Proceso III: Ajustes, Depreciación y Toma Física
2. ASIENTOS DE CIERRE AUTOMÁTICOS
2.3 CARTERAS DE CUENTAS POR COBRAR
Increased opportunities to publish and the sheer level of demand for photographs ensured that a large number of talented female photographers entered a profession that had traditionally been dominated by men. Women such as Dora Maar, Laure Albin-Guillot, Nora Dumas, Denise Bellon, Germaine Krull, Lisette Model, Florence Henri and Lee Miller were able to establish themselves and publish widely. Dora Maar‟s career in the 1930s is in many ways typical and clearly illustrates the domain of ambitious photographers in this period. Maar had returned to Paris in 1927 and enrolled at the Atelier André Lhote where Henri Cartier-Bresson was a classmate. She studied painting at the Union Centrale des Arts Décoratifs and at the Académie Julian as well as photography at the École de la Photographie de la Ville de Paris with Sougez. Late in life Maar claimed,
―My biggest debt from school onwards was to Sougez‖.81 It was he who encouraged her to open a commercial studio in 1930 with Pierre Kefer which was, according to Jacques Guenne, ―the biggest and best equipped in Paris.‖82 In four years of business a diverse range of work was produced under the name
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Kefer-Dora Maar and this eclecticism was to continue throughout the decade, which defines her relatively short photographic career.83 Her work included fashion assignments, documentary photographs of Gaudi‟s architecture in Barcelona (1932), archeological illustrations for Germaine Bazin‟s book on Mont St. Michel (1933), film stills for Jean Renoir‟s Le Crime de Monsieur Lange (1935), a collaboration with Raoul Ubac for the collective book Formes nues (1935), documents of the creation of Picasso‟s Guernica (1937),
advertising images and personal projects including collage works. 84
The high level of demand for photographs in the press, advertising and publishing ensured the success of Kefer-Dora Maar. In-house photographers were important but could not provide all of the images required by newspapers and magazines so freelance photographers offered images or were commissioned and picture libraries were established by magazines and photographers alike.
Photographic agents acted as intermediaries for freelancers and some formed agencies. Major foreign agencies also established themselves in Paris, both Keystone and Wide World did so in 1927. Maar suggested that she did not usually make a distinction between personal work and commissions although agreed that she had undertaken uninteresting subjects.85 Commissions encouraged photographers to develop their practice; there was no clear boundary between commercial and personal work and photographic studios were the loci of both artistic creation and regular work which generally had a pre-determined destination or a function to be mindful of.
For a short time in 1934 after the partnership with Kefer folded, Maar used the darkroom of a friend in Montparnasse, also used by Brassaï at this time, before she moved into her studio at 29 Rue d‟Astorg. It was at this juncture that she met André Breton and the members of the surrealist group at the Union des
Intellectuels contre Le Fascisme, later to become Contre-Attaque. In 1935 she exhibited with the surrealists and was a signatory to both the surrealist tract On
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3 Maar became a painter in the 1940‟s and although she continued to take photographs and make photograms they were not made public and consisted mostly of snapshots.
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4 According to Marie-Loup Sougez, Maar was a regular at the fashion shows. Combalia, Dora Maar: Bataille, Picasso et les surrealists, p 93.
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5 Combalia, V. „Dora Maar, Photographer: An Interview with Victoria Combalia‟ in Art
Press, no. 199, February 1995, p .58.
the Time When the Surrealists were Right and the second edition of the Contre-Attaque statement. Maar then produced a number of seminal surrealist
photographs which interestingly but for unknown reasons she refused permission for Rosalind Krauss to include in the L‟Amour Fou exhibition in 1984. Maar seems to have blossomed during the mid 1930s and said, ―the good thing about the surrealists was that they took women seriously. If they were talented then they were listened to and appreciated. Breton especially took it all very
seriously.‖86
Maar exhibited widely in the 1930s both individually and in group shows.87 She exhibited with the surrealists and was included in Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism in New York in 1936. 88 She contributed works to exhibitions of contemporary photography and exhibitions of commercial photography; her work was shown in La Publicité par la Photographie at the Galerie de la Pleiade and in Affiches-Photos at Galerie Billiet-Vorms in Paris in 1935. 89 Maar‟s photographs were widely published in a broad range of both cultural reviews and popular magazines.
This career pattern was common to the majority of the young photographers who orientated towards surrealism; Brassaï had also trained as a painter and subsequently found employment through the increasing importance of photographic images in the press. Marja Warehime uncovered a wealth of information concerning Brassaï‟s early career in Paris by reading his letters to his parents, which were at that point untranslated from Hungarian.90 She discovered that when he arrived in Paris in 1924 Brassaï was immediately employed as a correspondent for a daily political paper from Brasso, his native city on the Hungarian border and this small income, as well as regular contracts from two
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6 Combalia, „Dora Maar, Photographer „, p 57.
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7 Maar had individual shows at Galerie Vanderberg (1932) and Galeriede Beaune (1934 and 1939)
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8 Maar contributed to surrealist exhibitions in Tenerife (1935), Belgium (1935), London (1936 and 37), Paris (1936 and 37), Tokyo (1937) and Amsterdam (1938).
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9 Constitutions des Artistes Photographes, Galerie Studio Saint-Jacques, Paris (1932), Exposition Internationale de la Photographie, Brussels (1932), Exposition Internationale de la Photographe Conmtemporaine, Paris (1936) and École Francais de Photographie, Copenhagen (1939).
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0 Brassaï‟s letters were subsequently translated by Péter Laki and Barna Kántor in Brassaï: Letters to my Parents, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.
German newspapers provided scant but regular wages.91 His initial interest in photography was illustrative, he had learnt something about the medium from the photographers who accompanied him and began to take photographs in 1929 to illustrate his own articles. Brassaï claimed that by the end of that year he had so many commissions for articles that he expected to escape constant financial worries as he had sold one article to L ‟Illustration and two to Vu. By 1932 AMG had offered to publish his book Paris de Nuit which made him famous in 1933 (the same year he became involved in surrealism by agreeing to contribute photographs to Minotaure) but in the meantime he sold photographs that would not be included in his book to a wide range of magazines for use as illustrations to such an extent that in the early thirties his work was ubiquitous.
Photo-books allowed practitioners a great deal of creative freedom and were popular with photographers, publishers, collectors and the public. They dealt with a broad range of topics and cities were a particular source of fascination.
Brassai‟s Paris de Nuit was one of many dealing with the capital including Germaine Krull‟s 100 x Paris, with text by Florent Fels (1929), Atget.
Photographe de Paris (1930), Moi Ver‟s Paris (1931), Paris vu par André Kertész, with preface and captions by Pierre Mac Orlan (1934), Francis Carco‟s Envoûtement de Paris, illustrated with 112 photographs by René-Jacques (1938), Paris, by Emmanuel Boudot- Lamotte (1939), and Paris, photographed by Marc Foucault (1942). 92 Warehime suggests that Kertész may have provided useful contacts as he had begun photographing for Vu in 1928 and Brassaï maintained that his fellow Hungarian offered him advice, indeed his first article for the Berliner Illustr i rte was a collaboration with Kertész providing the photographs.93
Kertész had already achieved an international reputation both as an artist- photographer and a photojournalist by 1929 and had exhibited and published widely so naturally he was a role model for young photographers who thought of themselves as artists. After his first solo show in 1927 at the Galerie Le Sacre du Pr intemps Kertész was in great demand as a commercial photographer as
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1 Warehime, M. Brassaï: Images of Culture and the Surrealist Observer, Baton Rouge LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1996, pp. 25 - 26.
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2 Gunther, „The Spread of Photography‟ in Frizot, p 573.
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3 Warehime, Brassaï, pp. 28 — 33.
magazines recognised the value of his approach. Later in life, speaking of his 1929 shot of empty chairs in the Champs-Élyséeshe said ―At that time
photography was zero - only the ordinary commercial kind of shots with little or no artistic value. Nobody photographed the chairs in the parks ... I did. Of course, at that time I did not know that this was modern or unique.‖94 This originality was attractive to magazine editors as they recognised energy within these powerful images that set them apart from mere illustrations; the work of Kertész is immediately recognisable in a survey of Vu due to its exceptional quality and as a result the photographer enjoyed an enviable freedom of expression. Kertész gives this account of how he produced his „distorted nudes‟ series
A Hungarian friend of mine introduced me to the editor of the magazine Le Sourire, a very French sort of magazine - satiric, risqué. Many artists worked for this publication. They had never published photos before.
The editor asked me to do something. I bought two distorting mirrors in the flea market - the kind of thing you find in amusement parks. With existing light and an old lens invented by Hugo Meyer, I achieved amusing impressions. Some images like sculptures, others grotesque and frightening. I took about 140 photographs ... Le Sourire published a couple of them, and we planned a book.95
Similarly, Man Ray was often able to present fashion in settings that inspired him using models of his own choice; he sometimes used his own studio containing his own works of art, those made by friends such as Giacometti, Brancusi or Oscar Dominguez or found objects.96 During this decade the conception of young artists of the medium was shaped by photojournalism but also informed by artistic tradition; they wanted their work seen as art and it was. Commerce was keen to embrace the entire catalogue of new visual possibilities provided by modernist photography; surrealist effects, geometric compositions and straight photography all offered a rich resource. The Foreign Advertising Exhibition held at the Art Centre in New York in 1931, organised by Abbott Kimball of the American advertising firm Lyddon, Hanford & Kimball, assembled the leading trends in European advertising photography. Exhibitors included Moholy-Nagy, Herbert Bayer, George Hoyningen-Heune, Sougez, Laure Albin-Guillot, Kertész,
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4 Kertész, Kertész on Kertész, p 75.
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5 Kertész, Kertész on Kertész, p 82.
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6 Hartshorn, W. and Foresta, W. Man Ray in Fashion, New York: International Center of Photography, 1990, p 18.
Germaine Krull and Florence Henri; representatives from France won seven of the nine awards, Herbert Bayer won first prize.97 The following year many of these photographers also exhibited in the Modern European Photographers show at the Julien Levy Gallery. For artists such as Henri who were influenced by the aesthetic philosophy of the Bauhaus, commercial photography was attractive and advertisers applauded an intense focus on the object itself as a novel approach.
Previously products had been illustrated by line-drawings of them in use and the focus was generally on the people using them, by contrast these sharp close ups emphasised fashionableness.
Lee Miller was introduced to the world of magazine publishing when she famously met Condé Nast in New York by chance; she was almost ran over by a car and he pulled her out of its path, he subsequently employed her as a model for Vogue where she was photographed by Steichen and befriended by Frank Crowninshield, the editor of Vanity Fair. These contacts helped Miller on her arrival in Paris in 1928 as she had been given an introduction to both Man Ray and George Hoyningen-Huene, director of French Vogue. 98 In Paris Miller worked on both sides of the camera with Huene and his then assistant Horst as well as working for other titles and on collaborations with Man Ray who often passed unwanted commissions on to his assistant.99 On her return to New York in 1932 Miller continued with fashion and advertising work and in 1934 a Vanity Fairarticle described her, alongside Huene and Cecil Beaton and others, as ―one of the most distinguished living photographers‖.100 Man Ray had achieved this level of recognition from the commercial sector a decade earlier and his career is particularly of interest because from the mid 1 920s became central to the development of surrealist photography. The kind of understanding that he had of the commercial world is something that is evident in his influence on the surrealist journals.
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7 Du Pont, Diana C., Florence Henri: Artist-photographer of the avant-garde, San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1990, p 33.
98 Penrose, A. The Lives of Lee Miller, London: Thames and Hudson, 1988, p 16.
99 Penrose suggested that Man Ray offered Miller the assignments that he did not want or did not pay well, The Lives of Lee Miller, p 30. Burke, C. „Framing a life: Lee Miller‟ in Roland Penrose Lee Miller: The Surrealist and the Photographer, Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland, 2001, p 128 - 130 outlines this period of apprenticeship in Paris.
100 Vanity Fair, May 1934, p 51.
On his arrival in Paris in July 1921 Man Ray was quick to establish himself in both the artistic and commercial sectors; in December of that year he had his first solo show in the city and had set up the portrait business which ensured that by the mid 1920s he was very well known and in great demand. He was known as an innovative photographer and as someone who was closely connected to the literary and artistic avant-garde as well as rich and famous socialites. His 1922 portraits of among others Picasso, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Hemingway and Proust on his deathbed along with his fashion shots for Poiret and his association with Le Boeufnightclub described by Cocteau as ―the meeting place of all the best people in Paris, from all spheres of life‖101 cemented his fashionable status.
In July 1922 Vanity Fair published his portraits of Picasso and Joyce. Frank Crowninshield had bought four rayographs and published them later that year in the November issue along with a portrait of Man Ray in a feature entitled „A New Method of Realizing the Artistic Possibilities of Photography‟.102 This exposure led to an extremely successful, sustained and lucrative commercial career for Man Ray who received commissions from Europe and America. In 1934 Brodovitch was appointed as art director at Harpers Bazaar in New York and employed Man Ray, as well as Brassaï, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Cassandre. Brodovitch believed that artists
must be able to perceive and preconceive the tastes, aspirations and habits of the consumer-spectator and the mob ... must be a pioneer and a leader, he must fight against routine and the bad taste of the mob... a new aesthetic is born. This is an achievement. To deepen this achievement is the problem of the publicity artist.103
By the 1920s technological advances facilitated the development of sophisticated advertising where text was replaced by image and the image was not necessarily a faithful reproduction of the object. In the 1930s Man Ray‟s finely crafted and extreme surrealist images, involving deep shadows, solarisation, photograms and negative printing were highly sought after for commercial purposes as they appeared to be both magical and modern. In 1931 he was offered a commission
101 Cocteau quoted by Klüver, B & Martin, J. „Man Ray, Paris‟ in Foresta, Perpetual Motif, p 106.
102 Hartshorn and Foresta, Man Ray in Fashion, p. 14
103 Hartshorn and Foresta, Man Ray in Fashion, p 20.
to produce a deluxe portfolio for the Compagnie Parisienne de Distribution d‟Électricité depicting electricity and its applications. For this project he used photograms as well as photographs containing photogrammed elements and signed his work as an artist would.104 (Fig 1)
In 1934 Brodovitch commissioned Man Ray to produce impressions of the Parisian fashion collections for the November issue of Harper‟s Bazaar which featured five pages of fashions transmitted from France directly by short wave, to appear in New York. For his simulated „wirephoto‟ Man Ray used the photogram technique, placing a piece of fabric and a paper cut-out on top of the photographic paper to give the impression of a new fashion „coming over‟ the short waves.105 (Fig 2) By the end of the 1930s styles of surrealism had been assimilated into fashion photography and advertising. Nancy Hall-Duncan‟s survey of how forms of surrealism influenced fashion photography concluded that the genre drew what it could use effectively from the style including fantasy, mystery, the dreamlike and humour.106 Man Ray lamented the steady
professionalism of photographers during the 1930s, promoting instead a violation of the medium and proposing that a ―certain amount of contempt for the material employed to express an idea is indispensable to the purest realization of this idea.‖107 Chapter Two will consider the nature of photography in La Révolution Surréaliste under the direction of Man Ray and explore the relationship between the commercial use of the medium and its presence in the surrealist journal.
104 Lemagny, J-C. & Rouillé, A. (eds.) A History of Photography: Social and Cultural Perspectives, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987, p 122. Ten images were published by the company in a portfolio with an accompanying text by Pierre Bost, Électricité, Paris:
Compa gnie P a r isienne de Distr ibution d‟Électr icité, 1931.
105 Esten, J. Man Ray: Bazaar Years, New York: Rizzoli, 1988, p 13.
106 Hall-Duncan, N. „Surrealism and Fantasy‟ in The History of Fashion Photography, New York: Alpine Book Co., 1979, p 97.
107 Man Ray (1934) „The Age of Light‟ in Plachy, S. & Phillips, C. Photography in the Modern Era: European Documents and critical Writings 1913 Ŕ 1940, New York: Aperture, 1989, p 53.