Peter Keetman

The Photography of Peter Keetman

Born at the Wupper River city of Elberfeld in April of 1910, Peter Keetman was a German photographer, a member of the avant-garde Fotoform and a formative force in the evolution of subjective photography.

In the post-war period of the 1950s, inter-human subjectivity was seen as a significant means to correct the errors of objectified wartime politics. This concept of subjectivity, taught by photographer Otto Steinert, influenced the Essen school of photography and formed the basis of a new movement, subjective photography, that championed the exploration of both the inner psyche and human condition rather than the outside world.

Born to consul and banker Alfred Keetman and Käthe Simons, Peter Keetman attended the Bavarian State Institute for Photography, later known as the State Academy for Photographic Design, Munich. After his graduation, he worked in Duisburg as an assistant to portrait photographer Gertrud Hesse and, later, industrial photographer Carl Heinz Schmeck in the Wurm River city of Aachen.

In 1940, Keetman was called into Germany’s Army where he served as a member of its Railway Pioneers, a division that converted Russian rail lines from broad gauge to German standard gauge, thus enabling the transport of Germany’s troops and supplies into Russia. In 1944, Keetman returned from the war; however, a serious injury during his service left a permanent disability. He resumed his studies by finishing his master class at the Bavarian State Institute for Photography in 1947-1948. In this period, Keetman assisted prominent New Objectivist photographer Adolf Lazi with the planning of “The Photographie 1948” exhibition in Stuttgart’s State Museum of Applied Arts.

In 1949, Peter Keetman became a founding member of Fotoform, a six-member avant-garde group that sought to revive the creative possibilities of photography that had been extinguished by the propaganda of Nazi cultural policy. The group adhered to personal expression and formalism, the study of art by comparing form and style, often through unusual compositional framings and darkroom manipulation. Keetman played a major role in the evolution of subjective photography; his work was presented at the 1951 “Subjective Photography” exhibition and within its accompanying catalogue.

Beginning in 1948, Keetman’s work appeared in all major German and many international photography magazines. He united within his wort the two main aesthetic currents of his era: the modernist attention to form, experimentation, and abstraction, and subjectivity’s wish for a humanistic approach to the depiction of the world, both cities and nature..The motifs of Keetman’s images were drawn from nature, architecture, people and industry; he was particularly adept at depicting the detail and sturcture of even ordinary objects.

Among all his collective works, Peter Keetman’s most noted series was his “Volkswagen: A Week at the Factory”, where he captured images of car parts and assembly lines. Begun on Easter of 1953, this series was more than conventional industrial photographs or documentation of the production process. Keetman included long shots in which the vastness of the factory halls dominate, and close ups with a high degree of abstraction taken under natural light.

Peter Keetman died in Marquartstein, Bavaria at the age of eighty-eight in March of 2005. For his photographic work, he was awarded the David -Octavius-Hill Medal from the German Photographic Academy, and the Cultural Award of the German Society of Photography. Keetman’s work is held in many private collections and such public institutions as the Art Institute of Chicago, the city of Wolfburg’s Art Museum, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, among others.

Top Insert Image: Peter Keetman, “Self-Portrait with Camera”, 1957, Gelatin Silver Print, 17.2 x 23.3 cm, Stiftung F.C. Gundlach

Second Insert Image: Peter Keetman, “Trister Bahnhof (Dreary Train Station)“, 1954, Ferrotyped Gelatin Silver Print on Agfa Paper, 30.8 x 23.9 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Peter Keetman, “Mensch und Natur (Man and Nature /My Own Shoe)”, 1948, Ferrotyped Gelatin Silver Print, 41.3 x 50.8 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Peter Keetman, “Volkswagen Work/Welding the Dash Panel and Roof of the Beetle, Assembly Hall 2”, 1953, Gelatin Silver Print, 25.8 x 26.8 cm, Private Collection

Ralph Eugene Meatyard

The Photography of Ralph Eugene Meatyard

Born at the city of Normal, Illinois in May of 1925, Ralph Eugene Meatyard was an American photographer, a visionary artist known for his black and white portraits of friends, posed family members in masks, and experimental abstracted compositions.

Raised in the city of Bloomington, Ralph Meatyard at the age of eighteen joined the United States Navy during World War 11. After his discharge from military service, he studied optometry through the government’s GI Bill at Williams College in Massachusetts. After his marriage to Madelyn McKinney, Meatyard and his wife relocated to Chicago where he began training as an apprentice optician.

From 1950 to 1967, Meatyard worked at Tinder-Krausse-Tinder, a large optical firm in Lexington, Kentucky. After leaving the company, he opened his own business, Eyeglasses of Kentucky, that created lenses for glasses. The city of Lexington was the site of the University of Kentucky and, during the 1960s, the gathering place for the area’s writers and intellectuals, many of whom became Meatyard’s friends. Among these artists and writers were novelist Wendell Berry, visual artist Guy Davenport, photographers Jonathan Williams and James Baker Hall, and Trappist monk Thomas Merton, a poet who resided at Kentucky’s Abby of Gethsemani.

In 1950, Ralph Meatyard purchased his first camera to photograph Michael, his first-born of three children. Having become interested in photography, he joined the Lexington Camera Club and the Photographic Society of America in 1954, working primarily with a Rolleiflex 6cm square medium format camera. During the 1950s, Meatyard attended a series of summer workshops created by Indiana University’s photography teacher Henry Holmes Smith. He also studied under Minor Martin White, a photographer known for his technical mastery and his strong sense of light and shadow.

Meatyard embraced photography’s function as both a memory and documentary device. His images were populated with family and friends portrayed on suburban front stoops, beside cars, within backyards, and either outside or inside abandoned farmhouses. Meatyard’s subjects, dressed in everyday clothes, were photographed in tight focus from commonplace angles with just enough light. Addressing the issue of identity, he often portrayed family and friends behind costume-shop masks or paper bag faces. This single addition to a posed everyday scene radically altered the image’s context and hinted at an undiscovered story.

In 1956 through fellow photographer Frank Van Deren Coke, Ralph Meatyard entered his photographs in the “Creative Photography” exhibition held at the University of Kentucky. He frequented the Trappistine Abbey of Gethsemani where he shot a number of experimental photographs depicting his friend Thomas Merton posed on its grounds. In 1971, Meatyard collaborated with writer Wendell Berry on “The Unforeseen Wilderness”, a book about Kentucky’s Red River Gorge. The public response to this volume, which contained photography by Meatyard, rescued the gorge from construction of a federally proposed Army Corps of Engineers dam.

Meatyard’s photography began to be known nationally in the early 1970s through several museum shows and its publication in magazines. He had shown his work in several exhibitions alongside such photographers as Ansel Adams, Minor White, Harry Callahan, Edward Weston and Robert Frank. Over the course of his career, he produced a number of photographic series including “Romances”, “Dolls and Masks” and “Light on the Water”. Produced over a two year period, his final series of photographs, the 1974 “The Family Album of Lucybelle Crater”, contained sequential cryptic double portraits of friends and family members wearing masks and enacting symbolic dramas.

A pioneering and inventive artist, Ralph Eugene Meatyard died at the age of forty-six from cancer in his hometown of Lexington, Kentucky on the seventh of May in 1972. He was survived by his wife Madelyn and three children: Michael, Melissa and Christopher. Meatyard was cremated and his ashes scattered in Kentucky’s Red River Gorge. His work is contained in several museums, among which are Atlanta’s High Museum of Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington DC, the John Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, and New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Notes: The name Lucybelle Crater in Meatyard’s final series was adapted by the artist from a character in Flannery O’Connor’s 1955 short story “The Life You Save May Be Your Own”. Meatyard clearly intended that the identity of each person in the series not be known to the viewer of this work; he identified every character in this series with the same name: Lucybelle Crater. In each image, the Lucybell figure was portrayed by the artist’s wife, Madelyn Meatyard, who wore a costume-shop hag mask. This figure was paired with a family member or friend who wore a transparent mask that hid identity and aged the wearer.

“The Believer” is a quarterly literature, arts and culture magazine that specializes in criticism, literary non-fiction, and immersive reporting on contemporary issues. Investigative reporter and novelist Ted McDermott wrote an extensive article, “The Family Albums of Ralph Eugene Meatyard”, for its January 2007 issue: https://www.thebeliever.net/the-family-albums-of-ralph-eugene-meatyard/

Writer David A. Cory has a biographical article on Ralph Eugene Meatyard at the online photography magazine “F-Stop”: https://www.fstopmagazine.com/blog/2013/ralph-eugene-meatyard-by-david-cory/

San Francisco’s Fraenkel Gallery has an article on Ralph Eugene Meatyard that contains images from four of his series: https://fraenkelgallery.com/artists/ralph-eugene-meatyard

Top Insert Image: Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Untitled, (Self Portrait), 1964-1965, Gelatin Silver Print, Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Second Insert Image: Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Untitled, (Self Portrait), 1958, Gelatin Silver Print, 28 x 35.6 cm, Fraenkel Gallery

Third Insert Image: Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Untitled, (Boy by Abandoned House), 1968-1969, Gelatin Silver Print, Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Fourth Insert Image: Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Untitled (Table and Chair), circa 1957-1958, Gelatin Silver Print

Bottom Insert Image: Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Untitled, (Wagon Wheel), 1957-1958, Gelatin Silver Print, 19.3 x 21.5 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Alair de Oliveira Gomes

The Photography of Alair Gomes

Born at Valença, a suburb of Rio de Janeiro in December of 1921, Alair de Oliveira Gomes was a Brazilian photographer whose work fixated on the depiction of the male body. Over the three decades of his photographic career, Gomes produced one hundred-seventy thousand images, the majority of which still remains unpublished.

During his early career and life, Alair Gomes dealt with an environment where the expression of one’s queer identity was fraught with danger. He often worked in secrecy and faced challenges as a photographer of homoerotic images. In the repressive and strictly controlled political climate that succeeded the 1964 military coup in Brazil, photojournalism focused on exposing the abuses of power perpetrated by the regime, while another significant branch of photography placed its focus on issues of social exclusion and cultural identity. Within the Brazilian heteronormative culture, Alair Gomes was one of very few photographers of the homoerotic tradition.

The son of a civil servant, Alair Gomes spent his formative years in Brazil’s capital, Rio de Janeiro. During his early childhood, he studied the violin and won a local photography competition. At his father’s request, Gomes studied civil engineering and the philosophy of science, that branch of philosophy that examines the foundations, methods, implications and reliability of science. He graduated with a degree from the National School of Engineering at the University of Brazil in 1944. In the following year, Gomes was appointed as a civil engineer for the Brazilian Railway Company.

In 1946, Gomes collaborated with José Francisco Coelho and other friends to found the literary review MAGOG. He abandoned his profession as an engineer to devote himself to the study of modern physics, mathematics and biology. With a 1961 philosophy grant from the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, Gomes spent a year in the United States where he, in addition to his studies, associated with New York’s academic and artistic communities. From 1964 to 1976, Gomes participated in numerous international conferences on the philosophy of science.

Gomes began turning to photography in the mid to late 1960s. He traveled to Europe in 1965 for the first time; during this six-month trip, Gomes visited museums and began his photographic career through the use of a borrowed camera. In 1977, Gomes decided to devote himself specifically to the development of his photographic work, which initially focused almost exclusively on the men at Rio de Janeiro’s beaches.

Alair Gomes created an immense collection of black and white photographs, shot on the beach or through a telephoto lens from his balcony, that were devoted to the beauty and nudity of the male body. These images were reworked and ordered in carefully constructed sequences to form several series of visual compositions. Among these works are “Sonatinas”, the “four feet” series, “Beach Triptychs”, and “A Window in Rio”. Gomes’s most ambitious work, “Symphony of Erotic Icons” (1966-1978), is composed of thousands of images, sometimes shot at unusual angles, that detail slight variations of the nude body. The choreographic sequence of each rhythmic subset is evocative of music scores.

Gomes was a professor of Philosophy of Science at the Biophysics Institute of the Federal University in Rio de Janeiro. He was also a professor of Contemporary Art at the School of Visual Arts for the Brazilian Ministry of Culture. Gomes later became an advisor at the National Institute of Visual Arts (National Foundation for the Arts, Rio de Janeiro). Between 1976 and 1984, he exhibited his photographs in New York, Paris, Rio de Janeiro, and Toronto.

A highly cultured man who was active as a writer, critic and university professor, Alair Gomes was a collector of books, pictures, and films; he had kept copious journals as well as instructive notes on how his photography should be displayed. Gomes died, at the age of seventy-one, from a stabbing at his Rio de Janeiro home by an unknown attacker in August in 1992. Upon his death, Gomes’s entire archive was donated to the National Library of Brazil and the Foundation Cartier pour Art Contemporain in Paris.

In 2001, the Foundation Cartier organized a major monographic exhibition of Alair Gomes’s work, which was accompanied by a comprehensive catalogue. Since then, his work has gradually achieved international attention, having featured in the 30th São Paulo Biennial and the Maison Eoropéenne de la Photographie in Paris. Gomes’s photographs are now in the Foundation Cartier in Paris, Madrid’s Loewe Foundation, and New York’s Museum of Modern Art.

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown,”Alair Gomes, Rio de Janeiro”, May 1980, Gelatin Silver Print, Ronca Clube Magazine, April 2016

Second Insert Image: Alair Gomes, “A Window in Rio No.120, Opus 2”, Gelatin on Plate, 23.3 x 17.2 cm, Coleção Gilberto Chateaubriand MAM Rio

Third Insert Image: Alair Gomes, “Sítio Burle Marx”, “Botãnica” Series, Gelatin Silver Print, 30 x 20 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Alair Gomes, Untitled, Greco-Roman Statue, “Viagens” Series, Collection of Renata Phoenix, Museum of Modern Art

Wilfried Sätty

The Collages of Wilfried Sätty

Born at Bremen in April of 1939, Wilfried Sätty, birth name Wilfried Podriech, was a German graphic artist who became known for his assemblages, black and white collage art, and lithographs. After the end of World War II, Sätty’s early life took place within the surreal landscape of Bremen’s heavily-bombed ruins.

In the mid-1950s, Wilfried Sätty entered into a three-year apprenticeship as a mechanical engineer. After his training, he worked as an engineer in the construction of Brasilia, a modern, planned city development in Brazil to replace Rio de Janeiro as the nation’s capital. Sätty relocated in 1961 to San Francisco, California where he settled in North Beach’s artistic bohemian community and worked as a draftsman for the Bay Area Rapid Transit system. Inspired by the creativity of the city’s psychedelic sub-culture, Sätty began in 1966 to create pictorial collages; some of these were sold as poster prints.

After establishing a studio on San Francisco’s Powell Strret, Sätty created the first of his assemblage installations, “The North Beach U-Boat”, a warren of rooms containing mirrors, dolls, oriental carpets, and other discarded material found in the trash bins of wealthy residents. During the 1970s, he created animations, colored artwork, lithographic prints, and hundreds of black and white collages. These collages were well-received and were used as illustrations in both establishment periodicals and counter-culture publications.

Poster artists accepted Wilfried Sätty as a peer due to his designs for rock concert advertisements. However, his work was rooted in the more somber and utopian German Surrealism, an art expression that he accented with bits of the bizarre and grotesque. Generally excluded from gallery exhibitions, Sätty turned to publishing his work. Using printing presses to multiply and overprint his collages, he published two volumes of collages; the first of which was “The Cosmic Bicycle”, a collection of seventy-nine collages published in 1971 through “Rolling Stone” magazine’s imprint Straight Arrow Books. Sätty’s second volume from Straight Arrow Books was the 1973 “Time Zone”, a collection of collages in the form of a wordless novel akin to the collage books of Max Ernst.

Sätty created illustrations for the 1976 “The Annotated Dracula” which contained an introduction, notes and bibliography by Romanian-American author and poet Leonard Wolf. He also created eighty black and white illustrations for Crown Publishing Group’s 1976 “The Illustrated Edgar Allan Poe”, a collection of Poe’s horror and literary short stories. Sätty is, however, perhaps best known for his commissioned work for Terence McKenna’s anthology book “The Archaic Revival”, published in May of 1992 by Harper Collins. This collection of essays, interviews and narrative adventures is illustrated through Sätty’s black and white collages depicting themes of ancient cultures seen through modern technology, optical art, and sacred religious architecture.

Beginning in the late 1970s, Wilfred Sätty’s work drew inspiration from the dramatic and often unruly events in the history of San Francisco; these collages cover the period from the 1848 Gold Rush to the 1890s. Sätty died in January of 1982, at the age of forty-two, from an accidental fall from a ladder at his Powell Street home. His final work, “Visions of Frisco: An Imaginative Depiction of San Francisco during the Gold Rush & the Barbary Coast Era”, was published posthumously in 2007 by art historian Walter Medeiros.

Notes: The Wilfried Sätty website is located at: https://satty.art/#top

The online “FoundSF”, a San Francisco digital history archive, has an article on Wilfried Sätty and his “North Beach U-Boat” project: https://www.foundsf.org/Satty_and_the_%22North_Beach_U-Boat%22

“Melt”, an archive of esoteric and contemporary culture, has an article on Wilfried Sätty that includes a biography as well as several images of his artwork: https://visualmelt.com/Wilfried-Satty

San Francisco artist and educator Ryan Medeiros has an article on Wilfried Sätty entitled “Wilfried Sätty; The Psychedelic Alchemist of Collage” on his website: https://ryanmedeiros.substack.com/p/wilfried-satty-the-psychedelic-alchemist

On John Coulthart’s “(feuilleton)” website, there is an article entitled “Wilfried Sätty and the Cosmic Bicycle” that examines Sätty’s life and the publishing of his 1971 book of collages: https://www.johncoulthart.com/feuilleton/2025/09/10/wilfried-satty-and-the-cosmic-bicycle/

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Wilfried Sätty”, circa 1960-1970s, Gelatin Silver Print

Second Insert Image: Wilfried Sätty, “Listen, Sweet Dreams”, 1967, Lithographic Psychedelic Poster, 88 x 59 cm, Orbit Graphic Arts, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Wilfried Sätty, “Stone Garden”, circa 1960s, Lithographic Psychedelic Poster, 88 x 58 cm, Printed at East Totem West, California, Private Collection

Mario Cattaneo

The Photography of Mario Cattaneo

In the period between the end of the Second World War in 1945 and the economic resurgence of the 1960s, Italy experienced enormous social and political transformations. Italian photographers responded to this post-war era by creating images that examined the realities of everyday life. These images, although seen as neo-realist or humanist in the tenor of social documentary photography, actually contained a wider range of motivations and styles.

Photojournalism thrived with the rapid growth of illustrated weekly magazines. At the same time, amateur photographic organizations sought to promote photography as a form of art. These photographers produced images of urban street life in the industrial cities of northern Italy. Southern Italy also became a primary source for the camera. While the site of the greatest post-war economic problems, southern Italy was a place of national unity, where local customs persevered amid Italy’s rapid modernization.

Born at Milan on the twenty-eighth of January in 1916, Mario Cattaneo was a significant but little-known Italian photographer who found the world of photographic clubs to be a place for his artistry and a framework for discussion and debate. Within those clubs, Cattaneo studied the technical aspects of photography,the works of established international photographers, and the theoretical and aesthetic concepts of the medium. The influences of French photographers Robert Doisneau and Henri Cartier-Bresson can be seen in Cattaneo’s attention to lighting and photo compositions.

Cattaneo’s first photographs, the series of images known as “La Fera del Sinigaglia”, were taken at Milan’s traditional flea market in the commune of Sinigaglia. The images he captured included portraits, articles for sale, and moments of spontaneous human interactions, often between buyers and sellers. Started in 1950, Cattaneo’s “Alleys” series explored the vibrant, and sometimes violent, everyday life found in Naples’s alleyways and also captured the hidden beauty and human stories found among the city’s narrow passages. A collection of these Naples images was later published in 1992 by Electra under the title “Vicoli”.

After his return to Milan, Mario Cattaneo became interested in the leisure and entertainment of Milanese youth during the economic boom of the post-World War II era. His photographs were taken at amusement parks, dance halls, and Sunday excursions at the Idroscalo, a city park with artificial lake that offered boating and swimming events as well as open-air concerts, bars and nightclubs. The images of Cattaneo’s three series “Luna Park”, “Una Domenica all’Idroscalo (A Sunday at the Idroscalo)” and “Giovanni al Juke Box” present the hope and carefree spirit of the young Milanese generation in newly adopted social activities and imported fashions.

Cattaneo continued working in Milan from 1964 to 1977 during which time he created two more series: the 1964-1965 “Caravaggio” and the 1973-1977 “Pop Festival”. Alongside his social and cultural presentations of Italy, Cattaneo produced travel images shot during his explorations of diverse cultures, among which were several trips to India.

In 1991, the Federazione Italiana Associazioni Fotografiche (FIAF), an Italian photography confederation that supported amateur groups, named Mario Cattaneo “Author of the Year” and dedicated a traveling exhibition to his work. He received awards and recognition in Italy and overseas, including first prize in the competition “Racconto e Reportage Fotografico (Storytelling and Photographic Reportage)” held in Fermo. In 1996, “La Fera del Sinigaglia”, with editing by W. Tucci Caselli, was published by the Fondazione E. Monti.

Mario Cataneo died in 2004 on the last of his many journeys to India. Following a donation from his heirs in 2006, the Mario Cattaneo collection has been owned by the Fondazione Museo di Fotografia Contemporanea in the Italian commune of Cinisello Balsamo. The photographic collection comprises over one hundred-ninety thousand film negatives, slides, prints, and contact sheets. This extensive collection attests to Cattaneo’s work between 1950 and 2004 as well as his ability to capture the beauty inherent in humanity, even within the simplest single shot.

Notes: Images of the Mario Cattaneo Collection of the Fondazione Museo di Fotografia Contemporanea can be found online at: https://www.mufocosearch.org/autori/AUF-10090-0000020?pageCurrent=1#paginationTop

The Italian photographic website The Mammoth Reflex has a short article on the work of Mario Cattaneo with several images at: https://www.themammothreflex.com/grandi-fotografi/2020/07/14/mario-cattaneo-mostra-cielo-aperto-cinisello-balsamo/

Top Insert Image: Mario Cattaneo, “Osteria”, 1970, Gelatin Silver Print, Museo di Fotografia Contemporanea

Second Insert Image: Mario Cattaneo, “Giovanni”, Juke box Series, 1960-1962, Gelatin Silver Print, Museo di Fotografia Contemporanea

Third Insert Image: Mario Cattaneo, “Napoli”, 1954, Gelatin Silver Print, Museo di Fotografia Contemporanea

Bottom Insert Image: Mario Cattaneo, “Napoli”, 1954, Gelatin Silver Print, Museo di Fotografia Contemporanea

Tod Browning, “The Mystic”: Film History Series

Ira H. Morgan, “Actress Aileen Pringle as Zara”, Todd Browning’s 1925 silent “The Mystic”, Costume by Roman Petrovich Tyrtov (aka Erté)

“The Mystic” was a 1925 silent drama film directed by Tod Browning for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. The script was co-written by Browning and Waldemar Young, who over the course of his career wrote screenplays for over eighty films. The film was produced by Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg who, two years before, had finished production on a drama film starring Lon Chaney, “The Hunchback of Notre Dame”. Although Chaney was Browning’s immediate choice for the role of Michael Nash, he was unable to hire Chaney for “The Mystic” due to scheduling issues.

“The Mystic” starred Aileen Pringle, a stage and film actress who had worked previously with Rudolph Valentino in the 1920 “Stolen Moments” and with Conrad Nagel in the 1924 adaptation of Elinor Glyn’s romance novel “Three Weeks”. Her co-star was Conway Tearle, who began his career as a stage actor in London and later on Broadway. Over his thirty-six year career, he appeared in over ninety films and, at one point, was thought to be the highest-paid actor in America.

The cinematography was done by Ira H. Morgan who later successfully transitioned from silent to sound films. He worked extensively over his long career with major studios including Paramount Pictures, Warner Brothers, and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Morgan’s credits included Charlie Chaplin’s “Modern Times”, George W. Hill’s “Tell It to the Marines”, Sam Katzman’s East Side Kids “Bowery Champs” and the Screen Gems television series “The Adventures of Rin-Tin-Tin”, among others.

The gowns in “The Mystic”, worn by Aileen Pringle in her role of the gypsy Zara, were created by the well-known Russian-born French artist and designer Roman de Tirtoff, known to the world as Erté. Brought to the United States by Louis B. Mayer, Erté first designed the sets and costumes for the 1925 silent film “Paris”. He later did designs for such MGM silent films as “Ben-Hur”, “The Comedian” and “Dance Madness”, as well as William Randolph Hearst’s 1920 silent drama “The Restless Sex”.

Released in September of 1925, one print of “The Mystic” has survived. It has a running time of seventy minutes and has English inter-titles. It is available as a web file at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:The_Mystic_(1925)_by_Tod_Browning.webm

Bottom Insert Image: Ira H. Morgan, “Aileen Pringle and Conway Tearle”, 1925, Film Still from “The Mystic”, Director Tod Browning, MGM

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

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

Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau: Film History Series

F. W. Murnau, “Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror”, 1922, Film Scene Gifs, Cinematography Fritz Arno Wagner and Günther Krampf (Uncredited), Premiere Music Score Hans Erdmann, Prana Film

Born in Bielefeld, a city near the Teutoburg Forest in December of 1888, Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau was a German film director, producer and screenwriter. Recognized as one of the most influential filmmakers of the silent era, he achieved international recognition for his 1922 film “Nosferatu”, an adaptation of Bram Stoker’s 1897 Gothic horror novel “Dracula”.

Born Friedrich Wilhelm Plumpe to Otilie Volbracht and Heinrich Plumpe, the owner of a cloth factory, Murnau was one of four children raised in a wealthy family of the northwest part of Germany. By the age of twelve, Friedrich had already read works by Henrik Johan Ibsen, Friedrich Nietzsche, Arthur Schopenhauer and Shakespeare. He studied philology, the study of language in oral and written historical sources, at the University of Berlin and later art history and literature at the University of Heidelberg.

Noticed for his acting ability in university performances, Friedrich was invited in 1908 by film and theater director Max Reinhard to attend his drama school. It was during this period that he changed his name to Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, as his parents did not accept either his homosexuality or his choice of a career in the theater. While studying at Reinhard’s school, Murnau met and began a relationship with the poet, writer and musician Hans Ehrenbaum-Degele. It was Ehrenbaum who introduced Murnau to the work of such Expressionists as painter Franz Marc and Else Lasker-Schüler, a writer of plays, poetry and prose.

In addition to his acting in several of Reinhardt’s plays, F. W. Murnau’s experience with film making began with his position as Reinhardt’s assistant on the production of the 1912 silent “The Miracle”, a full-color film experience that included a full- sized symphony orchestra and chorus. During World War I, Murnau fought in the infantry on the Eastern front and, beginning in 1916, served as a member of the Imperial German Flying Corps. He survived several missions over France and eight crashes without serious injuries. Murnau was detained in neutral Switzerland in 1917 until the end of the war. His friend and lover, Hans Ehrenbaum served in the war as an infantry soldier but was killed on the Eastern front in 1915, an event which had a profound effect on Murnau.

After the war, Murnau returned to Germany and, in 1919, entered into a collaboration with actor Conrad Veidt to establish a film studio. His directorial debut, now considered a lost film, was the 1919 feature-length drama “Der Knabe in Blau (The Boy in Blue)” inspired by Gainsborough’s 1770 painting of the same name and Oscar Wilde’s novel “The Picture of Dorian Gray”. Between 1919 and 1922, Murnau created films on a variety of topics and in a variety of styles. An Expressionist film of this period, now lost, was Murnau’s fourth feature film, the 1920 “Der Janus Kopf (The Head of Janus)“. This was a variation on Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella “Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” and starred Conrad Veidt and Hungarian actor Bela Lugosi.

F. W. Murnau’s best known film is the 1922 “Nosferatu”, an adaptation of Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” that was produced through his newly founded Prana Film Company. This film was the only one released by the company due to a copyright infringement lawsuit brought by Florence Stoker, Bram Stoker’s widow. In its judgement, the court ordered all existing copies destroyed; only one copy of “Nosferatu” survived and became the basis of all prints existing today. Working alongside cinematographer Fritz Arno Wagner, Murnau created macabre visual effects for the film that included negative images of trees against a black sky, stop-motion movements, and projected shadows.

Murnau’s collaboration with scriptwriter Carl Mayer and cinematographer Karl Freund resulted in the 1924 “Der Letzte Mann (The Last Man)”, starring Emil Jennings in his best known role. This film, nearly as important as “Nosferatu”, established Murnau’s reputation as one of the foremost German directors. Mounted cameras on bicycles and overhead wires created a rapid series of subjective images; the entire film was pantomime with only one title card used in the entire seventy-seven minute silent film. Murnau’s final two films produced in Germany were the 1925 “Herr Tartüff (Tartuffe)”, an adaptation of Molière’s satiric play, and “Faust”, a silent 1926 fantasy film that starred Emil Jennings as Mephisto and Gösta Ekman as Faust.

Acquiring a contract in the United States with Fox Film Corporation in 1926, F. W. Murnau and his staff of German technicians and craftsman produced the 1927 “Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans” which won several Oscars and Janet Gaynor her first Academy Award for Best Actress. The film shared what is now the Best Picture Award with William A Wellman’s “Wings” and was held by critics as the finest silent film ever produced by a Hollywood studio. Murnau did two more films for Fox Film Corporation: the 1928 “Four Devils”, now considered a lost film, and the 1929 “Our Daily Bread” to which Fox Film in an attempt to be more current hastily added spoken dialogue to the silent scenes, essentially compromising Murnau’s vision.

In 1928, Murnau formed a film production company with documentary film maker Robert Flaherty in order to better control the content of his films. They traveled to the Tahiti in 1929 to film “Tabu”. Flaherty withdrew from the project in its early stages when Murnau began incorporating a fictionalized love story into what had started as an objective documentary of Polynesian life. Finished at Murnau’s own expense and released in 1931, “Tabu: A Story of the South Seas” was a synchronized sound film split into two chapters with a music score and sound effects. “Tabu” became Murnau’s most popular and successful film. Deep in debt, he was offered a ten-year contract with Paramount Studios upon his return to Hollywood.

On the tenth of March in 1931, one week prior to the premiere of “Tabu”, Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau was driven up the Pacific Coast Highway from Los Angeles in a rented Packard touring car by his young Filipino driver Eliazar Stevenson. The fast-driven car swerved to avoid a truck that unexpectedly veered into the northbound lane. After striking an embankment, Murnau and Stevenson were thrown out of the vehicle. Murnau suffered a fractured skull and died in the hospital the next day. His body was transported to Germany and entombed in the Stahnsdorf South-Western Cemetery near Berlin on the thirteenth of April.

Notes: An excellent biographical article on F. W. Murnau’s life can be found at the CineCollage site: http://cinecollage.net/murnau.html

A 1967 article, “Shadow and Substance: F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu”, written by Gilberto Perez Guillermo for the Sight and Sound Archive can be found at the British Film Institute’s site located at: https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/features/shadow-substance-f-w-murnaus-nosferatu

The University of California’s Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive has a listing with information on thirteen of F. W. Murnau’s films that were previously screened: https://bampfa.org/program/f-w-murnau-voyages-imaginary

Top Insert Image: Thomas Staedeli, “Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau”, Date Unknown, Studio Publicity Card, Private Collection

Second Insert Image: F. W. Murnau, “Matahi and Anne Chevalier”, 1931, “Tabu: A Story of the South Seas” Film Still, Cinematography Floyd Crosby, Flaherty-Murnau Productions, Paramount Pictures

Third Insert Image: F. W. Murnau, “George O’Brien and Margaret Livingston”, 1927, “Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans”, Film Still, Cinematography Charles Rosher and Karl Struss, Fox Film Corporation

Fourth Insert Image: F. W. Murnau, “The Haunted Castle”, 1921, Film Still, Cinematography Franz Arno Wagner and László Schäffer, Uco-Film Company

Bottom Insert Image: F.W. Murnau, “Gösta Ekman as Faust”, 1926, Film Still, Cinematography Carl Hoffmann, Ufa (Germany) Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (USA)

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

Upcoming Getty Museum Exhibitions

These black and white photographs of past Sam Francisco Pride events between 1984 and 1990 were taken by Saul Bromberger and Sandra Hoover. These scenes were among many published in the June 27, 2014 edition of Mother Jones.

For those interested, Los Angeles’s Getty Museum is having two exhibitions on LBGTQ+ culture beginning in June. Note that these two exhibitions close on the 28th of September!

“Queer Lens: A History of Photography”

On view June 17–September 28, 2025

Since the mid-19th century, photography has served as a powerful tool for examining concepts of gender, sexuality, and self-expression. The immediacy and accessibility of the medium has played a transformative role in the gradual proliferation of homosocial, homoerotic, and homosexual imagery. Despite periods of severe homophobia, when many photographs depicting queer life were suppressed or destroyed, this exhibition brings together a variety of evidence to explore the medium’s profound role in shaping and affirming the vibrant tapestry of the LGBTQ+ community.

Generous support from the Getty Patron Program

“$3 Bill: Evidence of Queer Lives”

On view June 10–September 28, 2025

“$3 Bill: Evidence of Queer Lives” celebrates the contributions of LGBTQ+ artists in the last century. From pioneers who explored sexual and gender identity in the first half of the 20th century, through the liberation movements and the horrors of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, to today’s more inclusive and expansive understanding of gender, $3 Bill presents a journey of resilience, pride, and beauty.

Generous support from the Getty Research Institute Council and the Getty Patron Program

Additional support from The Danielson Family Foundation

Carl Van Vechten

The Photography of Carl Van Vechten

Born at Cedar Rapids, Iowa in June of 1880, Carl Van Vechten was an American accomplished photographer, author, critic, and ardent supporter of Harlem Renaissance artists and writers. He was the youngest child of prominent banker Charles Duane Van Vechten and Ada Amanda Fitch, a talented musician who founded the Cedar Rapids Public Library. A passionate follower of music and theater from an early age, Van Vechten left Cedar Rapids after graduating high school to pursue his interests and advance his education in Chicago.

Van Vechten entered the University of Chicago in 1899 where he studied a variety of topics including music, art and opera. Developing an interest in writing, he contributed work to the “University of Chicago Weekly”. After graduating from the university in 1903, Van Vechten accepted the position of columnist for the “Chicago American”, a growing afternoon edition newspaper. During this period, he began his experiments in photography, a passion for which he later gained widespread recognition.

After moving to New York City in 1906, Carl Van Vechten was hired by “The New York Times” as an assistant to its music critic. This position allowed him to continue his interest in opera through travels to Europe. In 1908, Van Vechten became the newspaper’s Paris correspondent and, upon his return to the United States in 1909, became the first American critic of modern dance. He later became the drama critic for the “New York Times” during 1913 and 1914. During a 1913 musical premiere in Paris, Van Vechten met and became a life-long friend and champion of American author and poet Gertrude Stein. Upon her death in 1946, he became her literary executor and assisted in the printing of her unpublished writings.

Having finished with writing both fiction and critical, Van Vechten at the age of fifty began photographing his large circle of friends with a 35 mm Leica camera, given to him by the Mexican painter, ethnologist and art historian Miguel Covarrubias. Van Vechten’s earlier career as a New York Times writer and his theater connections through his actress wife, Fania Marinoff, provided him access to new and established artists as well as cultural figures of the time. Van Vechten’s photographic portfolio became a collection of America’s cultural icons of the early to middle 1900s.

Carl Van Vechten’s portraits were usually busts or half-length poses in front of backdrops. Although he employed an assistant for lighting setups, Van Vechten was skilled in the techniques of photographic development. The subjects of his portraits included such notables as playwright Eugene O”Neill, novelist and poet Gertrude Stein, actress Anna May Wong, social activist Langston Hughes, actress and singer Pearl Bailey, and many others. Van Vechten’s photographs were exhibited at New York City’s luxury department store Bergdorf Goodman in 1933, the Museum of the City of New York in 1942, the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1951, and at annual Leica Exhibitions between 1934 and 1936.

Van Vechten strongly felt that his documentary photographic work of the mid-1900s should be available for scholarly research. During his lifetime, he donated his collection of manuscripts, letters, clippings and photographs to several university libraries. The Museum of the City of New York houses an extensive collection of over two-thousand images. In 1966, the United States Library of Congress acquired a collection of fourteen-hundred photographs that had been the property of Saul Mauriber. Originally a busboy at the Stage Door Canteen during World War II, Mauriber was Van Vechten’s photographic assistant for twenty years; he organized the collection and later became the photographic executor for Van Vechten’s estate.

As an author, Carl Van Vechten published several volumes of essays on a variety of subjects between 1915 and 1920, during which time he acted as an informal literary scout for the newly formed publisher Alfred A. Knopf. The publisher printed seven novels by Van Vechten between 1922 and 1930, including the 1922 “Peter Whiffle: His Life and Works”, a fictionalized autobiographical work built around the Harlem Renaissance, and the 1930 “Parties: Scenes from Contemporary New York Life”, a satirical portrait of upper-bohemian New Yorkers and Harlem jazz clubs.

Active in both writing and photography in his latter years, Carl Van Vechten died in December of 1964 at the age of eighty-four in New York City. His ashes were scattered over the Shakespeare Garden in the city’s Central Park. Van Vechten’s personal papers, a collection of nineteen-hundred Kodachrome slides, and his series “Living Portraits: Color Photographs of African Americans from 1939 to 1964” are housed at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library. His work is also housed in Tennessee’s Fisk University, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art, among others.

Notes: While in Europe in 1907, Carl Van Vechten married Anna Snyder, his long time friend from Cedar Rapids. Their marriage lasted for five years; the divorce was finalized in 1912. Two years later, he married American-Russian actress and dancer Fania Marinoff. This marriage lasted for fifty years during which the couple played a prominent role in the Harlem Renaissance. After a successful fifty year career, Marinoff died from pneumonia at the age of eighty-one in November of 1971.

From the beginning of their relationship, Fania Marinoff was aware of Van Vechten’s romantic and sexual relationships with men. Most notable of these was his relationship with Richmond journalist Mark Lutz, who was introduced to Van Vechten at a 1931 party hosted by Hunter Stagg, editor of “The Reviewer” literary magazine. Lutz became a model for Van Vechten’s early photographic work and would maintain a close relationship until Van Vechten’s death. Upon Mark Lutz’s death in 1968, all his correspondence with Van Vechten, some ten-thousand letters, were destroyed as per his wishes. His collection of photographs by Van Vechten were donated to the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

A November 2023 article by Anne McCrery for the Library of Virginia’s “The Uncommon Wealth”, entitled “Authors of All Four Sexes” examines Hunter Stagg, his friendship with Van Vechten and Lutz, and the literary renaissance of Richmond, Virginia: https://uncommonwealth.virginiamemory.com/blog/2023/11/22/hunter-stagg/

The Elisa Rolle/ Queerplaces website has a biographical article on Carl Van Vechten that includes a collection of his portrait photographs gathered by Tony Scupham-Bilton: http://www.elisarolle.com/queerplaces/a-b-ce/Carl%20Van%20Vechten.html

Top Insert Image: Mark Lutz, “Carl Van Vechten, Villa Curonia, Florence, Italy”, 1935, Gelatin Silver Print

Second Insert Image: Carl Van Vechten, “Vincent Price”, 1939, Bromide Print, Marquette University, Wisconsin,

Third Insert Image: Carl Van Vechten, “Mark Lutz, Rhinebeck, New York”, July 1936, Gelatin Silver Print, 35.3 x 27.9 cm, Philadelphia Museum of Art

Fourth Insert Image: Carl Van Vechten, “James Earl Jones”, May 1961, Vintage Gelatin Silver Print, 34.5 x 24 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Carl Van Vechten, “John Gielgud”, 1936, Vintage Print, 25.3 x 18 cm, Estate of Carl Van Vechten, National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

Robert Giard

The Portrait Photography of Robert Giard

Born at Hartford, Connecticut in July of 1939, Robert Giard was an American portrait, figurative and landscape photographer. He is best known for his black and white, unadorned portraits of American poets and authors, a two decade-long series that specifically focused on gay and lesbian writers.

Robert Giard received his Bachelor of Arts from Yale University where he majored in English Literature. He earned his Master of Arts in Comparative Literature at Boston University. After graduating, Giard taught at the private New Lincoln School in Manhattan, New York. In 1972, he began, entirely self-taught, to photograph portraits of friends, nude figurative works, and the landscapes of the South Fork region of Staten Island. Giard’s early landscapes were mainly shot in late autumn to the beginning of spring when many of the homes were empty for the season. Included in these landscapes are photographs taken at The Creeks, artist Alfonso Ossario’s estate.

In 1974, Giard and his life partner, early childhood educator Jonathan Silin, settled in the popular resort hamlet of Amagansett on the south shore of Long Island, where they remained for nearly thirty years until Giard’s death. In 1985, Giard attended a performance at New York City’s The Public Theater of playwright and gay rights activist Larry Kramer’s “The Normal Heart” which dealt with the AIDS crisis in the gay community. Sensing the enormity of the situation, he decided to use his photography to record the experiences, history and culture of the queer community. Combining his interests in literature and gay issues, Giard began documenting through portraits both the significant and new literary figures on the scene.

Robert Giard’s portraits included such notable figures as poet and writer Allen Ginsberg, poet and essayist Adrienne Cecile Rich, playwright Edward Albee III, poet and performance artist Assotto Saint, and novelist Michael Cunningham, a later literary Pulitzer Prize winner. A selection of the more than five hundred portraits Giard had amassed at the time were published in 1997 as an anthology entitled “Particular Voices: Portraits of Gay and Lesbian Writers” by MIT Press. This collection served as the companion volume to the New York Public Library’s 1998 exhibition of the same name.

In his later years, Giard began working on a portrait documentation of the three hundred twenty-one grant recipients of the Thanks Be To Grandmother Winifred Foundation, which supported until 2001 projects by women fifty-four years or older that benefitted other mature women. These grants supported research and artistic projects as well as those with social, economic or medical problems. Before his death, Giard had successfully photographed two hundred and forty-one of the women grantees. He traveled extensively across the country by train, bus or plane and kept a diary of his travels and his visits with the diverse group of women he met.

While traveling to a portrait session in Chicago, Robert Giard passed away on the sixteenth of July in 2002 at the age of sixty-two. His published version of “Particular Voices” won the 1997 Lambda Literary Foundation Award for Best Photography/Art Book. A recipient of many awards and grants, Giard had a long and distinguished solo and group exhibition career in the United States. His work is in the public collections of the Brooklyn Museum, New York Public Library, San Francisco Public Library, and the Library of Congress. Giard’s complete archive is housed in Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library in its American Collection.

The Robert Giard Foundation was formed in 2002 to preserve his photographic legacy, promote his work for educational purposes and encourage young photographers. The annual Robert Giard Fellowship is a ten-thousand dollar grant given to visual artists whose work addresses gender, sexuality and issues of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender identity.

In 2005, Crones’ Cradle Conserve Press published “The Grandmother Winifred Journals” 1996-2002” which contains all Giard’s images of the women grantees plus his diary entries that documented each session.

Notes: Although the Robert Giard Foundation site has not been updated since 2022, the Robert Giard Grant Cycle is still active. The pertinent addresses are: https://robertgiardfoundation.org and https://www.queer-art.org/giard-grant

The Lambda Literary Foundation has a biographical article on Robert Giard on the Gale Literature Resource Center site. It can be accessed through your library system’s card: https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CA92049131&sid=sitemap&v=2.1&it=r&p=LitRC&sw=w&userGroupName=anon%7E9af9193c&aty=open-web-entry

Top Insert Image: Toba Tucker, “Robert Giard”, Date Unknown, Gelatin Silver Print, Private Collection

Second Insert Photo: Robert Giard, “Portrait of the Photographer”, (Self-Portrait), 1982, Gelatin Silver Print, 25.4 x 20.3 cm, Estate of Robert Giard

Bottom Insert Photo: Robert Giard, “Newton McMahon”, 1981, Gelatin Silver Print, 35.6 x 35.6 cm, Private Collection

George Platt Lynes: “José Martinez”

George Platt Lynes, “José ‘Pete’ Martinez”, 1937, Photo Shoot at Lynes’s Studio, Vintage Silver Prints, Private Collections

Born in Mexico in March of 1913, José Antonio Martinez-Berlanga was a ballet dancer who in the early 1940s danced with both the American Ballet Caravan and the Ballet Society, precursor ensembles of the New York City Ballet.

José Martinez at a very young age moved with his family to Houston, Texas. After graduating high school, he relocated to New York City where he studied at the School of American Ballet founded in 1934 by Lincoln Kirstein, Edward Warburg and George Balanchine. Martinez eventually gained a full scholarship and, upon graduation, was invited to join The Ballet Caravan, a touring company founded by Lincoln Kirstein to provide off-season employment to American ballet dancers. Martinez gradually became involved with the group’s creative process and provided ideas and librettos for ballets.

Martinez eventually began an intimate relationship with Lincoln Kirstein; they lived together in a Greenwich Village townhouse at St. Luke’s Place. After Kirstein married graphic artist Fidelma Cadmus, the younger sister of artist Paul Cadmus, Fidelma moved into the apartment for the first year of the marriage. This triangular romantic relationship was similar to that of their friends, Paul Cadmus, Jared French and his wife Margaret Hoening.

José Martinez performed with the Ballet Caravan in the 1941 “Pastorela”, a one-act ballet choreographed by Lew Christensen and dancer José Fernandez, that toured Latin America with great reviews. The work included music by Paul Bowles and traditional songs orchestrated by Blas Galindo with words by Rafael Alvarez. Martinez tried in 1942 to enlist in the Army but was denied. He moved to Haverford, Pennsylvania and began work at a Jewish refugee hostel where writer Christopher Isherwood, whom he had met through Kirstein in 1939, was already employed. From Isherwood’s diaries, it is known that their relationship, except for one sexual encounter in August of 1942, was platonic.

José Martinez and Christopher Isherwood traveled together several times to New York City to visit the Fidelma and Lincoln Kirstein. They both left Haverford in September of 1942 and went their separate ways. Their friendship, however, continued and they met several times in California and New York after the war years. Called up for service during the Second World War, Martinez was trained at Norfolk, Virginia, and served in the United State Army in northern France until 1945.

As a member of the Ballet Society, Martinez toured the United States with visits in both large and smaller cities. The Society’s repertoire was very different from those trained by Sergei Diaghilev, who founded the Ballets Russes. Martinez danced in the original cast of George Balanchine’s “Four Temperaments” in which he performed the first Theme with Beatrice Tompkins in the 1946 performance tour. He also originated and danced the role of the minister in dancer and choreographer William Dollar’s 1947 “Highland Fling”.

In late 1947, José Martinez suffered a knee injury which forced an end to his performances. Hesitant about the next part of his life, he drifted for a year before beginning life as a dance teacher in Norfolk, Virginia. Over the next two decades, Martinez founded dance studios in Ohio and California where he continued to teach ballet until his retirement in the mid-1960s. José Martinez-Berlanga died at the Huntington Memorial Hospital in Pasadena, California on the twenty-fourth of June in 1997 at the age of eight-four.

Notes: Paul Cadmus, Jared French and his wife Margaret Hoening would spend the summers from the late 1930s to the early 1950s on Fire Island where they painted and took photographs. This collaborative artistic endeavor became known as the PaJaMa collective, taken from the first two letters of their names. Artist George Tooker would later join the collective during the period of 1944 to 1949 when he was in a relationship with Paul Cadmus.

Many friends would often visit the group on Fire Island, among whom were ballet impresario Lincoln Kirstein, artist Bernard Perlin and photographer George Platt Lynes. Lynes became acquainted with José Martinez through this group of friends and would also photograph him. Although Martinez appeared in many of the pre-war photographs, Lynes’s studio portraits of Martinez wearing the straw hat are the best known.

The Fire Island Pines Historical Preservation Society has an article entitled “The Fire Island Muses of George Platt Lynes & the PaJaMa Collective” by Brian Ferrari on its site located at: https://www.pineshistory.org/the-archives/fire-island-muses

Top Insert Image: William Caskey, “José Martinez”, circa 1935-1955, Vintage Print

Second and Bottom Image: Photographers Unknown, “José Martinez”, circa 1935-1955, Vintage Prints, Fire Island Pines Historical Preservation Society