Monday, February 5, 2018

Art Photographs from the Twentieth Century (Tate)

August Sander
Farm Girl
ca. 1910
gelatin silver print
Tate Gallery

August Sander
The Fighter or Revolutionary
1912
gelatin silver print
Tate Gallery

What Kind of Times Are These

There's a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill
and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows
near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted
who disappeared into those shadows.

I've walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don't be fooled
this isn't a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here,
our country moving closer to its own truth and dread,
its own ways of making people disappear.

I won't tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods
meeting the unmarked strip of light –
ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise:
I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear.

And I won't tell you where it is, so why do I tell you
anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these
to have you listen at all, it's necessary
to talk about trees.

– Adrienne Rich (1995)

August Sander
Artists' Party
ca. 1930
gelatin silver print
Tate Gallery

August Sander
Gypsies
ca. 1930
gelatin silver print
Tate Gallery

August Sander
Secretary at West German Radio in Cologne
1931
gelatin silver print
Tate Gallery

Man Ray
Gertrude Stein
ca. 1920-29
gelatin silver print
Tate Gallery

To Gertrude Stein

White, blandly isolated on the ground
Where slaughters, thievings, contradictions pour,
You twirl umbrellas, cryptograms of sound,
Like some old princess on a wistful tour,
Abhorring nakedness and common stress,
Ignoring uproars in the ruined yards,
And fingering an old, brocaded dress
In corners of deserted boulevards.

Your mannerisms, sensitively curled,
Involved and sighing curiosities
Implore us – in the unrelenting world
Of bedlams, plottings and monstrosities –
To leave our hatreds, make the earth again
An aproned inn where subtleties can reign.

– Maxwell Bodenheim (1940)

Albert Renger-Patzsch
Gemäldegalerie, Dresden
ca. 1928-29
gelatin silver print
Tate Gallery

Albert Renger-Patzsch
Paderborn, Westphalia, Jesuit Church
ca. 1945-48
gelatin silver print
Tate Gallery

John Piper
Tomb of John Thornycroft at the Church of Our Lady of Bloxham, Oxfordshire
ca. 1930-80
photograph
Tate Gallery

René Burri
Former Summer Palace - Dead Lotus Flowers on Kunming Lake - Beijing, China, 1964
1964
gelatin silver print
Tate Gallery

Forbidden City

Asleep until noon, I'm dreaming
we've been granted another year.

You're here with me, healthy.
Then, half-awake, the half-truth –

this is our last day. Life's leaking
away again, and this time, we know it.

Dear body, I told you, pleading,
Don't Leave! but I understand you

can't say anything. Who are we?
Are we fictional? We don't look

like our pictures, don't look like
anyone I know. Daylight

flickers through a bamboo grove,
we approach the Forbidden City,

Looking together for the Hall
of Fulfilling Original Wishes.

Time is the treasure, you tell me,
and the past is its hiding place.

I instruct our fictional children,
The past is the treasure, time

is its hiding place. If we told him
how much we love him, how much

we miss him, he could stay.
But now you've taken me back

to Luoyang, to the Garden of Solitary Joy,
over a thousand years old –

I wake, I hold your hand, you let me go.

– Gail Mazur (2016)

René Burri
France, 1975
1975
C-print
Tate Gallery

René Burri
New York City, USA, 1988
1988
C-print
Tate Gallery

René Burri
Beijing, China, 1989
1989
C-print
Tate Gallery

Cornelia Parker
The Spider that Died in the Tower of London
2000
digital print
Tate Gallery

Poems from the archives of Poetry (Chicago)