Exhibition dates at the Metropolitan Museum of Art: 11th October 2012 – 27th January 2013
Exhibition dates at the National Gallery of Art: 17th February – 5th May 2013
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What a fascinating subject. Having completed multiple exposure work under the black and white enlarger I can attest to how difficult it was to get a print correctly exposed. I was using multiple negatives, moving the piece of photographic paper and printing in grids. Trying to get the alignment right was quite a task but the outcomes were very satisfying. Of course today these skills have mainly been lost to be replaced by other technological skills within the blancmange that is Photoshop. Somehow it’s not the same. My admiration for an artist like Jerry Uelsmann will always remain undimmed for the undiluted joy, beauty and skill of their analogue imagery.
I will post different photographs in this exhibition from the National Gallery of Art hang when I receive them!
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Many thankx to the The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
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Unidentified American artist
Two-Headed Man
c. 1855
Daguerreotype
The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri, Gift of Hallmark Cards, Inc.
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George Washington Wilson (Scottish, 1823-1893)
Aberdeen Portraits No. 1
1857
Albumen silver print from glass negative
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Fund, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 2011
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Henry Peach Robinson (English, 1830-1901)
Fading Away
1858
Albumen silver print from glass negatives
The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the National Media Museum, Bradford, United Kingdom
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Unidentified artist
Man Juggling His Own Head
ca. 1880
Albumen silver print from glass negative
Collection of Christophe Goeury
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Maurice Guibert (French, 1856-1913)
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec as Artist and Model
c. 1900
Gelatin silver print
Philadelphia Museum of Art
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F. Holland Day (American, 1864-1933)
The Vision (Orpheus Scene)
1907
Platinum print
The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the National Media Museum, Bradford, United Kingdom
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Unidentified American artist
Man on Rooftop with Eleven Men in Formation on His Shoulders
c. 1930
Gelatin silver print
Collection of George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film, Rochester
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Unidentified American artist
Dirigible Docked on Empire State Building, New York
1930
Gelatin silver print
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Twentieth-Century Photography Fund, 2011
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“While digital photography and image-editing software have brought about an increased awareness of the degree to which camera images can be manipulated, the practice of doctoring photographs has existed since the medium was invented. Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop at The Metropolitan Museum of Art is the first major exhibition devoted to the history of manipulated photography before the digital age. Featuring some 200 visually captivating photographs created between the 1840s and 1990s in the service of art, politics, news, entertainment, and commerce, the exhibition offers a provocative new perspective on the history of photography as it traces the medium’s complex and changing relationship to visual truth. The exhibition is made possible by Adobe Systems Incorporated. The photographs in the exhibition were altered using a variety of techniques, including multiple exposure (taking two or more pictures on a single negative), combination printing (producing a single print from elements of two or more negatives), photomontage, overpainting, and retouching on the negative or print. In every case, the meaning and content of the camera image was significantly transformed in the process of manipulation.
Faking It is divided into seven sections, each focusing on a different set of motivations for manipulating the camera image. “Picture Perfect” explores 19th-century photographers’ efforts to compensate for the new medium’s technical limitations – specifically, its inability to depict the world the way it looks to the naked eye. To augment photography’s monochrome palette, pigments were applied to portraits to make them more vivid and lifelike. Landscape photographers faced a different obstacle: the uneven sensitivity of early emulsions often resulted in blotchy, overexposed skies. To overcome this, many photographers, such as Gustave Le Gray and Carleton E. Watkins, created spectacular landscapes by printing two negatives on a single sheet of paper – one exposed for the land, the other for the sky. This section also explores the challenges involved in the creation of large group portraits, which were often cobbled together from dozens of photographs of individuals. For early art photographers, the ultimate creativity lay not in the act of taking a photograph but in the subsequent transformation of the camera image into a hand-crafted picture.
“Artifice in the Name of Art” begins in the 1850s with elaborate combination prints of narrative and allegorical subjects by Oscar Gustave Rejlander and Henry Peach Robinson. It continues with the revival of Pictorialism at the dawn of the twentieth century in the work of artist-photographers such as Edward Steichen, Anne W. Brigman, and F. Holland Day. “Politics and Persuasion” presents photographs that were manipulated for explicitly political or ideological ends. It begins with Ernest Eugene Appert’s faked photographs of the 1871 Paris Commune massacres, and continues with images used to foster patriotism, advance racial ideologies, and support or protest totalitarian regimes. Sequences of photographs published in Stalin-era Soviet Russia from which purged Party officials were erased demonstrate the chilling ease with which the historical record could be falsified. Also featured are composite portraits of criminals by Francis Galton and original paste-ups of John Heartfield’s anti-Nazi photomontages of the 1930s.
“Novelties and Amusements” brings together a broad variety of amateur and commercial photographs intended to astonish, amuse, and entertain. Here, we find popular images of figures holding their own severed heads or appearing doubled or tripled. Also included in this light-hearted section are ghostly images by the spirit photographer William Mumler, “tall-tale” postcards produced in Midwestern farming communities in the 1910s, trick photographs by amateurs, and Weegee’s experimental distortions of the 1940s. ”Pictures in Print” reveals the ways in which newspapers, magazines, and advertisers have altered, improved, and sometimes fabricated images in their entirety to depict events that never occurred – such as the docking of a zeppelin on the tip of the Empire State Building. Highlights include Erwin Blumenfeld’s famous “Doe Eye” Vogue cover from 1950 and Richard Avedon’s multiple portrait of Audrey Hepburn from 1967.
“Mind’s Eye” features works from the 1920s through 1940s by such artists as Herbert Bayer, Maurice Tabard, Dora Maar, Clarence John Laughlin, and Grete Stern, who have used photography to evoke subjective states of mind, conjuring dreamlike scenarios and surreal imaginary worlds. The final section, “Protoshop,” presents photographs from the second half of the 20th century by Yves Klein, John Baldessari, Duane Michals, Jerry Uelsmann, and other artists who have adapted earlier techniques of image manipulation – such as spirit photography or news photo retouching – to create works that self-consciously and often humorously question photography’s presumed objectivity.”
Press release from The Metropolitan Museum of Art website
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Maurice Tabard (French, 1897-1984)
Room with Eye
1930
Gelatin silver print
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1962
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Wanda Wulz (Italian, 1903-1984)
Io + gatto (Cat + I)
1932
Gelatin silver print
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Ford Motor Company Collection, Gift of Ford Motor Company and John C. Waddell, 1987
Alinari / Art Resource © Wanda Wulz
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John Paul Pennebaker (American, 1903-1953)
Sealed Power Piston Rings
1933
Gelatin silver print
1934 Art and Industry Exhibition Photograph Collection, Baker Library Historical Collections, Harvard Business School, Boston, Mass.
© John Paul Pennebaker
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George Platt Lynes (American, 1907-1955)
The Sleepwalker
1935
Gelatin silver print with applied media
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Ford Motor Company Collection, Gift of Ford Motor Company and John C. Waddell, 1987
© The Estate of George Platt Lynes
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Barbara Morgan (American, 1900-1992)
Hearst over the People
1939
Collage of gelatin silver prints with applied media
The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri, Gift of Hallmark Cards, Inc.
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Grete Stern (Argentinian, born Germany, 1904-1999)
Dream No. 1: Electrical Appliances for the Home
1948
Gelatin silver print
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Twentieth-Century Photography Fund, 2012
Courtesy of Galería Jorge Mara – La Ruche, Buenos Aires
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Erwin Blumenfeld
“Doe Eye” Vogue cover
1950
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Yves Klein (French, 1928-1962)
Photographed by Harry Shunk (German, 1924-2006) and János (Jean) Kender (Hungarian, 1937-2009)
Leap into the Void
1960
Gelatin silver print
Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 1992
© Yves Klein / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris
Photograph Shunk-Kender © Roy Lichtenstein Foundation
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Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American 1899-1968)
Marilyn Monroe
c. 1960
Gelatin silver print
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Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American 1899-1968)
Elizabeth Taylor
1961
Gelatin silver print
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Richard Avedon (American 1923-2004)
Audrey Hepburn, New York, January 1967
1967
Collage of gelatin silver prints, with applied media, mylar overlay with applied media
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Jerry N. Uelsmann (American, born 1934)
Untitled
1969
Gelatin silver print
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Twentieth-Century Photography Fund, 2011
© Jerry N. Uelsmann
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Martha Rosler (American, born 1943)
Red Stripe Kitchen
1967-72, printed early 1990s
from the series “House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home”
Chromogenic print
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Anonymous Gift, 2002
© Martha Rosler
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The Metropolitan Museum of Art
1000 Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street
New York, New York 10028-0198
T: 212-535-7710
Opening hours:
Tuesday – Thursday: 9.30 am – 5.30 pm*
Friday and Saturday: 9.30 am – 9.00 pm*
Sunday: 9.30 am – 5.30 pm*
Closed Monday (except Met Holiday Mondays**), Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s Day
The Metropolitan Museum of Art website
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National Gallery of Art
National Mall between 3rd and 7th Streets
Constitution Avenue NW, Washington
Opening hours:
Monday – Saturday 1000 am – 5.00 pm
Sunday 11.00 am – 6.00 pm
National Gallery of Art website
Filed under: American, american photographers, black and white photography, colour photography, English artist, exhibition, existence, gallery website, landscape, light, memory, New York, photographic series, photography, portrait, psychological, reality, space, surrealism, time Tagged: Aberdeen Portraits No. 1, american artist, american photographer, American photography, Argentinian artist, Argentinian photographer, Arthur Fellig, Artifice in the Name of Art, assemblage, Audrey Hepburn New York 1967, Barbara Morgan, Barbara Morgan Hearst over the People, before Photoshop, BP (Before Photoshop), Cat + I, collage, daguerreotype, Dirigible Docked on Empire State Building, Dream No. 1: Electrical Appliances for the Home, Elizabeth Taylor, English photography, Erwin Blumenfeld, Erwin Blumenfeld Doe Eye, Erwin Blumenfeld Doe Eye Vogue cover, F. Holland Day, F. Holland Day The Vision, Fading Away, Faking It, Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop, Frederick Holland Day, french artist, French photographer, French photography, George Platt Lynes, George Platt Lynes The Sleepwalker, George Washington Wilson, George Washington Wilson Aberdeen Portraits No. 1, German artist, german photographer, Grete Stern, Grete Stern Dream No. 1, Grete Stern Dream No. 1: Electrical Appliances for the Home, Harry Shunk, Harry Shunk Leap into the Void, Hearst over the People, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec as Artist and Model, Henry Peach Robinson, Henry Peach Robinson Fading Away, House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home, ideological photographs, image manipulation, Io + gatto, Italian artist, Italian photographer, János (Jean) Kender, János (Jean) Kender Leap into the Void, Jerry N. Uelsmann, Jerry Uelsmann, Jerry Uelsmann Untitled 1969, John Paul Pennebaker, John Paul Pennebaker Sealed Power Piston Rings, Leap into the Void, Man Juggling His Own Head, Man on Rooftop with Eleven Men in Formation on His Shoulders, manipulated photographs, manipulated photography, Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop, Marilyn Monroe, Martha Rosler, Martha Rosler House Beautiful, Martha Rosler House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home, Martha Rosler Red Stripe Kitchen, Maurice Guibert, Maurice Guibert Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec as Artist and Model, Maurice Tabard, Maurice Tabard Room with Eye, Mind’s Eye, montage, multiple exposure, multiple exposures, Novelties and Amusements, overpainting, photographic objectivity, photography before Photoshop, photomontage, Photoshop, Picture Perfect, Pictures in Print, political photographs, Politics and Persuasion, Protoshop, Red Stripe Kitchen, retouching, Richard Avedon, Richard Avedon Audrey Hepburn, Richard Avedon Audrey Hepburn 1967, Room with Eye, Scottish artist, Scottish photographer, Sealed Power Piston Rings, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Sleepwalker, The Vision (Orpheus Scene), transformation of the camera image, Two-Headed Man, Unidentified American artist Dirigible Docked on Empire State Building, Unidentified American artist Man on Rooftop with Eleven Men in Formation on His Shoulders, Unidentified American artist Two-Headed Man, Unidentified artist Man Juggling His Own Head, visual truth, Wanda Wulz, Wanda Wulz Cat + I, Wanda Wulz Io + gatto, Weegee (Arthur Fellig), Weegee Elizabeth Taylor, Weegee Marilyn Monroe, Yves Klein, Yves Klein Leap into the Void
