Category: photography

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

Peter Hujar

The Photography of Peter Hujar

Born in Trenton, New Jersey in October of 1934, Peter Hujar was an American photographer known for his black and white portraits. Only marginally known during his lifetime, he has since been recognized as one of the major American photographers in the late twentieth-century. 

Peter Hujar never met his father, who abandoned his mother Rose Murphy during her pregnancy. He was raised by his Ukrainian grandparents in the rural landscape of Ewing Township. Hujar remained with his grandparents until his grandmother’s death in 1946. After which, Hujar lived with his mother and her second husband in New York City; however, the household situation was difficult. He left the home in 1950 at the age of sixteen to live independently. 

In 1953, Hujar entered Manhattan’s School of Industrial Design, later named the High School of Art and Design, where he expressed an interest in photography. Encouraged by his teacher, poet Daisy Aldan, Hujar became a photographic apprentice at a commercial studio where he mastered the technical processes of photography. Four years later, his photographic work had reached museum quality. In 1958, Hujar was able to accompany realist painter and watercolorist Joseph Raffael on study trip to Italy. 

Having been awarded a Fulbright Scholarship, Peter Hujar returned to Italy in 1963, this time with painter and sculptor Paul Thek, to study and photograph the Capuchin Catacombs of Palermo, Sicily. These images would later be featured in Hujar’s 1975 “Portraits in Life and Death” published with a written introduction by writer and critic Susan Sontag. Upon his return to New York City in 1964, Hujar became the chief assistant to commercial photographer Harold Krieger, widely known for his innovative advertising work and celebrity portraits. 

In the mid-1960s, Hujar met Andy Warhol and posed for four of Warhol’s short, silent black and white film portraits, the “Screen Shots” series. Four hundred and seventy-two of these three-minute films depicting New York’s cultural figures are known to have survived. In 1967, Hujar was selected as one of the photographers in a master class led by Richard Avedon and Marvin Israel. The quality of Hujar’s classwork led to assignments from Harper’s Bazaar and other publications; through this class, he met photographers Diane Arbus and Alexey Brodovitch. 

In 1967, Peter Hujar made the decision, at great financial sacrifice, to leave the commercial world and pursue his own photography that would reflect his true personal identity. Hujar and his lover at that time, political activist Jim Fouratt, witnessed the Stonewall riots in New York’s West Village. An influential artist and activist of the gay liberation movement, Hujar, although not actively involved with the Gay Liberation Front, shot the group photo that was used on many of its posters. In 1973, he settled into a loft above the East Village’s Eden Theater on Second Avenue where he resided for the rest of his life. 

Throughout the late 1970s and into the early 1980s, Hujar traveled in the art world of lower Manhattan shooting portraits of noted actors and writers including William Burroughs, Fran Lebowitz, drag queen actor Divine, Susan Sontag, and Rolling Stone writer Vince Aletti. He visited and shot photos at the area’s bars and also the abandoned West Side piers on the Hudson River, a gathering spot for artists and the gay community. In early 1981, Hujar met filmmaker and artist David Wojnarowicz who had become one of the prolific members of the avant-garde artists who used mixed media, graffiti and street art. After a brief period as Hujar’s lover, Wojnarowicz became his protégé and remained closely linked to him for the remainder of Hujar’s life. 

Peter Hujar was a consummate technician and master of the darkroom who produce images that, though stripped of excess, were highly emotional. His photography covered a wide range of subjects, including abandoned and ruined buildings, cityscapes, animals, portraits, still life, and nudes. Due to his connection with the sitter, Hujar excelled in portrait work and was able to achieve an intimate and honest pose for the camera that caught his sitter’s idiosyncrasies and inner feelings. He never used props in his portraits and focused entirely on the sitter as opposed to the backdrop of the shot. 

Hujar was diagnosed with AIDS in January of 1987. Ten months later at the age of fifty-three, he died at New York’s Cabrini Medical Center on the twenty-fifth of November. Hujar’s funeral was held at the Church of St. Joseph in Greenwich Village; he was buried at Gate of Heaven Cemetery in Valhalla, New York. In his lifetime, Hujar had few substantial solo exhibitions and attracted little notice by the press. His only major show in his lifetime was a 1986 exhibition of seventy photographs curated by Sur Rodney Sur of New York’s Gracie Mansion Gallery. 

Peter Hujar willed his entire artistic estate to novelist and historian Stephen Koch, a longtime friend. Since 1987, Koch has worked to place Hujar’s work in its rightful position in twentieth-century art. Photography curator Joel Smith assembled a collection of one hundred and sixty-four images from Peter Hujar’s work for a 2018 retrospective at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York City. Hujar’s work has been exhibited throughout Europe and the United States and is housed in such public collection as the Metropolitan Museum of New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Art Institute of Chicago. 

Notes: All images, unless noted, are from the Peter Hujar Archive which is located at: https://peterhujararchive.com

An exhibition of Paul Hujar’s work is currently being held at the Ukrainian Museum, 222 East 6th Street, New York City until the 1st of September, 2024. Article: https://news.artnet.com/art-world/peter-hujar-rialto-ukrainian-museum-2490813

An excellent 2018 article by the New Yorker’s longtime art critic Peter Schjeldahl, entitled “The Bohemian Rhapsody of Peter Hujar”, can be found at: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/02/05/the-bohemian-rhapsody-of-peter-hujar

New York’s Pace Gallery has an online conversation moderated by the gallery’s curatorial director Oliver Shultz, entitled “Cruising Utopia”, that coincided with its 2020 exhibition of Hujar’s intimate photographs of queer culture: https://www.pacegallery.com/journal/conversation-on-peter-hujar-video/

Top Insert Image: Peter Hujar, “Self Portrait Jumping (1)”, 1974, Gelatin Silver Print, 63.2 x 58.1 cm, Fraenkel Gallery

Second Insert Image: Peter Hujar, “Christopher Street Pier #3”, 1976, Gelatin Silver Print, Peter Hujar Archive

Third Insert Image: Peter Hujar, “The Shareef Twins”, 1985, Gelatin Silver Print, Peter Hujar Archive

Fourth Insert Image: Peter Hujar, “Gary Schneider in Contortion #1”, 1979, Gelatin Silver Print, Peter Hujar Archive

Bottom Insert Image: Peter Hujar, “Candy Darling on Her Deathbed”, 1973, Gelatin Silver Print, Peter Hujar Archive

Přemysl Koblic

The Photography of Přemysl Koblic

Born in July of 1892 in Prague, Přemysl Koblic was a Czech avant-garde photographer and educator whose theoretical findings and photographic practices significantly influenced the development of photography in Czechoslovakia. In addition to his experiments in photographic chemistry, Koblic promoted the emergence of new black and white photographic materials with such firms as Foma, Ako, and Neobrom.. 

The son of a chemical engineer, Přemysl Koblic began his studies in 1911 at Prague’s Czech Technical University; however, his education was  interrupted by the onset of World War I. After basic training, Koblic was sent at the end of 1915 to the Isonzo Front in Slovenia where he served as an army photographer with the 91st Infantry Regiment. Koblic finished his military service in the summer of 1918 and returned to his studies at the Czech Technical University. He graduated in 1919 and initially worked as an assistant at the university’s sugar-manufacturing department. Two years later, he became an administrator at Czechoslovakia’s Patent Office, where he managed patents covering photography, prints and food until 1935. 

Přemysl Koblic, who used his own small-format cameras, was a lifelong experimenter. He published his first technical texts prior to the First World War and, by 1920, was already a member of the Amateur Photographers’ Club in the Prague neighborhood of Královské Vinohrady. Among its members were such notable photographers as Alois Zych, Robert A. Šimon, Augustin Myška, František Oliveriusand, and Stanislav Krofta who joined upon his return from the United States. In 1923, Koblic joined a rival Prague photographic club that was later known as the Nekázanka. 

While post-war photographic work in Czechoslovakia during the early 1920s tended to create beautiful images, Koblic was interested in photographing the civilians of Prague during their daily work routines, the wait for trains, and travel through the bustling city streets. He felt that the essence of photography was found in the depiction of movement, life and activity. For him, the presentation of personal movement in the city, surrounded by its shapes, colors, lights and tones, was the highest form of photography as it depicted man in his own creation. Koblic was a pioneer in photography of the modern city, a theme that was further developed by others in the early 1940s.

When the country was affected by an economic crisis in the early 1930s, Přemysl Koblic collaborated with the Brno Film-Photo group of the Left Front which was led by economic theorist Lubomir Linhart. However, his work differed from the emerging photojournalism of the Communist periodicals that often published anonymous images by photo reporters. In the 1930s, Koblic published two books, the 1937 “Fotografování Vidí Svêt (Photography Sees the World)” and “Zvêtšování (Enlarging)” in 1938. Both of these volumes contained perfectly arranged photo appendices and samples of recent photographic work.

In 1936, Koblic became editor-in-chief of “Fotoografický Obzor (Photographic Horizon)” magazine and compiled the 1937 almanac edition for “Československá Fotografie (Czechoslovak Photography)”. He also closely collaborated with “Fotografie” magazine led by photographer and theorist Karel Hermann, a long-time friend. Koblic shared his photographic discoveries in numerous articles and through courses and lectures at local photo clubs and public venues. His photographic work and the technology he used greatly influenced the generation of magazine photographers in the late 1930s, including such artists as Josef Voříšek and Jan Lukas, as well as those of the later 1950s. 

For his entire life, Přemysl Koblic was connected with the Vršovice section of Prague; he converted his apartment on Ruskâ Street into an experimental photographic and chemical laboratory. Although he focused on other Prague locations, he depicted Vršovice in all its seasons and published many of these photographs equipped with texts. Koblic’s photographs were unique in their spontaneity; he could, without any hesitation, effortlessly shoot his subject within a second. Beginning in the 1930s, Koblic worked with a motion blur that gave a unique dynamic to his photographs. The most famous and frequently published of these works was the series done in 1948 at the Sokol Festival, entitled “Čtvrtá Dimense (The Fourth Dimemsion)”, for which he used a wide-angle camera. 

In the early 1950s, Koblic became involved in the Czechoslovak Union of Socialist Photography and the “Nova Fontografie (New Photography)” magazine that began publication in 1950 and promoted socialist realism in Czech photography. His photographs were quite distinctive from the average productions of that period. Although Koblic tried to comply with magazine’s desire for images with a socialist presence, his life-long interest in the documentary depiction of reality, including social relations, continued to be prevalent in his work.

Perceived by the general public as a clerk with a hard-earned status, Přemysl Koblic was involved in many hobbies and obsessions. His involvement in photographic chemistry led to the creation of the developer Pextral which became a standard for many years. He also constructed a series of photographic apparatuses including the Pohotovka, a prompt device. Koblic was interested in the chemistry aspect of the food industry and patented a process for yogurt production. He researched natural medications, made astronomical observations, and studied early European linguistics. All these interests, added to his homosexual orientation, made Koblic an eccentric figure for his time. 

Přemysl Koblic died in Prague in November of 1955 at the age of sixty-three. Due to the efforts of Czech photographer and historian Rudolph Skopec, the Moravian Gallery in Brno acquired part of Koblic’s work and Prague’s National Technical Museum became the guardian of a substantial collection of Koblic’s positive and negative images. 

Notes: For the research on this article, I am indebted to authors Jan Mlčoch, Pavla Vrbová, and Romana Kmochová for their informative articles on the photographic history of Czechoslovakia and Přemysl Koblic’s life and work. Their introductory article and “Prague in Pictures by Přemysl Koblic” are located at: https://eshop.ntm.cz/static/_dokumenty/1/6/2/8/8/00350_premysl_koblic-aj_m21_ukazka.pdf

An 2017 article on Czech Avant-Garde photography by Mariana Holá can be found on the Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism located at: https://www.rem.routledge.com/articles/overview/photography

Top Insert Image: Jan Beran, “Přemysl Koblic”, Date Unknown, Vintage Print, 30 x 32.8 cm, Moravská Galerie

Second Insert Image: Přemysl Koblic, “Praha-Vršpvoce Depot”, circa 1930s, Vintage Print

Third Insert Image: Přemysl Koblic, “View of a Village from Above”, 1939, Vintage Print

Fourth Insert Image: Přemysl Koblic, “The Jewish Cemetery”, 1930-1939, Vintage Print, 29 x 39 cm, Moravská Galerie 

Bottom Insert Image: Přemysl Koblic, “Prague Street Scene”, 1946, Vintage Print, Moravská Galerie

William Gedney

The Photography of William Gedney

Born at Greenville, New York in October of 1932, William Gale Gedney was an American documentary and street photographer. Intensely dedicated to his work, he was interested in street and night photography, portraiture, creative composition, and the study of human nature. Gedney’s work took him across the United States several times and overseas to England, India, Ireland, France, and the Netherlands. 

William Gedney spent his early years in upstate New York. At the age of nineteen, he relocated to New York City and attended Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute where he became interested in photography. Gedney graduated in 1955 with a Bachelor of Arts in Graphic Design. He worked for two years at the global mass-media company Condé Nast Publications before deciding to pursue a freelance career. After several years of freelance work and part-time employment, Gedney was hired in 1961 for the graphic department of Time, Inc. where he primarily did photographic layouts. 

With the money he saved, Gedney traveled in 1964 to Kentucky and ended his journey at a coal-mining town in Perry County. For a period of two weeks, he stayed at the Leatherwood home of Willie and Vivian Cornett and their twelve children. The family was struggling due to Willie Cornett having just recently lost his job at the mines. Gedney photographed the daily activities of the family members during this stay and a later one in 1972. The Corbett Family series eventually contained nine hundred twenty-one images in total. For the following twelve years, Gedney remained in touch with the family and exchanged letters.

In 1966, William Gedney was recommended by photojournalist Walker Evans for a one-year fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Through this fellowship, Gedney settled in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco where he began photographing its residents and drifters who passed through the neighborhood. Between October 1966 and January 1967, Gedney shot twenty-one hundred 35 mm photographs that chronicled San Fransisco culture. Upon his return to New York, Gedney organized a maquette for a photography book of his stay in San Francisco; however the book was not published in his lifetime.

In 1968, John Szarkowski, photography director of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, curated Gedney’s only solo exhibition in his lifetime, a MOMA show that presented twenty-two images of the Kentucky series and twenty-one of the San Francisco series. Shortly after the exhibition, Gedney was offered teaching positions for photography at the Pratt Institute and Manhattan’s Cooper Union; he would remain a member of both faculties for the rest of his working life. 

In 1969, William Gedney received a two-year Fulbright Fellowship for photography in India. His photographs of India were taken over two extensive stays during this fellowship and during a later trip in 1972. On his initial visit, Gedney lived a year and a half in Varanasi at the home of a local family; in 1972, his four-month visit focused on the city of Calcutta. The big overseas adventure in Gedney’s life was India: though the trip wearied him, Gedney particularly cherished the work from this period.

 In June of 1989, William Gedney died in New York City, at the age of fifty six, of complications from AIDS. He left photographs and writings to his lifelong friend Lee Friedlander and requested that his books and cameras be given to one of India’s colleges. His brother, Richard Gedney, donated them to the Chitrabani Art College in Calcutta. Gedney’s photographs, sketchbooks, diaries and papers are housed in the Rare Book, Manuscript and Special Collections Library of Duke University. Its digital collection contains finished prints and contact sheets created by Gedney between 1955 and 1989.

Margaret Sartor, a photographer, writer, and teacher at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, was approached by the university’s Special Collections Library for the curation of an exhibition of Gedney’s work. In 2000, Sartor and English author Geoff Dyer coedited “What Was True: The Photographs and Notebooks of William Gedney”, which quickly sold out.

Notes: William Gedney’s photographic book of his work in San Francisco was published posthumously in February of 2021 by Duke University Press under the title “William Gedney: A Time of Youth-Sam Francisco, 1966-1967”.

An article written by Samanth Subramanian, entitled “William Gedney’s Travels in India” for The New Yorker can be found at: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/photo-booth/william-gedneys-travels-in-india

Author Rebecca Bengal wrote an article entitled “William Gedney’s Timelessly Intimate Photographs of San Francisco in the 1960s” for the June 2021 issue of “Aperture”. This article,  with images and quotes by Gedney’s friends as well as his onetime lover writer Joseph Caldwell, can be found at: https://aperture.org/editorial/william-gedney-timelessly-intimate-photographs-of-san-francisco-in-the-1960s/

The Howard Greenberg Gallery in Manhattan, New York had an exhibition of William Gedney’s work in February to March of 2016. Thumbnail images of the exhibition’s photos can be located at: https://www.howardgreenberg.com/exhibitions/william-gedney-all-facts-eventually-lead-to-mysteries

Second Insert Image: William Gedney, “Cornett Sisters”, 1965, Kentucky Cornett Family Series, Gelatin Silver Print, Duke University

Third Insert Image: William Gedney, “Calcutta”, circa 1980, Gelatin Silver Print, 27.3 x 18.4 cm, Duke University

Bottom Insert Image: William Gedney, “Kentucky, 1972”, Kentucky Cornett Family Series, Gelatin Silver Print, Duke University

Jimmy DeSana

The Photography of Jimmy DeSana

Born in Detroit in November of 1949, Jimmy DeSana was an American artist and a key figure in New York City’s East Village punk art and New Wave scene in the 1970s and 1980s. His work, as a conceptual artist, conveyed that ers’s radical spirit and initiated a new approach to photographing the human body.

Born James Arthur DeSana, DeSana spent his early years in Atlanta, Georgia. His interest in photography began as a teenager through photographing the city’s suburban landscapes and both friends and acquaintances. DeSana studied at the University of Georgia where he he earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1972. For his thesis, he printed the 1972 series “101 Nudes”, a collection of fifty-six halftone black and white photographs of nude and partially nude figures posed inside or just outside houses. The figures, friends as well as himself, were seen from different viewpoints and sometimes only partially. Those partial anatomical views were reminiscent of earlier abstract work created by visual artist Man Ray. 

In 1973, Jimmy DeSana relocated to New York City and settled in the vibrant East Village area of Manhattan. As a street photographer doing commercial assignments for magazines as well as occasional record-album commissions, he shot the musicians who habituated late-night clubs and bars. These portraits included punk and New Wave figures such as Debbie Harry, Billy Idol, Richard Hell, Laurie Anderson and others. This commercial work supported DeSana’s photographic artwork in the studio. He was also active in the new correspondence art movement in which artists mailed their work through chain letters. Mailed out in 1973, DeSana’s nude self-portrait was later featured in a 1974 magazine published by the Canada’s conceptual artist collective, General Idea. 

In 1978, DeSana’s photographs of the human body were shown in Washington D.C. at the “Punk Art” exhibition sponsored by the Washington Project for the Arts. In 1979, he had his first exhibition at the Stefanotti Gallery on West 57th Street in New York City. In the same year, DeSana published his first collection entitled “Submission”. a volume of surreal, queer and humorous images that  situated his life and art within the queer and counterculture experiences. The published volume was created in collaboration with author William S. Burroughs.

In 1980, Jimmy DeSana began to experiment with color photography. His “Suburban” series continued his use of human bodies twisted into androgynous sculptural forms that challenged the viewer. In this series, DeSana began to also photograph commonly found objects in staged surrealistic settings.The images of this exploration of sexuality, gender and consumer issues had almost a nightclub atmosphere with their powerful, almost garish, colors of vibrant greens, pinks and mauves. To create his staged tableaus, DeSana used tungsten lights that imbued the surrealistic scenes with unnatural pigments. 

Shortly after 1985, DeSana was diagnosed with HIV and began to experience its symptoms. Continuing his work, he began the “Remainders” series that marked a move from the human body toward abstracted objects. This series featured everyday objects, such as balloons and aluminum foil, seated in dreamlike atmospheres lit in spectral hues.

Jimmy DeSana died, at the age of forty, from an AIDS-related illness at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center on the twenty-seventh of July in 1990. He left his estate to photographer and filmmaker Laurie Simmons who, in collaboration with Salon 94 Gallery, managed the estate for nearly a decade. The DeSana estate is currently co-managed by Simmons and New York City’s contemporary P.P.O.W. Gallery, one of Manhattan’s longest-running galleries now based in the city’s Tribeca district.

The photography volume “Jimmy DeSana: Suburban” was published by Del Monico Books/Brooklyn Museum in 2015 and included texts by filmmaker Laurie Simmons as well as art curators Dan Nadel and Elisabeth Sussman. A 2022 edition entitled “Jimmy DeSana: Submission” was published, also by Del Monico, with texts by Simmons, author Drew Sawyer, and Brooklyn Museum director Anne Pasternak. The first museum retrospective of DeSana’s work, curated by Simmons and Drew Sawyer, was held in late 2022 at the Brooklyn Museum.

Notes: All images in the header group, unless noted otherwise, are from the Estate of Jimmy DeSana, P.P.O.W. Gallery, New York

Top Insert Image: Jimmy DeSana, “Smoke: Self-Portrait”, 1985, Gelatin Silver Print, Estate of Jimmy DeSana, P.P.O.W. Gallery, New York

Second Insert Image: Jimmy DeSana, “Cowboy Boots”, 1984, Vintage Cibachrome Print, 48.3 x 32.4 cm, Estate of Jimmy DeSana, P.P.O.W. Gallery, New York

Third Insert Image: Jimmy DeSana, “Cardboard”, 1985, Silver Dye Bleach Print, 48.3 x 32.4 cm, Estate of Jimmy DeSana, P.P.O.W. Gallery, New York

Bottom Insert Image: Jimmy DeSana, Untitled (Self-Portrait with Graduation Cap), 1978, Polaroid Photo, Diego Cortez No Wave Collection, Cornell University

Elliott Erwitt

The Photography of Elliot Erwitt

Born Elio Romano Erwitz in July of 1928, Elliott Erwitt was a French-American documentary and commercial photographer as well as a film director. Born to Jewish-Russian parents in Paris, he spent his early years in Milan, Italy, The Erwitz family emigrated in 1939 to the United States where they settled in the Los Angeles area of California. 

After securing a position at a commercial darkroom, Erwitt studied photography and film making at the Los Angeles City College. In 1948, he relocated to New York City where he continued his studies at the New School for Social Research. Among the photographers Erwitt met in New York were Edward Steichen, Robert Capa and Roy Stryker who had founded the photo-documentary project for the Farm Security Administration.

During 1949, Erwitt traveled throughout France and Italy where he shot a series of images with his Rolleiflex camera. Upon his return, Roy Stryker hired Erwitt to build a photographic library for the public relations department of the Standard Oil Company. In collaboration with other photographers, Erwitt next worked on Stryker’s project to establish the Pittsburgh Photographic Library, a depository of prints and negatives relating to the history of Pittsburgh that was incorporated into the city’s Carnegie Library.

Elliott Erwitt was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1951 and served as a photographer for the Army Signal Corps in Germany and France until his discharge from duty in 1953. Returning to civilian life, he joined photojournalist Robert Capa’s Magnum Photos, the first cooperative agency for worldwide freelance photographers. Erwitt began a freelance photographer career and created work for “Life”, “Holiday, “Collier’s”, “Look”, and other illustrated publications of the period.

In addition to his commercial work, Erwitt documented social and political events in his photographs. He covered, among others, the tenth anniversary in 1957 of Russia’s October Revolution, President Nixon’s 1959 visit to the Soviet Union, the funeral service for President Kennedy in 1963, and the 2009 inauguration of President Barack Obama. Through Magnum Photos, Erwitt was hired to document film production on several movie sets. He captured iconic images of Marlon Brando on the set of “On the Waterfront” and Marilyn Monroe during filming of “The Seven Year Itch”. Throughout his career, Erwitt continued to have access to the world’s notable figures and shot portraits of Fidel Castro, Jacqueline Kennedy, Che Guevara and Jack Kerouac among others.

Elliott Erwitt was known for his warm, wry sense of humor in the depiction of everyday scenes. He took many black and white candid images of ironic or absurd situations that occurred in ordinary settings. Dogs were also a regular motif in Erwitt’s work. Although he never specifically set out to take dog pictures, dogs appeared in substantial numbers on his contact sheets. Among Erwitt’s twenty-seven volumes of published work, five of them are collections whose focus is exclusive to dogs. Two of these volumes are the 1974 “Son of Bitch”, his first collection, and 1998 “Dog Dogs”, a series taken during Erwitt’s world travels.

Elliott Erwitt devoted his attention towards film making during the 1970s and 1980s. He produced feature films, television commercials and several notable documentaries. Among Erwitt’s documentaries are the 1970 “Arthur Penn: The Director”, “Red, White and Bluegrass” in 1973, and the award-winning 1977 “Glassmakers of Herat, Afghanistan”. He produced numerous programs and movies for HBO in the 1980s, including “The Great Pleasure Hunt”, a series of comedic travel documentaries. Erwitt is credited as camera operator for the 1970 “Gimme Shelter” and still photographer for the 2005 “Bob Dylan: No Direction Home”. 

A  large-scale retrospective of Erwitt’s work, “Elliot Erwitt: Personal Best”, was held in 2011 at the International Center for Photography in New York City. In the same year, he received the ICP’s Infinity Award for Lifetime Achievement. Elliott Erwitt died at his New York home at the age of ninety-five on the twenty-ninth of November in 2023 while sleeping. 

Notes: A documentary film by Adriana Lopez Sanfeliu entitled “Elliott Erwitt: Silence Sounds Good” by Camera Lurid Productions is located at: http://www.cameralucida.fr/en/Documentaries/elliott-erwitt

Top Insert Image: Betina La Plante, “Elliott Erwitt”, Date Unknown, Gelatin Silver Print

Second Insert Image: Elliot Erwitt, “USA, Times Square, New York City”, 1950, Gelatin silver Print, Magnum Photos

Third Insert Image: Elliot Erwitt, “Cuba, Havana, Che Guevara”, 1964, Gelatin Silver Print

Bottom Insert Image: Elliot Erwitt, “USA, New York City, Marlene Dietrich”, 1959, Gelatin Silver Print

Karlheinz Weinberger

The Photography of Karlheinz Weinberger

Born in Zürich in June of 1921, Karlheinz Weinberger was a self-taught Swiss photographer who over his sixty year career documented the outsider culture of rebellious male youths and working-class men. He used the pseudonym “Jim”, taken from a popular 1930 song written by German-Austrian composer Hanns Eisler, for his photographic work from 1948 to 2000.    

From 1936 to 1939, Karlheinz Weinberger attended Zürich’s grammar school and began taking photographs with his first camera. He became a member of the Bund der Nuturfreunde (Association of Nature Enthusiasts) photography club where he developed greater skills in both photographing and processing. In 1942, Weinberger was called for military training after which he served a period of active military service. At the end of the Second World War, he gained temporary employment as a carpet and furniture salesman but also endured periods of unemployment. 

Beginning in 1948, Weinberger became an active member of Zürich’s famous underground gay club “Der Kreis (The Circle)”. He began in the mid-1950s to publish his photos in the underground gay journals “Der Kreis”, printed through the club, and “Club68” Karlheinz Weinberger, Untitled Portrait, Zurich, circa 1970s, Gelatin Silver Print, Karlheinz Weinberger Estatefounded by a small team of former Kreis members. Weinberger  published more than eighty photographs though “Der Kreis” until the journal’s last issue in 1967. It should be noted that “Der Kreis”, besides being the only gay publication to include editorial content in three languages, was the most important European journal promoting the legal and social rights of gay men at that time.

During the 1950s, Karlheinz Weinberger spent his summer holidays in the Mediterranean area where he took portraits on the coasts and islands of Italy and during later excursions into Morocco. Weinberger’s images of sailors, fishermen, beach goers, and dockworkers were later published in “Mediterranean”,  a 2021 posthumous volume, the third of a series through the Swiss publisher Sturm & Drang.

From 1955 to his retirement in 1986, Weinberger was employed in the warehouse department of the Siemens-Albis factory in Zürich; this day-time position provided the finances for his off hours’ photographic work. In 1958, Weinberger met and photographed the young rocker Jimmy Oechslin in the streets of Zürich. Oechslin introduced him to Switzerland’s growing gang culture known by the German term Halbstarker, meaning ‘half-strong’. Groups of Zürich’s young people, influenced by the many aspects of American culture, were looking for an identity of their own. They established an antiauthoritarian subculture based on American film, rock music, customized jean clothing and the riding of motorcycles. 

Intrigued by the teenagers’ edgy look as well as their attitude towards authority, Karlheinz Weinberger began documenting this post-war generation on Zürich’s streets and at local festivals. He later established an improvised portrait studio at the apartment shared with his mother. During this period, Weinberger  became the one of the first photographers granted permission to document the local chapter of the Hells Angels motorcycle club. Between 1964 and 1976, he worked as a freelancer for various sports magazines and specialized in sports reporting in Switzerland and East Germany. 

Karlheinz Weinberger, Untitled, Portrait from 2011 "Jeans", Swiss Institute, New York CitySince 1963, Weinberger presented his work in various group exhibitions in Zürich, Israel, Italy, Canada and the United States. In 1968, he won a prize for his sports photographs at the NIVON Holland competition. Weinberger’s first solo exhibition, entitled “The Hooligans 1955-1960” was held in 1980 at Zürich’s Migros Club School, a recreation and education center. The first institutional exhibition of Weinberger’s work to a wider audience was a major retrospective entitled “Intimate Stranger” held in 2000 at Zürich’s Design Museum. Consisting exclusively of vintage prints mostly developed in Weinberger’s home lab, the show documented his close, but still outsider, view of the Halbstarker gangs. This exhibition later traveled to Vancouver, Canada.

Karlheinz Weinberger passed away in December of 2006 in Zürich at the age of eighty-five. The Galerie Esther Woerdehoff is the owner of the Weinberger Estate which is housed in the Swiss Social Archives in Zürich. In February and March of 2011, the Swiss Institute at St. Marks Place in New York City held an exhibition of Weinberger’s vintage prints curated through the collaboration of the Karlheinz Weinberger Estate and Gianni Jetzer, Curator-at-large at Washington DC’s Hirshhorn Museum. In conjunction with the exhibition, the Swiss Institute published a portfolio of fifty-four images entitled “Karlheinz Weinberger: Jeans”. 

In August of 2017 in conjunction with a large retrospective exhibition at Les Rencontres d’Arles, the German publisher Steidl released French and English editions of “Swiss Rebels”, a collection of Weinberger’s homoerotic images of rockers, bikers, construction workers and athletes. In 2018, publisher Starm & Drang released “Karlheinz Weinberger: Sports” , a collection of work discovered after the artist’s death in 2006. The volume, the second in its series, included one hundred-thirty images taken from thousands of negatives, slides and prints that documented bike races, wrestling matches and weight-lifting events.

Notes: The online magazine on contemporary culture Kvadrat Interwoven has an excellent article on Karlheinz Weinberger’s early career written by Larissa Kasper. This article can be located at: http://kvadratinterwoven.com/foto-jim-zurich

A timeline of Karlheinz Weinberger’s life is available at the Gallery Esther Woerdehoff site, the executor of his estate. This information is located at: https://ewgalerie.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Weinberger_en-2022.pdf

Second Insert Image: Karlheinz Weinberger, Untitled Portrait, Zürich, circa 1970s, Gelatin Silver Print, Karlheinz Weinberger Estate

Fourth Insert Image: Karlheinz Weinberger, Untitled, Portrait from 2011 “Jeans”, Swiss Institute, New York City

Raymond Carrance

The Artwork of Raymond ‘Czanara’ Carrance

Born in Paris on the twenty-fourth of January in 1921, Raymond Carrance was a French photographer and book illustrator whose work became known under the name Czanara. One of the little-known erotic artists of the twentieth-century, he began his career as a costume and set designer for theatrical companies and as a graphic designer for commercial brands, among which was France’s mineral water company Perrier.

In the 1940s and 1950s, Raymond Carramce was commissioned to create elaborate etchings and lithographs as illustrations for published editions by author Pierre Jules Renard and playwright Cyrano de Bergerac. He also illustrated a 1951 edition of Henry du Montherlant’s classic theatrical play “La Ville Dont le Prince Est un Enfant (The City Whose Prince is a Child)”. Clarrance also received a commission for seventeen copper engravings as signed illustrations for a 1971 limited edition folio which included writer Jean Giono’s “Le Chant du Monde: Bourg-Le-Reine (The Song of the World)”. This folio was a special tribute to Jean Giono who had passed away on the eighth of October in 1970. 

As a photographer, Carrance’s private catalogue of homoerotic work is reminiscent of the magical-realist style of his contemporaries, the painters Paul Cadmus and Jared French. His images are simple compositions without extensive detail, distinctly European in style and reverential in nature. Carrance’s unique work contained both simple nude portraits and dreamlike scenes composed with overlaid graphics. The desired atmosphere of these collaged male nude scenes was established by layers of superimposed photographs depicting props, flowers, bodily details, or simple patterns and shadows. Carrance exhibited both his photographic and illustrative work in several venues throughout Paris during the 1960s and 1970s.

Raymond Carrance died in Paris on the fourth of June in 1998 at the age of seventy-seven. He passed in obscurity without heirs; his entire body of work was sold at auction. Carrance’s work was rediscovered by art collector David Deiss who acquired the contents of Carrance’s atelier from a Lyon bookseller upon his death. Focused on the discovery of unknown artists of significance, Deiss is responsible for publishing the 2007 monograph “Czanara: Photographs and Drawings”, an imprint of Carrance’s work through Antinous Press. This imprint was the first book published by creative director Sam Shahid’s new press.

Nicole Canet, publisher and owner of the Parisian gallery “Au Bonheur du Jour”, exhibited her collection of Carrance’s drawings and photographs at her gallery in 2010. The gallery and its publishing arm are known for their focus on early European homoerotic photographers; Canet is recognized for her work as a researcher and archivist of sexual sociology in Paris.  

Notes: For those interested, the Wessel + O’Connor Fine Art gallery has an extensive collection of Raymond Carrance’s photographs, drawings and engravings on their site. The gallery also carries the work of such artists as Jim French, Jean Cocteau and Greg Gorman, among others. Their site is located at: https://wesseloconnor.com/exhibits/czanara/index.php

Auteur Shutter: Studies in Photography has an excellent article entitled “Czanara (Raymond Carrance): Homoerotic Surrealist Photography”, including various reference links, on its site: https://auteurshutter.wordpress.com/2025/07/04/czanara-raymond-carrance-exploring-homoerotic-surrealist-photography/

Top Insert Image: Raymond Carrance, “Flanders, Belgium”, circa 1950-1960s, Vintage Print, 24 x 18 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Raymond Carrance, “Venice”, circa 1950-1940s, Vintage Print, 18 x 17 cm, Private Collection

Angus McBean

The Photography of Angus McBean

Born in the Monmouthshire city of Newbridge on the eighth of June in 1904, Angus Rowland McBean was a Welsh photographer and set designer associated with the Surrealist movement. He went through two main creative periods in his forty-year career: pre-World War II in which he experimented successfully with surrealist images and post-war when his portraiture photography became more conventional and focused on theatrical and entertainment artists.

Angus McBean was the eldest and only son of Clement McBean, of Scottish descent, and Irene Sara Thomas, of Welsh descent. His father, after his military career in the South Wale Borderers, became a surveyor in the mining industry which necessitated frequently moving his family. McBean had his primary education at the Monmouth School for Boys and later attended the Newport Technical College where he developed an interest in photography. At the age of fifteen, McBean bought his first camera and created sets, props and costumes for the amateur dramatic productions at Monmouth’s Lyceum Theater.

In 1925, McBean’s father died from tuberculosis which he had contracted while fighting in the trenches during World War I. After his fathers death, McBean relocated to London where he worked in the antiques department of Liberty’s, London’s luxury department store on Regent Street. In his free time, McBean engaged in photographing his friends, making masks, and attending theater performances in the West End. He left Liberty’s in 1931, grew a distinctive beard, and began a career in photography. McBean served as an apprentice at the New Grafton Street Studio owned by photographer Hugh Cecil who taught him photographic techniques. After a year, McBean established his own studio on Belgrave Road in Victoria, London.

The turning point in Angus McBean’s career came in 1935 when Welsh actor and dramatist Ivor Novello asked him to create masks for playwright Clemence Dane’s adaption of author Max Beerbohm’s “The Happy Hypocrite”. Pleased with the masks, Novello commissioned McBean to take portrait photographs for the production. In 1937, McBean received a commission from the British weekly illustrated journal “The Sketch” for a photograph of actress Beatrix Lehmann in Eugene O’Neill’s “Mourning Becomes Electra”. This portrait was inspired by the surrealist art of the era. McBean, in collaboration with artist Roy Hobdell, produced a series of surrealist-styled portraits of leading actresses for a weekly series which ran until the beginning of World War II. 

After the war, McBean established a new studio on Endell Street in London. One of his first commissions was to photograph the American actress Clare Luce who was appearing in “Anthony and Cleopatra” at Stratford-on-Avon’s Shakespeare Memorial Theater. McBean next produced a series of portraits that incorporated notable objects from the lives of his sitters: Ivor Novello is shown with bound editions of his musicals and Cecil Beaton is surrounded by pages from his scrapbooks. In the 1940s and 1950s, he was the most important photographer of theater and dance personalities. Among his many sitters were Audrey Hepburn, Marlene Dietrich, Noel Coward, Mae West, Katharine Hepburn, Margot Forteyn and Robert Helpmann. 

Angus McBean’s career took a new direction in the 1950s and 1960s as he began shooting color photographs for album covers. He photographed Cliff Richard and the Shadows, Shirley Bassey and the Beverley Sisters, and Spike Mulligan for his album “Milligan Preserved”. McBean also was responsible for the 1963 cover art of The Beatles album “Please, Please Me” which showed the group leaning over the balcony at the EMI offices in London. Six years later, he was to recreate the shot for the the proposed “Get Back” album; however, the recreated shot later appeared on the two retrospectives of the group’s work “1962-1966” and “1967-1970”. 

In the 1960s, McBean purchased Flemings Hall in Bedingfield, Suffolk and undertook a major renovation project; this estate would be his home until his death. In this period, he gradually reduced the number of commissions he accepted but continued to work on selected projects. In 1984, McBean appeared as a special guest in musician-composer David Sylvian’s music video “Red Guitar”. Sylvian, who has a strong interest in McBean’s work, was directly inspired by McBean’s 1938 surrealistic portrait of cinema and theatrical actress Flora Robson. 

Over the course of his career, Angus McBean produced two hundred and eighty portrait photographs; he was also produced seventy-nine self portraits. In 1990, McBean fell ill on a holiday in Morocco and, after returning to England, died at Ipswich Heath Road Hospital on the 9th of June in 1990, eighty-six years after his birth. His work is in many private and public collections including London’s National Portrait Gallery, the Mander & Mitchenson Collection at the University of Bristol Theatre Collection, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Royal National Theater Archive, and the Shakespeare Center Library and Archive in Stratford-on-Avon. 

Note: In the spring of 1942, Angus McBean’s career was temporarily ruined when he was arrested in the city of Bath for criminal acts of homosexuality. He was sentenced to four years in prison; however he was released in the autumn of 1944. After the end of the second World War, McBean was able to successfully resume his career. In the late 1940s, he formed a close, yet brief, relationship with male model Sebastian Minton. McBean helped Minton, who had ambitions of becoming an actor, put together a photographic portfolio for studio presentations.

Note: If anyone knows the identity of the actress in the fourth photo of the header photo array, please send me that information via the contact page. Thank you.

Top Insert Image: Angus McBeam, “Self Portrait”, circa 1951, Bromide Print, 29.4 x 26 cm, National Portrait Gallery, London

Second Insert Image: Angus McBean, “Surrealist Beach Scene with a Male Figure”, circa 1949, Hand-Colored Silver Print, 50.5 x 67.0 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Angus McBean, “Vivien Leigh ‘Twelfth Night’ Old Vic Tour”, 1961, Bromide Print, Private Collection

Fourth Insert Image: Angus McBean, “Choreographer and Dancer Berto Pasuko”, 1947, Gelatin Silver Print, 37.5 x 28.6 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Angus McBean, “Binkie Beaumont, Angela Baddeley and Emlyn Williams”, 1947, Bromide Print, 38 x 29.7 cm, Harvard Theater Collection, Harvard University, National Portrait Gallery

Robert Doisneau

The Photography of Robert Doisneau

Born in April of 1912 at Gentilly, a commune in Paris’s southern suburbs, Robert Doisneau was a French photographer. One of the pioneers of photojournalism, he was a strong advocate of Humanist Photography which, instead of focusing on newsworthy events, placed emphasis on everyday human experiences with all their customs and mannerisms. Doisneau is best known for his modest images of intermingled social classes and eccentrics in contemporary Paris cafes and streets.

Robert Doisneau was orphaned at an early age with the deaths of both his father in World War I and his mother three years later. Raised by an aunt, he enrolled at the age of thirteen in the École Estienne from which he graduated with lithography and engraving diplomas in 1929. It was during these studies that Doisseau began taking his first photographs; he shot images of the city’s cobbled streets before progressing onto adult portraits. At the end of the 1920s, Doisneau was employed as an advertising draftsman for Atelier Ullmann. Seizing the opportunity to work as a camera assistant in its graphic studio, he later became a staff photographer.

In 1931, Doisneau became an assistant to the modernist photographer André Vigneau, known for his photographic work in the three volume “Encyclopédia Photographique de l’Art: Le Musée du Louvre” and other museum art books. In 1932 Doisneau sold his first photographic story to the Excelsior magazine. After five years of working as an advertising photographer for Renault, he earned his living by doing freelance advertising, engraving and postcard photography. In 1939, Doisneau was hired by the Rapho, a press agency founded by Hungarian immigrant Charles Rado which specialized in humanist photography. It was through this agency that Doisneau began his professional street photography. 

During World War II, Robert Doisneau served as both soldier and photographer. Until the end of the war, he used his draftsmanship, lettering and engraving skills to forge passports and identification papers for the French Resistance. Post-war, Doisneau returned to freelance photography; he sold his work to Life and other international magazines. Despite a brief membership with the Alliance Photo Agency and an invitation from Magnum Photos, Doisneau remained a loyal photographer for the Rapho press agency throughout his working life. 

Doisneau reached the height of his career in the 1950s. His most recognizable work, “Le Baiser de l’Hôtel de Ville (Kiss by the Hôtel de Volle)”, was done for an issue of Life magazine. This photograph of a couple kissing in the busy streets of Paris became an internationally recognized symbol of young love in Paris. For the photo shoot, Doisneau had posed the couple, aspiring actors Françoise Delbart and Jacques Carteaud, at the Place de la Concorde, the Rue de Rivoli, and finally the Hôtel de Ville. The photograph was published in the June 12, 1950 issue of Life; the relationship between the couple only lasted for nine months. 

Robert Doisneau continued to work through the 1960s and 1970s as picture magazines were closing and television was gaining popularity. He produced children’s books, advertising photography, and worked on a series of celebrity portraits which included, among others, Pablo Picasso, Fernand Léger, Jean Cocteau, Georges Braque, and Alberto Giacometti. Doisneau also worked with writers and poets such as Swiss-born novelist Blaise Cendrars, an important member of the Montparnasse artistic community, and poet and screenwriter Jacques Prévert, a prominent figure in the poetic realist film movement. Prévert wrote the script for the two-part, universally acclaimed 1945 “Les Enfants du Paradis” by Marcel Carné.

In 1936, Doisneau married Pierette Chaumaison, whom he had met on a holiday in 1934 when she bicycled through the village. Two daughters, Annette and Francine, were born through the marriage; Francine would later work as Doisneau’s assistant from 1979 until his death. Pierette Chaumaison died in 1993 suffering from Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases. Robert Doisneau died six months later in April of 1994, after a triple heart bypass and suffering from acute pancreatitis. A shy and humble man by nature, he personally delivered his photographic work to his clients even at the height of his fame. Doisneau is buried, next to his wife, in the cemetery located at Raizeux in north-central France.

Note: Robert Doisneau’s photo archives include approximately four-hundred fifty thousand photographs. He personally established a method of thematic sorting to simplify research. At the Atelier of Robert Doisneau, ARD, there are currently fifty-one portfolios online for viewing. The atelier’s website address is: https://www.robert-doisneau.com/en/atelier/

Top Insert Image: Robert Doisneau, “Self Portrait”, 1947, Gelatin Silver Print

Second Insert Image: Robert Doisneau, “Le Baiser de l’Hôtel de Ville (Kiss by the Hôtel de Volle)”, 1950, Gelatin Silver Print

Third Insert Image: Robert Doisneau, “Les Frères, Rue du Docteur Lecène, Paris”, 1934, Gelatin Silver Print

Bottom Insert Image: Gérard Dussandier, “Robert Doisneau”, 1960-1969, Gelatin Silver Print

Alina Noir

The Photography of Alina Noir

Born in Romania in 1981, Alina Noir is an visual artist, author and choreographer. Her education in literature and art history was internationally based with studies in Romania, Germany, France, Sweden and New Zealand. Noir studied classical and contemporary dance at Les Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montréal and Lyon’s École Nationale de Musique de Danse et D’art Dramatique. This multi-cultural academic background has had strong influence on her work as a photographer.

Alina Noir maintains an artist studio in the Renaissance city of Lyon, France, where she works with a team of ballet dancers and actors. Her work is influenced by the city’s classical Renaissance and Baroque paintings, in particular the works of Michelangelo Caravaggio. Initially focused on color photography, Noir has incorporated black and white images and re-colored images into her oeuvre. She shoots both theatrical and nude photography with an emphasis on the interaction of bodies in a given space. A variety of emotions and situations, such as fragility, force, solitude, despair and connection, are expressed in Noir’s images. 

For each of her photographic projets, Noir shoots a series of images that often contain an autobiographical dimension. An early project entitled “I Turned My Blood Into a River” was a personal anthology of legends and myths. Noir’s “Cathedrals” was an exploration of her favorite artistic themes presented more mathematically in concept. This project examined the intricate ways , other than sexual or emotional, in which human bodies connect in space. During the winter months of 2018 to 2019, Noir created “Sculptures in the City”, a series of sixty digital photographs of random constructions and urban landscapes in Montreal. Based on the 1930s Surrealist art form of objet trouvé (found objects), the project’s impersonal images evoked sensations of both strangeness and displacement.

In 2019, Alina Noir produced a two-part project “La Bal-Act One” and “La Bal-Act Two”. The first part was a series of photographs taken during May and June of 2019 in which characters were involved in scenes both improvised and choreographed. In the images, references to art history and popular culture were combined with contemporary issues, such as gender, identity and body control. The shooting for “Act Two” took place in Lyon between July and September of 2019. These images were studies of choreographed movements that examined how desire, vulnerability, and intimacy become motivating forces in one’s life. The figural gestures portrayed in the photographs draw upon gestures exhibited in Renaissance paintings.

In January of 2020, Noir created “The Magic Square” series at the Institute for Contemporary Art during Lyon’s fifteenth Biennial for Contemporary Art. Inspired by Albrecht Dürer’s 1514 engraving “Melencolia I”, this series of photographs explored the notion of contemporary masculinity and examined its relationship to the male image in western art. In 2021, Noir created the series “Ships Anchored in Fog”, a set of nine self-portraits visually inspired by statues from classical Antiquity. These photographs translated certain aspects of mathematical set theory into the art of dance. The uniqueness of the dance movements, reinterpreted through the choice of statues, became static choreography which allied the subliminal creative idea with infinite sets. 

Alina Noir created a collection of twenty dance performances from 2018 to 2022 among which were “Keeping This Body Alive”, “Black Bird”, and “No Ghost Just A Bell”. Her “Chrysanthèmes” was a 2021 performance at Lyon’s Maison de la Danse that translated certain aspects of Ferdinand de Saussure’s Semiotics theory into dance movements. The Semiotics theory provides a framework for understanding how humans use signs to make meaning of the world around them; however, an important assumption of this theory is that signs do not convey meaning that is inherent to the object being represented. The performance piece is centered around the symbol of the chrysanthemum as seen in two different cultures, Alina Noir interpreted the chrysanthemum in Romania (a symbol of mourning, death and rebirth) and dancer Mio Fusho interpreted the flower in Japan (a symbol of light, hope and metamorphosis).

Alina Noir’s photography has been featured in many print and online  publications. She has exhibited her work in both collective and solo exhibitions in Lyon, Paris, Berlin, Potsdam, Prague, and Geneva. 

Alina Noir’s portfolio site, which contains contact information and images of her work including installations and performance videos, is located at: https://www.alinanoir.com/index.html

Note: An article describing Albrecht Dürer’s 1514 engraving “Melencolia I” can be found at the online site of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art located at: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/336228

Top Insert Image: Alina Noir, “Sculptures in the City” Series, 2018-2019, Color Print

Second Insert Image: Alina Noir, “La Bal-Act Two” Series, 2019, Color Print

Bottom Insert Image: Alina Noir, “Sculptures in the City” Series, 2018-2019, Color Print

Steven Arnold

The Tableau-Vivant Photography of Steven Arnold

Born in Oakland, California in May of 1943, Steven F. Arnold was an American multidisciplinary artist. A protege of Spanish surrealist artist Salvador Dali, he was a photographer, filmmaker, painter, illustrator, set and costume designer, and assemblage artist. Encouraged in his fantasies by his parents, Arnold at a young age devoted himself to the art of transformation, dressed himself and others in costume and built puppets and theater sets to perform shows for the neighborhood children.

Arnold entered Oakland’s Technical High School in the autumn of 1956. There he met Pandora who would become his muse, collaborator and lifelong friend. This inseparable pair of artists and performers were eventually mentored by their high school art teacher, Violet Chew, who encouraged her students to use their art as a means to explore and solve the problems they faced. By introducing the young Arnold to art history, antique shopping and Eastern spiritual traditions, Chew made a lasting impact on his philosophy and art. She also introduced Arnold to her friend, the painter Ira Yeager, a true Bohemian renowned for his landscapes and scenes of Native Americans, and lifelong partner of lawyer and ceramic artist George Hellyer. 

After graduation in the spring of 1961, Steven Arnold attended the San Francisco Art Institute on a full scholarship. After earning perfect grades for two years, he took a break in the summer of 1963 to study in Paris at the École des Beaux-Arts. Feeling confined by its traditional curriculum, Arnold along with several American classmates rented villas on Formentera, an island off the coast of Spain. For several months, the group lived communally, took LSD, explored the island, and experimented with costumes and paints. Arnold returned to San Francisco in the fall of 1964 and resumed his studies at the Art Institute where he wrote, designed and directed three short films in the following two years.

Arnold’s final student film before receiving his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree was “Messages, Messages”. Influenced by Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel and German Expressionism, this journey of the psyche through the unconscious starred jazz poet Ruth Weiss and premiered to critical acclaim at New York’s Regis Hotel. After receiving invitations to several international film festivals, Arnold and his collaborator Michael Weiss screened the film and a rare collection of early surrealist films at the Palace Theater in San Francisco’s North Beach. This evening film show led to “Arnold’s Nocturnal Dreamshows”, weekly midnight movie showcases that became nationally popular in the 1970s. Through performances at these midnight showings, the psychedelic San Francisco drag troupe, “The Cockettes”, was launched into underground fame. Arnold became one of the original group of rock poster artists and created some of the first posters for the famed Matrix nightclub on Fillmore Street. 

In 1970 while finishing his Master in Fine Arts, Steven Arnold began filming his “Luminous Procuress”. This 1971 film of bizarre, mystical and sexual vignettes won Arnold the 1972 New Director’s Award at the International Film Festival in San Francisco. With this success, Arnold’s work was shown at an extended exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art; he also received a second invitation to the Cannes’Director’s Fortnight. Impressed with the film, Salvador Dali arranged a private screening for special guests from New York’s elite. In 1974 as a favorite of Dali, Arnold began  to study with him in Spain and eventually became a member of Dali’s Court of Miracles, which included such notables as David Bowie, Marianne Faithful, Mick Jagger, French singer Amanda Lear, and American supermodel Peggy Ann Freeman.

From 1982 to 1989, Arnold worked through his Los Angeles photographic studio and west coast salon, Zanzibar. Through this new form of expression, he designed and shot tableau-vivants for four books. Tableau-vivants are carefully posed scenes of one or more actors or models, usually costumed, who are theatrically placed amid props or scenery. Many thousands of these photographs and negatives were never published in his lifetime and are housed in Los Angeles’s Steve Arnold Museum and Archive. Arnold cultured many close friendships with other kindred spirits among whom were actress Ellen Burstyn, know for her portrayals of complicated women in dramas, and fashion designer and critic Simon Doonan, now the husband of ceramic potter and interior designer Jonathan Adler.

Steven Arnold gleaned inspiration for his work from his dreams, fine art masterpieces, world religions, sexuality, Jungian archetypes and social attitudes and excesses. He would work through both night and day to sketch his dreams and visions into a growing collection of sketchbooks. These sketches formed the basis of his photographic work and the large body of paintings and assemblage sculptures produced from 1990. Steven Arnold, an artist who never pursued fame, status, or wealth, was an integral figure in the American counterculture for thirty years. Diagnosed with AIDS in 1988 at the height of his popularity, Arnold died from complications due to the virus in August of 1994 in West Hollywood, California, at the age of fifty-one.

Steven Arnold’s works are in the collections of New York’s Whitney Museum and Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Oakland Museum of California, the ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archive and Museum in Los Angeles, the Cincinnati Art Museum, and Germany’s Frankfurter Kunstverein. His work continues to be exhibited worldwide and was the subject of director Vishnu Dass’s 2019 documentary “Steven Arnold: Heavenly Bodies”. 

Notes: The Steven Arnold Museum and Archives’s website is located at: https://stevenarnoldarchive.com

An article entitled “Illumination Procured: Steven Arnold and the Body Electric”, written by Steve Seid for the University of California, Berkeley, Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), discusses Arnold’s “Luminous Procuress” and the participants involved. This article can be found at: https://bampfa.org/page/illumination-procured-steven-arnold-and-body-eclectic

Top Insert Image: Don Weinstein, “Steven F. Arnold”, Date Unknown, Gelatin Silver Print, Don Weinstein Photography

Second Insert Image: Steven F. Arnold, “Pandora’s Offering”, 1982, Gelatin Silver Print, The Steven Arnold Museum and Archives

Third Insert Image: Steven F. Arnold, “Kunga Brings My Crown of Dreams”, 1983, Gelatin Silver Print, The Steven Arnold Museum and Archives

Bottom Insert Image: Steven F. Arnold, “Self Portrait”, 1987, Gelatin Silver Print, The Steven Arnold Museum and Archives

Francisco Martins

The Photography of Francisco Martins

Born in Cascais, a municipality of Lisbon in 1980, Francisco Martins is a Portuguese photographer, illustrator and graphic designer. He developed his drawing skills from a very young age; the focus of his artwork became the human body depicted in a realistic style. Spending long hours drawing faces and bodies, Martins was captivated by the idea of capturing on paper a subject at a particular moment in time, in effect rendering the subject timeless and beyond mortality. 

Throughout his art history studies, Martins felt especially inspired by the works produced during the Renaissance and Late Baroque periods, the Classical art of Europe’s seventeenth-century and the works of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood which included such artists as William Holman Hunt, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and, later, William Morris and John William Waterhouse. Martins was also inspired by the portraits of past monarchs who, considered to have been anointed by God, were depicted in divine postures surrounded by auras of light and magical atmospheres. 

Francisco Martins, drawn to these painting styles and techniques, began to apply these same principles to his own artwork. Along with his love for nature, he has a deep fascination for Greek and Celtic mythology, as well as the folklore of his native Portugal. Martins’s book collection of fairy tales and local lore told by elders around fires on cold nights played an important role in shaping his graphic style. 

Between 2000 and 2004, Martins attended Lisbon’s Institute of Art, Design, Technology and Communication where he earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts in Graphic Design. After graduation, Martins began to experiment in photography. He combined photography with his illustrative techniques to create hyper-realistic illustrations that depicted scenes from ancient myths. As his photographic skills matured, Martins began to focus more on fashion and his favorite form of expression, portrait photography.

Begun in 2016, Francisco Martins’s “LongIsBeautiful” project is a photographic series that celebrates that which is different and aims to break down labels and stereotypes. Primarily it is an attempt to break rigid trends in the fashion industry, elevate the industry’s  fundamental values, and confront society’s rigid expectations of what a man’s image should be. The project also glorifies the image of men in communion with Nature, a communion exemplified by Native Americans and Brazilian and Polynesian native cultures. 

The “LongIsBeautiful” project associates long hair with the sixth sense and sees it as a celebration of the natural world of which we are a part. Societies, especially ancient ones, believed that hair was more than an aesthetic attribute; a person threatened or in danger would feel one’s hair rise up on the back of his neck, an unconscious perception of a warning. The project depicts modern man as a being who recognizes and respects the importance of the natural environment. 

Concurrently with his “LongIsBeautiful” project, Martins began a project entitled “RedIsBeautiful”, a photographic series that was started with the goal of ending the negative stigma that is usually associated with red hair. The rarest of all hair colors on the planet, less than two percent of the world’s population, red hair is often an excuse for bullying, derogatory comments, harassment and even hate crimes. There are high incidents of both depression and suicides among those with red hair due to such occurrences. In Martins’s vision, red hair plays a major role in fairy tales and should be recognized as an exceptional trait. His project hopes to increase self-esteem and shape the fashion world into a more accepting and appreciative industry. 

As an independent artist, Francisco Martins’s work has appeared  in many periodicals including Umbigo Magazine, Egoísta Magazine, DIF Magazine, PARQ Magazine, Computer Arts Portugal Magazine and MC1R Magazine, among others. He has also done photographic work with guitarist Steve Vai for Ibanez Guitars. 

Martins’s work was featured in two compendiums of illustrations from worldwide artists by the German art publishing house TASCHEN. His images appeared in “Illustration Now: Volume 3” and “Illustration Now: Portraits”, as well as in the promotional calendars and diaries. Martins’s work was also featured in the official catalogues for the 2009 Lisbon Offf festival and the 2010 Offf in Paris.

Francisco Martins’s work can be found at his Instagram site located at: https://www.instagram.com/franciscomartinsphotography

Francisco Martins’s Behance site, which combines his three fields of graphic work, illustration and photography, is located at: http://www.behance.net/FrancMartins

Second Insert Image: Francisco Martins, “João David, Cascais”, 2019, “LongIsBeautiful” Project, Black and White Print

Third Insert Image: Francisco Martins, “Chris Pritchard, Cascais”, 2015, “RedIsBeautiful” Project, “NC1R?-The Magazine for Redheads, Issue 5, 2016

Bottom Insert Image: Francisco Martins, “António Godinho, Cascais”, 2018, “RedIsBeautiful” and “LongIsBeautiful” Projects, Color Print

Gordon Coster

The Photography of Gordon Coster

Born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1906, Gordon H. Coster was an American photographer known for his abstracted industrial images and his photojournalism documenting civil rights and labor issues. Interested in photography from an early age,  he joined the Baltimore Camera Club in the early 1920s and garnered a reputation when his modernistic images were accepted in international photographic salons. At nineteen years old, Coster’s 1925 Bauhaus-inspired image of Baltimore’s Washington Monument, “Shadow of the Washington Monument”, was published in the Baltimore Sun’s rotogravure section. 

From 1920 to 1925, Gordon Coster worked for the Bachrach Portrait Studio in Baltimore. Once photography replaced drawing in advertising illustration, he moved to New York City where he became employed by the prestigious Underwood & Underwood. Originally the largest producer and distributor of stereoscopic and other photographic images, the photographic studio became a pioneer in the field of news bureau photography. Coster secured his place in the field by creating innovative advertising and industrial photo-illustrations for newspapers, magazines and catalogues. 

From the beginning of 1927 through 1936, Coster documented labor union activities. He relocated to Chicago in 1930 where he founded a mid-western branch of Underwood & Underwood. During his years in Chicago, Coster developed an unique artistic style for his evening cityscapes. These experimental works presented an abstracted perspective of Chicago’s buildings, shot with tilted angles and occasionally through unfocused lenses. Coster shifted his career to photojournalism with freelance work for such periodicals as Life, Scientific American, Time, Fortune, and Holiday.

Gordon Coster’s personal commitment to the welfare of his fellow citizens led to many extensive documentary projects. In the late 1930s, he produced many projects dedicated to American life in the mid-west. Coster created a series on the lives of wheat farmers and a detailed photo-documentary on the Tennessee Valley Authority Dam Project. Passed in 1933, the TVA project, though controversial at the time, transformed the wild Tennessee Valley river system into a stable region with flood-control, safe navigation, electrification, and economic development. Through the 1930s and 1940s, Coster documented the impact of World War II on the U.S. home front through images of  factories repurposed for military production, women assembly-line workers, and rallies to support the troops.

In 1946 Bauhaus professor László Moholy-Nagy, who founded the Chicago Institute of Design, invited Coster to lecture at the institute’s course “The New Vision in Photography” alongside such eminent photographers as Paul Strand, Erwin Blumenfeld and Berenice Abbott. Coster returned to lecture in 1950 to 1951 and later in 1960 with a focus on socially-oriented themes. In 1955, Edward Steichen selected Coster’s work for inclusion in the landmark exhibition “The Family of Man” held at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art. 

Gordon Coster ceased his photographic work in 1964 and eventually retired in 1982. He passed away in 1988 at the age of sixty-two. Coster’s work has been included in exhibitions at Houston’s Contemporary Art Museum, the Stephen Daiter Gallery in Chicago,  London’s Viewfinder Gallery, and New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Notes: Gordon Coster’s  photographic work is included in the current 2023 exhibition “Trick Photography and Visual Effects”  (January 19 to March 18) at the Keith de Lellis Gallery located at 41 East 57th Street in New York City.

A major collection of Gordon Coster’s work, including over twenty-five thousand prints, negatives, transparencies, and film reels, is housed at the Research Center of the Chicago History Museum. 

Top Insert Image: Gordon Coster, “Self Portrait”, circa 1945, Gelatin Silver Print, 20.3 x 25.4 cm, Private Collection

Second Insert Image: Gordon Coster, “Eliot Elisofon”, 1942, Gelatin Silver Print, Life Magazine Cover July 13, 1942, International Center of Photography

Bottom Insert Image: Gordon Coster, “Chicago Outdoor Street Market”, 1944, Gelatin Silver Print, Life Magazine Collection, 33.7 x 26.7 cm, International Center of Photography