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Picks from: February 18 Photographs from The Abe Frajndlich Collection: A Photographer Collects Showcase Auction
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Paris was Ilse Bing's creative cauldron in the 1930's.
After leaving her home in Frankfurt in late 1930, she established herself
as "The Queen of the Leica" within a very short time.
Even competing with the big boys, Cartier-Bresson, Andre
Kertesz and Man Ray, Ilse was not only recognized, but lionized. Her moment in
the sun lasted only about a decade.
When the Nazis entered France in 1940, and Ilse
and her husband Conrad Wolf had to flee their home and go to Amerika, it left a
gaping hole in her very full universe. By the time she returned to Europe,
and Paris in particular in 1952, this particular image becomes the distillation
of so many of her feelings for that home that had been left behind. Now
in one photograph, "All of Paris" was captured within the confines of
this street vendor's box--the Eiffel Tower in multiple iterations, the Arc de
Triomphe, with postcards, trinkets and even earrings of some of them. A
tourist's paradise in one image. And it was one of Ilse's favorites, of
her photographs.
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Aaron Siskind's "Harlem Document" photographs are
one of the most important visual records of Harlem in 1930's, documenting a
vibrant, culturally rich community within an impoverished,oppressed borough. This image of the singing mother
and her infant child looks like it might have been taken at a church service,
where she is surrounded by other parishioners. Though Siskind created a
rich body of work at this time, while he was a teacher of English in the New
York City public schools, he gradually found his real voice, after he became
friends with some of the Abstract Expressionist painters, such as Franz
Kline, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, Barnet Newman and Adolph Gottlieb, and
was strongly influenced by their working styles and artistic ideas.
Though images from this Harlem period are definitely a strong part of the
Siskind ouevre, the work he became way more
associated with, is his abstract images of walls and graffiti in Rome, Peru, Mexico
and in Chicago and Providence Rhode Island.
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This very abstract image by Aaron Siskind, was done only
nine years after the Harlem Document image, and already one can see the
photographer engaged by very different visual problems. On a dark ground,
what we see is possibly an abstracted head in profile, with a large black
circle for an eye, and a hard black line for a mouth. This image was done
in Gloucester Mass., the same year as an even more famous photograph of a glove,
seemingly floating in deep outer space was done in the same place in
Massachusetts, maybe even on the same outing. By this time, Aaron is no
longer a documentarian of the social scene but has become an artist of a much
wider dimension and scope. His themes are now more universalist, and his
art is reaching to transcend the purely informational. His work is
aspiring for the stars, and like his great abstract expressionist colleagues,
he is beginning to be taken more seriously in a larger Art Arena with this
extended body of work.
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Gunter Blum was not even fifty when he passed away in 1997.
His wife and muse, Sylvie Blum, was the model for this and many more of
his remarkable nude photographs, where quite often he would design the
backgrounds and the props for the shoots. Soon after Gunter passed away,
his photographs, in editions, were selling at German galleries for close to
Euro 20,000 apiece. Sylvie spent a few years in Mannheim, where they
lived and worked and then moved to Los Angeles, where she opened a now thriving
photo studio for fine art and commercial work. She has published at least
five monographs that are still in print and clearly learned a great deal from
her mentor and husband. Besides being a model for Gunter Blum, Sylvie
modeled successfully for Helmut Newton, Jeanloup
Sieff, Jan Saudek, Andreas Bitesnich and many others before she set off on her
own path as a photographer.
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When I was in Tokyo in December of 2009, I had the privilege
of photographing Nobuyoshi Araki on 24 December followed by Kishin Shinoyama,
two days later. Both of their portraits later appeared in my book, Penelope's
Hungry Eyes, portraits of 101 international photographers. Eikoh Hosoe, who I had known since 1974, was the one who
opened the doors for me to both of these Japanese masters of the medium.
After spending a few hours photographing Shinoyama,
I told him how much I admired his nude work, especially this image. He
brought out a print, and we did a trade for one of my portraits of Bill Brant
who was a big hero of his. Clearly this nude image was greatly
influenced by the nude work of Brandt in his seminal book, Perspective
of Nudes, from 1961. I was delighted to live with this print for
a number of years, as it had come directly from Shinoyama.
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Nigel Russell
Director, Photographs,
New York
NigelR@HA.com
(212) 486-3659
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