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  Barry L. Thumma, Face of America, Gelatin silver print 1980

  BARRY L. THUMMA (1947-2003) USA

  Face of America   1980

  Gelatin silver print

  Size: H: 13 3/8” x W: 11”

  Size (with board): H: 14” x W: 11”

  Size (framed): H: 21 ¼” x W: 17”

  Price: $2,750

  Barry L. Thumma, a former New Era photographer, covered four presidents as White House photographer for The Associated Press. In his 20-year career with the AP, he traveled on more than 100 Air Force One flights to photograph presidents Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton. He also photographed Pope John Paul II, Jerry Falwell, Mikhail Gorbachev, Michael Deaver, Alan Greenspan and Donald Rumsfeld, among other personalities and politicians of his time. He was a member of the White House News Photographers Association. Thumma began his career in 1967 as a part-time photographer for the Lancaster New Era. He joined the Associated Press in 1973 in Cincinnati, where he covered the Reds and the Bengals. After two years as the Ohio photo editor, Thumma moved to Washington, D.C. to cover the White House. He also captured heartbreaking images of the famine in Ethiopia, NASA space flight operations and troop actions in the field.

   

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  Werner Rohde, Self-portrait, Silver gelatin print 1926

  WERNER ROHDE (1906-1990) Germany

  Self-portrait 1926

  Silver gelatin print, ebonized wood frame

  Signed: Werner Rohde 1926 (pencil signature and date on back on photo); inv. 3RMG 1081.27

  Photo: H: 6 13/16” x W: 4 15/16”
  Framed: H: 16 5/16” x W: 14 3/8”

  Price: $38,000

  Werner Rohde’s visual play with the animate and inanimate draws him close to the aesthetics of the surrealists while maintaining a strong alignment with Germany’s new-vision avant-garde. Rohde experimented widely with double exposures, photomontage, perspective and dramatic lighting that reflected his interest in filmic effects. The son of a glass painter (a medium he would turn to later in life), Rohde took up photography during his studies at the Arts and Craft School in Halle. Like Kesting, Willy Zielke and Kretschmer, he participated in the 1929 ‘Film und foto’ exhibition in Stuttgart that remains one of the historical focal points for Germany’s new photographic vision. Despite this early recognition of his work, Rohde fell into obscurity after the war until the rediscovery of his photographs in the mid 1970s.

  Rohde’s fascination with the play between life and lifeless, animate and inanimate, has strong reverberations with surrealism. Masks, mannequins and paper models were used in his photographs to illuminate the uncanny. They were also employed in his self-portraiture in which he mimicked his idol Charlie Chaplin. These techniques of visual illusion provided a mnemonic tool for the images of his wife in which she is posed and photographed to resemble a doll or mannequin. In the act of art imitating life, ‘Wachspuppenkopf’ is uncanny in its mimicry of the human form with realistic teeth, eyes, skin and even the unusual detail of small wrinkles under the eyes. The downward angle, lighting and odd doubling of the neckline utilizes standard surrealist methods to infer life and movement.