Celebrity the Focus of Season Blockbuster!
South Shore Arts has announced that its 2008-2009 season blockbuster exhibit will be Celebrity Revealed: Rare and Unpublished Images of Film Legends, a major exhibition of classic images by renowned photographers from Magnum Photos, which capture the world of American movie-making. The exhibit is scheduled to run from November 13, 2008, through February 1, 2009. A special VIP Preview Reception will be held on the evening of Wednesday, November 12, from 6-9pm.
Over 100 color and black-and white photographs documenting the film industry will be featured by such renowned photographers as Robert Capa, Bruce Davidson, Eve Arnold and others. For over 50 years, the photographers of Magnum have observed the world of film through their own lenses. For this exhibition, they have sorted through their private archives and pulled out more than 5,000 photographs, many of which were previously unpublished. The final selection bears the inimitable Magnum stamp and tells of remarkable encounters between a family of photographers and the world of cinema.
The works in this exhibition share a central theme of exploring the vibrant environments and personalities that make up the cinema universe. Despite the unified theme, the selection of photographs presents an enormous range in style and content, varying from witty and strategic images of Alfred Hitchcock to intriguing behind-the-scenes shots of remarkable stars such as Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, as well as many others, that will give viewers an exceptional glimpse into the environment of filmmaking before post production.
Celebrity Revealed: Rare and Unpublished Images of Film Legends is organized by Magnum Photos and toured by International Arts & Artists in Washington, D.C., a non-profit arts service organization dedicated to increasing cross-cultural understanding and exposure to the arts internationally, through exhibitions, programs and services to artists, arts institutions and the public.
Magnum Photos is a photographic co-operative of great diversity and distinction owned by its photographer-members. With powerful individual vision, Magnum photographers chronicle the world and interpret its peoples, events, issues and personalities. Through its four editorial offices in New York, London, Paris and Tokyo, and a network of 15 subagents, Magnum Photos provides photographs to the press, publishers, advertising, television, galleries and museums across the world.
Celebrity Revealed: Selected Artists
Eve Arnold, American, b.1912, was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, of immigrant Russian parents. She began photographing while working at a photo-finishing plant in New York City in 1946, then studied photography (for six weeks) with Alexei Brodovitch at New York City’s New School for Social Research in 1948.
Arnold first became associated with Magnum Photos in 1951, working in America, Britain and China. The first major solo exhibition of her China work was held at the Brooklyn Museum in 1980. That same year, she received the National Book Award for her book In China. She was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Society of Magazine Photographers in 1980. In 1995 she was made a fellow of the Royal Photographic Society and was elected “Master Photographer,” the world’s most prestigious photographic honor, awarded by New York’s International Center of Photography. In 2003, she was awarded an honorary O.B.E. (Order of the British Empire) by the British Government.
Robert Capa, American, b. (Budapest) 1913 – d. (Indochina) 1954. On December 3, 1938, Picture Post introduced “The Greatest War Photographer in the World: Robert Capa” with a spread of 26 photographs taken during the Spanish Civil War at the battle of Ebro. But, the “greatest war photographer” hated war.
Capa was born Andre Friedman, a Jew from Budapest, and studied political science in Berlin from 1931-33. At the same time, he was working part-time in the lab of the Ullstein magazines group to whom he sold his first published picture of Leon Trotsky’s 1931 Copenhagen meeting. Driven out of the country by the beginnings of the Nazi regime, he settled in Paris in 1933.
In Paris he participated in the beginnings of the agency Alliance Photo and met the journalist and photographer, Gerda Taro. Together they invented the “famous” American photographer Robert Capa and sold his prints under that name. He met many artists, among them Picasso and Hemingway, and began friendships with colleagues that would be essential in the creation of Magnum.
Beginning in 1936, Capa’s coverage of the Spanish Civil War appeared regularly in Vu, Regards, Ce Soir, Weekly Illustrated and Life. His 1936 picture of the Loyalist soldier falling to his death brought him international reputation and became a powerful symbol of war. Capa traveled to China (1938), then emigrated to New York in 1939. From 1939 to 1945 he photographed World War II (most famously the landing of American troops in Omaha beach, the Liberation of Paris and the Battle of the Bulge). In 1947, he founded Magnum Photos, in conjunction with Henri Cartier-Bresson, David Seymour, George Rodger and William Vandivert. The next year Capa traveled to Russia with John Steinbeck, and from 1948-1950 to Israel with Irwin Shaw, completing the first of a number of stories for Holiday.
Capa died on May 25, 1954, in Indochina, after stepping on a land mine while photographing for Life.
Henri Cartier-Bresson, French, b.1908 – d.2004. Born in Chanteloup, Cartier-Bresson started painting in 1923 and photographing in 1931, met Tériade, the editor of Verve magazine and frequented members of the French surrealist movement. After a trip to the Ivory Coast he discovered the Leica, since then his camera of choice.
A war prisoner, he escaped in 1940 and made portraits of artists such as Matisse, Rouault, Braque and Bonnard. In 1945 he photographed and covered the liberation of Paris with a group of professional journalists. In 1947, he founded Magnum Photos, then spent three years in India, Burma, Pakistan, Indonesia and China. In 1954, he became the first foreign photographer admitted into the USSR. He subsequently traveled to China, Cuba in the 1960s, Mexico, Canada, the U.S., India and Japan among other countries. Best known for his concept of the “decisive moment” in photography, Cartier-Bresson was the recipient of an extraordinary number of prizes, awards and honorary doctorates.
Bruce Davidson, American, b.1933, began photography at the age of ten in Oak Park, Illinois. As a youth, he was given the freedom to explore the streets of the city alone with his camera and in 1949, at the age of 16, won first prize in the Kodak National High School Competition. He went on to attend the Rochester Institute of Technology and Yale University.
His college thesis pictured the emotions of football players behind the scenes of the game, and it was published in Life magazine in October 1955. Later he was drafted into the army and was stationed in Paris where he met Henri Cartier-Bresson. After military service, Davidson worked as a freelance photographer for Life and in 1958 became a member of Magnum Photos.
Davidson continued to photograph extensively from 1958 to 1961, creating such bodies of work as “The Dwarf,” “Brooklyn Gang,” and “Freedom Rides.” He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1962 to photograph what became a documentation of the civil rights movement. This work included images from an early Malcolm X rally in Harlem, steel workers in Chicago, Ku Klux Klan cross burnings, migrant farm camps in South Carolina, cotton pickers in Georgia and the protest marches and demonstrations in Birmingham and Selma, Alabama. In 1963 the Museum of Modern Art in New York presented his work in a one-man show that included, among others, these historically important images.
In 1966 he was awarded the first grant for photography from the National Endowment for the Arts, and spent two years documenting one block in East Harlem, photos that were published by Harvard University Press in 1970 and exhibited that same year at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Philippe Halsman, American, b. (Latvia) 1906 – d. 1979, began to take photographs in Paris in the 1930s. He opened a portrait studio in Montparnasse in 1934, where he photographed André Gide, Marc Chagall, André Malraux, Le Corbusier and other writers and artists, using an innovative twin-lens reflex camera that he had designed himself. He arrived in the United States in 1940, just after the fall of France, having obtained an emergency visa through the intervention of Albert Einstein.
In the course of his prolific career in America, Halsman produced reportage and covers for most major American magazines, including a record 101 covers for Life magazine. His assignments brought him face-to-face with many of the century's leading personalities. In 1945 he was elected the first president of the American Society of Magazine Photographers, where he led the fight for photographers' creative and professional rights. In 1951, he was invited by the founders of Magnum Photos to join the organization as a 'contributing member,' so that they could syndicate his work outside the United States.
Halsman began a 37-year collaboration with Salvador Dalí in 1941, which resulted in a stream of unusual ”'photographs of ideas,” including the Dalí's "Mustache" series. In the early ’50s, Halsman began asking his subjects to jump for him at the conclusion of each sitting, and these uniquely witty and energetic images have become an important part of his photographic legacy.
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