Aperture's Blog, page 103

The Fearless Lynsey Addario

Katie Couric interviews the lauded photojournalist about her adventures abroad and her challenges at home.

Lynsey Addario, Taimaa Abazli, 24, holds her new baby Heln in their tent at the Karamalis camp in Thessaloniki, Greece, 2016
© the artist

Lynsey Addario has been kidnapped twice, was ambushed by the Taliban, and is one of the few photojournalists who has experience working in Afghanistan. A Pulitzer Prize winner, Addario regularly shoots for publications such as the New York Times, National Geographic, and Time. Her biography, It’s What I Do: A Photographer’s Life of Love and War (2015), is currently being developed as a movie to be directed by Steven Spielberg, and is slated to star Jennifer Lawrence. Most recently, Addario has been focusing on the lives of Syrian refugees, including the lives of three babies whose families have been seeking refuge in Europe.

In an interview with Katie Couric at the annual ICP Spotlights luncheon last November, Addario confided, “Most of the time I’m photographing, I’m weeping.” Her immense empathy carries into the projects that she takes on. Addario used her MacArthur fellowship to concentrate on maternal health and mortality, and she speaks passionately about documenting the tragic effects breast cancer in Uganda. Her photographs do nothing to hide the horrors to which she bears witness, but they emphasize a shared humanity, a social responsibility too often neglected by those who can afford to ignore the world’s cruelties. Addario allows—even compels—viewers to see themselves on the other side of her lens, despite differences of race, gender, age, or nationality.

—Annika Klein

Lynsey Addario, Captain Emily Naslundm, patrols through the village of Soorkano, Afghanistan, May 7, 2010
© the artist

Katie Couric: Let’s start at the very beginning, as Maria von Trapp would say. Why did you decide to become a photographer?

Lynsey Addario: I started photographing very young. I was timid. I was terrified to photograph people. Then, in 1999, the Associate Press asked me to do a story on transgender sex workers in the Meatpacking District. There had been series of murders in that community, and when Mayor Rudy Giuliani received a report about these murders, he had allegedly called them “the throwaway community.” I spent about six months of every single Thursday, Friday, and Saturday night in their apartments, going out on the streets with them. I realized that most people don’t have any idea that they’re human beings, that they have a life.

When I first started, the camera felt so obtrusive. I was too shy to walk up to people and take their picture. But now, my camera is exactly the reason I can walk up to people because I have an excuse.

Couric: How has your work evolved over the years? I imagine that you probably look back to some of your earlier work and think, Ugh.

Addario: I went to Afghanistan when it was under the Taliban in 2000, and it was one of the first difficult trips I had taken, one of the first times I had traveled to a war zone. I was twenty-six years old. I borrowed money from my sister, and I called my mom the night before leaving, and said, “Mom, I’m going to Afghanistan tomorrow,” and she said, “Okay, honey! Have a good time!”

I was one of the few people who went into Afghanistan under the Taliban and actually photographed there because photography was illegal at the time. Families would open up their homes and school their little girls at home, which was illegal under the Taliban. I look at these photographs and think, “Ugh, if I could have these opportunities today, with the technical skills I have now, then it would be such a different body of work.”

Lynsey Addario, An Iraqi woman walks through a plume of smoke rising from a massive fire at a liquid gas factory as she searches for her husband in the vicinity, Basra, Iraq, May 2, 2003
© the artist

Couric: Do you remember the experience of going to Iraq and being so up close and personal?

Addario: In 2003, the only way to get into Iraq—if you didn’t have a visa from the government, from Saddam before he fell—was to sneak in through Iran into northern Iraq. I didn’t go with the military because I wasn’t sure I would have the courage to be with them. I had never been in full-on combat. I thought, Why don’t I go to northern Iraq, and if there’s a humanitarian crisis, I’m well positioned. I didn’t think I’d see combat there.

About a month in, there was a proxy war going on with Ansar al-Islam, which was linked to Al Qaeda, and they were being fought by Kurdish Peshmerga backed by American special forces. We started covering that war. There was one day when the Americans fired dozens of cruise missiles into Iraq, into their area. We as journalists—for the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, there was a group of us—went to that area where the cruise missiles were fired because we wanted to see if there were civilian casualties.

I was photographing, and, suddenly, the locals started warning us to get out. We reconvened the journalists; there were about fourteen of us. We said, “Okay, we should go.” Everyone is warning us to leave. I was standing next to this TV camera man, and we were shooting side by side this truckload of Peshmerga. I got this feeling in the pit of my stomach, and I dropped my camera, and ran back to the car, and I shut the door, and a car bomb went off at that truckload of Peshmerga. The guy that I had been standing with was killed.

We didn’t know what happened. In those moments you have no idea, all you know is that you have to get out. We fled to a school where there were wounded being unloaded. A taxi driver pulled up and he said, “Is anyone here a journalist?” I said, “I am.” He said, “I have the body of a journalist in the back of my car. Can you help me identify him?” I thought I was going to throw up, and I ran to the back of the school and just started crying and thinking, “I don’t want to do this for a living. This is horrible.”

Lynsey Addario, An Iraqi man leans against a wall as he walks along rows of remains of bodies discovered in a mass grave south of Baghdad, now laid out in a building in Iraq, May 29, 2003
© the artist

Couric: Did you identify him?

Addario: No, I couldn’t look. I asked Elizabeth Rubin, who was there, to look, because she was much more seasoned than I was. There was no way to get out of the country because I didn’t have another visa for Iran and Saddam Hussein had not fallen. So I had to stay, but I was terrified.

Couric: There have been many other terrifying situations, I know. One was the Korengal Valley. What were you doing there, and why was it such a scary place?

Addario: In 2007, Elizabeth Rubin for The New York Times Magazine wanted to do a story about why there were so many civilian casualties in Afghanistan.

If we had the best military in the world—

Couric: So-called “smart bombs.”

Addario: Right. We were trying to figure out what was going on, so we asked to go to the heart of the war, where it was most dangerous, and the U.S. military was dropping the most bombs. Elizabeth and I went to the public affairs officer, and said, “Hi, we’d like to go to the Korengal Valley.” We were already in Afghanistan. The guy just looked us over and said, “Mm, it’s not really a place that’s fit for women.” And we’re like, “Why?” And he said, “There’s no place for you to sleep, and there’s no place for you to go to the bathroom.” And we looked at him and were like, “Well, where do men sleep? Where do men go to the bathroom?” He said, “They sleep in bunkers.” And we said, “We can do that.” He got flustered because, at that point, women in the military were not allowed on the front lines, but there was no rule for journalists. He said, “Come back tomorrow,” and we went.

We spent two months living on the side of the mountain with the troops. At the end there was Operation Rock Avalanche, which was a battalion-wide operation. We were airlifted in Black Hawks, and jumped out of Black Hawks in the middle of the night on the side of the mountain, and walked for a week with everything we owned on our backs. On the sixth day, we were ambushed by the Taliban.

Lynsey Addario, Soldiers with the 173rd Airborne, Battle Company, on a battalion-wide mission in the Korengal valley on the Abas Ghar ridge line, October 23, 2007
© the artist

Couric: Another place we were going to talk about was when you were meeting the Taliban, when you were really frightened—understandably so. Paint a picture for us.

Addario: Exactly a year later, Dexter Filkins, who is now with The New Yorker but was with the New York Times at the time, called me up and said he had this great story on the Talibanization of Pakistan. My husband, who was my boyfriend at the time, said, “You’re not going to meet the Taliban.” I was like, “No, absolutely not. Why would I do such a thing?”

Of course, a month later, we were invited to meet Haji Namdar. They said the one thing you can’t do is to bring a woman. Our translator, who was basically Taliban, said, “Can’t Mr. Dexter take your camera and take photos?” And I was like, “No, Mr. Dexter can’t.” [Audience laughs.] They dressed us up as husband and wife. All Taliban will understand is that you can’t leave your wife in this strange village, so you have to go together.

Couric: How did he explain that his wife happened to have a camera?

Addario: We go to Haji Namdar’s compound, and I’m fully veiled—I can’t see anything. I go in this very small room with fifteen to twenty fighters and they all have their weapons and rockets. It’s very awkward because women don’t leave their house in this part of the world. I’m stumbling in, and sit down behind Dexter, who says, “Hey, Haji Namdar, man, thanks for welcoming my wife. She happens to have a camera, do you mind if she takes a few photos?” [Laughs.] At that point, the fact that there was a woman in the room was so awkward that it didn’t matter what I did.

Lynsey Addario, Pakistani Taliban fighters in Bar Kambar Khel, in the Pakistani tribal area near the border of Afghanistan, July 4, 2008
© the artist

Couric: Let’s talk about your scariest experience of all, which was in Libya. Why were you there, and what was going on at the time?

Addario: When the Arab Spring started in Egypt and Tunisia, I was on assignment for National Geographic in Iraq. But, eventually, I went into Egypt and crossed illegally into Libya. In many of these cases, that’s how you cover an uprising, because the government doesn’t want journalists there. Almost immediately, the war started. None of us thought there would be combat, because we expected it to be an uprising, like in Egypt. None of us had flak jackets or helmets, or any of the combat gear that we needed. But there was a call to arms, and, suddenly, we started moving forward on the front line with some of the rebels. It was unbelievable, it was not like anything I’ve ever seen because there was no place to hide. It was in completely flat desert. We were with guys who had no training at all. Often the journalists had more experience in combat than they did. Gaddafi had his military still. There were air strikes, helicopter gunships, mortars, sniper rounds, and they were hitting us from all sides. Often, the rebels would just turn around and leave when things got really bad, and the journalists were just sort of there. I was working on the front line for about two weeks.

Couric: And then what happened?

Addario: On March 15, 2011, I was working with Tyler Hicks, Stephen Farrell, and Anthony Shadid—all for the New York Times. The front line was moving in very quickly, so we knew Gaddafi’s troops were moving in, and that we had to pull back towards Benghazi. Originally, we were in two cars, which journalists often do in case one of the cars breaks down, but the driver of the second car, his brother was shot, so he stopped in the middle of the battle and said, “I quit.” There were four of us in one vehicle. To ask four journalists how long to stay in one place is quite complicated because everyone had a different idea of safety and different needs journalistically. We went back to the hospital to measure civilian casualties, and then we went back to the front line, when we knew it was about to fall. Mortar rounds were locking into our position, and civilians were fleeing. Eventually, by the time we made a decision to leave, we ran directly into one of Gaddafi’s checkpoints. Our driver panicked, stopped the car, and jumped out. They were all pulled out of the car. I, as the only woman, am often left sitting in the car. It was the second time I had been kidnapped, and the same thing had happened in Iraq.

At that moment, the rebels that we were covering started opening fire on the checkpoint. We were caught in a wall of bullets, and I knew I had to get out of the car. I crawled across the back seat and jumped out where Tyler, Anthony, and Steve had jumped out. Eventually, we ran for cover to a small cement building. Once we got behind that building, we were told to lie facedown in the dirt. We each had a gun put to our heads, and our hands and our ankles were tied together. They were about to execute us when the commander walked over and said, “You can’t kill them, they’re American.” We were very lucky because, obviously, there are a lot of people who don’t feel that way.

We were put in vehicles and placed on the front lines for hours while bullets and bombs rained around us. They laughed at us because we were tied up and couldn’t get out. For the next few days, we were beaten up, blindfolded, remained tied up, threatened with execution. As the only woman, I was groped repeatedly. Then we were transferred to a glorified prison-apartment in Tripoli, and we were released after six days.

Lynsey Addario, Opposition troops burn tires for cover during heavy fighting, shelling and airstrikes near the main checkpoint in Ras Lanuf, Eastern Libya, March 11, 2011
© the artist

Couric: As you were going though that horrific experience—I’m sure it was very scary for your mom, your husband, for your friends, your family—and most of all, for the four of you. Tell me about when you realized that you were finally going to be released?

Addario: There was an incredible guilt involved, because I knew my family was suffering. That is one of the hardest things about putting my life at risk. It’s not about me, and what happens to me, and if I get killed. That’s a consequence of doing this work. It’s more about, What do you leave behind? I’ve lost a lot of friends, and I’ve seen how it tears apart their families, and that’s very difficult.

Couric: You wrote a piece about being pregnant and doing your job in The New York Times Magazine. Tell us why you wrote it, and the backlash that you got as a result.

Addario: When I got pregnant, I was terrified. It was right after Libya—about six weeks after I was released from captivity. My husband and I had talked about having a family at some point, but as a woman and a professional, I was terrified of what that would do to my career. There were no role models. I didn’t know a single woman who did what I do who even had a boyfriend, much less a child. For me, the natural reaction was to hold on to my identity, and to work as much as I possibly could before I gave birth. I went to Senegal. I was in Saudi Arabia. I was in America—I did a road trip.

No one talked about how hard it is; everyone just talks about how beautiful it is to have a child—which it is, of course, but it’s very, very difficult. I felt like I needed to be honest. I wrote about going to Kenya to cover a drought, and going to Somalia, which was a war zone, when I was six months pregnant.

I received a lot of criticism. My response is: first of all, there are male journalists who get killed with children at home, and no one says, “What were they doing in a war zone?” It’s just as bad to lose a father as it is to lose a mother. Second, in these places that I cover, there are women who are pregnant and having children, and no one talks about the conditions for them. All they talk about is, “How can a girl from Connecticut go to Somalia when she’s pregnant?”

Lynsey Addario, Killis Camp, Turkish–Syrian Border in Turkey, October 22, 2013
© the artist

Couric: Tell us about the sexism you’ve faced early in your career. Do you feel that it’s gotten better as you’ve proven yourself to be so competent?

Addario: I kept thinking, when I started out, that there would be more and more women in the field—and there just aren’t. There are women who decide the lifestyle isn’t for them, but I also think that editors need to start assigning women, and putting more faith in women. When I look around in the field, it’s mostly white men, and that, to me, is a problem. We need local people to tell their own stories. We need people of color. We need women. And it’s just not happening.

Couric: As a woman, you’ve been able to have access to some extraordinary situations that men wouldn’t have access to. These are some of your proudest photographs as well. 

Addario: In 2009, when I won the MacArthur, I wanted to focus on maternal health and maternal mortality. At that point, 550,000 women were dying in childbirth every year, around the world. Now, 800 women die every day around the world. That is extraordinary because 98 percent of those deaths are preventable.

Once, in Afghanistan, on the way back from some very remote hospitals and clinics, we saw these two women on the side of the mountain. Anyone who’s familiar with Afghanistan knows that a woman is always accompanied by a man. We didn’t see a man, so we assumed something was wrong. It turned out the woman on the right was in labor, and her water had broken. Her husband’s first wife had died in childbirth. He was so determined not to lose her that he borrowed a car, and that car broke down. I brought the family to the hospital and she delivered safely.

Lynsey Addario, Nazer Begam and her pregnant daughter Noor Nisa, 20, wait for transport to hospital, after their car broke down, November 14, 2009
© the artist

Couric: You stepped in and helped the woman in Afghanistan. It must be so difficult not to get emotionally invested in these stories. I’m sure you want to help every person you photograph.

Addario: Most of the time I’m photographing, I’m weeping. This picture is out of focus because when the daughter came in and saw her mother in the coffin, she didn’t even know that her mother had cancer. All of the attention went to preventing HIV/AIDS. Cancer was overlooked. This little girl came in and looked in the coffin and saw her mother, and I was crying so hard that I couldn’t even take the picture.

Couric: Why is photography so powerful? As someone who is a communicator and a storyteller myself, when can photographs tell a story that a documentary or television news story can’t?

Addario: It’s the moment that brings you to the heart of the image, and the emotion that is captured in that one second. I’ve been photographing a lot of Syrian refugees for the past five, six years. When the public hears about Syrian refugees, or refugees in general, you just generally turn the page, and you are like, I don’t even know how to connect with that story because it’s so far away. And, for example, I’ll take a picture of this mother and her children to show you she’s a mother—

Couric: The shared humanity.

Addario: An entry point. That’s constantly what I’m trying to do—to bring you into that moment and that emotion.

Katie Couric is an American journalist and author.

This interview is adapted from a live conversation at the International Center of Photography Spotlights luncheon on November 7, 2017.

The post The Fearless Lynsey Addario appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

Where the Homeless Sleep

Anthony Hernandez takes a hard look at the neglected landscapes of Los Angeles.

By Stephen Hilger

East Los Angeles–born Anthony Hernandez has long recognized the underprivileged people and disregarded spaces of his hometown in his photographs. The artist’s photobooks published between 1995 and 2017 provide an anthology of overlooked, ordinary, and deprived public life in his native city. While Hernandez’s intention of giving visibility to this segment of society has been consistent, his photographic style has undergone important shifts during his fifty-plus-years calling. Despite these formal changes, however, Hernandez has persistently aimed to picture life in Los Angeles from an atypical perspective. Allan Sekula likened his imagery to “a city grid opening up to the east, and thus a reversal of the usual understandings of Los Angeles topography, which always approach downtown from the west, and rarely take in the view from the other side of the river.”

Anthony Hernandez, Forever #62, 2010
Courtesy the artist and MACK

In Hernandez’s most recent title, Forever (MACK, 2017), he returns to this familiar territory, examining the most neglected landscapes throughout points east and south of downtown LA. The fifty-five closely cropped color photographs in the book are different from the sweeping, cinematic images of Los Angeles one may be accustomed to seeing. Instead of buying into the glamorous projection exported through motion pictures and via self-aggrandizing digital screens, Hernandez takes what he has described as a “very hard look” at the urban landscape, and at the “hard spaces” its citizens occupy. With Forever, Hernandez returns to a longtime subject, photographing the spaces inhabited by the homeless in Los Angeles and beyond. The first photograph in the book reveals a worn-out broom leaning against a white-washed yet stained wall, and soiled sheets of cardboard jutting out past the foreground. As in William Henry Fox Talbot’s seminal picture of the broom at Lacock Abbey, the photograph attests to everyday life. A crucial difference is that Hernandez’s broom positioned against a dead-end concrete wall appears more confrontational as opposed to Talbot’s, positioned by an open door.

Anthony Hernandez, Forever #31, 2011
Courtesy the artist and MACK

Made two decades earlier, Hernandez’s first monograph, Landscapes for the Homeless (Sprengel Museum, 1995), presents the viewer with the visual evidence of homeless encampments between or underneath the sprawling freeways of Los Angeles. Invisible to the multitudes traveling through the city in motorized vehicles, these sites are made conspicuous in Hernandez’s saturated color photographs of the denizens’ bedding, clothing, cooking utensils, and other possessions within the brushy foliage. Landscapes for the Homeless depicts the social condition of homelessness without human subjects. It is the absence of the dispossessed in these “landscapes” that charges the scenes. Borrowing from Walter Benjamin, the “photographs become standard evidence for historical occurrences, and acquire a hidden political significance. . . . They stir the viewer; he feels challenged by them in a new way.” The lack of human presence marks the perhaps most significant transformation of the artist’s working process. While Hernandez’s earliest views from the street emphasized city dwellers adrift in the city by foot, his “landscapes for the homeless” are as hauntingly absent of people as the city views by Eugène Atget. This signature emptiness has remained in every subsequent series that Hernandez completed since that landmark work.

Anthony Hernandez, Landscapes for the Homeless #1, 1988
© the artist and courtesy Yancey Richardson, New York

When Hernandez started out as a photographer in the sixties, he roamed streets, beaches, and other public spaces to compose street photography–style portraits of the city’s residents. By the late seventies, Hernandez began to photograph people waiting for the bus throughout Los Angeles with a 5-by-7-inch view camera; in the process, he created a new style of street photography more attuned to the urban landscape. These photographs remained unpublished for thirty years, until they appeared in the monumental book Waiting, Sitting, Fishing, and Some Automobiles: Los Angeles (Loosestrife Editions, 2007). The coveted volume, published by John Gossage’s imprint, features forty-two exceptional duotone, gatefold reproductions of Hernandez’s black-and-white photographs from the late seventies and early eighties. Waiting, Sitting, Fishing, and Some Automobiles includes four distinct yet related photographic series that portray the systematic use of public space in Los Angeles. The large-format views open up the pictorial space and render details not possible with a smaller negative. In the book’s first sequence, “Public Transit Areas,” the viewer can glean small details like chewing gum littered on the sidewalk by waiting riders and motor oil–speckled roadways. Pedestrians recede from the foreground to the middle ground, transforming his images of people waiting into urban landscapes. The following two series in the book also depict Angelenos waiting: in “Public Use Areas” office workers take their breaks in overbuilt corporate plazas, while in “Public Fishing Areas,” people pass time at lakes and watering holes in the city’s furthest environs. In the final selection, “Automotive Landscapes,” Hernandez pictures auto-repair shops, used-car lots, and junkyards—the locations where the defining machinery of daily life in Los Angeles is maintained.

During the early nineties, on a walk through the city after his own car broke down, Hernandez noticed a crowd waiting in line at a social-services office. Although he had passed the scene often in his own vehicle, he experienced things differently by foot, where he could observe architectural details from the vantage of the people waiting in line at the welfare office. Hernandez photographed the tile façade that wraps around the building, recording what the people saw as they moved through the line. A detail view of the tile grid enfolds the book Waiting for Los Angeles (Nazraeli Press, 2002). The image is highly formal—a straight-on depiction of square colored tiles—yet the significant shift in perspective places the observer within the social space of the subject, simultaneously representing both an abstract and real view.

Anthony Hernandez, Forever #36, 2009
Courtesy the artist and MACK

As in Waiting for Los Angeles, Hernandez assumes the perspective of the subject—the vantage point of the homeless—in Forever. While the “landscapes for the homeless” made by Hernandez two decades earlier created views of an outsider looking in, Hernandez’s new photographs look out from the sites where the homeless sleep. The artist perceived what the inhabitants see as he positioned his camera on the ground where they sleep, cook, and maintain their makeshift shelters. An essay by Hernandez’s wife, Judith Freeman, written in dialogue with him, gives context to the photographs by transporting the reader along the photographer’s itineraries through the city. The conversational format is evocative of the dialogue between Lewis Baltz and Hernandez in Landscapes for the Homeless, titled “Forever Homeless,” which served as inspiration for the title of the new book. In the original text, Hernandez claimed, “the homeless stand for the failure to face the future. Maybe forever homeless is the future.” In 1995, the year when Landscapes for the Homeless was published, the global homeless population was estimated to be 55 million people. Twenty years later, it had nearly doubled to 100 million. To document the homeless sites in Forever, Hernandez didn’t need to discover hidden enclaves of the dispossessed; so many of these campsites now appear in plain sight, in the harsh, bright light of the midday sun. As the photographer learned through firsthand observation, “the most neglected landscapes are left for the most neglected people.”

Anthony Hernandez, Forever #56, 2009
Courtesy the artist and MACK

The bulk of Hernandez’s work has focused on what Baltz described as the “defeated” majority; however, in the course of five decades of photographing and the publication of more than a dozen books, there is an important exception. Rodeo Drive, 1984 (MACK, 2012) brought to light Hernandez’s photographs of luxury shoppers or wannabes in a brilliant series of corporeal color photographs. They compose the last series in which Hernandez depicted people, and the first photographs by the artist in color. Hernandez took aim at “the winners, the lumpen rich, enjoying the spoils of their victory on Rodeo Drive.” With the inclusion of Rodeo Drive, 1984, Hernandez’s archive provides an even further-reaching visual atlas of the socially diverse and divided metropolis.

Stephen Hilger is a photographer also born in Los Angeles, a place he frequently photographs. His recent monograph, Back of Town (SPQR Editions, 2016), chronicles the disappearance of a neighborhood in New Orleans. He teaches at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, where he is chair of photography.

The post Where the Homeless Sleep appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

The Honesty of Petra Collins

The young photographer is celebrated for her raw and real depictions of femininity. But can images ever be trusted?

By Gideon Jacobs

Petra Collins, from the book Petra Collins: Coming of Age, 2017
© the artist and courtesy Rizzoli

 

Petra Collins was five years old, in 1998, when Britney Spears’s “. . . Baby One More Time” was released. She was seven when Survivor first aired. She was almost eleven when Paris Hilton’s sex tape went public (conveniently, just a few weeks before Hilton’s television debut in The Simple Life), and eleven when Facebook launched. She was fourteen when Pornhub launched. She was seventeen when Instagram launched. She was nineteen when Kodak declared bankruptcy.

Collins’s generation—of which I’m a slightly older member—grew up in a cultural era defined by a potent combination of high commercialism and consumerism, seller enthusiasm and buyer naiveté. Seemingly caught off guard by new forms of media and technology, many still believed what they saw on the covers of magazines, on TV, on the internet, on their friends’ brand-new social media profiles. Sure, there was some baseline distrust of images—iconoclasm is as old as the icon—but savvy cynicism wasn’t quite as mainstream as it is today. It’s almost as if, in the late ’90s and early 2000s, it wasn’t fully understood, or maybe was simply ignored, that Photoshop is a powerful manipulative tool, that reality TV is an oxymoronic term, that the pictures from your ex’s vacation might not be telling the whole story. When Collins burst onto the scene at the start of this decade with her “real,” “raw,” “honest” photographic explorations of femininity, beauty, and sex, although she was borrowing heavily from many who came before her—Nan Goldin, Cindy Sherman, and Ryan McGinley, to name a few—it felt a little revolutionary.

Petra Collins, from the book Petra Collins: Coming of Age, 2017
© the artist and courtesy Rizzoli

 

Now, years later, but still just twenty-five years old, Collins has published Petra Collins: Coming of Age (2017), an attempt to put her meteoric rise to renown into a larger cultural and artistic context. Dubbed her first monograph, the book mixes Collins’s words and photographs with interviews, essays, and messages from other prominent voices, all reflecting on one subject: Petra Collins. Across the board, the guest contributors, from artist Laurie Simmons to writer Karley Sciortino, are unabashedly adoring. Model Diana Veras’s note begins, “Well first of all you’re fucking amazing and all your work has blown me away recently.” These sentiments would ring false, and their inclusion would feel tacky, if they weren’t expressed with such sincerity and urgency. What quickly becomes clear, when flipping through this book or browsing the comments section below a @petrafcollins Instagram post, is that many fans of Collins don’t just like her work; they’re thankful for it.

Petra Collins, from the book Petra Collins: Coming of Age, 2017
© the artist and courtesy Rizzoli

 

It’s this—the feeling that Collins has somehow given us something that we needed, or has finally said something that we’ve all been thinking—that has made her, for better or worse, a poster child. Having tapped into a wishful shift away from the inauthentic and fake, perhaps it’s no coincidence that her popularity has grown right alongside the recent revival of analog technologies like vinyl records and film cameras. Collins’s early work feels unmediated, like peeks behind the scenes. These images of teens hanging out, applying makeup, taking selfies—performing for their own cameras, not Collins’s—positioned her as a kind of visual truthsayer, an artist working to debunk the myth of the hairless body, the unblemished face, emotional invulnerability, uncomplicated happiness, perfect families, perfect romances, perfect lives.

But the most powerful force fueling Collins’s widespread fandom stems from her firsthand understanding of just how uniquely damaging it must be to grow up female in a Western world of false idols. (This is an experience I cannot directly speak to, but I hope it’s important for people of all genders to consider—with awareness and empathy—what it’s like to be a woman in a patriarchy.) Constructing a sense of self is a process of comparison, of establishing some idea of how one fits into the sociocultural context in which they live. So how could a young woman not feel alienation and shame when surrounded by imagery in which she fundamentally cannot see herself represented? But, to that same point, how could a young person of color not experience something similar? Or, for that matter, a young trans person of any race? Petra Collins: Coming of Age mostly features thin white women, a fact that feels incongruous with the goal Collins plainly lays out in her introduction: “This book is extremely personal, but I hope that when you look at it you can see yourself in it, too.”

Petra Collins, from the book Petra Collins: Coming of Age, 2017
© the artist and courtesy Rizzoli

 

The nagging question that will always sit just below the surface of any conversation about Collins is whether images, even ones made with an impulse to convey truth, can ever really be truthful, particularly because her photographs are celebrated for their “honesty.” That is, if Collins’s audience expects her to close the gap between who we are and how we are portrayed, are they bound to be disappointed? And if her mentality and work are, in large part, a reaction to feeling lied to by the images she was exposed to growing up, why should we trust images now, even hers?

Or maybe there’s another, more pressing question: If Collins is after honesty, at least in some sense, why is she a photographer? And why is she now working for fashion brands (Gucci, Bulgari, Juicy Couture) that are among the worst offenders of producing and propagating images that lie between their teeth? There’s a moment at the midpoint of Petra Collins: Coming of Age, in her dialogue with artist Marilyn Minter, that approaches an answer. Referring to media as the vehicle “that gives us all of our information,” Collins says, “It’s our duty to change it by working inside of it.” This statement of intent signals that her work, whether documentary or commercial, is never really without agenda. But it’s also an admission of her overall project’s inherent shortcoming—that her pictures are, at the end of the day, still pictures, part of the very thing they hope to undo.

Gideon Jacobs is a writer who has contributed to The New Yorker, The Paris Review, It’s Nice That, and BuzzFeed, among others, and previously was Creative Director at Magnum Photos.

Petra Collins: Coming of Age was published by Rizzoli in October 2017.

The post The Honesty of Petra Collins appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

Take the J Train

In Andre D. Wagner’s new photobook, an intimate chronicle of black life on New York City’s subways.

By Jessica Lynne

Andre D. Wagner, Gates Avenue, Brooklyn, New York, 2014
Courtesy Creative Future

I can’t quite remember the first time I encountered one of Andre D. Wagner’s photographs. It might have been during an afternoon perusing Instagram. It might have been during one of my many conversations with friends about exciting young photographers. Or maybe I read an early profile of the Brooklyn-based photographer. But, I’m not upset that I can’t recall that specific moment. Which is to say that, somehow, Wagner’s images feel as if they have always been here, inviting viewers to marvel at the quiet beauty of even the most familiar scenes.

Andre D. Wagner, New York, 2015
Courtesy Creative Future

Wagner’s photographs emit a sonic vibration that pulsates beyond the eye as he captures scenes from New York—particularly his neighborhood of Bushwick, the streets of SoHo, and the subway—that move toward a poetic vision of the city and its residents. The Omaha, Nebraska, native, who has a background in social work, tells me that taking photographs is always part of his daily regimen. And although he has a studio, you’ll rarely find Wagner shooting inside. Instead, his thousands of recent images are the result of hours-long city strolls. Last summer during a break from work, I walked past Wagner in SoHo as he watched the crowds pass by, camera in hand. Caught up in the chaos of tourists, it took me a few seconds to recognize him, but I’m sure he saw me before we eventually said hello—his eye somehow able to find a center in the busy New York shopping storm. He is nothing if not an artist who knows how to find a moment’s kinetic energy.

Andre D. Wagner, New York, 2014
Courtesy Creative Future

His debut monograph, Here for the Ride (2017), invites us to look closely at the environ of the city’s vast subway system. Here for the Ride is comprised of sixty-two black-and-white images that were taken over a three-year period, primarily along the J train, the line off which Wagner lives. It’s a line that starts in the capitalist heart of the city, the Financial District, and then runs eastward through Brooklyn and Queens, across some of New York’s most disenfranchised neighborhoods. In the wrong hands, such a story might be reduced to clichés of pity, of voyeurism. Resisting didactic social commentary, Here for the Ride offers us a world unto itself that hums with intimacy and possibility: a daughter leaning on her mother’s shoulder, caught in a moment of rest, or two showtime dancers intertwined in their choreography.

Andre D. Wagner, Lorimer Street, Brooklyn, New York, 2014
Courtesy Creative Future

Wagner is not the first photographer to position the New York City subway as subject in his images. Walker Evans and Bruce Davidson each chose the subway and its passengers as a site for mapping urban life: Evans in the early twentieth century, using a hidden camera, and Davidson in the 1980s, capturing the decade’s franticness. Indeed, for image makers, it’s difficult to fully comment on the rhythm of New York without paying attention to its massive public transit system. Wagner has found the romance in it all, the gentleness that emerges when working from a nuanced space of subjectivity. In this way, I’m reminded of the late Charles “Teenie” Harris, a photographer who chronicled black Pittsburgh from the 1930s to the ’70s. Many, though not all, of Wagner’s subjects are black folks. Like Harris, Wagner has found a way to record moments of black urbanity that emphasizes an expressiveness that runs counter to stifling narratives about blackness and urbanity we are too accustomed to seeing in mainstream newspapers and media outlets—if and when blackness is represented at all.

Andre D. Wagner, Gates Avenue, Brooklyn, New York, 2014
Courtesy Creative Future

What does it mean, then, to glean a vocabulary of abundance from Wagner’s photograph of four smiling black boys in their backpacks? From a father exiting a train car with his two daughters? In the introduction to her recent book, Listening to Images (2017), Tina M. Campt argues that quietness is a sonic methodology that provides a tool for contemplating the registers of the photograph. As she notes, “the quotidian is not equivalent to passive everyday acts, and quiet is not an absence of articulation or utterance.” That is, it’s not enough to see the image. Instead, we must also contend with what lives beyond the image, the world in which the image is located. Wagner’s Here for the Ride is a project of great care and skill from an artist who understands his role as a storyteller and attends the many utterances contained within his pictures. It’s a narrative of quiet wonder.

Jessica Lynne is the coeditor of ARTS.BLACK.

Here for the Ride was published by Creative Future in 2017.

The post Take the J Train appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

The Other Side of Gordon Parks

A new exhibition reconsiders the legendary photographer’s fashion and portrait work.

Gordon Parks, Cocoon Cape, New York, New York, 1956 © and courtesy the Gordon Parks Foundation

Gordon Parks, Untitled, 1978 © and courtesy the Gordon Parks Foundation

Gordon Parks, Ferry Commuters, Staten Island, New York, 1946 © and courtesy the Gordon Parks Foundation

Gordon Parks, Untitled, New York, New York, 1957 © and courtesy the Gordon Parks Foundation

Gordon Parks, Evening Wraps, New York, New York, 1956 © and courtesy the Gordon Parks Foundation

Gordon Parks, Alberto Giacometti and His Sculptures, Paris, France, 1951 © and courtesy the Gordon Parks Foundation

Gordon Parks, Untitled, New York, New York, 1956 © and courtesy the Gordon Parks Foundation

Gordon Parks, Bettina and Frances McLaughlin-Gill, 1950 © and courtesy the Gordon Parks Foundation

Gordon Parks, Ingrid Bergman at Stromboli, Stromboli, Italy, 1949 © and courtesy the Gordon Parks Foundation

“Even from the beginning, Parks challenged prevailing rules about how to photograph fashion, including objects, group poses and streetscapes that beckoned with the allure of a desired lifestyle or career,” writes the photography historian Deborah Willis of Gordon Parks. A new exhibition at Jack Shainman Gallery, Gordon Parks: I Am You, Part 1, displays Parks’s fashion work from the 1950s and ’60s along with portraits of artists in their studios—Helen Frankenthaler, Alexander Calder, and Alberto Giacometti, to name a few. Parks, who is best known for his velvety black-and-white photographs of the civil rights era, was also an innovative fashion photographer, often taking to New York’s streets for his atmospheric shoots. His artist portraits, however, are quiet and considered, letting the artists disappear into their creations.

Gordon Parks: I Am You, Part 1 is on view at Jack Shainman Gallery, New York, through February 10, 2018.

 

The post The Other Side of Gordon Parks appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

Jamie Hawkesworth Doesn’t Believe in Boundaries

A rising photography star bridges the divide between art and fashion.

By Adam Murray

Jamie Hawkesworth, Preston Bus Station, 2016
© the artist

Last fall, I met the photographer Jamie Hawkesworth at Central Saint Martins, London, to reflect on his recent exhibition, Landscape with Tree at Huis Marseille in Amsterdam. The college was a fitting location for such a discussion, as it was during my time as a lecturer at the University of Central Lancashire in the northwest of England that I first encountered Hawkesworth’s work, when he joined the undergraduate photography course in 2008. His deservedly quick rise from novice student to the photography establishment is long documented, with key moments often discussed, such as his work in the Preston Bus Station, his longtime collaboration with fashion designer J.W. Anderson, and his commissions for fashion and current affairs publications. All of which have contributed to his Huis Marseille exhibition, for which he was given free reign of the entire building—sixteen spaces filled with well over 150 hand-printed C-type prints.

Jamie Hawkesworth, Congo, 2016
© the artist

Built around 1665, the Huis Marseille is housed in the former residence of French merchant Isaac Focquier. The combination of seventeenth-century architecture, eighteenth-century interior embellishment (including intricate stuccowork), and a room with a painted ceiling depicting Apollo among the clouds, accompanied by Minerva and the nine muses and twenty-first-century reconstruction, makes for an unusual yet compelling setting for photography. This being Hawkesworth’s first major exhibition, I made the trip from Manchester to Amsterdam for the opening weekend. As I walked into Huis Marseille, I was confronted by an ambitious body of work, which had the feel of an early-career retrospective.

Jamie Hawkesworth, Congo, 2016
© the artist

One gallery featured seven prints from a reportage project in the Democratic Republic of Congo commissioned by the Wall Street Journal. On the main wall hung three photographs: a young girl peering around a wall, a close-up of a torso clothed in a turmeric-colored blazer, and a green landscape with a single tree in the center, from which the exhibition’s title is derived. Each print was monumental in scale, allowing viewers to see every tiny detail that Hawkesworth’s 6-by-7-cm negatives have been able to capture.

Jamie Hawkesworth, Rio, 2016
© the artist

The focus for another space—this one dominated by a rich gold and red décor and the Apollo ceiling—was a project originally commissioned for Mastermind, a niche fashion publication directed by Marie-Amélie Sauvé. In this body of work, the beaches of Ipanema, Brazil, provide the backdrop for a styled editorial that features street-cast teenagers alongside models dressed in Louis Vuitton’s 2017 Resort collection. A less minimal curatorial style was given to a long, narrow space that displayed every photograph from Hawkesworth’s recently published photobook Preston Bus Station (2017)—139 images of people that he fleetingly encountered during his many visits to the Preston Bus Station in Lancashire.

Jamie Hawkesworth, Preston Bus Station, 2016
© the artist

The trend for producing “fashion exhibitions” in photography spaces has long been used as a way of bringing in large audiences through the network of press platforms that the photographer is already part of. No doubt Hawkesworth’s work is most often seen in a fashion context, a context that gave the work a major audience at an early stage. But for Hawkesworth, this does not come without its frustrations. “I do feel pigeonholed and I struggle to understand why people still distinguish between art and fashion,” he says. “My approach is always to try to take on work regardless of the context, where I feel like I am going to appreciate these pictures.”

Jamie Hawkesworth, Russia, Endless Rhythm, 2015
© the artist

Landscape with Tree was a seductive exhibition in a seductive space, not an exhibition intended to bamboozle the viewer with overcomplicated contextualization or a gimmicky hang. As Hawkesworth explained, “I liked the idea that you moved through someone’s sensibility, through many different rooms, but it all felt like one perspective. Nanda van den Berg [the curator] and I spent time walking through the space and instinctively identifying what work lent itself to each particular room.” Hawkesworth used the word “instinctive” many times during our conversation, which is not a flippant way to justify decisions that have not been given much thought: this has always been his approach. It is very much about actively responding to the time and place that he is in, exactly the behavior that the viewer was encouraged to engage in when in the exhibition.

Adam Murray is a lecturer at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, and Manchester Metropolitan University. He recently cocurated North: Fashioning Identity with Lou Stoppard, on view at Somerset House, London, through February 4, 2018.

Jamie Hawkesworth: Landscape with Tree was on view at Huis Marseille, Amsterdam, from September 9 through December 3, 2017.

The post Jamie Hawkesworth Doesn’t Believe in Boundaries appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

The PhotoBook as a Literary Form

Teju Cole’s first photobook unfolds the possibilities of text and image.

By Rick Moody

Is there not a formidable hybridization going on these days that conjoins literature and photography?

Teju Cole’s Blind Spot, a moving and playful fusion of text and image, would appear to be a solid contribution to this emerging hybrid activity (whose origins perhaps lie in books like Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, by James Agee and Walker Evans, or in the novels of W. G. Sebald). Its structure is as follows: an image on recto, usually a lightly abstracted image, almost always an image without a face (that is, not a portrait), and only occasionally an image with a figure, often an image that contains landscape, often an image that contains drapery, sometimes an image that contains some portion of an automobile, often an image of Northern Europe, though some-times of Africa and the United States of America, Beirut, São Paulo, etc.

Teju Cole, New York City, May 2015
Courtesy Steven Kasher Gallery, New York

And on the verso, there is text. The text is usually slugged to a subhead of place-names. “Poughkeepsie,” for example, or “Lagos,” or “Berlin.” (There is quite a bit of Berlin.) Beneath each sub-head is a short meditation, which comments on the photograph on the recto. Usually, it’s fair to say, the text depends upon the image and enlarges the signifying field of the image.

Sometimes the images turn up twice, as if they have yet to be fully described, as if the book is circling back to certain images. The writing, generally, is allusive, and accomplishes its mission via implication, discretely, as opposed to the kind of accumulation that we would call a story, which is to say a development of preordained meanings in time. There is a diaristic accumulation of the first person here, but it’s by no means certain that the first person is Teju Cole, the author. It could be a constructed Teju Cole, a refraction of the actual Teju Cole, especially given the author’s past as a writer of fiction. Because the book concerns itself with travel, or at least with the appearances of an apprehensible global field of destinations, assembled fragmentarily, it feels most relevant to think of the first-person narrator simply as a traveler. Or: the one who both travels and gazes upon.

Teju Cole, Blind Spot, Penguin Random House
New York, 2017

Sometimes the texts feel philosophical in ambition, and the clearest layer of influence would seem to be, e.g., the Roland Barthes of A Lover’s Discourse (1977) or Camera Lucida (1980). There are also emanations of Adorno and Nietzsche. Sometimes the texts feel like prose poems, or flash fictions. Perhaps, inevitably, there is the trace of Calvino’s celebrated novel Invisible Cities (1972), another genre-less work of literature that can be read in nearly any order and in which there is little conventional character work.

As with Calvino’s revolutionary text, Blind Spot makes possible improvised reading. In this way, the work feels musical, or, perhaps, it is structured like the Internet is structured. It encourages alternative engagements, impulsivities, lateral associations. The photographs flourish in this engagement. They inhabit multiple spaces and meanings. My one-year-old son, for example, took a great interest in Blind Spot, because of its heavy photo paper and handsome green exterior. I found him paging through the book repeatedly. On at least one occasion, however, he was reading it upside down. Is it the case that this approach to consuming the book was entirely out of line? We should travel in the book, as the book travels in the world.

Formally, then, Blind Spot is ingenious, conceptually rich, and original. You might make the distinction here that the texts, no matter how amiable, how casually brilliant, are art-historical texts, in that they are often concerned with illuminating or contextualizing the images. Or would that be another way to consign this work to taxonomy? And yet: its deconstructing of literary genre (is it a travel book, or a book of essays, or a book of prose poetry?) is like Achille Mbembe’s Critique of Black Reason (2017), wherein he writes: “The demotion of Europe opens up possibilities for critical thought.” The blurring of genres feels, in Blind Spot, like a restatement about how meaning is generated. It is both evidence of an unfolding of possibilities with respect to meaning, and about the relatedness of polysemic literature and image making.

Teju Cole, Capri, June 2015
Courtesy Steven Kasher Gallery, New York

“Losing myself in the city during those aimless walks,” Cole says in a chapter entitled “Brooklyn,” “I encounter chimeras made of lexical fore parts and material hind parts.” This would seem to be an allegory for the book itself. Blind Spot is an aimless walk (that is, organized in discrete and fragmentary sections), and it does mix “lexical” engagements on the left with “material” engagements on the right, though as usual in postmodernity, any oppositional arrangement is provisional and subject to change.

In a way what I imagine Cole is saying in “Brooklyn” is that these chimeras, though perhaps exotic at first blush, might be more aptly fitted together than anyone would have hitherto guessed back at the dawn of the camera obscura.

Rick Moody is the author of five novels, an award-winning memoir, and collections of short stories. His second novel, The Ice Storm (Little, Brown and Company, 1994), was adapted for the screen in 1997. His most recent published work is the novel Hotels of North America (Serpent’s Tail, 2017).

Teju Cole’s Blind Spot was shortlisted as part of the 2017 Paris Photo-Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards. The exhibition of all shortlisted books is on view at Aperture Gallery from December 9, 2017 – February 2018.

The post The PhotoBook as a Literary Form appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

How Can Images Tell the Story of Mass Incarceration in the US?

Aperture Magazine Announces “Prison Nation” Issue, Exhibition, and Public Engagement Series

 

Most prisons and jails across the United States do not allow prisoners to have access to cameras. At a moment when 2.2 million people are incarcerated in the US, 3.8 million people are on probation, and 870,000 former prisoners are on parole, how can images tell the story of mass incarceration when the imprisoned don’t have control over their own representation? How can photographs visualize a reality that disproportionately affects people of color, and, for many, remains outside of view?

This spring, Aperture magazine will release “Prison Nation,” addressing the unique role photography plays in creating a visual record of this national crisis. Organized with the scholar Nicole R. Fleetwood, this landmark issue will be accompanied by a related exhibition from February 7 through March 7, 2018, as well as a series of six public programs—featuring speakers such as Nigel Poor, Jamel Shabazz, Deborah Luster, Bruce Jackson, Jesse Krimes, Sable Elyse Smith, Joseph Rodriguez, and more—all to take place at Aperture Foundation’s gallery.

Incarceration impacts all of us. “Americans, even those who have never been to a prison or had a relative in prison, need to realize that we are all implicated in a form of governance that uses prison as a solution to many social, economic, and political problems,” Fleetwood notes. Empathy and political awareness are essential to creating systemic change—and through Aperture magazine, and the accompanying exhibition and public programming, “Prison Nation” may provoke us to see parts of ourselves in the lives of those on the inside.

Prison Nation: Public Programs

In a six-part series of programs, photographers, writers, historians, and activists discuss the unique role photography, art, and storytelling play in understanding and creating a dialogue around the crisis of mass incarceration in the United States.

Nigel Poor, Prison Rock Band, June 26, 1975
Courtesy the artist and Haines Gallery, San Francisco

Narratives from Inside

Wednesday, February 7, 2018 at 7:00 p.m.

Aperture Foundation Gallery, New York

Panelists: Nigel Poor, Virginia Grise, Vee Bravo, Russell Craig

How can storytelling convey the experience of incarceration? Be it photographs, podcasts, or fiction workshops, these panelists deploy various modes of narrative strategy to bring stories of incarceration beyond prison walls.

Moderated by Shani Jamila, managing director of the Urban Justice Center

Deborah Luster, Layla “Roach” Roberts (Inquisitor), fromthe series Passion Play, 2012–13
Courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

Seeing Angola

Wednesday, February 14, 2018 at 7:00 p.m.

Aperture Foundation Gallery, New York

Panelists: Deborah Luster, Zachary Lazar, Keith Calhoun and Chandra McCormick

Louisiana’s State Penitentiary, the largest maximum-security prison in the United States, is also known as “Angola,” as it sits on the site of a former plantation with a slave population originating from Angola, Africa. This panel convenes three photographers and one writer who have made work about the notorious prison in a state that has the highest rate of incarceration of any place in the world.

Moderated by Makeda Best, Richard L. Menschel Curator of Photography at the Harvard Art Museums

Jamel Shabazz, A detainee from Brooklyn poses in the corridor of his housing area, Rikers Island, 1986
Courtesy the artist

Inside Rikers Island

Wednesday, February 21, 2018 at 7:00 p.m.

Aperture Foundation Gallery, New York

Panelists: Jamel Shabazz, Lorenzo Steele Jr., Katherine Cheairs

A movement to close New York’s Rikers Island jail facility is gaining momentum. This panel brings together two former corrections officers/photographers who worked at the facility in the 1980s and ’90s, as well as a documentary filmmaker who taught filmmaking to incarcerated women at Rikers, to discuss their work around the facility and criminal justice reform.

Moderated by Brandon J. Holmes, NYC Campaign Coordinator at JustLeadershipUSA

Joseph Rodriguez, At Walden House FOTEP (Female Offender Treatment Employment Program),
a young mother holds her son. El Monte, California, 2008
© the artist

Art & Incarceration

Wednesday, February 28, 2018 at 7:00 p.m.

Aperture Foundation Gallery, New York

Panelists: Lisette Oblitas-Cruz, Aliya Hana Hussain, Jesse Krimes, Joseph Rodriguez

How does incarceration impact art making for incarcerated artists and non-incarcerated artists concerned with the criminal justice system? This panel brings together a range of artists and figures who facilitate art projects with incarcerated individuals.

Moderated by Nicole R. Fleetwood, contributing editor of Aperture’s “Prison Nation” issue

Stephen Tourlentes, Wyoming State Death House Prison, Rawlins, Wyoming, 2000
Courtesy the artist and Carroll and Sons, Boston

Architecture of Confinement

Wednesday, March 7, 2018 at 7:00 p.m.

Aperture Foundation Gallery, New York

Panelists: Bruce Jackson, Stephen Tourlentes, and Laurie Jo Reynolds.

This panel considers incarceration from an architectural perspective and how photographers engage with prisons as omnipresent structures in the American landscape. Moderated by educator and activist, Shana Agid.

Sable Elyse Smith, from the book Landscapes & Playgrounds (San Francisco: Sming Sming Books, 2017)
© and courtesy the artist

Artist Talk: Sable Elyse Smith

Tuesday, March 27, 2018 at 7:00 p.m.

Aperture Foundation Gallery, New York

Known for her work across photography, video, poetry, and performance, Sable Elyse Smith is interested in the personal consequences of mass incarceration in the United States. Her recent artist’s book Landscapes & Playgrounds (2017), featured in Aperture’s “Prison Nation” issue, is a meditation on the relationship between an incarcerated father and a daughter, and a form of communication that is embedded in surveillance. Smith’s work has been presented most recently in Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon at the New Museum and in the solo exhibition Ordinary Violence at the Queens Museum in New York. She is a 2018 artist in residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem.

Aperture magazine’s “Prison Nation” issue and the related exhibition and programs are funded, in part, with generous lead support from the Ford Foundation, as well as funding from the Reba Judith Sandler Foundation. Additional funding is provided by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the Grace Jones Richardson Trust, and the Board of Trustees and Members of Aperture Foundation. Additional public funds are from the National Endowment for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council. 

The post How Can Images Tell the Story of Mass Incarceration in the US? appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

Beauty in the Eye of the Storm

Inside the ACLU, two trans artists stage a secret photo shoot—and question the attitudes of liberal institutions.

By Jenna Wortham

Amos Mac and Juliana Huxtable, Liberty, 2013
Courtesy the artists

“Creepy, exciting, and a little weird” is how Amos Mac, a Los Angeles photographer, describes slinking into the American Civil Liberties Union offices in Manhattan late one night in 2013 to shoot the artist and musician Juliana Huxtable, who worked there at the time. Over the course of several evenings, the two snuck in suitcases of clothing, light kits, and equipment.

As an artist and a creative, Mac centers on reclaiming trans bodies in his work. In 2009, he founded Original Plumbing, a quarterly magazine focusing on the experience of trans male culture. “I started documenting other trans artists because I was tired of seeing disembodied body parts and scars hanging on the walls in museums and galleries and feeling like shit when I saw it,” Mac said. “There’s more to this, to us. These people are human beings. We are human beings.”

Amos Mac and Juliana Huxtable, Rest, 2013
Courtesy the artists

Mac and Huxtable first crossed paths in 2011, at a house party in Bushwick. They soon met up for coffee and, shortly after, collaborated on several photographs of Huxtable in her home, as part of Mac’s ongoing Bedroom Series, which began in 2011 and features queer artists and writers in their personal spaces. Two years later, they agreed to work together on another series. During a brainstorming session, Huxtable told Mac about some of the disturbing, traumatic, racist, and transphobic attitudes she encountered at her job at the ACLU, where she worked as a legal assistant with the racial justice program.

Mac was shocked by her story but not surprised. “These organizations are large and they don’t always encompass the issues they’re fighting for,” he said. Huxtable also revealed that she planned to quit soon, and the two seized on the idea of reclaiming the space that oppressed her during the daylight hours. As she stated in a 2013 interview with Mac about their collaboration, most of Huxtable’s challenges came from adjusting to the corporate, nine-to-five routine, and she “felt restricted by the gap between the politics of people who, despite their best and most liberal intentions, saw me as a problem.”

Amos Mac and Juliana Huxtable, Table, 2013
Courtesy the artists

The ACLU, like other U.S. institutions, is facing criticism and scrutiny on a national scale for defending the right of white supremacists to march in Trump’s America, forcing many to reexamine the infrastructure that governs our country, as well as raising questions about who they are serving and at what cost. This awakening has come slower to others—while some, like Huxtable, have spent their lives calling for this inevitable revolution of thought and policy.

The photographs from those nighttime shoots show Huxtable in repose around the ACLU offices: in the bathroom, atop mail room shelves, near an enormous poster of the Statue of Liberty. Her regal face is quiet, contemplative. Her beauty rests at the eye of the storm. The nondescript corporate background disappears behind her—the eye cannot focus on anything but her. She looks poised, undefeated. Ready for action.

Jenna Wortham is a staff writer at The New York Times Magazine and cohost of the podcast Still Processing.

Read more from Aperture Issue 229, “Future Gender,” or subscribe to Aperture and never miss an issue.

The post Beauty in the Eye of the Storm appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

The Offset Artist

From Dayanita Singh, a portable museum in book form.

By Lesley A. Martin

In July of last year, before the Museum Bhavan had been shortlisted for the Paris Photo-Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards, and well in advance of the book having been selected as the winning PhotoBook of the Year, I was delighted to catch Dayanita Singh in Tokyo on the occasion of her exhibition Museum Bhavan, curated by Michiko Kasahara, on view at the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum (May 20 through July 17, 2017). In the weeks and months since, Singh has taken to the road with two bespoke suitcases full of multipatterned Museum Bhavan book sets, the evolution of her earlier Suitcase Museum—a luggage set designed to function as both delivery system and display case, an enactment of her idea that the museums of the future should be “small and portable.” In fact, the museum of the future might just be a set of books, open and installed for all who visit your dining room table. Like an itinerant salesperson, she has had a jacket specially tailored and outfitted with nine pockets, one for every leporello volume enclosed within each set. Singh is quite serious about getting her work—which she defines, in large part, as her offset-printed images—into the world and into your hands, not just onto the traditional white-box space of the gallery wall.

Dayanita Singh, from “Little Ladies Museum,” in the book Museum Bhavan (Steidl 2017)
Courtesy the artist

Lesley A. Martin: In terms of artists who embrace the book as an essential part of their practice, you have really taken this to heart as central to your work. I love the “snout-to-tail” approach that you bring—you find a use for everything, every part of the book: the pages, the outside and cover of the book, the architecture of the book. You really engage with it as a form.

Dayanita Singh: I can no longer separate the images from the paper, the structure, the exhibition that it will become, and then the book becomes the exhibition, and the catalogue of that exhibition. I want the book to be an object, and a very desirable object. When you buy a book, I want it to be the same as if you acquire a sculpture. Of course, it’s a book, and I would never want to dislodge the bookness of it. But I want it to be more. I think I managed to do that with Museum Bhavan (Steidl, 2017). Inside they are all the same book(s), but each of the three thousand copies is enclosed in a box bound with a different type of cloth. The cloth used is called achaada, the under-cloth used in block printing. The residue of the ink collects in different places in different ways, and they usually throw that away once it becomes all coated with ink. Some of the boxes still have drops of paint, which you can peel off. So, I made this very desirable object, it’s mass-produced, and yet it’s unique. Now my question to you: What do you call it? Is it a book? Is it a museum? Is it an exhibition? A multiple, or a unique object?

Dayanita Singh, from “Godrej Museum,” in the book Museum Bhavan (Steidl 2017)
Courtesy the artist

LAM: I like your use of the term “book object” as a description for what you produce.

DS: Yes, I always wanted the mass-produced book to be unique. People like to make a distinction between artists’ books and mass-produced books. I say I make mass-produced artist books. Wealthier collectors will come and say, “Well, Dayanita, I’m not going to buy your little offset book object. I’m going to buy a print.” And I say, “I’m really sorry, but there are no prints. This is it.”

LAM: Ed Ruscha always said that he wanted to make mass-produced books for mass distribution. He wasn’t interested in the handmade, one-of-a-kind book. You’ve found a way to do both. Each of the individual seven offset-printed volumes within your previous book, Sent a Letter (Steidl, 2007), and the nine in Museum Bhavan are packaged together inside a box. Each volume can be viewed by turning the pages in the traditional manner, or displayed individually as a mini-exhibition, either in a gallery or in one’s own home, as you discuss with Aveek Sen in “Conversation Chambers.” You also call the Museum Bhavan a “pocket museum.”

DS: Yes. I even have a jacket that holds nine museums in its pockets, to wear at my openings. But it is such a privilege to be in people’s homes. It falls in line with other traditional forms of disseminating the photograph—like giving people family portraits that still hang in their homes. First Sent a Letter, and now Museum Bhavan will exist in personal archives of their homes. And it is an invitation to you, the reader, to become the curator of my work if you like. Whenever I attended an exhibition of my work, I always felt bad that the book wasn’t there, you know? I want the viewer to know that there’s a sequence to this work. I’m not making single images. The organizers always said, “Dayanita, a book is a book, and an exhibition is an exhibition.” That stayed in my head. I asked myself, “So, what is it going to take for my book to be in the exhibition?” The answer is that it has to be in a format in which it can be exhibited. Hence the idea of the Museum Bhavan and the book objects, the suitcase museum, and the book cases.

Dayanita Singh, Museum Bhavan, 2017. Installation at the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum
Courtesy the artist

LAM: At the Venice Biennale in 2013, your part of the installation at the German Pavillion consisted entirely of a line of framed books; then you launched the book in a little pop-up shop along some side alley, like a Venetian book vendor. In the exhibited set of framed books, are they offset images or did you tip gelatin-silver prints onto the book case?

DS: They’re all offset. I love offset. I prefer to call myself an offset artist because “book artist” and “artist book” is getting confused within the photobook world.

LAM: Tell me a little bit about Spontaneous Books and the Kochi Box (2017).

DS: I am Spontaneous Books. I made the Kochi Box on my own. Inside the wooden frame are thirty image cards, printed offset in India. It was only available at the Malabar House Hotel during the Kochi Biennale. There was no publicity. It was about finding it by chance, and realizing then that you could acquire it. Once you acquire it, you can become the curator of my works, deciding willy-nilly which image you wanted to display. The viewer becomes part of my process. Depending on what order you place them in, it’s a different book.

LAM: This is another way to combine or confuse—very productively—the idea of exhibition and book. One thing that has struck me is the incredibly coherent and consistent approach to all of the sculptural objects you make—frames, box structures, desks, installation pieces—they all feel of a piece. Your ability to do so is integral, ensuring that these efforts never feel random or chaotic. All of your objects feel quite modular, as though they will and can fit together in the end.

Dayanita Singh, from “Museum of Men,” in the book Museum Bhavan (Steidl 2017)
Courtesy the artist

DS: I would love it to be a little chaotic, but I’m just incapable of it.

LAM: There’s a little chaos in the Kochi Box, don’t you think?

DS: Absolutely. But it’s controlled disorder.

LAM: Isn’t that what bookmaking is to some degree?

DS: I think it’s trying to make order, but not too much order. Leave it to the reader to work out the relationships, and leave room to bring their conversations into the work.

LAM: On the other hand, the idea of the book object as the combination of the book space and the exhibition space, as you describe it, also seems a way to preserve your directed view through the work—a way to ensure that the edit and the sequence remain intact. Tell me about how you approach the editing process. Do you think it can be learned, to know how to edit properly?

DS: I wish I could teach that, because that is what I find is missing from a lot of the photobooks that I see. Photographs are just the raw material. The key is editing. And with the editing, a sequence builds up. That’s the stage at which the material starts to demand how it wants to be gathered. What form will it take? You have to be prepared for it, because it could be, and I suspect this is going to happen with the next book I want to make, that it demands to be a projection and not a book at all. That it demands to be a box of cards, for example. For me, editing has just as much to do with other questions: What’s the smell of this book going to be? What will the sound of the paper be? The feel of the cloth on the cover? What’s going to stay with you?

Dayanita Singh, from “Little Ladies Museum,” in the book Museum Bhavan (Steidl 2017)
Courtesy the artist

LAM: So it’s the edit and sequence working in combination with the physical experience?

DS: Yes, the tactile, sensual experience of the book. When I start, I don’t know how that book will be, what size, shape, or feel it’ll have, but I trust the editing process. All I need is about three weeks of being able to shut everything out to get to zero, where I can start the process. A piece of music helps me a lot. Depending on the music, or whom I’ve been in conversation with, or not, or what book I’m reading—all of this sets up a tune in my head for the editing.

LAM: In your writing, you’ve used music as a metaphor for editing.

DS: Yes. I’ve traveled so much with classical musicians that for me the idea of a raag is very present. In a raag you have an alap, or an introductory section, an inventory of the notes you have to work with. Following that, you’re elaborating on those notes and setting up the larger raag from them. Then there’s what is called the silent note, the khaali, which in photobook language we would call the empty page, which is crucial. I edit with my ears and not strictly with my eyes. I’m looking at the image, but I also want to be able to hear it, and to understand the resonance that the image leaves with me.

Dayanita Singh, from “Museum of Photography,” in the book Museum Bhavan (Steidl 2017)
Courtesy the artist

LAM: You mean where is the crescendo to a sequence and where does one need to pause? I find that people tend to clump things together in their editing instead of weaving them through—the arc of a narrative needs to be complicated and textured.

DS: Exactly. I don’t expect anyone to immediately say, “Ah, got it.” That would be a tremendous failure on my part. I feel like many mistakes made in editing books are often a holdover from photojournalism, from thinking about pictures in magazines. Magazine sequencing is one thing, and you can’t apply that to a book, or God forbid, to an exhibition. Of course, it’s the same boys who did the big magazine photo-essays who shaped the photo discourse. And I think unfortunately the photobook, too, has become somewhat of a boys’ club. When you talk to artists who work with photography, it’s such a relief, because they don’t have any of that baggage.

LAM: Perhaps they feel less of a feeling of obligation to who, what, where, when, why. You’ve said that “we need to get past the established forms of analogue photography as our language.” Is that what you’re talking about here? That the modes of storytelling or the established forms of editing and assembling images have become overly structured and didactic?

DS: Yes. It has to be more organic. The form has to be much more organic, fluid, and allow for waxing and waning. And it has to have a resonance. It doesn’t matter how beautiful your image is if there’s no resonance.

LAM: Resonance implies that something is bouncing off another object, another person, another ear, another set of eyes. There is an implied reader or recipient.

DS: If you’re putting work out into the world, then have some respect for the person who is going to see it, and their intelligence.

Dayanita Singh, from “Museum of Machines,” in the book Museum Bhavan (Steidl 2017)
Courtesy the artist

LAM: Do you think about the audience when you are making your books and your edit?

DS: I never have an audience in mind, but there’s always an addressee. Naoya Hatakeyama wrote a great piece about my work called, “Who is that Someone, the addressee?” that you can find on my blog. He asks a crucial question: who are we photographing for, and who is the addressee of the work? Often, my writer friends have been the addressees, because I’ve gone with them to all these incredible places. They’ve opened all these doors (in my mind), and then I want to respond to them, so I’ll make a book for them by cutting up my medium-format contact sheets and pasting them into accordion-fold Moleskines. That was the start of Sent a Letter, actually. For all my work, there is one or maybe two addressees, never more.

LAM: You seem to use written language frequently in your installations, but you generally don’t rely heavily on texts or language in your books.

DS: I have that very romantic idea that a photograph can really go where there are no words. If you could explain an image to yourself in words, you wouldn’t need the image. But if it leaves you with something, whether it’s annoying or pleasant or whatever, that cannot be put into words, it has resonance with you. And that’s the magic of photography.

LAM: One of the metaphors that people use with your work is literature, as if it were something along the lines of a photo novel or visual literature.

DS: House of Love (Radius, 2011) is a book that I called photo fiction, in which I tried to create a set of short stories. (I think all bookstores should have a section called photo fiction.) It’s slightly tongue-in-cheek when I say, I’ll make a photo novel, or, Can a photograph be poetry. But it’s intended to tease people a bit, to get them to understand that a photograph or photobook can actually do something quite distinct from other forms.

Dayanita Singh, from “Museum of Vitrines,” in the book Museum Bhavan (Steidl 2017)
Courtesy the artist

LAM: The idea of a distinct visual literacy of the photograph is so important.

DS: And so much of that visual literacy has to do with the sequence, no? What happens when you break up the sequence? Museum of Chance, as a book, has eighty-eight covers. It’s a book and it’s bound to a sequence. But when I frame the covers and reinstall it, I break the sequence. There are endless possibilities. I wrote about this recently in my short story on an Instagram post of a photographer who becomes a photograph. I’ll probably disappear into one of those little—

LAM: [laughs] Into the folds.

DS: Yes! I’m going to become that little creature who gets lost in her own book.

LAM: The idea that you are consciously creating this new space, I hope, will provide a way for other artists to think a little more about how to engage with these ideas.

DS: Absolutely, because we can’t rely on galleries and museums. You can’t say that I can only be an artist if I’m shown in a gallery. We need to think about dissemination. This is the one thing that I really imbibed from photojournalism: the importance of the dissemination of the image. And if I can’t do anything else, if no one wanted to show or publish my work, I could project my images from this hotel room onto those clouds and put my work out there. There is always a way, once you step out of the box that photography often can be.

Dayanita Singh’s work and writings can be found at dayanitasingh.net.

The post The Offset Artist appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.