Published by Mack, A Forest Fire Between Us catalogues Tee Corinne’s radical and expansive practice as one of the foremost lesbian photographers of her time

July 01, 2024

After two years and 1,460 photographs, they stopped. “Our mindset had already shifted,” they reflect. Left with a vast diary of portraits, they started to form a sequence. The result is a breathless universe of light and shadow that chronicles their return to intimacy. It presents 164 image combinations, but also a fold-out poster of all 730 to show the full process. This is all bound in a reflective silver cover to echo its title, because since the beginning, the duo always referred to themselves as each other’s mirror. “There are things we don’t know about ourselves, but through each other, we can see ourselves more clearly,” they say. “In a mirror, you don’t always see what you want. Good or bad, it gives you a clear image of yourself.”

Some images are dynamic and playful, full of gestures and movement. Others are delicate and obscure, like a secret whispered between lovers. In many photos, it is hard to distinguish between the couple. Both have long black hair, and their faces and body parts are often disguised. This was intentional. They weren’t concerned about making a record of their daily life, the focus was to employ abstraction and performance to express “how reality is not always what you see.”

A landmark in both photographic and American history, the daguerreotype was the subject of fierce competition in Sotheby’s sale of Fine Books and Manuscripts, Including Americana, ultimate selling for some ten times its estimate and becoming, at $456,000, the most valuable American daguerreotype ever sold at auction.

Among the most important American photographic portraits to ever come to market, and one of very few surviving photographs of the woman who defined what it means to be the First Lady of the United States of America, the daguerreotype will now join the museum’s 1843 daguerreotype of John Quincy Adams by Philip Haas – the first known photograph of a U.S. President – which was acquired by the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery from Sotheby’s in 2017.

Likely created in early 1846 by John Plumbe, Jr., when photography was still in its infancy, this portrait captures Madison at 78 years old, a key figure in Washington society, nearly thirty years after her late husband, James Madison, served as the fourth U.S. President (1809-1817) and a decade after she was widowed in 1836.

This image is one of the few surviving photographs of Madison. Initially attributed to Mathew Brady, new research uncovered by Sotheby’s specialists attribute the actual maker as enterprising John Plumbe, Jr., a leading figure in American photography.

Known for her influential role, Dolley Madison came to define a First Lady as we know it today, remaining a polestar of Washington society even after his presidency and after she was widowed. The House of Representatives awarded Dolley Madison an honorary seat on the floor whenever she chose to attend sessions – a privilege never granted before to a woman – and in 1844, when Samuel Morse demonstrated his invention of the electric telegraph, he chose Dolley Madison to send the first private message. Upon her death in 1849, thousands lined the streets to observe the procession – the largest funeral the city had ever seen. President Zachary Taylor’s eulogy coined the term “First Lady”, a term which survives in American tradition to this day.

Name: Max Dillon

Age: 23

Location: Kent

Camera of choice: Someone else’s. It might be the change of perspective I enjoy, but more likely the delusion that there’s always a better camera out there.

Preferred subject: Musicians on a stage. I’ve always loved live music, so taking photos never feels like work.

Favourite time of the day to shoot: Morning.

Most recent photo you took: A funeral flotilla sailing out to sea to scatter the ashes of a fallen seaman.

How you first became interested in photography: I stumbled across a Robert Mapplethorpe photobook in a library whilst I was at school and it turned my brain inside out.

Biggest influence: Wolfgang Tillmans has always been an inspiration with his diversity of output, whilst always keeping politics firmly in the conversation around his work.

Favourite photography series/book: Laia Abril’s On Abortion: And the Repercussions of Lack of Access. The best art is functional, and you’d be hard-pressed to find a more important function than to educate in the way Abril does.

Current project/s: I’ve been experimenting with photographic vorticism for a few years now, using my own DIY vortoscope (an awkward contraption of tape and mirrors over a lens). I’ve always been fascinated by how such a beautiful practice like vorticism could be conceived by artists with ultimately fascist beliefs. I’m hoping to carry this on, just without the dodgy politics.

President Biden’s age is a particular concern with voters

After a rocky debate performance on Thursday night, political analysts and several US media organisations have been calling for US President Joe Biden to drop out of the 2024 race. Now, the former White House deputy director of photography under the Biden administration has also joined the growing chorus.

In an Instagram story after the debate, Chandler West wrote, “It’s time for Joe to go,” Axios reported.

“I know many of these people and how the White House operates. They will say he has a ‘cold’ or just experienced a ‘bad night,’ but for weeks and months, in private, they have all said what we saw last night—Joe is not as strong as he was just a couple of years ago. The debate was not the first bad day … it’s not gonna be the last,” Mr West wrote.

He further claimed that White House aides have known for months that Joe Biden’s mental health has been deteriorating but covered it up ahead of the debate. 

Several unnamed current and former Biden aides told Axios that the president is mentally engaged from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., but outside of this time frame, he is more likely to have verbal lapses and fatigue.

Notably, President Biden’s age is a particular concern with voters and there have been calls from some Democrats for him to step aside for a new candidate. Despite weak poll numbers and questions about his age, he has stuck to his plan to seek a second term.

However, the 81-year-old president’s alarming presidential debate performance on June 27, has renewed calls for him to step aside. Biden, frequently seen fumbling and freezing during public events, appeared to lose his train of thought while answering a question by a CNN anchor on the economy. The Democrat made yet another mistake while answering a question on voters feeling “worse off” under his presidency.

If Joe Biden withdraws his name, delegates from 50 states will have to look for a replacement at the earliest. Vice President Kamala Harris, California Governor Gavin Newsom, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer and Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro are among the names that can represent the party. 

Former Longview News-Journal reporter Angela Ward, second from right, and former News-Journal sports editor Bob Ward, right, listen during an awards ceremony Sunday afternoon as part of the Texas Bank and Trust’s annual Photography Contest and Exhibition. (Jordan Green/Longview News-Journal Photo)

This review of George Hoyningen-Huene: Photography, Fashion, Film by Susanna Brown (ed.) appears in the July/August 2024 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.

Is a model a mannequin, a statue or a living thing? For the early 20th-century fashion photographer, this was a burning question (and not just because the studio lights were so hot). The model was, herself, a relatively new invention, the flesh and blood embodiment of the replica women who went before her: the miniature 18th-century dolls in their miniature example gowns sent out to prospective customers; the usefully proportioned dressmakers’ busts that aided tailoring; the wax dummies with glass eyes and human hair displayed in shop windows. The fashion show, popularised around the turn of the century by designers including Charles Frederick Worth, Lady Duff-Gordon and Paul Poiret, required her ambulatory services as she strolled, drifted and turned, animating the clothing she wore.

Where the fashion show might have encouraged the model to move, the photographer beckoned her back towards stasis. (Early fashion photography could only move as fast as the technology – confined to the tripod within the studio, gestures had to be held for as long as it took the camera to blink.) As the fashion magazine – another fin-de-siècle invention, with American Vogue founded in 1892 – slowly made the move from illustration to photography, the display of clothes on the printed page became an experimental arena. Photographers including Adolph de Meyer and Edward Steichen laid the groundwork for a new visual language that combined the illustrative and the theatrical. Meyer’s chosen women were hazily lit society queens; Steichen, a modernist who took over Meyer’s position as chief Vogue photographer in 1923, favoured sultry, cinematic gloss. At first glance George Hoyningen-Huene is a photographer of the statue school. There is one right there on the cover of Thames & Hudson’s lavish new book about him. Taken in 1934, it features Catharina ‘Toto’ Koopman, a Dutch-Javanese model with a marvellously storied life (her CV included stints as a Chanel model, an Allied spy during the Second World War and a successful London gallerist). She is wearing a crisp, sinuous dress by French label Augustabernard. Toto’s face is perfectly lit in profile, her limbs throwing back long shadows. The pose suggests motion, one leg poised for the next step, but the effect is one of absolute stillness. If a skilled carving asks us to marvel at its uncanny mimicry of textures and movements – a muscle flexed, a skirt draped – then a photo like this achieves the opposite, reducing the human body to a glorious display of frozen solidity.

Reflections…, Miss Hubbell (1930), George Hoyningen-Huene. © The George Hoyningen-Huene Estate Archives

Digging into his background, one can see why Hoyningen-Huene might like an ice queen. Born in 1900 in tsarist St Petersburg to a Baltic baron father and American mother, he spent his childhood in what he described as ‘a world of Emperors, Grand Dukes and Grand Duchesses, nobility, militarism, authoritarianism, high-principled duty and incredible emotional tension […] a world of sacred things, of ikons and incense.’ Later, as revolution brewed, the family fled the country, first to England and then to France.

In Paris, Hoyningen-Huene landed in the midst of a creative and cultural explosion, a much-mythologised period in which France became, in the words of the composer Virgil Thomson, ‘a miracle spot like ancient Greece’. Hoyningen-Huene slipped comfortably into a social and professional network of Russian émigrés, American expats and artists drawn from across Europe, assembling the kind of contacts book that yielded an endless supply of models, subjects, creative collaborators and prospective employers, soon including French Vogue and Vanity Fair. He was aided by friends such as Man Ray, who taught him some of the rudiments of photography. In 1924 the pair collaborated on a fashion portfolio.

Man Ray, steeped in Surrealism, was a mannequin man through and through. The body was something to be segmented, distorted, upended, solarised; models’ faces interchangeable with masks, their eyes dripping perfect glass tears. The cynic might call it the ultimate form of objectification, the apologist (myself among them) drawn to the eerie fun of doubling and visual deception. Although Hoyningen-Huene photographed actual mannequins several times, his early vision was distinctly neoclassical – a mode that worked especially well in the 1930s, Madeleine Vionnet’s bias-cut gowns and Cristóbal Balenciaga’s bulbous, swooping silhouettes equally at home under stage lighting that picked out every drape and cheekbone, juxtaposed against the prop columns and blocks that Hoyningen-Huene favoured. There is an untouchable quality to the women who wear these elaborate designs, an enjoyably bitchy froideur that could not be sustained in quite the same way once Hoyningen-Huene made the move into colour. Even his erotic portraits of men, including his lover, friend and fellow photographer Horst P. Horst, are successful relics of a monochrome age – though these Olympians, muscles rippling, are not as remote as those still, self-contained women who graced Vogue and later Harper’s Bazaar.

Porch of the Maidens, Erechtheion, Athens, Greece (1939), George Hoyningen-Huene. © © The George Hoyningen-Huene Estate Archives

This book, edited by Susanna Brown, is clever and illuminating, with chapters by different writers devoted to the many and varied stages in Hoyningen-Huene’s life, all the way to a final act as a film colourist consultant in Los Angeles, where he died as a naturalised US citizen in 1968. Much of his architectural and travel photography restates his preoccupation with ancient forms – the line from the caryatids atop the Acropolis to his models draped in silk and jewels clear.

Fashion has always naively maintained an obsession with ‘timelessness,’ as though there could be some pure, unchanging definition of beauty not subject to societal tastes and neuroses. But a statue woman is as much a commodity as the mannequin woman, the fashion photograph borrowing from portraiture and fine art but ultimately separate given its commercial undertones – the fantasy always for sale.

George Hoyningen-Huene: Photography, Fashion, Film by Susanna Brown (ed.) is published by Thames and Hudson.

From the July/August 2024 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.