Autobiography The Artist as Collector Sol LeWitt Conceptual Artist Book Photography

Autobiography Sol Lewitt 1980

New York and Boston: Multiples, Inc. and Lois and Michael K. Torf, 1980. First edition. Paperback. Very Good +. 10" square paperbound volume. First edition of this wonderful artist book created by Lewitt by photographing every item in the artist's Manhattan loft. Cited in Parr & Badger Vol. 2, The Open Book etc as a hugely influential photobook as well as a conceptual artist book.

“Autobiography” published by Multiples and Lois and Michael Torf, New York and Boston in 1980. Adam Weinberg in his excellent critique on the book entitled, “LeWitt’s Autobiography: Inventory to the Present” wrote, “When published, “Autobiography” was one of LeWitt’s eighteen “artist books” and one of six photography books. ..These books are no less profound than “Autobiography”, but “Autobiography” is a more complex, ambitious, and in some respects, intimate project…In “Autobiography” LeWitt presents more than a thousand black-and-white images in grids, generally nine to a page. The artist catalogues virtually every corner, crevice, and item in his loft. We see an aggregate of unposed images – the bare facts of his everyday existence.  We investigate each image, but the significance of this autobiography derives from the connection between images on a page, on a spread, and from page to page, as much as from any individual picture… LeWitt’s artist books situate themselves among dozens of the artist’s structures, wall drawings, drawings, and prints. For LeWitt, none of these works or media occupies a privileged position. Each work is a part of a chain of artistic production. Every work is part of a nonhierarchical whole. Thus, contradictorily, LeWitt’s “Autobiography” purports to be just another work, yet its special significance is undeniable. ..In “Autobiography”, Lewitt presents the life of the artist as the life of a particular person, in a particular culture, at a particular time and place. Nevertheless, “Autobiography” is unique in his oeuvre. For LeWitt, whose drawings, wall drawings, and structures are seemingly so pure and pared down, “Autobiography is an unparalleled work. While it takes its place as one work among “equals,” it is singular in its demonstration that LeWitts’s abstract, geometric forms are inextricable from the experience of his life and culture.”

Cover to cover Sol Lewitt's artist's books

	'Autobiography' 1980 photo-lithographyCollection of the National Gallery of Australia click to enlarge

The 1960s witnessed a proliferation of alternative art forms, including the artist’s book, which set out to challenge the historically privileged status of painting and sculpture. An artist’s book is a book as art, authored or conceived by the artist as a vehicle for his or her ideas.¹

The emergence of the artist’s book was fuelled by the political and socio-economic climate and facilitated by developments in commercial printing, which presented artists with the opportunity to produce relatively inexpensive books in large editions as a democratic means of disseminating their art practice to a wider audience. What is characteristic of this type of artist’s book is that it challenges the preciousness of the unique work of art and, at glance, is often indistinguishable from the mass-produced commercial publications from which it draws impetus.

Since the mid-1960s, Sol LeWitt has been one of the most important and enduring exponents of the artist’s book. His books are inseparable from his output in other media, such as wall drawings, three-dimensional structures, or prints, and are not ‘spin-offs’ of LeWitt’s ‘real’ art.² It could be argued that the intrinsic nature of the book, coupled with the convention of reading from cover to cover, makes the book the ideal medium for LeWitt’s serial systems.

One of the artist’s earliest projects was instigated by the conceptual art dealer and publisher Seth Siegelaub who, in 1968 with John W. Wendler, published Carl Andre, Robert Barry, Douglas Huebler, Joseph Kosuth, Sol LeWitt, Robert Morris, Lawrence Weiner, generally known as The xerox book. The seven artists were asked to provide 25 pages each. LeWitt’s contribution was xeroxed copies, or photocopies, illustrating the pen and ink work, Drawing series IA 1–24 1968, in which a series of line drawings is derived from combinations of numbers 1,2,3 and 4.

Whereas LeWitt’s Drawing series IA 1–24 in The xerox book is no more than a tentative chapter in a collaborative work, his Four basic kinds of straight lines 1969, published by Studio International in London, is a classic autonomous artist’s book. It is a flimsy, softcover, staple-bound book. The first page presents the four basic kinds of straight lines: vertical, horizontal, diagonal from lower left to upper right, diagonal from upper left to lower right, then all possible super-imposed combinations. This ‘table of contents’ outlines the set of permutations, which is then followed though in the subsequent pages of the book as the idea merges with the medium.

'Four basic kinds of straight lines ' 1969 photo-lithography Collection of the National Gallery of Australia click to enlarge

LeWitt’s books have often been published in conjunction with exhibitions, such as Arcs, circles and grids 1972 for a solo show at the Kunsthalle in Bern, Switzerland, and Incomplete open cubes 1974, published on the occasion of an early installation of the work at the John Weber Gallery in New York.³ Both books adhere to the standard format and recognisable ‘look’ that unifies LeWitt’s prodigious output.

The location of lines 1974 was published by the Lisson Gallery in London to coincide with an exhibition of wall drawings, which are works of art that are drawn directly onto a wall in accordance with written instructions provided by the artist. In the book a correlation between the textual and the visual is established on each double-page spread. The left page presents the reader with a statement that describes the location of a line on the facing page or metaphorical white wall. In the first pages there is a visual balance between the text and the line. As the reader proceeds through the book, however, the instructions become increasingly verbose and tedious. It is a book that is not finished when the reader reaches the last page, but rather when they realise the futility of the process.

In the late 1970s LeWitt produced two books, both called, in short, Color grids. The first, subtitled Grids, using straight, not-straight and broken lines in yellow, red & blue and all their combinations, was printed at Crown Point Press in Oakland, California, and published by Parasol Press in New York in 1975. The second, which explores a similar proposition, Color grids: all vertical and horizontal combinations of black, yellow, red and blue straight, not-straight and broken lines, was published by Multiples in New York in 1977.

The first, Color grids 1975, is a finely printed book, containing 45 etchings for 45 possible combinations, in a limited edition of 10 with seven artist’s proofs, each signed and numbered by the artist. The second book,Color grids 1977, in contrast, is mass produced, with the introduction of black increasing the number of combinations from 45 to 78. More significantly though, the use of blue, red, yellow and black in Color grids 1977 is an explicit acknowledgment of the four-colour printing process underlying commercial offset litho-graphy. As the titles suggest, there is a schematic affinity between both Color grids, yet in material form they represent very different genres of the book.

	'Blue background with yellow outer lines and blue inner lines' 1988 photo-lithography Collection of the National Gallery of Australia click to enlarge

Eadweard Muybridge’s 19th-century photographic studies of human and animal locomotion were a catalyst for LeWitt’s investigation of serial systems. The debt is made explicit in Schematic drawing for Muybridge II, 1964 1969, and evident in LeWitt’s photographic books from the late 1970s. Brick wall 1977, for example, contains 30 black and white photographs of, as the title suggests, a brick wall. The assumption made by the viewer is that it has been photographed at regular intervals during the day from dawn to dusk, although, the gradual light changes seem artificial and more reminiscent of the predetermined tonal progression in Four basic kinds of straight lines.

Autobiography 1980 is LeWitt’s most widely discussed artist’s book.⁴ It is an album of black and white photographs taken by the artist of his New York city loft, arranged in a familiar grid-like format of nine images to a page. There are snapshots of the floor, windows, ceiling, doors, light fittings, plants, the artist’s library, a visual chronology of his work. Autobiography is an exhaustive record of the artist’s material possessions, yet the mundane nature of so many of the items seems to strip the artist’s studio of its sanctity and mystery. If the reader is not familiar with LeWitt’s biography, the ephemeral fragments and often subtle references to the artist’s life and career are ironically meaningless.

LeWitt has utilised the book as a vehicle for his ideas and as an alternative space in which to exhibit his work to a wider audience. They encapsulate the artist’s creative process, as well as address the broader issues crucial to the evolution of the artist’s book since the mid-1960s. Sol LeWitt’s artist’s books are exemplary books as art.

Steven Tonkin

notes ¹ See Clive Phillpot, ‘Books by artists and books as art’, in Cornelia Lauf and Clive Phillpot, Artist/author: contemporary artists’ books, New York: Distributed Art Publishers Inc., 1999, pp 31–33, for a discussion of the artist’s book as idea and form; see Joanna Drucker, The century of artists’ books, New York: Granary Books, 1995, pp 1–19 ² Lucy Lippard, ‘The structures, the structures and the wall drawings, the structures and the wall drawings and the books’, in Sol LeWitt, New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1978, pp 27-28 ³ Considered one of the artist’s most important works, Incomplete open cubes has been the subject of a recent exhibition and catalogue; Nicholaus Baume (ed), with essays by Nicholas Baume, Jonathan Flatley and Pamela M. Lee, Sol LeWitt: Incomplete open cubes, Hartford, Connecticut: The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, 2001 ⁴See most recently, Adam D. Weinberg, ‘LeWitt’s Autobiography: Inventory to the present’, in, Gary Garrels (ed), with essays by Martin Friedman et al., Sol LeWitt, San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2000, pp 100-108

Sol LeWitt The artist as collector
ART WORLD NEWS|COLLECTORS & COLLECTIONS|MARCH 4, 2015
Sol LeWitt: The artist as collector

Sol LeWitt’s widow Carol speaks to Lydia Lee, curator of the Magnificent Obsessions exhibition at Barbican, about his lifelong fascination for collecting

The American artist Sol LeWitt (1928–2007), who was a key proponent of both Minimalism and Conceptual art, built an extensive collection of works by his contemporaries, including Hanne Darboven, Dan Flavin, Eva Hesse, Robert Mangold and Robert Ryman, among many others.

LeWitt collected in other areas, including Japanese woodblock prints and hand-coloured tourist photographs, modernist photography and scores by composers such as Steve Reich and Philip Glass.

Lydia Yee: Do you know when, where and how Sol first began collecting?

Carol LeWitt: He started collecting stamps when he was eight years old. He became an obsessive collector of block of four stamps. I even have a little note he wrote to someone in Shanghai saying, ‘I am a collector, can you please send me something with such and such a stamp on it?’

Some of the musical scores in his collection are from people like Steve Reich, Philip Glass and Alvin Lucier. I can imagine that he felt an affinity with his own work, the serial nature of that kind of music.

He would often say that everything he learned about serial art he learned in two ways: from Bach’s fugues, because that was a perfect serial system, and from Dan Flavin. Flavin’s ideas on seriality were enormously important to Sol, and he would always talk about that and always credit him.

Sol LeWitt, Autobiography, 1980. LeWitt Collection, Chester, Connecticut USA © ARS, NY and DACS, London 2015. Magnificent Obsessions: The Artist as Collector

Do you have any interesting anecdotes about any acquisitions that he made?

Sometimes he would buy things that we couldn’t afford. He would just find a way to make it work. I remember he saw a Richter show of candle paintings, at Sperone Westwater Fischer in the 1980s, and if he could then he would have bought the whole show. He did buy a painting. It was $10,000 at the time and a tremendous amount of money for us.

But an incredible investment now if you look at it. But I’m sure that’s not what he was thinking.

That never would have occurred to him. He always used to quote Gertrude Stein, who said a work of art is priceless or worthless.

What is the relationship between the objects in the collection and Sol’s own work? Was he looking for something in the work of other artists that spoke to him and to the way he worked?

I think that because of his collecting interests, the collection went way beyond what he would have taken from his own work. I think if he had collected that way it would have been a much more refined and defined kind of collection. This was more like Sol, the great proletarian collector, everything from young people, artists that had little recognition, little value. None of that ever mattered to him.

Hirosada, Untitled, 1860s. LeWitt Collection, Chester, Connecticut USA. Photo by Jody Dole Hirosada. Magnificent Obsessions: The Artist as Collector

And when he put things up in the house, was it also with this non-hierarchical approach?

It would be a total mixed bag, with the kind of eclecticism that was part of everything he did. One of the other interesting things is not only did he buy art, he loved furniture. He collected Hoffmann furniture and Rietveld furniture, he made his own furniture, and he loved Umbrian antiques. So it’s a real mix.

He was ahead of his time, because now this kind of mixing has become quite fashionable, but less so 30 years ago.

Sol never thought about style. He loved comfort, so his spaces were always very personal and filled with books and colour. That was one of the things he started to do when we first renovated the house in the mid-1980s — it was sort of cool colours, white and maybe a light grey. He decided to paint the house up. He started by painting the central hallway of this federal house a kind of brown. I remember once saying, ‘Brown is not exactly a fashion colour, I don’t know about that’. He looked at me and said, ‘I’m one of the great colourists of the century, and I think this is the colour!’ It went on and on: we had a kitchen that was electric yellow that went into a chartreuse room with a red door. It was very personal and very eccentric.

Magnificent Obsessions: The Artist as Collector runs at Barbican until 25 May, then at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Norwich from 12 September — 24 January 2016. Extract taken from the accompanying book Magnificent Obsessions: The Artist as Collector, co-published by Barbican Art Gallery and Prestel.

Main image: Magnificent Obsessions: The Artist as Collector: Sol LeWitt's collection. Barbican Art Gallery. © Peter MacDiarmid, Getty images

Views & Reviews For the Boys Tour of Duty Winning Hearts and Minds in East Timor Matthew Sleeth Photography

Matthew Sleeth: Tour of duty. Winning hearts and minds in east timor. 2002. 

Hardie Grant Publishing, South Yarra, Victoria in Kooperation mit M.33, Balaclava, Victoria, Australia, 2002. Australische Originalausgabe. Erstausgabe. Signiert von Matthew Sleeth! Martin Parr, The Photobook, vol 2, Seite 235 und 257. Paperback (as issued). 280 x 240 mm, 112 Seiten. 97 Farbfotos. Text von Paul James; edited von Helen Frajman; design von Matthew Sleeth.

Matthew Sleeth’s book of photographs, Tour of Duty constitutes a significant and sustained visual investigation into the international presence in East Timor immediately following the Independence ballot.It must primarily be viewed in the context of the plethora of images which have been published and broadcast over the period of Australia’s participation and which indeed have contributed to our national understanding of this involvement.

What we mostly saw in our press and on TV was either the genuinely abject plight of the East Timorese on the one hand and on the other, the heroic InterFET peacekeepers coming in to save the day. Media presentation and publicity of the Australian presence was carefully orchestrated and milked for every patriotic possibility.

Sleeth uses the visual vocabulary of traditional documentary photography and disturbs and undermines it with techniques and angles borrowed from cinema. His vivid colours and jaunty angles humorously yet incisively track the Australian army and the accompanying media and entertainment caravan in Timor to form an impression quite unlike the one we have received from our mainstream press.

A far more complex view emerges, formed of multiple layers of meaning. The East Timorese people are not featured as victims as they often are in traditional photojournalism, nor are they bit players in their own redemptive drama. Instead we are given a challenging body of work, which focuses rather on the construction and staging of history.

The photographs are accompanied by a five-part essay by Paul James, which discusses Australia’s national identity through the prism of past and present military engagements.

Published by Hardie Grant Books in association with M.33, Melbourne 2002
112 Pages
280mm x 240mm
Edited by Helen Frajman

For the boys

by Alistair McGhie, 1 March 2011

Untitled #88 from Tour of Duty series (Captain Brad Kilpatrick and Kylie Minogue , Balibo, East Timor, 20 December 1999), 1999 by Matthew Sleeth

Watching an American starlet leaving the stage after performing in front of an audience of G.I.s, Bob Hope said ‘I just want you boys to see what you’re fighting for’. Since the 1940s the United Service Organizations has staged morale boosting camp shows and pictures of actors, comedians and musicians entertaining soldiers have become part the spectrum of images of war.

Soon after her marriage to Joe DiMaggio, Marilyn Monroe en route to Japan in February of 1954 took a four-day side trip to Korea and performed ten shows for 100,000 American soldiers. They were Marilyn’s first performances in front of an audience and she said that the reaction of the soldiers made her realise she had really made it as a star.

Roosevelt was the first and every US president since has been the Honorary Chairman of the USO. George Bush Senior said that ‘the USO is how America says thanks to those serving on the front lines of freedom and at home, it is a way to let them know we care and appreciate their service and sacrifice’. The rhetoric, however, does not acknowledge the origins of the organisation. Before America entered the Second World War it had begun drafting civilians and training them at bases in rural America. Under pressure to appease the locals who resented these on-leave strangers flooding into their hometowns, Roosevelt challenged six voluntary civilian agencies, the YMCA, YWCA, National Catholic Community Service, the National Jewish Welfare Board, the Traveler’s Aid Association and the Salvation Army to organise recreation for the servicemen. The USO’s formation was partly public relations and partly to get the soldiers out of bars and into church groups.

In the Iraq–Afghanistan era of unmanned drones, soldiers blogging their experiences and uploading videos to Youtube from their laptops, morale-boosting troop-thanking camp concerts are anachronistic. The link between celebrity and patriotism and the symbolism, whether it is the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders posing for souvenir photographs or Robin Williams on a stage in battle fatigues,
is as necessary, popular and potent as ever before.

In 1999 Australian artist Matthew Sleeth went to East Timor with an art project in mind. He had been living in Belfast creating art projects around the orthodoxies of war photography and, although he concedes that at the time he wasn’t really aware of the buildup or the politics of the situation, he headed for East Timor with the intention of creating an optimistic project on the theme of redemption.

In September of 1999 Australia led a multinational peacekeeping force to East Timor to restore security following the result of the UN sponsored independence referendum. When Sleeth arrived in East Timor he realised that his assumptions had been wrong and the project took a different direction. It was apparent to him that the United Nations, Australian government and the non-government organisations were less interested in the Timorese than they were in constructing the public image of the crisis and branding their efforts for audiences back home. The disparity between what the Timorese needed and the spin, Sleeth says was never more clearly evident than the USO-style Christmas concert ‘Tour of Duty: Concert for the Troops’ that featured John Farnham and Kylie Minogue.

Bob Hope and Anita Ekberg’s 1955 show at Thule Air Force Base in Greenland was the first televised USO performance. Jessica Simpson’s 2008 USO performance in Kuwait was also a live MySpace concert. Compared by Rampaging Roy Slaven and HG Nelson, ‘Tour of Duty: Concert for the Troops’ was telecast on two commercial networks in Australia as well as being webcast. Held at Dili Stadium in front of 4 000 troops, and despite the performances stopping for the ninety-second ad breaks, the concert was described as a special Christmas present to show appreciation and support for the troops stationed in East Timor, away from their families for Christmas.

On the world stage Timor was a small conflict and the details were never clear nor well understood. Sleeth created a critique of Australia’s response to the crisis in the form of eighty photographs that can be read as filmstills for a jingoistic movie: part Australia to the rescue and part unofficial advertisement. For the project called Tour of Duty Winning Hearts and Minds In East Timor and the accompanying monograph published in 2002, Sleeth took the stencil typeface from the title sequence of the 80s American TV show set during the Vietnam War ‘Tour of Duty’.

Australia’s inexperience in the leadership role for the InterFET gave Sleeth unhindered access to the people and the places including what he describes as the PR setpiece ‘Tour of Duty: Concert for the Troops’. Two photographs of Kylie Minogue from the Tour of Duty Winning Hearts and Minds In East Timor series have become part of the National Portrait Gallery collection, gifts of Patrick Corrigan AC. With the conventions of war photography in mind, in each of the photographs Sleeth intended to create shots that looked as though they were selling a product. Seductive and with the feel of lifestyle photography his technique combines a large format camera with square format colour negatives clearly distancing his work from the snapped at a moment reportage type of  war photography .Sleeth, whose background is in film, talks a lot about editing his photographs for exhibition and publication as if they were a film. Tour of Duty Winning Hearts and Minds In East Timorwas exhibited at the Centre for Contemporary Photography in Melbourne in mid-2002.

Sleeth’s photograph of Kylie posing with an Australian Army Styer rifle in a tough ‘Terminator’ stance with a  beaming Australian Army Officer over her right shoulder appears to be part of the tradition of contrived images of performers ‘showing their support’ for their country’s military. For Sleeth the true narrative is an unexpected moment when the official story and the revealing subtext of the unofficial one intersect.

The soldier, who appears as if he’s ‘just happy to be there’ is Kylie’s old friend and co-star from the 1980s Australian TV show, ‘The Henderson Kids’. Kylie Minogue played the part of Charlotte ‘Char’ Kernow while Bradley Kilpatrick played Brian ‘Brains’ Buchanan. Captain Kilpatrick had deployed to East Timor as the Second in Command of B Squadron 3/4 Cavalry Regiment with InterFET in 1999. His mum had called Kylie’s mum to ask her if she’d go to East Timor as a favour to Brad. He stands behind Kylie relieved that the tense wait – the helicopter had been delayed by bad weather on its flight up to Balibo where the concert was staged – is over.

Matthew Sleeth’s project in East Timor ultimately comments not only on the repurposing of war stories for national audiences but Tour of Duty Winning Hearts and Minds In East Timor also instructs photojournalists, official war artists, freelancers, and us, the viewers, to see past the familiar imagery, clichés and contrivances derived from war to sell the role of a country in a conflict and to look more deeply into the lives of those directly affected.

By Alistair McGhie

MATTHEW SLEETH: WORLD VISION
Matthew Sleeth: World Vision - Art Collector
Issue 41, July - September 2007

Photographer Matthew Sleeth takes on the world. And gives back as good as he gets. It’s a perfect match, writes Edward Colless.

“There is a conflict in photography – in practice and theory – between constructing and capturing the real,” reflects Matthew Sleeth. He looks out from his panoramic studio windows across the stark, sun burnt industrial rooftops of Melbourne’s Footscray. “But,” he carefully adds, glancing back toward several large framed prints leaning against the wall of phantasmagoric street scenes from wintry Tokyo nights, “every photo is always a bit of both.”

Sleeth’s studio is up a giddying, zigzag metal staircase that hangs in a cavernous well by its fingernails off the top level of a po-mo refitted factory; a staircase that unaccountably doesn’t connect to any of the floors below in the building. The ascent is like climbing into the space shuttle while it’s waiting for lift off. You expect to look out on the horizon. And from up there you look directly down onto an old, now empty, building – waiting to be converted into more studios – that for years used to house a reception centre, specialising in Croatian weddings. “I guess people were so used to this factory being empty they never thought anyone could see them. Quite often during the night young couples would duck out for some … privacy,” he recalls. “It almost looked staged: the parents dancing upstairs, blissfully unaware of what their kids were doing in the alley exactly below them.” Look off to the right of that and you see the sizable headquarters for Lonely Planet publications. Since they built a stylishly boho café deck for their employees on their roof, Sleeth’s own view of the river and city beyond is blocked.

The scene could all be an ingenious and elegant exposition of this photographer’s own work. The fascinating celebratory manoeuvres of local, street-level culture compared to an international marketing enterprise formulating street-wise guides to the world’s localities. The chance discovery of all-too-human events right in front of you – a rich detail in a seemingly bleak or austere environment – contrasted against the stylish crafting, clarity and framing of a privileged view. From neighbourhood festivity to global entrepreneurship. From Tokyo to Melbourne. From pavement loitering to penthouse leisure. And behind it all a man gazing through the viewfinder of his window. But, of course, it’s not that simple. The real isn’t just waiting to be discovered in a dark alley. And the perspective on the world gained from a rooftop café isn’t necessarily smug, illusory or artificial. We encounter the real world but we also manufacture our encounters. We may feel we’re in the thick of things only to be disappointed at how conventional, generic or staged our photographs of it turn out. We may try to control the situation with all the muscle of a dictatorial director only to be frustrated by a scene-stealing baby or an unscripted interruption from an animal.

From Scandinavia to Japan and from Ireland to Timor, Matthew Sleeth’s photography has focussed on the world that he has been fortunate enough – and determined enough – to see. But it has also focussed from the start on what he recognises as an aesthetic argument between construction and capture. Sleeth’s graduating work in photography in the early 1990s was a portrait series of male prostitutes working the streets, with the comments of the subjects subsequently written over the prints on site. Throughout much of the 90s he was working in 35mm black and white, using lightweight Leica cameras and snapping fast. The traditional hallmarks of documentary realism. “I liked the way this allowed me to be subjective,” he explains, “and, against those 80s postmodernist methods of conceptualism and mise-en-scène photography, there’d been a resurgence of humanist photography.”

Sleeth’s first book, Roaring Days which came out in 1998, was both a summation of this on-the-run humanistic style and a conclusion to it. Gritty and hard, even in their more intimate, humble and sentimental moments, the photographs radiate a commitment to realism that feels as affectionate and agitated as it is fervent in its moral appeal to an unflinching honesty. Many of the subjects in the book are characters whose work, however, is a type of act: circus acrobats, transvestites, hookers, a rock band on tour. Even waterside workers on a picket line seem to strike a conventionally heroic, photogenic pose for the camera. They seem as histrionic as the guys horsing around in a snooker hall, or as self-conscious as a bride checking her dress out in a mirror. The real seems to be a bit of a performance.

What was expressed as a dark suspicion in his 90s work became an eloquently cool scepticism by the time of his second and provocative book, Tour of Duty. A two-week stopover in the Timor war zone en route from Ireland became a six month residency with eventually over 600 rolls of film being dispatched to a friend’s fridge in Darwin. And this was no longer 35mm black and white film. “I wanted to slow down my process,” he says. “The black and white imagery seemed disposable, too quick. For both me and the viewer. So I’d shifted over to medium format gear, and to colour. It could take several minutes to set and get a shot.” Accordingly, Sleeth’s coverage of the military activity in Timor shuns the grain and hustle associated with press photography. The troops in his photos play cricket on a beach, cheer at concerts, jostle around a barbecue, arm wrestle, read magazines, pose for photos. But this isn’t a glimpse at the human side or down-time of military action. Cameras pop up everywhere: around soldiers necks, or poking in from the side of an image of a helicopter dropping supplies. If the soldiers act like tourists at a Club Med resort, the military events seem to be choreographed displays for media coverage, almost like a lifestyle promotion. It’s the posed nature of the military intervention that is Sleeth’s real subject matter. Or more precisely, his subject is the cameras that both witness and induce events.

When, for the 2006 solo show Pictured at Monash Gallery of Art, he turned his camera surreptitiously onto anonymous tourists and passers by who were taking photos or were themselves being photographed by their companions, Sleeth folded together the divergent strategies of witnessing and triggering an event into a captivating paradox. Two Tokyo schoolgirls facing off at a Starbucks counter giggle while shyly covering their mouths as they snap each other simultaneously on their mobile phone cameras, only a few centimetres apart. What could they be photographing? Each other’s phone? Their own mirrored coyness? But this timidity seems like a performance, induced by training a camera on their friend as much as by having one pointed back at them. There’s an undeniably innocent air about this momentary exchange; but equally it’s a calculated and ritual instance of consumerism and of a commodity fetishism that fashions an identity and bond of girlpower.

Sleeth’s own sly photograph of the two of them, at a distance through a window, exploits this disarmingly cute episode with the assurance of a steady, confident voyeurism. Ironically, however, since he is photographing their public performance for their own cameras, this hardly seems a trespass. Unless, that is, we insist that what their cameras see is private. In which case, the same defence applies to Sleeth’s photo. And standing on a busy street with a bulky camera on a tripod, he’s hardly hiding. In any respect, accusing a photographer of voyeurism is like criticising their model for being exhibitionistic. Each of the photos in Pictured has this ambiguous status and vertiginous irony: Sleeth’s camera discreetly peeks around corners, over ledges or chairs to catch candid shots of people who are conscientiously posing for a photo, and lingering in venues that seem picture perfect.

“I’m interested in found narrative,” says Sleeth, “but photographed in a way where everything is so controlled that it looks staged.” Sleeth shoots in an analogue format, with very high resolution. His method over the past two years has become painstaking as well as meticulous: 20 minutes to set a shot, usually in challenging circumstances, and a minute or two for exposure. Then days of digital work on the computer screen, editing colour temperature and tone. All this to produce an image that has the rhetorical immediacy of a snapshot, a chance observation of an incident or a photo opportunity on the edge of vision, but presented on a monumental scale and with transfixing clarity. In Century Southern Tower (Shinjuku) a young woman in a track-suit top gazes into the vast neon night beyond the glass walls of the high rise executive bar where she waits for a companion whose unfinished drink sits across the table. Has this other person briefly excused themself, or have they maybe left for good? Is she petulant over the delay, idly passing time, or holding herself together having been dumped?

All these possible stories hang in the air like the miraculous lights of the city, which hover equally in the distance or in the foreground and across the whole span of the scene, bouncing around the reflective glass, and supernaturally shining through as well as onto the enframing architecture. A blurred figure to the right of the shot indicates how slow this shot’s exposure must be, which implies that this woman must be so poignantly immobilised she is oblivious to the camera. A camera – both tactfully remote but also insistently fascinated with her – that has become the unrequited gaze of her absent companion. It’s so achingly beautiful and magnificently engineered it’s hard to believe this is for real. Not a set up, not an act, not a ploy on her part to be in the picture. And it’s an enchantingly deceptive vision of the world: a world that disavows its own photogenic allure, and yet poses for us everywhere we look. ¦

Matthew Sleeth’s exhibition titled Mixed Tape will be up at Sophie Gannon Gallery, Melbourne from 7 August to 1 September 2007.

Until his death an anonymous craftsman Mike Disfarmer (1884-1959) Studio Photography

Between 1915 and 1959, American studio photographer Mike Disfarmer (1884-1959) made portraits of the residents of Heber Springs, a small town in rural Arkansas.

Only after his death did his work become known internationally and regarded as a typical example of classic American portrait photography. Foam is staging a major retrospective, with 182 vintage photographs, including a number of 8 x 10 inch prints that have never been exhibited before.

Disfarmer started life as Mike Meyer, one of seven children born to a family of German immigrants. In 1914 he and his mother arrived in Heber Springs. Along with George Penrose he ran a photographic studio for a while, called Penrose and Meyer. Their portraits were typified by the poses and props that were usual for photo studios of the time: arm in arm, or leaning on a small table placed on an oriental carpet against a background of romantically painted cloudscapes. This changed not long after Disfarmer set up his own studio in the main street of Heber Springs. The atmospheric settings were replaced by a black backdrop, or a white backdrop with a vertical black stripe. This gives his portraits a less nostalgic, more contemporary feel.

Disfarmer’s clients were a cross-section of the population of Heber Springs: farmers in overalls and housewives dressed up for the occasion to soldiers in uniform, high-school football players and children in their Sunday best. He documented women whose husbands had been sent to the front in the First or Second World War, and he photographed the farming community during the Great Depression and in the more optimistic 1950s.

Mike Disfarmer, Seated man (Daulton Hartsfield). Vintage gelatin silver print, ca. 1940. Courtesy Edwynn Houk Gallery, New York, and the collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg.

Disfarmer’s way of working was straightforward. He positioned his models directly in front of the camera, against a simple background, and had them look right into the lens. The effect is a focus on the individual without any distraction from the surroundings or props. At fifty cents for three, the photos ended up in postcard format in family albums and living rooms.

Not until 1977, eighteen years after Disfarmer’s death, did his work attract the attention of the world of photography and art. That year the ICP in New York organized an exhibition of enlargements made from the original glass negatives, which had been kept throughout the intervening period by the former mayor of Heber Springs. After an extensive project in Heber Springs, the vintage prints were brought together in early 2000 in the collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg, and at the Edwynn Houk Gallery. Since then the work has become part of the collections of the Arkansas Art Center, the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the International Center of Photography in New York.

The exhibition Disfarmer – The Vintage Prints is part of a series of exhibitions about photo studios that Foam has presented in recent years, including Portraits from Isfahan, Fotogalatasaray and Miryam Sahinyan’s Photo Studio. This reflects a growing interest over the past twenty years in vernacular photography and in its value both as social history and as art.

All prints are courtesy of the Edwynn Houk Gallery, New York, or the private collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg.

From a Studio in Arkansas, a Portrait of America
By PHILIP GEFTERAUG. 22, 2005

Dead for half a century, Mike Disfarmer, the eccentric portrait photographer from Heber Springs, Ark., has drawn modest yet respectful attention in recent decades. From the 1920's to the 50's, he photographed a steady stream of townspeople in his Main Street studio in an American Gothic style of portraiture that was singularly his own.

Now, a trove of recently discovered vintage prints is generating renewed interest in his work. In a hush-hush entrepreneurial race to the finish, two photography collectors from New York have separately bought up about 3,400 vintage prints stashed away in the attics and basements of relatives of Disfarmer's subjects.

The only prints of his work previously known to exist were made posthumously from about 3,000 glass negatives found in his studio when he died in 1959.

The New York collectors, Steven Kasher and Michael Mattis, began acquiring the vintage prints last year after a young couple from Heber Springs who had relocated to Chicago offered Mr. Mattis 50 family pictures taken by Disfarmer. Word of the sale traveled back to Heber Springs, where residents realized that their family pictures might also be of value. Several people tracked Mr. Mattis down to offer their pictures for sale. That's when he saw gold - well, silver (as in silver prints) in them there hills.

Around the same time, other Heber Springs residents began contacting Mr. Kasher, a dealer who once worked for Howard Greenberg Gallery, which sells prints from Disfarmer's glass negatives. That piqued Mr. Kasher's interest in buying up as many vintage prints as he could find.

What makes these postcard-size prints of unknown people so valuable is their authenticity. A vintage print, one made by a photographer around the time the picture was taken, will be closer to the way the photographer wanted it to look. Because the photographic paper dates from when the picture was taken, the print is a genuine artifact of its era. Disfarmer's clients often ordered several copies of their pictures, so Mr. Mattis and Mr. Kasher realized that a single image might be in the possession of more than one friend or relative.

Now, fresh from the foothills of the Ozarks, several hundred of these newly discovered portraits are the subject of simultaneous exhibitions opening on Sept. 8 in Manhattan, at the Edwynn Houk Gallery on the Upper East Side and at the new Steven Kasher Gallery in Chelsea. Two books are being published in conjunction with the shows.

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"It's always a good way to make a big statement, and it's definitely a marketing strategy," Mr. Kasher said of the exhibitions and books.

Mr. Houk is less enthusiastic about the simultaneous timing of the shows.

"It's not particularly a good thing," he said. "In fact, it would be better to do it sequentially." But Mr. Kasher had decided to time his Disfarmer show with the opening of his new gallery in Chelsea, so the two dealers agreed to work together.

Mr. Kasher is pricing his Disfarmer prints from $10,000 to $30,000. Mr. Houk's will range from $7,500 to $24,000.

Mr. Kasher said he had bought 400 prints over all, and Mr. Mattis said he had acquired 3,000, selling about 1,000 of those to Mr. Houk.

Mr. Kasher would not say what he had paid over all for his photographs. Mr. Mattis would only say that he had invested a seven-figure sum in the process of acquiring his vintage prints.

"Michael and I were both doing the same thing at the same time," Mr. Kasher said. "Sometimes we were competing. Sometimes we were cooperating more, just like any two collectors who were interested in the same subject." He added that they even traded prints.

In his quest for the vintage work, Mr. Mattis mounted a show of Disfarmer prints from the glass negatives at the Cleburne County Historical Society in Heber Springs and put advertisements in the local paper seeking vintage Disfarmer prints.

Mr. Mattis hired half a dozen residents to go door to door, because he said he thought they would be more likely than New Yorkers to gain people's trust when asking about their family photos. He found some scouts by searching for the Heber Springs ZIP codes on eBay, others by word of mouth.

He trained his scouts to identify good prints from bad. "There is image quality and there is print quality," he explained, saying he preferred subjects wearing overalls instead of suits, and with serious expression rather than smiles. If the print was yellow, creased, flushed out in the highlights, or had a flat tonal range, he wasn't interested. Eventually, he said, his representatives in Heber Springs were giving him "the same kind of condition report you'd get from Sotheby's or Christie's."

Representatives scanned the Disfarmer prints they gathered from residents, and e-mailed them as digital images to Mr. Mattis.

Mike Disfarmer, formerly Mike Meyer, was viewed as a maverick. To drive home his individuality, he adopted a contrarian surname. (In German "Meier" means dairy farmer.) Farmland surrounds Heber Springs and farmers make up the majority of the local population.

As a bachelor, loner, atheist and the only person in town to practice studio photography, Disfarmer was in fact very different from most people there. Notice of his name change appeared in the local paper under a headline, "Truth Is Stranger than Fiction," which included Disfarmer's account of his origins - something about being delivered on his parents' doorstep by the winds of a tornado.

According to an essay by the writer Richard B. Woodward in "Disfarmer: The Vintage Prints" (Powerhouse Books), published for the show at Edwynn Houk, the photographer "paid far more attention to people as artistic problems to solve, sometimes taking as long as an hour to make a portrait, than as individuals with lives outside the studio."

Mr. Woodward cites one subject, Charlotte Lacey, photographed by Disfarmer in her school band uniform during the early 1940's. Disfarmer wasn't friendly or talkative, she recalled. The studio, she said, was "this big empty room" with "damp walls," and he was "very spooky and scary" when he vanished under the camera cloth for minutes at a time.

"There wasn't much of a greeting when you walked in, I'll tell you that," another subject, Tom Olstead, is quoted as saying. "Instead of telling you to smile, he just took the picture. No cheese or anything."

In a telephone interview last week, Sandra S. Phillips, curator of photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, said of Disfarmer's images: "He's not an expansive voice, but he's carved out a very small field for himself, which is studio portrait photography of ordinary people. He's great at what he does when he does it well."

His images, with their stripped-down, no-nonsense quality, focus directly on the individual as specimen. In that era, of course, self-consciousness was less about how to play to the camera than about the shyness of posing in front of it. With his outsider's eye, Disfarmer captured that awkwardness, and provided a record of people from a particular time and in place in America.

Tot zijn dood een anonieme ambachtsman
Rianne van Dijck
12 april 2016

Vanaf links: De dagvangst, 1940;Ara Lou Henderson, co-aanvoerder basketball, 1940;Zittende man (Daulton Hartsfield), ca. 1940;Louie en Alma Ramer met hun dochters Lucille Avonell en Faye, 1945.
Disfarmer, The Vintage Prints

T/m 5/6 in Foam Amsterdam. Inl: foam.org

‘Soms is de werkelijkheid nog vreemder dan fictie.” Met die zin opende op donderdag 13 april 1939 de lokale krant van Heber Springs (Arkansas, VS) een berichtje over een van haar inwoners. De fotograaf Mike Meijer, 59 jaar en eigenaar van de Meijer Studio, wilde niet langer zo heten. Hij beweerde dat hij op driejarige leeftijd in een tornado naar het gezin Meijer was geblazen en dat hij, nu zijn vermeende ouders waren overleden en hij in onmin leefde met de familie, zijn naam wilde veranderen in Mike Disfarmer. ‘Een hoogst ongebruikelijk verzoek’, zo meende de rechter, die desondanks besloot het te honoreren.

Het is een van de wonderbaarlijke verhalen over Mike Disfarmer (1884-1959), de studiofotograaf die tussen 1915 en 1959 de inwoners fotografeerde van het plattelandsdorp Heber Springs: boeren in overalls, vrouwen in een bloemetjesjurk, soldaten voordat ze naar het front vertrokken. Net als de Amerikaanse fotografen Dorothea Lang en Walker Evans fotografeerde hij de boerenbevolking gedurende de Great Depression van de jaren dertig, met dat verschil dat Lang en Evans erop uit trokken, terwijl het bij Disfarmer ging om buren, kennissen, vrienden en familie. Terwijl zij te boek stonden als beroemde fotografen, zou Disfarmer tot zijn dood een anonieme ambachtsman zijn, die in stilte en onopvallend zijn werk deed: voor 50 cent maakte hij voor zijn klant drie foto’s, formaat postkaart.

In Foam zijn nu voor het eerst (op een kleine expositie in een New Yorkse galerie in 2005 na) zijn vintageprints te zien. De originele afdrukken dus, zoals Disfarmer ze in die tijd, op die plaats in zijn donkere kamer maakte. Niet dat zijn werk niet al eerder ontdekt werd: vijftien jaar na zijn dood, in de jaren 70, werden er tentoonstellingen van zijn werk gehouden – daarbij en sindsdien ging het echter altijd om uitvergrotingen en uitsnedes, gemaakt op basis van de originele glasnegatieven die al die tijd bewaard waren door de voormalige burgemeester van Heber Springs. De intieme kwaliteit die Disfarmer in zijn portretten had weten te leggen, werd al snel herkend en de foto’s werden verzameld en opgenomen in belangrijke collecties van onder andere het MoMa en het International Center of Photography in New York. Hij werd vergeleken met Diane Arbus, Irving Penn en August Sander en voor Richard Avedon zouden zijn rurale beelden de inspiratie zijn voor zijn beroemde serie In the American West.

De originele foto’s die nu in Foam te zien zijn, hebben niet de allure die bovenstaande ronkerigheid doet vermoeden. Het zijn geen perfecte afdrukken. Ze hebben bij mensen aan de muur gehangen of werden in familiealbums geplakt, en zijn daardoor soms beschadigd en verkleurd. En ze zijn een stuk kleiner dan de postuum geprinte versies. Het houdt in dat je soms bijna met je neus op de foto moet gaan staan om goed te kunnen zien. Disfarmer fotografeerde zo dicht op de huid, in zo’n heldere en eenduidige beeldtaal, dat je als kijker zo extra het gevoel krijgt even heel dichtbij deze echtparen, vriendengroepen en ouders met kinderen uit de vorige eeuw te zijn. De man die het liefst niks meer met zijn eigen afkomst te maken had, was een groot artiest in het vastleggen van de families van anderen.