Aperture's Blog, page 104

Walker Evans, Hero of the Vernacular Style

A landmark exhibition argues that the photographer’s approach to image making goes far beyond documentary.

By Sarah M. Miller

Walker Evans, Resort Photographer at Work, 1941
© Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Last fall, shortly after the opening of Walker Evans at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, curator Clément Cheroux and I sat down for a conversation about the massive retrospective, which he originally organized for the Centre Pompidou. We spoke about the organizing thematics of “vernacular as subject” and “vernacular as method,” Evans as a proto-conceptualist, and the risks of including objects from Evans’s own collection of weird and grisly photographs.

Sarah M. Miller: Framing Evans’s work through the vernacular allowed you to sidestep the thorny question of what documentary is, and what our expectations of it are, while also presenting to American audiences a less familiar history of documentary: the avant-garde’s. Could you expound on that framework? How did you choose it?

Clément Chéroux: The challenge was to show the work of Walker Evans, including his iconic photographs, but also to build something new in the approach. Especially in Europe, Evans is mostly known as a documentary photographer. I’ve been thinking about this question of the documentary style, and the question of the vernacular.

The two larger categories we have in photography are art and non-art. On one side, you have the art photographer, and on the other side, the vernacular. Everything that is not art is vernacular photography: documents, snapshots, architecture photographs, postcards, photographs of tools for catalogs, et cetera. Evans used the term “documentary style.” Documentary photography is only part of a larger category known as the vernacular. This is the reason why I proposed the concept of a “vernacular style.”

Walker Evans, Sidewalk and Shopfront, New Orleans, 1935
© Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Miller: What you’re saying is that you don’t accept this common division that puts documentary in opposition to art. It makes more sense to put vernacular in opposition to art, and to see documentary as that which bridges or deliberately brings the vernacular into art?

Chéroux: No, for me, documentary is part of the vernacular. In twentieth-century photography, the line is between what is art and what is not art. What is not art is the vernacular, which includes documentary photography, amateur photography, scientific photography, everything. For me, documentary photography is a small part of vernacular photography.

Miller: So, style is the bridge. As someone who also works on the history of documentary photography, I always stress that artists associated with “documentary style” chose the form or the look of information, rather than the function of actually transmitting information, and deployed those forms in order to change what kind of art photography could be. The aesthetic of information allowed artists to play with the deadpan, and to reject the overtly expressive. I saw that argument played out in the show, which I loved.

Chéroux: The fact that Evans was recognized as a photographer using the documentary style is a historical phenomenon. When Evans became more recognized in the 1980s and ’90s, especially in Europe, he became the hero of the documentary style. Most of the photographers were working in this style—the whole Düsseldorf school, the Bechers, Ruff, Gursky. Contemporary photographers need predecessors.

Walker Evans, Penny Picture Display, Savannah, 1936
© Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Miller: How did you divide the ideas of “vernacular as subject” and “vernacular as method” to structure the two parts of the exhibition?

Chéroux: Almost everybody who has written about Evans says he was trying to define the essence of American culture through the vernacular. But the word “vernacular” is never very well defined.

Miller: You give it a historically and linguistically specific definition in your catalogue essay.

Chéroux: The etymology was useful to understand the definition of vernacular: it brings us back to the Roman Empire where the Latin word for slave was verna, so the vernacular is something that is useful. Vernaculus means a slave that is born in the house, so vernacular means something that is domestic. Along with the domestic comes the idea of the local, and throughout history the meaning of the local has extended to the village, to the town, to the region, and to the whole country. According to the Roman civil code, the slave is at the bottom of the hierarchy. So, the vernacular is always something that is low.

Walker Evans, Main Street, Saratoga Springs, New York, 1931
© Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Miller: It’s easy to see how the utilitarian and culturally low are manifest in Evans’s subjects. But how does this understanding of the vernacular translate to method?

Chéroux: The first part of the exhibition is about what is in front of the lens, and the second is about what is behind the lens. The second part is really about the method with which Evans chose to photograph the vernacular. I realized that Evans, when he was choosing a subject, approached it by mimicking a style of photography, which was that of an applied photographer. For example, when he was taking photographs of the small-town Main Street, he was choosing the vantage point and the cropping of a postcard photographer. When he was taking shots of doorways or wooden churches, he photographed them as if he were an architecture photographer or a survey photographer. Some series he made are related to studio portrait photography; others are related to architectural photography, postcard photography, snapshot photography, et cetera.

What’s the best way to photograph a tool? Stieglitz would photograph it one way, Man Ray another way. Evans decides to do it as if he were a catalogue photographer: no shadows, no angles, no distortions, very straight. Every time Evans was interested in a subject, he would choose a way to depict it that was related to a certain kind of vernacular photography. The vernacular as a subject, plus vernacular as a method, combine to make the vernacular as a style. That’s really the idea I would like to demonstrate through this exhibition.

What’s the reason why Evans chooses not to play the artist? Stieglitz, for example, was really playing the artist. Evans was hiding himself as an artist by mimicking vernacular photography. And that’s quite difficult to explain to the public. He is an artist, but an artist who is not playing the artist; and on the contrary, he is playing the non-artist. This is the reason why I think that Evans is a conceptual photographer. The vernacular as a subject explains why Evans is perceived as a precursor of Pop Art. Rauschenberg, Warhol, and Lichtenstein also chose the vernacular as a subject. But if you think about the vernacular as a method, it explains why Evans was perceived by many photographers of the 1970s—“artists using photography” like Dan Graham—as a kind of precursor.

Walker Evans, Chain-Nose Pliers, 1955
© Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Miller: Part of what’s so difficult about Evans is that he comes with a controlling mythology. It’s all about impersonality and removing the artist from the picture. But critics recognized as early as the ’30s that Evans was creating another form of auteurism. Many of the reviews of American Photographs (1938) noted that he could appropriate any subject at all into “an Evans.” In the ’70s, that idea was taken to extremes and used against him by critics, namely Martha Rosler and Allan Sekula. But will it ever be possible to address that idea in a museum context? Will it ever be possible to mount an exhibition that doesn’t proceed from Evans’s self-definition as an artist, his posture of self-suppression?

Chéroux: Maybe a way to answer your question is by raising the issue of the political in Evans work. When I started working on this Evans retrospective, I was almost sure I would find some connection with the Left. Evans was friends with a lot of people who were leftist, people like artist Ben Shahn. But after reading letters and texts, and going through his photographs, I quickly understood that Evans was not interested in politics. The fact that he was interested in the sharecroppers, the fact that he was photographing the effects of consumerism, the effects of industrialization, all of these things, was not a political approach. That was an aesthetic approach. It’s a Baudelairean approach.

Miller: I’ve always thought of Evans as an astute cultural critic, but one who would refuse to call himself a political critic. His cultural criticism comes from a political viewpoint, to be sure. But there is no political agenda, only a political viewpoint.

Chéroux: Yes, that’s it. In French we say “la politique” and “le politique.” So, the first one is being engaged in politics, and the second one, just by changing the pronoun, is being concerned, but not part of the movement.

Walker Evans, Subway Portrait, 1938–41
© Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Miller: When you played out the argument about vernacular as method through the exhibition, did you have any worry that it could flatten the distinctions between different kinds of assignments—for example, Evans’s work for the Museum of Modern Art on African masks, or for Fortune—versus a highly individual project like the subway photographs?

Chéroux: The only one that I would really consider as a commission is the African masks. All of the projects for Fortune were his own ideas. I mean, there was no editor saying to him, “Please make a project about tools,” or “Please make a project about taking photographs from the train.” He was choosing the subject, he was taking the photographs, but then also cropping the photographs, doing the layout, and writing the text. We should not consider the projects for Fortune as commissioned. It’s totally different from what Cartier-Bresson was doing for the press. When Cartier-Bresson was sent on assignment, he was taking the photographs and then sending everything to his agency. He was not editing. Evans was really in control of everything.

Miller: So for you, it’s a way to demonstrate not only that he’s a conceptual photographer, but also that there’s a conceptual continuity to projects that otherwise might look like very different parts of his career and different frameworks for making and distributing.

Chéroux: Yes, the magazine projects were another way to make art. He was doing that since the ’40s. Again it makes him a precursor to conceptual artists of the ’60s and ’70s, people like Dan Graham, or other artists who were treating the magazine as the best way to disseminate their ideas. So, for me, if it’s not commissioned, it’s a piece of art in itself. That is why I wanted to have the magazines on the wall, and not in the middle of the room in a vitrine.

Walker Evans, “Labor Anonymous,” Fortune 34, no. 5, November 1946
© Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

 

Miller: You’re emphasizing that the magazine really is the art; it’s Evans’s chosen presentation of the art.

Chéroux: If you think about the ’40s through ’60s, he was doing more projects for Fortune than exhibitions. In a way, it was more important to show the magazines than to show American Photographs. There were a lot of strong choices in planning this exhibition. American Photographs is a great book, but the magazine work is as important. American Photographs is for me a kind of Bible of the vernacular. But I really didn’t want to reduce the whole exhibition through the book.

Miller: In the first week of the show, I raised concerns about the inclusion of a lynching photograph in the exhibition. I would have been alarmed no matter what, but I suppose I was on heightened alert because I was preparing to bring my students. Were you surprised that it could elicit such a strong reaction?

Chéroux: Yes, that was a bit of a surprise for me, and that’s a cultural difference between the United States and France, where the exhibition originated and was presented for the first time. You know, I’ve only been here nine months, and I’m learning every day about these questions. The newspaper photograph that you mentioned is among the press material that Evans clipped from papers and kept in a scrapbook titled Pictures of the Time: 1925–1935. He collected these images as a young man, when he was developing his visual style and sourcing thousands of references including fine art images, news images, vernacular and applied photography, postcards, street photography, and graphic design. We don’t know exactly why he kept these images, he never expressed himself about that, but we believe that they are an important part of Evans’s artistic process. We have included a label alerting visitors that there is challenging content in one gallery. For me, the question is why he was so interested by disturbing graphic images—not only that one, but also the electric chair, the people who were assassinated in Cuba.

Walker Evans, Street Debris, New York City, 1968
© Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Miller: I understood that context. I had already talked with my students about how the interest in the document of the ’20s was, in some cases, as Pierre Mac Orlan said, the notion that a photographic knowledge of the world is cruel. Evans was fascinated by the weird and barbaric insight that photography inadvertently provided into modern life, and collected images that his generation would have called documents for that reason. But it’s a hard line to walk here, where the work of racial terrorism those lynching photographs were manufactured to carry out can feel very alive. Especially in a season where we’re debating Civil War memorials and people are voicing the right not to be attacked by acts of white supremacism in public—no matter what historical context they were erected in or published in.

Chéroux: I perfectly understand this sensitivity, but for me, the problem would be to hide this photograph because of it. Or to hide the fact that Evans was collecting these photographs, or to hide the fact that he was photographing Confederate monuments. Throughout my career, I’ve been dealing with these questions. I’ve published a book on the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. I curated an exhibition and published a book on photography and the Holocaust. I’ve always chosen to show the photograph with, of course, an explanation or with some attention to the way it was displayed in a museum.

In this case it’s a bit different, because that’s not really the subject: this room is not about lynching, it’s about Evans’s own collection. I always take the position that the image is a good way to talk about these questions, and that we should use the image to debate these subjects. The worst thing for me is to hide the images, and the questions that the images raise.

Sarah M. Miller is an independent scholar, teacher, and critic based in Oakland, California.

Walker Evans is on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art through February 4, 2018.

The post Walker Evans, Hero of the Vernacular Style appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

Gender Is a Playground

From Aperture’s “Future Gender” issue, Zackary Drucker and Kate Bornstein discuss pioneers, politics, and the next frontier in gender expression.

Zackary Drucker and Kate Bornstein, Brooklyn, 2017
Photograph by Ryan Pfluger for Aperture

Kate Bornstein is a gender outlaw. Decades before Caitlyn Jenner graced the cover of Vanity Fair, Bornstein was pushing for a radical vision of gender beyond the binary. In 1989, with daytime talk shows among the only mainstream arenas to address nonnormative identities, she appeared on Geraldo in a segment titled “Transsexual Regrets: Who’s Sorry Now?” The show was meant to sensationalize Bornstein, a transgender lesbian, but she wasn’t having it. “I was the one who wasn’t sorry,” she later said. In her performances and plays, such as Hidden: A Gender (1989), and in her groundbreaking, genre-defying 1994 book Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us, Bornstein writes with characteristic wit, candor, and generosity about topics from gender confirmation surgery to trans activism. Throughout her life and career, Bornstein has defied the rules. For Aperture’s “Future Gender” issue, Bornstein spoke with guest editor Zackary Drucker about trans pioneers, the thrill of pornography, and the young photographers envisioning the next frontier in gender expression.

Hobbes Ginsberg, Self-Portrait, Seattle, 2013
Courtesy the artist

Zackary Drucker: I wanted to start by telling the story of how I found my way to you and your writing as a fourteen-year-old queer youth. It was the mid-’90s and I’d recently discovered the word queer. There I was, in the LGBT and women’s studies section at the bookstore. I don’t know what possessed me, but I shoplifted a copy of Gender Outlaw, and discovered the word transgender, and found myself in your words and in your experience in a way that I had never felt reflected before. It was a Bible of sorts. It was a Talmud, rather. I still have this copy of Gender Outlaw, and it’s creased and worn, and has notes in it—my little fourteen-year-old self, writing notes in the margins. It has a rainbow sticker on the front [laughs]. You were such a gender pioneer for me personally, and for countless others—I think an entire nation, really. Who are your gender pioneers, and who were they when you were transitioning in the 1980s?

Kate Bornstein: First off, allow me to say that when we first met, you stole my heart, and it’s lovely to hear that you also stole my fucking book. I’m so proud of that!

Drucker: I’ll pay you back for it.

Bornstein: It’s a gift now. Oh! I cherish that story.

My pioneers. Well, there weren’t many. There were, of course, the mainstream big hitters: There was Christine Jorgensen. There was Renée Richards. But I didn’t identify really with any of those. There was Wendy Carlos. She was the first trans person to graduate from Brown University. I was the second—that we know of. But honestly, my real hero, who I wanted to grow up and be like, was Tula.

Photographer unknown, Modeling shot of Tula, ca. 1970s–’80s
Courtesy Caroline Cossey

Drucker: Caroline Cossey.

Bornstein: Yes. But she was Tula, and that’s all she was known as, and she wrote the book I am a Woman (1982). What got me was her liminal beauty. She was a beautiful boy and a beautiful girl all at the same time—and I wanted to be pretty! She was the first trans woman I saw who embraced beauty. She went right into being “girl.” But she lived “boy.” That sang to me. She was my earliest hero.

Much later, Lou Sullivan was a hero of mine. We lived near each other in the Mission District in San Francisco in the late ’80s and early ’90s before he died. He was a complete maverick. I was one of the earliest trans women who came out as lesbian. He may have been the first trans man who came out openly as a gay man. So, we spoke about the entanglement of sexuality and gender. I have lots of heroes today, and you’re one of them.

Mariette Pathy Allen, Lou Sullivan, at home, San Francisco, 1990
© the artist

Drucker: Oh, my goodness.

Bornstein: You are.

Drucker: You’re making me blush now. I have so many questions. First, I was thinking about your relationship to postmodernism, and how hard it must have been to conceptualize this binary—that of Christine Jorgensen and the writer Jan Morris, and the antiquated narrative of being a woman trapped in a man’s body. It must have been reductive to you because you were so much more interested in complicating meaning and adding layers. That’s why you’re my gender pioneer, because you were presenting a way of being that was not a simple, reduced, “I am one way, but I should have been the other.” That feels like a very black-and-white way of thinking.

When I found your book, you were way ahead of the curve of where we are today, with people acknowledging that gender is a spectrum like everything else. How did the conditions of the 1980s and your understanding of postmodernism influence your sense of self, or was it completely self-made?

Bornstein: I didn’t know about postmodernism until I got invited to an academic women’s theater conference in 1987. These were not women who were making theater; these were women who were critiquing theater. They invited me to come perform, and told me that what I was doing, performing three genders, was postmodern. Postmodernism runs so against the grain of either/or, which is the basis of America; but that basis proved to be a veneer for a deeper truth that everything—including gender—is relative to context and point of view. And in the 1980s and early ’90s, that made the most sense to me. The word binary didn’t exist in relation to gender. Or, if it did, I didn’t know it. We called it “the two-gender system.” Actually, in the first edition of Gender Outlaw I called it “the bipolar gender system.”

Drucker: That’s so accurate.

Bornstein: Postmodern theory gave me the permission to define myself as “not man, not woman.” We didn’t have words for what we were, but we could definitely state what we were not. The Warhol superstar Jackie Curtis said that way before I did. “I am not a man and I am not a woman.” Many of the queens of the day, in the late ’60s and through the ’70s, were actually embracing and living nonbinary lives.

There’s intense polarization on many levels within the trans community these days—one of them is between drag queens and transgender women, who claim that drag queens hold on to male privilege. But, my guess is that none of these transgender women has met a drag queen out of drag. For the most part, they are highly effeminate men, sometimes just flaming fags. They have no privilege out in the world. And they are wonderfully nonbinary. Drag is a “queer” identity. Female impersonation is a “straight” identity. So, female impersonation is what transgender women might be objecting to. Out of their female clothes, those men retain male privilege.

Photographer unknown, Former soldier Christine Jorgensen at a press reception in London to launch the film The Christine Jorgensen Story, September 14, 1970
© Wesley/Getty Images

Drucker: I couldn’t agree with you more. Female impersonation has been used as a tool of misogyny, especially in television and film, and has too often been conflated with trans identity. I think much of the time homophobia is really rooted in a discomfort with gender, with gender roles, and with people performing outside of their gender roles. It’s not about two masculine men holding hands walking down the street—though, of course, that can be cause for violence, too. I think it’s actually swishy queens and butch women that bear the brunt of what we call homophobia, which we can just as easily situate in the realm of transphobia or trans misogyny.

Bornstein: Bingo.

Drucker: Moving from people to images—to film, television, and photographs—who were your pioneers in image making? What images of trans life informed your imagination or your sense of yourself? How did you arrive at a trans identity through culture at large?

Bornstein: In the 1970s and through into the ’80s, and even today, the images of trans porn inspire me, light me on fire. I think it’s so fucking beautiful!

In April, Laverne Cox told Elle magazine that trans people are beautiful and shouldn’t have to “blend in.” I retweeted that, but I was quickly reminded that sometimes you have to pass for safety’s sake. Absolutely. That takes priority. But the beauty inherent in the blend—porn was the only place I could find it. And there were wonderful porn magazines. Chicks With Dicks. She-Male. They weren’t trying to be women. They were beautiful not-men, not-women.

Janell Shirtcliff, Laverne Cox, 2016
Courtesy Form Artists Inc.

Drucker: Yes! I’ve been collecting all the trans woman magazines that I can get my hands on. They go back to the early ’60s. It’s a rare glimpse at our history, and it provides documentation of people who are not really documented elsewhere. Our history is in those magazines, and it’s embedded into a history of sexual exploitation, and maybe in the history of sexual pleasure, too. We often forget to recognize how empowering it can feel to be photographed and to be represented. And that’s continued today. Trans pornography is a category of pornography that’s growing faster than any other category. So, it’s interesting how our relationship to pornography, as a community, is so fraught. We have existed there, and it has provided a rare economic opportunity, where we were typically shut out of other economies.

Bornstein: For decades, porn was the only place we were allowed to be sexy, where people were allowed to be attracted to trans bodies. And today, you can’t be attracted to a trans body. You have to be attracted to a woman’s body. You’re allowed to be attracted to a woman who transitioned out of being a man. You’re allowed to be attracted to a man who transitioned out of being a woman. You’re not allowed to be attracted to those of us who blend.

Cover of She-Male, 1974
Courtesy Zackary Drucker

Drucker: What do you think about the wave of visibility that trans folks have had over the past several years? How has that amplified platform helped us, and where has it hurt us?

Bornstein: In the ’60s and ’70s, when transsexuals first became known to the mainstream, we were the cultural butts of jokes. When transsexual—a binary-identified man or woman who had transitioned out of another gender—became transgender, it was a big step because transgender is now understood not to depend on biology, so that’s good. But what’s visible again is only the binary. The people who took the place of trans as the butt of the jokes are now the genderqueer folk, the gender fluid, the nonbinary, the gender nonconforming.

If you google genderqueer you will find very objectifying visibility. Whereas transgender visibility is more and more inclusive, more and more, “Oh yes, they’re just like us.” So, there are two levels of visibility going on here. But the flood of trans everywhere is specifically binary-identified trans people.

Drucker: Absolutely. To your previous point about Jackie Curtis, when Holly Woodlawn was interviewed by Gay Power newspaper in the late 1960s, they asked her, “Do you live your life as a transvestite completely?” and she said, “There is only one Holly Woodlawn. I know what I am.”

Bornstein: [applause]

Drucker: For the 1960s, that was so forward-thinking. It was kind of like, “Fuck you; there are more than two ways of being.”

How do you think this kind of pluralistic range of identities today has established new barriers and obstacles between us? The right thinks that the left is fetishistic about identity, and even the moderate left has been critical of the trans rights movement for pushing the conversation too far out of people’s comfort zones.  How do we rush the gates instead of backing down, and how do we push the conversation ahead and lean into a backlash, instead of losing momentum with these sorts of increasing legislative setbacks?

Bornstein: When gender is a binary, it’s a battlefield. When you get rid of the binary, gender becomes a playground. All kinds of ways of looking at gender can peacefully coexist. Of course, there are playground bullies. But whereas the activism of any kind of binary politic is struggle, and opposition, and gaining ground at the expense of someone else, the activism of a playground is cooperation and coalition. And that’s not really being tried. Caitlyn Jenner is doing it—in the weirdest way. She is forging a coalition within the right. Good for her. I couldn’t do that. I am trying to forge a coalition within the left.

How about you? In art and photography, what do you see?

Leah James, Macy, 2016
Courtesy the artist

Drucker: I love looking to the horizon of young trans and genderqueer visualizers, like Lia Clay, Hobbes Ginsberg, Leah James, and Wynne Neilly, each of whom incorporate disparate elements of culture seamlessly, connecting fashion, performance, auto-ethnography, social media, and more. Being around long enough to identify a new wave of talent cresting is so exciting—it makes the future feel limitless. These image makers are imagining future gender in their own way, and it looks like nothing that’s come before.

Moving into the future, how do you think gender will be regulated by technology? Or do you think binaries will be more or less entrenched? Do you think there’s always going to be an “us” and a “them,” a dominant versus a subjugated? Or do you think medicine and science will veer us away from fixed states of being altogether into this sort of proverbial playground that you so gloriously illuminated? We might be the most visible generation of trans people, but medicine and science could actually reduce our visibility in the future, and yet this also speaks to the growing class divide. If it’s only people with affl uence and status who have access to procedures that reduce their visibility, will there be a sort of rebel class of gender warriors, of people who are resisting the binary?

Bornstein: Way into the future, I see the dissolution of binary thinking. This is the basis of postmodern theory. This is the basis of all Eastern philosophies. This is the basis of quantum mechanics. Relativity. Nondualism. The acknowledgment that things are unpredictable, that things are going to change. Gender is a continuum. Identity is a continuum. And that, I think, is the future, not only of gender, but of the world.

Lia Clay, Pierce, 2017, from the series What It Means to Be Trans/GNC & at the Beach in America
Courtesy the artist and Refinery29

Drucker: You just performed On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us at La MaMa in New York. How have you noticed the change in your audiences since you started performing in the ’80s? What have you learned from the younger generations in the past thirty years?

Bornstein: When I first started performing, with Hidden: A Gender and my solo shows The Opposite Sex Is Neither (1992) and Virtually Yours (1994), everything was a revelation to my audience. No one was going “Me, too.” Or, if they were going “Me, too,” they were really quiet about it. What is still new about what I’m performing is the notion of “not man, not woman.” That still knocks some people over. But now, there are more and more audience members who go, “Yeah, yeah.” When I see your generation embracing the possibility of a third, embracing the notion of fluidity, it gives me hope for the world I’m going to be reborn into.

Drucker: You’re an incredible visionary and a futurist. What do you think are the most significant changes you’ve witnessed in your lifetime, and where do you see gender heading in future societies?

Bornstein: I grew up in the 1950s in the “great America” everyone wants us to be again! But the fact that, today, people are motivated by a wish for inclusion, a wish for cooperation, a wish for breaking down barriers—that never existed when I was growing up.

Where do I see gender going in the future? Which future? One hundred years from now? Two thousand years from now?

Drucker: Either.

Hobbes Ginsberg, Self-Portrait, Los Angeles, 2014
Courtesy the artist

Bornstein: There’s a Star Trek movie, Star Trek: Nemesis (2002), that starts with a great big dinner party, and all the Federation officers are in dress uniform, and it’s a fancy do, and Commander Data is welcoming people, and he says, “Ladies and gentlemen, and invited transgendered species.”

Drucker: Really?!

Bornstein: Oh, yes. They are some of the first words of the movie. When I saw that, I was rocked to my core. That made me think, “Okay, I exist in a future of Star Trek.” What’s more, in 2002, transgender was an inclusive word. Transsexual was the binary word. He didn’t say “transsexual species.” He was talking nonbinary. So, I see the future of gender as being included as neither-nor, just being acknowledged. That will be gender. It won’t be worldwide. But my God, Gender Outlaw has been published in China, Korea. People are thinking about this shit.

Drucker: I think that people will continue reading Gender Outlaw two thousand years ahead. Star Trek time in the future.

Bornstein: Let’s hope for favorable rebirth in a universe that’s still exploring gender. That would be swell.

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

The post Gender Is a Playground appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

The Cult of Walter Pfeiffer

Delighting in male beauty and gender play, a prolific Swiss photographer reinvented the rules of attraction.

By Alistair O’Neill

Walter Pfeiffer, Untitled, 2009
Courtesy the artist and Art + Commerce

Visiting the photographer Walter Pfeiffer in his studio in Zurich, you find an orderly space, painted white, possessing the trappings of a typical design studio: swivel chairs, Pantone pens, and a white Formica tabletop on trestles. Yet, lining the walls are exquisitely arranged mood boards, wrapping paper, photographs, posters, plastic props, and a Technicolor cornucopia of cascading bolts of cloth. Early in his career, Pfeiffer was a window dresser for a department store, where he learned the skills of arrangement. Today, he still employs this way of working to test environments and themes for commissions, as if he always has the shopwindow in mind.

Now in his early seventies, Pfeiffer has never been in greater demand. His photographs are exhibited and published worldwide, and he continues to work commercially, represented by a leading fashion-image agency, Art + Commerce, which handles the likes of Steven Meisel, Patrick Demarchelier, and Paolo Roversi. Pfeiffer’s style readily connects with the preoccupations of contemporary image makers with whom he is now identified, such as Jack Pierson, Wolfgang Tillmans, and Ryan McGinley. Yet, he emerged in the 1970s with an earlier generation of photographers that included Larry Clark, Duane Michals, and Peter Hujar, who explored the instability of gender and sexuality in relation to the male body. To look at a Pfeiffer photograph, such as the lead image for the 2017 exhibition Smoke Gets in Your Eyes at F+F design school, in Zurich, of a bare-chested young man exhaling a curling puff of yellow smoke between cupped hands—like a modern-day satyr performing at a party—is to be reminded that masculinity is now rooted in self-awareness, a kind of disruptive sexualization. This is the legacy of the liberation movements of minority groups who undermined the hegemony of heterosexual masculinity in the 1970s.

 

Walter Pfeiffer, Untitled, 1974–81
Courtesy the artist and Art + Commerce

Pfeiffer’s work first garnered attention in 1974 as part of the group exhibition Transformer: Aspects of Travesty at the Kunstmuseum Luzern, in Switzerland, curated by Jean-Christophe Ammann, who would become Pfeiffer’s long-term editor. The title references Lou Reed’s 1972 album; Transformer was the first museum exhibition to explore transvestism and nonnormative sexualities as represented in art, fashion, and music. The show brought together American and European practitioners such as Andy Warhol, the Cockettes, Jürgen Klauke, Luciano Castelli, and Urs Lüthi. Pfeiffer exhibited a set of photographs of a young transsexual, Carlo Joh (pictured opposite, bottom right), taken over a number of months in 1973. They charted, across black-and-white images printed on cheap photo paper, a boy in differing states of gender, oscillating between nakedness and drag with the aid of makeup and accessories. Pfeiffer recalls that the sequence “started with Carlo Joh in his blossoming beauty and every time when he came—we photographed maybe once a month—he got thinner, and you see this in the pictures.” Carlo Joh died unexpectedly soon after the photography sessions ended, and before Pfeiffer first worked with Ammann on selecting the photographs for display.

The work has an intense beauty, depicting a person at their moment of becoming, just before that beauty is taken from them. As portraits, they show the strength and vulnerability of the trans boy in the visual register of both his glamour and decline. Writing in the introduction to Peter Hujar’s 1976 book, Portraits of Life and Death, Susan Sontag identified two impulses in photography: one that “converts the world itself into a department store,” and another that “converts the whole world into a cemetery.” The theory evoked how photographs aestheticize and commodify subjects as much as they ossify them, by marking the beauty of their moment in front of the camera as time passes. Like Sontag’s theory, Pfeiffer’s photographs of Carlo Joh invoke the department store and the cemetery, just like Hujar’s Candy Darling on Her Deathbed (a portrait of a Warhol superstar in declining health, now regarded as a significant image of trans identity), also taken in 1973. What makes Sontag’s formulation particularly relevant to Pfeiffer is that he actually worked as a department-store window dresser before becoming a photographer.

Walter Pfeiffer, Untitled, 2005
Courtesy the artist and Art + Commerce

In the mid-1960s, Pfeiffer was employed at the Globus department store in Zurich, where, he recalls, “you had to create an atmosphere because it was a stage. So you learned what works up and what works down, and about depth, height, and framing, even though I never touched a camera.” Pfeiffer’s training in the commercial gaze taught him how to construct visual seduction, and it translated readily into a self-taught mode of photography that placed value on the look of things. This made Pfeiffer adept at backgrounds, scenarios, and settings, as well as how to direct a model’s gesture and how to frame elements within an image.

Pfeiffer was soon promoted to assist the art director of Globus magazine, the department store’s promotional catalog, learning illustration, typography, photography editing, and layout design. This led him to enroll in the newly opened private art college F+F (a reference to Form und Farbe, the Bauhaus term for form and color), established in 1971 by Serge Stauffer, a Marcel Duchamp specialist, and the artist Hansjörg Mattmüller, who greatly influenced Pfeiffer and first revealed to him that Warhol was a homosexual. It was much later that Pfeiffer found out that Warhol also had an early career as a window dresser and fashion illustrator, but the revelation of his sexuality encouraged Pfeiffer to be open about being gay. At F+F, Pfeiffer, a student of painting and drawing, was exposed to art history via Dada, a movement that started in Zurich at the Cabaret Voltaire, and to contemporary Swiss design, typified by graphic designer Josef Müller-Brockmann. The design principles absorbed during his schooling are visible in his 1977 portrait series Chez Walti, which includes Pfeiffer as a model, and makes use of brightly colored backgrounds and matching food props. His ongoing, confident handling of saturated color and graphic motifs were born out of a calibrated approach to art directing his own work.

Walter Pfeiffer, Untitled, 1974–81
Courtesy the artist and Art + Commerce

After being introduced to British Pop artist Peter Phillips via Phillips’s girlfriend, who ran a fashion boutique in Zurich, Pfeiffer arrived in London for a short trip in 1970. He met shoe designer Manolo Blahnik (who had seen Pfeiffer’s shoe illustrations in Twen magazine) at the opening of an exhibition at Arthur Tooth & Sons by Pop artist Allen Jones, which displayed fetishistic female mannequins posed in furniture forms—a chair, a table, a hatstand—that would incite feminist criticism. Staying with Blahnik in his Notting Hill flat, Pfeiffer unwittingly entered a small enclave of fashionable creatives who were obsessed with nostalgia and fed on old movies shown at the Electric Cinema on Portobello Road. They included artist David Hockney, textile designer Celia Birtwell, fashion designer Ossie Clark, and fashion editor Anna Piaggi, and, as such, the scene connected to the culture of Warhol’s underground superstars in New York, which reprised the star system of Hollywood’s golden era and an interest in the aesthetics of the 1920s.

Returning to Zurich, Pfeiffer continued his job as a commercial illustrator, living in a small white room simply furnished with a bed, a table, and a television. “When I made my illustrations, I worked on the table, and when friends came round they sat on the bed, and then I started to use this camera to take pictures of them,” Pfeiffer remarked, referring to a small white Polaroid with which he shot copies of his illustrations. By turning the camera on his guests, he took his first photographs. Incorporating discarded window-display props from his day job, he created his own one-room nostalgic star system.

Walter Pfeiffer, Untitled, 1975
Courtesy the artist and Art + Commerce

The scale of his site-based, theatrical photography soon expanded when Pfeiffer, in the early 1970s, rented a large villa near the lake in Zurich to live in, regularly staging parties where guests would be sprayed with perfume on arrival and directed to be “always on camera” for the duration of the evening. But all the campy exultation these scenarios produced was tempered by Pfeiffer’s wish to segue into the everyday life of his friends, what he called “their habits, objects, and traces.” The edited, Muybridge-like run of connected images he took at these events was shown in 1974 at Galerie le Tobler, in Zurich, where photographs were collaged over textile samples set into cheap frames and bound photo albums of portraits were set out on tables for visitors to look through. The display offered glimpses into a way of life carried out by a group of young confidants without much money, but possessing the will to reinvent themselves by being photographed.

The presentation of the photo albums is reminiscent of Pfeiffer’s scrapbooks, made for his own satisfaction from 1969 to 1985, which are now celebrated for their incongruous and iconoclastic juxtapositions of found images, mixing male anatomy, objects, flora, fauna, and food to startling effect. In Pfeiffer’s world, everything is intense and nothing is natural; it is a queer material culture of sorts. Yet the color and combinations of Pfeiffer’s scrapbooks are far from the aesthetic found in the black-and-white photobook that made his name. First published in 1980, with a second edition printed in 2004, Walter Pfeiffer: 1970–1980 was, according to a 2003 Artforum profile, one of the two most thumbed-through photobooks during the 1980s at Printed Matter, a specialist bookshop in New York. (The other was Larry Clark’s 1981 Teenage Lust, which also operates in a terrain that is neither documentary nor pornography.) Pfeiffer’s book features young men he knew from teaching drawing classes at F+F, as well as those he met in local bars and clubs. The photographs show close crops of mostly naked bodies in a variety of positions. In some instances, modeling was brokered; the subject decided which frames could be used and which had to be destroyed. The final images were selected by Ammann, who insisted on including full-frontal nudity. As Pfeiffer recalls, “Without the cocks it still would have been a good book, but with those forceful things it was better.”

Walter Pfeiffer, Untitled, 2004
Courtesy the artist and Art + Commerce

International recognition came to Pfeiffer much later, in the form of a survey exhibition and publication titled Welcome Aboard, shown at Galerie Schedler in Zurich in 2001 and the Scalo Project Space in New York in 2002, followed by a retrospective at the Centre Culturel Suisse in Paris in 2004. But a more prescient indicator of the changed world of visual culture is a 2005 profile that appeared in Butt, a Dutch gay-interest fashion magazine printed on pink paper and published by Gert Jonkers and Jop van Bennekom. Butt (and for a short time its sister title, Kutt, which means “cunt” in Dutch) aimed to make a virtue of the number of gay creatives involved in the fashion world, promoting a European aesthetic for making queer sensibilities visible in fashion photography that veered away from the look of American hetero “porno chic” developed by Terry Richardson.

In addition to an interview with Pfeiffer and a survey of his photographs, issue fourteen of the publication contains a Marc Jacobs advertising campaign of Rufus Wainwright shot by Juergen Teller, an advertisement for a Wolfgang Tillmans monograph by Taschen, an article on fashion stylist Simon Foxton’s homoerotic scrapbooks, and a readers’ section, “Buttstuff,” featuring amateur photographs of readers’ behinds. It must have been a curious “arrival” for Pfeiffer, who had anticipated nearly all of the creative strategies for queer representation presented in the issue by more than two decades.

Walter Pfeiffer, Untitled, 2004
Courtesy the artist and Art + Commerce

Jonkers and Van Bennekom went on to launch the fashion magazines Fantastic Man, in 2005, and The Gentlewoman, in 2010. By continuing to commission Pfeiffer for editorial work, they helped bring him to the attention of other fashion titles, including French Vogue, i-D, Self Service, and Dazed, as well as fashion labels such as A.P.C., MSGM, Pringle of Scotland, and Hermès. One of the reasons for Pfeiffer’s late-blooming success with fashion is his ability to direct an attitude about bodies without having to rely on clothes, which suits the homogenous nature of much contemporary fashion. As a young man with aspirations to be an artist, Pfeiffer knew about the closed, elite world of fashion: in the ’70s he traveled to Milan to buy his shoes and he read fashion magazines, loving the otherworldly photographs by Guy Bourdin. It is telling that the world of fashion, so distant to Pfeiffer as a young man, would not only come to embrace him as one of their own, but would also co-opt his territory of image making, produced on the periphery, as their own.

When shooting the images for his first photobook, Pfeiffer was told by his editor, Ammann, that he must publish the full extent of what he had captured, as the future might not be so permissive. It would be easy to argue that Ammann got this wrong, as the twenty-first century heralds a newfound visibility for queer visual culture celebrated not just in museums and galleries, but also within aspirational commercial imagery. And yet, just like the subject matter that this aspect of photography tends to coalesce around—what Pfeiffer calls his “beauties”—this visibility might yet be merely provisional, particularly as we enter our new political landscape. Asked what propels him to photograph beauty, Pfeiffer responds, “Because you do not know how fast she is fading.”

Read more from Aperture Issue 228, “Elements of Style,” or subscribe to Aperture and never miss an issue.

Alistair O’Neill is professor of fashion history and theory at Central Saint Martins, London.

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Time and Again

A new exhibition spotlights Nicholas Nixon’s preoccupation with the elusive passage of time.

Nicholas Nixon, The Brown Sisters, New Canaan, Connecticut, 1975.
© the artist and courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Nicholas Nixon, View of Essex Street, Near the Massachusetts Turnpike, Boston, 1976.
© the artist and courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Nicholas Nixon, Hyannis, Massachusetts, 1978.
© the artist and courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Nicholas Nixon, The Brown Sisters, Truro, Massachusetts, 1984.
© the artist and courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Nicholas Nixon, Covington, Kentucky, 1982. © the artist and courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Nicholas Nixon, Allentown, Pennsylvania, 1982. © the artist and courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Nicholas Nixon, The Brown Sisters, Concord, Massachusetts, 1992.
© the artist and courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Nicholas Nixon, Sam, St. Maries de la Mar, France, 1997. © the artist and courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Nicholas Nixon, View of Boston Common, 2002.
© the artist and courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Nicholas Nixon, The Brown Sisters, Truro, Massachusetts, 2016. © the artist and courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

In large-format, yet intimately scaled black and-white photographs, Nicholas Nixon has documented his wife and her three sisters since 1975, in four decades of annual portraits. The new exhibition Persistence of Vision presents The Brown Sisters in its entirety, punctuated by images taken by Nixon in the corresponding years of each photograph. Coupling his long-term series with scenes of landscapes, rural poverty, and city life in Boston, where he is based, the exhibition underscores Nixon’s constant preoccupation with the elusive passages of time.

Nicholas Nixon: Persistence of Vision is on view at the ICA, Boston, December 13, 2017–April 22, 2018.

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The Best Photography Features of 2017

 

Gender is a Playground

From Aperture’s “Future Gender” issue, Zackary Drucker and Kate Bornstein discuss pioneers, politics, and the next frontier in gender expression.

Erotic Voyeurs of Japanese Photography

Three celebrated photographers push the limits of sexuality and surveillance.

These Radical Black Women Changed the Art World

Jessica Lynne speaks with the curators behind the Brooklyn Museum’s landmark exhibition about the revolutionary artists who transformed American culture.

The Lives of Samuel Fosso

The acclaimed photographer pushes self-portraiture into new realms of gender-bending theatricality.

Why Aren’t There Any Famous Asian American Photographers?

Three young artists discuss the histories, struggles, and complexities of making photographs in America today.

Collier Schorr: Humanity, Visibility, Power

From Aperture’s “Elements of Style” issue, is the world finally ready for Collier Schorr’s women?

The Radical Notion That Women Are People

Are we living in a state of emergency feminism?

Is Andrew Tshabangu the Unsung Hero of South African Photography?

In searing and poetic images, Andrew Tshabangu chronicles Johannesburg in the age of democracy.

You Can Never Be Too Rich

In Lauren Greenfield’s chronicle of American wealth, the desire for status is insatiable.

Learning to See: Photography at Black Mountain College

How a small, liberal-arts college became a birthplace of modern photography.

The Cult of Walter Pfeiffer

Delighting in male beauty and gender play, a prolific Swiss photographer reinvented the rules of attraction.

The Unfinished Work of the Civil Rights Movement

LaToya Ruby Frazier and Kellie Jones reflect on political photography from Selma to Flint.

Subscribe to Aperture and never miss an issue.

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Trans Lives Illuminated

Since the 1970s, Mariette Pathy Allen has photographed the lives of trans and gender nonconforming people around the world.

By Katie Booth

Mariette Pathy Allen, Valerie, scientist with many patents, 1985
© the artist

Mariette Pathy Allen didn’t initially set out to photograph members of the transgender community. As she remembers it, they found her. In 1978, while visiting New Orleans with her husband, she noticed a group of cross-dressers in the hotel where she was staying. When she approached them with her camera, she instantly connected with one person in particular: a trans woman named Vicky West. Allen describes her meeting with West as an epiphany; their resulting friendship opened the door to a career documenting, with gentle reverence, the lives of gender-nonconforming people around the world, from trans communities in the United States, to, more recently, “spirit mediums” in Burma and Thailand.

Allen’s first book, Transformations: Crossdressers and Those Who Love Them (1989), portrays cross-dressers and their families. In those years, when gender variance was deeply stigmatized, Allen offered a vital and revelatory portrait of trans and gender-variant lives. Thirty years later, Allen continues to photograph communities around the world where the blurring of normally rigid gender lines is accepted, and even embraced. Between 2012 and 2014, she photographed a community of transgender women in Cuba. The resulting images were published in TransCuba (2014). Her most recent work, Transcendents (2017), explores a growing subculture of gender nonconforming men who act as “spirit mediums” in Burma and Thailand.

Compassionate without being sentimental, Allen’s photographs challenge our conceptualization of gender, and serve as a counternarrative to the often sensational and exploitative depictions of transgender lives in the media. Upon the release of Aperture’s “Future Gender” issue, which features a portfolio of Allen’s poignant, 1980s-era portraits, I spoke with Allen about her photography career, and the experiences that have shaped it.

Mariette Pathy Allen, Drag ball in Harlem, 1983
© the artist

Katie Booth: You first encountered the gender nonconforming community by chance in 1978, in New Orleans. As a cisgender photographer, what made you gravitate towards them?

Mariette Pathy Allen: On the last day of Mardi Gras, I was invited to join a group of incredible-looking people for breakfast at our hotel. At the time, I didn’t know anything about gender variance. All I knew was that I was hearing loud, masculine sounding voices and seeing people wearing wigs, ball gowns, earrings, eyelashes, and heels. After breakfast, they lined up on one side of the swimming pool, ready to be photographed by the group’s leader. As I raised my own camera to my eyes, I looked deep into the eyes of the person standing in the middle of the group. I felt as if I weren’t looking at a man or a woman, but at the essence of a human being. I said to myself as I took the picture, “I have to have this person in my life.”

Booth: How did that experience shape your concept of gender?

Allen: I knew nothing about gender variance, but I’ve always been puzzled by society’s rules. How, when, and why did our culture decide that women are supposed to be one way, and men another? It always struck me as odd. I had the great good luck to study anthropology in high school. I was so relieved when I realized: “Wait a minute, those are just our culture’s interpretations! There are many other ways of living, and many other interpretations of what it means to be human.” When I met Vicky West, I came into direct contact with a different way of experiencing gender. I was excited by the flexibility and playfulness around gender, by seeing typical gender roles dissolve in front of my eyes! It felt like escaping the prison of rules.

Mariette Pathy Allen, Steve Dain, formerly Doris, at home, 1984
© the artist

Booth: You forge close friendships and connections with the people you photograph. How do you balance the personal and anthropological in your work?

Allen: I have always been fascinated by how people live their lives. I try to create an environment where people are comfortable enough to reveal their essence, to go beyond their “corporate look,” if I can put it that way. Beyond that, I look for details, for beauty. What is the light doing on this face? What is the shape they’re sitting in? What emotion comes through, based on these details? What environment feels right, or how does the environment relate to this person? I feel like I’m reading and writing at the same time.

Booth: At that time, the transgender community was far less visible than it is today. What questions were you asking yourself as a photographer with regard to how you portrayed your subjects?

Allen: When I first started, and well into the ’90s, I encountered cross-dressers who grew up feeling very bad about themselves. Many thought they were the only ones in the world who felt the way they did. Some thought they were insane. Many were ashamed of themselves or terrified of being discovered. They kept their secret from their spouses, children, and other family members. I discovered, pretty early on, that I could make a difference in the lives of crossdressers and their families through photography. It could actually help a lot of people. This realization gave me a new sense of purpose, and a lot of joy.

Mariette Pathy Allen, Paula and her daughter, Lisa, 1987
© the artist

Booth: When did you discover that your photographs could be helpful?

Allen: As I photographed male to female cross-dressers, I worked out ways of changing their relationship to movement and space, in order to develop an appreciation of their feminine character. While they were working on the emotional aspects of transforming themselves, I had to figure out how to handle issues related to wigs, makeup, clothes, backdrops, and other aspects of the journey that I had never considered.

In 1989, when my first book, Transformations, was released, it was received with joy and relief by the “community.” This was the book that they had been looking for when they were growing up. Transformations was the book that many people used to tell their family and friends who they were. I’ve been told that it saved marriages, and saved lives. At that time, however, the art community wasn’t all that impressed, but gender non-conforming people were ecstatic over it.

Booth: How was your work different from other portrayals of transgender people that existed at the time?

Allen: Gender-variant people were often depicted as freaks, evil, dangerous, or crazy people. They were usually photographed alone, always the “other,” and never as lovable people. A lot of media coverage focused on shock value. They also enjoyed outing gender nonconformists. I always wanted to show them in the daylight, in everyday life, to make them feel relatable.

Mariette Pathy Allen, Toby, at rest after a long shoot. She was the opening act for the drag performer Ethyl Eichelberger, 1990
© the artist

Booth: Tell me about the “fantasy shoots” you did.

Allen: Many cross-dressers were involved in very typically masculine work: police officers, truck drivers, or in the military, for example. When somebody would pose, it would be like standing there for a passport picture, totally symmetrical. I would try to help them figure out what kind of woman they wanted to be, and encourage them to act as that person. It was a combination of trying to get more at the essence of a person. You can see in the pictures in Aperture: they don’t all look happy, but I think they do look true to themselves.

Booth: The first picture of yours that appears in “Future Gender,” of Valerie, really struck me as an unguarded moment.

Allen: Yes, we went up in the dunes in Provincetown. Valerie brought fancy clothes, and we created a great variety of photographs, playing with ideas of sex and glamour. By sunset, it was getting cold and Valerie was tired. She grabbed her fur coat, hugging it to herself. She looked like was a little girl, holding her teddy bear.

Mariette Pathy Allen, Sai Si in the countryside just outside Mandalay, 2014–17, from the book Transcendents
© the artist

Booth: I’d like to shift focus to your work in Burma and Thailand. In her preface to Transcendents, Zackary Drucker writes, “To see trans folks living among their fellow country-people, fully integrated into the fabric of their communities and living openly, is a tremendous global model for all of us moving into the future.” Tell me more about how spirit mediums—people who channel spirits—fit within their communities.

Allen: I completely agree with Zackary. To be free from making choices according to the binary, in a society that appreciates you for who you are, is otherworldly! I asked Tun, a spirit medium, “How do you see yourself? As a man, as a woman?” And she said, “I don’t care, whatever.”

Booth: That would be a bold statement in a lot of places.

Allen: Yes. And I only say “she,” because I saw her presenting as a woman a lot, but it seemed to be irrelevant to the spirit medium community. In Burma and Thailand, Spirit Mediums can be cisgendered women, or (primarily) gay men, or transgender women. The work they do is a contribution to what their community needs, so they are held in high regard. Although both Burma and Thailand are homophobic and transphobic countries, gay and transgender spirit mediums are safe and accepted as they are.

Mariette Pathy Allen, A gender variant tattooed and muscular nat kadaw in Mount Popa waits to perform at a nat pwe, 2014–17, from the book Transcendents
© the artist

Booth: Can you give an example of a spirit medium whose work extended beyond actively channeling a spirit?

Allen: One time I went to visit a nursing home with a spirit medium. People were very sick, and the air conditioning was gone. The spirit medium borrowed a big fan from the nurses, and began greeting and fanning the sick individuals. She was participating in the community as a helpful citizen as well as during times when possessed by her spirit.

Booth: Do you think you might return to work in the United States again? There has certainly been a major cultural shift in recent years, in terms of how transgender folks are represented.

Allen: I actually have a transgender assistant who was here yesterday, when I received the “Future Gender” issue. She got all excited because she knew some of the people in it, including on the cover. When I looked through the magazine, I was inspired and thought maybe there is more I could do photographing gender variance in the U.S.

Mariette Pathy Allen, Tinko, a spirit medium, preparing to perform at Win Shi Thu’s nat pwe, 2014–17, from the book Transcendents
© the artist

Booth: As a photographer, what ideas or concerns do you have when you think about representing the transgender community in our current political and cultural climate?

Allen: I’m not interested in photographing transgender celebrities. I’m still much more interested in regular folks and how their lives are going with all the push and pull that is being experienced now. I continue to be fascinated by the evolution of this movement. I think people are at the stage where we can really ask ourselves, What does it mean to identify as a man or a woman, or as both, or neither? I believe that it’s the gender nonconforming people who have the most to teach us.

Booth: Looking through “Future Gender,” if someone had told you when you first started making this work that your work would be presented in this context, would you have believed them?

Allen: No. I really got very little respect for this work for a long time. Galleries thought the subject too limited, and I think they didn’t find the pictures very exciting because my images de-sensationalized the subject matter. I have never thought that gender variance was a narrow subject. I think it refers to all of us, at any time. The questions about identity may seem to be simpler for those of us who are cisgender. But, as time goes on, and rigid gender roles continue to loosen, we might all be dealing pretty equally with those little internal voices that say to us: Who are you, anyway?

Katie Booth is the digital manager at Aperture Foundation.

Mariette Pathy Allen’s Transcendents: Spirit Mediums in Burma and Thailand was published by Daylight in fall 2017. Read more about Mariette Pathy Allen in Aperture Issue 229, “Future Gender.”

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On the Side of Truth

The Kenyan photojournalist Priya Ramrakha covered twentieth-century icons from Malcolm X to Miriam Makeba. Nearly fifty years after his death, a new exhibition reveals the scope of his pan-African vision.

By Bongani Madondo

Priya Ramrakha, Models, ca. 1965
© The Priya Ramrakha Foundation

If he had some kind of supernatural powers, the archivist and filmmaker Shravan Vidyarthi would make sure the world, especially Africa, never forgets the name Priya Ramrakha. With the exhibition Priya Ramrakha: A Pan-African Perspective 1950–1968, cocurated by Vidyarthi and the scholar and curator Erin Haney, and recently presented at the FADA Gallery at the University of Johannesburg, the moment has arrived to illuminate Ramrakha’s story from a decades-old archive.

Ramrakha (1935–68) started working as a photographer as a teenager. He was a gifted and subtle documentarian, and yet he remains relatively unknown in his native Kenya and beyond. Born into a Kenyan-Indian family, by age eighteen he was working as a photojournalist for his uncle G.L. Vidyarthi’s rebellious Nairobi newspaper, the Colonial Times. From there, Ramrakha quickly made his name. Against the grain of the British, state-owned press, Ramrakha sought to capture his subjects with an acute and penetrative, yet sympathetic, eye, and his earliest efforts focused on the anticolonial nationalist movement, the Mau Mau war, and the Kenyan populace at large.

But Ramrakha was never just a one-dimensional protest photographer. His work, evident in the yellowing press cuttings of the late 1950s and early 1960s, is imbued with a jocular sense of humor, cinematic poetics, and the urgency of journalism, and paints a portrait of the artist as a young genius. At twenty-five, he crossed the Atlantic and headed to Los Angeles, where he enrolled in photography at the Art Center College. The America of the ’60s was a hotbed for all sorts of immigrant intellectuals, artists, and exiled students, mostly coming from what then was called the “third world,” and who were gripped in vicious struggles for independence. In New York, he photographed Malcolm X; in LA, Ramrakha was drawn to the civil rights movement, and met a veritable mix of activists, including Nation of Islam organizers, Martin Luther King Jr., and the South African siren Miriam “Zenzi” Makeba—of whom he made a series of intimate, frill-free, and yet alluring portraits.

Priya Ramrakha, Malcolm X and Nation of Islam protestors, New York, 1960
© The Priya Ramrakha Foundation

Back home during the raging ’60s, as the African continent was gripped by the radicalizing fervor of rock ’n’ roll, soul music, and the quest for freedom following Ghana’s 1957 independence, Ramrakha got a freelance gig shooting for both Time and Life magazines. His work for them is unique for its unadorned yet uncomfortable portrayals of independence movements across Africa and the military takeovers that followed. Like Robert Capa, or the Polish metafictional writer Ryszard Kapuściński, Ramrakha’s immersion reveals the story of an embedded man. Although he was anticolonialist, the situations he shot and the access he gained make it difficult, at first, for the eye to discern with which side he was embedded. But, Ramrakha was embedded on the side of truth.

The exhibition in Johannesburg contained a series of battlefront portraits in Biafra, Nigeria, which tells two stories at once: the story of what’s framed in war, and what’s left out. On one hand, he tells the story of the gruesomeness of war; on the other, the story of the man who shot some of Africa’s vicious contemporary battles for self-determination. How did he get so close, so intimate, and so participative? What were the personal risks he worked in and through to beam war back to the world?

These are questions every artist—not that he referred to himself as such—has to contend with, then and now; they go to the very heart of his biography. In 1968, Ramrakha was shot dead in Owerri, Nigeria, caught in the crossfire between federal Nigeria’s army and the secessionists in Igboland’s Biafra. A CBS film crew captured his final moments; the correspondent Morley Safer tried to carry him to safety, but Ramrakha died before they reached an aid station. He was thirty-three years old.

Priya Ramrakha, Bicyclists, Nairobi, Kenya, ca. 1950
© The Priya Ramrakha Foundation

Although Ramrakha was definitely attracted to war, he also retained a lyrical aesthetic and warmth for ordinary people and their sense of dress, laughter, and the poetic lack of drama that shapes humanity’s daily mundanities. It is a poignancy drawn out of his love for people, especially fellow Africans. To Vidyarthi, a Georgetown University-trained filmmaker, Ramrakha’s life is both a pan-African archival story as much as a personal one: Vidyarthi is related to Ramrakha through his father, who was the photographer’s first cousin. Since 2004, Vidyarthi has been working on Ramrakha’s archive, searching for material for a documentary film, African Lens: The Story of Priya Ramrakha (2007).

I recently spoke with Vidyarthi and Haney about Ramrakha’s legacy and his first-ever exhibition, which could not have come at a more apt and urgent moment: South Africa once again finds itself in the eye of the storm, as fierce, tertiary students lead “decolonialization” debates and take on identity politics body armor. Who is and is not an African? What role do you play, as an artist and seer, in relation to the tumultuous times around you?

Priya Ramrakha, Two men, Nairobi, Kenya, ca. 1958
© The Priya Ramrakha Foundation

Bongani Madondo: Why a pan-African show now? Is this a climb on the vogue-ish public discourse on decolonization revived by the student and youth movements in the U.S. and South Africa in the last three years?

Shravan Vidyarthi: This project has been a long-term labor of love, dating back to 2004, when, in Nairobi, I first began the work of recovering the neglected archive of Priya Ramrakha, who was my father’s cousin. My initial research led to the production of African Lens: The Story of Priya Ramrakha, a documentary film I directed and produced, in which I sought to bring attention to Priya’s remarkable story and photographic output. Ramrakha was a total outlier for his time. In the 1950s, he left Kenya to briefly study in the U.S., and then, in the 1950s and ’60s, he photographed all around the African continent, the U.S., and Europe for Time and Life. Priya was largely drawn to communities during the rise of anticolonial resistance and nationalism, and he focused often on ordinary people doing quietly heroic things, sometimes at great costs to life and family, as well as to the lesser known leaders and visionaries. He was not beholden to political marquee names, although he documented the major players, such as Malcolm X, with grace.

As to the question of current debates in South Africa and the U.S., there has been a surprising dovetailing, but we have been working on this project far longer. Erin’s research in West Africa and my own in Kenya brought together joint efforts like our forthcoming book on Ramrakha, as well as educational programs we are working on.

Priya Ramrakha, March, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, 1964
© The Priya Ramrakha Foundation

Erin Haney: In 2015, VIAD (Visual Identities in Art and Design) at University of Johannesburg asked us to create an inaugural exhibition of Ramrakha’s work, with a view to featuring more stories from the continent. So there are many points of urgency that we recognize, and it is not about coopting present struggles and activism around decolonization (be it in South Africa or elsewhere), or jumping on trendy bandwagons; rather, it is about being attentive to histories often neglected or sidelined in the mainstream.

We have been focused, here, on opening up a broader critical dialogue, by way of engaging Ramrakha’s visual archive. For us, the objective as curators was to situate current struggles and challenges within an extended, layered, and essentially pan-African story of colonial disentanglement.

Priya Ramrakha, Family gathering, Accra, Ghana, ca. 1966
© The Priya Ramrakha Foundation

Madondo: Should our references of pan-Africanism always be a rear-window view, always looking and celebrating the past with scant attention to a changing Africa globally? Have you factored in the current winds of “wokey” Pan-Africanism coursing through South Africa today?

Haney: Pan-​Africanism in Kenya and in other places was inherently futurist and collaborative, even with its ambiguities and omissions. Pan-Africanism has never been cut off from the rest of the world, in time or space. From each of our own experiences, we see how there is still a critical absence of visual material around these stories, and much intellectual and creative work needs to go in to a necessary and critical rethinking of the period, and its politics. Our view is that history is a work of the here and now and not a fossilized past.

Seeing the responses of people in Johannesburg—the younger “born-frees” and the older generations—it was clear that the exhibition brought out distinct stories, especially in light of the public debates around decolonizing education and the sidelining of African histories that is commonplace. It’s part of a messy and ongoing dialogue—hopefully that connects with the deeper frustrations and misrepresented histories that are so profoundly troubled and debated in South Africa, and which have powerful resonances in the U.S. as well.

Vidyarthi: That said, present day Kenya does a terrible job of celebrating its pan-African heroes and helping young people connect with them, and their aspirations and ideals. Ramrakha’s work reveals important political collaborations across racial lines, especially in the pre-independence era. All of this is almost impossible to remember today. Very few people in Kenya, whether of African or Indian descent, know of the relationships forged between African and Indian freedom fighters, or the extent of those collaborations and solidarities. Symbolically, his work is rendered all the more relevant, especially in a place like Kenya where Kenyan Indians have been vilified as “non-indigenous” bourgeoisie.

Priya Ramrakha, Miriam Makeba, New York, 1962
© The Priya Ramrakha Foundation

Madondo: I’m particularly interested in the discovery of the photographs of the singer Miriam Makeba within the Ramrakha archive. So much love in there.  

Vidyarthi: To be clear, the Makeba images have been part of Priya’s broader archive all along. They are one of many tremendously exciting subjects, most of which were never published. The inclusion of the Makeba images is, of course, an important point of connection for a South African exhibition, and one that demonstrates the kind of pan-African and international conversation that has linked independence movements across the continent, as well as associated civil rights and antiracist movements in the U.S. and elsewhere.

Priya Ramrakha, Ladies, Democratic Republic of the Congo, 1964
© The Priya Ramrakha Foundation

Madondo: Did Priya have a close relationship with Makeba at all? Looking at some of those images, the viewer is confronted with intimacy, and a sense of warmth in the subject and her surroundings.

Vidyarthi: No, but by all accounts, he was incredibly good at gaining the trust of his subjects. He would have been a student in Los Angeles during this time, and would probably have been excited to meet Makeba, given his connection to the anticolonial press in Kenya, and his interest in (and coverage of) the civil rights movement in the U.S.

Madondo: What did he think of Makeba? Are there any letters or diaries he kept that might shed a light? 

Vidyarthi: Priya’s scrapbooks are essentially a visual record. Unfortunately, we don’t have any letters or diary entries around his interaction with Makeba. Some of these encounters demand a measure of imagination, which is so often an aspect of revisionary historical work!

Priya Ramrakha, Deliveries, Manhattan, 1962
© The Priya Ramrakha Foundation

Madondo: Is this a posthumous retrospective or a fraction of Priya’s work?

Vidyarthi: It is retrospective in the sense that we are looking back at a particular continuous time and view of this person’s work, but not at all an exhaustive reflection of his career. As we are working on the book we are still digging through the archive, discovering fascinating images, and piecing together their stories.

Priya was killed in the Nigerian Civil War in 1968. Prior to that, he shot thousands of photographs. Thus, the exhibition is a selection that presents a broad overview of his practice, and will give audiences an opportunity to rethink and revisit a set of experiences and political moments that continue to resonate today, as the legacies of colonialism are grappled with and negotiated.

Priya Ramrakha, Rally for John F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign, Los Angeles, 1960
© The Priya Ramrakha Foundation

Madondo: Who, specifically, discovered these photographs? 

Vidyarthi: Priya’s images were scattered across the globe. Priya’s friends had some in the U.S. and the U.K. Some were in the Time and Life archives. The most elusive, thousands of negatives and prints, were concealed in the depths of Priya’s cousin’s garage in Nairobi. Over the ten years working to gather and collate the archive, I have interviewed numerous people connected with Priya and his time. All of the photographs are presented for the first time in over fifty years.

Priya Ramrakha, Football watchers, Los Angeles, 1961
© The Priya Ramrakha Foundation

Madondo: What state were they in?

Vidyarthi: Fortunately, many of the negatives, contact sheets, and clippings were in great condition because of Nairobi’s dry climate.

Madondo: What exactly was discovered: prints or negatives? 

Vidyarthi: Both, and some letters, documents like passports, death certificates, Time and Life correspondence.

Priya Ramrakha, Salvador Dali, New York, 1962
© The Priya Ramrakha Foundation

Madondo: How do we know the images have never been published before?

Vidyarthi: Some images in his archive have been published in Time and Life. Others were published in Drum magazine’s East Africa edition, and in Kenyan newspapers. The majority have not appeared in any publications that Ramrakha worked for, to the best of our knowledge.

Madondo: Is there a possibility that Priya shot these while on commission (say for Life) and that the photographs were not used during his time there?

Vidyarthi: We don’t know for sure, yet. It would appear that Ramrakha shot these either in New York, or at the University of California, Los Angeles, where Makeba might have been performing and visiting a cohort of continental African students there in 1961 or 1962. Ramrakha was in both places, and he attended the Art Center College in LA at that time.

Priya Ramrakha, Kenyan subjects rallying for land rights and political equality, Nairobi, Kenya, ca. 1950
© The Priya Ramrakha Foundation

Madondo: As a photographer in those tumultuous times, roughly from 1960 to late 1968, was Priya associated with any cultural or liberation movement?

Vidyarthi: Not that I am aware of. I would say that Priya’s political drive is reflected in his photographic practice, in the kinds of stories he told, many of which are located around experiences of race, civil rights, anticolonial struggles, and experiences of independence. As one of the first African photographers for Time and Life, he was in a unique position to counter, to some degree, reductive views on African political struggles and experiences. Significant in this regard is, I believe, the attention he gave not only to key political figures and “big moments,” but also to the everyday experiences of African people.

Priya Ramrakha, Local and international press corps, Independence day, Nairobi, Kenya, December 12, 1963
© The Priya Ramrakha Foundation

Madondo: What’s next for this exhibition?

Vidyarthi: I’m thrilled that a selection of works from the recovered archive were finally on public display, and I am honored that an African audience has been able to experience images that have lain dormant for over half a century. VIAD, who commissioned and made a deep investment in this project, and the FADA Gallery were extraordinary in their commitment to see this work come to public light. We are all looking forward to seeing the work travel within South Africa, and hopefully soon to Kenya, as well as in Europe and the U.S.

Bongani Madondo is the author, most recently, of Sigh, the Beloved Country (2016). He is an associate researcher at Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research, as well as contributing editor at the Johannesburg Review of Books. 

Priya Ramrakha: A Pan-African Perspective, 1950–1968 was on view at the FADA Gallery, Univeristy of Johannesburg, from October 5 to November 1, 2017.

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Aperture’s Holiday Gift Guide

This year, Aperture publications have explored how fashion photography can serve as a vehicle for social change, how photography empowers transgender communities, the black dandy movement, our relationship to food, and more. From iconic monographs by master photographers, to groundbreaking, never-before-published work, we offer titles for everyone on your holiday list.

For the Collector

 

Intimate Distance: Twenty-five Years of Photographs, A Chronological Album

Intimate Distance is the first comprehensive monograph charting the career of acclaimed American photographer Todd Hido. Though he has published many smaller individual bodies of work, this book gathers his most iconic images for the first time and brings a fresh perspective to his oeuvre with the inclusion of many unpublished photographs.

 

Illuminance Limited-Edition Box Set

Rinko Kawauchi’s work has frequently been lauded for its nuanced palette and offhand compositional mastery, as well as its ability to incite wonder through careful attention to tiny gestures and the incidental details of her everyday environment. In Illuminance, Kawauchi continues her exploration of the extraordinary in the mundane. This limited-edition boxed set includes a specially bound copy of the artist’s monograph Illuminance (Aperture, 2011) and two beautiful prints of images found in the book, all presented in a clothbound case.

 

Stephen Shore: Selected Works, 1973–1981

Stephen Shore’s Uncommon Places is a canonic body of work—a touchstone for those interested in photography and the American landscape. Remarkably, this series of photographs has yet to be explored in its entirety. Over the past five years, Shore has scanned hundreds of negatives shot between 1973 and 1981. In this volume, Aperture has invited an international group of fifteen photographers, curators, authors, and cultural figures to select ten images apiece from this rarely seen cache of images.

 

John Chiara: California

John Chiara creates his own cameras and chemical processes in order to make unique photographs that use the direct exposure of light onto reversal film and paper. Each resulting image is a singular, luminous object. This highly anticipated first book includes the surreal and thrilling landscape and architectural photographs for which the artist has become known. John Chiara: California features pictures taken in the artist’s hometown of San Francisco and other locations along the Pacific Coast.

Great Storytelling

The Notion of Family

Now available in a paperback edition, LaToya Ruby Frazier’s award-winning first book, The Notion of Family, offers an incisive exploration of the legacy of racism and economic decline in America’s small towns, as embodied by her hometown of Braddock, Pennsylvania.

Jonas Bendiksen: The Last Testament

Imagined as a sequel to the Old and New Testaments of the Bible, The Last Testament features visual accounts and stories of seven men around the world who claim to be the Second Coming of Jesus Christ.

Susan Meiselas: On the Frontline

Susan Meiselas, one of the most influential photographers of our time and an important contributor to the evolution of documentary storytelling, provides an insightful personal commentary on the trajectory of her career.

Tabitha Soren: Fantasy Life

In 2002, Tabitha Soren began photographing a group of minor league draft picks for the Oakland A’s. Fifteen years after that first shoot, Fantasy Life portrays a selection of these stories, gathering together a richly textured series of photographs taken on the field and behind the scenes at games, along with commentaries by each of the players and memorabilia from their lives.

Intersectional Inspirational

Future Gender

The Winter 2017 issue of Aperture magazine is dedicated to the representation of transgender lives, communities, and histories in photography. Guest edited by Zackary Drucker, the artist, activist, and producer of the acclaimed television series Transparent, “Future Gender” considers how trans and gender-nonconforming individuals have used photography to imagine new expressions of social and personal identity, from the nineteenth century to today.

Muse: Mickalene Thomas Photographs

Mickalene Thomas, known for her large-scale, multi-textured, and rhinestone-encrusted paintings of domestic interiors and portraits, identifies the photographic image as a defining touchstone for her practice. Thomas’s portraits draw equally from 1970s black-is-beautiful images of women such as supermodel Beverly Johnson and actress Vonetta McGee to Édouard Manet’s odalisque figures.

On Feminism

The winter 2016 issue of Aperture, “On Feminism,” focuses on intergenerational dialogues, debates, and strategies of feminism in photography, and considers the immense contributions by artists whose work articulates or interrogates representations of women in media and society. Across more than one hundred years of photographs and images, “On Feminism” underscores how photography has shaped feminism as much as how feminism has shaped photography.

Question Bridge: Black Males in America

Question Bridge assembles a series of questions posed to black men, by and for other black men, along with the corresponding responses and portraits of the participants. The questions range from the comic to the sublimely philosophical: from “Am I the only one who has problems eating chicken, watermelon, and bananas in front of white people?” to “Why is it so difficult for black American men in this culture to be themselves, their essential selves, and remain who they truly are?”

Wanderlust

Highway Kind

Since 2004, Justine Kurland, known for her utopian photographs of American landscapes and their fringe communities, and her young son, Casper, have traveled in their customized van, going south in the winter and north in the summer. Her life as an artist and mother is finely balanced between the need for routine and the desire for freedom and surprise. Kurland’s deep interest in the road, the western frontier, escape, and living outside mainstream values pervade this stunning and important body of work.

The Open Road: Photography and the American Road Trip

The road trip is an enduring symbol in American culture. As photographers have embarked on trips across the United States with the express purpose of making work, they have created some of the most important photographs in the history of the medium: from images by Walker Evans, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Berenice Abbott to Robert Frank’s 1950s odyssey, The Americans. From Stephen Shore to Ryan McGinley, hundreds of other photographers have continued the tradition. The Open Road is the first book to explore the photographic road trip as a genre.

This Is Mars: Midi Edition

This Is Mars offers a thrilling visual experience of the surface of the red planet. The award-winning French editor and designer Xavier Barral has chosen and composed images, drawn from the comprehensive photographic map of Mars made by the U.S. observation satellite MRO (Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter), to revel in the wonder of Mars.

Foodie

Feast for the Eyes: The Story of Food in Photography

From basic sustenance to savory repasts, food awakens the senses and touches both private and public life. This is the first book to cover food photography’s rich history—not only in fine art photography, but also in crossover genres such as commercial and scientific photography and photojournalism.

The Photographer’s Cookbook

Playing off George Eastman’s famous recipe for lemon meringue pie, as well as former director Beaumont Newhall’s love of food, the cookbook grew from the idea that photographers’ talent in the darkroom must also translate into special skills in the kitchen. An extensive and distinctive archive of recipes and photographs are published in The Photographer’s Cookbook for the first time.

Downtown Kid

Lyle Ashton Harris: Today I Shall Judge Nothing That Occurs

Throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s, a radical cultural scene emerged in cities across the globe, finding expression in the galleries, nightclubs, and bedrooms of New York, London, Los Angeles, and Rome. In Lyle Ashton Harris: Today I Shall Judge Nothing That Occurs, the artist’s archive of 35 mm Ektachrome images are presented alongside journal entries and recollections by contributors such as Vince Aletti, Rashid Johnson, and Sarah Lewis.

Manhattan Sunday

Drawing heavily on personal experience, Richard Renaldi captures that ethereal moment when Saturday night bleeds into Sunday morning across the borough of Manhattan. This collection of portraits, landscapes, and club interiors evokes the vibrant nighttime rhythms of a city that persists in both its decadence and its dreams.

The Ballad of Sexual Dependency

The Ballad of Sexual Dependency is a visual diary chronicling the struggle for intimacy and understanding between friends, family, and lovers—collectively described by Goldin as her “tribe.” Her work describes a world that is visceral, charged, and seething with life. First published in 1986, this reissue recognizes the persistent relevance and freshness of Nan Goldin’s cutting-edge photography.

Peter Hujar: Speed of Life

Underappreciated during his lifetime, Peter Hujar is now a revered icon of the downtown art scene. He is best-known for his portraits of New York City’s artists, musicians, writers, and performers, which feature characters such as Susan Sontag, William S. Burroughs, David Wojnarowicz, and Andy Warhol. Hujar and was admired for his completely uncompromising attitude toward work and life.

Inner Child/Actual Child

Seeing Things, A Kid’s Guide to Looking at Photographs

Aimed at children between the ages of nine and twelve, Seeing Things is a wonderful introduction to photography that asks how photographers transform ordinary things into meaningful moments. In this book, acclaimed and beloved photographer Joel Meyerowitz takes readers on a journey through the power and magic of photography.

The Martin Parr Coloring Book!

Photography and Pop-culture buffs, get out your crayons and colored pencils! Martin Parr’s colorful, tongue-in-cheek photographs—his comedy of contemporary manners—have been transformed into a coloring book.

Go Photo!

Go Photo! features twenty-five hands-on and creative activities inspired by photography. Aimed at children between eight and twelve years old, this playful and fun collection of projects encourages young readers to experiment with their imaginations, get messy with materials, and engage with the world in new and exciting ways.

Nature Lover

A Wild Life: A Visual Biography of Photographer Michael Nichols

A Wild Life is Michael “Nick” Nichols’s story, told with passion and insight by author and photo-editor Melissa Harris. Nichols’ story combines a life of adventure, with a conviction about how we can redeem the human race by protecting our wildlife.

Picturing America’s National Parks

Picturing America’s National Parks brings together some of the finest landscape photography, from America’s most magnificent and sacred environments. Photography has played an integral role in both the formation of the National Parks and in the depiction of America itself. This book traces that history and delights readers with stunning photographs of the best American landscapes.

Cape Light

Cape Light, Joel Meyerowitz’s series of serene and contemplative color photographs taken on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, quickly became one of the most influential and popular photography books in the latter part of the twentieth century. Now, over thirty-five years later, Aperture is pleased to bring back this classic collection in its original form.

Fashion Forward

Fashion Photography: The Story in 180 Pictures

Fashion photography captures our desires and fantasies about how we present ourselves to the world, while reflecting the changing values of our culture and society. Fashion Photography: The Story in 180 Pictures explores the profound influence that fashion photography has had over the past eight decades, presenting its evolution as a language, and a genre, while showcasing some of its most glamorous moments.

Dandy Lion: The Black Dandy and Street Style

Suits that pop with loud colors and dazzling patterns, complete with a nearly ubiquitous bowtie, define the style of the new “dandy.” Described as “high-styled rebels” by author Shantrelle P. Lewis, black men with a penchant for color and refined fashion ave gained popular attention in recent years. Lewis’s carefully curated selection of contemporary photographs surveys the movement across the globe, with all of the vibrant patterns, electrifying colors, and fanciful poses of this brilliant style subculture.

Louise Dahl-Wolfe

Louise Dahl-Wolfe opens a window onto the work of one of the most influential fashion photographers of the twentieth century. After being discovered by Edward Steichen and having her work exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1937, Louise Dahl-Wolfe went on to revitalize the Hollywood portrait and invigorate fashion photography of the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s.

Design Savvy

Rinko Kawauchi: Halo

In recent years, Rinko Kawauchi’s exploration of the cadences of the everyday has begun to swing farther afield. In Halo, Kawauchi expands this inquiry, this time with photographs of the southern coastal region of Izumo, in Shimane Prefecture and interweaving them with images from New Year celebrations in Hebei province, China, plus her ongoing fascination with the murmuration of birds along the coast of Brighton, England. Kawauchi mesmerizingly knits together cycles of time, implicit and subliminal patterns of nature, and human ritual.

The Many Lives of Erik Kessels

The Many Lives of Erik Kessels presents the highly anticipated first illustrated survey of this pioneering and influential curator, editor, and artist whose varied experiments with photography and photographic archives reconsider the medium’s vernacular and narrative possibilities in today’s inundated image landscape.

 

Self Publish, Be Happy: A DIY Photobook Manual and Manifesto

An economic and cultural revolution has shaken the photobook world in the last five years: self-publishing. An army of photographers operating as publishers have had an instrumental role in today’s photobook renaissance. This book offers a do-it-yourself manual and a survey of key examples of self-published success stories, as well as a self-publishing manifesto and list of resources.

Classic Cat

Bruce Davidson: Survey

This survey focuses on the work that has made Bruce Davidson one of the most influential documentary photographers to this day. In his work, Davidson prizes his relationship to the subject above all else. From his profound documentation of the civil rights movement to his in-depth study of one derelict block in Harlem, he has immersed himself fully in his projects.

Elliot Erwitt: Home Around the World

Elliott Erwitt: Home Around the World offers a timely and critical reconsideration of Erwitt’s unparalleled life as a photographer. Produced alongside a major retrospective exhibition, the book features examples of Erwitt’s early experiments in California, intimate family portraits in New York, major magazine assignments, long-term documentary interests, and ongoing, personal investigations of public spaces.

Lisette Model

Lisette Model is an unsurpassed introduction to one of the twentieth century’s most significant photographers—a woman whose searing images and eloquent teachings deeply influenced her students who included Diane Arbus, Larry Fink, and many others.

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Inside Sarah Meyohas’ Cloud of Petals

Sarah Meyohas, Bell Vitrines, 2017. Photography by Lance Brewer. Courtesy Red Bull Arts, New York

Reagan Brown © Aperture Foundation

Sarah Meyohas, Most Beautiful Petals, 2017. Photography by Lance Brewer. Courtesy Red Bull Arts, New York

Reagan Brown © Aperture Foundation

Reagan Brown © Aperture Foundation

On December 4, 2017, Aperture Members at the Connect level and above met with New York–based artist Sarah Meyohas for a special tour of her first large-scale exhibition and virtual reality experience, Cloud of Petals, at Red Bull Arts New York. The exhibition is the culmination of an extensive yearlong project, which employs both defunct equipment and the latest technology to question ideals of beauty.

The tour began with a 16 mm film, in which workers at Eero Saarinen’s Bell Works in Holmdel, New Jersey, choose the most beautiful petal from individual roses, and create images of them. The 100,000 rose petals collected and imaged then became a data set fed to an artificial intelligence algorithm capable of creating infinite new petals.

After the film, Meyohas spoke with Aperture Members in front of an archival grid of 3,289 petals. She discussed the project’s evolution, the film’s production, and how she discovered Bell Works, former site of the venerable Bell Labs, where, among breakthroughs such as satellites and lasers, information theory was born.

Meyohas then led Members to four glowing boxes salvaged from discarded wall paneling and wiring from the Bell Works switchboards. The tour culminated with Aperture Members trying on the six virtual reality headsets, which allow the viewer to interact with AI-generated rose petals floating through the digital void.

Multimedia artist Sarah Meyohas (French-American, born 1991) uses networks of information, power, value, and communication in her work. Recent projects include creating the cryptocurrency Bitchcoin in 2015, and in 2016, trading stocks while stationed at 303 Gallery. Meyohas has been featured in the New York Times, Time, Wired, Vice, Fortune, Artspace, and the Atlantic, and she has appeared on CNBC, PBS, and CBC. Meyohas holds a BA in international relations from the University of Pennsylvania, a BS in finance from the Wharton School, and an MFA from Yale University.

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

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

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You Get Me?

Mahtab Hussain’s tender portraits question the image of South Asian Muslim men in Britain.

By David Campany

Mahtab Hussain, Young boy, white boxing gloves, 2010, from the series You Get Me?
Courtesy the artist

Xenophobia and anti-Muslim sentiment helped drive the momentum behind the U.K.’s June 2016 vote in favor of Brexit. How, then, can British artists create counternarratives that offer nuanced representations of unfairly maligned populations? Mahtab Hussain, a British photographer, has recently created a visual record of his community, which has been neglected by the art establishment and media alike. Recently published in the monograph You Get Me?, Hussain’s series features emotionally layered portraits of young South Asian Muslim boys and men, and often examines the performance of masculinity. The book’s title references the trend for British Asian men to identify with black urban experience. As Hussain writes, “The phrase You Get Me? also embodies it all. It can be seen as aggressive and confrontational, yet it expresses a glimmer of vulnerability too, that uncertainty when voicing one’s thoughts and opinions, asking the real question behind it all: Do you understand me?”

Mahtab Hussain, Shemagh, beard and bling, 2010, from the series You Get Me?
Courtesy the artist

David Campany: Mahtab, you’ve just published the book You Get Me? with MACK. I’ve heard it was a long time coming. How and where did this project begin? I guess it’s tied very closely to the story of your own youth?

Mahtab Hussain: My identity as a young British Pakistani boy was never in question. Until the age of seven, I was oblivious to race, class, and ideals of difference. Although I was conscious of racial violence and tension between whites and blacks, my father was very open about talking through his experiences, which helped me to understand, to an extent. But, crucially, I was never directly affected. I went to school surrounded by others like me, a mix of ethnicities—Indian and Pakistan—and where we were the majority. And then it all changed. My parents divorced when I was six. This forced not only a family separation, but also a community separation too, as we were essentially ostracized. My father moved to Druids Heath in Birmingham, a very poor, white, working-class community, and my mother to Handsworth, which had a predominately black and Indian demographic.

Living with my father in Druids Heath thrust racism directly into my life. My brother and I were the only British Pakistani boys at the local Catholic school. Our first day was met with violence and racial remarks, and it was the first time the word “Paki” was directed at me. Questions were asked: “When would I go home? Why had I come here?” Questions that I had never thought about before, about my race, class, and culture. We were always looked upon as a problem, or at least positioned in a place of difference. It was obvious to me then that my identity was under threat, and for ten years I hated being brown—this color that brought unwanted, often violent attention.

Mahtab Hussain, Friends, curry sauce n’ chips, 2012, from the series You Get Me?
Courtesy the artist

Campany: When did photography begin to interest you?

Hussain: Well, truly, at seventeen. I decided to live with my mother and deliberately enrolled at Joseph Chamberlain College (the British equivalent to American high school), which had a predominately Pakistani intake, to study photography. On my first day there, I was confronted with another form of discrimination. This time I was ridiculed not for my skin color, but for my attitude, personality, even culture. I was told I was too white, I was “fish and chips,” a “John,” I spoke too gently, too posh, like a white boy. I retaliated saying they were too black, and it was at the college that I first heard the phrase “wagwan,” Jamaican slang for “What’s going on?” It staggered me that for ten years I battled with my own identity crisis and continue to do so. My contemporaries were undergoing the same crisis. I regret now never turning my camera on my friends at college, but it was a subject too close at hand. And even at this stage in my life, I was still very much ashamed of being a “Paki” and all the stereotypes that came with that name.

Mahtab Hussain, Boy in grey hoodie, 2012, from the series You Get Me?
Courtesy the artist

Campany: But somehow you wanted to become a photographic artist . . .

Hussain: The idea of becoming an artist came as an undergraduate at Goldsmiths College in London, studying for a degree in History of Art during my second year. I had chosen to study postcolonialism, and this introduced me to black artists who analyzed and responded to the cultural legacies of colonialism, racism, class, and gender. Yinka Shonibare, Chris Ofili, Carrie Mae Weems, Sonia Boyce, Lorna Simpson, and cultural theorists like Stuart Hall, Edward Said, and Frantz Fanon. They turned my world on its head, forcing me to question the absence of Asian/brown artists, a voice was missing in art history.

All this ignited a deep-rooted passion. I felt connected not only to the work which these extraordinary artists were making, but also to the historical narrative they were exploring and dissecting. In other words, I experienced the transformative possibilities of art. I started to think about my experiences as a child and what identity really meant to me, and how complex this concept was for many British Asians. I wanted to create a visual history about my identity and community, a community which had seemingly been forgotten by the art establishment. That was in 2002. It took me five years, however, before I ventured back into photography, and inevitably my first series would directly address identity politics, race, class and gender. That project became known as You Get Me?

Mahtab Hussain, Green chalk stripe suit, 2017, from the series You Get Me?
Courtesy the artist

Campany: One can say to oneself: “I’m going to directly address identity politics, race, class and gender.” But in practice what did that mean for you? How did the images come about? What were you looking for in this series? Did you know straight away how to approach it photographically?

Hussain: I wanted to make a body of work that countered the narrative that I have been fed over the last twenty years by external forces. I wanted to show the complexity of the community, their humanity, their struggle in trying to find their sense of self in a world that actively tells them that they do not belong—a world that also asks them who they are, while comparing their differences. The men in my series are from working-class backgrounds. Some even see themselves as a subclass. This is what I mean by identity politics—visually articulating how these men are defining themselves and why. Race is important here, too, as the series begins to ask the question about what the audience is seeing. Certain portraits allow the viewer to gaze upon them, while others challenge what they are looking at. Do you see them as simply men? Are they British men? Asian men? Muslim men? I guess at the beginning I was looking for all the stereotypes in my head: the boy with the dog, the man in the car, the thuggish looking chap, the gangster wannabe, the man smoking the joint. I was collecting these characters.

I had a strong idea as to how I wanted to present my work. At the time, I was working at the National Portrait Gallery and was heavily influenced, in particular, by seventeenth-century court and society paintings. It was the gaze that I was drawn to, that direct look at the audience. For me, that was power in its purest sense, knowing that someone was going to look at you, judge you, but you too were able to judge them. So, their gaze was important, and I often asked my sitters the question, “How do you want to be seen?” That is how I began to make the work. I walked the streets looking for striking individuals. It could be the way they walked, a piece of clothing that I liked. There had to be this level of attraction. All the men in the series have a level of beauty, and this was important to me, too.

Mahtab Hussain, Black hat, black glove and bling, 2012, from the series You Get Me?
Courtesy the artist

Campany: These portraits are horizontal.

Hussain: I deliberately framed all the work in a landscape format for many reasons. I wanted to get close while being able to include some of the environment. But I also wanted to make a comment on advertising campaigns, the billboards, television, and computers screens—formats that are filled with visions of male beauty, with those who belong and own such spaces—ideas around representation, or the lack of it, and the importance of seeing yourself reflected in society. The work then moves beyond the narrative of the disenfranchised youth. It becomes an enquiry into male beauty, masculinity that visually articulates how these men are defining themselves as men to each other and to a wider society. When I look back at the portraits, I wonder what masculinity would look like in their ancestral homes. So, in a sense this performance of masculinity, male peacocking even, has a strong cultural influence from British/Western/Urban culture.

Mahtab Hussain, Muscles, blue dothi, 2011, from the series You Get Me?
Courtesy the artist

Campany: I’m struck by the fine balance in the portraits between confidence and vulnerability. Between self-assertion and inner complexity. You mentioned that there had to be something outward that first attracted you to photograph each man. But you’re going beyond that, getting to that place where we feel that outward appearance can never quite carry inner complexity. Is this how you see it?

Hussain: Yes, exactly. I feel there is a very fine balance between external confidence and inner vulnerability; the outward appearance is a type of performance, acted out in public environments, on the streets—bravado at its best. The environment here is key. I firmly believe the types of portraits made in You Get Me? would be completely different in a studio setting, too constricting for the sitter to perform or magnify this outward appearance, or subjectively exude different meanings based around pride, success, uncertainty, or fear. What is interesting is that there are very few portraits made indoors, or in domestic environments, places which may have given rise to a greater show of vulnerability. In order for that to be truly articulated, it was vital to include interviews alongside the portraits. I wanted to address the challenge of navigating dual identities, whether social, religious, or ego-related, dealing with hate, violence, or stereotyping. On top of all that, these people are also having to navigate what it means to be a man, not only in their community, but also within the rapidly changing modern Western world.

Mahtab Hussain, Young boy in white shirt, 2012, from the series You Get Me?
Courtesy the artist

Campany: Yes, it is really a rich and complex combination of images and words. At what point did You Get Me? begin to take on this form?

Hussain: In order to make the work I had to engage in conversation, which was part of the process of gaining trust in order to make the portraits. I really enjoyed these exchanges. However, it was in 2010 that the idea of including these voices came to me. I say came to me, but actually I was asked by various curators, directors, and picture editors if I had interviewed the sitters. At the time, I was a little reluctant to interview the sitters because I wanted to position the work as fine art portraiture. I felt if I included their voices it would start to ghettoize and position the work as documentary. But I guess this thought is just a hangover of previous work that I have seen and did not want to replicate. I also did not want people to feel sorry for these men, as often the conversations were very dark. I realize now how important it was to include these statements: it helped inform the work but also empowered the community, by retaking control of their narrative.

Mahtab Hussain, Checked top, striped top and cap, 2010, from the series You Get Me?
Courtesy the artist

Campany: The portraits certainly become much richer when seen in the light of the various voices in the book. All portraits are inevitably ambiguous things, as the title of your book suggests. “Getting” a person through a two-dimensional image of their momentary outward appearance to a camera is always so fraught and, in a way, it seems to me this is a large part of what your project is about. But I wonder if the “me” of the title also refers to the idea that the portraits might amount to clues about the photographer who made them. That is, you, Mahtab. And if this is autobiographical, what kind of self-portrayal is it?

Hussain: Yes, it is difficult to define a person by their portraits alone. It is an impossible task. However, my intention was not to collect individual portraits, but to build a body of work that represents the community through a collective narrative. When making the portraits of these men, I never felt it was fraught as I fully immersed myself as one of them. Their words echoed the voices I had heard all around me as I was growing up. So, yes, in a way you are right that in part this project is autobiographical and the “me” sits squarely to represent this in my work. I feel in an abstract way they are all self-portraits because I am reflecting upon my community. I have felt that real art comes from within, and can then serve a bigger purpose. When I started the project, I was trying to discover my identity, where I belonged in my own community and in a wider society. In the end, I realized that it’s not something that can be arrived at easily. It is a journey that we are all on. I’m just attempting to reflect upon where we currently stand. You get me?

Mahtab Hussain, Young man asleep, 2010, from the series You Get Me?
Courtesy the artist

Campany: I get you. In many ways, the richness of the book is in the nuances. There are no specific pairings of images with words, so the reader/viewer is left to piece the puzzle together, and not all the pieces are there. It’s a community with all the richness and contradictions of any community. For example, there’s quite a range of views in the book around masculinity, sexuality, power, belonging, and integration. How much of an eye did you have to keep on the balance of those views as you brought the book together?

Hussain: I did not put too much pressure on myself when I was making the work. It was really about trying to build a color palette so that when it came to editing the book and exhibition there would be enough material to play with. Each portrait embodies all those elements or views you speak of, but the book has also been broken down subtly into small chapters to reflect specific issues. I left the work for about a year or two in order for it to settle.

At this stage Michael Mack, my publisher, saw the series, and as I was showing it and talking to him about the work, I felt very uncomfortable. You see, the series at that point included environmental details, broken sofas, graffiti tags “repping” various postcodes, dirt on the street, and deprived areas. However, I was talking about power, pride, noble sitters who should be envied for their strength and beauty, so the sequence as it existed seemed to be jarring, and made you feel sorry for the community rather than wanting to connect with them. I remember calling Michael and telling him that I wanted to remove these pieces for that very reason, and he paused for a moment and said, “I agree, you’ve made a very wise decision.” It was great to have Michael truly understand a body of work that took a very long time for people to comprehend and see exactly what I was trying to achieve.

David Campany is a writer, curator, and artist based in London. 

You Get Me? was published in 2017 by MACK.

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