The Family of Man

Every time I open a new book on photography I read something about The Family of Man exhibition, curated by Edward Steichen at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1955.  So now I have THE book where I can see all the images together in one place.

In his introduction Edward Steichen talks about "Photographs concerned with man in relation to his environment, to the beauty and richness of the earth he has inherited and what he has one with his inheritance, the good and the great things, the stupid and the destructive things."

The exhibition has a linear and I think quite pedestrian progression, starting with couples, lovers and then looking at marriage in various cultures and followed by pregnancy and birth, children, families, work, death, war, industry, religion, the youth and ending with images of government and specifically the UN.  Although the exhibition according to Steichen is about all man (humans) and all religions I can't help but think it has a powerfully idealised American cultural flavour.  It is certainly a very hopeful and optimistic collection of photographs even though it also shows some of the horrors of being human; war, death, immense sadness and suffering in some images.  But the overall impression I get from it is one of optimism about the future and about the human family's potential ability to overcome the hardships of the war years moving forward.  I suppose that reflects the feelings of society during the 50s from what I have learnt in documentaries and history books.

There are a wide variety of photographers included in the exhibition from very well known names such as Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Frank, Frank Capa, and Dorothea Lange amongst others, along with lesser known names such as Paul Himmel who I wrote about recently and some totally unknown names too.  There are photographers and photographs from all over the world.

What I have noticed while looking at the images is that there is across most of them a simplicity and honesty which is not what we'd expect from photographic images we are faced with today.  Today's photographs, perhaps what I'm talking about here is visual imagery, are so sophisticated, and often times manipulative and knowing.  If you compare the family and children's photographs in this exhibition with the photographs you might expect from a family photographer today there is a huge difference. There is an expectation today that such photographs will be very glossy, perhaps have several filters, and quite fantasty-like, like photographs from a perfect dream almost.  I have found it quite interesting to see these earlier, simpler examples of photographs and like them very much in particular ones by Conseula Kanaga, Wayne Miller, and Elliot Erwitt and plenty more too.  I love the family group shots.  They are very matter of fact.  There are 5 family group shots from various parts of the world and not one of them looks fake, or idealised in any way - I am aware that earlier I said the exhibition as a whole was rather idealised - perhaps I should have said idealogical, but these family shots seem much less contrived than the ones I feel I ought to be aspiring towards today.

Once of my favourite photographs in the whole book is by Howard Sochurek from Life taken in India of a group of workers on some scaffolding at the entrance (taken from inside ) of what I think must a be a rail tunnel.  The figures are silhouetted against the daylight and look tiny in comparison to the tunnel and construction process.  I also think a photograph by Jerry Cooke, also Life, of a woman sitting with her head in her arms on a bench perhaps crying is very powerful and quite modern unlike some others.

All the photographs together feel like an important record of the time - a time that is not really that long ago but seems to represent the end of an era and also totally alien to ours.  Life is so different now - it seems extraordinary somehow.  As I look through the book I can almost hear one of those 50s clipped, quite speedy male voices that we are so used to hearing narrating news reels and documentary films from that era describing the images.

I have to say I really enjoy looking through this book.  I find it fascinating and the photographs quite compelling.

The exhibition is still intact and has a permanent home in Luxembourg.  I think I would love to go and see it if I'm ever there and who knows, may even go there one day for that reason alone!

Family of Man - Luxembourg
MoMA archives

Wynne Bullock: Revelations

“Mysteries lie all around us, even in the most familiar of things, waiting to be perceived.” [1]

Wynne Bullock, Revelations Introduction, 2014,

University of Texas Press and the High Museum of Art

The quote above couldn’t be more appealing to me.  When I first read about Wynne Bullock in photographer Douglas Stockdale's blog I was immediately drawn to his work and wanted to find out more.  Wynne Bullock was a key figure in American photography during the period that I am beginning to understand is so important in American photographic history  – 1940’s to the 1970s.   His works Child in Forest and Let There Be Light both appeared in the Family of Man exhibition at MOMA in 1955, a landmark event which toured for 8 years and celebrated human existence and all its joy and horror following the war years. 

Bullock was born in 1902 and died in 1975.  After he finished school he pursued a concert-singing career which took him to France where he became interested in visual art.  He studied photography at the Los Angeles Art Centre School from 1938-1940, starting his photography career later than his contemporaries had done.  (I try to take comfort from this as I’m a only a few years older than Bullock was when he began; ok, maybe more than a few years but we live far longer nowadays!)  Bullock was part of the West Coast photography tradition working with and friends of Edward Weston and Ansel Adam’s amongst others.[2]

“His early work is deeply experimental.  Drawing direct inspiration from his exposure to Man Ray and Maholy Nagy, as well as that of his Art Centre teacher Edward Kaminski, Bullock began working to control tonal reversals in his photographs by subjecting them to pulses of light in the processing and printing stages, thereby creating evocative figure studies similar to the solarisations he had become acquainted with in Europe”[3] Like Paul Himmel and Lillian Bassman, who also had work included in the Family of Man exhibition, Bullock was interested in experimenting with processes and in-camera effects – It struck me that I am repeatedly and unknowingly drawn to photographers who like to play with their equipment and processing techniques and who enjoy pushing the boundaries.

Wynne Bullock’s work is very much linked to the ideas and philosophies he was so interested in.  One of his main fascinations was with the work of Einstein and the theory of relativity as well as the difference between existence and reality.   His collection of books, all richly annotated, is testament to a deeply intellectual basis from which he practiced his art throughout his career.

Light itself was extremely important to Bullock, not just as a crucial element for photography but as a subject in itself.  Many of his images explored light and like the Dadaists he enjoyed relying on chance to realise some of his work; for instance Gravitation Acceleration was created by hanging “a small light pendulum over an unexposed sheet of film and allowing the forces of gravity and acceleration to construct a composition for him.  Given a push by the artist, the swinging light traced a precise design over the negative…”[4]  ‘Light to me is perhaps the most profound truth in the universe”. [5]

Bullock believed, like the artist Paul Klee, that art should “not reproduce the visible but ‘make visible’”[6] and his experimental abstract work, using solarisation, reticulation (subjecting the print to varying temperatures while processing in order to create cracks and bumps and faults  – which reminds me a bit of using Snapseed and other such apps to paste scratches and make holes in iPhone images), upside-down prints (I’ve done that!) and negative reversals are all used to recreate the reality he was photographing and see the world from a fresh place, much like Brecht did with his alienation affect. “Reality is as much about how you look as where”.[7]

I am extremely taken with Bullock’s attitude that “an individual must live passionately and sincerely”[8] which is the philosophy that informed his work and life.  I think there is much to learn from this position.

One of the things that I am beginning to find difficult to absorb and contend with as I study more and more photographers and other artists is the practice of photographing women without their clothes on, especially women laying down in particular poses, draped languidly and looked utterly unreal, as opposed to more genuine images of women such as Jodi Bieber’s Real Women [9] for instance. (I know it is unfair to compare, as these two photographers are working at very different times in history and are different types of photographer.  I was recently advised to look at Jodie Bieber and was so pleased to see this work that celebrates woman as they are; not alabaster fantasies or anorexic marketing tools.  The difference in her approach immediately struck me as I'd just been looking at Bullock's).  

Of course, there is a long tradition of ‘the nude’ in Western and other art throughout our histories.  And I am sure it seemed like a perfectly reasonable thing to do in a different time but it seems less reasonable now in my eyes, although I know it continues.  Perhaps this is an example of some form of cultural myopia on my part?  A few of my images had recently been invited to a group on Flickr that I briefly looked at and understood to be for black & white images. It wasn’t until I looked more carefully that I realized the group was actually black and white erotica – I was amazed by some of the images, I have to say, and I never thought of myself as some sort of reactionary Mary White house type – quite the opposite actually.  It’s not the nudity I have a problem with.  It’s the attitude that it’s fine to ‘gaze upon’ women as if they were fresh meat, alabaster and perfect.  Surely we have all moved on … apparently not.  I thought perhaps there was as chance I was being a cultural philistine when looking at Bullocks naked females but a quick internet search confirmed that feminist academics have collectively written quite a lot on female nudity in western art, and it’s a relief to know I’m not the only one who thinks it’s an outdated habit that could arguably be consigned to history.  Nevertheless I do worry I am missing something important and profound by being so nonplussed with these images.

“’By looking at the nude, I stopped thinking in terms of objects,’ Bullock explained. ‘I was seeing things, instead, as dynamic events, unique in their own beings yet also related and existing together within a universal context of energy and change”.[10]

I am more than a bit ambivalent about the images of nude women in Bullock’s work.  I can see that the work is important and that he is looking at realities that don’t immediately present themselves to us in our everyday lives.  But I can’t get over these examples of the male/female relationship that exist in our world, and one which allows such images to be considered more than fine.  Do we really have to undress women to stop seeing things in terms of objects?  Isn't that the opposite of what is happening anyway?  I don’t think every image that contains naked women is indicative of that attitude.  I think maybe Navigation without Numbers just about escapes it as the naked baby at least gives the woman something to relate to other that her nakedness - although she isn't relating to it at all; here there is something surreal and disturbing, why is the baby so far from it’s mother, why is there a vast black space between them, why do they both look down?  I would like to know more about this photograph.  I much prefer Lynne, Point Lobos or Child On Forest Road to any of the pictures of his daughter without her clothes, even though I know the Child in Forest is an important and well known work.  In the two aforementioned images the power of the natural world in relation to the small children is overwhelming and vast, and yet the children exist within it and will grow up and eventually die, and always be part of that world and its perpetual cycles too. And they didn't even have to be naked.

I really do like the abstract images and landscapes (sans naked women).  They are profoundly beautiful and imbued with the philosophies that Bullock was so interested in.  I think I will look at them a great deal.

---

Quotations taken from the  introduction to Wynne Bullock, Revelations, copyright © 2014 University of Texas Press and The High Museum of Art
[1] Page 6

[2] Page 9

[3] Page 3

[4] Page 3

[5] Page 4

[6] Page 12

[7] Page 6

[8] page 12

[9] http://www.jodibieber.com/index.php?pageID=17&navLay=3

[10] Page 8