An umbrella and a bowler hat sit on a windowsill in a pub – patiently waiting, it seems, for their boozing owner to return. This striking black and white vignette of British culture is an unusually playful photograph by Evelyn Hofer, taken in London in the 1960s, presented with many others that depict the capital as a hostile city, as part of the artist’s first UK exhibition.

Split across two floors of the Photographers’ Gallery in London, the show focuses on the photographs Hofer took in Europe and the US in the 60s and 70s. An early pioneer of new colour techniques, working with a more collaborative approach than her shoot-from-the-hip predecessors, she quietly changed the course of documentary photography.

Hofer was born in Germany in 1922, and her early life was itinerant. The family fled the Nazis, moving to Switzerland, where Hofer began to study photography, taking private lessons with Hans Finsler, who was associated with the modernist new objectivity movement that also included August Sander. The family later moved to Spain but, after Franco’s rise, they left Europe, arriving in Mexico in the 1940s.

By 1946, Hofer had moved to New York, but she continued to travel back to Europe. Upstairs are her visionary views of European cities in the 60s, most of them shot in black and white and evoking a sombre atmosphere: there are photographs of Paris, Barcelona, Rome and Dublin, alongside a body of work made while she was living in London, produced for a book by VS Pritchett. London, through Hofer’s eyes, appears smoky, industrious and austere. Even children she photographed in Notting Hill Gate and Battersea look baleful or despondent.

Descending a floor, the exhibition switches gear – from black and white to dazzling colour, from Europe to the US. Some of her early successes with the complex colour dye transfer printing process are here: a bar on Mercer Street, a car park in New York, signs in Coney Island – the most humdrum of scenes scintillate with the particular qualities of the technique. US cities pulse with heat and joy: the series Just Married presents 12 couples, taken one morning in 1974 outside the New York civil register office. Hofer didn’t choreograph the newlyweds, but the details of their clothing, gestures and poses suggest much about their circumstances and dynamics.

While love and leisure are common themes in the American pictures, when Hofer does turn to labour, it feels exuberant and fresh: in Secretaries in Rawlings Park, Washington DC and Chauffeurs, Washington (both 1965) she pays homage to the inexorable power of immaculate style. In contrast to her abject view of an old-fashioned Europe, the US appears modern, consumer-friendly and free.

Hofer remained concerned with society’s outliers – working-class people, people of colour and women are frequent subjects, all of them exuding a certain self-confidence. The pictures of unnamed cockle pickers and coalminers, secretaries and seminarians, gravediggers and lorry drivers have aged – but they also capture something timeless. It is in these subtleties that Hofer is most subversive, asserting the authority of her sometimes idiosyncratic interests in what, or who, could be revered in an image. In her photographs, a quivering, impossibly high beehive hairstyle or an impeccably dressed elderly woman sitting on a bridge are treated with the same respect as buildings on Park Avenue or olive trees in Spain.

As well as Hofer’s exhibition, the gallery is showing Johny Pitts’ Home is Not a Place, a series that also seeks to convey the atmosphere of a city while dissolving a sense of time. Like Hofer, in 2021 Pitts embarked on a roving journey with his camera, following the Thames east to Tilbury – where the Windrush docked in 1948 – then moving along the coast, from Dover to Plymouth, Liverpool to Edinburgh, in search of Black communities.

As well as photographs, Pitts’ installation includes objects, furniture, text and video. Rather than presenting a linear narrative, the photographs – left uncaptioned – move back and forth in time and place. At times, Pitts brings the camera very close to his subjects, or submerges them in hazy light, so they are cast as silhouettes, bodies in spaces that remain ambiguous.

Photographs can create a sense of belonging: alongside his search for a collective image that might reflect his experiences, he has also included personal family albums from a formative period in the late 80s when he lived in Japan. Spliced and reshuffled with more recent photographs taken on return visits, Pitts examines the impulse to archive, and photography’s relationship to memory.

The wistful beauty of the photographs, however, is swamped by the other elements of the installation which make it feel crowded, physically and conceptually, with an avalanche of references and ideas. The original impetus of the project – the journey around Black Britain – feels lost. A reconstruction of a living room – which now seems to be de rigueur in photography exhibitions – stuffed with relics of Pitts’ childhood home in 80s Sheffield, seems to suggest home is in fact a place, with a leather sofa, artworks on the wall and books on the shelf.

• Evelyn Hofer and Johny Pitts: Home Is Not a Place are at the Photographers’ Gallery, London, from 23 June to 24 September

All photographs by Malcolm Ferguson.

“One Life: Frederick Douglass” at  Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery offers an image-based timeline of the orator and statesman’s life and work from his days of enslavement up until his postwar activities and beyond.  

The show, which opened the weekend of Juneteenth, centers on Douglass’s obsession with photography. Often called the most photographed American of the 19th century, Douglass had an acute understanding of the power that photography had in the struggle for African American equality. He simultaneously recognized the widespread familiarity that images bred, and the fact that images—particularly portraits—were the most authentic way for him to be seen.

That understanding is a huge part of why there are so many more photos of Douglass. He had a healthy skepticism of “the hand of the white artist,” which he might distort his features or misinterpret him in paintings or drawings. Douglass often frequented the numerous studios of Black photographers instead. 

Douglass “had faith in the ‘truth value,’ as well as the beauty, of photography,” says John Stauffer, a professor of history at Harvard University and author of Picturing Frederick Douglass who guest-curated the exhibition. “He was one of the first to recognize the politics of aesthetics, that art can be a very powerful engine of change…for Douglass, there’s a greater likelihood that someone can be converted into an activist through images at least as much, if not more, than through words.” 

The first section, “Enslavement & Escape,” focuses on Douglass’ period of enslavement from his recorded birth in 1818 until he fled to New York in 1838 with the help of his future wife Anna Murray Douglass, a free Black woman from Caroline County, Maryland. The section contains a classic photograph of Murray, a print of the famous “Fugitive’s Song” sheet music cover dedicated to Douglass, and the faded paper ledger of his first owner Aaron Anthony, who recorded Douglass’s birth to Harriet Bailey in 1818.

Next, the “Circle of Activists” highlights Douglass’ enthusiastic collaboration with the women’s suffrage movement. Douglass, the only African American present at the seminal Seneca Falls Convention in 1848, was a friend and ally to campaigners like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, who were among the founders of the American Equal Rights Association in 1866. This section holds a portrait of seven notable 19th-century suffragists, as well as a famous photo of activist Sojourner Truth. 

There’s also a daguerreotype gallery, a small collection of some of the earliest forms of photographs. Each image is around the size of an index card and slightly obscured by an eerie haze. The stark stare of a young Frederick Douglass, his afro in all its glory, can be viewed alongside daguerreotypes of abolitionists John Brown, William Lloyd Garrison, and Gerrit Smith. Another section, “Douglass and Brown,” includes more photos of Brown and Douglass, and more information on their relationship, which, according to Stauffer, was in a sense optically easier at the time because it preceded the bogus science like phrenology that helped inspire brutal Jim Crow laws.

The Civil War section centers Douglass’ friendship with President Lincoln. The first African American to meet and advise a US President, Douglass often had Lincoln’s ear during the Civil War. When the war began, Douglass implored Lincoln to arm every Black person enslaved in the South, citing their knowledge of the terrain and desire for freedom, but to no avail. The section holds a letter from Douglass to Lincoln regarding reelection strategies, and a massive painting, The Result of the Fifteenth Amendment, which depicts African Americans marching parading through Baltimore in celebration of Black men receiving the constitutional right to vote. 

The “Post War” section is a bit more personal, focusing on Douglass’ travels as an orator, his somewhat controversial marriage to his second wife, white abolitionist Helen Pitts Douglass, and his time as a resident of Washington, DC. 

Douglass moved to DC, Stauffer says, because it was a Black metropolis in ways that other cities in which he lived, including Boston and Rochester, New York, were not. “Douglass knew there were a large number of African Americans,  he wanted to be a part of an African American community, and he knew he could have an influence with African Americans because they listened to him more than whites did.”

The exhibit concludes with the “Afterlife” section, an homage to other African American activists who either knew Douglass personally or were particularly inspired by his activism. There are portraits of  Ida B. Wells, W.E.B  Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, and Langston Hughes, all of whom share Douglass’ legacy.

Stauffer believes that the public still has much more to learn regarding Douglass. “In my view, he was as important as someone like Lincoln. And I say that because far more people heard Douglass speak, read Douglass, than they did any other figure, with the possible exception of Mark Twain, who was a whole different generation. Just in terms of his fame and popularity, Douglass was like the LeBron James of his day,” he says. Douglass’s significance “is in a combination of the popularity, the accuracy and detail of a photograph. Our aim is to highlight the long arc of that extraordinary life.”  

“One Life: Frederick Douglass” is open now until April 21, 2024. Learn more here 

Editorial Fellow

LOS ANGELES, June 22, 2023 /PRNewswire/ — Leica Gallery LA announces the opening reception of “Yul Brynner’s Photography: An Extraordinary Vision,” an exhibition showcasing the photographic work of the iconic actor, Yul Brynner. The opening reception will be held on Saturday, July 8, from 6-8 PM, followed by a meet and greet with Victoria Brynner on Sunday, July 9, from 1-3 PM. The exhibition will run until July 31.

Brynner, best known for his acclaimed performances in The King and I, The Ten Commandments, and The Magnificent Seven, was also a passionate photographer who had a remarkable ability to capture the essence of mid-century Hollywood. This showcase will present 25 images from Brynner’s unique photographic collection. Additionally, a selection of Brynner’s Leica MP cameras will be on display, one of which will be auctioned at the upcoming Leitz Photographica Auction in November.

Brynner’s photography reveals his extraordinary vision. Influenced by legendary photographers Henri Cartier-Bresson and André Kertész, Brynner used Leica cameras to capture moments that collectively narrate the story of old Hollywood. Traveling from western Europe to southern California, Brynner’s work provides an insider’s look into his personal experiences with friends, who also happened to be the stars of his generation, such as Elizabeth Taylor, Audrey Hepburn, Frank Sinatra, Ingrid Bergman, and Sofia Loren.

The essence of Brynner’s work lies in his empathetic intelligence that enabled him to beautifully render both the intimate and artistic aspects of his subjects. This exhibition seeks to commemorate Brynner’s talent and contribution to the field of photography.

In conjunction with the exhibition, a series of limited-edition prints of some of his most important images will be made available.

The exhibition opens July 8 and runs through July 31. Admission is free via Eventbrite. The Leitz Photographica Auction will be held November 24 & 25 in Vienna, Austria.

About Leica Gallery LA:
Leica Gallery LA showcases the works of both international and American photographers and features an impressive roster of artists and collections in its archives. The gallery is dedicated to crafting engaging exhibitions that speak to the cultural significance of photography in the 21st century.

Note to Editors:
High-resolution images and interviews are available upon request.

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SOURCE Leica Camera

At a time when photography was going gonzo – when people were hunting out action, shooting from the hip – Evelyn Hofer turned the other way. The German-American photographer had a quieter, more formal, composed approach. 

She took her large format camera and her long exposures onto the streets of Paris, London and New York. There are cheeky scamps in 1960s Battersea, an aloof waiter at The Garrick, warehousemen and lorry drivers, Barcelona street sellers and kids playing in a Parisian square. Her sitters look right out at you, concentrated, placid, intense. She didn’t sneak secret photos like so many ethically dubious photographers who came after her, she collaborated with the people she found interesting, worked with them to create intimate visual dialogs.

They’re lovely, neat, thoughtful images for the most part. But it’s when the humans are absent, or at least faceless, that her work feels the most special. Her cityscapes and interiors are so perfectly composed, so dramatic, so quietly grand. They’re like a long, slow single chord, a huge sweeping sound, a deep intake of breath. Trinity College’s library sucks you into its vanishing perspective, a street in New York is immense and empty, Park Avenue is stark and striated, motorways are shockingly twisted. You can see in these vast landscapes and tiny interiors the birth of modern giants like Thomas Struth and Andreas Gursky, it’s all the vast drama of the constructed world. 

This is slow, considered and careful photography that can be small and intimate or big and overwhelming, but always tenderly human.