Oh My!

Martin Munkacsi, [Two men with a sea lion], ca. 1930

Weegee, [Woman and tiger], ca. 1960

Roman Vishniac, [Polar bear], ca. 1921

Happy 80th Birthday Nathan Lyons!

Nathan Lyons, Untitled, from the “Notations in Passing” series, 1962–74

Nathan Lyons is a photographer (Verbal Landscape/Dinosaur Sat Down, Notations in Passing, Riding First Class on the Titanic!, After 9/11), educator (founder of Visual Studies Workshop), curator/coordinator (John Wood: On the Edge of Clear Meaning), and award winner (ICP Infinity Award for Lifetime achievement, 2000).

To hear Nathan Lyons speaking at ICP in October 1975, click here.

From the press release from his 2000 exhibition at ICP, Riding First Class on the Titanic:

In May 2000, Nathan Lyons was honored with the International Center of Photography’s Infinity Award for Lifetime Achievement in Photography. Artist, curator, educator, and founder and director of the Visual Studies Workshop (VSW) in Rochester, New York, Nathan Lyons has exerted a profound effect on the field of photography, and has had an enormous influence on countless students, artists, critics and curators. Although much of his career has been spent teaching and directing at the VSW, Lyons has continued to photograph and produce a major body of work that reveals his unique view of America and its social landscape. As a young photographer in the late 1950s, Lyons used a view camera to create images that emphasized the medium’s expressive rather than documentary potential. In 1962, he moved to the more portable and lightweight 35mm camera. In doing this, he joined contemporaries such as Lee Friedlander and Garry Winogrand they turned a speculative eye toward contemporary culture. Nathan Lyons: Riding First Class on the Titanic, on view at the International Center of Photography from April 5 through June 18, 2000, is composed of 100 black and white framed diptychs. It represents a continuation of an earlier project, “Notations in Passing”, which was organized into extended sequences that explore the variety of visual relationships and meanings made possible by pictures unaccompanied by text. This current project continues from 1974 to the present, encompassing work that has been generated over the past 36 years. According to Lyons, “The passage of time is in itself an important factor in the development of Riding First Class on the Titanic. While it records a series of cultural artifacts in real time, the sequential structure establishes a contextual display that encourages a reading and an expansion of visual language. The title of the exhibition and book derives from a particular image in the sequence in which this graffiti message is spray painted onto a wall. According to Lyons, “Riding First Class on the Titanic expresses a metaphor that reflects an important transitional stage in our culture, the assumption of invulnerability, the Titanic, is revealed as a contradiction when experienced through its ultimate vulnerability…” Reflecting his predilection for photographs that include words and interest in found language, Lyons’s images give the viewer the challenge of layered interpretations that question our cultural assumptions and beliefs. ICP curator Edward Earle asserts: “It is not so much the isolation of text found in the landscape that is significant as it is the resolved context of the sequence of images. Books and exhibitions are exercises in discourse for Lyons. Riding First Class on the Titanic takes us on a critical journey into American culture and into the process by which photographs contribute to a visual vocabulary.” This exhibition at ICP is accompanied by an artist’s book, Riding First Class on the Titanic (1999, MIT Press and the Addison Gallery of American Art). The book highlights Lyon’s 36-year photographic project, and features a preface by Adam D. Weinberg, Director of the Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover MA, and an essay by Leroy F. Searle, Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Washington.

Recent Acquisition: Francesca Woodman

Francesca Woodman, Polka Dots, November 1976

American photographer Francesca Woodman created a beguiling and important body of work during her short nine-year career. Working primarily with black-and-white photography, she mined some of the same themes as photographers as stylistically diverse as Ralph Eugene Meatyard (loss and the passage of time) and Cindy Sherman (self-presentation and role-playing). Woodman usually used herself as a model, contorting her body and exploring her relationship to her surroundings, often seeming to merge with them.  A recent acquisition, this rare vintage print is part of a series she made wearing a polka dot dress while a student at the Rhode Island School of Design; Woodman printed it at the time and gave it to a friend.

Mt. (Mt. Shasta) Shasta

Stephen Shore, Mt. Shasta. US 97, South of Klamath Falls, OR, 7/21/71, 2003

Stephen Shore’s single image book. The original image was included in the Uncommon Places collection.

To hear and see Stephen Shore speaking at ICP on May 18, 2007, click here…

A small, quick desktop-armchair-traveler’s re-photographic project:

Approximate location of where the original photograph was taken using Google’s street view, 12/23/09.

Ox Head Shed

John Coffer, Ox Head Shed, 2004

Bloody Sunday through Gilles Peress’s Eyes

Gilles Peress, Bottom of William Street one minute before the British First Parachute Regiment opened fire, killing thirteen civilians–an event now known as Bloody Sunday, Derry, Ireland, January 30, 1972

A young man, Jim Wray, sits down in defiant but peaceful protest in the street; minutes later he would be shot dead in the courtyard of Glenfada Park.

Gilles Peress, William Street, Derry, Northern Ireland, January 30, 1972

Gilles Peress, As the shooting stops on Bloody Sunday, Barney McGuigan lies in a pool of blood. Derry, Northern Ireland, January 30, 1972

Magnum photographer Gilles Peress remembers his first professional photo assignment, covering the civil rights marches in Derry:

I remember the beginning of the march, when it left the Creggan Estate–I think Martin McGuinness was speaking to people. The march proceeded down the hill from the Creggan to the Bogside. By the time it reached William Street, I was at the head of it to shoot the picture of the marchers coming down William Street, the traditional shot.

The paratroopers had established two barricades. the first, I believe, was at Agro Corner, on James Street before it crosses William Street. The other barricade was at the bottom of William Street halfway between Chamberlain Street and Waterloo Road. What I find is that for the last thirty years the lines of confrontation have remained in those particular spots, and over that time I don’t think they have moved more than ten yards. As the march passed on towards Free Derry Corner, a mini-riot started. By the time the army brought out its water cannon, things had begun to cool down: I have this picture of the crowd sitting down on the pavement at the corner of William Street and Chamberlain Street under a rain of purple dye–well, some of them were sitting down! One of the young people sitting down in protest was killed moments later. Suddenly, from the corner of my eye, from James Street across William Street, I saw the first Paras [members of the First Battalion of the Parachute Regiment] in their Saracens move towards Free Derry Corner, towards the Rossville Flats. Then the shooting started. then everybody started running….

I’m trying to remember my emotions–I know that at one point I was shooting and crying at the same time. I think it must’ve been when I saw Barney McGuigan dead. By the time I had reached him, people were still huddling by the telephone box, protecting themselves from the shooting. He was alone. Then a priest [Father Tom O'Hara] arrived and started to give him the Last Rites. I remember taking a few pictures then. i remember I was crying as I was doing it. I remember that I didn’t want to intrude too much, but that at the same time I felt this obligation to shoot, to document. It is always the same f***ed-up situation: you are damned if you do and damned if you don’t….

This was the first time I saw what a real war weapon can do. I mean the destruction, the impact of it. Up until then, I thought that bullets killed you but they would kill you kind of neatly. You understand what I’m saying? This was the first time I realized the terrible destruction that those things create.

Gilles Peress interview with Trisha Ziff in Hidden Truths: Bloody Sunday 1972 (Santa Monica, CA: Smart Art Press, 1998), pp. 72-74.

Spider Girl

Helen Levitt, New York, 1980

Born in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn in 1913, Levitt lived and worked in New York until her death in 2009. A high school drop out, Levitt was teaching art to children in 1937 when she purchased a Leica so that she could record the chalk drawings she saw everywhere. She spent most of her time photographing in Spanish Harlem in the late 1930s and ’40s and is best known for the black and white pictures that she took during this period. Levitt was interested in summer life in the city,  where families, especially children, lived their lives publicly on stoops and streets. According to Levitt, she decided to take pictures of working-class people to contribute to the political movements of the time. It was only after seeing the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson, she said, that she understood that photography could also be art. Her photography has been used and received as both political document and art. One of her portfolios of New Yorkers out on their stoops was reproduced in PM, the left-leaning daily newspaper. Some of these pictures were included at her first show, Photographs of Children, which was curated by Edward Steichen at the Museum of Modern Art in 1943.

Levitt spent much of the 1950s working in film and returned to still photography at the end of the decade. Along with William Eggleston and Joel Sternfeld, Levitt was one of the pioneers of color photography. She was awarded Guggenheim Fellowships in 1959 and 1960 to document New York in color. However, most of this early color work is gone; her negatives and prints were stolen from her apartment in 1970.

Levitt has said that she was interested in documenting the energy of the city, which she had seen expressed primarily in children. The children, however, eventually disappeared, living more of their lives indoors. This photograph documents this change in New York in the 1980s. It also focuses on the isolated human body as a sculptural form. Here, Levitt captures a child at play. Arms and legs splayed out in a careful balancing act, the girl is totally unaware of the photographer’s presence. The poppy colors of the cars offer a stark contrast with the drab grays of the street, sidewalks, and stoops—the urban playground. This photograph itself is a delicate balancing act of politics and aesthetics.

Atget, Archivist of Paris

Eugène Atget, [39, rue de Paris, Houdan], 1908

Eugène Atget, [Hôtel de Choisy, 8, rue de Barbette, Paris], 1901

Eugène Atget, [Balcony railing, 15, rue de Petit Pont, Paris], 1913

Eugène Atget, [Ornamental ironwork, Collégiale Notre Dame, Dammartin-en-Goële], 1921

Eugène Atget, [Door knocker, Hôtel de Chateaubriand, 120, rue de Bac, Paris], 1902–03

Twenty-six vintage prints by the celebrated French photographer Eugène Atget—drawn from the ICP permanent collection—will be on view in our galleries starting this Friday, January 29 in Atget, Archivist of Paris.

Surrealists such as Man Ray were fascinated by Atget’s images of dreamlike urban spaces. As this exhibition reveals, such photographs were part of a much larger body of work that reflected Atget’s systematic documentation of the historic streets, buildings, and artifacts of Old Paris.

Fifty Years on the New York City Subway

Weegee, Subway Serves as Blackout Shelter, August 13, 1943

Lee Sievan, Ninth Avenue Local, South Ferry, 1940s

Danny Lyon, IRT 2, South Bronx, New York City, 1979

Bruce Davidson, New York Subway, 1980

Steven Siegel, Fourth Avenue Subway Station, 1995

Truth Now

Unidentified Photographer, I Sell the Shadow to Support the Substance, 1864

Unidentified Photographer, I Sell the Shadow to Support the Substance, 1864

Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (Danny Lyon, photographer), NOW, ca. 1968