The Donora Digital Collection

 

I stumbled across this digital collection quite by accident when researching something entirely different and was amazed by some of the powerful images that reflect life in a Pennsylvanian industrial town.

 

“The month of October, 2008 marks the 60th Anniversary of a 1948 Donora smog incident that claimed the lives of at least 21 people and sickened thousands. All signs pointed towards the emissions from the world’s largest zinc mill and a weather inversion that encompassed the geographical horseshoe of the Mon Valley. Sixty years later a museum opened on McKean Avenue to preserve and share the unique history of Donora, PA and to celebrate the clean air movement that followed. This Digital Collection is the site of a special exhibit devoted to the arduous process of digitally preserving and cataloging hundreds of the primary source materials that have survived the test of time. These materials provide special insight into industrial and social aspects of American life in southwestern Pennsylvania and date from the beginning of Donora at the turn of the 20th century up to the current period.”

Text from the The Donora Digital Collection website

 

 

‘A shot of the Wire Works Acid Plant from across the Monongahela River’
nd

 

 

‘Looking toward the Zinc Works in Donora, PA from Webster, PA’
1948

 

 

‘Open Hearth and Rod Yard’
nd

 

 

‘Wire workers in mill near large cables, August, 29, 1925′

 

 

‘Acid storage area’
nd

 

 

‘Workers among huge gear mechanisms’
nd

 

 

‘Workers and crane inside the Wire Works, July 14, 1925′

 

 

‘Man in suit underneath train’
nd

 

The last photograph is one of the most painful and emotive I have seen in a long time. ‘Man in suit underneath train’.

Sitting in a suit under a train this photograph says nothing but everything about this man’s life. He sits in the dirt, crumpled suit, dirty shirt, filthy hands, head bowed, one armed with his left suit sleeve hanging limply at his side, eyes daubed with dark rings staring straight at the camera under glowering lids. This is me this is who I am! he declares. Sitting in the dirt in a suit under a train.

Perhaps he was a odd job worker in the town, but he doesn’t wear a labourers clothes and the suit is incongruous with his dirty hand. Perhaps he was a hobo hopping from town to town on the railcars hoping not to get caught. From the photograph it looks like the 1920s. The dark shadow of the train looms menacingly over him and two steel poles lay abandoned by the tracks. I can’t make out what the writing says directly above him and I am unsure whether it is written on the side of the train or on the photograph itself. But it is his text, the marking an anonymous epitaph for his life: “I was here, I lived.”

And I thank God he did.

 

 

The Donora Digital Collection
Donora, PA: From its Origins to the Nationwide Case for Clean Air

The Donora Digital Collection website

The work of Eric Tabuchi

 

One of my favourite artists at the moment is Frenchman Eric Tabuchi. I don’t know a lot about him as there is only an exhibition list on his website and no other details but this does not matter. His work speaks for him. Taken in simple formalist objective style his colour photographs tell it like it is, speaking the images of existence in a clear and precise manner. His work ‘en serie’ are conceptually based but the images themselves are straight forward, images that depict the ironies and degradations of environments and artifacts without moral judgement. His photographs have links back to the formalist style of the German Bernd and Hiller Becher whose work has influenced many contemporary photographers (including Andreas Gursky, Candid Hofer, Thomas Ruff and Thomas Struth amongst others).

Tabuchi’s latest artist book ‘Twentysix Abandoned Gas Stations‘ is a contemporary reprise on the very first modern artist’s book ‘Twentysix Gasoline Stations‘ produced by Ed Ruscha in 1963. Using minimalist notions of repetitive sequence and seriality Tabuchi addresses a contemporary landscape full of abandoned technologies, toxic environments and architectural wastelands foretelling the badlands of future worlds. As in all his bodies of work the body of the human is absent, the sense of corporeal distance from object to viewer devastating. His constructions, both photographic and environmental, speak eloquently to the human absence presence.

He is surely a photographer to remember.

 

 

Eric Tabuchi
‘Station #1′ from the book ‘Twentysix Abandoned Gas Stations‘
2002

 

 

Eric Tabuchi
‘Station #21′ from the book ‘Twentysix Abandoned Gas Stations‘
2008

 

 

Eric Tabuchi
‘Station #22′ from the book ‘Twentysix Abandoned Gas Stations‘
2006

 

 

Eric Tabuchi
‘Stock Options #3′ from the Monument series
2007

 

 

Eric Tabuchi
‘Two Windows’ from the Road Signs series
2006

 

 

Eric Tabuchi
‘Untitled’ from the Untitled Landscape series
2005

 

 

Eric Tabuchi
‘Untitled’ from the Various Ruins series
2007

 

 

Eric Tabuchi
‘Untitled’ from the Work in Progress series
2007

 

 

Book: Twentysix Abandoned Gas Stations

Eric Tabuchi website

All images copyright Eric Tabuchi

Exhibition: ‘Charting the Canyon: Photographs by Klett and Wolfe’ at Phoenix Art Museum

Exhibition dates: 21st March – 12th July, 2009

 

An interesting concept but I’m not entirely sure that the images are successful. Some work better than others. Perhaps it is not necessary for there to be an absolute registration across time and space, the continuation of a horizon line for example. The famous photographic collages by David Hockney are a case in point. It doesn’t matter when the images were made, whether there is a second or a century between compositions. The camera and the artist are always selective, the camera always privileging one view over another view: all images are therefore constructions. Hockney pushes the boundaries of these constructions whereas I don’t think these images do to anywhere near the same extent. There are some vaguely interesting videos on the Phoenix Art Museum website about the starting point, discovery, process and collaboration for the work.

 

 

Mark Klett and Byron Wolfe.
‘Rock formations on the Road to Lee’s Ferry, Arizona’
2008.

Left inset: William Bell. ‘Plateau North of the Colorado River near the Paria’ 1872 (courtesy National Archives)
Right inset: William Bell ‘Headlands North of the Colorado River’ 1872 (courtesy National Archives)

 

 ”Arizona’s Grand Canyon – natural wonder, national park, tourist attraction, sacred land – is perhaps the world’s best “photo op.” The collaborative photographic team of Mark Klett and Byron Wolfe have set out to explore this celebrated place of dramatic beauty, and Phoenix Art Museum is proud to be the first to show a comprehensive look at their powerful, thoughtful, and playful approach to the Grand Canyon.

Drawn from two seasons of fieldwork, Charting the Canyon will include about 30 photographs ranging from a modest 20 by 20-inch print to a panorama nearly 10 feet wide. Mark Klett, a Regents Professor at Arizona State University, and Byron Wolfe, a former student of Klett’s who is now a Lantis’ University Professor teaches at California State University at Chico, have been interested in rephotographing historic images since their collaboration began in 1997.

Now the pair combines their own color photographs with imagery by 19th-century photographer J. K. Hillers and artist William Holmes and by Ansel Adams and Edward Weston, who worked at the Canyon in the early 20th century. Klett and Wolfe respond to the historic images and the Canyon itself, yielding artworks that reconsider an icon, challenge how we perceive the land, and bring a new perspective to its portrayals.

Charting the Canyon offers visual delights: the humorous layering of a 19th-century drawing with contemporary photographic details, the extension of an Ansel Adams view into a serene panorama, and the illusion of three-dimensions with a stereopticon viewer built for the twenty-first century, among others to be discovered in this unique exhibition.”

Text from the Phoenix Art Museum website

 

 

Mark Klett and Byron Wolfe
‘Seventy-one Years after Edward Weston’s Storm, Arizona from Marble Canyon Trading Post’
2007

Left: Edward Weston. ‘Storm, Arizona’ 1941 (courtesy of the Center for Creative Photography, Tucson).

 

 

Mark Klett and Byron Wolfe
‘Desert View: from the window of the Watchtower gift shop’
2008

 

“In 2007, Mark Klett, a Regents Professor at Arizona State University, and Byron Wolfe, a former student of Klett’s and now a Lantis’ University Professor at California State University at Chico, headed to the Grand Canyon to re-envision the many images made at the site over the last 150 years. During two summers of field work, they identified the exact locations portrayed in early photographs and drawings. From those geographic points they created new photographs that incorporate the original view. Digital versions of the historic images are inserted within the contemporary photograph, creating combined images that convey the big picture surrounding earlier artists’ depicted view. 

Working collaboratively, Klett and Wolfe challenge one another to invent new ways to integrate the historic images they discover. Charting the Canyon reveals their combined invention, offering provocative ways to think about the land, its history and our role in seeing it.

Charting the Canyon includes 26 photographs ranging from a modest 20 by 20–inch print to a panorama 10 feet wide. Exhibition highlights include: 
The humorous layering of a 19th-century drawing with contemporary photographic details. 
The extension of an Ansel Adams view into a serene panorama. 
The pairing of a black-and-white Edward Weston view with a color image made 66 years later. 
The illusion of three-dimensions with a stereopticon viewer built for the 21st century.”

Text from Artdaily.org website

 

 

Mark Klett and Byron Wolfe
‘Point Imperial on the Grand Canyon, 50% Ansel Adams, 50% Red Wall Limestone’
2008

Left: Ansel Adams. ‘Grand Canyon National Park, Arizona’ 1941

 

 

Mark Klett and Byron Wolfe
‘Panorama from Hopi Point on the Grand Canyon, made over two days extending the view of Ansel Adams’
2007 

Right: Ansel Adams. ‘Grand Canyon National Park, Arizona’ 1941 (Courtesy of the Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, AZ)

 

“We’re intentionally using playfulness as a way to extend ideas, a kind of free-form exploration that puts a premium on creative solutions to complex space and time problems. Many of the things we’re trying to do seemed impossible at first – like merging several views of a scene from different times into a continuous space, or extending one photo’s frame to include spaces from multiple vantage points.”

Klett and Wolfes process of inserting historic views within contemporary photographs, or linking a number of different historic views, emphasizes the possibilities of multiple interpretations of a single landscape. If we look at a photograph of the Grand Canyon, we bring to it our own cultural notions, myths, and memories, and read it based on our personal point of view. By bringing together images made throughout time, Klett and Wolfe remind us that any terrain is not only what we see and think about it in this present moment, but it is part of a long evolution of thought and use that includes the past and future, as well. The team’s photographs present time as overlapping layers, much like the stratigraphic rock of the Canyon. This unconventional presentation encourages viewers to see time as a flexible construction.”

Text by Rebecca Senf, Assistant Curator of photography, Phoenix Art Museum from the exhibition brochure

 

 

Mark Klett and Byron Wolfe
‘Details from the view at Point Sublime on the north rim of the Grand Canyon, based on the panoramic drawing by William Holmes (1882)’
2007

Lithograph by William Henry Holmes, 1882. From Clarence Dutton, Atlas to Accompany the Monograph on the Tertiary History of the Grand Cañon District. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress).

 

 

David Hockney
‘Pearblossom Highway., 11 – 18th April 1986 #2′
1986

 

 

Phoenix Art Museum

McDowell Road & Central Avenue
1625 N. Central Avenue
Phoenix, AZ 85004

Opening hours:
Closed Mondays and major holidays
Tuesday, 10am-9pm
Wednesday-Sunday, 10am-5pm
First Friday Evenings, 6-10pm

Phoenix Museum of Art website

Byron Wolfe website

Review: ‘Mark Strizic: Melbourne – A City in Transition (Rare Silver Gelatin Photographs) at Gallery 101, Melbourne

Exhibition dates: 8th April – 2nd May 2009

 

 

Mark Strizic
‘Eastern Market Destruction – 1′
1960

 

“‘Melbourne – A City in Transition’ is a collection of iconic images of Melbourne city life taken with a sympathetic eye for humanist detail. Strizic accurately depicts the joys and hardships experienced in everyday life with a fresh and living memory. He successfully captures the vicarious essence of suburban life. His portrait of Melbourne includes the city, harbour and river banks – streets and trams, pavements, arcades and lanes, stations and bridges, billboards and facades and public sculpture. We see people going about their daily activities – commuting, shopping at leisure, trading, embracing, conversing, reading the newspaper and visiting the beach. Other works record the demolition and construction of building sites and the changing face of Melbourne, both in society and the urban landscape.”

Text from the exhibition flyer

 

“In these eloquent studies of light and shadow, Strizic finds beauty in the commonplace – Melbourne’s desolate lanes, street paving, derelict ferries – adopting interesting camera angles, viewpoints and cropping. Through his images, this visual humanist teaches us to observe, to see our surroundings, perhaps with the intention of stimulating us to a higher level of civilisation.”

Emma Matthews, ‘Mark Strizic, Melbourne: Marvellous to Modern’, to be published by Thames & Hudson in association with the State Library of Victoria, September, 2009.

 

 

 

Mark Strizic exhibition at Gallery 101, Melbourne installation views

 

 

 

Mark Strizic
‘At St.Pauls’
1954

 

 

Mark Strizic
‘Near Spencer Street – 1′
1950

 

Social Fact and Urban Vision

This is an exhibition by the veteran Australian photographer Mark Strizic that plays like the coda at the end of a piece of music, the pensive full stop at the end of a well read book. There are some stunning highlight photographs among the 139 black and white silver gelatin prints on display, some good photographs and some fairly mundane images and prints. With some judicious editing of the photographs (perhaps by a third), the exhibition could have had a stronger artistic aesthetic and carried the voice of the photographer with greater projection. As it is the exhibition will be popular drawing in the crowds because of the photographs subject matter and their appeal to both an individual and collective nostalgia.

Examining Strizic’s photographs we note a traditional structure to the picture plane. Unlike the photographs of Eugene Atget who photographed Paris in the early 20th century there is little sublime spatial representation in Strizics photographs, that different angle of alignment that Atget achieved with the positioning of his camera. Further, we observe that unlike an immigrant to another country at around the same time, Robert Frank and America, the photographs follow traditional format: none of the revolutionary experimentation in handheld, grainy images of jukeboxes, cut up people or images of flags appear in this work. We can also say that unlike Helen Levitt’s early black and white images of New York from around the same period there is little ‘joie de vivre’, little engagement with the actual nitty gritty stuff of living in Strizic’s work. The quote below articulates what Strizic’s photographs both address and dismiss:

“To walk in the city is to experience the disjuncture of partial vision/partial consciousness. The narrativity of this walking is belied by a simultaneity we know and yet cannot experience. As we turn a corner, our object disappears around the next corner. The sides of the street conspire against us; each attention suppresses a field of possibilities. The discourse of the city is a syncretic discourse, political in its untranslatability. Hence the language of the state elides. Unable to speak all the city’s languages, unable to speak all at once, the state’s language become momunental, the silence of headquarters, the silence of the bank. In this transcendent and anonymous silence is the miming of corporate relations. Between the night workers and the day workers lies the interface of light; in the rotating shift, the disembodiment of lived time. The walkers of the city travel at different speeds, their steps like handwriting of a personal mobility. In the milling of the crowd is the choking of class relations, the interruption of speed, and the machine. Hence the barbarism of police on horses, the sudden terror of the risen animal.” 1 

 

 

We observe in the photographs an emphasis on surfaces, on a supreme understanding of light and shade coupled with a certain distance and emotional remoteness from the frenetic hubbub of city life. Empty streets and isolated people fall into shadow and their is little evidence of ‘play’ in the photographs. This is observation not interaction or integration as an immigrant observing Melbourne life. There is no up front presence of disembodied people as in Robert Franks photographs in ‘The Americans’. Here the alienation that pervades the photographs is the alienation of the photographer from the people as much as it is the alienation of the people from themselves. People are shot in silhouette against the sun or shop windows or peering in at unobtainable goods; desolate streets and working class suburbs all express the isolation of city life but at a structured distance from them.

 

 

 

When Strizic’s photographs are good they are very good. His understanding of light is magnificent: light reflects off water, hazes and shimmers off city buildings. The mixing of shadows and sun and his use of the technique of ‘contre jour’ (shooting into the sun) the one thing Strizic does against traditional conventions works to good effect in some of the best photographs. His 1968 night time long exposure photograph of the old ‘Gas and Fuel Building’ is rewarding for the black bulk of the end of the building looming over Flinders Street and the striations of car headlamps. The photograph ‘Flinders Lane’ (1967) shows a delicate use of depth of field where the foreground of cars and person are out of focus, the light bouncing off the edges of the woman, the focus of the image in the far distance. The photograph ‘McPhersons Building’ (1958, below) is one of my personal favourites in the exhibition and is a stunning photograph for the atmosphere the photographer has captured.

 

 

Mark Strizic
‘Macpherson Building – 1′
1958

 

After a while the use of the ‘contre jour’ technique becomes tiresome. Other photographs simply document a city in transition. These photographs appeal both to an individual nostalgia (‘I used to work in that building’; ‘My grandmother used to live in that street’) and a collective nostalgia where people experience things collectively, “in the sense that [collective] nostalgia occurs when we are with others who shared the event(s) being recalled, and also in the sense that one’s nostalgia is often for the collective – the characteristics and activities of a group or institution in which the individual was a participant.”2

Collective nostalgia refers to that condition in which the symbolic objects are of a highly public, widely shared and familiar character, i.e., those symbolic resources from the past which can under proper conditions trigger off wave upon wave of nostalgic feeling in millions of persons at the same time3 and in this exhibition it is the photographs of a city in transition that trigger this nostalgia, a city now lost to the mists of time. Through these photographs we remember what Melbourne was like at this time collectively.

As Harper has observed

“Nostalgia combines bitterness and sweetness, the lost and the found, the far and near, the new and the familiar, absence and presence. The past which is over and gone, from which we have been or are being removed, by some magic becomes present again for a short while. But its realness seems even more familiar, because renewed, than it ever was, more enchanting and more lovely …” 4

 

 

 

Does this collective nostalgia make the photographs good? This is a pertinent question.

Today, nostalgia has become a cultural phenomenon one centered on a longing for home (home is where you are happy to be!) in a collective sense and promoted through commercialization and the realization that nostalgia sells.  The use of the value seeking word ‘rare’ in the exhibition title is instructive in this regard. Only about 25% of the photographs in this exhibition are ‘vintage’ prints, in other words photographs printed within 3 years of the negative being taken. All other photographs have been printed within the last 15 years. Some are ‘Unique state’ gelatin photographs while others are not. What does this mean. Are they are unique state only in this size? What about the common or garden silver gelatin prints in the show? What does the status word ‘rare’ imply for them?

I remember seeing an exhibition of the photographs of Henri Cartier-Bresson in Scotland about ten years ago. Three rooms had large prints of his work. One room just had vintage prints. The contrast was astounding. The room full of vintage prints had an intensity of vision, of his vision at the time he took the photographs evidenced in small jewel like photographs that the three other rooms photographs simply did not possess – through scale, printing and aesthetics. The same question, without any need for an answer, can be posed here. Only the word ‘rare’ demands that answer for the modern prints are just what they are and nothing more.

 

 

Mark Strizic
‘On Princes Bridge’
1959

 

In conclusion this is a strong show by Strizic that could have been edited and focused in a more rewarding way. Strizic is one of Australia’s best photographers for understanding the significance of place. His use of light is superb but there always seems to be an emotional distance to his photographs. An element of collective nostalgia adds to their documentary appeal but the best photographs do not just record, they challenge and transcend the subject matter taking the work to an altogether different plane of existence.

M Bunyan

 

 

Mark Strizic, Melbourne: Marvellous to Modern: The Book by Thames and Hudson in association with the State Library of Victoria will be published in September 2009.

 

GALLERY 101 
Ground level, 101 Collins Street, Melbourne VICTORIA 3000
Tuesday – Friday 10am – 5pm, Saturday 12 – 4pm
T 61 3 96546886  F 61 3 9663 0562

Gallery 101 website

 

1. Stewart, Susan. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Durham: Duke University Press, 1993, p.2. Prologue.

2. Wilson, Janelle. “Remember when …” a consideration of the concept of nostalgia” in et Cetera. Concord: Fall 1999. Vol. 56, Iss. 3;  pg. 296, 9 pgs.

3. Davis, F. Yearning For Yesterday: A Sociology of Nostalgia. New York: The Free Press, 1979, p.222.

4. Harper, R. Nostalgia: An Existential Exploration of Longing and Fulfilment in the Modern Age. The Press of Western Reserve University, 1966, p.120 quoted in Wilson, Janelle. “Remember when …” a consideration of the concept of nostalgia” in et Cetera. Concord: Fall 1999. Vol. 56, Iss. 3;  pg. 296, 9 pgs.

Vale Helen Levitt: Always ‘Here and There’

 

“For the perfect flaneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world … Thus the lover of universal life enters into the crowd as though it were an immense reservoir of electrical energy …”

Charles Baudelaire ‘The Painter of Modern Life’ 1863

 

Speaking of pioneers of colour photography the wonderful American photographer Helen Levitt died recently at the end of March. Here is a selection of her colour work from the 1970s – 1980s. With two Guggenheim Foundation grants in 1959 and 1960 she switched from black and white to colour dye-transfer prints photographing the theatre of the street, the serendipity of the decisive moment previsualised and captured through awareness and an intimate knowledge of her subject matter. Unfortunately in a burglary in 1970 most of her colour transparencies and prints were stolen from that initial period.
What remains, as Sally Mann would say, are the eloquent bones of the matter: superb lush colour photographs taken after 1970 that engage the viewer not in memory but in the moment, not in nostalgia but in joy. In colour she found “beauty in correspondences.”

 

 

Helen Levitt
‘New York’
1972

 

 

Helen Levitt
‘New York’
c.1971

 

 

Helen Levitt
‘New York’
c.1971

 

“A good image, she thought, was just lucky. But her New Yorker’s instinct seemed to tell her exactly where to wait for one. A broken-down car would soon attract people to lie under it, peer under the hood or try to push it. A cane chair, put out on the sidewalk, would draw an elderly man with cigar and newspaper, or a plump young woman in a housecoat wilting in the heat. With luck dogs would come out too, rough-haired mutts or poodles with fresh-shampooed coats. The open back of a truck would reveal delivery men moping on piles of sacks, or dozing among pink and blue bales of cloth. Any abandoned thing – a tea-chest, a mirror frame, the pillared entry of an empty building – would soon sport knots of children diving in, climbing up, fighting and contorting their small bodies in every kind of way … 

Her pictures did not have names. “New York”, and the year, was the label on most of them. They did not need explaining; they were “just what you see” … 

 

 

Helen Levitt
‘New York’
c.1971

 

 

Helen Levitt
‘New York’
c.1972

 

In the 1960s, when she got two Guggenheim grants, she began to shoot the streets in colour. The tricky developing ultimately frustrated her, and the streets, too, had changed. The children had retreated indoors to watch television. But where she had found grace and texture in black and white, colour now provided beauty in correspondences. The multicoloured balls in bubble-gum machines could be picked up in a girl’s dress, or the red of a stiletto shoe matched with the frame of a shop window. Her broken-down cars were now lurid beasts against the stucco walls. And out of her peeling, greenish doorways could come women in furs, or pink hair-curlers, or orange-striped socks.”

Text from the Economist April 8th 2009

 

 

 

Helen Levitt
‘New York’
1980

 

 

Helen Levitt
‘New York’
1971

 

 

‘Slide Show: The Color Photographs of Helen Levitt’ by John Szarkowski, Powerhouse Books, 2005 is available from the Amazon website. The photograph above is used on the cover of the book.

Exhibition: ‘Paul Outerbridge: New Color Photographs from Mexico and California’ at the Downtown Central Library, Los Angeles

Exhibition dates: 28th March – 28th June, 2009

 

Recently discovered color images of California and Mexico taken during the 1940s and 1950s by the late visionary photographer Paul Outerbridge, who was considered “a master of color photography,” will be exhibited at the Central Library’s First Floor Galleries, 630 W. Fifth St., downtown, from March 28 through June 28.

 

 

Paul Outerbridge
‘Laguna Beach, California’
c.1950

 

 

Paul Outerbridge
‘Balboa Beach, California’
c.1950

 

“Art is life seen through man’s inner craving for perfection and beauty–his escape from the sordid realities of life into a world of his imagining. Art accounts for at least a third of our civilization, and it is one of the artist’s principal duties to do more than merely record life or nature. To the artist is given the privilege of pointing the way and inspiring towards a better life.” 

Paul Outerbridge

 

 

Paul Outerbridge
‘Reclining Nude’
c.1937

 

“So wrote Paul Outerbridge, rather exaltedly, about his chosen profession. He was a designer and illustrator in New York before turning to photography in the 1920s. In 1925, having established himself as an innovative advertising photographer and graphic designer, he moved to Paris and worked for the French edition of Vogue magazine. There he met Edward Steichen, with whom he developed a friendly rivalry. Around 1930, having returned to New York, Outerbridge began to experiment with color photography, in particular the carbro-color process. He focused primarily on female nudes – striking, full-color images that were ahead of their time. The growing popularity of the dye transfer process lead to cheaper color photographs and Outerbridge, who stuck fast to the carbro process as superior in its richness and permanence, saw his commercial work dry up, leaving him without a regular source of income. In 1943 Outerbridge moved to California, where he photographed only intermittently.”

Text from the Getty Museum website

 

Well if he only photographed intermittently what photographs they are. Perhaps some of the most important colour photographs of their generation were made after he moved to California influencing the next generation of colour photographers as noted below. His aesthetic sensibility is scintillating what else can one say – so far ahead of his time, so prescient of future colour spaces in photography. I know how no regular income feels as an artist but he still had the courage and vision to make the work. I am in awe of the man; the visual complexity but eloquent simplicity of his photographs is just that – simply amazing.

Perhaps the Getty needs to ammend their text especially the last sentence!!

 

 

Paul Outerbridge
‘Airport Cafe with Band, Mexico’
c.1950

 

 

Paul Outerbridge
‘Airport Lounge, Mexico’
c.1950

 

 

Paul Outerbridge
‘Gas Station, Mexico’
c.1950

 

 

Paul Outerbridge
‘Self-portrait on Lounge, Oceanside Resort, California’
c.1950

 

“Outerbridge, who died in 1958, built his reputation in the early 1920s in New York and Paris making elegant black and white photo abstractions primarily of nudes and still lifes that rivaled those of his peers, Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, and Edward Weston. In the 1930s, Outerbridge mastered the exquisite tri-carbro-color print process and went on to make some of the most important color photographs in art and advertising of that time.

Moving to California in 1943 and taking up residence in Laguna Beach, Outerbridge made his last important body of work throughout California and Mexico. Between 1948 and until his death in 1958 he codified a new language in color photographs that anticipated the work of William Eggleston, Stephen Shore, Joel Sternfeld and others known for their “New Color” work in the 1970s.

“The curious position of prosperous American tourists amid the daily poverty experienced by some Mexicans is one of the recurring themes in the work, but with Outerbridge there is no political polemic,” says co-curator Phillip Prodger. “Outerbridge was thinking of his photographs as jig-saw puzzles made up of many different highly colored pieces, each placed with meticulous care.”

Among Outerbridge’s subjects are carnival carriages with passengers dressed and headed for a grand party; a group of fashionable men relaxing in an outdoor hotel lobby drinking Coke and beer while a small orchestra plays; a girl in a lime-green dress and white sweater walking past a gas station whose painted-red details add a vibrant flourish to the scene.”

Text from the Downtown Central Library press release

 

 

Paul Outerbridge
‘Model with Satin Dress, Laguna Beach, California’
c.1950

 

 

Paul Outerbridge
‘Party, Laguna Beach’
c.1950

 

 

Los Angeles Central Library

630 W. 5th St., Los Angeles, CA 90071 – (213) 228-7000
Mon. 10-8, Tue. 10-8, Wed. 10-8, Thu. 10-8, Fri. 10-6, Sat. 10-6, Sun. 1-5

Central Library website

Exhibition: ‘Into the Sunset: Photography’s Image of the American West’ at The Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), New York

Exhibition dates: 29th March – 8th June 2009

 

“The Museum of Modern Art presents ‘Into the Sunset: Photography’s Image of the American West’, a survey of 138 photographic works dating from 1850 to 2008 that chart the West’s complex, rich, and often compelling mythology via photography. The exploration of a large part of the American West in the mid-nineteenth century by European Americans coincided with the advent of photography, and photography and the West came of age together. The region’s seemingly infinite bounty and endless potential symbolized America as a whole, and photography, with its ability to construct persuasive and seductive images, was the perfect medium with which to forge a national identity. This relationship has resulted in a complex association that shapes the perception of the West’s social and physical landscape to this day. With political, cultural, and social attitudes constantly shifting in the region over the last 150 years, Into the Sunset further examines the way photographers have responded to these changes. The exhibition is organized by Eva Respini, Associate Curator, Department of Photography, The Museum of Modern Art, and is on view in the Special Exhibitions Gallery on the third floor from March 29 to June 8, 2009.

Organized thematically rather than chronologically, ‘Into the Sunset’ brings together the work of over 70 photographers, including Robert Adams, John Baldessari, Dorothea Lange, Timothy O’Sullivan, Cindy Sherman, Joel Sternfeld, Carleton E. Watkins, and Edward Weston, among others. The exhibition draws extensively from MoMA’s collection, along with private and public collections in the United States, and features new acquisitions from Adam Bartos, Katy Grannan, and Dennis Hopper, with each work also on view for the first time at the Museum. 

Ms. Respini states: “Ranging from grand depictions of paradise to industrial development, from pictures taken on the road to prosaic suburban scenes, the photographs included in Into the Sunset do not all picture the West from the same point of view, or even perhaps, picture the same West. Rather, each is one part in a continually shifting and evolving composite image of a region that has itself been growing and changing since the opening of the frontier.” 

‘Into the Sunset’ begins with the birth of photography and the American West. In the midnineteenth century, the region’s seemingly infinite bounty and endless potential symbolized America as a whole, and Carleton E. Watkins (American, 1829-1916) captured the grand depictions of an American paradise in his photographs of Yosemite Valley in California. Arguably the world’s first renowned landscape photographer, Watkins made his first photographs there in 1861—large sized prints made with an 18-by-22-inch mammoth plate camera, well suited to the grandeur of the land. Included are the three contiguous photographs that make up his extraordinarily detailed View from the Sentinel Dome (1865-66). 

 

 

 

 

Carelton Watkins
‘View from the Sentinel Dome, Yosemite’
1865-66

 

The exhibition balances the early work of landscape photographers with the twentieth century focus on the failure of the West’s promised bounty. In Joel Sternfeld’s (American, b. 1944) ‘After a Flash Flood, Rancho Mirage, California’ (1979), the photographer documents the impact of a natural disaster, specifically a landslide, shot with neutral tones softly camouflaging the extent of flash flood on this suburban neighborhood. And in Karin Apollonia Müller’s (German, b. 1963) ‘Civitas’ (1997), the photographer shows a very different view of California than that of Watkins, with Müller revealing a contemporary Los Angeles as a littered wasteland of freeways and anonymous glass towers.

 

 

Joel Sternfeld
‘After a Flash Flood, Rancho Mirage, California’
1979

 

 

Apollonia Müller
‘Civitas’
1997

 

As highways and interstate travel became more prevalent, the automobile and the open road became synonymous with the region, with Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) as the first great photographer of these open roads. Included is Weston’s iconic ‘Hot Coffee, Mojave Desert’ (1937), a humorous black-and-white photograph of a roadsign revealing a greater thematic shift to the highway and its signage as an inescapable element in picturing the West in the twentieth century. 

Once the West became more populated, photographers began to showcase humans’ effects on the land, including images of industrial development. In the 1950s William Garnett (American, 1916-2006) was hired by a real estate company to record the efficiency of massproduced housing. For this series, ‘Lakewood, California’ (1950), Garnett took photographs of the neighborhood from an airplane, resulting in images that are completely devoid of people and focus on the progress of mass-produced construction. However, the series subsequently came to represent all that was wrong with such development and the massive sprawl of the West in the eyes of its critics.

 

 

William Garnett
‘Foundations and Slabs, Lakewood, California’
1950

 

 

William Garnett
‘Grading, Lakewood, California’
1950

 

 

William Garnett
‘Trenching, Lakewood, California’
1950

 

 

William Garnett
‘Framing, Lakewood, California’
1950

 

Photographs of the people of the West represent a diversity of archetypes: gold miners and loggers, Native Americans, cowboys, suburbanites, city dwellers, starlets, dreamers, and drifters. ‘Into the Sunset’ explores these archetypes, and their mutability into the twenty-first century. Included is ‘Half Indian/Half Mexican’ (1991), from the photographer James Luna (Native American, Pooyukitchum/Luiseno, b. 1950), an artist of Native American ancestry. This tongue-incheek self-portrait captures in profile both an identity photograph and a mug shot, and works as a counterpoint to the tokenized portrayals of Native Americans from the past 150 years. 

A similar reevaluation of past archetypes occurs in Richard Prince’s (American, b. 1949) ‘Cowboy’ series from 1980, with one work from the series included in the exhibition. For that series Prince famously photographed Marlboro advertisements, cutting out the text, cropping the images, and enlarging them, highlighting the artifice of the virile image of the cowboy and its potency as a deeply ingrained figure in American mythology.

 

 

James Luna
‘Half Indian/Half Mexican’
1991

 

 

Richard Prince
‘Untitled (Cowboy)’
1989

 

The suburbs and their inhabitants have been a rich subject for photographers of the West, and included are Larry Sultan’s (American, b. 1946) ‘Film Stills from the Sultan Family Home Movies’ (1943-1972), in which Sultan chose individual frames from his family’s home movies and enlarged them. Although the images feature the activities that epitomize suburban life, a sense of unease lurks beneath the surface of these images; cropped and grainy, they resemble surveillance or evidence photographs.

‘Into the Sunset’ concludes with the theme of the failed promise of Western migration. Dorothea Lange’s well-known 1936 photograph ‘Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California’, photographed when Lange was employed by the Farm Security Administration, is included and documents the conditions of the West in rural areas during the Great Depression. Her photographs had a humanist purpose and resulted in putting a face on the hardships of that era.

 

 

Dorothea Lange
‘Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California’
1936

 

This tradition of capturing the downtrodden of the West continues into this century with Katy Grannan (American, b. 1969), a photographer who recently completed a series of new pioneers, individuals struggling to define themselves in the West of today. In ‘Nicole, Crissy Field Parking Lot (I)’ (2006), a woman, “Nicole,” poses seductively on a gravel parking lot, with her makeup-streaked face and harsh light alluding to her perilous existence on the fringe of society.”

Text from the MOMA website

 

 

Katy Grannan
‘Nicole, Crissy Field Parking Lot (I)’
2006

 

 

Cindy Sherman
‘Untitled Film Still #43′
1979

 

 

Bill Owens
‘We Are Really Happy’
1972

 

 

MOMA website

11 West 53 Street  New York, NY 10019 

Opening: ‘Nicola Loder: Tourist #3 sighted child 1-11′ at Helen Gory Gallery, Melbourne

Exhibition dates: 15th April – 2nd May 2009

 

A wonderful, social opening at Helen Gory Gallery of Nicola Loder’s latest work in her ongoing ‘Tourist’ photographic series. As always Loder’s work looks superb, the mounting of the images at the back of thick perspex giving the images an almost holographic 3D effect. I still remember her exhibition of black and white children’s faces at the sadly closed Stop 22 Gallery in St Kilda many years ago: those images still impinge on the subconscious. This work continues those themes of instability in the mapping of identity, how we begin to see, to represent ourselves as an individual entity. Speaking of Stop 22 it was great to see Marianne, ex curator of that gallery at the opening with new bub in tow! There is an excellent catalogue essay by Stuart Koop.

 

 

 

“We might think of Loder’s work as ‘undoing’ visuality. She sets technology in reverse, working against the imperatives of photography to clarify, focus, refine and sharpen images, as if our eyes worked backwards, as if acuity worsened. The face is an obvious (originary) limit beyond which chaos prevails and other senses are engaged to interpret what looks like abstract static but which many now believe is an unstriated sensory realm, a liberated space of interrelated, undifferentiated holistic sensory experiences; the original synaesthesia from which perception emerges as a travesty according to 5 distinct categories. 

So it’s not blindness after all that the work references, not the failing of vision, but the first moments of looking, when ‘seeing’ begins to separate from the other senses and consolidates into a face, a percept, then into a code, a genre, a representation.”

Stuart Koop

 

 

I don’t know who the lady and the bub are but thankyou for the wonderful photograph – children upon children!

 

 

Nicola Loder
‘Tourist #3 sighted child 1-11′
2009

 

 

The radiant Nicola Loder in front of one of her works

 

 

Helen Gory Gallery

25 St Edmonds Road
Prahran VIC 3181

Opening Hours: Wed – Fri 11am – 5pm, Sat 10am – 4pm

Helen Gory Gallery website

Nicola Loder website

Josef Sudek: Master of Photography

 

Further to the last post I have collected some images from the Czech photographer Josef Sudek (1896 – 1976), one of my favourite photographers. The images of this master photographer are a delight. Like the photographs of Eugene Atget they evince generosity in the understanding of light, space and humanity. Insightful writing on Josef Sudek by Charles Sawyer is included in the post.

 

 

Josef Sudek
‘A Summer Shower in the Magic Garden’
1954 – 59

 

 

Joseph Sudek
From the series ‘Remembances’
1954

 

 

Joseph Sudek
‘Untitled’
1967

 

“The systematic approach, and the dogged aesthetic experimentation of Sudek are akin to the working habits of Cezanne. But these alone are insufficient to make great art or even good art. On the contrary, if these are all one sees in a work, then the cumulative burdern of so much plain labor would be unbearable. Sudek’s devotion to work may have integrated his shattered life but it could not have offered him the spiritual redemption he was seeking; only his aesthetic quest could bring this. It is the struggle for spiritual redemption through his aesthectic quest that gives Sudek’s best photographs their true power. Two qualities characterize his best work: a rich diversity of light values in the low end of the tonal scale, and the representation of light as a substance occupying its own space. The former, the diversity of light values, requires very delicate treatment of the materials, especially the negative, but also the paper (Sudek used silver halide papers in the main). The latter, the portrayal of light as substance, is a more original trait than his tonal palette, which one sees in occasional prints of other photographers. Flaubert once expressed an ambition to write a book which would have no subject, “a book dependent on nothing external … held together by the strength of its style.” Photographers have sometimes expressed parallel aspirations to make light itself the subject of their photographs, leaving the banal, material world behind. Both ideals are, of course, unobtainable, but nonetheless they may be worth pursuing. (Artists, in their pursuit of the unobtainable, are not so likely to be called pathological as others, of us, though recent developments in ihe philosophy of science tend to view the scientist’s quest for truth as equally quixotic).

 

 

Josef Sudek
From the series ‘Vanished Statues in Mionsi’
1969

 

 

Josef Sudek
‘The Window of My Atelier’
1969

 

Sudek has come closer than any other photographer to catching this illusive goal. His devices for this effect are simple and highly poetic: the dust he raised in a frenzy when the light was just right, a gossamer curtain draped over a chair back, the mist from a garden sprinkler, even the ambient moisture in the atmosphere when the air is near dew point. The eye is usually accustomed to seeing not light but the surfaces it defines; when light is reflected from amorphous materials, however, perception of materiality shifts to light itself. Sudek looked for such materials everywhere. And then he usually balanced the ethereal luminescence with the contra-bass of his deep shadow tonalities. The effect is enchanting, and strongly conveys the human element which is the true content of his photographs. For, throughout all his photography, there is one dominant mood, one consistent viewpoint, and one overriding philosophy. The mood is melancholy and the point of view is romanticism. And overriding all this is a philosphic detachment, an attitude he shares with Spinoza. The attitude of detachment that characterizes Sudek’s art accounts for both its strength and weakness: the strength which lies in the ideal of utter tranquility and the weakness which is found in the paucity of human intimacy. Some commentators find Sudek’s photos mysterious but I think this is a mistake: the air of mystery vanishes once we see in Sudek’s photography a person’s private salvation from despair.”

Charles Sawyer 1

 

 

Josef Sudek
‘Still-life after Caravaggio, Variation No 2 (or a night-time Variation)’
1956

 

 

Josef Sudek
‘Stille (Still Life According to Caravaggio)’
1956

 

 

Josef Sudek
‘Remembrance of Mr. Magician (the garden of architect Rothmayer)’
1959

 

 

Josef Sudek
‘Labyrinths’
1969

 

 

A good collection of Josef Sudek photographs can be found on the Museum of Fine Arts Boston website. Go to the site and enter ‘Josef Sudek’ in the Collection Search box to the right and then click on the arrow.

 

1. Sawyer, Charles. “Josef Sudek” in Creative Camera, April 1980, Number 190 [Online] Cited 14/04/2009 at
www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~sawyer/Sudek.htm

Exhibition: ‘Czech Photography of the 20th Century’ at the Exhibition Hall of the Federal Republic of Germany, Bonn

Exhibition dates: 13th March – 26th July 2009

 

Looks like an interesting exhibition but it just scratches the surface of what is a large and very interesting subject matter. The photographs I have gathered are in the exhibition.

 

 

Arnoltice
From the ‘Village Life’ series
1985

 

“Czech photography produced and produces leading figures in all areas of photography – from classical documentary photojournalism to surrealism, realism or avant-garde works. From 13 March 2009 on, the Art and Exhibition Hall of the Federal Republic of Germany is presenting over 400 photographic works, a historical mosaic of Czech photography from 1900 until the late 20th century that underlines the international reputation enjoyed by Czech photography today. That reputation is not only apparent in the outstanding contributions by such renowned artists as Josef Sudek, Karel Hájek, Václav Jírů, Vilém Reichmann, Jan Reich, Jindřich Štreit, Frantisek Drtikol, Jaromír Funke, Jaroslav Rossler, Josef Koudelka and Jan Saudek, but also in works from a host of younger photographers. The exhibition does not only showcase famous names but also less well-known photographers, providing an overall impression of the variation and innovation in Czech photography.

 

 

Eugen Wiskovsky
‘Lunar Landscape or Collars’
1929

 

 

Josef Sudek
‘The Last Rose’ from the Rose series
1956

 

 

Frantisek Drtikol
‘Nude’
1927

 

 

Jan Saudek
‘Life’
1966

 

From Surrealism and other avant-garde experimentation to realism and classic photo reportage, Czech photographers have long played a key role in all areas of photography and continue to do so to this day.

This exhibition is the first in Germany to present the history and development of Czech photography from 1900 to the turn of the millennium. Beginning with Art Nouveau-inspired pictorialism, the comprehensive survey traces the rise of avant-garde photography and the development of photo montage in the 1920s to the 1940s. It examines the influence of ideological pressure on photography during the Second World War, the Stalinist 1950s and the period of Communist ‘normalisation’ after the occupation in 1968 and introduces the visitor to the multifaceted range of contemporary trends.”

Text from the Exhibition Hall of the Federal Republic of Germany website

 

 

Jaroslav Rossler
‘Untitled’
1931

 

 

Eugen Wiskovsky
‘Disaster’
1939

 

 

Frantisek Drtikol
‘Wave’
1925

 

 

Josef Koudelka
France 1987

 

 

Exhibition Hall of the Federal Republic of Germany

Museumsmeile Bonn
Friedrich-Ebert-Allee 4 • 53113 Bonn
Postfach 12 05 40 • 53047 Bonn
Germany
Telephone: +49-(0)228-9171-0

Opening hours: Tues – Wed 10 – 9pm, Thurs – Sun 10 – 7pm

Exhibition Hall of the Federal Republic of Germany website