MODERN PHOTOGRAPHS FROM THE THOMAS WALTHER COLLECTION AT MUSEUM OF MODERN ART NEW YORK

MODERN PHOTOGRAPHS FROM THE THOMAS WALTHER COLLECTION 1909 - 1949

MUSEUM OF MODERN ART NEW YORK

December 13, 2014 - April 19, 2015

MODERN PHOTOGRAPHS FROM THE THOMAS WALTHER COLLECTION 1909 - 1949

MUSEUM OF MODERN ART NEW YORK

December 13, 2014 - April 19, 2015

The Edward Steichen Photography Galleries, third floor

Exhibition Coincides with the Culmination of the Thomas Walther Collection Project, a Four-Year Research Collaboration Between MoMA’s Curatorial and Conservation Staff

Explores photography between the First and Second World Wars, when creative possibilities were never richer or more varied, and when photographers approached figuration, abstraction, and architecture with unmatched imaginative fervor. This vital moment is dramatically captured in the photographs that constitute the Thomas Walther Collection, a remarkable group of works presented together for the first time through nearly 300 photographs. Made on the street and in the studio, intended for avant-garde exhibitions or the printed page, these objects provide unique insight into the radical intentions of their creators. Iconic works by such towering figures as Berenice Abbott, Karl Blossfeldt, Alvin Langdon Coburn, El Lissitzky, Lucia Moholy, László Moholy- Nagy, Aleksandr Rodchenko, and Paul Strand are featured alongside lesser-known treasures by more than 100 other practitioners. The exhibition is organized by Quentin Bajac, the Joel and Anne Ehrenkranz Chief Curator of Photography, and Sarah Hermanson Meister, Curator, Department of Photography, MoMA.

The exhibition coincides with Object:Photo. Modern Photographs: The Thomas

Walther Collection 1909–1949, the result of a four-year collaborative project between the Museum’s departments of Photography and Conservation, with the participation of over two dozen leading international photography scholars and conservators, making it the most extensive effort to integrate conservation, curatorial, and scholarly research efforts on photography to date. That project is composed of multiple parts including a website that features a suite of digital visualization research tools that allow visitors to explore the collection, a hard-bound paper catalogue of the entire Thomas Walther collection, and an interdisciplinary symposium focusing on ways in which the digital age is changing our engagement with historic photographs.

Modern Photographs from the Thomas Walther Collection, 1909–1949, is organized

thematically into six sections, suggesting networks between artists, regions, and objects, and highlighting the figures whose work Walther collected in depth, including André Kertész, Germaine Krull, Franz Roh, Willi Ruge, Maurice Tabard, Umbo, and Edward Weston. Enriched by key works in other mediums from MoMA's collection, this exhibition presents the exhilarating story of a landmark chapter in photography’s history.

http://www.moma.org/visit/calendar/exhibitions/1496

A BASIS FOR COMPARISON: THE THOMAS WALTHER COLLECTION AS  RESEARCH COLLECTION BY JIM CODDINGTON 

What is it? What is an object, a particular work of art? This question, which lies at the heart of art-historical inquiry, is itself comprised of others: who made this object? When? Where? What is it made of? The study of archival materials that relate to an artwork, such as provenance, exhibition records, and written accounts by contemporaries and historians, is vital to such investigation, but initially, how the arthistorical object is defined by these questions is an empirical problem, which is derived from observation of the object itself. Once we start to answer these basic questions, we can begin to place the object in the larger art-historical narrative and scholarship—a process that is the result of comparing these answers to those derived from other objects, other artists, other periods. Indeed, the reflexive use of comparisons seems as fundamental to art-historical inquiry as the description and analysis of objects, even when it is not explicitly recognized as such.1  Comparative analysis is thus central to art-historical inquiry, and it is a core methodological principle as well for conservation and conservation science, both of which play a significant role in characterizing the art object itself and in classifying it relative to its place in the art-historical context, as is evident here in the collective research conducted as part of the Walther project. These qualitative and quantitative analyses not only help us to better understand the specific artworks themselves (in this case, photographs [fig. 1]), they also form a basis for comparisons with other works by the same artist, other works within the collection, and works across multiple collections as well.  

Conservation and conservation science often bring particular methods and sets of data to the task of arthistorical investigation. For instance, observation of works by the same artist reveals patterns of material use as well as technique in using those materials, while deeper research on the particular object can include direct analysis of its materials to establish their chemical composition and physical performance. Knowing what paint Jackson Pollock used is critical to identifying his works, for example, and also to the understanding of his development of a distinctive style that placed him well outside the norms of historical painting practice.2 More subtly, a better knowledge of the white pigments employed by Piet Mondrian can enhance our insight into the effects one sees in his paintings by understanding the fundamental properties of those pigments.3 Such information is derived from instrumental analysis of microscopic samples taken from the work or, increasingly, using instruments that collect data directly from the work without sampling.4 Material comparison can be critically important in the medium of photography, where original artworks often exist as multiples that are sometimes created years apart using the same negative but printed with different materials and artistic intentions, such as is evident in examining Edward Weston’s switch from platinum to gelatin silver printing, a key transition in his artistic development. Essential to such analysis is, once again, the use of comparative data, not only from works by the specific artist but also from reference collections of materials, which are a fundamental and invaluable resource. Reference collections of art materials are, by definition, material samples of known provenance. Often the reference collection, the material archive, will also contain analytical data of some kind for comparison by other researchers analyzing similar material samples.

Material archives have long been a part of conservation research, one of the first being the Forbes Collection. Begun around 1910 as a collection of historical artists’ materials to support Edward Waldo Forbes’s course on Italian painting at Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum, today samples from the Forbes pigment collection reside not only at Harvard but at numerous other institutions; taken as a whole, the collection represents an essential attribute of all truly valuable reference collections, which is a provenance of the sources of the samples themselves.5 Although the Forbes Collection is known principally as a pigment collection, it is in fact broader than that, comprising samples of artists’ materials such as historic paint media and varnishes as well. In addition, the collection of pigments has come to serve other research uses beyond its initial purpose as a reference to study Renaissance Italian painting. Because the collection was built during the first half of the twentieth century, it can also be viewed and used as an archive of pigment manufacture during that time. It thus offers comparative data for the history of pigment making and a resource for comparing pigment samples from objects made during that period, demonstrating that material archives can often find applications beyond the vision of their original creators.  Particularly useful have been those reference collections dedicated to paper, such as the one at the National Gallery of Art. A prime value of such paper collections is the identification of watermarks as a means to date the paper as well as the maker. The material constituents of a paper collection, such as the fiber content of the individual papers (fig. 2), have become increasingly valuable as analytical equipment and techniques to aid such characterization have become more commonly available to the conservation field, as demonstrated here in the work of Hanako Murata and Lee Ann Daffner.  

Indeed, this increased analytical capacity and sophistication have expanded the idea of the reference collection to include not only materials of well-documented provenance but data collections of well-documented provenance as well. The Infrared & Raman Users Group (IRUG) is one of the oldest and most widely used of such collections, in which the material sources and analytical protocols for deriving the data are both clearly detailed.6 The IRUG collection of reference data is not deposited in a single place but rather is a searchable database from which members can compare their analytical results to the reference materials and the data in the database. For instance, if there is an adhesive or coating on a work, a sample can be analyzed via infrared spectroscopy, and similar spectra are then called up for comparison to identify the closest match. This would be one of the approaches to identifying the paint Pollock used in the example above. It is worth noting that such analysis is not simply a mechanical process or computational result but one that requires a degree of judgment. Differences in results can be due to an unknown element in the sample, deterioration or aging of the material of interest, as well as differing protocols, sampling techniques, or sensitivity of the detection method itself, all further evidence of the critical role of data interpretation by experienced scientists in rigorous material studies. 

It is fortunate that reference collections that make use of sophisticated analytical tools have been incorporated at roughly the same time that the range of artist materials has started to increase exponentially. Synthetic polymers, singly and as constituents in complex formulations or as composites, have been present in the work of artists for much of the twentieth century. The task of characterizing this huge universe of materials is daunting, and conservators and conservation scientists routinely turn to industrial literature to acquire key data and research information. Industrial paint literature has been central to characterizing the paints used by many modern artists, for example.7 The photographic film and paper industry, a truly modern phenomenon as well, was for many decades one of the most extensively researched and recorded, due to the size of the market for these materials and their general penetration not just into fine-art collections but into the culture at large.  Certainly when it comes to furthering our materials based understanding of the history and development of the photograph as an artistic medium, the Messier Collection of photographic papers is critical, a fact amply illustrated by Paul Messier’s contribution to this project. Consisting of more than 5,000 paper samples, this material archive offers researchers the opportunity to probe in numerous ways the complex medium of photographic papers, from early in its commercial history to the late twentieth century, thus providing an incomparable resource to better establish how, when, where, and by whom fine-art photographs were made.8 The Messier Collection has been a fundamental tool for the research conducted on the Walther Collection, both directly and through the utilization of past research based on the collection. Protocols from that prior research, as well as other protocols, have been incorporated into the examination and instrumental analysis of the photographs in the Walther Collection. These include elemental analysis of the baryta and emulsion layers using X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy (XRF; fig. 3), thickness measurements (fig. 4), Fourier Transform Infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), texture imaging (fig. 5), gloss assessment, and UV fluorescence of the photos.  The Museum of Modern Art’s film stills archive represents another material collection that has greatly benefited efforts to better characterize photographs. Consisting of more than 4 million individual stills and promotional materials from the United States, England, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, and Asia, and from the earliest days of the film industry to the present, the collection is another example of one that was originally acquired for historical and documentation purposes (in this case, surrounding the history of movies) but is now valued for its material information as well. This collection, with well-documented printing dates for the photos, has been used to refine a methodology for dating photographs, and these research methods have also been central to the characterization of the photographs in the Walther Collection.9  Such deep characterization of the material constituents of the entire collection thus brings the Walther Collection, in addition to its art-historical importance, into the realm of the kinds of material archives and research collections outlined above. The research methods are clearly detailed and public. The photos themselves are well documented, with substantial provenance and historical research supporting them.10 The collected data, both art historical and scientific, can be a source of comparison for other researchers who have derived their own data through their study of similar photographs or other works by the same photographer. More broadly, the methodologies from this research can be applied to other photographs and photography collections, which in turn will further extend the field’s global set of data so that new comparisons leading to new characterizations and classifications of photographs can be made. And, like other such collections, the research on the Walther Collection, both material and arthistorical, will be extended and expanded in the future, offering ever more comprehensive understanding of the collection itself, its photographers, and the vital period of photography it represents—in sum, what each of these photographs is.

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  https://www.moma.org/interactives/objectphoto/assets/essays/Coddington.pdf 

https://www.moma.org/interactives/objectphoto/the_project.html

You may reach above link to see all the photographs under fig. with photographs information and notes under numbers related to essay for your research. You would like to research exhibition web page to read and find out more essay and photographs to click above link.

1- THE MODERN WORLD

Even before the introduction of the handheld Leica camera in 1925, photographers were avidly exploring fresh perspectives, shaped by the unique experience of capturing the world through a lens and ideally suited to express the tenor of modern life in the wake of World War I. Looking up and down, these photographers found unfamiliar points of view that suggested a new, dynamic visual language freed from convention. Improvements in the light sensitivity of photographic films and papers meant that photographers could capture motion as never before. At the same time, technological advances in printing resulted in an explosion of opportunities for photographers to present their work to ever-widening audiences. From inexpensive weekly magazines to extravagantly produced journals, periodicals exploited the potential of photographs and imaginative layouts, not text, to tell stories. Among the photographers on view in this section are Martin Munkácsi (American, born Hungary, 1896–1963), Leni Riefenstahl (German, 1902–2003), Aleksandr Rodchenko (Russian, 1891–1956), and Willi Ruge (German, 1882–1961).

WILLI RUGE ( GERMAN 1882–1961 )

WITH MY HEAD HANGING DOWN BEFORE THE PARACHUTE OPENED… 1931

Gelatin Silver Print

Dimensions Image: 14 × 20.3 cm

The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Thomas Walther Collection.

Gift of Thomas Walther

ALEKSANDR RODCHENKO ( RUSSIAN 1891–1956 )

DIVE 1934

Gelatin Silver Print

Dimensions Image: 29.7 x 23.8 cm

The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Thomas Walther Collection.

Gift of Shirley C. Burden, by Exchange

WILLI RUGE ( GERMAN 1882 - 1961 )

SECONDS BEFORE LANDING SECONDS BEFORE LANDING

From the Series – I Photograph Myself during a Parachute Jump 1931

Gelatin Silver Print

Dimensions Image: 20.4 × 14.1 cm

The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Thomas Walther Collection.

Gift of Thomas Walther

LENI RIEFENSTAHL ( GERMAN 1902–2003 )

UNTITLED 1936

Gelatin Silver Print

Dimensions Image: 23.4 x 29.5 cm

The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Thomas Walther Collection.

Abbott-Levy Collection funds, by Exchange

 

WANDA WULZ ( ITALIAN 1903 - 1984 )

EXERCISE 1932

Gelatin Silver Print - Print Date 1932- 1939

Dimensions Image: 29.2 × 21.9 cm

Credit Line Thomas Walther Collection.

Abbott-Levy Collection Funds, by Exchange

© Fratelli Alinari Museum Collections-Studio Wulz Archive, Florence

 

ROBERT PETSCHOW ( GERMAN 1888 – 1945 )

LINES OF MODERN INDUSTRY: COOLING TOWER 1920 - 1929

Gelatin Silver Print

Print Date 1920 - 1932

Dimensions Image: 8.5 × 11.5 cm - Sheet: 8.8 × 11.9 cm

Credit Line Thomas Walther Collection.

Gift of Albert Renger-Patzsch, by Exchange

2- PURISM

The question of whether photography ought to be considered a fine art was hotly contested from its invention in 1839 into the 20th century. Beginning in the 1890s, in an attempt to distinguish their efforts from hoards of Kodak-wielding amateurs and masses of professionals, “artistic” photographers referred to themselves as Pictorialists. They embraced soft focus and painstakingly wrought prints so as to emulate contemporary prints and drawings, and chose subjects that underscored the ethereal effects of their methods. Before long, however, most avant-garde photographers had come to celebrate precise and distinctly photographic qualities as virtues. On both sides of the Atlantic, photographers were making this transition from Pictorialism to modernism, while occasionally blurring the distinction. Exhibition prints could be made with precious platinum or palladium, or matte surfaces that mimicked those materials. Perhaps nowhere is this variety more clearly evidenced than in the work of Edward Weston, whose suite of prints in this section suggests the range of appearances achievable with unadulterated contact prints from his large-format negatives. Other photographers on view include Karl Blossfeldt (German, 1865 - 1932), Manuel Álvarez Bravo (Mexican, 1902–2002), Jaromír Funke (Czech, 1896 - 1945), Bernard Shea Horne (American, 1867 - 1933), and Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864 - 1946).

JAROSLAV ROSSLER ( CZECH 1902 – 1990 )

UNTITLED 1923 - 1925

Gelatin Silver Print

Print Date 1923 - 1935

Dimensions Image: 22.1 × 21.8 cm

Credit Line Thomas Walther Collection. Horace W. Goldsmith Fund 

Through Robert B. Menschel

© 2014 Sylva Vitove-Rösslerova

BERNARD SHEA HORNE ( AMERICAN 1867 – 1933 )

UNTITLED 1916 - 1917

Platinum Print

Print Date 1916 - 1917

Dimensions Image: 20.3 × 15.5 cm

Credit Line Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Thomas Walther

EDWARD WESTON ( AMERICAN 1886 – 1958 )

ATTIC 1921

Palladium Print

Dimensions: 18.9 × 23.9 cm

The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Thomas Walther Collection.

Grace M. Mayer Fund and gift of Mrs. Mary Donant and Carl Sandburg, by Exchange

BERNARD SHEA HORNE ( AMERICAN 1867 – 1933 )

UNTITLED 1916 - 1917

Platinum Print

Print Date 1916 - 1917

Dimensions Image: 20.5 × 15.5 cm

Credit Line Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Thomas Walther

Grace M. Mayer Fund and gift of Mrs. Mary Donant and Carl Sandburg, by Exchange

JAROMÍR FUNKE ( CZECH 1896–1945 )

PLATES 1923 - 1924

Gelatin Silver Print

Dimensions Image: 21.5 × 29.3 cm

The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Thomas Walther Collection.

Gift of Shirley C. Burden, by Exchange

 

EDWARD WESTON ( AMERICAN 1886 – 1958 )

STEEL: ARMCO, MIDDLETOWN, OHIO - 1922

Palladium Print - Print Date 1922

Dimensions Image: 23 × 17.4 cm

Credit Line Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Thomas Walther

 © 1981 Center for Creative Photography,

Arizona Board of Regents.

 

EDWARD WESTON ( AMERICAN 1886 – 1958 )

STEEL: ARMCO, MIDDLETOWN, OHIO - 1922

DESCRIPTION

In Edward Weston’s journals, which he began on his trip to Ohio and New York in fall 1922, the artist wrote of the exhilaration he felt while photographing the “great plant and giant stacks of the American Rolling Mill Company” in Middletown, Ohio. He then went to see the great photographer and tastemaker Alfred Stieglitz. Were he still publishing the magazine Camera Work, Stieglitz told him, he would have reproduced some of Weston’s recent images in it, including, in particular, one of his smokestacks. The photograph’s clarity and the photographer’s frank awe at the beauty of the brute industrial subject seemed clear signs of advanced modernist tendencies.

In moving away from the soft focus and geometric stylization of his recent images, such as Attic of 1921 (MoMA 1902.2001), Weston was discovering a more straightforward approach, one of considered confrontation with the facts of the larger world much like that of his close friend Johan Hagemeyer, who was photographing such modern subjects as smokestacks, telephone wires, and advertisements. Shortly before his trip east, Weston had met R. M. Schindler, the Austrian architect, and had been excited by his unapologetically spare, modern house and its implications for art and design. Weston was also reading avant-garde European art magazines full of images and essays extolling machines and construction. Stimulated by these currents, Weston saw that by the time he got to Ohio he was “ripe to change, was changing, yes changed.”

The visit to Armco was the critical pivot, the hinge between Weston’s Pictorialist past and his modernist future. It marked a clear leave-taking from his bohemian circle in Los Angeles and the first step toward the cosmopolitan connections he made in New York and in Mexico City, where he moved a few months later to live with the Italian actress and artist Tina Modotti. The Armco photographs went with him and became talismans of the sea change, emblematic works that decorated his studio in Mexico, along with a Japanese print and a print by Picasso. When he sent a representation of his best work to the Film und Foto exhibition in Stuttgart in 1929, one of the smokestacks was included.

In the midst of such transformation, Weston maintained tried-and-true darkroom procedures. He had used an enlarger in earlier years but had abandoned the technique because he felt that too much information was lost in the projection. Instead he increasingly favored contact printing. To make the smokestack print, Weston enlarged his 3 ¼ by 4 ¼ inch (8.3 by 10.8 centimeter) original negative onto an 8 by 10 inch (20.3 by 25.4 centimeter) interpositive transparency, which he contact printed to a second sheet of film in the usual way, creating the final 8 by 10 inch negative. Weston was frugal; he was known to economize by purchasing platinum and palladium paper by the roll from Willis and Clements in England and trimming it to size. He exposed a sheet of palladium paper to the sun through the negative and, after processing the print, finished it by applying aqueous retouching media to any flaws. The fragile balance of the photograph’s chemistry, however, is evinced in a bubble-shaped area of cooler tonality hovering over the central stacks. The print was in Modotti’s possession at the time of her death in Mexico City, in 1942.

—Lee Ann Daffner, Maria Morris Hambourg

http://www.moma.org/interactives/objectphoto/objects/84082.html

JAROSLAV RÖSSLER ( CZECH 1902–1990 )

UNTITLED 1924

Pigment Print

Dimensions Image: 23 × 23 cm

The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Thomas Walther Collection.

Horace W. Goldsmith Fund Through Robert B. Menschel

3- REINVENTING PHOTOGRAPHY

In 1925, László Moholy-Nagy articulated an idea that became central to the New Vision movement: although photography had been invented 100 years earlier, it was only now being discovered by the avant-garde circles for all its aesthetic possibilities. As products of technological culture, with short histories and no connection to the old fine-art disciplines—which many contemporary artists considered discredited—photography and cinema were seen as truly modern instruments that offered the greatest potential for transforming visual habits. From the photogram to solarization, from negative prints to double exposures, the New Vision photographers explored the medium in countless ways, rediscovering known techniques and inventing new ones. Echoing the cinematic experiments of the same period, this emerging photographic vocabulary was rapidly adopted by the advertising industry, which appreciated the visual efficiency of its bold simplicity. Florence Henri (Swiss, born America, 1893 - 1982), Edward Quigley (American, 1898 - 1977), Franz Roh (German, 1890 - 1965), Franciszka Themerson and Stefan Themerson (British, born Poland, 1907 - 1988 and 1910 - 1988), and František Vobecký (Czech, 1902 - 1991) are among the numerous photographers represented here.

EDMUND KESTING ( GERMAN 1892 – 1970 )

PHOTOGRAM LIGHTBULB 1927

Gelatin Silver Print

Print Date 1927 - 1939

Dimensions Image: 29.6 × 39.7 cm

Credit Line Thomas Walther Collection.

Abbott-Levy Collection funds, by Exchange

© 2014/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Germany

EL LISSITZKY ( RUSSIAN 1890 – 1941 )

KURT SCHWITTERS 1924

Gelatin Silver Print

Dimensions: 10.8 × 9.8 cm

The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Thomas Walther Collection.

Gift of Shirley C. Burden, by Exchange

ISTVAN KERNY ( HUNGARIAN 1879 – 1963 )

NEPTUNE 1916

Gelatin Silver Print

Print Date 1916–35

Dimensions Image: 16 cm

Credit Line Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Robert Capa, by Exchange

FRANCIS BRUGUIERE  ( AMERICAN 1879 – 1945 )

VIOLENT INTERVENTION 1925 - 1929

Gelatin Silver Print

Print Date 1925 - 1929

Dimensions Image: 24 x 18.9 cm

Credit Line Thomas Walther Collection.

Abbott-Levy Collection Funds, by Exchange

© 1991 Kenneth H. Bruguière and Kathleen Bruguière Anderson

ALVIN LANGDON COBURN ( AMERICAN 1882 – 1966 )

VORTOGRAPH 1916 - 1917

Gelatin Silver Print

Dimensions: 28.2 x 21.2 cm

The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Thomas Walther Collection.

Grace M. Mayer Fund

ADOLF NAVARA ( CZECH, ACTIVE C. 1930S)

UNTITLED C. 1930

Gelatin Silver Print

Print Date c. 1930–35

Dimensions Image: 29.5 x 22.8 cm

Credit Line Thomas Walther Collection.

Abbott-Levy Collection Funds, by Exchange

HANS RICHTER ( AMERICAN, BORN GERMANY 1888 – 1976 )

UNTITLED STILL FROM FILM STUDY ( 1928 ) 1927

Gelatin Silver Print

Dimensions: 7.3 x 9.8 cm

The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Thomas Walther Collection.

Gift of Thomas Walther

MARGARET BOURKE - WHITE ( AMERICAN 1904 – 1971 )  

UNTITLED - FEBRUARY 1931

Gelatin Silver Print

Print Date 1931–39

Dimensions Image: 33.5 x 23.4 cm

Credit Line Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of James N. Rosenberg, by Exchange

 © 2014 Estate of Margaret Bourke-White/Licensed by VAGA, New York

 

HANNES MEYER ( SWISS 1889 – 1954 )

FILM 1926

Two Gelatin Silver Prints Mounted on White Cardboard

Print Date 1926

Dimensions Image: 21.2 × 3.4 cm - Mount: 29.6 × 21 cm

Credit Line Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Thomas Walther

© Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin

OSKAR NERLINGER ( GERMAN 1893 – 1969 )

MOTORCYCLE IN THE RACE 1925

Gelatin Silver Print

Dimensions: 22 × 17.4 cm

The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Thomas Walther Collection.

Abbott-Levy Collection Funds, by Exchange

 

STEFAN THEMERSON ( BRITISH, BORN POLAND 1910 – 1988 )

FRANCISZKA THEMERSON ( BRITISH, BORN POLAND 1907 – 1988 )

UNTITLED, FROM MOMENT MUSICAL 1933

Gelatin Silver Prints on White Cardboard

Print Date 1933 - 1935

Dimensions Mount: 37.8 × 39 cm

Credit Line Thomas Walther Collection. Abbott-Levy Collection funds, by exchange

© 2014 Themerson Estate

FRANZ ROH ( GERMAN 1890 – 1965 )

UNTITLED 1928 - 1933

Gelatin Silver Print

Print Date 1928 - 1935

Dimensions Image: 10.1 × 23.3 cm

Credit Line Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Thomas Walther

© Estate Franz Roh, Munich

 

MODERN PHOTOGRAPHS FROM THE THOMAS WALTHER COLLECTION 1909 - 1949

THE COLLECTION

In the 1920s and ’30s photography underwent a period of exploration, experimentation, technical innovation, and graphic discovery so dramatic that it generated repeated claims that the true age of discovery was not when photography was invented but when it came of age, in this era, as a dynamic, infinitely flexible, and easily transmissible medium. The Thomas Walther Collection concentrates on that second moment of growth. The Walther Collection’s 341 photographs by almost 150 artists, most of them European, together convey a period of collective innovation that is now celebrated as one of the major episodes of modern art.

THE PROJECT

Our research is based on the premise that photographs of this period were not born as disembodied images; they are physical things—discrete objects made by certain individuals at particular moments using specific techniques and materials. Shaped by its origin and creation, the photographic print harbors clues to its maker and making, to the causes it may have served, and to the treatment it has received, and these bits of information, gathered through close examination of the print, offer fresh perspectives on the history of the era. “Object:Photo”—the title of this study—reflects this approach.

In 2010, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation gave the Museum a grant to encourage deep scholarly study of the Walther Collection and to support publication of the results. Led by the Museum’s Departments of Photography and Conservation, the project elicited productive collaborations among scholars, curators, conservators, and scientists, who investigated all of the factors involved in the making, appearance, condition, and history of each of the 341 photographs in the collection. The broadening of narrow specializations and the cross-fertilization between fields heightened appreciation of the singularity of each object and of its position within the history of its moment. Creating new standards for the consideration of photographs as original objects and of photography as an art form of unusually rich historical dimensions, the project affords both experts and those less familiar with its history new avenues for the appreciation of the medium. The results of the project are presented in multiple parts: on the website, in a hard-bound paper catalogue of the entire Thomas Walther Collection (also titled Object:Photo), and through an interdisciplinary symposium focusing on the ways in which the digital age is changing our engagement with historic photographs.

http://www.moma.org/interactives/objectphoto/the_project.html#intro

THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART NEW YORK

THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART NEW YORK

Founded in 1929 as an educational institution, The Museum of Modern Art is dedicated to being the foremost museum of modern art in the world.

Through the leadership of its Trustees and staff, The Museum of Modern Art manifests this commitment by establishing, preserving, and documenting a collection of the highest order that reflects the vitality, complexity and unfolding patterns of modern and contemporary art; by presenting exhibitions and educational programs of unparalleled significance; by sustaining a library, archives, and conservation laboratory that are recognized as international centers of research; and by supporting scholarship and publications of preeminent intellectual merit.

Central to The Museum of Modern Art’s mission is the encouragement of an ever-deeper understanding and enjoyment of modern and contemporary art by the diverse local, national, and international audiences that it serves. You may read more about MoMA’s entire information to click below link.

http://press.moma.org/about/

THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART NEW YORK

DIRECTOR DR. GLENN D. LOWRY

THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART NEW YORK

DIRECTOR DR. GLENN D. LOWRY

THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART NEW YORK

MODERN PHOTOGRAPHS FROM THE THOMAS WALTHER COLLECTION 1909 - 1949

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

The Walther Collection is particularly suited to such a study because its photographs are so various in technique, geography, genre, and materials as to make it a mine of diverse data. The revolutions in technology that made the photography of this period so flexible and responsive to the impulse of the operator threw open the field to all comers. The introduction of the handheld Leica
 in 1925 (a small camera using strips of 35mm motion-picture film), of enlargers to make positive prints from the Leica’s little negatives, and of easy-to-use photographic papers—each of these was respectively a watershed event. Immediately sensing the potential of these tools, artists began to explore the medium; without any specialized training, painters such as László Moholy-Nagy and Aleksandr Rodchenko could become photographers and teachers almost overnight. Excitedly and with an open sense of possibility, they freely experimented in the darkroom and in the studio, producing negative prints, collages and photomontages, photograms, solarizations, and combinations of these. Legions of serious amateurs also began to photograph, and manufacturers produced more types of cameras with different dimensions and capacities: besides the Leica, there was the Ermanox, which could function in low light, motion-picture cameras that could follow and stop action, and many varieties of medium- and larger-format cameras that could be adapted for easy transport. The industry responded to the expanding range of users and equipment with a bonanza of photographic papers in an assortment of textures, colors, and sizes. Multiple purposes also generated many kinds of prints: best for reproduction in books or newspapers were slick, ferrotyped glossies, unmounted and small enough to mail, while photographs for exhibition were generally larger and mounted to stiff boards. Made by practitioners ranging from amateurs to professional portraitists, journalists, illustrators, designers, critics, and artists of all stripes, the pictures in the Walther Collection are a true representation of the kaleidoscopic multiplicity of photography in this period of diversification.

CONSERVATION SCIENCE

The conservation objectives were manifold: to determine the manner of the photographs’ construction—the material constituents of both the image and its paper— and to test a new methodology, previously applied only to smaller sets of pictures. To this end the conservation team gathered literature, magazines, advertisements, and broadsides of the period—tracking the appearance and history of once familiar products and techniques, so many now given up to history—and launched into a suite of technical analyses for each photograph in the collection. Chris McGlinchey, the Museum’s Sally and Michael Gordon Conservation Scientist, who had pioneered the use of handheld X-ray fluorescence (XRF) devices on photographs in 2001, set to work, and Ana Martins, Associate Conservation Scientist, statistically evaluated the immense data sets that the research had produced. Surface texture, a special line of investigation for Paul Messier, independent conservator, and Jim Coddington, the Museum’s Chief Conservator, drew on a body of research in imaging systems built up by, among others, the Cultural Heritage Imaging group in San Francisco, using techniques of polynomial mapping and reflectance transformation imaging. Messier’s modifications of these methods enabled the study, documentation, and sharing of the surfaces of photographs by the same artists in other museum collections. The success of documenting photographs from different collections with these kinds of reproducible results not only raised the bar for standards of collaboration but made possible future comparisons that adhere to these published methods and procedures. MoMA was thus positioned not only to synthesize and mine the largest body of raw data on a group of photographs ever gathered, but to extend that effort beyond its own walls.

http://www.moma.org/interactives/objectphoto/the_project.html#intro

You may visit a comprehensive web page that prepare for the exhibition of Modern Photographs From the Thomas Walther Collection at Moma to read all the essays, artist’s information and to see all the photographs with there knowledge to click below special link.

http://www.moma.org/interactives/objectphoto/#home

THE ARTIST’S LIFE

Photography is particularly well suited to capturing the distinctive nuances of the human face, and photographers delighted in and pushed the boundaries of portraiture throughout the 20th century. The Thomas Walther Collection features a great number of portraits of artists and self-portraits as varied as the individuals portrayed. Additionally, the collection conveys a free-spirited sense of community and daily life, highlighted here with photographs made by André Kertész and by students and faculty at the Bauhaus. When the Hungarian-born Kertész moved to Paris in 1925, he couldn’t afford to purchase photographic paper, so he would print on less expensive postcard stock. These prints, whose small scale requires that the viewer engage with them intimately, function as miniature windows into the lives of Kertész’s bohemian circle of friends. The group of photographs made at the Bauhaus in the mid-1920s, before the medium was formally integrated into the school’s curriculum, similarly expresses friendships and everyday life captured and printed

in an informal manner. Portraits by Claude Cahun (French, 1894 - 1954), Lotte Jacobi (American, born Germany, 1896 - 1990), Lucia Moholy (British, born Czechoslovakia, 1894 - 1989), Man Ray (American, 1890 - 1976), August Sander (German, 1876 - 1964) and Edward Steichen (American, born Luxembourg, 1879 - 1973) are among the highlights of this gallery.

ANDRE KERTESZ ( AMERICAN, BORN HUNGARY  1894 – 1985 )

MONDRIAN'S GLASSES AND PIPE 1926

Gelatin Silver Print

Print Date 1926–c. 1928

Dimensions Image: 7.9 × 9.3 cm - Sheet: 8.5 × 13.6 cm

Credit Line Thomas Walther Collection. Grace M. Mayer Fund

© Estate of André Kertész

GEORG MUCHE ( GERMAN 1895 – 1987 )

REFLECTION: THE WEAVING WORKSHOP IN THE BALL 1921

Gelatin Silver Print

Print Date 1921–25

Dimensions Image: 15.9 × 11.9 cm

Credit Line Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Thomas Walther

© Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin

EL LISSITZKY ( RUSSIAN 1890 – 1941 )

SELF-PORTRAIT - 1924

Gelatin Silver Print

Print Date 1924

Dimensions Image: 13.9 × 8.9 cm

Credit Line Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Shirley C. Burden, by exchange

© 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

 

GERMAINE KRULL ( DUTCH, BORN GERMANY 1897 – 1985 )

JEAN COCTEAU 1929

Gelatin Silver Print

Dimensions: 22.3 × 16.5 cm

The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Thomas Walther Collection.

Gift of Thomas Walther

GUSTAV KLUTSIS ( LATVIAN 1895 – 1938 )

UNTITLED  1926

Gelatin Silver Print

Dimensions: 8.9 × 6.5 cm

The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Thomas Walther Collection.

Abbott-Levy Collection Funds, by Exchange

IWAO YAMAWAKI ( JAPANESE 1898 – 1987 )

UNTITLED 1931

Gelatin Silver Print

Dimensions: 22 x 16.5 cm

The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Thomas Walther Collection.

Abbott-Levy Collection Funds, by Exchange

 

WALTER A. PETERHANS ( AMERICAN, BORN GERMANY 1897 – 1960 )

ANDOR WEININGER, BERLIN 1930

Gelatin Silver Print

Print Date 1955–86

Dimensions Image: 21.7 × 15.6 cm - Sheet: 22.5 × 16.4 cm

Credit Line Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Thomas Walther

© Estate Walter Peterhans, Museum Folkwang, Essen

  

GERTRUD ARNDT ( GERMAN 1903 – 2000 )

AT THE MASTERS’ HOUSES 1929 - 1930

Gelatin Silver Print

Dimensions: 22.6 x 15.8 cm

The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Thomas Walther Collection.

Gift of Thomas Walther

LORE FEININGER ( GERMAN 1901 – 1991 )

ERICH SALOMON 1929

Gelatin Silver Print

Dimensions: 23.2 x 16.5 cm

The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Thomas Walther Collection.

 Gift of Thomas Walther

ANDRE KERTESZ ( AMERICAN, BORN HUNGARY  1894 – 1985 )

LÉGER STUDIO - 1927

Gelatin Silver Print

Print Date 1927 - 1929

Dimensions Image: 10.3 × 7.9 cm - Sheet: 10.5 × 8.1 cm

Credit Line Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Thomas Walther

© Estate of André Kertész

ANDRE KERTESZ ( AMERICAN, BORN HUNGARY  1894 – 1985 )

GÉZA BLATTNER 1925

Gelatin Silver Print

Print Date 1925–35

Dimensions Image: 7.7 × 8.2 cm

Credit Line Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Thomas Walther

© Estate of André Kertész

 

5- BETWEEN SURREALISM & MAGIC REALISM

In the mid-1920s, European artistic movements ranging from Surrealism to New Objectivity moved away from a realist approach by highlighting the strange in the familiar or trying to reconcile dreams and reality. Echoes of these concerns, centered on the human figure, can be found in this gallery. Some photographers used anti-naturalistic methods—capturing hyperreal, close-up details; playing with scale; and rendering the body as landscape—to challenge the viewer’s perception. Others, in line with Sigmund Freud’s definition of “the uncanny” as an effect that results from the blurring of distinctions between the real and the fantastic, offered visual plays on life and the lifeless, the animate and the inanimate, confronting the human body with surrogates in the form of dolls, mannequins, and masks. Photographers influenced by Surrealism, such as Maurice Tabard, subjected the human figure to distortions and transformations by experimenting with photographic techniques either while capturing the image or while developing it in the darkroom. Additional photographers on view include Aenne Biermann (German, 1898 -  1933), Jacques-André Boiffard (French, 1902 - 1961), Max Burchartz (German, 1887 - 1961), Helmar Lerski (Swiss, 1871 - 1956), and Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz (Polish, 1885 - 1939).

ANDRE KERTESZ ( AMERICAN, BORN HUNGARY  1894 – 1985 )

DISTORTION #126 - 1933

Gelatin Silver Print

Print Date 1933 - 1939

Dimensions Image: 20.3 × 34 cm

Credit Line Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Thomas Walther

 © Estate of André Kertész

HERBERT BAYER ( AMERICAN, BORN AUSTRIA 1900 - 1985)

HUMANLY IMPOSSIBLE 1932

Gelatin Silver Print

Dimensions: 38.9 × 29.3 cm

The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Thomas Walther Collection.

Acquired Through the Generosity of Howard Stein

MAX BURCHARTZ ( GERMAN 1887 – 1961 )

EYE 1928

Gelatin Silver Print

Dimensions: 30.2 x 40 cm

The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Thomas Walther Collection.

Acquired Through the Generosity of Peter Norton

 

MAURICE TABARD ( FRENCH 1897 – 1984 )

SOLARIZED FILM 1936

Gelatin Silver Print - Print Date 1936 - 1955

Dimensions Image: 24.1 x 12 cm - Mount: 24 × 18 cm

Credit Line Thomas Walther Collection.

Gift of Robert Shapazian, by Exchange

MAURICE TABARD ( FRENCH 1897 – 1984 )

UNTITLED 1928

( HAND ON WALL WITH SHADOW )

Gelatin Silver Print

Dimensions: 17.7 x 22.9 cm

The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Thomas Walther Collection.

Gift of Thomas Walther

RAOUL HAUSMANN

UNTITLED - FEBRUARY 1931

Gelatin Silver Print

Print Date 1931-1933

Dimensions Image: 13.7 × 11.3 cm

Credit Line Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Thomas Walther

 © 2014 Raoul Hausmann/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris

RAOUL HAUSMANN

UNTITLED - FEBRUARY 1931

DESCRIPTION

As a key member of the Berlin-based Dadaists, between 1918 and 1922 Raoul Hausmann exhibited assemblage sculptures, collages, and photomontages made with magazines and newspaper clippings. Being a Dadaist, he dissociated himself from photography— considered a positivist medium—in a 1921 unpublished manifesto titled “Wir sind nicht die Photographen” (We are not the photographers), but by the late twenties he had taken up photography in earnest, making straightforward images of landscapes and plants before turning to more experimental works on light and optics.

Hausmann made this untitled image in February 1931, during his intensive years of experimental photography and prior to his departure from Berlin in 1933. The model is his second wife, Hedwig Mankiewitz-Hausmann, who is pictured in other of his photographs from early that year. This print is among Hausmann’s more modest small formats from the early 1930s. He enlarged the image onto double weight paper with a semireflective surface and later trimmed the print; Hausmann printed on a range of paper types but favored German Agfa-Brovira papers. On the verso, the presence of adhesive residues along the top and a faint dark spot at the top center, possibly due to adhesive residue, indicates that this print was previously attached to a support, perhaps as part of a photomontage or other presentation.

Hausmann took at least two other images of this model and mirror, most likely at the same time. He used one in an untitled photomontage exhibited in Fotomontage,a show organized by his friend César Domela-Nieuwenhuis and mounted in April–May 1931 at the Staatliche Kunstbibliothek in Berlin. Hausmann published this image in the Cologne-based review A bis Z, in May 1931. In 1946 he included another version in two other photomontages: L’Acteur (now in the collection of Institut Valencià d’Art Modern) and an untitled work in which he kept only a part of the enlarged eye. In all the images, the reflection in the shaving mirror magnifies the organ of vision, the eye, in line with many avant-garde photographic works of that period. The round mirror becomes a metaphor for the camera’s mechanical lens, which enables the operator to see the world literally larger than life. In another untitled work (MoMA 1689.2001), Hausmann used a lens instead of a mirror to achieve a similar magnification.

—Quentin Bajac, Hanako Murata

http://www.moma.org/interactives/objectphoto/objects/83999.html

JOHAN NIEGEMAN (DUTCH 1902 – 1977 )

UNTITLED 1926 - 1929

Gelatin Silver Print

Dimensions: 7.5 × 10.5 cm

The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Thomas Walther Collection.

Gift of Thomas Walther

UMBO ( OTTO UMBEHR ) ( GERMAN 1902 – 1980 )

WARRIORLIKE FACE 1926 - 1927

Gelatin Silver Print - Print Date 1926–27

Dimensions Image: 17.3 × 12.2 cm - Sheet: 17.7 × 12.9 cm

Credit Line Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Thomas Walther

© 2014 Umbo/Gallery Kicken Berlin/Phyllis Umbehr/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

HARRY LACHMAN ( AMERICAN 1886 – 1975 )

UNTITLED STILL FROM THE MAGICIAN ( 1926 ) 1925

Gelatin Silver Print

Dimensions: 22.7 x 28.8 cm

The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Thomas Walther Collection.

Gift of Thomas Walther

6- DYNAMICS OF THE CITY

In his 1928 manifesto “The Paths of Contemporary Photography,” Aleksandr Rodchenko advocated for a new photographic vocabulary that would be more in step with the pace of modern urban life and the changes in perception it implied. Rodchenko was not alone in this quest: most of the avant-garde photographers of the 1920s and 1930s were city dwellers, striving to translate the novel and shocking experience of everyday life into photographic images. Equipped with newly invented handheld cameras, they used unusual vantage points and took photos as they moved, struggling to re-create the constant flux of images that confronted the pedestrian. Reflections in windows and vitrines, blurry images of quick motions, double exposures, and fragmentary views portray the visual cacophony of the metropolis. The work of Berenice Abbott (American, 1898 -  1991), Alvin Langdon Coburn (American, 1882 - 1966), Germanie Krull (Dutch, born Germany, 1897 - 1985), Alexander Hackenschmied (Czech, 1907 - 2004), Umbo (German, 1902 - 1980), and

Imre Kinszki (Hungarian, 1901 - 1945) is featured in this final gallery.

http://www.moma.org/visit/calendar/exhibitions/1496

ANDRE KERTESZ ( AMERICAN, BORN HUNGARY  1894 – 1985 )

GRANDS BOULEVARDS 1926

Gelatin Silver Print

Print Date 1926 - 1935

Dimensions Image: 7.8 x 10.9 cm - Sheet: 8.4 × 12.9 cm

Credit Line Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Thomas Walther

 © Estate of André Kertész

ANTON BRUEHL ( AMERICAN, BORN AUSTRALIA 1900 – 1982 )

UNTITLED 1929

Gelatin Silver Print

Print Date 1929–55

Dimensions Image: 25.3 × 20.2 cm

Credit Line Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Thomas Walther

© 2014 Anton Bruehl Estate

CHARLES SHEELER( AMERICAN 1883 – 1965 )

FORD PLANT, RIVER ROUGE, BLAST FURNACE AND DUST CATCHER 1927

Gelatin Silver Print - Print Date 1927 - 1944

Dimensions Image: 24.1 × 19.2 cm

Credit Line Thomas Walther Collection. Horace W. Goldsmith Fund through Robert B. Menschel and gift of Lincoln Kirstein, by Exchange

© 2014 The Lane Collection

CESAR DOMELA – NIEUWENHUIS ( DUTCH 1900 – 1992 )

HAMBURG, GERMANY'S GATEWAY TO THE WORLD 1930

Gelatin Silver Print

Print Date 1930–32

Dimensions Image: 40.3 × 41.9 cm - Mount: 48.5 × 49.9 cm

Credit Line Thomas Walther Collection.

Abbott-Levy Collection funds, by exchange

© 2014 César Domela/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

WALKER EVANS ( AMERICAN 1903 – 1975 )

VOTIVE CANDLES, NEW YORK CITY 1929 - 1930

Gelatin Silver Print

Dimensions: 21.6 x 17.7 cm

The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Willard Van Dyke and Mr. and Mrs. Alfred H. Barr, Jr., by Exchange

FLORENCE HENRI ( SWISS, BORN AMERICA 1893 – 1982 )

UNTITLED 1928 - 1930

Gelatin Silver Print

Dimensions: 9.1 × 12 cm

The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Thomas Walther Collection.

Gift of Eulabee Dix, by Exchange

J. JAY HIRZ ( AMERICAN )

BROOKLYN BRIDGE IN RAINY WEATHER 1927

Gelatin Silver Print

Dimensions: 24.2 × 19.5 cm

The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Thomas Walther Collection.

Gift of Thomas Walther

LEE MILLER ( AMERICAN 1907 – 1977 )

UNTITLED 1929 - 1932

Gelatin Silver Print

Print Date 1929–39

Dimensions Image: 21.3 × 24.8 cm

Credit Line Thomas Walther Collection. The Family of Man Fund

© 2014 Lee Miller Archives, England

MARJORIE CONTENT ( AMERICAN 1895 – 1984 )

STEAMSHIP PIPES, PARIS

Winter 1931

Gelatin Silver Print

Print Date 1931–65

Dimensions Image: 9.7 × 6.8 cm

Credit Line Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Andreas Feininger, by exchange

© Estate of Marjorie Content

JAROSLAV ROSSLER ( CZECH 1902 – 1990 )

UNTITLED 1924

Gelatin Silver Print With Pencil and Black Ink

Dimensions Image: 24.1 x 22.8 cm

Medium Gelatin Silver Print With Pencil and Black Ink

Credit Line Thomas Walther Collection. Robert B. Menschel Fund, by exchange

© 2014 Sylva Vitove-Rösslerova

UMBO ( OTTO UMBEHR ) ( GERMAN 1902 – 1980 )

MYSTERY OF THE STREET 1928

Gelatin Silver Print - Print Date 1928- 1932

Dimensions Image: 29 x 23.5 cm

Credit Line Thomas Walther Collection.

Gift of Shirley C. Burden, by Exchange

© 2014 Sylva Vitove-Rösslerova

UMBO ( OTTO UMBEHR ) ( GERMAN 1902 – 1980 )

MYSTERY OF THE STREET 1928

DESCRIPTION

Trained at the Bauhaus under Johannes Itten, a master of expressivity, Berlin-based photographer Umbo (born Otto Umbehr) believed that intuition was the source of creativity. To this belief, he added Constructivist structural strategies absorbed from Theo Van Doesburg, El Lissitzky, and others in Berlin in the early twenties. Their influence is evident in this picture’s diagonal, abstract construction and its spatial disorientation. It is also classic Umbo, encapsulating his intuitive vision of the world as a resource of poetic, often funny, ironic, or dark bulletins from the social unconscious.

After he left the Bauhaus, Umbo worked as assistant to Walther Ruttmann on his film Berlin, Symphony of a Great City 1926. In 1928, photographing from his window either very early or very late in the day and either waiting for his “actors” to achieve a balanced composition or, perhaps, positioning them as a movie director would, Umbo exposed three negatives. He had an old 5 by 7 inch (12.7 by 17.8 centimeter) stand camera and a 9 by 12 centimeter (3 9/16 by 4 ¾ inch) Deckrullo Contessa-Nettle camera, but which he used for these overhead views is not known, as he lost all his prints and most negatives in the 1943 bombing of Berlin. The resulting images present a world in which the shadows take the active role. Umbo made the insubstantial rule the corporeal and the dark dominate the light through a simple but inspired inversion: he mounted the pictures upside down (note the signature in ink in the lower right).

In 1928–29, Umbo was a founding photographer at Dephot (Deutscher Photodienst), a seminal photography agency in Berlin dedicated to creating socially relevant and visually fascinating photoessays, an idea originated by Erich Solomon. Simon Guttmann, who directed the business, hired creative nonconformists, foremost among them the bohemian Umbo, who slept in the darkroom; Umbo in turn drew the brothers Lore Feininger and Lyonel Feininger to the agency, which soon also boasted Robert Capa and Felix H. Man. Dephot hired Dott, the best printer in Berlin, and it was he who made the large exhibition prints, such as this one, ordered by New York gallerist Julien Levy when he visited the agency in 1931. Umbo showed thirty-nine works, perhaps also printed by Dott, in the 1929 exhibition Film und Foto, and he put Guttmann in touch with the Berlin organizer of the show; accordingly, Dephot was the source for some images in the accompanying book, Es kommt der neue Fotograf! (Here comes the new photographer!). Levy introduced Umbo’s photographs to New York in Surréalisme (January 1932) and showcased them again at the Julien Levy Gallery, together with images by Herbert Bayer, Jacques-André Boiffard, Roger Parry, and Maurice Tabard, in his 1932 exhibition Modern European Photography.

—Maria Morris Hambourg, Hanako Murata

http://www.moma.org/interactives/objectphoto/objects/83932.html

RAOUL HAUSMANN ( GERMAN, BORN AUSTRIA 1886 – 1971 )

UNTITLED C. 1930

Gelatin Silver Print

Print Date 1960 - 70

Dimensions Image: 18.2 × 22.6 cm

Credit Line Thomas Walther Collection. Horace W. Goldsmith Fund through Robert B.

© 2014 Raoul Hausmann/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris

PAUL CITROEN ( DUTCH, BORN GERMANY 1896 – 1983 )

METROPOLIS 1923

Gelatin Silver Print

Dimensions: 20.3 × 15.3 cm

The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Thomas Walther Collection.

Gift of Thomas Walther

© 2014 Paul Citroen/Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York/Pictoright, Amsterdam

IMRE KINSZKI ( HUNGARIAN 1901 – 1945 )

UNTITLED C. 1930

Gelatin Silver Print

Dimensions: 8.5 x 11.6 cm

The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Thomas Walther Collection.

Gift of Thomas Walther

ALEKSANDR RODCHENKO ( RUSSIAN 1891 – 1956 )

DEMONSTRATION 1932

Gelatin Silver Print

Dimensions: 29.6 × 22.8 cm

The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Thomas Walther Collection.

Gift of Shirley C. Burden, by Exchange

FRED KORTH (AMERICAN, BORN GERMANY 1902 – 1983 )

UNTITLED  C. 1928

Gelatin Silver Print

Dimensions: 5.5 × 7.8 cm

The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Thomas Walther Collection.

Gift of Robert and Joyce Menschel, by Exchange

 

DZIGA VERTOV ( RUSSIAN, 1895 – 1954 )

UNTITLED 1927 - 1928

Gelatin Silver Print - Print Date 1927 - 1932

Dimensions Image: 13.4 × 8.9 cm

Credit Line Thomas Walther Collection.

Abbott-Levy Collection Funds, by Exchange

 

LASZLO MOHOLY - NAGY ( AMERICAN, BORN HUNGARY. 1895 – 1946 )

BERLIN, RADIO TOWER 1928

Gelatin Silver Print

Print Date 1928–36

Dimensions Image: 38.1 × 27.8 cm

Credit Line Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Thomas Walther

© 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

SASHA STONE ( AMERICAN, BORN RUSSIA 1895 – 1940 )

THE EINSTEIN TOWER IN POTSDAM (THE COELOSTAT IN THE UPPER DOME 

THAT CATCHES AND PROJECTS THE LIGHT OF THE STARS INTO THE LABORATORY) 1928

Gelatin Silver Print - Print Date 1928 - 1935

Dimensions Image: 23.1 × 17.4 cm

Credit Line Thomas Walther Collection.

Abbott-Levy Collection Funds, by Exchange

 

GERMAINE KRULL ( DUTCH, BORN GERMANY 1897–1985)

UNTITLED 1926 - 1928

Gelatin Silver Print

Dimensions: 16.9 x 22.9 cm

The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Thomas Walther Collection.

Gift of David H. McAlpin, by Exchange

FACE TIME BY MATTHEW S. WITKOVSKY 

LOOKING FOR WORK 

Photography came into circulation around 1840, in the grand age of the bourgeoisie, and before it could be accepted as art, it had to be shown to be honorable work. According to literary historian Franco Moretti, “The creation of a culture of work has been, arguably, the greatest symbolic achievement of the bourgeoisie as a class.”1 In  his compactly sweeping study The Bourgeois (2013), Moretti traces the rise and fall of this class, which he asserts has lately disappeared from discourse, though its standards and aspirations remain everywhere embedded in popular consciousness. Near the start of his chronology Moretti places Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), whose protagonist, Moretti points out, puts in far more hours tending  to his abundantly wellprovisioned castaway’s domain than the average English wage laborer did in the factory — even in Defoe’s time of capitalism without fetters.2 Although  the novel’s plot is predicated on the total otherness of its solitary, uncivilized setting, Crusoe demonstrates his  continuing social value through over-compensation, presumably to avoid the appearance that he is enjoying an endless island vacation.  

Such a dilemma would confront photographers repeatedly across photography’s first century, for their traffic in “instantaneously” completed likenesses could seem unearned.3 The enduring Pictorialist movement, which began in Victorian England in the 1880s and soon spread internationally among the middle classes, explained the  art value of photography largely in terms of expen diture (of time and money), whether on complex printing processes or on matting, calligraphic adornment, and other presentational devices. To be art, it had to be serious effort: Camera Work, as Alfred Stieglitz called his leading Pictorialist  journal. The Pictorialists declared they were striving for imagination, and in their love of soft focus and vague contours they may have in fact unwittingly provided one of  the more imaginative analyses of their artistic inheritance: “many perspicuous details, adding up to a hazy whole,”  as Moretti terms the work of prose in Defoe’s great novel.4 Pictorialism performed a cultural service by putting the haze on view. 

Photographic modernism of the 1910s and ’20s overturned Pictorialist compositional habits, to be sure, but its American contingent, in a sad cliché, perpetuated the absolute insistence on effort as an index of artistic achievement. The Europeans, by contrast, struck a remarkable balance between work and its denial. At the Bauhaus, entire careers were made in photography taken during “off hours,” such  as group portraits of students perched on the dormitory balcony or relaxing on the sand. These portraits emanate  a lightness and portability that applies as much to the personal relationships memorialized as to the handheld cameras that memorialized them. Leisure scenes abound: the repertory of Bauhaus professor László Moholy-Nagy’s photographic subjects, for example, stretches from dolls, children, and house pets to foreign towns, activities like bathing and sailing, and viewing platforms at tourist sites such as the Berlin Radio Tower (MoMA 1793.2001) and  the Rothenburg cathedral. Modernist photographic portraiture in Europe — at the Bauhaus and elsewhere — brought playfulness into the art world at an unprecedented scale. Whether capturing the mock seriousness of Claude Cahun and Gertrud Arndt costumed as mash-ups of respectable citizens with outcasts — the soldier meets the vamp for Cahun; the mademoiselle meets the madam for Arndt (fig. 1) — or the outright laughter of Czech surrealist Václav Zykmund holding a light bulb with his teeth (fig. 2), (self-) portrait photography in Europe in the 1920s and ’30s became an expression of the irrepressible.  “Irrepressibility” stands opposite to the bourgeois keywords that Moretti so brilliantly analyzes, including “utility,” “seriousness,” “comfort,” and “precision.” The opposition is so perfect that one could argue for European modernist photography as a mere safety valve in an otherwise thoroughly repressive civilization. “Containing one’s immediate desires is not just repression: it is culture,” Moretti observes, offering as example an analysis of Crusoe’s contorted  narration as he reluctantly kills a mother goat and her kid  to ease his hunger.5 Not denial, but containment. In an analogous fashion, leisure and even sleep — another great occasion for Moholy-Nagy and many others to make portraits (e.g., MoMA 1688.2001) — have long been understood as necessary but limited escapes from the otherwise all encompassing world of work.  

In that sense, no amount of fooling around could  seriously challenge the work a day life of the bourgeoisie. Only photography as redolent of labor as labor itself might  perform this analysis — and not by imitating high art,  which was itself conventionally understood as a refuge or escape. August Sander’s life project, People of the Twentieth Century (Menschen des 20. Jahrhunderts), gives such an  analysis in exemplary form. The very model of a bourgeois professional, Sander also turned his thousands of sitters into citizens of an upstanding, thoroughly bourgeois nation. Yet the signal feature of his great project was its necessary incompleteness, a thoroughly sober form of irrepressibility. There could and must always be more types of citizens  to portray and add to the infinitely expanding archive.  This challenge to containment lay in the very structure of Sander’s project. In addition, his encyclopedic undertaking nuanced the terms by which the bourgeoisie typically  made creativity into labor, through close management and control. Products of an unstoppable tradesman, Sander’s photographs hyperbolize the terms of Moretti’s analysis and thus induce a reflection on those terms akin to Moretti’s own. 

Sander gradually formulated his proposal to “map”  the German character in portrait photographs, beginning at  the start of the 1920s, some two decades into his career. The exceedingly ambitious plan to group all his existing  and future portraits according to heteronomous portfolios of “types,” such as farmers, intellectuals, and women, depended on the outright incompatibility of its constituent subjects. This project would take shape as “a mosaic picture,” as the photographer later characterized it to fellow artist Peter Abelen.6 Sander pointedly displayed his photographs two per frame, and in 

two rows, at the first public showing of his work-in-progress, in a Cologne group exhibition in 1927. Each portrait could be seen only alongside others. In the foreword to Sander’s 1929 book, Antlitz der Zeit (The face of our time), subtitled 60 Fotos deutscher Menschen (60 photos of German people), novelist Alfred Döblin pointed up the value of this approach, calling it “comparative photography.”7

One can argue the other side, too: a mosaic is made  of differently colored pieces, but it does typically form a unified picture. Sander may be said to have contained, not heightened, conflicting social truths in his portraiture by assimilating his multicolored subjects to a graying bourgeois nation. To return to Moretti’s keywords, one sees that it is work above all that unites the many citizens portrayed by Sander, just as it is a bourgeois ideal of work that defines Sander’s project, and arguably the general ethos of Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), the movement to which his photographs are generally assigned by art historians.  

It is a constitutive fact of Sander’s photographs that everyone, even intellectuals and the unemployed, has a job to do. Furthermore, Sander shows service professions but no servants — each sitter appears in his portraits as master of his or her occupation.  Sander did not exempt himself from these bourgeois values. Why should he? Photography was a respected part of industrial labor and had been since the later nineteenth century. Portrait photography was a trade, not a form of fine art, and Sander, like so many others looking to be modern, explicitly distanced himself from colleagues who strove  for the qualities of fine art: “Nothing is more hateful to me than sugarcoated photography with tricks, poses, and special effects.”8 Contempt for Kunstphotographie was widely shared among progressive photographers as well as avantgarde artists. What is surprising, in retrospect, is not that these modernists disliked banalizing a potentially useful profession (photography) with the trappings of fine art, but that, in Neue Sachlichkeit, not just photographers but also  so many modern artists — inheritors of a great tradition of anti- bourgeois, anti-careerist bohemianism —  depicted themselves demonstratively as professionals. Painter Georg Scholz, in his selfportrait of 1926 “in front of an advertising column” (fig. 3), might be mistaken for a banker, protectively overcoated as he fronts for a small universe of consumer goods and advertisements that he could as well have financed or purchased as painted. Scholz the creator carries no association with bohemians in this canvas; he could  even be an ad man or a product or graphic designer, a maker of useful images, pictures that serve a purpose for capital.  

Painting and photography of the Neue Sachlichkeit  are aligned, beyond any question of form or facture, in their shared assimilation to the bourgeoisie. To this point, Sander’s chosen settings unprecedentedly conflate working and living space. Although his subjects are identified by occupation, the spaces of Sander’s portraiture emanate a comfort and intimacy typically associated with the domestic interior, the single most vaunted bourgeois location. White-collar professionals pose in their studies; painters sit 

in chairs or stand in their studios; women of leisure sway  or relax in living rooms. Sander rarely photographed in a larger work environment, such as a factory, a street, or an office building. Most sitters are pictured against a warmly neutral background that suggests a spatial refuge. Coming close for his exposure, and softening the focus around  their bodies, Sander made all his subjects look at home. Even a setting clearly associated with gatherings away from home, such as the restaurant kitchen in which the famous pastry chef greets the photographer (as one  professional to another), appears as a home away from home (fig. 4). The chef fills this workspace with his bulk and solidly takes possession of it. His surroundings dissolve from focus, as in a painting by Vermeer, so that the workplace becomes a space of comfort. Comfort — cum plus forte, or “with strength” — is a word that once meant succor but came to mean well-being: a state finely balanced between necessaries and luxuries. Moretti observes that comfort is a key term of desire for that class of humanity that need not worry over basic survival but does fret at ostentation. “Comfort is no longer what returns us to a ‘normal’ state from adverse circumstances,” he writes, “but what takes normality as its starting point and pursues well-being as an end in itself.”9  

What in Sander’s photographic project could disturb that well-being? Only its state of perpetual incompletion. Scholar Susanne Lange has asserted that Sander was aware from the start that his project must remain forever partial, or what one could call, following Marcel Duchamp, “definitively unfinished.” She cites as evidence his earliest written announcement of People of the Twentieth Century, made in a letter to photography historian and collector Erich Stenger in 1925: “As soon as my work is completed, if one can even speak of completion in this context, I am thinking to publish the entire oeuvre in an exhibition tour through various cities.”10 The quixotic nature of Sander’s oft-expressed hope of publishing the full series is of a piece with the inherent infinitude of his chosen task. He persevered after the Nazis destroyed the printing plates for Antlitz der Zeit; and he continued to make some new photographs as well as to promote his older ones even after losing twenty-five to thirty thousand glass negatives in a fire that consumed the basement of his Cologne studio in January 1946.11 (This after the photographer had spent years secreting his  life’s work around the Westerwald countryside, to avoid its destruction by Allied bombs.) Nothing would stop him —  nor could the project ever find an end.  

Sander repeatedly expanded an original list of seven portfolio headings that he had typed up in the mid-1920s, adding categories that addressed, for example, National Socialism. A true encyclopedist, he also wished to update and extend those subjects that had formed his earliest interest, creating subgroupings like “Farmers in the Second Half of the Twentieth Century.”12 The point of origin is clear, while the end point cannot even be imagined. It is only fitting that Sander’s son, grandson, and great-grandson have all continued to tend to his life project.13 The creator of a colossal monument to work creates more work even from beyond the grave.  

At the same time, there can be no new photographs  by Sander himself; his descendants are handling a mosaic to which further tesserae will not be added. Its incompleteness remains, perversely, its greatest promise, that of society as a montage without end. “Description as a form was not neutral at all,” Moretti writes, referring to the advent of realism in nineteenth-century literature and art: “Its effect was to inscribe the present so deeply into the past that alternatives became simply unimaginable.”14 Not so when the picture was conceived as a necessarily incomplete inscription. In that case there must always be more to write.

MACHINE WORK

Sander was far from the only artistically ambitious photographer attracted to portraiture in the 1920s and ’30s. To work in photography and consider oneself an artist took a strong degree of self-consciousness, which manifested itself most directly in portraits or self-portraits in which the sitters are depicted alongside cameras. Such images proliferated in the 1920s and ’30s; photographers, historically  the greatest advocates for their profession in print, now seemed delighted to recommend it through pictures as well. Following in the lineage of mid- nineteenth-century views  of photographers standing surrounded by assistants, chemistry vials, or other signs of mastery and knowledge, such pictures would traditionally have been classed in the genre of the occupational portrait. A self-portrait by Edward Steichen from around 1917 (fig. 5) is one such modern example. Steichen, a protean character whose one life constant was an unflagging hold on power, projects a confi- dence in his ability to connect that was indispensable to  a career spent taking portraits of the rich and famous,  from Auguste Rodin or J. P. Morgan to actresses such as Gertrude Lawrence (MoMA 1869.2001). In his self-portrait (one of a few that he composed just prior to joining  the United States military as Commander of Aerial Photography), the camera itself, shrouded in marginal shadow, is notably insignificant compared to its artificially illumined operator. 

It is the machine that dominates its operator, by  contrast, in many of the most progressive portraits or selfportraits with cameras made in the early twentieth century — again, principally in Europe. For one, the deference of the typical occupational portrait toward its subject, which equates (as in the Steichen) to a sense of distance,  is replaced in these more progressive works by a sense of proximity that can seem either intimate or claustrophobic. In addition, the proud ego feci of artistic selfportraiture, which has a grand lineage in painting traceable to Velázquez and Dürer, falters when the brush is replaced by an imaging device that has its own, impersonal stare. As Paul Citroen looked into a mirror to make his self-portrait in 1930, the camera on its tripod looked with him (MoMA 1653.2001); and though he clearly pressed the button, the third eye of the lens projected its own, monocular force of capture, seemingly unbidden by the artist. Is this independence of the apparatus the reason why Citroen’s fingers seem  only tentatively posed atop the camera body, and why his look —

 lips apart, eyes raised slightly, head inclined toward the machine as his body crouches unsteadily behind a  far more stable tripod — registers expectant uncertainty? The camera knew what it could deliver. Citroen’s own sense of himself, by contrast, seems to have been as unformed  at the moment of exposure as the abstract background that rises softly behind him. 

Citroen had taken up photography suddenly in December 1926, together with his close friend Otto Umbehr (Umbo), in a two-week portrait-making binge at the Bauhaus that proved decisive for Umbo’s career.15 Unlike Umbo, who continued thereafter in photojournalism  and other camera ventures, Citroen made photographs only sporadically, although he did earn his living in the early 1930s as a portrait photographer in Berlin and Amsterdam. Citroen was also among the first to try to sell photographs as collectible art; exactly at the moment of his experimental portrait sessions with Umbo, he wrote to curator and  dealer Hildebrand Gurlitt (in the news again recently, via  his hoarder son Cornelius Gurlitt, for the energetically selfserving and exploitative career he led during the Nazi  era) to propose that he sell gelatin silver prints the artist made of his own photomontages, including an already iconic work, Metropolis (City of My Birth) (Weltstadt [Meine Geburtsstadt]) (1923; MoMA 1651.2001). Gurlitt, as Maria Hambourg recounts elsewhere in this project, would in turn become an adviser to the artphotography collection of Dresden manufacturer Kurt Kirchbach, likely the earliest European private collection of vanguard contemporary photography, which included at least three of Citroen’s photographs of his own photomontages.16  

That artists from a premier modern art school and a leading art dealer were involved with photography suggests how high the stakes for the medium as modern art had become — which makes the doubt portrayed in Citroen’s self-portrait the more interesting to observe. While one would expect to see Steichen’s look of selfassurance, or the outright heroism and virility common to portraits of Edward Weston (MoMA 1908.2001), the tentativeness shown by Citroen next to his apparatus is surprising and compelling. One sees comparable expressions of submission to the camera in portraits of Citroen taken by Marianne Breslauer and Umbo in the late 1920s. In the portrait by Breslauer (fig. 6), Citroen seems to be halfheartedly shielding his blankly gazing eyes from the glare of a light bulb (or perhaps an early flash). The camera is intrusive and was welcomed as such in the ’20s —  a bizarre invitation to the invasion of privacy that has flagrantly become the norm today, and that makes these nearly hundred-year-old portraits newly relevant to our era of web cams and “selfies.” When Umbo depicts Citroen in “warriorlike” paint (fig. 7), the makeup is stunningly out of step with the demeanor of the man wearing it. Only half of Citroen’s face is painted, whereas all of him seems riven by doubt: raised eyebrows, furrowed brow, slack lips and chin. Lit and photographed from below, he should be preparing to deal a conquering blow yet instead looks worried that he may be the captured prey. Portraits in and by the Bauhaus circle were famously clownish  (see MoMA 1808.2001 and 1916.2001), but this one 

shows a hurt that, while undoubtedly intended as comic, appears all too serious in its woundedness. 

Loss and lack are common features of interwar portraiture in Europe, and they give the camera more power than should logically be held by a mere instrument of human interests. Looking at the portraits in the Thomas Walther Collection, at least, one imagines the camera not as an auxiliary weapon but as a force of command that enervates and even debilitates its bearers or subjects. James Joyce sports an eye patch (fig. 8). Jean Cocteau covers his face — he hides and cannot see (MoMA 1753.2001). František Vobecký, in the act of taking a picture, converts himself into a shadow (MoMA 1896.2001). El Lissitzky is blinded and overcome by his own drafting equipment (MoMA 1764.2001).17 On a lighter note, Herbert Bayer regards with mock astonishment his arm turned to wood and sectioned off (fig. 9) — a (perhaps  vulgar) comedic recollection of World War I, when wounded veterans in Austria and Germany were judged fit for continued military action according to percentages  of serviceability. Many memorable photographic portraits from the interwar period involve a degree of amputation.  Often, such photographs bear clear signs that the wounding is constructed, giving the camera machine an even more active role. Bayer achieved his effect through montage — cutting and pasting — which he then “made whole” through retouching and rephotography. In a 1927 portrait of Ruth Landshoff (MoMA 1885.2001), Umbo scrubbed her nose off through overexposure, either in the negative or in darkroom enlargement. The following year, graphic designer Max Burchartz redefined cropping as vivisection in creating Lotte (Eye) (Lotte [Auge]) (1928; MoMA 1646.2001), his one masterpiece in photography. Burchartz took pains to preserve the sense of a living eyeball, glinting with moisture, and he inpainted the eyelashes and eyebrow as well. But he also registered Lotte’s shock, in what remains of her nose and lips, at having her face halved vertically and sliced at the top and bottom by the apparatus. The innocent girl has a bit of the cyborg in her stare. Her remaining eye no longer connotes human binocularity, but rather the implacable single eye of the camera.  

In Lissitzky’s magnificent 1924 portrait of Kurt Schwitters (fig. 10), the artist and poet from Hannover is likewise split in two — but also doubled — as he recites his now classic concrete poetry piece, the Ursonate (Primeval sonata, 1922–32). Schwitters has two faces here, and the one with both eyes visible seems overcome by the other, in which Schwitters’s right eye and open mouth assault the viewer: binocularity outdone once more by a monocular stare. The basic principle of ego formation is cast into question here, for the work must be understood as a shared creation. Schwitters’s doubling is a metaphor for a collaborative effort — one in which the camera operates as an equal partner with the two artists.  

One could deny the force of that partnership with the machine only at one’s peril. A 1916–17 portrait of Ezra Pound by Alvin Langdon Coburn (MoMA 1657.2001) depicts the poet concentrating, with a show of mastery that suggests the photographer is not 

collaborating with his subject but rendering homage to him. This portrait ostensibly transmits Coburn’s fealty to Pound, consistent with Coburn’s decision to take the name and guiding concept of his Vortographs (this portrait among them) from a movement declared by Pound just a few years earlier: “The image is not an idea. It is a radiant node or cluster; it is what I can, and must perforce, call  a VORTEX, from which, and through which, and into  which, ideas are constantly rushing.”18 Yet the portrait, deliberately left to chance, obeys not the will of the photographer but the operations of his equipment, and it  fails to flatter its model. Deploying a setup of multiple mirrors and possibly multiple exposures,19 Coburn showed Pound simply and wonderfully as a human vortex — that is to say, a chaotic mass at whose center lies  no all-commanding power but an unpredictably moving void. Coburn suggested randomness, rather than mastery, as the guiding force in his Vortographs; this approach in turn caused Pound to appear a prisoner of swirling shards.  

WORKER PORTRAITS  

Important types of interwar portraiture are missing from the Walther Collection, or figure in it only marginally.  

Lisette Model’s endearing yet unsentimental picture of  a middle-aged lady on the Lower East Side (MoMA 1788.2001), from 1942, is nearly the only photograph to admit working- class subjects into a collection otherwise populated by cultural and popular elites. Paul Strand had shown with his famous 1916 photograph Blind that it was possible to depict individuals from circumstances vastly different from one’s own with dignity and personality. (Blind also gives an early example of the association of camera work with wounding or disability.) But the most significant possibilities for portraiture of working subjects were developed later, within the Worker Photography movement, an internationally widespread tendency in photography of the later 1920s and ’30s.20 Worker Photography generated far more sustained bodies of portraiture, and also more innovations in portraiture, than could be addressed through the making of single pictures. 

One such example is Kata Kálmán’s great book Tiborc (1937). Like Sander’s Antlitz der Zeit, Kálmán’s is a book of portraits, but her subjects are all agricultural or urban workers (figs. 11, 12). Kálmán, unlike Sander, was looking for individuals rather than types; she brought her camera quite close to most sitters, and named them all in her titles, giving in addition a general job description (e.g., “factory worker”), age, and, most unusually, a brief biographical sketch. Kálmán chose specificity over completeness. Her ambition could not be nearly as grand as Sander’s, but  it achieved, in word and image, the ascription of subjectivity to working people — a rare accomplishment for that  time and one that deserves the term “portraiture” in the fullest sense.  

The Worker Photography movement boasted other class-based innovations, principally in the areas of serial and collective portraiture, text-image combinations,  and photography in print. As an example, composite portraits, pioneered in disparate ways by Stieglitz, Aleksandr Rodchenko, and Josef Albers in the decade 1918–28, took an explicitly proletarian turn with “A Day in the Life of  a Moscow Working-Class Family.” Commissioned by the Agitation and Propaganda Sector of the Comintern for  a traveling Soviet exhibition in 1931, the story chronicled the joys and hardships of a family named Filippov. Over twenty-eight pages and the cover of the Berlin weekly Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung, the Filippovs were shown studying, working at the factory, eating, playing chess, and even preparing for a game of tennis, in a mixture of dramatized and deliberately undramatic images that  the editors parsed in lengthy captions. Extensive commentary accompanied its publication and its reissue, in  a strikingly different layout, in the Soviet magazine Proletarskoe Foto later the same year. As historian Erika Wolf describes it, the Filippov story, and especially the authenticity imputed to it by interested political organizations, was “an elaborate media stunt,” but it did truly change the terms for the portrayal of working people.  Single and singular pictures were forsaken in favor of cumulative, at times banal exposure to the camera, and to a  phototext narrative that constructed portraiture through literary means.21  

A radical destabilization of the individual ego was achieved, meanwhile, in photographic “mass portraits,” such as views of demonstrations taken by Rodchenko (MoMA 1825.2001), which were intended in fact to discredit the genre of portraiture as a bourgeois inheritance insufficient to the needs or the will of a revolutionary collective. Rodchenko found the greatest expression of collective identity not in political rallies but in sports, and his photographs of the Spartakiada competitions (fig. 13) remain touchstones in the representation of countless bodies working as one. The oxymoronic nature of the phrase “mass portrait” comes across with a real sense of peril, meanwhile, in posters by Gustav Klutsis. In one of them (fig. 14), he achieved  a seductive yet frightening fusion between the man and machine by replicating a view of a single hand — his own —  numerous times to symbolize unity among the working masses. (A 1926 self-portrait with a view camera [MoMA 1741.2001] likewise projects Klutsis’s confidence in the symbiosis of man and machine.) In posthumanist politics,  the single individual has no meaning apart from the  collective cause. The camera apparatus stands triumphant behind Klutsis’s poster as a tireless laborer. Many of the brilliant portraits gathered in the Walther Collection show people wounded, at play, and in other states of unfitness for work; some of the images point by contrast to a potentially limitless expenditure of effort. It is in Klutsis’s awesome poster composition, however, that the latent insights contained in interwar portraiture become fully manifest. Like a virus — an entity neither living nor dead — the apparatus will follow its program of division and replication to infinity. Awareness of such ceaseless invasiveness is the heritage of photographic modernism. The monocular lens never stops working, nor, in our  own age, does it seem likely ever to become unemployed. It has become the endless, faceless face of our time. 

https://www.moma.org/interactives/objectphoto/assets/essays/Witkovsky.pdf 

https://www.moma.org/interactives/objectphoto/the_project.html

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MODERN PHOTOGRAPHS FROM THE THOMAS WALTHER COLLECTION 1909 - 1949

MUSEUM OF MODERN ART NEW YORK

December 13, 2014 - April 19, 2015