With some 70 per cent fewer flights in the air globally, Hegen looked to the vast sections of the airports that were closed and used as parking lots for aircraft: “Airplanes, once a symbol of freedom, had become the symbol of a standstill in the spring of 2020.”

In Aerial Observations on Airports, he examines these sites—in Berlin, Bonn, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Stuttgart and Düsseldorf—with an eye for geometry. “The view from above shows the very autonomous, graphic, and almost illustrative quality of airports,” he observes. Having previously taken aerial pictures from small aircraft, travelling over the Arctic, Spanish farmland and the Namib desert, this time Hegen used helicopters, flying between 400 and 600 metres high, guiding the pilot via a headset.

Talking to me from his photography and graphic design studio in Munich, Hegen recalls the challenges of shooting from a helicopter, buffered by the cold air from the rotor blades, one foot propped precariously on the skid. “For me a helicopter is more like a tripod in the air,” he says. “The side door is removed so I have a clear view down to the ground. This makes it very stressful. It’s such a harsh environment. It’s not the best environment to take super detailed photographs.”

It was, tangentially, a pandemic project. Hegen presents the ant hill minus the ants. “Aviation is the central engine of globalisation. At the hubs of international air travel, goods are traded and deals made,” he writes in his introduction. “The slots on overfilled runways are closely and precisely timed. This intense networking of the world has, however, also led to diseases spreading faster than ever before.” Airports have fast-tracked Covid-19.

(©TOM HEGEN)

“It is super hard to get permission to fly in a helicopter over huge airports,” he says. But with restrictions lifted in lockdown, the project was suddenly viable. The helicopter pilots were intrigued. A Lufthansa pilot in Frankfurt said that he suddenly saw his airport in a different, more contemplative, light.

In his previous work, Hegen has captured the elegance of sand dunes, reefs, craters and glaciers, in compositions that often feature the intrusion of people (developers, industrialists, swimmers). Here, however, his photographs deliver abstract, and figureless, arrangements of stencilled numbers and letters and bold coloured lines—all delivering coded information to pilots and ground crew—set against the graphite background of tarmac. Wheel-marks swirl and loop like Cy Twombly’s pencil work, coloured grids echo Mondrian’s configurations, control towers and blocks sit like pieces of uncompromising Bauhaus furniture.

We don’t think of airports as being beautiful in the way we do railway stations (the Parisians even turned their glorious Beaux Arts terminal into the Musée d’Orsay). This is, in part, due to the 20th-century fashion for functionalist line over ornate curlicue, sans-serif over the serif, metal over stone. Buildings can be less attractive when they are utilitarian. But, seen from above, these terminals often possess the symmetrical elegance of snowflakes. And the planes that pepper the ground look like dance partners, albeit with some a little tighter on their marks than others.

The palette of German signage is limited to red and yellow, a rather jolly Lego-like colour scheme that feels simultaneously nostalgic and contemporary. But there are visiting hues—easyJet orange, RyanAir blue, the pink wingtip of a maverick Cessna. Just who decides on this aesthetic remains a mystery. Are planners adhering to a corporate design? “I assume so because in Germany everything is run by guidelines,” Hegen retorts. Apart from one huge sign for Berlin airport, the pictures give little away as to the individual locations. Hegen adds to the anonymity by not captioning his pictures. Uniformity—natürlich—is key.

“When you’re a guest in an airport you think it’s such a mess. Such chaos, so many people. Hopefully your luggage will arrive at the right destination,” says Hegen. “But then when you see it from this vertical perspective you see that there’s so much thought behind it.” A bit of distance can be enlightening (I particularly liked the caravans of redundant luggage wagons that trail around like ducklings).

(©TOM HEGEN)

Airports hold an appropriately transient place in culture. They are a plot cog in numerous novels—not least Arthur Hailey’s Airport—but, considering that they have existed for more than a century, they have had little impact on the visual arts. The exception being the work of the Italian Futurists who, in the early 20th century, seized on aviation as a dynamic example of progress. The result was a gallery of sometimes prophetic, sometimes scary, images of flight. They called it “aeropainting”. Tullio Crali created canvases dizzy with propellors and parachutists while Guglielmo Sansoni, known as Tato, painted vertiginous views of the ground as seen from above. At the dawn of the movement, before the First World War, the Lombardian architect Antonio Sant’Elia drew up plans for an entire Città Nuova, a brave new metropolis that included an airport perched on top of railway tracks.

In 1976, Hergé conceived an idea for his final Tintin book, in which the entire story would be set in an international airport. This chamber piece, thought Hergé, would show how the whole world—“tragedies, jokes, exoticism and adventure”—was condensed in an airport. The book was never completed. Steven Spielberg, a great admirer of Hergé, directed a variation on the theme with his 2004 comedy-drama The Terminal.

In the field of photography, meanwhile, airports have always been more a setting than a subject. Most prominently, they have been the hunting ground of the paparazzi. During the golden age of Hollywood, when Pan Am was Uber to the stars, celebrity snappers caught a dazzling cast hanging around the concourse and the check-in desks: Marilyn Monroe, wrapped in furs at LaGuardia, the Beatles grabbing a coffee between flights in Stockholm, Audrey Hepburn walking her Yorkshire terrier to the plane at Rome’s Ciampino Airport. Everyone is smiling. Today, it’s a scrum. In 2015, Los Angeles International Airport proposed a special celebrity arrivals lounge to stop stars being hassled by feral hordes of photographers.

In art photography, Andreas Gursky has created panoramas of runways and departure gates at Hong Kong, Frankfurt and Düsseldorf. And, for his 1994 work Schiphol, he shot through the windows of the Amsterdam airport out towards a hazy horizon for a photographic twist on the tradition of Dutch landscape painting. 

(©TOM HEGEN)

In his foreword to Aerial Observations on Airports, Alain de Botton suggests that Hegen’s photographs envisage “a world in which people might not fly at all”. He suggests that the events of 2020 offer us pause for thought. De Botton imagines a time when red-eye flights and passenger queues, hangars and landing strips, could all become the stuff of fireside legends, with airports turned into galleries and home-owners on flight-paths finally getting a good night’s sleep. He quotes an ancient Arabic proverb about the soul travelling at the speed of a camel.

The wishful thinking of a philosopher, perhaps, but de Botton has a point: our love affair with aviation has soured. “How we would admire planes if they were no longer there to frighten and bore us,” he writes. “We would stroke their steel dolphin-like bodies in museums and honour them as symbols of a daunting technical intelligence and a prodigious wealth.”

Hegen sees something altogether more abstract in these places. “It’s such a graphical world. I was really surprised at how everything is in order, there are so many lines and signs.” At the new Berlin Brandenburg Willy Brandt Airport he was confronted with a crisp high-definition muse. “It was supposed to open eight or ten years ago and it just opened two weeks ago. The lines were very fresh, they were really saturated and popping out. In airports that were much older they had vanished already.”

He sees his work as an exploration of the intersection between humans and their surroundings, specifically: “how we interfere with nature, how we extract resources out of it and how we change the surface of our planet”.  His photographs are an amalgamation of documentary work and exercises in graphic design. But, while the aesthetic is rigidly geometric, Hegen’s subject matter touches on the fluidity of social, industrial and political forces.

“I do all of this to tell stories about how we deal with the environment,” he says. “And with this lockdown series it is the same. I usually focus on landscapes where humans interfere with nature but this time it’s the other way around, nature is interfering with our daily life.”

(©TOM HEGEN)

“Aerial Observations on Airports” by Tom Hegen, with a foreword by Alain de Botton, is published by Hatje Cantz Verlag, €54.00

The post A tripod in the sky appeared first on Standpoint.

An unusual rash has popped up recently in Britain’s GP surgeries. A pox of pandemic posters produced to show the public how to bin it and kill it. Four years ago, a similar outbreak sprang out of the EU referendum, when the German contemporary artist Wolfgang Tillmans created posters declaring “What is lost is lost forever”. On the other side of the fence was Boris’s billboard.

Since they first appeared some two centuries ago, posters have been many things: sales pitches, artistic expressions, mechanisms of social change, propaganda and collectors’ items. And with Brexit, Covid and the climate crisis, they have suddenly returned to our streets as public markers of motivation and despair.

In the new book The Poster: 200 Years of Art, curator Jürgen Döring writes that “each one represents an attempt to convey a message on a clearly delimited surface—a message that will, it is hoped, be received by the viewer despite competing perpetually and pitilessly with an indefinite number of others found in the immediate vicinity”. The poster was the tweet before Twitter.

Döring’s study is focused on the poster collection in the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe in Hamburg for which he is responsible. Its publication coincides with that of The Poster: A Visual History, a tour through the poster collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. While the V&A volume takes an entertaining and barrelling thematic approach—consumption, sport, protest, transport—the German book is an elegant piece of scholarship that delivers a chronological tour through the work of some 200 artists.

Both books highlight how these scrappy punctuations of student halls and derelict walls have in reality been societal game-changers. Since its conception, the poster has delivered politically explosive, anarchist and avant-garde arguments and consistently crossed boundaries of artistic and social norms. Their power lies in the primacy of the messaging: the poster needs you!

This first-person shout out to the passer-by began with Kitchener’s call-up posters—replicated by both the German and US forces during the First World War—and in the decades since posters have pressed the public to combat communism and capitalism, ban the bomb and wear a condom. During the May ’68 riots, French students set up their own Atelier Populaire to disseminate witty digs at De Gaulle in a poster campaign plastered throughout the boulevards of Paris. Jan Lenica, the maestro of Polish avant-garde design in the 1960s, observed that the poster “has a job to do, and it must fulfil its duty”.

In terms of design, posters have always papered their own path. In Belle-Époque France, advertising sheets delivered curlicues of limbs and palm fronds; Imperial Germany invented the sachplakat—object poster—which isolated a product on a plain of bold colour (shoes were a popular sachplakat subject). Later, neither the Third Reich or the Soviets could print posters fast enough: both pumped up their muscular self-image at the  press. And then in the 1960s things got kaleidoscopic with incomprehensible counter-cultural compositions.

For artists, the poster is the perfect conduit for trial and error. Low-cost, in terms of material, production and time, it allows them to test boundaries of aesthetics and wreak havoc with the relationship between typography and imagery. Schiele, Kirchner, Picasso and Warhol all played around with the medium.

As these two books highlight, the really intriguing case studies, however, are the pioneering but less famous graphic designers. Characters like Edward McKnight Kauffer, the son of a travelling musician from Montana who shaped the visual identity of the London Underground during the interwar years. His posters of Kew Gardens and Westminster Abbey mashed together Vorticism and Cubism without losing an English sensibility. And then there were the Stenberg brothers, two Soviet film poster designers who blended photomontage and Constructivist tics to sell Buster Keaton to their Muscovite comrades.

Designers like these understood that a successful poster required a visual shorthand. Kauffer described it as a search for “a simplified, formalised, and more expressive symbol of the things represented”. A cross-pollination of iconography is another trope. In a Socialist Worker poster from 1983, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher embrace in the midst of nuclear fallout for a Gone With The Wind parody (“The Most Explosive Love Story Ever”).

Posters have “given dissenters the graphic language to agitate”, observes Gill Saunders, head of the prints department at the V&A. “Their designers have used every possible strategy—humour, seduction, provocation, shock—to get their message across.”

Since the mid-19th century, when lithographic printing revolutionised the practice, hot colours have punctuated those points. You can make a lot of noise with a few hues. “Limiting the number of colours makes a poster not only cheaper, but also better,” explained one 19th-century German curator. “A poster printed in just a few colours will be visible from afar.”

What is less clear are the origins of the poster. Early examples are immensely rare due to their frailty and small print runs. As an independent source of public information, they date to the early 19th century, as Jürgen Döring explains: “Before the French Revolution, censorship had a firm grip on the European continent. Public proclamations were the royal prerogative of the head of state and his government.”

By the turn of the century a full-blown poster frenzy—affichomanie—had taken hold. There were magazines for poster fans in Paris and London. In fin-de-siècle France, Alphonse Mucha, Henri Toulouse-Lautrec and others made their names creating posters featuring bohemian women entwined in tactful foliage, romantic images that were used to advertise railway routes and department stores, cabarets and cigarette papers. The actress Sarah Bernhardt kept a whole raft of artists busy with her theatrical posters. Another prolific designer of the period was Leonetto Cappiello whose posters were marked by “a dab of colour” and a dash of audacity (high-kicking showgirls were his forte).

These designs were intended for indoor use in foyers and corridors and the walls of upmarket boutiques. The street poster came into its own in the 20th century. Technological developments and a revolution in typography coincided with a growing urban population to create both the means and motivation for widespread poster production. It promptly became a favourite with dictators and dissenters everywhere.

During the post-war years, posters got down with the young ones. Rock posters became design classics: psychedelia took the medium on an acid trip and punks did their thing with subversive collages. Meanwhile, in their distillation of a film’s atmosphere into a single image, cinema posters became an art form in their own right. In Hollywood, Saul Bass—poster designer to Alfred Hitchcock, Otto Preminger and Billy Wilder—had the poster tally with the opening credits to create a visual branding, what he described as “a simple visual phrase to tell you what the story is all about”.

In recent decades, posters have fractured the conservative mindset of marketing executives. Companies became campaigners and campaigners got slick. Benetton’s ads of kissing nuns garnered outrage and acclaim. Meanwhile, the anti-fur organisation Lynx employed David Bailey to shoot their bloody billboards (“It takes 40 dumb animals to wear a fur coat. And only one to wear it”). Taste is a fluid concept in the advertising world: Levi’s probably wouldn’t now go with their “logo on a woman’s bare-buttock” campaign of the early 1970s.

A recent resurgence in print posters in the US has been fuelled by the live music and street art scenes and various activist groups. Shepard Fairey, designer of the Barack Obama “Hope” poster in 2008, has designed for all three arenas. But elsewhere there has been the inevitable digital overhaul. Oxymoronic “digital prints”—those ingratiating screens that “rotate” next to you at the bus stop—have ratcheted up the immediacy of poster recognition, demanding audience attention in the programmed time it takes for the screen to change.

The digital sphere is hostile to the charms of the traditional poster. And while the paper poster has authority—its argument is literally fixed in ink—a screen “poster” is a removable and deniable despatch. Perhaps it is that conviction that accounts for the emotional heft of the traditional poster. Consider the passive-aggressive punch of the First World War poster designed by Savile Lumley for the Parliamentary Recruiting Committee in 1915. A father is shown in his armchair, surrounded by his adoring children. The tagline: “Daddy, what did YOU do in the Great War?” One assumes that Lumley told his kids that he did his bit hitting print deadlines.

Yet, while doctors, environmentalists and Europhiles—as well as anti-vaxxers, climate sceptics and Brexiteers—have all embraced the poster in recent years, the medium is perhaps ill-suited to the present political landscape. With the ever-changing messaging—the management of crises one slogan at a time—there isn’t enough paper to go around.

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“The Poster: 200 Years of Art and History” is published by Prestel, £45. “The Poster: A Visual History” is published by the V&A  and Thames & Hudson, £45

The post The writing on the walls appeared first on Standpoint.

As several new books illustrate, Brigman is emblematic of the free-spirited women who have, over more than 150 years, embraced photography. Here, at last, was a medium for women who wanted to chart their own course.

Brigman certainly followed her own compass. Born in Hawaii in 1869, she married a mariner, sailed the South Seas, ditched the skipper and reinvented herself as a San Franciscan bohemian just in time for the arrival of the 20th century. Two recent studies—Anne Brigman: The Photographer of Enchantment and Anne Brigman: A Visionary in Modern Photography—situate her work somewhere between Pre-Raphaelite paintings and Kate Bush videos.

Her staged shots presented nudes en plein air—twisted around tree-trunks, bookended by rocks—in the ridges and lakes of the high Sierras. The results are a fuzzy mix of naturism, paganism and classical allusions. She wasn’t interested in revering nature but rather creating—via Kodak and gelatin silver prints—an earthy fiction of sirens among the pines, what she describes in a poem as “a sanctuary under gracious skies”.

Brigman also appears in Women Photographers, Thames & Hudson’s new series of three books which collectively profile 190 women—pioneers, revolutionaries and contemporaries—who became shutterbugs. While Brigman’s lens sought the ecstasy of the elements, these books also present photographers who found surrealism in cats (Wanda Wulz), beauty in solitude (Sophie Calle) and drama in circuses (Mary Ellen Mark).

In recent years a corrective in the art world has seen a reappraisal of women painters—the Lee Krasner show at the Barbican highlighted what a one-drip pony Jackson Pollock was compared to his wife—but the history of women photographers is different: they were always there, front and centre. “When the emerging profession was not yet subject to any codes or rules, women were free to immerse themselves in photography. They opened studios, filed patents and travelled,” notes Clara Bouveresse in her introduction to Women Photographers.

In the mid-19th century, it was class rather than gender that was a hurdle for fledgling photographers. In the cumbersome days of glass plate negatives, monumental stands and convoluted chemical processing, photography was expensive and required considerable space and time. It was not a pursuit for anyone, man or woman, who had to earn a living.

The female pioneers were often well-heeled amateurs, Julia Margaret Cameron being the most famous, but there was also Lady Clementina Hawarden, who produced stereoscopic images of her debutant daughters; La Castiglione, the Italian aristocrat who took risqué pictures of legs; and Alice Austen, the Staten Island heiress whose photographs illustrated the pages of Bicycling for Ladies.

Technical developments in the early 20th century, including negative film and affordable and portable 35mm cameras, placed photography into the hands of a new generation of women. And they ran with it, seeing in the medium a way both of recording their daily routines and expressing their internal lives.

From the 1920s through the 1960s there were prominent female figures working on various fronts, from reportage and commercial work to landscape and portraiture: Eve Arnold and Inge Morath focused on the stars of Hollywood; Lee Miller went to war (famously exposing the domesticity of evil in Hitler’s bathtub); Grete Stern and Ellen Auerbach set up an advertising and design agency in Berlin; and across six decades Jane Bown, the doyenne of photojournalism at the Observer, photographed subjects from Bertrand Russell to Björk.

But there were many talents who shot in the shadows. Vivian Maier was the hidden maestro whose story is now told as a fable of success deferred. A mercurial figure, Maier was a Chicago nanny who secretly took thousands of photographs on her days off, beautiful images of everyday encounters. Following her death, this huge cache, which undoubtedly classifies her as a modern master, was discovered in a storage facility. Yet, it is the value placed on fame that frames Maier’s posthumous celebration as a good thing. It is not something she sought for herself, or her photographs, during her lifetime.

In The New Woman Behind the Camera, a phenomenal work of research published by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, readers can discover how photography obsessed 20th-century women across the globe. Written to accompany a blockbuster show (postponed to 2021 due to the Coronavirus pandemic) the volume surveys the impact of 120 women—fearless, radical, involved—a sprawling community engaged in photography spanning some 20 countries. 

“The Handcrafts Group Organised by Families of Shanghai Business Owners Making Chinese Dolls”, by Niu Weiyu, 1956 (©Gao Fan & Niu Weiyu Foundation)

“Many of these ‘new’ women found the camera to be a means of independence as they sought to redefine their position in society,” observes curator Andrea Nelson. The gallery of images she has uncovered is astounding, broaching industry, warfare, community, sexuality and parenthood as well as abstraction and form. These women often photographed within extraordinary constraints. Taking pictures in the early days of the People’s Republic of China, Niu Weiyu was limited to shooting “women-related topics” such as the doll-makers of Shanghai. And in wartime Stalingrad, Galina Sanko created Soviet propaganda on the front line.

There was also fun. In Weimar Germany, Etel Fodor-Mittag recorded the erotic undercurrents and zany antics of the Bauhaus crowd. Later, in post-war Jamaica, Toni Frissell photographed fashion models lazing under the glare of the Caribbean sun. And there was adventure: a picture of Niu Weiyu on assignment in the Chinese mountains in 1960 sees her heroically perched on a rocky path, relaxed and camera in hand.

“During an Attack”, by Galina Sanko, 1943. (© Robert Koch Gallery)

As these sometimes jarring, sometimes joyous images highlight, every woman has a unique view. The nonagenarian British street-photographer Dorothy Bohm explained that there was a benefit to being a woman: children and elderly subjects were put at ease. Bohm shot all around the world and, in London, worked with Sue Davies, the maverick who founded the Photographers’ Gallery in a former Lyons tearoom, the first public gallery dedicated to photography.

Men took photography seriously as soon as status and money arrived on the scene. In 1968, the National Portrait Gallery, under the aegis of its director Roy Strong, presented its first photographic exhibition with a major Cecil Beaton retrospective. The event marked an intersection of society gentlemen rather than an acceptance of the medium. “Women photographers are still vastly under-represented in scholarship and exhibitions of the modern period,” Nelson notes.

And then in the 1970s the auction houses sat up, initially offering vintage albumen prints from the 19th century and then modern works. And perhaps the most obvious litmus test of the gender equation is the marketplace: of the five most expensive photographs sold at auction only one is by a woman (Cindy Sherman’s Untitled #96).   

Today, colour photography, long considered the poor cousin to monochrome, is dominated by women with wild ideas. In the Thames & Hudson volumes readers can enjoy the seedy Americana of Nan Goldin, Ouka Leele’s vivid mash-ups of oil-paint and photographs and the Iranian portraits of Shirin Nashat which incorporate coloured Farsi calligraphy.

“Birds in Marseille, France”, by Dolorès Marat, 2003 (©Dolores Marat)

Perhaps the most atmospheric example of a woman who has made colour photography entirely her own is Dolorès Marat, the French photographer who once processed film for L’Oreal’s beauty magazine and whose woozy images are like half-remembered nights out. She produces skewed cinematic atmospheres in throbbing colours—blood-clot reds and queasy greens—in which people loiter in alleyways and birds swarm ominously across the sky. “Dolores Marat is to photography what Edith Piaf is to the French song,” observed one critic.

As an adolescent growing up in post-war Paris, Marat already knew that she wanted to be a photographer. No, said her mother, she would be a dressmaker. “I went to sewing school, without protest,” Marat
recalled. After several years making waistcoats, she strategically took a holiday job as a maid for the local photographer. “I’d do the cleaning in the morning,” she recalled. “In the afternoon the photographer taught me how the cameras worked, how to develop, to print, to touch up the passport photos. I think I picked everything up in a week.”

Marat’s story echoes the observation of Anne Brigman: “I wanted to go and be free, that was all I wanted.” Those liberties have been fundamental in shaping a modern medium. Women photographers shouldn’t represent a secret history of photography; they were truly its founding mothers. 

“Anne Brigman: The Photographer of Enchantment” by Kathleen Pyne is published by Yale, £50; “Anne Brigman: A Visionary in Modern Photography” is published by Rizzoli, £87; “Women Photographers” is published by Thames & Hudson, £35 (set);

“The New Woman Behind the Camera” is published by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, £48

The post Focusing on the female gaze appeared first on Standpoint.

In Cesare Colombo’s mid-century shots of Milan, figures remain ghostly; they are largely missing from Luigi Ghirri’s snapshots of Bologna, Turin and Parma in the 1970s and ’80s; and they are lively, but capricious, in the monumental works of Massimo Vitali, taken in more recent years along the beaches of the Ligurian Sea. Each, in their way, has caught something of the region’s sense of the elegiac.

The novelist Carlos Ruiz Zafón, who died last month, was a resident of Los Angeles. He once remarked that in his city you got the sense “that there’s a mysterious patrol at night: when the streets are empty and everyone’s asleep, they go erasing the past”. The opposite is in play in the towns and cities of northern Italy, where the streets have a heavy impasto of history, a composition in which everyone lives. The landscape is layered with reinvention, as industrial and political fortunes, grinding poverty and brief gentrification have shaped and reshaped it.

This is true of the whole country but in the north the weather adds further fluctuations. Inland, as Colombo and Ghirri both captured, the air is heavy with fog; buildings appear elemental as stone and atmosphere get confused. And, as Vitali details, in the height of summer the coast can sizzle and shimmer to an alienating degree.

In his photographs from the late 1950s, Colombo pictured the Milanese as phantoms. They haunt the parks, they wait on platforms, they shelter from the rain. Even caught en masse, or at Mass, a single face will stand out within his frame, often looking straight into the lens. He sees them, they see him, everyone else is oblivious.

A survey of his work, Cesare Colombo: Photographs, 1952-2012, illustrates how, while he largely worked in monochrome, when he shot in colour he used hues like subtle suggestions: the yellow edge of a pavement, a dash of red on a dress, the green panels of a tram. Not technically perfect—figures are often a little soft in a Colombo picture—the imprecise nature of his focus matches his fleeting subjects. Photographs, Colombo noted, were for the “analysis of one’s fears as well as analysis of desolate urban structures that evoke solitude and soliloquies”.

“Largo Cairoli, ore 8, 1956, Milano”, © Cesare Colombo. (Civico Archivio Fotografico, inv. COL 7)

In the work of Luigi Ghirri, however, we discover a country that is also stuck in time: a late 20th-century Italy of coastal resorts, museums and market squares that already seems nostalgic. Rather than rose-tinted tourist views, people are notable largely by their absence. The restaurants are empty, the beaches are bare, the hotels stay vacant. Ghirri was the maestro of silence.

A major retrospective volume of his work, The Map and the Territory, highlights his obsessions: isolated houses, advertising boards, dawn and dusk. His prints were almost impressionistic in their bleached-out pastel shades. Like memory, his images are hazy.

Ghirri came to photography during the 1970s, in his twenties, focusing primarily on the architecture and topographical quirks of Emilia-Romagna and the Veneto. He captures lonesome swings and slides in Ravenna and a church waiting for its congregation in Modena. He made ghost towns out of Bologna, Ferrara and Trieste and when a figure does appear—a sleeping dog, a lone stroller—they seem lost.

The stillness of these pictures doesn’t detract from the intellect at play. Ghirri explained that he was as enlightened by the ballads of Bob Dylan and the brushstrokes of Brueghel, as he was the work of other photographers. His work, however, would never emerge from the woozy world of analogue photography. Ghirri died in 1992, aged just 49, a tragedy that meant that his Italy remains preserved under his rather graceful glaze.

“Photography has spiritual links with the end of the world,” remarked the film director Wim Wenders. Photographs record what will never be the same again. Ghirri saw it slightly more romantically: “Taking photographs is above all restoring a sense of wonder, like observing the world through an adolescent eye.”

Colombo and Ghirri were both writers and historians as well as photographers, both understood the context of their images. In the 1980s, Colombo compiled an anthology of Italian photographs to celebrate the medium’s centenary in the country. “In the magic Italian landscape, nature, evoked by centuries of painting and poetry appeared through the photographic lens to be suddenly damaged by bridges and tunnels,” he wrote. “The camera could finally document everything.”

“Genoa Pegli West”, 2006, by Massimo Vitali (©Massimo Vitali)

Everything is precisely what you get in a Massimo Vitali panorama. At first glance, Vitali’s work might appear the antithesis of Colombo and Ghirri’s still scenes: his large format, immensely detailed pictures focus on the sunbathers, swimmers and posers that pepper Italy’s beaches, pools and piers. Often hordes of them. But, again in a nod to Brueghel, look closer and the viewer sees that each of these figures tells its own tale. These characters are alone in a pack: a boy takes his first plunge in a Genoese pool; a woman, lost in thought, stares out to sea.

Vitali has photographed bathers and revellers all around the world—a collection of which feature in Short Stories—and has come to the conclusion that less is more: the crowds have gradually dispersed in his pictures. “I think I can get what I want with fewer people and less eventful situations,” he notes.

Following several months of lockdown, Vitali recently returned to the seaside, taking his large-format camera to the resort of Tonfano in Tuscany. From his studio in Lucca, Vitali tells me that there was a sense of uncertainty rather than sadness on the sands. “Young kids were perfectly at ease, they consider themselves immortal, but the rest of the people were very cautious.”

You can find the existentialism in his work, he says, “if you know how to read a photo”. His photographs are full of humanity but they celebrate its most evanescent events. “Humanity is ephemeral,” he says, “It’s not something I am trying to underline, but it is natural.”

Vitali’s colour scheme, like those of Colombo and Ghirri, remains calm. “Ghirri was definitely a master of the subdued,” Vitali says. “I shared a printer with him in Modena, and so I got very influenced by this lightness. And Cesare was a very good friend of mine, but I tend to think of him as a black and white photographer.” Vitali’s photographs are great washes of blanched rock, turquoise waters and faded swimwear.

People are almost beside the point in this landscape. These places have seen residents and workers come and go for centuries; the carmakers of Turin, the financiers of Milan, the sailors of Genoa, they have always ebbed and flowed through their piazzas and ports. “Landscape is not where nature ends and the artificial world begins, it is rather a passageway,” Ghirri noted.

When contemporary architecture is bereft of people, it’s like haute couture on the rack. But the avenues of Milan and lidos of Livorno seem ambivalent to the masses. They have survived invasions and allegiances, the fascists and the Red Brigades, depressions and economic miracles. What endures is the setting, the resilient loggias and churches, the cliffs and the mountain paths.

In recent years the forsaken has become fashionable: all those coffee-table books of crumbling Soviet institutions and Mitteleuropean mansions turned into beautiful tableaux of rubble and weeds. It’s the pornography of nostalgia. But that’s not what is happening in the photography of Colombo, Ghirri and Vitali. Rather, they confront the inevitability of change—what Vitali calls “the next normal”—and, invariably, acknowledge what remains.

Massimo Vitali in Tonfano, Tuscany, after lockdown, photographed by Nicola Gnesi

“Cesare Colombo: Photographs, 1952-2012” is published by Silvana Editoriale, £35. “Luigi Ghirri, The Map and the Territory” is published by Mack, £40. “Massimo Vitali: Short Stories” by Massimo Vitali is published by Steidl, £120

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Since then, according to the Whitechapel curators, representational painting has lost its appeal, is past its sell-by date, and has been largely overtaken by photography and video produced by ambitious young artists. In a century dominated by digital photography (a jaw-dropping 1.8 billion images are uploaded every day) how can painting ever compete? 

For your answer, walk around Radical Figures: Painting in the New Millennium. Instagram selfies are so last year: this is a show articulating topical social issues with new energy, showing how the paintbrush is so much more powerful than the camera in its capacity to portray an inner psychological world, of the self, the body, race and gender. Reports of the death of figurative painting have been greatly exaggerated. Chris Ofili, Peter Doig, or Luc Tuymans, to name but a few established figurative painters, are not exactly languishing in obscurity, despite the ubiquitousness of the photography or conceptual art installations that continue to bemuse most gallery visitors.

Curatorial headline-grabbing aside, Radical Figures deserves attention. The Whitechapel’s director, Iwona Blazwick, says it highlights 10 of the “most exciting artists working in figurative painting today”. In stark contrast with the 1981 Royal Academy show, seven of the painters are women and four are artists of colour. The choice is inevitably subjective: who is to say there would not be 10 completely different “exciting” artists chosen at another venue? Well, the more the merrier. This is a truly enthralling vibrant display of young talent.

“Tarifa” (2001) by Daniel Richter (courtesy of Galerie Thaddeus Ropac, London)

The dialogue with art history is genuine. Tarifa (2001), by the German Daniel Richter, evokes the notion of the sublime and the terror of dramas at sea, referencing Theodore Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa and Turner’s The Shipwreck. Painted at the time when night vision technology started to be used by the military and the police, it is a harrowing and alarmingly prescient image showing a small inflatable raft tossed in a dark sea, overloaded with refugees huddling in fear.

Nicole Eisenman’s Brooklyn Biergarten II (2008), painted at the height of the 2008 crash, shows artists, hipsters and businessmen drowning their sorrows, echoing Édouard Manet’s masterpiece of Parisian bourgeois entertainment, Music in the Tuileries (1862); her Progress, Real and Imagined (2006), meanwhile, has clear references to Pieter Bruegel and Hieronymus Bosch.

But painters have always engaged in visual conversations with their predecessors. Turner was, after all, known as the “British Claude”.

Right panel of “Progress, Real and Imagined” (2006) by Nicole Eisenman (courtesy of Ringier AG/Sammlung Ringier, Switzerland)

Kenyan-born Michael Armitage uses social media videos as a source for his subjects. #mydressmychoice (2015) is taken from an incident in 2014 in which a woman was assaulted and stripped by a group of men while waiting for a bus in Nairobi. The attackers accused the victim, who wore a miniskirt, of “tempting” them with “indecent” clothing. The attack was captured on a video that was posted on YouTube and went viral. Thousands took to the streets in uproar, under the hashtag #MyDressMyChoice.

In this work, the pose of the woman is a direct reference to Diego Velàzquez’s Rokeby Venus, the mirror replaced by the “male gaze” of the attackers’ shoes. Armitage tells me that the  fascination lies in the conflation of beauty with something truly horrible and violent. “Painting is still and silent, so it gives us more time to reflect on the full horrors of what this scene depicts”. Precisely because it consists of recognisable images articulated through paint, figurative work, Armitage claims, unlike abstraction or conceptual art, is a far more powerful way of engaging and reflecting life.

This reinvigoration of figurative painting has been especially championed among black artists, such as the British artist Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s enigmatic portraits of imagined black subjects (a retrospective of her work was scheduled to be at Tate Britain from May 20 to August 31; the Tate galleries are now closed until at least June 1), and the Chicago-based Kerry James Marshall. In both cases it is figurative painting that lends greater potency to the representation of issues of identity and racial stereotyping.

Kehinde Wiley is a young African-American painter who is quite literally changing the faces of portraiture with his pulsating and political depictions of black men and women, ranging from young people he meets on the street (a process he calls “streetcasting”) to rap artists, and even Barack Obama, whose 2018 portrait now hangs in the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC. Wiley has made his name with hyper-realistic, brightly coloured portraits, often with dramatic botanical backdrops. He challenges viewers’ preconceptions of people of colour and brings them into museums and galleries where they have, up to now, been largely excluded. His works are represented in every major museum in the United States.

His portraits give power to those without it, turning the privileged and elitist identity of traditional portraiture— the “field of power”—on its head.

Installation view of “Portrait of Melissa Thompson” by Kehinde Wiley. (© Kehinde Wiley, 2020. Courtesy Stephen Friedman Gallery, London. Photography by Nicola Tree)

Wiley’s latest venture is a collaboration with the William Morris Gallery in Walthamstow in London. Long inspired by the floral motifs of William Morris, he first came to know the designs while helping his mother sell bric-à-brac in South Central Los Angeles in the 1980s. In what must surely be a coup for the gallery, this is his first solo exhibition at a public institution in the UK. It is also the first time he features portraits exclusively of women, all of whom he met last summer in Dalston. Kehinde Wiley: The Yellow Wallpaper takes its name from the 1892 text “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The short story, much loved by literary theorists, is a semi-autobiographical and proto-feminist tale of a new mother confined to her bedroom after being diagnosed with “hysteria”. The room’s yellow wallpaper design takes on a monstrous life of its own, contributing to her paranoia. It is a consuming, psychological parable of the dangers of denying women their independence. In deliberate contrast, Wiley’s Dalston women break out of their yellow wallpaper like powerful warriors; they are palpably not objects of consumption for the male gaze or control.

Wiley’s work is right at home in a museum dedicated to Morris, the great socialist maverick who passionately believed that art and design could change people’s lives. These monumental East End women are immortalised in a Grand Manner style in an artform previously reserved for royalty, aristocratic landowners or simply the very rich and famous. Museums can no longer afford to ignore or exclude culturally the people who live their lives outside their doors. Wiley’s portraits address centuries of inequality and lack of representation with scintillating and empowering images that turn the genre on its head.

Installation view of “Portrait of Dorinda Essah” by Kehinde Wiley. (© Kehinde Wiley, 2020. Courtesy Stephen Friedman Gallery, London. Photography by Nicola Tree)

“Radical Figures: Painting in the New Millennium” was at the  Whitechapel Gallery, London, scheduled to run until May 10. “Kehinde Wiley: The Yellow Wallpaper” was at the William Morris Gallery, scheduled to run until May 25. Both galleries are now closed until further notice

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Louise Baring’s new book, Lartigue: The Boy and the Belle Époque, details a golden age as seen through the lens of an unusual photographer. Young Jacques captured the dawn of the 20th century as a time of japes and escapades and the innocent pursuit of the new. But for more than half a century this joyous body of work languished in a bundle of family albums. His story is one of privilege and obscurity, of a buried vision and a late resurrection.

Lartigue was born in 1894, into an haute bourgeoisie bubble. His father, Henri, was a successful banker—and enthusiastic balloonist—who provided a cossetted life of fun, access and opportunity for his sons. “I have plenty of money,” said Henri. “My children should learn how to spend it.” Jacques was given a chunky wooden plate camera when he was seven and a catalogue of models followed—Gaumont Block-Notes, Kodak Brownie, Klapp Takyr—each more advanced than the last. The boy was provided with a darkroom and developing chemicals, and a steady stream of subjects drawn from the comings and goings at their hôtel particulier in Paris.

Simone Roussel, Rouzat, 1913, by Jacques Henri Lartigue © 2020 Ministère de la Culture–France/AAJ HL

Baring has a penchant for such glamour: her previous books have delved into the high life and elegant works of the French photographer, painter and poet Dora Maar and the English fashion photographer Norman Parkinson. But in Lartigue she has a subject who is both elite and elegiac, whose fledgling talent was extraordinary but unrecognised when it emerged. It is on that period—between the turn of the century and the outbreak of the First World War—that she concentrates.

After providing a whistle-stop biography, Baring looks at young Jacques’s four pillars of interest: speed, travel, family and society. Sometimes all four elements overlapped in a single frame. “The subject always finds me,” Lartigue noted. “I am only the spectator. I don’t run after it.” It was unnecessary. Thanks, he said, to his tennis player’s eye, he had mastered the art of the instantanés: images of action frozen in motion.

At the family’s estate in the Auvergne he took pictures of family members, guests and servants as they somersaulted into swimming pools, fell off go-karts and leapt over chairs. When his older brother Zissou built a homemade glider, using sheets borrowed from the mansion’s laundry room, Jacques was on hand to capture the moment the wind lifted him off the ground.

His most famous photographs show a world shifting up a gear. He came of age in the first decade of the 20th century, and witnessed and photographed many of its spectacles: the pioneering flights of Louis Blériot, competitors hurtling down the avenues of Picardie during the French Grand Prix and the rising drama of the first Coupe Aéronautique Gordon Bennett gas balloon race (during which Charles Rolls, co-founder of Rolls-Royce, got lost and came down near Hull). One remarkable photograph, taken at a skijoring competition in Chamonix in 1913, fixes the moment a man in a dashing Homburg hurtles across the snow-flats towed by a galloping horse.

The French Grand Prix, Circuit de Dieppe, Normandy, 1912, by Jacques Henri Lartigue © 2020 Ministère de la Culture–France/AAJ HL

His compositions record the playful and emboldened but they are also part of the game: skiers, skaters and cyclists act up for the camera at a time when it was still a novelty. He also focused on the great and good as they pottered around the Bois de Boulogne tipping their hats to each other. The latest fashions impressed and amused him, the men with their canes, the women—invariably photographed from behind—in their buttressed frocks and plumed headwear.

His ideal prey, he said, would stand out among the strollers “like a golden pheasant in a hen coop”. In addition to photographing the haut monde, he drew them in detailed fashion studies. In his teenage years he exhibited great skill as a draughtsman, producing sketches and watercolours of flamboyant orange and green outfits. In his mathematics exercise book, he dashed off a drawing of a woman shrouded in a fine lace veil, her face obliterating his scribbled sums and fractions.

But Lartigue’s work is also interesting for what it doesn’t show. The Belle Époque was not belle for everyone. His photographs do not show the colonial subjects who bankrolled the joie de vivre. This is a photographic microclimate. The Lartigue household included a valet, cook, butler, tutor and private secretary, all of whom were expected to throw balls, goof around and smile for the young man’s camera.

Photography has always fallen foul of snobbery and Lartigue’s legacy illustrates a Venn diagram of cultural haughtiness. It is often described as the epitome of a democratic medium which implies that anyone can make art from it (not true) and that painting, an autocratic medium, one assumes, is of an inherently higher value (equally absurd). Even the term “snapshot” suggests a lack of consideration. But Lartigue’s understanding of composition, perspective and momentum could rival the Futurists at their easels.

He was caught between two judgments: his photographs were seen as hobby shots while his social position meant he couldn’t make photography his profession. It was no job for a gentleman. The irony is that in middle age he took up painting, in the post-Impressionist vein: canvases that are today overshadowed by his photographs.

“Anna la Pradvina, avenue du Bois de Boulogne, 1911”, by Jacques Henri Lartigue, © 2020 Ministère de la Culture – France/AAJ

Perhaps his most obvious British counterpart would be Cecil Beaton, snapper of the tweedy and gowned residents of stately homes and Knightsbridge apartments. Both photographers ploughed a gilded field. “He contrived nothing,” Beaton wrote of his French contemporary. “It is this utter straightforwardness that gives his work an abiding quality.” No one could spike a compliment quite like Beaton. Jealousy may have played a role. While Beaton was something of a castle creeper, Lartigue owned the chateau. And, according to one of his contemporaries, Beaton could barely work the shutter, but even as a child Lartigue was technically adept—he recorded apertures and light readings like other boys noted football scores.

War brought an end to the idyll. Many of the aviators, divers, drivers and tobogganists pictured in Baring’s book were destined for the trenches. Lartigue spent the war as a military chauffeur in Paris but friends and cousins died at the front. “His profound faith in his right to happiness served as a bright shield against the increasingly chaotic world outside,” Baring writes, emphasising that the boy never really grew up.

Lartigue married three times, giving his wives juvenile nicknames such as Bibi and Coco. Baring’s selection of quotes suggest that he used the present tense when he wrote a memoir of his early years. As an adult he tried his hand at writing and commercial illustration for couture houses, as well as oil painting, but recognition as a photographer, his great obsession, continued to elude him.

It was the Americans who recognised his genius. In the mid-1960s the portrait photographer Richard Avedon, having been introduced to his work by curators at MoMA in New York, helped rescue him from obscurity. A MoMA show was followed by a book, Diary of a Century (1970), edited by Avedon. And so the amateur finally entered the canon, just as he turned 70.

Lartigue took some 280,000 pictures, starting in the time of Kitchener and Toulouse-Lautrec and ending eight decades later in the era of Madonna and Microsoft. He died in 1986, aged 92. In his dotage, snowy-haired but still impish, he welcomed journalists to his home on the Riviera where he waxed lyrical about the dreamy days of his youth. He recollected, with plenty of nostalgic flourishes, the dazzling endeavours of a lost age. “I want to stop time,” he said. “As a boy I already had a passion for preserving the fleeting images of life.” The good life, at least.   

“Lartigue: The Boy and the Belle Époque” by Louise Baring is published by Thames & Hudson, £29.95

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At Per Se, one of New York’s most sought after restaurants, you can brace yourself for a 13-course meal for an eye- (and no doubt mouth-) watering $355 per person, wines extra. Your taste buds can romp through courses ranging from—to mention just a few—a dish called “oysters and pearls” (oysters with caviar), duck foie gras on a “condensed milk tuile”, butter-poached Maine lobster and some veal ribeye; in case you were tempted, the “charcoal grilled Miyazaki wagyu beef with Fukushu kumquats, cipollino onions, gem lettuce and anchoide” incurs a $100 supplement. To finish, there is aged gruyère and black winter truffles, because you’re worth it, and an assortment—aka, lots and lots—of desserts. Don’t get me wrong, were I invited (reader please note, invited), to experience this extravaganza, I would accept with relish (excuse the pun).

The show-stopping tasting menus of today are reminiscent of 17th-century Dutch Golden Age binges on canvas: still lifes of over-laden tables filled with food intended to focus our minds on economic abundance (it was not called the Golden Age for nothing), temptation, and a soupçon of sex versus morality. Mounds of costly foodstuffs, as shown in Joris van Son’s Still Life with a Lobster were genuinely served up in reality. These images are part of more than 300 works on display in Feast and Fast, a remarkable and highly entertaining exhibition exploring historical customs surrounding Western eating at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge.

Still-life with a lobster. Son, Joris van (Flemish, 1623-1667). (©Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge)

The exhibition’s curators explain how the bills of fare of great Baroque feasts often read like inventories rather than menus. Take, for example, that for James II’s coronation banquet in Westminster Hall in 1685. We learn that the king and his new wife, Maria di Modena, sat down alone to a table laden with 170 different dishes. One consisted of “twenty four puffins, cold” and another of “four fawns, two larded”. Although van Son appeared satisfied with a single lobster on his still life table, and Per Se in New York offers just one morsel of Maine lobster on its tasting menu, their majesties had 12 on theirs.

The exhibition is a curated cornucopia overflowing with paintings, prints and objects from the 15th to 18th centuries, demonstrating how food was as much about power, status and morality as filling an empty hole. Bedazzling dining room bling abounds; its craftsmanship not only astounds but also makes one feel a tad queasy at the unbridled flaunting of opulence. Tableware wrought in gold and silver, known as plate, was a perfect way to show off in elite circles for the sheer hell of it.

One object stands out as particularly outlandish: a spectacular cup which was created in London in 1585 by an Antwerp goldsmith. It was made out of an exotic nautilus shell from south-east Asia, encased in an elaborate silver gilt setting. A figure of Neptune, bronco-busting a dolphin, forms the stem; and as if that were not enough, a giant silver lobster crawls inside the cup, ready to stick his frightful pincers up your nostrils.

Besides such nightmarish ostentation are delightful examples of table paraphernalia, designed to amuse or surprise. The porcelain soup tureen on page 58 was made in Chelsea in 1755. The manufacturers stressed the rabbit should be “as large as life”, the idea being that when placed on the table, diners would be deceived into thinking that a cuddly rabbit, daubed in lilac-brown glaze and munching a cabbage leaf, was real. Well, why not?

The prize for sheer inventiveness must surely go to the bizarre tureen and cover in the form of a trussed roast capon.  In the late 1790s, due to war with France and several failed harvests, flour was in short supply and the authorities forbade its use in pastry. Staffordshire potters rose to the challenge by making stoneware dishes to mimic pie crusts. This tureen would have been made to hold a poultry or game pie. The attention to detail is extraordinary if not outright weird: the makers even included holes to show where the “bird” had been removed from the spit, as well as giving it a golden-brown roasted glaze.

Eating made our ancestors anxious, although perhaps not in the same self-absorbed, Instagrammable ways of privileged 21st-century influencers and celebrity chefs. Gluttony was a deadly sin, and as the curators point out, in this early-modern period, people had to fast because the Church told them to. The current 5:2 diet craze seems lame in comparison. Incidentally, servants were always forced to fast—no meat, no dairy—but if you were rich enough you could pay your way out of abstinence with a small fine.

In 1691 the writer and merchant, Thomas Tryon, advocated veganism as the way to have a long, happy and by implication, devout life: in his view God created the earth along with Adam and Eve, and animals were created to keep them company, so man, as created by God, was originally a vegan.

A 17th-century drawing by Jacob III de Gheyn shows a duck, plucked alive and hung up by its neck and one leg. Another from the 1550s shows the barbaric practice of hunting cranes, (a delicacy), which involved luring the poor birds to stick their beaks into paper hoods smeared with sweet-tasting glue; the hunters hide behind a tree waiting to trap them. Thus the word hoodwinked, according to the curators.

A plucked duck suspended by its neck and one leg. Gheyn, Jacob III de (Dutch, c.1596-1641). Pen and brown ink on light brown paper (©Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge)

Trapping cranes near Pisa (Grus Cinera). Straet, Jan van der called Stradanus (Giovanni Stradano), (Flemish, 1523-1605). Pen and brush, brown ink, heightened with white, on paper (©Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge)

It is not too far-fetched to see these as a form of protest art which expressed unease about culinary cruelty to animals. My favourite is a tiny print from 1530 (a magnifying glass is provided), showing animals getting their own back. Entitled The World Turned Upside Down, it portrays some feisty hares who have captured a hunter and his dogs and are roasting him on a spit while boiling his dogs alive.

Whether deliberate or with an eye to cost, there is a nod to another of our contemporary concerns about food miles and the campaign to “shop local”. Most of the works on display are from Cambridge, either from the Fitzwilliam’s own extensive collection or from the rich pickings of neighbouring university colleges.

Hares Roasting a Hunter. Solis, Virgilius, the elder (German, 1514-1562). Etching, engraving. Acquisition Credit: Bequeathed by the Rev. R. E. Kerrich 1872

Elaborate displays by the food historian Ivan Day include historically accurate recreations of a sugar banquet, with edible playing cards made specially for an English Renaissance wedding and an enticing shopfront window of a Georgian sweet shop in London. These are works of art in themselves, but I prefer the real things—infinitely more eccentric and surprising. After such a visual tasting menu I came away longing for a succulent roast and suffering from a severe case of tureen envy.   

“Feast & Fast: The Art of Food in Europe,1500-1800” is at the

Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, until 26 April

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In a God-fearing Calvinist society, many took this to be the end of the world, with the gates of hell opening and God’s wrath cascading down upon the town. But out of this devastation came a new way of seeing the city. Where buildings had collapsed and disappeared, new sight lines were created and completely new perspectives emerged. While part of Delft was left in ruins, a new cityscape was redefined. Painters such as Egbert van der Poel, in his View of Delft After the Explosion of 1654, expressed civic pride and created a powerful new identity for the surviving citizens, with depictions of the prominent church towers left standing.

Egbert van der Poel, View of Delft After the Explosion of 1654

One artist in particular, Pieter de Hooch, who  worked there throughout the 1650s, opted for a unique approach. He made an intriguing connection between the public cityscape and the private home. Like his contemporaries, de Hooch (pronounced De Hoak) included the familiar church towers, but incorporated them into people’s private surroundings; courtyards, alleyways and gardens, hidden from passers-by, and now bathed in new sources of light from the blasted skyline. This,  according to the curators, made for a “spectacular innovation”. It’s as if the outside presence and authority of Delft’s public landmarks gives us licence to venture inside, into the private lives of its
citizens, turning their mundane routines into symbolic and integral parts of the well-ordered state.

“A Dutch Courtyard”, c.1658-60, by Pieter de Hooch, which shows the tower of the Nieuwe Kerk rising above the wooden fence (National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC).

De Hooch’s paintings from his Delft years show the quiet, intimate moments of the household, where nothing seems out of place, and even the courtyards are free of clutter. Sunlight streams through regularly cleaned panes; shafts of light discreetly illuminate one or two damp floor tiles, freshly washed. Cleanliness in Calvinist Delft is next to Godliness: home is where the mop is. If in doubt, look up at that sparkling church tower for proof. Simon Schama’s study of Dutch culture in the Golden Age, The Embarrassment of Riches, is particularly revealing about the Dutch obsession with what he describes as “militant” cleaning: a clean home, he explains, was the social and political bedrock upon which “the saving grace of Dutch culture” was built. Pieter de Hooch’s depictions of tidy courtyards and pristine interiors are stilled lives, testaments to his contemporaries’ obsession with the home as a window into greater themes of morality and patriotism. Marie Kondo may have made millions telling people how to de-clutter their life with The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up; but De Hooch’s domestic goddesses of Delft were way ahead of her.

“A Mother Delousing her Child’s Hair, Known as ‘A Mother’s  Duty’”, 1660-61, by Pieter De Hooch (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam).

De Hooch turned daily routines into enigmatic atmospheric dramas, bathed in a light that lends them a devotional quality. Domestic virtue equals religious conviction. In A Mother’s Duty a woman sits quietly with her daughter’s head in her lap, and buttery sunlight illuminates her starched collar and smooth forehead as she carefully delouses the girl’s hair. The details of the space are understated but breathtaking. Each room in the painting has its own illumination and reflections of light—but not a speck of dust. A small dog gazes out, inviting us to look to the sunlight that drifts through the doorway of a smaller room with an open window; you can almost smell the freshness of the air. More light from the high window on the right allows us a glimpse of the bed with starched linen covers on well-plumped pillows. De Hooch’s colours are rich and velvety; this is comfort food from a painter’s palette. Who knew a nit check could be so beatific? An ordinary and, as many parents know, loathsome, task becomes extraordinary.

For an artist who produced some 160 works in his lifetime (compared with 35 from Vermeer), there is surprisingly little known about De Hooch’s life. A bricklayer’s son, he was born in 1629, in Rotterdam, just 15 km from Delft, the son of a bricklayer. He settled in Delft in 1652, where he most probably would have met his younger contemporary, Johannes Vermeer, a colleague at the painters’ Guild. Vermeer is the obvious comparison here and the curators of this current exhibition want us to reassess De Hooch not in the shadow but from the shadow of Vermeer. Probably it was de Hooch, the slightly older artist, who inspired Vermeer into taking the art of domestic stillness into something altogether more mesmeric. But we should not underestimate de Hooch. While Vermeer’s subjects were more entrancing and subtly composed, and, yes, he probably was a better painter, de Hooch welcomes us into interior scenes which are infused with touching naturalism; it is hard not to feel emotionally engaged.

Delft was the city that shaped his artistic identity, and it is where De Hooch did his best work, so it seems astonishing that this is the first retrospective to be held in the Netherlands, let alone mainland Europe. The last solo exhibition was held at London’s Dulwich Picture Gallery more than 20 years ago. In the Prinsenhof show, a collection of 30 paintings trace de Hooch’s artistic development, from his early, rather clichéd images of soldiers living it up in taverns and guardrooms, through to the atmospheric courtyards and front rooms of Delft, to aspirational Amsterdam, where he moved in 1662. There his style changed again, not for the better. The wealthy burghers of northern Europe’s prosperous banking centre look bored and indifferent to their luxurious drapes and marble floors. Their homes are showcases, not nurturing nests, and de Hooch is clearly more engaged with the accoutrements of frugal domesticity.

His most compelling works hold narratives in front of us so we can choose to fill in the gaps; yet the end of his life remains a mystery with many unfilled gaps. By the 1670s prices for paintings in Holland began to stagnate and de Hooch, along with most of his colleagues, must have faced financial hardship. Compared to his contemporaries, his paintings never commanded particularly high prices, but, with large parts of the country occupied by French troops by 1672, the economy and therefore the art market collapsed. It had been thought he ended up in a mental hospital, but recent research has established that it was his son, also called Pieter, who was committed in 1679, aged just 24. After this, there is no trace of de Hooch, his wife or his remaining six children. We do not even know where he is buried.

De Hooch presented us with comforting, non-threatening glimpses of everyday life in 17th-century Holland, which, however much they may have been contrived or imagined, still speak to us in a visual language we can understand. In his canvases, there truly is no place like home.

The exhibition “Pieter de Hooch in Delft: From the shadow of Vermeer” is at the Museum Prinsenhof Delft, Netherlands, until February 16 2020

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Street photography has been around since Eugène Atget’s 19th-century images of Paris on the cusp of modernisation. But it really became a genre, like Instagram is now, in the wake of the Second World War, when a generation of combat photographers returned home still hungry for drama and spectacle. And while the hotspots of the mid-20th century—Cuba, Korea, Vietnam—provided the big-ticket gigs for Magnum photographers, everyday grist could be found on the pavements, sidewalks and strips of London, New York and Paris and Tokyo.

The fruits of these walks have been compiled in a new book, Magnum Streetwise (Thames & Hudson, £28), edited by the photographer and curator Stephen McLaren, which surveys 70 years of bravery, frailty, comedy and tragedy, immortalised on streets, railways, beaches and harbours by the agency’s diverse membership. “Street photography revels in the incongruous, the implausible, the inconstant and the ineffable,” writes McLaren in his introduction. The practise also requires a bold mindset, he observes: “For the truly committed street photographer, acting suspiciously is an occupational hazard. It rewards gamblers and those with sharp elbows.”

Cartier-Bresson claimed that “thinking should be done beforehand and afterwards—never while actually taking a photograph”. A kind of muscle-memory is involved in taking shots on the fly. But there are patterns. Certain subjects reappear: the guileless antics of children, the clash of urban tribes, random acts of tenderness. And when we talk about street photography, we are talking about streets we generally wouldn’t want to live on. This is the topography of poverty and conflict.

A great street photograph demands a double take of the viewer. In Streetwise we see cockerels perched on heads, surfers in Munich and Santa Claus on the subway. Notwithstanding his friend’s advice, even Cartier-Bresson continued to pursue the ridiculous. In one of his final photographs he captured his own shadow lying alongside those of a row of trees. At their most profound, such photographs are windows on the absurd theatre of life; at their crudest they are click-bait for the eye.

Magnum Photos was always a cosmopolitan enterprise. Its four founding fathers were a Hungarian (Capa), a Frenchman (Cartier-Bresson), an Englishman (George Rodger) and a Pole (David Seymour). For a coterie of mavericks, they could be rather prescriptive: photographs had to use only natural light, be shot in black and white and printed uncropped.

Magnum is a strange mix of art, storytelling and business. It is a cooperative, which provides a sense of security in the gig economy navigated by photographers. It created shortcuts to editors, commissioning across a sudden proliferation of news magazines in the post-war years. Assignments were complemented by personal passion projects. And sometimes the boundaries blurred.

The genius of the agency lies in how its members, from the outset, ploughed the intersection between humanity and geometry. These Leica-wielding flâneurs found intricate forms in the grids of roads and the dot-matrix of pylons and buildings; they also pinpointed the daily dramas staged in this maze. McLaren, memorably, describes these photographs as “light sketches”, the modern equivalent of 19th-century watercolour pads, a medium for dashed-off impressions fixed on the move.

Roving photographers can be professionals or amateurs. Both are subject to questions of authenticity. Street photographs are presumed to be unstaged. But where are the lines drawn? Does the presence of a camera act as a spur to events? For some, the purest form of street photography is that of Vivian Maier, the Chicago nanny who took roll after roll of film, covertly, on the streets of the Windy City. The democracy of her lens had no particular objective; she did not even develop her film. It was the opposite methodology to Magnum’s.

In the 1950s and 1960s, a second generation of Magnum recruits brought humour and artistry to the form. Elliot Erwitt, still working in his 90s, has always seen the funny side of New York. He has a particular penchant for photographing Manhattan’s canine population, giving us bulldogs hanging out on brownstone stoops, dachshunds in repose, chihuahuas dwarfed by their owners. Dogs, he noted, are “just people with more hair.” They are given the same reverence as kissing couples and delinquent boys. Erwitt’s pictures condense emotion into a beautiful arrangement.

“CUBA. Havana. Old city. French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, 1963” © Rene Burri/Magnum Photos

The Swiss photographer René Burri had a similar take. A telling photograph in Streetwise is his shot of Cartier-Bresson at work in Havana in 1963 (above). Burri catches the balletic pose—part sniper, part dancer—of his mentor bracing himself to take a picture of a subject tantalisingly out of frame. It is a portrait of a craftsman, delivered in a Cubist composition of legs, pavements and shadows (Burri insisted that his greatest inspiration was Picasso).

Other members pursued their own agendas. The American photographer Bruce Davidson, whose humanistic work detailed mining towns in South Wales and protest marches in Alabama, claimed: “I am in the picture, believe me. I am in the picture but I am not the picture.” His photograph of a priest delivering pastoral care on the blocks of Illinois exemplifies the camera as social apparatus.

Davidson also helped usher in the era of colour, which began to bleed into the contact sheets during the 1980s. Martin Parr, a member since 1994, has become the audacious face of this shift, with his gaudy flashgun shots of Britain’s chip shops, bus stops and burger bars. Parr’s taste for the prosaic—“I was really enjoying exploring the bland,” he remarked—has since become a staple of style magazines. Cartier-Bresson thought Parr’s work was insincere, others thought it was just plain ugly. As McLaren tactfully puts it, Parr had “no desire to cleave to aesthetic credos”.

As Magnum Photos grew, factions formed and spats sparked. Membership is by invitation only, and four-fifths male. A boys’ club, some say. But the agency has endured and adapted. With the notable exception of the New York Times, newspapers now have little interest in photojournalism. The lucrative photo-essays, for Time, Life and other periodicals, have dried up, replaced by coffee-table books and commercial work. Throughout its history, however, street photography has remained a staple of the agency’s practice.

The genre’s strong narrative thread has provided some profitable repurposing. Penguin Books recently mined the archive of long-time Magnum member Harry Gruyaert, the Belgian photographer whose images of shady cafes and murky alleyways were lit up with primary colours. His vivid, seamy scenes of Brussels and Paris now illustrate perfectly the covers of Georges Simenon’s Inspector Maigret mysteries.

Magnum’s street work has some mileage yet. New members have brought their, sometimes radically different, signature styles to unfamiliar turf. Russian-born Gueorgui Pinkhassov creates dreamscapes out of Tokyo’s railroads and neon-heavy nightclubs, his frames dappled with light from a kaleidoscope of windows (see page 51). And the Norwegian photographer Jonas Bendiksen, who interned in the Magnum office as a teenager, brings his glacial perspective to Istanbul commuters and Black Sea bathers.

“GEORGIA. Abkhazia. Sukhum. 2005.” Although Abkhazia is isolated, half-abandoned and still suffering war wounds due to its unrecognized status, both locals and Russian tourists are drawn to the warm waters of the Black Sea. This unrecognized country, on a lush stretch of Black Sea coast, won its independence from the former Soviet republic of Georgia after a fierce war in 1993. © Jonas Bendiksen/Magnum Photos

No one exemplifies this creative new wave more than the British photographer Olivia Arthur. Her shots of Dubai’s racetracks and fish markets discombobulate with double exposures and reflections. They convey, she explains, “what it is like for a stranger to confront this place, where people live in their own little lifestyle bubbles and rarely interact with other social classes and ethnic groups.”

“U.A.E. Dubai. Workers unload sharks from vans at the Dubai Fish Market, 2013” © Olivia Arthur/Magnum Photos.

Arthur has created a Dadaist take on a city of great wealth and immense misfortune. “The sense of belonging is not strong there,” she observes. Her work illustrates this detachment: figures melt into the environment as they clean fountains, unload trucks and walk through sandstorms. No doubt a young Cartier-Bresson would have approved. This is real—yet surreal—life on the street.   

“Magnum Streetwise: The Ultimate Collection of Street Photography”, edited by Stephen McLaren, is published by Thames & Hudson, £28.

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My question was addressed to a successful businessman and patron of the arts who needed a portrait for his boardroom and had invited me to his office to discuss the matter. Things got off to a poor start when he said he disliked the Freud of Jacob Rothschild, and my reply lost me the commission.

When I look at portraits, I see history revealed. The Tudors live for me through Holbein, whose models did not ask him to correct their squint or soften their features. The Capodimonte Titians of Pope Paul III depict a querulous old man hanging onto power. Innocent X’s reaction to Velázquez’s portrait of him was: “Troppo vero!” (“All too true!”), yet the artist was still paid for revealing the true nature of the sly, calculating pontiff. Goya’s portraits of the Spanish royal family make its members look eccentric verging on the ridiculous, and go a long way to explain why Napoleon took over, yet they did not hide them, let alone destroy them. Helena Rubinstein did not ask Graham Sutherland to give her a facelift, and nor did Lord Beaverbrook suggest he make him look less shrunken and petulant. 

When I won the Imperial Tobacco National Portrait Gallery portrait painting prize in 1982, I was still a student at the Slade. Three commissions for the NPG followed: of Lord Olivier, Lord David Cecil and Sir Christopher Cockerell. Despite my youth and lack of experience, it did not occur to any of these great men to try and affect my representation of them. On seeing the finished picture, Laurence Olivier commented: “Joan [his wife] will love this portrait, as it makes me look like the mean bastard I am.”

Sometimes, I have found kindness behind a rough exterior. My sketch of Jeremy Paxman reveals a gentler and far more hesitant nature than his public persona suggests; I was delighted to hear that my portrait of Michael Portillo is so loved by his wife that she has hung it by her desk. At other times the revelation can be less comfortable, even alarming. A portrait should not merely reproduce the features, it should expose what a camera cannot. 

This can prove painful, for both artist and model. A couple of years ago I began the portrait of a lovely young girl whom I was looking forward to drawing. We chatted away as I worked, but I suddenly began to feel as though my lines were losing their freshness and her face was turning into a funerary mask. I stopped and asked her what was going on in her life. She opened her bag and showed me bottles of pills, saying that she would scream if she didn’t take them. The finished portrait shows her smiling, but her eyes look as though she was crying. I now ask prospective clients what medication they are on, and if they’re on Prozac (which an astonishing number are), I politely suggest we don’t go ahead.

As the years passed I began to notice a greater insecurity in my sitters, particularly the richer ones commissioning more expensive portraits. It was not just a question of the more you pay the more you worry. In the past, people have paid very high prices to be portrayed by a painter they admired and were prepared to live with the finished work, however it represented them to posterity. Nowadays it seems people want to control the process themselves, and increasingly use artists who will work from a photograph, carefully chosen by the sitter and perhaps even photoshopped.

This has had a detrimental effect on the skills of portrait painters, since more and more of them have to learn to copy strictly defined, and often false, images. If you do not work from life, you will never touch the spirit of a human being—or for that matter, of an animal.

It takes courage to live with the truth. One highly distinguished client commissioned me to paint him at a time he was going through a very public and distressing divorce. My portrait of him made his secretary gasp in horror when he saw it as it bared the full extent of his vulnerability and sadness. Some of his friends suggested he either hide it or get me to repaint his face at a later stage when he had recovered his spirits. He refused to be swayed by such arguments and I am told it hangs in pride of place.

There have always been insecure people, plagued by anxiety about how they are perceived by others. But when one sitter urged me to make his nose smaller, I felt I was dealing with something more than mere vanity; it was clear he did not like the way he looked and thought he could alter reality with a few tweaks of the paintbrush. What people like him do not appreciate is that a portrait that has been doctored becomes lifeless and cannot be a work of art.

More and more individuals seem to be unhappy with themselves, and it is increasingly easy for them to reinvent themselves as they would like to be seen, thanks to digital technology and social media.

What sort of an age are we living in, when so many feel the need to retreat into a digitally constructed, comfortable place which the truth cannot reach? It bodes ill for artists: truth is what all real art is about.

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