Register

Hunt's Three Ring Circus

By Peggy Roalf   Monday September 28, 2015

W.M. Hunt, known to most in the photo world as Bill, is a collector with a penchant for the eccentric, the funny, the mordant—which is readily seen in his Dancing Bear Collection. More than 500 of those images were published in The Unseen Eye (Aperture 2011), the exhibition of which was presented at Eastman House

Today, an exhibition of photographs from another of Bill’s collections opens at 1285 Gallery, in collaboration with The International Center of Photography. Hunt’s Three Ring Circus: American Groups Before 1950 features more than 100 works dated from the late 19th Century to 1950, in large format banquet or panorama style. These photographs of American crowds, rallies, assemblies, teams, organizations, fraternities, unions, clubs, tribes, conventions, and alliances provide a unique, often oddball vision of American life and were made by photographers or studios whose histories are completely unknown or just now coming to light. Bill did this exclusive Q&A for DART when the show opened in Arles. Now installed in the former UBS Gallery, New Yorkers can see what folks in Houston, Bologna, and Arles have been talking about.

Peggy Roalf: “Smile for the camera.” When you think about it, that’s probably not what a photographer of large groups of people would ever say. What, do you imagine, does that person have to do to charm 20 or 100 people into looking good for a split second? 

W.M. Hunt: I think the thing they would say is ”Hold Still, . . .PLEASE!!!”, especially in the earlier days of photography, when bulky yet fragile glass plate negatives were necessary. Few of these images appear to be the work of amateurs. These photographs were made by specialists who undoubtedly had highly disciplined ways of working.

Mole & Thomas, 30,000 Soldiers make U.S. Human Shield, Camp Custer, 1918. 

One memorable studio, Mole & Thomas, is known for their self-described “living insignias,” such as 30,000 Soldiers make U.S. Human Shield, Camp Custer, 1918 (above). These are logistical showpieces, made with a large format camera (11” x 14”) set up on a 70-foot specially constructed viewing platform to shoot 30,000 people! Who gets to have 30,000 people stand for a photo? For what it’s worth in terms of financing, imagine if 10% of the subjects in the image bought prints. In those days, if a print was $10, that’s $3,000. In today’s dollars, who knows?  

Assume a level of proficiency and know-how. Then it’s something else to judge the relative artistry involved. The accomplishment is daunting but then so is how good looking most of these pictures are. Looking at these works today I think one responds differently than even 50 years ago. Part of this has to do with our contemporary regard for vernacular photos. We are more tuned in in our looking.  

PR: “You Press the Button; We Do the Rest.” (George Eastman.) Some of the photographs in your collection were made before Kodak put camera and film into the hands of every dad in America. There’s a sense of gravity in these images that would be nearly impossible to replicate today. Does looking at these photographs make you wonder how people a hundred years ago thought of how the world saw them?

 

E.J. Kelly, Hunt’s Three Ring Circus, 1931.

WMH: It’s more about how the world saw itself. Look at a central image for the exhibition, Hunt’s Three Ring Circus, (above) which is dated 1931. The sitters look so comfortable and unflappable. Look at the guilelessness they project. There is so little self-consciousness in them. The level of narcissism is so heightened today. People know how to behave on camera and that makes for self-consciousness. Also it is hard to imagine how people saw their place in the world a hundred years ago. Did that world feel infinite?  Was it an era of hope? So yes, it does make me wonder now how the world saw itself.

PR: “I wouldn’t be a member of any club that would have me.” (Groucho Marx.) Have you ever joined a club, or a team, and become a subject within a group photograph? Do you still own the photograph? What does it make you think about?

WMH: There is an homage to Sam Wagstaff in the show. I saw him in action only once but he showed an image of a group—a sports team I think—and said that it was the first photograph he had bought and he had found it at a flea market. He asked if anyone in the audience knew why it grabbed him. “It’s my Dad,” he said. So this arbiter of taste began it all with a family photograph.

 

Fred Hess & Col, Miss America Pageant, Atlantic City, New Jersey, September 1953.

PR: “I photograph to find out what the world looks like photographed.” (Garry Winogrand.) Formal group photographs are not exactly portraits. Would you consider the best of these pictures to be a kind of landscape photography? What does this genre of photography contribute to our understanding of American social life? Is there something missing today when people are rarely put in the position of being part of a formal group photograph made by a professional photographer? Does Instagram help to fill this void—if there is a void?

WMH: These images are first and foremost documents and records that had seemingly very little artistic intention, and these photographs could contribute to our understanding of our American life and history. The presumption is that we know what’s going on and who took the picture. Overwhelmingly that is not the case. These are huge mysteries. The whos, whys, and wherefores are all gone. Anthropologists looking at Instagram 50 years from now will make the same kind of discovery. They’ll see what it looked like without necessarily knowing what it is.  

PR: “People cannot really concentrate. They don’t look at a thing for a long time. Our eyes are always moving and searching for something else to see.” (Hiroshi Sugimoto). Before the world was as image-saturated as it is today, most people (and that probably includes most of the people in the photographs you have collected in American Groups) probably had a different way of looking at pictures than we do now. When/how did you develop an appreciation for and desire to collect vernacular photography? Do you think that because you have studied vernacular photography for a long time that you have an unusual appreciation for moments in time? Leaving out irony and nostalgia, what is the main draw?

WMH: I have always been attracted to the so-called “Three Legged Dog” in photography or to take a page from you, "Why would I want to be a member of any club that would have me." It is fun and provocative to champion the curiosity. I also like that I haven’t sorted it out yet. Being a collector is a work in progress (thankfully). I do find that I look at these pictures differently than still life or conventional portraiture. My eye skips all over the page. There isn’t one glance that offers it all up at once. It takes some time. I like your notion of landscape. How about people-scape? Group photographs behave almost like abstract paintings; with shapes and shadows with the literal information not nearly so relevant as the journey my eye and mind make together. 

International Center of Photography, in collaboration with W.M. Hunt/Collection Blind Pirate, and the 1285 Avenue of the Americas Art Gallery presents Hunt’s Three-Ring Circus: American Groups Before 1950, which opens tonight from 6-8 pm and runs through January 8, 2016. 1285 Avenue of the Americas at 51st Street, New York, NY.

W.M.—Bill—Hunt is or has been a photography collector, dealer, writer, teacher, judge, curator, fund raiser, and consultant ... everything but photographer. He loves photography. It changed his life; it gave him one. Facebook


DART