1930s. These comprise the image archive of the former Rohde & Dörrenberg company from Düsseldorf-Oberkassel, which produced machines and machine parts. The photographs were originally taken for the production of the company catalog and reflect the company’s entire product range. To facilitate the manual cropping of the illustrated object at that time, the respective products were often photographed individually against a white background; the print was then retouched and further processed for final printing. Ruff emphasised this extremely elaborate preparation and image processing – the analog counterpart of digital processing by Photoshop – by colouring individual areas of the digitised images by means of deliberately set colours, similar to retouching, for the works in his series created between 2003 and 2005. CATALOG ILLUSTRATIONS In the 1930s, the Rohde & Dörrenberg company from Düsseldorf Oberkassel published a catalog of its drills and milling machines. It also offered machines with which the customer could service the tools, such as sharpening apparatus, grinding machines, and the tip-tapering machine illustrated here. The images in the product catalog are hardly recognisable as photographs. The processing steps of cropping, retouching, and re-photographing resulted in an image that is more reminiscent of a technical drawing than a photograph of a machine in a workshop. Thomas Ruff’s series of pictures of machines thematise this elaborate path from photography to illustration in the product catalog and draws attention to the possibilities of staging and stylising objects in photography. THOMAS RUFF (German, b. 1958) Kunstsammlung NRW, Düsseldorf 2020 (installation view)WG Bildkunst 2020
PHOTO: WDR / Thomas Köster THOMAS RUFF (German, b. 1958)_m.n.o.p.01_
2013
C-Print, Edition 01/0647.3 x 60cm
VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2020_M.N.O.P._
_W.G.L._
Two series by Thomas Ruff are based on black-and-white photographs from famous museum presentations of the 1940s and 1950s in New York and London. Thomas Ruff partially coloured the installation photographs digitally with a colour scheme reminiscent of the 1950s and enlarged them. While the artworks were left untouched – out of respect for the artists and their works – he coloured the carpets, the walls covered with fabric, and the ceilings. Through this treatment, he underscored the exhibition aesthetic of the 1940s to the 1960s and, with the resulting abstract coloured surface compositions, emphasised the design work of the exhibition organisers. All of this emphasises the contrast to today’s widespread notion of the exhibition space as a “white cube”. _m.n.o.p._ (2013) presents processed installation views of the presentation of the Museum of Non-Objective Painting in New York (now the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum) with works by Wassily Kandinsky, Rudolf Bauer, and other artists from the collection, which took place in the first museum building on 24 East 54th Street in 1948. The motifs from _w.g.l._ (2017) were taken from the exhibition‚ _Jackson Pollock 1912-1956,_ one of the most important exhibitions in terms of the mediation of contemporary art, which was presented at the Whitechapel Gallery inLondon in 1958.
THOMAS RUFF (German, b. 1958) Kunstsammlung NRW, Düsseldorf 2020 (installation view)WG Bildkunst 2020
PHOTO: WDR / Thomas Köster With the exhibition _Thomas Ruff,_ the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen presents a comprehensive overview of one of the most important representatives of the Düsseldorf School of Photography. The exhibition ranges from series from the 1990s, which document Ruff’s unique conceptual approach to photography, to a new series that is now being shown for the first time at K20: For _Tableaux chinois,_ Ruff drew on Chinese propaganda photographs. Parallel to Thomas Ruff’s exhibition, the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen is also presenting highlights from the collection at K20 under the title _Technology Transformation. Photography and Video in the Kunstsammlung,_ which also deals with artistic photography and technical imaging processes in art. “With his manipulations of photographs from many different sources, Thomas Ruff comments in an incredibly clever way on how we see images in a digitalised world. Through his virtuoso handling of digital image processing, he confronts us with a critical examination of the image material he uses and its historical, political, and epistemological significance. Some of his most important series are represented in our collection, and we are very proud to dedicate a large-scale exhibition at K20 to this prominent representative of the Düsseldorf School of Photography,” states Susanne Gaensheimer, Director of the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen. Thomas Ruff (b. 1958) is one of the internationally most important artists of his generation. Already as a student in the class of the photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Düsseldorf Academy of Art in the early 1980s, he chose a conceptual approach to photography which is evident in all the workgroups within his multifaceted oeuvre and determines his approach to the most diverse pictorial genres and historical possibilities of photography. In order not to tie his investigations in the field of photography to the individual image found by chance, but rather to examine these in terms of image types and genres, Thomas Ruff works in series: “A photograph,” Ruff explains, “is not only a photograph, but an assertion. In order to verify the correctness of this assertion, one photo is not enough; I have to verify it on several photos.” The exhibition at K20 focuses on series of pictures from two decades in which the artist hardly ever used a camera himself. Instead, he appropriated existing photographic material from a wide variety of sources for his often large-formatpictures.
Thomas Ruff’s contribution to contemporary photography thus consists in a special way in the development of a form of photography created without a camera. He uses images that have already been taken and that have already been disseminated in other, largely non-artistic contexts and optimised for specific purposes. The modus operandi and the origin of the material first became the subject of Ruff’s own work in the series of newspaper photographs, which were produced as early as 1990. The exhibition focuses precisely on this central aspect of his work. The pictorial sources that Ruff has tapped for these series range from photographic experiments of the nineteenth century to photo taken by space probes. He has questioned the archive processes of large picture agencies and the pictorial politics of the People’s Republic of China. Documentations of museum exhibitions, as well as pornographic and catastrophic images from the Internet, are starting points for his own series of works, as are the product photographs of a Düsseldorf-based machine factory from the 1930s. They originate from newspapers, magazines, books, archives, and collections or were simply available to everyone on the Internet. In each series, Ruff explores the technical conditions of photography in the confrontation with these different pictorial worlds: the negative, digital image compression, and even rasterisation in offset printing. At the same time, he also takes a look at the afterlife of images in publications, archives, databases, and on the Internet. For _Tableaux chinois,_ the latest series, which is being shown for the first time at K20, Ruff drew on Chinese propaganda photographs: products of the Mao era driven to perfection, which he digitally processed. In his artistic treatment of this historical material, the analog and digital spheres overlap; and in this visible overlap, Ruff combines the image of today’s highly digitalised China with the Chinese understanding of the state in the 1960s and its manipulativepictorial politics.
From the _ma.r.s._ series created between 2010 and 2014, there are eight works on view that have never been shown before, for which Ruff used images of a NASA Mars probe. Viewed through 3D glasses, the rugged surface of the red planet folds into the space in front of and behind the surface of the large-format images. Moving through the exhibition space and comprehending how the illusion is broken and tilted, one is introduced to Ruff’s concern to understand photography as a construction of reality that first and foremost represents a surface – a surface that is, however, set in a historical framework of technology, processing, optimisation, transmission, and distribution. His hitherto oldest image sources are the paper negatives of Captain Linnaeus Tripe. When Tripe began taking photographs in South India and Burma, today’s Myanmar, for the British East India Company in 1854, he provided the first images of a world that was, for the British public, both far away and unknown. Since then, the world has become a world that has always been photographed. It is this already photographed world that interests the artist Thomas Ruff and for which he has also been called a ‘historian of the photographic’ (Herta Wolf). The exhibition therefore not only provides an overview of Ruff’s work over the past decades, but also highlights nearly 170 years of photographic history. In each series, Ruff formulates highly complex perspectives on the photographic medium and the world that has always been photographed. Further series in the exhibition are the two groups of works referring to press photography, _Zeitungsfotos_ (1990/91) and _press++_ (since 2015), the series _nudes_ (since 1999) and _jpeg_ (since 2004), which refer to the distribution of photographs on the Internet, as well as _Fotogramme_ (since 2012), _Negatives_ (since 2014), _Flower.s_ (since 2019), _Maschinen_ (2003/04), _m.n.o.p._ (2013), and _w.g.l._ (2017) – and, with _Retouching_ (1995), a rarely shown series of uniquepieces.
Text from the press kit from the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen THOMAS RUFF (German, b. 1958)_m.n.o.p.08_
2013
C-Print
47.3 x 60cm
VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2020 THOMAS RUFF (German, b. 1958)_w.g.l.01_
2017
C-Print
42.6 x 60cm
VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2020 KUNSTSAMMLUNG NORDRHEIN-WESTFALENK20, Grabbeplatz 5
40213 Düsseldorf
Opening hours:
Tuesday – Friday 10am – 6pm Saturday, Sunday, public holiday 11am – 6pm The Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen is closed on December 24, 25 and31
Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen website LIKE ART BLART ON FACEBOOKBACK TO TOP
17
Oct
20
EXHIBITION: ‘WILLIAM WEGMAN: BEING HUMAN’ AT FOTOMUSEUM DEN HAAG,THE NETHERLANDS
By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leavea Comment
Categories: American , american photographers, beauty
, colour photography, exhibition
, existence
, gallery website
, intimacy
, light
, memory
, photographic series, photography
, Polaroid photography, portrait
, psychological
, reality
, space
and time
Tags: American art , Americanidentity , American
photography , American Polaroid photography, American
portrait photography,
anthropomorphic ,
conceptual photography, construction of
identity , Cursive
Display , Cut to Reveal, Dog Walker
, Farm Boy
, Fay Wray
, Feathered Footwear , Fotomuseum Den Haag , From the spirit world, human-like
portraits ,
observation , On base , Polaroid photograph , Polaroid photography , Polaroid portraits, Polaroids
, studio photography, Tamino with magic
flute , Three
Legged Dog , Upside
Downward , Weimaraners, William Wegman
, William Wegman Casual, William Wegman
Constructivism
, William
Wegman Contact ,
William Wegman Cursive Display, William
Wegman Cut to Reveal, William
Wegman Dog Walker
, William Wegman
Farm Boy , William
Wegman Feathered Footwear, William
Wegman From the spirit world,
William Wegman George , William Wegman Man Ray , William WegmanOn base , William
Wegman Tamino with magic flute,
William Wegman Three Legged Dog, William
Wegman Upside Downward, William
Wegman V , William WegmanWall
EXHIBITION DATES: 5TH SEPTEMBER 2020 – 3RD JANUARY 2021 WILLIAM WEGMAN (American, b. 1943) _Untitled (Three Legged Dog)_1974
Gelatin silver print Collectie Kunstmuseum Den Haag William Wegman. Courtesy of the artistConcept
Pathos
Portrait
Polaroid
Performance
History
Humour
Humanity
Master / artist
Human / being
Dr Marcus Bunyan
.
Many thankx to the Hague Museum of Photography for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image. > PEOPLE LIKE US / PEOPLE WE LIKE>
> I didn’t always dress up the dogs. My first dog Man Ray was spared > anthropomorphic adornment. That was left for Fay Ray. Fay and I came > to a mutual realisation that she had a desire to be observed. > Anyway, I found myself looking at her for long periods of time. Then > one day, after some looking, I made her tall. Before long I was > blurring the pedestal with fabric and creating the illusion of the > anthropomorphic vertical. With the birth of Fay’s puppies, my cast > of characters grew. Fay’s puppies – Chundo, Battina and Crooky > – grew up watching their famous mother, and when it came their > turn they were not taken by surprise. They knew what to do.>
>
>
> COLOUR FIELDS
>
> I began by ignoring colour, using the colour Polaroid film as though > it were black and white. I distrusted colour. Sensuous, romantic, > elusive colour. Colour was … well … colourful. In fact, the > first few days with the Polaroid camera I made only black-on-black > pictures. Man Ray under a black cloth against a black background. > Polaroid film is very beautiful within a limited range. Man Ray was > too dark for this film but Fay was perfect. With Fay I began to > explore colour and light.>
>
>
> WEIMARANERS
>
> No other breed that I am aware of is as conducive to the illusion of > transformation as Weimaraners. Weimaraners are called ‘grey > ghosts’. Their fur gives off an almost iridescent glow. They > inhabit their forms in a strange way, never appearing to solidify > into themselves as, say, a lab, a collie or a bulldog does. When you > photograph a collie, you get a collie.>
>
>
> TALES
>
> One day my assistant Andrea stood behind Fay to adjust her dress and > she gestured out to me with her hand. Her long human arm appeared as > Fay’s. The illusion startled me. A miracle. Kind of creepy. Fay > was part human. I thought of cartoons and mythology, superheroes and > Egyptian gods. Next thing you know, Batty’s son Chip was playing> the flute.
>
>
>
> SIT! / STAY!
>
> The dogs have an obvious pride in what they do. They can sense the > feeling in the room when they are working. If it’s a great picture > or a difficult picture, they can feel what happens because everyone > stops and goes ‘Wow!’ Fay was particularly agile and for her I > concocted a series of anatomically challenging poses. I came to > understand her balance and points of physical tension. Fay liked the > challenge of a difficult pose. I think she liked to impress me.>
>
>
> VOGUE / STYLE
>
> I have a very awkward relationship with fashion. I’m a little bit > timid about it. This isn’t the attitude of the typical fashion > photographer. Fortunately, my Weimaraners are the perfect fashion > models. Their slinky elegant forms are covered in grey, and grey, as > everyone knows, goes with anything.>
>
>
> NUDES / PHYSIQUE>
> Up close, unadorned, standing, sitting or lying before the eye of > the big camera, the dogs become landscapes, a forest of trees, a > topography of hills and valleys, earth and boulders, in a shoreline > of endless interconnectivity.>
>
>
> CUBISTS
>
> Since 1972 I have had a habit of keeping a white box in the studio. > If I can’t think of anything to do, the box is a good place to > start. The original work I made with this box alluded to Sol > LeWitt’s minimal sculptures of the 1960s, but this is now a fading > memory. I use a box the way a philosopher uses a chair, as a > physical object representing hypothetical questions: ‘How many > ways can a dog fit on a box?’, ‘How many dogs can fit in a > box?’, ‘Around a box?’ And on and on. On these square wheels, > round questions keep rolling.>
> .
> William Wegman
Fotomuseum – William Wegman from Kunstmuseum Den Haag on Vimeo.
Many artists have a muse. Movie directors perfect their craft working repeatedly with their favourite actors, while choreographers create some of their best works for a specific dancer. In some cases, the muse is a silent partner, the object of an artist’s intense and obsessive gaze; in others the work emerges from a partnership so close that it is unclear which is the artist and which is the muse. For the American artist William Wegman (b. 1943), his muses have been generations of the Weimaraner breed. The inspiration came in 1970 when his first dog, Man Ray – named after Wegman’s favourite artist – sat himself in front of the camera. Instead of sending his faithful companion to his bed, Wegman seized the moment, and the rest is history. Wegman was already a well-known artist, but it is his numerous, human-like portraits of his ever-expanding cast of Weimaraners that have brought him worldwide fame. In partnership with renowned guest curator William A. Ewing and the Foundation for the Exhibition of Photography, Fotomuseum Den Haag presents a major survey of no fewer than four decades of Wegman’s wide-ranging collaboration with Man Ray, Fay Wray, Candy and their descendants. Press release from the Fotomuseum den Haag WILLIAM WEGMAN (American, b. 1943)_Constructivism_
2014
Pigment print
William Wegman. Courtesy of the artist WILLIAM WEGMAN (American, b. 1943)_Dog Walker_
1990
Colour Polaroid
William Wegman. Courtesy of the artist WILLIAM WEGMAN (American, b. 1943)_Farm Boy_
1996
Colour Polaroid
William Wegman. Courtesy of the artist WILLIAM WEGMAN (American, b. 1943) _Tamino with magic flute_1996
Colour Polaroid photograph61.0 x 50.8cm
Collection of the artistWilliam Wegman
In Mozart’s _The Magic Flute,_ the Queen of the Night persuades Prince Tamino to rescue her daughter Pamina from captivity under the high priest Sarastro; instead, he learns the high ideals of Sarastro’s community and seeks to join it. Separately, then together, Tamino and Pamina undergo severe trials of initiation, which end in triumph, with the Queen and her cohorts vanquished. The earthy Papageno, who accompanies Tamino on his quest, fails the trials completely but is rewarded anyway with the hand of his ideal female companion, Papagena. WILLIAM WEGMAN (American, b. 1943)_George_
1997
Colour Polaroid
William Wegman. Courtesy of the artist WILLIAM WEGMAN (American, b. 1943)_Wall_
1997
Colour Polaroid
William Wegman. Courtesy of the artist WILLIAM WEGMAN (American, b. 1943)_Cut to Reveal_
1997
Colour Polaroid
William Wegman. Courtesy of the artist WILLIAM WEGMAN (American, b. 1943) _Feathered Footwear_1999
Colour Polaroid
William Wegman. Courtesy of the artist WILLIAM WEGMAN (American, b. 1943)_Casual_
2002
Colour Polaroid
William Wegman. Courtesy of the artist William Wegman: Being Human Many great artists have a muse. Sometimes this muse is a silent partner, the object of an artist’s obsessive gaze. At other times the relationship is a deeply collaborative act. The history of photography has its own celebrated cases: Jacques-Henri Lartigue and Renée Perle, for example, or Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O’Keeffe. For William Wegman, whose muses have been all these things and more, inspiration arrived almost half a century ago, when a Weimaraner who had joined the family showed both aptitude and passion for performing before the camera. In honour of one of Wegman’s most admired modern artists, he was named Man Ray, the first in a line of highly spirited performers. William Wegman is a renowned and versatile American artist who resists an easy classification as he moves adroitly between painting, drawing, photography, film, video, books and performances. Although his famed Weimaraners are not featured in all these media, they reside at the core of his art. In the late 1970s Wegman found, in the large-format Polaroid print, his ideal means of expression – the perfect print size, exquisite colour and an ‘instantaneity’ which allowed for spontaneity and beneficial ‘accidents’. When his Polaroid chapter finally came to an end, the artist shifted to working digitally, rediscovering in this new medium what was essential to him about the Polaroid process: the print size, expressive colour and the studioset-ups.
Wegman’s world may revolve around his dogs, but his choice of sets, costumes and props betray a fascination with art history – Cubism, colour field painting, Abstract Expressionism, Constructivism, Conceptualism and the like. The diverse fields of photography also intrigue the artist, and we find in his work landscapes, nudes, portraits, reportage and fashion. And yet, is it all really about dogs? Being Human suggests otherwise: these performers are us and we are them: housewife, astronaut, lawyer, priest, farm worker, even a dog walker! Some pose proudly and with confidence, others express doubts or vulnerabilities. It’s all aboutbeing human.
William A. Ewing. Exhibition curator WILLIAM WEGMAN (American, b. 1943)_Upside Downward_
2006
Color Polaroid
William Wegman. Courtesy of the artist WILLIAM WEGMAN (American, b. 1943) _From the spirit world_2006
Colour Polaroid photograph61.0 x 50.8cm
Collection of the artistWilliam Wegman
WILLIAM WEGMAN (American, b. 1943)_On base
_2007
Colour Polaroid photograph61.0 x 50.8cm
Collection of the artistWilliam Wegman
WILLIAM WEGMAN (American, b. 1943)_Cursive Display_
2013
Pigment Print
William Wegman. Courtesy of the artist WILLIAM WEGMAN (American, b. 1943)_Contact
_2014
pigment print
111.7 x 86.4cm
Collection of the artistWilliam Wegman
WILLIAM WEGMAN (American, b. 1943)_V
_2017
Colour polaroid photograph Collection of the artistWilliam Wegman
FOTOMUSEUM DEN HAAG
Stadhouderslaan 43
2517 HV Den Haag
Opening hours:
Tuesday – Sunday 11.00 – 17.00 The museum is closed on Mondays Fotomuseum Den Haag website LIKE ART BLART ON FACEBOOKBACK TO TOP
13
Oct
20
PHOTOGRAPHS: ‘GUNNER ANDREW RUMANN EMBARKATION FOR SINGAPORE, AUGUST 1941’ AND OTHER WW2 AUSTRALIAN PHOTOGRAPHS By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leavea Comment
Categories: Australian artist, black and white
photography
,
documentary photography, existence
, intimacy
, landscape
, light
, memory
, photographic series, photography
, portrait
, psychological
, reality
, space
, time
, Uncategorized
and works on paper
Tags: 8 Division Artillery, 8th Division
, Aerial Starboard side view of the Dutch liner Johan van Oldenbarnevelt,
AIF , Amcross
, American Red Cross , American Red Cross inAustralia ,
American Red Cross in Australia World War II,
Andrew Rumann , Australia, Australia at war
, Australian ImperialForce ,
Australian photography, Australian
photography during World War 2,
Australian services personnel WWII,
Australian war photography, Boots Callahan
, Cecil Arthur Callaghan, convoy US11B
, embarkation for Singapore1941 ,
Gunner Andrew Rumann , HMT FF , Johan van Oldenbarnevelt, Major General
Cecil Arthur Callaghan,
Major General Henry (Gordon) Bennett, Malaya
, NX26452
, prisoner of war
, Royal Australian
Artillery ,
Second World War ,
Singapore , Sydney
, Sydney 1941
, Trooper Johan van
Oldenbarnevelt
, war
photography , World War 2OCTOBER 2020
ANDREW RUMANN (Australian, 1905-1974)_Untitled _
1941
Silver gelatin photograph5.5 x 5.3cm
These photographs were given to me in an envelope titled “Gunner Andrew Rumann embarkation for Singapore, August 1941”. I have carefully digitally scanned and cleaned them. The attribution seems correct for the first group of photographs in the posting, _Departure from Circular Quay, Sydney for Fremantle and Singapore, _but not for the rest. I have located Rumann’s POW record and found several pictures of the ship he would have taken to travel to Singapore. The other photographs in the posting show Australian armed services personnel (none are American), but there are several anomalies that enable me to say that these are later photographs. Four Australian women personnel stand in front of an American Red Cross sign, and the ARC (or Amcross) did not arrive in Australia until 1942. And in the photograph _Transportation Corps US Army BKC*23, _the men an women are standing on a US Army transportation barge, unlikely to have been in Australian waters before 1942. Behind them Carley floats hang fromtheir tethers.
As always, what interests me most about these photographs are the details contained within: the casualness of the men waiting at _Post Exchange No. 2, _with their sandals, singlets and slough hats; the man caught mid-clamber, climbing up into the truck in _Taking out the rubbish_; the women in dark glasses and hat sheltering her eyes from the sun in _BKC*23; _the men peering out of the portholes in the same photograph, one with a fag in his mouth. We can feel the heat emanating from these photographs (it must be summer). All the men are in shorts and topless. In photographs such as _Transportation Corps US Army BKC*23 _and _Embarkation _we can admire their lithe bodies, and observe the ubiquitous 1940s mop of curly hair with short back and sides. They were already athletic before departure, but imagine fighting in the stinking hot forests of Burma on Army rations, or ending up in a Japanese prisoner of war camp, with so little meat on the bone to start with. You would be a skeleton before long. Finally, there is one personal sign that you can make out in the crowd seeing off the troops to Singapore from Circular Quay in 1941. “Jim Carr” it reads. Did he survive the war? Whoknows.
More than 15,000 Australian soldiers were captured at the fall of Singapore. Of these, more than 7000 would die as prisoners of war, some in transport ships on their way to Japan, sadly torpedoed by Allied submarines. Andrew Rumann survived his trip to Japan as a POW and returned to Australia after the war. He died in 1974 aged 68 yearsold.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
.
All photographs have been digitally scanned and cleaned by Marcus Bunyan. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of theimage.
GUNNER ANDREW RUMANN Headquarters, Royal Australian Artillery, 8th Division, Australian Imperial Force (AIF) SERVICE NUMBER – NX26452 DATE OF BIRTH – 13 Sep 1905 PLACE OF BIRTH – Hungary PLACE OF ENLISTMENT – Paddington NSW NEXT OF KIN – Rumann, Rena Malaya, captured at SingaporeCAMP: Osaka, Japan
Andrew died in 1974 in Toor, Australia at 68 years old In January 1941 a large component of the Australian Army’s recently raised 8th Division was posted to Malaya. An element of some 6000 men departed Sydney in the liner _Queen Mary _as part of Convoy US9 on 4 February 1941, arriving in Singapore two weeks later on 18 February. A further 5000 troops in Convoy US11B arrived at Keppel Harbour on 15 August 1941. Under the command of Major General Gordon Bennett, the force initially established its headquarters at Kuala Lumpur. Bennett had urged for specific territorial responsibility for his Division, and this resulted in an area which included Johore and Malacca, coming within his responsibility. The Australian Army 8th Division in Malaya eventually reached about 15,000 men. An apt description of the commander, Major General Henry (Gordon) Bennett, found in a Veterans’ Affairs publication, (Moremon& Reid 2002) reads:
“A prominent citizen soldier, he had proven himself in World War I to be a fierce fighter and leader, but he was well known for his prickly temperament, argumentative nature and proneness to quarrel. His relations with senior British commanders and staff in Malaya were, at times, strained, as he grappled to maintain control of the Australian troops.” Bennett’s independent spirit did not fit into the Allied command structure, however his Division generally acquitted themselves well against a seasoned enemy. Walter Burroughs. “The Naval Evacuation of Singapore – February 1942,” on the _Naval Historical Society of Australia_ website. June 2019 edition of the _Naval Historical Review_ Cited04/09/2020.
CONVOY US11B
CONVOY US11B
Departed Sydney 29/7/1941 – Arrived Fremantle 6/8/1941 Departed Fremantle 8/8/1941 – Arrived Singapore 15/8/1941 SHIPS: _Johan Van Oldenbarnevelt, Katoomba, HMAS Sydney, Marnix Van St. Aldegonde, HMAS Canberra, Sibajak._ In late July 1941 a convoy was organised to transport 8th Division troops to Singapore. The convoy included three Dutch passenger ships, and escort ships from the Royal Australian Navy. SUMMARY OF EMBARKATION FOR JOHAN VAN OLDENBARNEVELT (HMT FF) The following troops embarked _Johan Van Oldenbarnevelt _at Woolloomooloo, Sydney on 29/7/1941 for the voyage to Singapore. 61524 – 8 DIVISION ARTILLERY 29 men arrived including 3 officers, 1 warrant officer, 3 sergeants, 22 corporals and privates. (Source: Australian Army War Diary 1/15/14 – District Records Office Eastern Command May – July 1941) TROOPSHIP 32 – VOYAGE 4 She departed Sydney on July 17 and headed for Auckland New Zealand where she arrived on July 21 and departed again on the 22nd. She returned to Sydney arriving on July 25 and departed again on the 29th, sailing via Fremantle to Singapore arriving on August 15. End ofTroop voyage 4.
_JOHAN VAN OLDENBARNEVELT_ ON THE WAY TO FREMANTLE, 1/8/1941 _Aerial Starboard side view of the Dutch liner Johan van Oldenbarnevelt transporting Australian troops to the Middle East as part of convoy US11B. Note the 4.7 pound gun and 12 pounder AA gunaft_
1st August 1941
Australian War Memorial Naval Historical CollectionPublic domain
_Trooper Johan van Oldenbarnevelt_ is seen departing Wellington New Zealand during Troop Voyage 6 on September 15, 1941 – Note the guns up on the aft section! ANDREW RUMANN (Australian, 1905-1974)_Untitled _
1941
Silver gelatin photograph5.5 x 5.3cm
Circular Quay with the Sydney Harbour Trust building at left in the background. The spire is the CQ Fire Station No. 3. ANDREW RUMANN (Australian, 1905-1974)_Untitled _
1941
Silver gelatin photograph5.5 x 5.3cm
ANDREW RUMANN (Australian, 1905-1974) _Untitled _(detail)1941
Silver gelatin photograph5.5 x 5.3cm
NX26452 Gunner Andrew Rumann POW entry ANONYMOUS PHOTOGRAPHER (Australian)_Untitled _
1942-45
Silver gelatin photograph5.5 x 5.3cm
ANONYMOUS PHOTOGRAPHER (Australian)_Untitled _
1942-45
Silver gelatin photograph5.5 x 5.3cm
The AMERICAN RED CROSS (ARC or Amcross) in Australia during WW2 became the largest hotel and restaurant chain in Australia at the time. Amcross was headed by Norman H. Davis with its headquarters in Sydney,NSW. …
Four American women led by Miss Helen Hall arrived in Australia in about late August 1942 to take charge of American Red Cross Service Personnel and to establish new American Red Cross centres and to extend existing centres. Miss Hall was the administrative assistant to the delegate in charge of American Red Cross Service Clubs and Leave Areas in Australia. The other three women were Miss Hannah More Frazer, who was appointed Director of the American Red Cross Service Club in Melbourne in about September 1942; Miss Florice Langley who opened an ARC Service Club in Cairns, in far north Queensland; and Mrs. Anita Woodworth who opened an ARC Service Club in Charters Towers in north Queensland. ANONYMOUS PHOTOGRAPHER (Australian)_Untitled _
1942-45
Silver gelatin photograph5.5 x 5.3cm
ANONYMOUS PHOTOGRAPHER (Australian) _Untitled _(detail)1942-45
Silver gelatin photograph5.5 x 5.3cm
ANONYMOUS PHOTOGRAPHER (Australian)_Untitled _
1942-45
Silver gelatin photograph5.5 x 5.3cm
ANONYMOUS PHOTOGRAPHER (Australian)_Untitled _
1942-45
Silver gelatin photograph5.5 x 5.3cm
ANONYMOUS PHOTOGRAPHER (Australian) _Untitled _(detail)1942-45
Silver gelatin photograph5.5 x 5.3cm
ANONYMOUS PHOTOGRAPHER (Australian)_Untitled _
1942-45
Silver gelatin photograph5.5 x 5.3cm
MIKE PEEL
_Carley float_
2018
CC-BY-SA-4.0
CARLEY FLOAT
The Carley float (sometimes Carley raft) was a form of invertible liferaft designed by American inventor Horace Carley (1838-1918). Supplied mainly to warships, it saw widespread use in a number of navies during peacetime and both World Wars until superseded by more modern rigid or inflatable designs. Carley was awarded a patent in 1903 after establishing the Carley Life Float Company of Philadelphia.…
Simply by casting it over the side, the lightweight Carley float could be launched more rapidly than traditional rigid lifeboat designs, and without the need for specialised hoists. It could be mounted on any convenient surface and survive the battering against the ship’s sides during heavy seas. Unlike the rubber inflatable rafts of the period, it was relatively immune to compromise of its buoyant chambers. Seafarers in it were however completely exposed to the elements, and would suffer accordingly. An inquiry of 1946 reported that many sailors who had succeeded in getting to the safety of Carley floats had nevertheless succumbed to exposure before rescue could be made. The crew of the Canadian minesweeper HMCS _Esquimalt,_ sunk offshore of Nova Scotia in April 1945, lost at least 16 to hypothermia during the six hours in which they awaited rescue. Few of the survivors could still walk. Despite these shortcomings many seamen did owe their lives to the Carley float. Chinese sailor Poon Lim survived for a record 133 days adrift in the South Atlantic aboard a Carley float after his freighter SS _Benlomond_ was sunk on 23 November 1942. He fashioned fishing gear from components of the raft. He was close to death when discovered off the coast of Brazil on 5 April 1943, but was able to walk ashoreunaided.
Though its occupant did not survive, a shrapnel-ridden Carley float carried the body of an unknown man to land on Christmas Island in February 1942. The sun-bleached corpse had evidently spent a lengthy period at sea, though to this day it remains unknown from where the sailor had come. It has long been suspected that the body was that of a sailor from HMAS _Sydney,_ which was lost with all hands under mysterious circumstances off the coast of Australia on 19 November 1941. A second Carley float, more confidently believed to be from _Sydney,_ was recovered drifting 300 km off the Australian coast one week after the ship sank. It had been badly damaged by shellfire, but was empty. The float is now displayed at the HMAS _Sydney_ exhibit of the Australian War Memorial, Canberra. Text from the _Wikipedia_ website ANONYMOUS PHOTOGRAPHER (Australian) _Untitled _(detail)1942-45
Silver gelatin photograph5.5 x 5.3cm
ANONYMOUS PHOTOGRAPHER (Australian)_Untitled _
1942-45
Silver gelatin photograph5.5 x 5.3cm
ANONYMOUS PHOTOGRAPHER (Australian) _Untitled _(detail)1942-45
Silver gelatin photograph5.5 x 5.3cm
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09
Oct
20
EXHIBITION: ‘ROBERT FRANK – MEMORIES’ AT THE FOTOSTIFTUNG SCHWEIZ, WINTERTHUR, ZÜRICH By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leavea Comment
Categories: beauty , black andwhite photography
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documentary photography, exhibition
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Tags: 1950s photographs of America, Bar –
Gallup , black and whitephotography ,
Black White and Things, Bus-Stop Detroit
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, White Tower New York EXHIBITION DATES: 12TH SEPTEMBER 2020 – 10TH JANUARY 2021 ROBERT FRANK (Swiss, 1924-2019) _White Tower, New York_1948
Gelatin silver print Andrea Frank Foundation; courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York An interesting selection of media images, including some early Swiss and American photographs, which are rarely seen. Frank’s perceptiveness of human beings and their context of being and becoming is incredible. Look at the faces in _Landsgemeinde, Hundwil _(1949, below), _Paris _(1952, below) and the attitude of the bodies, surmounted by the sun (top left), in _London _(1951, below). “It is important to see what is invisible to others.”Dr Marcus Bunyan
.
Many thankx to Fotostiftung Schweiz for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image. The recently deceased Robert Frank is widely regarded as one of the most important photographers of our time. His book _The Americans,_ first published in Paris in 1958 and then in New York the following year, is quite possibly the most influential photo book of the 20th century. As a kind of photographic road movie, it sketches a gloomy social portrait that served as a wake-up call to all of America at the time. And his personal style, alternating between documentary and subjective expression, radically changed post-war photography. But _The Americans_ wasn’t merely a spontaneous stroke of genius. Frank’s early works already feature back stories and side plots that are closely connected to the themes and images of his legendary book. The Fotostiftung Schweiz holds a collection of lesser-known works – many of which were donated by the artist – which illustrate the consolidation of Frank’s subjective style. In addition to essays from Switzerland and Europe, it also includes works from early 1950s America that are on par with the well-known classics, but remained unpublished for editorial reasons. At the heart of the exhibition _Robert Frank – Memories_ is the narrative force of Frank’s visual language, which developed in opposition to all conventions and only received international recognition when Frank had already abandoned photography and turned to the medium of film. The exhibition is accompanied by a presentation of the books that publisher Gerhard Steidl produced with Robert Frank over a period ofmore than 15 years.
ROBERT FRANK (Swiss, 1924-2019)_New York City_
1948
Gelatin silver print Andrea Frank Foundation; courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York ROBERT FRANK (Swiss, 1924-2019) _Landsgemeinde, Hundwil_1949
Gelatin silver print Andrea Frank Foundation; courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York ROBERT FRANK (Swiss, 1924-2019) _Landsgemeinde, Hundwil_1949
Gelatin silver print Andrea Frank Foundation; courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York ROBERT FRANK (Swiss, 1924-2019) _Landsgemeinde, Hundwil _(detail)1949
Gelatin silver print Andrea Frank Foundation; courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York ROBERT FRANK (Swiss, 1924-2019) _Landsgemeinde, Hundwil _(detail)1949
Gelatin silver print Andrea Frank Foundation; courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York ROBERT FRANK (Swiss, 1924-2019)_London_
1951
Gelatin silver print Andrea Frank Foundation; courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York ROBERT FRANK (Swiss, 1924-2019)_Paris_
1952
Gelatin silver print Andrea Frank Foundation; courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York ROBERT FRANK (Swiss, 1924-2019)_New York City_
early 1950s
Gelatin silver print Andrea Frank Foundation; courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York Robert Frank, who was born in Zurich in 1924 and died last year in Canada, is widely regarded as one of the most important photographers of our time. Over the course of decades, he has expanded the boundaries of photography and explored its narrative potential like no other. Robert Frank travelled thousands of miles between the American East and West Coasts in the mid-1950s, going through nearly 700 films in the process. A selection of 83 black-and-white images from this blend of diary, sombre social portrait and photographic road movie would leave its mark on generations of photographers to come. The photobook _The Americans_ was first published in Paris, followed by the US in 1959 – with an introduction by Beat writer Jack Kerouac, no less. Off-kilter compositions, cut-off figures and blurred motion marked a new photographic style teetering between documentation and narration that would have a profound impact on postwar photography. It is quite possibly the single most influential book in the history of photography; however, rather than being a spontaneous stroke of genius, Frank had worked on his subjective visual language for years. Many of his photographs from Switzerland, Europe and South America, as well as his rarely shown works from the USA in the early 1950s, are on a par with the famous classics from _The Americans._ The photographer’s early work, which remained unpublished for editorial reasons and is therefore little known to this day, reveals connections to those iconic pictures that still define our image of America, eventoday.
At the heart of the exhibition _Robert Frank – Memories_ is the narrative force of Robert Frank’s visual language, which developed in opposition to all conventions and only received international recognition after Frank had already abandoned photography and turned to the medium of film. The exhibition mainly features vintage silver gelatin prints from the collection of the Fotostiftung Schweiz, which either come from the former collection of Robert Frank’s long-time friend Werner Zryd (now owned by the Swiss Confederation) or were donated to the Fotostiftung Schweiz by the artist himself. They are complemented by a number of loans from the Fotomuseum Winterthur. A presentation of the books and films that publisher Gerhard Steidl released with Robert Frank over a period of more than 15 years accompanies the exhibition (in the corridor leading to the library and in the seminar room).EARLY WORK
In March 1947, Robert Frank arrived in New York following an adventurous journey on a cargo ship. The young, ambitious photographer had found Switzerland too stifling and he hoped to gain new freedom in America liberated from social and family obligations. The photographer carried a 6×6 Rolleiflex and a small spiral-bound book of 40 photographs taken during his apprentice years from 1941 to 1946. This portfolio included landscapes, portraits, personal photojournalistic works, and meticulously executed still lifes, all of which reveal that the 22-year old was a highly skilled photographer. It is therefore unsurprising that influential _Harper’s Bazaar_ art director Alexey Brodovitch swiftly hired Frank as an assistant photographer after seeing his portfolio and first test photos. In the magazine’s in-house photo studio, Frank photographed fashion industry products from clinical shots of women’s shoes and every imaginable accessory to laboriously staged fashion shoots and occasionally even photojournalistic assignments offering a little more freedom. Frank was successful and rose through the ranks, but quickly realised that this industry cared only about money, an attitude to which he couldn’t reconcile himself. Only a few months later, he quit his job in order to be able to work wholly free of constraints. He traveled to Peru and Bolivia the following year and often used his 35 mm Leica. Later he recalled: “I was making a kind of diary. I was very free with the camera. I didn’t think of what would be the correct thing to do; I did what I felt good doing. I was like anaction painter.”
Frank returned to Europe in spring 1949. He photographed the yearly cantonal assembly in the Swiss canton of Appenzell Ausserrhoden, during which citizens (exclusively men back then) voted by a show of hands. However, he was unsuccessful in placing this story with a major periodical, even though he circulated the images via the acclaimed agency Magnum. Evidently, Frank had focused too little on the actual events. He was more interested in the bystanders’ stances than in the pomp of government officials wearing tailcoats and top hats. His photographs of this assembly prefigure the penetrating and critical gaze he would later level on America’s societal and political landscape. Here as there, his was an outsider’s subjective and inward looking perspective. _BLACK WHITE AND THINGS_ In late 1949, the international magazine _Camera_ published a first selection of Robert Frank’s work. The accompanying text described him as a photographer who loved “truth and unvarnished reality”, as someone “whose thirst for experience compelled him to get out and capture life with his camera”. Indeed, Frank worked chiefly in Paris, London, and Spain between 1949 and 1953, frequently traveling between Europe and the US. He reported on a bullfighter in Spain and observed life in London’s financial district. In Paris he took pictures of objects – mostly chairs and flowers – photographs he assembled in an album dedicated to his future wife. In subsequent years, he shook off any sentimental tendencies. Frank continued his attempts to publish both smaller and more substantial stories and photo essays in glossy magazines such as _Life,_ but with limited success. His reportage on Welsh coal miner Ben James, which appeared in _U.S. Camera_ 1955 annual, was a rare exception. But Frank found himself less and less able to reconcile himself with the conventional view of photography as a universal language accessible to all. Instead, he increasingly distanced himself from print media’s expectations and developed a strong aversion to what he once termed stereotypical “_Life_ stories”, “those goddamned stories with a beginning and an end”. In autumn 1952, Frank created _Black White and Things_ with his Zurich-based friend Werner Zryd. This handmade book comprising 34 photographs was an attempt to counter these expectations with something new: an intuitively ordered series of photos with neither text nor linear narrative structure, introduced simply by Saint-Exupéry’s famed lines from _The Little Prince:_ “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.” Accordingly, _Black White and Things_ is a kind of three-part visual poem: “Black” evokes death, materialism, loneliness, and anonymity; “White” evokes home, love, religion, and camaraderie; and “Things” engages with diametrical oppositions such as friendship and cruelty, and affection and solitude. The order and pairing of the images sparks thoughts, associations, and feelings. Yet Frank’s evocative arrangement is intentionally ambiguous and open: “Something must be left for the onlooker, he must have something to see. It is not all said for him.”AMERICA, AMERICA
After a further trip to New York – which he assured his mother would be his last – Robert Frank applied for a Guggenheim fellowship in October 1954. His project proposal was for an “observation and record of what one naturalised American finds to see in the United States that signifies the kind of civilisation born here and spreading elsewhere”. The result was to be a book, for which he had already won support from Arnold Kübler, the long-standing editor of the Zurich-based culture magazine Du, and Robert Delpire, a young publisher in Paris. Thanks to help from Alexey Brodovitch, Walker Evans, Edward Steichen and others, Frank was the first European photographer to be awarded this generous fellowship. The award made it possible for him to set off on his now-legendary road trips across theUS in spring 1955.
Over almost two years, Frank took more than 20,000 photographs on his travels. He made roughly 1,000 work prints in the autumn and winter of 1956-57, which he pinned to the walls and laid on the floor of his apartment. At the time his home was East Village, New York, where artists including Alfred Leslie and Willem de Kooning also lived. Over many months Frank made countless passes through his photographs, eliminating those images he was unsure of and focusing on specific themes. He constantly rearranged the selection that was gradually coming together until he had a first mocked-up book with just under 90 images and the provisional title America, America. Frank took this book with him when he traveled to Europe in summer 1957, showing it to Delpire and his Swiss photographer friend Gotthard Schuh. Over the years, the America photographs not included in his final selection disappeared into archives and collections or even got lost altogether. Only recently has it been possible to ascertain that many of the rejected and unpublished photographs were of the same caliber as the 83 book images Frank and Delpire agreed on. Frank’s contact sheets show that these photos were often taken directly before or after the images that have become icons of photographic history. Rather than putting forth a single message, Frank’s dark take on 1950s America contains impressive variations, facets, and excursuses that made a powerful impression on many, including his early supporter, Schuh. Schuh wrote to his young friend: “I don’t know America, but your photographs frighten me because in them you show, with visionary alertness, things that affect us all.”_THE AMERICANS_
Following the first French edition of _Les Américains,_ Robert Frank’s book was published as _The Americans_ in New York in 1959. The English edition dropped the cover illustration and the selection of texts on America (which Delpire had insisted on over Frank’s protests), and added an introduction by Jack Kerouac. Frank had much in common with the Beat poets, though he only met them after his Guggenheim-funded travels. Like Kerouac’s main character in _On the Road,_ Frank crisscrossed the country with apparent aimlessness, working spontaneously. Moreover, his work shares a stylistic consonance with Beat literature: Frank had abandoned all technical conventions and photographed intuitively instead. Many of his photographs are underexposed and grainy; they frame a scene and omit key details; their horizons are slanting and the lighting is often murky. Frank’s focus was the everyday, the fleeting, and the marginal. People are shown turning away from the camera, and his landscapes are desolate and bleak, “really more like Russia”, as Frank once remarked to Kerouac. He flouted the rules he had learned during his early training as a photographer in Switzerland in order to be as true as possible to his subjective experience and to capture unvarnished reality. Kerouac’s introduction begins with the words: “That crazy feeling in America when the sun is hot on the streets and music comes out of the jukeboxes or from a nearby funeral, that’s what Robert Frank has captured in tremendous photographs taken as he traveled on the road around practically forty-eight states in an old used car (on Guggenheim Fellowship) and with the agility, mystery, genius, sadness and strange secrecy of a shadow photographed scenes that have never been seen before on film …” _The Americans_ is a long, poetic image arc with cross-references, digressions, and associations, but also mental leaps and ambiguities, which provoked many critics. Although most acknowledged that Frank’s photographs were highly powerful, they read his take on Americans as a malicious attack on the country. Frank, a Jewish foreigner, was resented for picking up on the racism, hollow patriotism, commodified cheer, and political corruption lurking behind the façade of American society. Even before his groundbreaking book was published, Robert Frank wrote: “Above all, I know that life for a photographer cannot be a matter of indifference. Opinion often consists of a kind of criticism. But criticism can come out of love. It is important to see what is invisible to others.” Martin Gasser, Curator ROBERT FRANK (Swiss, 1924-2019)_“Los Angeles”_
1955
Gelatin silver print Andrea Frank Foundation; courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York ROBERT FRANK (Swiss, 1924-2019) _City fathers – Hoboken, New Jersey_1955
Gelatin silver print Andrea Frank Foundation; courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York ROBERT FRANK (Swiss, 1924-2019)_Bus-Stop, Detroit_
1955
Gelatin silver print Andrea Frank Foundation; courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York ROBERT FRANK (Swiss, 1924-2019) _Bar – Gallup, New Mexico_1955
Gelatin silver print Andrea Frank Foundation; courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York ROBERT FRANK (Swiss, 1924-2019) _Charity Ball – New York_1954
Andrea Frank Foundation; courtesy Pace / MacGill Gallery, New York Collection of the Swiss Photo Foundation Müller + Hess, Wendelin Hess and Jesse Wyss, Basel / Zurich FOTOSTIFTUNG SCHWEIZGrüzenstrasse 45
CH-8400 Winterthur (Zürich) PHONE: +41 52 234 10 30Opening hours:
Tuesday – Sunday 11am – 6pm Wednesday 11am – 8pmClosed on Mondays
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04
Oct
20
EXHIBITION: ‘ACTING OUT: CABINET CARDS AND THE MAKING OF MODERN PHOTOGRAPHY’ AT THE AMON CARTER MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART, FORTWORTH, TEXAS
By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leavea Comment
Categories: american photographers, beauty
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Tags: 56 & 58 Market Street Louisville, A. M.
Nikodem Chicago Cat
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Albumen silver print , Alfred U. Palmquist photographer, American
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Caught in the Act ,
Charles L. Griffin Scranton, Charles L.
Griffin Scranton Toddler with dog,
Charles Quartley Baltimore, Charles
Quartley Baltimore Church woman,
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Bread , early Americanphotography , F.
J. Nelson Anoka , F. J. Nelson Anoka Domestic Bread, Fanny
Davenport , Fanny LilyGipsey Davenport
, Fred Howe
, Fred Howe the Fatman, G. S. Smith Salt
Lake City , G. S.
Smith Taking in the view, George Moore
, George Moore and Fred Howe, George Moore
the living skeleton
, Getting
the cleaver , Getting the saw , Gilbert G. Oyloe , Gilbert G. Oyloe Ossian, Gilbert G. Oyloe
Woman , Hatch and
White Burlington
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White Burlington Man in woman's clothing,
Helena Luy , Howie Detroit George Moore and Fred Howe,
Howie Detroit photographer, James F. Ryder
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Hosford Getting the cleaver, M. C.
Hosford Getting the saw, M. C. Hosford
West Rutland , Man
in woman's clothing
, Miss A.M. Nikodem
, My first baby friendTompie and his pet
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Napoleon Sarony , Napoleon Sarony Fanny Davenport, Palmquist
& Jurgens , Palmquist &Jurgens Skater ,
Palmquist & Jurgens St. Paul Minnesota, Peder
T. Jurgens photographer, Planographic
print , R. O. Helsom , R. O. Helsom Menomonie, selfie culture
, Sharing Life: Family andFriends ,
Taking in the view , The Photographic Times and American Photographer,
Toddler with dog , Unknown photographer Chess against myself,
W. A. White Wilson , W. A. White Wilson My first baby friend Tompie and his pet,
W. A. Wilcoxon Bonaparte, W. A. Wilcoxon
Bonaparte Baby
EXHIBITION DATES: 14TH AUGUST – 1ST NOVEMBER 2020 G. S. SMITH, Salt Lake City, UT__
c. 1880
Albumen silver print Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas While the premise for this exhibition is interesting – that cabinet cards acted as a “primer” for coaxing “Americans into thinking about portraiture as an informal act, forging the way for the snapshot and social media with its contemporary “selfie” culture – in reality, the notion is far fetched. Of the many millions of cabinet cards produced during their period of proliferation (1880s-1910s), only a small percentage, perhaps as low as 3%, would ever fit the performative type illustrated in this posting. Most were of the “solemn records of likeness and stature type”, typically full-length, half-length or a head and shoulders portrait, usually of a single person, sometimes a couple or family. Even then, the performative type of cabinet card would have a limited distribution, either within the family or commercially. The four sections of the exhibition – CAUGHT IN THE ACT (actors, orators and other public figures); THE TRADE (commercial advertising); SHARING LIFE: FAMILY AND FRIENDS (family albums); and ACTING OUT (people at play; reality and truth) – are logical partitions of these certain types of cabinet card. But what interests me more are the psychological aspects of having ones photograph taken. Why is the person’s photograph being taken, at whose direction (the photographers, the sitters)… who is posing the individual, what do they intend to convey through the image, who decides what that message is and, of course, how does the viewer decipher the message. “The interpretation of a person’s acting out and an observer’s response varies considerably, with context and subject usually setting audience expectations.” (_Wikipedia_) Here we must acknowledge that the acting out is not singular but plural, for it is as much an act on the part of the photographer as it is the sitter. How much the outcome is dependent on the “director” or the subject is an act of constant negotiation (and, of course, it is also an outcome of the ritual of production). The curator John Rohrbach observes that, “In our current moment of ‘selfie’ culture and social media-centered interaction, understanding the history of self-presentation and portraiture is more prescient than ever…” but this statement, linking cabinet cards and selfies, is a very very long bow to draw. This is because cabinet cards are not “selfies” as we perceive them now – informal snapshots taken by the self – but posed and performed photographic studies that require inherent discipline, structure and form constructed by the photographer and the sitter to achieve their end. I often wonder about the revelatory process of having one’s portrait taken in the early days of photography. I know from texts that I have read that some people found the process slow and irritating, the results unsatisfactory. On the other hand, imagine being made to stand still for several seconds when you are not used to being completely still. Could there possibly be a moment in time and space, of meditation and reconciliation with oneself, a revelation in the stillness of the seconds of exposure. A revelation more spiritual than performative? *_Two girls_ (1864, below)Dr Marcus Bunyan
.
Many thankx to the Amon Carter Museum of American Art for allowing me to publish the art work in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.ACTING
The art or practice of representing a character on a stage or beforecameras.
ACTING serves countless purposes including the following: It reminds us of times past and forgotten, or gives us a glimpse of a possible future. It portrays our raw, unadulterated, vulnerable, emotional, and at times, ugly, horrifying humanity. It provokes emotion, thought, discussion, awareness, or even imagination.ACTING OUT
A child is “acting out” when they exhibit unrestrained and improper actions. The behaviour is usually caused by suppressed or denied feelings or emotions. Acting out reduces stress. It’s often a child’s attempt to show otherwise hidden emotions. Acting out may include fighting, throwing fits, or stealing. In severe cases, acting out is associated with antisocial behaviour and other personality disorders in teenagers and younger children. … Acting Out a) represents in action and b) translates into action, expressing (something, such as an impulse or a fantasy) directly in overt behaviour without modification, not complying with social norms. In the psychology of defence mechanisms and self-control, acting out is the performance of an action considered bad or anti-social. In general usage, the action performed is destructive to self or to others. The term is used in this way in sexual addiction treatment, psychotherapy, criminology and parenting. In contrast, the opposite attitude or behaviour of bearing and managing the impulse to perform one’s impulse is called acting in. The performed action may follow impulses of an addiction (e.g. drinking, drug taking or shoplifting). It may also be a means designed (often unconsciously or semi-consciously) to garner attention (e.g. throwing a tantrum or behaving promiscuously). Acting out may inhibit the development of more constructive responses to the feelings in question. …INTERPRETATION
The interpretation of a person’s acting out and an observer’s response varies considerably, with context and subject usually setting audience expectations.ALTERNATIVES
Acting out painful feelings may be contrasted with expressing them in ways more helpful to the sufferer, e.g. by talking out, expressive therapy, psychodrama or mindful awareness of the feelings. Developing the ability to express one’s conflicts safely and constructively is an important part of impulse control, personal development andself-care.
Anonymous. “Acting out,” on the _Wikipedia_ websiteCited 04/10/2020
G. S. SMITH, Salt Lake City, UT_ _(detail)
c. 1880
Albumen silver print Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, TexasHOWIE, Detroit, MI
_George Moore and Fred Howe_1890s
Collodion silver print Robert E. Jackson Collection FRED HOWE, the Fatman and GEORGE MOORE, the living skeleton; they are the most comical boxers in the world. Fred Howe’s father was a carpenter at Alleghany City, Penn., and Fred started to learn the same trade, but soon became too fat. At the age of eighteen he joined the Forepaugh Circus as a “tat boy,” and there met his presentsparring partner.
George Moore was born in Helena, Montana, where his father had a little dry goods shop. Until he was twenty-one years of age George worked in his father’s shop. But his greatest desire was to see the world. When the fist big circus came to Helena, the manager offered him an engagement to exhibit himself as the “living skeleton,” and he closed with the offer at once. Fred Howe, they soon became great friends. The doctors advised both to take as much exercise as possible – the one to gain flesh, and the other to get rid of it. These smart Yankee lads then resolved to combine duty with pleasure, so they went in for boxing. For a long time they practised privately. One day, however, the manager was told of the fun by some of his “freaks,” who had been allowed to see a set-to” between the two gladiators. The manager then arranged a round or two, and the moment he saw Howe and Moore face each other, he offered them a long engagement at an increased salary, if only they would do their boxing before the public. Today these funny fellows are not only expert boxers, but also perfect comedians in their “art.” Their boxing isuproariously funny.
Moore is 6ft. 3in. in height, and weighs but 97lb., Howe is only 4ft. 2in. high, and weights exactly 422lb. _The Strand Magazine_HOWIE, Detroit, MI
_George Moore and Fred Howe _(detail)1890s
Collodion silver print Robert E. Jackson Collection ALFRED U. PALMQUIST (Swedish, 1850-1922) and PEDER T. JURGENS, St.Paul, MN
__
1880s
Albumen silver print Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas The Swede Alfred U. Palmquist (1850-1922) immigrated to America in 1872. In 1874, together with the Norwegian Peder T. Jurgens he opened the photo studio Palmquist & Jurgens in St. Paul, Minnesota. Alfred Palmquist was born in Finland to Swedish parents on June 21, 1850. We know nothing about his childhood and upbringing except that he emigrated to Minnesota in the United States at the age of twenty-two. A year later, he and a colleague started a photo studio in Saint Paul, Minnesota, which was named Palmquist & Lake. Ten years later, in 1883, Palmquist entered into a collaboration with Peder T. Jurgens. We only know about his partner Jurgens that he was Norwegian and had previously supported himself as an economist. Peder Jurgens worked in the company between the years 1882 to 1888. The new company was then of course named Palmquist & Jurgens and lived on until the beginning of the 20th century. During the 1870s and 1880s, most photographers worked in their studios… Palmquist & Jurgens was such a typical photography company that preferred people to come to their studio to be photographed. The company had specialised in photographing famous families in Saint Paul. M. C. HOSFORD, West Rutland, VT__
1880s
Albumen silver print Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas M. C. HOSFORD, West Rutland, VT_ _(detail)
1880s
Albumen silver print Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas M. C. HOSFORD, West Rutland, VT_ _(detail)
1880s
Albumen silver print Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas M. C. HOSFORD, West Rutland, VT__
1880s
Albumen silver print Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas _Acting Out: Cabinet Cards and the Making of Modern Photography_ offers the first-ever in-depth examination of the photographic phenomenon of cabinet cards. Cabinet cards were America’s main format for photographic portraiture through the last three decades of the nineteenth century. Inexpensive and sold by the dozen, they transformed getting one’s portrait made from a formal event taken up once or twice in a lifetime into a commonplace practice shared withfamily and friends.
Building on the museum’s history as a leader in American photography, this exhibition reveals how photography studios and their sitters across the United States introduced immediacy to studio portraiture and transformed their sessions into avenues of fun and personal expression. Sections will trace the cabinet card’s development and evolution, from its beginnings in celebrity culture through the marketing and advertising innovations of practitioners to the diversity of what people brought to their sittings. Not only did Americans embrace photography as a commonplace fact of life during these years, they openly played with the medium’s believability. In short, cabinet cards made photography modern. This August, the Amon Carter Museum of American Art will present _Acting Out: Cabinet Cards and the Making of Modern Photography,_ an exhibition offering the first in-depth examination of the nineteenth-century photographic phenomenon of cabinet cards. Charting the proliferation of this under appreciated photographic format, _Acting Out_ reveals that cabinet cards coaxed Americans into thinking about portraiture as an informal act, forging the way for the snapshot and social media with its contemporary “selfie” culture. _Acting Out_ presents hundreds of photographs – many on view publicly for the first time – from collections nationwide, including examples from the Carter’s own extensive photography collection. On view August 18 through November 1, 2020, the exhibition is organised by the Carter and will travel to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. In the second half of the nineteenth century, cabinet cards gave birth to the golden age of photographic portraiture in America. Measuring 6 1/2 by 4 1/4 inches, roughly the size of the modern-day smartphone screen, they were three times larger than the period’s leading photographic format. This larger size revealed previously obscured details in the images captured, encouraging action-ready gestures and the introduction of an astonishing array of props. Where photographs had once functioned as solemn records of likeness and stature, cabinet cards offered a new outlet for entertainment and remembering life’severyday moments.
_Acting Out_ investigates how this new performative medium prompted sitters to become far more comfortable with having their portrait made. By the time Eastman Kodak introduced its new affordable Brownie camera in 1900, cabinet cards had primed Americans to photograph every aspect of their lives. Though produced over 100 years ago, cabinet cards have a familiarity and a levity that resonates with our experience of photography today. “_Acting Out_ exemplifies the Carter’s commitment to organising exhibitions rooted in groundbreaking scholarship, a core tenet of our curatorial philosophy,” stated Andrew J. Walker, Executive Director. “This exhibition harnesses the resources of our vast photography collection and archive to show visitors the contemporary relevance of the medium’s pre-modern history.” The exhibition is organised into four sections chronicling the birth and evolution of the cabinet card: * CAUGHT IN THE ACT: Actors, orators, and other public figures were among the first to embrace cabinet cards. This section examines how the creative innovations employed by New York photographer Napoleon Sarony and his cohorts built public enthusiasm for a new kind of photographic portraiture founded on a relaxed sense of immediacy that influenced studio photographers across America. * THE TRADE: This section looks at the entertaining and evocative ways that photographers worked to overcome low prices and fierce competition, and to stand out from their peers. Their creative solutions gave rise to the ubiquity of cabinet cards across America bythe 1880s.
* SHARING LIFE: FAMILY AND FRIENDS: Over the last quarter of the nineteenth century, cabinet cards were often the favoured means for recording and celebrating family life. This evocative section reveals the ways in which cabinet cards established a model for family albums as channels for sharing and boasting of the joys and transits of life. * ACTING OUT: If portraiture was the ostensible subject of cabinet cards, play was just as important. This section examines Americans’ acceptance of the camera as a tool for shared amusement as they toyed with photography’s pretence of reality and truth. “In our current moment of ‘selfie’ culture and social media-centered interaction, understanding the history of self-presentation and portraiture is more prescient than ever,” said John Rohrbach, Senior Curator of Photographs at the Carter. “This exhibition reveals how nineteenth-century Americans approached photography far more playfully than ever before, a transformation that forever shifted our relationship to the medium.” _Acting Out: Cabinet Cards and the Making of Modern Photography_ was organised by the Amon Carter Museum of American Art. The exhibition is supported in part by the Alice L. Walton Foundation Temporary Exhibitions Endowment and accompanied by a 232-page catalogue co-published with the University of California Press, Berkeley. The book is the first dedicated to the history of the cabinet card and features colour plates of 100 cards at their actual size. Contributors include Dr. John Rohrbach, Senior Curator of Photographs at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art; Dr. Erin Pauwels, Assistant Professor of American Art at Temple University; Dr. Britt Salvesen, Department Head and Curator of the Wallis Annenberg Department of Photography at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and Fernanda Valverde, Conservator of Photographs at the Carter. Press release from the Amon Carter Museum of American Art UNKNOWN PHOTOGRAPHER__
1880s
Albumen silver print Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas UNKNOWN PHOTOGRAPHER_ _(detail)
1880s
Albumen silver print Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas HATCH AND WHITE, Burlington, WI__
c. 1891
Collodion silver print Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas BENJAMIN J. FALK, New York, NY_Helena Luy_
1880s
Albumen silver print Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, TexasBENJAMIN J. FALK
When Napoleon Sarony died in 1896, Benjamin J. Falk ascended to the first place in the world of performing arts photography… Falk’s contemporaries, who spoke primarily of the clarity, verisimilitude, and composure of his images, never recognised his greatest power as a portraitist. Falk was a man of extraordinary erotic engagement with his sitters, and the intensity of his attention becomes visible only when one sees the entirety of his work envisioning one of the several women – Belle Archer, Mrs. James Brown Potter, Cleo De Merode, Cissy Fitzgerald, Amy Busby, the Barrison Sisters – who capture his imagination. He was capable of refracting the sitter’s beauty in a tremendous array of scenes, costumes, and attitudes, doing so without making the images seemartificial.
When asked in 1893 what was most important in creating effective portraits, he replied matter of factly, “I name expression, posing and lighting in the order as they appear to be most important. The technique of the profession being absolutely under the control of the operator since the introduction of the dry plates, there is no excuse now for any but perfect photographic results. I have always made my price high enough, so that I did not have to consider the cost of material while doing my work.” The camera, in the proper hands, is, in many ways, a finer art tool to-day than the chisel or the brush, although, like them, it has its limitations.SPECIALTY
The first strong adherent of artificial light sources in the studio, Benjamin Falk created portraits that were among the most dramatically sculptural looking images of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Possessed of a playful visual wit, he often experimented with his images, using curious juxtapositions, unusual poses, and lighting highlights to convey distinctiveness of personality. Increasingly indifferent to painted backdrops, he did many portraits against blank walls or bleached out backcloths. He began the fashion for faces and figures suspended in a milky white ground that became ubiquitousshortly after 1900.
Anonymous. “Benjamin J. Falk,” on the _Broadway Photographers_ website Cited 05/09/2020 BENJAMIN J. FALK, New York, NY _Helena Luy _(detail)1880s
Albumen silver print Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas NAPOLEON SARONY, New York, NY__
c. 1870
Albumen silver print Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, TexasNAPOLEON SARONY
NAPOLEON SARONY (March 9, 1821 – November 9, 1896) was an American lithographer and photographer. He was a highly popular portrait photographer, best known for his portraits of the stars of late-19th-century American theatre. His son, Otto Sarony, continued the family business as a theatre and film star photographer. Sarony was born in 1821 in Quebec, then in the British colony of Lower Canada, and moved to New York City around 1836. He worked as an illustrator for Currier and Ives before joining with James Major and starting his own lithography business, Sarony & Major, in 1843. In 1845, James Major was replaced in Sarony & Major by Henry B. Major, and the firm continued operating under that name until 1853. From 1853 to 1857, the firm was known as Sarony and Company, and from 1857 to 1867, as Sarony, Major & Knapp. Sarony left the firm in 1867 and established a photography studio at 37 Union Square, during a time when celebrity portraiture was a popular fad. Photographers would pay their famous subjects to sit for them, and then retain full rights to sell the pictures. Sarony reportedly paid the internationally famous stage actress Sarah Bernhardt $1,500 to pose for his camera, equivalent to $42,683 in 2019. In 1894, he published a portfolio of prints entitled “Sarony’s Living Pictures”. Text from the _Wikipedia_ website NAPOLEON SARONY, New York, NY_ _(detail)
c. 1870
Albumen silver print Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas FANNY LILY GIPSEY DAVENPORT FANNY LILY GIPSEY DAVENPORT (April 10, 1850 – September 26, 1898) was an English-American stage actress. The eldest child of Edward Loomis Davenport and Fanny Elizabeth (Vining) Gill Davenport, Fanny Lily Gypsey Davenport was born on April 10, 1850 in London. Most of her siblings were actors, including Harry Davenport. She was brought to the United States in 1854 and educated in the Boston public schools. At age 7, she appeared at Boston’s Howard Athenæum as Metamora’s child, but her real debut occurred in February 1862 when she portrayed King Charles in _Faint Heart Never Won Fair Lady_ atNiblo’s Garden.
In February 1862, she appeared in New York City at Niblo’s Garden at the age of 12 as the King of Spain in _Faint Heart Never Won Fair Lady._ From 1869 to 1877, she performed in Augustin Daly’s company; and afterwards, with a company of her own, acted with especial success in Sardou’s _Fédora_ (1883) her leading man being Robert B. Mantell, _Cleopatra_ (1890), and similar plays. She took over emotional Sardou roles that had been originated in Europe by Sarah Bernhardt. Her last appearance was at the Grand Opera House in Chicago on March 25, 1898, shortly before her death. Her first husband was Edwin B. Price, an actor. They married on July 30, 1879, and divorced on June 8, 1888. On May 18, 1889, she married her leading man, Melbourne MacDowell. Both marriages were childless. Davenport died September 26, 1898, from an enlarged heart, at her summer home in Duxbury, Massachusetts. Text from the _Wikipedia_ website UNKNOWN PHOTOGRAPHER__
1864
Albumen silver print (carte de visite) Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas UNKNOWN PHOTOGRAPHER__ (detail)
1864
Albumen silver print (carte de visite) Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas A. M. NIKODEM, Chicago, IL__
1880s
Albumen silver print Robert E. Jackson CollectionA.M. NIKODEM
According to _Origin, Growth, and Usefulness of the Chicago Board of Trade: Its Leading Members, and Representative Business Men in other Branches of Trade_ (1885): “Miss A.M. Nikodem, Photographic Artist. No. 701 West Madison Street. – One of the most popular and finely appointed photographic studios in Chicago is that conducted by Miss A.M. Nikodem, who succeeded Mr. M. T. Baldwin one year ago. This lady, who is regarded as one of the most skilful and accomplished photographic artists in the city, occupies an entire two-storied building completely equipped with all modern improvements and appliances and her elegantly furnished parlours are the resort of the élite of Chicago. Miss Nikodem is the only lady in the city who give personal attention to the taking of pictures, etc., and having had an extended practical and theoretical training she has attained a marked perfection in her art. In social circles Miss Nikodem occupies a prominent position both as a skilful artist and estimable lady, while in the business world she is held in high esteem as an enterprising and capable woman.” Nikodem occupied the studio at this address from 1885-1891, and then moved to another location. 1895 is the last year in which she seems to be listed in Chicago city guides. Despite her prominence, photographs from her studio are exceptionally uncommon. Nikodem’s skill is fully on display in this portrait. The three or four other examples of her work we could find, all in library special collections, are all of women or girls, and they display a uniform artistic excellence and technical photographic skill. W. A. WHITE, Wilson, KS _My first baby friend Tompie and his pet_1896
Collodion silver print Robert E. Jackson Collection W. A. WHITE, Wilson, KS _My first baby friend Tompie and his pet _(detail)1896
Collodion silver print Robert E. Jackson Collection W. A. WILCOXON, Bonaparte, IA__
1890s
Collodion silver print Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas UNKNOWN PHOTOGRAPHER__
1890s
Albumen silver print William L. Schaeffer Collection UNKNOWN PHOTOGRAPHER_ _(detail)
1890s
Albumen silver print William L. Schaeffer Collection CHARLES L. GRIFFIN, Scranton, PA__
c. 1892
Gelatin silver print Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas F. J. NELSON, Anoka, MN_Domestic Bread_
c. 1890s
Collodion silver print Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas GILBERT G. OYLOE (American, 1851-1927) Ossian, IA__
1880s
Albumen silver print Robert E. Jackson Collection Oyloe had a studio in Ossian during the 1880’s and 1890’s. JAMES F. RYDER, Cleveland, OH_Verso_
1880s
Planographic print
Gift of Robert E. Jackson Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas CHARLES QUARTLEY, Baltimore, MD__
1880s
Albumen silver printRobert E. Jackson
CAROLINE BERGMAN, Louisville, KY_Untitled _
c. 1890
Relief print
Gift of Robert E. Jackson Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas LOUISE AND CAROLINE BERGMAN Louis Bergman opened a Louisville photo studio in 1872 on W Market. After 1885, however, Caroline Bergman (his wife) is listed as the proprietor and photographer, and Louis is listed only as “manager”. This very successful studio was in operation until1896.
Louis Bergman’s … studio was located at 56 & 58 Market Street, in Louisville, Kentucky. Perusal of Louisville business directories reveals that Bergman began business with a partner. Bergman & Flexner; the firm was listed in the 1868 and 1869 directories. He was reported to be the sole proprietor of a studio from 1872 until 1886. Bergman was listed at a number of different addresses over these years. Using these addresses, it appears that this particular photograph was taken between 1873 and 1881. From 1886 through 1894 the proprietor of the studio became Caroline Bergman. _The Photographic Times and American Photographer_ (1883) reported that Bergman was Vice President of the Photographers Mutual Benefit Society of Louisville. Louis Bergman (c. 1838 -?) was born in Hanover, Germany to Prussian parents. His wife, Carrie (1845 -?) was born in Louisiana to German parents. The couple married in about 1865. The Bergman’s had a daughter, Lillie, who was 12 years-old at the time of the 1880 census. The census listed Louis as a photographer and Carrie as a homemaker. It is interesting to note that when the couples daughter reached 18 years of age, Carrie became the studio’s proprietor / photographer. ANONYMOUS. “Man with a Great Beard in Louisville, Kentucky,” on _The Cabinet Card Gallery_ website 03/01/2012 Cited05/09/2020
R. O. HELSOM, Menomonie, WI_Verso_
1880s
Relief print
Gift of Robert E. Jackson Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas_Cabinets_
c. 1880s
Celluloid-covered album Robert E. Jackson Collection AMON CARTER MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART 3501 Camp Bowie Boulevard Fort Worth, TX 76107-2695Opening hours:
Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday: 10am – 5pm Thursday: 10am – 8pm Sunday: 12am – 5pm Closed Mondays and major holidays Amon Carter Museum of American Art website LIKE ART BLART ON FACEBOOKBACK TO TOP
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EUROPEAN PHOTOGRAPHIC RESEARCH TOUR EXHIBITION: ‘L’EQUILIBRISTE, ANDRÉ KERTÉSZ’ AT JEU DE PAUME, CHÂTEAU DE TOURS PART 2 By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leavea Comment
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, Winter Garden New York EXHIBITION DATES: 26TH JUNE – 27TH OCTOBER 2019 VISITED SEPTEMBER 2019 POSTED SEPTEMBER 2020 CURATORS: Matthieu Rivallin and Pia Viewing ANDRÉ KERTÉSZ (Hungarian, 1894-1985) _Nageur sous l’eau, Esztergom_ _Underwater swimmer, Esztergom_1918
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> “”… especially haptic qualities are demanded of the > deconstructionist performer, spectator, and reader; not to follow > optically the ‘line of ideas’ in the text or in a picture and > see only the representation proper, the surface, but to probe with > the eyes the pictorial texture and even to enter the texture.”69 > Such “touching” with the eye did not lead to a secure tactile > experience of being firmly planted on the ground, for all grounds, > all foundations, were suspect, however construed. We are, as > Nietzsche knew, swimming in an endless sea, rather than standing on > dry land. To “touch” a trace, groping blindly in the dark, is no > more the guarantee of certainty than to see its residues.”>
> .
> Gandelman, Claude. ‘Reading Pictures, Viewing Texts’. > Bloomington, Indiana, 1991, p. 140 quoted in Martin Jay. ‘Downcast > Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French > Thought’. Berkley: University of California Press, 1993, p. 512. TOUCHING WITH THE EYE Part 2 of a large posting on the exhibition _L’equilibriste, André Kertész_ at Jeu de Paume, Château de Tours, which I saw in Tours inSeptember 2019.
This posting contains photographs from his famous series “Distortions” (fascinating to see the original plates for the book of the same name, complete with cropping marks and red lead pencil annotations); American works from 1936 onwards, when Kertész moved to the United States to avoid the persecution of the Jews and the threat of World War II; and the late work colour Polaroids. I admit that Kertész is not my favourite photographer. While I admire some of his photographs, I feel emotionally distant from most of them. Edward Clay observes in the quotation below that Kertész was “one of the most lyrical and formally inventive photographers of the twentieth-century… often convey a quiet mood of melancholy … He remains revered for his clarity of style and ability to blend simplicity with emotion, prizing impact over technical precision, seeking metaphors and geometry in everyday objects and scenarios, to turn the mundane into the surreal.” Personally, I don’t find his photographs emotional nor lyrical, only a few poetic. Not melancholic, but geometric. In later works, he simplifies, simplifies, simplifies much like his friend Mondrian did. For me, the balance between sacred / geometry, the sacred geometry of the mystery of things, is often unbalanced in these images (particularly relevant, given the title of this exhibition). Is it enough just to turn the mundane into the surreal? Where does that lead the viewer? Is it enough to just observe, represent, without diggingdeeper.
At his best, in images such as _Underwater swimmer, Esztergom_ (1918, above), _Arm and Fan, New York_ (1937, below) and _Washington Square, New York_ (1954, below) there is a structured, avant-garde mystery about the reality of the world, as re/presented through the object of the photograph, it’s physical presence. In _Underwater__ swimmer,_ the body is stretched and distorted by an element, water, not a man-made mirror. His photographs from Hungary, Italy and early Paris possess a sensitivity of spirit that seems to have been excised from his life, the older he got. Far too often in later images, there is a “brittleness” to his photography, in which the object of reflection sits at the surface of the image, all sparkling in unflinching light. The single cloud oh so lonely in the sterile city; the man looking at the broken bench; the “buy, buy, buy” of consumer culture. You consumer Kertész’s later images, you do notreflect on them.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
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All iPhone installation photographs © Marcus Bunyan. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image. View Part 1 of theposting
.
> “André Kertész, one of the most lyrical and formally inventive > photographers of the twentieth-century, whose work advocated for > spontaneity over technical precision, has left a distinctive legacy > of poetic images which form a bridge between the avant-garde and > geometrical precision. A roamer for much of his life, his feelings > of rootlessness manifest in his work and often convey a quiet mood > of melancholy. …>
> Claiming _“I am an amateur and I intend to stay that way for the > rest of my life”,_ Kertesz was a great source of inspiration to > photographic legends such as Cartier-Bresson.>
> He remains revered for his clarity of style and ability to blend > simplicity with emotion, prizing impact over technical precision, > seeking metaphors and geometry in everyday objects and scenarios, to > turn the mundane into the surreal. Nothing was too plain or ordinary > for his eye, since he had a special ability to breathe life into > even the most ‘unremarkable’ subjects.”>
> .
> Edward Clay. “André Kertész: between poetry and geometry,” on > ‘The Independent Photographer’ website, May 19th 2020 > Cited 26/08/2020 ANDRÉ KERTÉSZ (Hungarian, 1894-1985)_Distortion #34 _
1933
Gelatin silver print ANDRÉ KERTÉSZ (Hungarian, 1894-1985)_Distortion #40_
1933
Gelatin silver print Installation views of the exhibition _L’equilibriste, André Kertész_ at Jeu de Paume, Château de Tours showing photographs from the series _Distortions, _the bottom image showing at left, the photograph _Underwater swimmer, Esztergom _1918 PHOTOS: Marcus Bunyan ANDRÉ KERTÉSZ (Hungarian, 1894-1985) _Planches originales de la maquette du livre ‘Distortions’ _(installation view) _Original plates of the model of the book ‘Distortions’ _1975-76
Collection Médiathèque de l’architecture et du patrimoine PHOTOS: Marcus Bunyan Installation view of the exhibition _L’equilibriste, André Kertész_ at Jeu de Paume, Château de Tours showing photographs from the series _Distortions _PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan__
ANDRÉ KERTÉSZ (Hungarian, 1894-1985) _Distortion #60_ (installation view)1933
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PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan ANDRÉ KERTÉSZ (Hungarian, 1894-1985) _Distortion #86_ (installation view)1933
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PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan ANDRÉ KERTÉSZ (Hungarian, 1894-1985) _Distortion #86_ (installation view)1933
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PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan ANDRÉ KERTÉSZ (Hungarian, 1894-1985) _Distortion #109_ (installation view)1933
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PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan ANDRÉ KERTÉSZ (Hungarian, 1894-1985) _Distortion #6_ (installation view)1933
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PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan ANDRÉ KERTÉSZ (Hungarian, 1894-1985) _Distortion #159_ (installation view)1933
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PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan ANDRÉ KERTÉSZ (Hungarian, 1894-1985) _Distortion #128_ (installation view)1933
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PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan ANDRÉ KERTÉSZ (Hungarian, 1894-1985) _Distortion #70_ (installation view)1933
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PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan ANDRÉ KERTÉSZ (Hungarian, 1894-1985) _Distortion #70_ (installation view)1933
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PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan ANDRÉ KERTÉSZ (Hungarian, 1894-1985) _Distortion #80_ (installation view)1933
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PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan ANDRÉ KERTÉSZ (Hungarian, 1894-1985) _Distortion_ (installation view)1933
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PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan ANDRÉ KERTÉSZ (Hungarian, 1894-1985) _Portrait déformé (Visage de femme), Paris _(installation view) _Distorted Portrait (Face of a Woman), Paris_1927
Gelatin silver print PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan One of the twentieth century’s great photographers, André Kertész (Budapest, 1894 – New York, 1985) left a prolific body of work spanning more than seventy years (1912-1984), a blend of the poetic and the intimate with its wellspring in his Hungarian culture. _The Art of Poise: André Kertész_ traces this singular career, showcasing compositions that bear the stamp of Europe’s avant-garde art movements, from the artist’s earliest Hungarian photographs to the blossoming of his talent in France, and from his New York years to ultimate international recognition. Kertész arrived in Paris in October 1925. Moving in avant-garde literary and artistic circles, he photographed his Hungarian friends, artists’ studios, street life and the city’s parks and gardens. In 1933 he embarked on his famous _Distortions_ series of nudes deformed by funhouse mirrors, producing anamorphic images similar in spirit to the work of Pablo Picasso, Jean Arp and Henry Moore. In addition to this profusion of activity, he explored the possibility of disseminating his work in publications. Between 1933 and the end of his life he had designed and published a total of nineteen books. In 1936 Kertész and his wife Elizabeth left for New York, where he began with a brief assignment for Keystone, the world’s biggest photographic agency. He struggled, though, to carve out a place for himself in a context whose demands were very different from those ofhis Paris years.
Inspired by the rediscovery of his Hungarian and French negatives, from 1963 onwards he devoted himself solely to personal projects, and was offered retrospectives by the French National Library in Paris and MoMA in New York. This fresh recognition sparked a flurry of books in which he harked back to the high points of his oeuvre. In his last years, armed with a Polaroid, he returned to his earlier practice of everyday photography. Text from the Jeu de Paume website for the earlier exhibition _The Art of Poise: André Kertész_ Text from the exhibition _L’equilibriste, André Kertész_ at Jeu de Paume, Château de Tours ANDRÉ KERTÉSZ (Hungarian, 1894-1985) _La Tulipe mélancolique, New York_ _Melancholic Tulip, New York_1939
Gelatin silver print ANDRÉ KERTÉSZ (Hungarian, 1894-1985) _Paris _(installation view)1984
Gelatin silver print PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan ANDRÉ KERTÉSZ (Hungarian, 1894-1985)_Paris_
1984
Gelatin silver print Installation views of the exhibition _L’equilibriste, André Kertész_ at Jeu de Paume, Château de Tours showing at top left, _Ballet, New York _1938; and at bottom left, _Lake Placid_ 1954 PHOTOS: Marcus Bunyan ANDRÉ KERTÉSZ (Hungarian, 1894-1985) _Ballet, New York _(installation view)1938
Gelatin silver print PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan ANDRÉ KERTÉSZ (Hungarian, 1894-1985)_Ballet, New York_
1938
Gelatin silver print ANDRÉ KERTÉSZ (Hungarian, 1894-1985) _Lake Placid_ (installation view)1954
Gelatin silver print PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan ANDRÉ KERTÉSZ (Hungarian, 1894-1985) _New York _(installation view)1937
Gelatin silver print PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan ANDRÉ KERTÉSZ (Hungarian, 1894-1985) _New York _(installation view)1939
Gelatin silver print PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan ANDRÉ KERTÉSZ (Hungarian, 1894-1985)_New York_
1939
Gelatin silver print ANDRÉ KERTÉSZ (Hungarian, 1894-1985) _New York _(installation view)1954
Gelatin silver print PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan ANDRÉ KERTÉSZ (Hungarian, 1894-1985) _Escalier, rampe, ombres et femme, New York_ (installation view)_ Staircase, banister, shadows and woman, New York_1951
Gelatin silver print PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan ANDRÉ KERTÉSZ (Hungarian, 1894-1985) _Escalier, rampe, ombres et femme, New York_ (installation view)_ Staircase, banister, shadows and woman, New York_1951
Gelatin silver print PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan ANDRÉ KERTÉSZ (Hungarian, 1894-1985) _“Buy”, Long Island_1963
Gelatin silver print ANDRÉ KERTÉSZ (Hungarian, 1894-1985) _6th Avenue, New York_1973
Gelatin silver print ANDRÉ KERTÉSZ (Hungarian, 1894-1985)_Nuage égaré_
_Lost cloud_
1937
PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan ANDRÉ KERTÉSZ (Hungarian, 1894-1985)_Nuage égaré_
_Lost cloud_
1937
Gelatin silver print ANDRÉ KERTÉSZ (Hungarian, 1894-1985) _Poughkeepsie, New York _(installation view)1937
Gelatin silver print PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan ANDRÉ KERTÉSZ (Hungarian, 1894-1985) _Poughkeepsie, New York_1937
Gelatin silver print ANDRÉ KERTÉSZ (Hungarian, 1894-1985) _Of New York…_ (installation view) New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1976 PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan ANDRÉ KERTÉSZ (Hungarian, 1894-1985) _New York _(installation view)1951
Gelatin silver print PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan ANDRÉ KERTÉSZ (Hungarian, 1894-1985) _Of New York…_ (installation view) New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1976 PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan ANDRÉ KERTÉSZ (Hungarian, 1894-1985) _“Buy”, New York_ (installation view)1966
Gelatin silver print PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan ANDRÉ KERTÉSZ (Hungarian, 1894-1985) _Of New York…_ (installation view) New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1976 PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan ANDRÉ KERTÉSZ (Hungarian, 1894-1985) _Double page de la maquette originale du livre ‘Of New York…’_(installation view)
_Double page of the original model of the book ‘Of New York…’_1975-76
PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan Installation view of the exhibition _L’equilibriste, André Kertész_ at Jeu de Paume, Château de Tours showing at second left, _New York_ 1939; and at third left, _New York_ 1936 PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan ANDRÉ KERTÉSZ (Hungarian, 1894-1985) _New York_ (installation view)1939
Gelatin silver print PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan ANDRÉ KERTÉSZ (Hungarian, 1894-1985) _New York_ (installation view)1936
Gelatin silver print PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan ANDRÉ KERTÉSZ (Hungarian, 1894-1985)_New York_
1936
Gelatin silver print Installation view of the exhibition _L’equilibriste, André Kertész_ at Jeu de Paume, Château de Tours showing at second right, _Arm and Fan, New York _1937 PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan ANDRÉ KERTÉSZ (Hungarian, 1894-1985) _Bras et ventilateur, New York_ (installation view) _Arm and Fan, New York_1937
Gelatin silver print PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan ANDRÉ KERTÉSZ (Hungarian, 1894-1985) _Bras et ventilateur, New York_ _Arm and Fan, New York_1937
Gelatin silver print ANDRÉ KERTÉSZ (Hungarian, 1894-1985) _Of New York…_ (installation view) New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1976 PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan ANDRÉ KERTÉSZ (Hungarian, 1894-1985) _New York _(installation view)1947
Gelatin silver print PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan ANDRÉ KERTÉSZ (Hungarian, 1894-1985) _Le retour au port, New York_ (installation view) _Return to port, New York_1944
Gelatin silver print PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan Installation view of the exhibition _L’equilibriste, André Kertész_ at Jeu de Paume, Château de Tours showing at left, _Disappearance, New York _1955 PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan ANDRÉ KERTÉSZ (Hungarian, 1894-1985) _La Disparition, New York_ (installation view) _Disappearance, New York_1955
Gelatin silver print PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan ANDRÉ KERTÉSZ (Hungarian, 1894-1985) _La Disparition, New York_ (installation view) _Disappearance, New York_1955
Gelatin silver print PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan ANDRÉ KERTÉSZ (Hungarian, 1894-1985) _Disappearance, New York_1955
Gelatin silver print ANDRÉ KERTÉSZ (Hungarian, 1894-1985) _New York_ (installation view)1969
Gelatin silver print PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan Text from the exhibition _L’equilibriste, André Kertész_ at Jeu de Paume, Château de Tours Installation views of the exhibition _L’equilibriste, André Kertész_ at Jeu de Paume, Château de Tours showing at left in the bottom image, _Broken Bench, New York _1962 PHOTOS: Marcus Bunyan ANDRÉ KERTÉSZ (Hungarian, 1894-1985) _Le Banc cassé, New York Broken Bench, New York_1962
Gelatin silver print ANDRÉ KERTÉSZ (Hungarian, 1894-1985) _Of New York…_ (installation view) New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1976 PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan ANDRÉ KERTÉSZ (Hungarian, 1894-1985) _Soixante ans de photographie _(installation view) _Sixty years of photography_1912-1972
Paris, éditions du Chêne, 1972 PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan ANDRÉ KERTÉSZ (Hungarian, 1894-1985) _Jour pluvieux, Tokyo_ (installation view)_Rainy day, Tokyo_
1968
Gelatin silver print PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan ANDRÉ KERTÉSZ (Hungarian, 1894-1985) _McDougall Alley, New York _(installation view)1965
Gelatin silver print PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan ANDRÉ KERTÉSZ (Hungarian, 1894-1985) _Washington Square, New York_1954
Gelatin silver print ANDRÉ KERTÉSZ (Hungarian, 1894-1985) _Washington Square, New York _(installation view)1954
Gelatin silver print PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan ANDRÉ KERTÉSZ (Hungarian, 1894-1985) _Washington Square, New York_1954
Gelatin silver print ANDRÉ KERTÉSZ (Hungarian, 1894-1985) _Jardin d’hiver, New York_ (installation view) _Winter Garden, New York_1970
Gelatin silver print PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan ANDRÉ KERTÉSZ (Hungarian, 1894-1985)_Martinique_
1972
Gelatin silver print ANDRÉ KERTÉSZ (Hungarian, 1894-1985) _Soixante ans de photographie _(installation view) _Sixty years of photography_1912-1972
Paris, éditions du Chêne, 1972 PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan ANDRÉ KERTÉSZ (Hungarian, 1894-1985) _Dans la cave, Williamsburg_ (installation view) _In the cellar, Williamsburg_1951
Gelatin silver print PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan ANDRÉ KERTÉSZ (Hungarian, 1894-1985)_Nara, Japan_
1968
Gelatin silver print Text from the exhibition _L’equilibriste, André Kertész_ at Jeu de Paume, Château de ToursHAROLD RILEY
_André Kertész _(installation view) Manchester, The Manchester Collection, 1984 Collection Médiathèque de l’architecture et du patrimoine PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan Installation views of the exhibition _L’equilibriste, André Kertész_ at Jeu de Paume, Château de Tours showing his late Polaroidwork
PHOTOS: Marcus Bunyan ANDRÉ KERTÉSZ (Hungarian, 1894-1985) _12 December 1979 _(installation view)1979
Tirage jet d’encre d’après la reproduction d’un polaroid, 2019 Inkjet print from a reproduction of a polaroid, 2019 PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan ANDRÉ KERTÉSZ (Hungarian, 1894-1985) _Untitled _(installation view)1979-1981
Tirage jet d’encre d’après la reproduction d’un polaroid, 2019 Inkjet print from a reproduction of a polaroid, 2019 PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan ANDRÉ KERTÉSZ (Hungarian, 1894-1985) _June 1979 _(installation view)1979
Tirage jet d’encre d’après la reproduction d’un polaroid, 2019 Inkjet print from a reproduction of a polaroid, 2019 PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan ANDRÉ KERTÉSZ (Hungarian, 1894-1985) _21 June 1979 _(installation view)1979
Tirage jet d’encre d’après la reproduction d’un polaroid, 2019 Inkjet print from a reproduction of a polaroid, 2019 PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan ANDRÉ KERTÉSZ (Hungarian, 1894-1985) _Untitled _(installation view)1979-1981
Tirage jet d’encre d’après la reproduction d’un polaroid, 2019 Inkjet print from a reproduction of a polaroid, 2019 PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan ANDRÉ KERTÉSZ (Hungarian, 1894-1985) _13 August 1979_ (installation view)1979
Tirage jet d’encre d’après la reproduction d’un polaroid, 2019 Inkjet print from a reproduction of a polaroid, 2019 PHOTO: Marcus Bunyan ANDRÉ KERTÉSZ (Hungarian, 1894-1985)_July 3, 1979 _
1979
Tirage jet d’encre d’après la reproduction d’un polaroid, 2019 Inkjet print from a reproduction of a polaroid, 2019 ANDRÉ KERTÉSZ (Hungarian, 1894-1985)_Untitled_
1979-1981
Tirage jet d’encre d’après la reproduction d’un polaroid, 2019 Inkjet print from a reproduction of a polaroid, 2019 ANDRÉ KERTÉSZ (Hungarian, 1894-1985)_13 August_
1983
Tirage jet d’encre d’après la reproduction d’un polaroid, 2019 JEU DE PAUME AT THE CHÂTEAU DE TOURS 25 avenue André Malraux, 37000 Tours PHONE: 02 47 70 88 46Opening hours:
Tuesday – Sunday 2pm – 6pmClosed on Monday
Jeu de Paume at the Château de Tours website LIKE ART BLART ON FACEBOOKBACK TO TOP
-------------------------Previous Entries
------------------------- -------------------------DR MARCUS BUNYAN
Dr Marcus Bunyan is an Australian artist and writer. His art work explores the boundaries of identity and place. He writes Art Blart, a photographic archive and form of cultural memory, which posts mainly photography exhibitions from around the world. He holds a Dr of Philosophy from RMIT University, Melbourne, a Master of Arts (Fine Art Photography) from RMIT University, and a Master of Art Curatorship from the University ofMelbourne.
CONTACT
bunyanth@netspace.net.au ARCHIVE OF ALL AUSTRALIAN ARTISTS AND EXHIBITIONS THAT HAVE APPEARED ON THE BLOG AT THIS LINK ARCHIVE OF ALL INTERNATIONAL ARTISTS AND EXHIBITIONS THAT HAVE APPEARED ON THE BLOG AT THIS LINK MARCUS BUNYAN BLACK AND WHITE ARCHIVE: ‘DOGS, CHICKENS, CATTLE’1994-95
Marcus Bunyan black and white archive: 'Dogs, chickens, cattle'1994-95
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RECENT POSTS
* European art research tour: Pinball art at the Flippermúzeum, Budapest * Exhibition: ‘Photography’s Last Century: The Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee Collection’ at the Metropolitan Museum of Art,New York
* Photographs: Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) Part 1 * European art research tour: Vasarely Museum, Budapest permanent exhibition * Exhibition: ‘Thomas Ruff’ at Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf * Exhibition: ‘William Wegman: Being Human’ at Fotomuseum den Haag, the Netherlands * Photographs: ‘Gunner Andrew Rumann embarkation for Singapore, August 1941’ and other WW2 Australian photographs * Exhibition: ‘Robert Frank – Memories’ at the Fotostiftung Schweiz, Winterthur, Zürich * Exhibition: ‘Acting Out: Cabinet Cards and the Making of Modern Photography’ at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, FortWorth, Texas
* European photographic research tour exhibition: ‘L’equilibriste, André Kertész’ at Jeu de Paume, Château deTours Part 2
* Photographs: ‘Lusannah and Francis Wadsworth Hubbard, Wadsworth Hall, Hiram, Maine; and Moat Mt and Saco River, North Conway N.H.’ * Marcus Bunyan black and white archive: ‘Horses,sheep’, 1994-95
* Marcus Bunyan black and white archive: ‘Dogs, chickens,cattle’, 1994-95
* Exhibition: ‘Gathering Clouds: Photographs from the Nineteenth Century and Today’ at George Eastman Museum, Rochester, NY * Exhibition: ‘Model Aircraft’ at SFO Museum, San Francisco International AirportLASTEST TWEETS
* European art research tour: Pinball art at the Flippermúzeum Budapest wp.me/pn2J2-fx0 #pinballmuseum#Tommy
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* European art research tour: Pinball art at the Flippermúzeum, Budapest wp.me/pn2J2-fx0 #sexism…
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* European art research tour: Pinball art at the Flippermúzeum, Budapest wp.me/pn2J2-fx0 "Ultimately for me,… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…4 days ago
* 'Pathway to extinction': Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney closes doors. "Everyone is a photographer." No t… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…6 days ago
* Exhibition: 'Photography's Last Century' at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York wp.me/pn2J2-fCt … twitter.com/i/web/status/1…1 week ago
* Exhibition: 'Photography's Last Century' at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York wp.me/pn2J2-fCt … twitter.com/i/web/status/1…1 week ago
November 2020
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TOP POSTS
* Exhibition: 'Hold That Pose: Erotic Imagery in 19th Century Photography' at the Kinsey Institute, Bloomington, Indiana Part 2 * Photograph: 'PBY Blister Gunner, Rescue at Rabaul, 1944' by HoraceBristol (1908-1997)
* Exhibition: 'nude men: from 1800 to the present day' at the Leopold Museum, Vienna * Photographs and text: George Platt Lynes and the male nude * Exhibition: 'Hold That Pose: Erotic Imagery in 19th Century Photography' at the Kinsey Institute, Bloomington, Indiana Part 1 * Exhibition: 'Sensuous Steel: Art Deco Automobiles' at The Frist Center for the Visual Arts, Nashville, TN * Exhibition: 'Sensual/Sexual/Social: The Photography of George Platt Lynes' at the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields * Exhibition: 'Masculine / Masculine: The Nude Man in Art from 1800 to the present day' at the Musée d'Orsay, Paris * Exhibition: 'The Naked Truth and More Besides: Nude Photography around 1900' at the Museum for Photography, Berlin * Exhibition: 'Gay Gotham: Art and Underground Culture in New York' at the Museum of the City of New York, New York City Part 1ARCHIVES
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