Archive for the 'John’s Bailiwick' Category

The nineteenth century era of colonial exploration and discovery fronted a desperate race among the leading world nations to take a stake in the rapidly diminishing spoils of a shrinking planet. Children of every generation since that time have thrilled to accounts of the adventures spawned by this headlong rush to claim the yet unknown parts of planet earth. But there is one such story that once it caught fire in the public imagination, has never burned out. It is more than a tale of colonial greed. It is one of sacrifice and heroism and its hold on the public imagination is due largely to this young man:

The story of Ernest Shackleton’s third polar expedition, (the “Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition 1914-1917”) an attempt to walk across the frozen continent and its polar region with  a crew of 27 (a failed venture like his two previous attempts) has been the subject of many books, feature films and documentaries.  Within several years of the mission’s end many members of the crew published breathtaking memoirs of struggle, camaraderie, life-threatening deprivation, and rescue after months spent on Elephant Island, a barren, rocky outcropping nearly 800 miles over treacherous seas from the nearest habitable outpost, a Norwegian whaling station on South Georgia Island.

It was Shackelton and five hand-picked members from the crew that sailed in a re-rigged lifeboat from the lost mother ship, Endurance, who made that unbelievable voyage to find help, even as Hurley and 21 of the crew waited for over three months, somehow surviving on diminishing supplies of seal and penguin while they huddled against the ferocious elements in shelter that was not much more than two overturned small boats.

Most of the record of this heroic adventure, starting with its promising departure from Plymouth, England on August 8, 1914, only four days after the outbreak of WWI, until its end, as all of the still stranded team members were transferred aboard a Chilean vessel, the Yelcho, almost two years later, might easily have disappeared into the archives of government historical societies. Such was the fate of many such contemporaneous ventures. But none of those expeditions included as documentarian a photographer with the technical and artistic acumen nor  the courage of Frank Hurley.

When Englishman Shackleton engaged Hurley, the young Australian was already a veteran of the Mawson Antarctic expedition of 1911-14. Born in a suburb of Sydney on October 16, 1885, Hurley was 26 when he joined the Mawson expedition. Hurley had run away from home at age 14 and had found work on the nearby Sydney docks. Within three years he bought his first camera, a Kodak Box Brownie, and taught himself the rudiments of photography. In a much later diary entry Hurley recalled the thrill of immersing himself in darkroom chemicals: “From the time I first gazed wonderingly at the miracle of chemical reaction on the latent image during the process of development, I knew I had found my real work and a key, could I become its master, that would perhaps unlock the portals of the undiscovered world.” Such unbridled enthusiasm sustained him throughout his decades long career.

Shackleton had heard of Hurley’s work with Mawson, had seen a film he had made of the venture, and offered him the position of the expedition’s photographic and motion picture documentation.  Hired sight unseen, Hurley met Shackleton in Buenos Aires where the Endurance was making its final preparations. For Shackleton, much of the investor money entrusted to this expedition was to be recouped by sales of photos and a film of the venture. Hurley was thus a key player.  Aware of Shackleton’s desperate need for a photographer for this polar venture, Hurley was able to negotiate a 25% participation on all film revenues.

So thorough was Hurley’s commitment to recording the voyage and trek that only months after his rescue, he returned to South Georgia Island for additional photos and filming, to record the only part of the expedition that he had missed while trapped on Elephant Island. You can look at a number of books and films spawned by Hurley’s work by scrolling to the bottom of the page on this site:

Coolantarctica.com — Ernest Shackleton Trans-Antarctic Expedition link

There are also numerous accounts here about Shackleton and the complete expedition. But there are two that have Frank Hurley’s life and work as their focus. The first is a biography by Alasdair McGregor, currently out of print:

The other is South With Endurance, compiled from the archives of several historical societies in England and Australia and with essays by Shane Murphy, Gael Newton, and Michael Gray. This volume is rich with several hundred pages of Hurley’s black-and-white photographs as well as a selection of his Paget color plates. There are also sections on his techniques and an equipment manifest and description. It has provided much of the research for this essay:

Amazon.com — South Endurance: Shackleton’s Antarctic Expedition link

The Endurance left the port of Buenos Aires on October 26 and reached the final supply outpost of Grytviken on South Georgia Island on November 14. It steamed out of Cumberland Bay on December 5, 1914 headed for the Weddell Sea and the Antarctic continent. A second ship, the Aurora, would retrieve the expedition trekkers at Cape Evans on the Ross Sea, on the other side of the continent. But within a day of raising anchor the ominous warnings of early pack ice became a reality and progress was slowed. The hull of the Endurance, still on its maiden voyage, was built to crush through most ice. But by February 14, 1915, the very eve of Shackleton’s 41^st birthday, even the optimistic leader had to admit that the ship was caught fast in pack ice for the rest of the season; the ice ridges were from 12 to 18 feet thick. Thus began the ordeal as well as the detailed day-to-day documentation by Hurley’s still and film cameras.

Hurley was well prepared for his thorough documentation of the expedition. There are slightly varying manifests of his equipment but he certainly had at least half a dozen still cameras, mainly full glass plate (8 ½ x 6 ¼ in. Folmer & Schweigs) as well as a 5 x 7 in. glass plate, a panoramic camera, several roll film cameras in formats of 127mm and 118mm. including a Kodak Folding Vest Pocket Camera which was the only one he was able to take after they were forced to abandon the sinking Endurance. It was this latter camera that recorded all the images of the subsequent ordeal.

While still living on board Endurance for almost ten months, even as flow ice began to crush the hull, Hurley had a fully equipped still and motion picture lab and darkroom, (the ship’s walk-in refrigerator) and despite the freezing weather he was able to develop and print his work, the motion picture film hand processed 10 feet at a time. Before having to abandon his Prestwich No. 5 Cinecamera as well as all the large format cameras and all but 120-150 of the developed glass plate negatives, Hurley made one final cine record of Endurance’s demise. It occurs at six minutes into this video clip. The entire 10-minute clip is a testament to the breadth of Hurley’s motion picture work.

Youtube.com — (4 of 11) Endurance, Shackleton and the Antarctic link

A more detailed description of how and what Hurley was able to rescue from the sinking ship is described here:

Youtube.com — (4 of 11) Endurance, Shackleton and the Antarctic link

Again, there are conflicting records of what was saved. But it is known that about 500 photographs survive in the various archives. The rescued glass plate negatives were packed along with the motion picture negatives in zinc-lined, soldered tins. About 400 glass plates were intentionally destroyed when the ship was abandoned and the decision was made to set out for land. Only three to five spools of roll film were taken, along with the Kodak Pocket Camera (12 exposures per roll), and nearly 60 images made after the wreck of the Endurance sank, survived. In the darkroom on board ship Hurley had made master prints of 286 images in black and white and had mounted them in a book he called the “Green Album.” Also, 18 Paget color plate screens were saved. Hurley carried all of this visual record over hundreds of miles of ice and across rough seas in fragile lifeboats to Elephant Island where he preserved it for another four and a half months, until rescue came on August 30, 1916.

A Kodak website recounts Frank Hurley’s engagement in the expedition and includes more information about his work on the expedition:

Kodak.com — The Endurance link

As moving as Hurley’s record of the expedition’s human ordeal may be, his work was also on the cutting edge of photographic technique. He made several night exposures of Endurance, ice-bound. This one was taken by using over 20 flashes on the night of August 27, 1915.

The 18 Paget color screen plates record a quite rare and still new color technique. Hurley had first employed the Paget process on the Mawson Expedition. Its main asset was that it was several times faster in exposure time than the more proven Autochromes. The intricate technical skill required in this process is described in a Wikipedia entry:

The system used two glass plates, one of which was the color screen plate while the other was a standard black-and-white negative plate. The color screen plate comprised a series of red, green and blue filters, laid down in a regular pattern of lines to form an réseau, or matrix. Because the negatives of the time required long exposure times, the colors in the screen plate were diluted to let more light through to the negative, resulting in a quicker exposure. A viewing screen with more intense color filters was used in combination with the developed positive to project a composite color image.

The color screen plate was usually sold as a separate item to the panchromatic negatives. A single color screen plate could be placed into the camera and used to expose many negatives in succession. The resultant negatives looked like standard black and white negatives, with a noticeable crosshatch patterning in areas of strong color. Transparency positives could be made from the system’s panchromatic negatives by contact printing; these positives were then bound in register with a color viewing screen of the same type as used for exposure, to reproduce the image in color. Multiple copies could be printed from each negative, the resultant positives each being registered with their own color viewing screens.

Here are several of the Paget color images:

Almost as remarkable as the sheer survival of the expedition members (not a single one lost) is what Hurley accomplished immediately afterwards. His return to South Georgia Island to continue his work in still and film only a few weeks after the ordeal, enabled him to complete the film.  At the same time he also made 72 more Paget color plates.

The film, now titled In the Grip of the Polar Pack-ice was shown to great acclaim. Shackelton was able to pay off all expenses of the expedition. Frank Hurley’s work was indeed the linchpin.

Unbelievably, the now “Captain” Hurley went into battle on the French and Belgian fronts of the war. He landed in Flanders, made photos at the 3rd Battle of Ypres and Chateau Wood, and then moved on to the front in Palestine.

This was only the beginning of a film and photography career that lasted almost to the day of his death in 1962 at age 78. He made several more polar expeditions, took stills and film in New Guinea, in Australia, and even returned to the front in WWII. Here is a photo of him in Palestine in 1941. He is on the left of the camera, wearing glasses.

After the war Hurley published several best selling, high-quality books of his photos, especially Shackelton’s Argonauts in 1948. He also published several memoirs and was active on the lecture circuit. Always a naturalist, he argued for species preservation and against whaling.

“Straight” photography was never an imperative for Hurley and shortly after the Shackelton venture he began to experiment in his photography with manipulated images. He sandwiched negatives and composited elements from others; he employed elaborate printing techniques, all in service of the aesthetic of his vision. As early as June 1911 he wrote an article in the Australian Photo-Review. He said that camera art is:

…not an exact representation of nature, and a picture is not a record of things in view… Regard your camera as an artist does his brush. Think that you hold a piece of apparatus worthy of the same possibilities as the artist… Your camera is but a piece of mechanical apparatus. You are its intellect.

Here is a photo of the motion picture camera that Hurley acquired in 1929 just before his third Antarctic trip. He used it for the next 30 years.

Though it was a youthful adventure in a lengthy career that covered many assignments worldwide, Frank Hurley’s name will always be linked foremost to the Shackelton expedition. It was more than a coming of age experience for this stalwart photographer. It framed a life spent at the edges of existence, bearing witness to dramatic world events that are to most of us merely pages in a coffee table book.  His is the embodiment of the life that most of us will never experience.

ONE

Within the span of a year, 1915-1916, two young men who were to become among the greatest photographers of the 20th century suffered devastating wounds in World War One. Both fought on the Italian Front for the soon to be defeated, Hapsburg Austro-Hungarian Empire. Josef Sudek of Bohemia and André Kertész of Hungary both sustained severe wounds to their right arms. Kertész’ arm was paralyzed for some time but it was saved. Josef Sudek’s wound was not as severe but gangrene set in, and his arm was amputated. Both young men subsequently spent several years in therapeutic recovery at military facilities. And both were left with deep psychic scars that had a profound influence on their temperament as well as on their work.

Ten years later, while touring with the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra, Sudek wandered away from the company during a concert in southern Italy. The performance was near the town where he had been wounded. His biographer Sonja Bullaty, a survivor of Auschwitz and a noted photographer herself, quotes him:

… In the dark I got lost, but I had to search. Far outside the city toward dawn, in the fields bathed by the morning dew, finally I found the place. But my arm wasn’t there – only the poor peasant farmhouse was still standing in its place. They had bought me into it that day when I was shot in the right arm. They could never put it together again, and for years I was going from hospital to hospital, and had to give up my bookbinding trade. The Philharmonic people apparently even made the police look for me but I somehow could not get myself to return from this country. I turned up in Prague some two months later. They didn’t reproach me, but from that time on, I never went anywhere, anymore, and I never will. What would I be looking for when I didn’t find what I wanted to find?”

A few years after being wounded, Sudek took up photography, at first in the war veterans’ home, then in and around the cafes of Prague. An early subject for his camera was the final construction stages of St. Vitus Cathedral.

Sudek never married; he lived most of his life with a sister dedicated to assisting him and who continued to live in his wooden bungalow/atelier/darkroom years after his death in 1976. Sudek never traveled widely after the traumatic search for the lost arm and he spent the remainder of his life photographing Prague and its environs.

André Kertész returned to his native Hungary after the war and continued photographing friends, family and village life, subjects he had documented as a young man before the war’s outbreak. In 1925 he moved to Paris where he lived and worked for the next eleven years, becoming one of the most important photo-journalists of the time (principally for VU magazine), shooting the street life, parks, cafes and artist ateliers of the city. Along with fellow countryman Brassai he captured the complex social and cultural milieu of his newly adopted home. Much as he loved the city, he remained an outsider and with the promise of new work in the United States and the growing Nazi threat to Jews at home, he emigrated again, this time to New York City where he and his wife, Elizabeth, lived the rest of their lives.

Kertész, in Paris and New York City, and Sudek in Prague, spent many of their most productive years in the best tradition of the street photographer cum flaneur. Yet in substantive ways both remained loners. Sudek’s circle of friends consisted mainly of a few literary pals and musicians; on Tuesday evenings he hosted a listening party of phonograph records culled from his extensive collection of classical music. Kertész and Elizabeth, conversely, were a society of two; they never felt integrated into the New York art scene. Having been classified as an enemy alien during the early part of WWII, his photographic activities were closely monitored, although he and Elizabeth gained US citizenship in 1944. Even after the war, his considerable European reputation garnered him nothing more than a fifteen-year post-war stint as an architectural photographer for the Condé Nast magazine House and Garden.

Kertész became embittered about this lack of recognition in the United States, a condition that was only partly ameliorated when newly appointed head of the Department of Photography at MOMA, John Szarkowski, offered him a one-man show in 1964. By this time Josef Sudek had become a highly regarded, if eccentric, presence in the art photography world of Prague.

A documentary film from 1963 by Evald Strom, photographed by Jan Spata, follows Sudek through the streets and into the parks and woods of Prague. The intimate footage of this lone and wounded lion going about the work of setting up his enormous view camera (up to 12×16 inches) is intensely moving. The video’s resolution is poor, the voice-over of Sudek is not subtitled, but it is a rare glimpse into his world. The images speak for themselves, but a camera assistant on my current film, Andy Kugler, helped provide information on the two parts of the documentary Zit Svuj Zivot (Living Your Life).  Sudek’s enigmatic comments express his efforts to photograph a flower, and then of a large group of photos of the “Magic Garden” of his friend, architect Otto Rothmayer. The sprinklers in this garden, especially when backlit by the sun, enthralled Sudek. Of the image of an old lamp he says “This is a celebrated lamp; it holds a lot of memories.” He does not elaborate. The rest of the film shows him searching for images in the woods:

Its subdued tone and pace reflects the studied calm that pervades all of Sudek’s photography, work that, as the years passed, became more and more intimate. Trees, flowers, still life studies of paper and glass, bread and eggs, frost patterns on a window, became more and more the substance of his work. Human portraits all but vanished.

Kertész’ photos from the earliest days in Hungary and forward, reflect an almost Truffaut-like celebration of human intimacy. Other work, especially in Paris, reflected the modernist compositional conceits of the Bauhaus and of VU magazine’s oft-times surrealist photojournalism. Here is a short video that offers a glimpse at some of Kertész’ most famous images. The last thirty seconds are SX-70 images in color. It is this late work, however, and the similar-themed black and white images of Sudek, that I will look at here:

TWO

In the late 70s, according to differing versions of the story, André Kertész was given, by either the Polaroid Corporation’s Eelco Wolf or by musician/photo collector Graham Nash, a then new instant camera, the Polaroid SX-70. Nash especially was aware of the melancholy that overwhelmed Kertész and of his reluctance to venture far from his apartment. Unlike Sudek who worked with large format cameras and mostly made contact prints, Kertész always preferred smaller hand cameras. His first one was an ICA box camera.

As a photographer in WWI he was given a Goers Tenax and after his arrival in Paris he bought the 35mm Leica that became his signature camera. But late in life, after initially rejecting the SX-70 as a mere toy, Kertész became fascinated with the “notebook” quality of its instant images.

During WWII both photographers were largely inactive in the world outside their homes, Sudek because of the Nazi Occupation of Prague and his fear of photographing in public, and Kertész because of his enemy alien status. Both artists turned inward and began personal photography in their confined quarters. In 1952, Kertész and Elizabeth moved to #2 Fifth Avenue. Their twelfth floor apartment had a small terrace that commanded a view of Washington Square Park directly below, and Kertész had a broad unimpeded view to the south and west. He began a series of work from his windows and terrace.

Sudek’s Prague quarters consisted of a small, turn-of-the-century, wooden bungalow sandwiched like a dollhouse between two taller apartment buildings. For decades he lived, entertained and worked there, all the while his personal papers growing into huge piles. The clutter of his personal surroundings belied the stark simplicity and clean lines of his work. Kertész’ apartment also began to fill with his archives and papers and after the death of his beloved Elisabeth of lung cancer in 1977, Kertész became even more of a recluse.  As the last decades of their respective lives approached, each man in his own way developed an introspective style, devoid of humans, where quotidian objects and chotchkes became the stand-ins for people.

Here is the final part of a BBC documentary made in 1982. Kertész is interviewed in his apartment surrounded by the accumulated small objects that became his last models. He talks about the new SX-70:

The little Italian blown glass bust that became the metaphor for his deceased wife was found in the window of a nearby Brentano’s Bookstore on 8th Street.

Several months later Kertész found a second bust and the Polaroids he made of the two glass figures became a tribute to the primacy of his marriage. Kertész placed the busts on the inside sill of his windows and photographed them as well as other small objects, in differing compositions and in changing light. He made hundreds of these Polaroids over the next few years.

I visited Kertész in this apartment shortly after I completed American Gigolo in 1979. He showed me dozens of these square SX-70 photos. My wife, Carol, and I had begun to collect photography several years before and we had one of Kertész’ small, vintage, contact prints from the Hungary period.

Kertész showed me a cigar box full of dozens more of these platinum prints. He was willing to sell them to dealers and collectors, but refused to part with any of the Polaroids.  At the time, the few dealers that even knew of this work had pretty well marginalized it as the last gasp of a bitter and lost, once-great master. Time and a keener understanding have elevated the status of this final work. A book of the SX-70 work has been published:

Amazon.com –André Kertész: The Polaroids link

Robert Gurbo is biographer and the curator of the Kertész estate. His introduction gives insight to the mindset of Kertész in these final months. Since 1939 Kertész had suffered bouts of vertigo and dizziness, and darkroom work became all but impossible for him. He was at the service of his printer, Igor Bahkt. That sense of immediacy a photographer gets by working in the darkroom (or today at the computer with Photoshop) came again to Kertész with the Polaroid process as he became witness to the developing prints and could alter exposure, focus and composition  shot to shot, even as he evolved the definitive version of an image. Further, according to Gurbo:

The immediacy and intimacy of the Polaroid process afforded André the opportunity to explore a rawness of feeling in which he may not have otherwise engaged. The SX-70 gave him the privacy to work through his anger, melancholy, and reveries.

When I spent the afternoon with him, Kertész seemed obsessed with the many decades of oblivion in America, his longing for Paris, and the medical incompetence he felt had contributed to Elizabeth’s death. A short time later, when I learned about his youthful war injury and his many nomadic periods, I wondered how much of a toll it all had taken on his psyche.

THREE

A life of quiet privacy did not seem as alienating to Sudek. Perhaps it was because that despite the trauma of the lost arm that made him ever a reluctant social being, he was loved and respected in the smaller art world of Prague. Late in life he received commissions, public and private, for work that documented the city. His cramped home and studio, which had been abandoned to slow decay after his and then his sister’s death, was restored in 1990. The wall and fence at the street, as well as the gardens, were given a makeover. Because so much of his late work had been in his own studio with views out his windows, it was easy to re-configure the building and the garden from photographs of Sudek’s own work. There is a video documentary Photographer in the Garden, also in Czech,  showing the re-construction of the house as a Sudek museum and gallery for contemporary work that I had planned to include in this essay but it was recently disabled on YouTube. But here is a site that has information and some photo documentation, followed by three photos below.

www.sudek-atelier.cz

I had written a commentary on this video and though it is not now available I hope that these few notes will still be helpful. In the video Jan Mlcoch talks about the bungalow that had been Sudek’s home since 1927. Then, biographer and assistant Anna Farova, sitting in front of a restored window of the studio, says:

This is where for 14 years… Sudek created an unusually large body of work. This window that was in fact a barrier between life inside and out, also served as a canvas for rain, frost, and snow. That’s where I began to see Sudek as a philosopher or meditative person for whom such an absolute thing like this window was enough to step into the world’s consciousness.

Mloch shows a montage of Sudek’s St. Vitus Cathedral images as well as ones of “The Magic Garden.” Farova returns to show photos of the clutter of Sudek’s studio, views from his window and exterior views of the garden. Sudek’s work in this small studio and at its windows reflects all the purity and distilled sensibility of a classical still life painting. There is no immediate trace of personal biography or of a loaded emotional subtext as there often is with Kertesz. The work extols the simpler tonal beauty of black and white.

The Kertész Polaroids, conversely, are almost primal screams of emotion and sentiment—if not at times, sentimentality. This has been the critical attitude toward some of this work.

These twilight years’ images by two of the 20th centuries most regarded photographers radiate a common thematic affinity, while avoiding a shared emotional one. Personal taste and aesthetics play a large role here, it seems to me, whether you find emotion and beauty in one vision or the other, or in both. In any case, the intense personal expression of these two contrasting bodies of work creates a surprising and stimulating dialogue for any viewer willing to enter into their quiet enclave.

Paris was first called the “City of Light” in the 18th century; it was home to many of the great scientific, philosophical and literary minds of the 18th century “Age of Enlightenment.” A later and more literal appellation came as a result of its early deployment of large-scale urban street lighting at a time when many other European capitals were still swathed in nighttime gloom.

There is a certain irony, then, that this radiant city should become the capital of early 20th century Surrealism, a literary and artistic movement that positively wallows in literal and metaphorical darkness and crepuscular ambiguity. And while we most easily associate its tenets with the dream-like twilight of semi-consciousness, automatic writing, and improbable conjunctions of images and objects in painting and sculpture, it is photography that is the subject of a traveling exhibition that closed recently at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville. It is now at the International Center for Photography in New York City, from January 29-May 9, 2010, then at the Telfair Museum of Art in Savannah, Georgia.

Amazon.com Twilight Visions: Surrealism and Paris link

The New York venue is certain to create much interest, as this is the first major exploration of surrealist photography I can think of since the landmark L’Amour Fou show at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. in autumn of 1985. This exhibition’s catalog by Rosalind Krauss and Jane Livingston, with an essay on surrealist texts by Dawn Ades, has been the go-to book for the last twenty-five years:

Amazon.com L’Amour fou : Photography and Surrealism link

Its Corpus Delecti chapter by Ms. Krauss vividly demonstrates that explicit sexual imagery of the female body in the work of controversial figures like Hugnet, Bellmer, Ubac, and Boiffard, were matched by more mainstream artists such as Kertész, Man Ray, Bing, Breitenbach and Brassaï. In a time long before gender and political correctness issues began to contextualize public art, explicit images of the female nude presented one portal into an exploration of the unconscious state that was the male Surrealists’ main pre-occupation. Women photographers like Lee Miller, Nusch Eluard, Dora Maar, and Claude Cahun created self-portraits that at first doubled those of the men but they soon found their personal iconography.

The unique perspective of Twilight Visions: Surrealism and Paris, curated by Therese Lichtenstein, with catalog essays by her, Julia Kelly, Colin Jones, and Whitney Chadwick, is stated in a forward by Susan H. Edwards, Executive Director of the Frist Center:

[The exhibition] offers a fresh perspective, drawing new connections by examining the role of the city as muse and the burgeoning popularity of photography as a democratizing factor in the dissemination of culture.

Getting beyond standard history and museum-speak is exactly what this exhibition does. As soon as you enter the darkened grey/blue quasi-twilight lit galleries you enter a world of unsettled, unstable mood, of images that seem to almost float out of the near darkness, freeing themselves from the walls as they engage your mind. Even the most literal, the most familiarly representational of them, the ones we think we know, the Kertész of Bauhaus-like odd perspective views of daytime Paris, or Brassaï’s foreboding, nighttime, foggy streets with its inviting dens of alcohol and flesh, create a beckoning yet unsettling presence. The photos do not exist here as mere documents to examine, but as entry points into an unpredictable psychic world, mysterious, dangerous, yet irresistible.

Amazon.com The Secret Paris of the ’30s link

Though it provides only a pale approximation of the haunting atmosphere of this exhibition, here is a video that gives some orientation. The intimate, dim lighting in the galleries is overpowered by the recording video camera, losing much of  the mystery of the installation:

In the video, relevant books and magazines are shown displayed in vitrines. Most exhibitions about Surrealism generally feature the major literary texts of the movement: its several manifestoes, editions of poetry, and the two major novels of André Breton, Nadja and L’Amour Fou. But several of these cases also display open copies of VU magazine along with the artists’ photos on the walls nearby. VU was a French weekly news magazine, a predecessor of LIFE and LOOK; it was published from March 1928 until May 1940 and covered much the same range of news, sports, social and cultural events as its American counterparts; however, its commitment to photography and photomontage was singular. This went well beyond the American styled photo-essay as we know it, as it covered new and imaginative aspects of layout and design. VU’s pages are chock-a-block with photography, much of it in an overtly experimental style that incorporates elements of Russian Constructivism and of the German Bauhaus, but with a distinctive Gallic tilt toward the surreal and poetically non-literal. VU, and its arts and literary companion, Minotaure, were in every sense avant-garde even when documenting quotidian events.

Amazon.com VU: The Story of a Magazine link

In addition to providing a wider audience for the artists’ works than any gallery, especially at a time when photography was still considered by many to be only a craft, not an art form, VU assignments were a source of stable income for the photographers. Vu provided a security blanket for the many artist/ flaneur/ foreigners such as Brassaï, Kertész, Bing, and Breitenbach to indulge their passion to capture the ever-changing and unpredictable life on the streets of a still to them “foreign” city, while working under the cover of being accredited photojournalists. Here is Andre Kertész’s VU press card:

The prime position of the American artist Man Ray in this milieu is evident in the exhibition. Not only did he reflect many of the stylistic concerns of the other photographers of the Parisian scene, but he was singular among them on many fronts: his fashion work graced the pages of tony magazines for the idle rich; his portraits using surrealist metaphors were highly sought by celebrities who wanted câchet in the art world; his darkroom experiments in solarization, montage, and camera-less images which he called Rayographs, broadened the parameters of pictorial language; his sexual affairs and his many mistresses like Kiki of Montparnasse and Lee Miller, made him the envy of fellow artists; his paintings, sculptures and composited ready-mades allowed him entry into the inner sanctum of the Surrealists and acceptance as an equal among the prestige painters of the movement; his photo-documentation of Surrealism’s poets, novelists, painters and sculptors rendered him the movement’s visual diarist:

Man Ray Wikipedia entry link

A 1934 publication of Man Ray’s photographs from 1920 to 1934 illustrates the wide range of his subject matter.

Man Ray’s introduction to the book reads like a lot of “Surrealist” gibberish extolling some of leader André Breton’s arcane pronouncements, but he does refer to the photographs as “autobiographical.” Perhaps in a certain sense all artistic work is. But here is a sample of his writing:

Seized in moments of visual detachment during periods of emotional contact, these images are oxidized residues, fixed by light and chemical elements, of living organisms. No plastic expression can ever be more than a residue of an experience. The recognition of an image that has tragically an experience, recalling the event more or less clearly, like the undisturbed ashes of an object consumed by flames, the recognition of this object so little representative and so fragile… .

It does go on and on. Maybe it sounds better in French. Or maybe Man Ray had been in France a few years too long. He reads as precursor to the semioticians. In any case, I wonder what Garry Winogrand would have said about his pronouncements on photography.

As much of a revolution that the Surrealists insisted they represented, the truth is that they had numerous antecedents, the most direct of which was the movement’s emergence out of the deaths and ashes of WWI, the Swiss-born, “anti-art,” Dada. The dream-reality qualities of Surrealism harkened back in literature to Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Lautréamont, and in photography to that most unlikely of men, Eugène Atget, whose photos of an ancient and disappearing Paris, evoked the Surrealists’ fundamental ambivalence toward modernism. Atget’s clochards and street vendors, as well as his studies of shop windows and empty streets, documented a disturbing and uncanny space that seemed ripe for surrealist ir-reality. Here is an Atget daytime shop window and a Brassaï nighttime one:

Among the galleries in “Twilight Visions” LCD TV monitors also hang, flat to the wall like a paintings or photographs. They show films imbued with the Surrealist spirit, such as Luis Bunuel’s Un Chien Andalou, Man Ray’s L Étoile de Mer, Emak Bakia and Renoir’s Little Match Girl. These films reinforce the intersection between film and photography so vital to Surrealists and that was to increase in the coming decades. This exhibition of film, visually oriented magazines, and photography all together, argues compellingly that there was a cultural shift occurring at this moment that will resonate through the rest of the century: that the visual media will become primary vehicles of cultural expression, usurping the centuries long dominance of the printed word, relegating even painting to the purview of a marginalized elite.

Man Ray’s L Étoile de Mer (part 1) YouTube link

A truly marvelous aspect of the “Twilight Visions” exhibition is the pre-eminent role it gives to photography and to VU Magazine in the realization of these same Surrealist ideas. While much of the literature and manifestos of the movement are today mostly historical referents and footnotes to the ennui and psychic crises of the period between two horrible World Wars, the visual arts gain support here as the key expressions of the epoch. The photographers of Paris in the 20s and 30s are not a stand-alone, navel gazing claque unto themselves, but great artists who are in touch with a larger audience. Their work is not only a window into the entire society, and an engagement with the socio-political reality of an emerging faschism, but haunting testaments of an alternative psychic reality that nibbles at our waking consciousness even today.