The exhibition will close tomorrow. Hunt’s Three Ring Circus: American Groups Before 1950 was organized by collector and curator W. M. Hunt in collaboration with the International Center of Photography. The exhibition was sponsored by the 1285 Avenue of the Americas Art Gallery, in partnership with Jones Lang LaSalle, as a community-based public service.
The exhibition had slightly more than 250 photographic prints on view plus another 75 presented digitally.
It was a great presentation, much better than in Arles 2 years ago.The collection’s future is to be determned. Here is how W.M. – Bill – Hunt is talking about it.
Where’s W.M.?
Where do I go now? My exhibition “Hunt’s Three Ring Circus” closes in New York so what’s next? Who knows? Let me take a moment to reflect, to consider what I know now that I didn’t when I put up the show in September or on the other occasions when I have shown this remarkable and uniquely American material.
The beloved and sagacious Houston photography collector Ed Osowski asked me once upon a time if I responded to these photographs because I felt like an outsider (myself) and not part of the group (whoever they might be). The question seemed more revealing about him than me, and I deflected with a negative response.
But after some refection, I thought YES, of course, I am. Aren’t we all? Further, aren’t these all pictures of me? And you?
I love this stuff. It has a three legged dog appeal. It’s not popular. Museums and galleries don’t care about it. Social historians certainly make some note of it, but other than the Library of Congress, who is going to make note of or store it?
Even as I gathered this material I had a certain disdain for it. There is another major photo collection I was truly obsessed with; these group pictures were, literally, the step child curiosities I was shoving under the bed. I felt like I was saving it from the cultural dumpsters – real and imagined. It wasn’t until it occurred to me that I had the makings for an exhibition that I really looked at what I had.
Looking and seeing are the keys to photography. I possessed the photographs. I had certainly looked at them, but I don’t think I had I truly seen them. In effect at some point I had to go backwards to figure out what it was I had been responding to, like a salmon going the wrong way in the stream.
What is my taste?
First and foremost, the basic requirement in making these images is that you need a group. For the photographer to have any sort of control of the group, the people have to cooperate. The most epic versions of these are the Mole & Thomas insignia and E.A. Goldbeck military formations and the early 20th Century “Living Flags”. Spectacle and spectacular.
There is the behavior of the group to consider. Are the people orderly like the students in the Tupper Studio Graduation, 1909? The lack of any depth of field makes the rows of people look like a mural, as if everyone is on a ladder on the same plane. Take a look at the photo with 7 men actually on a ladder to see what I am talking about.
Also how many people constitute a group? My answer is 5, and it is completely arbitrary.
Size doesn’t matter. I like the small odd tribes of people: buddies or telephone operators and the “banquet camera” formal portraits and the panoramas made with military precision or with distracted conventioneers or exuberant workers.
I am especially drawn to those images with uncountable numbers of people, crowds or mobs brimming with life, spirit, and power out to the edge of the frame. The inspired Morchroe Company, Office and Factory Staff, the Fisher Body Ohio Co’y, Cleveland, Ohio, September 21, 1926 is the best of these in the collection and probably my favorite. People ask how many people are in this? Really? I don’t care. I can’t really see well enough to look at the detail. I simply like the way the blacks and whites play out across the horizontal. It’s enough for me; it’s musical. Plus the crowd looks so happy!
I appreciate the photographers’ choices for composing the images with some intuitive, often uncanny sense of balance and proportion.
There are the social histories – fraternal organizations, work forces, labor unions, and conventions. I like that element in this work. An image like Gallery, Muncie seems so perfect with its unknown date, unknown photographer, unknown event. It is probably a set of covered bleachers, filled with Midwesterners – an integrated mix of blacks and whites at that – all dressed nicely and comfortably, at ease.
The pleasure of the pictures comes from this unremarkable atmosphere: the simplicity, the laid back comfort. Maybe this is a Sunday after church event, a social gathering, a baseball game or state fair on the day of rest. Even the scrawled inscription on the lower right is loose and free.
I like that.
These are playful too, like the Falk Studio photo of a 1924 outing of employees all in white, looking like milkmen (and women), leisurely lounging on the grass. This is a “double-ender”, a Cirkut camera image in which a fellow on the left hand side of the frame has raced around to the right hand side so that he appears twice in the frame.
That’s fun.
Anticipating this show, I did an exercise to sort out my sense of this material by posting images of groups on Facebook, also hoping this might gain some traction for the show. People seemed to assume that I owned all of the works, which will account for some long faces of disappointment at the reading of my will.
I found great stuff though – the Rockettes, a totally odd set of nudists exercising by Willy Kessels (curiously NOT an American group), and a great press print of the premiere of “Gone with the Wind” and a still from the film itself. You can remember the impact of the that sweeping shot of the dead and wounded after the the burning of Atlanta with Scarlett O’Hara in a sea of bodies. Indelible.
It reminded me too of a show “Stills”, curated years ago by Douglas Blau at the MoMA about groups in films: press and production shots. This show was memorable for me because I recognized that we have so little experience of seeing groups in photographs. If you think through the history of photography, you realize these pictures simply don’t happen very often. We experience portraits of individuals, maybe couples, but not so many of groups.
The history of painting has had some role here in the education of my eye. Everything from “The Last Supper” to “Night Watch” to “The Raft of the Medusa” to those gigantic Romantic history paintings in the Metropolitan. If you look at the beginnings of the history of photography, it is revealing to see staged and composited works in this sweeping narrative style, like Oscar Rejlander’s Two Ways of Life, 1867.
This genre is so oddly unpopular although contemporaries Neal Slavin, Vincent LaForet and Adam Magyar do work with groups. Andreas Gursky has some raves and concerts. Weegee had his Coney Island. Arthur Siegel had his “Right of Assemblies”. Although in 20th Century social and political history look at how change has been captured in photographs of groups: Woodstock, Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” on the Washington DC Mall, in fact most of the Civil Rights movement, has been documented with iconic works like Ernest Wither’s I am a Man, masses of people insisting on recognition in the 1960’s.
This has nothing to do with anything in particular but I adore images of people holding things: accordions, watermelons, cans of beer or pipes.
I have to remind myself what an odd exercise this is, to more or less review yourself after the dust has settled. What a treat to have done this show. Thank you to the International Center of Photography. I feel terribly indebted to the ICP for my early education looking at photographs. This feels like paying back the debt.
“Hunt’s Three Ring Circus: American Groups Before 1950” had a long sweet run in the gallery space at 1285 Avenue of the Americas, the lobby of the UBS building. Any way you slice it is and will remain an office building lobby: monolithic, cool, unforgiving, but it is in New York and that’s where I live. This is my hometown.
I joked that the offer from that ICP was basically “hey you want to show your American groups in New York?”. “Huh? Sure, I mean absolutely”. “The venue is the lobby of the UBS building … Stonehenge.”
There are tall walls, set very far apart, that aren’t as wide as they seem (3 meters); you can’t paint or change any of the layout. What you see is what you get. A tough room. One of my students sized it up for me and reported that it was basically a place where people could have quiet conversations on their cell phones. But it’s New York, and as intractable as I found the space initially I think it worked out.
The wood trim surrounding the immovable fabric panels looked good with the frames which were a mix of black and brown wood with a number of exotic folk art frames, often the originals. This played well in the space. It warmed it up a bit.
One thing I managed in this installation was the inclusion of a video monitor playing a mind blowing selection Busby Berkeley musical numbers one after another. To see those blonde wigged beauties with neon violins and hoop skirts on a reflective floor is to stagger the imagination.
And that is all swell but more than anything the venue was in New York. Important.
Here is some back story. I am long time collector (and dealer, writer, teacher, etc.) who is best known for a collection “magical, heart stopping images of people in which you cannot see the eyes, because they are viewed, obscured, whatever”. Highlights from that collection have been exhibited in France, Switzerland, The Netherlands and The George Eastman House in Upstate New York. There is a book too: “The Unseen Eye: Photographs from the Unconscious” (Thames & Hudson, Aperture and “L’Oeil Invisible” from Actes Sud.)
That brings us to up around 2011.
One day I got a call from the Houston Center for Photography asking if I wanted to show the big collection there. I demurred because it didn’t seem like the right fit. Too big for HCP. But I asked Bevin Bering Drobrowski the then very talented director if I could call her back in a couple of minutes because I had an idea.
That idea became “RE: Groups-American Photographs before 1960” and that begat “Work Force: American Groups before 1960” in 2013 at Foto Industria in Bologna, Italy and “Foule: American Groups before 1950” in 2014 at the Rencontres in Arles, France. Thank you Francois Hebel for both of those.
My line about exhibiting what you collect is that it is the most fun you can have with your clothes on.
You collect stuff and it’s fine and fun, and every so often you land on something that changes everything. You get all breathless and faint with the delirious joy of possibility. Hope springs eternal.
Here is an example.
I am not nearly as active a collector as I was 10 years ago: a looker, yes; but collector no, with some snapshots here and there and some groups. Friends now text and send me finds on their phones from flea markets and antiques shops and if I am quick, I get those sometimes. It’s great to have a couple of “pickers”. Even after the show was installed I found some new beauties, or rather they found me. Any collector who is really humming is like a magnet.
Every so often Jo Tartt, a source in D.C. sends me a press print or two for my consideration. He hit the motherlode with the ACME Pictures’ U.S. Army Air Force Photo ‘Round the Clock Aircraft Production, 2/18/42. Yowser! This is my kind of rare and special beauty. There is something perfect about how these men stand row upon row, like a broadloom carpet up close. If you look at the edge of the print, you can see that someone recorded numbers in the margin needing absolutely to determine how many people through some unrecognizable system. I don’t need to know how many or who is here. The figures are laid into the frame so precisely. The piece is exact and crazy wonderful.
Another example that is also new to the collection is the classic Margaret Bourke-White of the garment district shot from overhead. I have known about and lusted after this image for awhile, but my determination to keep the costs of this collection in check, kept me from acquiring it. Shhh! These photos are so inexpensive in the marketplace relative to everything else. Amazingly Rikki Reich, a wonderful photographer and the best sort of New York character gave me a print as an opening night gift. I have no idea of its provenance, but I am thrilled to have it with all those hats, like a crazy stampede of GPS location dots. It is a perfectly sighted photograph, of the Garment District apparently shot for Fortune Magazine. It is the ultimate Bauhaus bird’s eye view, shot from above image with the composition of a heated jazz score, men in hats zooting through the streetscape. It sizzles like ants on a hot flat rock. Yum.
It makes me hunger for more I suppose.
What’s next? Indeed, I am Waldo from “Where’s Waldo?” (Charlie in France, Wally in other places) without the distinctive red-and-white-striped shirt, hat, and glasses, nonetheless lost in the masses, crowds, assemblies, choruses, etc of a life crowded with photographs.
Maybe we can find me and find you in these groups. Look.
EXHIBITION
Hunt’s Three Ring Circus: American Groups Before 1950
Until January 8, 2016
International Center of Photography
1285 Avenue of the Americas at 51st St.
New York
USA
http://www.icp.org
http://www.wmhunt.com
