Aperture's Blog, page 101

What Makes a Family?

An exhibition explores how black photographers portray their communities and kin.

John Edmonds, American Gods, 2017. Courtesy the artist

LaToya Ruby Frazier, Momme, 2008. Courtesy the artist and Gavin Brown's enterprise, New York

Deana Lawson, Mohawk Correctional Facility: Jazmin & Family, 2013
Courtesy the Columbus Museum of Art

Carrie Mae Weems, from the series Family Pictures and Stories, 1981–82. Courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

Lyle Ashton Harris, Mother and Sons II, 1994. Courtesy the artist and Salon 94, New York

Ming Smith, Auntie Esther, Pittsburgh, ca. 1993, from the series August Wilson. Courtesy the artist and Steven Kasher Gallery, New York

When Roy DeCarava set out in mid-twentieth century Harlem to undertake what would become the landmark photobook The Sweet Flypaper of Life (1955), he employed photography as “a creative expression to meditate on everyday life and family,” says Drew Sawyer, head of exhibitions and curator of photography at the Columbus Museum of Art. The artists featured in the exhibition Family Pictures–LaToya Ruby Frazier, Deana Lawson, Carrie Mae Weems, John Edmonds, and Gordon Parks among them–work in a similar vein, pushing against traditional notions of documentary photography in radical and intimate depictions of domestic life.

Family Pictures is on view at the Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, Ohio through May 20, 2018

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Inside a Japanese Legend’s Latest Book

At the Japan Society, Aperture Members enjoyed a rare glimpse into Naoya Hatakeyama’s artistic process.

On Wednesday, February 28, Aperture Members and Trustees gathered at the Japan Society to celebrate the release of Naoya Hatakeyama’s book Excavating the Future City, copublished by Aperture and the Minneapolis Institute of Art. Following a brief introduction by Yukie Kamiya, director of Japan Society Gallery, Members had the rare opportunity to hear Hatakeyama in conversation with Aperture’s creative director, Lesley A. Martin. Hatakeyama, speaking through a translator, mentioned artists such as Stephen Shore as early influences on his work. The pioneering use of color by Shore’s generation and their turn “toward the social landscape” informed Hatakeyama’s photographs of environments altered by human construction and industrial intervention.

Much of Martin and Hatakeyama’s talk revolved around the artist’s best-known series, Blast. From 1995 to 2006, Hatakeyama photographed quarry explosions, capturing from a natural formation to the raw material for construction. A stop-motion video, Twenty-Four Blasts (2011), was projected in the front of the room, bringing to life his original series. Hatakeyama also shared how his practice was deeply marked by the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan.

The evening brought supporters of Aperture Foundation and Japan Society together to engage with an artist who, as Kamiya noted, is able to “focus on the transformation of the city . . . and still find what is [uplifting] after a hopeless situation.” Hatakeyama concluded the event by signing copies of the book.

Naoya Hatakeyama (born in Iwate Prefecture, Japan, 1958) is included in some of the most important public collections in the U.S., Europe, and Japan. He co-represented Japan in the 49th Venice Biennale in 2001, and presented his first solo museum exhibition outside of Japan in 2002 at Kunstverein Hannover. Hatakeyama’s work was also included in Japan Society’s presentation of In the Wake: Japanese Photographers Respond to 3/11 in 2016, originally organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Excavating the Future City is copublished by Aperture and the Minneapolis Institute of Art (Mia) on the occasion of Excavating the Future City: Photographs by Naoya Hatakeyama, curated by Yasufumi Nakamori and on view at Mia through July 22, 2018.

Click here to join Aperture’s membership program or contact our membership office at 212.946.7108 or membership@aperture.org.

Aperture Foundation is a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization that relies on the generosity of individuals for support of its publications, exhibitions, and public and educational programming.

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Being and Belonging at MoMA

Behind the scenes of the museum’s latest showcase for new photography.

By Annika Klein

Aïda Muluneh, Strength in Honor, 2016
© and courtesy the artist and David Krut Projects, New York and Johannesburg

Two questions have been central to photography since its inception: how do we see, and how do we see ourselves? This year, the Museum of Modern Art takes a contemporary approach to these inquiries by asking “how photography can capture what it means to be human,” as a matter of identity and representation. I recently spoke with Lucy Gallun, curator of Being: New Photography 2018, about how photographers are using both conceptual and personal approaches to reckon with the history of portraiture and beyond.

Annika Klein: I wanted to start with the previous iteration of New Photography, Ocean of Images: New Photography 2015, which you also cocurated. It focused on a post-internet view of images, often ones with a digital element. Three years later, why have you picked a theme that focuses on subjectivity? What’s the shift there?

Lucy Gallun: Ocean of Images took place on the thirtieth anniversary of the New Photography series. The series started in 1985 with an exhibition simply called New Photography, organized by John Szarkowski, who was then director of the Department of Photography at the Museum. Prior to the thirtieth anniversary, the new chief curator of photography, Quentin Bajac, decided to expand the scope of the exhibition and hold it a bit more infrequently—approximately every two years instead of every year. Historically the show had presented the work of between three and six participants, and usually the participants’ work was shown on its own, and there wasn’t necessarily the opportunity to look at themes across the artistic practices.

On the occasion of Ocean of Images, we included nineteen artists, gave the show a title, and, as you mentioned, we were really looking at wider themes across the included works, including issues of dissemination and the circulation of images at that moment. The show included works in a variety of formats: some were framed photographs and others took different forms, including projected video, sculpture, and site-specific installation, among others. It was a diverse show: artists at different stages in their careers, from different countries, and very different types of work.

When I started thinking about work for the next exhibition, I was struck by the work of artists considering ideas of representation in diverse contemporary contexts. It seemed to me that many artists were focusing on specific issues of citizenship or nationality, gender, sexuality, specific cultural heritage, and considering the stakes of representing oneself or others in this particular political or cultural moment. Unlike the last iteration, in which most attention was directed to the format of the physical objects, here the focus is on something specific to the subject of these photographs, a subject that is more inward or personal even as it addresses being in the world.

Stephanie Syjuco, Cargo Cults: Cover-Up, 2013–16
© and courtesy the artist, Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco, and Ryan Lee Gallery, New York

Klein: Do you think the stakes of image making feel higher than when you were working on the last show?

Gallun: No. The stakes of image making have always been quite significant. But there are issues that are specific to this moment, and depending on the circumstances or situations in which the artist is working, or the questions they are hoping to raise, their approaches can be quite distinct from one another. In some cases that means drawing attention to the ways photography has addressed particular markers of nationality, or classification or identification around perceived racial or ethnic categories, such as in the Cargo Cults (2013–16) or Applicant Photos (2013–17) series by Stephanie Syjuco. In other cases, such as the unique objects constructed by Em Rooney, artists are drawing attention to how a photograph might be a very personal object, how it might serve as a memento or keepsake, reminding us of a special individual experience. In all cases, there is an awareness of the questions raised around representation and, to address such questions, the artists are thinking about the history of representation, particularly through photography. Even in their contemporary approaches, they’re aware of certain characteristic elements that have been traditionally deployed in portrait photography, for example, and they are working with or through those expected elements.

Andrzej Steinbach, Untitled, 2017, from the series Gesellschaft beginnt mit drei
© and courtesy the artist and Galerie Conradi, Brussels and Hamburg

Klein: Could you give a couple examples of the new ways they’re playing with representation?

Gallun: A number of the works deploy conventions that have traditionally been associated with studio portraiture, but they might interrupt or disrupt or underscore those conventions.

For example, there are seven images in the exhibition from a larger series called Gesellschaft beginnt mit drei (Society begins with three) (2017), by Andrzej Steinbach, in which the artist employs the format of a group portrait. All of the people are gathered together and are looking at the camera, but Steinbach has only depicted one figure in full in each picture, so the other people who would be around that figure are partially cropped out of the frame. As we follow along from each picture to the next, we start to see that the individual figures have actually switched places within the group and that they’ve also switched clothing over the course of the series. Confusion starts to set in and we might start to feel disoriented; we’re reminded that individuals are always changing, they’re always mutable, their relationships to others are always changing. These figures push against or defy easy interpretations of what they represent. Typically, we might look for specific characteristics in each member of a group portrait—who’s sitting where, who’s wearing what—but when they subtly switch in this way, that mechanism is interrupted.

Another artist, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, often foregrounds elements of the studio itself that we, as viewers, don’t typically pay attention to in a portrait. Often that means the relationships between the photographer and the model. The camera apparatus is usually quite visible, and the layered aspects of his studio process are brought forward through multiple pieces of photographic paper that are collaged together in one work, or the use of a mirror to bring together many planes into one composition. The process that goes into making a picture is evident in the final image. In other pictures, he foregrounds the platform or the drapery against which a model would pose. The model themself might not be visible at all, but their presence is palpable. At the forefront always are his own relationships to his models (traditionally something that is kept hidden), underscored by the presence of his camera apparatus or his own hand on the camera lens.

Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Untitled, 2017
© and courtesy the artist; courtesy Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York, and Document, Chicago

Klein: Even though this exhibition has a very different focus than Ocean of Images, it seems similarly concerned with semiotics—in the sense of how images create and denote meaning. This has been a prominent conversation among image makers since, at the very least, when New Photography started in 1985. How are these artists questioning systems of meaning in new ways, as opposed to how they might have been in 2015, or any time since this exhibition series has been running?

Gallun: I anticipate when people think about a show that’s about representation, they’ll expect to see maybe a lot of portraits. And, indeed, there are many works that we would immediately call out or identify as “portraits.” But there are also works in the show where there is no figurative imagery at all. In such cases, there might be particular objects or other signs that stand in for a particular person. Sometimes those are quite personal objects, such as a work by Em Rooney that consists of a welded metal ladder with photo keychains dangling from the rungs— an homage to a family friend who had passed. In fact, a physical photograph is an object that stands often as a precious or valued object: we might frame it and put it in a special place, for example, so that a physical object stands in for a person.

There’s one project in the exhibition—a large project, we’ve excerpted it—by Shilpa Gupta, in which she gathered together representations of one hundred people who had changed their surnames for different reasons, some political, some personal, some emotional; these are each represented by a picture that has been sliced in half, and the two halves of the picture are near each other in these clusters, but they are read as separate. Often, the pictures that represent each of these individuals are not figurative depictions, but other imagery that has been captioned with short text notations about the particular stories behind those names.

In other cases, a mask might stand in for a person. For example, Sofia Borges often takes photographs in museums or archives or zoos, or other places where things or beings are put on display. Her pictures—which are usually at an immense scale and rendered in brilliant hues—emphasize the spectacle inherent in that way of looking or of understanding “reality.” A couple figures in a display case representing a particular era or culture are meant to stand in for all the lives that were part of that culture. Or when looking at an ancient mask, we’re somehow transported into the head of that person, and we understand it as a representation of that moment in time or that life.

Sofia Borges, Painting, Brain and Face, 2017
© the artist

Klein: The exhibition text talks about “personhood.” Could you say more specifically what that means?

Gallun: I actually quite like that word. We have a sense of what it might mean just because we’re familiar with the word “person” and we’re familiar with the idea of “selfhood,” so maybe we interpret it as the state of being a person, in a straightforward way. It also traffics in other, specific fields: It might be used in philosophical terms, imagining when a person begins to exist—in a more philosophical sense. It’s also used in legal terms, quite often in terms of the rights of a person, and when such rights might be in place. Some works in the exhibition address imagery of birth and death, and living in the world, in a more existential, philosophical way. Other works refer to particular rights that a person may or may not have in a society, and in those cases, audiences might consider the legal characteristics of the term.

Sam Contis, Junction, 2015
© the artist

Klein: These New Photography exhibitions introduce artists who aren’t in the MoMA collection and who haven’t shown at the museum. Is there an artist who you’re particularly excited to be showing at MoMA for the first time?

Gallun: I can’t call out one artist [laughs]. But one thing that I will point out is that the artists are at very different stages in their careers. Some of the artists are what one might call “emerging”: they might be younger artists, or showing in New York for the very first time. Other artists are at a later stage in their careers, but their work hasn’t been presented at this museum.

Klein: Such as Aïda Muluneh?

Gallun: Yes, she’s one. Or Matthew Connors. Both these artists have been working in the field for some time, supporting the field of photography. Muluneh is the founder and director of the Addis Foto Fest and also the founder of DESTA, an organization that supports arts initiatives. In that way, she has been directly linked to the circulation and the support of photography. Connors has been the chair of the department of photography at MassArt for a number of years.

Matthew Connors, Pyongyang, 2016, from the series Unanimous Desire
© and courtesy the artist

Klein: Contemporary photography is a broad field, especially when you’re including image-makers and photo-based artists. What’s the most difficult part of curating a “state of the union” exhibition, such as this one, that people will look to and say, “This is what was happening in 2018”?

Gallun: I think you’ve alluded to it in the question. The hope is that viewers will not perceive the show to be a “state of the union,” in that it’s not meant to be comprehensive in any way. There are, of course, any number of artists that it would have been wonderful to include. I do hope that the selection is diverse, in terms of the stages of the artists’ careers, and also their very different approaches. Especially with a theme like this, about representation at this moment, one thing I want to underscore is that these artists are really all very aware of difference, and are looking at diverse circumstances and experiences. So, in this way, it’s not at all a universalizing idea, but instead looking at specific and quite distinct ideas of being.

Joanna Piotrowska, XXXIII, FROWST, 2013–14
© the artist

Klein: Someone walks into MoMA who maybe didn’t study art, or maybe isn’t incredibly versed in contemporary photography, and they enter this show. What do you hope they take away from it?

Gallun: Many works in the show will be prints, framed and hung on the wall. In that way, the language will not necessarily be surprising to visitors. These are formats we typically associate with photography. But even in works that use these standard formats, the artists are often working against or disrupting the particular characteristics that we associate with those standards, complicating them so that they are not so easily legible. And right away, visitors will also find references to the contemporary world—issues of migration or gender play, for example—and they might be surprised by or touched by the ways the artists address these issues. All the works speak to how, through photography, we might capture ideas of being human at this moment.

Annika Klein is the editorial assistant of Aperture magazine.

Being: New Photography 2018 is on view at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, March 18–August 19, 2018.

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What New York Photo Editors Want to See

The curators of the Aperture Summer Open discuss what inspires them in photography today.

The curators of the 2018 Aperture Summer Open: Marvin Orellana, Antwaun Sargent, Siobhán Bohnacker, and Brendan Wattenberg
Photograph by Katie Booth

Katie Booth: Every year, Aperture calls on photographers from all over the world to submit their work for a juried exhibition here at Aperture Gallery. This year’s Summer Open will be curated by a fantastic group of editors and writers; among them is my colleague, Brendan Wattenberg, the managing editor of Aperture magazine.

Brendan Wattenberg: Thanks, Katie. The theme of this year’s Summer Open is The Way We Live Now. We’re looking for bodies of work by photographers who are addressing society in innovative ways, through fashion, through the environment, through portraiture, through documentary photojournalism: all kinds of photography that speak to our moment. We want to be open-minded. We want to take a broad approach and see what’s out there. (Submissions are currently open through April 4, 2018.)

This year, we have three amazing editors and writers who will join me on the jury for the 2018 Aperture Summer Open: Siobhán Bohnacker, a senior photo editor at The New Yorker magazine; Marvin Orellana, a photo editor at New York magazine; and Antwaun Sargent, a writer, critic, and contributor to newyorker.com, Artsy, Vice, Surface, and Aperture, among many other publications. They are some of the most creative and exciting editors and thinkers in contemporary art and photography today, so it’s a huge privilege to work together and curate this show as a team.

Brandon Nichols, Selfie, 2015
Courtesy the artist. Nichols’s work was presented in the 2016 Aperture Summer Open

Booth: To start off, could you talk a little bit about your own point of view as writers, as critics, and as editors?

Siobhán Bohnacker: It’s a real pleasure to be part of the team curating the Summer Open this year. I’m especially excited because it gives me a chance to work outside of the weekly format of The New Yorker. It’s a different way of looking at work, separate from having to think so strictly about specific stories for the magazine: a bit more of a relaxed look at what artists are making.

Marvin Orellana: It’s one thing to work at a magazine and have deadlines, but it’s not just that. You’re constantly having to assign to very specific subjects. So this will be an opportunity to invite photographers to allow us to enter the different worlds that they all inhabit.

You know, the world is so big, and there are so many big forces shaping us and in so many different ways. What are we not seeing? I really want photographers to think about what that would be. I want to feel shocked. I want to know: What is happening in your country, in your part of the world? It will be very exciting to see.

Junsheng Zhou, Representation of a refused negative film, 2014
© the artist. Zhou’s work was presented in the 2016 Aperture Summer Open

Antwaun Sargent: I’m also really excited about this opportunity to see what photography means right now to different photographers around the world. I just came back from Marrakech, where I saw this wonderful photography show called Africa Is No Island, featuring forty-two African photographers, and a lot of work I’d never seen before, which really made me excited about the types of submissions we might receive and to think about what photography can do today.

And with a theme that’s so broad, we can think about how photography encounters identity, or politics, or culture. As Siobhán said, I’m excited to see work I’ve never seen before, but I’m also thinking through the possibilities of this show. Hopefully we will meet really good photographers who are pushing those types of conversations.

Eva O’Leary, Molly, 2015, from the series Happy Valley, 2014–15
Courtesy the artist. O’Leary’s work was presented in the 2015 Aperture Summer Open

Bohnacker: A great example of a photographer doing just that is Eva O’Leary, who was in the 2015 Aperture Summer Open. I’ve worked with Eva a number of times, most recently on a project about a beauty convention in Los Angeles. Eva was ideal for that assignment because her work is so much about how young women conceive of their public identities versus their private identities. Her work has this kind of uncanny feel to it aesthetically, so she was great for this story about young girls and young boys going to these conventions and experimenting with makeup as a means to figuring themselves out.

In that respect, with the Summer Open, there’s a real Venn diagram between all of our fields. And the people who come to see an exhibition like this could very well be people who might assign photographers in the future or want to write about their work or collaborate with them in some way.

Sargent: Hopping on the Eva train, so to speak, I wrote about her work after seeing the Aperture show. I was interested in the way that she was thinking about beauty, but she also has a series of work that talks about her hometown. And the way that she is thinking about those moments where you’re looking at photography and you’re looking at magazines and you’re looking at images in the world, trying to find yourself. So, there is a dialogue between editors and writers and what is seen on the walls at an exhibition like the Summer Open, and this can lead to conversations and assignments around different bodies of work.

Chris Maggio, Untitled, 2014
© the artist. Maggio’s work was presented in the 2016 Aperture Summer Open

Wattenberg: Marvin, you’ve had a very interesting career. You’ve worked at The New York Times Magazine, and you were a photographer yourself, back in school.

Orellana: No one’s supposed to know about that! [laughter]

Wattenberg: Well, you know what it’s like behind the lens!

Orellana: I give my utmost respect to all photographers out there, because, yes, being on the other side, it’s a challenge to try and capture what’s in my head—this idea or fantasy of a photograph. But when you’re on the ground, obviously, the situation can be very different. I always feel like that is the hardest part of being a photographer. How do you walk into a situation and make something that hopefully will be remembered, be iconic, transcend the page, so that when we print it in the magazine, it’s not just something that we, as a publication, feel proud to present to the world, but that we feel like will also add to the bodies of work of those respected photographers? A lot of what we do, at least in the magazine, is to think about how certain assignments will also shape the way a photographer goes on to work or takes on the next stage of their career.

Jon Henry, Untitled #5, Parkchester, New York, n.d.
Courtesy the artist. Henry’s work was presented in the 2017 Aperture Summer Open

Booth: For all the brave souls who are working so hard to get their work seen, a question for all of you: When you’re looking at a portfolio, what is it that makes that body of work cohesive? What advice could you give photographers in pulling their work together, presenting it to editors, or a picture desk, or even to a writer like yourself, Antwaun? What are those qualities?

Sargent: One of the things that I’m always trying to find in photography, across a range of subjects and genres, is that it tells a story. You can tell if the photographer is truly invested in a body of images if it tells a story that moves you.

Bohnacker: And if the photographer has a distinct voice. I get so many unsolicited pitches—

Orellana: Sorry, Siobhán, I didn’t mean to send you those! [laughter]

Bohnacker: And there are some real tropes that I see, in terms of subject matter, for sure. Some things have been photographed to death, but depending on who is making that image, it can be told in a very different way from the next person. So, just as in fiction writing, where the writer’s “voice” distinguishes the writing, it’s the same thing with visual art making.

But on a practical note, in terms of storytelling, to speak to Antwaun’s point, I don’t think that necessarily means photographers should need to submit a very tight edit. I mean, that’s what we as editors are here for. I think, often, that photographers are not the best editors of their own work. So, I think they should leave the edit wide enough so that an editor can actually get in there and shape the narrative a little bit.

Shane Rocheleau and Brian Ulrich, Martin + Scene at the Former Bluebird Theatre, n.d.
Courtesy the artists. Rocheleau and Ulrich’s work was presented in the 2017 Aperture Summer Open

Wattenberg: Exactly. That’s how we like to work at Aperture as well. To see a wide amount of work and then think collaboratively about how to make the best presentation.

Bohnacker: I’ll speak often to the editors at Aperture or to writers like Antwaun, to find out what other people in the field are seeing. Or, if I’m looking for somebody making work on a certain subject. I might not know anyone, but maybe Brendan has been researching this very subject matter, and he’ll be able to give me a tip.

Wattenberg: Or vice versa.

Noritaka Minami, Tract No. 3279 (California City, California), 2016
Courtesy the artist. Minami’s work was presented in the 2017 Aperture Summer Open

Booth: There are so many calls for entries and numerous opportunities for juried exhibitions, but this one is very unique. Could you speak to some of the ways that the Summer Open is an incubation space for Aperture to meet new artists, for us to become familiar with what’s really out there?

Wattenberg: I’ll give you one example from Aperture. In 2015, the Summer Open theme was Black Mirror, which included the work of a fantastic young photographer named Farah Al Qasimi. The following year, we published a portfolio of Qasimi’s work in Aperture’s “On Feminism” issue. And during this time, she has been doing so well. She had a breakout show at Helena Anrather gallery last fall; Siobhán commissioned her for a fiction piece for The New Yorker; and she’s been reviewed in Artforum and a number of other magazine. So, it’s great to see photographers participate in the Summer Open and then follow their careers. I think that’s one of the most valuable things that can come from an open like this.

Farah Al Qasimi, S with Floral Fabric, 2015
Courtesy the artist and The Third Line, Dubai. Qasimi’s work was presented in the 2015 Aperture Summer Open and published in Aperture, issue 225, “On Feminism”

Sargent: Aperture’s gallery is in Chelsea, so photographers have the exposure of showing their work in a community where we have some of the best artists working today, who are showing their work down the street and around the corner. And there will be so many different people around and in the art world that will see the work and want to engage the work, whether that is in a magazine story or critically, through text, or people who might want to collect the work. All of that is possible given the location of where the show will be.

Bohnacker: There are few places I would commit so much of my personal time to, but I totally get behind everything Aperture does. I think in terms of programming, across books, exhibitions, and the magazine, Aperture is rigorous in investigating photography now.

Matthew Herrmann, Analog Upsample #2, 2016
© the artist. Herrmann’s work was presented in the 2016 Aperture Summer Open

Booth: One last question: Why should people submit to the Summer Open?

Bohnacker: You get to come to the party! [laughter] No, because it’s exciting to be part of a group show in Chelsea, in New York, and so many people will come and see this exhibition. I mean, we work with all kinds of people—dealers, curators, editors, writers—so it’s like a—what’s that phrase?

Wattenberg: One-stop shop.

Bohnacker: One-stop shop!

Orellana: Every opportunity counts, and there’s no reason why you shouldn’t submit your work. It’s important for us to see your work, to be aware of what you’re doing. So, please submit!

Bohnacker: And, doesn’t it feel like a critical and urgent time to support artists expressing themselves? The way in which we are living now is just so strange and interesting. Aside from the professional-connections element to it, I think just making work and sharing that with people who care is important.

Sargent: This is a show that’s going to be about what it means to image the world and the people who live in it. So, I would hope that young and emerging and established photographers around the world will want to show their work in dialogue with other photographers who are having a conversation about how we live now.

Katie Booth is the digital manager at Aperture Foundation.

Submit your photographs to the 2018 Aperture Summer Open now through April 4, 2018, at 12 noon EST.

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Can a Feminist Embrace Araki?

At the Museum of Sex, a new look at the prolific—and provocative—Japanese photographer.

By Russet Lederman

Nobuyoshi Araki, Marvelous Tales of Black Ink (Bokuj ū Kitan) 068, 2007
Private Collection

Being a feminist and an admirer of the work of Nobuyoshi Araki are two viewpoints that do not easily fit well together—especially in our current era of #MeToo. Araki, one of Japan’s most celebrated photographers, is a controversial figure whose work has been derided for its pornographic and sexually demeaning depictions of women. How, then, to reconcile this popular and occasionally apt perception of Araki as misogynistic with a pro-women attitude? Surprisingly, the current Araki retrospective at the Museum of Sex does a lot to address this question.

Acknowledging this prevalent, mostly Western view of Araki’s photography as sexist and devoid of meaning, the curators at the Museum of Sex have justifiably chosen to frame their exhibition with a direct confrontation of the controversy surrounding his work. Organized by the major themes that have defined the artist’s nearly fifty-year career, The Incomplete Araki covers two floors in a presentation that examines the paradoxes within his copious and consciously branded output. Traveling through the show elicits fluid opinions and conclusions in the viewer, at times seeming to confirm Araki as bluntly misogynistic while at others reframing him as a deeply private sentimentalist. Both perceptions are equally valid when assessing the slippery factual and fictional persona that Araki has cleverly nurtured into “Ararchism”—a portmanteau of “anarchy” and “Araki.

Nobuyoshi Araki, Sentimental Journey, 1971
Courtesy of Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo

On entering the exhibition on the museum’s second floor, the outspoken, incendiary side of Araki is in full view as one moves down a darkened hallway adorned with rope knots suggestive of kinbaku-bi (Japanese rope bondage art) to confront a lone spot-lit photograph of a suspended, bound kimono-clad woman with her legs splayed, her genitals barely covered by a flower. Conscious of their audience, the curators at the Museum of Sex are literally roping in the viewer’s attention with the most sensational work before slowly unfurling a more nuanced reading of Araki.

Nobuyoshi Araki, Tokyo Comedy, 1997
Private Collection

With the initial shock in place, the photographs that follow in the second floor galleries vacillate between large-scale black-and-white and color images of bound women alone, women having sex, models in a studio setting with Araki, and more intimate, date-stamped images that include bound women as well as Tokyo cityscapes, the photographer’s back terrace, his adored cat Chiro, and cloud-filled skies. Expanded wall texts and interspersed video interviews draw attention to the contradictions on display: details on Araki’s relationships with his models (both consensual sexual participation and one anonymous model’s accusation of sexual harassment), notes on his relentless self-branding and cultivated celebrity status, comments on his freewheeling merger of fact and fiction, and a historical explanation of kinbaku-bi are a few of the issues tackled.

Nobuyoshi Araki, KaoRi Love (Diptych), 2007
Private Collection

If exiting the exhibition without continuing to the third floor, the feminist who admires Araki would be inclined toward an overwhelmingly negative evaluation, having gleaned only subtle hints at Araki’s full range. But a signal of what is to come can be found on the last gallery wall of the second floor. Less dramatic than the nudes, but critically important, is a copy, and associated page-turning video, of one of Araki’s early Xerox Photo Album books. Its modest and roughly printed monotone images are juxtaposed on the same wall with similarly unadorned, more personal portrait and landscape prints from his 1995 Endscapes series. Herein lies a key to a broader, more complex reading of Araki that unfolds in its full intensity on the next floor.

Nobuyoshi Araki, Sentimental Journey, 1971
Courtesy of Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo

In contrast to the dark and theatrically lit second floor, the upper-floor gallery is awash with an even light that serves to showcase a spectacular room-size case filled with over 450 books from Araki’s prolific photobook production. Presenting the tomes cheek-by-jowl with only their covers visible, the display cleverly includes several interspersed videos of book interiors. The overall impression is a sea of books that covers every stage of Araki’s career, which serves to introduce several of the more introspective thematic obsessions presented on the gallery walls surrounding the case. Foremost is a selection of prints associated with Araki’s Sentimental Journey (1971) and Sentimental Journey/Winter Journey (1991) books, each chronicling an important period in Araki’s tender relationship with his now-deceased wife, Yoko. Black-and-white images of a young Yoko on her honeymoon share the walls with her flower-filled casket—all reflective of the gentle romanticism of a man in love.

Nobuyoshi Araki, Sentimental Journey, 1971
Courtesy of Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo

A less sensational yet still highly sexual perspective is found in the group of Erotos images that examine Araki’s unabashed fixation on the dichotomy of Eros (the impulse toward life and sex) and Thanatos (the impulse toward death). Verging on the abstract, these close-up images of organic and flower forms suggest the sensuality and ephemerality of life without the aggressive sexuality found in the bondage photographs. A curatorial pairing of sexually brazen nineteenth-century ukiyo-e woodblock prints—one with specific references to kinbaku-bi—next to staged photographs of bound women provides further analysis of Araki’s contradictory forces. As Araki observes, “Photography, in a way, is a modern ukiyo-e.” However, he is quick to point out that he likes to take photographs similar to shunga (erotic ukiyo-e), but has yet to reach that level of mastery.

Nobuyoshi Araki, Colourscapes, 1991
Courtesy the Museum of Sex Collection

Paradoxes and obsessions shape Araki’s world, which blurs the boundaries between respectful depictions of women and pornography. Whether presenting a spectacularly lit photograph of a bound woman, a group scene of drunken, sexualized debauchery at Tokyo Lucky Hole (Araki’s favorite bar in Shinjuku’s Kabukicho district), or a tender photograph of his late wife, Araki is a complex persona and artist who should be more fully explored in the U.S. beyond his provocative, audience-arousing bondage photographs. The Museum of Sex is apparently the only institution in the U.S. willing to take on this challenge. As a retrospective, The Incomplete Araki is indeed incomplete—as any retrospective of his would be, given his immense output—but it is nevertheless a window into a fascinating artist. While the exhibition lures visitors with the more provocative and titillating photographs, its lasting imprint dispels many of the one-dimensional viewpoints that otherwise keep Araki’s work from being embraced by a broader audience.

Russet Lederman, a researcher and writer, teaches art writing at the School of Visual Arts, New York.

The Incomplete Araki: Sex, Life, and Death in the Works of Nobuyoshi Araki is on view at the Museum of Sex, New York, through August 31, 2018.

The post Can a Feminist Embrace Araki? appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

Are You Listening, America?

Eugene Richards’s new film shares stories of overlooked citizens.

By Melissa Harris

Eugene Richards, Grandmother, Brooklyn, New York, 1993, from the book Americans We
Courtesy the artist

Eugene Richards always pays attention, close attention, while stealthily drawing almost no attention to himself. His countertenor voice floats or pitter-patters slightly above a whisper. He’s tall and lanky, yet seems to take up almost no physical space. His serene demeanor belies an explosive intensity. His instincts are those of both predator and prey—the one who hunts for the stories, and the one who has seen too much, and thus emanates a vulnerability to which people relate, respond.

And he knows this country and its people—“Americans We,” as he titled one of his books—having spent much of his life documenting from America’s heartlands to its peripheries, its blue-collar and most down-and-out neighborhoods, its industrial landscapes and its institutional landscapes—hospitals, jails, and the like. He engages. Always. Conversing, photographing, and on some occasions filming and videotaping those people he meets with a story to tell. Curious? Absolutely. But also aware of the efficacy of keeping a record, bearing witness—his own record, his memory, having been irreparably damaged after he was brutally beaten by likely Klansmen, when he lived in Arkansas (from 1969 to 1972).

Born in 1944 in Dorchester, Massachusetts, Richards made his hometown and its people an early focus in his book Dorchester Days (1978). But that came after his time as a VISTA volunteer health worker in Arkansas’s Mississippi River Delta, after which he became a reporter and social worker in Eastern Arkansas. There, he and other ex-VISTA volunteers founded RESPECT, which helped organize and distribute food and clothing to the poor. Out of this work evolved his first book, Few Comforts or Surprises: The Arkansas Delta (1973). Later, at the request of his then wife, the writer and poet Dorothea Lynch, who was dying from breast cancer, they together chronicled her illness and created the book Exploding into Life (1986). Its disquietingly poignant texts (hers) and images (his) revealed cancer’s physical and social realities long before the disease was openly discussed as it is now. Only a few years before, they had collaborated (again, Gene’s images, Dorothea’s writing) on 50 Hours (1983), a book that experientially moves through illness, protests, births, and other life events occurring mostly in Seabrook, New Hampshire. In other words, from the beginning, Gene has intimately focused on issues of social justice and health that challenge America and its citizens.

Eugene Richards, Final treatment, Boston, Massachusetts, 1979, from the series Exploding into Life
Courtesy the artist

He continued with Below the Line: Living Poor in America (1987), and then came his riveting coverage of Denver General Hospital’s emergency room in The Knife and Gun Club (1989). Gene’s portrayal of the drug scourge in inner-city America, in his devastating Cocaine True, Cocaine Blue (1994), was a scathing indictment, through interviews and images, of our so-called “war on drugs” and its accompanying slogan, “Just say no.” Recognizing both the uselessness and the ultimate indifference of such inept policy, the book instead examines how crack-cocaine addiction ultimately destroys the very fabric of disenfranchised, vulnerable communities, and must be addressed in terms of this, and the poverty from which it emerges.

Myriad magazine stories (many collected in The Fat Baby, 2004) and other book and film projects consider everything from river blindness to mental illness (A Procession of Them, 2008) within and outside of the US. His stories embrace individuals of all races, genders, ethnicities, and ages, including two films on the elderly—Clarence, a Nebraska farmer, and Melvin, a farmer in North Dakota, respectively—in But, the Day Came (2000) and The Rain Will Follow (2016). Gene’s searching book Stepping through the Ashes (2002) evokes the ghostly World Trade Center site soon after the horrors of 9/11. There, he photographed while his wife and partner on many projects, film and print producer Janine Altongy, interviewed first responders and others. War Is Personal (2010) contemplates the excruciating toll of the war in Iraq on those who fight, and on their families at home—again through images and interviews. The story side of war becomes even more prominent in his 2015 play, In a Far Away Mind.

Eugene Richards, Still House Hollow, Tennessee, 1986, from the series Below the Line
Courtesy the artist

Gene has a habit of making work that defies categorization, and is often prescient in form and/or content—as is the case with his new film, Thy Kingdom Come, which will have its world premiere at Austin’s SXSW Film Festival on March 10, 2018. Begun in 2010, the film questions the very nature of documentary. The cast comprises individuals from the town of Bartlesville, Oklahoma, as themselves, and an actor: Javier Bardem, in character as a priest, yet most essentially himself. The film opens in such a way that announces its conceit.

Visually, it is quintessentially Eugene Richards. Camera angles, at times askew, intensify the raw intimacy of what we are experiencing. Ambient light conspires with the layering of images. Stark contrasts resonate with stark truths. Windows and mirrors compositionally and metaphorically play with transparency, opacity, and reflection. Shadows seem to have matter, and the tangible—a hand, a cat—feels almost illusory.

It turns out that the people who Bardem and Gene meet and speak with in the no-longer-thriving oil town of Bartlesville, home of Frank Lloyd Wright’s only skyscraper, are desperately hungry for someone to talk to. This has always been Gene’s forte: sensing where the stories are and then, of course, how to tell them. Trusting his gut, he has often been led by his assignments to experiences entirely unanticipated when he began. Such is the case with Thy Kingdom Come, which all began with Terrence Malick and To the Wonder (2012).

Ben Affleck and Javier Bardem in To The Wonder, 2012
Courtesy Magnolia Pictures

Melissa Harris: What is the genesis of Thy Kingdom Come?

Eugene Richards: It was in 2010, so it’s tough to remember exactly, but the first call was from Nick Gonda, Terrence Malick’s producer. He asked me if I wanted to be involved on a film with Malick. Terry and I had met briefly in the 1990s and I loved his film Badlands (1973), so I was very honored to be asked to be a part of this. At the time of Nick’s and my first conversation, the film was untitled and the script not something to be discussed—except that one of the characters, to be played by Javier Bardem, would be a priest experiencing a crisis of faith, and a lot of it would be set in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, where Malick in part grew up.

As part of this film, their idea was to incorporate real people, local townspeople, in scenes interacting with the parish priest, Javier, in order to give the film a broader sense of reality or atmosphere. These were meant to be short scenes shot on video that might later be edited into the final work.

Harris: When did you first go out to Bartlesville to scout, to find your subjects?

Richards: I first went in August 2010 on a kind of research trip and met Father Lee Stephens, Bartlesville’s Episcopal reverend, who said he would introduce me to people he knew who he thought might be interested in speaking with us. That’s how we began to meet people.

Father Lee was a really good guy, very interested in social justice, and in association with his Episcopal parish, he ran a program focused on helping those struggling economically and emotionally. Father Lee had this great term—“future story”—that he used when talking to people. His idea is that there’s no point in always dwelling on the past. He tries to help them know that there is the possibility to get their lives under control. This was a big part of his ministering.

Mary Ellen Mark, Mother Teresa giving communion in the Mother House, Mother Teresa’s Missions Of Charity, Calcutta, India, 1981
© the artist

Harris: Did Malick have a clear idea of what he wanted his priest to be like—both his fictional priest (played by Javier Bardem) in To the Wonder (2012), and then what he was hoping to get from your footage with Bardem?

Richards: Terry Malick very much liked Mary Ellen Mark’s Mother Teresa photos . . . He, in fact, lent me one of her books. He thought a priest should act in the hands-on manner of a Mother Teresa—at least the one pictured in the photographs. But I had to tell him about what I had actually seen, for example, when I photographed in the emergency room in The Knife and Gun Club (1989). The priest would have to come in and talk with the person while they were critically ill and talk to the families, to find out what their wishes were. That’s what I said to Terry; it isn’t so much a physical thing as it is a listening process. I told him that I saw the priest’s first role as listener—as did Father Lee, as did Javier, in time.

Harris: Did Father Lee interact with Bardem at all?

Richards: Yes. Father Lee was helping Javier to understand the role, what to do with his hands, and other gestures . . . He also spoke to Javier about the prayer book he’d be carrying, the nature of confession, and the last rites, and what might be appropriate passages from the prayer book for such occasions.

Harris: So how did it begin, with the subjects? After Father Lee introduced you to them, or you met others on your own, what happened next?

Richards: Everybody knew there was a film going on in town—they’d heard about it, they’d seen the trucks and all that. Some of them had seen Javier in No Country for Old Men, but most of them had not. Still, everyone knew he was an actor. When we went into people’s houses, we introduced ourselves, and most everyone said they wanted to do it. I said to each person, just be yourself. It’s a fictional film. We’ll just be here for a little while, and there are no instructions about what to do or say. That’s all up to you.

Callie and her son from Thy Kingdom Come, 2018
Courtesy the artist

Harris: What was the camera you used? Thy Kingdom Come feels very panoramic.

Richards: The camera I was using was a very high-quality digital video camera called a RED. And generally we filmed with either an 18 or a 21 mm lens. We would be shooting with an aspect ratio that was quite wide and narrow, something like CinemaScope wideness. The surprise was that the camera was quite sizable, or heavy, for me, since I don’t shoot professional video. And I have almost never used a tripod, so I really didn’t know how to work with the RED on a tripod. I hand-held the camera the whole time.

Julio Quintana, my assistant, insisted that we take a belt and strap the camera to me so I wouldn’t drop it. The wide format, when I looked through it, actually felt quite natural. I thought it was very beautiful, but it’s disconcerting at first because in order to get close to somebody, you have to be literally, quite literally on top of him. Most filmmakers would be far back and then use a zoom lens.

Harris: I bet both your holding the camera—you’re amazingly steady—and your being so close, without tons of equipment, along with the use of natural light, must have also made it easier for everyone to be comfortable with all of you.

Richards: We assumed that people might be self-conscious, that they might stare at the camera, that they might perform, but remarkably, that didn’t happen. Part of this, of course, is due to Javier’s gentle, calming demeanor. Part of it is that we generally kept quiet, proved not to be judgmental, treated people with the respect they deserved. While the priest was fictional, the film is a documentary, revealing simply what happened, with only the smallest bit of direction.

Adam and Samantha outside their home from Thy Kingdom Come, 2018
Courtesy the artist

Harris: Who did you film first?

Richards: It was kind of by chance. I was this stranger, walking through the trailer park, when it was getting to be really hot. It was 104 degrees. I saw a young woman and I waved. She came over and asked me if I wanted a glass of water. She got me a glass of water, and we started talking. That’s how I met Samantha. She had no self-consciousness, she didn’t know I was a filmmaker. Then I asked her if she and her boyfriend would allow me to use my camera. So Samantha and Adam were the first people that I filmed, but without Javier. And the filming was clumsy, as I was learning how to operate the camera.

Then Father Lee introduced Julio and me to Josh. We walked into his house and after some general small talk about what we were doing, about the fact that this was for a film, I knelt down and began filming while asking him questions. There was something very special about doing the interview with this man. It at first raised an ethical question for me, because his children were there. Part of me was thinking just concentrate on the father, because he wanted to, needed to talk. The kids were there watching. I included them because he didn’t chase the kids out. Their response makes it so extraordinary—these kids were so cool. They totally paid no attention to me. They were just playing.

One of the next people I visited was Tasia. She proceeded to tell me that she had lost her baby in a terrible accident. What was clear was that she wanted to tell somebody about what had happened, only five months earlier. When I later brought Javier there, I most probably told him about the loss of a child, since I didn’t know whether he should or shouldn’t bring this up. But she brought it up, told her story, after letting Javier play with her little girl—she has two other children. I think she sensed that all of us would be supportive. Javier quite naturally held her hand. He’s very, very nice. He couldn’t be a more decent guy, and totally without ego, just a gentle guy who knows how to be with people. She told him her whole story.

Basically, that was the process with almost everybody, and in most cases I did meet them in advance of Javier. And they would almost always ask, “What would you like us to talk about?” and I would say, “Anything you want.” Later Javier would say, “Tell me about yourself, if you want to.”

Tasia and her daughter from Thy Kingdom Come, 2018
Courtesy the artist

Harris: He’s so intense, yet simultaneously low-keyed. Was Javier scripted in Thy Kingdom Come?

Richards: No, not a word of it, except for the small introduction that I wrote. He would occasionally, when under stress—and we were all under stress—struggle for words and come up with what sounded like scripted lines from To the Wonder as a kind of default. Most of Thy Kingdom Come was Javier and everyone else being themselves.

Harris: A challenge that he met extraordinarily, despite or perhaps because of whatever unease he may have experienced. He was a bit of a revelation—unscripted and remaining in character—as your subjects, one after the other, opened up to him. I found myself watching him, like I used to watch dancers—where you take note of the most minute gesture. His movements are slow and nuanced, never abrupt. I don’t know if they were intuitive, or if they were almost reflexive, because of his own distress at the intense suffering he was suddenly privy to, but whatever it was felt honest.

Richards: Yes—in part because he is a truly decent man, who is interested in people, so he wanted to listen in that open-ended way. And people will speak when they feel someone is listening.

He was moved, and deeply troubled, by some of the stories we heard—as anyone would be. As it happened, months later he gave his fee for the Malick film to Father Lee and me to distribute to many of the subjects. But this was a personal matter for him.

Harris: When, or how, did you realize that you might want to create something independent from the conversations you were documenting with Bardem, in his role as priest?

Richards: If anything, we realized one by one how significant they were, but didn’t, until two weeks into the shooting, consider that they might together comprise their own possible film. It was then that Javier, my wife Janine (who served as co-producer on Thy Kingdom Come), Julio, and myself kind of went, “Wow.” Javier’s first interest, as I remember it, was in a film quite possibly for film students, in which the differences between reality and performance could be discussed, along with the actor’s process.

Thy Kingdom Come is comprised of video footage that I shot over a three-week period back in 2010 for To the Wonder, but it was only licensed to us this past year. We didn’t see any of the footage while we were shooting except for one day, when Julio and I were not sure that the camera had recorded. But I knew we were getting something unique, that people were telling their stories to us, and that their stories mattered.

Eugene Richards, Doctor after loss of patient, Denver, Colorado, 1987, from the book The Knife and Gun Club
Courtesy the artist

Harris: For a very long time now, haven’t you been interviewing your subjects in conjunction with your photographs—asking them to tell their stories? I’m thinking of those, for example, in your book The Knife and Gun Club (1989).

Richards: Before that was an assignment I received in 1981 to photograph at the Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Lima, Ohio. I had incredible access to the patients and felt the need to know their stories, since many of the people, though rather drugged, didn’t seem to be the people to commit the violent crimes that others said they did. So then I learned by asking questions. The Knife and Gun Club interviews began after the initial magazine assignment in 1980 went nowhere, and I went back to Denver occasionally during the next few years, whenever I had the time and money to do so. And for Below the Line: Living Poor in America (1987), which began in late 1985, Janine was my researcher and producer. We were very aware that the photographs weren’t enough, that archetypal pictures depicting poverty were oftentimes too simplistic.

This is going to sound strange, but I’ve always felt uncomfortable with the silence of the still image. I feel that you’re—when you go into some place, when you are with somebody, you are taking a moment out of a big life. If you’re not careful, you end up looking for the dramatic moment, which can so easily slip into the clichéd moment. What you tend to look for is something revelatory in a large way. In fact, people’s lives are revelatory in little ways. So I just started talking to people.

You realize there’s no way that you can, in a still photograph—no way you can quite grasp either the joy that people have, or the desperation—at least in all its complexity. If I had my life to live over again, it would be as a filmmaker, where you can combine the language and the images much more comfortably in a sense. I never totally trusted images. Sometimes life is much harder than what you see.

The grandmother under the bridge in Brooklyn from Americans We (1994), for example—this is a beautiful scene, and I’m talking to the grandmother and I said, “So this is your family.” She said, “Well, not everyone.” I said, “What do you mean, not everyone?” She said, “My daughter is up there, around the corner.” Her daughter apparently, as I understood it, had an addiction problem . . . so that kind of a thing. That this wonderful demeanor, this sweet, sweet grandmother you see and feel in the photo—well, my picture doesn’t show what’s lurking up there, around the corner. And that’s her real, whole story . . . And that’s the thing about journalism. My picture of the grandmother is not untruthful, but it’s also not the entire truth.

Kathryn from Thy Kingdom Come, 2018
Courtesy the artist

Harris: I guess by nature, making a photograph is a reductive process; you are focusing on a moment of someone’s life, from the perspective that most interests you. It’s not false. But it’s not, it can’t be, a full picture. So I understand how the addition of their words can help contextually, but I also think you may be selling yourself way short. What in part distinguishes your work are, I think, your visual narratives, your storytelling, your sense of characters—you are never hit-and-run. You linger . . . you let people reveal themselves—at least aspects of themselves—in your photos for who they are, for better or for worse, without judgment. But you’re right in the sense that you are still distilling someone else’s life as you perceive it, and/or wish to render it. Is that journalism? I think so, if we accept that the notion of utterly objective, baggage- and-perspective-free journalism is a false construct. But you are always forthcoming and upfront about what you are doing.

Richards: We all get defensive about what we are and what we’re not. I mean, you want to do something that is just, that is truthful, that matters. Photography to me is like raw instinct. It’s more like the hunter in the woods. Writing, for me, is less intuitive, but involves a different kind of energy and effort.

The exercise yard at Osage County Jail from Thy Kingdom Come, 2018
Courtesy the artist

Harris: The way you filmed Bardem, which is very rarely straight on—you see his hand turn ever so slightly, you see him fiddling with his eyeglasses, you see him from the side, you show his collar, and the black shirt—all this, before you actually see his recognizable face. In your mind, were you filming Javier, or were you filming an actor, or were you filming a priest?

Richards: A priest.

Harris: It’s funny—a “real” priest is also essentially playing a role. The conversations you and Javier invited were not about God, or the Bible, or salvation. They were about as present and real and as human as it gets.

And with Bardem, you have somebody who, as he is listening to and responding to your subjects, in a way becomes a conduit for Thy Kingdom Come’s audience. He becomes the medium through which the interviewees’ answers can be processed by the people watching this documentary. He’s not having big responses. He’s not interfering with their storytelling. And what’s cool is that the tone—in the entire documentary—is not confessional. There are no sins, no absolving or Hail Marys. That’s what makes it so especially wrenching. Everyone seems to be accepting of his or her lot, while at the same time longing for the “future story” offered by Father Lee. There’s no denial, there are no excuses and not one false emotion.

Richards: It’s true, and the tension or the questions about what’s real and what isn’t real—this then adds another dimension. But this is true documentary. We are never asking Javier nor any of the individuals we are speaking with to do anything. There is no direction, except that I strongly suggested that Javier and Julio and I, for that matter, remain as nearly quiet as possible, in order to let people truly say what was on their minds. Nothing is contrived.

Former Klansman from Thy Kingdom Come, 2018
Courtesy the artist

Harris: How did you meet the Klansman? Was Father Lee ministering to him?

Richards: We met the Klansman—Melvin C.—by accident. We were actually looking for someone else. That person had been suddenly evicted from her house and these other folks—Melvin C. and his family—were sitting outside their house across the street.

Melvin was visibly very upsetting to Javier. A one-time Klan leader in Missouri, this guy was talking about being a bigot, about his hatred and prejudice. Javier was pretty taken aback, taking a seat in a room papered with Confederate flags, and there may have been a swastika in the corner. But he worked to become the priest and the listener, rather than let his feelings show. But then, of course, his feelings began to show. And I was there to offer up an off-camera question, when needed, and an occasional hand on Javier’s to calm him. I think the thing that disturbed Javier the most was how very up-front Melvin was. There were excuses offered, but little was hidden, and usually such bigots stay in the dark.

Harris: On another note, my mind immediately went to this country—the United States currently. Is the America you reveal in Thy Kingdom Come the America that the Democrats missed, somehow overlooked?

Richards: I think it’s the America that many people want to miss. Just think about Kathryn, the woman who is extremely overweight. You can just see people shaking their heads at her appearance. And she suffered unspeakably when boys she trusted raped her. She is rarely seen for who she is, but she is a spectacular woman.

Heritage Villa Nursing Home from Thy Kingdom Come, 2018
Courtesy the artist

Harris: It must have been profoundly complex for Javier to move between these real experiences he was having with you, and then go back to being in his To the Wonder role.

Richards: He had some trying emotional reactions during the process, as did Janine, as did I, as did everyone involved. It was made worse by the fact that Annie, the woman in the nursing home who spoke so beautifully to Javier, died the next day. She fell over and banged her head. It devastated him.

And Callie, the young woman with cancer—her visible suffering was almost unbearable. We questioned filming her, but she told us she was doing this for her kid. She said, “I want him to know that I really love him, because I’m not going to be around for much longer. This is a way for me to tell him that will last forever.”

Other things happened . . . We returned to the nursing home. We’re in there and this elderly woman, Lavonne, says to me, “What are you doing, dear?” I said, “We have a film going on about a priest coming in, and what he would do in the nursing home.” She says, “What will he be doing?” I say, “Well, he will be visiting patients, he may say the last rites.” She says, “Well, he can do the last rites on me.” So we said okay, and she closed her eyes and lay perfectly still. Javier went ahead, reading from the prayer book, trying to recite the last rites, and I did film, but clumsily. I felt terribly uncomfortable, envisioning this dear woman passing away. But I did the best I could, and got a little scene of him walking out of her room.

We were getting so involved in people’s lives; we were going really deep. But then we went to the county jail in Pawhuska, Oklahoma. I wasn’t sure whether Javier could take another episode. He was getting very emotional. I think we all realized that this could go on forever . . . And maybe we wanted to keep hearing people’s stories.

Osage County Jail from Thy Kingdom Come, 2018
Courtesy the artist

Harris: What happened when you went to the jail?

Richards: I met these guys and they say, “What would you like us to do?” I said to them, “Do what you want, but don’t go too heavy on him.” They understood. These are inmates. At the onset of our time together, one of them—Melvin K.—created this murderous character, but it didn’t go very far; Javier saw right through it.

Javier had such class because this guy kept blowing his cigarette smoke directly in Javier’s face, and he just rolled with the punches. At the same time, those cigarettes, the smoke, were gifts to a guy with a camera.

Harris: Yes, visually, that smoke, along with the blinding sunlight coming through the window, flanked by the two of them silhouetted, mostly in profile, is dazzling, and you never could have anticipated that.

Richards: But that’s how this whole experiential film happened. You begin in one place, not moving, not intruding, and things happen. The children look on, the daughter plays the guitar, tears come, a sexual assault is revealed, a butterfly truly does pass overhead.

There is this one scene of Javier with Callie. It is personally revealing of Javier, perhaps more than anything else in the film. When Callie walks away, out of view, he is left sitting there on the bed alone. He was a bit upset. It would have perhaps been kinder if I had not continued to focus on him, but, as with most every moment that I filmed, I let it play out.

Melissa Harris is editor at large of Aperture and coeditor of Aperture Conversations: 1985 to the present.

Thy Kingdom Come will have its world premiere at the South by Southwest (SXSW) Film Festival in Austin, Texas, on March 10 at 11:30 a.m. There will be additional screenings on Tuesday, March 13 at 6 p.m., and Friday, March 16 at 12 p.m.

The post Are You Listening, America? appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

Black is Brilliant

From Accra to Harlem, the photographs in an exhibition curated by David Hartt expand the field of representation.

By Oluremi C. Onabanjo

Kwame Brathwaite, Untitled (Self-Portrait), 1964
© the artist, courtesy David Nolan Gallery, New York and Philip Martin Gallery, Los Angeles

What are the images that encapsulate the moments, spaces, communities, and myriad experiences of blackness across the globe? What are the gestures, the glances, the ways of being that illustrate “a crisis of borders, a fold in time, a rupture in space. An assertion of gradience”?

This Synthetic Moment, a group exhibition curated by Canadian artist David Hartt, currently on view at David Nolan Gallery in New York, grapples with such questions, deftly incorporating the work of Russian Ghanaian photographer Liz Johnson Artur, Ghanaian photographer James Barnor, and American photographers Kwame Brathwaite, Zoe Leonard, and Christopher Williams alongside Hartt’s own work. A polyphonic, essayistic installation, the exhibition crisscrosses varied geographies and temporalities, highlighting visions of beauty and style alongside quotidian, melancholic scenes. Spanning six decades, and locations from Accra to Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, London to New York, it gestures toward an embodied network of visual relations about black identity and subjectivity. Formally, there is a persistent elegance across all images, a grace to the recurring profiles, concealed gazes, open grins, abandoned seascapes. These photographers’ respective pictures are packed with intention, and often signal means of circulation and image making not contingent upon the gallery space. Yet united there, they seem to take a collective breath anew. In dialogue, these works go beyond offering varied visual forms and compositions, and perhaps urge us toward a more iterative, expansive mode of considering black identity and its renderings photographically.

Kwame Brathwaite, Untitled (Sikolo with Carolee Prince Designs), 1968
© the artist, courtesy David Nolan Gallery, New York and Philip Martin Gallery, Los Angeles

Oluremi C. Onabanjo: This Synthetic Moment seems to have been borne of a series of conversations and exchanges, but also equally operated as a site of inquiry when you were at a loss for words. I wonder if you could revisit your conversation with Thomas J. Lax, associate curator at the Museum of Modern Art, which you’ve stated provided you with the seeds of the exhibition’s title?

David Hartt: When I was speaking with Thomas, we were discussing Unfinished Conversations (2017), an exhibition at MoMA that he had worked on and which was on view at the time. I was interested in the show’s proposition, which contained an expanded notion of black identity, beyond national constructs. The exhibition incorporated black voices from a variety of different backgrounds—Black British artists, African American artists, those from the African continent. For me it created a complex understanding of black identity, one that was expansive and complementary. At the moment that I happened upon Unfinished Conversations, I was initially at the museum to see Martine Syms’s Projects 106 (2017) installation. Through viewing her work, a two-hour feature-length film, and then John Akomfrah’s The Unfinished Conversation (2012), I began to recognize not only the conversation that was happening between the two pieces specifically, but also how these images provided a kind of synthesis, in terms of two generations of artists working with film. The concept took root across geography, but also in terms of temporalities.

James Barnor, AGIP Calendar Model, 1974
Courtesy the artist and October Gallery, London

In my own practice, I was also coming to terms with a piece I had just finished, The Last Poet (2017). It’s a film I shot via drone, where I looked at the Eastern Seaboard of the United States. For the film’s narration, I spent two days at Stanford University interviewing Francis Fukuyama, considering the current state of our liberal democracy, and perhaps its decay. Throughout the course of our conversations, the language that he was using was uncompromising and terrifying. It was a very sober, poignant analysis of what we are experiencing. I didn’t know how I would react in the face of this account, but there was a complexity to the emotion that I began to feel, in giving agency to a voice that I wouldn’t necessarily agree with in its entirety. As the piece unfolded, I began to trust myself, and the viewer, knowing that they would be able to use their own values to process the commentary. From there, one thought that endured was the different forms of crisis that we’re experiencing—whether that’s class or race, but also along the lines of unstable borders and shifting political allegiances.

So in combining this experience vested in crisis and the moments of resonance across those two exhibitions, Thomas and I talked through these ideas, trying to find a word to describe them—these permeable boundaries present all around us. Out of that came the “synthetic.”

Liz Johnson Artur, Untitled, 2016
© and courtesy the artist and courtesy David Nolan Gallery, New York

Onabanjo: From the start, This Synthetic Moment has been intertextual, with these manifold references and allusions circling one another, informing its overall structure. This lyrical quality is writ large with the visual rhymes and echoes, but also with regard to the photographers’ biographies, which feed into one another in a manner that is quite organic and fluid. How did you arrive at the various bodies of work that populate the exhibition?

Hartt: The spine of the exhibition is Liz Johnson Artur. I first encountered her work when I was featured in an exhibition with her in Munich, and I remember falling in love with the work as it was presented. I already had her monograph, but it wasn’t until I saw the work presented that I realized its strength. You know, when you put work on display in an exhibition context, it can be quite cold and cut off from the life and the experience of the artist, but with her work, there was a strange, empathetic connection that was sustained. There is this central importance of generosity to her mode of presentation, in which she wants to be able to share, and explore with the viewer as they move through the work. There’s a kind of haptic quality to everything that she does.

Liz Johnson Artur, Untitled, 2016
© and courtesy the artist and courtesy David Nolan Gallery, New York

From there, everything else followed. I was interested in trying to find different voices that could expand on this notion of interrelationships through time, through space, through modes of subjectivity. Christopher Williams and Zoe Leonard came to mind quickly. With Leonard, I was reminded of one of my favorite photographs, Rear View (Geoffrey Beene Fashion Show) (1990), because of its immediacy and its confrontational qualities. So that led me toward an exploration of that body of work, and then I was reintroduced to One Woman Looking at Another (Carolyne Roehm Fashion Show) (1990), and that became another really important image that other lines of inquiry or thinking hinged upon.

Zoe Leonard, One Woman Looking at Another, 1990
Courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth, New York and Galerie Gisela Capitan, Germany

With regards to Williams, I was thinking about the photographs of Mustafa Kinte (2007), and in a conversation with Hamza Walker, he introduced me to the work of James Barnor and Kwame Brathwaite. I wasn’t familiar with either of them, but I realized immediately that they allowed me to speak in terms of an expanded geography, as well as an expanded concept of temporality and representation. With Barnor, there was a particular image of a beautiful Ghanaian model surrounded by Agfa chemistry containers, which just rang as a proto-Willliams, especially considering Williams’s darkroom images. The self-portrait of Brathwaite also related very nicely, again as a kind of proto-Williams. So it became a process of going back and forth, each image becoming contingent on another one.

Kwame Brathwaite, Untitled, 1966
© the artist, courtesy David Nolan Gallery, New York and Philip Martin Gallery, Los Angeles

Onabanjo: I’m interested in the different contexts from which these images arrive. Take Kwame Brathwaite and his work with the Grandassa Models and the popularizing of the phrase “Black Is Beautiful,” but also James Barnor’s legacy as the first Ghanaian photographer to use color, photographing Kwame Nkrumah and also working for Drum magazine in London, taking images of these gorgeous cover girls. So having those kinds of fashion and editorial visual vocabularies informing their practices, as well as in the work of Zoe Leonard and Liz Johnson Artur, I wonder how that shapes your understanding of these works living beyond the milieu within which they had circulated, and entering the gallery space together.

Hartt: I interpret these works through the lens of my own education and practice, a photographic one that came at a moment when conceptualism was prioritized. With that, I think what could happen, at least initially, is a sort of instrumentation in terms of how I’m contextualizing Brathwaite and Barnor, because what you’re saying in terms of the origins of their respective practices, and what their agendas were, is definitely outside of this kind of gallery context. So at first, I’m looking through the lens of a Williams or a Leonard, or even myself, in terms of how I understand their work coming together. That being said, I think it’s important to note that the images by Barnor and Brathwaite stand their ground. They change the reading of other images, especially Williams’s portraits of Mustafa Kinte (2007).

Christopher Williams, Mustafa Kinte (Gambia), 2008
© and courtesy the artist and courtesy David Zwirner, New York/London

Williams himself has said those images have been difficult to contextualize and that there is a kind of pressure in terms of addressing how they perform. Therefore, I feel there is a generosity, if you will, by having such portraits then juxtaposed with images by Barnor and Brathwaite. It’s precisely this space where the halo that they grant to Williams’s work is quite important—all of a sudden, the work begins to address subjectivity in a way that is within Williams’s intention, but as a white artist, is perhaps more difficult to make those kinds of requests. So while I recognize the very different kinds of realms in which they operate or were formed in, when brought together here, we begin to kind of appreciate the resonances that these artists’ works share, and grant one another. In having those pieces kind of coexist in the same kind of space, I think, electively, they all benefit.

David Hartt, Interval XIII, 2014
© and courtesy the artist and David Nolan Gallery, New York

Onabanjo: You mentioned in a 2015 interview that “Our understanding of ourselves is deeply rooted in the spaces we occupy.” How do you consider your own work within these associative networks, and within the exhibition?

Hartt: I think that in terms of my own practice, the role that race plays is not immediately apparent. This notion of subjectivity, it’s implicit rather than explicit—perhaps except in the case of Stray Light (2011)—so dealing with the concept of race within the work was something that quite selfishly I wanted to engage. For me, the idea of blackness in my work has everything to do with my ability as a black artist to travel into different communities and cultural expressions, and to represent them in some other way, something typically the domain of white artists. There’s this kind of cultural colonialism that they’ve been able to enjoy, and this sets up a bizarre dichotomy in terms of representation: it’s either the perspective of the white colonizer, or a member of the culture that is being colonized attempting to recognize and depict themselves.

However, I am of the belief that in order for us to understand and learn more about these different positions, they have to be dimensionalized, and by “dimensionalized” I mean that they need to be depicted by more than one, or two—or however many have you—modes of analysis. So simply by my being a black artist engaging with these cultural experiences, I’m adding another dimension in terms of trying to understand what’s present there.

David Hartt, Interval I, 2014
© and courtesy the artist and courtesy David Nolan Gallery, New York

Onabanjo: So there’s a refusal on your part, then. Rather than this being a linear or structured means of outlining representation, you’re offering something more associative, something freer and modular. The viewer can engage with these modes of documentation beyond just straightforward celebration, or just straightforward interrogation.

Hartt: Yes, this notion of subjectivity that we’re talking about has to do with looking at the act of photography and its relationship with these different kinds of subjects in a more complex way. It has to do with providing a latitude in terms of how the photographer operates, and what the photograph can do and what it can say. In that sense, with This Synthetic Moment, it’s vitally important to have somebody like Williams interrogate the idea of black representation, just as it is for Leonard, just as it is for Barnor or Brathwaite, or Johnson Artur. I think what we’re all doing is beginning to expand the fields of representation of this idea of black identity.

Oluremi C. Onabanjo is Director of Exhibitions and Collections at The Walther Collection.

This Synthetic Moment is on view at David Nolan Gallery, New York, through March 10, 2018.

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Behind the Scenes of Peter Hujar’s Bohemia

Aperture members met with curator Joel Smith to hear the stories behind Peter Hujar’s radical work.

On Wednesday, January 31, Aperture Patrons and Trustees met at The Morgan Library & Museum for an intimate after-hours tour of Peter Hujar: Speed of Life, led by Richard L. Menschel Curator of Photography Joel Smith. The exhibition features more than 140 of Hujar’s photographs and contact sheets, which portray avant-garde pockets of New York City from the 1970s and ’80s. Along with a book of the same name, published by Aperture this past year, the exhibition follows Hujar’s career, divided thematically into sections. Smith described the sequence of the exhibition as: “Every image is a fresh thought, so you have the chance to see the work as interrelated and yet a puzzle.” Throughout the tour, Smith helped decipher this puzzle of Hujar’s complicated life for Aperture members.

A highlight of the exhibition is the photograph Daisy Aldan (1955) of Hujar’s high school teacher, who deeply inspired the artist as a youth. Smith shared many stories behind the images, including photographs of celebrities like Susan Sontag, Hujar’s lovers, and communities, such as drag queens, that historically haven’t been featured on museum walls. Hujar was obsessed with conveying “what makes an individual truly fascinating”—as befitted an artist who was so fascinating himself.

The tour offered great insight into Hujar’s life and work, and meditated on the message he was never able to fully articulate during his lifetime.

Peter Hujar (1934–1987) died of AIDS at age fifty-three, leaving behind a complex and profound body of photographs. A leading figure in the cultural scene of downtown New York in the 1970s and ’80s, Hujar was admired for his portraits of people, animals, and landscapes. Since his death, his work has been the subject of major retrospectives at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and the Fotomuseum Winterthur in Switzerland, and he is included in permanent collections at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among others.

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Aperture Foundation is a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization that relies on the generosity of individuals for support of its publications, exhibitions, and public and educational programming.

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Lola Flash is Ready for Her Moment

In her first retrospective, Lola Flash celebrates queer legacies through vibrant portraiture.

By Jessica Lynne

Lola Flash, karisse, 2003, from the series [sur]passing
Courtsey the artist and Pen + Brush

Lola Flash has spent her career documenting and celebrating the lives of queer people of color through photography. Entering into the field in the 1980s as the HIV/AIDS epidemic began to take hold, Flash became an ardent activist through her image making as she told stories of queer life in New York City during a time of change. A core member of ACT UP, Flash was deeply entrenched in the work of caring for a generation that was reckoning, at the time, with a new disease that transformed the LGBT community; as a result, her art and activism were intimately connected. Today, Flash’s germinal bodies of work—such as SALT, an intimate portrait series of women over the age of seventy, or surmise, which explores gender perception and (mis)representation—continue to serve as an important touchstone for any student of photography, and certainly the lineage of art produced by black, queer women. On the occasion of the opening of her first retrospective at Pen + Brush, I spoke with the critically acclaimed photographer about what it means to reflect on a career of activism and art.

Lola Flash, tanya, 2008, from the series surmise
Courtsey the artist and Pen + Brush

Jessica Lynne: Organizing a show of this scale requires you to think about how you’ve evolved as an artist, formally and technically, which must also bring up so many memories. What does it mean to be in this moment of reflection?

Lola Flash: It is very emotional. It’s great to be working with a gallery, although, to be honest with you, I never really wanted gallery representation. My focus as a photographer is really just to say to my beautiful subjects, “Lola Flash thinks you’re beautiful. She’s going to drag her big old camera over and take a portrait of you.” But it’s been great working with the gallery. I really trust Parker Daley and Dawn Delikat at Pen + Brush. As art historians, they saw how my older work, the cross-color work, led to what I’m doing now. In hindsight, I did not really see the connection.

All last year, I was just driving myself crazy. I was thinking, “I’m invisible.” I was making all these posts saying, “Do you see me?” And continuously—it’s nothing new—I’ve been going to galleries and museums forever and feeling invisible. So, thanks to this exhibition, I’m finally getting the recognition that is long overdue.

Lola Flash, Murray, 2016, from the series LEGENDS
Courtesy the artist and Pen + Brush

Lynne: Why do you think that’s happening now? What feels different for you about this moment versus a year, five, ten years ago?

Flash: So much has changed: the Obama era, the outstanding folks like Deborah Willis, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and even artists such as Carrie Mae Weems and Kerry James Marshall. These people have helped create a different and positive model of the African American experience and I am riding that wave. And, of course, I am terribly thankful to Pen + Brush for seeing me and promoting my work in such a gorgeously professional manner.

Lola Flash, toni (Toni Parks), 2011, from the series SALT
Courtsey the artist and Pen + Brush

Lynne: What does it mean to celebrate and think critically about the lives of gay, lesbian, and queer black folks and other queer people of color, and also recognize that sometimes those people may not find their way into these kinds of art institutions—that the infrastructures are often set up to not allow that in the first place?

Flash: Right. That is why I never really wanted gallery representation. For years, when I was younger, I used to show in pubs or restaurants, because I wanted the people who I was photographing to be part of the conversation. One of my friends, Arnie Charnick, he used to do—he still does—a lot of amazing murals in the East Village. He was one of the artists I really started to admire early on, and he never really wanted a big show. He was just really happy with making his murals.

But it wasn’t until I saw the Kerry James Marshall retrospective at the Met Breuer and noticed the way that people were looking at his paintings that I thought to myself, Maybe there is value in exposing my work to audiences that I am not particularly concerned with, thematically speaking. I think it opened up my mind to a subject that I was really kind of against for so long. Of course, I want my work at the Met, of course I want my work at some of these big places. But it’s definitely not the root of why I do what I do.

Lola Flash, Vickster, 1999, from the series Cross-Color
Courtsey the artist and Pen + Brush

Lynne: Was there a moment when you realized that photography was the tool that you wanted to use as you reckoned with all of these larger, complex concerns about identity?

Flash: When I was a child, the camera was a toy that brought me hours of fun. Once I became a photography major at MICA, I created a process which I coined “cross-color.” This process was before Photoshop, and was a comment on the notion of perfect “Kodak days”—in reverse. I was known for this process; it was my signature style. The colors were so vibrant and all hues were reversed. Blue became red and white became black. I was consumed by the psychological meanings of what colors were supposed to mean. My work continues to focus on issues around race, gender, and sexism, but in a more direct way.

thato, 2017, from the series [sur]passing
Courtsey the artist and Pen + Brush

Lynne: Now that you are in this moment of reflection, what’s coming next for you, Lola? How do you think about the futurity of your work and practice, your self-sustainability, and legacy?

Flash: Legacy is a very important part of my drive. I think about all the people who stood up for our rights—my ancestors—I feel like I have a commitment to them, and I’ve been given the tools. I have a presentation about legacy that I show the kids I teach in the first days of the school year. I say to them, “If you don’t feel like you have a legacy, then maybe it’s you who’s going to start it.” And so, for me, I want to make sure the work is contextualized properly, alongside the work of my peers, so that people can see the validity of my photography.

Jessica Lynne is the coeditor of ARTS.BLACK.

Lola Flash: 1986–Present is on view at Pen + Brush, New York, through March 27, 2018.

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Roaming Without End

A group exhibition in Paris navigates documentary strategies in a directionless world.

By Wilco Versteeg

Henk Wildschut, Ville de Calais, 2016
© the artist

Everything about In Between (En suspens) is understated—except its politics. This group exhibition at LE BAL in Paris presents an outstanding slice of regionally diverse contemporary documentary projects. The show forgoes facile conclusions about the state of our visual culture, our politics, our failings and blind spots. Instead, it opts for a poetic, peripatetic tour without beginning or end.

Featuring thirteen artists from the United States, Africa, and Europe, In Between is a willingly unfinished and incomplete cartography of the most burning issues in documentary aesthetics today: the place of fiction in a medium feeding on reality; the place and function of the museum; the use of computer-generated imagery; the relevance of old-school photojournalism; and the overall political impotence of film and photography in an age that is oversaturated not only with images but also with autonomous image-making technologies. In Between lacks a central curatorial narrative; instead, it activates the visitor to forge links between the individual works. The catalogue, through its black-and-white reproductions and softcover binding, lacks the authoritative appearance and tone of the usual weighty tome accompanying shows. Instead, this ephemeral quality contributes to the ambiance of open-endedness of the exhibition.

Debi Cornwall, Welcome to Camp America: Inside Guantánamo Bay, from the series Beyond Gitmo, 2017
© the artist and Steven Kasher Gallery, New York

The exhibition spaces have been filled to capacity with photography, video, and prints, but nowhere does it feel overcrowded. Politics hover constantly above the artworks; In Between provides a map of post-9/11 conflict from a western as well as eastern perspective. Debi Cornwall’s impressive Beyond Gitmo shows former prisoners of the Guantánamo Bay detention center. Her large photographs are supplemented with short texts factually but tragically informing us how long they have been detained. Cornwall’s work maps ruined lives in times of perpetual war and failing international politics. Kurdish artist Hiwa K, in View from Above, shows the inhumanity of bureaucracy confronting asylum-seekers. Using computer-generated imagery based on the real-life statements of “M,” Hiwa K reconstructs a war zone, detailing a city “M” claims to be from to obtain refugee status. Fact and fiction entangle in a manner that leaves visitors wondering what the limits of both are in the context of documentary photography.

Hiwa K, still from View From Above, 2017
© the artist, KOW, Berlin and Prometeo Gallery di Ida Pisani, Milan

Henk Wildschut’s Ville de Calais perfectly illustrates the understated yet highly political nature of In Between. Wildschut photographs the subsequent construction, dilapidation, and removal of a refugee encampment in the dunes of Calais, a French border city. The improvised camp, deemed a symbol of the failure of European immigration policy and an affront to the supposed humanism of the European Union, harbored a handful of immigrants wishing to cross the channel to England in 2015, but reached thousands of inhabitants by the time it was dismantled at the end of 2016. Wildschut’s series, of which only a small selection is presented, shows the rise and fall of this micro-civilization: from early, primitive dwellings to a community with churches, mosques, grocery stores, and various competing neighborhoods. Between the appearance and disappearance of the camp, as if it were a natural process, we must imagine the lives of the people living in this landscape of decay.

Mélanie Pavy, still from Go Get Lost, 2018
© the artist

One important theme of In Between is surveillance and control. What is the role of visual artists vis-à-vis commercial and state apparatuses doing part of the artist’s job: mapping, showing, representing, and interpreting? Former Magnum photographer Luc Delahaye’s video installation Eyal Checkpoint was made with a smartphone filming a seemingly endless stream of Palestinians crossing into Israel to work. The mechanical sound of the turnstiles combined with the flux of fast-appearing and disappearing faces becomes unbearable if we consider the politics behind this seemingly quotidian event. Another work, a promotional video for a Chinese company, shows the state-of-the-art application of fully automated mining in a plethora of databases coupled with real-time facial recognition, thus entering into a dialogue with Delahaye’s more observational use of surveillance. Human agency seems to be rarer in today’s world, humans instead becoming the targets of the technology we invented.

Sebastian Stumpf, still from Puddles, 2013
© the artist and Galerie Thomas Fischer, Berlin

In Between walks in step with our time: our love-hate relationships with states of in-betweenness, with not knowing who we are, where we are going, and where our culture is headed. In short, in a time that is profoundly felt to be without direction, In Between does not provide answers but instead shows diverse routes in documentary practices that shed light on our culture at the crossroads. Our task is to actively engage with and navigate through this brave new world.

Wilco Versteeg is a researcher in visual culture and war photography at Université Paris Diderot.

In Between (En suspens) is on view at LE BAL, Paris, through May 13, 2018.

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