“No Really, You’re Such a Doll . . .”

Ruth Bernhard, Broken Doll, 1938

Hans Bellmer, The Doll, 1935

Fred Stein, [Doll in glass jar], ca. 1935

Cindy Sherman, Untitled #341, 1999

Dolls frequently manage to resist categorical definition because they hover between anthropological artifacts, toys, and avatars. More than just replicas of the human form, dolls mirror the more complex psychological states within the culture, the maker, or even the subject. Perhaps it is this ambiguity and allusiveness that accounts for photographers’ seemingly endless fascination with dolls; the inability to definitively describe their nature becomes not so much a conclusion as a discursive opening.

Although a completely compliant model, the doll and its character cannot be completely subjugated. In photography, the doll instead performs best as a reflective canvas onto which the artist can project his or her desires and fears. The ensuing and unavoidable dialogue with the doll’s character then becomes the essence of the work.

What then is the dialogue suggested by the mangled, distorted, encapsulated, and/or decapitated bodies of the dolls seen in the photographs of Hans Bellmer, Ruth Bernhard, Fred Stein, and Cindy Sherman? Do we simply read the artist as eccentric and or perverted? Or can we account for the artists’ experiences rooted in the time and culture in which they live? How does the work reflect these experiences? Could it be the fear of another world war with the rise of Hitler in the 1930s?  Or the relentless fighting in the Middle East, Afghanistan, and the Balkans in the 1990s? Whatever the intentions, the continued and pervasive impulse by artists to represent the human form as grossly deformed and aggressively mangled suggests a provocation beyond the personal interest of the artist and one that speaks largely from a more political agenda. And if the doll in the photograph is reflecting who we are and what we have become, then it’s more than just a frightening glimpse in the mirror.

Stereoviews

Unidentified Photographer, [Two Unidentified Women Reading a Letter], ca. 1880s

George Barker, The Johnstown Calamity, 1889

Unidentified Photographer, How De Debil Do Dey Make A Bicycle, ca. 1900

Handheld stereoviewer

Oliver Wendell Holmes invented the “Holmes type” stereoviewer. He explains his device in an article in the Atlantic Monthly from 1859 :

A stereoscope is an instrument which makes surfaces look solid. All pictures in which perspective and light and shade are properly managed, have more or less of the effect of solidity; but by this instrument that effect is so heightened as to produce an appearance of reality which cheats the senses with its seeming truth…The first effect of looking at a good photograph through the stereoscope is a surprise such as no painting ever produced. The mind feels its way into the very depths of the picture. The scraggy branches of a tree in the foreground run out at us as if they would scratch our eyes out. The elbow of a figure stands forth so as to make us almost uncomfortable. Then there is such a frightful amount of detail, that we have the same sense of infinite complexity which Nature gives us. A painter shows us masses; the stereoscopic figure spares us nothing,—all must be there, every stick, straw, scratch, as faithfully as the dome of St. Peter’s, or the summit of Mont Blanc, or the ever-moving stillness of Niagara. The sun is no respecter of persons or of things.

William Safire and the Kitchen Debate

Associated Press, The Great Debate…U.S. Vice President Richard Nixon, in dark suit, gestures as he talks with Soviet Premier Khrushchev, left during their tour of American Exhibition in Moscow this summer, July 24, 1959

This Sunday, September 27, 2009, New York Times columnist William Safire died at the age of 79. Safire won a Pulitzer Prize for his critical political columns and was a speechwriter for President Richard Nixon. In 1959 Safire was the press agent for the exhibition where the so-called “Kitchen Debate” took place: a series of meetings between U.S. Vice President Richard Nixon and the Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev to discuss the merits of their respective economic systems. The first encounter took place on July 24, 1959, during the opening of the American National Exhibition at Sokolniki Park in Moscow. For the exhibition an entire house was built as a symbol to the comforts and advantages of the American way of living. Although the conversations between Nixon and Khrushchev were held throughout the whole house, the kitchen was the main location for their dialogue. This is where Safire documented the historical meeting. On July 24 2009, precisely 50 years after the event, Safire reflected on his experiences in his Op-Ed column for the New York Times.

Energy in America

Mitch Epstein, Amos Power Plant, Raymond, West Virginia, from the “American Power” series, 2004

Joel Sternfeld, Coburn, Virginia, April 1981 (printed June 1983)

The Annual Feast of San Gennaro

Alfred Gescheidt, Little Italy, Manhattan, (Feast of San Gennaro), 1952

Dan Weiner, San Gennaro Festival, 1952

Lee Sievan, San Gennaro lights, 1940s

Weegee, Murder at the Feast of San Gennaro, September 22, 1939

Weegee, “‘Fiesta’ turns into tragedy, body of dead man, lies on street, Mulberry St., Little Italy,” ca. 1939

“The Annual Feast of San Gennaro, New York City’s longest-running, biggest religious outdoor festival in the United States. . . . The central focus of the celebration takes place every September 19th, the official Saint Day when a celebratory Mass is held in Most Precious Blood Church, followed by a religious procession in which the Statue of San Gennaro is carried from its permanent home in the church through the streets that comprise Little Italy.”

Although perhaps less photogenic and cinematic (the first, and perhaps best, five minutes of Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets) than it used to be, it’s also a bit less bloody…

Andreas Feininger

Andreas Feininger, Telescopic camera catches NYC skyline, 1946

Photographing both wonders of the natural and material world, Andreas Feininger is best known for his images of New York City. Capturing skylines, avenue canyons, and other city landscapes, Feininger’s images reproduced in Life have become part of the iconic visual language of New York City.

In Memoriam: Christian Poveda, Photographer and Filmmaker

Christian Poveda, Fabricating explosives in “liberated zone,” Usulatán, October 1981

French-Spanish photographer and filmmaker Christian Poveda was killed in El Salvador, on September 2, 2009. Since the 1990s, Poveda had been documenting Salvadoran gang culture. His most recent film, La Vida Loca (2008), captures the violent lives of young members of the heavily tattooed Mara 18 gang.

Poveda first went to El Salvador in the early 1980s to cover the country’s decade-long civil war. His unflinching black-and-white images of the war were included in a 1983 ICP exhibition, El Salvador: Work of 30 Photographers. Following the exhibition’s initial presentation at ICP, it toured the U.S. for more than two years, raising awareness about the civil war, America’s role in the conflict, and its devastating toll on the Salvadoran people. In 2005, Poveda joined the other photographers in the exhibition in donating the works to the ICP Collection, creating a permanent archive of images of the war that is an invaluable resource for students and scholars.

When ICP remounted El Salvador: Work of 30 Photographers in 2005, we included a monument to three of the photographers in the exhibition who had lost their lives in the course of their work: Oliver Rebbot, John Hoagland, and Richard Cross. It is with great sadness that we add Christian’s name to that list.

From Holland with Love

Martin Munkácsi, [Buyers assessing lots at flower auction, Aalsmeer, Netherlands], ca. 1929

Martin Munkácsi, [Buyers reviewing lots at flower auction, Aalsmeer, Netherlands], ca. 1929

Martin Munkácsi, [Bidding at flower auction, Aalsmeer, Netherlands], ca. 1929

The very first flower auction in the Netherlands was established in 1899, at the famous flower market in Amsterdam. Due to a growing demand a decade later, a group of flower growers decided to group together and start their own auction near the town of Aalsmeer. They held their first auction on December 4, 1911 in café “Welkom.” Within a year, the auction turned out to be highly profitable and by the end of 1912 the auction cooperation “Bloemenlust” (translated as “flower desire”) was officially established.

Around 1929, the period that Martin Munkácsi visited and photographed the flower auction, the original facility in Aalsmeer had undergone several expansions and the cooperation continued to grow. Today the auction flower auction in Aalsmeer consists of six different locations with a central auction building that is the second largest in the world. Each day nearly 20 million flowers and more than 2.4 million plants and garden plants are being processed and distributed to different countries all over the world.

September 11

Alexander Heilner and Amy Baxter, December, 2001, September 11 Archive, Gift of Alexander Heilner and Amy Baxter

Memory, Loss, and Jewish Identity in Germany

Mikael Levin, Nordlager Ohrdruf, 1995

Shimon Attie,  Joachimstrasse 11a: Former Jewish cafe with patrons, 1933, 1992 from “The Writing on the Wall” series, 1991-93

Can you document something or someone that no longer exists? Can a photograph of absence convey past atrocities like the Holocaust? Can a landscape preserve memory?

In 1995, photographer Mikael Levin retraced the steps his father Meyer Levin, a war correspondent with Overseas News Agency, and Eric Schwab, a photographer with the France-Presse Agency, had taken in 1945. Although he could not see what his father saw, Levin wanted to examine how the landscape had changed or stayed the same fifty years later. The picture above documents the now-empty field at Nordlager Ohrdruf, the first concentration camp visited by Levin père and Schwab. Here are their impressions, as recorded in Levin’s autobiography, Europe: The Witnesses:

We drove through the gate and halted. A circle of dead men lay there, in the stripe slave uniforms which we now saw for the first time; these cadavers were fleshless; in back of each tight-skinned shaven skull was a bullet hole.

The Pole opened the back door of a shed. There was a cordwood stack of stiff naked human bodies, a stack as high as we stood. The bodies were flat and yellow as lumber. A yellow disinfectant was scattered over the pile.

We had known. The world had vaguely heard. But until now no one of us had looked on this. Even this morning we had not imagined we would look on this. It was as though we had penetrated at last to the center of the black heart, to the very crawling inside of the vicious heart.

Long ago I had known the Chassidic tale [Israel and the Enemy] of the child who went into the forest and found himself within the primordial beast, and there he saw the very heart of evil. In this moment I understood the legend.

Like Mikael Levin, Shimon Attie is interested in exploring the connections between landscape and memory, also in relation to Jewish identity and its erasure. For his 1991–93 project, “The Writing on the Wall,” Attie projected images of pre-World War II life in the Scheunenviertel, the former Jewish quarter in Berlin, at the same locations of the original images. The juxtaposition of images of working-class Jewish life on the facades of buildings in the then newly gentrifying neighborhood highlight the changes in the city and its inhabitants.