Category: photography

James Baldwin: “The Child is Filled with Darkness”

Photographer Unknown, The Child is Filled with Darkness

“In a moment someone will get up and turn on the light. Then the old folks will remember the children and they won’t talk anymore that day. And when light fills the room, the child is filled with darkness. He knows that every time this happens he’s moved just a little closer to that darkness outside. The darkness outside is what the old folks have been talking about. It’s what they’ve come from. It’s what they endure. The child knows that they won’t talk any more because if he knows too much about what’s happened to them, he’ll know too much too soon, about what’s going to happen to him.” 

—-James Baldwin, Sonny’s Blues

“Sonny’s Blues” is a short story written by James Baldwin, originally published in 1957 in the Partisan Review, a small circulation quarterly New York City magazine dealing with politics, literature, and culture. Written in the first-person singular narrative style, the story presents the memories of a 1950s black teacher in Harlem as he reacts to his brother Sonny’s drug addiction, arrest, and recovery. 

Baldwin’s story is set in New York City of the post–World War Two era, when an important political and cultural change was occurring. A diverse array of artists from all over the world, learning and borrowing ideas and techniques from each other,  converged in the city and made New York a new cultural capital. Despite differences in style and subject matter, these artists were responding, through their work, to what they believed was America’s unique cultural and political crisis.

While the art scene in New York was rapidly expanding, thousands of African American soldiers were returning home from the war and heading north toward communities like Harlem.  Instead of finding new job opportunities and equal rights, the returning men found newly constructed housing projects and vast urban slums. Hundreds of homes in Harlem had been leveled to build these housing projects, which would eventually become symbols of urban blight and poverty,. This experience would be faced by thousands of other African-Americans in the years after the war’s conclusion.

Although America in the 1950s was generally more conservative, the groundwork for the 1960s radical political movements was being laid. The civil rights movement, which had begun in the South earluer in the decade, had started to rapidly spread across the country as millions of African Americans began to seek equal rights. Written at this critical juncture in history, James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” is a testament to the frustration of life in the cities of America and this frustration’s eventual transformation into a political and artistic movement.

Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” was adapted for a short film of the same name by Gregory Scott Williams Jr for his second year project at New York University’s Graduate Film Program. Written and directed by Williams, the short, seventeen-minute film was produced by Seith Mann and starred actor Charles Parnell as the narrator-brother David, and New York-based poet and verbal stylist Saul Williams in the role of Sonny. The cinematography was by Cybel Martin, featuring the music of Gil Scott-Heron and Ray Charles with an original score by composer and pianist John Bickerton. The film can be found in its entirely at YouTube:   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Y9CDEfnKvQ

Harald Kreutzberg

Hans Robertson, “Portrait of Harald Kreutzberg”, 1931

Born in Liberec, Czech Republic in December of 1902, Harald Kreutzberg was a modern dancer and choreographer, known for his roles in both traditional ballets and expressive dance dramas. He played a major role in the development of the expressionist modern dance in Germany. 

Trained at the Dresden Ballet School, Kreutzberg studied under two of the most important figures in modern dance, Mary Wigman and Rudolf Laban, and was a critical link in the aesthetic lineage that gave rise to American choreographer and composer Alwin Nikolais, choreographer and dance educator Hanya Holm, and many other U.S. choreographers. 

In 1926, Harald Kreutzberg was in Swiss theater choreographer Max Terpis’s “Don Morte”, a version of Edgar Allen Poe’s novel “The Masque of the Red Death”.  A year later, he appeared in the plays “Turnadot and Jedermann” and as Puck for “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, both directed by Max Reinhardt. Kreutzberg  accompanied Reinhardt to New York City where he began a tour of the United States, Canada, and Europe with the dancer Yvonne Georgi. 

While his impact on expressionist modern dance was sweeping Europe, in the United States, Kreutzberg was considered by many as a major force in the development of the male modern dancer. He was not afraid to challenge the gender norms in his time. Kreutzberg tended to incorporate feminine movements and costuming in his performances, especially alongside his dance partner Yvonne Georgi. He specifically inspired male dancers by breaking the stereotypical roles of princes, birds, and mythical gods. 

With their international tours from 1928-1931, Kreutzberg and Yvonne Georgi exposed the public to the style of expressionist dance. Many gay male dancers in Germany also pursued their careers during the years of the National Socialist government. He was the most notable among them as his long-term partnership with his accompanist and composer Friedrich Wilckens was an open secret. While other gay men were imprisoned and forced to wear a pink triangle, Kreutzberg was allowed to tour throughout Germany and abroad.

In 1943, Harald Kreutzberg appeared as a jester in Georg Willhelm’s film “Paracelsus”, in which he performed a modern hypnotic dance. Choreographer George Balanchine and writer Lincoln Kirstein invited him to share a program with the New York City Ballet in the late 1940s. Kreutzberg established his own dance school in 1955 in Bern, Switzerland, and retired from the stage in 1959. He continued to choreograph for others and teach at his school until his death in Bern on April 25, 1968. 

Insert Image: German photographer Hans Robertson, who specialized in the genre of dance, took this photo, on December 11, 1902, showing  Harald Kreutzberg wearing a headdress for a performance at the Volksbühne in Berlin.  

Stephen Busken, “Jesse Metcalfe”

Stephen Busken, “Jesse Metcalfe”, 2014, Photo Shoot, Styled by Monty Jackson

Stephen Busken, the son of a bakery owner in Cincinnati, Ohio, is a portrait, fashion, and architecture photographer living and working in East Los Angeles. Known for injecting his energetic personality into his work, he combines his technical knowledge with his artistic sense to create both soulful and elegant images.

Busken has done a long series of portrait work, shooting images of interior designer Jeremiah Brent, multi-media artist Petra Cortright, floral designer Eric Butterbaugh, and painter Zachary Crane, among others. He has also done corporate work for such clients as Lexus, Bravo, Vogue, Interview, Traditional Home, Esquire, Interiors Magazine, and MM Magazine. 

This series of photographs is the second photo shoot by Stephen Busken of actor Jesse Metcalfe. The first shoot was a black and white image series for the June 20th, 2015 issue of Flaunt, a digital American satirical fashion and cultural magazine which engages art with technology.

Mikolaj Kaczmarek

Photographer Unknown, “Combattants de la Grande Polgne (Fighters of Greater Poland)”, 1918-19, Colorization by Mikolaj Kaczmarek

Mikolaj Kaczmarek is a Polish graphic artist and photographer. Recognized for the quality of his colorization work on historical photos, he now works in conjunction with Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance and the Polish National Fund. 

Examples of Kaczmarek’s work, including photos and histories of Polish freedom-fighters during World War II, can be found at: https://www.facebook.com/KolorHistorii/?ref=page_internal

Sunil Gupta

The Photographic Work by Sunil Gupta

Born in New Delhi, India in 1953, Sunil Gupta is an artist, educator, photographer, and curator. He studied at the London’s Royal College of Art and completed his doctoral program at the University of Westminster in 2018. He has been involved with independent photography as a critical practice since the 1970s focusing on race, migration and queer issues. Gupta’s work has been instrumental in raising awareness around the political realities for international gay rights and the visible tensions between tradition and modernity, both public and private.

In the mid-1970s, Gupta studied under Lisette Model at the New School for Social Research and became interested in the idea of gay public space. It was during this period that he shot his early street series “Christopher Street, New York”, documenting the daily lives of gay men in lower New York City. 

In the 1980s, Gupta constructed his “Exiles” series, consisting of documentary images of Indian gay men in the architectural spaces of Delhi, which with images and texts described the conditions for gay men in India at that time. His series with the fictional name, “Mr. Malhotra’s Party”, was shot twenty years later and updates this theme during a time in which queer identities are more open and also reside in virtual space on the internet and in private parties.

Gay nights at local clubs in Delhi are always sign-posted as private parties in a fictitious person’s name to get around Section 377, a British colonial law, which still criminalizes homosexuality in India. Mr Malhotra is is the ubiquitous Punjabi refugee who arrived post partition and contributed to the development of the city.

Among Sunil Gupta’s published works are the monographs: “Wish You Were Here: Memories of a Gay Life” published by Yoda Press, New Delhi in 2008; and “Pictures From Here”, published by Chris Boot Ltd., New York, in 2003. Along with photographer Charan Singh, whose work is informed by HIV/AIDS work in India, Sunil Gupta exhibited in 2008 “Dissent and Desire” at Houston’s  Contemporary Arts Museum, which was accompanied by the book, “Delhi: Communities of Belonging”.

Sunil Gupta is a Professorial Fellow at UCA, Farnham, and Visiting Tutor at the Royal College of Art, London, and was the Lead Curator for the Houston Foto-Fest in 2018. Gupta’s work is in many private and public collections including, George Eastman House; Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Royal Ontario Museum; Tate Museum in London; and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Note: For those interested in Sunil Gupta’s work, a lecture at the International Center of Photography  by Sunil Gupta on his life and work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7aPdzwCKvP4

Bottom Insert Image: Sunil Gupta, “The New Pre-Raphaelites 3%”, 2007, Color Print. jpg

Max Dupain

 

Max Dupain, “Tea Towel Trio”, 1934, Silver Gelatin Print, 29.5 x 22 cm

Born in April of 1911 in Sydney, Australia, Maxwell Spencer Dupain was an Australian photographer whose influential style of commercial photography emphasized the geometric forms of his industrial and architectural subjects. He studied at both the East Sydney Technical College and the Julian Ashton Art School between 1933 and 1935, and  apprenticed with commercial photographer Cecil Bostock from 1930 to 1934.

During World War II, Max Dupain worked for the army camouflage unit; upon deployment, he worked for the Australian Department of Information until 1947. When he returned to his studio work, Dupain concentrated on more abstract architectural and industrial imagery instead of his previous portraiture and landscape work. This more abstract imagery established him as one of the most significant Modernist photographers in Australia.

Living in Sydney all his life, Dupain photographed the city from the 1930s until his death in July of 1992. Although traveling a few times abroad, including photographing the Seidler Australian Embassy in 1988, he was chiefly interested in the beaches and cities of Australia. Dupain’s photographic series of Australia’s beach culture are his most enduring images, with his 1937 “Sunbaker”, a low-angle shot of a male sunbather on the beach, becoming an icon of the Australian life.

Simple and direct in his work, Max Dupain, feeling that color was restricting in its objectivity, remained an adherent to black and white photography. His work has been collected by most of the major galleries in Australia and resides in many private collections. Dupain’s work was featured at the Photographer’s Gallery in London to celebrate his eightieth birthday, At the age of eighty-two, he was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 1982. Maxwell Dupain continued his work in photography until his death in July of 1992.

Note: Max Dupain’s collection of twenty-eight thousand archived negatives are now catalogued and preserved in the New South Wales State Library located in Sydney.

Vangelis Kyris

 

Photography by Vangelis Kyris

Born in Athens, Greece, Vangelis Kyris started his multi-faceted career as the fashion editor of Gynaika, one of Greece’s top women’s popular magazines. Recognized for his artistic vision, he began his photographic work through collaborations with Vogue, Elle Magazine, Marie Clare, and Lacoste, which led to international projects with Puma and Nina Ricci.

Vangelis Kyris’ body of work includes not only fashion editorials but also celebrity portraits, including those of Woody Allen, model Gisele Bundchen, actress Jerry Hall, and French electronic-composer Jean Michel Jarre. He participated in Georgio Armani’s 2004 book “Facce da Sport (Faces in Sport)” and in the 2016 museum-digital archive project entitled “Emotions of the Athletic Body” held at the Armani/Silos fashion art museum in Milan.

Religion, nature in its different geographical locations, and the perplexed emotions of human beings in its varied forms are mixed with Vangelis Kyris’ obsession for beauty to form the themes behind his  photographic works. To these works, he adds a sensibility to the forms and culture of Hellenic civilization, often paying tribute in his photographs to Greek painter Yannis Tsarouchis.

One of Vangelis Kyris’ most recent series is his collaboration with Bulgarian photographer and dancer Anotoli Georgiev, entitled “A Voyage Within”. This portrait series is seen through the context of a global travel, starting from Asia and Africa and ending in Greece. The creative portraits take their roots form the local traditions, are printed on canvas, and hand-embellished by Georgiev to give them a third-dimension through texture and volume. With this addition, contemporary photography joins with the traditional methods of tea-dyeing and thread corrosion.

“The Voyage Within” website featuring the works of Vangelis Kyris and Anatoli Georgiev, curated by Erica Vassiliou, can be found at: https://avoyagewithin.com/about-us/

Rotimi Fani-Kayode

The Photographic Work of Rotimi Fani-Kayode

Photographer Rotimi Fani-Kayode, the son of a chieftain of Ife, the ancestral capital of the Yoruba people, was born in Lagos, Nigeria in 1955, He moved at the age of eleven, with his family to Brighton, England, in order to escape the Nigerian Civil War. Fani-Kayode studied at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, and later at the Pratt Institute in New York, where he earned his MFA in 1983. 

After graduating, Fani-Kayode returned to England, settling permanently, to pursue a career in photography.  A prominent figure in the Black British art scene, he was a founding member and the first chairman of Autograph ABP, the Association of Black Photographers, in 1968. During the height of the AIDS crisis and in response to the homophobia in both England and his home country of Nigeria, Fani-Kayode photographed images that called attention to the politics of race, dignified queer black culture and homoerotic desire, and explored cultural differences and identity.

Using ancestral rituals and multi-layered symbolism joined with archetypal motifs from both African and European cultures, Fani-Kayode depicted the black male body as the focal point to probe the boundaries of erotic and spiritual fantasy, and sexual and cultural differences. He saw his work as a way to explore the position of the black body in the imagery of the Western cultures and to contest the narrowness of the Yoruba mindset in terms of homosexuality. Fani-Kayode , using the dramatic lighting of chiaroscuro and the transformation of Yoruba mythological symbols and rituals, presented intimate moments of queer sexuality as a means of personal and political survival.

Rotimi Fani-Kayode’s photographs have been exhibited internationally since 1985, with numerous solo exhibitions in London, Boston, New York, and Cape Town. In 2003, his work was featured in the African Pavilion at the 50th Venice Biennale and, in 2011, in ARS 11 at the Kiasma-Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki, Finland. Fani-Kayode’s work is represented in the collections of numerous institutions and private collectors including the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Walther Family Foundation, Harvard University’s Hutchins Center, and the Kiasma-Museum of Contemporary Art, among others.

One of the most significant names in the history of black photography, Rotimi Fani-Kayode’s career was cut short by his untimely death at the age of thirty-four in December 1989. Many of his photographs were created in collaboration with his late partner Alex Hirst and are collected in the posthumous 1996 publication “Rotimi Fani-Kayode and Alex Hirst: Photographs”. His work is represented by Autograph ABP, London.

“My identity has been constructed from my own sense of otherness, whether cultural, racial or sexual. The three aspects are not separate within me. Photography is the tool by which I feel most confident in expressing myself. It is photography therefore – Black, African, homosexual photography – which I must use not just as an instrument, but as a weapon if I am to resist attacks on my integrity and, indeed, my existence on my own terms.  — Rotimi Fani-Kayode, “Traces of Ecstasy”, Ten-8, Number 28, 1988.

Note: All photographic work shown was a collaborative effort by Rotimi Fani-Kayode and Alex Hirst.  Images reblogged with thanks to Autograph ABP, London.

Gary Lee

Photographs and Illustration by Gary Lee

Gary Lee is a Larrakia artist, born in 1952 and raised in Darwin, the capital city of the Northern Territory, Australia. An anthropologist, artist, writer and curator, Lee has been an active participant in and promoter of Aboriginal arts since the early 1980s.

Prior to his studies at Sydney College of the Arts, Gary Lee worked alongside Andrew Trewin to produce a line of evening and cocktail wear, incorporating Lee’s Aboriginal designs and sold under the Trewin Lee label. Lee attended a year at Sydney College majoring in glass and painting, but left to pursue a career in fashion design. After a few years in Sydney, Lee returned to the Northern Territory where he began working as a trainee Aboriginal arts advisor with Chips MacKinolty at Mimi Arts and Crafts in Katherine.

This move brought Gary Lee in contact with a wide range of Aboriginal artists and led to his curating a series of shows of Aboriginal crafts and art. Working at Mimi Arts inspired him to undertake studies, firstly as a Cultural Heritage Management student at Canberra’s College of Advanced Education and later at the Australian National University, earning a BA with Honors in Anthropology. Lee also undertook internships at the National Gallery of Australia, becoming its first Aboriginal intern, and the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies. 

After five years of study and employment as a project manager for the Australia Council for the Arts, Gary Lee returned to his homeland as a Larrakia anthropologist in a research position at the Northern Land Council. During this time, he wrote a musical play based on his maternal heritage entitled “Keep Him in My Heart: A Larrakia-Filipino Love Story”, which premiered in Darwin and showcased Lee’s skills as writer and fashion designer.  

In 1993, Gary Lee began working in the field of photography with his series “Nice Colored Boys”, an allusion to Australian film maker Tracey Moffatt’s classic short film “Nice Colored Girls”. It began as a project to reconnect Lee with the regions of Nepal and India, where he traveled in the 1970s. The film was designed to celebrate the physicality of the men in the area, to subvert Western male beauty stereotypes, and to explore nuances of Aboriginal art and identity.

In 1998, Lee’s street photography, portrait series “Bablu, Milk Boy” was published in Australia’s oldest and most respected photography magazine, Photofile. At the suggestion of Photofile editor Alasdair Forster, Lee produced the “Skin” series, placing himself in the frame alongside men from Nepal and India. Photographs from this series were later shown in the 2008 “More Than My Skin” exhibition, which focused on Aboriginal male photographers, at the Campbelltown Arts Center.

Beginning in 2005, Gary Lee’s photography came to reflect a combination of contemporary and historical Larrakia subjects. The catalyst for this was partly his involvement as co-curator in an exhibition celebrating Billiamook, who was a key Larrakia figure in the region’s contact history. In this exhibition Lee displayed a portrait of his nephew, Shannon, alongside a portrait of Billiamook by the colonial photographer Paul Foelsche, in which both sixteen year old boys exude physical prowess.

Lee’s venture into portraits incorporating his own family paralleled his work into other Aboriginal portraits, becoming an extension of his “Nice Colored Boys” series. To some extent, he had already been doing this as a way of documenting Aboriginal gay and transgender communities. From 2004, however, he began a discrete, ongoing series called “Nymgololo”, a Larrakia word for young man or bachelor,  which focused on Aboriginal men in Darwin. 

In October 2007, Gary Lee was in Canberra for the opening of the “Culture Warriors” exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia when he suffered a life-threatening stroke. While undergoing extensive rehabilitation in 2008, Lee experienced his busiest period of exhibition commitments including his very first solo exhibition, “Maast Maast”, at Darwin’s 24HR Art NT Centre for Contemporary Art. This exhibition was largely a selection of past work from the “Nice Colored Boys”, “Skin” and “Nymgolofo” series.

Gary Lee’s work has been published in books, art journals and magazines in Australia and abroad. His work can be seen in many major collections including: the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra; the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory in Darwin; and the art Gallery of Western Australia in Perth.

Note: A book of note is author Dino Hodge’s “Did You Meet Any Malagas (Men)”: A Homosexual History of Australia’s Tropical Capital”, published in 1993. It is a collection of oral histories intended to tell a gay history of the Larrakia territory, recognizing local issues of sexuality, gender, colonialism, and race. It should be noted that Hodges’ friend Gary Lee was the first indigenous person to collaborate with the Northern Territory AIDS Council.

Haruki Murakami: “. . .From the Distant Past”

 

Photographer Unknown, From the Distant Past, Photo Shoot

“Most things are forgotten over time. Even the war itself, the life-and-death struggle people went through is now like something from the distant past. We’re so caught up in our everyday lives that events of the past are no longer in orbit around our minds. There are just too many things we have to think about everyday, too many new things we have to learn. But still, no matter how much time passes, no matter what takes place in the interim, there are some things we can never assign to oblivion, memories we can never rub away. They remain with us forever, like a touchstone.” 

—Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

Frank Yamrus

Photography by Frank Yamrus

Born in 1958, Frank Yamrus attended Wilkes University, earning his BA in 1980, and Drexel University in Philadelphia, earning his MBA in 1986. A sensitive observer of his life and surroundings, he works in series to produce intimate, introspective photographs, creating suggestive visual narratives focused primarily on himself and his place in the world. 

In series form, Yamrus has addressed environmental issues in his carefully composed photographic still lifes of flowers, blocks of ice, and plastic water bottles. He frequently shoots self-portraits amid the natural landscapes that formed his experiences, allowing the insertion of himself into the scene to serve as proxies for his emotions. 

Frank Yamrus leaves his open-ended images largely unexplained, explaining that his photography has always been about process and not about resolution. Two of his previously shot series are the 1994 figurative-nature “Primitive Behavior” and the 2000  “Rapture Series” of facial- expressive portraits. In 2008, to mark the milestone of his fiftieth birthday, Yamrus shot ” I Feel Lucky”, a poetic series of self-portraits, at once overt and ambiguous, which conveyed the pivotal experiences that shaped his identity.

Bohnchang Koo

Photography by Bohnchang Koo

Born into a prominent Korean family in 1953, Bohnchang Koo attended Yonsei University in Seoul, receiving a Bachelor of Arts in Business, and began his life working in an office. Dissatisfied with this career, he moved to Hamburg, Germany, in 1980 to study design and photography. 

In 1985, Koo returned to Korea, taking up careers as a teacher and photographer with exhibitions in Germany, Iceland, Australia, Japan, Korea, and the United States. He was a professor at the Kaywon School of Art and Design, the Chung Ang University, Institute of the Arts in Seoul, and holds a visiting professorship at London’s Saint Martin School. Koo currently teaches at Kyungil University in Korea.

One of Bohnchang Koo’s latest work series is “The Allure of Blue”,  delicate photographs of porcelain pieces from the Joseon dynasty. Captivated by its charm, Koo began studying and photographing these traditional Korean ceramics fourteen years ago. After visiting sixteen museums throughout Korea, he compiled a body of work to highlight the simplistic beauty of Korea’s cultural heritage of that time.

Bohnchang Koo’s work can be found in several published collections which include the 2004 “Vessels for the Heart” and the 2006 “Deep Breath in Silence”, both published by Hangil Art,  and “Hysteric Nine”published in 2003 by Nobuhiko Kitamura.

Bohnchang Koo’s works have been exhibited in over thirty solo exhibitions including: Seoul’s Samsung Rodin Gallery in 2001, the Peabody Essex Museum in Massachusetts in 2002, Paris’ 2004 Camera Obscura Exhibition, Kukje Gallery, the Goeun Museum of Photography in Busan in 2007, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2010, among others. His work can be seen at San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum, Paris’ Musee Guimet, Hamburg’s Museum of Art and Craft, Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts, and Reykjavik Museum of Photography in Iceland.

Note:  The gallery images are from the March to April 2020 exhibition at the Choeunsook Gallery, a modern art and contemporary hand crafts exhibition space in Seoul, South Korea. The black and white images are from Bohnchang Koo’s photographic series “In the Beginning”, set in the landscape of modern Korea, which focuses on physical conflict and the frustration of things gained and things postponed. 

Jan Pypers

Jan Pypers, The Hare Series

Antwerp-based Belgium photographer Jan Pypers captures moments in places, sometimes dark and ominous, that form stories in the viewer’s mind. He starts with a memory or experience, often from his youth, gives it a slight twist, and transforms it into an image. To stage these moments, he uses scale models of different sizes, lifelike decors, and cinematic effects, often drawing inspiration for his creation from films by such artists as Christopher Nolan and David Lynch. Making the basic images with a digital camera, Pypers then shoots additional photos in his studio, bringing it all together in post-production. 

Pypers initiated the “Hare Series” after experiencing a succession of intense dreams. In this series, an innocent, endearing character, reminiscent of Peter Rabbit from our childhood, is inserted into a dark world, becoming a disturbing, stalking menace. The hare figure is seen hidden on conspicuous corners and casually standing or sitting on a windowsill; but even in these circumstances, a growing sense of unease and paranoia is instilled in the viewer.

“In the morning, I always felt lost, you know the feeling. Hare is actually a tribute to the dream, where nothing is impossible and we can do and feel whatever we want. Hare is about our irrational fear of the unknown but also about our denial for real problems such as climate, individualism, loneliness” — Jan Pypers

Many thanks to a great art, film and music site: https://ohbythewayblog.blogspot.com

Konrad Helbig

Photography by Konrad Helbig

German photographer and archaeologist, Konrad Helbig was born in 1917 in Leipzig, Germany. He was a soldier fighting in the Soviet Union during World War II, was taken in captivity by the Soviet Union, and held until his release in 1947. 

Upon his release, Helbig poured himself into the study of art history and archaeology, especially of the Mediterranean region. After graduation, he worked as writer and photographer for the German travel and cultural magazines “Merian” and “Atlantis”, relating in-depth the nuances of the history, geography, people, and culture of the region to his readers.

Best known for his black-and-white images of young Sicilian men. Helbig posed his subjects, photographing both nude and clothed models, in brightly lit, typically Italian landscapes. His profound knowledge of Mediterranean cultures and the tradition of earlier German photographers, such as Baron William von Gioeden and Guglielmo von Plüscho, can be readily seen throughout his body of work. 

Helbig saw his subjects as incarnating the myth of pre-industrial and Arcadian culture, with its unspoiled, harmonious atmosphere. The postures and forms of Helbig’s nudes are composed from a formal point of view directly related to the classical artistic perfection of Greek and Roman sculptures. In a trial volume for publication compiled in collaboration with the archaeologist Herbert von Buttlar, Helbig interspersed these portraits with images of ancient bronze sculptures

Konrad Helbig’s first published photo collection was his volume on Sicily in 1956, followed by collaborative collections with Karl Heinz Hoenig in 1959 and photographer Toni Schneiders, entitled “Archipelagus”, in 1962. One of Helbig’s best-known collections is “Homo Sun (I am Human)’, published posthumously in 2003, which surveys his boldest erotic work from the 1950s and 1960s. 

Konrad Helbig died in Mainz, West Germany, in February of 1986 at the age of sixty-eight. Notably, the nude photographs for which he is now most famous were discovered posthumously at his home in Mainz.

The photographic works of Konrad Helbig are in the archives of Dresden’s Deutsche Fotothek, which includes 160,000 shots, of which 60,000 are color slides,. Additional works are in the photo archive of Germany’s University of Marsburg, which contains 23,800 shots, of which 11,000 are photographs of Greece and 6,000 of Italy.  Helbig’s work can also be found in the State Archive Hamburg, as well as private foundations and museums in Germany. 

Top Insert Image: Konrad Helbig, “Young Boy in Water, Sicily”, circa 1950-1959, Gelatin Silver Print, 30.5 x 24 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Konrad Helbig, Untitled, (Young Man with Sculpture, Sicily), circa 1950-1959, Gelatin Silver Print