Bizarre Capa statue

October 10, 2015 ~ gregneville1 ~ Leave a comment

Hungarian artist Hervé Loránth Ervin has created a bizarre sculpture based on Robert Capa’s photograph of the falling soldier. The famous image was taken during the Spanish Civil War and supposedly shows a Loyalist soldier felled by a sniper’s bullet. It was taken in 1936.

Robert Capa was born in Budapest in 1913 and the sculpture is displayed in a park there as part of the Budapest Art Market. Mercifully it will come down later in the year.

Despite its clumsiness as a reproduction of the photograph, it is still an interesting example of what I call Photography by Other Means. This is where photography is engaged through means other than photography itself, in this case through sculpture.

The essence of Capa’s photograph, an instantaneous capture of a fleeting moment in time is usually presented in a two-dimensional sheet of silvered paper, a darkroom print. Here it has morphed into a 7.5 metre tall, four ton, three-dimensional object. Without Capa’s photograph the statue would not exist – it can only be understood in reference to the photograph, so in a sense it is a photograph, but one that was not achieved using photography.

On another level it can be viewed as a Surrealist sculpture, an absurd reversal of the intrinsic qualities of a photograph. Capa’s image was taken in a fraction of a second but the sculpture took much longer to craft. The photograph shows the soldier shot in Spain but the sculpture has him falling in Hungary. The microscopic particles of silver that make up the Spanish soldier weigh almost nothing, but the Hungarian soldiers weighs tons. It is a series of paradoxes that might interest Rene Magritte.

All this ignores the bad taste of exploiting a man’s death in this way, but that’s another matter.

The sculptor Hervé Loránth Ervin

The Iwo Jima photograph 3

November 25, 2010October 25, 2014 ~ gregneville1 ~ Leave a comment

The 5×4 inch sheet of film that photographer Joe Rosenthal exposed on Mount Suribachi during World War II was transformed in 1954 into a 60 foot high bronze sculpture. This is a unique metamorphosis: from film to bronze, from 2D to 3D, from small to large.

The sculptor of the Iwo Jima monument was Felix de Weldon, a Vienna-born artist who achieved fame as a sculptor in Britain before arriving in the US. He can be seen in these photographs of the making of the Marine Corps monument. These strange images record his transformation of the photograph into a giant sculpture.

De Weldon refines the soldier’s boots that have been attached to the steel framework.

Each figure was designed without clothing in order to duplicate the muscle tone of the stretched and straining bodies.

De Weldon views the figures of Harlan Block and Rene Gagnon.

De Weldon refines the figure of John Bradley.

Bronze figure of Harlan Block being moved to the base of the memorial in Arlington.

The final result is the Iwo Jima memorial at the Arlington National Cemetry, opened in 1954.

See my other posts on this: Iwa Jima photograph 1 and Iwa Jima photograph 2,

The Iwo Jima photograph 2

October 1, 2010October 25, 2014 ~ gregneville1 ~ 2 Comments

The Iwo Jima photograph is unique in the history of photography for its amazing transformation into other art forms. This simple two dimensional black & white print metamorphosed into a 3D clay model, then into a 32 foot foot high bronze sculpture. It was transformed from a photograph into an engraving on a postage stamp. And its stillness was brought to animate life in two Hollywood movies. Surely no other single photograph has changed form so much, spread so widely, and made so much money? Here is a timeline of its various afterlives.

February 1945: Upon seeing the photograph for the first time, sculptor Felix de Weldon transforms it into a clay model.

April 1945: De Weldon (centre) is photographed with his model, alongside the photographer Joe Rosenthal (right), and President Truman.

July 1945: A US postage stamp showing the Rosenthal photograph is released. 137,000 stamps are issued.

Spring 1945: De Weldon makes a series of life size sculptures which are paraded around the US, in a campaign that helped to raise over $20 billion for the war effort. The last surviving model is now on display on the USS Intrepid in New York harbour.

1945: Joe Rosenthal wins the Pulitzer Prize for Photography.

December 1949: The Sands of Iwo Jima premieres, a movie starring John Wayne, about the invasion of the island of Iwo Jima.

It includes a reenactment of the raising of the flag. The movie is a hit.

1951: De Weldon is commissioned to build a memorial to the Marine Corps. He begins work on converting the smaller sculpture into a 32 foot high monument.

November 1954: The massive bronze sculpture, 78 foot high on its pedestal and weighing 100 tons, is dedicated by President Eisenhower at Arlington National Cemetry, in front of a large crowd.

1954 to today: Numerous souvenir models of the statue are sold, as well as various other kinds of merchandise.

2006: Clint Eastwood’s film Flags of our Fathers is released, covering many of the events of 1945 relating to Iwo Jima and the mythical photograph.

2006: The film features a detailed reconstruction of the raising of the flag, and shows Sgt. Genaust and Joe Rosenthal photographing the event.

See my other posts on this subject: Iwa Jima photograph 1 and Iwa Jima photograph 3.

Grail and Wail

September 11, 2010February 9, 2011 ~ gregneville1 ~ Leave a comment

Susan Fereday, Grail

Sherry glasses hanging by thread. A spotlight casts their shadows onto the wall behind. Each glass casts a shadow of its form, like a negative. Each shadow sparkles from within: the refracted light from the lens of the glass stem. These are the elements of Susan Fereday‘s Grail, part of her PhD exhibition, Light Out of Darkness, at Monash University in late 2009.

The exhibition explored two of the foundation artefacts of photography, Joseph Niepce’s Point de Vue de Gras of 1826 and Henry Fox Talbot’s Latticed Window of 1835. These were probably the first photographs ever made, photo-chemical experiments that initiated the revolutionary new medium. They are mythical objects.

Henry Fox Talbot, negative and positive of Latticed Window, 1835

Fereday’s approach is what I call “photography by other means”, creating photographs which are not photographs, making images or objects that are about photography, but are not made by photography. Gerhard Richter is someone to look at in this regard, making paintings that investigate the condition of photography. Fereday’s work has often been about de-mythologizing (there’s a 1980s word) photography, deconstructing its supposed transparency and truth-telling capacity. In a 2006 conference paper, (I am) the Ghost in the Image: Photograph as Mirror, Window, Veil, she responded to John Szarkowski’s Mirrors and Windows thesis by proposing that photography should be considered, metaphorically, as a veil: “…what appears in the photographic image is a ghostly trace. The photographic surface is implicitly a Veil, a screen for the real, at once covering, and calling attention to – the absence of the Subject.”

In Grail, the pattern of Talbot’s window is suggested in the arrangement of sherry glasses, an emblem of the Victorian social sensibilities which he embodied. Photography is founded on the transparent medium of glass in the lens which lets light into the camera and focuses it on the film. It is a sort of window. At the back of a camera, the image is composed on another piece of glass, the viewfinder – another sort of window. Thus the notions of windows and transparency are the essence of photography. But a window is also a barrier, and it is a framing device, and it has its own materiality. And so, by analogy, is photography itself: a medium that promises transparency (“the camera never lies”) but brings its own kinds of deceits and obfuscations.

Talbot’s invention is founded on a paradox. When his camera captured light it turned it into darkness. The silver nitrate in his film blackened upon exposure to light: day became night, white became black – it is a negative of reality. The process has to be repeated to turn the world back again and make it positive. There is a Manichean element to photography that troubled some god-fearing people in the early years. Fereday’s sherry glasses enact this light-in-darkness scenario, casting shadows of their form but focussing highlights within them.

The title of the exhibition refers to the search for Christ’s cup, suggested by the form of the sherry glass. The clarity, purity and transparancy of glass is the metaphorical grail, the impossible, unattainable quest for the same qualities in photography. The slowly turning glasses cast moving images, the lights sparkle and the forms change. “The images they produce are unstable and shifting, as impermanent as they are fascinating. Photography is an elusive as well as illusive medium, latent with meaning, leaking code.”

Susan Fereday, Grail (detail)

Fereday’s Wail, which accompanied Grail, is a screen of small paper balls, hanging in a pattern that also resembles Talbot’s Latticed Window. The screen is lit by a spotlight which projects its shadow onto the wall behind. This time the objects are opaque, the pattern of the window can be made out in the dyed paper but the shadow behind is just rows of dots, like code. The image of the window is the negative version, where the clear glass and sky is represented in solid black. The paper balls are doubly opaque because they are the shredded remnants of Fereday’s client notes, gathered in her work as a counsellor. They presumably contain the records of shared secrets, but give nothing away even under the spotlight.

.Susan Fereday, Wail

Wail’s opacity answers Grail’s transparency, but both use Talbot’s momentous photograph to say something about his invention. One work points to the faulty notion of its semantic clarity, the other to its obscurity. “Against photography’s identity as a medium of instantaneity, precision and stability, I argue that photography has a powerful capacity to encode multiple, latent, and occult meanings.”