Category Archives: Photography

Images of Washington Square: André Kertész

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Laurie says:

I saw this article by David Gonzalez on André Kertész‘ images of Washington Square recently in the Times. The images brought back a lot of memories. I lived with my mother in an apartment on Washington Square for a couple of years before I was 9. My grandmother used to take me to run under the fountain in Washington Square Park when I was 4 and 5. It was long enough ago that I was wading in the water in my underwear (acceptable then). I still have fond memories of running around in the pool and the fountain. Kertész moved there in 1952. I was a child there from about 1946 to 1950. But my memories are of being a very small child in the park.
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The photo is in winter, but the pool in the background is the one I loved as a child.
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From David Gonzalez:

Perched inside his apartment 12 stories above Washington Square Park, Andre Kertesz beheld a cityscape of trees, rooftops and snow-covered paths. Caught between distance and intimacy, his images revealed with affection and longing a Hungarian émigré who was an outsider in his adopted land.

“There is a kind of psychological component to it,” Robert Gurbo, his estate’s curator, told Lens in 2015, “where he is clearly looking to see what they have to see, what he has never had.”
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His desire for a room with a view led him and his wife, Elizabeth, in 1952 to the Greenwich Village apartment whose vistas offered a panoply of light, lines, shadows and textures…. Washington Square Park’s trees and paths marked the change of seasons, while the skyline had the no-nonsense flavor of postwar New York, before sharp-angled steel and glass towers began soaring ever higher. Some images are rendered in quick, visual strokes: shadows on a brick wall contrasted against a skeletal tree, or snowfall reducing a scene to a sketchlike abstraction.
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This the copy of the Arc De Triomphe in Paris that’s at the park entrance. It looked even bigger when I was little. And far more romantic.
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All of these images evoke strong memories for me.

“Passing Time”: The Photography of Lui Hock Seng

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Laurie says:

I saw the photographs of Lui Hock Seng initially on the BBC.
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Fish-sellers at Ellenborough Market at Clarke Quay
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They are from an exhibit titled Passing Time at the Objectifs gallery in Singapore and they will also be a book. They cover a long period of the visual story of the city and it’s changes. What impressed me was the quality of the work. Usually this kind of historical photography is fine but not superb. His images would be significant whether you know the context or not. They are beautifully and thoughtfully composed.
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Unfortunately I could only find a limited amount of information about his work in English so I am only able to title some of his images in this post. And two of the images are slightly asymmetrical. The BBC has him talking about his work as he walks through modern Singapore and has a stunning group of his photos.

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Quotes are by Akanksha Raja from an article in Artsquator.

Passing Time is 81-year-old Lui Hock Seng’s first solo exhibition, curated by Objectifs manager Ryan Chua, for whom it was also a first as a curator. It was inspired by an article published in The Straits Times profiling Lui: a former car mechanic, now an office cleaner at Singapore Press Holdings, with a lifelong passion and latent talent for photography.

Lui’s interest in photography began as a teenager in the late 1950s, and, with a Rolleiflex gifted to him by his elder brother, he developed his practice as a member of the now-defunct Southeast Asia Photographic Society. This was the closest to a photographic or artistic education that he had received. After all, one can learn only so much about the technicalities of making good photographs; to hone a sharp eye and a sensitivity to “the decisive moment” is what turns skill into magic…

Passing Time is a visual time capsule, perhaps telling stories of Singapore’s early years more impressively in black-and-white snapshots of light and shadow than some school textbooks can.
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Man burning crushed cockle shells to make whitewash paint.

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Tree of Life, Jurong c. 1960s – 1970

Her commentary on this photo gives a sense of someone from Singapore’s reaction to a specific work.

It was hard for me to believe images such as Tree of Life (above) were taken in Jurong, a neighbourhood I frequented as a schoolgirl while it was rapidly developing into the crowded and commercial hub it is today. These images, and a series of pictures of lone trees displayed on the walls of the retail store, made me – having grown up recognising Singapore by its endless skyscrapers and the sound of an MRT train whizzing past somewhere nearby – yearn a little bit for the idyllic calmness and wide, open landscapes of a Singapore long gone.

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Ship Repair Merdeka Bridge

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This is one of the photographs that particularly struck me.  I love his use of light. I wish I could see the exhibition and may very well buy the book.