Mary Panzer

California Museum of Photography, University of California, Riverside

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"This is the first exhibition ever devoted to Street Vendor Portraits, a form of photography practiced worldwide from the 1930s through the 1970s, long before we carried digital cameras.  Street vendor photographers snapped first, then surprised customers with the offer of a portrait as soon as the film got developed and printed. Many said yes! Today these full-length pictures of ordinary people—photographed on the street just like movie stars caught by paparazzi—survive in flea markets and family albums.  In San Francisco, Joe Selle called his business “Fox Movie Flash” and his vendors worked Union Square, Market Street, Cliff House and the Sacramento State Fair.  Selle developed all the film, but only printed pictures that sold.

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When a new BART station replaced the Fox Movie Flash building at 642 Market Street, the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester NY agreed to house 1000 35 mm film cans, each holding 100 feet of film, roughly one million anonymous portraits by dozens of unknown photographers. Now it is the largest known Street Vendor photography archive.

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In the early 2000s, Andrew Eskind used then-new technology to look at 100,000 Fox Movie Flash negatives for the first time since they were made.  Along with striking images, the digitized strips of film revealed what Fox Movie Flash photographers found on the San Francisco streets: an unpredictable parade of diverse people going about their lives.  Photographers approached each subject with energy and humor; performance was part of the pitch. Through their eyes, we see a world where everyone has value. Today, cameras are everywhere, from our phones to the ATM, and ordinary people are photographed with or without consent.  But when Fox Movie Flash and street vendor photographers worked the crowds, cameras were a relative luxury, and surveillance was not a part of everyday life.  We see these images as a composite portrait of the public sphere in the years after World War II, a time and place we rarely see in photographs."

Sponsored by UCR College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, and the City of Riverside.

Museum of the Palestinian People, Washington DC

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"Bethlehem Beyond the Wall, a new travelling exhibition that invites viewers to see a familiar place from a new point of view. Everyone recognizes Bethlehem as the birthplace of Jesus, few know that the city has a rich modern culture. Throughout history, Bethlehem has been a site of tragedy and struggle and survival. Today the area including Bethlehem and its surrounding villages is home to 100,000 people, the site of three refugee camps, and four generations of refugees. The city is divided by the Wall first erected by the State of Israel in the West Bank in 2002. This exhibition seeks to move beyond both myth and politics to show Bethlehem from the vantage point of view of the men, women and children who lived here the past 150 years.

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The exhibition spans 1880 to the present , the era in which photographs of Bethlehem traveled around the world. We draw from photographs which the American Colony Company made between 1880 and 1945 for postcards, stereocards, illustrated books and magazines. We use photojournalism from the past and present, as well as images from family albums and private collections. The years from 1947 through 1949, known as the Nakba, are narrated by individual survivors, interviewed in 2013 for the documentary film Voices Across the Divide. Original art by young painters whose work also appears on the walls that line the streets of Dheishe Refugee Camp. A drone video made over Bethlehem reveals the city and the Wall today.   

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Bethlehem Beyond the Wall shows rarely seen views of ordinary life against a background characterized by familiar landmarks as well as relentless change. We recognize the Nativity Church and its surrounding market square, the narrow stone streets through town. Once remote refugee camps, like Dheishe, Aida and Azza, have become part of the modern city.  

The constant state of struggle against a succession of colonial powers — from the Ottoman Empire to the state of Israel today — has produced a resilient culture, rich in tradition and responsive to change. The effect can be seen in the art of the newest generation who turn the walls that surround them into bold celebrations of history, and heroes executed with a distinctive mix of humor, bravery, sincerity and optimism." 

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Picture: "A Basket of Saffron," (2015).

National Museum of African American History and Culture

"Anderson’s postwar pictures of everyday life in the segregated black community in Greenville, taken from the 1940s through the 1970s, document a wide range of community subjects such as weddings, funerals, formal dances, families, soldiers, high-school portraits, sports events, working professionals, nightclub entertainers, parades and Civil Rights gatherings.

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In 2007, Shawn Wilson and Charles Schwartz published Separate But Equal: The Mississippi Photographs of Henry Clay Anderson, a book that highlighted Anderson’s work and unveiled his remarkable perspective into African-American life. An exhibit of Anderson’s photographs in New York City that same year portrayed his photographs as documenting “a virtually ignored chapter in African-American history, that of the proud, dignified community of middle-class African-Americans that existed throughout the South during the Civil Rights Movement. They intimately portray a community of black Southerners who considered themselves first-class citizens despite living in a deeply hostile America.”

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Picture: Anderson, Henry Clay. "Indoor portrait of a woman,” (1948-1970s) [National Museum of African American History and Culture]

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Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Gift of Charles Schwartz and Shawn Wilson

National Portrait Gallery/Smithsonian Institution

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"During a career that spanned more than forty years, nearly every leading personality in the arts and many major world figures sat for Philippe Halsman's camera. In this major retrospective, published to coincide with a traveling exhibition, the best of Halsman's brilliant work is included. Here are his famous portraits, many of which have become the definitive image of the subject. Here too are testaments to his fascination with surrealism, such as his famous "Dali Atomicus," and other outrageous visual puns. His "jumpology" photos which capture famous people from Richard Nixon to the Duke and Duchess of Windsor jumping for his camera, offer a glimpse into the whimisical and fantistical side of this artist.

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From the most serious, deeply penetrating portraits of Albert Einstein to the fanciful image of Marilyn Monroe in mid-air, Philippe Halsman: A Retrospective is a look at a true master of photography. With an insightful introduction by Mary Panzer, superb duotone printing, and an inventive design, this is a truly definitive collection of Halsman's work."

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Photographs from the Halsman Family Collection

National Portrait Gallery/Smithsonian Institution

"Serious scholarship on photographer Mathew Brady has been both scarce and flawed over the past half-century. Roy Meredith’s landmark, laudatory biography Mr. Lincoln’s Camera Man (1946) stood as the definitive appreciation for generations, but ultimately yielded to a revisionist historical consensus that more credit was due Brady’s camera operators than the impresario himself for the great body of work produced under his name during the Civil War. This recent view has tended to overwhelm the opinion expressed by Dorothy Meserve Kunhardt and Philip B. Kunhardt, Jr., in their 1977 book, Mathew Brady and His World, that “Brady was the most important force in early American photography.”

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Now, accompanying a brilliant exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery (scheduled to travel to the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard and to the International Center of Photography in New York), comes a catalogue destined to take its place immediately as the most important study yet produced of Brady and his body of work. But readers expecting an homage to him will be disappointed. This is at once a lavishly illustrated analysis of the Brady oeuvre and a shrewd and unsentimental critique of Brady’s methods and motivations. Mary Panzer, curator of photography at the Portrait Gallery, has a distinct and original point of view and, utilizing much new research in original sources, sheds important light on the art–and business–of nineteenth-century photography in general and on its most celebrated and criticized practitioner in particular."

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In collaboration with Ron Coddington

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Picture: "M.B. Brady’s New Photography Gallery,” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper (January 6, 1861) [Library of Congress]

Yale University Art Gallery