SALISBURY, Md. – 47 ABC Master Control Operator Josh Griffin received an award from Wor-Wic Community College for his participation in their Earth Day photo contest.
Way to go Josh!
We want to hear your good news, just email newsroom@47abc.com.
“People who you’ve read about or know about – there they are looking right at you.” Art curator Kara Vander Weg is talking with me about global art gallery Gagosian’s major new Richard Avedon retrospective, where 150 individuals – ranging from the younger Barbara Bush to Khloe Kardashian to Spike Lee to Elton John to Renata Adler to Vander Weg herself – each selected a single Avedon photo to celebrate. She’s explaining the intimacy that she believes sets Avedon’s photos apart. “His subjects are looking right at you, and you can look right at them. You can’t help but react to the human right there in front of you.”
Avedon was monumental for the size of his photos, which tended to be printed in life-size or larger, leading to the effect that Vanger Weg described, where viewers can look right at his subjects and have an encounter that feels extremely intimate. “It’s a really interesting relationship between art and the viewer,” she told me. “Avedon must have known. He would work for months and months with models trying to find the right sizes of images. He must of known that humans in the room would relate to the images in a really special way. That’s what it is about these photographs, you’re looking in the eyes of another person. You can’t help but connect.”
In addition to being monumental for his size, Avedon was also monumental for his range – from heads of state to celebrities to art creators, fashion models, writers, musicians, and even a beekeeper, his output feels almost impossibly capacious. “He spanned so many different genres,” said Derek Blasberg, another curator with Gasgosian who has been integral in putting together Avedon 100. “He shot almost every important figure of the second half of 20th century.”
Showing from 4 May through 24 June, Avedon 100 will dominate Gagosian’s gallery space in New York’s Chelsea district. The show does feel enormous, with showstoppers from one area after another, be it politics, fashion, film, literature, street scenes, music. “What is awesome about this show is that it’s an enormous look at all of Avedon,” said Blasberg. “It spans from the earliest days of him touching a camera.” That includes what Blasberg deemed “arguably the first mirror selfie,” a side-by-side photo Avedon made with author James Baldwin. The 1946 image definitely has the aesthetics of a selfie, with Baldwin smiling into the mirror, eyes pointed toward the lens, while Avedon squints down into the viewfinder, his camera looking eerily like an iPhone.
From the small to the large, the show also features two gigantic murals – one of Andy Warhol posing with members of The Factory (10ft high by 31ft wide) and one of poet Allen Ginsberg with members of his extended family (9ft by 20ft). “The two large murals are a tour de force,” said Vander Weg. “They were printed before any kind of digital printing, so it was a massive job to get them done correctly.” Indeed, these murals are among the largest fine art photos ever printed, and in their time they pushed the boundaries of what was possible with the photographic medium.
Vander Weg went on to explain that Gagosian “had a specific day dedicated to just installing those two murals. They were brought in rolled up, and then they were unrolled under supervision”. During Avedon’s lifetime the murals would not have been exhibited under glass, but since the photographer’s death in 2004 they have grown immeasurably more precious, and now glass is required. That’s because, according to Vander Weg, Avedon’s will contained a clause against printing any more of his photos. In addition, the Avedon Foundation, which now authenticates and licenses all of the photographer’s work, is known to go after anyone attempting to sell unauthenticated Avedon prints. “Collectors like knowing that there’s a finite body of work,” said Vander Weg. “Each one is signed and stamped on the back, making them precious objects.”
Many of the individuals invited to help curate the show – particularly those from the fashion world – ended up selecting images of themselves. There’s Tom Ford looking gregarious and confident – the fashion designer said he adored the image so much that he ended up using it on the back cover of his first book. Supermodel Naomi Campbell chose a full-body, naked shot of herself encrusted with sand, a powerful, intent stare on her face. Quintessential supermodel Cindy Crawford chose a nine-exposure series that captured her flinging her hair around, looks of playful rapture beaming from her face. And Stephanie Seymour picked a shot of her in a sheer dress in a pose reminiscent of a ballet dancer, her pregnant belly clearly visible.
“Seymour said that working with Avedon was like a graduate program in modeling,” said Blasberg. “It was awesome to hear models talk what it was like to work with him. Linda Evangelista said that nobody did lighting like him.”
Although Avedon 100 certainly offers plenty of opportunities to view the powerful and the famous, Vander Weg also noted that many of the photographs involve anonymous or unknown individuals. For the image she curated, she picked on of a young boy, from an unpublished series for Life magazine done in 1949. “What’s really interesting about the whole series is that they’re not known sitters. They’re just everyday people, not posing. Yet he manages to give them all a dignity and a glamorous presentation. He knew so well how to frame, what would make them look their best. I look at that boy and think about the determination of many people who come to New York City. I really connect to it. You look at the eyes, and you think ‘this kid is going somewhere.’”
In an intimate, fun touch, each image comes with a brief text composed by the curator, where they offer often personal stories explaining why they chose what they did. Blasberg shared with me that he chose the Warhol Factory mural because, as a kid growing up in St Louis, it made him realize there was so much more to the world. “I remember the first time I saw that image, I was so struck by it. Over the years I’ve dived more and more into what was behind that photo. For a little boy from Missouri to see a glorification of male beauty – it made me think I have to get to New York. I wanted to be one of those cool kids in that shop.” Decades later and an art world insider, Blasberg finds “working on this show has been a total surreal career highlight.”
Avedon 100 feels like a one-of-a-kind event because it’s such a large-scale show, bringing together so many strands of an enormous career. It’s a fitting testament to a major American creator. In the words of Vander Weg, “People have grown up seeing these images, but to see them in a room all together is something else. One man’s incredibly interesting, varied life – it will be a very powerful experience.”
Avedon 100 opens at the Gagosian in New York on 4 May and runs until 24 June
A photographer has gone viral on social media after he revealed “the worst question” that a shooter could be asked.
In a TikTok video, captioned “the worst question to ask a photographer,” Bohdan Lee shared a series of some of his stunning images.
In the clip, the photographer, who is based in Vancouver, Canada, imagines an individual complimenting his pictures: “Your photos are so good.”
@bohdanlee The worst question to ask a photographer #photography #photographer #aesthetic #cinematicphotography ♬ hotline bling – hellaxgay
Lee then reveals the dreaded question that a photographer could be asked after such a compliment. According to Lee, that question is: “What camera do you use?”
The clip resonated with TikTok users — racking up 1.6 million views and over 400,000 likes. Thousands of photographers on the social media platform seemed to heartily agree with Lee.
“Like asking a painter what brush they use,” a photographer comments.
While another photographer comments that it is a common misconception that the camera model is more important than the person behind the device: “It hurts when people think the better camera the better picture.”
A further TikTok user believed that social media users are too preoccupied with owning the most coveted camera as opposed to learning the skills involved in photography.
“People be thinking if they just get the camera they can take photos like you, they can’t,” the user writes.
Another photographer similarly says: “It’s never about the camera, it’s about the skill. Try taking a picture with no skill on a $5,000 camera.”
One photographer lamented how often she was asked about her camera kit: “I wish I could take pictures with my eyes sometimes.”
However, others pointed out that the subject of camera technology was still a justifiable question — even if it may be a bit tiresome for photographers.
“Even for a great photographer, still a valid question, or they wouldn’t be walking around with expensive body or lenses,” a TikTok user argues.
A further viewer remarks: “Is it wrong to ask that? If people ask that then they think your pictures are awesome and wanna copy your work.”
Some TikTok users on the platform said they were simply curious about the photographer’s kit and wanted to more learn about camera technology.
In the comments, Lee was glad to help viewers with the question and directed them to a previous TikTok video where he revealed that he used a Sony A7IV camera.
TikTok has increasingly become the online space to discuss photography for younger users. Generation Z users on TikTok recently debated how modern digital cameras are better than smartphones for taking photos.
Image credits: Header photo licensed via Depositphotos.
Posted: 27th April, 2023 by The Editor
It’s weekend 2 of Coachella and I’m wondering how long it’s going to take to get from Los Angeles to Riverside on a Friday afternoon. I expected people that were heading out to the desert for the festival to take the same route I was about to hop on. One of the hottest tours of the year didn’t hit my city and I knew I couldn’t miss Canadian post-hardcore band, Silverstein. After being on the road for 2+ hours, I was ready to rock.
Silverstein headlined Riverside Municipal Auditorium with direct support from post-hardcore quartet, Dayseeker, plus hardcore bands, SeeYouSpaceCowboy and One Step Closer. Although One Step Closer was the opening act, it seemed like they were no strangers to some of the fans in the crowd. This said, the band did not hesitate to deliver one hell of a performance and engage with the already established fans in the crowd. The energy started to get in full swing. Following the Wilkes-Barre-based quartet was Southern California’s very own SeeYouSpaceCowboy. The band was not new to the crowd because seeing as how they were just a couple of hours away from their hometown, SYSC fans in attendance already knew what to expect. When it comes to calling Southern California home, SeeYouSpaceCowboy is not alone. Orange County-based band, Dayseeker were in Riverside for what they said was their second time in the band’s history. Throughout the set, they even recalled the crowd size they performed in front of the first time around. If you’re the guys in Dayseeker, 30 to 40 people is small when you look at the fact that you’re playing a SOLD OUT show at Riverside Municipal Auditorium. This said, Dayseeker and their fans were ready to jam when the band started their set with “Dreamstate”, “Crooked Soul”, and “Burial Plot”. Other fan favorites that they squeezed into their set were “Crying While You’re Dancing”, “Sleeptalk”, and “Neon Grave”. Lastly, to end the night was Silverstein.
I’ve lost track over the years of how many times I’ve seen Silverstein, but every time I see them, it’s always better than the last! In the 20+ years that the band has been around, they admitted during their set that they had never played in Riverside before. Since the tour did not make a stop in Los Angeles or Orange County, the band thanked L.A. and O.C. fans that drove out to Riverside to catch the show.
Even before the band took the stage, fans up against the barricade had their phones out to capture those first moments of the set. The first three songs consisted of “Ultraviolet”, “Retrograde”, and “Burn It Down”. With all the music a band can write in the course of two decades, one would think that it would get harder to come up with a setlist. Somehow Silverstein managed to deliver as they didn’t miss with their older songs such as “Giving Up” off When Broken Is Easily Fixed (2003) and “The Ides of March” and “My Heroine” off Discovering The Waterfront (2005). By the way, kudos to fans for singing during “My Heroine” because if you’ve seen Silverstein before, YOU KNOW it gets loud during this song. One other song that the crowd sang every word to was Linkin Park’s “One Step Closer” as Silverstein covered it. It was pretty damn awesome! Other fan favorites we got to hear were “California”, “American Dream”, “Infinite”, “and “The Afterglow”. As fans anticipate a lot of times at shows, we were treated to an encore with the band playing “Smile In Your Sleep” and “The Altar/Mary”.
Was the show worth being in traffic for 2+ hours the same weekend Coachella was happening? ABSOLUTELY. And I’d do it again.
Silverstein, Dayseeker, SeeYouSpaceCowboy, and One Step Closer are still on the road and will wrap up the tour on Sunday, May 7th at The Intersection in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Photos by Jazmin Lemus
–
The Alternative is ad-free and 100% supported by our readers. If you’d like to help us produce more content and promote more great new music, please consider donating to our Patreon page, which also allows you to receive sweet perks like free albums and The Alternative merch.
An aerial view of flood waters inundating farmland in the re-emerging Tulare Lake, in California’s Central Valley. Once the largest body of freshwater west of the Mississippi River, the lake disappeared when waters were diverted by agricultural interests to irrigate crops in the late 19th and early 20th century
Photograph: Mario Tama/Getty Images
When Henry Yee arrived as a young boy in early 1970s New York City, he did what so many kids in the Big Apple do: He became a Yankees fan.
But his interests extended beyond the Bronx Bombers. Yee became enamored with old photos of New York, images of skyscrapers rising into a skyline built over a century, and life in America’s largest city as it evolved across the decades. He also loved vintage photos of iconic Yankees ballplayers — particularly Babe Ruth. By the 1980s, he was taking photography courses and began buying old photos of New York and of its ballplayers.
Advertisement
“I merged the two interests together,” Yee said. “Back then, there weren’t too many collectors of this stuff.”
And because it was a niche hobby, outside the refined world of fine art photography collecting and the older pastime of trading cards, it was a chaotic wild west of random pricing and no universal system of authentication — was that Ruth photo taken and developed while he was still playing, or developed off a duplicate negative many years later? Or was it a total fake?
“There always was a problem in our hobby,” Yee said. “There was no system for how we sell photos.”
By the 1990s, original vintage sports photography began coming into its own as a serious hobby, and what brought it wider attention was the famed September 1996 auction by Christie’s in New York of hundreds of images from “Baseball” magazine’s photographic archive that spanned 1908 through World War II and featured images of baseball’s greatest players of the era shot by the most famous baseball photographers, such as Charles M. Conlon.
“That’s when a lot of material was put on the market for the first time,” Yee said.
What took the hobby much closer to the far more structured universe of graded trading cards was Yee and a couple of collector friends, Marshall Fogel and Khyber Oser, assembling the 2005 book “A Portrait of Baseball Photography.”
But it wasn’t a coffee table book of vintage images. It systemized how to grade original sports photography.
And thanks to that system, which allows images to be “slabbed” in a plastic holder with condition and grading data like a trading card, the vintage photography hobby has become a genre of sports collectibles that produces eye-popping sales prices that can run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
In the book, Yee and the others created what’s known as “The Photo Type Classification System” and in 2007, PSA (one of the major card-grading companies) licensed the system to create an authentication and grading service for old photos. Yee was hired to run PSA’s photo grading and authentication service.
Advertisement
“To get to the next level, someone had to create a system to give it structure. With cards, you had that organization,” Yee said. “There was no third party, which gives it a boost and gave confidence to those not collecting those items to come in. Once it’s graded, it becomes a commodity that can be traded sight unseen.”
The system they developed grades photos as Type I through IV based on the negative and when it was developed from that negative. The best is a Type I photo, which means the image was developed from the original negative within two years of that image being shot, while a Type II photo is made from the original negative after two years from the negative’s creation.
Type III and Type IV photos are made from duplicate negatives, not the original, and are graded as either within two years of the duplicate negative’s creation or after two years. Those have much less value than Type I and II.
The system is now the foundation of original sports photography buying and selling.
“Took a few years to get momentum, and by 2012-13 it started picking up,” Yee said. “It was shocking to us that it was so widely accepted. You had a framework that allowed the hobby to grow.”
Unlike trading card collectors, original photography buyers expect some wear and tear or editorial marks — grease pencil lines for cropping, agency and filing stamps, notations, paper captions, etc. — on the physical images because the photos were used in practical ways and were not intended as collectibles. And if the marks came from a noted photographer, that could add further provenance and value to the image.
“People appreciate photos that were practically used and have the evidence of behind-the-scenes editorial work,” said Oser, Yee’s co-author and now the director of vintage memorabilia and photography at Goldin Auctions. “That’s not a liability, that’s not a detriment. … For now, at least, condition is secondary.”
Original sports photography has been growing in popularity on the shoulders of the wider collectibles surge that’s been underway for several years, particularly among trading cards that have seen some sell for as much as $12 million.
Advertisement
“Original photography has benefitted from the card boom,” said Robert Edward Auctions president Brian Dwyer.
Earlier this month, Robert Edwards Auctions sold a Type 1 Josh Gibson photo from the 1940s when he was with the Homestead Grays, an image used for his 1950-51 Toleteros rookie card, for $150,000. In the same auction, a circa 1913 original photo of “Shoeless” Joe Jackson of the Cleveland Naps, graded Type 1 and shot by Conlon, sold for $132,000 while a Type 1 1947 Jackie Robinson rookie photo — taken the day after he broke baseball’s racial color barrier as a Brooklyn Dodger — sold for $32,400, the auction house said.
“We’re seeing the number of photographs come to market increase, but also the number of people bidding increase,” Dwyer said.
Like with cards, rarity drives interest and price, and photos have a more defined era of physical availability than cards. Photographers were limited by their film stock — a camera held only so much film — until digital photography started to become widespread in the 1990s and shooters could take literally endless numbers of photos.
“The rarity factor is gone,” said Rob Rosen, the vice president of sales and consignments at Heritage Auctions.
Hence, original sports images starting with the rise of baseball (and photography itself) around the time of the American Civil War through the end of the 1980s is the general collecting period.
What most often drives price are the celebrity of the player, the age and rarity of the photo under the classification system, and if the image has historical significance linked to a milestone event.
“The first million-dollar photo … turned out to be a 1951 Bowman card-used photo (of Mickey Mantle), I think in a private sale,” Oser said. “Six-figure photos are more and more common, and we will certainly be seeing more million-dollar photos.”
Advertisement
Who took the photo also can significantly goose value.
One such shooter was Conlon, who took an estimated 30,000 baseball photos until his retirement in 1942. His archive of more than 7,400 fragile glass plate and other negatives sold through Heritage Auctions in 2016 for $1.79 million.
Conlon, who mostly took portrait shots of players, is perhaps best known for an action photo of Detroit’s grim-faced Ty Cobb sliding into third base on July 23, 1910, at New York’s Hilltop Park — the Highlanders’ home stadium until 1912, a year before they became the Yankees — with infielder Jimmy Austin failing to tag him amid a small explosion of dirt around the bag.
An original image developed by Conlon off the negative he shot that day for the New York Evening Telegram sold for $390,000 via Robert Edwards Auctions in December 2020.
Famous photo of Ty Cobb sliding into third, taken by photographer Charles Conlon in July 1910, sells for $390,000 in @REAOnline sale. pic.twitter.com/41A55dPRUB
— Darren Rovell (@darrenrovell) December 7, 2020
Even outside the major auction houses, vintage original sports photos are priced at big numbers.
On eBay as of this writing, there’s a PSA-graded Type I 1923 photo of Lou Gehrig that’s possibly the earliest photo of him in a Yankees uniform, and it’s listed at $500,000 with 49 people labeled as watching the listing. Next after that is a listing for a 1919 Babe Ruth photo for $125,000.
Auctioneers said modern sports images taken from negatives sell for much less than the vintage stuff, but value can still be found from early images of top-tier athletes such as Michael Jordan, particularly of the photo used for his much-sought 1986 Fleer rookie card.
While loose, framed, or mounted vintage photos used to be the only way they were sold for years, the ability to get images authenticated and graded in plastic holders (known as slabs) streamlined the hobby, with PSA as the only major firm doing such work.
Advertisement
“Slabbing always helps everything,” Rosen said. “We’ve sold some (original photos) for half a million dollars.”
The hobby isn’t limited to enormously expensive cards. Collectors can buy lower-graded photos for much cheaper prices, even under $100, but famous players may still be pricey even at the lesser type levels.
“Collectors underappreciated Type II and III photos for many years, and now you see Type II and IIIs being affordable alternatives to important historical images,” Oser said. “The value is there now. We are selling Ruth and Gehrig Type IIIs in the thousands of dollars.”
And much like the trading card world’s scandals, original sports photography has experienced its share of fraud and swindlers.
For example, the baseball photo archive of Chicago’s George Brace, who died in 2002, was sold for $1.35 million in 2012 but the deal ended up in lawsuits over non-payment, and the buyer, vintage news and sports photos and memorabilia collector John Rogers, in 2017 pleaded guilty to running a fraudulent operation and was sentenced to 12 years in federal prison and ordered to pay $23 million in restitution.
“There’s a seedy underbelly to baseball photography,” Oser said. “All these industries had their wild west period before professional authentication became the sheriff in town.”
Authentication is intended to help offset deception as the hobby matures. PSA has invested in resources and staffing as sports photography collecting has continued to grow, Yee said, with more space devoted to his department and a dozen staffers working under him.
“We have grown double every year for the past five years, in submissions and revenue,” Yee said. He didn’t disclose financial specifics.
PSA is owned by Collectors Universe, which since its 1986 founding has created a number of sports and non-sports collectibles third-party authentication and grading services. Billionaire New York Mets owner Steve Cohen led an investment group’s purchase of Collectors Universe for $700 million in early 2021 and then bought Goldin Auctions as a standalone business several months later for an undisclosed sum.
That means PSA and one of the major auction houses are linked, which can raise eyebrows, but the photo grading system has been widely accepted across the industry. Trust is critical.
The authentication process is rooted in experience, Yee said, and practical research and technical investigation with powerful microscopes and other technology. In addition to basic eye tests, PSA has a library of thousands of photo paper samples and hundreds of photo agency stamps against which researchers can index an image. Yee calls it a fossil record and noted, “the paper doesn’t lie.”
“You see enough of something, you know right away. There are signs to look for. It comes from experience,” Yee said. “We can identify a photo right away. Some of it, we can’t. We’re still learning.”
Baseball remains the most popular sport among submissions and collectors, Yee said, but there’s been an uptick in other sports, including football, basketball, hockey and soccer, in recent years.
“The most expensive photographs are going to be baseball,” Yee said. “It’s always been that way. It’s always vintage baseball.”
The most money for single vintage images mirrors what’s the big driver in baseball cards: rookies.
“(That) is where the market has matured,” Yee said. “That gap has widened so much, with the rookie images selling for 10, 20 times as much (as later photos of players). People have started to realize that the early images are the hardest to find.”
What’s the so-called white whale of old baseball photos?
“The holy grail image is probably the Honus Wagner image,” Yee said. “It probably would blow past $5 million.” The auctioneers and others agreed.
Boston photographer Carl Horner shot Wagner in a studio around 1902 and the portrait was later used for the famed T206 Wagner “tobacco” card from 1909 that has been one of the most famous and expensive rare cards of all time. A few prints of the Wagner photo have sold for thousands of dollars in varying conditions, and the original image is said to be rarer than the trading card (a Wagner T206 sold in 2021 for $6.6 million).
Babe Ruth remains the most popular player among vintage photo collectors, Yee said, and in February a 1915 image of The Babe sold for $468,000 via Robert Edwards Auctions.
“He is the guy in our hobby, the king,” Yee said.
What vintage sports photography is missing that the trading card industry relies upon, particularly for the most rare and expensive items, is population reports. Those are lists of graded things and their sales prices — easy to do with cards because of known print runs and other data from manufacturers and collectors. But with photos, it’s usually impossible to know how many prints may have been made off a glass plate negative.
While PSA is working on some yet-to-be-disclosed efforts in that vein, true pop reports may be impossible, Yee said.
“The big challenge is cataloging it,” he said. “I don’t know if it’s logically possible and economically feasible.”
And the future of vintage sports photography collecting?
It’s obviously in the best interest of PSA and auction houses to be publicly optimistic, but it’s true that the overall collectibles boom — estimated to hit $35 billion this year — has continued and is expected to for some time. While any collectibles genre is subject to market forces and the whims of the public (hello and goodbye, sports NFTs) high-end commodities such as fine art, wine, cars, stamps, etc., have traditionally retained their value in the face of inflation and recessions. There are only so many Conlon and Brace Type I images left.
“The best of the best stuff will always continue to go up. It’s a finite amount of stuff,” Yee said.
GO DEEPER
State of the sports card boom: After sky-high surge, is market still healthy?
(Top photo: Charles M. Conlon / Sporting News via Getty Images Archive via Getty Images)
“Not all realisms: Photography, Africa, and the Long 1960s,” on view at the Smart Museum of Art, examines the mobilization of photography amid the shifting cultural and political dynamics that coincided with the African independence movements of the 1960s. The show surveys the dissemination of images over an array of print media, featuring the work of photographers Ernest Cole, James Barnor, Marc Riboud, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paul Strand, and many others. The Reader connected with curator and art historian Leslie M. Wilson, now the associate director of academic engagement and research at The Art Institute of Chicago, to talk about the research that shaped the exhibition and photography’s narrativizing role in material culture.
Alexandra Drexelius: Can you discuss the title of the exhibition, “not all realisms”? The lack of capitalization suggests an ambivalence towards authority or a troubling of universal statements. What does “realism” mean to you?
Leslie M. Wilson: “Not all realisms” is a phrase taken from the last paragraph of the American photographer and photo theorist Allan Sekula’s 1986 essay “The Body and the Archive.” That essay focuses on how photographs have been used as a means to represent, to study, and surveil different types of people. At its heart is the tension between a medium that can be used all at once to make the portrait of a loved one and a mug shot, between what he frames as the “honorific” and “repressive” functions of the photograph.
While that essay largely focuses on North American and European examples, at the very end, Sekula turns his attention to the work of the South African photographer Ernest Cole, whose book House of Bondage: A South African Black Man Exposes in His Own Pictures and Words the Bitter Life of His Homeland Today, published in 1967, was a powerful indictment of South Africa’s brutal system of racial segregation known as apartheid. Reflecting on the impact of Cole’s work, Sekula wrote, “Not all realisms necessarily play into the hands of the police . . . .” Writing this in the essay’s last paragraph, Sekula suggests that even though photographs can be used in repressive ways, they may still provide “testimony” about lived experiences that support meaningful challenges to unjust systems. This exhibition is interested in that potential.
As for the lack of capitalization, that actually reflects that in turning over the phrase from Sekula, “not all realisms,” I started to read it anachronistically through what we might call “hashtag logic,” as in #notallrealisms. And by that I mean a thought process that might sound something like: “I know realisms can be problematic and that I shouldn’t trust photographs and the ways that people and systems use them, but not all realisms are bad.” Or, “I know some really great realisms.” Against a lot of the distrust that people—that we—express about photographs on a daily basis, we make exceptions for the photographs we believe in or want to believe in. I wanted to hold space for the hope that the makers of photographs have for the medium’s capacity to represent aspects of lived experience. I wanted to make space for the hopes and the risks of making photographs and making claims to and about photographs. And I think we can really see that through the dynamic practices and the very high stakes of photography amidst the major political and social shifts in Africa in and around the 1960s.
The exhibition’s geographic scope includes the postcolonial context of West African nations Ghana (formerly Gold Coast) and Mali, which had both gained independence by the start of the 1960s. You also look at South Africa—reconstituting itself as a Republic in 1961, this so-called independence advanced the National Party’s discriminatory agenda and the ongoing disenfranchisement of Black South Africans. This juxtaposition offers a heterogenous view of Africa during this period—one articulated by the shifting map of independent African nations on the 1964 cover of the magazine Bingo, featured at the beginning of the exhibition. Could you talk about the role of place and what led you to focus on these nations?
I started with the Smart Museum of Art’s collection and built from there. When I began my two-year curatorial fellowship at the museum in 2019, I noted that only four photographs in the Smart Museum’s collection were made by African photographers: three photographs by the South African photographer Ernest Cole and one photograph by the Malian photographer Malick Sidibé. And all four photographs were made in the 1960s. And so I thought about what I could build with that work as a starting point.
In thinking about that work, I reflected on the overlap in time frame but the radically different histories of these places. Yet, despite those differences and their geographic distance, through the circulation of images, through the circulation of publications, there were overlaps and connections and themes in conversation. I began to think that focusing on Ghana as well could further complicate and complement those explorations. From there, necessarily, the exhibition reaches beyond those three countries in following the flows of visual culture, of populations, of ideas.
In March 2020—before rushing back to the states and into pandemic-related lockdown—I was on a research trip to Johannesburg where I spent time with Ernest Cole’s papers in the Historical Papers Research Archive at Wits University. Cole’s exhaustive research in support of House of Bondage is evident in his extensive notes and his collection of booklets, magazines, newspapers, and more. Cole annotated many of these texts refuting the official accounts of the apartheid state. When the pandemic started, I wasn’t sure of the fate of the exhibition and whether I could reach out to collections beyond Chicago for loans, so I turned my attention even more emphatically to Chicago-area collections to serve as an engine for developing my thinking about the exhibition. With Cole’s papers still very much on my mind, I really dug into libraries and archives—especially the Herskovits Library at Northwestern and Regenstein Library at UChicago—as I focused on the material through which photography circulated most broadly in the 1960s before art museums and galleries in many parts of the world, including South Africa, Ghana, and Mali, began taking photography seriously as art. Books, magazines, newspapers, posters, and booklets were especially important.
Time also plays an important role in the exhibition. The long 1960s suggests an expansive temporal framework that allows for bleed. Can you discuss what the long 1960s means to you and the narratives it opened up for you?
I was living in South Africa back in 2015-2016, and during that time, a major period of student-led protests took place, motivated most directly by an announced plan to raise fees for university education—but more broadly by the colonial legacies and profound inequalities enduring in South Africa. There was a noticeable uptick of interest in the Black Consciousness Movement that emerged in South Africa in the 1960s, and I was really struck by the ways that it felt like the 60s were back—not only ideologically, but even in fashion, in style. I found myself thinking a lot about what students who hadn’t lived through that period of time and who were born after the official end of apartheid in 1994 were calling forth. And then I was thinking about how different that 60s was across southern Africa—where many countries were still mired in anti-colonial and anti-racist struggle—from what is so often thought about when the 60s are referred to in Africa, which is a shorthand for liberation and independence. Recent books like James Meyer’s The Art of Return: The Sixties and Contemporary Culture (2019) encouraged me to go even further in this direction. And then, there are my own imaginings about the 60s, a time that I didn’t personally experience but which has felt so culturally and politically alive in my life. That sense of presence has been fostered especially through the photographs and stories that my parents share, having immigrated to the United States from Jamaica in that decade, emphatically embracing their lives in Brooklyn, New York, while remaining closely connected to their West Indian community and roots. And so I’m thinking about Africa and thinking about diaspora and the lead up to and far-reaching legacies of the 60s.
I am also interested in photography’s relationship to time. The exhibition considers the material life of a photograph. Can you talk about moments in the exhibition where a photo’s meaning or impact changes through its transformation or distribution?
Yes, the ways in which photographs are reproduced and the ways in which they mutate and are subjected to other reimaginings and uses than those of their makers is crucial to the exhibition. This can be seen with some of Ernest Cole’s photographs from House of Bondage.
Cole was very committed to the book as a form for telling a powerful story about Black life under apartheid and the layout of the book and the control he could exercise over the relationship between image and text was very important to him. But as the struggle against apartheid continued into the decades that followed, many activists pulled images from the book to use in posters, pamphlets, and magazines. In the different uses of Cole’s photograph of young men behind bars, the contrast in the photograph is significantly heightened, it’s cropped, it’s given a sepia treatment, it’s adapted into a drawing. It is reimagined and remade over and over again as an icon of struggle. Reportedly, the use of Cole’s work without attribution or permission frustrated Cole, but it also speaks to the ways that a photograph can take on a life of its own. With examples of the use of Cole’s photograph in this way in the section of the exhibition titled “Again & Again,” I wanted to think about the photograph as a kind of zombie—it is alive in the present but shaped by a moment that has passed.
Unlike other media, a photograph retains its medium-specificity when reproduced in other print media—a black-and-white image remains a black-and-white image; however, “not all realisms” exhibits photographic sources transformed in the paintings and collages of Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Romare Bearden, and Sam Nhlengethwa. How did you select these artists?
The works by these artists are in a close conversation with photography, using photographs as part of their material form in collage—in the work of Bearden and Nhlengethwa—and as transfers in the work of Crosby. But I’m especially excited about the ways that these artists play with time through their use of photography. Crosby adapts the subjects of Sidibé’s photographs, such as the dancers at the center of his renowned photograph Nuit de Noël (Happy Club), and paints them as larger-than-life figures. Although working in very different modes, these artists draw from the everyday in ways that help viewers see it better, to understand something more about life—life and death, memory and memorialization.
The exhibition groupings indicate diligent, curious research. Could you share a favorite moment?
I spent a lot of time going through folders in the vertical files collection at Northwestern’s Herskovits Library. And the librarians there—Esmeralda Kale, Crystal Martin, and Gene Kannenberg in particular—know so well that I came across materials that prompted me to audibly gasp, which, you know, is not ideal in a library when you’re supposed to be quiet!
One major moment for me was coming across an issue of the newsletter Dissent, which was produced by the National Union of South African Students (NUSAS) and South African National Students Press Association (SANSPA). That publication sought to “provide some analysis of the South African situation and encourage students to a struggle that requires courage, discipline and tenacity.” In a 1972 issue, an uncredited photograph by Ernest Cole appears in an article tracing the history of the disenfranchisement of Black South Africans—an article that importantly takes the longer view of its roots in British imperialism and the wider European colonial project and not solely the product of Afrikaner nationalism. Despite its global readership and far-reaching impact, House of Bondage was banned in South Africa, and many there did not engage robustly with the project until after apartheid’s official end in 1994. However, this issue of Dissent, published just six years after the release of Cole’s book, demonstrates that Cole’s images were, in fact, circulating in South Africa following its release, albeit without attribution. Two of Cole’s photographs appear as illustrations in the same issue of Dissent in the article “Poverty, Apartheid and Economic Growth,” featuring the divisive signage of apartheid. Although used as mere illustrations and appearing without captions or analysis, these images signal wider visibility for Cole’s images—if not his book as a whole, in South Africa during the era following the book’s publication. And it speaks to the ways that Cole’s photographs circulated through their separation from the banned book.
Another key moment was when I came across an accordion booklet made in 1955 that outlines the Volta Dam River Project. The planning for that project was underway during colonial rule, before the Gold Coast officially became Ghana, and it was a project influentially promoted by then-Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah. The booklet targeted audiences with a range of literacy levels—featuring text written in English and Ewe. It brings photographs, drawings, and text together to tell a story about this major industrial project, one that would displace many people in its efforts to accelerate aluminum production, thereby diversifying the country’s market beyond cocoa as its primary export. That booklet shows the dynamic ways that the government sought to reach audiences with its message, joining with a traveling film program shown in a mobile tent among other outreach efforts.
“not all realisms: Photography, Africa, and the Long 1960s”
Through 6/4: Tue-Wed, Fri-Sun 10 AM-5 PM, Thu 10 AM-8 PM, Smart Museum of Art, The University of Chicago, 5550 S. Greenwood, smartmuseum.uchicago.edu, free
Photography has long been used to challenge mainstream cultural narratives and create new ones. For artists living in a world that often denies their existence, photography can be a tool of empowerment, revealing beauty, vulnerability, and humanity.
Join artists Jaypix Belmer, Jess T. Dugan, and C. Rose Smith for a virtual conversation moderated by visionary curator theo tyson. Each artist will discuss how they use the photographic image to construct queer visual histories through intimate representations of individuals with nonbinary, transgender, and gender-expansive identities.
This program will have automated captions and is hosted via Zoom webinar. Registration is required.
ABOUT THE PARTICIPANTS
theo tyson (she/they) is a curator who invites conversations about the sociocultural implications of race, gender, identity, and sexuality through a lens of fashion, art, and culture. Their practice focuses on creating sartorial spaces of reclamation and authority to share the powerful stories of Black women and those on the LGBTQI+ spectrum. theo privileges noncanonical ways of seeing, offering audiences poignant new perspectives from which to view the rich diversity of our humanity. Their previous posts include Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, SCAD FASH Museum of Fashion + Film, and the Boston Athenæum. Most recently, tyson co-curated the exhibition Being Muholi: Portraits as Resistance at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and served as an advising scholar for Patrick Kelly: Runway of Love at the Peabody Essex Museum. Currently, she is the Penny Vinik Curator of Fashion Arts at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston.
Jaypix Belmer (they/them) is a non binary black, indigenous person of color who uses the lens as a tool for storytelling. Born and raised in Boston, MA, Belmer is a graduate of New England Art Institute with a B.A. in Photography and has worked with clients in both private and commercial industries, delving into the subtle intricacies of class, capturing the unconsidered people and places who inhabit the urban landscape while attempting to bring light to the voiceless.
Jess T. Dugan (they/them) is an artist whose work explores issues of identity through photography, video, and writing. Dugan’s work has been widely exhibited and is in the permanent collections of over 50 museums throughout the United States. Dugan’s monographs include Look at me like you love me (MACK, 2022), To Survive on This Shore: Photographs and Interviews with Transgender and Gender Nonconforming Older Adults (Kehrer Verlag, 2018) and Every Breath We Drew (Daylight Books, 2015).
C. Rose Smith (they/them) is a Boston-based artist who uses photography, fashion, and time-based media to thread the connections between identity, memoir, and sociopolitical landscapes. Smith’s recent achievements include the 2023 Prix Picto De La Mode Top 10 Finalists with Picto Foundation Paris, France and 2023 Coup de Coeur Award with Leica Camera Paris, France, 2022 Inaugural Silver List of Emerging Photographers and was a 2021 finalist for the Aperture Magazine Portfolio Review Prize. Smith’s work has been featured in group exhibitions at Hangar Arts Center in Brussels, Belgium; Fotofest Biennial, Houston, TX; Blue Star Contemporary, San Antonio, TX; SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, GA; and Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, Atlanta.
Dozens of pictures and other art of flowers are featured in “Art in Bloom,” the New Kensington Camera Club’s annual spring floral photography and art show.
The exhibition has prizes for both the artists and the public who will decide the winners.
Club President Joel Varga said the show features 85 entries from 29 artists from the Alle-Kiski Valley.
“They’re over the top,” he said of the quality of the work. “They’re all very, very good.”
The show is going on through May 20 at the club’s “Focus on the Arts Gallery,” which is in the Galleria at Pittsburgh Mills in Frazer. The gallery is open from 5 to 8 p.m. Fridays and noon to 5 p.m. Saturdays.
This is the third year for the show in its present format, Varga said. The club has had a floral photography art show in some form for at least a decade.
For this show, Varga said each participant could enter up to four pieces.
Prizes for the artists are gift cards for Michaels of $50, $30 and $20, Varga said.
For voters, the first-place prize is a $25 gift card to a mall business of the winner’s choice, while the second is a $15 gift card. The third prize is a movie package for two at GQT Pittsburgh Mills Cinemas.
Those interested in visiting the gallery are advised to use mall entry 2 by M@C Discount, formerly Sears Grand, and turn left. The gallery is down the hall and across from Blackburn’s.
Brian C. Rittmeyer is a Tribune-Review staff writer. You can contact Brian by email at brittmeyer@triblive.com or via Twitter .
Judith Joy Ross, who has been taking portraits for decades, is the subject of a large retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
This article is part of our Museums special section about how art institutions are reaching out to new artists and attracting new audiences.
BETHLEHEM, Pa. — To hear the photographer Judith Joy Ross tell it, her life and career are riddled with nonstarters.
Her stint in graduate school? “Complete failure,” she said. Her teaching career? “Utter failure.”
In her photography archive on the second floor of her yellow house here, there is a box marked “downers,” containing what she considers bad prints of good images.
Ms. Ross, who has been taking pictures for nearly 60 years, has never been much of a self-promoter.
“I have a problem with authority figures,” she said on a gray day in February.
Despite all that, Ms. Ross, 76, is the subject of a large retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, with about 200 of her photographs on display until Aug. 6, almost all of them portraits.
“She’s a giant,” said Peter Barberie, a curator of photographs at the museum. “In 500 years, people will be talking about her work.”
The show was jointly organized by the Philadelphia museum and the Fundación Mapfre in Madrid, where it appeared first; it then made stops at Le Bal in Paris and Fotomuseum den Haag in the Netherlands. “She’s better known in Europe than she is here,” Mr. Barberie said.
Although she rarely works in color, calling Ms. Ross’s photographs black-and-white is not exactly right; the images occupy a place on the spectrum between gray and sepia. And except for her 1986-87 series featuring Washington politicians, Ms. Ross has taken pictures mostly of people on the street, in parks or in schools.
“The subject matter is not easy; it’s complex,” said Joshua Chuang, an independent curator who organized the show. “She’s not photographing celebrities.”
Mr. Chuang added that photography was more than a medium to Ms. Ross. “She found out in the 1970s that the camera was a way to connect with people,” he said.
Ms. Ross agreed, up to a point. “It looks like I love people,” she said of her work. “I do love them for a few seconds. After that? No. Goodbye.”
The Dutch artist Rineke Dijkstra, who also photographs people, said she first saw Ms. Ross’s work in the 1990s.
“I fell in love with her pictures,” said Ms. Dijkstra, who has had a solo show at the Guggenheim Museum.
“You can feel if pictures are ‘open,’ and if the people are being prejudged,” Ms. Dijkstra said, noting that that was not the case with Ms. Ross.
Ms. Ross said that her major series had all stemmed from a different question. For her series taken in Eurana Park in Weatherly, Pa. — represented at the museum by several images including an untitled 1982 image of two children sitting on a stump — it was a large query, indeed: “Why is life worth living?”
Ms. Ross is a Pennsylvania native who grew up in the town of Hazelton. At the Moore College of Art & Design in Philadelphia, she took a photography class “by accident,” she said, and that led to her first picture: a piece of trash on a cobblestone street, illuminated by raking light.
“It still stuns me how mysterious it is,” she said.
Even though in 1970 she got a master’s degree in photography at the Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, Ms. Ross says she thinks she did not become a real photographer until a decade later.
“I didn’t have a theme,” she said. “I had been photographing people, but randomly.”
A change in equipment was also transformational. Ms. Ross started working with a wooden, folding 8-by-10 Deardorff camera that stands on a tripod. (She still owns and uses it.)
People get curious when she appears with the large contraption. “They think the circus has come to town,” she said. But its effect is that of an icebreaker, and a piece of protective armor.
“I am so self-conscious, I can’t even point a cellphone at you,” she said. “I need it for me.”
The Eurana Park series of 1982 was the first time Ms. Ross brought her considerable tenacity to bear over a long period. She picked the town of Weatherly because it was close to a family summer home.
“I stood there for the summer at Eurana,” Ms. Ross said, frequently photographing children. “It was a totally inappropriate space to do that. But I didn’t care. That tells you what kind of person I am.”
People visiting the Vietnam Veterans Memorial became her next long-term subject. Sixteen works from the 1983-84 series are in the Philadelphia show, including an untitled 1984 portrait of a Black boy.
Ms. Ross recalled that it forced her to ask, “How do you deal with pain and suffering?”
One of her biggest challenges was taking pictures of politicians she didn’t agree with during the making of her congressional series, including Senator Strom Thurmond, Republican of South Carolina.
“I didn’t like Strom,” she said. “But I was in awe of him. It was like meeting the king.” He served in the Senate for 48 years and died in 2003.
Armed with some of her photographs, Ms. Ross overcame her shyness and submitted her work to the Museum of Modern Art, earning a same-day meeting with John Szarkowski, an influential photography curator.
“He asked me if I had heard of August Sander, and I denied it,” Ms. Ross said, referring to the German photographer known for his portraits. “He knew I was lying.” (Sander is one of her biggest influences, she said, a list that also includes Robert Adams and Eugène Atget.)
Mr. Szarkowski put Ms. Ross in the 1985 “New Photography” show at MoMA with three other artists; the poster for the show hangs in her house.
Mr. Chuang called Ms. Ross a tough critic of her own work. “She has stacks of incredible pictures that she has never thought to show to other people,” he said.
Even though her most famous series were done in the 1980s, she has been making plenty of striking work since then, including “Annie Hasz, Easton Circle, Easton, Pennsylvania” (2007), featured in the Philadelphia show.
Ms. Ross, who is represented by the German dealer Thomas Zander, said that sales of her work had been slow lately. She attributed it to the decidedly non-fashionable character of her work, both in style and content. “It’s not in color, and it’s of people,” she said.
The dominance of digital photography is not helping, either. The special paper that Ms. Ross likes to print on — which helps her get the rich tones she is known for — is no longer made. “I have a freezer full of it, but it’s almost gone,” she said.
Ms. Ross was in her basement standing by her photography development equipment — in a small room with her washer and dryer — when she said that she had an idea for a new series, market headwinds and occasional cynicism be damned.
“I’m not showing anybody anything yet,” she said. “But I’m hopeful.”
