2002 Moving Pictures; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum,
New York
2003 Traveling: Towards the Border; The National Museum
of Modern Art, Tokyo, Japan
Selected Works
Der Lauf der Dinge(The Way Things Go) 1985–1987
Airports, 1988
Bilder, Ansichten, 1991
Mo ́n Visible(Visible World), 2000
Further Reading
Armstrong, Elizabeth, ed.Peter Fischli and David Weiss: In
a Restless World. Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1996.
Cameron, Dan. ‘‘Through the Looking Glass, Darkly: Fischli/
Weiss.’’Artforum International,v.31(September1992).
Tiravanija, Rirkrit. ‘‘Real Time Travel: Rirkrit Tiravanija
talks with Fischli and Weiss.’’Artforum International,v.
34 (Summer 1996).ROBERT JOSEPH FLAHERTY
American
Robert J. Flaherty has been widely acknowledged
as ‘‘the inventor of documentary film.’’ Although
primarily known as a film director and a camera-
man (for the filmsNanook,Moana,Man of Aran,
The Land), he was also a still photographer, capable
of lyrical images with an ethnographer’s perspec-
tive. Born in Iron Mountain, in Michigan’s Upper
Peninsula, on February 16, 1884, he was the eldest
of seven children of an Irish Protestant father and
German Catholic mother; his paternal grandfather
had lived in Quebec City, Canada. His father was a
mining engineer and an iron ore explorer, and the
young Flaherty was more often in the northern
woods with his father, looking for iron ore, than
in school.
In the employ of a railroad company exploring
the eastern coast of the Hudson Bay, the great
indent in the frozen north of Canada between
1910 and 1912, Flaherty made several expeditions
to the Nastapoka Islands, Fort George, Great
Whale Island, and across the Ungava Peninsula.
He took many still photographs and became
acquainted with the native Inuit. His striking
body of photographs from these expeditions are
held largely in the collection of the Thunder Bay
Historical Museum Society. These photographs
included images from Fort George, Baffin Island,
the Ungava Peninsula, and Fort Chimo, and they
depict the Natives of Northern Quebec, including
the Nasakapi of the Nastapoka Islands with their
distinctive headgear and clothing, and the Inuit. He
captured portraits of men, women, children, candid
and posed; and images of their dogs, dwellings, and
boats, as well as daily life in Port Arthur, today’s
Thunder Bay. On all of his trips, Flaherty had
heard tales of the Belcher Islands, and he was
determined to explore them; for a trip launched in
August, 1913 with this goal in mind, Flaherty was
carrying a hand-cranked Bell and Howell movie-
camera. The weather, however, prevented his suc-
cess, and he returned to the United States for his
marriage in 1914 to Frances Hubbard, who was to
become as well his collaborator on future projects.
Flaherty gave to friends some of the photographs
that he made; they found them fascinating in their
depiction of a people and culture of which they had
little knowledge. Further motivated, Flaherty
returned to explore the Belchers from 1914 until
1916, shooting about 70,000 feet of film footage—
mostly of the Inuit pursuing their prey, but also of
the landscape and wild life. The title of this first
effort was to beInnuit(Eskimo), roughly edited in- But disaster struck when the highly flam-
mable film stock in use at the time caught fire
while Flaherty was working with the negative; the
only copy seems to be lost.
Unsatisfied by his first experience with motion
pictures (and badly burned by the fire of the nitrate
celluloid), Flaherty returned to the Canadian
North on exploration assignments, always accom-
FISCHLI, PETER, AND DAVID WEISS