“WILLIAM MORTENSEN: CELLULOID BABYLON”
The New York City Book and Ephemera Fair celebrates William Mortensen's golden Hollywood years with a special exhibition curated by Brian Chidester. The exhibition will feature works from William Mortensen's personal collection that have never been shown before, as well as works from the estate of his first wife Courtney Crawford that will also be exhibited for the first time ever.
March 9 & 10, 2019, Sheraton Central Park / Times Square 811 7th Avenue New York
His work was startling and new. It had the power to surprise, shock, even haunt the viewer. William Mortensen was a highly controversial artist during his lifetime, stirring up the photographic world in the early twentieth century with images that were in direct opposition to the prevailing realism of his contemporaries. Today we recognize Mortensen as the trailblazer he was —the first to use highly manipulated imagery in a way that wasn’t embraced until Photoshop almost a century later.
The New York City Book & Ephemera Fair will mount a special exhibition of the artist’s work when it returns to the Sheraton Central Park/Times Square hotel on March 9 & 10. Curated by author/art historian Brian Chidester, courtesy of the Stephen Romano Gallery, “Celluloid Babylon” draws from the artist’s Hollywood years in the 1920s and '30s.
Mortensen, the son of Danish-born parents, was the first photographer to take live still photographs of actors on Hollywood movie sets while the action was being shot, rather than re-staging the entire scene for the photographs. He also photographed film stars like Jean Harlow, Fay Wray, Rudolph Valentino, and John Barrymore in posed studio settings. It all started when, as a still photographer on Cecile B. DeMille’s epic Hollywood film The King of Kings, Mortensen was tasked with creating a full book of pictorial studies instead of the usual type of record shot and lobby display. One of these handmade volumes, in fact, resides now in the collection of the Vatican.
Mortensen was also known for retouching prints with an abrasion process that used razor-blades, carbon pencil, ink, eraser, texture screens that emulated drawing, and a masking technique that allowed for multiple exposure of different negatives to create manipulated images almost indistinguishable from etchings or paintings. His subject matter was theatrical, gothic, and often strange. “The Command to Look” and “Monsters and Madonnas” are two of his best-known published books.
Mortensen later clashed openly with the better-known Ansel Adams and his Group f-64 contemporaries in the 1930s and '40s. Adams’ classic and stately images of Rocky Mountain peaks and valleys at sunset were a world away from Mortensen’s pictorialism, as seen in photographs of satanic rituals, ancient Hindu goddesses, witch doctors with scary masks, and vengeful gorillas. Adams once wrote: “Photography is an objective expression and a record of actuality”—a philosophy which became even more influential after the hard realities of World War II. Mortensen disparaged such “literal recordings,” calling them “a good beginning, but not an end in itself.” Adams then dubbed him the “Antichrist of Photography.”
Today, Mortensen’s altered images feel right at home in a world saturated by fantasy figures and layered images in movies, television, graphic novels, and video games. His work finds affinity with all forms of storytelling, however, be fantastic, horrific, or mystical, for he was, above all else, an artist with a keen talent for tapping into the most euphoric and sexual aspects of human life.
From his early movie lobby cards, which were all about selling fantasy, Mortensen developed a visionary private art that took the Hollywood aesthetic into an even more timeless space, one which ultimately divest itself of the mechanical limits of the camera in favor of inventing new techniques that would bring his vision to fruition.
Fair hours are: Saturday, March 9, 2019, 8AM – 4PM Sunday, March 10, 2019, 9AM – 3PM
Where: Sheraton Central Park / Times Square 811 7th Avenue New York, NY, 10019
Admission: $15 each day, With student ID – Free
PRESS
Festivals in NYC: New York City Book & Ephemera Fair (March 9-10)
ephemera.com: William Mortensen
“WILLIAM MORTENSEN: CELLULOID BABYLON”
Photography’s First Superstar: The Work of William Mortensen on Display at NYC Book and Ephemera Fair By Elisa Shoenberger
Special Exhibition of William Mortensen's Photography
"William Mortensen: CELLULOID BABYLON" by Brian Chidester
Special Exhibition of William Mortensen "CELLULOID BABYLON"
NYC Book and Ephemera Fair Expands to Second Day
For further information and visuals contact Stephen Romano at 646 709 4725 or email at romanostephen@gmailcom or Brian Chidester at bcxists@gmail.com