images that haunt us
On left page: “Despair” contact print from original negative (neutral background)
On right page: the ‘manipulated’ image: “Highlights on shoulder and on background introduced on paper negative” (Transparency-paper-negative-method)
In Munich, Maja Lex was first a student member but soon, together with Gunild Keetmann and the founders Dorothee Günther and Carl Orff, belonged to the leading teaching staff of the Günther-Schule, a forward-looking school with a trebly diversified training concept of integrative musical and movement education. War events disrupted this unique constellation of artistic and educational personalities.
Maja Lex developed a new movement and dance education of a timeless pedagogic and artistic value. She liberated herself from the formalized practice/exercise/training and introduced instead the varied movements of rhythmic-dynamic, spatial and formal variation. Structured improvisation, similar to musical improvisation, was established as a definite component of the teaching lesson.
As a solo dancer and choreographer of Tanzgruppe Günther, Maja Lex was a pioneer of the New German Dance (Neuer Deutscher Tanz) in the 1930s. She created a specific dancing style of a ‘thrilling rhythmic intensity’, a definite feeling for form and a high technical dancing discipline. Music and dance became elements of equal value, not least because of the use of rhythm instruments for the dance and for the orchestra of Günther-Schule, where dancers and musicians changed roles. The director of the orchestra was Gunild Keetmann. Maja Lex’s dances belong to the absolute dance. / quoted from Elementarer Tanz
From 1927, Maja Lex performed her own choreographies. As a soloist and choreographer of the Tanzgruppe Günther-München (lead by Dorothee Günther), she made her decisive breakthrough in 1930 with the “Barbarian Suite” in collaboration with the musical director of the group, the composer Gunild Keetman. Numerous guest performances and awards at home and abroad followed until the school was forcibly closed in 1944 and finally destroyed in 1945.
Maja Lex, who had been very ill since the beginning of the 1940s, moved to Rome in 1948 and lived there together with Dorothee Günther in the house of her mutual friend Myriam Blanc. At the beginning of the 1950s Maja Lex resumed her artistic-pedagogical work and taught at the German Sport University Cologne at the invitation of Liselott Diem. From the mid-1950s until 1976, she taught the main training subject “Elementary Dance” as a senior lecturer. The concept of elementary dance was further developed by her and later in collaboration with her successor Graziela Padilla at the German Sports University Cologne. / quoted from queer places
All images sourced ODLP and/or MAMM were retrieved from:
ODLP : l’oeil de la photographie / the eye of photography
MAMM : Multimedia Art Museum : Elapsed Time
Born in the Arizona territory, Arthur Kales received a law degree from the University of California at Berkeley in 1903. While living in the Bay Area, he became interested in the burgeoning Pictorialist movement in photography that flourished there, and his images met with immediate success. Kales moved to Los Angeles to work in advertising but returned to San Francisco in 1917. In the following year, he nevertheless joined the Camera Pictorialists of Los Angeles. For fourteen years beginning in 1922, Kales wrote about Pictorialist photography in western America for the journal Photograms of the Year. [quoted from Getty museum]
un regard oblique 