Propaganda

Propaganda can serve multiple means. It can help advance a progressive cause, it can challenge our own beliefs and assumptions or reinforce stereotypes. Photography is a very malleable tool, which, often combined with words, can serve such aims effectively.

Barbara Kruger, Pope Fetus I, ca. 1990 (6.2001)

Barbara Kruger uses tools of the advertising industry effectively to get across a message, in this case to highlight one of the obstacles to the empowerment of a woman’s control over her body–the Catholic Church and Cardinal O’Connor–at the height of the culture wars in 1990.

Artists’ Poster Committee of the Art Workers’ Coalition, And Babies?, 1970 (813.2002)

The Artists’ Poster Committee of the Art Workers’ Coalition is most famous for their And Babies? poster

A.R.T., Hanoi–Its the Same War–Kent, 1970 (2011.68.277)

This poster highlights a pivotal moment of the antiwar movement in the US, after the May 4, 1970 massacre at Kent State.

fierce pussy, We Just Really Enjoy Each Other, 1991-95 (1155.2000)

fierce pussy is a collective of queer woman artists, who became active in the early 1990s in the context of AIDS activism. Their output of posters find clever ways of celebrating and affirming dykedom.

Signal, March 1941 (2008.72.7)

Signal was a Nazi propaganda magazine published by the Wehrmacht with a layout similar to LIFE magazine, which promoted a cheerful view of fascist Germany and an anti-bolshevik united Europe under Teutonic hegemony. It was published for neutral, allied, and occupied countries. At one point, it reached a circulation of 2.5 million in twenty-five editions.

Weegee, [Nikita Khrushchev], ca. 1960 (193.1981)

After retiring as a photojournalist, Weegee started making distortions. He continued using his skills in the darkroom and self-invented distortion lenses to comment irreverently on the famous personalities of his day, thus providing an antidote to propaganda.

–Alp Klanten, ICP-Bard 2013

James VanDerZee

James VanDerZee, [Group in car], ca. 1920s (753.1990)

James VanDerZee, The Actor, 1922 (853.2000)

James VanDerZee, [Unidentified Man], ca. 1923 (650.1990)

James VanDerZee, Escape Artist, 1924 (883.1990)

James VanDerZee, A Pioneering Negro-Owned Grocery, 1927 (859.2000)

James VanDerZee, [Unidentified Boy], 1927 (867.2000)

James Augustus Joseph VanDerZee was born to a middle-class family (his parents were the maid and butler for Ulyssses S. Grant) in Lenox, Massachusetts, in 1896. A trained violinist and pianist, he was a leading figure in the Harlem Renaissance. His photographs documented twentieth-century Harlem, the largest black community in the United States at that time. For six decades VanDerZee photographed the ordinary man as well as the most celebrated and famous: Marcus Garvey, Bojangles Robinson, Countee Collen, Bill Cosby, Basquiat. But it was the ordinary man whom he photographed the most. Through his lens he captured the citizens of Harlem in lodges and clubs, weddings and funerals. He made studio portraits of actors, political figures, artists, soldiers, church groups, or people who simply wanted a photograph of themselves in elegant attire.

He owned a studio in Harlem from 1916 to 1983. Often his focus was the black middle class and his photographs showed the upward mobility and status of a people in transition. Everyone flocked to VanDerZee’s studio. VanDerZee’s realistic representation of the Harlem community countered the often stereotypical and offensive caricature views of African Americans. His photographs earnestly visualize the pride and beauty of the African American community. His dreamlike, romantic tableaux grab hold of the imagination. His prolific documentation of this time and place is unmatched: 100,000 photographic prints, negatives, and glass plates that archive black life in America.

VanDerZee’s strength lies in the classicism of his studio portraiture. He made images with extreme precision and technique as well as with compositions that were sensitive to light and texture. He often styled and posed his clients with props and costumes. His sets included architectural elements and elaborate backdrops reminiscent of a Hollywood stage. He was a master re-toucher and often created a sense of glamor with the use of handtinting and other darkroom techniques. The tones and textures in his portraits paid homage to Old Masters paintings. All of this allowed him to push his craft and become a successful and sought after photographer.

Sixty years after he disappeared into obscurity, the artworld came calling for photographs for the exhibition Harlem on My Mind at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1969. Photographer Reginald McGhee, the exhibition’s director of photographic research, had rediscovered VanDerZee’s archive in the late 1960s. After VanDerZee’s death in 1983, a major retrospective at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC, in 1993 recognized him as the premier chronicler of Harlem life.

–Nona Faustine Simmons ICP-Bard 2013

Seen on the Street

Leon Levinstein, [Women, India], ca. 1979 (2008.94.5)

Leon Levinstein, [Man on bicycle] (2010.113.10)

Leon Levinstein, St. Marks Place, 1968 (2011.53.5)

Leon Levinstein, Times Square, 1985 (2011.53.33)

Street photographer Leon Levinstein (American, 1910-1988) came to New York in the 1940s and studied under Harper’s Bazaar artistic director Alexey Brodovich and Photo League founder Sid Grossman. By 1950, he had begun photographing people on the street, a practice he would continue for the rest of his life.

International Mother Earth Day

“Nature is beyond all teaching.”

Proverbs are defined as short expressions of popular wisdom. When in the past our survival was clearly related to nature, proverbs were a common and popular form to transmit nature’s knowledge.

Therefore, I decided to create an homage to Mother Earth with these photographs and some proverbs, some of which are Native American.

And if Mother Nature is important… don’t forget the “father.”

“The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.”

Edward Weston, Cabbage Leaf, 1931 (3408.1992)

“All plants are our brothers and sisters. They talk to us and if we listen, we can hear them.” – Arapaho

Brett Weston, Cactus, Baja, California, ca. 1940 (2012.119.41)

“When we show our respect for other living things, they respond with respect for us.” – Arapaho

Brett Weston, Yucca Plants, 1960s (371.2003)

“We will be known forever by the tracks we leave.” – Dakota

Brett Weston, Cactus, ca. 1950 (2012.119.42)

“When a man moves away from nature his heart becomes hard.” – Lakota

Brett Weston, Botanicals, ca. 1980, (2012.119.54)

Love Me, Love My Dog

Filling the role of Man’s Best Friend below are some featured pups being embraced, ogled, petted, held, hugged, and loved by their owners.

Dogs with style:

Chim (David Seymour), [Peggy Guggenheim on the Grand Canal, Venice], 1950 (354.1982)

Dogs with musical talent:

Elliott Erwitt, Amsterdam, 1972 (2007.4.32)

Dogs in all shapes and sizes:

Edwin Rosskam, Oil Town Children, Wyoming, 1944 (121.1983)

Dogs can be regal:

Robert Capa, [Adolphe Max, burgomater (mayor) of the city for thirty years, with his dog Happy, Brussels], 1939 (2516.1992)

Dogs are beautiful, too:

Garry Winogrand, from the series Women are Beautiful, 1975 (248.1984)

Harold Feinstein Inspires Us for National Garden Month

Harold Feinstein is a well-known photographer who was born in Coney Island in 1931 and lives in Brooklyn. New York City (and Coney Island in particular) has been the inspiration for his black-and-white street photography for over sixty years.  In 1990,  ICP’s  exhibition A Coney Island of the Heart: Five Decades of Photographs by Harold Feinstein focused on Feinstein’s passion for his birthplace.

Harold Feinstein, Lace Weeds Blowing with Clouds, Saxtons River, Vt., 1976 (620.1982)

During the seventies, Feinstein was still focused on New York and was consolidating his career as one of the New York School photographers. Meanwhile, he was slowly changing his subject matter.

Harold Feinstein, Squash Flower, Saxtons River, Vt., 1977 (627.1982)

Remarkably, ICP has some of Feinstein’s photographs in its collection that were taken in 1976, which show this significant change and depict some flowers. Amazingly, these pictures are still shot with black-and-white film, but are very close-up and isolated with a neutral background.

These compositions foreshadow the subject matter that would be fully developed in color photography. Indeed, during the eighties, the photographer started working in a completely new style, reproducing and revealing the beauty of flowers, leaves, seashells, and butterflies.

Harold Feinstein, Gloriosa, 1980 (630.1982)

Feistein has often declared that he started shooting flowers up on the roof of his small Greenwich Village studio and holding “blossom up against the sky to the translucence of the petals.” As he said: “That series of 35 mm photographs was entitled Sky Flowers and I had many of them printed as dye transfers and Cibachrome.”

 Harold Feinstein, Cattleya, 1980 (633.1982)

From that period on, Feinstein started exploring not only a completely different subject but also experimented with new techniques, such as scanography, which utilizes a scanner as a camera. He was inspired by nature and flowers and composed short poems.  Similarly, I was inspired by his work “Flora”; his poetic vision is perfect way to celebrate April,  National Gardening Month.

Harold Feinstein, Siddhartha, 1980 (638.1982)

Recent Acquisition: Sam Falls

Sam Falls, Crayon Roofs, 2011 (2013. 3.1)

Courtesy Higher Pictures

Thanks to the generosity of the Acquisitions Committee, ICP recently acquired a unique work by ICP-Bard alumni Sam Falls. Mixing photography, painting, drawing, computer rendering, video, printmaking, and sculpture, Falls’ work, including Crayon Roofs from 2011, is steeped in a freewheeling sensibility that is one of the hallmarks of his generation of artists. Although he regularly employs a host of different mediums, the notion of “the photographic” remains the conceptual motor for much of what he does, guiding his thinking about the ways that the variables of light, space, and time can be employed to shape an image. Falls produces art that is at once wildly improvisational and relentlessly idea-driven: he worries less about the stylistic coherence of his output than the consistency of its creative logic. “The notion of an artist working in one style doesn’t make any sense,” he says flatly.

Sam Falls was born in San Diego in 1984 and grew up mostly in Vermont. He received his BA from Reed College in 2007 and MFA from ICP-Bard in 2010. He lives and works in Brooklyn.

–Christopher Phillips, Curator