Aperture's Blog, page 102

Robert Gober’s Willful Revision

The sculptor’s rarely seen photographic series reveals the power of memory.

By Alex Jen

Robert Gober, Untitled, from the series 1978–2000, 1978–2000
Courtesy the artist and Matthew Marks Gallery

In 1978, the artist Robert Gober made photographs on a drive from Manhattan to Jones Beach on Long Island, printed them, and forgot about them. Twenty-two years later, in 2000, while making a group of photographs of washed-up litter near his studio in Peconic, Long Island, he recalled the images, but could only find the contact sheets. Gober rephotographed the contact sheets, leaving some as they were and digitally insetting the new photographs in others, snapping these memories together with a harsh, redacted precision. The result, 1978–2000 (1978–2000), originally compiled as an artist’s book for Gober’s presentation at the 49th Venice Biennale in 2001, and currently on view at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (ICA), frames moments of loss connected by place but obscured by time.

Robert Gober, Untitled, from the series 1978–2000, 1978–2000
Courtesy the artist and Matthew Marks Gallery

Gober does not privilege a numbering or sequence for 1978–2000. In one frame, the inset image of a glistening, greasy wheel blocks some fading apartments, interrupting the breezy drive like a bad memory. Once useful, the wheel now lingers as a gaping cavity; waves froth around it viciously, but it doesn’t budge. Another frame centers a putrid, bulging pack of Kraft Mayo against a forest haze of strange, jerky branches, while yet another shows two pale, hairy legs that lead into a tangled, billowing plastic bag, natural light suffusing the condensation built up on the inside. Both the mayo and the bag blister, waiting to be punctured, their contents bodily and overripe. 1978–2000 holds you precariously, the blur and grain in each photograph threatening to dissolve into smog.

Robert Gober, Untitled, from the series 1978–2000, 1978–2000
Courtesy the artist and Matthew Marks Gallery

In its layers of both time and image, in the rephotographing and reprinting, 1978–2000 implicates the decay and willful revision of memory. If you can remember memories differently, should you? This question hits an emotional center as the installation directs viewers into a corner. There, in one photograph, framed by the inner thighs of a subject’s heavy denim jeans, is a clipping from the March 5, 1999 issue of the New York Times, which details the homophobic torture, killing, and burning of Billy Jack Gaither in rural Alabama by Steven Eric Mullins and Charles Monroe Butler, Jr. Gober has cut out only a fragment of the article, however; the lack of the full story heightens the abruptness of our imagined violence of the crime. The adjacent photograph in the installation builds on this composition, as Gober’s hand blocks the clipping, gently holding a letter to the editor that demands “Orthodox Jews, conservative Christians and others” should have the right to oppose homosexuality without being seen as bigots. Gober believes in freedom of speech, even when it hurts.

Robert Gober, Untitled, 1994
Courtesy the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami

At the ICA, 1978–2000 is balanced out by Untitled, which sits at the center of the gallery and doesn’t, at first glance, take up much physical space. The sculpture consists of a bronze grate in the ground that leads down a bricked hole to reveal the bare, beeswax chest of a man. A chrome-plated drain is lodged where his heart should be, and a shallow film of water gurgles over him, swaying the human hairs on his body. The grate and drain are both walls and holes, blocking but letting us look through; they pull all the dregs toward them, to be sucked in and never seen again. Untitled frames the body and makes it the center of attention, but then blocks it—like 1978–2000 does with its photographs of once-used debris that obstruct memory. You can see your reflection in the water, a specter beside the sculpted body, whose wax torso appears alive; it heaves somewhere between peace and distress. You don’t want to leave, but eventually you have to. Neither you nor anyone else can help that trapped body anyway.

Alex Jen is a writer and curator based in Williamstown, Massachusetts.

Robert Gober is on view at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, through February 24, 2019.

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Photofairs Comes to San Francisco

Erica Deeman, Asaba, 2015. © the artist and courtesy Anthony Meier Fine Arts, San Francisco

Matt Lipps, Act IV (silver), 2016. © the artist and courtesy Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco

Hai Bo, South series, No. 28, 2012. © and courtesy the artist

Gohar Dashti, Home, 2017. © the artist and courtesy Robert Klein Gallery, Boston

John Chiara, Westline Drive at Mussel Rock, Variation 2, 2017. ©the artist and Courtesy Haines Gallery, San Francisco

Noémie Goudal, Telluris, 2017. © the artist and courtesy Les Filles du Calvaire, Parie

Sophie Clements, still from How We Fall, 2017. © and courtesy the artist

Tammy Rae Carland, Smoke Screen, 2013. © the artist and courtesy Jessical Silverman Gallery, San Francisco

Klea McKenna, still from Untitled, 2018. © the artist and courtesy Euqinom Projects, San Francisco

Wolfgang Tillmans, Paranal ESO, sky and ocean, 2012. © the artist and courtesy Sage, Paris

Erica Deeman titled her breakout spring 2017 solo show at San Francisco’s Anthony Meier Fine Arts Brown. Deeman, who was born in the UK and now lives in California, presented a series of portraits of men from the African diaspora, set against a backdrop the shade of Deeman’s own skin. The portraits drew comparison to the work of Rineke Dijkstra and Dawoud Bey, and announced a new talent in contemporary photography. Deeman’s powerful work, together with photographs by Tammy Rae Carland, John Chiara, Noémie Goudal, Matt Lipps, Alec Soth, and Wolfgang Tillmans, is among the many highlights to be found at Photofairs | San Francisco, which will also feature public conversations with artists David Benjamin Sherry and curators Virginia Heckert and Sarah Meister.

Photofairs | San Francisco will take place at the Festival Pavilion, Fort Mason Center, San Francisco, from February 23–25, 2018.

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Between Dusk and Dawn

Tobias Zielony captures the colors and moods of Ukraine’s queer nightlife.

By Camila McHugh

Tobias Zielony, Shed, from the series Maskirovka, 2016–17
Courtesy the artist and KOW, Berlin

Tobias Zielony’s work offers a lingering, sidelong view at communities at the edges of society. His images blur boundaries between documentary and fine-art photography, offering ambiguous, often fragmented scenes. Standing apart from documentary photography, Zielony, who was born in 1973 in Wuppertal, Germany, nevertheless directs his gaze at the apparatus of that form of storytelling. In Maskirovka (2016–17), a recent project made in Kiev (also spelled Kyiv), Zielony photographed the LGBT community living in the wake of the 2014 revolution. Maskirovka recalls Zielony’s early projects depicting youth, but it has a strong political undercurrent, as working in Ukraine allowed him to examine the current state of Europe. The project also became a mode of exploring the remaining possibility of underground culture, in an age where social media offers illusions of connectedness.

Zielony is a talker: He is informed and gets involved, often spending significant time with his subjects. He integrated himself into Kiev’s LGBT scene with the help of Tasia, an activist who is also part of the techno scene, whom he met at a workshop in Germany. In the monograph of Maskriovka, published last year, Zielony included extensive interviews as a companion to his shadowy photographs of these isolated figures with gazes askance, peering into a mobile phone, smoking a glowing cigarette, or standing on a threshold. He is interested in stretching the space between reality and the way it is depicted, communicating other forms of truth. I recently spoke with Zielony at his studio near Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin.

Tobias Zielony, Make Up, from the series Maskirovka, 2016–17
Courtesy the artist and KOW, Berlin

Camila McHugh: In your recent Maskirovka project in Ukraine, as well as subsequent projects in Latvia and in your hometown of Wuppertal, you’ve returned to photographing youth culture. You have photographed many young communities, often on the fringes of society, in the past—in Winnipeg, Canada, in 2009 and in rural California in 2008, for instance. What was it like returning to this sort of work?

Tobias Zielony: Well, the project in Ukraine was looking more attentively at political issues, but it is true that I hadn’t done a project on youth or underground culture for some time. So it was interesting to go back and see how much youth culture had changed, particularly in terms of fashion and social media. After photographing in Kiev, I photographed in Riga and Wuppertal, and it was so surprising how similar a lot of things are, especially the fashion. I was struck by how quickly this kind of mirroring is happening because of social media. There was something particular to Kiev, a sort of remaining underground feeling, which I don’t think you find many places anymore. We haven’t had it in Berlin for a long time. I think it is because in somewhere like Kiev, the community is politically and culturally isolated from normative society. Somewhere like Berlin, the boundaries have been blurred for a long time. It also felt like this culture hadn’t been commercialized yet in Kiev, at least during the moment when I was there. The underground community was more of a necessity or a matter of political resistance, so that felt very unique, and also quite warm, in terms of a sense of bonding and solidarity. But it may have begun to change already; I haven’t been back.

McHugh: How do you feel about documenting youth culture now that you’ve noticed this mirroring and other ways in which social media has affected young people?

Zielony: These shifts will inevitably affect the sort of work I am interested in making. Looking at youth culture wasn’t the main purpose of my work in Kiev, but it did make me think about what my role as photographer really is. It is an interesting dynamic, when people like my photos, but they aren’t perfect Instagram material or don’t quite fit the mold of what they consider cool. I often gift my photographs, and twenty years ago people would put them on their wall, but now they put them on Instagram the same night. And so their reaction is more immediate—you see what images people choose to post or like. And then people also started putting filters on the images. There was a guy in Riga who put this analog filter on my digital image with dust specks and everything. But instead of getting mad, I actually think it’s interesting. Or people crop or whatever, saturate the colors. But still I think—if I’m not really doing the coolest or most fashionable thing, it’s probably because I have a different role. You could say I transport a kind of aesthetics or political or cultural situation into a different context, like the art world, but I don’t know how different those contexts are anymore. The context of the art space and the social media space and the actual club—I don’t think it is so easy to distinguish between those spaces anymore. So I think it’s more about seeing connections and communicating my own experience. Or looking at something very specific, like the ideas of masks, which I focused on in Kiev. And then there is also the question of what audience I have in mind. Do my images from Kiev somehow make sense on some level to an audience in London or New York or Berlin?

Tobias Zielony, Shine, from the series Maskirovka, 2016–17
Courtesy the artist and KOW, Berlin

McHugh: There is a nostalgic click on some level for people in Berlin, like a yearning for what they imagine Berlin used to be. Or in London, as well, for the ’90s of early Wolfgang Tillmans, for example.

Zielony: I think that’s happening. There is a sort of desire in both directions. People all over the world, though maybe especially in Ukraine and Russia, are looking at this ’90s club culture and aesthetic and they’re copying it. Berlin is kind of the ultimate desire and ultimate cool for them. And then here in Berlin, people feel like things have changed so much and they want to return to the sense of community and wildness of a real underground scene, like the one in Kiev, for example. So there are different perspectives or forms of nostalgia at play. My work ends up positioned between those yearnings.

McHugh: As you mentioned, your work in Kiev also directly addresses the political situation there after the 2014 Ukrainian revolution. You titled the work Maskirovka, a term for a Russian military tactic of deception. How did you begin to think about the situation in Ukraine, and your work, in conversation with the term?

Zielony: Maskirovka is a term I was aware of even before the project began, but I came across it again in some research I was doing about masks in Ukraine. Tasia, one of the women who appears in the photographs and who I also interviewed for the project, noticed my interest in masks and began telling me how prevalent masks are in the Kiev party scene. I looked into it further and found that during the so-called Maidan revolution, people were wearing masks most of the time for protection from tear gas, smoke, and so on. And some people were even wearing fancier or funny masks, like medieval helmets and stuff. These masks became sort of a weird, popular, Pop art kind of thing in the face of violence. So in noticing this phenomenon of disguise, I began thinking about the word maskirovka. It’s a Russian term and there are lots of famous examples, like the disruption of the Prague Spring of ’68 and more recently the occupation of Crimea, which began in 2014. When Russia occupied Crimea, they sent special forces in green uniforms without any Russian insignia. Despite the lack of identifiers, it soon became evident that this was a Russian intervention, but by the time there was enough consciousness of what was going on to react, it was already done. This was followed by the conflict in eastern Ukraine, a proxy war that had not been declared. People also use maskirovka to refer to this hybrid state of undeclared, but evident, war or occupation.

Tobias Zielony, Cover, from the series Maskirovka, 2016–17
Courtesy the artist and KOW, Berlin

McHugh: Titling your project Maskirovka draws attention in part to the phenomenon of the masks: a few of your subjects appear in the masks that Tasia mentioned are popular clubbing accessories. What significance does this notion of a hybrid state have with regard to the work, or Kiev’s LGBT community?

Zielony: I suppose I’m playing with the possibilities of the term as a metaphor of sorts, but this hybrid state of undeclared war is also an everyday reality for the subjects of my photographs and for everyone in Kiev. Everybody is somehow involved in the war—as a volunteer soldier or a medic, or like Vicky, who I interviewed—she is a therapist who deals with people who have been traumatized. And then obviously everybody has someone close to them who was hurt or killed. Kiev is hugely affected, the wound of the war is present, the signifiers of tanks and people in uniform are there, but people hardly seemed to speak about it and no actual fighting is taking place. And it’s not clear when or how anything will change. If you look at the queer community specifically, it is also a strange situation, as Ukrainian leadership has made some moves toward tolerance: the police were protecting Kiev Pride instead of beating up participants this year, for instance. But then it’s dangerous to kiss or act out in the street. This creates a situation where people cautiously move between openness and hiding. A mask becomes an apt metaphor there, too.

Tobias Zielony, Apartment, from the series Maskirovka, 2016–17
Courtesy the artist and KOW, Berlin

McHugh: Your work is presented in an art context, but requires significant understanding of a political and cultural situation. You published a series of interviews with some of your subjects as a companion to the photographs, and the project took place in the wake of mass media coverage of Ukraine. You also studied both documentary and fine-art photography. Do you see your work as a hybrid of the two?

Zielony: Well, first it is important to say that the same photograph can have a different meaning depending on the context it is seen in. As you said, my work is intended for an art context, but also occasionally is presented editorially, like this work in the pages of Aperture. My strategy does have roots in something perhaps more editorial, that sort of storytelling. I’m kind of exploring that tradition—more like investigating the possibilities and limitations of that form of documentation, rather than really participating in it. It is kind of a referencing, in a sense.

McHugh: I noticed a similar motion in your interviews as well. By interviewing a fixer, for instance, you utilize a mode of sort of turning the lens toward the journalistic apparatus, as opposed to participating in it.

Zielony: Right—I am definitely not a journalist. There are a lot of journalistic standards that I’m not interested in participating in: I don’t feel obliged to tell the real story or the whole story or, on some level, even the truth. But there has to be another kind of truth in my work or, like, a lot of different truths. It’s not that I want to lie; the image has to be connected to my experience and the experience of the people around me.

Tobias Zielony, Line, from the series Maskirovka, 2016–17
Courtesy the artist and KOW, Berlin

McHugh: Right, I noticed that—similar to the sense of a glimpse into the edges or periphery of a world that I get from your photographs—your interviews also give space to narratives that remain outside of typical news media documentation. Like when Vicky spoke about exhaustion as a major effect of revolution, for instance.

Zielony: It’s so difficult to understand what’s going on and find the right pictures or the right words for it or whatever, so it’s interesting that everybody has their own theory. But I do think it is important to find words or images or characters, because otherwise you leave the higher powers to do the defining, whether it’s Russia or the Ukrainian government, and you don’t want to let them do their thing without any room for being able to describe or criticize what is going on.

McHugh: How do you see the role of photography in facilitating that form of definition?

Zielony: There is a relationship between reality and what comes out of it on an image level. And it’s all about this relationship basically, what’s happening in between, and what role photography or the camera plays in that process. At the moment, with the advent of Instagram and so on, what’s happening in “reality” and what photography is, are increasingly fixed together. I’m interested in what photography can do while maintaining some sort of space or distance from reality. That disconnect, almost. So when people ask me, it’s easier to say I’m a photographer, because it’s an easier way for them to understand what I’m going to do—I’m going to take photographs—but the way I think and build my life is more the life of an artist. I find that I am in kind of an in-between position, between the art and photography worlds, and it’s not very comfortable, but I think that is what photography is about. Or can be about.

Camila McHugh, a curator and art critic based in Berlin, is the cofounder and director of the project space East of Elsewhere.

Tobias Zielony’s work was featured in Aperture issue 229, “Future Gender.” His photobook Maskirovka was published by Mousse in 2017.

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The Many Worlds of Susan Meiselas

A comprehensive exhibition celebrates the photographer’s unique approach to storytelling.

Susan Meiselas, Debbie et Renee, Rockland, Maine, 1972, from the series, Carnival Strippers, 1972-1975. © the artist/Magnum Photos

Susan Meiselas, Returning home, Masaya, Nicaragua, 1978. © the artist/Magnum Photos

Susan Meiselas, Searching everyone traveling by car, truck, bus or foot, Ciudad Sandino, Nicaragua, 1978. © the artist/Magnum Photos

Susan Meiselas, Road to Aguilares, El Salvador, 1983. © the artist/Magnum Photos

Susan Meiselas, Concrete blocks mark the mass grave in Koreme, Northern Iraq, 1992. © the artist/Magnum Photos

Susan Meiselas, Mistresses Solitaire and Delilah I, the Dressing Room, 1995, from the series Pandora's Box. © the artist/Magnum Photos

Susan Meiselas, Janet, Room 9, Black Country, United Kingdom, 2015, from the series, A Room of Their Own. © the artist/Magnum Photos

The current retrospective of Susan Meiselas’s work, a coproduction of Jeu de Paume, Paris, and Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona, curated by Carles Guerra and Pia Viewing, spans four decades of photographs, up to her recent collaboration with women in domestic violence shelters in the U.K. “Trying to understand my relationship as a photographer to the subject as, or to, a community is consistently the preoccupation that has guided my work,” says Meiselas. The exhibition is a testament to the way Meiselas has continually asked herself that question over the years. Her photographs depict worlds as divergent as American carnival strippers, teenage girls in New York, and the peoples of Nicaragua, Kurdistan, and El Salvador.

Susan Meiselas is on view at the Jeu de Paume, Paris, through May 20, 2018.

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How to Witness Nothing (and Everything)

Photographer Edmund Clark and historian Crofton Black trace a network of black-site prisons.

By Edmund Clark

Edmund Clark, Bagram Airbase, from the old Soviet control tower, from the book Negative Publicity: Artefacts of Extraordinary Rendition, 2016
© the artist and courtesy Flowers Gallery, New York

In principle, to testify—not being a witness but testifying, attesting, ‘bearing witness’—is always to render public. The value of publicity, that is of broad daylight (phenomenality, openness, popularity, res publica and politics) seems associated in some essential way with that of testimony. The idea of a secret testimony seems thus a contradiction in terms. Especially when the experience of the secret itself implies some inner witness, some third party in oneself that one calls to witness. —Jacques Derrida

A giant cross stands on a mountaintop overlooking the city, outlined at night in bright white neon. A German citizen saw this view, twelve years ago, from a hotel room in Skopje, Macedonia. The American embassy is nearby, across the park, past the zoo. He was passed to the CIA after 23 days of interrogation in this room, by Macedonian government personnel. The layout fits my copy of his hand-drawn plan: top floor opposite the lift. His description of the view matches too; the cross, a broken chimney. Other details of his testimony differ from what is here now: the hotel has fewer floors; blue venetian blinds replace curtains; a smaller table. Have any of the three star fixtures and fittings been touched by us both? Do we share the same bed?

Edmund Clark, Room 11, Skopski Merak hotel, Skopje, Macedonia, from the book Negative Publicity: Artefacts of Extraordinary Rendition, 2016
© the artist and courtesy Flowers Gallery, New York

These words are written in room 11 of this side street hotel. I am trying to make sense of four years spent tracking and photographing sites of extraordinary rendition. I have witnessed nothing during this time, but the making of these photographs has become an act of testimony. It was not possible to see the secret journeys of extraordinary rendition or the interrogations that punctuated them, but it has been possible to glimpse the places and networks that circled them.

The photographs in this project show only surfaces of these events through detectable traces and liminal sites or objects: unremarkable streets, facades, furnishings, ornaments and detritus. It is the opacity of these images that reveals something of the condition of extraordinary rendition. Look at them and they show nothing. Look into them and they are charged with significance. They are veneers of the everyday under which the purveyors of detention and interrogation operated in plain sight. This is the banal complicity of today’s global war; the everyday absurdity and dread of Kafka’s world made real.

Edmund Clark, Richmor Aviation’s office at Columbia County Airport, New York, from the book Negative Publicity: Artefacts of Extraordinary Rendition, 2016
© the artist and courtesy Flowers Gallery, New York

*

Assembling a large format camera and tripod in a remote car park on the edge of Fayetteville airport, North Carolina, a man approaches from the low white building to enquire as to my purpose. We both know there is only one reason for my being there. I explain that I am photographing locations associated with extraordinary rendition and that his company has been mentioned in that context. He denies any involvement but acknowledges that I have the right to be there, requesting only that I don’t photograph his employees. I agree. Minutes later he returns with a point-and-shoot camera and says that he has the right to photograph me too, taking several shots of me and the number plate of my hire car. As I drive away, a police car appears and follows me to the airport perimeter.

Looking for meaning in unexpected areas began with the weak points of business accountability: the traceable bureaucracy of invoices, documents of incorporation and billing reconciliations from companies using the familiar paths and carriages of executive travel and global exchange. Pieces of paper bearing the traces of small-town and Small and Medium Enterprise America, seeking profit from the outsourcing of detainee transportation. Visually compelling and eloquent, as well as sources of evidence, they are the product of a circuitous journey by researcher Crofton Black, working for lawyers on behalf of the transported, to find links and join dots; to see through the bureaucratic and circumstantial to the forensic. The structure of this book is an evocation of this network, with a system of cross-referencing to suggest alternative paths through the forest of documents and images; an experience that by turns sheds light on the process and acknowledges its impenetrability.

Edmund Clark, A room formerly used for interrogations in the Libyan intelligence service facility at Tajoura, Tripoli, from the book Negative Publicity: Artefacts of Extraordinary Rendition, 2016
© the artist and courtesy Flowers Gallery, New York

Equally cogent are the documents and reports that seek to define the scale and experiences of extraordinary rendition. These include police files, human rights reports, national and transnational inquiries and internal secret service investigations. It is here that testimony of those caught up in the so-called Global War on Terror can be found and is reproduced, in fragments, in this book. So too can the counter-forensics of secrecy, censorship and obfuscation that shade the paths to accountability.

*

The documents and photographs in this project are archaeological. These are artefacts of research; things made by man; excavated, extracted, revealed. As traces of absence, or evidence, or that which makes anything evident (videre—to see—at its heart), their purpose is as part of a present forensic process into the procedure of extraordinary rendition. The existing narrative—where it can be seen at all—is easily obscured by denial and secrecy. It is perhaps as a record of such negative evidence—and as a document of negative publicity—that this work may form part of a future discourse and future history.

Edmund Clark is an artist based in London. This feature is adapted from the Aperture book Negative Publicity: Artefacts of Extraordinary Rendition.

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Alec Soth Revisits His Legendary First Book

How the American photographer fell in love with photography.

By Aaron Schuman

In 2004, Alec Soth published his seminal monograph Sleeping by the Mississippi to widespread critical acclaim, helping to establish both his own and the book’s place firmly within twenty-first-century photographic culture. After being out of print for nearly a decade, a new edition of Sleeping by the Mississippi was released by MACK earlier this autumn. Although it bears a striking resemblance to the original first edition, it also contains a number of subtle and revealing tweaks, and once again affirms the book’s remarkable power, relevance, and long-lasting resonance.

Alec Soth, Patrick, Palm Sunday, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 2002, from the book Sleeping by the Mississippi
Courtesy the artist and MACK

Aaron Schuman: To start, what’s it like for you to revisit Sleeping by the Mississippi today, thirteen years after it was first published?

Alec Soth: I’ve been in the process of looking back for some time now—not just to Sleeping by the Mississippi, but to my original motivations for getting into photography. As I’ve gotten older, and also as commerce has come into play, my relationship to the medium has changed; it’s so easy to get jaded. So, recently, I’ve been investigating those primal feelings that I had at the start. Reprinting this book made me think about the time when I first fell in love with the medium, but had also reached a certain level of competence; that’s the sweet spot. I’ve talked with many people about photographers’ first books—I think that what often makes them so strong is the photographer’s newness mixed with a certain amount of attained skill, but still without knowing too much. For a long time after making Sleeping by the Mississippi, I didn’t look at it because I just saw its flaws. But now I get that the flaws—or its naïveté—were essential to my passion at the time.

Schuman: Could you talk me through an example of a “naïve flaw” within Sleeping by the Mississippi?

Soth: As you can imagine, I’m still reluctant to point flaws out, but there are all sorts of things. For example, there’s one image of a hospital bed in a house, and too many things are perfectly placed within it. I had a tendency to fill up the picture and overdo it. That particular photo was made in a peculiar little town. I saw this amazing house, and then I saw the eerie hospital bed. It was one of those magical experiences that speaks to that primal feeling of photographers when they’re starting out, to the adventure of it. At the time, I didn’t have a career or this big identity as a photographer, so I was almost making sculptures and then photographing them; I was moving stuff around, playing in that space; there was a joyousness to it. But as a picture that eventually became part of a photobook with a quasi-documentary vibe, it’s kind of problematic. I wouldn’t do it that way now; maybe I’d strip things away and leave the bed itself. Also, beneath the bed in that picture there’s a hole in the floor; I love that. Today I might let that hole exist on its own.

Alec Soth, Kym, Polish Palace, Minneapolis, 2002, from the book Sleeping by the Mississippi
Courtesy the artist and MACK

Schuman: Obviously you can’t change the photographs themselves, but in reprinting a book there’s the opportunity to revise or “remaster” it in various ways, retrospectively. Yet in the new MACK edition, you’ve remained relatively true to the original.

Soth: This book has a peculiar little history. The first edition was done with Steidl; I loved the cover and everything else—it was perfect. We thought about reprinting it as a soft-cover trade edition, but for whatever reason we moved back to hardcover, and put a more commercial picture on the front—the one of Charles holding the airplanes—which in retrospect was a mistake. Nevertheless, that sold out quickly so we decided to do a third edition, but by then it felt like cheating to go back to the first cover, so I figured we should keep using different images on the cover. Then that edition sold out, things kind of stalled, I moved on to a different publisher, and the book stopped being reprinted. Years passed, and I occasionally thought about reprinting it again, but felt that it should probably coincide with the twentieth anniversary or whatever. Then last year, Michael Mack suggested we do it again, and I thought, Why not—let’s just do it and make it available. But there wasn’t any particular reason to do it, so I figured we could finally reprint it like the first edition: same essays, sequence, no changes. Then gradually, tiny little tweaks happened. At some point I decided to put one new picture in, at the beginning of the book. Originally, I’d made some photographs at the headwaters of the Mississippi, but even in 2004 I didn’t like them, and using one of those would have been a very obvious way to start the book. When I looked at my pictures again recently, I stumbled across a photo that’s not of the headwaters but looks like what the Mississippi might have been before mankind. In 2004, that picture wasn’t usable, because the first edition was made entirely from contact prints, and this particular image had vignetting in the sky. But today I can take the vignetting out digitally, so I introduced it into the new edition, before the title, and it really changes the feeling of the book. I liked the idea of starting the book with this very primal picture.

Alec Soth, Ste. Genevieve, Missouri, 2004, from the book Sleeping by the Mississippi
Courtesy the artist and MACK

Schuman: You’ve also made a slight change to the back cover of the new edition, incorporating a picture that depicts the Mississippi River. In the past, you’ve explained that you were reluctant for the book to be interpreted as a project literally about the Mississippi—the river was one underlying thread that tied it all together, but it wasn’t the focus. So it’s intriguing that both the newly added image—the “primal” landscape—and also the back cover are introducing the river back into the work.

Soth: It’s true. After Sleeping by the Mississippi I did Niagara (Steidl, 2006), and in that book I showed Niagara Falls a number of times. I’ve thought that if I did Sleeping by the Mississippi now I’d probably make more river-related pictures, which totally contradicts what I often say about it not being about the river, but I just think I’d have that impulse.

Schuman: You’ve added another new image at the end of the book—a picture of a large ball of twine in the corner of a room that’s been roughly stripped of its wallpaper.

Soth: I really love that picture, and regretted not including it in the first edition. But there’s always the page-count situation, which is something many readers may not consider: because of the way the signatures work within a book, you can only have a certain number of pages. Practical things like this came into the process of editing back then as well. But I have a real affinity for that picture. To me, so much of Sleeping by the Mississippi is about being creative in a modest way. I love thinking about someone collecting string, making this ball, and getting creative satisfaction from wrapping it larger and larger.

Alec Soth, Green Island, Iowa (Ball of String), 2002, from the book Sleeping by the Mississippi
Courtesy the artist and MACK

Schuman: You just mentioned how the practicalities of bookmaking often come into play when making various creative decisions. In returning to this book, what other aspects of this were you reminded of?

Soth: What was crazy about the first edition of Sleeping by the Mississippi was how fast so many major decisions were made. Originally, there were spreads with two pictures on facing pages, and at the very last minute I changed my mind, deciding to go with one image per spread; the original cover was decided upon very quickly; and so on. All those little decisions affected the book, so that’s something that I’ve kept in mind with other projects. It’s dangerous to work something to death, and sometimes—like when you make spontaneous choices photographing—you have to make spontaneous decisions when it comes to the edit and design of a book, in order to give it energy. That can be risky, and you make mistakes. I’ve made many mistakes in the past. But even with something relatively minor, like the addition of two pictures—I could fret over it for months, and ask hundreds of people if it works or not. But sometimes it’s fun to roll the dice and see what happens. Every decision comes into play. In the new edition, the color of the endpapers is different than in the original, and even something as seemingly minor as endpapers really helps give feeling to the book.

Schuman: The new edition’s endpapers are burnt orange, rather than the original white.

Soth: Exactly. An endpaper can give you this splash of color that introduces a subtle mood. One of the things that I learned early on as a photographer was that I knew nothing about design. So when it comes to a decision like that, I’ll ask them to suggest options. That burnt orange was one of the colors that MACK suggested, and it sets the mood perfectly. I haven’t lived with it very long, but I can already tell that it’s affecting my feeling for this edition: it’s like when filmmakers tint their film slightly amber, or how the music that plays while the credits are rolling subtly affects the feelings you carry with you when you leave a movie theater. The endpaper, in this very subtle way, gives this suggestion of feeling.

Alec Soth, Mother and daughter, Davenport, Iowa, 2002, from the book Sleeping by the Mississippi
Courtesy the artist and MACK

Schuman: Speaking of tint, when I looked at the first edition and new edition side-by-side, I noticed that there was a hint of warmth in the printing of the first edition, whereas the photographs in the new edition have a slightly crisper, more neutral feel.

Soth: There are a couple of factors there. Firstly, the paper has shifted; the original paper had whiteners in it that gave it more pop, but these yellow over time, particularly on the edges. To be honest, I can’t really tell how much of it is yellowing versus the tone of the original printing anymore—but yes, in the new edition we did try to correct this, and the pictures probably look a bit cooler overall. Plus, I see color differently now and have a better sense of printing. Also, the technology has changed in epic ways. I’m not an expert in printing by any means, but technological changes always come into play—even that stuff about optical whiteners, which I don’t really understand, keeps changing. And of course, there have been nine billion changes in terms of scanning and so on. So I mean, if Stephen Shore makes a new print of a 1970s image today, is he going to make it super-yellow? No. Don’t get me wrong—I might love the first edition of Robert Adams’s Summer Nights, and originally fall in love with the richness of all of the blacks; and then it gets reprinted, and all of a sudden it’s on nicer paper, and there are new details in the shadows. I still love the first one because my heart fell in love with it, but I also know how the new one is better. So, I would never reprint something poorly on purpose—and by no means am I saying the Sleeping by the Mississippi was poorly printed in the first case, which it definitely wasn’t—but changes happen, and like everyone I roll with them.

Schuman: When Sleeping by the Mississippi was released, it rapidly gained momentum and quickly became an established part of the “canon” of both photobooks and photography at large. What was that experience like for you?

Soth: It was totally unexpected, and I still don’t think it makes any sense. There was just no reason for it to become such a big thing. In a funny way, if it were to be published for the first time right now—because of Trump, Middle America, and all that—I could see why it might resonate. But back then there was no particular reason for it to become so huge; it still seems arbitrary and baffling. That said, I’m really happy that it was that book, because it is so profoundly connected to my basic impulses. Like the picture of Charles holding the airplanes—I’m so glad that’s my best-known photograph, firstly because I like it, and secondly because it’s about all of the things I’m still interested in.

Alec Soth, Charles, Vasa, Minnesota, 2002, from the book Sleeping by the Mississippi
Courtesy the artist and MACK

Schuman: Given the current issues in America that you mention—Trump, Middle America, etc.—do you feel like this book has taken on new meanings, or could evoke a sense of nostalgia?

Soth: The problematic part of talking about politics in relationship to this book is that I’ve always been a big defender of Middle America, saying that it’s far more interesting and complicated than people give it credit for. But I’ve become a little skeptical, sometimes thinking, Was I an idiot? Was I super naïve? Partly it’s because I haven’t been traveling in that part of the world very much in the last year, so I’m out of touch with real human lives, and am getting too much information from TV and media coverage. In terms of “nostalgia,” 9/11 is the ultimate turning point in terms of “before” and “after” in my life, and I’m genuinely nostalgic for pre-9/11. A lot of the pictures in Sleeping by the Mississippi were made before 9/11, and many were taken after, so it crosses that threshold. It’s not so much that I’m nostalgic for that time in history, but as a photographer it was exciting to be making something back then, and in making this new edition I’m able to feel it all again.

Schuman: Speaking of which, you’ve removed only one picture from the original edit—a snapshot of you standing on a ladder behind an 8-by-10 camera, with your head buried underneath a dark cloth, in the midst of a snowy field.

Soth: That picture was made at the beginning of my biggest trip for that project, probably around 2001, and was taken with a very early digital camera. Someone was driving by and they pulled over, wondering what was happening. So I went up and talked to them, and then said, “Hey, would you mind taking a picture of me with this camera?” and they took that picture. But the original digital file is long gone, so part of the issue with reprinting it was that we couldn’t find the file.

Alec Soth, New Orleans, Louisiana, 2002, from the book Sleeping by the Mississippi
Courtesy the artist and MACK

Schuman: But surely you could have scanned it from one of the book’s earlier editions?

Soth: Okay—as you well know, I’ve always been kind of embarrassed about that picture. But in my defense, there were two points to it. First, in a lot of photobooks from the 1970s you’d have this page where the photographer would list all of their technical information—what kind of camera they used, what film, what lens, etc.—and for a young photographer it’s the best, because you get all of that technical information, and you also get to imagine what it’s actually like to take the pictures. Second, there’s that picture of Joel Meyerowitz on the back of Cape Light, where he’s standing next to his 8-by-10 camera with his shirt off—I love that picture. So I think that’s what I was trying to do with that picture in the original version of Sleeping by the Mississippi. I could have kept it in this time around, but I couldn’t stomach it. I was self-conscious about putting it in again thirteen years later; I guess not being able to find the original file provided a good enough excuse to get rid of it.

Schuman: Considering all that’s happened to you since Sleeping by the Mississippi was first published, is it strange for you to look back at that anonymous, “naïve,” “passionate” kid standing on a ladder in the cold, entirely focused on trying to make a good picture?

Soth: That’s the thing about the release of this new edition—I’m currently in the thick of thinking about my earliest photographic impulses, and have been consciously trying to get back into that headspace. So the timing is quite good. When I was first making Sleeping by the Mississippi, I’d reached a point where I thought, No one cares—I can just do what I want, and it doesn’t matter. And lately, I’ve taken a period of time to just do whatever I want, even if that means making sculptures or doing sound pieces. They may never see the light of day, but I’ve given myself the space nonetheless. That’s the feeling I’m after, and that’s what Sleeping by the Mississippi represents to me. Apart from how it got out into the world, the actual shooting of that book had this incredible fairy dust all over it; it was magical and filled with the best luck. I now know that photography isn’t always like that, so this book is still a very special thing.

Aaron Schuman is a photographer, writer, lecturer, and curator. He is the author of FALLING (2017) and FOLK (2016), senior lecturer at the University of Brighton, and course leader of MA Photography at UWE, Bristol.

The post Alec Soth Revisits His Legendary First Book appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

The Fragility of Existence

With uncompromising directness, Margaret Courtney-Clarke photographs the lives and landscapes of Namibia.

By David Goldblatt

Margaret Courtney-Clarke, Gottlieb plays traditional Damara music at the funeral of Ouma Juliana ǂÛ-khui ǁAreses on the family farm beneath the Dâures. Uis District, Erongo Region, 6 December 2014
© the artist

Except perhaps for a thread of elegance that runs through most of her work, not any of Margaret Courtney-Clarke’s earlier photography prepared me for the work in her book Cry Sadness into the Coming Rain (2017). No hint of what she has done here could I find in my memory of our collaborations of the late seventies. Nor could I link what she has done in the past few years in Namibia with her photography on the art of African women in traditional societies. Fifteen years of work, unaccompanied journeys into remote parts of Africa, hardships, fevers and great risks resulted in three seminal and definitive books, yet all of them differed fundamentally from what we have here.

Margaret Courtney-Clarke, While Marta Rooinasie lives out her day in the nearby Klein Spitzkoppe Mountain digging for tourmalines, her Africanis dog Skrikkie (Afrikaans for “little fright”) guards her home, poultry and pigeons. Erongo Region, 9 January 2015
© the artist

Margaret returned to Namibia, the country of her birth and upbringing, in 2008 to live in Swakopmund on the edge of the Namib desert. Recovering from a life-threatening illness and the effects of its treatment, one might be forgiven for thinking that she would adopt a quiet life and write her memoirs. Instead, in photographs quite unlike anything she (or others) had done before, she embraced the reality of the Namib desert and its people with an extraordinary energy, acuity and devotion.

Margaret Courtney-Clarke, Ashanti Gaises was born and raised in Khorixas in north-eastern Namibia and has moved south with her baby in search of work. She drags a bag of cardboard boxes from an illegal dump on the outskirts to the DRC. Swakopmund, 4 March 2014
© the artist

The photographs she produced are about existence. They come from an awareness of the fragility of her own existence and from a symbiotic grasp of the ancient rhythms of the desert and the coast, the ways of life of its people, the traces of their passing and the seemingly inexorable advance of corporate and mining development. The photographs are bare of nostalgia, fat or facile certainties. They are eloquent of raw existence and offer faint glimmers of hope, of life scratched from an appallingly inhospitable terrain in the face of overwhelming societal transition. Yet these photographs attain a searing grace which is in no sense false to the reality but is, on the contrary, a rare synthesis of what is there with an intensely heightened and uncompromisingly honest vision.

Margaret Courtney-Clarke, A morning at the “amphitheater” in the sand dunes. Dorob National Park, 26 April, 2016
© the artist

Margaret’s relationship with the people she has photographed in this work is practical and intimate, never patronising, almost that of family rather than of compassionate observer. It is of a piece with the wholeness of her embrace. Using the sand of the desert she built a dwelling of sandbags with a family who had no home. She is a trusted friend of the women and children who scavenge the garbage dumps. She puts children into school and confronts municipal officials over their treatment of landless people. Deep into the desert she goes to friends and she knows their life. She celebrated her birthday with a family of peasant farmers who slaughtered a goat in her honour. When she heard of two children who had died of snakebite, she raised money for their coffins and travelled 230 kilometers on a rough desert track to be at their funeral.

Margaret Courtney-Clarke, Tattered by wind and burnt by the sun, an effigy made by Tolikie Dausab is meant to attract buyers/tourists to his pile of rose quartz stones on the side of the road. A road grader returns to camp for the night. Uis District, Erongo Region, 8 August 2015
© the artist

In her earlier work Margaret’s concern was the art of African women. In this work her involvement is with the people themselves and their place. Like a pulse in the background her involvement throbs with anger and love. Anger at the stunting of lives, the blunting of hope, the desecration of the Namib and her own frailty, when there is so much to tell. Not the least of which is love.

David Goldblatt is a photographer based in Johannesburg. This text is reproduced from the foreword to Margaret Courtney-Clarke’s photobook Cry Sadness into the Coming Rain, published by Steidl in 2017.

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Framing Justice

How do photographs tell the story of citizenship in the United States? Sarah Lewis, guest editor of Aperture magazine’s summer 2016 issue, “Vision & Justice,” recently asked this question to her class at Harvard University. Here are five reflections from participating students.

Wayne Miller, Sgt. Johnie Morgan and his Korean wife, Blue (nickname for Lee Yong Soon) greet the former’s mother after arriving in the US, Seattle, Washington, 1950
© the artist and Magnum Photos

The Racial Assimilation of America’s “First Korean War Bride”

By Nathan Cummings

On November 5, 1951, Life magazine published an article that claimed to profile “the first Korean war bride to arrive in America” along with her new American GI husband. Although the woman’s real name was Lee Yong Soon, the article referred to her as “Blue,” a nickname she had been given by American soldiers in Korea during her work there as a telephone operator.

Life’s breathless coverage of Lee’s arrival in Seattle reflects an imminent shift in American attitudes and policy toward Asian immigrants. Only thirty years earlier, the U.S. Supreme Court had explicitly excluded foreign-born Asians from the category of “free white persons” in a series of cases including Ozawa v. United States (1922) and United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind (1923), making them ineligible for citizenship. A year after Lee’s arrival, however, the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 (also known as the McCarran-Walter Act) repealed this category and allowed certain categories of Asian immigrants—in particular, the wives of American soldiers—to become naturalized. As “America’s first Korean war bride,” Lee represented this future prospect. Even so, the Life article reflected the paternalism and ethnocentrism that defined white Americans’ apparent embrace of Lee and her fellow “war brides.”

In the article, photographer Wayne Miller captures Lee’s arrival in Seattle as she and her husband, Sgt. Johnie Morgan, are warmly welcomed by Morgan’s parents. One full-page photograph is captioned: “Homecoming kiss squeezes Blue between Johnie and his mother.” The image embodies the simultaneous assimilative pressure and cultural isolation experienced by Korean military spouses. Sgt. Morgan and his mother flank a smiling Lee, symbolically adopting her into their domestic unit; yet the photograph’s vertical hierarchy—along with the oddly romantic aura of the sergeant kissing his mother—casts Lee as a juvenile member of this unit, subordinated beneath parental control. The intimacy of the Morgans’ kiss further suggests a level of cultural connection that Lee is unable to access, leaving her paradoxically marginalized, even though she’s “squeezed” at the center. Moreover, the tight, symmetrical framing furthers this narrative: with her body obscured by a Western military coat, Lee is reduced to an isolated Asian face swaddled within the fabric of her new country. Her forward gaze reflects the implicit burden of this position—she must choose between isolation and assimilation, as the article’s use of Lee’s American nickname suggests.

In Miller’s other photographs, Lee is shown performing a vision of domestic life in the United States: eating dinner with the Morgans and cooking her husband’s favorite “Carolina-style” gravy. Published in the pages of Life, these images would have helped create what historian Grace M. Cho calls a “fantasy of honorary whiteness,” which acted to erase Korean military spouses’ cultural heritage in the eyes of the American public. In her 2008 book Haunting the Korean Diaspora: Shame, Secrecy and the Forgotten War, Cho argues that Korean spouses were expected to accept and participate in this “willful forgetting of . . . the violent and intimate history shared by Korea and the United States.” Even though the category of “free white persons” was no longer a prerequisite for foreign-born Asian citizenship, whiteness remained an aspirational ideal that Asian immigrants like Lee were expected to pursue.

Nathan Cummings studies American history and literature at Harvard University.

Bill Hudson, A 17-year-old civil rights demonstrator, defying an anti-parade ordinance of Birmingham, Alabama, is attacked by a police dog, May 3, 1963
© the artist and AP Photo

In Birmingham, Enduring Emblems of Authority and Violence

By Josiah Corbus

The German shepherd lunges, teeth bared. The black adolescent grimaces, midriff exposed. The white policeman clenches both fists: one wielding his predator, the other clutching his prey.

Bill Hudson’s May 3, 1963, photograph tells a story that arrays white authority and its attendant violence, emblematized by the police dog, against an unarmed black teenager. As the policeman yanks the boy, Walter Gadsden, a seventeen-year-old student at Birmingham’s Parker High School, to the right, the dog lunges to the left, creating a diagonal line that bolts across the frame. Hudson, an Associated Press photographer who was in Alabama to cover the Birmingham Children’s Crusade, captures the instant before the spearhead of this diagonal—the dog’s open maw—pierces the boy’s stomach, thereby leaving viewers to imagine the impending tear of flesh.

The next day, Hudson’s photograph ran on the Saturday front cover of nearly every major newspaper in the country. The New York Times printed it above the fold and across three columns, below the headline, “Violence Explodes at Racial Protests in Alabama.” Upon seeing the photograph, President John F. Kennedy said he felt “sick” and dismayed.

James Bevel, Martin Luther King, Jr., and other Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) leaders had come to Birmingham hoping to expose the violence of Commissioner of Public Safety Bull Connor’s racist regime. Hudson’s photograph and others depicting the May 3 police crackdown achieved this objective and forced viewers across the country to confront the harm that violent policing had inflicted on young African Americans engaged in nonviolent resistance. These images mobilized public opinion. As Diane McWhorter, a scholar of the Birmingham campaign, has argued, they “shifted international opinion to the side of the civil rights revolution.” This shift contributed to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, among other legislative achievements.

The broad resonance and persuasive power of Hudson’s photograph stems from the ways its visual story connects to longstanding experiences of authority and violence in the United States. Historian Walter Johnson has explored how the structure and perpetuation of slavery depended on violence, including the use of hunting dogs to track down so-called fugitives. In the wake of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, African Americans continually faced the threat of violence. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, public lynchings and their visual reproductions enforced white racial hegemony. Hudson’s image highlights how state-sanctioned violence against African Americans persisted into the mid-twentieth century. In today’s world, where images and videos of struggles between police and African Americans have proliferated, Hudson’s depiction of white authority wielding violence on black bodies feels all too familiar.

Josiah Corbus is a senior at Harvard College, where he studies American history and literature, and directs an educational enrichment program for underserved local youth.

Edward S. Curtis, Maricopa women gathering fruit from Saguaro cacti, Arizona, 1907
Courtesy the Library of Congress

“Aliens” in America

By Ted Waechter

John Elk was an alien. Likely a survivor of repeated forced removals, Elk renounced the Winnebago tribe, to which he was born, about a year before trying to vote in Omaha, Nebraska. But in Elk v. Wilkins (1884), the Supreme Court ruled that he was not a U.S. citizen because, like other “Indians,” he “owed immediate allegiance” to his tribe, an “alien” nation.

Though at the time naturalization laws varied by state, they often required indigenous people to reject their tribes and prove they had “adopted” the habits of “civilized life.” In citizenship ceremonies, men were directed to trade their bow and arrow for a plow, symbolically abandoning the “life of an Indian,” as Frank Pommersheim writes in Broken Landscape: Indians, Indian Tribes, and the Constitution (2009), for the “life of the white man—and the white man lives by work.” Naturalization thus entailed reconstituting oneself racially through rules and rituals that discursively linked citizenship, civilized-ness, and whiteness. The indigenous person thereby embodied the dual definition of an alien given by Ulrike Küchler, Silja Maehl, and Graeme Stout in Alien Imaginations: Science Fiction and Tales of Transnationalism: both a noncitizen foreigner and something inhuman, removed from civilization.

This dual meaning of “alien” is at work in Edward S. Curtis’s Maricopa women gathering fruit from Saguaro cacti (1907). Taken near Arizona’s Gila River, home to the Maricopa since the sixteenth-century, the photograph foregrounds three women and a towering saguaro. Curtis exaggerates the saguaro’s height by severing it at the top of the frame, making it appear so tall that it dwarfs the women by comparison. Land domination is central to notions of civilization and humanity in Judeo-Christian theology, but nature dominates the Maricopa in Curtis’s composition. Because these tiny-looking women are nameless racial types, their faces obscured by shadow, they stand in for all members of an “uncivilized” race.

In Maricopa women Curtis rhymes the women’s bodies with the saguaros behind them, and both the human figures and cacti are rendered in similar shades of gray. Their shadows are identical. And the saguaros’ grooves and ridges find both formal and textural equivalents in stripes and folds in the women’s dresses, patterns on their baskets, and streaks in their hair. By likening the Maricopa women to cacti, Curtis makes indigenous bodies appear as inhuman features of the landscape. But how can natives be foreign? Believing Native Americans to be a “vanishing race,” Curtis makes them foreigners from a distant time. He deliberately hides evidence of missionary contact, which had begun years prior, and as Brenda McLain and Tobi Taylor explain in a 2006 issue of American Indian Art Magazine, he uses the tropes of Pictorialism—a nostalgic, soft-focus style of photography—to portray “Indians as ancient relics fixed in a permanent, ahistorical past.”

Turn-of-the-century discourse linked citizenship, civilized-ness, and whiteness through narratives of the land: whites claimed it for the mission of manifest destiny, dominated it as an index of humanity, and even incorporated plows in citizenship ceremonies. Whites justified the disenfranchisement of indigenous people by representing them as aliens, inhuman foreigners—yet their age-old relationship to the land undercut assertions of their foreignness. By portraying Maricopa women and thousands of other indigenous subjects as extratemporal relics of the past, Curtis subverts indigenous people’s history and casts them as foreigners from a distant time, alien invaders of the present.

Ted Waechter is a senior at Harvard College.

Dorthea Lange, Baseball players in a huddle, Manzanar Relocation Center, Manzanar, California, 1942
Courtesy the Online Archive of California, Berkeley, California

Home Field Disadvantage

By Christopher Chow

On February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which authorized the eviction of Japanese Americans to U.S. concentration camps for the “protection against espionage and sabotage.” Several months later, on Memorial Day 1942, Fred Korematsu was arrested in San Leandro, California, for evading eviction. Yet Korematsu, who had previously attempted to alter his appearance with plastic surgery, resisted again. In federal court, he argued that the executive order violated the Fourteenth Amendment. But the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the order in the 1944 case Korematsu v. United States. This ruling legitimized the cultural hysteria that discounted the citizenship of Japanese Americans for racist fears linking their biological ancestry to treachery.

During the same cultural moment, the photographer Dorothea Lange sought to dignify Japanese Americans living in internment. In one photograph from Manzanar, California, she depicted a group of eight boys holding each other closely. The extended caption reads: “Baseball players in a huddle. This game is very popular with 80 teams having been formed to date. Most of the playing is done in the wide firebreak between blocks of barracks.” Lange’s description preserves the anonymity of the boys: with turned backs and hidden faces, they might be any baseball players in a huddle. The absence of social markers in the photograph foregrounds the boys’ national belonging. No matter their ethnicity, they participate in American culture by playing the nation’s favorite pastime.

But internment policies displaced Japanese American families from their homes to concentration camps without regard for their belonging. In the photograph, shacks and telephone poles form a repetitive middle ground before the backdrop of the mountains. The built elements of the landscape mark Manzanar as the site of a concentration camp, and accordingly, the boys as Japanese American interns therein. Lange both documents the emotional emptiness of their displacement and appears to sympathize with them; she centers their bodies within the barren camp at eye level. This framing underscores the open bleakness of internment life, but it also directs focus to the contrasting intimacy of the boys’ huddle. The boys stand anchored here, contained within the camp, but convivial in their spirit nonetheless.

Outside the boys’ circle, Lange observes the tragic irony of Japanese displacement. The conspiracy of their enclosed formation and anonymity touches on the fears of spying that justified the decision of Korematsu v. United States. And like Fred Korematsu, who tried to hide his identity, the boys here are concealed, too. But while they cover their faces and themselves with each other’s bodies, they huddle neither to evade eviction nor hide from American troops. The boys are merely strategizing for their next home run: they are players of the national sport, yet victims of a national suspicion they did nothing to deserve.

Christopher Chow studies history and literature at Harvard University.

Paul Fusco, Women in mourning were joined by their husband in protesting against police brutality, NYC, 2000
© the artist and Magnum Photos

The Veiled Truth

By Larisa Owusu

On February 4, 1999, four undercover NYPD officers in the Bronx mistook Amadou Diallo, a Guinean immigrant, for a serial rapist. By the end of the confrontation, Diallo fell victim to forty-one shots, nineteen of the bullets piercing through his body, obliterating his spleen, kidney, liver, aorta, intestine, and spinal cord. The reason for this use of excessive force? The officers assumed that Diallo was reaching for a gun. In fact, he was searching desperately for his wallet to prove his identity.

Over a year later, at a protest against police brutality outside the United Nations, a protester held up a sign that read: “Go ahead and shoot. I’m black so it must be justified.”

One of the most striking details of this photograph by Paul Fusco, who covered the demonstration, is a veiled woman. The woman’s obscured face mirrors how every facet of Diallo’s encounter with the police officers was veiled, unclear: Diallo’s mistaken identity as a rapist; the undercover police officers; Diallo’s desperate last attempt to reveal who he really was. The contrast between the darkness of the veil, and the light that strikes the photograph she holds of Diallo’s face, serves as a stark reminder of the official portrait Diallo urgently tried to reach for in order to bring light to his identity. The black hands caressing his image seem to suggest a silent understanding: “I see you. I acknowledge you. I stand for you.” Unlike in his fateful encounter with the officers, Diallo, in Fusco’s photograph, is finally visible.

Ten years before Diallo died at the hands of NYPD officers, the Supreme Court case Graham v. Connor (1989) created a set of standards that determines when an officer can use excessive force. In 1984, in Charlotte, North Carolina, Dethorne Graham, a diabetic, was falsely accused of theft after leaving a convenience store where he was trying to buy some juice. A Charlotte officer, M.S. Connor, stopped Graham’s friend’s car, and in the ensuing altercation, Graham was injured. Following District and Appeals Courts rulings in favor of the police, the Supreme Court argued for the concept of “objective reasonableness,” a test based on the Fourth Amendment’s standards against unwarranted search or seizure. The court officially stated that the decision to use force “must be judged from the perspective of a reasonable officer on the scene, rather than with the 20/20 vision of hindsight.”

But, how effective is “objective reasonableness”? The court’s decision itself serves as a veiled conclusion. It is yet another way to conceal the injustice of unwarranted excessive force. The solution to police violence is not to put more power in the hands of aggressors. Amadou Diallo is proof of that. The 282 black individuals who lost their lives to police in 2017 are proof of that. Instead, the solution is, finally, to see past the veil, and to acknowledge black bodies as worth saving.

Larisa Owusu is a Ghanaian American first year student at Harvard University.

Read more from Aperture, Issue 223, “Vision & Justice.”

The post Framing Justice appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

Peter Hujar’s Italian Reverie

From the underground art star, a delicate picture of youth.

By Joel Smith

Peter Hujar, Boy on Raft, 1978
© The Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, and courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York, and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

In the early 1970s, in New York, Peter Hujar shuttered the commercial studio on Madison Square he’d been operating for a few years, moved into the East Village loft he would call home for the rest of his life, and turned his back on the hustle of fashion photography. Hujar’s enduring status as an underground art star is owed to what he called his “personal work,” which consumed him from then until his death in 1987—in particular, portraits of the famous and infamous among his generation of artists based downtown (which, by some counts, was the last).

But to associate Hujar only with portraits is to miss out on an oeuvre of great depth and variety. Rather than being a portraitist who did other work besides, he was a well-rounded artist for whom portraiture provided a moral anchor: it was his model for art making as the fixing and framing of a moment of intense identification with a subject. Empathy was Hujar’s emotive signature, whether he was shooting a drag performer under studio lights, the dappled surface of the Hudson River, or a cube of compacted scrap metal.

Hujar photographed this teenager on a chunk of Styrofoam in an Italian coastal town in the summer of 1978. A look at the contact sheet (one of over fifty-seven hundred of Hujar’s at the Morgan Library & Museum) reveals that artist and subject occupied separate spaces: Hujar was on the promenade, watching locals roughhouse on the rocky shore below. The boy—who appears in just one frame, marked with a red dot—is exposed to the elements, but to the camera he gives only a deeply shaded profile. Anonymity makes him readable as a focus of either desire or projection: self-portrait as a youth on a precarious raft.

Hujar was forty-three that summer, with one book to his name (the largely overlooked Portraits in Life and Death from 1976), and he was intensely aware that the slow maturation of his art had left him behind the curve of such nakedly ambitious peers as Robert Mapplethorpe. But here, under the warm natural light of a place where no one knew him, he was at his freest and at his fullest strength, and the world of beauty was his oyster.

Joel Smith is the Richard L. Menschel Curator of Photography at the Morgan Library & Museum and contributor to Peter Hujar: Speed of Life, published by Aperture in 2017.

Peter Hujar: Speed of Life is on view at the Morgan Library & Museum, New York, through May 20, 2018.

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American Prospects

Tina Barney zooms out in a new series of landscapes.

Tina Barney, High School Band, 2017. © the artist and courtesy Paul Kasmin Gallery

Tina Barney, 4th of July on Beach, 1989. © the artist and courtesy Paul Kasmin Gallery

Tina Barney, Tennis Court, 1988. © the artist and courtesy Paul Kasmin Gallery

Tina Barney, Weekapaug Surf, 2017. © the artist and courtesy Paul Kasmin Gallery

Tina Barney, Bike Parade, 2017. © the artist and courtesy Paul Kasmin Gallery

Tina Barney, Bay Street, 1988. © the artist and courtesy Paul Kasmin Gallery

Tina Barney, Fun Slide, 2017. © the artist and courtesy Paul Kasmin Gallery

Tina Barney, The River, 2017. © the artist and courtesy Paul Kasmin Gallery

Known for her lush and precise portraits of upper-echelon American families, Tina Barney, in a new body of work, has reimagined her subjects at a distance. In Landscapes, her current exhibition at Paul Kasmin Gallery, she pans out from the individuals themselves, placing landscape at the forefront. Although many were taken in the last year (with a few, previously unseen works from the ’80s), Barney’s East Coast landscapes strike a similar mood as her previous work. In an interview from 1995, Barney noted that her photographs “are based on nostalgia, not only on the nostalgia of this place as opposed to the West Coast where I was living, but also nostalgia for my own childhood.” More than two decades later, in these large-scale color prints, Barney depicts classic scenes celebrating American traditions: Fourth of July parades, state fairs, tennis courts, beachside barbecues, and a high school sporting event sprinkled with cheerleaders and marching band players. Barney’s landscapes expand upon the theatricality of American wealth and prosperity, and widen the stage she has been working on throughout her career. Even in the most still moments or sparsely-populated scenes, these works appear choreographed by tradition.

Tina Barney: Landscapes is on view at Paul Kasmin Gallery, New York, through March 3, 2018.

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