The
Public Image Social Documentary Photography from the Collection of the Zimmerli Art Museum A collaborative project between the Zimmerli Art Museum and Department of Art History, both Rutgers University, supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
The
Public Image Social Documentary Photography from the Collection of the Zimmerli Art Museum A collaborative project between the Zimmerli Art Museum and Department of Art History, both Rutgers University, supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
CONTributors Faculty leaders and graduate students in Art History
Leeza Cinar Donna Gustafson Betty Jarvis Peter Kharmandarian James M. Levinsohn Sophie Ong Kathleen Pierce Anna Rogulina Emily Spencer Tianyi Sun Andr茅s Mario Zervig贸n
CONTENTS
ForeworD AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS by Marti Mayo.................................................................................................... 6 Introduction by Donna Gustafson and Andrés Mario Zervigón........................................................................................ 8 Maks Alpert and Arkady Shaikhet, Buying Food (or Getting Food Ration) by Tianyi Sun...........................................10 Maks Alpert and Arkady Shaikhet, The Filippovs in the Gorky Park of Culture and Recreation by Tianyi Sun............ 12 William Castellana, Woman with Children—Williamsburg, Brooklyn by Peter Kharmandarian........................................ 14 Larry Clark, David Roper, Untitled, and Untitled, all from the Tulsa series, by Sophie Ong..................................................16 Elliott Erwitt, Pigeon in Cobbled Street, Orleans by Emily Spencer...................................................................................20 Elliott Erwitt, Ranch Boy with Father by Emily Spencer.................................................................................................... 22 Elliott Erwitt, Church at Wounded Knee by Emily Spencer...............................................................................................24 Igor Moukhin, Moscow, USSR by Anna Rogulina...............................................................................................................26 Igor Moukhin, Moscow, USSR by Anna Rogulina...............................................................................................................28 Catherine Opie, Untitled (urban panorama) by James M. Levinsohn...................................................................................30 Catherine Opie, Untitled (Ice Houses) by James M. Levinsohn.............................................................................................. 32 Carol Rosen, Yellow Star and The Vultures by Peter Kharmandarian...................................................................................34 Sebastião Salgado, Tea Plantation Worker, Rwanda by Sophie Ong...............................................................................36 Aaron Siskind, New York I by Betty Jarvis............................................................................................................................38 Aaron Siskind, New York 2 by Betty Jarvis...........................................................................................................................40 W. Eugene Smith, Untitled (Refinery Worker) by Kathleen Pierce.........................................................................................42 W. Eugene Smith, Untitled (Man in front of a canning machine) by Kathleen Pierce.............................................................44 Garry Winogrand, New York City, New York by Leeza Cinar............................................................................................46 Garry Winogrand, Beverly Hills, California by Leeza Cinar..............................................................................................48
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FOREWORD AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
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his publication, which is distributed online as an ebook, is one aspect of the second project funded by an important grant to Rutgers’ Zimmerli Art Museum by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation with the goal of furthering professional collaboration between the museum and Rutgers’ Department of Art History. These collaborations are designed to bring to bear significant resources from both entities on shared projects that enhance the professional and intellectual development of graduate students by advancing their interest in and better preparing them for future careers in the art museum profession. The first exhibition project in this initiative was an investigation of the subject of portraiture. Donna Gustafson, curator of American art and Andrew W. Mellon Director for Academic Programs, and Susan Sidlauskas, professor, History and Theory of Modern Art, organized an exhibition seminar, two symposia, and an ebook, and coauthored the book Striking Resemblance: The Changing Art of Portraiture in 2012–14. The second in the series takes as its focus the Zimmerli’s photography collection and the subject of social documentary photography. The seminar was cotaught by Donna Gustafson and Andrés Mario Zervigón, associate professor, History of Photography. The nine students (seven graduate students and two undergraduates) met in the museum’s seminar room, examined photographs from the collection with staff curators, discussed conservation and digital and darkroom printing techniques with professionals in the field, visited other institutions and exhibitions, and wrote the short essays that are found in this online publication. They also suggested works of art that might be loaned to the future exhibition (to be organized by Drs. Gustafson and Zervigón for exhibition at the Zimmerli beginning in January 2017), explored themes and approaches to the subject, and played an important role in conversations that defined the shape of this major project. The museum and Department of Art History owe Donna and Andrés gratitude and appreciation for their role in the seminar, publication, and upcoming exhibition. Both enthusiastically embraced the collaboration and worked hard to create a stimulating learning environment for their students. One of the great pleasures of working in a university art museum is that we all are enriched by the opportunity to work with young art historians, to guide them on their way to fully professional careers, and to learn from them ourselves—the
interaction between professionals and students enriches both. Evidence of the creativity and training of the students, and their ambition and intellect, is demonstrated in the short essays that follow. We are all grateful for their contributions. Donna and AndrÊs particularly wish to recognize and thank Zimmerli curatorial and registration staff who assisted the students in their research on the collection: Christine Giviskos, associate curator of European Art; Jane Sharp, research curator for Soviet Nonconformist Art and associate professor of Art History; Marilyn Symmes, former director of the Morse Research Center for Graphic Arts and curator of Prints and Drawings; Julia Tulovsky, associate curator of Russian and Soviet Nonconformist Art; Leslie Kriff, registrar; and Kiki Michael, assistant registrar, who secured the required photography permissions and organized photography of the works in this ebook. In addition, we wish to acknowledge Stacy Smith, manager of publications and communications, for overseeing production of this publication with her customary intelligence and grace, Carolyn Vaughan for careful editing of its text, and Christian Luis for its fitting and creative design. We are ultimately most appreciative of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, for the vision and support that have made the various components of this project possible. The commitment of the foundation to the humanities at American universities, and to the role of university art museums in the education of all students, is rare and valuable, and we are very thankful for the foundation’s prescient interest and continuing support. Marti Mayo
Director (Interim)
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INTRODUCTION
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his e-book is one portion of a larger project that will include an exhibition, a book, and a symposium on the subject of social documentary photography. The project began with an idea for an exhibition drawn from the largely unpublished photography collection of the Zimmerli Art Museum, a project that would also serve as the theme for a graduate exhibition seminar. The museum’s deep strength in Soviet photographs and recent gifts of American social documentary–style photography provided a platform from which to survey recent developments in this pictorial mode. Recent studies including Jorge Ribalta’s 2011 exhibition and catalogue, A Hard, Merciless Light: The Worker Photography Movement, 1926–1939, had complicated the standard histories of documentary, and it was clear that a rethinking of the history of this genre would be fruitful. Our goal was to break through the traditional discussions of social documentary by approaching the subject with a wide enough lens to contextualize two sorts of work in the Zimmerli’s collection. The first includes pictures by well-known photographers such as Maks Alpert, Marc Asnin, Larry Clark, Joel Meyerowitz, Igor Moukhin, Catherine Opie, Alexander Rodchenko, Aaron Siskind, Edward Steichen, and Garry Winogrand. The second encompasses significant loans of works by the Farm Security Administration photographers from the American Depression, examples of worker photography from Europe between the two World Wars, and some contemporary images. By tying mid-twentieth and late twentieth-century social documentary photography together, we hoped to show that image makers have continued to reinvent the traditions of documentary photography for a variety of purposes, not least among them to inspire social change. This is particularly true, of course, for contemporary artists who use canny interventions to dismantle the ongoing assumption of photography’s transparency and play with our conditioned responses to such prints. Aptly titled “Reading Photography as Document,” the graduate exhibition seminar that resulted in this e-book examined the ways in which photography has been mobilized for social change. The students read deeply in photographic history and theory. The class debated categories of documentary and especially the intentions of photographers who have been defined as social documentarians. We encouraged the students to think of photographs as objects and, correspondingly, we visited dark rooms, digital labs, and conservation studios.
We thought about how photography enters the public realm—through exhibition, journals, government reports, books, the Internet—and discussed the medium’s histories as document and art object. The students were widely diverse in their interests and backgrounds, and they participated in reshaping the exhibition’s themes, which were reflected in a working checklist of possibilities. They carefully historicized the meaning of social documentary photography and researched artists outside of the Zimmerli’s collection by way of suggesting additional loans to the exhibition. The seminar culminated in the Andrew W. Mellon Graduate Student Colloquium, “Rethinking Social Documentary Photography,” organized by the Museum and the Department of Art History. It included a keynote address by Katherine A. Bussard, Peter C. Bunnell Curator of Photography, Princeton University Art Museum. Her paper, “Social Documentary Photography: Some Questions,” served as a provocation to new thinking on the subject, opening the afternoon’s discussion. We take this opportunity to commend each of the students for their hard work, innovative thinking, and willingness to grapple with our subject: Leeza Cinar, Betty Jarvis, Peter Kharmandarian, James M. Levinsohn, Sophie Ong, Kathleen Pierce, Anna Rogulina, Emily Spencer, and Tianyi Sun. We also thank Ms. Ong, PhD candidate in Art History and 2015 Mellon Summer Intern at the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers, and Betty Jarvis, MA candidate in Art History and Graduate Curatorial Assistant 2015–2016. who assisted in editing and formatting this collection of essays. Donna Gustafson and Andrés Mario Zervigón
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Maks Alpert and Arkady Shaikhet Ukrainian (1899–1980); Russian (1898–1959)
This photograph is from the photo-essay “A Day in the Life of a Moscow Worker Family” by the Soviet photographers Maks Alpert and Arkady Shaikhet. Composed of fifty-two pictures, the photo-essay was first published in the German magazine Die Arbeiter-Illustrierte Zeitung (AIZ) in September 1931 and only later in the Soviet journal Proletarskoefoto in December of that year. Meant as a record of the daily life of a Moscow worker’s family, the structured photographs and accompanying text provide an inventory of the purportedly superior living, working, and cultural conditions of Soviet workers for the first time. The series played a critical role in establishing the photo-essay as a genre. In this image, the photographers capture a moment in a worker cooperative factory store. Mrs. Filippov, the wife and mother of the family, is in the center of the picture. She is smiling while waiting for the sales clerk to finish packing her order. The full box of eggs on the counter not only suggests an abundance of food available to the population, but also conveys visually the victorious economic development of the first Five Year Plan (1929–33) in the USSR. The number of figures leaves an impression that the picture was taken in the midst of a busy day. Some customers notice the camera while others do not, suggesting a spontaneous moment of everyday life. Tianyi Sun
Buying Food (or Getting Food Ration), from the series A Day in the Life of a Moscow Worker Family 1931 Gelatin silver print, 9 5 â „8 x 12 in. (24.5 x 30.5 cm) Collection Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers Gift of Margarita Tupitsyn 2002.0841.013
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Maks Alpert and Arkady Shaikhet Ukrainian (1899–1980); Russian (1898–1959)
This photograph was taken in 1931 by the Soviet photographers Maks Alpert and Arkady Shaikhet for the photo-essay “A Day in the Life of a Moscow Worker Family.” As one of several shots taken in Gorky Park, a large leisure expanse opened in Moscow in 1928, the photograph captures a moment when Mrs. Filippov and her daughter are relaxing on hammocks. In this picture, away from any signs of industrial modernity, the softedged, dark background of nature and the waning daylight highlight the two figures in white in the foreground, producing a floating and poetical effect. In both AIZ and Proletarskoefoto, where the photo-essay appeared, this picture was cropped so that only Mrs. Filippov on the hammock was visible, emphasizing the peaceful and comfortable lifestyle she enjoyed as wife and mother in the Soviet state. Unlike the majority of worker photographs in the 1930s, this image reflects a strange yearning for a bourgeois lifestyle that included escaping from the city to nature on weekends. Particularly in this photograph, the members of the Filippov family are presented not only as heroic workers who contribute to the construction of the state through their effort, but also as residents with a leisurely life in a new and healthy Soviet society. The photo-essay contains other pictures with such bourgeois-looking images. In one photograph, two girls holding tennis rackets smile for the camera. In another, three members of the family stroll through the park. These photographs show the intention of the two photographers to present the life of a Moscow worker family not as it was lived in 1931, but as it might one day be. Tianyi Sun
The Filippovs in the Gorky Park of Culture and Recreation, from the series A Day in the Life of a Moscow Worker Family 1931 Gelatin silver print, 9 5 â „8 x 12 in. (24.5 x 30.5 cm) Collection Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers Gift of Margarita Tupitsyn 2002.0841.021
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William Castellana American (born 1968)
William Castellana, a native of Williamsburg, New York, is an award-winning photographer, known for his stilllife photographs and commercial work. In a break from his usual subjects, Castellana took to the streets of his neighborhood to photograph its residents. Following the tradition of American 1960s street photographers such as Garry Winogrand, who captured individuals on the streets of New York, Dallas, and Los Angeles, Castellana’s photographs of Williamsburg also capture individuals in fleeting moments on public streets. His purpose is to document the life of his neighborhood, home to a large population of Orthodox and Hasidic Jews. Working with a digital camera and shooting in black and white, Castellana explores South Williamsburg’s unique character, which is tied directly to the social and religious customs of this large community. As Roman Vishniak did in his documentation of Jews in Eastern Europe, here Castellana captures the everyday life of one large, vibrant New York constituency. This photograph, taken in a moment of dynamic movement, features a smiling mother surrounded by her carefree children, some of whom seem to be caught off guard at having their photograph taken. The image of the family does not necessarily serve to make a specific point, but rather shows them as an integral part of the population. Peter Kharmandarian
Woman with Children—Williamsburg, Brooklyn 2014 Archival pigment ink print on paper, 12 15 ⁄16 x 18 15 ⁄16 in. (32.8 x 48.1 cm) Collection Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers Gift of the artist 2014.005.002 © Image Courtesy William Castellana
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Larry Clark American (born 1943)
Tulsa, Larry Clark’s unreserved and graphic exploration of American youth, caused much controversy and fascination when published as a book in 1971. Focusing on himself and his friends abusing drugs, playing with guns, and engaging in various sexual escapades, Clark radically altered the idea of social documentary photography. Instead of attempting to provoke direct social change or intervention through his work, as in the classic documentary of Lewis Hine and Dorothea Lange, Clark shines a spotlight on a side of Tulsa, Oklahoma—his hometown—previously unexposed to the camera’s lens. Providing his audience with an insider perspective on Tulsa, he creates a subjective, unidealized, and autobiographical series firmly located from his point of view. His form of documentary photography is predicated on notions of direct access and intimacy with no pretention of objectivity. Untitled, for example, captures Clark and his friends indulging in a drug-taking frenzy. It is a blurry snapshot of their unrestrained, rebellious lives in small-city America. Born in Tulsa in 1943, Clark trained as a photographer while assisting his mother with her baby photography practice. The black-and-white images included in Tulsa were shot over an eight-year period from 1963 to 1971. Through the careful pairing of photographs and a selective use of text, Clark devised an overall narrative for Tulsa that traces the lives of his friends from bored and reckless teenagers to battered adults. His opening statement foreshadows the inevitable demise of his primary characters: “once the needle goes in it never comes out.” This drug-induced downfall is most notable in the repeated portrayal of David Roper, one of Clark’s named protagonists, whose contemplative portrait David Roper sets the tone for the book. In Untitled, the young Roper—identifiable by his heart-shaped tattoo—shoots up amphetamine, while in Untitled, he takes aim in front of an American flag hung upside down and askew on the wall behind. Unlike documentary photography from the preceding decades, Clark’s intimate and raw photographs present life in Tulsa as it was lived and experienced by him and his friends, rather than from an outsider’s seemingly objective perspective. Sophie Ong
David Roper, from the Tulsa series; 1963; Gelatin silver print, from an edition of 25, 14 x 11 in. (35.6 x 27.9 cm.); Collection Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers; Gift of Ms. Eve Kessler; 85.026.001; ŠLarry Clark; Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York.
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Larry Clark American (born 1943)
Untitled, from the Tulsa series 1963 Gelatin silver print, from an edition of 25, 11 x 14 in. (27.9 x 35.6 cm.) Collection Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers Gift of Ms. Eve Kessler 85.026.018 ŠLarry Clark; Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York.
Untitled, from the Tulsa series 1970 Gelatin silver print, from an edition of 25, 14 x 11 in. (35.6 x 27.9 cm.) Collection Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers Gift of Ms. Eve Kessler 85.026.032 ŠLarry Clark; Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York.
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Elliott Erwitt American (born 1928)
Elliott Erwitt is perhaps best known for humorous and witty photographs that often take animals, especially dogs, as their subject. His other work is more evocative and poetic but difficult to read as social documentary photography. In this photograph, Erwitt captures a complex aesthetic scene centered on a pigeon, which, although out of focus itself, is the focus of the picture. The unusual composition and choice of unfocused action are characteristic of Erwitt’s conscious breaking of the rules of then-contemporary photographic standards. In order to make his pictures come to life, he abandoned specifications such as perfect exposure, full tonal range, sharp focus, and traditional composition.1 In this photograph, looking down a mysterious darkened alleyway, we can also see the influence of film noir and Erwitt’s experience with motion pictures. Like Henri Cartier-Bresson, Erwitt is known to seek a “decisive moment,” an instant in real time when people or animals can be photographed in exciting and illuminating ways.2 Despite the action in the foreground, the composition is organized into a series of formal juxtapositions. The pigeon in flight is in stark contrast to the in-focus pigeon calmly standing in the street. Human presence in the photograph is not immediately apparent. But upon a closer look, men appear standing by the truck, as tendrils of smoke swirl up from the buildings. Erwitt also plays with the contrast of light and dark, with bright rays of sunshine breaking through the shadowy alleyway. This play of aesthetic elements draws the viewer in for further contemplation and interpretation. Emily Spencer
Pigeon in Cobbled Street, Orleans 1952 Gelatin silver print, 16 x 19 7â „8 in. (40.6 x 50.5 cm) Collection Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers Gift of Martin Miller 81.032.012
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Elliott Erwitt American (born 1928)
Born in Europe, Elliott Erwitt moved with his family to the United States in 1939 to escape Fascism, but he never stayed in one place for long.3 His displacement and lack of family ties are reflected in the photographs he took of the love between parents and children. In this photograph, we see an emotional interaction between a son and father. The son grips his father’s arm tightly, and their facial expressions suggest they are receiving bad news. Erwitt took this photograph on assignment, but it was rejected in favor of other photographs of cheerful, happy children. The son lived with his grandparents, and on this occasion his father was visiting for Sunday dinner. While the family was talking, the son suddenly reached over and held onto his father.4 We can interpret the longing, melancholy expressions as tender love touched by absence. Erwitt is adamant about working as an observer, and he rarely stages his pictures. This photograph is characteristic of the way he lets his subjects take their time until something he finds worth snapping takes place. This subject of a somewhat broken family also has a place in Erwitt’s heart because his own family had moved so often, and he was aware of the dissolution of his parents’ marriage. He sees love between children and parents as one of the principle joys in life. His difficult background led him to idealize a sort of family life that others might take for granted.5 While this family is not perfect, he captured a loving exchange. Not only does Erwitt see himself in this scene, he also sets up the photograph so that viewers can feel a deep emotional connection, whether or not they know the story leading up to it. The aesthetic and evocative qualities in this photograph are linked, and together they create the emotion that emanates from Erwitt’s image and that invites the viewer to look more closely. Emily Spencer
Ranch Boy with Father 1954 Gelatin silver print, 16 x 19 7/8 in. (40.6 x 50.5 cm) Collection Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers Gift of Martin Miller 81.032.008
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Elliott Erwitt American (born 1928)
In this photograph, also found cropped and in color on the cover of Ivan Chermayeff’s Observations on American Architecture, a church sits atop a hill, far in the distance. The color and the black-and white versions each carry a distinct impression. The color image seems to be a typical American landscape setting, with a tranquil breeze sweeping through the grasses. One can easily imagine the photographer on a leisurely stroll up the hill making his way toward the church. In the black-and-white version, the sky has the ominous look of an impending storm, and the grasses and plants in the foreground are rippled by a strong wind. In this version, the photographer seems to have struggled with the quickly changing lighting, battling the wind for the best shot. The significant differences created by simply changing the color scheme induced Elliott Erwitt, for the majority of his career, to photograph in black and white. He uses color for his commercial and commissioned work, claiming that it works best for information reading. But, he says, life is already too complicated to add color to his personal work, which emphasizes leisure and contemplation.6 It is in his black-and-white photography that Erwitt’s role as a social documentary photographer becomes clear. In Chermayeff’s book, this photograph serves as a document of the church’s construction, architecture, and location. But when it is taken out of this context and included, instead, in a portfolio of Erwitt’s works, can it still be informational? Instead of knowing that this church was constructed in South Dakota in 1912, all we know is that it is a pretty hilltop church on a stormy day. Emily Spencer
Church at Wounded Knee 1969 Gelatin silver print, 16 x 19 7/8 in. (40.6 x 50.5 cm) Collection Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers Gift of Martin Miller 81.032.001
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Igor Moukhin Russian (born 1961)
Igor Moukhin’s first major body of work, Young People in the Big City is a series that captures the changing face of the Soviet Union in the final years before its dissolution. His work conveys this transition through moments in the lives led by urban youth in Moscow, Leningrad, Vilnius, and other cities across the USSR. The project was sparked by Moukhin’s discovery of subcultures associated with underground rock music in the 1980s. Having become involved in the publication of the samizdat music magazines Zomby and Zdvig in 1986, the photographer co-occupied a position on the margins of culture with the people he photographed. Not unlike the work of his contemporaries in the United States, such as Nan Goldin and Larry Clark, the photographs in this series bring into focus cultural groups, social dynamics, and spaces that resisted the mainstream, and with which the photographer himself identified. In this shot, Moscow, USSR, a group of four young men and women dressed in punk fashions present themselves to the camera. Gathered in a kitchen, most likely in a university dormitory, they offer boisterous gestures and feminine exposure, suggesting that the image was made with a degree of shared intimacy, by an insider. At the same time, a certain distance is maintained between the photographer and the photographed, as underscored by the subjects’ recession into the corner of the room. One can also see detachment in their awareness of (and in the case of the seated young man and the woman standing behind him, ambivalence toward) the camera. The entwinement of their bodies suggests a corporeal “us,” of which neither the photographer nor the viewer is part. The spectator is lodged in a perpetual oscillation between being invited into and pushed out of the tight, already crowded space. The photograph shifts back and forth between an intimate moment among friends observed by the camera and a self-conscious presentation of cultural identity posed for the camera. Anna Rogulin
Moscow, USSR, from the series Young People in the Big City (1985–88) 1985 Gelatin silver print, 11 7⁄16 x 15 3 ⁄4 in. (29 x 40 cm) Collection Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection of Nonconformist Art from the Soviet Union 2000.1176
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Igor Moukhin Russian (born 1961)
Although culturally and temporally removed from the New York school of street photographers of the 1960s, the prominent Russian photographer Igor Moukhin cites Lee Friedlander, Diane Arbus, and Robert Frank as important stylistic influences. Sharing their engagement with the rhythms of urban life, he has been committed to the aesthetic of black-and-white documentary photography and the public spaces where the lives of ordinary people intersect with one another. He has also been concerned with wider political, economic, and cultural forces. Moukhin’s early work in particular is attuned to the subtle manifestation of the significant societal changes that began to unfold in the mid-1980s under Gorbachev’s policies of perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (openness). Like many works in the series Young People in the Big City, this photograph is a close-up portrait of a youth made against the backdrop of a gritty, lightly grafittied architectural façade. Starkly dressed in black, boasting a spiky hairstyle, and wearing dark makeup, he casts a prolonged, ambiguous gaze at the camera—a “look” dramatized by the effects of light and shadow across his face. The close framing of the photograph further focuses our attention on his appearance, reflecting the series’ exploration of new forms of identity in a society undergoing transition. New license with body and dress made it possible for the Soviet citizen to declare his or her individuality in a society that was only beginning to allow opportunities for such expression. Also striking about this photograph is the juxtaposition of the youth, clearly a member of an alternative culture, against the building Dom Kul’tury (House of Culture), identified by a sign in the top left, an institution of official (albeit recreational) culture. While capturing a figure and a site that at first might appear to be incompatible, or even mutually repellant, the photograph also speaks to the changing relationship between the two, as definitions of cultural transgression were loosening and official cultural policy became more tolerant of rock music and its fans. In fact, by the mid to late 1980s, some houses of culture began hosting rock concerts in order to remain relevant. The question of whether the individual pictured is a sarcastic outsider or an actual affiliate of this particular house of culture remains open. This ambiguity aligns the image with the work of Arbus or Frank. Anna Rogulina
Moscow, USSR, from the series Young People in the Big City (1985–88) 1987 Gelatin silver print, 11 7⁄16 x 15 3 ⁄4 in. (29 x 40 cm) Collection Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection of Nonconformist Art from the Soviet Union 2000.1175
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Catherine Opie American (born 1961)
Catherine Opie came to renown in the early to mid-1990s for Being and Having (1991) and Portraits (1993–97), honorific color portrayals of fellow members of the queer, sadomasochistic leather subculture that deliberately blurred the line between gender performance and biological identity. Since then, Opie has constructed a documentary practice that remains dedicated to capturing “social facts,” inflected by the typological regularity and seriality of early twentieth-century social survey photography. Her images have nevertheless internalized postmodernist critiques of the supposed authorial objectivity and transparent truth of the documentary photograph. This print forms part of Opie’s Mini-Mall series, which documents an unfashionable but omnipresent feature of Los Angeles’s urban landscape with an unvarying panoramic, horizontal, and frontal orientation. This panoramic approach—recalling filmic depictions of the unsullied American West—is ironic given the series’ focus on shopping plazas that feature a staggering variety of small businesses owned by diverse immigrant groups. Photographed on weekend mornings when the shops are vacant of patrons, the multilingual signage emblazoned on the Mini-Malls becomes the focus of the images, standing in for the diverse ethnic communities who own these businesses or shop here. As language is embedded in the tattooed and pierced bodies of Opie and her friends in the S & M community to represent identity, language is embedded in the regularized architectural bodies of the Mini-Malls to signify community identity. The Zimmerli’s print is an anomaly within the Mini-Malls series. Centered on a parcel of vacant land, all the surfaces around it—storefronts, streetlamps, billboards, and bus benches—are decked out with advertisements for consumer goods: beer, Christmas trees, pharmaceuticals, and, most prominently, photocopies. The advertisements for photocopies self-referentially gesture to the reproducibility of the photographic image—just then made immaterial, and hence yet more reproducible, with the advent of digital photography—and to the ephemerality, flux, and decentralization characteristic of postmodern life. This reading is reinforced by the very disposability of the goods advertised, the power lines that echo the picture’s edges, and, most significantly, by the figures waiting for the bus, dwarfed by an urban landscape absent of permanent structures. An analogy for the conditions of documentary under the technological and economic conditions of postmodernism, this photograph was digitally printed from an analog negative on an Iris printer, an early digital device that has since become obsolete. James M. Levinsohn
Untitled (urban panorama), from the Mini-Mall series 1997 Iris print on paper, 8 3 â „4 x 21 5 â „16 in. (22.3 x 54.2 cm) Collection Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers Gift of Herbert and Lenore Schorr 2005.0158
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Catherine Opie American (born 1961)
The Ice Houses series emerged from an artist’s residency at the Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis. To capture these structures, Opie traveled to Minnesota’s northern edge on winter weekends, where transitory groups of impermanent shelters accrue on the region’s frozen lakes to facilitate ice fishing. The images’ virtual abstraction marks a departure from the typological realism of Opie’s previous photographic practice. However, they continue her dedication to capturing ephemeral and marginal communities, here rendered such by their proximity to undomesticated nature. They further articulate the meditation of the Mini-Mall series and the portraits of her queer S & M community on the limitations of the transparency of the documentary photograph. As in those previous series, Opie’s meticulous chronicling of the making of community identity through external appearance ironically belies claims to the transcendental nature of photography’s visual truth. In Opie’s work, the appearances the camera captures, in exquisite detail, remain resolutely opaque. This stance is reinforced in Ice Houses by Opie’s physical distance from the temporary structures, rendered into painterly geometric shapes scattered across the firm line of the horizon, separating the cerulean blue of the sky from the indomitable whiteness of the snowcovered ground. As a further demonstration of Opie’s dialogue with the history of painting, the emphasis on the horizon line recalls the nineteenth-century Romantic landscape canvases of Caspar David Friedrich. Her use of an 8 x 10 field camera, the painstaking work required to erect it in sub-zero weather, and the patience with which she waited for a perfectly composed image to form before her also mimic the exercises of duration required with painting. Furthermore, the photograph’s formal rigor, its appropriation of painterly genres, and Opie’s use of antiquated equipment ally the work with Düsseldorf school photographers like Thomas Struth and Candida Höfer, as does their original, 50 x 40 inch exhibition format as chromogenic color prints. However, the artist’s extreme distancing of herself from the subject demonstrates Opie’s resolute difference from these photographers. Through this emphatic attention to distance, Opie calls attention to her authorship—an authorship that can ultimately not be eliminated. Hence, she continues her project of a postmodern critique of social documentary photography through its conscious deployment. James M. Levinsohn
Untitled (Ice Houses), from the series Two OO One; 2001; Chromogenic print, 23 15 ⁄16 x 19 15 ⁄16 in. (60.8 x 50.7 cm); Collection Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers; Gift of Peter Frey; 2008.015.001.05
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Carol Rosen American (1933–2014)
Carol Rosen, a New Jersey public school teacher for forty years, was inspired to create a series of photomontage prints after visiting several European sites related to the Holocaust, as well as the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum in Israel. Printing them on translucent paper to show the dust and dirt collected when in the ownership of private individuals, the artist aimed to show the fragility and temporality of life. The artist fabricated each piece using her own prints and published photographs that she found in her research. While the stories suggested by the arrangement of pictures may well have occurred, Rosen’s use of documentary photographs in combination attempts to evoke a deeper understanding of one of the twentieth century’s most catastrophic events. As part of a collection of twenty-one portfolios with ten photomontages in each, these two images from Holocaust Series III serve as part of a larger narrative remarking on issues such as the silence on the part of the German public, the innocence of those murdered, and the monstrous means with which they were killed. Yellow Star includes an image of a small boy wearing a yellow “Juden” star with his arms raised, as if just captured, and a structure with the appearance of a concentration camp. The figure of the boy is taken directly from a famous photograph documenting the Nazi’s purge of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943. While the individuals in that photograph have not been definitively identified it is believed that the small boy is Tzvi Nussbaum, who did survive the Holocaust in Europe. This photograph was one of the 52 included in The Stroop Report documenting the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto. The Vultures presents a literal vulture sitting upon a pile of animal carcasses arranged to look as though they are stacked in the back of a cart. The marching soldiers in the upper register provoke the reader to ask who, in fact, are the vultures of the title. The translucent quality of the printed photomontages assists the artist’s understanding of the Holocaust as an event that could take place at any time. Ultimately, when paired with other images and with the poems that constitute the Holocaust Series III, these works realize Rosen’s effort to achieve her stated goal: to personalize the victims and to individualize their tragedy . Peter Kharmandarian
Yellow Star, from the Holocaust Series III c. 1997 Photographic transparencies and Japanese paper, 11 x 8 â…? (27.9 x 21.9 cm) Collection Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers Gift of Eliot and Carol Rosen 1997.0272.001.014
The Vultures, from the Holocaust Series III c. 1997 Photographic transparencies embedded in Japanese silk paper, 11 x 8 â…? (27.9 x 21.9 cm) Collection Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers Gift of Eliot and Carol Rosen 1997.0272.001.014
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Sebastião Salgado Brazilian (born 1944)
Born in the small town of Aimorés, Minas Gerais, Brazil, on February 8, 1944, Sebastião Salgado is widely celebrated as a prominent photojournalist and documentary photographer with a distinctive aesthetic sensibility. His interest in the consequences of global economic change—cultivated during his earlier career as an economist—has had a profound effect on his photography and is reflected in many of his major projects such as Workers: An Archaeology of the Industrial Age (1993) and Migrations: Humanity in Transition (2000). Through his mastery and exploitation of the dramatic effects possible in black-and-white photography, Salgado seeks to provoke an emotional response from the viewer. His photographs reflect a late return to the concept of documentary photography as a means for social reform, a notion championed by such early American photographers as Lewis Hine and members of the New York Photo League, including Paul Strand and the critic Elizabeth McCausland. In Tea Plantation Worker, Rwanda, Salgado focuses his camera’s lens on a worker’s hands, cropping out most of the body and drawing attention to the grim physical results of hard, manual labor—cracked, weathered skin encrusted with dirt. The photograph forms part of his Workers series, a project begun in 1986 for which he visited twenty-three countries in six years to produce a study of manual labor within a global context. Presented in both book and exhibition form, the photographs shed light on the people whose labor has allowed for the rapid growth of modern industrialization and which, in turn, benefits only a minority of the global population. For Salgado, aesthetics and technique—first championed earlier in the twentieth century by Strand, Walker Evans, and Margaret Bourke-White—are reintroduced as essential components to the success of the documentary photograph. As exemplified by Tea Plantation Worker, Rwanda (1991), framing, lighting, and impeccable detail produced through high-resolution printing, function simultaneously to communicate the full extent of the image’s human drama. Sophie Ong
Tea Plantation Worker, Rwanda, from the series Workers 1991 Gelatin silver print on paper, 22 1 ⁄2 x 26 9 ⁄16 in. (57.2 x 67.5 cm) Collection Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers Gift of Anne and Arthur Goldstein 2007.0212 © Sebastião Salgado/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
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Aaron Siskind American (1903–1991)
From 1936 to 1940, Aaron Siskind photographed socially and politically motivated scenes with a group of New York–based photographers associated with the Photo League. This collective included Berenice Abbott, Paul Strand, Jerome Liebling, and other likeminded photographers who were already or would soon be well known. Their group was ideologically founded on socialist sympathies, and these photographers were bound by faith in photography’s ability to document the often-harsh realities of the human condition, particularly as found in depression-era America. Siskind held firmly to the belief in the photograph’s ability to record and utilized the camera to convey his own sympathies with marginalized society, as is apparent in the acclaimed Photo League project The Harlem Document (1940), in which he was a key participant. However, by 1943 Siskind’s work changed; he became increasingly occupied with a formalist vision that fashioned abstractions from found objects and architecture. Typical of this shift in his oeuvre, New York I is an aesthetic study rooted in Siskind’s documentarian past. The high contrast and deep tonal range create ambiguity, and the viewer is not given any clear idea as to the picture’s larger meaning. Demanding a close look, the subject is revealed only by the ventilation systems sitting on top of the silhouette. The image is then understood to be the façade of a dilapidated building. Although there are no people present and the image is a near abstraction, the work still demonstrates a preoccupation with the social margins and the harshness of many people’s lived reality. Siskind may have evolved beyond the subjects associated with his Photo League work, but his conceptual preoccupation with the human condition still declares itself. In his development as a photographer and artist, Siskind moved from a strict documentary approach and into an abstracted version of photographic representation. Pushing the stylistic boundaries of the photographic medium, he helped to lead photography into a post–World War II aesthetic. At the same time, he paved the way for future photographers who would use photography to comment on the world around them and elicit an emotional response, not necessarily through explicit documentation, but through an abstracted look at human experience. Betty Jarvis
New York I 1951 Gelatin silver print, 10 7⁄8 x 13 7⁄8 in. (27.6 x 35.2 cm) Collection Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers Gift of Charles S. and Elynne B. Zucker 84.084.006
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Aaron Siskind American (1903–1991)
Few other photographers have been so closely associated with their painting contemporaries as Aaron Siskind. His friendship with the abstract expressionists Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothko, and Franz Kline, coupled with his deep knowledge of their work, had a visible influence on his work. Through them, he developed an interest in formalism and expressive details created through abstraction. Siskind fully believed that the primary function of photography was to record reality. But with this foundation, he chose to address issues of aesthetics and style and to investigate the ways that a photograph could convey meaning beyond its immediate subject. In his images, Siskind melds an exploration of documentary and formalism to investigate his own artistic response to the objects he photographs. In this way, he forms a marriage between the properties of straight photography—making photographs true to the uniqueness of the medium, rejecting the use of manipulations, such as double-exposure, blurred focus, or heavy burning, often used to produce photographs that resemble painting—and modernist art in post–World War II America. Part of Siskind’s relationship to painting can be understood in his development of two-dimensional images on the surface of the photographic print. By tightly cropping what is, in reality, a two-dimensional image of a three-dimensional space, he established a new set of rules for himself. While the objective of documentary photographers was to capture images from everyday life through the presumably unique ability of the camera to represent life accurately, complete with a foreground, middle ground, and background, Siskind did not feel that illusionist space was a necessity for depicting reality. His shift in attitude toward the importance of the flat picture plane is, in some ways, a more straightforward approach to documentation and photography. In his own words, images such as New York 2 express an honest “fidelity to the object and my instrument. . . .” As he explained, “the clear-seeing lens is unrelenting; transformation into an aesthetic object is achieved in the act of seeing, and not by manipulation.” 7 Through his unique vision of abstraction, the photographer explored and expanded the capabilities of his medium by returning photography to its most basic function as a recording device. Betty Jarvis
New York 2; 1951; Gelatin silver print, 14 x 11 in. (35.6 x 27.9 cm); Collection Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers; Gift of Charles S. and Elynne B. Zucker; 84.084.005
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W. Eugene Smith American (1918–1978)
W. Eugene Smith produced Untitled (Refinery Worker) as part of his series Taft and Ohio. Commissioned by Life magazine in 1949, these photographs documented senator and presidential hopeful Robert Alphonso Taft’s campaign for the 1950 Ohio senate elections. Smith photographed Taft—the son of President William Howard Taft—on the campaign trail with the key Ohioans he would have to persuade to support his candidacy. Life published these photographs as a photo-essay, a format Smith refined throughout his career. While Untitled (Refinery Worker) was not chosen for publication in the magazine, it was most likely taken at the Standard Oil of Ohio (SOHIO) plant in Cleveland at the same time as another photograph featuring refinery workers that did appear in the photo-essay. The text accompanying that picture reports that the refinery men “typify northern Ohio’s melting pot, and most of them are against Senator Taft,” who had worked to curtail the influence of labor unions.8 This portrait of an unidentified worker features a familiar trope of American social documentary photography: the laboring immigrant. Here, the soot caked on his cheeks, his wrinkled brow, the dust covering his shirt and collar, and the protective gear he wears—from the goggles around his neck to his thick gloves—attest to the difficult and potentially dangerous nature of his occupation. The steam and smoke billowing behind him similarly bear witness to the harsh working conditions he experiences day after day. Yet his relaxed posture, upturned gaze, and faint grin complicate a fully negative reading of this picture. While it can be seen as bolstering the image of the powerful industrial giant that is postwar America and the American union worker, it can also be understood as delivering a far more specific political message. Given Taft’s challenge to recruit voters from the working class who were opposed to his anti-union policies, the refinery worker’s casual pose and expression may indicate his anti-Taft sentiments and his support of labor unions. Significantly, while these very qualities may have appealed to Smith, (Untitled) Refinery Worker was not selected to appear in the strongly conservative and pro-Taft Life magazine. This omission becomes particularly telling when the tense political climate of the time is considered, as the rise of the Red Scare and McCarthyism fostered a fear of worker groups and the alleged potential they held to incite socialist revolution and radical politics. Kathleen Pierce
Untitled (Refinery Worker), from the series Taft and Ohio; ca. 1948–49 ; Gelatin silver print, 14 x 11 in. (35.6 x 27.9 cm); Collection Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers; Gift of Inge and Eugene Judd; 85.087.004
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W. Eugene Smith American (1918–1978)
In 1955, the historian and magazine editor Stefan Lorant hired Smith to produce photographs for a book commemorating Pittsburgh’s bicentennial. The original project ended after three weeks, one hundred prints, and Lorant’s publication of Pittsburgh: The Story of an American City. But Smith independently continued his exploration of Pittsburgh for several additional years, ultimately creating over seventeen thousand negatives.9 Untitled (Man in front of canning machine) most likely resulted from a visit to a Pittsburgh goliath: the H. J. Heinz company. In Popular Photography’s Photography Annual of 1959—in which Smith was given thirty-eight pages to print his Pittsburgh photographs—he titled one spread “The flamed . . . the molten . . . the wired . . . the canned.”10 In the subsequent magazine spread, he employed the text alongside the canning factory’s interior to document the growth of the Heinz Company from a door-to-door business to a Pittsburgh icon. In many ways, Smith’s subject in this photograph works within the classic mode of social documentary photography. This photograph, like Smith’s Refinery Worker, recalls efforts by social documentarians of the 1920s and 1930s to bring the working conditions of various industries to public attention and restore dignity to the manual laborer. While Lewis Hine and the Farm Security Administration photographers of the 1930s often worked within federally sponsored projects with reform as their goal, Smith and other postwar photographers often sought to change their audience’s perceptions and opinions through widely circulating magazines and photo books. Yet unlike the soot- and grime-covered scene of Refinery Worker, the cannery appears clean, sanitary, and sterile. Smith highlights the endless stream of products waiting to undergo the worker’s labor by consigning him to the lower left corner of the photograph. He foregrounds the length of reflective metal track comprising the assembly line, twisting and turning high above the worker’s head, compositionally emphasizing the ceaseless, numbing nature of factory work. Yet unlike other images of workers actively engaged in physical labor, the cannery employee looks away from his work, confronting the viewer with his gaze. This disconnect between worker and labor points to tensions between manual labor and developing automatic mechanical operations in Pittsburgh, a city particularly tied to factory production. The sterile environment, coupled with the crisp visual contrast and geometric forms of the photograph, suggests scientific and technological advancements and echoes these concerns. Kathleen Pierce
Untitled (Man in front of canning machine); ca. 1955–57; Gelatin silver print, 13 1 ⁄2 x 8 3 ⁄4 in. (34.3 x 22.2 cm); Collection Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers; Gift of Inge and Eugene Judd; 85.087.020
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Garry Winogrand American (1928–1984)
Considered one of the most influential artists in the genre of street photography, Garry Winogrand was devoted to portraying the aesthetic of the anonymous. He photographed random people on city streets, often without their knowledge or consent, in what seem like intimate momentary encounters. He often used a 35mm Leica camera, which allowed him to photograph quickly and with persistence. His photographs are meant to highlight the imperfections of society, but not to create a specific message; he held that interpretation is the viewer’s responsibility.11 In his portfolio “Women are better than men. Not only have they survived, they do prevail,” Winogrand creates a set of images with no context and no explanation of the women in the photographs. Simple titles with the city and date in which he shot each image are all he offers. This leaves viewers with a photograph they must interpret largely on their own, and it forces them to give meaning to what is in actuality merely a fleeting moment. The lack of information begs the question: Is there a social commentary embedded within the image, or is the photographer solely presenting us with random moments in time? In New York City, New York, the first photograph in the portfolio, we are presented with an image of two women and a small boy on a city sidewalk trying to hail a cab. To the left, two young girls play a clapping game. The most obvious detail in this image is that the woman most prominently in view is pregnant, her stomach bulge extended by Winogrand’s vantage point. The juxtaposition of the two women hailing a cab and the two young girls to the left who are playing a game creates an interesting doubling. There is a certain sense of empathy for the subjects captured in the image. Although this scenario seems commonplace for a city street, the presentation is thought provoking. What is Winogrand trying to say about these people and, moreover, about this moment? Leeza Cinar
New York City, New York, from the series Women Are Beautiful 1981 Gelatin silver print, 11 x 13 7⠄8 in. (28 x 35.2 cm) Collection Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers Gift of Varick D. Martin 82.082.001.01 Š The Estate of Garry Winogrand, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.
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Garry Winogrand American (1928–1984)
In this image from the same portfolio, “Women are better than men. Not only have they survived, they do prevail,” Winogrand sharply focuses his fascination with capturing the beauty of anonymous women. Titled Beverly Hills, California, the photograph includes two scantily clad women pushing bicycles through an intersection on a sunny California day. What is striking about this image is that the photographer seems to have taken it as he was crossing the street himself, passing these two young women. Their expressions indicate that they caught Winogrand in the act of snapping them and make it evident that he shot this on the fly. The off-kilter framing of the photograph toward the right adds to the effect of the photographer’s quick passing and reinforces our own sense of crossing paths with the women. Not simply a photograph, this seems almost a presentation, an invitation to step onto that street and engage with these brisk passersby and their bicycles. Winogrand admitted to a certain aesthetic lust for photographing women: “Whenever I’ve seen an attractive woman, I’ve done my best to photograph her. I don’t know if all the women in the photographs are beautiful, but I do know that the women are beautiful in the photographs.”12 For Winogrand, capturing women with his camera without their knowledge reveals a candid and authentic beauty, one without premeditation or effort. In this practice, he ultimately creates a picture that encourages viewers to make their own interpretation of who these women are, what their personalities are like, and what they were doing the day he captured them. One could say that his practice poses a key question. Is Winogrand capturing who these women truly are? Leeza Cinar
Beverly Hills, California, from the series Women Are Beautiful 1981 Gelatin silver print, 11 x 13 7⠄8 in. (28 x 35.2 cm) Collection Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers Gift of Varick D. Martin 82.082.001.02 Š The Estate of Garry Winogrand, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.
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ENDNOTES
1 Elliott Erwitt and Sean Callahan, Personal Best (Kempen: TeNeues, 2006), 2. 2 Ken Johnson, “Capture: A New York Minute, or One in Havana,” New York Times, June 9, 2011. 3 Erwitt, Unseen (Kempen: TeNeues, 2007), 2. 4 Erwitt, Personal Exposures (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988), 4. 5 Erwitt, Snaps (London: Phaidon, 2001), 8. 6 Elliott Erwitt, Elliott Erwitt (London: Thames & Hudson, 2007), 3. 7 Gilles Mora, Aaron Siskind: Another Photographic Reality (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014), 18. 8 “Taft and Ohio: ‘Mr. Republican’ Fights for Himself and His Party,” Life, November 28, 1949, 105. 9 Alan Trachtenberg and W. Eugene Smith, Dream Street: W. Eugene Smith’s Pittsburgh Project, ed. Sam Stephenson (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001), 19–20.\\i Dream Street: W. Eugene Smith\\uc0\\u8217{}s Pittsburgh Project\\i0{}, ed. Sam Stephenson, Reprint edition (New York; London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2003 10 Smith, quoted in ibid., 171. 11 John Szarkowski, “‘New Documents’ Wall Text,” New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1967, n.p. 12 Garry Winogrand, Women Are Beautiful (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1975), 93.
© 2015 Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University. All rights reserved. FRONT COVER Larry Clark; Untitled, from the Tulsa series; 1970; Gelatin silver print, from an edition of 25, 14 x 11 in. (35.5 x 28 cm); Collection Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers; Gift of Ms. Eve Kessler; 85.026.032; © Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York. EBOOK PRODUCTION Content Editors: Donna Gustafson and Andrés Mario Zervigón Manuscript Editor: Carolyn Vaughan Project Coordinators: Sophie Ong and Betty Jarvis Publication Manager: Stacy Smith Design: Christian Luis Graphic Design Photography: all images Photo Peter Jacobs, except William Castellana, p.14 and Bryan Whitney, cover and p. 19. SUPPORT The Zimmerli Art Museum is supported by Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, as well as the income from the Avenir Foundation Endowment Fund, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Endowment Fund, and the Voorhees Family Endowment Fund, among others. Additional support comes from the Estate of Victoria J. Mastrobuono and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts/Department of State, a Partner Agency of the National Endowment for the Arts. Contributions from other corporations, foundations, and individuals, as well as earned income, also provide vital annual support for the Zimmerli’s operations and programs.
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