Images from the Tosca Photography Fund Collection
PHOTOGRAPHY DISCUSSED Edited by Mehmet Dalman and Zelda Cheatle with Riikka Kuittinen
photography discussed
edited by Mehmet dalman & Zelda cheatle with riikka Kuittinen
photography discussed Images from the Tosca Photography Fund Collection essays by
Martin barnes geo dyer david campany brigitte Lardinois Louisa buck tom hunter adam broomberg & oliver chanarin Mark haworth booth
contents
on collecting photography MehMet daLMan
eve arnold in her own Words (From In Retrospect)
From the beginning to the Middle but not yet the end? the tosca photography Fund collection
everything the Matter: photography in the art of helen chadwick
ZeLda cheatLe
Louisa bucK
editors and text contributors
andreas gefelle: supervisions WM hunt
a certain dark uncertainty: discovering Josef sudek’s book Maquette
Living in hell and other Works
Martin barnes
toM hunter
alexandr rodchenko, Khleb (bread), endpaper, c.1930
the hidden promise
siMon baKer
brooMberg and chanarin
the ‘sinister’ photograph: Manuel alvarez bravo’s parábola óptica, 1931
photography – object to idea MarK haWorth-booth
david caMpany
the pLates Jacques henri Lartigue and the discovery of india geoFF dyer
List of illustrations
on collecting photography MehMet DalMan
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My introduction to photography came from the theatre. seeing angus Mcbean’s portraits of sir John gielgud in various shakespearean plays not only captured my attention but soon had me reciting lines from Macbeth and romeo and Juliet. Whilst looking at angus Mcbean photographs i was introduced to Zelda cheatle, in her gallery, by Mark eban, a photographer and friend. Within a short time the idea of a photography fund was born. the collection was to be an expression of what we liked and considered to be works of great merit from the 20th century. We set out to collect predominantly iconic photographs, to make collections of important works and as a consequence make a profit for our investors. We collect rare, predominantly vintage prints with complete provenance. the background story to every print is important to us. this is the first investment fund that focuses exclusively on photography. Many art funds exist and some do have photographs within them. Like with all things exploring new avenues, many lessons have been learnt along the way. the universe of photography is large and like in any inefficient market the opportunities are endless. in terms of capital, the fund is a sensible size. We have been able to buy not only the best of what is available, but we have also been able to carry out extensive research on photographers and collections. eve arnold is a true icon of 20th century photography. she was the first woman to be appointed to Magnum, the prestigious agency set up by henri cartier-bresson, robert capa, george rodger and david seymour. eve arnold’s name immediately summons up old hollywood, conjuring up memories of Marilyn Monroe, clark gable, Marlene dietrich and Joan crawford. arnold’s relationship with Marilyn Monroe was unique; recording her life and moods, from happiness to sadness, from innocence to sexuality. indeed, her studies of the superstars are exceptional. but there is another world of eve arnold. her works of the 1950s and 1960s, recording the american way of life, the Mccarthy era and the civil rights movement, are important
documents of our history. they cover the whole social spectrum, from the deprived to the privileged. arnold’s political work is not confined to the americas or even the West alone. certainly she captures the social structure of england well: from the aristocratic families on a day out shooting to the student riots of the 1960s. her work is global. her less known photographs, taken in the ussr, document the hardship and the devastation endured by ordinary people under communism, and the photographs taken in russian mental hospitals are disturbing yet captivating, if at times difficult to accept. arnold also visited cuba, where she captured the life of a young prostitute in a single photograph in bar girl, cuba. a significant group of alexandr rodchenko photographs form a part of the Fund’s collection of russian photographs. More than an archivist of russian history, he is an avant-garde artist who shaped the very essence of how we see the communist state of russia. he was convinced that non-objective forms should play a key role in collective transformation. his work spanning the soviet era is fundamental to our understanding of russian photography, and indeed russian history. the many photographers in the collection, such as yevgeni Khaldei, el Lissitzky, georgi Zelma and emanuil evzerikhin, demonstrate a diversified russia from pre-revolution 1917, to the emergence of the second World War, the rise of stalin and Lenin up to the 1970’s. in total contrast, sometimes a single photograph defines a photographer or an event better than an entire collection does. tina Modotti’s Mani (hands resting on a shovel), taken in collaboration with Manuel alvarez bravo and under the tutelage of edward Weston, is such a picture. Modotti learnt her craft from the master craftsman himself, who believed in ‘straight photography’. to me, this picture captures the struggle of the peasant life trying to survive. hands crossed over each other, resting on top of the handle of a spade. Fingers lined, nails rough. only a social and political revolution will change the life
of this man. this photograph is not just a documentary record of one worker’s struggle – it goes beyond that. i have found that a full understanding of a photographer’s work comes when you have investigated and discovered their entire life’s work. Look and look again. read all that can be read: their notes, diaries and even the reviews and comments from secondary sources. the rewards for this work are enormous. photography is an accessible medium, yet few have mastered the art of their craft. the ones that have, stand out and are only a handful. to study them, to understand them and thus to acquire their work is but a pleasure. they emerge as interesting people, some with an eye for the obvious, and some for the unusual and provocative. they are intellectuals, social observers, archivists of historical events. they are different because they have something to say that stimulates the mind through the medium of light. it is not what you see that really matters; it’s the consequences of what you see that shape thoughts and vision.
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From the beginning to the Middle but not yet the end ? the tosca photography Fund collection zelDa cheatle
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susan sontag and John berger were writing when i began in photography, in the late 1970’s. their inspired thinking and ways of looking at the medium have shaped thoughts on photography for me, from the beginning. up until then, there was little critical or theoretical text on photography, although plenty of great work was being made. “the camera was invented by Fox talbot in 1839. Within a mere 30 years of its invention as a gadget for an elite, photography was being used for police filing, war reporting, military reconnaissance, pornography, encyclopaedic documentation, family albums, postcards, anthropological records, sentimental moralising, inquisitive probing (the wrongly named ‘candid camera’): aesthetic effects, news reporting and formal portraiture.” susan sontag: on photography, 1977
“It was not until the 20th century and the period between the two world wars that the photograph became the dominant and most ‘natural’ way of referring to appearances. It was then that it replaced the world as immediate testimony. It was the period when photography was thought of as being most transparent, offering direct access to the real: it was, in the capitalist countries, the freest moment of photography. It had been liberated from the limitations of fine art, and it had become a public medium which could be used democratically.” John berger: about LooKing, 1978 now, it would seem that instead of liberation from art, and a democratic tool, the photography that susan sontag refers to, and John berger finds liberating, has become an art form in its own right. photography has come of age. tosca photography Fund collection incorporates many elements; in 2005 i had carte blanche to explore and find exceptional photographs of the 20th century and photographers
whose work i believed in. i have always had a fascination with russian photography, so this was a chance to develop the links to 20th century soviet works. the extensive russian collection incorporates a huge range of material, from the avant-garde of rodchenko to the everyday of Khaldei, from war and propaganda, to soviet life and architecture. i am an admirer and friend of eve arnold, so when the opportunity presented itself to acquire her vintage prints, that was a good acquisition for the Fund. eve arnold’s archive exemplifies the latter half of the 20th century as seen by an intelligent woman, () her pictures speak of social issues and historic moments, the glamour and the glitz of hollywood, the eccentricities of the english or the culture of communist china. some of the great women photographers i have included in the collection – berenice abbott, diane arbus, Lisette Model, tina Modotti – are matched by the great men of the 20th century: edward Weston, paul strand, andre Kertesz, robert Frank, brassaï. it is thrilling to work with these prints and these legendary names. a very difficult thing to decide upon was the small number of 21st century photographers for the Fund; those that showed exceptional talent, a new way of thinking and working, an awareness, and that also made really interesting pictures. tom hunter, Mari Mahr, andreas gefeller and david birkin, utilise large scale and digital possibilities, offering refreshing or challenging or thoughtful points of view. broomberg and chanarin lead the way forward in a new, radical way of dealing with the medium of photography. Within the pages of this catalogue (which reflects our collection) are practitioners and thinkers, artists/photographers, writers and speakers, all of whom are a vibrant part of the photography world now. the collection is full, the work is extraordinary and it has been an enormously good thing to do. the photography Fund was Mehmet dalman’s idea and he has been a wonderful colleague, a devotee of photography, a collector and an inspired person to work with. thank you.
My warmest thanks also go to Martin caiger-smith, brigitte Lardinois, anne Williams, Michael Wilson, valérie Whitacre, association des amis de Jacques henri Lartigue and asociación Manuel Álvarez bravo ac. the photographers, artists, galleries, dealers, writers, museums and institutions have also been a great pleasure to collaborate with. We have been pleased to lend photographs to: Fotomuseum, antwerp; gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon; Jeu de paume, paris; Macba, barcelona; Museo picasso, Malaga; tate Modern, London; and tisch school of the arts, new york. dr cheryl Finley, riikka Kuittinen and Johanna neurath each need special thanks for major, beyond the call of duty, work and advice, talent and time. each of the contributors to this publication warrant a special accolade, so appreciated. all the colleagues at toscafund deserve thanks too, most especially deborah Mills. Last but not least, Jack cheatle for all the jobs undertaken en route. the pictures included here are drawn from the tosca photography Fund collection (except for the Jacques-henri Lartigue photograph cap d'antibes august 1953, illustrating geoff dyer’s text). the accompanying texts are mostly drawn from a lively and heartening conference day at the courtauld, october 2009, Photography: Object to Idea, which we organised to celebrate photography. “Words, comparisons, signs need to create a context for a printed photograph in a comparable way; that is to say, they must mark and leave open diverse approaches. a radical system has to be constructed around the photograph so that it may be seen in terms which are simultaneously personal, political, economic, dramatic, everyday and historic.” John berger, about LooKing, 1978
photography is many different things, to many different people, i hope that here are many which fulfil berger’s theory.
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editors and text contributors
MEHMET DALMAN Following his post-graduate work at the London school of economics, Mehmet dalman worked as a lecturer before embarking on a career in investment banking. it was his passion for the theatre which was the catalyst for his fascination with photography, but whilst living in the Far east and specifically Japan, his interest in photography developed further. his varied, eclectic photographic collection encompasses works where he has a personal interest; particularly history, theatre and film. his investment banking background and continued enthusiasm for photography led him to develop the idea of a photography fund with Zelda cheatle. the inception of the photography fund began in 2005 and was launched in 2007. he has continued to have active involvement in adding important works to the collection.
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ZELDA CHEATLE after studies at the brighton college of art and goldsmiths college in London, and work as a freelance photographer, Zelda cheatle worked at the photographers’ gallery print room. in 1989 she founded the Zelda cheatle gallery, where she exhibited a wide range of international photographers, alongside book publishing under Zelda cheatle press. in 2005 she founded the WMg photography Fund, later tosca photography Fund. throughout her career, she has also lectured, written articles, curated exhibitions and worked as a consultant. she is a trustee of the Koestler trust, and has been a juror on photography awards, most recently for prix pictet and sony World photography awards. MARTIN BARNES Martin barnes is senior curator of photographs for the victoria and albert Museum in London. he began his career as a trainee curator at the v&a in 1995 and combined his interests in photography and museum studies to carve his path in the photographic department of the museum. a graduate of the university of Leicester and the courtauld institute of art, he is especially interested in architecture, 19th century, and contemporary, fine art photography. Martin’s exhibitions for the v&a include ‘diane arbus revelations’ (2005-2006) and ‘twilight: photography in the Magic hour’ (2006), which resulted in a co-authored book drawing on contemporary photographers’ exploration of the visual and psychological effects of twilight. More recently, in 2008, Martin was a judge at the Jerwood photography awards and he wrote the text for New Light (portfolio, 2009), a publication featuring the award winners; and curated the the exhibition ‘shadow catchers: camera-less photography’, exhibited at the v&a in 2010. DR SIMON BAKER dr simon baker is tate’s first curator of photography and international art. he joined tate from the university of nottingham in 2009, where he was associate professor of art history. he has published on surrealism,
photography and contemporary art, and co-curated two exhibitions with professor dawn ades: ‘undercover surrealism’ (hayward gallery, London, 2006); and ‘close-up: proximity and defamiliarisation in art, film and photography’, (Fruitmarket gallery, edinburgh, 2008). DAVID CAMPANY david campany works variously as a photographer, writer, curator, and lecturer. his published works include Photography and Cinema (reaktion, 2008) and Art and Photography (phaidon, 2003) along with essays for many journals and books. he is also a co-founder of pa magazine. his writings cover a broad range of topics but there is a focus on documentary photography, fine art photography, cinema’s relations with photography, and the photographic page. his latest curatorial project is ‘historia en curso’, the large show of hannah collins’ photographs and films for caixaforum, barcelona and Madrid. david is based at the university of Westminster. GEOFF DYER a recipient of many literary awards and fellowships, geoff dyer currently lives in London and is a graduate of corpus christi college, oxford. he is the author of four novels: Paris Trance (abacus, 1998), The Search (hamish hamilton, 1998), The Colour of Memory (cape, 1989), and, most recently, Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi (canongate, 2009) for which he received the bollinger everyman Wodehouse prize for best comic novel and the gQ Writer of the year award. he made his debut with a critical study of John berger, Ways of Telling (pluto press, 1986) and has since written a collection of essays, Anglo-English Attitudes (abacus, 1999) and five genre-defying titles: But Beautiful (cape, 1991)—winner of a 1992 somerset Maugham prize and short-listed for the Mail on sunday/John Llewellyn rhys Memorial prize—The Missing of the Somme (hamish hamilton, 1994), Out of Sheer Rage (Little brown, 1997)—a finalist, in the us, for a national book critics circle award— Yoga For People Who Can’t Be Bothered To Do It (Little brown, 2003)—winner of the 2004 W. h. smith best travel book award—and The Ongoing Moment (Little, brown, 2005)—winner of the icp infinity award for Writing on photography. EVE ARNOLD born in philadelphia, eve arnold has lived and worked in the uK for decades. she was the first american woman to be accepted by Magnum photos, the international co-operative of photographers. With very little formal training, she became a star photographer for both Life magazine and the Sunday Times Magazine of London. she has published and exhibited internationally. her work encompasses a wide range of subjects: from portraits of Marilyn Monroe and Joan crawford to the american civil rights movement, to life in great britain, ussr, cuba, the arab emirates and china. arnold is recognised as one of the great photographers of the 20th century.
LOUISA BUCK Louisa buck is a british art critic, writer, and contemporary art correspondent for the art newspaper. she regularly reviews on bbc radio and tv. in 1998 she wrote Moving Targets: A User’s Guide to British Art Now (tate, 1998)— revised into a second edition in 2007—investigating many of the key players and presences that shaped the british art scene in the 21st century. in 2004 she compiled a report entitled Market Matters: The dynamics of the contemporary art market (arts council england, 2004) for the arts council and in 2005 was a juror for the turner prize. she is also the co-author of Owning Art: The Contemporary Art Collector’s Handbook (cultureshock Media, 2006). a strong advocate of contemporary art, Louisa wrote an essay for the 2007 publication the turner prize and british art (tate), a work which evaluates the prize as a core part of contemporary british culture. her writings about helen chadwick include her 1994 publication something the Matter: helen chadwick, cathy de Monchaux, cornelia parker published by the british council and her essays for the catalogue of the exhibition ‘stilled Lives: helen chadwick’ for the portfolio gallery in 1996. Louisa continues to review and critique contemporary art and galleries, offering critical perspectives on the market and trends of the day. W.M. HUNT W.M. hunt – bill hunt – is a new york-based collector, curator and consultant, a champion of photography. he is a partner with sarah hasted and Joseph Kraeutler in their new venture hasted hunt KraeutLer. W.M. hunt’s photography collection entited ‘dancing bear’ is the subject of a thames & hudson book, after exhibitions in arles, Lausanne and amsterdam. he will receive ‘the vision award’ for leadership from the center for photography at Woodstock later this month. hunt is on the boards of the W. eugene smith Memorial Fund and aipad (the association of international photography art dealers). he teaches at the school of visual arts and produces the ‘your picture …’ panels annually for photo district news. TOM HUNTER tom hunter is an artist currently living and working in London. he graduated from the London college of printing in 1994 and received his Ma from the royal college of art, London in 1997. the following year he was awarded the John Kobal photographic portrait award and in 2006 was the first artist to have a photography show at the national gallery. recently, tom collaborated with the courtauld and the bbc’s culture show on a campaign to buy titian’s diana and actaeon for the nation, producing a photographic reproduction of titian’s work featuring courtauld students along with various actors. tom’s exhibitions include ‘Life and death in hackney’ (White cube, 2000), ‘thoughts of Life and death’ (Manchester art gallery, 2002), ‘Living in hell and other stories’ (the national gallery, 2006), and ‘interior Lives’ (geffrye Museum, 2008). recently, he has exhibited at the Museum of London, arts gallery
London and haunch of venison with several museum exhibitions throughout the uK and europe including stockholm, Madrid, antwerp and edinburgh. ADAM BROOMBERG AND OLIVER CHANARIN adam broomberg and oliver chanarin are uK-based artists who have been collaborating for over a decade. the two have focused on the investigation of the syntax and boundaries of documentary photography. though neither artist started with a traditional training in photography, they have produced prolifically, exhibiting in galleries and museums internationally, and receiving the vic odden award from the royal photographic society. their many publications—TRUST (Westzone publishing, 2000), Ghetto (trolley, 2003), Mr. Mkhize’s Portrait (trolley, 2004), Chicago (steidl verlag, 2006), Fig. (steidl/photoWorKs, 2007), and THE RED HOUSE (steidl editions, 2007)— have spanned subjects such as post-apartheid africa, the militarization of israel, and the archival impulses of colonial, documentary photography. the pair has also lectured for the Ma in photography at the London college of communication and gives regular master classes on photography. currently, broomberg and chanarin are working on a project surrounding the story of a single photograph by an, until recently, unknown iranian photographer. MARK HAWORTH-BOOTH Mark haworth-booth served as a curator at the victoria and albert Museum from 1970 to 2004. as the v&a's curator of photographs from 1977-2004 he worked with some of the greatest photographers of modern times, and organised ‘seeing things’ (2002) and ‘bill brandt: centenary retrospective (2004): vastly popular exhibitions. the acquisitions made to the v&a photography collection, the audience which he encouraged and inspired in photography, and his contribution to the community of photography mark him out as a significant and positive influence. Mark is an honorary research Fellow at the v&a and visiting professor of photography at the university of the arts London. his published work includes Photography: An Independent Art (v&a/princeton university press, 1997) and Things: A Spectrum of Photography 1850-2001 (cape, 2005). Mark is also an editor of the awardwinning photography series exposures published by reaktion books. he is currently curating a centenary retrospective of camille silvy with the Jeu de paume in paris and the national portrait gallery. this will be accompanied by a book in French and english editions titled Camille Silvy (1834-1910): Photographer of Modern Life.
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a certain dark uncertainty’: discovering Josef sudek’s book Maquette
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Fig.1. From the series Window of My atelier, 1944-53. Gelatin-silver print. 16.8 x 12 cm.
MartIn barnes
Josef sudek (1896-1976) was one of the twentieth century’s masters of photography. his iconic images, such as the series Window of My Atelier (1944-53) (fig.1) are poetic statements, to be read as a metaphor for the boundaries between the exterior and interior world, thought and observation, clarity and mystery and the material and the spiritual. his work deals with questions about photography as a mediator between such thresholds. it is concerned with transcending the medium as a tool of observation to become fundamentally about the consciousness of sight, and thereby the act of vision in its most subtle sense. in his 1964 monograph on the artist, Jan rezac noted: ‘Josef sudek transports us to the long lost magic of childhood, love and poetry. sudek’s photographs are a certain dark uncertainty.’ these last words can be read on two levels. on one hand, sudek’s work has a certain (in the sense of ‘largely indescribable’) suggestive quality shown by his fondness for shadowy images and low-key prints. on the other, sudek is certain (in the sense of sure and deliberate) about using a psychologically or spiritually charged darkness to imply a threshold state, where actual certainty is not the aim or meaning of his work. this latter interpretation, though not exclusive of the first, is borne out when examining sudek’s work in depth, looking at a cross-section and sequence of his best and most personal photographs from the long span of his career. as sudek himself often noted, photographs should not attempt to say everything; rather they should indicate where to look for meaning. one of the best opportunities for understanding sudek’s search for meaning is offered in the form of a book maquette compiled by the artist himself around 1965. the images it contains range in date from 1915 to 1965, covering fifty years, the personal distillation of a life’s work. assembled by a man at around seventy years of age, it is heavy with both nostalgia and wisdom. the grey-blue, card-covered scrapbook measures 32cm square and is made of brown pages, containing traces of straw
or hemp. these materials indicate a cheap alternative to more finely manufactured paper. it was probably commercially produced in the 1950s, in post second World War prague where sudek lived and worked, when good stock was difficult to come by. the pages are well-thumbed, and some minor repairs to fix the cover using Japanese paper have been carried out in recent years. inside this unassuming-looking album are eighty-three of sudek’s most precious photographs. the gelatin-silver prints are in four sizes, all contact printed and therefore approximately the same size as the original negatives: 5x4cm; 9x12cm; 10x15cm; and 13x18cm. the photographs are lightly glued or roughly stuck in to the album with double-sided tape. the album was clearly intended as a working model, a serviceable tool, rather than as an aesthetic object in its own right. this maquette must once have occupied the studio, really no more than a wooden shack, where sudek worked for thirty years, and which was described by one close friend as a ‘phantasmagoric mess’. the studio was famous among sudek’s fellow prague artists – writers, poets and musicians – for his ‘music tuesdays’, evening gatherings where he played records by Mozart and bach, as well as the czech composers, smetana, dvořák and Janáček. a short film about sudek, to Live one’s own Life, directed by ewald schorn in 1963, around the time sudek compiled the maquette, has a section conveying the atmosphere one of these intense gatherings. it also shows the artist in his studio space, whistling and organising books by casting them from one pile to the next. no doubt, the maquette was then somewhere among these piles. its provenance can be traced from sudek to the executors of his estate, a czech photography historian, prominent commercial galleries in berlin and new york, a private collector, and presently to the tosca photography Fund collection, London. however, the bulk of sudek’s work has entered the public collections of the Museum of decorative arts in prague and the art gallery of ontario, canada. the maquette therefore is a rare example
outside of the known collections of what appears to be a unique item in sudek’s extant work. sixteen books and monographs were published of sudek’s work during his lifetime, the most complete of which is Josef sudek, Fotographie (1956) containing two-hundred and thirtytwo photographs selected by sudek in roughly chronological order and presented in his several project cycles. although it follows the same concept, the tighter selection of images in the maquette in question here was apparently never published while sudek was alive. it was only in 1996 that it was reproduced as a limited edition by breclav publishers, prague, with tipped in reproductions. books must have held a special significance for sudek as he had trained as a bookbinder and gained his apprentice certificate at the age of seventeen, around the same time that he took up photography. sudek’s credentials as a craftsman extended to his perception of what was, at the time, photography’s questioned status as a fine art; he preferred to describe the medium as ‘just a beautiful trade requiring a certain taste.’ sudek’s reticence and modesty in evaluating photography should not preclude us from describing him nowadays as an artist – or poet of the camera. accompanying the original maquette is a single-sheet caption list, relating to some but not all of the images it contains, written in czech in a forwards-slanting hand, possibly that of sudek’s sister, who assisted in his studio. at the end of this list is warning in sudek’s own distinctive, somewhat jagged, backwards-slanting writing, translating approximately as: ‘do not change the order of the photographs and do not crop (or resize) them! the notes should have black borders on all pages’. evidently, for sudek, the sequence, size and graphic presentation of the images was crucial. under each image in the maquette the title, date and size of the original negative is noted, sometimes in the forwards-slanting hand, and sometimes in sudek’s hand. the dates presumably refer to when the negative was made, and not the print from it in the maquette. in many
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Fig.4 the Invalid’s home / Veterans’ hospital, 1922-27 [double page spread – or paring of images from facing pages]. Gelatin-silver print. Image on left page 8.8 x 7 cm. Image on right page 8.6 x 8.3 cm.
cases, especially for the earlier-dated images, the prints were almost certainly made later. noting the negative size was important for sudek who admired the quality of nineteenth century ‘contact prints’ from glass negatives which, because they were not enlarged, preserved the detail in the image. after about 1940, sudek rarely made enlargements, except for some of his commercial work. the sequence of images in the maquette is largely chronological, opening with a simple study of a tree (a recurrent motif and personal symbol for the artist) The Sluice (1915), followed by The Italian Front (1916-17) (fig.2) made after sudek was called up for military service at the age of sixteen. the very small size of this image belies its significance. the blasted landscape, with its wrecked trees and barbed wire, is desolate. if not the very site, this image no doubt stands for the location where sudek was injured by a grenade splinter in his right shoulder, leading eventually to the amputation of his arm. his response to his wartime experience and this personal catastrophe was complex: his correspondence can be read with various and mixed inflections. alongside self pity, anger, frustration and sadness there is also assumed nonchalance, dark humour and practicality:
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Dear Mother, I wanted to write sooner, but unfortunately I couldn’t since I no longer have my right hand and there was no one here who could write the card for me. ...
Fig.2 The Italian Front, 1916-17. Gelatin-silver print. 3.6 x 5 cm Fig.3 Lonely, 1919-24. Gelatin-silver print. 11.5 x 8.4 cm
after his recovery, sudek’s disability meant he had to abandon bookbinding as a profession and instead enrolled in 1922 to study photography at the school of graphic arts in prague. it is of course tempting, and perhaps sometimes too simplistic, to read an artist’s work in the light of personal trauma. yet the evidence in sudek’s imagery prompts this
15 reading in many cases. it can be detected in the maquette in the many images of trees with broken limbs, and in titles which are at times richly suggestive, such as a single bare tree against a darkening sky titled, Lonely (1919-24) (fig.3). as the sequence of images in the maquette unfolds, one becomes aware of significant pairings from the same series across double pages. these make both formal and conceptual links, such as the shafts of light that seem to emanate from a central source, in more than one example, to illuminate the images on facing pages (fig.4), or in a genealogical coupling of portraits of sudek’s mother and grandfather. there are also less specific overarching subjects throughout, such as the presence of light visible through mist, dust and spray, and the passage of time. the underlying tone is one of lyricism coupled with a penetrating melancholy. the maquette runs through the cycles of key works, and various formal and stylistic trends, from Kolin island (1924-26) (fig.5), showing his facility with the soft-focus and dappled light of pictorialism, to examples of his commercial work, recording glassware and book jacket designs in clean-edged Modernist lines (figs.6). sudek’s individual approach was created by combining these styles with traces of surrealism to create a
Fig.5 Kolin Island (1924-26).Gelatin-silver print. 8.5 x 8.3 cm
bottoM: Fig.6 book Jackets for the
applied arts league, 1932-40. Gelatin-silver print .16.7 x 11.8 cm beloW: Fig.7 st. Vitus Final Works (1924-28). Gelatin-silver print. 9 x 8.5 cm
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distinctive voice of his own; one that was forged in the present, but which was rooted in the past, especially in the labyrinth of memory and the psyche. in the series St. Vitus Final Works (192428) (fig.7), he documented the completion of the cathedral begun in 1344 and finished some six-hundred years later. inside the cathedral he waved cloths stirring the dust in order to ‘see the light’. it is perhaps this series more than any other that encapsulates sudek’s own motto and advice to students: ‘hurry slowly’. his legendary patience, savouring waiting for the right
moment, meant he was particularly suited to inanimate subjects and dealing with notions of stillness. this approach created something both ephemeral and yet monumental in his imagery. read as a microcosm, his still life studies become elemental: an egg on an elliptical dish and a tumbler of water symbolise earth and liquid; or more transcendentally, a ghostly shadow is cast behind a glass by its refracted light (fig.8). even sudek’s nude figure studies evoke still life. they are sculptural, the flesh rendered as marble (fig.9). in sudek’s world, time collapses, or seems to stand still. it is as if language reaches its limits, insufficient to describe this otherworldliness. this is highlighted by the titles accompanying the numerous pictures showing pairings of empty chairs, variously titled unknown, dumb or inarticulate conversations (figs.10, 11) some of these ‘conversations’ take place in the garden with furniture and stage-set-like layouts with surreal
Fig.8 still life with two Glasses (195054). Gelatin-silver print. 23 x 16.5 cm.
Fig.9 nude, 1951-54. Gelatin-silver print. 23 x 16.6 cm.
overtones designed by sudek’s friend, the architect otto rothmayer .their collaboration resulted in the cycle a Walk in the Magic garden (1954-56). sudek responded well to such creative synergies between the arts, and perhaps never more so than with music as his guide. the stage-set quality of some of sudek’s images is partly explained by the fact that they are sometimes recreations of spaces in which meaningful events connected to his personal history took place. his depictions of empty rooms are weighted with memory and personal significance. one such important space was the home of the composer Janáček at huckvaldy in Moravia, where for years sudek made a summertime pilgrimage. at the Janáčeks’ (194650) (fig.12) is a scene encapsulating many of sudek’s visual motifs and suggesting his philosophical concerns: light from a window diffused by a diaphanous curtain, the empty chair implying a lost human presence and a site of artistic creativity. sudek’s work is full of yearning, poetic realism and melancholy detachment: a desired intimacy that is not attainable. it is its sense of uncertainty that is its strength, its ‘certain dark uncertainty’. the maquette could be considered as a musical score with passages of tonal variety, light shade and mood, theme and variation. Music was sudek’s own preferred analogy for photography: If you take photography seriously, you must also get interested in another art form. For me, it is music. this listening to music shows up in my work like a reflection in a mirror. I relax and the world looks less unpleasant, and I can see that all around there is beauty, such as music. in this remarkable maquette we move from the object – a battered scrapbook filled with the record of places visited and things seen over fifty years – to the bigger idea: a visual autobiography of sudek’s inner life in which memories blend with the present in expertly crafted harmony.
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Fig.10 Unknown (Dumb) conversation (1956). Gelatin-silver print. 17.4 x 11.5 cm. Fig.11 Inarticulate conversation in the Magic Garden (1954-59). Gelatin-silver print. 12.3 x 17 cm.
Fig.12 at the Janáčeks’ (1946-50). Gelatin-silver print. 15 x 11 cm.
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alexandr rodchenko, Khleb (bread), endpaper, c.1930 sIMon baKer
“We don’t see what we look at. We don’t see the extraordinary perspectives, the foreshortenings and positions of objects. We who are accustomed to seeing the visual, the accepted, must reveal the world of sight. We must revolutionise our visual reasoning.” Written for the magazine noyvi Lef in august 1928, alexandr rodchenko’s ‘the paths of Modern photography’ (from which the above quote is taken), was part of an ongoing argument with the critic boris Krushner, and was, as chris phillips points out, “rodchenko’s most fully elaborated statement of his convictions about the need to ‘revolutionise’ visual thinking through photography”. however despite his claims that he bought ‘a lot of foreign journals’ and collected photographs, rodchenko reveals a profound sense of isolation from contemporaneous european attitudes to the potential of the camera lens and its associated technologies: “no one” he says, “has written about this matter” and “there are no articles on photography, its tasks and successes.” but while it would be true to say that the common technical language of photography in the 1920s might well have appeared staid, even regressive, to someone versed in the sophisticated strategies of montage and juxtaposition associated with the soviet film-makers dziga vertov and sergei eisenstein, it was certainly not the case that rodchenko was as alone as he feared. rather, that the most sophisticated essays on ‘revolutionising’ visual thinking were taking place in a cultural context that would have been anathema to the didactic ambitions of the arts under soviet communism.
alexandr rodchenko (1891-1956) Khleb. bread (endpaper) c. 1930 Vintage gelatin silver print 15.10 x 11.14
in Western europe, the artists and writers associated with the surrealist movement in paris, and with the so-called ‘new objectivity’ and ‘new vision’ in germany, had much to say about these same priorities for lens-based thought. although rodchenko was aware of, and engaged with the german end of this axis, with Laslò Moholy-nagy and albert renger-patzsch in particular, it was paris that offered the closest analogies with determined and disturbing re-organising of perceptual priorities that rodchenko espoused. although it is also worth considering the fact that both traditions (constructivist and surrealist) can trace their conflicted and distinct lineages to a common point of origin through the concept of ‘defamiliarisation’ set out as early as 1917 by the russian theorist victor shklovsky in his essay ‘art as technique’: “art exists” shklovsky suggests, so “that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony…the technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar’, to make forms difficult.” in paris in the 1920s, forms were being made ‘difficult’ through a marvellous and diverse series of conceptual experiments. the surrealists played their poetic game ‘one in the other’, in which an object was described entirely using the attributes of another, and avant-garde magazines and journals played fast and loose with the significances of forms. in 1922, Man ray published a close-up photograph of Marcel duchamp’s Large glass in the proto-surrealist journal Littérature as a ‘view seen from an aeroplane’ and everywhere in and around film and photography at the time we find cunning juxtapositions of radically different objects looking disturbingly alike through games played with scale and proximity. here is Fernand Léger, writing in 1925: “i filmed a woman’s polished fingernail and enlarged it one hundred times. i had it projected. the stunned audience recognized it at once as an astronomical photograph.” by the end of the decade, close-ups of bats’ ears sat alongside and ‘resembled’ railway sidings seen from the air; mayflies’ wings ‘looked like’ the tops of telegraph poles, and flowers doubled for faces.
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this heady revolution of looking, inspired and explored by the camera was transposed equivalently in surrealism to the praxis of daily life and the more hermetic practices of art-making. salvador dalí, for example, having only recently experimented with attempting to look as a camera does (recording second by second everything that passed his unblinking eyes), wrote the following in 1929 in his essay ‘photographic data’: “the photograph is capable of realising the most complete, scrupulous and moving catalogue that man has ever been able to imagine. From the subtlety of acquaria, to the fastest, most fleeting gestures of wild animals, the photography afforded us a thousand fragmentary images culminating in a dramatised cognitive totalisation…the mere fact of the photographic transposition already implies a total invention: the registering of an unKnoWn reaLity.” Like rodchenko (and yet so completely unlike rodchenko in every other conceivable way), dalí was obsessed with way in which the camera produced vision, as his later collaborations with the photographer brassaï confirmed. dalí’s so-called ‘involuntary sculptures’, which appeared in the surrealist magazine Minotaure in 1933, used brassaï’s camera, to transform an array of everyday objects and materials, close-up and deep in shadow, into ‘automatic’ works of art. cotton wool, toothpaste, metrotickets and even bread, were twisted, moulded and kneaded by dalí into tiny abstract objects that involuntarily assumed sculptural status through the camera lens. For the parisian surrealist, the transposition of one thing to another, the free play of forms, was an end in itself, a manifestation of what was known at the time as the ‘marvellous’: the operation of chance on the act of perception that allowed one thing to become another. but when rodchenko writes, as brilliantly as he does about a ‘revolution’ in visual reasoning, he imagines the act of looking as entirely progressive and focussed: defamiliarisation is a stimulus to active, engaged looking, not an invitation to subversive delirium. but evidently, the ways that the camera
produced new visions from everyday objects, the side-long cousins of rodchenko’s cherished ‘bird’s eye’ and ‘worm’s eye’ view, could not help but inflect his creative process in unexpected ways. it is little more than that most surrealist of things, a coincidence, that both dalí and rodchenko, through the eye of the camera produced stunning visual effects from that most quotidian of materials; bread. but it should be no surprise at all that where, on the one hand, dalí liberated his piece of bread from the economy of usevalue, transforming it alchemically, with brassaï’s help, into a very beautiful and very useless ‘involuntary sculpture’, rodchenko, by contrast, turned sustenance into the basis of something equally useful with his Khleb (bread) endpaper, made c.1930. Where Léger revelled in the mistaken viewers taking his close-up fingernail for the night sky, rodchenko transformed his doughy mixture into the very spit of the classic marbling that adorns the inside covers of antique books. With rodchenko then, useful material bypasses its alternate surrealist destiny – it could so easily be the surface of Jupiter rendered in chrystalline silvery tones and is returned instead to a specific function, albeit as a contribution to a more elevated form of consumption. but neither should it be imagined that even with his scrupulous attention to the mysterious aesthetic of baking, rodchenko was alone in identifying useful decorative forms in the everyday flow of forms. at the same time in France (no-doubt in the very journals to which rodchenko himself subscribed), Laure albinguillot was engaged in a project eventually published as decorative Micrography in which substances and objects as lowly as horses urine and barley roots were magnified, tinted and transformed into the bases of the most sophisticated modern fabric patterns. the surprising convergence of forms and functions at the end of a lens is precisely that aspect of revolutionary visual thinking that rodchenko saw beyond the facile recognition that the world through the lens (as renger-patzsch had shown) was merely ‘beautiful’. defending himself from the accusation that
he had copied renger-patzsch and Moholy-nagy, rodchenko put the difference between their approaches, as he saw it, in a nutshell: “the new, contemporary photography” he said, “‘has a job to do.” and writing soon after, in the paths of Modern photography, rodchenko was equally strident: ‘”to sum up: in order to accustom people to seeing from new viewpoints it is essential to take photographs of everyday, familiar subjects from completely unexpected vantage points and in completely unexpected positions”. rodchenko’s recipe for revolutionary visual reasoning, drawn from the laboratory of life into the melting pot of political ideology, it could be argued, was neither as subversive nor as effective as its surrealist counterparts, and yet, with this singular contribution to history of avant-garde defamiliarisation, rodchenko offers something unique: an aesthetic innovation that worked as well with bread as it did with roses.
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a. rodchenko, ‘the Paths of Modern Photography,’ (trans. J. bowlt), in c. Phillips, ed., Photography in the Modern era: european Documents and critical Writings, 1913-1940, aperture: new York, 1989, p262 Ibid., p256 Ibid., p258 V. shklovsky, ‘art as technique’ (trans. l.t. lemon and M.J. reis), in D. lodge, ed., Modern criticism and theory: a reader, longman: london, 1988, pp16-30 Man ray’s photograph, now called Dust breeding, was published in littérature 5 (new series), Paris, 1922: for more on this see D. ades and s. baker, close-up: proximity and defamiliarisation in art, film and photography, Fruitmarket: edinburgh, 2008 F. léger, ‘autour du ballet Méchanique’ (1924-5), in Fonctions de la Peinture, Gallimard: Paris, 2004, p134 For these images see D. ades and s. baker, op. cit., pp68-9 s. Dalí, ‘Photographic Data’, (trans. Y. shafir), in oui: the Paranoid-critical revolution, exact change: boston, 1998, pp70-71 ‘sculptures Involuntaires’, Minotaure, 3-4, Paris, 1933 l. albin-Guillot, Micrographie Décorative, Paris, 1931: see also; h. Dracol, ‘le Microscope au service de la décoration’ VU, no. 52, March 1929 the reference here is to renger-Patzsch’s 1925 book Die Welt is schön (the World is beautiful), to which rodchenko refers. a. rodchenko, ‘Downright Ignorance or a Mean trick?’ c. Phillips, op. cit., p248. a. rodchenko, ibid., p261.
the ‘sinister’ photograph: Manuel alvarez bravo’s Parábola óptica, 1931
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it is said that towards the end of her life Marilyn Monroe began to veto many of the portrait photos taken of her. increasingly troubled by her own image, she would run her eye over the contact sheets placed before her and run a pen through most of the shots, leaving very few available for publication. exasperated, the more manipulative photographers took to making images the wrong way around, flipping over the negatives before printing and showing them to her. Monroe then would see something more like her own mirror image, the personal rather than public version of her face. she duly accepted many more of these. surreptitiously they would then be reversed back again for the mass media. the story may be apocryphal but it is certainly true that many later photographers, including david bailey, exploited this effective if dubious trick. these days, magazine culture and the publicity industry are less careful about the images they circulate. in the digital age every computer design programme has a ‘flip’ command as standard, a creative tool lending instant flexibility to layout. Look closely and one sees that the faces of the famous appear both ways around, to the extent that it is often difficult to say which is correct. one wonders if this ever troubles the famous themselves, or whether it’s an advantage to not know quite who you are, given the basic unreality of celebrity. What follows here is a set of thoughts about the reversal of images, about what it tells us about photography and what it tells us about looking. reversal has a long history in the making of images. print makers, engravers and typesetters have always had to be intimately familiar with backwardness as a necessary stage in reproduction. When optics were put at the disposal of painters, lenses and concave mirrors were deployed to cast reversed images to be traced off. the effect, as david hockney has noted, was to suddenly flood western painting with depictions of lefthanded people. William henry Fox talbot’s invention of the photographic negative, through which light must pass in order
DaVID caMPanY
to make a positive image on photographic paper, opened up the potential for reversals by design or by accident. in Louis Jacques Mandé daguerre’s version of photography, a flipped image was fixed on a highly polished metal surface. viewers had to adjust to the jewel-like apparition that boasted great detail but in reversed form. it proved less irksome than one might imagine. Most people wanted images of themselves and the daguerreotype duly offered them their familiar mirror image in miniature. the painter edgar degas had experimented with photographic reversal as early as 1895. he combined the procedure with positive/negative reversal in such a way that front/back inside/outside confuse each other to leave the photograph oscillating between realist description and plastic objecthood. as well as using photographs for reference degas also took to painting and drawing only what he saw reflected in a mirror so as not to be overawed by actuality. indeed many of his sketches of ballet dancers were made via those large mirrors that are still a fixture of dance studios. in a note to himself he wrote: “do not permit yourself to paint things except when seen in a mirror in order to habituate yourself to the hatred of trompe l’oeil.” the deliberate reversal of the photograph is not as commonplace as photographs that include mirrors, which have littered the medium’s history from the beginning. Moreover the mirror has recurred in photography’s self-understanding, giving rise to all those metaphors and analogies such as the ‘mirror of nature' and the ‘mirror with a memory’. its glass optics and automatic duplication seems drawn by kinship to the nature of mirrors. a photograph of a reflection is, on one level or another, a reflection on photography. the writer craig owens described it as photography en abyme: the image reproduces at an internal level the fundamental condition of the photograph as a whole. the camera ‘naturally’ produces a double of the world, a substitute of unsurpassed naturalism, so a photo that includes a
mirror doubles the double, defamiliarizing that first replication. at the same time it enables a mastering knowledge of the whole phenomenon, for photographer and viewer. it is photography made ‘self-conscious’ in a very direct sense. Just as a young child turns its empty mimicry of sounds it hears into intentional communication by repeating them (ma-ma, da-da), so the searching photographer seeks out the camera’s own kinds of echo in mirrors and reflections. Most photographers will admit to having pointed the camera at a mirror at an early stage in their explorations, usually to picture their own reflection. While discovering what photography is for them, they also attempt to confirm or recognise themselves as photographers. the two go together in a private moment of self-disclosure made public when the image is printed. producing a ‘mirror image’ by flipping the negative before printing is a peculiar, even perverse, species of manipulation. it keeps the image quite intact while fundamentally changing its relation to reality. it is natural yet unnatural, true yet distorting, ordinary yet extraordinary. as a result it tends toward the uncanny, which was described by sigmund Freud as “that class of frightening thing which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar”. it reveals the world but at the cost of uncertainty, showing us the “familiar and agreeable” but in some way “concealed and kept out of site”. not surprisingly surrealism, with its interest in the uncanny and the unsettling double made great use of the mirror, most famously in the self-portraits of claude cahun. but it made almost no use of the reversed print. a rich and strange exception is Manual alvarez bravo’s parábola óptica (optic parable, 1931). taken in Mexico, we see an optician’s shop window – all glass, reflections and doubling. there are seven eyes and a pair of spectacles in the picture, visual motifs we can read either way around. there is also writing that appears to us the wrong way around (since it is mono-directional written language within an image tends to betray any reversal). are we
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(n/a. Manuel alvarez bravo (1902-2002) Parábola óptica 1931 silver gelatin print
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inside the premises looking out through the reflective glass? no, but we are not fully outside either. We see the shop is called optica Moderna, or Modern optics. the name takes on wider resonance for an image declared a ‘parable’: a photo of one optician’s in particular becomes a meditation on optics and photography in general. in bravo’s image our point of view is made uncertain. the phrase “point of view” in everyday day speech refers to values or opinions about things (“What’s your point of view?”). in photography it refers to where you put the camera in relation to the subject. so it is often tempting to draw a straightforward parallel, between a photographer’s values or opinions about the world and the positions from which they shoot it. there is always some kind of relation but there can be no formula. part of the unspoken fascination of looking at photographs derives from the way we must always negotiate this relationship. this is especially true of bravo’s image since its point of view is so blatantly equivocal. it deprives us of a solid position from which to look by proposing a point of view that is imaginary, as if from within a mirror. Michel Foucault included the imaginary space of the mirror in his suggestive essay ‘of other spaces’. there he compiled a speculative list of what he called social heterotopias, spaces of indefinite or multiple purposes that are understood to be both inside and outside the social order (other heterotopias included the cemetery and the cinema). For Foucault, From the standpoint of the mirror I discover my absence from the place where I am since I see myself over there. starting from this gaze that is, as it were, directed toward me, from the ground of this virtual space that is on the other side of the glass, I come back toward myself; I begin again to direct my eyes toward myself and to reconstitute myself there where I am. the mirror functions as a heterotopia in this respect: it makes this place that I occupy at the moment
when I look at myself in the glass at once absolutely real, connected with all the space that surrounds it, and absolutely unreal, since in order to be perceived it has to pass through this virtual point which is over there. his description certainly offers a productive way to think about the perplexing pleasures of parábola óptica especially since the image does not actually include a mirror as such. it suggests or projects one. in the spirit of the surrealist embrace of chance, the final form of bravo’s image came about by accident. he was checking over some printer’s proofs in readiness for a publication. he saw it had been reversed by mistake but he found he preferred it that way. a moment of uncanny recognition perhaps, in which his image appeared to have found some other intention, some other author, some other point of view beyond his own. thus a photograph already thick with ambiguous duplications was given its final twist by the automatic hand of a technician. bravo took artistic possession of the gesture in 1940 when the front cover of the catalogue for the exposición internacional del surrealismo carried his photograph of a broken stained glass window propped against a vine-covered wall, while the back cover showed the same image in reverse. here the very architecture of the book form with its serial rectos and versos was recruited into the exploration of the photographic medium. i think this is significant. Modernist photographers of all persuasions saw themselves as belonging primarily to the printed page and assumed it would be where and how viewers would encounter their images. the page has exerted a tremendous influence on how photographs are conceived, selected, ordered and presented. bravo’s reversed catalogue cover belongs to an unwritten history of reversal prompted by the formal and graphic possibilities of the page. that history includes the publications of many of the medium’s luminaries. For example bill brandt didn’t think twice about reversing an
image if he felt it would aid the flow or juxtaposition of his photographs. László Moholy-nagy’s book 60 Fotos (1930) is a dizzyingly sustained experiment with left/right positive/negative inversions across its thirty spreads. decades on, surrealism has been somewhat institutionalised but bravo’s image still causes problems. over the years i have encountered it often in publications of one kind or another and many times it has been ‘corrected’ by diligent designers, thus undoing the conspicuous reversal that had made it what is was. it is cautionary tale that hints at why the technique has not been explored more widely. it needs constant vigilance. a few years ago i found myself checking over the proofs of a book about to go to print. a friend leaned over my shoulder and whispered, “you have that robert Mapplethorpe image the wrong way around”. the photo in question was an early selfportrait in which the young photographer leans into the picture from the right, his arm reaching across to the other side of the square frame. My friend showed me roland barthes’ book camera Lucida, in which Mapplethorpe’s appears. sure enough, he leans from the left. nothing in the picture itself signals a reversal: no writing, no buttons or zip fasteners on clothing, no recognisable location. the image cannot declare itself correctly or incorrectly printed. it turned out the reproduction in camera Lucida has always been in error. unusually, barthes’ book has kept the same layout it had when it was first published back in 1980. perhaps the mistake doesn’t matter. or perhaps it does. several writers have remarked on the way Mapplethorpe’s half-open hand resembles the hands in Michelangelo’s painting of the sistine chapel. the bare arms of god and Man reach out to each other across a sublime void. earth is on the left, heaven is on the right. Mapplethorpe placed himself on the right. beyond the accidental, would it be unreasonable to imagine that many of the famous photographs with which we are familiar are the result of crafty reversal? Who would know if for aesthetic reasons edward Weston flipped his celebrated images of peppers or shells? or if a tableau constructed by Jeff Wall looked better printed other way
around? these kinds of reversal would not draw attention to themselves and would go unremarked, carrying on a secret life within our field of vision and right under our noses. certainly the mirror image and the flipped photo are very closely related. but the latter may have less narcissistic origins than the former. Flipping comes not at the founding moment of the taking of the image but later. the taker becomes a maker who doesn’t overidentify with the photo as a slice of the real but sees in the image new and latent possibilities. nevertheless both the mirror and the flip are gestures that can be photography’s path to profound meditation or to a cheap trick. and as we know, with photography the cheap and the profound are never that far apart. 27
Jacques henri Lartigue and the discovery of india
GeoFF DYer
‘You can hardly expect me to fall in love with a photograph.’ JaWaharLaL nehru
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this photograph was taken by Jacques henri Lartigue on the cap d'antibes in 1953. he was almost 60 by then, and had been photographing for half a century. the picture is of a woman – i don't know who – propped up on a lilo or lounger on the terrace of some presumably luxurious hotel or villa. she's wearing a swimsuit and one of those fun wigs made of strips of colored paper that you can buy in party shops. you can't see her eyes, she's wearing a pair of big plastic sunglasses, but there's a hint (and this is the lovely flirty thing about the picture) that she is glancing up at the photographer – which means that she is also glancing up at me, at us – rather than reading the unbelievably serious book in her hands: nehru’s the discovery of india! it looks like it's about 800 pages long and weighs a ton. it wouldn't be anything like the same picture if she was reading bridget Jones's diary which, obviously, hadn't been published back then – but that's another thing about the picture: it could have been taken yesterday, it could have been taken today (especially now that white sunglasses are in vogue again). the book is a touch of genius – either the genius of contrivance or of the moment – but, actually, if any element of the picture were removed (the wig, the glasses, the painted nails or lipstick) it would be thoroughly diminished. that's the thing about all great photos, though. everything in them is essential – even the inessential bits. it occurs to me that another important component of a photograph are the things that are not in it. the inclusion of certain things can not just diminish a photograph but destroy it. in this case – all the more remarkable in a photograph taken in 1953 – the absence of a cigarette (so often considered an accessory of glamour) or ashtray is crucial to its allure and its contemporaneity. a cigarette would ‘date’ or age the photograph as surely as it ages the faces of the people who smoke them. if
there were any evidence of smoking i would have to look away. as it is, i can’t tear my eyes away. i can't stop looking at her. so who is she? but there i go, forgetting one of my own rules about photography, namely that if you look hard enough a photo will always answer your question – even if that answer comes in the form of further questions. Well, whoever she is, she's beautiful. actually, i can't really tell if that's true, for the simple reason that i can't see enough of her face. but she must be beautiful for an equally simple reason: because i'm in love with her. Lartigue, too, i suspect. now, plenty of men have photographed women they love but this picture depicts the moment when you fall in love. that's why the suggestion that she is looking up, meeting our gaze – the photographer’s, mine – is so important: this is the first moment when our eyes meet, the moment that each subsequent meeting of eyes will later contain. if this picture is of a woman Lartigue has been with for ten years it actually proves my point: that look, that meeting of the eyes, still contains the charge of the first unphotographed look from way back when. as for me, since i've only just seen the photo, it's a case of love at first sight. and that, i think, is why Lartigue became a model for so many fashion photographers. the most effective form of subliminal seduction – the best way to sell the dresses or hats featured in photos – is to make men fall in love with the woman wearing them, and photographers are all the time trying to emulate or simulate that feeling. With Lartigue, though, it's for real, and the accessories on offer are what? a daft wig, some zany sunglasses and a hardback of the discovery of india! that's the charm of the picture, its magic. as i said at the beginning, they're all crucial, these ditzy accessories. the book lends a hint, at the very least, of the exotic. and the wigs and glasses give the picture its faint but unmistakable touch of the erotic. if you want to see her without the wig and glasses then you are already starting to undress
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J.h.lartigue © Ministère de la culture – France/aaJhl
her. not that there is anything explicitly sexual about this – it's more that you want to see what she really looks like. in other words, you want an answer to the question the picture insistently teases us with: to what extent is it posed, contrived? i'd love to know. it would probably be possible to find out by consulting one of the many books about Lartigue currently available but i prefer a less scholarly, more direct but – i hope – not too intrusive approach. ‘excusez-moi, mademoiselle. J’espère que je ne vous dérange…’
eve arnold in her own Words (FroM IN RETROSPECT)
i came to photography by accident. a beau who was a keen amateur gave me my first camera and taught me to use it – a forty-dollar rolleicord that took a twelve-exposure roll on a 2 1⁄4 –inch-square format. this was the instrument with which i made my first story that was published. My sole formal education in photography was a six-week course with alexei brodovitch at the new school for social research in new york in 1952. For the rest i am self-taught. Learning by doing turns out to be a good way to educate oneself. since the practitioner doesn’t know what could or shouldn’t be done, she goes ahead and does it, and thus may find a personal approach – primitive perhaps, but fresh, at least to her. the new school course started disastrously for me. sixty ambitious photographers and would-be photographers, in keeping with the socratic method used by the master (“i will not teach, you will learn from each other”), were anxious to impress the master. as art director of harper’s bazaar, he had assignments to hand out. the group used their criticism of my amateur attempts at photography to gain attention for themselves. their criticism was savage. it was infuriating and chilling, but sadly accurate. i felt bruised, but i listened. in a brief hour i learned the serious meaning of a photograph. it was my first step to professionalism. i decided to do the first class assignment – fashion, an alien subject that was without interest to me. i don’t know why i asked dora, my son’s nursemaid, what happened in harlem about fashion. she told me there were an average of three hundred fashion shows a year, with paid audiences. there were two modelling agencies: the sepia and the black & tan, both run by the same man, edward brandford. When i telephoned him he recommended that i come to a deconsecrated church on the following sunday to see the star of his show, “Fabulous” charlotte stribling, who had a huge following.
eve arnold caption to go here Dimensions, 1999 silver gelatin print
it was daunting to bring my pale face into that all-black audience and to get up enough courage to put my camera into their faces. i was anxious; my hands were shaking, from fear not of the people but of my ability to bring forth pictures. these were the days before the real thrust of the civil rights movement. there was then no obvious adversarial stance between the races. people smiled and started to pose for the camera. how could it be otherwise – i was so exposed. i quickly found my way backstage, where there might be a chance to take pictures without people being too aware of me because they would be busy preparing for their appearance onstage. Fabulous had an extraordinary walk. she moved like a golden animal – a leopard, perhaps, or a tiger. When she saw my white face (and black camera), she started to mince the way white models did on catwalks in those days. Lesson number one: pay attention to the intrusion of the camera. it was exasperating photographing that moving target, because i was using flash and the gun wouldn’t fire. somehow i managed to keep the lens open and get an exposure. When the pictures were developed – hallelujah! there were images! there is nothing to equal the excitement of seeing the image emerging from the chemicals. to go from what has been seen and envisioned in the mind to what can be held in the hand is a never-ending delight. but it’s easy to be beguiled by this chemical miracle and thus lose critical judgment of the final result. the photographer has to be careful to avoid the trap of taking the happening itself too seriously. i approached the class the next day with a combination of relief that there were pictures at all and trepidation that the other students would be scathing about them. When Mr. brodovitch put my photos at the bottom of the pile he was collecting, i was sure i was to be taken apart again. not so. When the class got through criticising each other’s photos, brodovitch said he wanted to give the critique on mine himself. he praised the pictures as being fresh, original, a new
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approach to fashion. “you,” he said to me, “do not do class assignments. go back to harlem and do a comprehensive study.” Forty years on, i can see why i was given this advice and why the teacher considered my work fresh. Fashion photography in those days was still hidebound by fairly rigid studio techniques of lighting, posing and retouching. We were beginning to emerge from formal large cameras to smaller, more mobile ones. Most of us were beginning to use the smaller rolleis, but still rigidly on tripods. although i had stumbled onto my technique by accident, my pictures looked freer than the norm of those days. they were handheld, used a reportage approach and depended on the existing light and ambience for their quality. For a year i haunted harlem, spending practically every weekend in a bar, a church hall or a restaurant where the black women came to show their handiwork. the clothing was made either by the models themselves or by local seamstresses, partly as a protest against the white establishment seventh avenue “shmatte” trade. it was one forerunner of the civil rights movement. in addition to the shows themselves to document, there was preparation at home and backstage. there was skin whitening, makeup and hair straightening (the afro and the wig were still to come). i was recording social history, learning to write a caption, a text block, to follow a visual story line through the beginning of the action, the peak of the action and the letdown at the end. i was starting to be able to assess the photogenic and the nonphotogenic. by the end of the year i was reluctant to wind up the project, because i feared i’d never have another idea. as a training tool the harlem story was a godsend, but where to find a publisher for it? in the early fifties no american picture magazine would consider such material for its lily-white pages, even though there was a market in the ten-percent-black population. so what to do with the material? My husband, who
had lived in britain and knew picture post, the great picture magazine, sent the story off to its editor, tom hopkinson, who published eight pages and a cover. i was lucky to have fallen into brodovitch’s design Laboratory. he was able to take a mixed group of photographers ranging from absolute beginners like me to professionals already widely published like avedon and penn and in his own idiosyncratic way prod us on to find ever more original ways to express ourselves. the class started with sixty people. each week found it shrinking, so that at the end of the short semester it was down to thirty. the ones who left wanted a formula, words of wisdom on how to achieve success in a hurry. they didn’t like the idea of pulling ideas out of themselves for which they would have to find techniques to produce pictures; the message was lost on them. those of us who stayed the course learned an important lesson about creative work: there are no prescriptions, no facile answers, there is only concentration and hard work. after the harlem fashion story was published, i ran into Mr. brodovitch at a party. he was pleased when i thanked him and told him how much i had learned from him. he was even more shy and reticent as usual, but asked me to come see him and to bring the published pictures. somehow i never did, and have regretted it. summing up the year’s work, i saw that i had strengthened some old skills and acquired new ones: i was able to abandon the tripod completely and work easily with available light, and thus streamline my operation, which meant toting less equipment so that i could concentrate on basic photography. this meant that when i started to travel it would be easier in every way. oh, yes, and i had gone beyond my forty-dollar rollei. new and better equipment had been earned and was deserved.
eve arnold caption to go here Dimensions, 1999 silver gelatin print
everything the Matter photography in the art of helen chadwick
loUIsa bUcK
My apparatus is a body x sensory systems with which to correlate experience. Photography is my skin. as membrane separating this from that, it fixes the point between, establishing by limit, the envelope in which I am.’ heLen chadWicK, soLiLoQuy oF FLesh, 1989
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helen chadwick caption to go here Dimensions, 1999 silver gelatin print
helen chadwick was an artistic omnivore. her materials ranged from flowers to fur, from cleaning fluids to bronze, all employed to make work that was an extended exploration of self. she investigated who and what we are through a variety of techniques and conceptual frameworks. but this was not autobiographical work. her aim was to embrace and engage with wider issues of identity and what it means to exist in the world: and to this end anything and everything could be used as subject matter. photography was a key medium for chadwick. she used it not only to fix and to establish but also to point to possibilities and to express notions of fluidity, flux and change. Many of the aims and aspirations running through her work are captured in the Wreaths to pleasure (1992-1993), a series of 13 photographs which present glowing clusters of flowers resting on a variety of domestic fluids. both toxic and organic, they pinpoint many of her preoccupations. she called them her “bad blooms”. in so much of her work chadwick specialised in seducing the viewer: dazzling and beguiling with the sumptuousness of her images, hijacking the instincts at the same time as she was engaging with the intellect. she used the process of photography to move between the fluid and the static, regarding photographic emulsion as a half-way-house between the liquid and the material. these images are as much chemical reactions offering up a wide spectrum of possibilities as they are wreaths that are simultaneously commemorative and celebrate. they are petri dishes where cultures can be grown and not just acquired and which mix together the domestic and the conceptual
without privileging one over the other. there are no hierarchies and everything is up for grabs. chadwick called these works her “libidinous bubbles”. this playing with and off the fluidity of the photographic medium had a precursor in one of chadwick’s earlier landmark works: of Mutability, a complex installation shown at the ica in 1986. in one of its elements, the oval court, she blended the scientific and the physical by photographing her body on a photocopier. chadwick worked with the latest technology available as previously photocopiers had not had the capability to produce images of this size and quality. she combined images of her body with those of dead animals, vegetables, frills, furbelows and a smattering of maggots in a magnificent meltdown of the repellent, the beautiful, the sacred and the profane. With the same eagerness with which she embraced a multitude of materials and media, chadwick was also culturally voracious, drawing on an extraordinary range of references whether from science, theory, poetry or popular culture. Many of these were harnessed to her longstanding fascination with the vanitas tradition. the oval court installation presented allegories of time passing, materials on the cusp of rotting or already decayed. all these were fixed in the medium of a photograph which provided not just a means of conveying the image but which also in its very nature offered up additional layers of interpretation and conceptual underpinning. chadwick said: “i have exchanged the moralities of the vanitas, homo or bulla, man or bubble, for a world blown from the passive bubble chamber of photocopier. Light in the flick of an instant, unflinchingly recalls of whatever lies on a glass plate, physicalities reduced to surface, a mere echo of self.” the oval court’s photographic meltdown of animal and mineral is punctuated – almost choreographed – by five gilded spheres representing a classical timeless harmony. chadwick loved doubles and binaries chiming and coming together in unholy alliances, this tension of opposites was crucial to her.
When she first showed Of Mutibility chadwick drew criticism from feminists with the images of her adorned, naked body. partly as a reaction to this, she withdrew her recognisable physical presence from her next series, Viral Landscapes (198889). here she used more intimate but less overt images of magnified cells taken from her cervix, ear, vagina, and mouth. these cellular self-portraits were then further enlarged and laid over landscapes of pembrokeshire coast, where she had spent time on an artist’s residency. she was drawn to the coastline, seeing it as a place of unstable, permeable boundaries – this was at the height of anxiety about the spread of hiv. in viral Landscapes, she used cutting-edge computer imaging technology to produce images of her cell structure, combining these with the painterly effects of physically pouring paint into the sea and dragging the canvas through it. these works combine the performative act with the intimacy of the physical self. they mix nature and culture with a tumultuous, subjective female energy, which also wryly references the macho cultural baggage harnessed to the painterly gesture. chadwick played with both the idea and the actuality of flowers, and all their suggested meanings of domesticity, gentility and femininity which she then subverted to create luscious and provocative images. she loved the hermaphrodite aspect of flowers and the way that their sexual organs are on full display, offering a sense of polymorphous sexuality. this synthesis of sexual difference is given perversely playful form in piss Flowers (1991-1992), a group of 12 sculptures created during an artist’s residency in alberta, canada. these were made by chadwick and her partner david notarius shaping mounds of snow with a daisy cutter and then urinating into them. the results were then painstakingly cast in plaster and then bronze. What emerged was a bizarre expression of gender reversal with the steady female stream creating a tall, craggy erect stamen, while the male scattering of pee forms a flowery corolla. chadwick called the works her “penis-envy farce”, and not only
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are the piss Flowers a sexual congress made manifest in bronze, but could be seen as a delicious debunking – a piss-take, even – of the lofty art historically endorsed monumentality of bronze, all of which is further subverted by the sculptures being spraypainted a uniform snowy gloss white. but perhaps the most outrageous of chadwick’s flowers was cacao, the fountain of liquid chocolate which oozes down an erect central shaft to fart and bubble in a circular pool below. With its almost overwhelming physical presence, cacao is at once delicious, repellent, abject and utterly irresistible: chadwick called it her “warm, dark matter”. cacao and the Wreaths to pleasure series were made at the same time and when they were installed together chadwick saw the Wreaths as being like bubbles which had popped out of the chocolate fountain to land on the surrounding walls. Like so much of chadwick’s work, cacao is immediately communicative and rich in reference and interpretation, it cuts across cultural readings and lays itself open to a wide variety of responses. Wreaths to pleasure also have a cellular feel to them, carrying a sense of evolution, of matter becoming form. they point the way to chadwick’s final group of works, unnatural selection (1996). this series was initiated by a residency at the assisted conception unit at King’s college hospital in London. here she photographed laboratory-generated, unwanted embryos which had been rejected as unfit for implantation. chadwick was interested in the rejection criteria, which is apparently based on the visual appearance of the embryo: the more ‘perfect’ the shape, the greater likelihood of being chosen. the resulting sculptures take the form of 19th century mourning jewellery – a ring, a pendant and a brooch – and thus become a memorial for embryos that will never become babies. they are a celebration of still lives, valued like jewels. created just before chadwick’s own untimely death, these mementos cherish life. in these poignant last works the medium of photography is not only the vehicle for showing the images, but it also plays a key
role in conveying a sense of suspended animation, memory and loss. yet again we see the rich and central role of the photograph within chadwick’s work: encapsulating and holding her ideas in perpetual suspension.
andreas gefeller – supervisions
We all look at hundreds of thousands of photographic images. curators, dealers and editors working in the photography world undoubtedly look at even more. the hope is always that there will be something fresh, the thing we have never seen. as diane arbus said, “My favourite thing is to go where i have never been.” it is rare to encounter a new talent with a compelling vision. it is like venturing into the future and returning with this report: andreas gefeller. gefeller takes us to an unfamiliar place, a destination not seen before. We may recognize it but it seems different. the works are collectively titled Supervisions. these are “groundscapes” – mostly – aggregates of thousands of individual digital photographs. each image is shot from a height of approximately two meters, made as the artist paces off the area to be photographed. he literally maps it. these individual shots are then stitched together in the computer. gefeller offers an intensely detailed view of the world, and it is unique. the viewer knows what he is seeing but senses that it is not actually possible. this is a low flying “bird’s eye” view. the joke would be that the bird would have to be a very fussy stork with total recall. the work is representational, a sort of topographic reportage, and yet, it seems disconcertingly unreal. shooting over and over so close to the ground yields a wide panoramic report full of detail but without perspective. the technique is assured and exact, even virtuosic. the talent and artistry are in gefeller’s “eye” – his uncanny ability to locate spaces that will unfold so stunningly, to imagine that the final supervisions will have such presence and resonance. start with gefeller’s Driving Range (2004) see p. xxx, which seems to be a constellation of white stars lost in an infinite green universe, tiny dots on an endless fairway. it is like a giant void that on close examination is exactly what its title indicates. Lottery Tickets (2004) behaves like a J.M.W. turner abstract painting of a sunset, which you discover is a sweep of little pieces of paper scattered on a cobblestone street. there is a
WM hUnt
sense of this as a giant vortex or wave crashing over the grid of bricks. Racetrack (2004) holds the wall like a giant renaissance trompe l’œil mural. closer up it suddenly presents – without perspective – a galaxy of details from hong Kong newspaper ads for chinese masseuses to torn up betting slips to a discarded evian bottle. his Holocaust Memorial, Berlin (2008) is a giant matrix or diode with small footprints suggesting the slightest presence of people, an unexpected meeting of strict Modernism and humanistic forensic evidence. the work started as analogue and was liberated by digital technology. What gefeller does could not have happened 10 years ago. he was recognized for earlier bodies of work made with film, soMa (utopian landscapes) and halbwertszeiten (radioactive half-Lives), but supervisions signal a quantum leap ahead. the very large size of these photographs adds to their presence and power while making them even more ambiguous and puzzling. “It was a combination of scientific interest and boredom. but seriously: as a child I was very interested in astronomy, and I was fascinated by images of the surfaces of other planets, especially by those images, which showed a lot of details and which had been assembled by piecing together dozens of individual exposures, made by a satellite in orbit, to create a large, mosaic-style tableau. intervieW With the artist, septeMber 2009
indeed there is a direct connection between the nasa moon and Mars “mappings” in gefeller’s work. “twenty five years later (around 1998) I am on a picnic at the river rhine with a friend, who is taking a nap, while I am bored. so I'm starting to survey the ground, taking photos with my Minox camera – I as a satellite and the ground
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beneath me as the alien surface of the planet Mars, except that instead of being hundreds of kilometers above ground, it's only two meters. later, when I cut the contact sheets and assemble them I note that I can really move away from the ground like something flying – not in reality, of course, but in a photographic way.” WWW.JMcoLberg.coM, septeMber 8, 2008.
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Further the work relates to david hockney’s pieced together polaroid landscapes and portraits, but gefeller recognized that late in the process of developing the supervisions. it is worth noting these artists deal with perspective differently; gefeller has none, and hockney plays around with it. the works also have a kinship with tapestries, not only in the scale, but also in the way they are incrementally built up or assembled. the surfaces even appear to have texture too. the systematic back and forth of the artist as he shoots the piece is like the warp and woof of weaving. it is worth noting that as contemporary and innovative as andreas gefeller appears, nothing is new. henry peach robinson and oscar g. rejlander made composited photographs by combining separate negatives almost 150 years ago. “any dodge, trick and conjuration of any kind are open to the photographer's use… It is his imperative duty to avoid the mean, the base and the ugly, and to aim to elevate his subject… and to correct the unpicturesque… a great deal can be done and very beautiful pictures made, by a mixture of the real and the artificial in a picture.” henry peach robinson: pictoriaL eFFect in photography (1867)
in other words, plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. the supervisions reflect the artist’s heightened sensitivity to time, evidence and order. each element of the finished image represents less than a fraction of a second exposure time as he
steps off and, from shoulder height, photographs every square meter below. but this takes a considerable amount of time (even before allowing for the studio time at the computer combining all of these elements). in other works, this is noticeable, in particular, in the lengthening shadows of Parking Site, düsseldorf (2007). it has eadweard Muybridge’s breakthrough perception of time and the running horse. the record of time is history, and it can be found in the celebratory detritus left on the ground after a World cup soccer match in berlin, 07/09/2006 or in the paint on paint on paint of the pollock or basquiat-like graffiti, new york (2007). the more we look the more we see. In Sand Tracks, Miami (2007) the details of the easily identifiable logos on shoes serve as a sort of a “google earth” time capsule, a Miami Moonwalk. there are layers and layers of time. gefeller likes these signs of life. the artist finds the tension between whirling craziness and calm, the chaos of water as it ripples and shimmers playing over the orderly bold black graphic at the bottom of the Swimming Pool, Düsseldorf (2008). similarly the breaking foaming waves oppose the still, transparent patches of sea in Beach, Domburg (2006). the checkerboard pattern subtly but definitively reveals time. consistently gefeller moves the viewer to a new dimension, a previously unseen, even unknown world, itself gridded and squared off on the wall. it is not the intention, but the works reference Modern painting. the above mentioned swimming pool has the graphic simplicity and grace of a hallucinatory and electric agnes Martin; sand tracks acts like an off-white robert ryman; and cdg, paris (2006), a tiled floor area at a set of airlocking doors at charles de gaulle airport, behaves like a minimalist Mark rothko. ultimately it is refreshing and remarkable to find a contemporary artist like andreas gefeller with this kind of visual imagination and ability to translate that to the photographic plane.
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andreas Gefeller, Driving range, 2000?? (printed c. 2000?) medium. measurements: 9.10 x 12.5 inches
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Living in Hell and other Works
toM hUnter
i made the Life and death in hackney series after i left the
story was ‘Living in hell’ which i took for the title of my image and my exhibition in the national gallery in 2006. i looked at the national gallery collection to find how the subject of poverty is represented and discovered a painting by the Le nain brothers, Four Figures at table (17th century). although it is about poverty, there is certain dignity about it: they have their family, they have a pride to them. Fast-forward to hackney in the present day where this woman is left to fester. no family or friends and the local council are completely negligent in their duties to help the helpless. hell seems to be creeping through the very wall and wallpaper of this woman’s home. i looked at the newspaper headlines and what was happening. i also saw the representations of the beautiful english countryside by John constable in the national gallery, creating the myth of the english rural idle. in the Gangland Execution Boys Find Man’s Body in the River (2004) photo (see p.xxx), this scene is disrupted as the boys discover a murdered drug dealer floating in the river. Up before the Beak Angry Swan Guards Bridge after Crash (2004) (see p.xxx) was made after i read about an angry swan in hackney that attacked people on a footbridge. i immediately thought of the greek myth where Zeus, in the shape of a swan, comes down from Mount olympus to rape a woman. this painting is also represented in the national gallery. great artists, whose works are now in the national gallery, were commissioned to paint nudes, but the paintings had to have a moral to the story. in the hackney gazette, the headline Girls Sex Act in Club (2004) (see p.xxx) talks of a modern day morality tale of how we can view naked women and what is deemed acceptable. in the present day, naked women are looked at in the stripper pubs all along hackney road, but rules and morals apply as in the old Masters. Ye Olde Axe (2002) was commissioned by the sunday times Magazine. it is the velazquez painting toilet of venus (1647-51) updated. they made her g-string slightly wider to make it more tasteful.
royal college of art, while living in a squatting community in hackney. i based the works on pre-raphaelite paintings for two main reasons. Firstly, the narrative element to the paintings, i wanted to make work which involved modern day narratives about the lives of the ordinary people around me in hackney. i found the way in which the pre-raphaelites wove narratives into their work, such as ophelia by shakespeare, a very engaging element in the interaction with their paintings. secondly, the notion of “beauty” in the visual arts and how i could make visually beautiful images in an “ugly” modern world. When i first came to London, i worked as a tree surgeon in the royal parks where i had to cut down weeds. this in my mind connected with how squatters, living on wasteland, were perceived as ugly and not worthy subjects. in my work i set out to include all these “ugly” elements and make something beautiful which will seduce the viewer. photographed in a disused warehouse before a rave party, Eve of the Party (2000) captures the moment before thousands of partygoers move in to dance and take drugs. this has all the elements of the “ugly” modern world but comes together in a rather poetic moment as if the subject is in prayer at a beautiful church. it refers to the painting eve of st. agnes by sir John everett Millais (1863). i discovered that thomas hardy took true stories from his local newspaper as inspiration for the horrific stories in his novels. i had been reading the hackney gazette for a number of years, it shows a very disturbing side to modern life in hackney. each week it conveys stories of rape, murder and everyday horrors of life in the big city. so i set out to create a body of work which used the headlines from my local paper. at the same time i was looking at the national gallery’s collection and discovering the stories around their collection of old Masters. i read about an old lady who had been sofa-bound in an insectinfested flat, with nobody looking after her, the headline for the
everything about my work is about hackney as i have lived there for 25 years. it is my life assignment. in 2006 i went off to dublin to do an artist residency for the Museum of Modern art. apparently my grandmother, who died when my father was very young, came from dublin so it is in my history. i did not know what to do once i got there so i headed out to the sea, to a place called Forty Foot. i started reading bits of James Joyce’s ulysses. in it, i found a lovely quote about the scrotum tightening snot green sea, which turned out to be true when i headed into the water. it made me think about the sea, being born, mothers and children. dublin bay is shaped like a womb and is one of the biggest ports in ireland. this made me think about the irish people and how more irish people live outside of ireland than in ireland, they are born into the sea, immigrating outwards to america, canada, england, the whole world. as i travelled around dublin bay, i discovered victorian bathing places with steps and railings going into the sea, some still in use every day, others having been reclaimed by nature. i photographed them with a pinhole camera, using a black sock over the lens and a two second exposure. the pinhole camera photos show the curvature of the earth, and gave the photograph a womb like element. i get people asking me if i’m using new digital scanning techniques, the new cameras and so on. i’ve got a ten pound pinhole camera. to me, it’s not about lenses, it’s not about technology. it’s about capturing something with meaning and describing it with beauty.
caption to go here Dimensions, 1999 silver gelatin print caption to go here Dimensions, 1999 silver gelatin print
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the hidden promise
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brooMberG anD chanarIn
the first image we made together was not a photograph. We were working in Lukole refugee camp in tanzania in august of 2000. at the time the camp was home to 120,000 hutus who had come over the border from rwanda during the genocide and who were now living in a suspended state as refugees. We were interested by Lukole because it was a place that the media had forgotten. in the months just after the genocide in rwanda, the region was crawling with international journalists and photographers, but now six years on, the media pack had moved on. While we were there we met a sign painter called Lenin who we commissioned to render in paint his idea of what a hutu and a tutsi looked like. he said he could tell them apart. although not a photograph it is consistent with the main concerns that have run through the last decade of our work–examining the role of representation in places of trauma and conflict. We were always filled with the suspicion that representation itself doesn’t just document human suffering but is somehow complicit in it– that it’s not despite depiction but partly because of it that the genocide took place in rwanda. in the years since the genocide a number of memorials had been created. a genocide industry had grown up around these museums that dovetail with the fragile tourist economy. We visited one such memorial, a school called Murambi in which 40,000 tutsis, mainly children, lost their lives. the bodies of the victims had been preserved in lime and lay in misshapen rows over the school desks of every classroom. but despite the obvious horror we both felt strangely numb standing before those bodies; dead bodies that looked like images of the dead; more like an installation than a crime scene, already neatly represented. it felt pointless to take a photograph of it. any photograph would be an inadequate representation of what happened there. We started to recognize the event as a crisis of witnessing itself. over the next three years we visited twelve ‘gated communities’ like as Lukole, each one a contemporary ghetto,
closed off from the rest of the world. these included pollsmoor, a maximum security prison in south africa, rene vallejo, a psychiatric hospital in cuba, and Leisure World, home to 40,000 wealthy north american retirees. in each place we would ask the same questions of the people we were photographing…how did you get here? Who is in power? Where do you go to be alone? to make love? to get your teeth fixed?... For many of those we photographed it was their first time in front of a camera. rarely did the subjects of our photographs understand fully the implications of standing in front of our camera – the political, economic or social power that a photograph can wield. the process of portraiture is inevitably rotten. We can easily just replace the role of photographer with the author in Janet Malcolm’s brilliant analysis of the subject- author relationship in “the Journalist and the murderer” in which she argues that “every journalist (read photographer) who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible…. he is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance, or loneliness.” the camera wields a strange sense of authority. over and over again we have seen a sense of naïve trust that subjects (from refugees who have never been photographed before to celebrities who are photographed every day) seem to feel in the presence of a camera. We were aware of this moral impasse and began to make our work with this struggle in mind. the series of self-portraits made in the psychiatric hospital in cuba came out of this dilemma We set up the camera with studio lights on either side of it. Loaded the machine with film and handed over a long release cable to the patients who had volunteered to be photographed. by squeezing the ball on the release cable they were able to take their own photograph. We were not sure how well the patients would understand the process, but as is evident in the photographs they understood perfectly. Mario’s decision to turn his back on the camera and then to trigger the shutter release demonstrates this with style.
there were a few inspirations for this work: ironically stalin’s idea of “one death being a tragedy, a million deaths a statistic”. ryszard Kapuscinski or John hersey’s “hiroshima”… the idea that the complexity and emotional impact of a catastrophe or a conflict can best be rendered by looking at the minute details of an individuals life. 19th century ethnographic photographic techniques (the large format camera, the static pose) but undermined by a fresh line of questioning, an interview which always accompanied the photograph. We met and spoke with everybody who we photographed. but we gradually began to lose faith in this equation. there is a hidden promise every single time a photograph is taken. the subject hopes that being photographed will somehow alleviate the suffering, and we do not live up to that promise at all. With photography, there is always inequality. We wanted to interrupt the one-way flow of power… to try and not always be on the winning side of an image. our photography is about exploring this possibility.
caption to go here Dimensions, 1999 silver gelatin print
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photography – object to idea
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photography has changed very strikingly over the past four decades. these changes have preoccupied me recently and informed my current projects. i gave a lecture recently at the art gallery of ontario in toronto. My topic was ‘the reality effect: questions of photography and truth’. i first gave it as my inaugural lecture as visiting professor of photography at the university of the arts London in, i think, 2003. it opens with some stirring remarks by the war historian geoffrey best. i was present at best’s inaugural lecture as professor of history, given at edinburgh university in 1969. he memorably remarked that “the historian is a citizen too” and that “history is in part a court of posthumous justice: justice to fellow humans who have worked, aspired, suffered and been made to suffer, who have made sacrifices, and been made sacrifices of, in the historic evolution of our kind…this is in effect an extension backward of the principle of present justice”. these majestic words have remained with me ever since. the whole enterprise of photographic history, which has seen such a dramatic expansion in our time, seems to me a kind of belated justice. however, i think there are special reasons for the intensity of this period of discovery, mapping, revaluation, celebration and analysis. it was interesting for me to give my lecture on photography and truth in toronto because some of my leading ideas derive from theorists long-based at the university of toronto. i am thinking particularly of Marshall McLuhan, who worked there for many years alongside important colleagues such as edmund carpenter. i was fascinated to find that McLuhan and i shared a teacher. We both studied english literature at cambridge university under the firebrand literary critic, dr F.r. Leavis – McLuhan in the late 30s and i in the early 60s. Leavis, unusually in his time, was both a subtle close-reader of classic texts and critically engaged with the culture of mass communications. i found the teachings of both Leavis and McLuhan illuminating as i began to study photographic history in the early 1970s – Leavis for his close-reading, McLuhan for the idea that there are ratios among mass media and that each new medium changes the role of its
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predecessor. the dominant medium, on this theory, carries a society’s clichés, the supplanted medium takes on a critical role. Furthermore, the now overtaken medium becomes revealed as precisely that… a medium. previously, because of the importance of the events it described – or the importance of its role in describing events – the medium had been invisible. now, suddenly it was revealed not only as a medium but one determined by human agency – potentially an artistic medium. the key text for me is edmund carpenter’s essay in a small book called they became What they beheld (1973). the writings of McLuhan and carpenter explain what happened when television took over the role of photography and magazines in mass reporting as the 60s turned into the 70s. you could say that 1970 was itself the key date because it was the year of two key exhibitions, both of which i saw: in new york, the Museum of Modern art presented information, curated by Kynaston Mcshine. this was an important early survey of conceptual art. it included many now-famous works, such as ed ruscha’s photo-booklets, including the now-celebrated twentysix gasoline stations. For many conceptual artists photography was the perfect tool for exploring and questioning received ideas. the other exhibition from 1970 was the bill brandt retrospective, curated by John szarkowski, which was shown at the hayward gallery – the first exhibition of photographic art in that then new, excitingly brutalist and avant-garde, building – before touring the uK. the idea that the rise of tv revealed photography as an art fits the facts very neatly. For example, the victoria and albert Museum collected contemporary photography in the 1850s and 1860s, arguably before photography achieved ascendancy as a mass-medium. after a long interval, the v&a began collecting contemporary once more in 1964 – Man ray, bill brandt, cecil beaton, roger Mayne et al. by 1964 – surely not coincidentally – the majority of british homes had televisions: i described this sequence of events in my history of the v&a collection, Photography: An Independent Art (1997).
because photography held the major mass-communications role for so long, the societies which used it – and still use it for many essential purposes – have a profound, often unquestioned, commitment to the idea of photographic truth. i have discovered, after giving my lecture on this subject on a number of occasions, that everyone has a stake in the truthfulness or otherwise of photographs. My lecture confesses to the many times i have been mistaken about photographs, especially pictures by photographers i have worked with closely – for example, don Mccullin, bill brandt, henri cartier-bresson and ansel adams. My talk then moves back into the past to consider roger Fenton, camille silvy and – because of the most recent allegations made about his Falling Militiaman of 1936 – robert capa. if capa’s legendary photograph does not show us the moment at which a Loyalist militiaman died in battle, this may be – as a new york times editorial remarked – a tragedy for capa’s reputation. however, the convincing new (or revived) interpretation of the photograph, as someone falling during military exercises or especially for capa’s camera, is a vindication of the discipline of historical method and its necessary skepticism. photographers have constantly compensated for the technical limitations of their medium. they have also actively conspired to create photographic illusions in the picture press. photo historians have mapped these procedures in detail in the past forty years. the period represents a golden age of photographic scholarship and publishing. as time has gone by, my lecture has got darker and darker. it now takes in the black arts of propaganda of the bush era and the recent attack on civil liberties in the uK – for example, the 2008 law making it illegal to photograph police officers. it also asks if, as photography has become accepted as an art medium – and under pressure from historical analysis, postmodern theory and our familiarity with digital manipulation – the medium has lost some of its reality. it is good, of course, that we are not naive about the reality of photographs, but i believe a desensitisation has also occurred. Let me give you an example.
in 1972 i first saw photographs of the american dustbowl taken by members of the us Farm security administration. i was, like many of my generation, hugely impressed by the ability of a government agency to organise – in a benign form of domestic propaganda – the skilful photography of a national environmental and economic calamity. Walker evans and dorothea Lange are the best known of a distinguished group of photographers working for the agency. My exhibition featured a documentary film season and the dustbowl ballads of Woody guthrie – bob dylan’s mentor and hero. i got to know the stories of the people in evans’s photographs – such as the alabama sharecroppers allie Mae burroughs and her husband Floyd. i learned from James agee’s impassioned text about them, in the book Let us now praise famous men, that Floyd burroughs thought he’d had a good year if he ended up only owing the bank $5. evans photographed their humble cabin with unsparing rigour and deep respect. these photographs became so famous that one eventually appeared on a us post office stamp. the portrait of Floyd burroughs became iconic. but did this mean that it became no longer him? i met this handsome farmer nearly twenty years later in a very unexpected setting – at an elegant dinner to celebrate the opening of a large exhibition about photographic realism at an art gallery. his face looked out at me from the menu card. Floyd burroughs, symbol of the hungry years, was an uncomfortable dining companion for some of us that evening. the incident made me super-sensitive to the way photographs are vulnerable to losing their reality as they move into the art mainstream. photographs of fatal car crashes – for example – can now be shown and interpreted as artistic works almost regardless of their actual content and the meaning of the photographs to those involved in the fatalities. despite this, as the photographs from abu ghraib, and more recently, the teheran demonstrations and the g20 demonstrations, have shown, photography remains not only a credible but an essential
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witness with serious political consequences. i commend paul Lowe’s open-i ‘webinar’ series which opened a few months back with a distinguished international panel discussing authenticity in photojournalism. Much of my lecture now centres on war and i was impressed by the intellectual boldness but also the curatorial care with which Julian stallabrass presented images of war in his timely brighton biennale on the subject. the latest version of my lecture closes with a new and also troubling book by the israeli writer ariella azoulay titled the civil contract of the photograph. the book proposes that we, the receivers of photographs, are morally required to respond. if we have responsibilities as historians to attempt to be good citizens, then we must also, as citizens, remain engaged with the larger world beyond our domestic and professional circles. My lecture, presented in association with ryerson university and the toronto photography seminar on 23 september 2009, can be accessed as an audio podcast at the website of the art gallery of ontario. (you won’t see the photographs i projected on the screen but you’ll know most of them anyway). i will be giving the lecture on photography and truth again i’m sure – it is like the peasant’s soup of cabbage and potatoes which is always the same and always different, the same basic ingredients from year to year but with fresh ones thrown in every time it’s served up. i have another major project – a book and exhibition titled camille silvy (1834-1910): photographer of Modern Life. this is the first ever retrospective of camille silvy and it will honour him in 2010, one hundred years after his death. it is a partnership between the Jeu de paume, paris, and the national portrait gallery in London. (the exhibition will be shown at the npg from 15 July to 24 october 2010). i first encountered silvy’s name and work at the v&a’s landmark exhibition From today painting is dead in 1972. i was not interested in nineteenth century photographs at the time but silvy’s river scene, France (1858) changed all that. Five years later i became responsible for
it and around 300,000 other photographs when i was appointed photo-curator at the v&a. in 1992 the getty published my monograph on the river scene. My new silvy book will be published in French and english editions and will at last – i hope – provide an adequate and accurate survey of his life and work. perhaps, because of the splendid amount of photographic research we have witnessed over the past generation and more, we might be tempted to think that all the major discoveries have been made and so we can now simply critique and theorise the heritage. not so: i have been astonished by the richness of material by silvy that survived, as if it lay patiently in obscurity, awaiting publication in his centenary year. there are precious prints in the v&a. they were owned by an adventurous collector of both fine art and fine photographs, the rev. chauncy hare townshend. townshend – to whom dickens dedicated great expectations – bequeathed his fabulous prints by silvy, Le gray and others to the v&a in 1868. then there are the 12 volumes of the daybooks of silvy’s London studio which were bought by the national portrait gallery in 1904. they contain not only a unique day-by-day record of a great 19th century studio but some 17,000 carte de visite portraits. then there are boxes of proof sheets, also at the v&a, which enable one to elucidate silvy’s working methods – he was an almost cinematic master of studio lighting at a time when all the light was from natural sources. then there is the collection of unpublished photographs kept by silvy’s descendants in France from generation to generation, including letters, business documents, his scrap-book, the unique catalogue of his studio sale and even a dress that appears in cartes de visite portraits of his wife. i published the sale catalogue in the autumn 2009 issue of history of photography and i am thrilled with the handsome book being prepared by the npg. silvy’s descendants speak of their act of preservation as ‘le devoir de mémoire’ – the duty of memory. My experience with silvy shows that there are still great treasures to be discovered and studied.
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Alfred Stieglitz/Clarence White (1864-1946/1871-1925) Miss Mabel C. | c. 1906
Bรถhm Eclipse | 1914
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Moisei Nappelbaum (1869-1958) Ida and Frederika | 1920s
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Ida Nappelbaum (1900-1992) Far lEFt :
Olga Nappelbaum with friend Rakhil | 1926
lEFt : Olga Nappelbaum with friend, Esfeed Efros | 1926 rIght:
Olga Nappelbaum and Vladimir Grutsov (film-camera operator) | 1926
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G. Bodrov (fl. 20th century) two women hugging | Mid-20th century
Max Alpert (1899-1980) Construction of the Dneprostroy Dam | 1928
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Max Alpert (1899-1980) Fergana Canal | 1939
Arkady Shishkin (1899-1985) the Sower | 1924
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Georgi Zelma (1906-1984) LEFT AND OPPOSITE :
asia | 1929
Shaman, Central
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Vkhutemas Workshops LEFT: Vkhutemas V-1(C)-15 (4) | 1920–1930
Vkhutemas IV-5-43 | 1920– 1930
RIGHT:
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Vkhutemas Workshops LEFT: Brigada aSNOVa, Dvorets Iskusstva. aSNOVa Brigade, Palace of art | 1920–1930 RIGHT:
Vkhutemas IV-5-52 | 1921-29
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RIGHT:
Vkhutemas Workshops
aSNOVa Brigade. Design for the Palace of Congress | 1920-1930
Alexandr Rodchenko (18911956)
LEFT:
Worker's club' installation at the 1925 Decorative arts exhibition in Paris | 1925
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Alexandr Rodchenko LEFT:
Samozveri | 1926
Photomontage for Mayakovsky’s poem, ‘About This’ | 1923
RIGHT:
Alexandr Rodchenko (1891-1956) Woman with a baby carriage | 1928
LEFT:
Cigarette girl, Street seller, Pushkinskaya Square | 1924 OPPOSITE :
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Alexandr Rodchenko (1891-1956) Mayakovsky with Scottie | 1924
Alexandr Rodchenko (1891-1956) Portrait of Mayakovsky | 1924
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Alexandr Rodchenko (1891-1956) OPPOSItE : rIght:
Portrait of Lili Brik | 1924
Portrait of Varvara Stepanova | 1925
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Alexandr Rodchenko (1891-1956) Notebook and Leica | 1930
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Yevgeni Khaldei (1917-1997) raising the Soviet ag over reichstag | 1945
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Josef Sudek (1896-1976) LEFT:
lorem Ipsum | 1234
OPPOSITE :
lorem Ipsum | 1234
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Josef Sudek (1896-1976) Untitled (trees with reection) c. 1922
LEFT:
landscape panorama | 20th century
OPPOSITE :
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Else Thalemann (1901-1985) Situation/Monument | c. 1930
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Else Thalemann (1901-1985) auf Einer Brucke. architektur | c. 1930
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Else Thalemann (1901-1985) Eiel tower | c. 1930
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Ellen Auerbach Schwarzer Walfisch I | 1930
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Werner David Feist Untitled | 1930
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Andre Kertesz (1894-1985) Untitled (Portrait of a woman) | 1928
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Andre Kertesz (1894-1985) le Mur de l’École Militaire | 1926
RIGHT AND OPPOSITE :
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Andre Kertesz (1894-1985) LEFT TO RIGHT: July 3, 1979 | August 16, 1979 | May 3, 1979
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aNtaNaS SUtkUS,
Marathon in the Universiteto Street, 1959 Silver gelatin photograph, 15.7 x 19.7 inches
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Antanas Sutkus (Born 1939) LEFT:
the Village ladies | 1973
RIGHT:
Cavaliers. Salakas | 1964
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Mari Mahr (Born 1941) autograph | 1984
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Mari Mahr (Born 1941) Scholarly Virtues – actual Conversations 1, 2, 3. | 1988
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Mari Mahr (Born 1941) Scenes from the life of a Warrior – 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 | 1988
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Tina Modotti (1896-1942) LEFT :
Untitled (three hammocks in the wind) | 1926-28
OPPOSITE :
three Ways to Wear a Serape | 1927-28
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Edward Weston (1886-1958) Portrait of tina Modotti | c. 1923
Paul Strand (1890-1976) ranchos de taos, Church, New Mexico | 1931
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Manuel Alvarez Bravo (1902-2002) Black Mirror | 1947
Manuel Alvarez Bravo (1902-2002) OPPOSITE :
absent portrait | 1945
the Unbandaged, Broken. la Desvendada | 1938
RIGHT:
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Manuel Alvarez Bravo (1902-2002) LEFT: Dreams Ought to be Believed | 1966 OPPOSITE :
Sparrow, skylight | 1938-39
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Manuel Alvarez Bravo (1902-2002) LEFT: the accordionist. Acordeonista | 1990
Tina Modotti / Manuel Alvarez Bravo (1896-1942/1902-2002) ABOVE LEFT AND RIGHT :
Mani S.D. (hands resting on a shovel) | 1926
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Javier Silva Meinel (Born 1949) la Madona Del rio, Palometas, Iquitos, Peru | 2004 Palometas, Iquitos, Peru | 2003 Dorado II, Iquitos, Peru | 2003 anaconda, Iquitos, Peru | 2003
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Paul Strand (1890-1976) Young ali, kalata el kobra, Delta, Egypt | 1959
John-David Samblanet Marocco | 2006
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Brassa誰 (1899-1984) Untitled (lightning) | Date unknown
LEFT:
Untitled (night view of posters on wall) | c. 1932
OPPOSITE :
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Brassa誰 (1899-1984) LEFT: Prostitutes in a bar, Boulevard rochechouart, Montmartre, Paris | c. 1932
a Prostitute Playing russian Billiards, Boulevard rochechouart, Montmartre | c. 1932
OPPOSITE :
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Edouard Boubat (1923-1999) lido Bar | 1948
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Jean-Philippe Charbonnier (1921-2004) OPPOSITE AND RIGHT : Centenaire des “ambassadeurs”, Paris | 1949
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Jules Aarons (Born 1921) LEFT:
two men at a café | c. 1955 Child through a fishtank | c. 1955
OPPOSITE :
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Sabine Weiss (Born 1924) Paris | c. 1955
Robert Frank (born 1924) Paris | 1951
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Alfred Eisenstaedt (1898-1995) Busy sidewalk café, from “the Parisians”, Paris, France | 1963 OPPOSITE :
RIGHT: Couple embracing at golfe Drouant, from “the Parisians”, Paris, France | 1963
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Alfred Eisenstaedt (1898-1995) LEFT: golfe Drouant, from “the Parisians”, Paris, France | 1963 OPPOSITE : girl dances with two boys at golfe Drouant, from “the Parisians”, Paris, France | 1963
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Karl Struss (1886-1981) St. Nickolas avenue, South from 146th Street | 1911
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Berenice Abbott (1898-1991) OPPOSITE :
Night Scene, Manhattan. From the 10 Photographs Portfolio | 1976
RIGHT : Exchange Place. From the 10 Photographs Portfolio | 1976
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Berenice Abbott (1898-1991) RIGHT: James Joyce. From the 10 Photographs Portfolio | 1976 OPPOSITE FAR LEFT: Princess Eugéne Murat. From the 10 Photographs Portfolio | 1976
Eugéne atget. From the 10 Photographs Portfolio | 1976
OPPOSITE LEFT:
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Robert Frank (born 1924) St. louis | 1947
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Robert Frank (born 1924) LEFT:
Mary in bed (pregnant) | c. 1950
OPPOSITE : Mary breastfeeding andrea while Pablo touches andrea’s hair in bed | c. 1954
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Robert Frank (born 1924) LEFT:
andrea in a long dress | c. 1954
andrea lifting her dress and looking at a young german shepherd | c. 1957
OPPOSITE :
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Eve Arnold (born 1234) Outside a premiere at the Metropolitan Opera, New York | 1950
OPPOSITE :
Josephine Baker, harlem | 1950
RIGHT:
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Eve Arnold (born 1234) LEFT:
Marilyn Monroe | 1955
RIGHT:
Jean Simmons | 1965
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Eve Arnold (born 1234) Black Muslim children at the Metropolitan Museum in New York | 1961
OPPOSITE :
RIGHT:
Malcolm X | 1961
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Eve Arnold (born 1234) Prue and Mabel ("Mogg") Mitchell, spinster sisters, in their garden in Chagford, Devon | 1965
OPPOSITE :
RIGHT: a midsummer jouney from the Inner hebrides to Mull in Scotland | 1963
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Lisette Model (1901-1983) Sammy’s Bar | 1944 anoymous pic of lisette Model | 1944
OPPOSITE :
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Bob Willoughby (1927-2009) ABOVE : Big Jay McNeely playing sax while lying on his back. the los angeles Olympic auditorium | 1953
Frank Sinatra singing at University high School | 1955
OPPOSITE :
Louis Faurer (1916-2001) Eddie, New York | 1948 (printed 1980)
LEFT:
Philadelphia (hand holding flower) | 1944
OPPOSITE :
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Louis Faurer (1916-2001) twins, New York | 1948 (printed 1980)
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Anonymous LEFT: lunar Surveyor Mosaic. Photographs taken on the surface of the Moon by NaSa. Day 154. Survey C. Sectors 6 and 7. | 1966
lunar Surveyor Mosaic. Photographs taken on the surface of the Moon by NaSa. Day 324. Survey W. Sectors 13 and 14. | 1966
RIGHT:
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Diane Arbus (1923-1971) Puerto rican Woman with a beauty mark | 1965
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Tony Ray-Jones (1941-1972) LEFT:
Eton | 1967
OPPOSITE :
Derby Day, Epsom | 1967
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Bruce Davidson (Born 1933) LEFT: Untitled (From Welsh Miners) | 1965
Untitled (Coal Miner with infant, South Wales) | 1970
OPPOSITE :
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David Bailey (Born 1938) David Bailey’s Box of Pin-Ups; the kray Brothers: reg Charlie ron | 1965
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David Bailey (Born 1938) David Bailey’s Box of Pin-Ups; Jean Shrimpton | 1965 David Bailey’s Box of Pin-Ups; Mick Jagger | 1965
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David Bailey (Born 1938) David Bailey’s Box of Pin-Ups; Michael Caine | 1965 David Bailey’s Box of Pin-Ups; andrew Oldham | 1965
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Helen Chadwick (1953 – 1996) Wretaths to Pleasure | 1992-1994
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Tom Hunter (b. 1965) Father and Son run ÂŁ2m Vice Racket from Sauna | 2005
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Tom Hunter (b. 1965) OPPOSITE TOP :
Sex Assault | 2004
Gangland Execution Boys find Mans Body in River | 2003
OPPOSITE BELOW :
Up before the Beak Angry Swan Guards Bridge | 2003
RIGHT:
FOLLOWING PAGES :
Tom Hunter (b. 1965) LEFT:
Bull Island | 2009?
RIGHT:
Forty Foot | 2009?
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Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin all images from Ghetto | 2003?
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Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin all images from Ghetto | 2003?
Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin all images from Ghetto | 2003?
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Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin all images from Ghetto | 2003?
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Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin From Ghetto | 2003?
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David Birkin (born 1977) OPPOSITE AND OVERLEAF:
Confessions | 2007-10
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Guido Castagnoli Street to the main station, Shimada City, Japan | 2007
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List of i 206
images 207
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