Champagne wishes from Photo of the Day
Today’s photo, titled `Happy New Year 1953′, shows yet another millinery masterwork created by Mr John of New York (note the bubbles in the champagne glass on the top of the hat!). We introduced our collection of photographic prints featuring Mr John’s hats a week ago and will keep showing more of his elaborate creations in 2010. The prints were acquired by the Museum in 1983 as a part of the Madame Louise Lamoureux collection.
Thank you for all your support, comments and contributions throughout 2009. Have a great New Year’s Eve!
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Post by Iwona Hetherington, Rights & Permissions Officer
This autographed photograph is of George Tinworth. It accompanies the self-portrait terracotta plaque of the artist which was purchased by the Museum back in 1979.
George Tinworth was born in England in 1843. After enduring years of severe poverty he managed to fulfil his dream of becoming an artist when he entered the Lambeth School of Art in 1861. He then went on to study at the Royal Academy and subsequently found employment at Doulton’s renowned pottery factory in Lambeth, which regularly employed gifted graduates from the Lambeth School. At Doulton, Tinworth quickly became a leading modeller specialising in decorative panels, sculptural vases and animal groupings; his humorous mice sculptures are highly sought after today by Doulton collectors. Powerhouse Museum has a number of Tinworth’s works in its collection, the most important being a large framed panel from 1883 titled `The Meeting of Jacob and Joseph’ .
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Post by Iwona Hetherington, Rights and Permissions Officer
This intriguing photograph of a boxing match between two women is part of a collection acquired from the estate of Raymond W. Phillips, a descendent of Arthur J. Phillips, a late nineteenth century Sydney assayer and gold refiner who is thought to have been the photographer.
This is one of three images in the Phillips collection depicting well-dressed middle class women participating in a traditionally working class, masculine activity, overturning ideals of male aggression and female submissiveness to humorous effect. It was at odds with conventional nineteenth century images of women in which they were generally depicted as passive and decorative, although not so far removed from many images of the ‘New Woman’ that appeared in the 1890s, when issues of gender equality were often the subject of debate.
Serious women’s prize fighting can be traced back to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when women occasionally took part in crude, bare-knuckle contests. Women’s boxing gained popularity in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and is now part of many standard fitness programs. Recently it was accepted for inclusion in the 2012 Olympic Games.
This photograph is an interesting example of the genre of tableau vivant, in which the subjects of the photograph play roles like actors on a stage. The genre linked photography to painting and theatre in the days before moving film, exploiting the potential of the photographic image as a performance space. Other examples of tableaux vivants in the Phillips collection include a card game, a woman dressed as a man and a group of men fencing.
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Post by Kathy Hackett, Photo Librarian
This is another of the playful tableau vivant images from the Phillips collection. It appears to be a gambling scene, with the man on the far left keeping score of the ‘fencing’ match and the man on the far right in charge of the winnings. The lettering on the bag, ‘stakes’ has been inscribed directly onto the negative, with one letter ‘s’ reversed. Many of these less formal images in the Phillips collection contain amusing words or messages like this one, either crudely written on the negatives or on objects placed in the photographs.
Although the circumstances of production are unknown, is likely that the Phillips collection tableaux vivants were produced for the entertainment of the family and their friends rather than for a wider audience. Another photograph taken on the same day shows the same group of men posed outside a tent, suggesting that the creation of this photograph may have been incorporated into their leisure activities.
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Post by Kathy Hackett, Photo Librarian
This photograph shows the New Zealand displays and was taken from the space under the upper gallery level in the eastern transept of the ‘Garden Palace’. In this photograph we are looking through towards the American displays with the wall behind the stairwell attached to the central dome lined with photographs and artworks on our left (see 91/1323-26 for another view). On the left we can see the marble bust of the Maori chief Hapuka and as we follow this line of sight we see the upper gallery levels and the galleries that lined the nave. On this side of the nave the extra height and windows illuminated the displays that lined these exterior walls of the ‘Garden Palace’.
Photography by Messrs Richards and Company
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Post by Geoff Barker, Assistant Curator
The Charles Kerry Studio took this panoramic photo of the World heavyweight title fight at Rushcutters Bay, Sydney. Perhaps still the most famous sporting event held in Australia, the fight took place in Sydney because promoters in the USA and Europe had erected a ‘colour bar’, banning black boxers from challenging white champions.
In 1908 the heavyweight title was held by Canada’s Tommy Burns. His main threat came from Jack Johnson, a slave’s son from Texas. Already crowned the ‘coloured’ champion of the world, Johnson challenged Burns for a fight for two years until Sydney promoter Hugh McIntosh lured the contenders here with a promise to break boxing’s racial divide. A timber stadium was hastily constructed at Rushcutter’s Bay; it was later enclosed and became the Sydney Stadium.
Kerry’s photograph depicts Johnson, Burns and entourages in the ring before the fight, surrounded by a crowd of 20,000 men (women were barred from the stadium). A movie camera at right (under a canvas canopy) is about to record the fight for cinemas around the world. The photo has been retouched with advertisements for Monopole cigars.
When the bell rang, Johnson humiliated Burns, punishing him at will until the fight was stopped. Johnson’s triumph was an international sensation. On his return to the US, he dispatched a succession of ‘great white hopes’, provoking hatred from white supremicists but adoration from his supporters. Three marriages and other relationships with white women saw him wrongly convicted in 1913 under a law aimed at the prostitution industry. In 2009 President Obama granted a posthumous presidential pardon.
During a seven-year reign as champion, Jack Johnson was undoubtedly the most famous African-American in the world and one of the leading challengers of institutionalised racism. His life and career has been celebrated in cinema, theatre and music.
Photography by Charles Kerry
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Post by Charles Pickett, Curator
Here’s the last of a trilogy of photographs drawn from Bruno Benini’s outstanding photography archive acquired by the Powerhouse Museum in early 2009 with funding assistance from the Australian Government through the National Cultural Heritage Account. It shows the photograph used by Italian-born Melbourne-based photographer Bruno Benini’s Christmas card for 1961.
Bruno’s wife Hazel Benini recalls how the image was created,
I was working in display at the time and had these tent shapes made for a window display of swimsuits. The tents were basically long and narrow tapering shapes with a wooden V top which I covered in striped fabric. The guy I worked for in display had a utility and we put two in the back of the ute one Saturday and Janice got into the swimsuit. We went down to South Melbourne beach on a semi-overcast day. Everyone was lying around and suddenly we arrived with these two tents. They just sat upright, You didn’t have to peg them in because they had this wooden frame underneath. We set them up and Janice got into position. Click, click, click! Then Bruno and I also did a Christmas Card shot. We got into one of the tents with both our heads poking up in mad hats holding a little sign out saying Merry Christmas. That was our card for the year. The whole thing only took about half an hour at most.
(Hazel Benini interview with curator, Melbourne, December 2009)
Photography by Bruno Benini
© Estate of Bruno Benini
Post by Anne-Marie Van de Ven, Curator
Merry Christmas from Photo of the Day
Merry Christmas 1952
This dazzling Christmas hat is one of the thousands created by a brilliant milliner and businessmen from New York known as Mr John (a.k.a. John P. John). We know that this particular photograph was taken in (or before) 1952 as it is accompanied by a typed caption “Merry Christmas 1952”.
Mr John was probably the greatest milliner of his time, famous for his beautiful hats and an extravagant lifestyle. He created hats for stars in movie classics such as Gone With the Wind by Victor Fleming, Shanghai Express by Josef von Sternberg, Death in Venice by Luchino Visconti, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Howard Hawks, also theatre productions, advertisements, magazines and a long list of the rich and famous. During his over fifty year long career, Mr John was widely admired and honoured with the highest prizes – he was the first milliner to receive the prestigious Neiman-Marcus Award. The obituary published on June 29th 1993 by The New York Times described him “as famous in the world of hats as Christian Dior was in the realm of haute couture”. Strangely enough, whilst the Dior’s name became a household word, Mr John, known once an “Emperor of Fashion”, disappeared into obscurity.
Powerhouse Museum has in its collection approximately 200 prints featuring models wearing hats made by Mr John. We are systematically scanning the prints so stay tuned for more great creations by this millinery virtuoso.
References:
Drake Stutesman, Gives Good Face: Mr. John and the Power of Hats in Film. Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media
Gail Stain, Mr. John, “Emperor of Fashion”. Dress: The Journal of The Costume Society of America, vol. 27, 2000.
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Post by Iwona Hetherington, Rights and Permissions Officer
This glass plate negative is one of a collection of 193 acquired by the Museum in the 1980s. The identity of the photographer is known to us only as Phillips but the locations and subjects suggest the studio was Sydney-based and active around 1900. The subjects covered by the images relate strongly to a number of the Museum’s collecting fields and this example is of the workers at an unknown pottery works.
Typical of glass-plate negatives, the level of detail is engaging, informative – often touching. The forty-seven workers are quickly defined by their dress and bracketed by the dark-suited managers and clerical staff. On a shadowless overcast day they are surrounded by the products of their efforts – high on the rear wall behind them and at their feet covering all market requirements from sanitary ware to chimney pots, jars, and garden-edge tiling. Many potteries in Sydney maximised profit by catering to a wide range of needs. On a more personal front, hands rest on the shoulders of colleagues, buttons are missing from shirts, rips, holes and dirt pockmark garments, and smirks betray the larrikins who, while we can guess welcomed a rest from manual labour, nevertheless considered the sitting all a bit of a lark.
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Post by Paul Donnelly, Curator
This image was taken during the launch of our new exhibition that celebrates the good and the bad of the 1980s- The 80s are back. This image was taken using an iPhone camera and then put through the Polarize application to give it a more 80s feel. You can see more of the images that we took during the opening night here and we have just added a time-lapse sequence of the construction of this exhibition in the gallery space that can be seen on our Building the exhibition page on the 80s website.
Photography by Paula Bray
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