The International Portfolio of Artists Photography

The International Portfolio of Artists Photography was an assembling book project launched by John P. Jacob in 1983. The project was conceived to integrate mail art, book art, and photography. Following the model of Richard Kostelanetz' Assembling Press, Jacob invited potential contributors to submit seventy-five copies of an original photograph, and these were alphabetically assembled into books. Contributions were solicited through the mail art community, in particular Judith Hoffberg's Umbrella. The First Portfolio included works by thirty-seven artists from fourteen nations, bound into a tri-fold muslin folio that Jacob, at that time working in the New York City garment industry to support such projects, designed and hand-sewed. Two sets of prints were used to create exhibition copies that traveled to venues in Europe, Asia, and in the US during 1983 and '84.
According to the "Editor's Notes" accompanying The First International Portfolio of Artists Photography, the project followed a series of earlier efforts described as "documentary portraiture," in which the subject of a photograph accompanied him or herself with an object; a single prop that would function as a supplement to personal identity. In the First Portfolio, Jacob writes, the photographer as well as the subject are eliminated, and what is left is the thing, the trace of an idea embodied in the print. Furthermore, the "Notes" announce the Portfolio project as a ten-year effort, with subsequent volumes focusing on photography from specific geographical regions, to appear biennially. The Second Portfolio, scheduled for 1985, would focus on the Soviet Bloc countries of Eastern Europe; the Third on South America; the Fourth on Asia; and the Fifth, like the First, would be "open to artists throughout the world."
The impetus to devote The Second International Portfolio of Artists Photography to Eastern Europe arose from problems encountered during the making of the First. Three artists from the region participated in that volume: Robert Rehfeldt from East Germany, Robert Swierkewicz from Hungary, and Waclaw Ropiecki from Poland. Rehfeldt, a graphic designer and illustrator, was prohibited by East German law from making multiples without authorization, therefore he submitted a negative which Jacob printed for him. Ropiecki's submission disappeared in the mail, a common form of state censorship. He is listed among the First Portfolio participants as "Missing." Only Swierkewicz, working under the somewhat less repressive cultural laws of 1980s Hungary, succeeded in submitting materials as required by the invitation to participate. Through correspondence with these three, as well as addresses shared by mail artists Volker Hamann and Henryk Gajewski, Jacob expanded his list of contacts in East Germany, Hungary, and Poland; from addresses shared by collector Jean Brown and emigre artists Rimma and Valeriy Gerlovin, he made contact with artists in Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union. Jacob began to solicit contributions for the Second Portfolio in 1985. Taking advantage of an already vital mail art network in Eastern Europe, each invitee was asked to share the invitation with other artists, and the map of potential participants expanded to include Bulgaria and Romania.
In order to limit postal censorship, participants were asked to mail a single photograph in an ordinary envelope, which Jacob would reproduce for the Second Portfolio. Following Jacob's participation in the International Day Art mail art exhibition, organized by Swierkewicz, Liget Galeria director Tibor Varnagy proposed an exhibition of the Second Portfolio in Budapest. Noting that it would be difficult, and possibly illegal, for such an exhibition to be locally organized, Varnagy invited Jacob to transport and present the Second Portfolio as his personal collection. The exhibition opened in May, 1986. Due to the volume of the material submitted, a second exhibition venue, the Galeria 11, was required to present it all. The exhibition included works by seventy-five artists from throughout Eastern Europe, one from the Soviet Union, and two Soviet emigre artists living in the US. The exhibition catalog, xerox-printed with a six-page gatefold of photographs by Polish artist Jozef Robakowski, contained an essay by Hungarian photographer Laszlo Lugosi-Lugo, and a co-authored text by Varnagy and Jacob. An address list of participants, mailed separately from the catalog, simultaneously marked the existence of a parallel culture of photo-based artists working within Eastern Europe while contributing to the awareness of a small but expanding network of semi-official organizations committed to presenting such work. Thus, the Second Portfolio exhibition participated in setting the stage for a series of increasingly adventurous international exchanges and events, including the exhibition of Milan Knizak's Fire Prints and Matthias Leupold's Flag Raising Ceremony at the Liget Galeria, and a long-term cooperation between the Liget and the Mala Galeria, the "little gallery" of the Polish Photographers' Union, under the direction of Marek Grygiel, in Warsaw.
The catalog of the Second Portfolio exhibition is as close as Jacob ever came to completing the intentions announced in the First, of a multi-year project surveying photographic activities from disparate geographic regions. Indeed, its importance is less to any of the genres that Jacob had sought to integrate than to its participation in the cultural opening of Eastern Europe in the 1980s, which the Second Portfolio inadvertently documents, and as the point of origin for a series of subsequent exhibitions and publications which examine that opening and photography's centrality to it. Having contributed to the network of artists and artists' spaces working in this period, and with ongoing support from the Soros Foundation, New York, from '86 through '89, Jacob traveled bi-annually to Eastern Europe and the USSR to develop further projects with them. The American photographer and theorist Diane Neumaier, in her history of Soviet non-conformist photography, credits these projects as foundational to the work of later historians such as herself. What was achieved was not just an engagement with the parallel culture of the 1980s, but also a document of its movement from the periphery to the center during the political changes of 1989, and with that the corresponding marginalization of Eastern Europe's official and semi-official artistic communities. Key to these latter efforts are Jacob's essay for ' "After Roskolnikov: Russian Photography Today," and the exhibition Recollecting a Culture: Photography and the Evolution of a Socialist Aesthetic in East Germany, both of which consider the impact of Western attention, including his own projects, within that transformation.
Jacob's Second Portfolio related productions related to Eastern European photography include:
* Out of Eastern Europe: Private Photography (List Visual Arts Center at MIT, 1987).
* The Photo-Diary of Anna Beata Bohdziewicz (Red Eye Gallery at Rhode Island School of Design, 1987; Photographic Resource Center at Boston University, 1987).
* Leupold/Leupold (Rosa Esman Gallery, 1987; Maine College of Art Gallery, 1988).
* Thomas Florscheutz (co-organized with Steven S. High, Anderson Gallery, 1988).
* The Metamorphic Medium: New Photography from Hungary (Allen Memorial Art Museum, 1989).
* New Hungarian Photography: Istvan Halas, Zsuzsi Ujj, and Tibor Varnagy (Houston Center for Photography, 1989).
* TV Contacts & Fire Contacts by Tibor Varnagy (Photographic Resource Center at Boston University, 1989).
* "The Legacy of Witkacy." Spot, Houston Center for Photography, Spring 1989, 4-7.
* Nightmare Works: Tibor Hajas (co-organized with Steven S. High, Anderson Gallery, 1990).
* "Perspectives, Real & Imaginary: Czechoslovakian Photography at FotoFest." Spot, Houston Center for Photography, Winter 1991.
* Hidden Story: Samizdat from Hungary and Elsewhere (co-organized with Tibor Varnagy, Franklin Furnace, 1990).
* The Missing Picture: Alternative Contemporary Photography from the Soviet Union (List Visual Arts Center at MIT, 1991).
* The Missing Picture: Boris Mikhailov (List Visual Arts Center at MIT, 1991).
* "After Roskolnikov: Russian Photography Today." Art Journal, Summer 1994 53(2), 22-27.
* Matthias Leupold: Flag Raising Ceremony (Photographic Resource Center at Boston University, 1995).
* Chimaera: Aktuelle Photokunst aus Mitteleruopa (co-organized with T.O. Immisch, Staatliche Galerie Moritzburg Halle, 1997).
* Recollecting a Culture: Photography and the Evolution of a Socialist Aesthetic in East Germany (Photographic Resource Center at Boston University, 1998).
A collection of essays by Eastern European artists and writers on photography, collected by Jacob during the late 1980s for a definitive edition of the Second Portfolio,
was originally proposed to the MIT Press but remains unpublished to this day.

Main Menu

See Also

Main Menu