The Photography Of Max Dupain

A major upcoming exhibition of photography at the National Gallery of Victoria brings to mind one of Australia’s most revered photographers - Max Dupain (1911 - 1992).  

Dupain produced in 1938 one of the most iconic images of 20th Century Australian photography - The Sunbaker.  It was in the 1970’s that this image really came to prominence as it was thought to represent an image of a carefree, post Vietnam War, beach loving society which gave it a social context.  There was much discussion at the time of the notion of an Australian identity - what is was to be Australian.  Apparently, Dupain regarded the image as just a holiday snap shot and he became increasingly uncomfortable with how the average viewer might add their interpretations to the image.

The Sunbaker, 1938

There is more than one version of this image, taken by Dupain at Culburra, south of Sydney.  Perhaps one of the ironies of The Sunbaker is that the subject is an English migrant, Harold Salvage who was a close friend of Dupain’s.  A print of the photograph was purchased by the National Gallery of Australia in 1976. 

Sunbaker inspired artist Julie Rrap to produce her own interpretation of the image in bronze and steel.  Believing Australia to no longer be the casual, fun loving place it was once perceived to be, she decided on trying to imagine the pose from underneath, as if the model is lying on a sheet of perspex, in order to explore the underbelly of society.

Julie Rrap, Speechless, 2017 bronze & steel (Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery)

Dupain received his first camera at the age of 12 and later joined the Photographic Society of New South Wales.  After serving in the second world war, his objectives in photography changed and he aimed to achieve a documentary truth in his image making.  He claimed that he wanted to abandon the "cosmetic lie of fashion photography or advertising illustration".

Impassioned Clay, 1936, double exposure, (National Gallery of Victoria)

Dupain embraced almost all genres in his photography - portraits, nudes, still life and later in his career, architecture including images of the Sydney Opera House under construction.  He only ever photographed in black and white, believing that this enabled him to achieve a simplicity and directness, in addition to allowing the viewer to add their own interpretation.

Collins Street Melbourne, 1946

Shortly before his death in 1992, Dupain bequeathed to his longtime studio manager and photographer Jill White, 28000 exhibition archive negatives for use by her.  Dupain was appointed an OBE in the 1982 New Years Honours list and 10 years later was made a Companion of the Order of Australia.

Australia Square Through A Keyhole, 1975

References; 

The Guardian

Wikipedia

www.maxdupain.com.au

YouTube - ABC News

The Photography of Andreas Gursky

Hyper reality is the thought that comes to mind when viewing the photography of Andreas Gursky.  I became aware of his large scale somewhat documentary work in the powerful exhibition “Civilization: The Way We Live Now” at the National Gallery of Victoria in 2019.  Sadly, I missed a major survey of his work at the same venue 10 years earlier. 

Born in Leipzig in 1955, Gursky was a student of the famous German conceptual photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher.  He is considered one of the finest photographers at work today and presents an almost overwhelming vision of contemporary life in images crammed with information, the individual reduced to an atom in a vast universe of order, or in some cases, chaos.     

He began to digitally alter his images as soon as the technology became available.  A prime example is 99 Cent, one of his most iconic works.  He altered the position of some of the store’s aisles and created a mirror image in the ceiling to flatten the image.  There is a formalist structure in his work but at the same time there is a sense of reality playing with unreality.  He pioneered the practice of face mounting photographs onto Plexiglas.

99 Cent (1999) 207 x 325 cm

Gursky also presents images of excess and waste, of consumerism having lost its bearings. There is a questioning of one’s place in this world, of man being overwhelmed by a capitalist system that has become a Frankenstein monster. In “Amazon” from 2016, he presents an image of the Amazon warehouse in Pheonix Arizona. This is a composite image designed to present each object in correct size relative to the others. Thus he achieves what has been described as a supernatural clarity to the image.

Amazon (2016) 207 x 407 cm

In Gursky’s imagery the individual becomes a cog in a vast capitalist machine where all semblance of a unique identity is lost in a sterile, regimentally ordered environment. Rather than focus on the individual as such, Gursky is more concerned with the human species and the environments that it has created.

Hong Kong Stock Exchange II (2001) 207 x 323 cm

His images are beautiful and yet in some ways disturbing. There is a political angle to his presentation of reality, to the key issues of our time, but he leaves it to the viewer to decide how to think. His method of using composite imagery dates back to at least 1993 with his image of a huge block of flats in Paris. He positioned his camera at two locations some distance apart so that each window would appear the correct size, free from the distortion of optics in an image over 4 metres wide.

Paris – Montparnasse (1993)

There has always been an element of abstraction in Gursky’s work. In his image “Rhine II” from 1999, he digitally removed the buildings on the far side of the river to present an abstract image of the Rhine near Dusseldorf. It could be considered an image of man’s manipulation of the natural world to create order. Yet there is an emphasis on textures, the contrast between the shimmering light from the river, the softness of the clouds, the lush carpet of the grass and the hardness of the pavement.

Rhine II (1999) 156 x 308 cm

Like other photographs he has produced, there is a detached yet enticing quality to his image making.  He encourages the viewer to enter these scenes yet provides no guidance as to how one should feel. 

Hello, my name is Geoff. You may be interested to know that I am a fulltime artist these days and I regularly exhibit in galleries in Victoria, but particularly in Melbourne. You may wish to check out my work using the following link; https://geoffharrisonarts.com

References; 

Tate.org.au 

Davidcharlesfox.com 

thebroad.org

Bill Henson - Art & Politics

“Meaning comes from feeling”, is a favourite quote from Bill Henson. To describe Henson as a photographer seems to understate the significance of his work and the motivations behind it.  He lives in a world within a world, “a retreat of quiet contemplation and dark imaginings”. Although there are classical overtones in his work, his imagery is often dark, mildly disturbing and gritty.  Henson believes the best art can be life-affirming but perhaps also disconcerting and confronting and it’s this paradox that brings an edginess to his art.  He claims that the images that have had the most profound impact on him artistically are paintings, not photographs.

Henson’s photograph of conductor Simone Young from 2002

The portrayal of children at around the age of puberty in much of Henson’s work requires explanation.  It’s an age of transition where the person is neither child nor adult.  It’s a time, says Henson, for experimentation, for self-examination when things can go very well or very badly.  The late Edmund Capon thought that Henson’s portrayal of adolescents was about vulnerability, about being on the cusp of knowledge where one is aware of things but doesn’t know how to deal with them.

Untitled 2001, 127cm x 180cm

His career dates back to the 1970’s and has courted controversy within the art world from time to time.  That controversy spilled over into the broader community as a result of an exhibition Henson held at Sydney’s Roslyn Oxley Gallery in 2008 – an exhibition that attracted the ire of then Prime Minister Kevin Rudd.

The exhibition featured images of naked adolescents (some aged only 13) that were seized by police and an argument raged over whether the exhibition was art or child pornography.  Kevin Rudd described the exhibition as revolting and stressed his belief that children need to have their innocence protected. 

Interestingly, then opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull, who owned a Henson work, called for level heads to prevail.  He was concerned about police “tramping through art galleries and libraries” being an attack on freedom. But reports that Henson had been allowed to scout for models at a local school complicated the debate.  Two things need to be emphasized here; firstly he was ALLOWED to scout for models. Secondly, where else was he meant to find them?  Go doorknocking?  Roam around sports grounds?

Untitled 1994, 250cm x 244cm

I have no recollection of any journalist having the courage to ask Rudd if he actually saw the exhibition, nor did any of them remind Rudd that Henson had been Australia’s representative at the Venice Biennale with similar work.

A few years after the Sydney show, I attended a talk at the Gippsland Art Gallery given by Henson during an exhibition of his work there.  Someone asked him to comment on the controversy and his response was quite enlightening.  As he was flying off to Sydney for the opening, a New South Wales state Labor politician was jailed on child sex charges.  Henson believes that Rudd was looking for a distraction and someone got into Rudd’s ear about the exhibition, which was just what the Prime Minister was looking for.

Untitled 2017

The police carried out interviews with the parents of the children depicted in Henson’s work and no one was prepared to lay charges.  So the story promptly died – at least as far as the 24 hour news cycle is concerned. 

Sensibly, Henson remained silent at the time whilst many in the art community passionately came to his defence.  The issue of freedom of artistic expression became central in the debate.

At the opening of the Melbourne Art Fair in 2010, Henson broke his silence over the controversy.He called for politicians to make art available for everyone in the community, not to stop people from seeing it.“We need a politics that makes the world safe for art.Art itself can never be entirely safe as it is a form of truth and truth is a wild thing for us to tame.”

Untitled 2008, 127 x 180 cm

“We see a new growth in censoriousness and an impulse to restrict the conditions under which art is produced - an absurd attempt to conflate artistic freedom and child welfare as an issue.  The idea that the two can be mutually exclusive is absurd.  Everything we know about the world comes to us through our bodies, the idea of banning the human body at whatever age as a subject for art is ridiculous when you look at it in a historical context.”  One only has to think of the paintings of Balthus decades earlier.

Balthus, Therese Dreaming, 1938

Henson has remained in contact with many of the children (now adults) depicted in his work and their parents, and they have expressed pride in their involvement.

Henson wants politicians to be more statesmanlike and lead, rather than pander to fear (real or imagined) about the portrayal of the human body in art.  Well, given the current crop of political “leaders” in this country, I would suggest that Henson shouldn’t hold his breath.

References;

ABC TV – 7:30

ABC TV - Lateline

The Art of Bill Henson, Obsessions documentary

Two People, One Artist - Gilbert & George

The expression “don’t judge a book by its cover” always comes to mind when I think of Gilbert and George.  Described as looking like repressed 1930’s bank managers, they have been confounding the art world for over 50 years. 

Matthew Collings describes them as the Morecombe and Wise of existentialism, and admires the shock value of much of their output. But he argues that there is a precedent, the work of Francisco Goya - the “father of shocks”. Like so many artists who have explored the theme of shock in their art, Gilbert and George argue that what appears on the TV news deeply shocking every day.

George Passmore (left) and Gilbert Proesch

They describe themselves as living sculptures and annoyance and provocation lie at the centre of their work.  One only has to look at their dancing song “Bend It” featured in their 1981 movie “The World of Gilbert and George” to see  they achieved that aim.

Being ineligible for government grants and teaching posts being out of the question, they were isolated and poor and decided to turn to their only resource – themselves.  They fused their art with their identity and the world around them.

Gilbert & George singing “Underneath the Arches” (DailyArt Magazine)

They decided they were going to be ’two people, one artist’.  They claimed that when they left art school they were completely lost and needed each other, no doubt at least partly due to their total eccentricity.   The major advantage of the partnership, they argue, is that there is always someone there to answer a question.  So they never have to work in a vacuum – the bane of many artists. They speak of the loneliness of many artists – especially when their work is rejected, but they always had each other to provide comfort.  They developed the concept that ‘nothing matters’.

This may explain why their naked bodies appeared more and more in their art, including the fluids that comes out of them, during the 1990’s.  Among their targets was the bible which they wanted to ridicule, texts of which appear alongside images of their naked bodies.  For 2000 years, they argue, the bible has dictated how people should behave, including images of nudity being suppressed.  They sought to confound the viewer by presenting images of shit in a decorative, colourful way.

Blood, Tears, Spunk, Piss series 1996 (Research Gate)

They have lived and worked at 12 Fournier St Spitalfields in London’s east end since the late 1960’s. It’s now a fashionable location.  But in the late 60’s the area was populated by the homeless, poor families and ‘cockney market traders’.  There were hostels nearby catering for tramps, returned servicemen damaged by their war experiences and petty criminals, all of which provided inspiration for their art.  They first met as students at St Martins School of Art in 1967 and immediately fell in love.  Two years later they appeared as “living sculptures”, painting their faces silver so they resembled robots and singing that appalling 1930’s music hall song Underneath the Arches.

Gilbert and George are inspired by their experiences of living in London.  12 Fournier St has become a shrine for their art and their reference material is carefully and meticulously referenced and catalogued so they can easily access it for future projects.  Thousands of photographic images have been reduced to contact sheets which form the basis of their reference material.  Almost all their images are taken either in their studio or within walking distance of it.  “We never felt the need to travel to exotic locations in order to be inspired”, says George.  They love the cosmopolitan nature of the East End where everyone seemed to get along quite well.

From their Dirty Words Pictures 1977 (Schirn Press)

Their “Dirty Words” pictures of the late 1970’s were based on images taken from the immediate neighbourhood and included images of the locals photographed from the windows at 12 Fournier St.  They wanted to show images of what “the city feels like or smells like”.  London was experiencing a massive garbage strike at the time and the city looked like a waste dump.  The middle class press gave their work a caning.  They were even asked “why do you have black people in your work?” But while the media complained, the public flocked to see their work.

In 2007, they were the first British artists to hold a major retrospective at Tate Modern which featured 200 of their works – thought to be one fifth of their 40 year output at that stage.  They curated the exhibition by producing an enormous scale model of the gallery space and placing miniature images of each work just so.

This exhibition was quite a coup given the suspicion with which the British art establishment had viewed them.

New Normal Pictures, White Cube Gallery (Art Limited)

Some of their work seeks to explore the intersection between masculinity, shame, anality and art.  They draw the viewer into their work by being decorative and large scale so that by the time they realize what they are looking at, it’s too late.

In April 2021, they held the exhibition “New Normal Pictures” at White Cube. In reviewing the show, The Guardian made reference to the paradox that is Gilbert and George. They were angered by the way some people saw the bright side of the Covid 19 pandemic; saying how great it is to be able to drive across London without the traffic and being able to see the stars at night without the pollution. Meanwhile tens of thousands of people were dying in misery and funerals were taking place several times a day near their home. “They are masters of provocation and proudly right wing, but they also have a compassion that would put plenty of seemingly virtuous artists to shame.”

On The Streets - Bag Men, Photograph, 2020 (White Cube)

What keeps Gilbert and George going is the sense that they are always under attack, so they need to fight back.  They have always been outsiders, despite the 2007 retrospective.  “We were never normal”.

References;

The Guardian

This Is Modern Art – BBC Channel 4, 1999

BBC Imagine

Photography As Art

Hidden amongst all the high-tech razzamatazz of the Triennial at the National Gallery of Victoria was a small collection of black and white photos from the early 1900’s which are part of the NGV’s permanent collection.  For some reason, they really grabbed my attention.  Perhaps they represented such a sobering contrast to the “gee whizz” digital extravaganza that constituted so much of the Triennial.

Don’t get me wrong, the Triennial is certainly worth seeing for entertainment value quite apart from anything else. But I enjoyed this little pocket of ‘sobriety’. After viewing these photos by Stieglitz, Kauffmann and Haviland, I decided to hop online and see what else they had to offer.

John Kauffmann  The Street Corner  c1914  (NGV)

John Kauffmann was born in Truro, South Australia in 1864. Initially he was articled to an architect before leaving for England in 1887 and abandoned architecture for chemistry. In Switzerland he became fascinated by new photographic reproduction processes such as photogravure, worked in a Viennese portrait studio and studied zinc etching and the collotype process (a dichromate-based photographic process to print images in a wide variety of tones without the need for halftone screens) in Bavaria.

John Kauffmann  The National Bank  c1920  (NGV)

He returned to Adelaide in 1897 and appeared to have brought back the ideals of a European pictorial style of art photography with him.  His soft focus, romantic style where inessential details were diffused won much praise and he won awards both locally and internationally.  His work is said to have inspired Harold Cazneau.  He moved to Melbourne in 1909 and in later years his romantic style began to fall out of favour as photographers preferred a more direct representation of the Australian sunlight.

Paul Haviland was born in Paris in 1880 of French/American origin.He became part of a movement in the early twentieth century in the USA called pictorial photography, where artists sought to move away from the direct point and shoot method of photography and use skills and processes that presented photography as an art form.

Paul Haviland  New York By Night  1914  (NGV)

Alfred Steiglitz was the leader of this movement in New York which became known as the Photo-Secession.  Artists experimented with processes such as platinum prints, which produce rich and varied grey tones, and gum bichromate prints, where manipulation of the print during processing achieves effects such as brush strokes, and pigmented colour.

Another process developed was the photogravure, a photomechanical process, produced in ink, and therefore the final image can be any colour. They look remarkably like a photograph, but under magnification a fine irregular image grain similar to an aquatint grain can be seen.

Paul Haviland  New York At Night  1914

From 1903 to 1917 Stieglitz was the editor of Camera Work, a journal promoting the cause of photography and avant-garde art.  In 1908, he opened his Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession at 291 Fifth Avenue, New York which became known simply as 291.  Initially this gallery was a venue showing the work of photographers committed to the ideal of photography as a medium for artistic expression.

Alfred Stieglitz  The City Of Ambition  1910 (National Gallery of Art USA)

These photographers were pioneering the concept of photography as an art form.  With photography like this, objectivity diminishes and the imaginings take over – so perhaps this is a case of less equals more.  Some have described this as impressionist photography.  The NGV held an exhibition called 291 in 2008 and I wished I had seen it.

New Zealand born Australian pictorialist photographer Harold Cazneau is famous for his award winning picturing of a tree in the Flinders Ranges in South Australia in 1937, commonly known as Cazneau’s Tree.  But in the context of this blog, I thought the image below was more appropriate.

Harold Cazneau  Cabbies Bridge St Sydney  1904 (Art Gallery of NSW)

The composition is superb and there is an almost timeless quality to this image.  Men idling away the time, waiting for the next fare just as they do today.  Only the mode of transport is different.

References;

National Gallery Of Victoria

The World of Imogen Cunningham

A recent online article posted by the National Gallery of Victoria included a black and white photograph by American photographer Imogen Cunningham (1883 - 1976) which drew my attention for its sharpness of observation and clean abstract qualities.  The challenge here is to condense a long career into a few paragraphs, but here goes.

Agave Design 1 1920's (NGV)

In 1901 she managed to save $15 and sent it off to a correspondence school in Pennsylvania.  They sent her a camera and some glass plates and she started out on her own, and what followed was the longest photographic career in the history of the medium – 75 years.  After graduating from the University of Washington with a major in chemistry, she was awarded a grant to study photographic chemistry in Dresden in 1909.

Magnolia Blossom 1925 (Artsy)

Raising three young children in the early 20th century meant that Cunningham was limited in her choice of subject matter.  Whilst they slept during the afternoons, she would photograph plants in her garden.  With regard to Agave Design 1 the NGV article discusses Cunningham arranging the leaves in a way that allowed her to create bold contrasts between light and dark.  She seems to have created another reality by focussing on form, pattern and light.

On Oregon Beach 1967 (Artnet)

Cunningham was one of the first women to photograph the male nude and received much criticism for doing so.  “I was described as an immoral woman.”  She said she wanted everything in her photographs to be smoothly in focus, or if it’s out of focus it has to be for a reason.  Also the quality of gradations and value is important.  “In order to make a good photograph you have to be enthusiastic about it and think about it like a poet.”

Part of the reason for the longevity of her career is that in later years she began to print images that she had previously neglected because “your point of view changes.”After photographing the dancer and choreographer Martha Graham she was asked to go to Hollywood and when asked for her preferences, she said ugly men because “they don’t complain.”

Triangles Plus One 1928 (Artnet)

Her relationship with her theosophical leaning father was unusual, he once said to her “why do you go to school for so long just to be a dirty photographer?”  Yet at the same time he made a very good darkroom for her in the woodshed.

“I don’t hunt for things (subject matter – I assume), I just wait until something strikes me.  Of course I hunt for an impression when I photograph people……I do portraits because people pay me for them and I still have to live…… I’ve always been glad for a certain amount of poverty – all I want to do is live.”

Frida Kahlo 1931 (Artsy)

When photographing anyone who does something with their hands, she always wanted to include the hands. 

Her work seems to be based on a certain formalism with a mixture of abstract and realist elements, but with an almost intuitive understanding of composition.  Over the decades she produced a staggering body of work comprising bold, contemporary forms.  There is a visual precision that is not scientific, but which presents the lines and textures of her subjects articulated by natural light and their own gestures. Her work has been described as refreshing, yet formal and sensitive.  Her floral arrangements of the 1920’s ultimately became her most acclaimed images. Cunningham’s real artistic legacy was secured through her inclusion in the "F64" show in San Francisco in 1932 which included notable photographers including Edward Weston and Ansel Adams.

Awarded a Guggenheim fellowship, Cunningham’s work continues to be exhibited and collected around the world.

Imogen & Twinka, Yosemite 1974, photographed by Judy Dater

References;

National Gallery of Victoria

Museum of North West Art

Portrait of Imogen (1988) - directed by Meg Partridge

Tracey Moffatt - Body Remembers

The current shutdown has given me an opportunity to reflect on an exhibition held at Tarrawarra Museum of Art last year; Tracey Moffatt’s Body Remembers photographic series and her video work Vigil both of which received acclaim at the 2017 Venice Biennale.

Walking into the space, there was a strong sense of alienation pouring out of these 10 sepia-hued photographs, of displacement and discord.  A lonely domestic figure (played by Moffatt) in an abandoned homestead seemingly in the middle of nowhere.  The colour of the walls was obviously chosen to emphasize the sombre mood of the exhibition.  Yet the photographs are also highly evocative, there is a sense of longing and sorrow.

Why has she been left behind, or has she returned?  What was she doing there in the first place?

Moffatt rarely gives interviews, but a Sydney Morning Herald article tells us that in preparing the series of photographs she created a diagram or mind map listing her various ideas and influences;

“Desert and silence”

"Essays about the ruin in art that I have never read."

"The back of women's necks."

"The history of Mount Moffatt Station – the former vast cattle station in Queensland where some members of my family worked in 1910 – of which I know nothing."

"De Chirico – shadows of the afternoon."

She also mentions the film Black Narcissus, the works of Andrew Wyeth and Martin Scorsese, glass-plate photography, Irish lace, Spain, Egypt, and various film scenes and actors.  A disparate list indeed, yet you can see many of these influences in the final series. 

We never see Moffatt’s face, instead we either see her in the distance from behind or she is gazing away from us.  According the Tarrawarra’s director Victoria Lynn, this emphasises one of the central themes of the photos: the collision of looking and being looked at.

"It is as if the woman portrayed is returning to the place where she used to be a servant, returning to that place of servitude, remembering the trauma," Lynn says. "She is looking and gazing in various directions away from the camera but she is also aware that we are looking at her.”

Moffatt was born to an Indigenous Australian mother and an Irish father in 1960, but was adopted into a white family in the suburbs of Brisbane at age three. Her birth mother would visit her and accustom her to Indigenous identity, thus allowing her to take part in two separate cultures growing up.

This exhibition is at once personal and universal, referencing the stolen generation.  This is not a new theme for Moffatt.  Her 1989 series Something More referenced the forced removal of young Aboriginal women from their families and their internment as domestic servants on rural properties.

Tracey Moffatt describes Body Remembers as ‘a play with time, backwards and forwards of the past and present’.  She appears to be exploring the legacy of colonisation, of resulting intergenerational traumas and their reverberations across time and place.

It was one of those exhibitions where viewing it alone seems to be the only option.  The carefully constructed compositions allowing the viewer to absorb the loneliness and the sense of simply being out of place.

References;

Sydney Morning Herald

Tarrawarra Museum of Art

Mosman Art Gallery

Art Born Of Anger - David Wojnarowicz

“Hell is a place on earth.  Heaven is a place in your head.”  Thus wrote New York based artist David Wojnarowicz in his essay Shadow Of The American Dream.  He was a gay activist, print maker, painter, poet and photographer who died of complications from AIDS in 1992.

It was only in 2018 that the arts establishment decided to afford Wojnarowicz the recognition he deserved by staging a series of retrospectives of his work.  One of those exhibitions was held at the Whitney Museum in New York and was titled History Keeps Me Awake At Night.

Born in New Jersey in 1954, he began creating a body of work in the late ‘70’s.  But given his background it is remarkable that he made it to adulthood at all.  He was the youngest of 3 children, his mother was very young whilst the father was a violent alcoholic.  When David was 2 years old, his parents split up and after spending time with his siblings in a boarding house where beatings were frequent, they ended up with their father and his new wife in New Jersey, the universe of the neatly clipped lawn – according to Wojnarowicz, “where physical and psychic violence against women, gay people and children could be carried out without repercussions.” 

Chelsea Piers, the setting for much of Wojnarowicz’s photography

By the mid 1960’s, the Wojnarowicz children decided they’d had enough of their father’s violence and traced down their mother, but she had only a tiny apartment in Manhattan and was in no shape to be caring for 3 now troubled children due to having problems of her own.

David eventually ran away from home and found himself hustling in Times Square at the age of 15.  He also liked to draw and go to movies on his own.  He briefly returned to his mother’s apartment but she had already kicked out his siblings and at 17, he found himself on the streets for good.  He would sleep in boiler rooms or cars, some men were kind to him, some weren’t.  In 1973 his sister threw out a lifeline by offering him a bedroom in her apartment.

Wojnarowicz, Self Portrait 1983-85

In the late 70’s he began taking photographs of his friends wearing a mask of his kindred spirit Arthur Rimbaud in locations from his hustling days before he fell into the somewhat dysfunctional East Village art scene that included Nan Goldin, Keith Haring, Jean Michel Basquiat and Peter Hujar.

Jacket worn by Wojnarowicz at a 1988 AIDS demonstration.

But it was the AIDS crisis that propelled Wojnarowicz’s work to prominence in the 1980’s as, one by one, he witnessed his friends and lovers die of a disease the Reagan Administration refused to name.  Art (and for that matter, sex) provided him with an avenue to escape the loneliness and isolation of his life – to escape the “prison of the self” as author Olivia Liang puts it in her book The Lonely City.

Wojnarowicz, Death Of American Spirituality 1987

In his wanderings around New York he often found himself at the Chelsea Piers which were left in a dilapidated state following the decline of shipping in the 1960’s.  It was here where his erotic and creative juices were fed and it was here where the ravages of the AIDS epidemic took hold.  Photography was to Wojnarowicz an act of taking possession, a way of making something visible and keeping it in storage.  He also produced some short films and his writings included the autobiography Close To The Knives (1991). The title says it all.  After he was diagnosed with AIDS in the late 80’s, his work took on a more political edge and he became involved in public debates around medical research and funding, morality and censorship in the arts, and the legal rights of artists.

Wojnarowicz, One Day This Kid 1990

According to Laing, 66,000 people died of AIDS in New York City alone between 1981 and 1996 when combination therapies became available.  People were sacked from their jobs and rejected by their families, patients were left on hospital trolleys (that’s if they were able to be admitted in the first place).  Nurses refused to treat them, funeral parlours to bury them and politicians and religious leaders blocked funding and education.

Wojnarowicz, Green Head 1982

In Close To The Knives Wojnarowicz wrote “My rage is really about the fact that when I was told I had contracted this virus it didn’t take me long to realize I had contracted a diseased society.”   He died 22 July, 1992 with his lover and family beside him.  The expression triumph in the face of adversity is a tediously overused cliché, yet it seems to describe his life.  In spite of everything he went through, he was able to so intensely and eloquently express his inner most feelings through a variety of media.  And act as a passionate spokesman on behalf of others.

Chelsea Piers

References;

The Guardian

The Lonely City – Olivia Laing, Picador Press, 2016