Bushchime

The 31-page dossier detailing a historical rape allegation against Christian Porter has been released publicly for the first time.

Beached, Dan Attoe

The travel of the Coalition's and Labor's leaders during the first week of the federal election campaign shows the electorates the major parties expect will determine who forms government.

African artist Laetitia Ky, 22, transforms her hair into fantastic sculptures as a hirsute form of socially-conscious art and, sometimes, just for fun.

From CNN:

In the Ivory Coast of her childhood, "the norm was to straighten your hair. So when I found the natural movement, I was fascinated. That's when my hair became important for me," she said.

Today Ky wears long extensions, adjusting their length depending on the design she wants to create. She sculpts by herself, using little more than wire, wool, a needle and thread. Ky never knows how much time she'll need to complete a project: so far, she said, a single piece has taken anywhere from 20 minutes to up to three hours...

Underlying it all, though, is a desire to promote a vision of African beauty grounded in pre-colonial aesthetic traditions; a commitment to body-positivity; and a well-defined feminist politics.

"Sexism exists everywhere, but in Ivory Coast there's still an attitude that women aren't supposed to be ambitious. My parents divorced when I was young, and my mom did everything on her own. So, it was hard for me to accept, later on, when I started hearing that women belong in the kitchen. I think it's really important to spread a message of equality," Ky said.

Laetitia Ky on Instagram (via Weird Universe)

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What a beautiful day ! I tried to catch this little guy but it not easy !!! #butterfly #picture #camera #art

A post shared by KY (@laetitiaky) on Jun 4, 2018 at 5:49am PDT

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Against gun and violence use love and art ! cause art denounces, educates, and can make people smile, I am convinced that artists can change the world ! Hummm but im a cute james bond girl huh #melanin #blackart #love #artisticgun #gun

A post shared by KY (@laetitiaky) on Oct 20, 2017 at 1:24pm PDT

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I am addicted to art and you? Tell a positive or funny element you are addicted to !!! More seriously if you are reading me and you have an addiction that affects you negatively that you want to erase, (alcohol, drugs, medicine, person, object), know that I am with you and I believe in you. I hope the universe will give you the strength to do that. I know its not easy but You are stronger and braver than you imagine. I wish you to attach only to things that will improve your life and make you happy. If you have one of your loved ones in this situation, I wish him the same and to you to have the strength and patience to help him. Everything will be alright. #braids #braidart #cigarette #addiction

A post shared by KY (@laetitiaky) on Sep 3, 2018 at 2:31pm PDT

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When your fav song comeee, everything around you become a microphone !!!! #bbhmm by the one and only ! QUEEN @badgalriri Tag her please #rihanna #badgalriri #microphone #braids #art

A post shared by KY (@laetitiaky) on Nov 5, 2018 at 12:17pm PST

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#bodypositivity #bodypositive #selflove #selfcare #loveyourself Story by @maja_diana I have a story for body positivity too. The thing is, I never struggled with my body, I always liked it. What I never liked were the comments. In relation to my body I have big boobs, wich is not the problem even if I'm not always happy with them. People might think, I should be and even if I am very Ok. with that the most time, it's not always funny. When i was younger (about 14), many people, especially women called me a whore, for just having them. I often got told that I am too slutty and my shirts are too sexy. The thing is, i never wore anything the others don't, just normal shirts, it just looked diffrent on me. People won't belive how many adult (in my case women) assault young teenager girls. When you are 14 and haven't even thought about sex, being a "whore" really confuses. In the other case for the men you're also just boobs, nothing else. It's the only thing they can see. I don't dress nondescript, I don't want to. I can't see why I should dress very careful just because an anybody feels attacked by my body. I wear what I like, and I do what I like, not to impress any men, not to be "sexy" for society. I do it just for me because I want to.

A post shared by KY (@laetitiaky) on Jan 19, 2018 at 6:33pm PST

The Three Stooges in and out of character, 1930s.

Still life, Hans Op de Beeck

Exhibition dates: 1st March – 20th May 2018

Victorian Giants: The Birth of Art Photography is curated by Phillip Prodger PhD, Head of Photographs at the National Portrait Gallery, London

 

 

 

Poster for the catalogue for the exhibition Victorian Giants: The Birth of Art Photography at the National Portrait Gallery, London

 

 

Oh Clementina! the light, the stars!

There is enough text in the posting for me not to really have to say anything. It’s all there…

Art, influence, technology;
Classical, formal, diaristic;
Intimacy, mystery, atmospheric;
Motherhood, sexuality, feminist identity, nascent womanhood;
‘Profil perdu’ (French, ‘lost profile’, which refers to a portrait in which the profile cannot be seen), mirror, loss, duplication and replication, illusion, and fetish

… all woven into a performative, psychological, expressive and creative (self) portraiture.

The real stars of the show are most definitely the women… the avant-garde artists of their era.

Marcus

.
Many thankx to the National Portrait Gallery, London for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

 

This major exhibition is the first to examine the relationship between four ground-breaking Victorian artists: Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-79), Lewis Carroll (1832-98), Lady Clementina Hawarden (1822-65) and Oscar Rejlander (1813-75). Drawn from public and private collections internationally, the exhibition features some of the most breath-taking images in photographic history. Influenced by historical painting and frequently associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, the four artists formed a bridge between the art of the past and the art of the future, standing as true giants in Victorian photography.

 

 

“The women are the real stars of this exhibition. Their pictures are bolder and bigger, more imaginative and more daring. They portray people with a raw reality that is not just the result of the collodion method but a powerful, visionary insight.

Hawarden’s pictures of Victorian women have an intimacy that transcends time and a mystery that asserts the autonomy of her subjects. They are feminist, and gothic too, in their eerie atmosphere. In an 1863-4 picture called ‘Photographic Study’, she poses a young woman by a mirror so that we see her twice. The “real” woman is in brooding profile while her reflection is a shadowy full-face image. The effect is spookily absorbing as we become witnesses to her melancholic introspection.

Hawarden’s ultra-sharp yet shadow-rich prints create unresolved stories featuring women free to show who they really are. None of them look happy. All are curiously defiant – these pictures anticipate those of the 1970s US artist Francesca Woodman. As portraits of women created by women, these Victorian photographers’ subversive creations have almost no precedents.

Not that Cameron looked to the handful of earlier women artists as models. She was trying to be a new Rembrandt: her portraits consciously compete with the masterpieces of the baroque age. While the painted portraits of male Victorian artists such as John Everett Millais and George Frederic Watts are period pieces at best, her great 1866 photograph Mountain Nymph, Sweet Liberty (Mrs Keene) with its subtle mix of resolution and suggestiveness brings us face to face with someone whose eyes hold ours and whose mind is as real to us as her tangled hair. There is a sensitivity to the magic of being human in Cameron’s portraits that makes her the greatest British artist of her time. This exhibition puts her in a brilliantly delineated context of experiment and imagination, the first avant-garde artist of the camera.”

.
Extract from Jonathan Jones. “Victorian Giants: the Birth of Art Photography review – the triumph of the female gaze,” on The Guardian website Friday 2 March 2018

 

 

 

 

Clementina Hawarden

Her life cruelly cut short by pneumonia at the age of forty-two, Clementina Maude, Viscountess Hawarden produced some 800 photographs in her lifetime, nearly all are of her eight children posed in poignant tableaux. She began to photograph on her family’s estate, outside Tipperary, around 1857, later moving to Princes Gardens, London, near Hyde Park. Frequently compared to Cameron, she was much admired by Carroll, and on her death, Rejlander wrote her obituary. (Wall text)

.
“In that vein, the greatest discovery in the exhibition is a thrillingly strange image by Hawarden, to my mind always the most intriguing photographer of the four. Hawarden was a Scottish countess who had ten children. She photographed all of her daughters repeatedly, and there were so many of them it’s hard to keep track. Her photographs, which are often classical in their formal qualities, nevertheless anticipate the diaristic work of the 20th century photographers Sally Mann and Nan Goldin. They often contain more than one girl, and often feature mirrors, so that everything is about multiplication or reflection – an effect that might also be seen as a form of self-portraiture in the mother of so many.” (Gaby Wood)

.
Her photographic years were brief but prolific. Hawarden produced over eight hundred photographs between 1857 and her sudden death in 1864. During this time she gave birth to three of her eight children. Lady Hawarden’s photographic focus remained on her children. There is only one photograph believed to feature the Viscountess Hawarden, yet it could also be a portrait of her sister Anne Bontine.

A collection of 775 portraits were donated to the Victoria and Albert Museum, London in 1939 by Hawarden’s granddaughter, Clementina Tottenham. The photographs were torn, or cut, from family albums for reasons that are still unclear. This accounts for the torn or trimmed corners which are now considered a hallmark of Hawarden’s work.

Carol Mavor writes extensively about the place of Hawarden’s work in the history of Victorian photography as well as contemporary interpretations of the work. She states, “Hawarden’s pictures raise significant issues of gender, motherhood, and sexuality as they relate to photography’s inherent attachments to loss, duplication and replication, illusion, fetish.” (Mavor, Carol (1999). Becoming: the photographs of Clementina, Viscountess Hawarden (1st ed.). Durham, NC: Duke University Press.) (Text from the Wikipedia website)

 

 

Clementina Hawarden (1822-65)
Photographic Study, 5 Princes Gardens (Clementina Maude)
1863-1864
from The Photographic Study Series by Clementina, Lady Hawarden
Albumen silver print from glass negative
Given by Lady Clementina Tottenham
© Victoria and Albert Museum, London

 

 

“Although her work has often been linked to that of Julia Margaret Cameron, the best known woman photographer of the Victorian epoch, Clementina Hawarden struck out into areas and depicted moods unknown to the art photographers of her age.” ~ Graham Ovenden 1974

 

This remarkable photograph shows a woman gazing into a mirror, but not at her own reflection. Instead, the picture was carefully arranged so that the woman’s face is seen in profile, while only her reflection looks back out of the mirror. Hawarden excelled at producing ambiguous narrative photographs such as this one, suggesting the rich inner life of the subject, without telling a clear story. The heroes of her pictures are nearly always women, who seem all but trapped in domestic interiors. (Wall text)

 

 

Clementina Hawarden (1822-65)
Photographic Study (Clementina Maude)
early 1860s
Albumen print from wet collodion negative
20.1 x 14.4 cm (7 15/16 x 5 11/16 in.)
Gilman Collection, Purchase, Harriette and Noel Levine Gift, 2005
© Metropolitan Museum of Art

 

 

Clementina, Lady Hawarden, is a poetic, if elusive, presence among nineteenth-century photographers. As a devoted mother, her life revolved around her eight children. She took up photography in 1857; using her daughters as models, she created a body of work remarkable for its technical brilliance and its original depiction of nascent womanhood. Lady Hawarden showed her work in the 1863 and 1864 exhibitions of the Photographic Society. With the exception of a few rare examples, her photographs remained in the possession of her family until 1939, when the more than eight hundred images were donated to the Victoria and Albert Museum. Only recently have they been the objects of research, publication, and exhibition.

Clementina Maude, her mother’s preferred model, is seen here in a reflective pose against a star-studded wall. The casual placement of the shawl on the table and the girl’s loose hair contribute to the feeling of intimacy. In the airy room time seems to be suspended. The sensuous curves of the table legs, the soft weight of the crushed velvet, and the crispness of the starry wallpaper are enhanced by the skilful handling of the collodion technique. The composition, devoid of Victorian clutter, brings together light, shadow, and compositional elements in a spare and appealing interplay. In contrast to the prevailing fashion of giving literary or sentimental titles to portraits of young women, Lady Hawarden titled her works simply “Photographic Study.”

Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website

 

 

Clementina Hawarden (1822-65)
Photographic Study (Clementina and Isabella Grace Maude)
1863-64
Albumen print from wet collodion negative
© Victoria and Albert Museum, London

 

 

Hawarden frequently dressed up her sitters and arranged them in enigmatic narratives like this one. Although not derived from any known painting, the manner of dress, including the cloak and tricorn hat of the male figure (actually one of Hawarden’s daughters dressed up), suggest an eighteenth century reference. (Wall text)

 

 

Clementina Hawarden (1822-65)
Photographic Study (Florence Elizabeth and Clementina Maude)
1863-4
Albumen print from wet collodion negative
© Victoria and Albert Museum, London

 

 

Working from upstairs rooms at 5 Princes Gardens, near to the South Kensington Museum (where both she and Julia Margaret Cameron were frequent visitors), Hawarden used light streaming from large floor to ceiling windows to illuminate her pictures. Her subjects were usually her children, especially her daughters Clementina, Florence, and Isabella Grace, whom she posed in domestic tableaux.

Both Carroll and Rejlander knew and admired Hawarden. On at least one occasion, Rejlander photographed her daughter Isabella Grace; after Hawarden’s death, he also photographed her youngest daughter, Antonia. (Wall text)

 

 

Clementina Hawarden (1822-65)
Hawarden Isabella Grace and Clementina Maude, 5 Princes Gardens
c. 1863-4
Albumen print from wet collodion negative
Given by Lady Clementina Tottenham
© Victoria and Albert Museum, London

 

 

Virginia Dodier thinks that this photograph belongs to an ‘Orientalist’ series. Here, Lady Hawarden gives her drawing room a tent-like atmosphere. Such scenes were popularised by the painter J. F. Lewis, and Roger Fenton exhibited his photographic ‘Nubian Series’ in 1859. Dodier writes that the idea of Orientalism allowed European artists to ‘evoke sensuality on the premise of presenting quasi-ethnographical information about the customs of the East’. The idea of the fancy dress or allegorical portrait stems from an earlier tradition in English art. They are found, for example, in the work of the painter Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-92). (Text from the Victoria and Albert Museum website)

 

 

Lady Clementina Hawarden: Themes & Style (extract)

With careful choice of props, clothing, mirrors, balcony, and posture, Hawarden produced exquisite studies of her adolescent daughters. The figures and dress are the main subject, carefully framed in the room, and often in front of the balcony. The city beyond often provides a blurred background.

The writer Carol Mavor in Becoming: The Photographs of Clementina, Viscountess Hawarden suggests that the often provocative poses of Hawarden’s daughters are significant. The Victorians were bothered by the idea of sexuality and adolescence, and in 1861 the Offences Against the Person Act raised the age of consent from 10 to 12. This was also the year in which Hawarden began to make this kind of photograph, though there is no evidence that she was deliberately exploring this controversial topic.

Hawarden liked to use natural light in her studio at her South Kensington home, in a way that was seen at the time as ‘daring’. She placed mirrors to reflect light and used them to explore the idea of ‘the double’, just as other photographers (and occasionally Hawarden herself) used a stereoscopic camera to produce twin prints.

From around 1862 Hawarden concentrated on photographing her daughters in costume tableaux, a popular subject at the time. Costumes from the dressing up box are combined with dresses at the height of fashion to produce beautiful and detailed studies that confound the contemporary with the make-believe.

Text from the Victoria and Albert Museum website

 

 

Clementina Hawarden (1822-65)
Photographic Study (Clementina and Florence Elizabeth Maude)
1859-61
Uncut stereo albumen print

 

 

Figure 60 and 61 of the catalogue for the exhibition Victorian Giants: The Birth of Art Photography at the National Portrait Gallery, London

 

 

Figure 112 and 113 of the catalogue for the exhibition Victorian Giants: The Birth of Art Photography at the National Portrait Gallery, London

 

 

Oscar Rejlander

According to his naturalisation papers, Rejlander was born in Stockholm on October 19, 1813. He was the son of Carl Gustaf Rejlander, a stonemason and Swedish Army Officer. During his youth, his family moved to the Swedish-speaking community in Rauma, Finland (then Russia). In the 1830s, he relocated to England, initially settling in Lincoln, England. In the 1850s he abandoned his original profession as a painter and portrait miniaturist, apparently after seeing how well a photograph captured the fold of a sleeve.

He set up as a portraitist in the industrial Midlands town of Wolverhampton, probably around 1846. In the early 1850s he learned the wet-collodion and waxed-paper processes at great speed with Nicholas Henneman in London, and then changed his business to that of a photography studio. He undertook genre work and portraiture. Rejlander also produced nude studies, mainly for use as studies by painters. There are no known erotic photographs of children by Rejlander. His so-called ‘Charlotte Baker’ photograph is a well-known forgery, produced by convicted child sex offender Graham Ovenden by Ovenden’s friend Howard Grey in the 1970s, rephotographed and printed to look antique by Ovenden. No person by the name Charlotte Baker ever seems to have posed for Rejlander.

Rejlander undertook many experiments to perfect his photography, including combination printing, which he did not invent; however, he created more elaborate and convincing composite photographs than any prior photographer. He had articles feature in the Wolverhampton Chronicle, on 15 November 1854 an article called “Improvement in Calotypes, by Mr. O.G. Rejlander, of Wolverhampton” it suggests that by 1854 he was experimenting with combination printing from several negatives. He was a friend of photographer Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (better known by the nom de plume Lewis Carroll), who collected Rejlander’s work and corresponded with him on technical matters. Rejlander later created one of the best known and most revealing portraits of Dodgson.

Rejlander participated in the Paris Exhibition of 1855. In 1856 he made his best-known allegorical work, The Two Ways of Life. This was a seamlessly montaged combination print made of thirty-two images (akin to the use of Photoshop today, but then far more difficult to achieve) in about six weeks. First exhibited at the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition of 1857, the work shows a man being lured to paths of vice or virtue by good and bad angels. The image’s partial nudity, which showed real women as they actually appeared and not the idealised forms then common in Victorian art, was deemed ‘indecent’ by some. Rejlander was also accused of using prostitutes as models, although Rejlander categorically denied this and no proof was ever offered. Reservations about the work subsided when Queen Victoria ordered a 10-guinea copy to give to Prince Albert. Victoria and Albert would go on to purchase three copies of the work, all of which are now lost. …

Rejlander moved his studio to Malden Road, London around 1862 and largely abandoned her early experiments with double exposure, photomontage, photographic manipulation and retouching. Instead, he became one of Britain’s leading portraitists, creating pictures with psychological charge. He became a leading expert in photographic techniques, lecturing and publishing widely, and sold work through bookshops and art dealers. He also found subject-matter in London, photographing homeless London street children to produce popular ‘social-protest’ pictures such as “Poor Joe,” also known as “Homeless”. …

Rejlander’s ideas and techniques were taken up by other photographers and this, to some extent, justifies labelling him as the father of art photography.

Text from the Wikipedia website

 

 

Oscar Rejlander (1813-75)
Charles Darwin
1871
Albumen print
© Moderna Museet, Stockholm

 

 

Starting in the late 1860s, Charles Darwin began collecting photographs for use in the research that would eventually become his book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872). Hoping to find authentic photographs, that captured emotional expressions as they actually occurred, he visited print shops and studios in London, and contacted several photographers hoping to commission new pictures. Few, if any, of the photographs he acquired met his ambitious expectations.

In April, 1871, Darwin wrote, ‘I am now rich in photographs, for I have found in London Rejlander, who for years has had a passion for photographing all sorts of chance expressions, exhibited on various occasions … instantaneously.’ Rejlander would go on to become the main contributor of photographs to Darwin’s book. (Wall text)

 

 

Oscar Rejlander (1813-75)
The Two Ways of Life
1856-7
Albumen print, made from approximately 32 separate negatives
Moderna Museet, Stockholm

 

 

One of the most famous pictures in photographic history, Rejlander’s Two Ways of Life caused a sensation when it was exhibited at the Manchester Art Treasures exhibition in 1857. To make it, Rejlander combined some thirty-two separate negatives (there were variations between printings, and it is not always clear where negatives begin and end). Some viewers were offended by the nudes, whose bodies appear frank and realistic compared to the ideal fantasies painters were expected to produce. Others objected to its ambition, since Rejlander seemed to be saying that photography could be used to produce pictures just as meaningful, and as artistically composed, as any painting.

To make Two Ways of Life, Rejlander had to arrange the various subjects within it at the right size to maintain visual perspective. This was a challenge, since enlargement and reduction of negatives was not yet possible in the darkroom. The only way he could change the size of something in the negative was to rephotograph it.

This is the finest known print of the photograph, which is also known in a reduced form. The photograph is a parable featuring Rejlander himself, who stands in the middle, listening to ‘good’ and ‘bad’ angels luring him to paths of vice and virtue. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert loved the picture and bought three copies, none of which survive. (Wall text)

 

 

Oscar Rejlander (1813-75)
The Evening Sun (Iphigenia)
c. 1860
© Gernsheim Collection, Harry Ransom Centre, The University of Texas at Austin

 

 

Oscar Rejlander (1813-75)
The Evening Sun (Iphigenia)
c. 1860
© Gernsheim Collection, Harry Ransom Centre, The University of Texas at Austin

 

 

Oscar Rejlander (1813-75)
The Evening Sun (Iphigenia) (detail)
c. 1860
© Gernsheim Collection, Harry Ransom Centre, The University of Texas at Austin

 

 

Iphigenia was a daughter of King Agamemnon who appears in legends about the Trojan War. When her father accidentally offended the goddess Artemis, he was forced to sacrifice Iphigenia to appease the goddess so that she would allow his ships to sail to Troy. She was tricked into going to the town of Aulis under the pretence that she would marry the heroic warrior Achilles. In some versions she was killed, while in others she was rescued by Artemis. (Wall text)

 

 

Oscar Rejlander (1813-75)
Ariadne
1857
Albumen print from a wet collodion negative

 

 

Oscar Rejlander (1813-75)
Nude female study
c. 1867
Albumen print
7 3/4 in. x 5 3/8 in. (196 mm x 138 mm) overall
Given by Stephan Loewentheil, 2017
© National Portrait Gallery, London

 

 

Rejlander produced a number of nude studies which he sold to painters for use as studies. He considered these pictures significant because they pointed up errors historically made by painters when depicting human anatomy. Although he was happy for painters to use photographs to improve their paintings, he also saw accuracy of depiction as one of the things that made photography special when compared to other art forms. (Wall text)

 

 

Oscar Rejlander (1813-75)
The Virgin in prayer (after Sassoferrato)
c. 1857
albumen print
6 7/8 in. x 5 7/8 in. (174 mm x 150 mm) overall
Purchased with help from the Art Fund, Jane and Michael Wilson and Stephen Barry, 2015
© National Portrait Gallery, London

 

 

This photograph is a based on the famous painting The Virgin in Prayer painted by the Italian Baroque painter Sassoferrato 1640-50, now in the collection of the National Gallery, London. The rise of public art spaces in Britain in the nineteenth century, including the National Gallery (1824), and the National Portrait Gallery (1856), provided inspiration for countless photographers. Rejlander was particularly enthusiastic about restaging famous paintings, often in order to demonstrate mistakes that painters had made in scale and perspective. The process was fun, and the results fuelled the debate about photography’s role among the arts. (Wall text)

 

 

Oscar Rejlander (1813-75)
The Virgin in prayer (after Sassoferrato)
c. 1857
Albumen print
7 3/4 in. x 5 3/4 in. (196 mm x 146 mm) overall
Given by Stephan Loewentheil, 2017
© National Portrait Gallery, London

 

 

Oscar Rejlander (1813-75)
Unknown young woman
1860-1866
Albumen print
7 3/8 in. x 5 1/4 in. (188 mm x 134 mm) overall
Purchased with help from the Art Fund, Jane and Michael Wilson and Stephen Barry, 2015
© National Portrait Gallery, London

 

 

Oscar Rejlander (1813-75)
Untitled (unknown sitter, possibly Rejlander’s wife, Mary)
c. 1863
Printed by Julia Margaret Cameron
Albumen print from wet collodion glass negative
Given by Mrs Margaret Southam, 1941
© Victoria and Albert Museum, London

 

 

Cameron invited Rejlander to the Isle of Wight in 1863. Before the visit, Rejlander provided her with some of his own negatives, so that she could practise printing. She experimented with some, decorating them with ferns. This picture, which descended through Cameron’s family, was once believed to have been made by her. However, it is now recognised as one of the pictures Cameron printed from a Rejlander negative. The subject is one who frequently appears in Rejlander’s work, and may even have been his wife, Mary. (Wall text)

 

 

Oscar Rejlander (1813-75)
Unknown young woman
1863-1866
Albumen print
8 1/8 in. x 5 7/8 in. (205 mm x 149 mm) overall
Purchased with help from the Art Fund, Jane and Michael Wilson and Stephen Barry, 2015
© National Portrait Gallery, London

 

 

Oscar Rejlander (1813-75)
‘Sleep’ (Mary Rejlander (née Bull))
c. 1855
Albumen print
6 1/8 in. x 6 5/8 in. (156 mm x 167 mm) overall
Purchased with help from the Art Fund, Jane and Michael Wilson and Stephen Barry, 2015
© National Portrait Gallery, London

 

 

Oscar Rejlander (1813-75)
Minnie Constable
1860-1866
Albumen print
7 1/2 in. x 5 3/4 in. (192 mm x 146 mm) overall
Purchased with help from the Art Fund, Jane and Michael Wilson and Stephen Barry, 2015
© National Portrait Gallery, London

 

 

Oscar Rejlander (1813-75)
‘Art must assist Photography’ (Putto as Allegory of Painting)
1856
Albumen print
4 3/4 in. x 3 5/8 in. (120 mm x 93 mm) overall
Purchased with help from the Art Fund, Jane and Michael Wilson and Stephen Barry, 2015
© National Portrait Gallery, London

 

 

Oscar Rejlander (1813-75)
Oscar Gustav Rejlander; Mary Rejlander (née Bull)
1860-1866
Albumen print
8 5/8 in. x 6 1/4 in. (219 mm x 158 mm) overall
Purchased with help from the Art Fund, Jane and Michael Wilson and Stephen Barry, 2015
© National Portrait Gallery, London

 

 

Oscar Rejlander (1813-75)
Unknown woman
1860-1866
Albumen print
8 in. x 5 3/4 in. (202 mm x 147 mm) overall
Purchased with help from the Art Fund, Jane and Michael Wilson and Stephen Barry, 2015
© National Portrait Gallery, London

 

 

Oscar Rejlander (1813-75)
‘A devotee’ (Unknown woman)
1860-1866
Albumen print
8 5/8 in. x 6 1/4 in. (219 mm x 158 mm) overall
Purchased with help from the Art Fund, Jane and Michael Wilson and Stephen Barry, 2015
© National Portrait Gallery, London

 

 

Oscar Rejlander (1813-75)
Purify my heart also known as The Little Sisters
c. 1862
Albumen print
5 in. x 4 1/8 in. (127 mm x 105 mm) overall
Given by Stephan Loewentheil, 2017
© National Portrait Gallery, London

 

 

This photograph shows two sisters side by side in profile, their hands clasped in prayer. One girl seems almost to be a mirror reflection of the other. Rejlander exhibited versions of this photograph with two different titles. Purify My Heart is a reference to the biblical passage James 4:8: ‘Draw nigh to God, and he will draw nigh to you. Cleanse your hands, ye sinners; and purify your hearts, ye double minded.’ Lewis Carroll admired this photograph and purchased a copy for his personal collection. (Wall text)

 

 

Oscar Rejlander (1813-75)
Unknown young woman
1863-1866
Albumen print
8 1/8 in. x 5 7/8 in. (205 mm x 149 mm) overall
Purchased with help from the Art Fund, Jane and Michael Wilson and Stephen Barry, 2015
© National Portrait Gallery, London

 

 

National Portrait Gallery
St Martin’s Place
London, WC2H 0HE

Opening hours:
Monday – Wednesday, Saturday – Sunday 10am – 6pm
Thursday – Friday 10am – 9pm

National Portrait Gallery website

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Donald Trump has made it clear he will nominate Peter Thiel to the Supreme Court if he wins the presidency, Thiel has told friends, according to a source close to the PayPal co-founder.

Trump “deeply loves Peter Thiel,” and people in the real estate mogul’s inner circle are talking about Thiel as a Supreme Court nominee, a separate source close to Trump told The Huffington Post. That source, who has not spoken to Trump directly about Thiel being nominated to the Court, cautioned that Trump’s offers often fail to materialize in real life.

It’s not clear whether Trump has indeed offered to nominate Thiel ― only that Thiel has said Trump would nominate him and that Trump’s team has discussed Thiel as a possible nominee. Both sources requested anonymity, given that Trump and Thiel have each demonstrated a willingness to seek revenge against parties they feel have wronged them. In Thiel’s case, he secretly financed lawsuits against Gawker.com with the intention of destroying the publication. He succeeded, and his role in the assault was only revealed in the final stages.

Thiel got rich building PayPal and went on to more success as a venture capitalist.

A conservative who occasionally affects the hamfisted libertarianism of people nerdy enough to read one long book when they are a child (but not nerdy enough for it to have been Anarchy, State and Utopia), Thiel complained about women getting the vote, believes that democracy and freedom are incompatible, thinks Lord of the Rings is a parable about economic freedom as the source of human happiness, yet finds taxpayers' money an excellent lining for his own pockets.

It's true, nonetheless! Who could be more fitting for a Trump court? They could even put it on a floating island.

(P.S. Trump isn't planning anything of the sort, he just cuts meaningless headnod deals all the time with his supplicants.)

Exhibition dates: 11th December 2015 – 24th April 2016

 

 

A monster posting of installation images of the exhibition Andy Warhol | Ai Weiwei at the National Gallery of Victoria, in chronological order. Thoughts to follow.

Marcus

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Many thankx to the National Gallery of Victoria for allowing me to take and publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

All photographs © Marcus Bunyan and the National Gallery of Victoria.

 

 

 

Marcus photographing the exhibition Andy Warhol | Ai Weiwei at the National Gallery of Victoria
Photo: Nick Henderson

 

 

Ai Weiwei talking to the media in front of his installation Forever Bicycles (2015)

 

 

Ai Weiwei (Chinese, 1957- )
Forever Bicycles (details)
2015
Stainless steel bicycle frames
Courtesy Ai Weiwei and Lisson Gallery, London

 

 

The assembly and replication of readymade bicycles in Ai’s Forever Bicycles series, ongoing since 2003, promotes an intensely spectacular effect. ‘Forever’ is a popular brand of mass-produced bicycles manufactured in China since the 1940s and desired by Ai as a child. Composed from almost 1500 bicycles, this installation suggests both the individual and the multitude, with the collective energy of social progress signalled in the assemblage and perspectival rush of multiple forms.

Forever Bicycles disconnects the bicycles from their everyday function – reconfiguring them as an immense labyrinth-like network. The multi-tiered installation also achieves an architectural presence, much like a traditional arch or gateway to the exhibition.

 

 

Marcus Bunyan
‘A star moves (Ai Weiwei)’
2015
© Marcus Bunyan

 

 

Installation view of the first room including Andy Warhol’s Dollar Sign (1981) and screen prints from his Campbell’s Soup II series (1969), with Ai Weiwei’s Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn (2015) made of LEGO-style plastic bricks at back left with, on the floor, his Coloured Vases (2015).

 

 

Installation view of the first room including Andy Warhol’s screen prints from his Campbell’s Soup II series (1969), with Ai Weiwei’s Coloured Vases (2015, detail)

 

 

Installation view of the first room including Andy Warhol’s Dollar Sign (1981), with Ai Weiwei’s Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn (2015) made of LEGO-style plastic bricks, with on the floor his Coloured Vases (2015, detail)

 

 

Ai Weiwei (Chinese, 1957- )
Coloured Vases (details)
2015
Synthetic polymer paint, Neolithic earthenware jars
Ai Weiwei Studio, Beijing

 

 

In Ai’s series of Coloured Vases, ongoing since 2006, Neolithic and Han dynasty urns are plunged into tubs of industrial paint to create an uneasy confrontation between tradition and modernity. In what might be considered an iconoclastic form of action painting, Ai gives ancient vessels a new glaze and painterly glow, appealing to new beginnings and cultural change through transformative acts of obliteration, renovation and renewal.

 

 

Marcus Bunyan
‘Irony (Ai Weiwei)’
2015
© Marcus Bunyan

 

 

Ai Weiwei (Chinese, 1957- )
Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn
2015
Plastic
Ai Weiwei Studio, Beijing

 

 

Ai Weiwei (Chinese, 1957- )
Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn (details)
2015
Plastic
Ai Weiwei Studio, Beijing

 

 

Ai’s photographic triptych Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn, 1995, which shows the artist holding, releasing and smashing a Han dynasty vase, is one of the artist’s most iconic works and demonstrates his critical engagement with China’s violent cultural tradition. Drawing attention to the desecration of cultural heritage, the artist’s performative action is presented matter-of-factly, with the viewer left to contemplate the event and what might be salvaged from the destruction. Ai has recreated the image here in children’s building blocks, in pixelated form, attesting to the distribution of images by digital technologies.

 

 

Ai Weiwei (Chinese, 1957- )
Neolithic Pottery with Coca-Cola Logo
2007
Metallic paint, earthenware jar
Collection of Larry Warsh, New York

 

 

Bringing together a readymade cultural artefact (after Marcel Duchamp) and pop-cultural imagery (after Andy Warhol), Ai’s painted Neolithic vase presents a rich albeit uneasy confrontation of elements. The Coca-Cola logo – emblem of American capitalism and brand identity – adorns an ancient, revered Chinese artefact. In branding a unique handcrafted object with a product of mass-consumption, Ai delivers a nuanced cultural comment, candidly invoking the conflicted contemporary identity of Chinese cultural heritage, socialist government and capitalist economics.

 

 

Installation view of second room including, at centre, Ai Weiwei’s Pillar through Round Table (2004-5) with Ai’s black and white photographs behind

 

Ai Weiwei (Chinese, 1957- )
Pillar through Round Table
2004-5
Elm, ironwood
Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, Purchased 2006

 

 

Pillar through Round Table is constructed from a pair of elmwood half-tables bisected horizontally  by an ironwood pillar. It is one of an extensive body of works by Ai composed of furniture and architectural fragments from the Qing dynasty period (1644-1911) which have been dismantled and painstakingly reassembled with the assistance of highly skilled carpenters to create new and often confounding arrangements. Ai’s reinvention of historical forms serves to enliven traditional crafts and skills, while his disavowal of modern industrial production processes also acts as a counterpoint to contemporary models of productivity and efficiency in Chinese industrial production.

 

 

Installation views of Ai Weiwei’s Pillar through Round Table (2004-5, detail)

 

 

Installation view of second room including, at centre, Ai Weiwei’s Pillar through Round Table (2004-5) with a group of Andy Warhol’s black and white photographs behind

 

 

Passageway between second and third rooms

 

 

Installation views of the third room including, at centre, Ai Weiwei’s Tonne of Tea (2006) and And Warhol’s Brillo Soap Pads Box (1964)

 

Ai Weiwei (Chinese, 1957- )
Tonne of Tea
2006
Compressed pu’er tea, wood base
Ai Weiwei Studio, Beijing

 

 

Ai’s Tonne of Tea is a readymade object redolent of the artist’s cultural context and heritage. Ai’s compressed cube of Pu’er tea – a staple of Chinese life, trade and custom – recalls not only the commercial aesthetics of Warhol’s Brillo Soap Pads Box but also the minimalist sculpture of postwar American artists such as Donald Judd, while introducing a specifically Chinese historical reference and cultural narrative into the readymade tradition.

 

 

Installation views of the third room including Ai Weiwei’s Tonne of Tea (2006) and And Warhol’s Brillo Soap Pads Box (1964) and You’re in (1967)

 

Andy Warhol (American, 1928-87)
Brillo Soap Pads Box
1964
Silkscreen ink and house paint on plywood
The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh
Founding Collection, Contribution
The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.

 

First created in late 1963, Warhol’s Brillo Soap Pads Box recasts the Duchampian readymade through the lens of American popular culture. Warhol produced approximately 100 of these boxes for his exhibition at Stable Gallery, New York, in March 1964, where they were tightly packed and piled high in a display reminiscent of a grocery warehouse. Unlike Duchamp’s use of real objects as readymade works of art, Warhol’s Brillo Soap Pads Boxes are carefully painted and silkscreened to resemble everyday consumer items. For philosopher Arthur C. Danto, Warhol’s Brillo boxes marked the end of an art-historical epoch and represented a new model of how art could be produced, displayed and perceived.

 

Andy Warhol (American, 1928-87)
You’re in
1967
Spray paint, glass bottles, printed wooden crate
The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh
Founding Collection, Contribution
The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.

 

Warhol was interested in the democratic cultural significance of mass-produced consumer goods. Popular grocery items distributed in vast quantities worldwide, at an affordable price, represented the best and brightest of American consumer society. Warhol’s first paintings of Coke bottles appeared in 1961. Here the artist turned to readymade objects as source material, coating the actual softdrink bottles with silver paint. Three years later Warhol went a step further by filling 100 silver bottles with a perfume he rakishly labelled ‘You’re In’ / ‘Eau d’Andy’. Not surprisingly, the Coca-Cola Company responded with a cease and desist letter.

 

 

 

“A major international exhibition featuring two of the most significant artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries – Andy Warhol and Ai Weiwei – opened at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, on 11 December 2015.

Andy Warhol | Ai Weiwei, developed by the NGV and The Warhol, with the participation of Ai Weiwei, explores the significant influence of these two exemplary artists on modern art and contemporary life, focussing on the parallels, intersections and points of difference between the two artists’ practices. Surveying the scope of both artists’ careers, the exhibition at the NGV presents over 300 works, including major new commissions, immersive installations and a wide representation of paintings, sculpture, film, photography, publishing and social media.

The exhibition explores modern and contemporary art, life and cultural politics through the activities of two exemplary figures – one of whom represents twentieth century modernity and the ‘American century’; and the other contemporary life in the twenty-first century and what has been heralded as the ‘Chinese century’ to come. Ai Weiwei commented, “I believe this is a very interesting and important exhibition and an honour for me to have the opportunity to be exhibited alongside Andy Warhol. This is a great privilege for me as an artist.”

Andy Warhol | Ai Weiwei premieres a suite of major new commissions from Ai Weiwei, including an installation from the Forever bicycles series, composed from nearly 1500 bicycles; a major five metre-tall work from Ai’s Chandelier series of crystal and light; Blossom 2015, a spectacular installation in the form of a large bed of thousands of delicate, intricately designed white porcelain flowers; and a room-scale installation featuring portraits of Australian advocates for human rights and freedom of speech and information.

Ai Weiwei lived in the United States from 1981 until 1993, where he experienced the works of Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol and Jasper Johns, among others. The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B & Back Again) was the first book that Ai Weiwei purchased in New York, and was a significant influence upon his conceptual approach. Ai Weiwei’s relationship to Warhol is explicitly apparent in a photographic self-portrait, taken in New York in 1987, in which Ai Weiwei poses in front of Warhol’s multiple self-portrait, adopting the same gesture.

Each artist is also recognised for his unique approach to notions of artistic value and studio production. Warhol’s Factory was legendary for its bringing together of artists and poets, film-makers and musicians, bohemians and intellectuals, ‘drag queens’, ‘superstars’ and socialites, and for the serial-production of silkscreen paintings, films, television, music and publishing.

The studio of Ai Weiwei is renowned for its interdisciplinary approach, post-industrial modes of production, engagement with teams of assistants and collaborators, and strategic use of communications technology and social media. Both artists have been equally critical in redefining the role of ‘the artist’ – as impresario, cultural producer, activist and brand – and both are known for their keen observation and documentation of contemporary society and everyday life.”

Text from the National Gallery of Victoria

 

 

Installation view of the fourth room including, at centre, Ai Weiwei’s Blossom (2015) with his Grapes (2011) rear left, and Andy Warhol’s Flowers (Hand Coloured) (1974) on the wall behind

 

 

Ai Weiwei (Chinese, 1957- )
Blossom (details)
2015
Porcelain
Ai Weiwei Studio, Beijing

 

 

Blossom is a new installation in the form of a garden bed, comprising thousands of flowers made from fine white porcelain. In response to the Flowers for Freedom movement which grew out of the artist’s With Flowers project, Blossom serves as a memorial to people who live in restricted conditions because of their fight for freedom of speech or human rights. The work was fabricated in collaboration with the finest craftspeople from Jingdezhen, whose predecessors once produced the highest quality porcelain for emperors of the past. Because of its size, the technical aspect of manufacturing this work was highly complex.

 

 

Ai Weiwei (Chinese, 1957- )
Grapes (details)
2011
Qing Dynasty stools
Collection of Larry Warsh, New York

 

 

By reassembling Qing Dynasty furniture, which was constructed by traditional joinery techniques without glue or nails, Ai transforms the meaning and function of these cultural artefacts. Here he reconfigures a collection of wooden stools into a group resembling an organically formed cluster of grapes. The arrangement serves as a metaphor for the relationship between the individual and the collective, signifying the deferral of personal interests to those of the community and state characteristic of China’s socialist history. The linked structure of Grapes also recalls the idea of networks and communication, which are recurrent motifs in the Ai work. Manufactured by skilled craftsmen, this type of three-legged stool was used for centuries in China by all kinds of people – the rich and the poor, in towns and in the country. Every family had one, and they were passed on through many generations.

 

 

Ai Weiwei (Chinese, 1957- )
With Flowers (detail)
2013-15
Bicycle, flowers, digital print on paper
Ai Weiwei Studio, Beijing

 

 

In 2011 Ai was detained by Chinese authorities for eighty-one days without being charged. Upon his release, Ai’s passport was revoked and his studio placed under constant surveillance. With Flowers saw the artist place a fresh bunch of flowers in the basket of a bicycle outside his studio on a daily basis in a poetic protest against restriction on his right to travel. Images of the flowers were posted to Ai’s social media feeds, and an internet movement called Flowers for Freedom emerged. The project concluded upon the return of Ai’s passport in July 2015.

 

 

Installation view of part of the fifth room showing Andy Warhol’s portraits of friends and celebrities

 

 

Ai Weiwei (Chinese, 1957- )
Letgo room (details)
2015
Plastic
Ai Weiwei Studio, Beijing

 

 

Composed of more than three million plastic building blocks, Ai Weiwei’s Letgo room is a new installation featuring portraits of Australian activists and champions of human rights and freedom of speech. Ai has chosen people who represent grassroots community activism and advocacy within the fields of international law and academia, social welfare and the rights of Indigenous people, asylum seekers, sex workers and the gender nonspecific, among other cultural contexts. Each subject was asked to provide a one-line statement reflecting their philosophy and views to accompany his or her portrait.

The work attests to Ai’s longstanding commitment to liberty, manifested in his work as an artist, social commentator, activist and public intellectual. Letgo room was intended to be constructed from LEGO blocks; however, the LEGO company declined to provide a bulk order of their product due to the purported ‘political’ nature of the proposed work. Instead, the installation is composed of building blocks manufactured in China, continuing the artist’s exploration of the copy and fake.

 

 

Installation view of part of the fifth room showing Andy Warhol’s silkscreen portraits of Mao (1972) hung on his Mao Wallpaper (1974, reprint 2015), on the exterior of Ai Weiwei’s Letgo room (2015)

 

Andy Warhol (American, 1928-87)
Mao
1972
Colour silkscreens on paper, ed. 162/250
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Purchased, 1973

 

 

The source image for Warhol’s numerous portraits of Mao Zedong is the frontispiece to the Chairman’s famous Little Red Book of quotations. Mao’s image was in the media spotlight in 1972, the year US President Richard Nixon travelled to China, and his official portrait could be seen on the walls of homes, businesses and government buildings throughout the country. It was also extremely popular among literary and intellectual circles in the West. Warhol’s repetition of the image as pop-cultural icon underlines the cult of celebrity surrounding Mao, and the ways in which the proliferation of images in media and advertising promotes consumer desire and identification.

 

 

Installation view of part of the fifth room showing, on the far wall, Ai Weiwei’s portraits of Mao: Mao (Facing Right) (1986) and Mao (Facing Forward) (1986)

 

 

Installation view of the sixth room with, on the floor, Ai Weiwei’s S.A.C.R.E.D. Maquettes (2011) with Andy Warhol’s Electric Chairs (1971) silkscreens at left, and his Electric Chair (1967) painting at right, hung on Warhol’s Washington Monument Wallpaper (1974, reprint 2015)

 

 

Installation view of the sixth room with, on the floor, Ai Weiwei’s S.A.C.R.E.D. Maquettes (2011) and Andy Warhol’s Gun (1981-82) paint and silkscreen ink on linen work on the wall behind

 

 

Ai Weiwei (Chinese, 1957- )
S.A.C.R.E.D. Maquettes (details)
2011
Fibreglass
Ai Weiwei Studio, Beijing

 

 

These maquettes are sculptural models for Ai’s major installation S.A.C.R.E.D., a series of architecturally scaled dioramas depicting scenes from the detention cell where he was held without charge by the Chinese government for eighty-one days in 2011. The work consists of six parts to which its acronymic title refers: Supper, Accusers, Cleansing, Ritual, Entropy and Doubt. The maquettes serve as archaeological evidence of the denial of personal freedom and dignity that Ai and many other dissidents have experienced, and cast him in the dual roles of rebel and victim of oppression.

 

 

Installation view of Ai Weiwei’s Feet (2005) in the sixth room of the exhibition Andy Warhol | Ai Weiwei at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

 

Ai Weiwei (Chinese, 1957- )
Feet
2005
Set of 13 fragments of sculpture from the Northern Wei dynasty CE 386-535 and North Qi dynasty CE 550-77 on a table stone, wood
Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane
Purchased, 2006

 

 

Ai Weiwei is a connoisseur of Chinese antiquity and Feet is an example of his practice of giving new life to found cultural artefacts. These stone feet are the remains of looted Buddhist statues dating from the Northern Wei (386-535 CE) and Northern Qi (550-577 CE) dynasties. Much destruction took place during periods of dynastic change in China as new regimes attempted to destroy the cultural and aesthetic achievements of former rulers. These fragments gathered by Ai demonstrate that the past cannot be erased that easily.

 

 

Installation view of Ai Weiwei’s Handcuffs (2015) in the sixth room of the exhibition with his Study of Perspective (1995-2011) series of photographs on the wall behind

 

Ai Weiwei (Chinese, 1957- )
Handcuffs
2015
Jade
Ai Weiwei Studio, Beijing

 

 

This pair of handcuffs sculpted in jade – the most precious stones in Chinese culture – replicate those worn by Ai during his imprisonment in 2011. Historically, the wearing of jade was reserved for high-ranking members of the imperial family, and today wearing jade jewellery is still believed to bestow good health and protection upon the wearer. Here Ai recasts this material and its historical cultural connotations in relation to the containment of dissident political expression in contemporary China.

 

 

Installation view of the seventh room of the exhibition featuring part of Ai Weiwei’s Circle of Animals (in Gold) (2010), with Andy Warhol’s silkscreen skulls on the wall behind

 

 

Ai Weiwei (Chinese, 1957- )
Circle of Animals (in Gold) (details)
2010
Gilt-bronze
Private collection, New York

 

 

Ai Weiwei’s Circle of Animals is based on twelve zodiac animal heads which functioned as a water clock-fountain in the European-style gardens of Yuanmingyuan palace, Beijing, designed in the eighteenth century by two European Jesuits for the Qing dynasty Emperor Qianlong. In 1860 Yuanmingyuan was ransacked by French and British troops and the heads were pillaged. In reinterpreting these objects, Ai focuses attention on the ethics of looting and repatriation, the role of the fake and the copy and power relations between China and the West.

 

 

Installation view of part of room eight of the exhibition Andy Warhol | Ai Weiwei at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.

This room was based on interactivity with not much of interest photographically speaking, hence only one image.

 

 

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National Gallery of Victoria website

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Filed under: black and white photography, colour photography, documentary photography, drawing, exhibition, existence, film, gallery website, installation art, intimacy, Melbourne, memory, National Gallery of Victoria, New York, painting, photographic series, photography, photojournalism, Polaroid photography, portrait, printmaking, psychological, reality, sculpture, space, time, Uncategorized, video, works on paper Tagged: A star moves (Ai Weiwei), Ai Weiwei, Ai Weiwei Blossom, Ai Weiwei Circle of Animals (in Gold), Ai Weiwei Coloured Vases, Ai Weiwei Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn, Ai Weiwei Feet, Ai Weiwei Forever Bicycles, Ai Weiwei Grapes, Ai Weiwei Handcuffs, Ai Weiwei Letgo room, Ai Weiwei Mao, Ai Weiwei Neolithic Pottery with Coca-Cola Logo, Ai Weiwei Pillar through Round Table, Ai Weiwei S.A.C.R.E.D. Maquettes, Ai Weiwei Tonne of Tea, Ai Weiwei With Flowers, Ai Weiwei With Flowers project, Ai Weiwei
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The University of California at Santa Barbara library has undertaken an heroic digitization effort for its world-class archive of 19th and early 20th century wax cylinder recordings, and has placed over 10,000 songs online for anyone to download, stream and re-use. (more…)

This fantastic sculpture by Clayton Boyer will delight, amaze, hypnotize, and/or induce motion sickness. He's posted the plans for sale and you can see how others have interpreted his basic design in this Flickr pool!

Read the rest

Courtney shared this story from Super Opinionated.

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At latest count, we've found 1855 planets orbiting distant stars.

This sounds like a lot, and it is. But the truth is that we've only scratched the surface. There are many thousands more we'll be able to see in upcoming years with next-generation telescopes, and some scientists are hopeful that we might someday even spot signs of life.

To give you an idea, here are a few animations from NASA's awesome Eyes on Exoplanets simulator:

(NASA/Eyes on Exoplanets)

This shows the Earth, zooming out to take in our entire solar system. The illuminated stars in the background are the ones we've found exoplanets orbiting, and that dense patch of them at the upper-right are the ones detected by the Kepler space telescope (which has found the majority of exoplanets so far) in particular.

(NASA/Eyes on Exoplanets)

This GIF zooms much farther out to show all the exoplanets we've found, with the Milky Way galaxy in the background.

Most of the planets we've are bunched together in a tight cone: the small area of the Milky Way that's been studied by Kepler. That telescope alone has found nearly 1,000 planets.

But the distribution of planets, scientists believe, is probably the same throughout the galaxy. And there are an estimated 100 billion stars in the Milky Way alone, with about 22 percent likely orbited by a roughly Earth-sized, rocky exoplanet.

So the entire darkened area of the Milky Way is also packed with planets — untold billions, waiting to be found. This is why many scientists are confident that other life forms exist, and that we might even be able to detect signs of them within our lifetimes.

By the way, the Eyes on Exoplanets simulator — the program that made these animations, created by NASA as a public education tool — is a very cool way of exploring all of our exoplanet-related discoveries and missions, and is definitely worth downloading. Among other things, you can search for any planet discovered and see its star system, its mass, temperature, the way we detected it — essentially, everything we know about it:

(NASA/Eyes on Exoplanets)

Further reading: Some scientists think we'll find signs of aliens within our lifetimes. Here's how.

Thousand mile long shadows

Night watch, Traer Scott

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“Other men have taken fine shipwreck photographs, but nowhere else in the world can one family have produced such a consistently high and poetic standard of work.”

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John Fowles

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“This is the greatest archive of the drama and mechanics of shipwreck we will ever see – a thousand images stretching over 130 years, of such power, insight and nostalgia that even the most passive observer cannot fail to feel the excitement or pathos of the events they depict.”

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Rex Cowan

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Dear readers, this gem of a posting will have to last you all of this week as it took such a long time to research, clean the images and assemble the post. I hope you enjoy the fruits of my labour.

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These are superb photographs obtained in the most trying of conditions, forming an artistic practice that spans generations and epochs.

As the text below notes, “At the very forefront of early photojournalism, John Gibson and his descendants were determined to be first on the scene when these shipwrecks struck. Each and every wreck had its own story to tell with unfolding drama, heroics, tragedies and triumphs to be photographed and recorded – the news of which the Gibsons would disseminate to the British mainland and beyond.”

This is the most glorious archive of shipwreck photographs that the world has even known and this posting brings together the largest selection of these photographs available on the Internet at the moment, in one place. I have to send a big thank you to the Press Office of the Royal Museums Greenwich (RMG) for sending me all these photographs and allowing me to post them on Art Blart. Unfortunately, because they had just been purchased from the auction house Sotheby’s, there was no information about each image, just the title of the ship. So I have spent hours researching the ships in this posting and cleaning up the scans that were sent to me, some of which were in a poor state. All the text comes from the Internet and if I have forgotten to credit someone I apologise in advance. I have included detailed close-ups of certain images to emphasise the drama, the calamity and the presence and inherent curiosity of onlookers.

The hours spent researching has all be worthwhile because the photographs are magnificent. Atmospheric, ghostly, tinged with loss, tragedy, heroism and the “presence” of these (mostly) sailing ships, these photographs are both memorials and romantic photographic ruins to the age of steam and sail. My favourite has to be the ghostly Flying Dutchman-esque The Glenbervie (1902, below), but for tragedy and poignancy you can’t go past the recumbent body of The Jeanne Gougy (1962, below), framed so beautifully by the artist in the horizontal, by just seen rocks.

But how can you pick just one or two? Each photograph has its own mystery, its own fiction, for as Susan Sontag observes, “Photographs, which cannot themselves explain anything, are inexhaustible invitations to deduction, speculation and fantasy.” In the case of these photographs we can only speculate as to the specific circumstances that led to the occurrence of each wreck (decisions made, or not), the set of circumstances and actions which are evidenced by the time freeze of these photographs, one end product of the performative act. Although they deny interconnectedness and continuity in the actual (conferring on each moment the character of a mystery), they enable interconnectedness and continuity in the imagination of the viewer for we can vividly imagine being on these ships as they are wrecked at sea.

What was interesting with this posting is that the images did not come with captions, just the name of the ship. My imagination was left free to roam, to scour the image for clues, to make up stories about what had happened until I did the research and the text based, “real” story emerged – the words becoming a means by which the viewer can decode the photographic evidence before them. Even though they were rushed to newspapers and magazines to impart news of the accident, I still prefer the fantasy of the image over the informational addendum, for this is what gives these images their power. Here, technology and the mistakes of man yield to the power of nature and you can only imagine how it would have been.

While the back story may add context of time, place, loss and heroism it is the beautiful isolation of these wrecked ships of the sea and their paradoxical nestling close in to the bosom of the earth, holding them fast, that will forever provide intimate fascination.

Dr Marcus Bunyan for the Art Blart blog

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Many thankx to the Royal Museums Greenwich (RMG) for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

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The Gibsons of Scilly
The Aksai
1875

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2 November 1875 – steamer Aksai (Russia) sailed into White Island, St Martin’s in thick fog while bound for Odessa from Cardiff with coal. The captain and crew of thirty-nine were saved by the Lady of the Isles. Citation: Larn, Richard (1992). Shipwrecks of the Isles of Scilly. Nairn: Thomas & Lochar.

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The Gibsons of Scilly
The Bay of Panama
1891

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SV Bay of Panama (British): The sailing ship was wrecked under Nare Head, near St Keverne, Cornwall, United Kingdom, during a great blizzard. The ship carried jute from Calcutta; 18 of those on board died but 19 were saved. Noall, C. (1969?) Cornish Shipwrecks Illustrated. Truro: Tor Mark Press; p. 15

Barque, built in 1883, 4 masts (equipped with floors and lower deck beams of iron. The forecastle was 37 ft long and the poop 54 ft. Rigged with double top- and top gallant sails and royal sails)

Built by the Belfast shipping firm of Hartland and Wolff in 1883, the Bay of Panama was described by everyone who saw her as probably the finest sailing ship afloat. With her steel hull, and four square-rigged masts, she was a very fast and beautiful ship of 2282 tons. But strength and good looks are no guarantee, and during March 1891 the Bay of Panama met up with the worst blizzard Cornwall had suffered for over two hundred years. It was to prove no contest. Because of her speed, the Bay of Panama was used on the Calcutta run, and on November 18th 1890 she left that port bound for Dundee loaded with a cargo of 13000 bales of jute.

For four months she sailed swiftly towards England until one morning during the early part of March 1891, she approached the Cornish coast in rapidly deteriorating weather. The Captain knew all about the dangers of a lee shore, but because of the bad visibility he was uncertain as to his exact position. He could see that the weather was unlikely to get any better, and he even thought that there might be some snow. After weighing up all the risks he decided to heave to, take some depth soundings, and generally take stock of his position. It was a decision that was to cost him his ship, and his life. Only a few hours later, in the early afternoon, a blizzard, the worst for over two centuries, swept into the West Country and engulfed the Bay of Panama.

Bay of Panama
Posted on July 4, 2007 Peter Mitchell

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The Gibsons of Scilly
SS Blue Jacket
1898

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SS Blue Jacket (United Kingdom) November 1898: She was unaccountably wrecked on a clear night a few yards from the Longships lighthouse, Lands End, Cornwall. The crew were saved by the Sennen lifeboat. Noall, C. (1969?) Cornish Shipwrecks Illustrated. Truro: Tor Mark Press; p. 21

Stuck fast – and surely a classic example of the expression – on the 
Longships lighthouse rocks off Land’s End, December 9th, 1898. This 
tramp was in ballast from Plymouth to Cardiff. The captain went below 
to his cabin – and his wife – at 9.30 p.m., leaving the mate on watch. 
He was woken near midnight by a tremendous crash, and came on deck 
to find his listing ship brilliantly illuminated by the lighthouse only a few yards away. Captain, wife and crew took to their boats and were picked 
up by the Sennen lifeboat. How the mate managed to play moth to this
 gigantic candle – the weather was poor, but provided at least two miles’ 
visibility – has remained a mystery. The Blue Jacket sat perched in this
ludicrous position for over a year.

John Fowles. Shipwreck. 1975

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The Gibsons of Scilly
The Minnehaha
1874

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The Gibsons of Scilly
The Minnehaha
1874

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The Minnehaha was shipwrecked in 1874 as it travelled from Peru to Dublin. It was carrying guano to be used as fertiliser and struck Peninnis Head rocks when the captain lost his way. The ship sank so quickly that some men were drowned in their berths, ten died in total including the captain.

On 18 January 1874, while travelling from Callao, Peru to Dublin, the 845-ton four-masted barque Minnehaha carrying guano was wrecked off Peninnis Head, St Mary’s, Isles of Scilly. Her pilot mistook the St Agnes light for the Wolf Rock and thought they were passing between the Isles of Scilly and the Wolf. Shortly after she struck a rock off Peninnis Head  and the vessel sunk at once with some of the crew being drowned in their berths. Those on deck climbed into the rigging, and as the tide rose the ship was driven closer to land, and some managed to climb onto the shore over the jib boom. The master, pilot and eight crew drowned.

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The Gibsons of Scilly
The Mohegan

1898

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The Mohegan struck the Manacles, October 14th, 1898. One of the most dreaded of all reefs, 
the Manacles (from the Cornish ‘maen eglos’, rocks of the church, a reference 
to the landmark of St Keverne’s tower) stand east of the Lizard promontory, 
in a perfect position to catch shipping on the way into Falmouth – and before
Marconi ‘Falmouth for orders’ (as to final North European destination) was
 the commonest of all instructions to masters abroad. But the Mohegan was
 outward bound, and hers is one of the most mysterious of all Victorian sea-disasters.
 She was a luxury liner on only her second voyage, from Tilbury to New York.
 Somewhere off Plymouth a wrong course was given. A number of people on shore 
realized the ship was sailing full speed (13 knots) for catastrophe; a coastguard
 even fired a warning rocket, but it came too late. The great ship struck just as 
the passengers were sitting down to dinner. She sank in less than ten minutes,
 and 106 people were drowned, including the captain and every single deck officer,
 so we shall never know how the extraordinary mistake, in good visibility, was made.
 The captain’s body was washed up headless in Caernarvon Bay three months later.
 Most of the dead were buried in a mass grave at St. Keverne.

John Fowles. Shipwreck. 1975

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The Gibsons of Scilly
MV Poleire
1970

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The MV Poleire was a Cypriot motor vessel of some 2300 tons. In April 1970 she was on a voyage from Ireland to Gdynia in Poland carrying a cargo of zinc ore when she struck the Little Kettle Rock, which lies just north west of Tresco. There was a thick fog when she struck, and although less than a mile from the Round Island light house, her master failed to hear the fog signal. The sea was flat calm so all the crew managed to get off safely. Within a week the Poleire broke in two and sank.

MV Poleire
Posted on July 4, 2007 Peter Mitchell

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The Gibsons of Scilly
The Jeanne Gougy
1962

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The Jeanne Gougy, a French fishing trawler (built 1948) ran aground on the 3rd November 1962. Several crew were rescued by Sergeant Eric Smith from a Whirlwind Mk 10 helicopter when he was winched down to the wheelhouse despite it being submerged by breaking waves. He was awarded a George Medal for his rescues.

“The dramatic but tragic shipwreck in which eleven men died and the rescue of the rest of the crew of the Jean Gougy, occurred on November 3rd 1962. The French trawler out of Dieppe, was bound for the fishing grounds of the southern Irish coast when it went aground on the north side of Lands End. At 05.20h, the Sennen Coxswain was contacted by the coastguard who informed him of the trawler’s situation. The firing of the maroons at Sennen Cove awoke two young Royal Marines from their deep sleep, bivouacking as they were, on the flat concrete platform that then existed not far from the lifeboat station at Sennen Cove. The reserve lifeboat on temporary duty at the station was launched as the two marines slowly dozed off back to sleep.

The lifeboat took approximately one hour to reach the scene at Lands End. A parachute flare was fired and the trawler could be seen lying on her side on rocks at the foot of the cliff. A very heavy swell prevailed after the storm. It was impossible for the lifeboat to get any closer than a hundred yards. An L.S.A team at the top of the cliff had fired several lines over the trawler, but the crew could not secure them as the trawler was completely submerged by the heavy swell. Several men were washed out of the wheelhouse. At 8.15h a helicopter from Chivener arrived and, together with the lifeboat, carried out a search of the area. The lifeboat found two seamen and the helicopter one. They were all dead. At 9.00h the helicopter left for Penzance to land a body and to then refuel at Culdrose Naval Air Base near Helston.
I had awoken with a start at the explosions around me, mistakenly in my stupor believing it was already bonfire night, which of course was two days away. I went back to sleep. Waking sometime later my climbing partner and I packed our equipment and proceeded to walk from Sennen Cove where we had been climbing the previous day, over to Lands End for another days climbing. As we approached Lands End, we noticed people standing on the northern headland. On arriving at approximately midday, we walked over to the zawn beneath us, into which a policeman was peering. There on it’s side was a trawler and looking up at us and waving were many trapped people in the wheelhouse.

Turning to the policeman I said “If my mate and I rope down this side of the zawn (there is a tidal platform, a ledge there), we can set up a belay station, throw our other rope in through the broken wheelhouse window and one by one pull those guys to the cliff below us” (the tide was going out). “Go away” was his curt reply. And so we walked away. In the next four hours, eight more fisherman lost their lives. The outcome could have been so very different.

As there appeared to be no one left alive on the Jean Gougy the lifeboat had made for Newlyn to land two bodies, it being impossible to return to Sennen Cove due to the tide. At noon however a woman watching from the top of the cliff top saw a man’s hand waving inside the wheelhouse and heard him calling. The coastguards fired a line over the trawler and a man, clinging to the edge of the wheelhouse as the vessel was now completely on her side, struggled to grasp it. He was prevented by heavy waves. Eventually he secured the line and was hauled to safety in the breeches buoy. Three others being rescued afterwards by the same means. The helicopter, on being recalled, hovered over the ship and lowered a crewman who saved two more seamen. These six had survived by breathing trapped air in pockets at the wheelhouse and forecastle. On learning of these developments, the Penlee lifeboat Soloman Browne launched at 12.45h and arrived threequarters of an hour later. The Sennen lifeboat also returned to the scene at 15.45h. With the helicopter they again searched the area but with no success. It was later learned that the trawler carried a crew of 18, 11 of whom lost their lives, including the skipper.

Sergeant E.C. Smith of the R.A.F who was lowered to the trawler to save the two injured men received the George Medal and also the Silver Medal of the Societe Nationale des Hospitaliers Sauveteurs Bretons. The stirring events connected with this shipwreck, which received extensive press and television coverage, provided an excellent illustration for the public of the manner of work the three principle sea rescue services provided in this country, and of the cooperation existing between them.”

Millenium Moments – The Jean Gougy – A personal recollection by Dennis Morrod

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The Gibsons of Scilly
Jeune Hortense
1888

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The French brigantine Jeune Hortense was swept on to the beach when she came into Mount’s Bay to land the body of a Fowey man who had died in France.
The schooner wrecked at Long Rock, Cornwall. The Penzance lifeboat, having been brought by carriage to the beach near Marazion, rescued four crew.

Stranded near St Michael’s Mount, May lyth, 1888. The foreground
 carriage is for the Penzance lifeboat

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The Gibsons of Scilly
The Mildred
1912

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The Mildred was traveling from Newport to London when it got stuck in dense fog and hit rocks at Gurnards Head at midnight on the 6th April 1912. Captain Larcombe and his crew of two Irishmen, one Welshman and a Mexican rowed into St. Ives as their ship was destroyed by the waves.

“The British barquentine Mildred, Newport for London with basic slag, struck under Gurnards Head at midnight on the 6th April 1912, whilst in dense fog. She swung broadside and was pounding heavily when Captain Larcombe, the mate, two Irishmen, one Welshman and a Mexican from Vera Cruz rowed into St. Ives at 6am. They later returned in a pilot gig but the Mildred was already going to pieces. The Mildred, Cornish built and owned, was launched in 1889.”

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The Gibsons of Scilly
SS Tripolitania
1912

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SS Tripolitania Italian cargo ship (built 1897) ran aground on the 26th December 1912. Driven ashore in a Westerly gale, she beached and attempts were made to refloat her over the coming months on a spring tide. This was unsuccessful and she was eventually scrapped.

“Boxing Day 1912 was remembered by the advent of a south westerly gale, the full force of which was experienced at the Loe Bar, the stretch of shingle and sand separating the Loe Pool from the sea near Porthleven. This Italian Steamer Tripolitania was 2,297 tons. She became firmly embedded and despite strenuous efforts to release her from this perilous position, she was broken up and shipped as scrap from local Porthleven. It has been stated that about £8,000 had been expended on trying to save her. Many tons of sand and shingle were removed in an attempt to free the Tripolitania in the Loe Bar Sands and a great expense was incurred to try and salvage the ship. Tugs stood by for the attempt on the full tide on the morrow, but a storm arose during the night and embedded the vessel even firmer than before. After this incident hopes for refloating her were abandoned and she was broken up for scrap iron. One man was drowned and his body was never recovered.”

Anon. “Tripolitania,” on the Helston History website Nd

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“Royal Museums Greenwich (RMG) today acquired a world renowned and nationally significant collection of photographic and archive material. The Gibson archive presents one of the most graphic and emotive depictions of shipwrecks, lifesaving and its aftermath produced in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The material was acquired at the Sotheby’s Travel, Atlases, Maps and Natural History Sale.

The archive of dramatic and often haunting images, assembled over 125 years (1872 to 1997) by four generations of the Gibson family, records over 200 wrecks – the ships, heroic rescues, survivors, burials and salvage scenes – off the treacherous coastline of Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly. The acquisition of this collection comprising of over 1360 glass and film negatives, complements the Museum’s existing, extensive historic photography collection, and creates an unprecedented opportunity for the Museum to further examine and explore the story of life at sea and the dangers experienced by seafarers through research, education and display projects.

John Gibson (1827-1920) founded the family photographic business in the 1860s and took his first photograph of a wreck in 1869. He apprenticed his two sons Alexander (1857-1944) and Herbert (1861-1937), who perfected the art of photographing wrecks, creating perhaps some of the most remarkable and evocative images of misadventure at sea. Among the items included in the collection is the ledger the Gibson brothers kept when taking the photographs, which contains records of the telegraph messages sent from Scilly and is full of human stories of disaster, courage and survival. Having secured the archive RMG will initially conserve, research and digitize the collection, leading to a number of exhibitions to tour regional museums and galleries, especially those in the South West of England.

Lord Sterling of Plaistow, Chairman of the Royal Museums Greenwich, said: “The acquisition of this remarkable archive will enable us to create a series of exhibitions that will travel across the country, starting with the South West. I am very pleased that the National Maritime Museum has been able to secure this wonderful collection for the nation, and I know that the Gibson family are delighted that their family archive will remain and be displayed in this country.”

Items acquired today at auction:

• 585 Glass plate negatives (214: 12 x 10in: 8 x 6in) housed in 16 original wooden boxes and one cardboard box
• 407 Glass plate copy negatives (6½ x 4¾ in) in 4 cardboard boxes
• 179 Glass plate negatives (4¼ x 3¼in)
• 198 film negatives (5 x 4in) in three boxes
• 335 cut film negatives (various sizes) and 39 (35mm) film negatives
• 97 original photographs of shipwrecks (silver prints, 12 x 10in)
• Manuscript ledger by Alexander and Herbert Gibson on the shipwrecks of Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly
• A collection of books by John Fowles, John Arlott, John Le Carré, and Rex Cowan on the Gibsons of Scilly, together with newspaper and magazine articles

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Text from the Royal Museums Greenwich (RMG) website

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Founder John Gibson bought his first camera 150 years ago

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Alexander Gibson was invited by his father John into the business in 1865

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Apprentice: Herbert Gibson was taken on by his father as an apprentice and went on to run the business

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James Gibson took over the business after the death of his father Herbert

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Frank Gibson spent time learning about new technology and techniques to help advance the family business

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“The Gibson family originated from the Isle of Scilly and have 300 years of family history. John Gibson acquired his first camera whilst abroad around 150 years ago when photography was still mainly reserved for the wealthiest members of society. He had to go to sea from a young age to supplement the income from a small shop on St Mary’s run by his widowed mother. Making ends meet on St Mary’s was a constant struggle and he learned to use the camera and set up a photography studio in Penzance.

Around 1866 he returned to St Mary’s with his family and he was assisted in his photography by his sons Alexander and Herbert in the studio shed in the back garden of their home. Both Herbert and Alexander learned the art of photography at their father’s knee and Alexander was to become one of the most remarkable characters in Scilly. He had a passion for archaeology, architecture and folk history. He took endless pictures of ruins, prehistoric remains, and artifacts not just in Scilly but all over Cornwall.

Herbert by contrast was a quiet man, a competent photographer and a sound businessman. There can be no doubt that without his steadying influence, the business aspect of their photography might not have survived Alexander’s more flamboyant approach. Frank spent some time working for photographers in Cornwall learning about new technology. But Frank returned to Scilly in 1957 and worked in partnership with his father for two years.

After this time it was apparent that they could not work together and James retired to Cornwall and sold the business to Frank. Under Frank’s stewardship the business expanded. He produced postcards and sold souvenirs to supplement the photography, and opened another shop. Scilly is always in the news and there is always demand for pictures by the press.

James Gibson was, in fact, the most qualified of all the photographers. He was an Associate of the Royal Photographic Society and won various medals and awards through his lifetime. He was an adventurous photojournalist as well as a jobbing photographer. Today, the family runs a souvenir shop which sells books and postcards and they are currently digitising 150 years of photographs.”

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“The family’s famous shipwreck photography began in 1869, on the historic occasion of the arrival of the first Telegraph on the Isles of Scilly. At a time when it could take a week for word to reach the mainland from the islands, the Telegraph transformed the pace at which news could travel. At the forefront of early photojournalism, John became the islands’ local news correspondent, and Alexander the telegraphist – and it is little surprise that the shipwrecks were often major news.

On the occasion of the wreck of the 3500-ton German steamer, Schiller in 1876 when over 300 people died, the two worked together for days – John preparing newspaper reports, and Alexander transmitting them across the world, until he collapsed with exhaustion. Although they often worked in the harshest conditions, travelling with hand carts to reach the shipwrecks – scrambling over treacherous coastline with a portable dark room, carrying glass plates and heavy equipment – they produced some of the most arresting and emotive photographic works of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.”

Text from Wills Robinson. “Gibson family’s photos chart a century of Cornish shipwrecks,” on the Mail Online website 21/10/2013

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James Gibson at work

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The Gibsons of Scilly
SS City of Cardiff
1912

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21 March – City of Cardiff (United Kingdom) wrecked at Nanjizal, two miles south of Land’s End. The Sennen Life-Saving Apparatus Team took the crew off by breeches buoy. Citation: Corin, J.; Farr, G. (1983). Penlee Lifeboat. Penzance: Penlee & Penzance Branch of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution. p. 120.

The steamer City of Cardiff pictured trapped on rocks with steam still coming out of the chimney, it was washed ashore by a strong gale in March 1912 at Nanjizel. The Captain, his wife and son, and the crew were all rescued but the vessel was left a total wreck. British ship built 1906, the City of Cardiff was en route from Le Havre, France, to Wales in 1912 when it was wrecked in Mill Bay near Land’s End. All of the crew were rescued.

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The Gibsons of Scilly
SS City of Cardiff
1912

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The Gibsons of Scilly
SS City of Cardiff
1912

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The Gibsons of Scilly
SS City of Cardiff (detail)
1912

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The Gibsons of Scilly
Brinkburn
1898

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“The steamer Brinkburn, belonging to Messrs. Harris and Dixon, of London, from Galverton for Havre, with cotton, ran ashore on the Maiden Bower, Isles of Scilly, on Thursday at midnight during dense fog.  The crew of 30 took to their lifeboats and landed in safety. The Brinkburn is a total wreck.” 15/12/1898

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The Gibsons of Scilly
SS Schiller
1875

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SS Schiller was a 3,421 ton German ocean liner, one of the largest vessels of her time. Launched in 1873 she plied her trade across the Atlantic Ocean, carrying passengers between New York and Hamburg for the German Transatlantic Steam Navigation Line. She became notorious on 7 May 1875, when while operating on her normal route she hit the Retarrier Ledges in the Isles of Scilly, causing her to sink with the loss of most of her crew and passengers, totalling 335 fatalities.

Captain Thomas needed to slow due to poor visibility in thick sea fog as she entered the English Channel, and was able to calculate that his ship was in the region of the Isles of Scilly, and thus within range of the Bishop Rock lighthouse which would provide him with information about his position. To facilitate finding the islands and the reefs which surround them, volunteers from the passengers were brought on deck to try to find the light. These lookouts unfortunately failed to see the light, which they were expecting on the starboard quarter, when in fact it was well to port (nautical). This meant that the Schiller was sailing straight between the islands on the inside of the lighthouse, leaving the ship heading towards the Retarrier Ledges.

The Schiller grounded on the reef at 10pm, sustained significant damage, but not enough in itself to sink the large ship. The captain attempted to reverse off the rocks, pulling the ship free but exposing it to the heavy seas which were brewing, which flung the liner onto the rocks by its broadside three times, stoving in the hull and making the ship list dangerously as the lights died and pandemonium broke out on deck as passengers fought to get into the lifeboats.

It was at these boats that the real disaster began, as several were not seaworthy due to poor maintenance and others were destroyed, crushed by the ship’s funnels which fell amongst the panicked passengers. The captain attempted to restore order with his pistol and sword, but as he did so, the only two serviceable lifeboats were launched, carrying 27 people, far less than their full capacity. These boats eventually made it to shore, carrying 26 men and one woman.

On board the ship the situation only became worse, as breakers washed completely over the wreck. All the women and children on board, over 50 people, were hurried into the deck house to escape the worst of the storm. It was there that the greatest tragedy happened, when before the eyes of the horrified crew and male passengers, a huge wave ripped off the deck house roof and swept the occupants into the sea, killing all inside. The wreck continued to be pounded all night, and gradually those remaining on board were swept away or died from exposure to cold seas, wind and resulting hypothermia, until the morning light brought rescue for a handful of survivors.

The recognized manner of signaling disaster at sea was by the firing of minute guns, carried on all ships for signalling purposes. Unfortunately, it had become the custom in the islands to fire a minute gun as your ship passed safely through the area, and so the firing of the Schiller’s guns failed to produce hoped for rescue. Such an operation at night and in the dark would have been near impossible anyway with such high seas, and thus it was not until the first light that rescue craft began arriving.
St Agnes pilot gig, the O and M, was summoned to investigate multiple cannon shots. Her crew discovered the mast of the sinking Schiller. The O and M rowed to pick up five survivors before returning to St Agnes for assistance. Steamers and ferries from as far away as Newlyn, Cornwall, assisted the rescue operation.

Of her original 254 passengers and 118 crew, there were 37 survivors. The death toll, 335, made the disaster one of the worst in British history. (Wikipedia)

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“An exceptional collection of shipwreck photographs taken by four generations of the Gibson family was bought at a Sotheby’s auction yesterday by the Royal Museums Greenwich (RMG) for £122,500 ($195,645) including buyer’s premium. The archive contains more than 1,100 glass plate negatives, more than 500 film negatives and 97 original print photographs of shipwrecks off the coasts of Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly. They make the perfect complement to the RMG’s pre-existing collection of historic maritime photography.

For 125 years, starting with patriarch John Gibson, a seaman who became a professional photographer in 1860, the Gibson family braved shoals, waves and sand to capture haunting scenes of shredded ships, dramatic rescues, cargo salvage and burials of people who fell victim to the treacherous coastal waters of southwest England. John’s sons Herbert and Alexander joined the business in 1865 and their talents would come to define the Gibson archive and its exceptional high quality. The first wreck they photographed was in 1869 when the telegraph had just arrived on the Isles of Scilly.

These were not simple point and shoot operations. It was dangerous, highly physical labour. On the occasion of the wreck of the 3500-ton German steamer, Schiller, in 1876 when over 300 people died, the two brothers worked together for days – [Herbert] preparing newspaper reports, and Alexander transmitting them across the world, until he collapsed with exhaustion. Although they were working in difficult conditions, travelling with a cart or boat to reach the shipwrecks – and scrambling over rocky crags and sand dunes with a portable dark room, carrying fragile glass plates and heavy equipment – they produced some of the most arresting and emotive photographic images of shipwrecks produced in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

They were pioneers. This was at a time when most photography was still firmly wedded to the studio portrait. The equipment was so bulky and fragile that climbing over crags hauling not just the camera and plates but a freaking dark room would be inconceivable to most people. That the Gibsons pulled it off is amazing in and of itself; that they also created images of such beauty and emotional resonance makes the archive little short of miraculous.

The Gibson family business is still going strong on the Isles of Scilly, although they’ve added souvenir and wholesale postcard sales to the professional photography. Sandra Gibson, John’s great-great granddaughter, runs it now with her husband Pete. The family decided it was time to sell the archive rather than let it continue to languish in boxes.”

Author John Le Carré, who used some Gibson photographs in his books, visited the business, then run by Frank, Sandra’s father, in 1997. I love his description of the archive:

“We are standing in an Aladdin’s cave where the Gibson treasure is stored, and Frank is its keeper. It is half shed, half amateur laboratory, a litter of cluttered shelves, ancient equipment, boxes, printer’s blocks and books. Many hundreds of plates and thousands of photographs are still waiting an inventory. Most have never seen the light of day. Any agent, publisher or accountant would go into free fall at the very sight of them.”

Now that National Maritime Museum has the pictures, we can all go into free fall at the very sight of them, and the family can be sure it will be archived properly and shared with the world. The museum plans to use the archive to study the dangers of the seafaring life and to display this invaluable record as widely as possible.”

Press release from the Royal Museums Greenwich (RMG)

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The Gibsons of Scilly
River Lune
1879

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River Lune struck in fog and at night just south of Annet (Scillies), July 27th, 1879 – the same day as the Maipu. The master later blamed a faulty
 chronometer, since he had believed himself fifteen miles to the west.
 The ship heeled and sunk aft in the first ten minutes. The crew took 
to their boats, but returned in daylight to collect their belongings. 
This barque was only eleven years old. She broke up soon afterwards.

John Fowles. Shipwreck. 1975

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The Gibsons of Scilly
The Punta
1955

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The Gibsons of Scilly
SV Seine
1900

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The Gibsons of Scilly
SV Seine (detail)
1900

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The French ship, the barque SV Seine (built in 1899) was on her way to Falmouth with a cargo of nitrate when she ran into a gale off Scilly on Decermber 28, 1900. She ran ashore in Perran Bay, Perranporth, Cornwall, but thankfully all crew members were rescued with Captain Guimper reported as the last man to leave the ship before she was broken up in the next flood tide.

Ran ashore in Perran Bay (Perranporth), December 28th, 1900. This beautiful ship was a French ‘bounty clipper’ – so called because a government subsidy to French ship-owners allowed them to build for elegance rather than more mundane qualities. The crew got off in heavy seas. By dawn the next day she was dismasted and on her beam-ends, and broke up on the next flood-tide. Two weeks later the hulk of this celebrated barque was bought for only £42.

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The Gibsons of Scilly
SV Albert Wilhelm
1886

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SV Albert Wilhelm 1886, a German brig was lost 16 October 1886 Lelant.
The Albert Wilhelm, Lelant, 1886, a 202 ton German Brig travelling from the Isle of Man to Fowey.

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The Gibsons of Scilly
MV Cita
1997

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The German owned 300ft merchant vessel the Cita, sunk after it pierced its hull and ran aground in gale-force winds en route from Southampton to Belfast in March 1997. The mainly Polish crew of the stricken vessel were rescued a few hours after the incident by the RNLI and the wreck remained on the rock ledge for several days before slipping off into deeper water.

On 26 March 1997, the 300-ft merchant vessel MV Cita pierced its hull when running aground on rocks off the south coast of the Isles of Scilly in gale-force winds en route from Southampton to Belfast. The incident happened just after 3 am when the German-owned, Antiguan-registered 3,000 tonne vessel hit Newfoundland Point, St Mary’s. The mainly Polish crew of the stricken vessel were rescued a few hours after the incident by St Mary’s Lifeboat, RNLB Robert Edgar with the support of a H-3 Sea King rescue helicopter from RNAS Culdrose. They sailed to the UK mainland on board the Scillonian III later that afternoon. Many containers were washed up on the rocks and beaches of the Isles of Scilly, and many were found in the Celtic Sea, travelling as far as Cornwall. (Wikipedia)

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The Gibsons of Scilly
The Glenbervie
1902

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The Glenbervie, which was carrying a consignment of pianos and high quality spirits crashed into rocks Lowland Point near Coverack, Cornwall, in January 1902 after losing her way in bad weather. The British owned barque was laden with 600 barrels of whisky, 400 barrels of brandy and barrels of rum. All 16 crewmen were saved by lifeboat.

The Glenbervie, The Lizard, 1902, travelling from the Thames to West Africa spirits and pianos. Struck on the Manacles and went aground near Lowland Point, December 1901. The crew were saved in heavy seas by the Coverack lifeboat. The old wreckers must have groaned in their uneasy graves when they heard that this cargo was officially salvaged, since it contained over a thousand cases and barrels of spirits. There was also a valuable consignment of grand pianos on board, which were all ruined. The Glenbervie was launched in 1866; she was first a tea-clipper, then had many years in the Canada trade. She normally made three trips a year, between the thawing and the freezing of the St Lawrence, on this latter run.

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The Gibsons of Scilly
SV Granite State / Slate
1895

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American three-masted sailing ship built in 1877 ran aground near Porthcurno 4th November 1895

On 3rd November 1895 this American sailing ship arrived in Falmouth with a cargo of wheat from the River Plate. Given orders to discharge in Swansea she sailed on the 4th November and whilst attempting to round Lands End, struck the Lee Ore rock of the Runnel Stone. Taken in tow by the Cardiff tug Elliot and Jeffrey she was beached in the shallows of Porthcurno. She rapidly settled, and when the wheat began to swell and the hatches burst under the pressure, she was abandoned. She broke up soon afterwards in a winter gale.

Struck on the Runnel Stone, three miles south-east of Land’s End, November 4, 1895. This fine Yankee windjammer was making for Swansea from Falmouth. A navigation error by the mate seems to have been the cause of disaster. She was hauled off by a tug, but had to be towed to the nearest sandy bay, Porthcurno. She settled rapidly, and when the cargo of wheat began to swell the crew took to boats. The Granite Slate was soon afterwards destroyed completely by a gale.

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The Gibsons of Scilly
SV Granite State / Slate (detail)
1895

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The Gibsons of Scilly
The Hansy
1911

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Wreck of the Norwegian full-rigger Hansy, Housel Bay, The Lizard, Cornwall, November 1911.

3 November – 1497 ton sailing ship Hansy (Norway) of Fredrikstad was wrecked at Housel Bay on the eastern side of the Lizard. Three men were saved by the Lizard lifeboat (Royal National Lifeboat Institution) and the rest along with the Captain’s family were taken off by rocket apparatus. She was bound for Sydney with building material and her cargo of steel and timber was washed up for weeks afterwards and used in many of the local cottages. One in Church Cove now bears her name. (Wikipedia)

“Wrecked in Housel Bay near the Lizard Point, November 13th, 1911. 
Sailing from Sweden to Melbourne with timber and pig-iron, she missed stays 
while trying to come about in a gale. The crew were brought ashore by 
breeches-buoy. Two days later a salvage party boarded – to find a pair of
goats lying happily in a seaman’s bunk. Local fishermen did a thriving trade 
in timber for weeks afterwards; and the iron pigs are fished up for ballast 
to this day. The Scottish-built Hansy (formerly Aberfoyle) had had an 
unhappy history. In 1890 the bulk of the crew jumped ship in Australia,
 after a bad voyage out – only to be returned on board following a fortnight 
in jail. Jail must have been more agreeable, for eight men jumped ship again 
at the next port of call. In 1896 a steamer found the Aberfoyle drifting helplessly
 off Tasmania. The captain had been swept overboard, the first mate had
 committed suicide by leaping into the sea and the rest had given up hope.
 Similar stories of low morale – and often of insane bitterness between
 officers and crew – are manifold.”

John Fowles. Shipwreck. 1975

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Royal Museums Greenwich (RMG)

The National Maritime Museum, Queen’s House, Royal Observatory and Cutty Sark are normally open 10.00-17.00 seven days a week.

Royal Museums Greenwich (RMG) website

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Filed under: beauty, black and white photography, documentary photography, English artist, gallery website, landscape, light, memory, photographic series, photography, photojournalism, portrait, psychological, quotation, reality, space, time Tagged: Aberfoyle, Aberfoyle Australia, Aberfoyle Melbourne, Aberfoyle Tasmania, Alexander Gibson, barquentine, Bishop Rock lighthouse, Blue Jacket, bounty clipper, breeches-buoy, Brinkburn, British photographers, British photography, British shipwrecks, Captain Guimper, Captain Larcombe, Captain Thomas Schiller, Cita, City of Cardiff, Cornish shipwrecks, Cornish Shipwrecks Illustrated, Cornwall, Dennis Morrod, Dennis Morrod The Jean Gougy, Elliot and Jeffrey, English artists, English maritime photography, Founder John Gibson bought his first camera 150 years ago, Frank Gibson, Frank Gibson spent time learning about new technology, George Medal, Gibson archive, Gibson family, Gibsons, Gibsons Albert Wilhelm, Gibsons Blue Jacket, Gibsons Brinkburn, Gibsons Cita, Gibsons City of Cardiff, Gibsons Glenbervie, Gibsons Granite State, Gibsons Hansy, Gibsons Jeune Hortense, Gibsons Poleire, Gibsons River Lune, Gibsons Schiller, Gibsons Schiller graves, Gibsons Seine, Gibsons SS City of Cardiff, Gibsons SS Schiller, Gibsons SS Tripolitania, Gibsons SV Albert Wilhelm, Gibsons SV Seine, Gibsons The Aksai, Gibsons The Bay of Panama, Gibsons The Glenbervie, Gibsons The Hansy, Gibsons The Jeanne Gougy, Gibsons The Mildred, Gibsons The Minnehaha, Gibsons The Mohegan, Gibsons The Punta, Granite Slate, Granite State, Gurnards Head, Hansy Melbourne, Herbert Gibson, historic maritime photography, Housel Bay, Italian Steamer Tripolitania, James Gibson, James Gibson at work, Jeanne Gougy, Jeune Hortense, John Fowles Shipwreck, John Gibson, Lady of the Isles, Land's End, Lee Ore rock, Little Kettle Rock, Lizard promontory, Loe Bar, Longships lighthouse, maen eglos, maritime photography, Mount's Bay, MV Cita, MV Poleire, Nanjizel, Nare Head, Newfoundland Point, O and M, Peninnis Head rocks, Penzance, Penzance lifeboat, Perran Bay, Perranporth, Peter Mitchell, photographic archive, photography archive, photography of the sea, Porthcurno, Porthleven, Retarrier Ledges, River Lune, RNLB Robert Edgar, Round Island light, Royal Museums Greenwich, Runnel Stone, Schiller graves, Scillonian III, Scilly, Sennen lifeboat, Sergeant Eric Smith, Sergeant Eric Smith George Medal, shipwrecks, Shipwrecks of the Isles of Scilly, SS Blue Jacket, SS City of Cardiff, SS Schiller, SS Tripolitania, SV Albert Wilhelm, SV Bay of Panama, SV Granite Slate, SV Granite State, SV Seine, tea-clipper, The Aksai, The Bay of Panama, The Brinkburn, The Gibson archive, The Gibsons of Scilly, The Glenbervie, The Hansy, The Jeanne Gougy, The Lizard, the Manacles, The Mildred, The Minnehaha, The Mohegan, The O and M, The Punta, the sea, Yankee windjammer

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On Wednesday's, New Zealand's parliament passed its Marriage (Definition of Marriage) Amendment Bill in a 77-44 vote, expanding the country's 2005 civil union regime into full-blown marriage equality. Observers in the gallery and MPs on the floor burst into song, a stirring rendition of "Pokarekare Ana," an NZ lovesong that dates back to WWI. What a lovely, lovely moment.

New Zealand House of Reps bursts into song after legalizing same-sex marriage (via Making Light)