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April 11, 2018

Inside Aperture’s 2018 Spring Party

Spring Party to benefit Aperture and to celebrate The Photographer in the Garden Spring Party to benefit Aperture and to celebrate The Photographer in the Garden

Dr. Ruth Oratz, host Martha Stewart, and Dr. Albert Knapp

Patrick McMullan/PMC © Patrick McMullan



Cooper Cooper

Regina DeLuise, sponsor Stuart Cooper, and Susan Belsinger
Patrick McMullan/PMC © Patrick McMullan



Spring Party to benefit Aperture and to celebrate The Photographer in the Garden Spring Party to benefit Aperture and to celebrate The Photographer in the Garden

Angela Dimayuga and Spike Jonze

Sean Zanni/PMC © Patrick McMullan



Spring Party to benefit Aperture and to celebrate The Photographer in the Garden Spring Party to benefit Aperture and to celebrate The Photographer in the Garden

Zsela

Patrick McMullan/PMC © Patrick McMullan



Spring Party to benefit Aperture and to celebrate The Photographer in the Garden Spring Party to benefit Aperture and to celebrate The Photographer in the Garden

Gabrielle and Andrea D'Avack

Patrick McMullan/PMC © Patrick McMullan



Spring Party to benefit Aperture and to celebrate The Photographer in the Garden Spring Party to benefit Aperture and to celebrate The Photographer in the Garden

Martha Stewart and Elizabeth Ann Kahane

Patrick McMullan/PMC © Patrick McMullan



Spring Party to benefit Aperture and to celebrate The Photographer in the Garden Spring Party to benefit Aperture and to celebrate The Photographer in the Garden

Ian Wardropper and host Sarah Anne McNear

Patrick McMullan/PMC © Patrick McMullan



The 2018 Aperture Spring Party The 2018 Aperture Spring Party

The Aperture Spring Party at PUBLIC ARTS
Michelle Kim © Aperture



The 2018 Aperture Spring Party The 2018 Aperture Spring Party

Zsela and Angela Dimayuga
Michelle Kim © Aperture



Spring Party to benefit Aperture and to celebrate The Photographer in the Garden Spring Party to benefit Aperture and to celebrate The Photographer in the Garden

Dr. Ruth Oratz and Jessica Nagle

Patrick McMullan/PMC © Patrick McMullan



Spring Party to benefit Aperture and to celebrate The Photographer in the Garden Spring Party to benefit Aperture and to celebrate The Photographer in the Garden

Samuel Lawson, Elizabeth Ann Kahane, and Brett Allen
Patrick McMullan/PMC © Patrick McMullan



Spring Party to benefit Aperture and to celebrate The Photographer in the Garden Spring Party to benefit Aperture and to celebrate The Photographer in the Garden

Alix Brown

Patrick McMullan/PMC © Patrick McMullan



Spring Party to benefit Aperture and to celebrate The Photographer in the Garden Spring Party to benefit Aperture and to celebrate The Photographer in the Garden

Andre Akpan and Adrienne Collatos

Patrick McMullan/PMC © Patrick McMullan



The 2018 Aperture Spring Party The 2018 Aperture Spring Party

Dianna Cohen and Alexander Hurst
Madison Reid © Aperture



The 2018 Aperture Spring Party The 2018 Aperture Spring Party

Floral arrangement by Saipua
Michelle Kim © Aperture



Spring Party to benefit Aperture and to celebrate The Photographer in the Garden Spring Party to benefit Aperture and to celebrate The Photographer in the Garden

Jessica Nagle, Hemant Kanakia, and Dr. Sonalde Desai

Sean Zanni/PMC © Patrick McMullan



Spring Party to benefit Aperture and to celebrate The Photographer in the Garden Spring Party to benefit Aperture and to celebrate The Photographer in the Garden

Elizabeth Ann Kahane and Lindsay McCrum

Patrick McMullan/PMC © Patrick McMullan



Spring Party to benefit Aperture and to celebrate The Photographer in the Garden Spring Party to benefit Aperture and to celebrate The Photographer in the Garden

Emma Bowen and Tina Barney

Sean Zanni/PMC © Patrick McMullan



Spring Party to benefit Aperture and to celebrate The Photographer in the Garden Spring Party to benefit Aperture and to celebrate The Photographer in the Garden

Florian Koenigsberger and Victoria Schorsch

Patrick McMullan/PMC © Patrick McMullan



The 2018 Aperture Spring Party The 2018 Aperture Spring Party

Aperture executive director Chris Boot and Dawoud Bey
Madison Reid © Aperture



The 2018 Aperture Spring Party The 2018 Aperture Spring Party

Hemant Kanakia, Dr. Sonalde Desai, Dr. Deborah Willis, Hank Thomas, Sr., and Elaine Goldman
Madison Reid © Aperture



The 2018 Aperture Spring Party The 2018 Aperture Spring Party

George Rabot, Zoe Suna, and Liz Grover
Madison Reid © Aperture



Spring Party to benefit Aperture and to celebrate The Photographer in the Garden Spring Party to benefit Aperture and to celebrate The Photographer in the Garden

Lisa Rosenblum and Nina Celebic

Patrick McMullan/PMC © Patrick McMullan



Spring Party to benefit Aperture and to celebrate The Photographer in the Garden Spring Party to benefit Aperture and to celebrate The Photographer in the Garden

Louise Lui and Colton Klein

Patrick McMullan/PMC © Patrick McMullan



Spring Party to benefit Aperture and to celebrate The Photographer in the Garden Spring Party to benefit Aperture and to celebrate The Photographer in the Garden

Tim Doody and Lisa Corinne Davis

Patrick McMullan/PMC © Patrick McMullan



Spring Party to benefit Aperture and to celebrate The Photographer in the Garden Spring Party to benefit Aperture and to celebrate The Photographer in the Garden

Host Stephen Shore and Anne Stark Locher

Sean Zanni/PMC © Patrick McMullan



Spring Party to benefit Aperture and to celebrate The Photographer in the Garden Spring Party to benefit Aperture and to celebrate The Photographer in the Garden

Neil Lester and Filip Vurdelja

Patrick McMullan/PMC © Patrick McMullan



Spring Party to benefit Aperture and to celebrate The Photographer in the Garden Spring Party to benefit Aperture and to celebrate The Photographer in the Garden

Zsela

Sean Zanni/PMC © Patrick McMullan



The 2018 Aperture Spring Party The 2018 Aperture Spring Party

Alex Berggruen and host Martha Stewart
Madison Reid © Aperture



Spring Party to benefit Aperture and to celebrate The Photographer in the Garden Spring Party to benefit Aperture and to celebrate The Photographer in the Garden

Host Sarah Anne McNear and Darius Himes

Patrick McMullan/PMC © Patrick McMullan



Spring Party to benefit Aperture and to celebrate The Photographer in the Garden Spring Party to benefit Aperture and to celebrate The Photographer in the Garden

Nina Rosenblum and Dan Allentuck

Patrick McMullan/PMC © Patrick McMullan



Spring Party to benefit Aperture and to celebrate The Photographer in the Garden Spring Party to benefit Aperture and to celebrate The Photographer in the Garden

Yasufumi Nakamori, Lesley A. Martin, and Elena Dorfman

Patrick McMullan/PMC © Patrick McMullan



The 2018 Aperture Spring Party The 2018 Aperture Spring Party

Michelle Kim © Aperture



Spring Party to benefit Aperture and to celebrate The Photographer in the Garden Spring Party to benefit Aperture and to celebrate The Photographer in the Garden

Anne Stark Locher, Whit Williams, and Kate Cordsen
Patrick McMullan/PMC © Patrick McMullan



The 2018 Aperture Spring Party The 2018 Aperture Spring Party

Alex Berggruen

Madison Reid © Aperture



The 2018 Aperture Spring Party The 2018 Aperture Spring Party

Aperture executive director Chris Boot, Susan Gutfreund, host Sarah Anne McNear, and Tony WhiteMichelle Kim © Aperture



Spring Party to benefit Aperture and to celebrate The Photographer in the Garden Spring Party to benefit Aperture and to celebrate The Photographer in the Garden

Allan Chapin, Anna Rachminov, Lisa Corinne Davis, and Jonathan Gould

Patrick McMullan/PMC © Patrick McMullan



The 2018 Aperture Spring Party The 2018 Aperture Spring Party

Michelle Kim © Aperture



Spring Party to benefit Aperture and to celebrate The Photographer in the Garden Spring Party to benefit Aperture and to celebrate The Photographer in the Garden

Tina Barney and Emma Bowen


Patrick McMullan/PMC © Patrick McMullan



Spring Party to benefit Aperture and to celebrate The Photographer in the Garden Spring Party to benefit Aperture and to celebrate The Photographer in the Garden

Amy Hood, Callie Roth, and Bode

Patrick McMullan/PMC © Patrick McMullan



Spring Party to benefit Aperture and to celebrate The Photographer in the Garden Spring Party to benefit Aperture and to celebrate The Photographer in the Garden

Marx Goldberg and Ethan James Green

Sean Zanni/PMC © Patrick McMullan



Spring Party to benefit Aperture and to celebrate The Photographer in the Garden Spring Party to benefit Aperture and to celebrate The Photographer in the Garden

Missy O'Shaughnessy, Allan Chapin, Aperture board chair Cathy Kaplan, and Emily Grillo
Patrick McMullan/PMC © Patrick McMullan



The 2018 Aperture Spring Party The 2018 Aperture Spring Party

Aperture Spring Party guests Madison Reid © Aperture



Spring Party to benefit Aperture and to celebrate The Photographer in the Garden Spring Party to benefit Aperture and to celebrate The Photographer in the Garden

Aperture board chair Cathy Kaplan and Darlene Kaplan

Patrick McMullan/PMC © Patrick McMullan



Spring Party to benefit Aperture and to celebrate The Photographer in the Garden Spring Party to benefit Aperture and to celebrate The Photographer in the Garden

Darius Himes, host Stephen Shore, Aperture executive director Chris Boot, and Tom Schiff

Patrick McMullan/PMC © Patrick McMullan



Spring Party to benefit Aperture and to celebrate The Photographer in the Garden Spring Party to benefit Aperture and to celebrate The Photographer in the Garden

Elizabeth Ann Kahane and Mariane Ibrahim

Patrick McMullan/PMC © Patrick McMullan



Spring Party to benefit Aperture and to celebrate The Photographer in the Garden Spring Party to benefit Aperture and to celebrate The Photographer in the Garden

Kellie McLaughlin, Hank Thomas, Sr., and Dr. Deborah Willis

Patrick McMullan/PMC © Patrick McMullan



Spring Party to benefit Aperture and to celebrate The Photographer in the Garden Spring Party to benefit Aperture and to celebrate The Photographer in the Garden

Leonard Lauder and Judy Glickman Lauder

Patrick McMullan/PMC © Patrick McMullan



Spring Party to benefit Aperture and to celebrate The Photographer in the Garden Spring Party to benefit Aperture and to celebrate The Photographer in the Garden

Host Martha Stewart with cupcakes by Brooklyn Floral Delight

Patrick McMullan/PMC © Patrick McMullan



Spring Party to benefit Aperture and to celebrate The Photographer in the Garden Spring Party to benefit Aperture and to celebrate The Photographer in the Garden

Michael Hoeh and Aperture executive director Chris Boot

Patrick McMullan/PMC © Patrick McMullan



Spring Party to benefit Aperture and to celebrate The Photographer in the Garden Spring Party to benefit Aperture and to celebrate The Photographer in the Garden

Roland Hartley-Urquhart, Aperture board chair Cathy Kaplan, and Renwick Martin

Sean Zanni/PMC © Patrick McMullan



Spring Party to benefit Aperture and to celebrate The Photographer in the Garden Spring Party to benefit Aperture and to celebrate The Photographer in the Garden

Susan Gutfreund, Lucky, and Judy Glickman Lauder

Sean Zanni/PMC © Patrick McMullan



Spring Party to benefit Aperture and to celebrate The Photographer in the Garden Spring Party to benefit Aperture and to celebrate The Photographer in the Garden

Zsela

Sean Zanni/PMC © Patrick McMullan



Spring Party to benefit Aperture and to celebrate The Photographer in the Garden Spring Party to benefit Aperture and to celebrate The Photographer in the Garden

Sharon Core

Patrick McMullan/PMC © Patrick McMullan



Spring Party to benefit Aperture and to celebrate The Photographer in the Garden Spring Party to benefit Aperture and to celebrate The Photographer in the Garden

Dr. Sonalde Desai and Kurt LocherPatrick McMullan/PMC © Patrick McMullan



Spring Party to benefit Aperture and to celebrate The Photographer in the Garden Spring Party to benefit Aperture and to celebrate The Photographer in the Garden

Matt Lucero and Priyanka Pulijal
Sean Zanni/PMC © Patrick McMullan



Spring Party to benefit Aperture and to celebrate The Photographer in the Garden Spring Party to benefit Aperture and to celebrate The Photographer in the Garden

Susan Belsinger and sponsor Rebecca Besson
Patrick McMullan/PMC © Patrick McMullan



Spring Party to benefit Aperture and to celebrate The Photographer in the Garden Spring Party to benefit Aperture and to celebrate The Photographer in the Garden

Liz Grover, April Havranek, Michelle Gladd, and Lori Grover

Sean Zanni/PMC © Patrick McMullan



Spring Party to benefit Aperture and to celebrate The Photographer in the Garden Spring Party to benefit Aperture and to celebrate The Photographer in the Garden

Hosts Martha Stewart and Sarah Anne McNear, Leonard Lauder, Judy Glickman Lauder, and Aperture board chair Cathy Kaplan
Patrick McMullan/PMC © Patrick McMullanPatrick McMullan/PMC



Spring Party to benefit Aperture and to celebrate The Photographer in the Garden Spring Party to benefit Aperture and to celebrate The Photographer in the Garden

David and Sally Park with Nathaniel Stein

Patrick McMullan/PMC © Patrick McMullan



Spring Party to benefit Aperture and to celebrate The Photographer in the Garden Spring Party to benefit Aperture and to celebrate The Photographer in the Garden

Christina Swilley

Patrick McMullan/PMC © Patrick McMullan



Spring Party to benefit Aperture and to celebrate The Photographer in the Garden Spring Party to benefit Aperture and to celebrate The Photographer in the Garden

Zsela
Sean Zanni/PMC © Patrick McMullan



Spring Party to benefit Aperture and to celebrate The Photographer in the Garden Spring Party to benefit Aperture and to celebrate The Photographer in the Garden

Esther Zuckerman and Denise Wolff

Patrick McMullan/PMC © Patrick McMullan



Spring Party to benefit Aperture and to celebrate The Photographer in the Garden Spring Party to benefit Aperture and to celebrate The Photographer in the Garden

Sean Zanni/PMC © Patrick McMullan



The 2018 Aperture Spring Party, held on April 6, was a much-anticipated happening for photography enthusiasts in New York during The Photography Show presented by AIPAD. Guests were decked out in vibrant floral patterns inspired by blooms—on dresses, skirts, blazers, and jumpsuits. Celebrating the pre-launch of Aperture’s forthcoming book The Photographer in the Garden, the nearly three hundred guests who attended enjoyed an evening of food, music, and dancing with Garden’s coauthors Sarah Anne McNear and Jamie M. Allen. The event was sponsored by Sb Cooper and R. L. Besson, Besson/Cooper Fund, and cohosted by McNear, along with Martha Stewart and Ginger and Stephen Shore. Event and auction proceeds support Aperture serving the art, story, and community of photography through publications and educational programs with the world’s leading photographers, artists, scholars, and authors.


A familial pre-party dinner with approximately one hundred of Aperture’s closest friends took place on the seventeenth floor of the Public Hotel with panoramic views of Manhattan. Guests were seated with Garden contributors, including McNear, Shore, Allen, and photographers Tina Barney and Sharon Core. Barney and Core, along with Daniel Gordon, contributed prints to a live auction conducted by Alex Berggruen of Christie’s. Dinner guests received gratis copies of Martha’s Flowers and The Photographer in the Garden, gifted by Martha Stewart and Aperture trustee Michael Hoeh.


The Spring Party, held at Public Arts, was hosted by Aperture’s Connect Member group of young leaders and other individuals. Guests sipped on cucumber and mint cocktails courtesy of VDKA 6100 and posed around the photo set powered by HYPNO, with a vibrant floral installation by Saipua and a neon Aperture sign. Among the mix of guests who attended were Darius Himes, Dr. Deborah Willis, Spike Jonze, Angela Dimayuga, Andrea and Gabrielle d’Avack, Leonard Lauder and Judy Glickman Lauder, Elizabeth Ann Kahane, Ethan James Green, Alex and Rebecca Webb, John Chiara, Mitch Epstein, and Penelope Umbrico. The highlight of the night was an enchanting performance by Brooklyn native singer-songwriter Zsela, accompanied by Daniel Aged on piano. (Zsela is currently working on a debut release for later this year.) Alix Brown wrapped up the night with sets that inspired a lively dance party until after midnight.


Courtesy of Patrick McMullan Company, click here to view photos from the event. Additionally, view the HYPNO booth photos by clicking here.


Aperture wishes to thank cohosts Martha Stewart, Ginger and Stephen Shore, and Sarah Anne McNear; sponsors Sb Cooper and R. L. Besson, Besson/Cooper Fund; George Eastman Museum’s Jamie M. Allen; all of the contributing Garden photographers; Christie’s; photograph magazine; Saipua; VDKA 6100; Zsela; Daniel Aged; and Alix Brown.


Additional thanks goes to the Leaders, the Host and the Spring Party Committees, and to all of the Aperture staff, work scholars, volunteers, and ambassadors for their time and dedication.


Sponsors


Sb Cooper and R. L. Besson, Besson/Cooper Fund


Leaders


Allan Chapin and Anna Rachminov

Anonymous

Bill and Victoria Cherry

Cathy M. Kaplan

Elaine Goldman and John Benis

Nion McEvoy

Thomas R. Schiff


Host Committee


Anne and Kurt Locher

Anonymous

Betsy Evans Hunt and Christopher Hunt

Darius Himes, Christie’s

Darlene Kaplan and Steve Zuckerman

Dr. Albert Knapp and Dr. Ruth Oratz

Elizabeth Ann Kahane

Hemant Kanakia and Sonalde Desai

Howard Greenberg

Jessica Nagle and Roland Hartley-Urquhart

Kate Cordsen

L.C. Wisnewski

Leonard and Judy Lauder

Malú Alvarez

Mark and Elizabeth Levine

Martha Stewart

Michael Hoeh

Missy and Jim O’Shaughnessy

Mrs. John (Susan) Gutfreund

M&T Charitable Foundation

Peter Barbur and Tim Doody

Rita Anthoine

Sarah McNear and Ian Wardropper

Victoria Schorsch

Whit Williams

Willard Taylor and Virginia Davies


Spring Party Committee


Alexander Hurst

Angela Dimayuga

Dianna Cohen

Liz Grover

Liz Higgins

Michael Sbabo

Paula Naughton

Sam Pritzker

Sarah F. Haimes

Tanya and David Wells

Tim Matusch

Todd Wiener


The post Inside Aperture’s 2018 Spring Party appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

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Published on April 11, 2018 15:13

In Marrakech, African Photography on Its Own Terms

A new museum in Morocco becomes a destination for contemporary art.


By Sean O’Toole


Leila Alaoui, Khamlia, Sud du Maroc #1, 2014, from the series The Moroccans
© Fondation Leila Alaoui


The life and work of Leila Alaoui, the celebrated Moroccan documentary photographer, looms large over Marrakech’s newest art institution. Alaoui, who at age thirty-three was shot and killed during an al-Qaeda attack in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, was a close friend of Othman Lazraq, the photography-enthused president of the Museum of African Contemporary Art Al Maaden (MACAAL), a privately owned art foundation on the southeastern outskirts of this walled city at the foothills of the Atlas Mountains. MACAAL’s inaugural photography exhibition, Africa Is No Island, bears the subtle imprint of Alaoui’s influence.


Speaking during a weekend of festivities in late February that included a boutique edition of the 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair to mark the international launch of MACAAL, Lazraq cited his friendship with Paris-born Alaoui, an accomplished editorial photographer and portraitist who grew up in Marrakech, for sparking his interest in photography. The two met in New York, where Alaoui studied photography, and quickly struck up a friendship. Lazraq’s first photography purchase was a work by Alaoui, who also guided him on his early acquisitions—Lazraq’s home in Casablanca includes works by Araki, Peter Beard, Malick Sidibé, and the emerging South African Phumzile Khanyile.


Africa Is No Island. Installation at Museum of African Contemporary Art Al Maaden. Photograph by Saad Alami
© MACAAL


“I was very young, only twenty, when I started buying photography with Leila,” said Lazraq, twenty-nine, who, like his father—Alami Lazraq, a Moroccan property tycoon and one of Africa’s wealthiest businessmen—is an architect by training. Speaking with characteristic brio, MACAAL’s youthful leader told an audience at the museum’s opening how Alaoui introduced him to her motivating ideas as a portraitist, of “facing” the real and “fixing a moment of history.” Alaoui’s sway, however, extends even further: she introduced Lazraq to Jeanne Mercier and Baptiste de Ville d’Avray, of the photography platform Afrique in Visu, who MACAAL later invited to curate Africa Is No Island.


The exhibition features a total of twenty-two individual photographers and one collective, many from the African continent, others—like Paris-based Italian photographer Nicola Lo Calzo and New Jersey-born Ayana V. Jackson—deeply occupied by its social life and connectedness to the wider world. Fittingly, the exhibition includes an image by Alaoui: a life-size portrait of a young Gnawa woman in violet-colored Mauritanian dress, photographed in 2014 in southern Morocco. Installed in an alcove with two speakers playing ambient sounds recorded in Marrakech by Italian artist Anna Raimondo, the work is excerpted from Alaoui’s The Moroccans (2010–14), a roaming project descriptive of the country’s disappearing cultural traditions and diverse racial makeup.


Nicola Lo Calzo, Portrait de David Godonou-Dossou, riche marchand et fondateur de la dinastie Godonou-Dossou, 2011
© the artist


“We chose someone who doesn’t look like a Moroccan,” said Mercier during a walkthrough of the exhibition in reference to Alaoui’s striking portrait. Although Moroccan, the swaddled Gnawa woman’s ancestry is linked to enslaved West Africans brought to the region by Arab and Berber traffickers. Africa Is No Island is mindful of the historical forces that have wracked the African continent. The exhibition includes five portraits from Lo Calzo’s ambitious multicountry project Cham (2007–16), about the embodied legacy of the African slave trade. In 2015, New Yorker critic Hilton Als praised Lo Calzo for bringing “disappeared bodies” back to life “by their living and breathing descendants.” Aalaoui’s portrait achieves much the same.


The team of Afrique in Visu invited French curator Madeleine de Colnet to assist them in their selections, with Lazraq offering additional input—notably a prohibition on wall captions and texts for the individual works on show. “I am really driven by emotions,” said Lazraq about his philosophy as a collector and curator. The lack of explanatory texts at MACAAL is nonetheless a hindrance, especially given the preponderance of documentary and conceptually applied photography on offer. For instance, French Moroccan photographer Mustapha Azeroual’s interest in uniqueness and preindustrial modes of photography—explored in Arbre #2 (2011), a ceiling-hung installation of two hundred porcelain plates featuring one-off images of trees made with a gum bichromate printing process—is hardly self-evident.


Ishola Akpo, L’essentiel est invisible pour les yeux, 2014
© the artist


Roughly half the work gathered in Africa Is No Island is drawn from MACAAL’s private collection, the balance sourced through Afrique in Visu’s vast network, which is visually signaled at the ground-floor entrance to the exhibition in a wall-scale collage of photographs featured on the platform’s website and exhibitions. Africa Is No Island properly begins with three color images by Beninese photographer Ishola Akpo, from his series L’essentiel est invisible pour les yeux (Essence is invisible to the eye, 2014), matter-of-fact descriptions of dowry objects—like an enamel plate and bottle of gin—that belonged to his recently deceased grandmother. The gently melancholic note registered by this work recurs throughout Africa Is No Island, even in the photographs of Walid Layadi-Marfouk and Lebohang Kganye, the show’s youngest exhibitors.


Along with Alaoui and Hicham Gardaf—a Tangier-born photographer whose series The Red Square (2014–17) offers an economical insight into Morocco’s rapid urban development in a style redolent of Lewis Baltz and Angolan photographer Edson Chagas—Layadi-Marfouk represents the vanguard of young Moroccan photography. His Riad series (2017–ongoing) is largely set in his family home in Marrakech and portrays his kin, notably an aunt, involved in choreographed actions. An outlier in the series, Haya Jat (Starfixion), presents this aunt in a blue evening gown, arms outstretched, facing an audience of two from the stage of Marrakech’s Le Colisée, an Art Deco cinema acquired by the Layadi family in 1971.


Walid Layadi-Marfouk, Haya Jat (Starifixion), 2017
© the artist


“The idea of the series came when I moved to the US,” said Layadi-Marfouk, who studied math at Princeton before changing to photography. “The visual representation [in the US] of my culture was completely separate and other from the way I had internalized, sublimed, and fantasized it growing up in Morocco. They were just black-and-white images of violent submission, pain, and extremism.”


Similar to Layadi-Marfouk, South African–born Kganye also uses portraiture to affirm her identity and explore intergenerational relations in her breakout 2013 series, Ke Lefa Laka (My heritage). Kganye’s photographic tableaux, which effortlessly blur the line between playful fantasy and sober document, present her in comical poses wearing her grandmother’s clothes and interacting with figures and settings photocopied from various family albums gathered during a research trip in 2012. “Photographs are more than just a memory of moments passed, or people no more, or a reassurance of an existence,” noted Kganye when she first exhibited her work at the Market Photo Workshop, Johannesburg, in 2013, adding that they were also evidence of “a constructed life.”


Lebohang Kganye, Pied Piper, 2013, from the series, Ke Lefa Laka
© the artist and courtesy Afronova Gallery, Johannesburg


Kganye is adroitly paired in the exhibition with Sammy Baloji. The Congolese photographer is represented by three photographs, one depicting a Chinese pagoda built by dictator Mobutu Sese Seko at his ruined palace complex in Gbadolite overlaid with a black-and-white image of a bare-breasted Congolese woman photographed in 1935 by Belgian tropical medicine expert Dr. J. A. Fourche. Both photographers use collage techniques to overlay visual memories of the past, some personal, others collectively experienced, on the present day—the burden of history is palpable.


Namsa Leuba, Statuette Kafigeledio Prince, Guinea, 2011, from the series, Ya Kala Ben
© the artist and courtesy Art Twenty One Gallery, Lagos


The exhibition is noteworthy for its strong showing of performance-inflected portraiture, with exemplary works by Joana Choumali, Maïmouna Guerresi, Ayana V. Jackson, and Namsa Leuba, whose cryptic frontal portrait of an anonymous figure wrapped in synthetic material posed in an industrial site, Statuette Kafigeledio Prince, Guinea (2011), forms the cover image of the exhibition catalogue. Choumali’s portraits from her series Hââbré: The Last Generation (2013–14) were a clear favorite with visitors. The images explore the waning practice of facial scarification in West Africa, and feature sitters photographed in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, from both frontal and posterior views.


Like Jackson, whose self-portraits explore the photographic representation of blackness, Choumali’s stylized work is informed by anthropological codes of picturing otherness. The Photography Museum of Marrakech, which opened in 2009, offers ample evidence of this earlier photography; its holdings include pictorial, ethnographic, and colonial photography dating from the colonial occupation of Morocco that ended in 1956. The museum’s displays include a selection of prints by Hungarian photographer Nicolás Muller, who died in 2000 and was the subject of a survey at Jeu de Paume, Paris, in 2014. His confidently modernist portrait of a Tangier youth, photographed in 1941 in three-quarter pose, chimes with the work of Choumali, and even Alaoui—at least stylistically.


Joana Choumali, Mme Djeneba, 2013–14, from the series Haabré: The Last Generation
© the artist and courtesy 50 Golborne Gallery, London


But style is an unreliable point of entry into contemporary African portraiture; rather it is an interest in photography’s hazy ethics and a common cause between subject and maker that compels many contemporary portraitists. That portraiture is now the genre du jour across the continent was clear from the selection at MACAAL, and also the offerings at the inaugural Marrakech version of 1-54, held in the sumptuous La Mamounia Hotel. Of the artists on show at MACAAL, Leuba, Choumali, François-Xavier Gbré, and Hicham Benohoud all had work on sale at 1-54. One of the highlights of the fair was New York dealer Yossi Milo’s presentation of five gelatin-silver prints by Sanlé Sory from his Volta Photo portrait studio, opened in 1965 in Bobo-Dioulasso, Burkina Faso’s second-largest city. The selection included a striking side-view portrait of a youth in a white vest and cap, thumb propping his chin, eyes appraising the camera—he oozes swagger. Last year, Sanlé told The Guardian, “Fun was central to my work.”


Sanlé Sory, Chez Inter Music, 1976
© the artist and courtesy Yossi Milo Gallery, New York


Fun also remains essential to the work of Hassan Hajjaj, a Moroccan pop artist who took up photography in 1989. Best known for his vivid and playfully garish street portraits of Moroccan youth, Hajjaj’s photography is a flip, urban counterpoint to Alaoui’s respectful portraits, and is on permanent view at Riad Yima, a boutique and tearoom in the medina that also includes a gallery. As part of the festivities around MACAAL’s opening, Hajjaj invited Yoriyas Yassine Alaoui to exhibit his street photographs of ball players, sunbathers, and worshippers from the series Casablanca Not the Movie (2015–ongoing).


Hajjaj’s initiative lent a biennial-like feel to the weekend of MACAAL’s opening, as did writer and translator Omar Berrada’s thoughtfully curated program of talks on the subject of decolonization at the fair, including a fascinating performance-lecture by the Black Athena Collective (photographers Dawit L. Petros and Heba Y. Amin) on pharaonic-era trade along the Red Sea.


Hassan Hajjaj, Marmouche, 2012
Courtesy the artist


In recent years, Marrakech has emerged as an important art destination in North Africa. This legacy is partly founded on the successes of the Marrakech Biennale, an unapologetically progressive showcase of Mediterranean—rather than exclusively African—art, founded in 2005. The 2009 edition, for instance, included a picnic hosted by Tangier-based photographer and artist Yto Barrada, and British artist Shezad Dawood’s Make It Big (Blow Up), hoax stills from a Pakistani remake of Michelangelo Antonioni’s film Blow–Up (1966). However, the withdrawal of sponsorship last year led to the cancellation of the 2018 biennial, which would have coincided with MACAAL’s opening.


Private collectors like the Lazraq family and Nabil El Mallouki, whose Museum of Art and Culture of Marrakech opened in early 2016, offer an alternative approach to sponsor-led events like the biennial. These new private museums also slot into a growing network of cultural venues in Marrakech: some are modest, like the photography museum and Hajjaj’s Riad Yima; others—like the Yves Saint Laurent Museum, opened last year opposite a garden that was created by artist Jacques Majorelle and later acquired by the late French fashion designer—cater to Marrakech’s new class of culture tourists.


“The role of a museum is to engage and educate people, to somehow bring a small touch of light and hope,” said Lazraq before proudly ushering journalists into Africa Is No Island. “I think Morocco needs it, Africa needs it, we all need it.” Part of that education, he added, involves reframing perceptions of photography. Lazraq jovially recalled his father’s befuddlement at his preference for photography, video, and installation art, saying he enjoyed the pushback. It helped reinforce a central article of faith: “Photography is a medium I love and care for.” The eccentricities characterizing MACAAL’s debut photography exhibition design and approach to information notwithstanding, Africa Is No Island is a confident expression of Lazraq’s passion for the medium and ebullient vision to make his North African museum a destination for photography enthusiasts.


Sean O’Toole is a writer and editor based in Cape Town.


Africa Is No Island is on view at MACAAL, Marrakech, through August 24, 2018.


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Published on April 11, 2018 13:10

April 10, 2018

2018 Aperture Portfolio Prize Shortlist

Fabiola Cedillo_Portfolio Prize 2018 Fabiola Cedillo_Portfolio Prize 2018

Fabiola Cedillo, Untitled, 2016; from the series Los mundos de TITA



Philip Cheung_Portfolio Prize 2018 Philip Cheung_Portfolio Prize 2018

Philip Cheung, Weapon maintenance, Kandahar Airfield, 2010; from the series The Thing About Remembering



Dylan Hausthor & P. Guilmoth_Portfolio Prize 2018 Dylan Hausthor & P. Guilmoth_Portfolio Prize 2018

Dylan Hausthor & P. Guilmoth, Untitled, 2018; from the series Sleep Creek



Eduardo Rivera_Portfolio Prize 2018 Eduardo Rivera_Portfolio Prize 2018

Eduardo L Rivera, A Seat at the Table, 2016; from the series Over Dry Lands



Ka-Man Tse_Portfolio Prize 2018 Ka-Man Tse_Portfolio Prize 2018

Ka-Man Tse, Untitled, 2017; from the series Narrow Distances



We’re pleased to announce the five finalists for the 2018 Aperture Portfolio Prize, an international photography competition whose goal is to identify trends in contemporary photography and highlight artists whose work deserves greater recognition:


Fabiola Cedillo

Philip Cheung

Dylan Hausthor & P. Guilmoth

Eduardo L Rivera

Ka-Man Tse


This year, Aperture’s staff reviewed more than 900 portfolios. Our challenge is to select one winner and four honorable mentions from this overwhelming response. One finalist will be selected as the winner and will be published in Aperture magazine, receive a $3,000 cash prize, and present an exhibition in New York.


We are delighted to welcome these five finalists to our ranks of illustrious past winners and finalists, joining such artists as Natalie Krick, Eli Durst, Drew Nikonowicz, Amy Elkins, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Alexander Gronsky, Sarah Palmer, Louie Palu, Bryan Schutmaat, and many others. The winner of the 2018 Aperture Portfolio Prize will be announced later this month, and the finalists’ portfolios and statements will be featured on aperture.org.


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Published on April 10, 2018 12:47

April 4, 2018

A Startling Discovery at San Quentin

Ear Hustle podcast creator Nigel Poor uncovers a trove of photographs at California’s most infamous prison.


By Rebecca Bengal


Photographer unknown, WH Woodside, CO Fight, April 8, 1961
Courtesy Nigel Poor, San Quentin Archive, and Haines Gallery, San Francisco


In 1999, at the tail end of a trip to Saint Petersburg, Russia, the artist Nigel Poor found herself standing outside Kresty Prison, the infamous eighteenth-century compound where Leon Trotsky was once held and Anna Akhmatova visited her incarcerated son. Scattered on the ground were dozens of paper cones, weighed down with pieces of bread, small missives tossed out by those behind Kresty’s brick walls. Poor bent down, picked up one of the cones, and took it back home to San Francisco. She has never opened it up. “I wanted to live with the mystery,” she told me one morning as she sat in her car, preparing to make a now frequent commute to California’s San Quentin State Prison.


Photographer unknown, Gym Crew, November 5, 1975
Courtesy Nigel Poor, San Quentin Archive, and Haines Gallery, San Francisco


Since the 1990s, Poor’s photographic series of found items, or banned books laundered like clothes, or portraits of the hands of people who visited her studio have navigated the borders between the known and unknown, using objects or visible features as a means of traversing the divide between the two. These days Poor is best known as a cocreator of Ear Hustle, a widely acclaimed podcast released in 2017 that was produced entirely inside San Quentin State Prison and takes its name from prison slang for “eavesdropping.” In each episode, Poor and her cohost, Earlonne Woods, and sound designer, Antwan Williams—both of whom are serving sentences at San Quentin—engage prisoners in funny, frank, and devastating explorations of topics such as solitary confinement and finding cellmates, but also what it means to confront love, intimacy, hope, aging, sickness, and death while incarcerated.


Photographer unknown, Smith Assaulted, February 3, 1965
Courtesy Nigel Poor, San Quentin Archive, and Haines Gallery, San Francisco


“We’re not journalists,” Woods and Poor frequently tell listeners, an unsubtle reminder that their stories should not be taken as literal documents of what it means to be an inmate at San Quentin. “Our project is about inside and outside people working together, and how we understand each other and misunderstand each other,” Poor told me. It’s exchanges that interest Poor—the paper cones dropped outside Kresty, her elaborate childhood collections of Popsicle sticks and other things people discarded on the ground, the accidental ways we leave behind impressions of ourselves. In one of the luckiest of those accidents, Poor stumbled on an astonishing visual archive from San Quentin, some ten thousand images depicting prison life at its most murderous and its most mundane. It led to San Quentin Project #3: Archive Typologies (2012–ongoing), a project predating Ear Hustle that continues to occupy Poor today.


Photographer unknown, San Quentin School Special, 1958
Courtesy Nigel Poor, San Quentin Archive, and Haines Gallery, San Francisco


The roots of the San Quentin project stem from 2011, when Poor and her colleague Doug Dertinger began coteaching a history of photography class through San Quentin’s Prison University Project. They had to drastically adapt the course they taught at California State University, Sacramento: neither books nor cameras were allowed into the facility. In one exercise, Poor asked her class to create “verbal photographs” instead—describing a memory for which they had no photograph, detailing how they would re-create it, frame it, light it, print it. Her students, she discovered, were keen observers. “If you survive in prison,” she told me, “you have to notice everything around you.” In another exercise of “mapping,” Poor gave each student a 17-by-11-inch photograph, each by a different artist and each printed with a wide margin, where she asked her students to dissect the image and then write a response, formal or creative.


Photographer unknown, Wedding, n.d.
Courtesy Nigel Poor, San Quentin Archive, and Haines Gallery, San Francisco


Every image shown in class had to be cleared by administrative officials, who initially deemed anything depicting children, drugs, violence, or emotionally complex issues to be off-limits. “I thought, What’s left?” Poor said. She was ultimately allowed to bring in almost all of the photographs she wanted, with the notable exception of a few by Sally Mann and Nicholas Nixon. Her students cataloged minute details of light and angle: A William Eggleston photograph of a Ford Mercury’s open hood triggered, for one student, the most evocative and meaningful memories of his life. Joel Sternfeld’s McLean, Virginia (December 1978) prompted another story of loss and abandonment, as well as a recipe for pumpkin pie. After the first semester, “one student told me he could now see fascination everywhere in San Quentin,” Poor said. “That was just so beautiful.”


Photographer unknown, Untitled, n.d.
Courtesy Nigel Poor, San Quentin Archive, and Haines Gallery, San Francisco


One day, in 2013, Poor noticed a few boxes of photographic paper in the office of Lieutenant Sam Robinson, the public information officer whose voice Ear Hustle listeners hear at the end of each episode (he personally approves each broadcast). “That’s nothing,” Robinson told her. He opened a file storage box; inside were hundreds of 4-by-5-inch negatives, each in a little manila envelope with a date and a cryptic description: “Assaulted in Print Shop,” “Football Game,” “New Exercise Fence.” Poor learned from him that more storage boxes were filling a room. “I’m not exaggerating when I tell you my heart just stopped,” Poor told me. She was granted permission to take home a box to scan. This first batch turned up violent images, including one of an assault victim, but also some of men in a classroom and a man carving a giant ice sculpture.


Photographer unknown, Prison Rock Band, June 26, 1975
Courtesy Nigel Poor, San Quentin Archive, and Haines Gallery, San Francisco


The thousands of images represent the work of corrections officers, who ostensibly made them in a purely documentary sense: to keep a record of incidents and events, weddings and stabbings, Christmas trees, lunchtime, the prison band, the eerie masked dummies some prisoners concocted when they attempted to escape. “It’s everything about life in prison that you see when you go in there,” Poor said, “the most depressing and funny and bizarre.” Poor is assembling an archive of the photographs, for teaching and as part of San Quentin Project #3 organized under twelve categories that reflect the aching divide between inside and outside. Among her typologies: “Holidays & Ceremonies,” “Animals & People,” “Escape & Confinement,” “Murders & Suicides,” “Blood & Evidence,” and, her favorite, “The Ineffable.”


Photographer unknown, Football, October 19, 1974
Courtesy Nigel Poor, San Quentin Archive, and Haines Gallery, San Francisco


Poor has discovered no negatives made after 1987. Presumably someone is digitally recording similar scenes in San Quentin now, but it’s curious why a true archive was never attempted, or why, in still predigital times, the photographs stopped. “I’m not interested in them as documents. That’s someone else’s job,” Poor said. “But there are so many details in the photographs I sometimes felt I needed an escort to guide me through them.” With Lieutenant Robinson’s approval, she began asking her students to map onto the San Quentin images too, prompting the kinds of discussions that unfold on Ear Hustle, excavating issues of race and violence and humiliation. “Ultimately, I think showing them these pictures is validating their experiences and giving them a way to talk about their trauma, how unfair life can be. It gives them some tangible truth.”


Photographer unknown, X-mas Tree, December 28, 1975
Courtesy Nigel Poor, San Quentin Archive, and Haines Gallery, San Francisco


But these anonymous photographers, she tells her students, were framing the world too, making implicit choices about what the camera revealed and, most importantly, what it did not. “It may be in this state of not knowing that we are ultimately given the opportunity to engage in the most difficult of life’s questions,” Poor writes. She calls the San Quentin Project #3 photographs “unreliable witnesses.”


Rebecca Bengal is a writer based in New York.


Read more  from   Aperture ,  Issue 230, “Prison Nation,” or  subscribe  to  Aperture   and never miss an issue.


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Published on April 04, 2018 09:47

At California’s Most Infamous Prison, An Archive Unveiled

Ear Hustle podcast creator Nigel Poor uncovers a trove of photographs at California’s most infamous prison.


By Rebecca Bengal


Photographer unknown, WH Woodside, CO Fight, April 8, 1961
Courtesy Nigel Poor, San Quentin Archive, and Haines Gallery, San Francisco


In 1999, at the tail end of a trip to Saint Petersburg, Russia, the artist Nigel Poor found herself standing outside Kresty Prison, the infamous eighteenth-century compound where Leon Trotsky was once held and Anna Akhmatova visited her incarcerated son. Scattered on the ground were dozens of paper cones, weighed down with pieces of bread, small missives tossed out by those behind Kresty’s brick walls. Poor bent down, picked up one of the cones, and took it back home to San Francisco. She has never opened it up. “I wanted to live with the mystery,” she told me one morning as she sat in her car, preparing to make a now frequent commute to California’s San Quentin State Prison.


Photographer unknown, Gym Crew, November 5, 1975
Courtesy Nigel Poor, San Quentin Archive, and Haines Gallery, San Francisco


Since the 1990s, Poor’s photographic series of found items, or banned books laundered like clothes, or portraits of the hands of people who visited her studio have navigated the borders between the known and unknown, using objects or visible features as a means of traversing the divide between the two. These days Poor is best known as a cocreator of Ear Hustle, a widely acclaimed podcast released in 2017 that was produced entirely inside San Quentin State Prison and takes its name from prison slang for “eavesdropping.” In each episode, Poor and her cohost, Earlonne Woods, and sound designer, Antwan Williams—both of whom are serving sentences at San Quentin—engage prisoners in funny, frank, and devastating explorations of topics such as solitary confinement and finding cellmates, but also what it means to confront love, intimacy, hope, aging, sickness, and death while incarcerated.


Photographer unknown, Smith Assaulted, February 3, 1965
Courtesy Nigel Poor, San Quentin Archive, and Haines Gallery, San Francisco


“We’re not journalists,” Woods and Poor frequently tell listeners, an unsubtle reminder that their stories should not be taken as literal documents of what it means to be an inmate at San Quentin. “Our project is about inside and outside people working together, and how we understand each other and misunderstand each other,” Poor told me. It’s exchanges that interest Poor—the paper cones dropped outside Kresty, her elaborate childhood collections of Popsicle sticks and other things people discarded on the ground, the accidental ways we leave behind impressions of ourselves. In one of the luckiest of those accidents, Poor stumbled on an astonishing visual archive from San Quentin, some ten thousand images depicting prison life at its most murderous and its most mundane. It led to San Quentin Project #3: Archive Typologies (2012–ongoing), a project predating Ear Hustle that continues to occupy Poor today.


Photographer unknown, San Quentin School Special, 1958
Courtesy Nigel Poor, San Quentin Archive, and Haines Gallery, San Francisco


The roots of the San Quentin project stem from 2011, when Poor and her colleague Doug Dertinger began coteaching a history of photography class through San Quentin’s Prison University Project. They had to drastically adapt the course they taught at California State University, Sacramento: neither books nor cameras were allowed into the facility. In one exercise, Poor asked her class to create “verbal photographs” instead—describing a memory for which they had no photograph, detailing how they would re-create it, frame it, light it, print it. Her students, she discovered, were keen observers. “If you survive in prison,” she told me, “you have to notice everything around you.” In another exercise of “mapping,” Poor gave each student a 17-by-11-inch photograph, each by a different artist and each printed with a wide margin, where she asked her students to dissect the image and then write a response, formal or creative.


Photographer unknown, Wedding, n.d.
Courtesy Nigel Poor, San Quentin Archive, and Haines Gallery, San Francisco


Every image shown in class had to be cleared by administrative officials, who initially deemed anything depicting children, drugs, violence, or emotionally complex issues to be off-limits. “I thought, What’s left?” Poor said. She was ultimately allowed to bring in almost all of the photographs she wanted, with the notable exception of a few by Sally Mann and Nicholas Nixon. Her students cataloged minute details of light and angle: A William Eggleston photograph of a Ford Mercury’s open hood triggered, for one student, the most evocative and meaningful memories of his life. Joel Sternfeld’s McLean, Virginia (December 1978) prompted another story of loss and abandonment, as well as a recipe for pumpkin pie. After the first semester, “one student told me he could now see fascination everywhere in San Quentin,” Poor said. “That was just so beautiful.”


Photographer unknown, Untitled, n.d.
Courtesy Nigel Poor, San Quentin Archive, and Haines Gallery, San Francisco


One day, in 2013, Poor noticed a few boxes of photographic paper in the office of Lieutenant Sam Robinson, the public information officer whose voice Ear Hustle listeners hear at the end of each episode (he personally approves each broadcast). “That’s nothing,” Robinson told her. He opened a file storage box; inside were hundreds of 4-by-5-inch negatives, each in a little manila envelope with a date and a cryptic description: “Assaulted in Print Shop,” “Football Game,” “New Exercise Fence.” Poor learned from him that more storage boxes were filling a room. “I’m not exaggerating when I tell you my heart just stopped,” Poor told me. She was granted permission to take home a box to scan. This first batch turned up violent images, including one of an assault victim, but also some of men in a classroom and a man carving a giant ice sculpture.


Photographer unknown, Prison Rock Band, June 26, 1975
Courtesy Nigel Poor, San Quentin Archive, and Haines Gallery, San Francisco


The thousands of images represent the work of corrections officers, who ostensibly made them in a purely documentary sense: to keep a record of incidents and events, weddings and stabbings, Christmas trees, lunchtime, the prison band, the eerie masked dummies some prisoners concocted when they attempted to escape. “It’s everything about life in prison that you see when you go in there,” Poor said, “the most depressing and funny and bizarre.” Poor is assembling an archive of the photographs, for teaching and as part of San Quentin Project #3 organized under twelve categories that reflect the aching divide between inside and outside. Among her typologies: “Holidays & Ceremonies,” “Animals & People,” “Escape & Confinement,” “Murders & Suicides,” “Blood & Evidence,” and, her favorite, “The Ineffable.”


Photographer unknown, Football, October 19, 1974
Courtesy Nigel Poor, San Quentin Archive, and Haines Gallery, San Francisco


Poor has discovered no negatives made after 1987. Presumably someone is digitally recording similar scenes in San Quentin now, but it’s curious why a true archive was never attempted, or why, in still predigital times, the photographs stopped. “I’m not interested in them as documents. That’s someone else’s job,” Poor said. “But there are so many details in the photographs I sometimes felt I needed an escort to guide me through them.” With Lieutenant Robinson’s approval, she began asking her students to map onto the San Quentin images too, prompting the kinds of discussions that unfold on Ear Hustle, excavating issues of race and violence and humiliation. “Ultimately, I think showing them these pictures is validating their experiences and giving them a way to talk about their trauma, how unfair life can be. It gives them some tangible truth.”


Photographer unknown, X-mas Tree, December 28, 1975
Courtesy Nigel Poor, San Quentin Archive, and Haines Gallery, San Francisco


But these anonymous photographers, she tells her students, were framing the world too, making implicit choices about what the camera revealed and, most importantly, what it did not. “It may be in this state of not knowing that we are ultimately given the opportunity to engage in the most difficult of life’s questions,” Poor writes. She calls the San Quentin Project #3 photographs “unreliable witnesses.”


Rebecca Bengal is a writer based in New York.


Read more  from   Aperture ,  Issue 230, “Prison Nation,” or  subscribe  to  Aperture   and never miss an issue.


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Published on April 04, 2018 09:47

The Woman Behind the First Photography Gallery

Helen Gee risked everything to open Limelight in 1954, selling prints by Ansel Adams, Berenice Abbott, and Robert Frank for less than fifty dollars each. Her tell-all memoir, Helen Gee: Limelight, a Greenwich Village Photography Gallery and Coffeehouse in the Fifties, is now available from Aperture as an e-book. Here, Denise Bethel’s introduction offers a preview of the late Gee’s story.


Arthur Lavine, Helen Gee, ca. 1954–1960
Courtesy Gary Schneider


Dear Helen,


I am writing to let you know that, sixty years on, some of the questions are still the same: who succeeds as a photographer? And, whose photographs sell? When you opened your first show at Limelight, in 1954, you linked those questions together for a new generation of collectors, and they’ve been linked that way ever since. Galleries had been selling art for centuries, but you wanted your gallery to be only about photography. This was an act of courage and an act of faith. Stieglitz sold photographs, and Julien Levy too, but they both offered other art as well. Now, look at what’s happened. In 2014, when I auctioned a sale of photographs for over twenty-one million, I wished you’d been there to see it. I was wearing some of your jewelry that night, given to me by two of your closest friends. There were prints in that auction that sold for tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars, many by some of the same photographers you’d struggled to sell for twenty or thirty or forty dollars a pop—Ansel Adams, Minor White, László Moholy-Nagy, Atget, Berenice Abbott, Gene Smith, Imogen Cunningham, Robert Frank, and more. The list is long. It’s ironic that one of your closing shows, the work of Edward Weston, saw some decent sales at seventy-five dollars a print. It’s all very different now. In my life as an auctioneer, I was as ambitious for the medium as you were, and finally, after years in the low-price trenches, I sold not one, but three photographs by Edward Weston for over one million dollars each.


In those long-ago days of the 1950s, you got into selling photographs through the back door: you were a painter who got hooked on photography, and you became a photographer yourself. You made money retouching photographs, enough money even to hire a secretary. And then you wanted to open a gallery. This was a time-honored route to becoming a dealer—through love of a subject—and in retrospect, it may have been the best one. You couldn’t help yourself, it was almost that simple. This was before photographs had much status in the marketplace, and before they could promise any return on the dollar. In 1980, when I got my first job in the photo trade, we called it “photographica.” Now, it’s “fine art photography,” and it’s a medium that’s sexy, a medium that’s hot, and that element of passion is not the determining factor it once was. Maybe that’s a shame. In 1954, you opened Limelight because you loved it, and you hoped that it would somehow, someway translate into money for food and rent.


Arthur Lavine, Helen Gee retouching transparencies, 1955
Courtesy Collection Center for Creative Photography, The University of Arizona


For anyone who loves photographs the way I do, your book is a fabulous roller-coaster ride. I love all that gossip and all that juice. People known to me only through their pictures are described by you in wacky detail. Your first photography teachers were Lisette Model and Sid Grossman—Sid kept your classes going on and on past midnight, endlessly pontificating on everything from politics to photo magazines. There were Robert and Mary Frank in their chaotic loft on Twenty-Third Street, boxes everywhere, hard to tell if they were moving in or moving out. The rugged Brett Weston, driving into Manhattan with a gun on his front seat. The tipsy Gene Smith, going from tavern to tavern in the wee hours, threatening to kill himself before he hung his show. The practical Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, glad to clear her husband’s clutter from her closets. Imogen Cunningham holding court at Limelight, giving Peter Hujar one perfect piece of advice. You even babysat the young Robert De Niro, an impossible-to-control toddler with no hint of famous actor in his future. Best of all is your scene with Edward Steichen in a kimono, chasing you around his apartment, putting the moves on. Let’s face it, Helen, you were a looker. But where did you find the guts to turn down Steichen, the most important person in the photography world at the time?


Arthur Lavine, Limelight premises (91 Seventh Avenue South at Sheridan Square) before renovation, February 1954
Courtesy Gary Schneider


These stories make your book a page-turner, and it would be a terrific musical: young woman finds a derelict nightclub in Greenwich Village, goes up to her neck in debt, strong-arms friends to help her plaster and paint, opens a coffeehouse–gallery, and the rest is history. Think of what a director could do with this scenario, Helen, think of the songs, the backdrops, the potential dance numbers—photographers in a cancan! Rain coming in through the broken skylights! We can look back and smile at some of this, but not at the tough parts, no—no, thank you. Let’s save the tough parts for the screenplay: the lawyer who cheated you, leaving you stranded . . . the times you faced bankruptcy . . . the crash course in the restaurant business, the endless staff turnover, the bookies in your apartment building, the union organizers who helped do you in. You wanted to figure out how to sell photographs, not how to work coffee machines. But it was food that kept Limelight going when the photographs didn’t sell, and so you had no choice—you figured it all out. That abandoned nightclub before you transformed it into Limelight—good grief. What exactly were you thinking? You recount it all with equanimity and sometimes, against all odds, with humor: the highs and the lows, the triumphs and the failures. And there’s not an ounce of self-pity in the narrative. It’s a lesson for all of us.


 


Arthur Lavine, Jerry Tallmer and Helen Gee (during renovations for Limelight), 1954
Courtesy Gary Schneider


When you did sell a photograph, and it didn’t happen often enough at first, you tell us candidly that it was nothing less than “an event.” You hung sixty shows in seven years, gave a lot of photographers their first exhibition, and created a special space, unique in the city then, for photography people to gather. For better or for worse, you brought photography back into the art market debate. Your shows were reviewed, with gravitas, in the New York Times and the Village Voice. One reviewer in the Sunday Times had the nerve to suggest that, for the modern world, photographs might just be more important than paintings. Whaaaaaat?! And so the controversy started up again, years after Stieglitz had thrown in the towel, and I’m writing to tell you that it’s going on still, today. I remember an Old Masters collector who walked into a photo auction preview by mistake. He was stunned when he saw the estimates. “Why, you can buy a good painting for what some of these things are worth!” he said to me, outraged. You just have to keep smiling, right?


Arthur Lavine, The first exhibition at Limelight featured the work of Joseph Breitenbach (and was installed by Sid Grossman), May 1954
Courtesy Gary Schneider


If you had just been able to hang on for a few more years, Helen, just a few. If you had just been able to figure a way around the union who tried to recruit your ragtag staff of part-time actors and out-of-work dancers. You were living one week to the next as it was, on borrowed time. Who could have predicted what the last straw would be, after all the creditors you’d dodged and all the photographers you’d cajoled? It’s heart-breaking to me that you closed when you did, because photography was about to move into the art world in a big, big way. Lisette Model introduced you to the young Diane Arbus, right at the end of your run. Grace Mayer brought by a Midwesterner named John Szarkowski—he was in town for a job interview at the Museum of Modern Art. Less than a decade after Limelight folded, Lee Witkin started down the trail you’d blazed: he opened his gallery in Manhattan, in 1969, and others followed. New York and London began to auction photographs in the 1970s, and slowly the prices went up. In 1989, I was in the room when a photograph broke that magic one-hundred-thousand-dollar ceiling at auction—an Edward Weston nautilus shell. Applause broke out, and all of us thought we’d hit the big time. Yet prices kept on going. In 2006, I was at the podium for the first photograph, classic or contemporary, to sell at auction for over a million dollars, $2.93 million, in fact. It was The Pond—Moonlight, a Pictorial tour de force by your old friend Edward Steichen. And again, I was wearing some of your jewelry that night, wishing you could be in the room to see it. What would you have thought if you had seen that $2.93 million in the press, who by then was jumping on every meteoric rise in price for photographs?


Arthur Lavine, Helen Gee on the way to the opening of Limelight, May 13, 1954
Courtesy Gary Schneider


Does reading your book now, when so much has changed, make me miss those historic old times? It’s romantic to read about, Helen, but maybe not to have lived it. You had the strength of an ox. Now there are more of us in the business, and there is safety in those numbers. You were thrilled when Roy and Anne DeCarava opened a gallery in their apartment on the Upper West Side, because you knew it would be good for Limelight as well. It closed before you did, unfortunately. You tried new kinds of food to keep the doors open and reviewed endless portfolios for free, but it was always a cliff-hanger. In the 1950s, selling photographs was not the way to get rich, that’s for sure. You were far, far out on a limb.


Arthur Lavine, Opening party (Helen Gee and Peggy Tallmer in center), ca. 1954
Courtesy Gary Schneider


And, yes, there’s one more question your book brings up, and it’s a question, like the others, that’s still with us today: not who succeeds at selling photographs, but can it be a woman? Being a woman, Helen, might not have been the easiest way to start. When I climbed into the auctioneer’s box for the first time, I was the first female auction head of photographs to actually take a sale. (“You need to stand up in the podium, don’t sit down up there,” a friend recommended later, when he saw how the box engulfed me. “I am standing up,” I had to tell him. “I’ve been standing up for years.”) Although there are many—many—more women in the photo world today, we’re still outnumbered. And, to top it all off, in your Limelight years, you were not just a woman, you were a divorced single mom. You stayed up nights working, retouching photos, you worked when you were sick, you scrambled to find babysitters, you read all those books on raising children, you wanted your daughter to have the best. Thank you for being frank with us about trying to find the time to date and to make those tricky man-woman relationships work. How did you have any stamina left at all? For single moms out there, career moms with not much money, like you, I expect this may not have really changed.


Arthur Lavine, Exterior of Limelight, ca. 1954
Courtesy Collection Center for Creative Photography, The University of Arizona


Helen, I’m such a fan. We don’t have enough in print about what it was like in the early days of the photo trade, and in your case, a memoir about the business has become a memoir about the medium itself. Although I adore all that gossip, my favorite parts of the book are your zingers about the lasting (or not!) value of the photographs and exhibitions of your day—your pages on The Family of Man, for starters. Your right-on comments about the whole photo scene can’t be paraphrased—and so I’ll leave it to new readers to discover for themselves your razor-sharp eye. You would have been a great critic, Helen, because you knew the medium from the inside, and you made it your business to know the people. I am in awe of what you did, and for taking the time and trouble to put it down on paper.


With all best wishes,


Denise Bethel, New York, January 2018


Denise Bethel, formerly Chairman, Photographs, Americas, Sotheby’s New York, is now an independent advisor, a writer, and a lecturer based in New York City.


Helen Gee: Limelight, a Greenwich Village Photography Gallery and Coffeehouse in the Fifties, published by Aperture as an e-book, is available on Amazon and other e-book retailers.


 


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Published on April 04, 2018 08:13

March 28, 2018

America on the Brink

Zoe Leonard’s retrospective investigates the politics of image making.


By Rebecca Bengal


Zoe Leonard, Income Tax, Rapid Divorce, 1999
Courtesy the artist, Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne, and Hauser & Wirth, New York


“Why does she look so surprised at the flowers?” a man asked of his companion on a recent afternoon at the Whitney Museum of American Art. He bent closer to the glass to inspect a publicity still–style photograph of a woman wearing a maid’s uniform, brandishing a vase of florals and an exaggerated, startled expression—an image from The Fae Richards Photo Archive (1993–96), Zoe Leonard’s photographic narrative of the fictionalized subject of a faux documentary by Cheryl Dunye. In photographs and film, Leonard and Dunye invent the story of Richards, an African American lesbian actress in twentieth-century Hollywood, who gets work playing slaves and maids (as in the aforementioned still), comes to fame for her role as the “Watermelon Woman,” lives a thinly closeted existence, becomes an activist in the civil rights movement, and, after her career is derailed by racism, slips into obscurity.


“Ah!” the man said. “A burlesque-y show. It makes sense.” He parsed through more of Leonard’s prints, presented as an archive of found photographs, in a glass-topped display box: pictures of Richards performing onstage topless, in a skirt made of bananas, lounging with her supposed lover in a park, blowing smoke rings under a spotlight. “I never heard of her before,” he continued, seemingly baffled that he hadn’t.


It’s a testament to the successful verisimilitude of Leonard’s staged photographs, created to mimic various vernacular and formal styles over the decades—snapshots, press clippings, a luminous series of black-and-white portraits that make for an affecting rendering of a very conceivable life—that they can inspire such genuine befuddlement. Leonard’s work, on view in Zoe Leonard: Survey, her first solo exhibition at the Whitney, invites that kind of pliable, multi-tiered appreciation.


Zoe Leonard, The Fae Richards Photo Archive (detail), 1993–96. 78 gelatin silver prints and 4 chromogenic prints
Courtesy the Whitney Museum of American Art


Leonard’s massive display of vintage postcards of Niagara Falls, You see I am here after all (2008), speaks to the desire to see the thing that everyone else has seen, and to own it, and the impossibility of doing so. The tangible image recorded in a postcard is what visitors to the falls will keep, and likely, it’s what drew them there in the first place, perhaps via the mailing of a similar postcard, signed—as the ones here are—by Alice, Edna, Bert, “Father,” and “A True Friend.” (The title comes from a line handwritten on one of the cards.) The postcards—hand-colored, glitter-covered, color-saturated—reveal changes over time, preferred angles, rainbows appearing in the mists. Leonard makes towers of postcards that share the same picture; they form their own waterfall. Museumgoers sit down on benches, stare: rippling along the wall, the waterfall postcards are nearly as calming and mesmerizing as the real thing.


In another room, more Niagara postcards are stacked on a workhorse table and arranged in piles corresponding to the various vantage points and depictions of the falls. Here, they speak to the collecting and archiving of memory. Barred from getting too close to the table, one has to crane in order to read their straightforwardly descriptive and accidentally evocative titles: Brink of American Falls, American Falls From Below, American Falls from Canada. On an adjacent wall, Leonard’s own photograph of Niagara Falls, made from above, is a gelatin-silver print that depicts a boat at the foot of the falls, caught in the horseshoe semicircle. You can sense the roar in the dark grain of her print; it swings between terror and beauty.


Zoe Leonard, You see I am here after all (detail), 2008. 3,851 vintage postcards. Installation at Dia: Beacon, New York. Photograph by Bill Jacobson
Courtesy the artist and Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne


Elsewhere her other photographs likewise exist on dual planes. The forty photographs that make up The Analogue Portfolio (1998–2009) depict small storefronts—on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, in Poland, Cuba, Mexico, and Uganda—with crude hand-painted signs advertising cell phones, fried pastries, back-to-school shoes, bolts of fabric, and quick divorces, as well as sidewalk displays of still more shoes, brooms set in sandbags, mattresses in stacks. At the outset, they are the sorts of pictures a traveler might take; similar to William Eggleston, Leonard finds her subject matter in the quotidian and renders it in dye-transfer printing: the lurid, glorious, and now-extinct process previously used in commercial photography. Eggleston was attracted to the vivid, saturated color of dye transfers; Leonard is, too, but she reclaims the original purpose of the process, as if “advertising” these benign, independently run laundromats and barbershops in an artistic context. The series includes a photograph of a wooden drink stand painted bright red, save for its hand-painted Coca-Cola logo and a similar wooden, handmade, shack-like structure, painted pink, that bears a sign reading “ARTIST.” Leonard effectively places corporations and individuals—in particular, artists—on equal footing.


Zoe Leonard, Red Wall, 2001/2003
Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne


These streets—ephemeral, endangered—are a mapping of the world, and of Leonard’s place in it. The wall text that opens Survey explicitly encourages all kinds of mapping, through place and time. In the first room, a row of blue vintage suitcases, one for each year of the artist’s life, includes space, perhaps superstitiously, for just one or two more; in still another room, stacks of a Kodak-published book on amateur photography. The installation How to Make Good Pictures (2016) shows the evolution of changes in the cover photo, design, and then, markedly, its title, which changes to How to Take Good Pictures. The verb switch from “make” to “take” signals a shift from the idea of creating a picture to “capturing” one.  The stacks sit across from Leonard’s photographs, made from her own family’s pictures taken near the Statue of Liberty, records of recent immigration.


On personal and artistic terms, the show is a record of the various work that Leonard, born in 1961, has been making for decades, some of which has previously appeared at the Whitney, including Strange Fruit (1992–97), her installation of sewn dried fruit skins, dedicated to her friend David Wojnarowicz, which anticipates the Whitney’s retrospective exhibition of his photographs opening this summer. The museum’s physical place in the world has changed since Leonard began showing there: her first Whitney Biennial was in 1993; her most recent, 2014. In 2016, one of her best-known works, the poem “I want a president,” was blown up and wheat-pasted along the High Line park just north of the Whitney. Leonard had written it in response to Eileen Myles’s run for president in 1992, as an independent, but most notably, as a woman and as a lesbian. Now the poem hangs on the wall of her survey, in a smaller, 8-by-10-inch format.


Zoe Leonard, Untitled, 1989
Courtesy the Artist


 


One by one, visitors approach the work, aim their phones at it. Some stop to reread. As I did, I started thinking again about Fae Richards, whose invented but very real-seeming life is mapped in the other room, surrounded by Leonard’s photographs of anatomical wax models and chastity belts. “I want a dyke for president . . . I want a Black woman for president. I want someone with bad teeth and an attitude, someone who has eaten that nasty hospital food, someone who cross-dresses and has done drugs and been in therapy. I want someone who has committed civil disobedience.” Leonard and Dunye created a perfect candidate—it’s a shame that she is imaginary, and a shame that they had to let their protagonist die, to serve a verisimilar, documentary truth. Looking at those photographs, you do believe in her. After all, she exists everywhere. Fae Richards for President!


Rebecca Bengal is a writer based in New York.


Zoe Leonard: Survey is on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, through June 10, 2018.


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Published on March 28, 2018 09:25

March 27, 2018

David Goldblatt and the Legacy of Apartheid

For more than fifty years, the South African photographer has documented the structures of a divided society.


By Violaine Boutet de Monvel


David Goldblatt, Young men with dompas (identity documents that every African had to carry), White City, Jabavu, Soweto, Johannesburg, November 1972
© the artist


David Goldblatt’s first retrospective in France, currently on view at the Centre Pompidou, unfolds across 250 photographs ranging from 1946 to 2016. The acclaimed eighty-seven-year-old South African photographer has spent his entire career capturing the ordinary—though at times dramatic—manifestations of the deep racial divide afflicting his country. “I want the most with the least: straightforward photography leading to what Borges, in regard to writers and writing, called ‘a modest and hidden complexity,’” he notes in the text viewers read upon entering the show. Words have always been significant to Goldblatt, whose photographs are systematically supplemented with highly detailed titles and captions. He has also authored all the wall texts punctuating his Parisian survey, which is arranged in two parts. The first includes past series touching upon the contrasted fates of black and white communities during the apartheid era (1948–94). The second is dedicated to his lifelong project Structures, which documents the urban and architectural traces of ethnic segregation throughout South Africa.


David Goldblatt, A plot-holder, his wife and their eldest son at lunch, Wheatlands, near Randfontein, Gauteng, September 1962
© the artist


Born in 1930 into a family of Jewish immigrants who had fled European persecution, Goldblatt grew up in Randfontein, a typical gold-mining city of the Witwatersrand area, where Africans from all over the continent would come and work for low wages (and still do). Determined to become a magazine photographer, he self-taught himself and took his first pictures at the early age of sixteen, some of which are exhibited here. They portray tailings heaps, on which he used to play and contemplate miners at work, then unaware of their particular circumstances. Two decades later, he provided powerful metaphors for the strain and misery many have endured—to the benefit of but a few—with simple depictions of facilities and tools in his mid-1960s series On the Mines. The image Shovels retrieved from underground, Central Salvage Yard, Randfontein Estates, Randfontein, 1966, for instance, depicts a huge stack of spades with the following caption: “Virtually every grain of sand in the mine dumps that made the Witwatersrand landscape was in a rock that came off the shovel of a black miner underground.”


David Goldblatt, Shop assistant, Orlando West, Soweto, Johannesburg, 1972
© the artist


In his 1960s series Some Afrikaners Photographed, Goldblatt concurrently focused on the lives of Dutch-descended farmers, also known as Boers, the primary supporters of the Nationalist Party responsible for apartheid policy. The diptych Kleinbaas with klonkie, Bootha Plots, Randfontein, Transvaal (Gauteng), January 1963 follows two boys playing outside. The first picture immortalizes the children seated together on a four-wheeled cart, whereas the second turns around this ideal of innocence and friendship to reveal instead an image of unmistakable racial subordination: a little black servant pushes his little white master up a hill to ride again. “Apartheid was a grey matrix of legislation and regulation hanging over the country, penetrating, restricting, controlling, cramping every aspect of life. Nothing and no one escaped it,” Goldblatt comments in a wall text nearby.


David Goldblatt, Saturday afternoon in Sunward Park. Boksburg. April 1979
© the artist


The exhibition continues with a stunning ensemble of early 1970s portraits, which were originally commissioned by the South African magazine Optima. They mostly represent segregated people in Soweto, a township bordering Johannesburg. Often concerned with the way people compose themselves—consciously or not—in front of his camera, he actually kept direct eye contact with all the subjects of these photographs. Many of the pictures were taken within the confined interiors of “matchbox” houses, the precarious accommodations provided to black workers by the apartheid government, which otherwise forbade them to own property. That said, the crepuscular view of Sunset over the playing fields of Tladi, Soweto, 1972 even more powerfully conveys the claustrophobic feel of this repressed existence. It shows children playing and posing on wrecked cars in the middle of a junkyard, a scene of sublime desolation behind which a humble skyline disappears into a haze of dust. In contrast, the series In Boksburg, which Goldblatt realized at the turn of the 1980s in a typical white suburb, extends a full horizon of possibilities for its inhabitants. For instance, the idyllic Saturday afternoon in Sunward Park, Boksburg, April 1979 represents a shirtless man mowing his lawn on a radiant day—a routine weekend for some, an unreachable dream for others until the end of the twentieth century.


David Goldblatt, Woman smoking, Fordsburg, Johannesburg, 1972
© the artist and Centre Pompidou


While Goldblatt’s style and method vary from one series to the next, the constant impartiality and benevolence of his gaze are perhaps what best describe his unique approach to social documentary photography at the crossroads with fine art. He never judges his subjects, but seeks to expose the most insidious dynamics of discrimination in the everyday—that is, in the simple ways people and their surroundings present themselves before his eyes. His work is all the more subtle in that it doesn’t always engage head-on with politics, or at least at first glance. For instance, his little-known mid-1970s series Particulars consists of rather formal close-ups, which highlight the body language and garments of either black or white people randomly encountered in the streets and parks of Johannesburg. Among them, Man sleeping, Joubert Park, Johannesburg, 1975 literally embodies the sense of constriction and bareness that pervades the entire exhibition: a black man curled up on a sunburnt lawn shields himself behind the tightly interlocked fingers of his hands. The series overall offers an extremely intimate counterpart to Goldblatt’s colossal ensemble Structures, in which people’s skin colors eventually translate into divergent architectures.


David Goldblatt, In commemoration of and protest against farm murders, Rietvlei,
on the N1 near Polokwane 19 June 2004
© the artist


As if to remark upon his country’s newfound, but tenuous, democratic freedom, Goldblatt started taking color photographs in the early 2000s, for only about a decade. A dozen are presented here. Among them, 5:52 AM, Going to work in 2012 shows a continuous stream of buses on their way to Pretoria from the remote former Bantustan of KwaNdebele—one of the so-called “homelands” that were created under the apartheid regime for black South Africans to inhabit, often against their will. This fairly recent image dismally echoes an older series, The Transported of KwaNdebele, which was made in 1983–84 and documented from the inside the excruciating six-hour-long bus commute of the Ndebele people going every day to Pretoria for work. Deploring this unbearable persistence of racial inequities, as well as the corruption and unprecedented unemployment that his country also faces after Jacob Zuma’s controversial nine-year-long presidency (he was forced to resign just a week before the retrospective’s opening), Goldblatt has since returned to the intensity of black-and-white photography. “Apartheid has gone,” he concedes; “its half-life will continue beyond knowing.”


Violaine Boutet de Monvel is an art critic and translator living in Paris.


David Goldblatt is on view at Centre Pompidou, Paris, through May 13, 2018.


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Published on March 27, 2018 10:40

March 21, 2018

Bruce Jackson: On the Inside

When a folklorist set out to document life in American prisons, he found the enduring segregation of the Old South.


By Brian Wallis


Bruce Jackson, Texas and Arkansas prison photographs, 1965–78
Courtesy the artist


Among other things, the American prison system is designed to keep a purportedly disagreeable or disposable portion of the population out of sight and out of mind. The same walls that keep prisoners in are intended to keep prying eyes out. The secret lives of prisoners—their living conditions, their social systems, their codes—are, in the free world, virtually invisible, and, therefore, unknowable. Breaking through these barriers, folklorist and photographer Bruce Jackson has, for over fifty years, tried to get inside the penitentiary walls to tape-record, film, and photograph inmates, not only to document their unique cultural forms and social microcosms, but also to make a clamorous case for prison reform and prisoners’ rights.


Bruce Jackson, Texas and Arkansas prison photographs, 1965–78
Courtesy the artist


Like many documentary photographers of the 1960s and 1970s, Jackson developed a unique approach to infiltrating and re-presenting otherwise unknown aspects of seemingly impenetrable and forbidding subcultures. Between 1964 and 1979, he compiled extensive studies of the social behavior of prisoners in Texas and Arkansas state prisons, and his research was presented in dozens of scholarly books, essays, films, and audio recordings. In 1964, while a visiting fellow at Harvard University, he first traveled to Ramsey prison farm, near Rosharon, south of Houston; it was Freedom Summer, a period of especially high racial tension in the South. Jackson’s goal—as noted in his 1965 text “Prison Folklore”—was to record “the ways of prison life, the factors that make for an independent world: the language and code, the stories and sayings, and, sometimes, the songs.” Following in the footsteps of early folk song collectors like Alan Lomax and Paul Oliver, Jackson was gathering the remnants of a rapidly disappearing African cultural tradition lingering in the diaspora in the forms of oral histories, toasts, spirituals, gospel music, blues, and work songs.


Bruce Jackson, Texas and Arkansas prison photographs, 1965–78
Courtesy the artist


The archipelago of southern prison farms that Jackson encountered in East Texas from 1964 to 1967 consisted of vast tracts of forests and farmlands, often located on the sites of former slave plantations. Under the watchful eyes of mounted prison guards, segregated work details of inmates, in matching white uniforms, labored from dawn to darkness building roads and levees, picking cotton and tobacco, planting bottomlands and felling trees, swinging axes in unison to the chants of traditional work songs. Cadenced work songs were a survival technique, intended to synchronize the prisoners’ labor, pace them under the scalding sun, and keep slower workers from falling behind. In the free world such music had been forced away or co-opted by commercial interest, but in the isolated prison work crews and chain gangs this anachronistic music survived. “I was interested in the black convict work songs,” Jackson recalled, “because they go back to a slavery-time musical tradition which in turn goes back to an African musical tradition. It’s a pure, unbroken line of musical performance and style, and the way music and physical labor integrated with one another.”


Bruce Jackson, Texas and Arkansas prison photographs, 1965–78
Courtesy the artist


In March 1966, Jackson joined with folk singer Pete Seeger and his family to film the last vestiges of African American work songs at Ellis prison farm, near Huntsville, Texas. The mesmerizing thirty-minute, black-and-white documentary film they produced, Afro-American Work Songs in a Texas Prison, records the chants and the rhythmic chopping, with very little narration. It’s the only known film record of a tradition that, by the following year, had literally vanished.


Bruce Jackson, Texas and Arkansas prison photographs, 1965–78
Courtesy the artist


In this context, Jackson began taking photographs, initially as notes or aides-mémoire, and later to illustrate his many publications. Jackson was interested in capturing whatever elements of prison folklife could be recorded, using whatever documentary instruments were necessary to gather this information as thoroughly as possible. According to Jackson, “Documentary work entails a responsibility to an external reality. For me, that external reality is broad and complex. Human experience is not one thing, it is everything: it is what you have for breakfast, what you wear, what you make, and the stories you tell. So, what I was trying to do was to use as many instruments as I could to look at and to preserve as many aspects of that world as I could, to let other people see what I saw. Photography was equivalent to my tape recorder.” Jackson’s photographs formed a crucial part of the research for his several classic books on prison life, including In the Life: Versions of the Criminal Experience (1972), Wake Up Dead Man: Afro-American Worksongs from Texas Prisons (1972), and “Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me”: Narrative Poetry from Black Oral Tradition (1974).


Bruce Jackson, Texas and Arkansas prison photographs, 1965–78
Courtesy the artist


True to his training as a folklorist, Jackson tended to be more practical than poetic about his photography, saying, “What I wanted in my photographs was the sense of what it was like if you were standing where I was standing.” Jackson’s photographs from the antiquated East Texas prisons meticulously catalog the various components of the bureaucratic penal system: the entry, or sally port; the chain-link and razor-wire perimeter; the warden’s office, with its boar’s head decor; the uniformed guards, mounted on horseback with rifles; the prison yard, where inmates are forced to strip down; and the endless parched fields, where the prisoners work. A retrospective volume of Jackson’s photographs, Inside the Wire: Photographs from Texas and Arkansas (2013), reproduces these brutal pictures with merciless fidelity. And they are astonishing, in part, because they seem so alien and anachronistic.


Bruce Jackson, Texas and Arkansas prison photographs, 1965–78
Courtesy the artist


These stark black-and-white photographs capture the primitive social conditions and enforced slavery-like labor of a not-so-distant version of criminal justice. They show legions of prisoners with raised shovels and hoes marching to work in the fields; they show uniformed guards with rifles monitoring the workers from high on horseback; they show inmates in striped prison costumes performing at a local rodeo; and they show inmates at ease in anonymous and poorly lit prison lunchrooms, confronting boredom. Pictures of paunchy white prison guards sipping iced tea while a field of hunched-over, white-suited African American prisoners pick cotton are not only images of a bizarre cultural remnant of the Old South, but also are records of the deliberately dehumanizing, almost medieval, caste system that survived in American prisons as late as the 1970s.


To continue reading this story, buy Aperture Issue 230, “Prison Nation,” or subscribe to Aperture and never miss an issue.


Brian Wallis is a writer and curator based in New York.


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Published on March 21, 2018 09:58

March 20, 2018

No Country for Young Men

In a society with strict definitions of manhood, how are photographers portraying Iranian masculinity?


By Haleh Anvari


Abbas Kowsari, Tehran/Azadi Stadium, April 22, 2006, from the series Masculinity A
Courtesy the artist and Ag Galerie, Tehran


Since the 1979 revolution, Iran’s image abroad has been defined by its politics. In this newsroom universe, Iranian women have been front and center in the frame, the Western gaze seeking their exotic attire and problems. Iranian men, on the other hand, have been strangely absent from this picture, unless they are bearded politicians or directors of art-house movies. Young Iranian men, in particular—perennially present in their own cities in the countless murals of fallen heroes of the Iran-Iraq War—became invisible to the world, their issues lost in the daily economic and political maelstrom of the country.


Abbas Kowsari, Tehran/Azadi Stadium, April 22, 2006, from the series Masculinity A
Courtesy the artist and Ag Galerie, Tehran


Abbas Kowsari, one of Iran’s prominent photojournalists, noticed the lack of representation of men in images about Iran while working as an assistant to the late Sadegh Tirafkan, who addressed issues of masculinity in his internationally celebrated art photography. “Maybe it was because of the wars that Western powers were starting in the region,” Kowsari says, referring to the consecutive wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. “There was more interest in women’s issues and women photographers taking photographs of women.”


Abbas Kowsari, Tehran/Azadi Stadium, April 22, 2006, from the series Masculinity A
Courtesy the artist and Ag Galerie, Tehran


In 2006, Kowsari began to focus on Iranian men in a series of photo-essays titled Masculinity. These images feature bodybuilders preparing for the stage (from oiling up to parading their pumped-up muscles) and wrestlers (who enjoy hero status in Iran because of the regular medals they bring home) captured in the moments before and after competition. “I really wanted to show that men can also feel fatigued or defeated,” Kowsari says. His photography addresses both the vanity and the vulnerability of men. His latest project, begun in 2015 and ongoing, documents male public bathhouses that operate in the poorer parts of Tehran.


Najaf Shokri, Untitled, 2009, from the series Bachelors
Courtesy the artist


While Kowsari’s work records men in public spaces, Najaf Shokri’s series Bachelors (2009) looks at the private spaces of a group of friends in the town of Karaj, some forty kilometers from the capital. Young men are seen whiling away their time at home, uninhibited and often half naked. Out of work and in retreat from the policed streets after the 2009 postelection turbulence in Iran, they depict a generation’s lassitude. It is surprising how relaxed and open these men are in front of the camera. “They were happy that I was photographing them,” Shokri says, “as if their lives became more meaningful by being photographed.”


Najaf Shokri, Untitled, 2009, from the series Bachelors
Courtesy the artist


Although Shokri’s photo-essay has been picked up for group exhibitions in the United States and Canada, he cannot show these photographs in Iran, as they reveal too much skin. Despite the fact that his series is reminiscent of the work of Larry Clark, in the intimate portrait it provides of friends, Bachelors is being both subjected to censorship inside the country and largely dismissed by the outside world, due to a tendency to favor stories from Iran that are told through images of its women.


Behzad Jaez, Khan Passageway, Qom, 2015, from the series Turbanites
Courtesy the artist and Ag Galerie, Tehran


In another cloistered environment, Behzad Jaez has recorded the lives of young men usually hidden from view: seminarians in religious schools across the country, whom he began photographing fifteen years ago. These are the aspiring ayatollahs of the future—potentially the elite clerics who will lead the country’s politics through religion. Jaez’s series Turbanites (2014) was exhibited in Tehran last fall and published as a book by Nazar Art Publications in 2017. But this glimpse into the austere lives of these religious students has aroused the ire of his secular friends, condemning his choice to photograph the young clergy, who they feel should not be valorized. Jaez notes, however, that this community is not as monolithic as it may seem: “Ironically, not all of these guys decide to take the robe when they finish their studies,” he explains.


Behzad Jaez, Jahangirkhan Seminary, Qom, 2014, from the series Turbanites
Courtesy the artist and Ag Galerie, Tehran


Aspects of Iranian men’s lives provide a wide scope for social documentary work about Iran as a whole. Men, especially the young, face overwhelming demands in a traditional society that defines manhood as a role of protecting and providing. In a country where the government is failing to create enough jobs, reduce rampant economic corruption, or prevent the current frightening increase in drug use, these men face challenges that are as complex as the issues that afflict the women and ultimately affect the whole population, regardless of gender. Photographers who choose to focus on the country’s men accept that their images may not find a regular spot in international exhibitions on Iranian photography as easily as works by photographers who zoom in on Iran’s women. And they know that these images of Iran’s masculine population almost never make it to the front pages of major publications in the West. In the gaze of foreigners and Iranians themselves, Iran is no country for young men.


Haleh Anvari is a writer based in Tehran and a regular contributor to the Guardian.


Read more  from   Aperture   Issue 226 “Prison Nation,” or  subscribe  to  Aperture   and never miss an issue.


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Published on March 20, 2018 14:34

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