Jeff Brouws: Just About Everything, Someplace Else

Following World War I, light abstraction emerged as a central preoccupation of photographers and filmmakers who began using innovative methods of projecting, reflecting, and refracting rays of light to create non-traditional works of photographic art. Abstracted Light: Experimental Photography, on view August 20 through November 24, 2024 at the Getty Center, focuses on light abstraction as one of the primary aesthetic concerns of avant-garde photography from the 1920s to the 1950s. Drawn from the rich holdings of the J. Paul Getty Museum’s collection, the exhibition features photographs by international artists including László Moholy-Nagy (Hungarian, 1895–1946), Francis Bruguière (American, 1879–1945), Man Ray (American, 1890–1976), Tōyō Miyatake (American, born in Japan, 1895–1979), Asahachi Kono (Japanese, 1876–1943), and Barbara Morgan (American, 1900–1992).. The exhibition is presented in conjunction with PST ART: Art & Science Collide, a groundbreaking regional cultural collaboration that unites more than 70 exhibition and performance spaces around a singular theme, the intersection of art and science.. “Whether explicitly or implicitly, light is the physical, conceptual and aesthetic fundament of photography,” says Timothy Potts, Maria Hummer-Tuttle and Robert Tuttle Director of the Getty Museum. “This exhibition focuses especially on the myriad ways light has been harnessed, abstracted, and manipulated in the creation of some of the most inventive and innovative photography of the 20th century. Abstracted Light will make a major contribution both to PST ART, as well as to the history of photography.”. The works in this exhibition represent a variety of approaches to light abstraction, starting with the photogram process. One of the earliest forms of photography, a photogram is made by placing objects directly on chemically treated paper and exposing them to light to capture their silhouettes. Photographers revived this technique as they sought novel ways to create abstract images. The Hungarian-born artist Lászlo Moholy-Nagy, working in Germany, became one of the photogram’s fiercest advocates, writing that it enabled photographers to “sketch with light” in the same way that painters work with paintbrushes and pigment. In Paris, the American expatriate Man Ray also embraced the photogram, mistakenly claiming that he had invented the technique and naming it the “Rayograph” after himself. Through international exhibitions and photography journals, the popularity of the photogram spread far and wide.. Another technique modern photographers adopted to create dynamic abstract compositions came to be known as “light painting.” This method involves moving a light source in front of the camera during a long exposure. The motion of the light creates glowing patterns and shapes on the negative that may appear as ethereal calligraphy. A photographer can achieve a similar effect by moving the camera itself during the exposure while aiming it toward static light sources, such as street lamps or neon signs, capturing a sort of luminous graffiti. These methods may be combined with other experimental techniques, such as superimposing multiple exposures, to create even more elaborate abstractions.. Included in the exhibition are four short films of the 1920s and ’30s (screening continuously) in which avant-garde artists explored light abstraction using innovative techniques that pushed the boundaries of the art form. Their experiments with varying styles of animation, as well as with a montage, multiple exposures, and other special effects, challenged conventional cinematic storytelling, providing audiences with immersive and mesmerizing visual experiences.. One gallery is devoted to the work of Thomas Wilfred (American, born Denmark, 1889–1968), a pioneer in light art which he referred to as “Lumia.” From the 1910’s to the 1960s, he designed and built a series of mechanical devices that generate choreographed displays of moving abstract forms. Wilfred’s inventions include the organ-like Clavilux, a keyboard controlling arrays of projectors for public performances, and self-contained Lumia instruments resembling television sets for adventurous collectors, four of which will be on view in the exhibition.. “I am excited to bring together such an exciting array of photographs, films and Lumia instruments which demonstrate the incredible synergy and energy of vanguard artists working across the globe in light abstraction,” says Jim Ganz, Getty Museum’s senior curator of photographs and the organizer of the exhibition. “This show provides a rare opportunity to view some of Getty’s most important 20th-century photographs which have not been displayed here in many years.”. Abstracted Light: Experimental Photography is curated by Jim Ganz, senior curator in the Department of Photographs. A companion exhibition, Sculpting with Light: Contemporary Artists and Holography, on view August 20 through November 24, 2024, features artists who incorporated the technology and magic of holography into their work in the late 1990s through 2020.. This exhibition is part of PST ART, a Getty initiative presenting over 70 exhibitions at institutions across Southern California tied to the theme Art & Science Collide. PST ART is presented by Getty. Lead partners are Bank of America, Alicia Miñana & Rob Lovelace, Getty Patron Program. The principal partner is Simons Foundation. Image: Untitled, about 1950, Hy Hirsh. Ansco Printon chromogenic print 7 7/8 × 9 7/8 in. Getty Museum, 2013.63. Gift of Deborah Bell

Zameen Aasman Ka Farq - As far apart as the Earth is from the Sky contemplates the affection between Indian men: the holding of hands, interlocking of pinkies, or the intimate leaning into one another. This physical touch offers a window into the complexities of friendship, love, sexuality, and queerness. Marc Ohrem-Leclef uses photographs and texts to visualize the many forms love takes on for his collaborators, from the open and socially accepted to the unspoken. Individuals across the gender, class, and religious spectrum share how they experience touch, its importance, and evolving norms—both expanding and constricting-amid LGBTQ+ identity politics. How do straight, cisgender men hold same-sex affection dear? What does it mean for queer-identifying collaborators? Many collaborators trust Ohrem-Leclef with their deeply personal histories only because he is an outsider. Often, they bond over a shared search for belonging and community-his own, being rooted in his queer, bicultural identity. Seated together in their rooms, in fields, and in parks, many speak of the "love that flows" when they hold a friend's hand in certain ways. Some, bound by circumstance, are unable to articulate their desire for same-sex love; others, living fluid lives in traditional cultural spaces—usually outside cities—have no need to name their identities. Zameen archives a profoundly human desire to connect through touch. What is perceived as "queer" or "traditional" remains in flux, set against rapidly-shifting standards and differing gazes. Ultimately, Ohrem-Leclef looks to his collaborators, who construct spaces for themselves, irrespective of labels. Image: © Marc Ohrem-Leclef

TOUCH / do we exist without photography features the work of Kris Sanford, Andrés Pérez, and Matthew Finley. They all use photographic archives to weave narratives that should be an integral part to our societal record without a past of collective marginalization and fear. In each case, the artists weave vintage photographs into queer narratives of historical representation. Kris Sanford: Through the Lens of Desire “Through the Lens of Desire creates implied narratives using snapshots from the 1920s- 1950s. Vernacular photographs from that era were created as private keepsakes and the unselfconscious intimacy they depict feels authentic and relatable. As modern viewers, we witness personal moments that were never intended to be public. By purposefully selecting images that picture men together and women together I am creating an imaginary queer past. I am drawn to the subtle points of contact and the spaces between the figures pictured. Each gesture or distracted glance holds a story, and it is these stories that reflect my own desire and experiences.” Andrés Pérez: Dead Family “Dead Family is an investigation that looks at the family archive as a binary historical document that protects heteronormative narratives imposed by patriarchal structures. These impositions imply a sexist order that separates the masculine from the feminine and marginalizes identities that are outside of this political-biological mechanism. Diverse identities have no visibility in the action of “family portraiture.” Matthew Finley: An Impossibly Normal Life “Imagine a world where it doesn’t matter who you love, just that you love. An Impossibly Normal Life is an artifact from another world, a more loving, inclusive one where who you love is of little societal importance. This fictional story, centered on my imagined uncle’s idealized life, is created from collected vintage snapshots from around the world.” Image: © Matthew Finley

In honor of the 100th anniversary of Surrealism we are pleased to present an exhibition “Out of this World” featuring vintage photographs that honor some of the leading figures of the Surrealist movement along with some lesser-known artists that were contributing to the art of surrealism with surprising images many of which have rarely been exhibited. The Museum of Modern Art presented its’ landmark exhibition “FANTASTIC ART DADA SURREALISM” in 1936-1937, an ambitious textbook survey documenting the art of that category and its precedents and distillation to other cultural art forms and mediums. The hefty MoMA catalog identifies the genre of art as “The fantastic and the marvelous in European and American Art” and further described this art in terms of the “the irrational, the spontaneous, the enigmatic and the dreamlike.” Surrealism permeated the culture in portrait photography, advertising photography, fashion photography, dance photography and almost any other form of photography that permitted the artist the leeway to experiment with images that piqued their imagination. Louise Dahl-Wolfe, one of the foremost fashion photographers of the post World War II era, collaborated with Russian artist Pavel Tchelitchew in the early 1940s to create a wildly imaginative surrealist set for a color-infused fashion layout for Harper’s Bazaar. This dreamy technicolor lit tableau features three models surrounded by drapery, fabric and news papered walls amongst the iconography of a fashion designers’ studio. Another interior and one of the most important pictures in the exhibition is a diptych photomontage by Frederick Kiesler (photography by Percy Rainford) of the interior of Marcel Duchamp’s 14th Street New York studio festooned with all the detritus that this trailblazing artist could manage to populate his studio with. This image was published in Charles Henri Fords 1945 issue of the art magazine View that was dedicated to Marcel Duchamp. Portrait photographers gravitated to surrealism to create complex and innovative images that went far beyond static portraiture. George Platt Lynes’ portrait of the actress Ruth Ford, (sister of Charles Henri Ford), created a delightful study of the actress who was often referred to as “the hummingbird” by her many artist friends. In Lynes’s image a hummingbird sits on top of Ford’s veil-wrapped visage while three eggs are floating on the upper right margins of the picture frame. Hi Williams was the go to photographer in the American food industry in the 1930s famous for his mastery of the carbro printing process, an early color printing technique, that was both laborious and expensive to produce. He created a still life photograph of utilitarian rubber items: a toy duck, a gas mask, a ball shoe and glove etc. all sitting on a sandy platform with a painted backdrop featuring blue sky and clouds. If it wasn’t clear that this was an homage, he titled this colorful 1941 photograph “Rubber Dali”. Image: Harry Richardson Cremer (American, active c. 1920–1949), Untitled, c. 1930, Gelatin Silver Print

The Rebecca Hossack Art Gallery, Little Havana Project presents an exhibition of new work by the British artist Jason Shulman. Featuring a series of long- exposure photographs of critical moments of our recent history, the show marks a new chapter in the artist’s decade-long practice of multimedia experimentation. By manipulating temporality and technology, Shulman opens a new door to our perception of some of the most iconic events and images of our shared cultural world. The project began when the London-based Shulman decided to photograph the coverage of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi: training his camera on his television, he took a series of long-exposure photographs of selected events, freezing dreamlike, fluid, action-charged representations of what the rest of the world was experiencing as HD motion on their screens. This idea of gathering all the light present in an event led to his celebrated series 'Photographs of Films' where the entire running time of a movie is captured in a single image. His new body of work takes iconic filmed moments from history as the subject for visual investigation. The 'History Photographs' inhabit a liminal third space between the moving and the static, opening up a new way of experiencing culturally familiar events. From Muhammad Ali’s knock-out punch on George Foreman, to the interment of Queen Elizabeth II and Marilyn Monroe’s rendition of ‘Happy Birthday Mr. President’ to Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece, '2001: A Space Odyssey,' Shulman reconfigures the flow of the moving-image through his own fixed lens, extending the exposure-time on his camera for seconds, minutes, or hours, to create a new category of representation. He captures feelings that are not seen by the naked eye, giving us the aura rather than just the details of what has happened. The atmospheric shift created through his process provides a transformative lens to an unseen world which is strangely dynamic and suffused with surreality. Currently living and working in London, Shulman has exhibited across Europe and the United States since the 1990s, and his works are held in important private collections across the globe. His work has been shown at COB (2021); Somerset House, London (2014); Shoreditch Town Hall, London (2014); La Maison Rouge, Paris (2013); The Wand, Berlin (2013); MONA, Tasmania, Australia (2012); The Rachofsky House, Dallas, Texas, USA (2011) and White Cube Gallery (Hoxton), London (2008). His work was also presented at Photo London, Somerset House, London (2017) and the Third Moscow Biennale, Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow (2009)

French photographer Cyril Bailleul has been an artist-in-residence at the Clermont Lounge since 2014, inspired by the atmosphere of this iconic Atlanta strip club. Over the last decade, the women of the Clermont Lounge have trusted Cyril to capture them in their essence, using only the club’s dimly lit décor and the adjoining Hotel Clermont as the source of inspiration: ''My photography is all about relationships and giving something back. Often, I let my subjects create the scene and the atmosphere, allowing myself to be guided by what they provide. In exchange, I try to offer a beautiful image. I want to pay homage to the women and show their beauty''” Following the exhibition of “Girls Girls Girls” in Paris in 2017 (Jacques De Vos Gallery) and “Above Where the Ladies Dance” for the reopening of the Hotel Clermont in 2018, Cyril returns to celebrate his 10 years as Artist in Residence at the Clermont Lounge and Hotel Clermont with “789 Ponce de Leon Avenue,” his first exhibition inside the Lounge itself. As the lounge approaches its 60th anniversary in 2025, it continues to be an integral part of the vintage 1924 building that also houses the Hotel Clermont. There has been “entertainment” in the building’s basement since 1943: Anchorage Club, the Gypsy Room, the Continental Room, briefly an unofficial Atlanta Playboy Club, the Jungle Club and of course, since 1965 everyone knows this is the home of the Clermont Lounge.

Curated by: Barbara Pollak-Lewis and Melissa Castro Keesor With this small sampling of imagery, we’ve culled photographs from Arthur’s recent projects including his 30 years spent living in and documenting his life in Cambria and his recent project documenting Mare Island. This diamond-shaped body of work captures the essence of his ongoing obsession with shape, line, and composition. Arthur draws inspiration from beach surroundings and the people he encounters on his photographic journey. Many images in this exhibition such as Flags, Mare Island, Ferry Boat Window were photographed during the making of “Arthur Tress: Water’s Edge”, which will be screened in the Harvey Milk Center for the Arts ballroom on November 14, 2024.

All About Photo presents an exclusive online exhibition featuring the work of the American photographer Carolyn Moore. On view throughout November 2024, this captivating showcase includes twenty street photographs from his acclaimed series ‘My Heart Exposed’ My Heart Exposed Photography to me, represents a composite of my personal feelings, emotions, values and experiences expressed on a canvas. It is as if the artwork is an open window where artist and viewer peer one to the other in a silent exchange. Images from “My Heart Exposed”, Volume 1, are created in a process that includes entering a meditative state where feelings, intuition and curiosity drive choices made in an experimental photographic process. This process lends an element of unpredictability, and as a result parameters are set for embracing surprises and allowing the image to evolve. The decisions I make are influenced by my innermost feelings and thus, each image presents a visually poetic reflection of my unique story. My personal story is made all the more poignant by the recent loss of family and intense emotional turmoil of the past year. This chaotic and complicated year of love, loss and strife made maintaining a sense of self a major challenge. I am often reminded of time spent in nature with lost family members, and I cherish the thought of loved one’s hands guiding me in a shared love of nature and an expression that uses plants as an artistic voice. I invite viewers to draw on their own experiences and allow their hearts to embark on a journey of reflection and discovery within each image. “My Heart Exposed”, Volume 1 are sunshine exposed Lumens with hand painted cyanotype on expired photographic paper. While developing this technique, I have experimented with different types of photographic paper, timing of exposure and elements that change the chemical reaction between plants and paper. Images evolve and change during the development process and I present captures of those stages in unaltered true color. While some images are fixed and will remain stable, others will continue to evolve and eventually dissipate altogether. Curated by Ann Jastrab, Executive Director Center for Photographic Art

The proliferation of Artificial Intelligence in media and art has been embraced by some, feared by others, and has prompted heated discussions in the world of photography. Is a photograph a “real” photograph if it’s made with AI? How much AI is too much? Photography is dead! Photography is having a renaissance! No matter where you fall, the conversation has been loud and hard to avoid. One school of thought likens the current controversy of AI in photography to the historical controversy of photography itself. In the early 19th century photography was a fledgling technology widely rejected by artists of the day, many who feared that photography was a threat and would be the death of painting. At that time, the new technology was seen as purely scientific, all about processes and equipment, and not as a tool to develop a new way of seeing, creating, and expressing an artist’s internal vision. 200 years later, in this early period of the 21st century, the same debates continue in the fine art realm, with consensus merely a daydream. One photographer who has used the latest tools at hand to create works of nuance and narrative, with mystery and memory, is Fran Forman. In the early 1990’s Forman began using Photoshop to push her interest in combining photography and mixed-media. She employed old and new photographs, scanned objects, paintings, and drawings, to create visual narratives untethered to time and place. The more recent incorporation of AI into Forman’s photographic work was a natural progression and has only furthered her ability to express her ethereal and cinematic vision. Using AI as an instrument in her work allows a seamless blending of both Forman’s visual concepts and original images. With the work in Obscure Intentions, Fran Forman takes the best of 21st century technology and effortlessly blends it with her career in photography and design to create what can only be called otherworldly views into history, melancholy, and illusion. – Jessica Burko, Curator, Obscure Intentions “My photo-paintings are constructed scenes that integrate and juxtapose realism with illusion, villains with saints, longing with disconnection, whimsy with reverence. Born of intuition, mood, and inspiration, they are suspended in vibrant fantasies that hint at ambiguities. Adding to my considerable toolbox for creating visual narratives is the revolutionary text-to-image generator. The resulting fantastical images, aligned with my long-term interest in magic realism, are hybrid – not strictly photographic, but suggesting a reality that still is illusive. These images are collaborations – endlessly altered and manipulated – between me, my photographs, my imagination, my hand, and the machines and robots. They are post-photography, intelligent images. I relish the serendipity, and I find that sometimes what lies hidden is a treasure worth revealing.” Between professional life and raising two daughters, Fran Forman continued to create her personal art, combining her illustrative and photographic skills with her fascination with the human psyche. Forman’s photo-paintings are in the permanent collections of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, The Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum (Washington, DC), the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Grace Museum, Abilene, The Sunnhordland Museum, Norway, the Conner Collection at The University of Texas, and North Down Museum, Northern Ireland and in 2022, she was awarded Top 50 from the prestigious Photo Lucida’s Critical Mass. Forman has mounted many solo exhibitions, including The Fox Talbot Museum, Lacock Abbey, England; BBA Gallery (Berlin); Gauting International Photography (Munich); Massachusetts State House and The Griffin Museum of Photography; AfterImage Gallery (Dallas); University of North Dakota; Galeria Photo/Graphica (Mexico); Sohn Fine Art; OpenShutter (Dorango); and Pucker Gallery (Boston), as well as numerous group shows. She is also the recipient of multiple residencies and awards and her work has been featured in The British Journal of Photography, 1854 Media, Dek Unu, L’Oeil de la Photographie, fStop Magazine, All about Photo, Shadow and Light, and other photo journals. Forman’s second monograph, The Rest Between Two Notes, was published in 2020 and has won an International Photo Award and selected as a best photo-book for 2020 by Elizabeth Avedon and What Will You Remember. Her first book, Escape Artist, 2013, received similar acclaim and awards. She was a Resident Scholar at the Women’s Studies Research Center at Brandeis University for 16 years. She teaches advanced workshops nationally and abroad. Fran Forman is represented by Pucker Gallery (Boston), Afterimage Gallery (Dallas), Susan Spiritus Gallery (Newport Beach, CA), BBA Gallery (Berlin), Photo/Graphica (Mexico).

This presentation marks the first U.S. solo museum exhibition dedicated to Joanna Piotrowska (b. 1985), a Polish artist based in London whose work examines the human condition through performative acts, photography, and film. Self-defense manuals and psychotherapeutic methods are used as reference points as Piotrowska explores the complex roles that play out in everyday life. The exhibition features large-scale, silver gelatin prints of subjects that probe human behavior and the dynamics of domestic relations, exploring intimacy, violence, control, and self-protection with an emphasis on gesture and touch. Throughout the galleries, the artist creates a space with domestic references from which contrasting image placement and content create an uncanny experience that reveals moments of care as well as hierarchies of power.

Humanity’s impact on the natural landscape is undeniable even when human figures are not immediately visible. This selection of works from the museum’s permanent collection serves as a visual response to the exhibition “Joel Sternfeld: When It Changed.” Artists including Arthur Tress, Robert von Sternberg and Diane Farris illustrate how human enterprise has reshaped the natural landscape. Some works trace the entanglement of human life and environmental change. Others catalogue the environment’s natural processes of self-preservation and renewal. Sternfeld’s photographs focus on the people and diplomatic powers that have shaped the global response to climate change. The artists and works in this companion installation recenter the impacted landscapes and surreal scenes of our changing environments. Image: Konza Prairie after Spring Burning, 1979 © Terry Evans

In fall 2024, the Raclin Murphy will present the first major exhibition in the United States featuring the work of Father Francis Browne, SJ, one of the most intriguing Irish photographers of the twentieth century. The Museum recently acquired this selection of 100 works from the artist’s archive. Born into an affluent family in Cork, Francis Mary Patrick Browne (1880-1960) was the youngest of eight children. By the time he was nine, both of his parents had died, and he became the ward of his uncle, Robert Browne, Bishop of Cloyne. The bishop gave Browne his first camera at his graduation from secondary school at age seventeen. In spring 1912, Browne received the gift of a ticket on the maiden voyage of RMS Titanic. He sailed from Southampton in England, to Cherbourg, France, then to Cobh in County Cork where he disembarked before the ship steamed into the North Atlantic. Following the Titanic disaster, Browne’s photographs of the ship, her passengers and crew, appeared in newspapers and magazines worldwide. Their popularity enticed the Eastman Kodak Company in England to provide him with a continuing supply of film.