Posts Tagged ‘Man Ray’
“History has left its mark on every corner, reminding us of our roots”*…
Wendell Brock on photographer Paul Kwilecki, who spent four decades documenting a single southwest Georgia county, a place he called home and where he never truly fit in…
Paul Kwilecki, the great Southern documentary photographer, was so enamored of his hometown that he could get homesick without even leaving.
He spent a remarkable four decades taking pictures of Bainbridge, Georgia, and surrounding Decatur County – and virtually no place else.
“The picture of the stores on Broad Street that I took Sunday is so lyrical and melancholy and has such a quality of loneliness that it has set me to thinking and feeling further in this direction,” Kwilecki wrote in his private journal in 1967, just seven years into his singular body of work.
“In that picture I put my finger on a feeling that is distinctly little-town. The stillness of the buildings with not a person in sight gives the viewer the feeling that he is standing alone just across the street about to cry with homesickness, in spite of this all being familiar and his hometown, for it is a more remote, unapproachable home that he longs for. This is as poetic an image as I ever made and I want to pursue the quality that makes it so.”
Exactly what was the “remote, unapproachable home” this isolated artist so desperately yearned for? Was it a metaphor for heaven? A memory of a lost moment in time?…
… Over time, Kwilecki’s great themes would emerge: home, memory, the passage of time, the certainty of death. And by the time of his own death in 2009, at age 81, he had metamorphosed from a somber young man into a sweet, wistful grandpa with a white beard and a yellow Labrador retriever he fed cubes of cheese and talked to like a baby. By then, Charlotte, his beloved wife of 56 years, was gone, and his work was done: He’d shot thousands of images and culled them down to the 539 master prints that form the core of the Paul Kwilecki Photographs and Papers Collection in the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University. Consisting of more than 9,000 items in 56 boxes and one large folder — 42 linear feet — the archive is a trove of negatives, prints, contact sheets, journals, letters, speeches, and arcana that reveal the soul of the self-taught artist from Bainbridge.
Today, photo geeks the world over consider Paul Kwilecki a master of the documentary form. I’ve never met a serious photographer or curator who didn’t want to pull up a chair and rhapsodize about Kwilecki. Never. You can see his influence on Athens-based Mark Steinmetz, Bainbridge native Jimmy Nicholson, North Carolina’s Rob Amberg, Kentucky’s Sarah Hoskins.
And yet to the general public, Kwilecki’s iconic images of the Decatur County Courthouse, Willis Park, Oak City Cemetery, the Flint River, and numerous other scenes barely register. Kwilecki got this. He did not feel seen — and felt required to explain himself at every turn, from the first picture to the last…
Brock traces Kwilecki’s steps, combs through his archives (sharing more photos), and cracks open his personal journals, revealing the man’s inner life – and genius: “The Only Home He Ever Knew,” from @MrBrock in @BitterSouth.
* Paul Theroux, Deep South
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As we reflect, we might send carefully-composed birthday greetings to Berenice Abbott; she was born on this date in 1898. While studying to be a sculptor in Paris in 1921, Abbott signed on as assistant to Man Ray, and quickly developed a reputation for her photographic portraits of his artist friends, then more generally of important cultural figures of the interwar period.
In 1929, Abbott moved to New York, having been taken with the city’s “photographic potential.” Over the next decade, she focused on documentary photography and on portraying the city as it underwent a transformation into a modern metropolis. Ralph Steiner wrote in PM that Abbott’s work was “the greatest collection of photographs of New York City ever made.”
Abbott’s third act began in the 1940s, when she turned to science. Abbott’s style of straight photography helped her make important contributions to scientific photography. She produced a series of photographs for a high-school physics textbook, developed by the Physical Science Study Committee project based at MIT to improve secondary school physics teaching. Between 1958 and 1961, she made a series of photographs for Educational Services Inc., which were later published. They were subsequently presented by the Smithsonian Institution in an exhibition titled Image of Physics. Then, in 2012, some of her work from this era was displayed at the MIT Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
For more on Abbott– and many examples of her wonderful work– see here, here, and here.
“The camera is first a means of self-discovery and a means of self-growth. The artist has one thing to say—himself”*…
In this Age of the Selfie, it’s good to remind oneself that the impulse to photographic self-portraiture has a long history… and that, sometimes, that heritage is shrouded in mystery…
He likely hailed from the Midwest, sometimes sported a fedora and smoked a pipe. He dressed in casual plaids or in a suit. His demeanor ranged from jovial to pensive. His hair evolved from thick black to a thinning white widow’s peak. And sometimes, a “Seasons Greetings” sign hung over his head.
We might know a lot about how this man aged, but what we don’t know is his identity or why he took – and saved – more than 450 images of himself in a photobooth over the course of several decades.
This mystery has come to light with “445 Portraits of a Man,” a collection being shown for the first time as part of “Striking Resemblance: The Changing Art of Portraiture,” an exhibition [that was] on display through [last] July at Rutgers’ Zimmerli Art Museum in New Brunswick.
The 445 images – silver gelatin prints owned by photography historian Donald Lokuta – were taken over the three decades from the Great Depression through the swinging ’60s, when the booths were most popular. “There’s quite an age difference in the photos: You see him as younger man and then with a white, receding hairline and wrinkles,” says Lokuta, who came across a few of these images at a New York City antiques show in 2012.
Upon learning that the antiques dealer had hundreds of these portraits of the same man, Lokuta knew he had to keep them together and purchased them all. “As a historian, I knew this was very rare, but on a deeper level, I wondered, ‘Why would somebody want to take almost 500 photos of himself in a photobooth?’ In appearance, they are unremarkable. They look like mugshots, but that’s what makes them special: The sameness, the repetition.”…
Read more about the “Mystery Photobooth Portraits.”
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As we say “cheese,” we might recall that it was on this date in 1928 that the first issue of VU was published. France’s first weekly French pictorial magazine, VU pioneered the “photographic essay” form and provided a home to contributors that included Cartier-Bresson, Man Ray, and André Kertész.
The cover of the first issue of VU
All the views that’s fit to print…
June 20, 1965: “Young fans holding aloft bats they were given by the Yankees yesterday at the stadium,” read a caption the day after the team lost a double-header to the Minnesota Twins. The crowd, numbering 72,244, was the largest in four years, provoking the organist to serenade fans with the tune “We’re in the Money.”
For generations, most of the photographs housed in the newsroom archive of The New York Times — known affectionately as “the morgue” — have been hidden away from the public eye in filing cabinets and manila folders.
There are exceptions, of course. The newspaper runs archival photographs every day. Then there are those photos Lens has featured in “The Lively Morgue,” an occasional series we introduced in September 2010. So far, we’ve published 17 collections, ranging in subjects from saucy publicity shots to the art of washing windows.
But we haven’t even made a dent. If we published 10 of our archival images everyday, it would be at least the year 3935 before we’d shown off the entire collection. That’s one of the reasons we launched “The Lively Morgue,” an all-archives, all-the-time feed on the social blogging site, Tumblr…
An archival photo from The New York Times shows news pictures being sorted in the newspaper’s photo “morgue,” which houses millions of images. Here they are — several each week — for you to see. Welcome to The Lively Morgue.
The Lively Morgue is here.
As we express our gratitude to the Gray Lady, we might recall that it was on this date in 1919 that a less successful editorial venture launched in New York City: Man Ray published the first (and only) issue of TNT an anarchist journal. An aspiring artist, he had been moved by the famous 1913 Armory Show, and had befriended Marcel Duchamp. For the next six years or so, Ray (born Emmanuel Radnitzky) had done his best to marry his political convictions with his creative impulse (e.g., contributing illustrations to Emma Goldman’s Mother Earth). But with the failure of TNT, Ray turned more fully to art; his next whack at publishing was New York Dada, a collaboration with Duchamp. That too failed to make a second number– and Ray departed for France… where he became part of the Surrealist circle– and an important practitioner of and influence on fine art photography.
Salvador Dali and Man Ray in Paris (source)
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