Tag: photography

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

Dana Yurcisin

Photography by Dana Yurcisin

Dana Yurcisin is a screenplay and song writer, cinematographer, musician and photographer. He entered Rowan University in 2007 and graduated with a Bachelors of Art in radio, television, and film.  In his third year at Rowan University, Yurcicim, along with John Bradley and Kevin McTinge, created the eight-part mini-series “The Adventures of Squirrel Man”, which won a Silver Telly Award. 

In 2011, Dana Yurcisin teamed with Daniel Attamante on the short film “Dog” for the Campus MovieFest competition. A campus finalist and an AT&T Rethink Possible semi-finalist, it was nominated for a Golden Tripod Award for cinematography and won the AT&T Wild Card Award. It also eared a spot at the International Grand Finale at Hollywood in June of 2011.

Expanding into still photography at the end of 2018, Yurcisin shoots with a fixed-lens Fuji and edits his images using Photoshop and Lightroom, often incorporating effects inspired by graphic novels and cinema. Using the backdrops of East coast beach towns, he produces images devoid of human presence that explore themes of solitude and loneliness.

Yurcisim  has done work in the digital marketing field: creating videos, shooting events and travel footage, advertising photography, and advertising campaigns. Currently based in Asbury Park, New Jersey, Yurcisin has also worked in all facets of media production including motion graphics, music and logo composition, and writing and editing.

The artist’s website is located at: http://www.danayurcisin.com

Gus Green Van Sant, Jr: “My Own Private Idaho”

Bruce Weber, Promotional Photo Shoot for “My Own Private Idaho”

These two images, showing River Phoenix with Michael Parker and with Rodney Harvey, were taken by Bruce Weber during a promotional photo shoot in 1991 for director Gus Van Sant’s early 1991 masterpiece “My Own Private Idaho”.

Born in July of 1952, Gus Green Van Sant, Jr. is an American screenwriter, film director, photographer, painter and author who has produced acclaimed independent and mainstream films. His films typically contain themes of marginalized subcultures, particularly homosexuality. Van Sant is one of the prominent film artists of the New Queer Cinema movement. 

Van Sant made his feature-length directorial debut with his 1985 film “Mala Noche (Bad Night)”, a drama film based on poet Walt Curtis’s autobiographical novel of the same name.  His second feature, released in 1989, was the highly acclaimed “Drugstore Cowboy”, which earned him Best Director from the National Society of Film Critics. Van Sant followed this success with the a series of similarly praised films: the 1991 “My Private Idaho” and the black comedy “To Die For” in 1995. His next two films,  the 1997 drama “Good Will Hunting”, and the biographical film “Milk” in 2008, were nominated by the Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Director. 

Note: You will find more information on Van Sant’s film “Malo Noche” at: https://ultrawolvesunderthefullmoon.blog/2015/07/09/mala-noche-directed-by-gus-van-sant-mala-noche/

Kyle McMillin

 

Kyle McMillin, “Los Primeros Cuatros”, 2020, Four Wet-Collodion Tintypes, Each 10 x 12.7 cm

These four portrait tintypes by Kyle McMillin were taken in Tacoma, Washington on July 27, 2020. They depict, in image order, Aloysious, Jesse, Kreg, and Kyle.

The wet-collodion process is an early photographic technique invented in 1851 by English sculptor and inventor Frederick Scott Archer. The process involved adding a soluble iodide to a solution of cellulose nitrate, known as collodion, and coating a glass plate with the mixture. In the darkroom, the plate was immersed in a solution of silver nitrate to form silver iodide.

This glass plate, still wet, was exposed in the camera and then developed by pouring a solution of pyrogallic acid over it. The image was fixed, originally, with a strong solution of sodium thiosulfate, for which potassium cyanide was later substituted. Immediate developing and fixing were  required in this process because, after the collodion film had dried, it became waterproof, preventing the reagent solutions from penetrating the film. This wet-collodion process was valued for the clarity and  level of detail it allowed.

A later modification of the process introduced in the 1850s, the ambrotype was a developed and fixed negative on a glass plate, which when viewed by reflected light against a black background, appears as to be a positive image. The clear areas look black, and the exposed, opaque areas appear relatively light. The glass plates were either backed with black velvet, or were coated on one side of the plate with black varnish.

During the 1860s, the ambrotype was superseded by the tintype or ferrotype, a photograph made by by creating a direct positive on a thin sheet of metal coated with a dark lacquer or enamel and used as the support for the for the photographic emulsion. Because the lacquered iron support was resilient and did not need drying, a tintype could be developed, fixed, and handed to the customer only a few minutes after the picture had been taken. The tintype became very popular in the 1860s and 1870s, being less fragile than the ambrotype and “instantly” available.

The artist’s site is located at: https://mcmillin.tumblr.com

Kyle McMillan’s studio, The Red Room Tintype Studio, is located at:  https://www.redroomtintype.me

Franz Betz: Music History

Photographer Unknown, “Franz Betz in His Role as Wotan”, 1876

Born in March of 1835 at the Rhine River city of Mainz, Germany, Franz Betz was a bass-baritone opera singer known for his performances in operas by Richard Wagner. He received his training in the city of Karlsruhe, home of the Baden State Theatre opera house. Betz made his debut, at the age of twenty-one, in 1856 at the Court Theater of Hanover in Wagner’s “Lohengrin”, part of the “Knight of the Swan”legend, but most recognizable for the”Bridal Chorus”, still played at weddings today.

Framz Betz’s successful performance in 1859 at the Berlin State Opera, singing the role of Don Carlo in Giuseppe Verdi’s “Emani”, resulted in a permanent contract with the company and his becoming one of Wagner’s most trusted singers. He sang the role of Hans Sachs in the world premier of Wagner’s “Die Meistersinger von Nümberg” at Munich in 1868, eventually singing the role over one hundred times.

Im May of 1872, Betz was one of the four soloists in the performance of “Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony” to mark the laying of the foundation stone for the Bayreuth Festival Theater, built by Richard Wagner for the sole use of his works. At the Beyreuth Theater in 1876, Betz sang the role of Wotan in the operas “Das Rheingold” and “Die Ring des Nibelungen”.

Franz Betz continued to sing lyric and lyric-dramatic roles well into his career as a singer of Wagner’s operas. For instance, he sang, in the same season of 1863, both the role of Telramund, a heavy dramatic part, and the lyric part of Valentin in “Faust”. Betz’s voice deepened as he grew older; and in consequence, Wagner added to his operas the role of König Marke, a lyrical bass role without a low tessitura and, in the same year, the role of Wotan. Betz’s enormous repertoire ranged from the roles of Don Giovanni and Wolfram, through Pizarro and Posa, to the roles of Holländer, Amonasro, Sachs and Wotan, expanding finally to Falstaff in 1894. 

During the period from 1882 to 1890, Betz held the position of president of the German trade union for stage artists, technicians and administrative staff, the Genossenschaft Deutscher Bühren-Angelhöger. Although singing in a few London concerts in 1882 and 1889, he never sang elsewhere outside of Germany. Franz Betz died in Berlin on the 11th of August in 1900 and is buried at the Protestant Wilhelm Memorial Cemetery in the Westend district of Berlin.

Note: The photographs show Franz Betz as Wotan, bearded and with shield,  in Richard Wagner’s opera “Die Ring des Nibelungen” performed in Bayreuth. The photo card is entitled Costume Portraits of the Bayreuther Festival Thater, and was published by Joseph Albert, Munich, in 1876. 

Top Insert Image: Loescher & Petsch, “Franz Betz”, circa 1870, Cardstock Photo, 8.6 x 5.5 cm, Kunstbibliothek, Berlin

Bottom Insert Image: Verlog von J. Albert, “Franz Betz as Wotan”, Costüm Portraits, 1876, Card Stock Photo, Berlin

Julien Duval

Julien Duval, “Port  and City of Rovinj, Croatia”, Date Unknown

Julien Duval, a professional photographer specializing in travel photography, interior design, and music photography, is based in Zagreb, the capital city of Croatia. Born in Normandy in western France, he lived most of his life in Besançon, located in eastern France close to the border with Switzerland. Duval majored in geography, obtaining a Masters degree in geography and started a PhD at the University of Franche-Comte in France. 

Julien Duval, upon changing his field of study to photography, spent three years of  study in Paris. Photographers that he admires include Finish portrait photographer Arno Rafael Minkkinen, American photo-journalist Steve McCurry, landscape photographer Max Rive from the Netherlands, and Croatian photographer Tošo Dabac, best known for his social photography of the1930s. 

Combining his photography and geography skills with his desire to travel, Duval  travels, preferably to remote places, to capture the beauty and simplicity of nature with his camera. Recent travels have taken him to the Plitvice Lakes National Park on the Croatian coast, the rural areas of Iceland, the streets of New York City, and the still less-visited national park of Durmitor in northern Croatia. His clients include tourist boards and agencies, hotels, corporate work, and global music festivals.

The artist’s site is located at: https://www.julienduvalphoto.com