Unidentified Artist, [Roosevelt Theatre, Cincinnati, advertisement for "Sugar Cane"], ca. 1928
“Sugar Cane,”
with 30 Stars as Sweet as the Title!
A musical cocktail with a kick,
“Sugar Cane”
Everything New and Startling…
Read more about the Roosevelt Theatre here.
Lou Bernstein, NY City, 1959
Lou Bernstein, Coney Island, 1951
Lou Bernstein, Ebbets Field, 1955
Lou Bernstein, South 3rd Street, Brooklyn, N.Y., 1947
Lou Bernstein (1911-2005), a noted New York photographer, was part of a circle of New York-based photographers that included W. Eugene Smith, Lisette Model, Sid Grossman, Gary Winogrand, and Weegee. His favorite subject was New York City, and here are some images he captured of things to do in New York in the summer.
Andrew Savulich, Man confused about spelling of new movie, 1986
Andrew Savulich, Mother and son at voguing ball, 1986
Andrew Savulich, Police prevent woman from jumping off Grand Central Station, 1991
Andrew Savulich, Woman laughing after car wreck, 1989
Andrew Savulich, Man delivering birdseed to sex shop, 1986
To hear Andrew Savulich explain why bird seed is being delivered to a sex shop, click here. He spoke at ICP on February 23, 1994 on the occasion of the exhibition, organized by Charles A. Stainback, Urban Realities: Spot News and Street Photography by Andrew Savulich, March 4-May 8, 1994.
Andrew Sauvlich is still making great photographs that can often be seen in the New York Daily News, like these images:
Andrew Savulich, New York Daily News, January 28, 2010. p. 3
Andrew Savulich, New York Daily News, January 22, 2010. pp. 8-9
Frank Wendt, Piramal & Sami, Brother & Sister Double Bodied Hindoo Enigma, ca. 1915
Frank Wendt, Adolph-Rudolph, 27 Years Old, Born, Vienna, Austria, ca. 1898
Ollivier Photo, Millie Christine: The Carolina Twin, surnamed the 2-headed Nightingale, ca. 1880
A book: History and medical description of the two-headed girl, sold by her agents for her special benefit, at 25 cents, told in “her own particular way” by “one of them.” (1869)
That “contains a short autobiographical sketch of Millie and Christine McCoy (1851-1912), conjoined twins who were born to a family of African-American slaves in North Carolina. Second section contains a detailed report on physiological aspects of the twins’ bodies” can be read here.
Martin Munkacsi, [Daisy and Violet Hilton in dressing room, Birmingham], 1932
Martin Munkacsi, [Daisy and Violet Hilton, Birmingham], 1932
Larry Silver, Memorial Day flag, Westport, Connecticut, 1979
Larry Silver, Memorial Day Minutemen, Westport, Connecticut, 1979
International News Photos, [Amelia Earhart and her Lockheed Electra above the Golden Gate Bridge], March 17, 1937
William E. Dassonville, Golden Gate Bridge from Sausalito, ca. 1925
Read more about the 75th anniversary festivities here.
Currently, Francesca Woodman has two shows in New York: at the Guggenheim and a separate selection of blue prints at Marion Goodman. To look at Woodman’s photographs is to constantly read the environment through the psychological and vice versa. At the Guggenheim, I related the logic of Lucy Soutter’s essay Dial “P” for Panties: Narrative Photography in the 1990s; the examination of female self-representation and how such constructions are built, layered, and interpreted in the composition of photography.
The following selections from the ICP’s permanent collection were pulled to show how women photograph themselves and each other, especially in relation to environment. Works by Justine Kurland, Katy Grannan, Dayanita Singh were included in Another Girl, Another Planet, the 1999 photography exhibition curated by Gregory Crewdson and Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn— Another Girl, Another Planet was the basis for Soutter’s essay.
But this time, let’s not look at these photographs through the lens of the staged moment, let’s consider how environment and psychology function in representations of self.
Dayanita Singh, Untitled, 2002
Francesca Woodman, Polka Dots, November 1976
Singh’s photograph of a domestic interior contains a similar quality of light as Woodman’s interiors, but it expresses the lived-in warmth of the absent presence that consumes these books, reposes in the chair, and consults the clock. The floor is spotless, a reflection of orderly quietude. Woodman’s decrepit interiors range from the romantic to the sinister. In Polka Dots, the dilapidated wall and the floor mirror each other: peels and crackles.
Left: Letizia Battaglia, A prostitute and two of her friends killed by the Mafia, 1983
Right: Letizia Battaglia, Young girl with soccer ball in the neighborhood where drugs are sold, 1982
Justine Kurland, Smoke Bombs, 1998
Girls in the streets, prostitutes murdered by the Mafia, young American women passing time in a suburbanized Eden—Kurland and Battaglia show us a fraction of the marginally homosocial. Kurland’s girl gang on the brink of adulthood are shown vagabonding in a space that evokes the iconic expansiveness of American landscape. Battaglia’s Young girl with soccer ball is a tightly composed picture, indicating the social and physical claustrophobia of the urban street.
Left: Lotte Jacobi, Beate Sauerlander, Amityville, Long Island, 1940
Right: Katy Grannan, Untitled, 1988
Taken forty eight years apart, the portraits by Jacobi and Grannan feature exquisitely elastic qualities of the expansive and the compact. Jacobi’s photograph is minimally composed, showing us the caressed optimism of aristocratic demeanor. Grannan’s photograph is less triumphant than Jacobi’s in visual approach, with its busier edges and awkward posturing (especially those fingers). But the sitter’s defiant confidence is framed by the objects of a comfortable life, comforts that contain odds we cannot name—we do not know them—but her gaze acknowledges their existence.
