Category: biography

Anton Carte

The Paintings of Antoine (Anton) Carte

Born at Mons, the provincial capital of Hainaut in December of 1886, Antoine (Anton) Carte was a Belgian painter and lithographer of the Flemish Expressionist movement who initially worked in the Symbolist style of the Sint-Martens-Latem artist colony. Along with painter and engraver Louis Buisseret, he founded the Groupe Nervia which  supported new artists in Hainaut and fostered the traditional Gallo-Romance art of the ethnic French-speaking southern region of Belgium.

The son of a woodworker, Anton Carte was an apprentice at the studio of Belgian painter and designer Frantz Depooter for a period of fourteen years. He began his formal training at the Academy of Mons in 1897 and finished his training in 1908 at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels. It was at the Academy of Mons that Carte met Louis Buisseret, the man who would become his lifelong faithful friend. At the Royal Academy, both men studied under artists of the Symbolist movement: muralist painter Constant Montald, painter and mosaic artist Émile Fabry, and painter Jean Delville, a poet and leading exponent of the Belgian Idealist art movement during the 1890s.

A 1912 scholarship enabled Carte to travel to Paris where he stayed for two years at the studio of set and costume designer Léon Samoylovich Bakst and renowned French organ designer Aristide Cavaillé-Coll. During this period, Carte and Bakst worked for the Ballets Russes founded by Russian impresario Serge Diaghilev. Among other acquaintances in Paris, Carte came in contact with French Symbolist painter and theoretician Maurice Denis and Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, a French muralist painter of allegorical and antiquity scenes. 

After initially working in the Symbolist style, Anton Carte became a Flemish Expressionist after the First World War. Encouraged by Louis Buisseret, he exhibited a series of illustrations for a work by Belgian poet and playwright Emile Verhaeren at the 1917 Salon de l’Illustration in Brussels. Carte also illustrated editions of Maurice Maeterlinck’s 1895 “Massacre of the Innocents” and Marcel Wolfer’s 1914 “Writings of November”. 

Carte exhibited with the Flemish Expressionists at the 1923 Paris Salon d’Automne, an annual multi-disciplinary event. In 1924, he traveled to the United States and, in the following year, had a major retrospective at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Institute. This show resulted in the sale of all sixty paintings presented at the show; it also ensured Carte’s success with the American public.

Although mostly known for his paintings, Anton Carte designed  posters in the 1920s and 1930s which included work for the Aéro Club de Belgique, the 1930 International Exposition at Antwerpen/Anvers, and Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum. Carte also created stained-glass windows, most notably the 1927 windows for a newly constructed building at the University of Mons-Hainaut in Wallonia, Belgium. Between 1935 and 1940, he undertook numerous commissions  with glassmaker F. P. Colpaert for stained-glass windows at the Church of Saint Philippe de Neri at the Abbey of La Cambre and a stained-glass series, “The Way of the Cross”, for the Notre Dame de la Cambre.

Carte, along with Buisseret and Léon Eeckman, founded the Expressionist art association Groupe Nervia in 1928. This group was committed to an intimate human art tinged with Symbolism and Italian art techniques. Carte began teaching in 1929 at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Visuels de la Cambre in Brussels; however, as he did not agree with the first director’s ideas, Carte left in 1932 to become Professor of Decorative and Monumental Art at the Brussels Academy.  

During the war years, Anton Carte finished the stained-glass windows he had started with F. P. Colpaert but later withdrew to his house in Wauthier Braine to find some calm. After the war, Carte painted frescoes in the chapel and in the Great Hall of Orval, a community within the French commune of Montigny-Lengrain. At the inauguration of his eight large stained-glass windows at the Basilica of the Sacred Heart in Koekelberg, Carte entrusted painter Jacques Maes with the completion of his project.

A complete artist throughout his life, Anton Carte produced drawings, engravings, book illustrations, posters, lithographs, banknotes, stamps, fresco designs, sculptures, stained glass windows, theater sets, ceramics and carpets. Tired at the age of sixty-seven, Anton Carte died on the fifteenth of February in 1954 at his home on the Rue de l’Ermitage in Ixelles, Belgium.

Notes: The Anton Carte Foundation has a more extensive biography of Carte’s life as well as an extensive collection of his artwork at their site: https://www.antocarte.art/en

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Anton Carte, L’Art Belge”, June 30 1920, Vintage Print

Second Insert Image: Anton Carte, “The Carter”, 1925-1930, Oil on Canvas, Anton Carte Foundation, Brussels, Belgium

Third Insert Image: Anton Carte, “Bénédiciié”, 1921, Oil on Canvas, 150 x 178 cm, Private Collection

Fourth Insert Image: Anton Carte, “The Boatman”, circa 1938, Oil on Canvas, 100 x 80 cm, Collection of the Province of Walloon Brabant

Botton Insert Image: Anto Carte, “The Passer (The Effort)”, 1920, Oil on Canvas, 130 x 90 cm, Private Collection

Danny Fitzgerald: Les Demi Dieux

The Photography of Danny Fitzgerald: Les Demi Dieux

Born in the Brooklyn, New York area of Carroll Gardens in 1921, Danny Fitzgerald was an American photographer who produced male nude physique photography between 1958 and 1968. The photographs were produced and marketed by Fitzgerald and his partner, Richard Bennett, under the name “Les Demi Dieux (The Demigods)”.

Born to first-generation Italian-Irish parents, Fitzgerald developed a love for art and film at a very young age. Although he would later travel throughout the world with his camera and his partner, Fitzgerald always considered the working-class Italian-American neighborhood of Carroll Gardens as home and the wellspring for many of his photographs. 

Danny Fitzgerald did not seriously considered photography as a possible profession until he was in his thirties. His first series of photographs were of the young bodybuilders at the Abe Goldberg Empire Health and Studio, a second-floor loft gymnasium in the Lower East Side of Manhattan where top bodybuilders of the period would train. Both a physically small and deeply private person, Fitzgerald gained the confidence of these men through asking for assistance with his own workout and sparring as their training partner. 

Fitzgerald’s early images were standard compositions with models presented in bikini trunks or posing straps. These photographs, processed by Fitzgerald in his own studio, were initially sold to private collectors. Later marketed under the pseudonym “Les Demi Dieux”, these posed male images were regularly published on the covers and pages of magazines printed by Canadian bodybuilder and entrepreneur Josef Weider. Fitzgerald’s male photos appeared in such popular publications as “Demi Gods”, “The Young Physique”, “Muscles a Go-Go”, and the publisher’s compilation volume “Era” that recognized the best photographers of the 1960s.

Now in his forties during the 1960s, Danny Fitzgerald met bodybuilder Richard Bennett who would become his partner, primary model and collaborator in the photographic process. With Bennett at his side, he returned to Carroll Gardens and began photographing the Italian-American gangs, known as “The South Brooklyn Boys”, as they gathered on the streets. It was at this time that Fitzgerald’s work shifted from standard ‘beefcake photography’ to grittier, realistic documentation of the Brooklyn youth culture. 

Influenced by twentieth-century art and film, Fitzgerald began to produce images that were free of the contrivance and overworked poses of standard physique photography. His nudes, presented as portraits set in landscapes or cityscapes, were given a larger context that invited aesthetic discussion. Inspired by the modern artists around him, Fitzgerald employed cinematographic techniques in his images, often placing compositions off-center and dramatizing his subject with the light and shadow contrast technique of chiaroscuro. His disciplined approach towards precise focus, clarity and vivid tonal range displayed Fitzgerald’s meticulous attention to the lighting, lenses, and camera settings.

Danny Fitzgerald’s work was little seen during his lifetime after he broke from the clichés of the beefcake genre. He died in 2000 at the age of seventy-nine without having exhibited his work in a gallery setting. In October of 2013, Berlin’s Bruno Gmünder Verlag published “Brooklynn Boys: Danny Fitzgerald and Les Demi Dieux”, a collection of the documentary work he had shot in Carroll Gardens. On the twelfth of December in 2013, a posthumous public exhibition of Fitzgerald’s images was held at the Steven Kasher Gallery on New York City’s Second Avenue. The opening and book signing was attended by Fitzgerald’s longtime partner Richard Bennett. 

Notes: Abraham Goldberg was born in the Lower East Side of Manhattan in November of 1924.  After his service in the army during World War Two, Goldberg  opened his second-floor Manhattan gymnasium, Empire Health and Studio, at 80 Clinton Street in 1950. A fitness trainer and bodybuilder, he appeared on the covers of such magazines as “Your Physique” and “Santé et Force”. Abe Goldberg died in December of 2002 at the age of seventy-eight.

Born in Montreal in November of 1919, Josef (Joe) Weider was a Canadian bodybuilder and co-founder of the International Federation of BodyBuilders (IFBB). He published the first issue of “Your Physique” magazine in 1940 and designed numerous training courses beginning in the 1950s. Weider was the creator of such contests as Mr. Olympia, Ms. Olympia and the Masters Olympia. He founded several major American fitness magazines in the 1980s including “Men’s Fitness”. Josef Weider died in March of 2013 at the age of ninety-three, He was inducted into the International Sports Hall of Fame in 2014. 

The Steven Kasher Gallery is located at 166 Second Avenue, 3A, New York, New York. (Appointments only). The gallery can be reached through 9179226861 or steve@stevenkasher.com

Top Insert Image: Danny Fitzgerald, Untitled (Demi-Dieux Model), 1960, Gelatin Silver Print on Double Weight Paper 12, 12.5 x 10 cm, Private Collection

Second Insert Image: Danny Fitzgerald, “Johnny, New York”, 1963, Gelatin Silver Print, Printed 2013 Steven Kasher Gallery, Edition of 10, 35.6 x 27.9 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Danny Fitzgerald, “Richard Bennett”, circa 1960s, Gelatin Silver Print, Private Collection 

Bottom Insert Image: Danny Fitzgerald, “Swim Hole, New York”, 1964, Gelatin Silver Print, Private Collection

Sekino Jun’ichirō

Woodblock prints by Sekino Jun’ichirō

Born in 1914 at the historic Yasukata district of the Aomori Prefecture, Sekino Jun’ichirō (関野 凖一郎) was a Japanese woodblock printer and one of the major postwar artists of the Sōsaku Hanga (創作版画 Creative Print) movement. This woodblock printing movement stressed the artist as the sole creator motivated by a desire for self-expression. The artist was responsible for all divisions of the labor, the drawing, carving and printing, as opposed to the traditional collaborative system of ukiyo-e (浮世絵).

The son of a merchant dealing in agricultural products, Sekino Jun’ichirō explored oil painting and printmaking from an early age. He studied intaglio etching and lithography under Kon Junzō and, later, at the Nihon Etching Institute under its founder Nishida Takeo (西田武雄). In 1935, Sekino won a first prize at the government sponsored exhibition in Teiten for his 1935 “Aomori Harbor”. In the following year, he won an etching prize at the juried Annual Imperial Exhibition held in Bunten.

In 1937, Sekino became a member of the Nihon Hanga Kyôkai (日本版画協会), an association of Japanese printmakers founded in 1918 to promote printmaking as a modern art form. Sekino moved to Tokyo in 1938 where he studied woodblock printing under Kôshirô Onchi (恩地 孝四郎), printmaker, photographer and founder of the Sōsaku Hanga movement. He became an associate of Kôshirô and a founding member of his teacher’s Ichimokukai (一木会 First Thursday Society), an informal study group that supported aspiring print artists. 

During the Second World War, Sekino Jun’ichirō worked in an ammunition factory. The war years uniquely challenged Japanese printmakers as access to the Western markets, particularly the United States, was disrupted leaving many struggling financially. Paper and ink became scarce and further limited printmaking, eventually bringing it almost to a standstill by 1945. After the war years, Sekino supported himself and his wife, Katsuko, through illustrating books and creating realistic woodblock print portraits that gradually led to international recognition.  

In 1953, Sekino had his first solo exhibition at Tokyo’s Yoseido Gallery which specialized in contemporary modern Japanese prints. In 1958, he received an invitation from the Rockefeller Foundation and the American Japan Society that began a series of international travels. Sekino’s work appeared in international exhibitions, print biennials, and such prestigious institutions as the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, New York’s Museum of Modern Art and the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris.  

Sekino Jun’ichirō taught printmaking in 1958 at New York’s Pratt Institute. In 1963, American artist and educator Gordon Waverly Gilkey, in his position as first dean of the College of Liberal Arts, hired Sekino to teach a class at Oregon State University. Sekino also taught at the University of Washington and worked in New Mexico’s Tamarind Studio where he studied with printmaker Glen Alps, the developer of the collographic printing process. In 1969, Sekino returned to teaching at Oregon State University.

Sekino launched his “Fifty-Three Stations of the Tokaido” at the end of 1959. This series, depicting the system of roads linking the city of Edo with the then-capital of Kyoto, was a popular subject for artists, most notable of which was master printmaker Utagawa Hiroshige (歌川 広重) who began his Ukiyo-e woodblock prints in 1832. Sekino designed and carved all of his woodblocks himself and gave the responsibility of printing the series to skilled artisans Yoneda Minoru, Kobayashi Sokichi and “Living National Treasure” Iwase Koichi. Sekino received Japan’s 1975 Ministry of Education Award for this fourteen-yearlong series. In 1975, Oregon State University exhibited Sekino’s “Fifty-Three Stations” alongside Hiroshige’s 1834 version..

Sekino Jun’ichirō passed away of lung cancer in April of 1988 at the age of seventy-three. His second son Sekino Yowsaku is a Tokyo woodblock printmaker who often incorporates gold leaf into his images. Sekino Junpei, the eldest son, is a retired mathematics professor who is known for his digital art and fractal computer graphics.

The Imperial Household Agency awarded Sekino Jun’ichirō with two Medals of Honor, the Shijuhosho in 1981 and the Kyokujitsu Shojusho in 1987, for his cultural contributions. The Imperial Household frequently purchased his woodblock prints to be used as gifts to foreign dignitaries when members of the Imperial family traveled abroad to promote Japan’s friendly international relations. 

Sekino’s woodblock prints are currently in the permanent collections of Ashmolean Museum of Oxford, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the British Museum, Cincinnati Art Museum, Cleveland Museum of Art, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), Tokyo’s National Museum of Modern Art, the Portland Art Museum, University of Oregon’s Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, and Royal Ontario Museum, among others. 

Notes: Japanese names in modern times consist of a family name (surname) followed by the given name, thus, 関野 凖一郎 Sekino (family name)  Jun’ichirō (given name), a traditional form I use for my articles. Beginning in the Meiji period of Japan during the turn of the twentieth-century, many English-language publications began to place the family name in the last position. Many Japanese people when writing and speaking English have now adopted this Western naming order.

The Fort Wayne Museum of Art has a 2023 article entitled “Treasures from the Vault: Jun’ichrō Sekino” that discusses Sekino’s contribution to Japanese printmaking: https://fwmoa.blog/2022/09/19/treasures-from-the-vault-junichiro-sekino/

For those interested in a deeper study of Japanese printmaking, the JSTOR site has a free journal article by Oliver Statler entitled “Modern Japanese Creative Prints” from the July 1955 “Monumenta Nipponica” at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2382817

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Sekino Jun’ichirō”, Date Unknown, Gelatin Silver Print, Windy City Times, January 5 2011, Chicago

Second Insert Image: Sekino Jun’ichirō, “Jun Morning in Kyoto”, 1979, Woodblock Print, 68 of 98 Edition, 85 x 57.8 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Sekino Jun’ichirō, “Yoshid”, Woodblock Print, No. 35 of “Fifty-Three Stations of the Tokaido”, Private Collection

Fourth Insert Image: Sekino Jun’ichirō, “Falling Leaves”, 1960-1970s, Woodblock Print, 55 of 128 Edition, 46.4 x 69.2 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Sekino Jun’ichirō, “Ki’iroi Ochiba (Yellow Fallen Leaf”, circa 1990, 43 x 60.5 cm, Private Collection

Dario Bellezza: “Crazed, Crazed for Love”

 

Photographers Unknown, Crazed, Crazed for Love

For Pier Vittorio Tondelli

At night we lose sight of the Tiber.
The wind forces open your honeyed
mouth; I taste firsthand
the languid roses of your springtime.

The quick pace of a police officer
perhaps young and willing, or maybe
elderly who gropes for the stairs
confounds the memories and the sky
goes dark–

Crazed, crazed for love, to love
thresholds oblivious and rabid for trade
where I enter without looking for the gloom
within, muted lover, I shout
to get through the days, arrived
midway through life and sated,
but still unknown to myself
restless, high-wired for sex –
inclined to abandon personal grievance,
to abjure, repudiate the celestial spheres
of nightly idleness or of infected Narcissus.
I’ll trample History
out of dishonor or delight.

Dario Bellezza, Crazed, crazed for love, Snakewoman, Translated in 2025 from the Italian by Peter Covino

Born at Rome in September of 1944, Dario Bellezza was Italy’s first openly gay major prizewinning poet, author and playwright. He is considered to be among the best poets of the second half of the twentieth-century due to the veritable variety of his work from epigrams and brash love-lyrics to unfaltering political chronicles.

Bellezza’s elementary education was at Rome’s classical lyceum from which he graduated in 1962. His education led to writing for several Italian literary and poetry magazines, including the 1967-1968 journal “Carte Segrete (Secret Cards)” dedicated to avant-garde and contemporary literature, art and thought. Bellezza began his rise to prominence in the 1960s through his lifelong collaboration with the magazine “Nuovi Argomenti (New Subjects)”, a literary magazine founded in 1953 by Alberto Moravia.

Through his association with literary critic and writer Enzo Siciliano, Dario Bellezza entered the intellectual world of mid-1960s Rome, at a time when Italy was undergoing convulsive ideological confrontations in its culture and politics. Those writers who primarily influenced his work included Italian poet Sandro Penna, French novelist and playwright Jean Genet, symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud whose entire poetic works  would later be translated into Italian by Bellezza, and Elsa Morante, poet, novelist and wife to Alberto Moravia.

Bellezza’s first published prose work was the 1970 “L’innocenza (Innocence)”, a dark partially-autobiographical story of the protagonist Nino, who after recognizing his own homosexuality, chose condemnation rather than acceptance. In 1971, Bellezza’s first volume of poetry “Invettive e Licenze (Invectives and Licenses)” was published by the Milan press Garzanti. Noted for its technical precision, the autobiographically-inspired poems depicted people overwhelmed by bitterness, guilt, scandal, and shame. 

Dario Bellezza’s debut poetry volume was praised by poet, film director and playwright  Pier Paolo Pasolini, prominent in the Roman intellectual scene and a major figure in European cinema and literature. Bellezza was very grateful for Pasolini’s affection and support for his work. Upset and angry at his friend’s death, Bellezza wrote the 1981 biographical essay “Morte di Pasolini” in response to the November 1975 brutal kidnapping, torture, and murder of Pasolini in the Roman coastal neighborhood of Ostia. This was followed three years later by a second work on Pasolini, “Turbamento (Disturbance)”.

In 1983, Bellezza published “io (me)”, a collection of autobiographical poems that described his everyday life and the desperation of his loves. Seeing himself as a highly educated bourgeois man and homosexual bigot, Bellezza suffered from insomnia that he felt was due to feelings of guilt as well as the many contradictions that struggled within him. The difficulty of a secret and clandestine homosexual life in Rome was a predominant topic in both his poetic and prose work. Bellezza cites the systematic refusal of the self as the only salvation from homosexuality in his 1972 “Lettere da Sodoma (Letters from Sodom)”,

Over his twenty-five year career as a writer, Dario Bellezza published more than twenty books, including eight full-length poetry collections, eight novels, two theater plays, and translations from the French. He received the 1976 Viareggio Prize, Italy’s prestigious literary award, for his 1976 poetry volume “Morte Segreta (Secret Death)”. In 1994, Bellezza received the Montale Prize for his poetic work “L’avversario (The Adversary)” and the Fondi la Postora Prize for his play “Ordalia della Croce (Ordeal of the Cross)”

Known for his candid exploration of homosexuality and its complexities in the modern world, Dario Bellezza, in the midst of writing a book about his struggle with AIDS, died a premature death related to complications from AIDS on the last day of March in 1995. He is interred at Campo Cestio (Cimitero Acattolico), Rome, Lazio, Italy.

Notes: The Poetry Foundation has a May 2025 article on Dario Bellezza written by essayist and poet Daniel Felsenthal, entitled “Drink Me, Lick Me Even” at its online site: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/1679372/drink-me-lick-me-even

The online literary site Asymptote has two poems by Dario Bellezza translated by University of Rhode Island Associate Professor Peter Covino: https://www.asymptotejournal.com/poetry/dario-bellezza-what-sex-is-death/

An obituary on Dario Bellezza written by James Kirkup for the online “Independent” news magazine can be located at: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/obituary-dario-bellezza-1303484.html 

There is a collection of Dario Bellezza’s poetry, translated by Italian literature researcher Luca Baldoni, in Volume 1 of the 2006 Italian Poetry Review available as a PDF  at Academie.edu: https://www.academia.edu/44358397/Dario_Bellezza_Selection_of_Poems_Translated_into_English

Top Insert Image: Guglielmina Otter, “Dario Bellezza”, circa 1976, Gelatin Silver Print, Interview with Velio Carratoni for Fermenti Magazine

Second Insert Image: Dario Bellezza, “Morte di Pasolini”, January 1, 1981, Arnoldo Mondadori Editore , Milan, Italy

Third Insert Image: Dario Bellezza, “Addio Amori, Addio Cuori”, January 1, 1996, Fermenti Editrice , Rome, Italy

Bottom Insert Image: Guglielmina Otter, “Dario Bellezza”, circa 1976, Gelatin Silver Print, Interview with Velio Carratoni for Fermenti Magazine

Elli Sougioultzoglou-Seraidari

The Photography of Elli Sougioultzoglou-Seraidari

Born in 1899 at the Vilayhet of Aidin (Aydini), an administrative division of the Ottoman Empire, Elli Sougioultzoglou-Seraidari was a Greek photographer whose work helped shape the image of Greece to Western culture. She was the first Greek photographer to export modern images of Greece abroad and thus influenced the future of Greek tourism. Later known by the pseudonym Nelly for her professional society portraiture, Elli Seraidari drew attention to Greece during the country’s turbulent interwar years, a period from 1918 to 1939 that resulted in economic, social, political, and military changes..

At the beginning of the Greco-Turkish War, the Aidini Massacre in the summer of 1919 uprooted Elli Seraidari’s family from their home and forced them to flee to the city of Smyrna. Seraidari relocated in 1920 with her brother to the German city of Dresden where they planned to study the arts. For two years, she studied photography under Franz Fiedler, known for his surrealist-inspired images, and Hugo Erfurth, a portraitist of early twentieth-century celebrities and cultural figures.

After the creation of the Grand National Assembly in the Ottoman Empire led by Mustafa Demal Atatürk, a campaign against the indigenous Greek and Christian populations began. The brutal persecution and destruction led to massacres, forced deportations, executions, and the destruction of cultural and religious monuments. The Great Fire of Smyrna in September of 1922, a deliberate act by the government, forced the city’s population to flee from the Turkish military forces and seek shelter in Greece and elsewhere. Although Seraidari was abroad at the time, she joined the hundred of thousands refugees who were seeking a new life in Greece 

In the spring of 1924, Elli Seraidari relocated to Athens where she made the bold decision to establish a photography studio in the high-rent center of the city. Seraidari used her equipment from Dresden to produce specialized portraits as well as dance and nude photography. Her portrait work soon became status symbols for the culturally elite in Greece. Seraidari’s introduction of models and performers into images of the national treasures of the Greek landscape created a new narrative for the growing nation and increased Seraidari’s reputation. Among her most notable works of this early period are the 1925 nude portrait of prima ballerina Mona Paeva and the 1930 mid-air image of Russian dancer Elizaveta Nikolska, both taken at the Parthenon.

Elli Seraidari adopted a naive nationalistic and conservative approach to her work. Her style coincided with Greece’s need to produce an ideal view of the country and its people, both for internal and tourism purposes. Seraidari was appointed as an official photographer for the newly established Greek Ministry of Tourism. She also was commissioned by the Greek Archeological Service to photograph Greek antiquities, both architecture and sculpture. Seraidari’s creative eye imbued the images with a dramatic use of light and dark shadows, sharp horizontal and vertical lines, and camera angles that brought life to the subjects.

Seraidari’s association with Greece’s Fourth of August Regime, under the leadership of General Ioannis Metaxas, made her one of the country’s most prolific photographers. As a refugee in Greece, Seraidari’s view of Greece was idyllic. This matched the propaganda of the Metaxas regime to illustrate the continuity of the Greeks since Antiquity. Now a well-established artist, Seraidari photographed the events and athletes at the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games. Three years later, she was commissioned with the decoration of the Greek pavilion at the New York’s World Fair, for which Seraidari created gigantic collages that expressed the similarities between ancient and modern Greeks. 

While in New York, Elli Seraidari decided to remain in the United States, establish her commercial photographic portraiture, and seek new work in the fields of photo reportage and advertising. She continued to maintain her connections with the Greek elite, including shipping tycoons Aristotle Onassis and Stavos Niachos, and soon developed contacts in the White House. As her new work failed to align with any previous Greek stereotype, viewings of her work in the United States went largely unmentioned. 

After several excursions to Greece beginning in 1949, Seraidari returned to Greece in March of 1966 where she settled with her husband at Nea Smyrni, a municipality in South Athens, and ceased her photographic work. In 1985, Seraidari donated her photo archives and cameras to Athen’s Beanaki Museum. The Greek government and the Hellenic Center of Photography awarded her in 1987 with an honorary diploma and medal. In 1993, Seraidari received the Order of the Phoenix, an award for those in Greece who have excelled in the arts and sciences. This award was followed in 1996 by the Athens Academy’s Arts and Letters Award. Elli Sougioultzoglou-Seraidari died in Nea Smyrni on the eighth day of August in 1998 at the age of ninety-seven.

Notes: The “Daily Art” has an article on Elli Seraidari’s work entitled “The Queen of Neoclassical Photography: Nelly” at its March 2024 edition: https://www.dailyartmagazine.com/greek-photographer-nelly/

Projects at Harvard has an article on the opposing photographic styles of two artists, British photographer Francis Firth and Elli Seraidari, both of whom shot images of the Acropolis and Parthenon: https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/sites/projects.iq.harvard.edu/files/whoseculture/files/nelly_frith_photography_dpenizzotto_oct_7_21.pdf

The “Greece Is” newsletter has a July 2023 article on Elli Seraidari’s work entitled “Nelly’s: Setting the Image of Greece in the Mind of the World” which coincided with a major exhibition of her work at the Pireos 138 Benaki Museum: https://www.greece-is.com/nellys-setting-the-image-of-greece-in-the-mind-of-the-world/

The Benaki Museum has a lecture on Elli Seraidari’s life and her photography on YouTube under the title “Nelly’s: Reflections on the Life and Work of the Greek Photographer Elli Seraidari-Sougioultzoglou”.

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Elli Sougioultzoglou-Seraidari”, circa 1920s,  Gelatin Silver Print

Second Insert Image: Elli Sougloultzoglou-Seraidari, “Temple de la Victoire Aptere, Athens”, 1925, Gelatin Silver Print, Banaki Museum Photographic Archives

Third Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Elli Sougioultzoglou-Seraidari”, Gelatin Silver Print, Impactalk Online Magazine 

Bottom Insert Image: Elli Sougloultzoglou-Seraidari, “Demetrius Karambatis on the Acropolis”, 1925, Gelatin Silver Print, Banaki Museum Photographic Archives

Hervé Guibert

The Photography of Hervé Guibert

Born at Saint-Cloud, Hauts-de-Seine on the fourteenth of December in 1955, Hervé Guibert was a French author and photographer. The author of two-dozen published works, he wrote with aggressive candor, detachment, and passion through a mixture of diary writing, memoir, and fiction. Both his writings and photography were closely linked to his private life. The subjects of Guibert’s writings often became his friends; those whom he loved were often portrayed as celebrities, alternately idolized and exposed.

Guibert’s photographic oeuvre contains interior scenes and landscapes as well as portraits of family, friends and lovers. He worked in black and white with tones drawn to soft grays. Photographs of Guibert’s immediate surroundings, his bookcase or desk, were created with the same intensity as photographs of nudes in his bed. His work is both restrained and subtle, created more for his person or close friends rather than public exposure. Although most of his work remains elusive, never having been exhibited or published, those images that have appeared are cool, confident and emotionally warm.

Hervé Guibert was born into a conservative middle-class family of a veterinary inspector and his wife, a former teacher. He relocated to Paris at the age of seventeen with the hope of becoming an actor or scriptwriter. After his rejection from a Paris film school, Guibert  entered the literary world and, by the age of twenty, was writing dating advice for “20 Ans (Twenty Years)”, a glossy women’s magazine. In 1977, he published his autobiographical novel, “La Mort Propagande (Death Propaganda)”. 

In 1978, Guibert was hired as a photography critic for France’s evening newspaper “Le Monde”. He successfully established himself as a photographer with a photographic literary volume, “Suzanne and Louise”, containing intimate portraits of his great-aunts. In 1981, Hervé Guibert published his “Image Fantôme (Ghost Image)”, an insightful collection of mini-essays on various photographic forms such as family album portraits, photo-booth film strips, and pornographic Polaroids. In this work, Guibert presented photography as tactile, fetishistic and linked to frustrated desires.

In 1982, Hervé Guibert completed his “Les Aventures Singulières (The Singular Adventures)”. This collection of short stories,  published through Éditions de Minuit in Paris, centered on a singular character’s life over a period of three years. He shared the Best Screenplay César Award in 1984 for a collaborative work with opera and theater director Patrice Chéreau on the 1983 film “L’Homme Blessé (The Wounded Man)”.

Guibert was granted in 1987 a two year residency scholarship at Villa Medicis, the site of the French Academy in Rome, where he studied with his friend, the openly gay writer and journalist Mathieu Lindon. In January of 1988, Guibert received a positive diagnosis for AIDS and began to record in his writings what would be the remainder of his life. He was the long-time friend of both Christine and her partner, film director Thierry Jouno, considered the man in Guibert’s life. Guibert married Christine to ensure that his royalty income would pass to her and her two children with Jouno.

In 1989, Hervé Guibert published his highly erotic novella ““Fou de Vincent (Crazy for Vincent)”, a dramatization of his earlier intermittent relationship with the impulsive and unpredictable teenager Vincent Marmousez. He revealed his HIV status in his 1990 real-life based novel “À l’Ami qui ne M’a Pas Sauvé la Vie (To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life)”. Following the release of this novel, Guibert became the focus of media attention with interviews and several talk show appearances.

Guibert’s last work, “Cytomégalovirus” was a description of his autumn 1991 hospitalization and the increasing blindness he suffered from his illness. In the second week of December in 1991, Guibert attempted suicide by taking digitalin, a heart medication toxic in large doses. Two weeks later, he died at the age of thirty-six in Clamart, Hauts-de-Seine, on the twenty-seventh of December in 1991.

Notes: An excellent article on Hervé Guibert’s 1981 essay volume “Ghost Image” can be found on British photographer Felix Pilgrim’s site: https://www.felixpilgrim.com/blog-1/herve-guiberts-ghost-image

The contemporary Vienna gallery Felix Gaudlitz, in collaboration with Attilia Fattori Franchini, organized a 2020 exhibition of Hervé Guibert’s photographic work entitled “…of lovers, time, and death”. The gallery’s article with several of Guibert’s photographs can be found at: https://felixgaudlitz.com/exhibitions/herve-guibert-of-lovers-time-and-death/

Information written by Christine (Guibert) on Hervé Guibert’s partner Thierry Joune and the impact he had on Guibert’s writings can be found at: https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/281395860/thierry-jouno

A more extensive biographical article on Hervé Guibert, with additional links, can be found in this blog’s November 2024 archive: https://ultrawolvesunderthefullmoon.blog/2024/11/18/hevre-guibert-he-who-wished-to-be-master-of-the-truth/

Top Insert Image: Hervé Guibert, “Self Portrait”, 1985, Gelatin Silver Print, 23.7 x 30.2 cm, Private Collection

Second Insert Image: Hans Georg Berger, “Hervé Guibert and Poet Eugène Savitzkaya, New Year’s Eve, Rio nell’Elba, Italy”, 1984, Gelatin Silver Print, Semiotext(e)

Third Insert Image: Hervé Guibert, “Christine”, 1983, Gelatin Silver Print, 23.8 x 30.5 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Hans Georg Berger, “Hervé Guibert and Thierry Juono, Hotel Gellért, Gesellschaft”, 1983, Gelatin Silver Print

Piero Pompili

 

The Black and White Photography of Piero Pompili

Born in the Roman borgata of Borghesiana in June of 1967, Piero Pompili is an Italian photographer whose work explores working class people and the landscape of Italy’s major cities. A significant part of his oeuvre is the portraiture of local boxers, those epic heroes from central and southern Italy who fight daily in the cities. A project that has covered a twenty-year period, Pompili’s series establishes the boxers’ identities through their bodies, discipline and skill, as well as their fears and ambitions.

Fascinated by the social and urban landscapes of the inner Italian cities since his childhood, Piero Pompili developed a deep attachment to the energy and passion of the common people. His approach to photography is realistic, not idealized, and presents real people who struggle with doubt but accept discipline and sacrifice through commitment. Pompili focused his images not on the battle itself but rather the strenuous routine of daily workouts and the rituals practiced by the boxers before their entry into the ring.

In April of 2017, Pompili published his “Gladiatori Moderni”, a collection of photographs printed through media company Salzgeber’s book division Bruno Gmuender. The photographs of these modern gladiators  were taken in the borgatas of Rome and Naples, within both the gyms and the catacombs where ancient gladiators prepared for their battles. 

Pompili’s work was featured in 2023 at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Trento and Rovereto (MART). In conjunction with the exhibition, MART published the exhibition catalogue “Piero Pompili: Pugili”. 

Note: The April 2nd 2017 edition of The Advocate has a short biographical article on Piero Pompili and a collection of images from the “Gladiatori Moderni” at its online site: https://www.advocate.com/books/2017/4/02/modern-gladiators#rebelltitem1

Top Insert Image: Piero Ppmpili, “Self Portrait”, May 2025, Instagram

Bottom Insert Image: Piero Pompili, “Lukaska”, 2018, “Gladiatori Moderni” Series, Gelatin Silver Print

 

Nicola Samorì, “In Principio era la Fine”

Nicola Samorì, “In Principio era la Fine (In the Beginning was the End)”, 2016, Oil on Copper Plate, 40 x 30 cm

Born at the northern Emilia-Romagna city of Forli in May of  1977, Nicola Samori is an Italian artist trained in the traditions of seventeenth-century Renaissance painting and sculpture. His figurative works translates these techniques into contemporary images.

Samori, interested in art from an early age, was encouraged by his family to study at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna. Using both realism and chiaroscuro, he pushes his imagery to it dissolution, taking its form to a breaking point. Samori’s images are dark, baroque canvas works whose surfaces have often been altered by the physical manipulation of scraping, diluting, tearing and slashing.  

Nicola Samori has consistently exhibited his work in group and solo shows throughout Italy and the world since 1998. Solo exhibitions include the 2002 “Enigma Uomo: Il fuoco della Rinascita” at Bologna”s L’Ariete Artecomtemporanea; the 2003 “Del Miti Memorie” at the Tafe Gallery in Perth, Australia; and the 2008 “Pandemie” at the Galleria Allegretti Contemporanea in Bergamo. Samori’s work was included as part of the Italian Pavilion at the 2015 Venice Biennale. 

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Notes: Nicola Samorì revisité : double exposition « Des milliers d’instants

Hal Foster

The Artwork of Hal Foster

Born in August of 1892 at Nova Scotia’s capital city of Halifax, Harold “Hal” Rudolph Foster was a Canadian-American comic strip artist and writer noted for his attention to detail and high level of draftsmanship. He was the first to adapt American writer Edgar Rice Burroughs’s 1912 “Tarzan of the Apes” into the comic format. Hal Foster is, however, best known for “Prince Valiant”, his own Arthurian epic adventure to which he devoted over three decades  of his life.

In 1906 at the age of fourteen, Foster relocated with his family to Winnipeg, the provincial capital of Manitoba, to recoup their finances through a land boom. Although this relocation ended his formal education, Foster was inspired by such artists as Howard Pyle, Arthur Rackham and N. C. Wyeth to study drawing. At the age of seventeen, he became employed as an illustrator for the Hudson’s Bay Company’s catalogue and as staff artist for the Brigdens Limited advertising firm. After his marriage to Helen Wells, Foster and his wife relocated in 1915 to the wilderness areas of Ontario and Manitoba where they worked on a goldfield claim at Lake Rice and as hunting guides for several years. 

Hal Foster, still interested in art and feeling pressure to support his family, relocated to Chicago in 1919 to seek employment and study art. After obtaining a position at the Jahn & Ollier Engraving Company, he audited evening classes at the Chicago Art Institute which was followed by night classes at the National Academy of Design and the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts. Now in his thirties, Foster began independent work in 1925 with the Chicago advertising studio Palenske-Young as a cover and ad illustrator for Popular Mechanics, Jekle Margarine, Northwest Paper, Wurlitzer Grand Pianos, and both the Southern Pacific and Illinois Pacific Railroads.

Since 1912, “Tarzan of the Apes” by Edgar Rice Burroughs had been appearing as a serial novel in the pulp “All-Story Magazine” published by Frank Munsey. In 1927, Joseph Neebe of the Campbell-Ewald advertising agency wanted to adapt “Tarzan” as a ten-week comic strip series. After novel illustrator J. Allen St. John declined the position, Neebe hired Foster as the strip’s illustrator. The “Tarzan” comic series appeared in newspapers through syndication with the Metropolitan Newspaper Service, later part of the United Feature Syndicate until the end of its run. “Tarzan” appeared first in November of 1928 as a series in the British weekly “Tid-Bits”; it was introduced in the newspapers of Canada and the United States in January of 1929.

Hal Foster’s “Tarzan” strip employed the text comic format, the oldest form of comics and one dominant in European comics since the nineteenth-century. Text comics presented the story through captions, written in the same style as a novel, either below or within the panel. Between September 27th of 1931 and May 2nd of 1937, Foster drew all the Sunday episodes of “Tarzan” while artist Rex Maxon worked on the daily episodes. Although Foster turned the strip into an epic adventure tale, he became increasingly disappointed with the script quality and began development on his own series. 

Launched by the King Features Syndicate of the Hearst media empire, Foster’s “Prince Valiant in the Days of King Arthur”, was inspired by the legends of King Arthur and Knights of the Round Table. The series premiered on the 13th of February in 1937 as a color comic in the Saturday tabloid papers. “Prince Valiant” became a full-page Sunday feature four months later; the comic series was changed to a half-page format in 1971. Due to the large-scale format, Foster was able to produce varied layouts and highly detailed scenes of outdoor life and epic fighting. He designed “Prince Valiant” in the same format as his “Tarzan” series,  a text comic with descriptions and dialogues as paneled captions..

Hal Foster’s epic sage followed the life of the son of the deposed King Aguar of Thule, Prince Valiant, who left his home in the wild fens of Britain to become a knight. Foster gradually refrained from the comic strip’s early fantasy elements and developed his characters into more real-life heroes. His “Prince Valiant” was rather unique at the time as an important core element of the narrative was Valiant’s domestic life. Through the course of the decades-long story, Foster’s characters age, an uncommon occurrence in epic hero-centered comics. Prince Valiant marries Aleta, Queen of the Misty Isles, and the marriage results in five offspring. In 1947, Foster became the first artist to depict a pregnant woman in a United States comic strip.

Using historical research, Foster gave “Prince Valiant” a strong sense of realism by drawing accurate depictions of medieval attire, castles, countries and weaponry. His characters were multi-dimensional and presented with subtle emotions as well as different attitudes to good and evil. Staying several weeks ahead of schedule, Foster would work over fifty hours a week to maintain the quality of artwork on single  page. In addition to the “Prince Valiant” strip, he also executed other projects including an 1943 comic adaptation of Frank Werfel’s “Song of Bernadette” and “The Mediaeval Castle”, a three-panel strip that ran from April 1944 to December 1945.

Beginning in 1950, Hal Foster began working with assistants which included his son Arthur James and Hugh Donnel doing the coloring . He continued writing the story script and drawing the comic strip until the early 1970s when arthritis began to affect his drawing ability. The final page drawn and signed by Hal Foster appeared on the 16th of May in 1971, thirty-four years after its initial printing. He continued to write and design the layouts for “Prince Valiant” until the February 10th episode in 1980. Harold “Hal” Rudolph Foster passed away in Spring Hill, Florida on the 25th of July in 1982 at the age of eighty-nine. 

One of the most widely praised comic artists of all time, Hal Foster was awarded the 1957 Ruben Award by the National Cartoonists Society, the Special Features Award in 1966 and 1967, as well as the 1978 Elzie Segar Award given to those who made a unique and outstanding contribution to the profession of cartooning. Foster was inducted posthumously into the Will Eisner Award Hall of Fame in 1996, the Joe Shuster Canadian Comic Book Creators Hall of Fame in 2005, and the Society of Illustrators’ Hall of Fame in 2006.

Notes: Contributing editor Felix James Miller wrote an excellent article on Hal Foster and the “Prince Valiant”comic strip for The European Conservative: https://europeanconservative.com/articles/reviews/the-9th-art-hal-fosters-prince-valiant-king-arthur-and-the-adventure-of-life/

Founded in 1968 by Kees Kousemaker, Lambiek in Central Amsterdam is the world’s oldest comic shop with an impressive collection of comics and art from all parts of the world. Its online site is located at: https://www.lambiek.net/infomenu/about-lambiek.html

Kees Kousemaker’s “Lambiek Comiclopedia is an extensive artist compendium that contains hundreds of biographies on comic artists as well as an art history article on comic books. Hal Foster’s biographical page is located at: https://www.lambiek.net/artists/f/foster_hal.htm

Bill & Sue-On Hillman’s “ERBzine” is an official Edgar Rice Burroughs Tribute and Weekly Webzine Site that was founded in 1996. It contains over 15,000 webzines and webpages in archive form. The site’s Hal Foster section has photographs and biography, as well as archived Sunday page issues of “Tarzan” from 1931 to 1937 and “Prince Valiant” from 1937 to 1940. The Hal Foster section is located at: https://www.erbzine.com/mag55/5570.html

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Hal Foster Drawing Prince Valiant”, 1937-1971, Gelatin Silver Print

Second Insert Image: Hal Foster, “Tarzan”, Episode 237-Mutiny, “The Vikings”, 22 September 1935, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Hal Foster, “Tarzan”, Episode 103-Darts of Death, 26 February 1933, Pen and Ink on Board, Private Collection

Fourth Insert Image: Hal Foster, “Tarzan”, Episode 103-Darts of Death, 26 February 1933, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Hal Foster Drawing Tarzan”, circa 1928-1937, Gelatin Silver Print

Paul (Pavel) Kotlarevsky

Paul Kotlarevsky, “Man Reading”/”Shoveling Sand on the Seine”, circa 1916, Double-Sided Oil on Canvas, 78.8 x 98.5 cm, Private Collection

Born in 1885 at the Iset River city of Yekaterinburg to a merchant family of the timber trade, Paul (Pavel) Kotlarevsky was a Russian painter and graphic artist who experimented in various artistic styles, predominately Cubism and Fauvism. He worked in a number of genres that included portraits, still lifes, landscapes, and collages.

Although formally educated as a lawyer, Kotlarevsky developed a passion for art in his early years. His parents, as a reward for his graduation, sponsored his trip abroad to view the art of Europe. Traveling with his wife and son, Kotlarevsky studied Western historic and contemporary art traditions in Rome and Vienna, finally reaching Paris in 1913. Kotlarevsky decided at the onset of the First World War to fight alongside the French army instead of returning to Russia. While he was fighting, the Russian Revolution completely changed his homeland; his family lost everything that they had owned.

Paul Kotlarevsky decided to remain in France. However, as his qualifications as a lawyer were not recognized in France, Kotlarevsky decided to pursue his interest in painting and enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He became a member of the Parisian artistic circles and associated with numerous artists. Among these were Russian painter and Dada poet Serge Charchoune, French Cubist painter Henri Victor Gabriel Le Fauconnier, a leading figure among the Montparnasse Cubists, and Spanish painter Francisco Bores, a close associate of Pablo Picasso and Henry Matisse. 

Having lost his Russian possessions and unable to fully support his family through his artistic work or legal knowledge, Kotlarevsky worked in a series of menial jobs that included driving a truck and working at Les Halles, the central fresh food market in Paris. He continued his painting and experimented with a variety of styles. Kotlarevsky was, however, drawn predominantly to the shifting perspective points and dynamic geometry of Cubism as well as the color theories and expressive gestures of Fauvism. He exhibited his work in 1933 at the Salon des Indépendants, an annual independent art exhibition held in Paris.

Paul Kotlarevsky’s work was influenced by many of the contemporary French Cubist  and Fauvist painters including Georges Braque, Juan Gris, and artist and theoretician Albert Gleizes. Kotlarevsky’s 1913-1915 “Still Life with Fruit Bowl” is a reflection of his admiration for the work of Braque. Similar to many of the Russian émigré artists living in Europe during the early part of the twentieth-century, Kotlarevsky’s body of work combined and united French and Russian artistic traditions. His work featured many of the characteristics of Russian avant-garde traditions that can also be seen in the work of artists such as Cubo-Futurist painters and designers Lyubov Popova,  Aleksandra Ekster, and Natalia Goncharova, co-founder of Rayonism, one of Russia’s first abstract art movements.

Paul Kotlarevsky died after a long illness in Paris in 1950 and was interred at the Russian cemetery of Saint-Geneviève-de-Bois near Paris. His works are mainly in private collections.

Notes: Kotlarevsky’s “Man Reading”, executed circa 1916, is a double-sided painting with his “Shoveling Sand on the Seine” on the obverse. The more colorful and intimate composition of “Man Reading” with its numerous planes and geometric elements is backed by the dynamic view of workers shoveling sand outside a large-scale view of an angled city. These two works are excellent examples of Cubism with their shifting perspective points and dissected compositions. 

Top Insert Image: Paul Kotlarevsky, “Portrait of a Lady in a Scarf”, Date Unknown, Pencil and Gouache on Paper, 36 x 24 cm, Private Collection

Second Insert Image: Paul Kotlarevsky, “Still lIfe with Violin”, circa 1913-1915, Watercolor with Pastel and Collage on Paper, 46 x 34 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Paul Kotlarevsky, “Still Life with Fruit Bowl”, 1913-1915, Watercolor, Gouache, Ink and Collage on Card, 27 x 29 cm, Private Collection

Edward Saidi Tingatinga

The Artwork of Edward Saidi Tingatinga

Born in 1932, Edward Saidi Tingatinga was a  self-taught Tanzanian artist who developed a unique painting style that evolved into an urban traditional art form. Once established as an artist, he taught his style to many students, both local and foreign.

Edward Saidi Tingatinga was born in 1937 to a family of subsistence farmers at the small village of Mindu in southern Tanzania near the border of Mozambique. He left his village in 1957 and worked on a sisal plantation in the Tanga district. Tingatinga traveled in the latter part of 1957 to Dar-es-Salaam where he labored in construction jobs and as a gardener until 1961. He relocated to the Mikoroshoni district where he met and married his wife Agatha Mataka. After the birth of his son Daudi, Tingatinga became employed in 1968 as a ward attendant at the public Muhimbili Hospital.

Impressed by the number of tourists who purchased western-styled paintings from Zairian artists, Tingatinga began to paint in 1968 and soon developed his own particular style of colorful, crowded paintings of fantastic animals and dancing tribesmen, as well as scenes of village life. The paintings sold well and soon developed into a distinctly urban art form. Through the support of the National Arts of Tanzania (NAT), Tingatinga regularly sold his paintings and began to teach his technique to students.

The traditional Tinga Tinga style of painting most often depicted the native fauna and flora of Tanzania, rendered in both a naïve and surrealistic style on single-colored backgrounds. Due to their availability, masonite substrates and highly-saturated, brilliantly colored industrial paints were used to create the artwork. Current Tinga Tinga painters now paint a variety of subject themes on stretched muslim and canvas. Many of these artists still uphold the traditional use of bicycle enamel paints.

Edward Tingatinga, who had established himself as a successful artist, was shot in 1972 by police in a case of mistaken identity during the officers’ search for a gang of bank robbers. He died at the age of forty years on the way to the hospital. Six-year old Daudi Tingatinga and his younger sister Martina were left in the care of their mother, Agatha. Growing up in a state of poverty, neither sibling received any formal education. Edward Tingatinga’s fellow artists formed the Tinga Tinga Arts Cooperative in his honor; this cooperative later became a school for artists from Dar-es-Salaam and Zanzibar. The traditional art form of Tinga Tinga was passed onto Daudi and Martina by their uncle Salum Mussa, known as “Mzee Lumumba”, who had received his art education from their father.

Notes: The Tingatinga Arts Cooperative Society website is located at: https://tingatinga.ch/en/about.php

An article entitled “Tinga Tinga: An African Tale” written by feature editor Kate Bystrova for the Commonwealth Secretariat’s independent magazine, “Global: The International Briefing”, can be located at: https://www.global-briefing.org/2014/09/tinga-tinga-an-african-tale/

The Tinga Tinga Arts Cooperative has a biographical article on Edward Saidi Tingatinga in its January 2022 edition located at: https://www.tingatingaart.com/blogs/articles/edward-saidi-tingatinga 

Top Insert Image: Jesper Kirknaes, “Edward Saidi Tingatinga”, Date Unknown, Color Print, January 2022 Issue of Tinga Tinga Art

Second Insert Image: Edward Saidi Tingatinga, “Le Lion”, 1971, Oil on Masonite, 61 x 71.5 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image, Edward Saidi Tingatinga, Untitled, Enamel on Board, 61 x 61 cm, Private Collection

CAConrad: “Be the Storm Love Places in Someone’s Home”

Photographers Unknown, The Storm Love Places in Someone’s Home

            I do not take any
           calls except from
          the century we are in
when there is no bible in my hotel room
 it makes me sad to have no place to put
     my filthy poems for future guests
      it is important to let them know
everyone should bum with abandon as soon as the heat is available
 be a self-styled alarm clock no one can shut off
   be the storm Love places in someone’s home
         are you sure we can handle this
          because I am absolutely certain
           c’mon wind knock us around
             we are a tide that cures ills
               look at us in the mirror
       as soon as the invented language enters
      us something else will vibrate in our skin
     opening door with teeth of the future to
   the place where we let the freer feeling go
when you told me you had been looking for me
        we pressed through every
       invisible barrier between us
     I watched you gently let the gods
   know you are ready to win the lottery
        there were people from the
           19th century alive in my
            lifetime many years ago
              I met some of them
            they are all gone now
             as we hold on to
             the side of one
           another howling down
           the velocity of seconds

CAConrad, Acclimating to Discomfort of the System Breaking Beneath Us, Amanda Paradise, 2021, Wave Books

Born in Topeka, Kansas in January of 1966, CAConrad is an American poet and professor currently teaching poetry at New York’s Columbia University and the Sandberg Art Institute in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Having worked with the processes of poetry and rituals since 1975, CAConrad is the originator of the poetic format known as “(Soma)tics”, a meditative writing exercise that emphasizes personal perception and experience. 

The child of a Vietnam War veteran and his wife, CAConrad’s early years were spent in the small factory town of Boyertown, Pennsylvania where bullying often occurred. CAConrad began writing poetry while in high school during the presidency of Ronald Reagan, a time in which the AIDS epidemic emerged and friends began dying. Placing poetry as the focus of his life, CAConrad relocated to the city of Philadelphia in 1984  to live openly in a queer neighborhood. 

In Philadelphia, CAConrad began a member of its poetry community and met such writers as Etheridge Knight and Sonia Sanches, both important members of the Black Art Movement,  poet and performer Essex Hemphill, and poet and essayist Gil Ott, who founded Philadelphia’s Singing Horse Press. Other influences on CAConrad’s work include those works by poets Emily Dickinson and Audra Lorde, poet and novelist Eileen Myles, narrative poet Alice Notley, and writer Will Alexander who later became a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize. 

In 2005, CAConrad began writing poetry in the  (Soma)tic Poetry Ritual format, a personal process of writing focused on one’s engagement in the present moment. The first publication of CAConrad’s poetry was the 2006 “Deviant Propulsion” printed through Soft Skull Press. The poems in this collection examined the repression inflicted on queer culture by society and the elimination of the fear produced by that repression. To date, CAConrad has published seven collections of poetry. Among these are the 2017 “While Standing in Line for Death”, winner of a 2018 Lambda Book Award, and the 2021 “Amanda Paradise: Resurrect Extinct Vibration”, a 2022 PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles Literary Award winner. 

CAConrad appeared as Jeremiah in the 2015 short film “Boyland”,  directed by Gabe Rubin and Felix Bernstein for the Brooklyn Film Festival. CAConrad was also approached by directors Belinda Schmid and David Cranstoun Welch, both who had seen the poet’s performances in New York and published works, for the production of a documentary. The resulting film “The Book of Conrad”, released in 2016 by Delinquent Films, examined CAConrad’s life and work as well as the horrific murder in Tennessee of his boyfriend Mark Holmes, known as Earth. In 2018, CAConrad and poet Eileen Myles read their work in filmmaker Beatrice Gibson’s 2018 short resistance-documentary “I Hope I’m Loud When I’m Dead”, a montage of photos overlaid with poetry and music.

“Felix Bernstein interviewed me for The New Museum and he asked me what philosophy has to do with my work. I told him I believe poetry is strong enough. The power of poetry has not failed me like it has failed some poets in recent decades who hoist philosophy to buttress the poem. It is misogynistic to say poetry is too feminine, too weak, needs a man’s ideas to move forward. Love philosophy–go ahead, I am not the least bit anti-intellectual; I simply do not need philosophy to make poetry appear more masculine. Sigmund Freud said, “Everywhere I go I find a poet has been there before me.” Not philosopher, but poet. And you can have whatever feelings you want about Freud but no one can disagree that he changed how we view the landscape of human emotion and the origins of feeling. “Everywhere I go” is bold. It is direct and from a man who was as careful with his words as a poet.”  —CAConrad, September 10, 2013 Interview with Christopher Soto, The LAMBDA Literary Review

Notes: The Poetry Foundation has an April 2020 essay article written by CAConrad entitled “Sin Bug: AIDS, Poetry, and Queer Resilience in Philadelphia” which recounts the poet’s life experiences in that city from 1982 during the AIDS epidemic that led to the deaths of many of his close friends. The article can be found at: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/featured-blogger/83869/sin-bug-aids-poetry-and-queer-resilience-in-philadelphia

The Poetry Foundation also has a selection of CAConrad’s poems as well as several podcasts produced by the poet which include group discussions and readings from CAConrad’s 2024 “Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return”: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/c-a-conrad

The Lambda Literary online site has a September 2015 interview between CAConrad and Christopher Soto that discussed the film “The Book of Conrad” and the poet’s belief in the power of poetry as a healing ritual: https://lambdaliteraryreview.org/2015/09/ca-conrad-on-the-film-the-book-of-conrad-and-his-life-in-poetry/  

Rachel Zucker of the Commonplace Podcast has an interview with CAConrad that discusses the poet’s life, writings and the (Soma)tic Poetry Rituals at: https://commonplace.today/commonplace-podcast/episode-49-caconrad

For those interested, Delinquent Films’s 2016 “The Book of Conrad”, directed by Schmid and Welch, is available for rental or purchase on Amazon Prime. Filmmaker Matthew Thompson’s short film for the 2025 ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival presents CAConrad reading his poem “Golden in the Morning Crane Our Necks”. The film is available for viewing at the Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation’s site: https://www.brinkerhoffpoetry.org/poems/golden-in-the-morning-crane-our-necks

Top Insert Image: Matthew Thompson, “CAConrad”, 1993, Gelatin Silver Print, The Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation

Second Insert Image: CAConrad, “Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return”, 2024, Wave Books, Seattle, Washington

Third Insert Image: CAConrad, “You Don’t Have What It Takes to Be My Nemisis and Other (Soma)tics”., 2023, Penguin Imprint

Bottom Insert Image: Eve Ariza, “CtConrad”, 2019, Color Print, Neopajamas Magazine

Bernardino del Boca

The Artwork of Bernardino del Boca

Born in the Piedmont commune of Crodo in August of 1919, Bernardino del Boca was an Italian painter, illustrator, and educator. Although best known for his book illustrations, he co-founded the publisher “L’età dell’Acquario (The Age of Aquarius)” and was the director of and contributor to its journal of the same name. Del Boca’s artwork had a crucial impact on the New Age and Theosophical movements in Italy during the 1970s. 

Bernardino del Boca was the son of Giacomo del Boca and Rosa Silvestri, parents of noble lineage who owned the Fonte Rossa mountain springs and spa in Crodo. He was introduced to Spiritualism and Theosophy at an early age by a related princess of the noble Hungarian Esterházy family who took him on several trips throughout Europe. While in the French city of Nice, del Boca met Princess Djavidan Hanem of Egypt who suggested he keep a journal. His early spiritual and genealogical interests combined with his writings became a crucial component of his future artistic production.

In 1921, del Boca and his family moved to Novara where he received his initial education. Although skilled in drawing, he did not excel in other subjects. In 1932, del Boca was given the opportunity to enter the Institut le Rosey, a renowned international boarding school in Lausanne, Switzerland. At the school, he became became friends with roommates Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who later became Shah of Iran, and Ananda Mahidol, the future monarch of Siam (Thailand).

 In June of 1935, Bernardino del Boca enrolled at the Brera Art High School in Milan, an extension of the Accademia della Belle Arti di Brera whose teachers taught at both locations. Among his teachers were figurative painter and printmaker Felice Casorati and modernist Neoclassical painter Achille Funi. Del Boca graduated in 1939 and, in the same year, had his first solo exhibition. Two years later, he held an exhibition in Domodossola and was a participant at the Thirteenth Exposition of Figurative Arts of the Fascist Unions held in Turin. 

Called into military duty during the Second World War, del Boca served in Verona and later in Florence. He left Italy in 1946 and relocated in Siam (Thailand) where he lived first in Singapore and then Bangkok as a portraitist. Returning to Singapore in 1947, he worked as an architect and interior designer. In October of that year, del Boca received his second Buddhist initiation at the Temple of Han  on the Linga Archipelago’s island of Nawa Sangga. In a collaboration with artist Robin A. Kilroy, he held an exhibition in September of 1948 at the Queen Victoria Memorial in Penang. “Nightly Face”, del Boca’s first novel was published in 1948; his second novel “Nawa Sangga” was published in the following year. 

After holding the position of honorary consul in Singapore, Bernardino del Boca returned to Italy in 1949. Two years later, he took part in a collective exhibition at the Broletto di Novara, a medieval architectural structure in the city’s center. Del Boca returned to teaching while continuing to paint, write and lecture. He became the president of the theosophical group “Besant-Arundal”, a position del Boca held for forty years. After serving as a member of Italy’s National Institute for Geographic Research and Cartographic Studies, del Boca published a university-level anthropology manual for students entitled “Sotia dell’Antropologia” in 1964. 

Del Boca, in a collaboration with Theosophist and publisher Edoardo Bresci, founded the journal “L’Età dell’Acquario- Rivista Sperimentale del Nuovo Piano di Coscienza (The Age of Aquarius- Experimental Journal of the New Plane of Consciousness)” in 1970. During the next seven years, he would publish four more works including the 1971 “La Dimensione Umana (The Human Dimension)” and “La Quarta Dimensione (The Fourth Dimension)” in 1977. After his retirement from teaching in 1978, del Boca relocated to Piedmont. 

During the 1980s, Bernardino del Boca attempted to create a series of Aquarian communities he called Villaggi Verde, or Green Villages. In 1986, he relocated to the first and only village that was completed, the Villaggi Verde of San Germano di Cavallirio. In addition to publishing two more works, “Il Servizio” and “Un Paese de Amare”, del Boca organized collective trips to southern and eastern Asia, gave lectures, edited and contributed to “L’Età dell’Acquario”, and organized conferences.

After living a productive life as a Theosophist, anthropology scholar, illustrator and painter as well as an advocate for sexual liberation, Bernardino del Boca died on the ninth of December in 2001 at the age of eighty-two in the hospital at Borgomanero, Novara. His artistic production was, for the most part, neglected until the 1960s when the “visionary” aspect of his art was analyzed for the first time. During his lifetime, del Boca rarely exhibited his work. Only through a series of recent publications, conferences, and posthumous exhibitions, particularly those held at the Foundation Bernardino del Boca in 2015 and 2017, have del Boca’s artworks been thoroughly studied and promoted.

Notes: Author and researcher Elisa Rolle has an article about Bernardino del Boca on her Queer Places website that examines his work as a pioneer of the sexual and homosexual liberation movement in Italy. The article also discusses his book“Long Night in Singapore” that won the 1951 Gastaldi National Award but caused a scandal: http://www.elisarolle.com/queerplaces/a-b-ce/Bernardino%20del%20Boca.html

A more extensive biographical article on Bernardino del Boca that delves more deeply into the theosophical aspects of his art can be found on the World Religions and Spirituality Project site: https://wrldrels.org/2021/05/20/bernardino-del-boca/

The Fondazione Bernardino del Boca site is located at: https://www.fondazionebernardinodelboca.it

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Bernardino del Boca with Cat”, Gelatin Silver Print

Second Inset Image: Bernardino del Boca,, “La Quatro Dimensione, L’Evoluzione della Coscienza”, Original Publication 1977, , L’Età dell’Acquario 1995 Edition

Third Insert Image: Bernardino del Boca, “Sviatovida”, circa 1970, Fondazione Bernardino del Boca

Fourth Insert Image: Bernardino del Baco, “La Dimensione Umana”, Original Publication 1975, New Edition by Fondazione Bernardino del Boca

Bottom Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Bernardino del Boca”, Gelatin Silver Print

Károly Kernstok

The Artwork of Károly Kernstok

Born in Budapest in December of 1873, Károly Kernstok was a Hungarian painter and a leading member of Á Nyolcak (The Eight). “The Eight” was an avant-garde art movement of Hungarian painters who were active in Budapest between 1909 and 1918. This group of artists, connected to the Post-Impressionist movement, were advocates of the rise of Modernism in all aspects of the arts. 

In 1892 at the age of nineteen, Kernstok traveled to Berlin where he studied under Hungarian painter  and educator Simon Hollósy, one of the prominent representatives of Hungarian Naturalism and Realism. After a year’s study with Hollósy, Kernstok studied at the Académie Julian in Paris from 1893 to 1896. He returned to Hungary in 1897 and painted his “Haulers” and “Agitátor”, an early composition with socialist undertones. Kernstok was awarded a bronze medal for a painting exhibited at the 1900 Universal Exposition in Paris. In 1901, he exhibited at the International Exposition of Art of the City of Venice and the Venice Biennale.

After inheriting an estate in 1905 in the Central Transdanubia town of Nyergesújfalu, Károly Kernstok became a prominent leader of the “Neos”, a radical group of artists who rejected the naturalism promoted by the Nagybánya artists’ colony that was mainly composed of plein-air painters from Hollósy’s Free School in Munich. Although some of the Neo artists had studied briefly at the Nagybánya colony, the group was heavily influenced by French Post-Impressionist painters such as Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, and Henri Matisse. During the 1930s, Kernstok would establish an art school in the Nyergesújfalu region of Hungary.

Kernstok returned to Paris in 1906 where he became notably influenced by the works of Henri Matisse who, along with painter André Durain, was considered a leading proponent of Fauvism at the time. Kernstok’s style changed; he began to paint large-scale decorative compositions and stylized scenes that emphasized forms and lines. The rhythmic forms and strong contrasting colors of Kernstok’s 1910 “Riders on the Shore”, characterized by a synthesis of Post-Impressionism and Expressionism, shows Matisse’s strong Fauvist influence. A year later in 1911, he painted “Male Nude Leaning Against a Tree”, another example of Fauvism’s brilliant colors in figure and landscape. 

After his return to Hungary, Károly Kernstok became an influence on the art group known as “The Eight”. Although a short-lived movement lasting only nine years from 1909 to 1918, the group consisted of major Hungarian artists, writers and composers. Its complex style encompassed the rationalism of Cubism, the decorative use of strong colors from Fauvism, and the depth of emotion found in German Expressionist works. Among those associated with the “The Eight” were painters Lajos Tihanyi and Róbert Berény, sculptors Vilmos Fémes Beck and Márk Vedres, writer and poet Endre Ady, and composer Béla Bartók. During his period with “The Eight”, Kernstok painted major frescoes and designed glass windows in 1911 for the Schiffer Villa and the County Hall of Debrecen, the second-largest city in Hungary.

In August of 1919, the Hungarian Soviet Republic, a short-lived communist state that lasted only one hundred thirty-three days, collapsed after its failure to reach an agreement with the Triple Entente which consisted of the French Third Republic, the Russian Empire and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. As a result, many artists including Kernstok emigrated to Berlin where they lived and worked. Influenced by Germany’s artistic trends, Kernstok painted a series of natural landscapes and a 1921 expressionist scene of “The Last Supper”.

In 1926, Károly Kernstok returned to Budapest and remained there for the rest of his life. He developed in his later years an interest in Etruscan frescoes and that culture’s use of mythological scenes and chiaroscuro.  Kernstock produced graphic works that included etchings and drypoint engravings on copper, among which is his 1932 “Flowering Desert”. Among the paintings he executed are the 1933 “The Rape of Saint Helen” and the 1934 “Burial”. His lectures and the articles on art published in newspapers and art journals greatly extended his influence among the Hungarian painters. 

After a long career of group shows and exhibitions at major Hungarian museums, Károly Kernstok died in June of 1940 in his home city of Budapest. His work is held in many private collections and public institutions, most notably the Hungarian National Gallery at Buda Castle in Budapest and the MODEM Centre for Modern and Contemporary Art in Debrecen. A major retrospective of Kernstok’s work was held at Budapest’s Metropolitan Centre for Popular Culture in 1951. Due to the rising interest in the early Modernism, major exhibitions of works by the early Hungarian modernists, especially those executed by “The Eight”, were held in 2010-2011 at the Janus Pannonius Museum in Pécs, Hungary, and at the 2012 Bank Austria Art Forum in Vienna, a collaboration between Vienna’s Museum of Art and the Hungarian National Gallery.

Top Insert Image: Károly Kernstok, “Önarckép (Self Portrait)”, 1903, Oil on Panel, 52 x 41.5 cm, Private Collection

Second Inset Image: Károly Kernstok, “Riders on the Shore”, 1910, Oil on Canvas, 214 x 292.5 cm, Hungarian National Gallery 

Third Insert Image: André Kertész, “Károly Kernsstok’s Studio, Berlin”, 1925, Gelatin Silver Print, 6.8 x 7.8 cm, Art Institute of Chicago

Bottom Insert Image: Károly Kernstok, “Önarckép (Self Portrait in White Hat)”, circa 1900, Oil on Canvas, 80 x 60 cm, Hungarian National Gallery

Alvin Baltrop

The Photography of Alvin Baltrop

Born in Bronx borough of New York in December of 1948, Alvin Baltrop was a working-class American photographer who extensively documented the dilapidated Hudson River piers and New York City’s clandestine gay culture during the 1970s and 1980s. 

Alvin Baltrop was the younger son of Dorothy Mae Baltrop who had moved from Virginia to the Bronx with her eldest son James. He discovered photography while attending junior high school and began photographing with a twin-lens Yashica camera. Baltrop studied under the older photographers in his neighborhood and taught himself the techniques of film development. During the Vietnam War, he enlisted in 1969 as a medic in the U.S. Navy and photographed his fellow crew members. After his military service ended in 1972 with an honorable discharge, Baltrop returned to New York City where he worked in a variety of odd jobs, including as a street vendor and cab driver.

In December of 1973, a truck laden with asphalt crashed through Manhattan’s elevated West Side Highway between West Twelfth and Gansevoort Streets and forever closed that section of highway to the south. The abandoned and dilapidated Hudson River piers to the west of the closed highway presented opportunities both as art platforms and meeting places. Fifteen years elapsed before the elevated structure was fully dismantled; the location served during this time as a major New York experimental art and social venue.  

In 1973, Alvin Baltrop enrolled in the School of Visual Arts where he studied photography until 1975. Interested in photographing the Hudson River piers, he became a self-employed mover of household furniture and belongings, work that allowed him to spend more time with his photography. Although initially terrified of the area, Baltrop constantly photographed the West Side piers from 1975 to 1986, particularly those piers that bordered Greenwich Village starting at the meatpacking district and extending south to Christopher Street. 

Baltrop often shot images at the piers for several days and lived inside his moving van parked nearby. Capturing both the personalities and the structure of the piers, he became a well-known member of its artistic and gay community and remembered every person he photographed. Baltrop eventually became established as both friend and confidant to many of those who frequented the pier areas. 

Although his work had both documentary and aesthetic value, Baltrop had great difficulty in finding a gallery to sponsor an exhibition of his work during his lifetime. In 1977, he had a small solo show at the Glines, a non-profit gay art organization best known for producing Harvey Fierstein’s 1982 “Torch Song Trilogy”. Baltrop also had an exhibition of his “Pier” series at an East Village gay bar where he occasionally was employed as a bouncer. However, the established photography galleries, even those that presented explicit homoerotic work, were unreceptive to Baltrop’s work.

As a result, Alvin Baltrop never gained the finances necessary to print the vast majority of his thousands of negatives or to properly care for those he managed to print. The majority of his printed photographs are small, approximately 13 x 18 centimeters (5 x 7 inches), however, he did print a few larger images. His photographs of the Hudson River pier area  constitute a significant record of a lost era of New York City’s industrial landscape and the gay culture’s pre-AIDS history. While his photography was documentary in nature, its studied compositions, intimacy, and the attention to both light and shadow attest to an artistic ambition.

Baltrop was befriended by the New York City glass artist and writer John Drury in the late 1990s. Drury, who recognized Baltrop’s  photographic abilities, nominated him for a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award for the Arts. Baltrop received a diagnosis of cancer in the 1990s, a time when he was impoverished and without insurance for care. After only a few exhibitions during decades of photographic work, Alvin Baltrop passed away due to complications from cancer and diabetes at the age of fifty-five in New York City on the first day of February in 2004. 

In 2012, a retrospective solo exhibition entitled “Perspectives 179-Alvin Baltrop: Dreams into Glass”, which included almost one hundred gelatin silver prints, was held at Houston’s  Contemporary Art Museum. New York’s Bronx Museum of Art, custodian of many Baltrop photographs and negatives, held a 2019 retrospective of his work, entitled “The Life and Times of Alvin Baltrop”, that included works from Baltrop’s private archive never before viewed by the public. 

Alvin Baltrop’s work has also been included in several exhibitions at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art including its 2015 “America is Hard to See”, 2016-2017 “Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection”, 2020 “Around Day’s End: Downtown New York, 1970-1986” and the 2024 “Trust Me”, an exhibition of intergenerational artists.

Unless noted otherwise, all photographs in this article are used courtesy of The Alvin Baltrop Trust, @ 2010, The Alvin Baltrop Trust / Artist Rights Society (ARS) and Galerie Bucholz, New York. All rights reserved. 

Notes: New York’s Museum of Modern Art has an article on Alvin Baltrop, along with several images from its collection, on its website at: https://www.moma.org/artists/48461-alvin-baltrop

An extensive biography of Alvin Baltrop, composed by the Alvin Baltrop Trust and drawn from audio recordings and interviews, can be found at the global strategic-consultancy Third Streaming site located at: http://www.thirdstreaming.com/alvin-baltrop-biography

Issue 4 of GAYLETTER Magazine has a short biography on the life of Alvin Baltrop written by Chris Stewart entitled “Alvin Baltrop’s Days on the Piers” located at: https://gayletter.com/alvin-baltrops-days-on-the-piers/

PIN-UP magazine has an article by Alejandro Carrion entitled “Masculinity Under Construction” that discusses, among other artists, the Hudson River pier area and Alvin Baltrop’s photography at: https://www.pinupmagazine.org/articles/sexy-construction-workers-urban-homoeroticism

Top Insert Image: Alvin Baltrop, “Self Portrait with Alice”, 1975, Ektachrome Slide, The Alvin Baltrop Trust

Second Insert Image: Alvin Baltrop, “The Piers ( Sunbathing Platform with Tava Mural)”, 1976-1985, Gelatin Silver Print, The Alvin Baltrop Trust 

Third Insert Image: Alvin Baltrop, “The Piers (Two Men)”, 1975-1986, Gelatin Silver Print, Edition of 25, Private Collection

Fourth Insert Image: Alvin Baltrop, Untitled (Three Sunbathers), 1975-1986, Gelatin Silver Print, 24 x 35  cm, Printed 2005, Museum of Modern Art, New York

Bottom Insert Image: Alvin Baltrop, Untitled (Male Portrait), 1975-1986, Gelatin Silver Print, Galerie Buchholz, Berlin, and The Alvin Baltrop Trust