Photographers: 2024

Monday, April 1, 2024

CINDY SHERMAN

PHOTO ELYSEE

29.03 – 04.08.24

Cindy Shermanhas been exploring themes of representation and identity for over 40 years. Her portraits have established her as one of the most recognized and influential artists of our time. In the dual role of photographer and model, playing with makeup, wigs and costumes–traditional methods of transformation–Sherman creates portraits of women with similar yet very different features, always using her own body. The sense of fractured identity, characteristic of our contemporary society, is particularly emphasized in her figures, constructed since the 2000s using digital manipulations. In her most recent series, the malleability of the self-image is expressed in these face collages in which Sherman accentuates incongruous facial details. These women who express a variety of emotions are all composites of the artist's own face. Sherman is both behind and in front of the camera, viewer and object. This series shows how complex our identity is, how it is subject to multiple constructions, and how impossible it is to capture in a single image.

Cindy Sherman is considered to be one of the most important American artists of her generation. Her ground-breaking photographs have interrogated themes around representation and identity in contemporary media for over four decades. In this new body of work, the artist collages parts of her own face to construct the identities of various characters, using digital manipulation to accent the layered aspects and plasticity of the self. Sherman has removed any scenic backdrops or mise-en-scène–the focus of this series is the face. She combines a digital collaging technique using black and white and color photographs with other traditional modes of transformation, such as make-up, wigs and costumes, to create a series of unsettling characters who laugh, twist, squint and grimace in front of the camera.

To create the fractured characters, Sherman has photographed isolated parts of her body–her eyes, nose, lips, skin, hair, ears–which she cuts, pastes and stretches onto a foundational image, ultimately constructing, deconstructing and then reconstructing a new face. In the double role of both photographer and model, Sherman upends the usual dynamic between artist and subject. Here, the sitter does not technically exist–all portraits are comprised of composites of the artist’s face–however, they still read as classical portraiture and, despite the layers, the image still gives a true impression of a ‘sitter’.

Tightly cropped, with frames full of hair, stretched-out faces or swathes of material, Sherman’s construction of her characters disrupts the voyeur-gaze and subjectobject binaries that are often associated with traditional portraiture. In works such as Untitled #661 (2023), subtle changes, such as the positioning of a towel, the copy and pasting of an eyebrow from one image to another, or the elongation of a facial feature, alter the entire demeanor and representation of the imagined ‘sitter.’

This type of warping of the face is akin to the use of prosthetics that Sherman began using in the mid1980s in series such as History Portraits (1988) or Masks from the 1990s, exploring the more grotesque or abject aspects of humanity. Like her use of costumes, wigs and makeup, the application of prosthetics would often be left exposed, breaking, rather than upholding, any sense of illusion. Similarly, the use of digital manipulation in her new series exaggerates the tensions between identity and artifice.

Cindy Sherman, Untitled #631, 2010/2023 © Cindy Sherman, Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

This is heightened in works such as Untitled #631 (2010/2023) where Sherman combines both black and white and colored fragments, highlighting the presence of the artist’s hand and disrupting any perception of reality, while also harking back to the hand-colored and hand-cut works that she made in the 1970s. By employing this layering technique, Sherman creates a site of multiplicity, exploring the notion that identity is a complex, and often constructed, human characteristic that is impossible to capture in a singular picture.

Cindy Sherman, Untitled #627, 2010/2023 © Cindy Sherman, Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

Catalogue

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue by Hauser & Wirth Publishers.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Born in 1954, Cindy Sherman lives and works in New York. Coming to prominence in the late 1970s with the Pictures Generation group, Sherman first turned her attention to photography at Buffalo State College in the early 1970s. In 1977, shortly after moving to New York City, she began her critically acclaimed series of Untitled Film Stills. Sherman continued to channel and reconstruct familiar personas known to the collective psyche, often in unsettling ways, and by the mid to late 1980s, the artist’s visual language began to explore the more grotesque aspects of humanity through the lens of horror and the abject, as seen in works such as Fairy Tales (1985) and Disasters (1986-89). These highly visceral images saw the artist introduce visible prostheses and mannequins into her work, which would later be used in series such as Sex Pictures (1992) to add to the layers of artifice in her constructed female identities.

Like Sherman’s use of costumes, wigs and makeup, their application would often be left exposed. Her renowned History Portraits, begun in 1988, used these theatrical effects to break, rather than uphold, any sense of illusion. Since the early 2000s, Sherman has used digital technology to further manipulate her cast of characters in her work. This is evident in her Clown series (2003), Society Portraits (2008) and her Flappers series (2016).

In 2017, Sherman began using Instagram to upload portraits that utilize several face-altering apps, morphing the artist into a plethora of protagonists in kaleidoscopic settings. Disorientating and uncanny, the posts highlight the dissociative nature of Instagram from reality.

Sherman’s work has been recognized by numerous grants and awards, including a MacArthur Fellowship, Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship and the Hasselblad Award. It has also been the subject of several major retrospectives, including at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles in 1998, the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 2012, the National Portrait Gallery, London, in 2019, and at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris in 2023.

Cindy Sherman, Untitled #659, 2023 © Cindy Sherman, Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth 9 PRESS IMAGES © Cindy Sherman, Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

Cindy Sherman, Untitled #648, 2023 © Cindy Sherman, Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

MAN RAY LIBERATING PHOTOGRAPH

PHOTO ELYSEE

29.03 – 04.08.24

This year, Plateforme 10 is celebrating 100 years of Surrealism. In 1924, André Breton published the manifesto of this major artistic movement of the 20th century. Among the artists associated with Breton were Luis Buñuel, Leonora Carrington, Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, Alberto Giacometti, Dora Maar, Dorothea Tanning and a photographer: Man Ray. His photographic work covers a wide range of genres: portraits and nudes, fashion, still life and abstract photography, etc. A multi-faceted artist, he had a pronounced taste for experimentation and new processes: photograms, solarizations, optical manipulations, coupling of positives and negatives, etc.

A fixture of the Paris art scene in the early 20th century, close to Marcel Duchamp and André Breton, he is one of the few photographers mentioned alongside Dada and Surrealist artists. Man Ray, whose career spanned more than 60 years, is recognized today as one of the most influential photographers of the 20th century. He took his first photographs in New York in the 1910s. However, it was in the following two decades, while living in Paris, that he abandoned the idea of a career in painting to devote himself to photography. He saw in this medium a creative tool that would enable him to go beyond the representation of reality. He thus tried his hand at abstraction, while photographing the artists he came into contact with in a relatively classical manner.

Establishing himself as a professional photographer, he opened his own studio, which rapidly became a gathering place for the entire Parisian art scene: Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Robert Delaunay, Alberto Giacometti, Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst. He made many portraits of artists, writers and intellectuals in his circle, including Coco Chanel, Paul Eluard, James Joyce, Elsa Schiaparelli, Igor Stravinsky and Virginia Woolf. In addition to celebrity portraits, he tried his hand at staging and photographing his female models–Lee Miller, Kiki de Montparnasse and Meret Oppenheim–in a variety of different settings.

To be totally liberated from painting and its aesthetic implications” was the first avowed aim of Man Ray (United States, 1890-1976), who began his career as a painter. Photography was one of the major breakthroughs of modern art and led to a rethinking of notions of representation. In the 1920s and 30s, the photographic medium came to the forefront of the avant-garde movement, and Man Ray soon made a name for himself with his virtuosity. As a studio portraitist and fashion photographer, but also as an experimental artist who explored the potential of photography with the people around him, Man Ray was a multi-faceted figure. Considered one of the 20th century’s major artists, close to Dada and then Surrealism, he photographed Paris’ artistic milieu between the wars.

Curated from a private collection, the exhibition explores the artist’s extensive social contacts while presenting some of his most iconic works. In addition to providing a dazzling who’s who of the Parisian avant-garde, the works also highlight the innovations in photography made by Man Ray in Paris in the 1920s and 30s. He took his first photographs in New York in the 1910s, but it was in Paris that his career took off.

Even before opening his studio in Montparnasse in 1922, Man Ray worked for a year in his hotel room. The photographer's reputation grew, and before long, the artist's studio was flourishing. Fashion photographs alternated with portraits of the artistic figures of the day who had made Paris’ notoriety: Marcel Duchamp, whom he met in New York in 1915 and who introduced him to the Parisian artistic elite, as well as Robert Delaunay, Georges Braque, Alberto Giacometti and Pablo Picasso, among others, who posed for the photographer. His portraits also included Ballets Russes dancers and guests at the Count de Beaumont's ball.

As soon as he arrived in Paris in the summer of 1921, Man Ray immediately became part of the Parisian intelligentsia of the Roaring Twenties. He met Jean Cocteau, who was himself a figure of the Parisian art scene, André Breton, Francis Picabia, Joan Miró, Salvador Dalí, Henri Matisse and Max Ernst. He also met Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, Igor Stravinsky, Ernest Hemingway, Arnold Schoenberg and James Joyce, whom he photographed for the Anglo-American bookshop Shakespeare and Company. But Man Ray was not merely content to have celebrities pose in his studio or to explore the female nude genre by working with those he considered his muses, such as Lee Miller, Kiki de Montparnasse, Meret Oppenheim and Adrienne Fidelin.

Man Ray also experimented in the darkroom, transforming the photographic medium into a powerful tool of artistic expression, even going so far as to do away with the camera when, in 1921-1922, he began creating photograms, which he coined "rayographs" after himself. He explained that working with light in the darkroom allowed him to free himself from painting, so convinced was he of the visual power of his experiments.

Man Ray, Alice Prin, known as Kiki de Montparnasse, around 1925 © Man Ray 2015 Trust / 2024, ProLitteris, Zurich

Man Ray, Dora Maar, 1936 © Man Ray 2015 Trust / 2024, ProLitteris, Zurich

Also in the 1920s, he experimented with the moving image and produced four films. The rhythm and freedom offered by the cinema complemented his photographic work, in which he saw a close relationship between film and poetry. This is why he gave his film Emak Bakia (1926) the subheading of "cinépoème". Without ever abandoning portraiture, he experimented with other techniques in the 1930s: solarization, overprinting and other distortions.

From the outset, photography has been more than a simple process of reproduction. For him, images were not taken fleetingly, but meticulously realized indoors. Unlike Henri Cartier-Bresson who opted for the spontaneous gesture and saw the street as a privileged playground, Man Ray composed and staged his photographs. The studio provided him with a space in which to explore his imagination. Some of the themes dear to the Surrealists can be found in his work: femininity, sexuality, strangeness, the boundary between dream and reality. His nude studies were part of his artistic research, which he developed in close collaboration with his companions who were part of the Parisian art scene.

Kiki de Montparnasse– the woman with the f-holes of a violin on her back– whose real name was Alice Prin, was a dancer, singer, actress and painter who posed for artists such as Chaïm Soutine and Kees van Dongen. Lee Miller, a fellow New Yorker like him, had begun a modeling career in the United States but wanted to move to the other side of the camera. She met the photographer in Paris in 1929 when she was 22-years old, and became active in the Surrealist movement. More than a muse, she became his collaborator, learning photography at his side. Together, they discovered the technique of solarization.

Another artist with whom Man Ray had a professional and romantic relationship was the Swiss artist Meret Oppenheim, who was close to the Surrealist scene before pursuing an independent career as an artist. Man Ray loved the freedom his photographic creations afforded him, and portraits and fashion photography enabled him to earn a living. It was in his studio that he embarked on a series of visual experiments. His portraits, which are relatively classical in style, testify not only to his commercial success, but also to his great sociability. Artists from Montparnasse, Surrealists, fashion and nightlife celebrities, patrons of the arts, Americans in Paris– the entire artistic elite–passed through his studio, as was the case with Nadar in the 19th century.

Almost 50 years after Man Ray's death, his photographs continue to fascinate us. His impact on the history of the medium is undeniable, and he served as an inspiration to photographers of the caliber of Berenice Abbott, Bill Brandt and Lee Miller. Man Ray remains one of the most famous photographers of the 20th century. He never stopped creating, without prejudice or constraint.

More Images

Man Ray, Rayograph Flowers, 1925 © Man Ray 2015 Trust / 2024, ProLitteris, Zurich

Man Ray, Nancy Cunard, 1925 © Man Ray 2015 Trust / 2024, ProLitteris, Zurich

Man Ray, Noire et Blanche, 1926 © Man Ray 2015 Trust / 2024, ProLitteris, Zurich

Man Ray, Fashion photograph, circa 1935 © Man Ray 2015 Trust / 2024, ProLitteris, Zurich

Man Ray, Bottle-holder by Marcel Duchamp, circa 1920 © Man Ray 2015 Trust / 2024, ProLitteris, Zurich

Man Ray, Jacqueline Goddard, circa 1932 © Pierre gassmann / ADAGP © Man Ray 2015 Trust / 2024, ProLitteris, Zurich 7

Book

Published in connection with an exhibition opening at Photo Elysée in spring 2024, this book presents more than one hundred and fifty of Man Ray's portraits, primarily from the 1920s and '30s.

Man Ray (1890–1976) was a man both of and ahead of his time. With his conceptual approach and innovative techniques, he liberated photography from previous constraints and opened the floodgates to new ways of thinking about the medium.

A close friend of Marcel Duchamp and André Breton, he was one of the few photographers to be mentioned among the Dada artists and surrealists. He also worked as a fashion photographer, first for Vogue and later for Harper's Bazaar and Vanity Fair. Renowned as the creator of Ingres's Violin—a photograph from 1924 that broke records when it was sold for $12.4 million in 2022—Man Ray remains an influential figure in the worlds of art, fashion, and pop culture, with many other artists referencing his work.

Published in connection with an exhibition at Photo Elysée and in the centennial year of the publication of André Breton's Surrealist Manifesto, Man Ray presents more than one hundred and fifty of Man Ray’s portraits, primarily from the 1920s and '30s. It includes portraits of the leading lights of the Paris art scene, among them Marcel Duchamp, Robert Delaunay, Georges Braque, Alberto Giacometti, and Pablo Picasso, as well as a selection of his fashion work. As an innovator of photographic techniques and compositional form, Man Ray found the studio portrait—be it of the artists and writers with whom he had longstanding friendships or of the objects and sculptures he collected—to be the playground in which he could express the visual wit and experimentation for which he is renowned.

Contributors

Nathalie Herschdorfer

Author

Nathalie Herschdorfer is the director of Photo Elysée in Lausanne, Switzerland. Her previous books include Deborah Turbeville: Photocollage, Body, and Coming into Fashion.

Wendy Grossman

Text By

Wendy A. Grossman is an independent scholar and curator. She is the author of Man Ray, African Art, and the Modernist Lens.

Saturday, February 3, 2024

Irving Penn The Bath

Thaddaeus Ropac

27 January—13 March 2024

This exhibition is dedicated to a rarely-seen series of photographs by Irving Penn. Taken in 1967, the carefully composed images are the result of Penn’s collaboration with the Dancers’ Workshop of San Francisco, capturing the groundbreaking work of the American choreographer Anna Halprin. In addition to the photographic series, one of Irving Penn’s rare paintings is also part of the exhibition. Penn captured the dancers in his studio as they re-staged Halprin’s improvisational choreography, The Bath (1966). The group of 14 photographs, which were printed for the first time in 1995, highlight Halprin’s pioneering approach to movement and reveal a more experimental side to Penn’s practice. In its entirety, the series is exhibited for the first time in the German-speaking world. The summer of 1967 in San Francisco has become known as the ‘Summer of Love’. Young people converged on the city, drawn to its burgeoning counterculture that broke the taboos of American society, promoting community, altruism, mysticism and free love. Fascinated by the movement, Irving Penn travelled to the Bay Area the following September to document its participants with a series of group portraits to be published in Look magazine. He wanted, as he termed it, to ‘look into the faces of these new San Francisco people through a camera in a daylight studio, against a simple background, away from their own daily circumstances.’ At the heart of the avant-garde art scene in the 1960s was the Dancers’ Workshop of San Francisco. Their founder and choreographer, Anna Halprin, was a pioneer of postmodern dance. Her practice promoted healing and a sense of community through body awareness and improvised group interactions based on ritual, which radically changed modern dance.

What I remember is the purity of the relationship of these young people and an innocence so different from today’s. As I look at these pictures, how the dancers touch each other, how they embrace [...] there’s a serenity that as a photographer I’m not used to. — Irving Penn, 1995 Press Release Irving Penn, The Bath (B) (Dancers’ Workshop of San Francisco), 1967. Gelatin silver print, print made 1995. 39.1 x 39.1 cm (15.39 x 15.39 in)2 ‘

Dance is breath made visible,’ Halprin said of her approach. Her daring performances were often participatory and rarely took place in traditional stage settings, with one instance leading to a summons for indecent exposure only a few short months before Irving Penn photographed the troupe. In the original performances of The Bath, the nude dancers bathed each other in fountains or using jugs and buckets of water. ‘The performance of the simple action,’ writes Halprin in her notes on The Bath, ‘the natural action, objectifies what is really going on inside the performer’s self.’ Penn omits the containers in his photographs, although fine droplets of water appear here and there on the dancers’ skin, and wet patches remain on the studio floor. When Halprin saw the pictures, she observed that Penn’s compositions put forward ‘the absolute purity of a boy and girl relating to each other in the most magical way, and yet it seemed real. What [the dancers] were left with was creating the essence of the bath, but it had nothing to do with actual bathing anymore.’ Although the majority of the dancers remain unnamed, Halprin’s daughter Daria Halprin can be identified throughout the photographs, her powerful gaze highlighted by Penn in one of the series’ most arresting images. Coming in laterally from the window on the north side of the studio, the daylight wraps itself around the dancers’ bodies as they interlace. ‘The pictures are primarily of embraces,’ Penn remarked upon rediscovering the photographs in 1995, ‘beautiful and touching. Here they are without clothes, there’s love, the gestures are tenderly erotic but certainly not pornographic.’

And yet the photographs were considered too daring to be published in ‘The Incredibles’ essay featured in the 9 January 1968 issue of Look magazine. According to Vasilios Zatse, deputy director of the Irving Penn Foundation, they remained forgotten for almost three decades until Halprin contacted Penn in 1995, enquiring about the photographs for her archive. He selected 14 negatives and printed them for her, using the gelatin silver process. Although the two never met, Penn stated at the time: ‘I didn’t know Ann[a] Halprin at all, but I know from these pictures, I tell you, I like her very much.’ Dance was a recurring theme throughout Penn’s career. From his photographs of American ballet companies in 1946 to his 1999 series capturing the movements of dancer and choreographer Alexandra Beller, the artist maintained an interest in new and avant-garde forms of performance. It is undoubtedly thanks to his affinity for the art form that Penn was able to capture The Bath with such acuteness. Where Halprin found that the photographs brought out the essence of her own work, Penn remarked that they gave him a sense of ‘serenity,’ which he was, in his words, ‘not used to.’ The series, therefore, represents a unique confluence between modern photography and postmodern dance and constitutes a rare document of the meeting of two artistic minds. Irving Penn, Untitled, 1987. Ink, watercolor, and dry pigment with gum arabic over platinum-palladium print on paper. 59.7 x 48.9 cm (23.5 x 19.25 in) Irving Penn, The Bath (G) (Dancers’ Workshop of San Francisco), 1967. Gelatin silver print, print made 1995. 38.6 x 37.8 cm (15.2 x 14.88 in) In addition to the photographs, the exhibition presents a work on paper from 1987 that highlights the broad spectrum of Irving Penn’s artistic practice. After his retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1984, the artist returned to the medium of painting and, inspired by his experience with printing photographs, developed an experimental technique: he photographed drawings and enlarged them as platinum-palladium prints. He then used the resulting prints as a painting surface, which he worked on with a combination of watercolours, ink, dry pigments and gum arabic – materials that lend the works a complex surface structure. The photographic series The Bath relates to Irving Penn’s wider interest in exploring movement and organic forms, a theme that can also be found in his abstract painting; the entwining shapes recall the interlacing bodies of the dancers.4 Born in 1917 to immigrant parents in Plainfield, New Jersey, Irving Penn attended the Pennsylvania Museum School of Industrial Arts from 1934—38 and studied with Alexey Brodovitch in his Design Laboratory. His first photographic cover for Vogue magazine appeared in October 1943 and he would continue to work at the magazine throughout his career. In the 1950s, he founded his own studio in New York and began taking advertising photographs alongside his private, experimental work. In the early 1970s, Penn closed his Manhattan studio and immersed himself in platinumpalladium printing in the laboratory he had constructed on the family farm on Long Island. There he created his innovative Cigarettes series, which was shown in his first exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1975, as well as his Street Material series, shown at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York in 1977. The first retrospective of Penn’s work was organised by The Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1984 and toured internationally to countries including Japan, France, Spain, Germany, Sweden, Israel, Italy and the UK. He donated his archives to the Art Institute Chicago in 1995, and established The Irving Penn Foundation in 2005 to promote knowledge and understanding of his artistic legacy, including the diversity of techniques, mediums and subject matter that he explored.

Recent exhibitions of the artist’s work include Irving Penn: Beyond Beauty at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C. (2015), Centennial at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2017), which travelled to the RMN - Grand Palais, Paris; C/O Berlin and the Instituto Moreira Salles, São Paulo and Irving Penn, Chefs d’œuvre de la collection de la MEP at the Franciscaines in Deauville (2023). From March 2024, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco will present the celebrated Centennial-retrospective, including 196 photographs, spanning every period of Penn’s nearly 70-year career.

Weegee Part II

Weegee Autopsy of the Spectacle

Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson
January 30 — May 19, 2024

Fundación MAPFRE, Madrid
September 24, 2024 to January 5, 2025

Self-Portrait, Weegee with Speed Graphic Camera, 1950 © International Center of Photography. Collection Friedsam.6 Weegee – Alessandra Sanguinetti

There’s a mystery to Weegee. The American photographer’s career seems to be split in two. One side includes his sensational photography printed in North American tabloids: corpses of gangsters lying in pools of their own blood, bodies trapped in battered vehicles, kingpins looking sinister behind the bars of prison wagons, dilapidated slums consumed by fire, and other harrowing documents on the lives of the underprivileged in New York from 1935 to 1945. Then come the festive photographs–glamorous parties, performances by entertainers, jubilant crowds, openings and premieres– to which we must add a vast array of portraits of public figures that Weegee delighted in distorting using a rich palette of tricks between 1948 and 1951, a practice he pursued until the end of his life. How can these diametrically opposed bodies of work coexist? Critics have enjoyed highlighting the opposition between the two periods, praising the former and disparaging the latter.

The exhibition Autopsy of the Spectacle seeks to reconcile the two parts of Weegee by showing that, beyond formal differences, the photographer’s approach is critically coherent. The spectacle is omnipresent in Weegee’s work. In the first part of his career, which coincides with the rise of the tabloid press, he was an active participant in transforming news into spectacle. To show this, he often included spectators, or other photographers, in the foreground of his images. In the second half of his career, Weegee mocked the Hollywood spectacular: its ephemeral glory, adoring crowds and social scenes. Some years before the Situationist International, his photography presented an incisive critique of the Society of the Spectacle. With a new perspective on Weegee’s oeuvre, Autopsy of the Spectacle presents the photographer’s iconic images beside lesser-known works, including images not-yet-exhibited in France.

Charles Sodokoff and Arthur Webber Use Their Top Hats to Hide Their Faces, 1942 © International Center of Photography. Louis Stettner Archives, Paris.

Exhibition curator Clément Chéroux Director, Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson

PUBLICATION The exhibition is accompanied by a catalog in French published by Éditions Textuel. Weegee, Autopsie du Spectacle Éditions Textuel Texts by Isabelle Bonnet, David Campany, Clément Chéroux et Cynthia Young. 20 x 26 cm 208 pages Published: 17 January 2024 ISBN 978-2-84597-990-1 55 €

The exhibition will also travel to Madrid, Spain, where it will be on view at the Fundación MAPFRE from September 24, 2024 to January 5, 2025. A catalog in spanish will be published for the occasion.

BIOGRAPHY

Weegee was born Usher Felig on June 12, 1899, to a Jewish family in Zolochiv, a small town in Galicia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, today in Western Ukraine. At 11 years old, he joined his father who’d emigrated to the United States. At Ellis Island immigration station, he became Arthur Fellig. Living in the slums of the Lower East Side, he left school at 14 to earn money to support his family. After working in different professions, he became a traveling photographer, worked for photographers Duckett & Adler, then in the ACME Newspictures agency lab.

Starting in 1935, he was self-employed as photo-reporter. Towards 1937, he began using the pseudonym Weegee, and around 1941, started marking the backs of his prints with a stamp in the form of a self-fulfilling prophecy: “Weegee the Famous.” For 10 years, his radio tuned to the police frequency, he took photographs, mainly at night, of crime, arrests, fires, accidents and other news items. Though the photographer most certainly had connections within the police, without whom his work would not have been possible, he also frequented left-wing circles. He was very close to the Photo League, a group of independent photographers who firmly believed in emancipation through the image and fought for social justice.

In 1945, he published his best photographs in a book entitled Naked City, which met with great success both in its reception and sales. In the spring of 1948, he moved to Hollywood to work in cinema as a technical advisor, and sometimes, as an actor. He photographed the endless party and developed different photographic techniques to create his caricatures of celebrities. In December of 1951, after four years on the West Coast, he returned to New York with no intention of resuming his former practice. Up until his death on December 26, 1968, the majority of his work involved taking advantage of his notoriety to publish other books, go on tour, and promote his photo-caricatures in newspapers.

Images

Weegee, Charles Sodokoff and Arthur Webber Use Their Top Hats to Hide Their Faces, 1942

Charles Sodokoff and Arthur Webber Use Their Top Hats to Hide Their Faces, 1942 © International Center of Photography. Louis Stettner Archives, Paris.

Afternoon Crowd at Coney Island, Brooklyn, 1940 © International Center of Photography. Courtesy Galerie Berinson, Berlin.

Book: Portrait and Place : Photography in Senegal, 1840–1960

When the daguerreotype first arrived in sub-Saharan Africa in the early nineteenth century, local kingdoms still held power in Senegal and the French presence was limited to trading outposts along the coast. The pioneers of photography in Senegal worked within, across, and beyond the borders of colonial empire, expanding the medium’s possibilities and contributing to a global visual language.

Portrait and Place explores these unique encounters, providing an in-depth and nuanced look at the images made at the intersection of Black Atlantic, Islamic, and African cultures.

Giulia Paoletti takes readers on a visual journey from the 1840s, when the oldest-surviving daguerreotype from West Africa was made, to the 1960s, when photography became the most popular medium as Senegal achieved its independence. She discusses some of Africa’s most celebrated modernists, such as Mama Casset, and also offers insights into lesser-known photographers like Oumar Ka and once-anonymous figures such as Macky Kane. Paoletti examines both professional and amateur artists in genres ranging from portraiture to landscape and across media such as glass painting and lithography.

Featuring a wealth of breathtaking images published here for the first time, Portrait and Place brings to life the important histories of photography on the African continent.

Thursday, February 1, 2024

Swann Galleries: Fine Photographs on Thursday, February 15

Edward Weston, *Dunes, Oceano (White Dunes)*, silver print, 1936. Estimate $20,000 to $30,000.

Swann: a special auction of 100 lots from the Collection of Dr. James and Debra Pearl. Rich in American masterworks, the collection features the premier photographers of the 19th-century American landscape such as Carleton Watkins, Eadweard Muybridge, and William Henry Jackson, as well as the 20th-century masters, including Ansel Adams, Irving Penn, and Edward Weston, featuring Richard Avedon’s exceptional portrait of Georgia O’Keeffe, as well as 6 of Irving Penn’s portraits from his Small Trades series, his portraits of Igor Stravinsky and Truman Capote, as well as imagery from Cuzco, including his iconic Cuzco Children, Peru (1948). Other highlights include Carleton Watkins’ The Domes from Yosemite Valley (1865-66; printed 1870s) and Mirror Lake and Mount Watkins, Yosemite (1861; printed 1870s), Eadweard Muybridge’s Pi-Wi-Ack, Valley of the Yosemite, Shower of Stars, Vernal Falls and Temple Peak (both 1872), Ansel Adams’ Clearing Winter Storm (1938; printed 1959-60) and Monolith, the Face of Half Dome, Yosemite National Park (1927; printed 1973-77), and Edward Weston’s rare and vintage Civilian Defense (1942) and Dunes, Oceano (White Dunes) (1936). This collection is a testament to the Pearls’ love and appreciation for the medium’s history as well as their understanding of photography’s unique and indelible beauty.

Edward Weston, Cabbage Leaf, from Edward Weston: Fiftieth Anniversary Portfolio, 1902-1950, silver print, 1931; printed circa 1951. From the Collection Dr. James & Debra Pearl. Estimate $4,000 to $6,000.

The auction also includes numerous works for a multi-owner section, including Henri Cartier-Bresson’s Rue Mouffetard, Paris (1952; printed 1980s); Peter Hujar’s New York: Sixth Avenue (1976); Helmut Newton’s Rue Aubriot (i), Yves St. Laurent, Haute Couture Collection, Paris (1975; printed 2000s); Andy Warhol’s Polaroid Self-portrait in Fright Wig (1986); Garry Winogrand’s eponymous portfolio (1960-74; printed 1978); and a stunning oversized Ruth Bernhard Nude in the Box – Horizontal (1962; printed 1992), among much more.

Irving Penn, *Deep Sea Diver, New York, from the Small Trades series*, silver print, 1951. $20,000 to $30,000.

Richard Avedon, *Portrait of the artist Georgia O’Keeffe*, silver print, 1958. $30,000 to $50,000.

Carleton E. Watkins, *Mirror Lake and Mount Watkins, Yosemite*, mammoth albumen print, 1861; printed 1870s. Estimate $7,000 to $10,000.

Irving Penn, *Breton Onion Seller, London, from the Small Trades series*, silver print, 1950. Estimate $20,000 to $30,000.

Lot 1: Ansel Adams, Monolith, the Face of Half Dome, Yosemite National Park, silver print, 1927, printed 1973-77.

Estimate $25,000 to $35,000;