W.M. Hunt

 #somereallygoodones, #charlesthurstonthompson, #royalphotographicsociety

This is the first photograph of a photography exhibition, and it is included in this collection because of the event it depicts, not because of any insightful ideas about composition or whatever.  This shows “The Great Exhibition of The Royal Photographic Society” at the Victoria & Albert Museum in 1858.

It had seven hundred exhibitors from the Photographic Society of London (soon to be known as “The Royal Photographic Society” and the Société Française de Photographie.  It welcomed over six million visitors in six months.  Imagine that many people crowding in to look at the still nascent phenomenon of photography exhibited exuberantly from floor to ceiling with “many singularly beautiful pictures, upon which we gaze and gaze until we find ourselves transported in thought to the scenes so faithfully represented” *1.

The photograph itself looks surprisingly contemporary made possible though a long exposure time.  Note the specter-like presence of a man seated at the table.

I appreciate photographic installation that demonstrates creative planning.   Photographs are exciting, and they merit thoughtful handling.  My approach has always been to be unexpected at least.  If someone shows up for an exhibition I have organized I want to make it worth their while.  Alison Nordström, legendary scholar and historian, condemns the most commonplace hang as a “bathtub ring”, pictures all hung at sixty inches high, horizontally, all in a row.  My approach has been that it should be the most fun you can have clothed.  I wan to astonish my audience.

Historically there were a few seminal exhibitions like “Film und Foto” (Stuttgart 1929) and “The Family of Man” (Museum of Modern Art 1955) which attempted innovative design: imaginative and unexpected arrangements of photographs designed to engage the visitor.  The number of today seemingly lazy installations of photographs today is a disservice to the art.

In 2010 in support of its exhibition “Discovering the Language of Photography” The Gernsheim Collection, the Harry Ransom Center in Austin hosted a two day symposium “Shaping the History of Photography”.  One of the presenters was an artist named Rita Dewitt about whom I know very little.

My memory of her presentation is that when she was growing up in rural Kentucky , she got a “How to Draw” book as a present.  It changed her life because she had no exposure to “Art”.  I put that in quotes because she seemed to.  She went on to earn at BFA and MFA from the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa but never entered an art museum until she was in her mid-20s.  And that changed her life, seeing the “real thing” for the first time.

It is hard to imagine.  But the experience of seeing the real thing is incomparable.

Taking someone to a museum for the first time is big deal, and I have strong feelings about it.

There seems to a too much wheedling and persuading and yelling accompanying a child’s first museum outing.  It becomes more of a punishment than pleasure.  “Don’t run.  Don’t talk.  Don’t touch anything!”

Fun, huh?

I once lured my nephew to the MoMA with the promise of a green helicopter which is a longtime fixture within the Design collection there.  About a hundred feet into the building, I suddenly heard “Hey this is a museum!”  Yep.  It was indeed.

I think better to encourage whomever that there might be one thing in the museum that will make their heart soar.  They should look and hope for that.

I made my peace with museums when I admitted to myself that these excursions are mostly boring.  I blame some of this one the lack of imagination in presentation.  Exhibition coordinators seems to forget that they are dealing with an audience who is hungry to be engaged.  Too often there isn’t enough respect given to the theatre of the event.

There is even a Charles Thurston Thompson photograph of an early — 1858 —“Exhibition of the Photographic Society of London” at the Victoria & Albert Museum with photos stacked form floor to ceiling.  It’s not spare at all but excessive and chaotic and full of vitality.  It was a beginning.

Steichen in his “Family of Man” was intent on connecting with his audience with an imaginative and entertaining immersive approach.  (Earlier the 1929 “Film und Foto” in Stuttgart anticipated this with an intensive submersive approach.)

In 2000, I remember walking through the Jardins du Luxembourg in Paris at twilight and being astonished to discover the outdoor exhibit of Yann Arthus-Bertrand’s “Earth from Above," with photographs on canvas lashed to the gates.  According to the art’s website, different iterations of the project went to110 cities and was visited by 120 million people, in the daytime and nighttime too.*1

“here is new york: a democracy of photographs” was a guerrilla type exercise in installation following the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001.  With photographs on clips hung up like laundry on wires strung across the room, you could buy works printed on demand.

There is also an “Artist’s Choice” show from the MoMA that was curated by Chuck Close twenty years ago.  “Head-On/The Modern Portrait” was densely hung with a widely disparate group of artists represented in the collection, famous and not so.  “On one wall, paintings are mounted salon-style from floor to ceiling; on the surrounding walls, prints, photographs, and drawings are closely arranged on stacked shelves, one work overlapping the next. Eight portrait busts are also displayed in the installation, their varying scales adjusted by aligning the eye level of each figure”.  And Kirk Varnedoe, the museum director  said “this show frees—and challenges—viewers to form their own hierarchies of choice and patterns of attention”. *2

Since then the best solo artist to deal with this in the past twenty years has been Felix Gonzalez Torres with his “Untitled” stacks of paper.   

From the MoMA website: “One of a number of works comprising stacks of paper that Gonzalez-Torres produced beginning in 1989, “Untitled” (Death by Gun) was conceived as a nine-inch stack presented directly on the floor and endlessly replenished, thus ensuring that it can be distributed indefinitely. Visitors are encouraged to read the sheets and take them away to keep, display, or give to others”.

The stacks could be dispersed, depleted, and renewed over time. What happens over a period of many minutes as opposed to the usual twenty seconds is that the visitor enters the gallery and sees the stack and museum guard usually talking to visitors inquiring about what’s on the floor, then you see the visitors take in the information and consider their next action.  Most often they will take one or two of the poster sized sheets of paper, study them and roll the up and put them under their arm, continue their journey happy that they have actually scored some free “Art”  They feel good.  Later outside the museum one can see many of these have been dumped in the trash, not making the journey home.

However, the visitor has now spent a considerable amount of time thinking and making decisions.  That kind engagement between the artist and the viewer is genius.

For myself when organizing a new show I spend a great deal of time thinking about how I can play with my potential audiences.  I want to amaze and astonish.

In January 2007 The New York Photo Festival was launched in an effort to establish a U.S. photo festival dedicated to the "future of contemporary photography" and to the exposure of new works.  It was a nice try but a bit of a mess.  It was under-financed and understaffed, but. I got to create an installation in the newly and almost renovated Galapagos Art Space.  The interior was basically like a big cement lily pad/four leaf clover surrounded by water.

Working with the photographers from the Photo Agency VII, we installed six projectors in a circle, all facing away from each other, and ran over 7000 images through the system.  Each was shown for two seconds in a cycle that took about twenty minutes to complete.  Nothing repeated.  Everything ran in continuous loops.

It was crazy.  The photographers hated it apparently.  To my amazement people would tell me afterwards what there favorite images had been.  I thought this impossible because it went by so quickly.  The ability of the human eye to see is surprising though, our power to retain is far beyond what we imagine.   

I have shown highlights from my collections in a number of venues.  I like red walls because it puts the audience on notice that what is coming is going be dramatic.  I don’t like wall text because it is intrusive.  If you absolutely need to read something. There is a checklist at the desk.  I like hanging salon style to change up the rhythm of the room.

The first major exhibition was in Arles at the Rencontres des Photographies.  Of this experience I reported that it was the most fun, I’d ever had with my clothes on.  Francois Hebel, the director has me quaking in my boots to be ready to go.  I was.  It was the first time I used red walls.  When I returned ten years later with another show, I ordered up the same color.  It put people of notice that I meant business.  It was a giant show — over 250 works, and I was very happy with the results although there was one wall. I never really got right.  Of course, Francois spotted it and commiserated with me that I had got the rest of right.  It was an experience that changed my life in that I was now a public person.  It’s always been an irony to be better known in Europe than the US.

I did an exhibition at the Appleton Museum in Ocala, Florida.  It is a very good looking venue in Central Florida.  Bearing in mind that the audience might not have the experience of big city museum goers , especially photography fans, I went easy.  I wanted them to enjoy the show.  I painted the walls intense red, yellow, cyan and black and hung the works a little lower than the standard 58 or 60 inches.  56 inches is a friendly height, and things were arranged on the horizon and in grids.

I did however hang a Larry Gianettino work “Wood Face” at 36 inches off the ground.

The director of the museum made an entrance late into the install and sang its praises although he kept staring down at the Gianettino distractedly.  Finally he asked if I had meant to hang it there.   

“Yes”.

“Aren’t you concerned that will slow down the patrons’ egress?”*4

I responded that seemed like a odd thing to be concerned about.  I was interested in them staying.

Another installation I think of was at FOAM in Amsterdam.  That was a very big show, and I thought the first room was particularly awkward because it was large and you could really y only use two walls because there was a staircase coming into the room on one end and that faced a bank of floor to ceiling windows on the other side.

I put some “speed bumps” in the room so you could not see everything all at once, and even put a photograph behind a wall that came out into the room at an angle.  I sensed everyone would be curious to look behind it, and there hung Susan E. Evans’ text piece “Ignore the Man Behind the Curtain.”

The night before the opening I asked if two dozen chairs could be located and brought in.  The next AM, there they were dutifully arranged around the perimeter of the room like there was going to be a square dance.  I moved them all into a crazy mess in the center of the room.  The crew was puzzled but supportive.

To my delight, visitors rearranged the chairs so that they could sit and talk quietly, or they could put a chair closer to the wall to inspect a work, or they could just move them around to make little pathways.  It gave the whole installation a wonderful organic fungible fluidity.

I love the challenge of bringing something together that is unique and compelling.  And fun.

My own experience of installing photographs in my residence was informed by a statement to me by Sam Wagstaff the collector.  I asked him how he took care of his pictures and he looked at me with an odd grin and said, “kid, they’re all over the fucking place”.   That was liberating.  (I may have added the “kid” and “fucking” but they seem right.)

Indeed I made my own Dancing Bear Cave.  It was uniquely mine.  Early on in my collecting I was looking around my newly renovated apartment, marveling that I was not sitting on anything that had come from the parents.  Further there were all those these photographs — a dozen at that point.  I took it all in and realized, “So this is my taste”.

In time I put up shelves — picture rails — so the I wouldn’t have to out nails or picture hooks into the wall each time.  I could surround myself with these wonders.

*1. “The Arts Journal”, 1 April 1858

*2 www.yannarthusbertrand.org

*3 Press release.  https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/324

*4 Egress is “the action of going out of or leaving a place”. (Oxford English Dictionary) and was made famous by the showman P.T. Barnum P.T. who put up signs that said "This Way to the Egress” which was not an exotic attraction but the exit.

©2021

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