Aperture's Blog, page 105

The Queen Unleashed

Lyle Ashton Harris’s archive offers a queer vision of the 1980s and ’90s.

By Catherine Lord

Lyle Ashton Harris, Marlon Riggs, Judith Williams, Houston A. Baker, and Jacqui Jones, Black Popular Culture conference, Dia Center for the Arts, New York, December 8–10, 1991
© the artist

Lyle remembers Marlon Riggs doing a runway walk in a dazzling white T-shirt with black letters that spelled “UNLEASH THE QUEEN.” Lyle has the photograph to prove it. I have no photograph and no memory of the T-shirt but am nonetheless certain that Marlon wore a black jacket, stood behind a podium, and daringly read a text straight from his laptop screen. Lyle didn’t photograph that performance, and so he doesn’t remember the laptop, or, for that matter, the text, which soon became the widely published “Black Macho Revisited: Reflections of a Snap! Queen.” Lyle remembers Marlon fierce, Marlon fabulous, Marlon laying claim to public space for the young and queer and black at an event for public intellectuals that leaned distinctly away from the arts toward academic discourse. I remember Marlon’s nerve. He had written his talk on the plane and had no way to present it but to read from a screen. I’d never seen a fellow procrastinator pull off that trick. It was 1991. People still used paper. Laptops were heavy. There was no easy way to scroll down a text. Marlon held his laptop in the air and managed, though his hands were a little shaky and so, just at the start, was his voice.

Lyle Ashton Harris, Kinshasha Holman Conwill, Black Popular Culture conference, Dia Center for the Arts, New York, 1991
© the artist

Same event, two performances (at least). Although Lyle and I are just little slices in each other’s archive, Marlon’s performance was a formative moment in our respective and respectful creative lives. It was at the Black Popular Culture conference organized by Michele Wallace and held at the Dia Center for the Arts in SoHo. I punctuate Lyle’s photographic archive as a terrible haircut on a middle-aged white woman in the audience, listening to Kinshasha Conwill, then director of the Studio Museum in Harlem. I was in row ten or so, not back row and not front either, trying to learn—which I did—while being a present but non-colonizing ally. Besides, I’m shy and I wasn’t in the in-group of speakers. Neither Lyle nor I remember exactly what Conwill said, just that she bluntly and boldly addressed some questions and discontents on the relationship between queerness, race, and representation, and that whatever she said caused a buzz of resistance. The year 1991 was a turning point for queer and for black and for mixing up those labels to contest fixed identities with a spectrum of practices, skin hues, ethnicities, and nationalities. We had gone through some of those changes together, Lyle and I. When I met him, around 1987, he had just graduated from Wesleyan and though he’d spent the summer at a well-known photography workshop program in Maine, he wasn’t yet an artist but rather a promising snow queen.

Lyle Ashton Harris, Lyle and Iké, Narcissistic Disturbance exhibition opening, Otis Gallery, Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles, February 3, 1995
© the artist

While everyone else devoted themselves to rocks and the zone system, Lyle stayed in his motel bathroom screwing around with whiteface and a tutu. Those antics alone, I figured, were worth the price of admission to CalArts. As I was the dean then, I saw to it that Lyle was admitted, despite the fact that the photo faculty, then rather conservative in their distaste for anything documentary, and perhaps for young black queens with a mouth on them, was less than enchanted. In his few years as a CalArts student at the end of the 1980s, Lyle created the space he needed. As a young student, any number of clueless comments by white faculty or by other students could have stopped him in his tracks, but Lyle’s photographs show him collaging another world—rigorous in its politics of race and sexuality, insistent that pleasure was the point of the project, and cognizant that sociality was not only the way to get there but in itself a method of working that could be documented. The photographs in Lyle’s archive—which weren’t what Lyle showed faculty as his Work—were a way of offering narrative and representation to the inhabitants of the world he was helping to invent. The snapshots construct a universe of queer and color, of joy and heartbreak, haircuts and T-shirts, meds and books, beds and pets, doorknobs and drinks. Such lists put flesh on gossip, give the backstory that drives and cements subcultures. The photographs and the act of celebrating through photographs are cultural resistance. This is what intellectual history looks like.

Catherine Lord is professor emerita of studio art at the University of California, Irvine. This feature is adapted from the Aperture book Lyle Ashton Harris: Today I Shall Judge Nothing That Occurs.

On Friday, December 15, Lyle Ashton Harris will be joined by an intergenerational group of artists and writers for a night of conversation and performance at the Whitney Museum. Tickets are available to purchase here. 

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Wayne Sorce’s Nostalgic America

Wayne Sorce, East Chicago, 1977. Courtesy Joseph Bellows Gallery, La Jolla

Wayne Sorce, Halsted Street, Chicago, 1978. Courtesy Joseph Bellows Gallery, La Jolla

Wayne Sorce, L.B. Oil, New York, 1984. Courtesy Joseph Bellows Gallery, La Jolla

Wayne Sorce, Vinegar Hill, New York, 1985. Courtesy Joseph Bellows Gallery, La Jolla

Wayne Sorce, Five Bros, 1982. Courtesy Joseph Bellows Gallery, La Jolla

Wayne Sorce, El Platform, Chicago, 1978. Courtesy Joseph Bellows Gallery, La Jolla

Wayne Sorce, Dave's Restaurant, New York, 1984. Courtesy Joseph Bellows Gallery, La Jolla

Wayne Sorce, Parklane Hosiery, 1980. Courtesy Joseph Bellows Gallery, La Jolla

Wayne Sorce, Fort Dearborn Coffee, Chicago, 1977. Courtesy Joseph Bellows Gallery, La Jolla

Wayne Sorce, Brooklyn Bridge, 1985. Courtesy Joseph Bellows Gallery, La Jolla

“For me, photography is very important in that it exists because of everything else,” Wayne Sorce stated in a 1973 issue of Camera magazine. For Sorce (1946–2015), his photographs were embedded in the identity of the cities in which they were taken, namely Chicago and New York. The exhibition Urban Color, currently on view at Joseph Bellows Gallery in La Jolla, California, presents selections of Sorce’s masterful work from the late 1970s and early ’80s. With their primary-color palette, old Cadillacs, retro store fronts, neon signs, and midcentury street corners, Sorce’s images contain a uniquely American sensibility, akin to the paintings of Edward Hopper. Like Stephen Shore and Walker Evans, Sorce flattens space, filling his images with graphic architecture and wry signage. While photography might exist because of everything else, such nostalgic images of America are enduring because of photographers like Sorce.

Wayne Sorce: Urban Color is on view at Joseph Bellows Gallery, La Jolla, California, through December 30, 2017.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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In Kashmir, Hope Blooms

Bharat Sikka offers a poetic portrait of a disputed region.

By Emma Kennedy

Bharat Sikka, Untitled, 2016, from the book Where the flowers still grow
© the artist and courtesy Loose Joints

Bharat Sikka first visited Kashmir as an adult, in 2014, at the age of forty. Raised in India, Sikka is best known for photographs that explore the nation’s recent economic and cultural shifts. Over several trips to Kashmir, Sikka has created a body of work that transports the viewer to its mountains and valleys. Oscillating between intimate portraits of men and sweeping landscapes, Sikka presents a poetic view of this disputed region.

I recently spoke with Sikka, who now lives between India and Europe, and he described his new photobook, Where the flowers still grow (2017), as “an emotional response” to Kashmir. The book acts as a recollection of emotions and experiences in Kashmir, allowing readers travel with Sikka on his journey. He focuses in on vivid details: the pink and purple blooms of spring, fresh footprints in the snow, a makeshift wooden fence. Amidst these idyllic scenes are the men of Kashmir, gathering wood, atop their horses, or reclining in a field of yellow flowers. The homes and interiors that appear in these pages are often deserted, as if the men belong to the snowy mountains, not in the cabins patched with sheets of tin. To Sikka, the men are just as much a part of the landscape as the pine trees.

Bharat Sikka, Untitled, 2015, from the book Where the flowers still grow
© the artist and courtesy Loose Joints

Emma Kennedy: What is the meaning behind the title of this series?

Bharat Sikka: Where the flowers still grow—a glimpse of hope in a disturbed area. Kashmir is known as one of the world’s most beautiful mountain valleys, but it has gone through so much turbulence and political conflict that nobody thinks about it in that way anymore.

Bharat Sikka, Untitled, 2016, from the book Where the flowers still grow
© the artist and courtesy Loose Joints

Kennedy: There are no children or women in the images. Why do you focus only on men, often in isolation in the landscape?

Sikka: Almost all my projects—from the beginning, starting with Indian Men (1999–2003)—are about men. I am naturally drawn towards photographing men, especially as subjects. I feel I have more to say about them, although they do make me uncomfortable. In Kashmir, I came across more men than women. It became about the relationship of a man with his space, and I wanted to make the narrative specifically about these men living in their land. In the series, I felt that men played a dominant role, just by their visual presence, especially outdoors, and their constant physical engagement in the political conflict. I had a stronger emotional response to the men. I was perhaps more intimidated by them.

On my first trip to Kashmir, I just photographed men as I found them in the landscape. The style was instinctive based on what I’d shot before: just positioning the person in their environment, and telling a narrative about them through their space—that’s very me. The people are very isolated there, and there are many reasons—some political—why I decided to isolate them in the landscape, which knows nothing of national borders and political rivalries. 

Bharat Sikka, Untitled, 2014–16, from the book Where the flowers still grow
© the artist and courtesy Loose Joints

Kennedy: This series came into being, in part, because of your discovery of Mirza Waheed’s novel The Collaborator (2011). How did the book help you conceptualize the physical and emotional landscapes of Kashmir?

Sikka: I haven’t read the book. During that first trip, my wife read it and told me the story, which is about a young boy and his struggles with his own sense of self in this turbulent region. I didn’t want to interpret the story, but by being in that space and moment, it made a lot of sense. And then I came across this one boy carrying sticks who reminded me of the book’s protagonist, and it started from there. The whole story is about this young boy, another reason why the project has just been about men. The book helped me gain clarity about how to proceed.

Kennedy: The image of the man in yellow with his back to the camera reminds me of the iconic nineteenth-century painting Wanderer above the Sea of Fog by Caspar David Friedrich. Could you talk a little about your influences for this series and your practice in general?

Sikka: I love this reference. I do look at paintings, and was influenced by Edward Hopper quite a lot in my earlier projects. For Where the flowers still grow, a lot of the influence came from my earlier projects. I also wanted to reinvent, and at the same time use my own style, and bring a narrative to the whole project.

Bharat Sikka, Untitled, 2014–16, from the book Where the flowers still grow
© the artist and courtesy Loose Joints

Kennedy: Another of your series, Space in Between (2003–7), also explores the Indian landscape. How do you think about landscape and geography?

Sikka: I am really drawn towards spaces. Even when I take portraits, I place the subjects in their environment, and I often wonder if the picture is more about the space and if the person is just a prop in it. In Space in Between, I was really interested in how India was evolving geographically. In that series and in Matter (2006–ongoing), I explore how India is losing its culture as we become more globalized and homogenized. I think India is confused and now looks dull and grey, especially in the urban areas. It’s not the exotic country that it was years ago. Industrial revolution never took place in India, and nothing was ever planned, or made in a logical way, and now all of this is decaying and cities are overpopulated and polluted.

Kashmir is an extremely beautiful place and has been photographed and documented in many different ways, mostly as pin up calendars with incredible landscapes, sunsets and flowers, or in a very documentary style.

Bharat Sikka, Untitled, 2015, from the book Where the flowers still grow
© the artist and courtesy Loose Joints

Kennedy: The landscapes you capture have a specificity to them, but they also refer to the larger history of landscape photography. For example, your images of valleys and mountain ranges recall those of Carleton Watkins and Ansel Adams, who photographed the grandeur of the American West. If I hadn’t known it was Kashmir, I probably wouldn’t have been able to identify the geographic location. How important is it that the viewer knows where the photographs were taken?

Sikka: I come from a strong Indian background. I spent my first twenty-four years in India, and hadn’t really discovered the world of fine art photography until I went to school at Parsons. I was exposed to all these photographers, even the contemporary ones like Joel Sternfeld and Stephen Shore. Then, when I reflected back on India, I really wanted to show a totally different side of it and how it could be seen in a completely new way. That is also an important part of my work, to move away from my Indian contemporaries and how they’ve explored India. I wanted to move away from all the stereotypical images that are associated with India, especially the ethnic ones.

Bharat Sikka, Untitled, 2016, from the book Where the flowers still grow
© the artist and courtesy Loose Joints

Kennedy: The cover image for Where the flowers still grow is almost completely black. It is such a dark image compared to the others in the series and its presence (or perhaps its “absence” of photographic information) really surprised me. Could you talk a little about this image and how it became the cover?

Sikka: I grew to really like the cover. First, because it was ambiguous and unexpected. Second, the white dot is actually a distant star in a dark sky, and reminds me of a light, like a glimmer of hope, which is similar to the idea behind the title of the book. Third, it reminds me of a conversation I had with my driver Shabir about meteorites—how its pieces fall from the sky, and how people in the past have become rich by finding them, and how he too hoped to find one someday.

Emma Kennedy is arts professional and former editorial work scholar at Aperture magazine. She is based in New York. 

Where the flowers still grow was published by Loose Joints in 2017.

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Michael Marcelle’s Surreal New Jersey

How Hurricane Sandy set the tone for an uncanny photobook.

By William J. Simmons

Michael Marcelle, Sister Smile, 2015
Courtesy the artist

As the photographer Gregory Crewdson notes in his afterword to Kokomo (2017), Michael Marcelle’s new photobook, when faced with trauma, “reality never feels ‘real’ in the same way again.” It would be easy to read Marcelle’s images as indices of some mental strife or survivor’s guilt, with their brightly lit and grotesque interiors reminiscent of a Roman Polanski movie screened in a West Hollywood gay bar.

Kokomo emerged in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, and although Marcelle’s childhood home in Belford, New Jersey was not destroyed by the October 2012 storm, the surrounding community was devastated. This biographical narrative notwithstanding, Kokomo also makes a statement about constructed photography. Marcelle’s work follows that of Crewdson, Laurie Simmons, Roe Ethridge, Sue de Beer, and Jimmy DeSana; yet, as with the best young photographers working with tableaux (like Cynthia Talmadge or Tommy Kha), there is something idiosyncratic and personal that resists pure imitation. There is something entirely unique, for example, in Marcelle’s relationship to queerness; it is restrained, coy even, but wildly evocative like the weepiest melodrama.

By coincidence, as I prepared for this interview last month, massive fires raged in Northern California, where my parents’ house was among the few untouched (homes only a half-mile away were destroyed). I imagine, to quote The Sound of Music (1965), that the Marcelle and Simmons families must have done something good, perhaps in another life.

Michael Marcelle, One Month Before, 2012
Courtesy the artist

William J. Simmons: Your book begins with text, and many of the images have a narrative/lyrical presence that implies a potential story. Of course, there is the reality of Hurricane Sandy, but I am also thinking of unseen stories. How do you engage with the history of photography as both a fragment of the real and a space of imagined projection? 

Michael Marcelle: The text that you mention is lyrics from the Beach Boys song “Kokomo,” which have been redacted and given a new context, accentuating the ominous non-space of the hallucinatory seaside utopia described in the song.

I’m interested in keeping the connection between fantasy and reality in these pictures in a very tenuous and uneasy state. It would’ve been incredibly boring and problematic to document the aftermath of this storm in a “real” way. So, instead, I used my own personal experience as an anchor to create something new out of the destruction rather than simply record it. I wanted to see how far I could abstract my own family’s narrative into something alien, yet also deeply personal, something that could act as an echo to the devastation. How far could the personal be pushed into oblivion?

Michael Marcelle, One Year Later, 2013
Courtesy the artist

Simmons: Constructed photography—I’m thinking of Robert Mapplethorpe, Jimmy DeSana—and portraiture by artists such as Catherine Opie, have been privileged media for queer people, perhaps as a result of some desire for the “real” of the photograph when homophobia has denied this kind of connection to representation. And you are engaged with each of these photographic lineages. Yet, refreshingly, there is nothing in Kokomo that explicitly or obviously enunciates queerness. Where might you locate a queer sensibility in your restrained combination of multiple modes of photography?

Marcelle: I’ve always viewed the queerness in my work as acting on a psychic, almost supernatural level. The earliest connections I can recall having with queer culture have less to do with my own sexual desires and more with glimpsing into a secret, strange world. Growing up as a fat, stuttering, gay, goth kid in New Jersey, my own queerness became inexorably linked to what I found escape in: the cheap spectacle of VHS genre films, the pageantry of Marilyn Manson, the occult world-building of Kenneth Anger. Queerness was a feeling, a sense of color, light, extremity, and horror. In my photographs, I’m just trying to emulate that feeling, to describe that world over and over again.

I think there’s a predominant sensibility in a lot of art made by gay men that sets up a more traditional relationship between the male body and the inherent desire within as the point of queerness in the work. But in my photos, I’m trying to create an entirely queer world, where everything is charged with a feeling of otherness, of a throbbing strangeness. I think that lends itself to slipping between modes of picture making while still being able to maintain an aesthetic continuity. I don’t see a difference between a portrait or a still life or a landscape, so I try to fill each picture with the same potency.

Michael Marcelle, Poinsettias, 2015
Courtesy the artist

 

Simmons: I’m intrigued by the idea of the uncanny here—people often use that term for photographs that just “look” surreal, but here I think you’re actually working with the term as it was defined—something both strange and familiar, something intimate and distant that bursts into our everyday consciousness. One of the few other artists who managed to do this is Cindy Sherman—not only in her “disaster” pictures from 1986–89, but even in her film stills, where we work constantly and in vain for figure out the movie that we “know” we’ve seen before. 

Marcelle: I would say the sense of uncanniness in these photographs is driven by a desire to subvert the typical structure of the home-based photography genre, where the artist presumes their life is inherently interesting enough to make work around it. I don’t think I’m particularly interesting on a personal level, so rather than focusing on the specific details of my life or my family, I focused on the act of picture-making itself, which I found incredibly freeing. I wanted to decontextualize the familial and the banality of the suburbs into something utterly strange and hallucinatory, with family members in constant states of mutation and landscapes slipping in and out of consciousness.

Michael Marcelle, Our Backyard, 2013
Courtesy the artist

Simmons: In Camera Lucida (1980), Roland Barthes discusses at length a photograph of his mother who has passed, but he refuses to reproduce the photograph, which instills a sense of nostalgia that we as readers or viewers cannot access. But we are learning every day—as with the Charlottesville white supremacist march, in August—that looking back in time or longing for the past is rarely, if ever, progressive. I still find myself nostalgic for nostalgia—a longing that once seemed harmless. What is your relationship to nostalgia?

Marcelle: A lot of my interest in the uncanny has to do with nostalgia, which I’ve always considered as basically synonymous with death, only in a more narcotic, saccharine form. The pictures in Kokomo are drenched in a kind of inverted, uncanny nostalgia, where the past, present, and future have merged, so death is looming over everything. I started the project as a way to describe the feeling of coming home to a world that had turned upside down, but as time went on the focused changed to ultimately be more about family and death.

When I was in grad school, the dean sat in on one of my early crits. He was really not feeling the work at all, and said that the pictures felt like work about magic that was made by someone who doesn’t believe in magic. He clearly meant it in a negative way, but I actually think it’s one of the most accurate descriptions of my work I’ve ever heard. My work is about using all these cheap special effects and theatrical lighting as a way to hide from death, to reach, but ultimately miss, immortality.

William J. Simmons is Provost’s Fellow in the Humanities at the University of Southern California and a Mellon Predoctoral Fellow in Women’s History at the New York Historical Society.

Kokomo was published by MATTE Editions in 2017.

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Why Aren’t There Any Famous Asian American Photographers?

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

By Will Matsuda

Tommy Kha, Unity, Memphis, Tennessee, 2013, from the series A Real Imitation
Courtesy the artist

The first time I saw a Rinko Kawauchi photograph, it felt a little like home. I connected with the softness, the warmth, the subtle hints of Japan. Like everyone in the photography community who comes from a “diverse” background, I’m always looking for images that the industry rarely provides—images that reflect my experiences, made by people who look like me. But, that doesn’t happen very often.

In the hands of a white elite, photographs have long constructed ideas of racial Others in America, and have preserved and propagated white supremacy. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, Edward Curtis presented Native Americans as a people nearing extinction, which contributed to the movement to erase them from American social consciousness. In the Jim Crow South, photographs of lynchings were printed onto popular postcards. From the late nineteenth century through the early twentieth century, anthropologists used photographs as “evidence” that colonial subjects in Africa were inferior. During the same period, American photographers, funded by the U.S. Bureau of Science, photographed hundreds of Filipinos, ranking their subjects on a hierarchical scale from savage to civilized.

Because American photographers have utilized photography as a tool of racial oppression, images made by people of color are vital. Today, a new generation of Asian American photographers is answering the call.

Mary Kang, 28, was born in South Korea, raised in Austin, Texas, and now lives in New York. She began by working in photojournalism, but now shoots fashion and music editorials. Tommy Kha, 28, from Memphis, Tennessee, now lives in New York and makes self-portraits. Jessica Chou, 32, was born in Taiwan and raised in Los Angeles, where she now lives now, and works in editorial and documentary settings.

I recently spoke with Kang, Kha, and Chou about the histories, struggles, and complexities that make Asian American photography a crucial part of American culture. Despite their differences, themes of belonging and community unify their work. And while these photographers are all of East Asian descent, the stories of Asia, in all its vastness, are not represented here. Kang, Kha, and Chou’s images don’t directly address grievances. Instead, they make visual space for nuanced dialogue.

Jessica Chou, Bruce and Sherry, 2013, from the series Suburban Chinatown
Courtesy the artist

Will Matsuda: Do you think being Asian American has affected your relationship with the photography industry? Do you feel pigeonholed in the assignments and opportunities you are given?

Mary Kang: When it comes to telling stories about Asians in America, I think it’s so important that Asian Americans do it.

Tommy Kha: YES.

Jessica Chou: Yes, we are the ones who can talk about it in a nuanced way.

Kang: We need to decolonize the narrative about Asian American communities.

Matsuda: What would a “decolonized narration” look like in images?

Kang: When photographing people with different identities than our own, we really have to confront our own biases. We have to be on the lookout for our blind spots. White men largely dominate the industry; their biases help them to maintain power. Most surviving histories are written by people in power.

Recently, I was in Perpignan, France, to attend the international photojournalism festival, Visa Pour L’Image. For six nights there were screenings of award-winning images. A lot of the images showed people of color in vulnerable positions. How does this imagery feed the people in power? When the narration is this one-sided, it does not recognize people of color as full human beings. So when it comes to East Asian American narratives, it would make a lot more sense to have someone from our own community tell the story.

Mary Kang, Mimi, 2016
Courtesy the artist

Kha: I think we’re always going to be seen as Asian photographers. One really well known photographer found out I was from Memphis and immediately dismissed my work, A Real Imitation (2011–15), because he said William Eggleston already photographed Memphis and the South. He thought that no one else could do it. As minorities, our work is easily dismissed. People are like, “Oh that’s a very specific voice, but is anyone really asking for this kind of work?” I feel like what we do is important no matter how many times we are told otherwise. I get a lot of, “Who really cares about your Asian grandma?” Or, “She survived a war; so what?” We get dismissed so easily.

Kang: I can’t believe the Eggleston thing. Just because a cisgender, white male did it, no one else can? That there’s a singular vision of Memphis?

Chou: That has to do with who has power in the industry. We need to have an industry that is much more diverse, and that sees the value in our stories. When I was showing my series Suburban Chinatown (2013), the nuance of the work went over a lot of editors’ heads. It’s not necessarily their fault for not understanding; it’s more about how there should be diverse voices and leadership in the photography industry. Who is making the decisions about what stories are elevated and heard?

Tommy Kha, Iron Closed , Batesville, Mississippi, 2013, from the series A Real Imitation
Courtesy the artist

Matsuda: Has the current political climate influenced your recent work?

Chou: It makes me want to get out and understand what is happening. My work in the San Gabriel Valley looks at where I come from—it’s mostly Asians and Latinos. If you asked me, when I was growing up, what the percentage of the U.S. population was Asian American, I would have said, like, thirty percent. Everyone I knew came from immigrant households.

I spent a couple of summers up in upstate New York, and that was the first time I experienced the “textbook” version of America. That was the first time I met people whose families had been in America for generations. I don’t know my family’s history beyond my grandparents, so I am interested in people whose sense of place in America has deep roots. Ultimately, I am trying to find my bearings here, and at the same time, understand what’s happening in these communities.

 

Jessica Chou, Back Lot, 2013, from the series Suburban Chinatown
Courtesy the artist

Kang: When I shoot fashion, I sometimes get to cast the models. I want to work with diverse communities, but I am still learning in terms of ethics. For example, looking back on it now, a year-and-a-half ago, what I would have considered to be cultural appreciation is actually cultural appropriation. There is always so much to learn, but that does not provide an excuse for people of color to misrepresent or disrespect other people of color. I have to question why I want diversity in my work. Is this benefiting the people represented, or just a white audience who is consuming these images and products? I continue to think about this. I think the closest solution is to listen. Listen more. Research more. Diversify the people who are making decisions, who have power.

As an East Asian American, I could push and elevate East Asian models only, but that gets complicated too. As East Asian Americans, we carry oppression, but we also must acknowledge that we carry privileges too. We should definitely stand for our own community, but also go beyond our own issues and help others who are even more unjustly discriminated against.

Kha: In self-portraiture, the body is immediately politicized. I don’t think I’m overtly political, but in my work I talk about representation, otherness, and the image itself. It’s very much attached to the political climate recently, but also connected to the politics that have been around for centuries. Yellowface and blackface emerged in America around the same time. Yellowface still continues in Hollywood. It’s our job, as photographers, to be aware of what is going on. How do we affect the people we photograph?

Mary Kang, Swae Lee, 2017
Courtesy the artist

Matsuda: Since you all come from different areas within the photography industry, do you think there is more “freedom” in the art world, which is about self-expression to a degree, than in editorial commissions for major media, which have gatekeepers and sometimes conservative or just majority-white perspectives?

Kha: I don’t think there’s more “freedom” because all aspects of the photography world came from a Western standpoint, thus the art world, fashion, and editorial industries have long been influenced by predominantly white, often male, voices.

Chou: There are gatekeepers everywhere deciding what is a legitimate and what tone an expression should take in order to be celebrated or considered “serious” work. In the editorial world, what is considered a worthy story or a worthy angle is sometimes decided by a newsroom that might not be asking the right questions, or it’s asking questions only from one perspective.

Kang: But with more people gaining access to cameras and access to online platforms such as blogs and social media, there is a sense of freedom in being able to share and see multiple perspectives. I find photographers on social media I wouldn’t have known otherwise.

Tommy Kha, Headtown III, New York City, 2017, from the series I’m Only Here to Leave
Courtesy the artist

Matsuda: Do you frame your work as resistance for yourself and your communities?

Chou: I think so. It’s an unwillingness to be defined by other people. Growing up, I tried bending over backwards to fit in. At some point, I stopped caring about being accepted. What I want is to be included. For all of us, it’s about defining ourselves. That’s a form of resistance.

Kha: Picking up the camera was a form of resistance and rebellion to my family. Jessica said it really well—we are defining our own space. But it’s important also to consider intersectionality and speak across difference.

Kang: We bring our own experiences and histories with us when we photograph. It’s our gaze. It’s not what we usually see in photography, which is the white male gaze. When we make photographs, it is already a form of resistance against the usual way images are produced.

Kha: White male photographers have been photographing people of color since the invention of photography. Give us some space here.

Kang: It is a form of resistance, even if we don’t get accolades. Even if we don’t get recognized by this audience. Just by producing photographs, we are resisting.

Kha: Holy shit, that is true.

Kang: If it inspires or connects with marginalized communities, it’s worth it.

Jessica Chou, Kids on Newmark Ave., 2013, from the series Suburban Chinatown
Courtesy the artist

Matsuda: There are many Asian American photographers making important work today. Ligaiya Romero, Pete Pin, Ka-Man Tse, Sze Tsung Nicolás Leong, and Chan Chao come to mind. But, in general, Asian Americans still aren’t very visible. There isn’t a touchstone Asian American photographer. Why do you think this is?

Kha: Yes, we are definitely here. But I think a lot of Asian Americans are first generation immigrants, so growing up, they didn’t get to go to museums to appreciate and learn about art. My mom had to clean the minefields.

Our parents want to see us succeed. Their relationship with art is almost nonexistent. It’s complicated to explain to them that it’s really fulfilling. My family didn’t really talk to me during my four years of undergrad. Just my mom, aunt, and my sister. But it was still like, “Maybe you will be lawyer later.”

Kang: My parents were not very happy when I told them I wanted to pursue a photography career. I know they have the best intentions, but they pushed me to become a pharmacist. I wanted to do art. I’m not speaking for all Asian American parents, but my Korean American parents really wanted to push for upward mobility. I feel like it has to do with the hardships our parents endured in their home countries. They fled from poverty and war. They want their kids to have what they couldn’t have. They want security. Their lives and their circumstances were much harder, so art wasn’t really encouraged.

Chou: My parents were actually really supportive of me. I think that mostly has to do with the fact that if they told me to do one thing, I’d just turn around and do the other. My parents are as hippy as Chinese parents can be. Even my grandma was one of the few girls in her time to get an education in China. She became one of the few women reporters in Beijing. So there is a bit of understanding about my path, and they respect it. But they are still confused about how I make money [laughs].

Mary Kang, Pink Narcissus, 2015
Courtesy the artist

Matsuda: Do you have any advice for young or emerging Asian American photographers reading this?

Kang: I had the privilege of being taught by Eli Reed in school. He went through so much bullshit as the only black member of Magnum Photos and in the wider industry as well. He said that even though these institutions are white-dominated, and they are usually racist, don’t let that stop you from doing your work. If you let that stop you from doing your work, then they have already won.

Kha: Everyone is just going to tell you “no” all the time. It’s so important to make the work you are making because no one else has your perspective. If they say “no,” push back. Arm yourself with a camera and your vision. Go out there and make pictures.

Chou: What makes you different is literally your own vision. Keep persisting. Show what could be. Show what you aren’t seeing.

Kang: When I first started photographing and pursuing photojournalism, I would think, what is the ultimate goal? Is it joining Magnum? And then I would look at all these photo agencies, and they are so predominantly white. Lack of representation is quite discouraging. But recently I’ve been seeing more organizing in the industry with Women Photograph and Diversify Photo.

Kha: If there isn’t space for these voices, create it. Elevate other voices, and surround yourself with them.

Will Matsuda is the social media associate at Aperture Foundation.

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A Mouthwatering History of Photography

From subtle to surreal, here are eleven innovative ways that artists have pictured food.

By Susan Bright

Wladimir Schohin, Stilleben, 1910
Courtesy Amatörfotografklubben I Helsingfors rf, Finland

Wladimir Schohin

Early color photography showcases soft hues, from a time before color became a staple of commercial photography. This autochrome of an egg is startling in its modern simplicity; it captures the yellowish-orange of the yolk, which was notoriously difficult to recreate with this process. The style and simplicity of many early color photographs marked a distinct change from photographic still lives of the nineteenth century, and rejected the allegorical traditions of painting.

Florence Henri, Composition Abstraite, 1929
Courtesy Galleria Martini e Ronchetti, Genoa, Italy

Florence Henri

Florence Henri visited the Bauhaus school in 1927 and became a key figure in the European avant-garde between the world wars. In her photographs, she attended to space, volume, and balance with skillful use of mirrors and food. Henri also used collage to create her still lifes, then rephotographed them—as can be seen here with the apple and oranges.

Farm Security Administration, photographs from Today’s Storage Is Tomorrow’s Dinner, 1942
Courtesy the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division

Farm Security Administration

The filmstrip Today’s Storage Is Tomorrow’s Dinner was designed to educate the public about preserving, canning, growing, and curing food as America entered the Second World War. Shown in schools and libraries, it promoted a lifestyle where nothing was wasted, at a time when food supply was limited. The photographs were taken by photographers such as Marion Post Wolcott, John Vachon, Russell Lee, and John Collier, then combined to make a narrative accompanied by a voiceover.

Cover of New Recipes for Good Eating, 1949

New Recipes for Good Eating

On the cover of this “cookbooklet” produced by Crisco, a photograph represents a fantasy of America that reverberated through much of how food was photographed in commercial settings. The cook is the mother, who happily feeds her perfect nuclear family homemade doughnuts, which she expertly deep-fries without any concern about two young children being nearby. One wonders, who will eat them all?

Carolee Schneemann, Still from Meat Joy, 1964
Courtesy of the artist and PPOW Gallery, New York

Carolee Schneemann

Feminist art of the 1960s and 1970s often turned to performance, and in particular the female body as a site for radical exploration. Carolee Schneemann’s Meat Joy NYC (1964) reflects a time of female emancipation in the art world and the culture at large. This is a celebration of not only human flesh, but also that of animals—in this case, fish, chicken, and pig-sausage, which were rubbed over near-naked bodies in a bacchanalian performance.

Ouka Leele, Peluquería, Limones, 1979
© the artist

Ouka Leele

Spanish photographer Ouka Leele came to prominence after Franco’s fascist regime, and her colorful, playful images reflect this new period of freedom and exuberance, with its greater artistic possibilities. The colors are very particular to her practice, since she hand-paints them onto her black-and-white photographs. The lemons and straw suggest an advertising image, but no brands or labels are included.

Martin Parr, Untitled (Hot Dog Stand), 1983–85
© the artist/Magnum Photos

Martin Parr

As in much of his other photography, Martin Parr turns to the cliché or stereotype to represent food and comment on national identity. The images are often garish, consumerist, and frequently just plain silly. Parr concentrates on what is considered “ordinary” food; this is not the stuff of banquets or weddings, but of church bake sales and butchers’ slabs. Here, the British seaside is shown as a scrum of people waiting for hot dogs and tea.

Jo Ann Callis, Untitled, 1994, from the series Forbidden Pleasures
© the artist and courtesy Rose Gallery, Santa Monica

Jo Ann Callis

Often setting her food against bright colors, Jo Ann Callis manages to photograph food so that it appears extraordinarily sexual, without making any direct reference to sex. Her treatment of the food is obsessive and tense, relying on saturated, cinematic lighting to create an unknown drama seemingly set in the 1950s or 1960s. Callis’s food becomes gendered; the construction here appears resolutely female, while simultaneously highlighting the clichés of femininity.

Laura Letinsky, Untitled #43, 2002, from the series Hardly More Than Ever
Courtesy the artist and Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York

Laura Letinsky

Since the 1990s, Laura Letinsky has been creating meticulously composed still-life photographs influenced by seventeenth-century Renaissance painting and later masters such as Chardin, Cézanne, and Morandi. But instead of simply referencing art history, her photographs are inscribed with the remnants of family life—specifically the aftermath of a meal—and hint at action outside the frame.

Rinko Kawauchi, Untitled, 2009; from the series Illuminance
© the artist

Rinko Kawauchi

Concentrating on tiny gestures of the everyday and musing on small, fascinating details, Rinko Kawauchi’s photographs feel like a sigh of serenity in a frenetic world. Food is a crucial part of that investigation into the quotidian. Photographed with an undulating perspective, moving in and out of focus, the most simple and delicate of foods—tuna, fish eggs, or melon—become something wholly more substantial.

Joseph Maida, #jelly #jello #fruity #fruto #thingsarequeer, October 26, 2014
© the artist

Joseph Maida

Joseph Maida crafts subversive tableaux that take their first cues from the social media trope of food porn, and add purposeful doses of Pop art humor, advertising gloss, and Japanese kawaii (cuteness). Working in a detached, matter-of-fact, style, Maida makes images that are historically understood as “straight”—referring to both skillful aesthetics and lack of manipulation—undoubtedly queer.

Susan Bright is a curator and writer. This feature is adapted from Feast for the Eyes, published by Aperture in June 2017.

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Across a Racial Divide, Images of Daily Life under Apartheid

An innovative book juxtaposes images from the archives of two South African families—one black, and one white.

By Oluremi C. Onabanjo

Unidentified subject, South Africa, ca. 1950s
Courtesy the Ronald Ngilima collection

Printed on tightly bound cloth, a curtain of soft ripples and floral design is rendered on the entirety of the book’s surface. A faint light emanates from the bottom left corner, infusing the texture with warmth and inviting us into Commonplace, an intimate view into the everyday lives of South Africans over the course of the twentieth century.

Authored collaboratively by Tamsyn Adams and Sophie Feyder, the book features photographs from two private collections—each informed by the movement and settling of communities within particular spaces in South Africa’s physical and social landscape: The Ngilima collection includes the combined work of two black South African photographers, Ronald Majongwa Ngilima and his son Thorence, who photographed life in the African, colored, and Indian neighborhoods in Benoni, east of Johannesburg, during the 1950s and ’60s. The other, the Drummond-Fyvie collection, dates back to the 1850s and spans 150 years of the Natal Midlands’ family history as the group settled and farmed land in Estcourt, the former Colony of Natal.

Spread from Tamsyn Adams and Sophie Feyder, Commonplace, Fourthwall Books, Johannesburg, 2016

With rich compilations from these two collections, Commonplace embraces quotidian moments, both despondent and jubilant, experienced by members of the different communities. Set against the backdrop of the social-documentary and photojournalistic heritage that often dominates South African photographic imagery, this book presents a different visual layer through which to understand the country’s complicated past. Replete with a variety of characters and compositions, Commonplace balances not only the differing social, racial, and ethnic circumstances of the apartheid era, but also the materials and objects of their lives.

Spread from Tamsyn Adams and Sophie Feyder, Commonplace, Fourthwall Books, Johannesburg, 2016

Differing in format, tonal range, and size, the photographs interact within each collection, and more subtly, in varying visual sensibilities. Occasionally a photograph is presented with its well-worn edges, borders, and jagged corners clearly visible. This appearance hints at differing temporal contexts, and provides a material reminder of the eyes and hands that engaged with these rich objects before our own—leaving behind the “trace of relatives, loved ones and friends who once, long ago, stepped out in front of a camera” (as stated in the book’s postscript)—and of those who handled the photographic products after the fact.

Sharp juxtapositions of family gatherings, intimate couples, or reclining feminine beauties across color lines and the rural-urban divide present ambivalent and, at times, beautifully fragmented representations of life within South Africa. Rhythmic echoes across a range of sartorial choices—from canes and hats or tailored suits to striped and spotted skirts—flit across decades and communities, providing playful visual cues through which to read form and self-making anew.

Undated photograph, South Africa
Courtesy the Drummond-Fyvie collection

At its core an exercise in deconstructing and parsing the components of a photo album, Commonplace elegantly destabilizes essentializing narratives of social life and subjectivity during apartheid—but to what end? With minimal, informative texts relegated to the back and printed on a thinner manila paper, the punch of the postscript and supporting essays pales in comparison to the rich, luxurious reproductions on matte paper that populate most of the publication. Through thought-provoking pairings, Adams and Feyder claim that the photographs begin “to suggest the varied ways in which lives lived in different times and places, and under very disparate circumstances, might nevertheless be tied to each other—if not in a common place then at least in their commonplaces.”

Again and again, we face these private moments of people’s lives, and yet, are left wondering how a “commonplace” can provide a prudent point of parallel, or contact, while still honoring the heartbreaking ruptures and tensions writ large throughout South African history. Perhaps Adams and Feyder prefer to leave these strings untied, as we continue to reckon with the social and spatial aftermath of the apartheid area in contemporary South Africa, and instead focus their offering on a more careful consideration of the country’s history through personal images—an exciting and worthwhile endeavor in itself.

Oluremi C. Onabanjo is director of exhibitions and collections for The Walther Collection. 

Commonplace was published by Fourthwall Books in 2016.

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Announcing the Winners of the 2017 PhotoBook Awards

Paris Photo and Aperture Foundation are pleased to announce the winners of the 2017 edition of the Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards, celebrating the photobook’s contribution to the evolving narrative of photography. “Each of the prizes have been awarded to very committed projects that show a dedication to and respect for the subject,” said final juror Krzysztof Candrowicz. “What I see in all of the books points to a change in traditional thinking about the photobook, blurring the boundaries and; expanding the scope what a photobook can be.”

Winner of Photography Catalogue of the Year

Mattie Boom, Hans Rooseboom

New Realities: Photography in the 19th Century

Publisher: Rijiksmuseum/Nai, Amsterdam, 2017

Designed by Irma Boom Office (Irma Boom/Tariq Heijboer)

“I appreciate that New Realities takes what might be considered ‘dusty’ material of the nineteenth century and brings new perspectives and fresh design to enliven this classical material. It’s important as an example of how to preserve and capture new interest in the history of photography.”—Nathalie Herschdorfer



Winner of PhotoBook of the Year

Dayanita Singh

Museum Bhavan

Publisher: Steidl, Göttingen, Germany, 2017

Designed by Dayanita Singh and Gerhard Steidl

“Dayanita Singh has extended the concept of what a book might be with Museum Bhavan: a book of books, each one exploring an Indian motif, from printing presses to the administrative archive. Her work is a sophisticated merger of East and West sensibilities, and celebrates the democratic possibilities of the offset multiple.”—Mitch Epstein

Winner of First PhotoBook ($10,000 prize)

Mathieu Asselin

Monsanto: A Photographic Investigation 

Publisher: Verlag Kettler/Acte Sud, Dortmund, Germany, 2017

Designed by Ricardo Báez

“Asselin’s Monsanto is a courageous, investigative project that connects evidence-driven photography and visual research to the democratization of knowledge; it’s important that this book exists in physical form, as a document, and not just the virtual world.”—Christiano Rainondo

Juror’s Special Mention

Carlos Spottorno and Guillermo Abril

La Grieta (The Crack)

Publisher: Astiberri Ediciones, Bilbao, Spain, 2016

“Very seductive in its draw on nostalgia and forms of popular culture, it’s a very interesting strategy to bring out attention anew to a topic that we see every day in the news.”—Nathalie Herschdorfer

A final jury at Paris Photo selected this year’s winner. The jury included: Florencia Giordana Braun, director and founder of Rolf Art gallery, Buenos Aires; Krzysztof Candrowicz, the artistic director of the Triennial of Photography in Hamburg; Mitch Epstein, New York–based, award-winning photographer whose most recent book, Rocks and Clouds, will be published by Steidl this fall; Nathalie Herschdorfer, director of Museum of Fine Arts, Le Locle, Switzerland; and Cristiano Raimondi, head of development and international projects at the New National Museum of Monaco and an invited curator for Platform 2017.

This year’s shortlist selection was made by Gregory Halpern, whose ZZYZX won the Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook of the Year Award in 2016; Lesley A. Martin, Creative Director, Aperture Foundation and Publisher, The PhotoBook Review; Kathy Ryan, longtime director of photography at the New York Times Magazine; Joel Smith, Richard L. Menschel Curator of Photography at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York; and Christoph Wiesner, artistic director of Paris Photo.

The shortlist was first announced at the New York Art Book Fair. The thirty-five selected photobooks are profiled in issue 013 of The PhotoBook Review, Aperture Foundation’s biannual publication dedicated to the consideration of the photobook. Copies will be available at Aperture Gallery and Bookstore. Subscribers to Aperture magazine receive free copies of The PhotoBook Review with their summer and winter issues.

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An Exhibition Where Every Opinion Matters

At the Art Gallery of Ontario’s annual photography prize, four artists compete for your vote.

By Tatum Dooley

Liz Johnson Artur, Untitled, 1986–2010, from the Black Balloon Archive
Courtesy the artist

The AIMIA/AGO Photography Prize makes a critic out of all who enter. Throughout the Art Gallery of Ontario’s annual exhibition, touchscreen monitors encourage visitors to vote for the “artist whose works speaks to you.” Handed the role of juror, viewers interact with the exhibition with a critic’s eye, forming their own responses and judgments, and assessing the work through aesthetic, concept, or both. The four finalists this year—Raymond Boisjoly, Taisuke Koyama, Liz Johnson Artur, and Hank Willis Thomas, who share an interdisciplinary approach—have already been vetted in two rounds in a nomination process led by the AGO’s photography curator Sophie Hackett.

By asking the audience to vote, the prize pits each artist against one another, resulting in four separate mini-shows rather than one unified exhibition. The transition between each artist’s area, or between each separate show, is signified by a small video screen with headphones where an “expert”—the director of a science museum, a talk show host, a curator—campaigns for why you should vote for a certain artist. These acts of rhetorical persuasion, along with the voting screens and wall text, however, are the only hints that this is not a typical museum exhibition.

Raymond Boisjoly, From age to age, as its shape slowly unraveled, 2015. Installation at the Art Gallery of Ontario, 2017
Courtesy the artist and Catriona Jeffries Gallery, Vancouver

The first mini-show is Raymond Boisjoly’s installation of large-scale photographs, From age to age, as its shape slowly unravelled (2015). Printed on vinyl and placed directly on the wall, the images become part of the cavernous room. The photographs, which range from life-size to larger-than-life, often require a tilt of the head to view in their entirety. To create this series, Boisjoly scanned Statues Also Die (1953)—an anticolonial French film by Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, and Ghislain Cloquet—while it played on his iPhone and iPad. As Boisjoly explains in a statement, “the distortions in the images result from the scanner’s inability to fix the film’s movement.” By replicating the repulsion of movement inherent in daguerreotypes, Boisjoly’s hypercontemporary images recreate technical pitfalls that existed more than a century ago.

Raymond Boisjoly, Station to Station (detail), 2014
Courtesy the artist and Catriona Jeffries Gallery, Vancouver

The results of these distortions are seen in various ways. From afar, the dust particles on Boisjoly’s photographs resemble constellations, bringing attention to the physical origins of the work. In The Objects Themselves (And Now Their Image) (2015), a triptych of statues’ heads appear like mannequins detached from the rest of their bodies. The video’s rapid movement has altered one head so that it looks in both direction at the same time, a contemporary Janus, the Roman god of beginnings and endings. In another, Subsequent Categorizations (Institutional Framings) (2015), the scan has splintered the statues from the video, crushing them into the right side of the photograph; they appear as if they’re invading the image, an apt metaphor for the colonialism that Boisjoly grapples with. The only deviation from grayscale is a tricolor shading, the same effect of viewing a 3-D images without the requisite glasses.

Liz Johnson Artur, Untitled, 1986–2010, from the Black Balloon Archive
Courtesy the artist

A few steps away, Liz Johnston Artur’s Black Balloon Archive (1991–ongoing) emphasizes the importance of the everyday. Instead of being mounted and framed, the photographs are displayed in vitrines, or adhered to the wall by magnets—an ode to hanging photographs on the refrigerator. And Artur’s photographs are exactly the kind you would hang on the fridge. Full of joy, Black Balloon Archive documents a broad range of Black experiences. “Whether congregating at parties or clubs, on streets, in parks or at churches, the groups in Artur’s photographs emphasize family, friendship, style, and joy without generalization,” the exhibition text explains. Artur captures her subjects in settings of celebration, where they’re looking, and maybe feeling, their best. The vitrines showing Artur’s collection of archival documents, both her own photographs as well as ephemera she has gathered, double as light boxes. The scrapbook-like documents become photographs; light shines through the newspaper image, becoming an accidental negative.

Taisuke Koyama, Rainbow Variations, 2009–ongoing. Installation at the Art Gallery of Ontario
Courtesy the artist and G/P Gallery, Tokyo

In the same room, scrolls of colorful photographs by Taisuke Koyoma are draped over black frames. To view the images themselves, visitors must weave in and out of a maze of these photo–sculptures. Unfortunately, the display is the most interesting component of the work. The aesthetically pleasing gradations—fading in and out of blue, pink, yellow, and green in vertical lines—disclose slight imperfections when inspected closely: watermarks, hair, and dust particles. Yet, Koyoma’s proposed line of inquiry, investigating the “relationship between organic processes, natural phenomena and imaging technologies,” remains ambiguous.

Hank Willis Thomas, Raise Up, 2014
Courtesy the artist and the Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg

The clear winner is Hank Willis Thomas. His work takes up the most physical space in the show, spanning two separate rooms and a hallway. In the first room is Thomas’s sculpture Raise Up (2014), from the series Punctum (2014–ongoing). Bronze heads and arms peak over a long white pedestal. Cut off at eye level, or sometimes right below, at first it might appear as if the Black men portrayed are drowning. And then you realize: maybe their arms are raised in surrender to police. Looping back, the reference for this work appears: a photograph by Ernest Cole from the early 1960s of gold mine recruits stripped down for medical evaluation. By referencing an archival photograph and using bronze, Willis creates a memorial.

One room over are seven of Thomas’s photographs, screen-printed onto retro-reflective vinyl, and activated with the flash of a camera or LED flashlight. Once hit with light, the photograph flares into focus, goes dark, and then lights back up for a final time. An artist statement reads, “When we activate the works with light, they become vivid evidence of historic moments easily forgotten in our fast-paced visual culture.” Do you look at the photograph as an image on your phone, or in the ambient light of the gallery? In mandating that these pieces be illuminated with a flash, Thomas puts the viewer in the role of the photographer, sharing some of the agency of not only viewing, but also of making the photographs, and bringing often-forgotten historical moments back into focus.

Hank Willis Thomas, Turbulence II (left), The Law of the Land is Our Demand (right), 2017
Courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

By allowing the audience the agency to choose which photographer they think should win, the AIMIA/AGO Photography Prize encourages visitors to actively interact with the works, as opposed to passively viewing them. Each artist mirrors this with work that also invites participation, enhancing the interactive experience. Yet whether a visitor views the art aesthetically or conceptually, Thomas is ahead on both fronts. (The official winner will be announced on December 4.) Thomas’s work requires viewers to engage with his photographs, participating in the development of the images in a novel way. The work itself is striking, and the fact that you can “develop” photographs—by taking pictures of them—means you get to revisit the images over and over again on your own camera-roll. While this exhibition’s framework turns you into a critic, Thomas turns you into a photographer.

Tatum Dooley is a writer based in Toronto. 

The AIMIA/AGO Photography Prize is on view at the Art Gallery of Ontario through January 14, 2018.

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In Cape Town, A New Destination for African Art

Asserting black identity, photographers take center stage at a bold new museum.

By Sean O’Toole

Thania Petersen, Flamingo (detail), 2017. Backlit photographic print in lightbox
Courtesy the artist and Everard Read, Cape Town

Photographic portraiture—of the self as much as subjects choreographed for the camera—is a central offering at the newly launched Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (Zeitz MOCAA), a one-hundred-gallery, nine-floor private museum that opened at a harborside address in Cape Town, South Africa’s leisure capital, and focuses exclusively on twenty-first-century art from Africa and its diaspora. Named after Jochen Zeitz, the former CEO of sportswear brand PUMA SE, whose art collection is on a twenty-year loan, the museum’s eleven inaugural exhibitions survey a broad range of contemporary artistic practices, many inventively using the camera to assert black identity and record performative engagements with social issues.

“I don’t know if I am backing the wrong horse, but I think it is going to help with public engagement,” said Mark Coetzee, Zeitz MOCAA’s executive director and chief curator, of his decision to make the figure the defining leitmotif of his museum’s opening exhibitions. Coetzee explained that his decision was influenced by two key factors: the fetish value of “selfies and the photographic image” among millennials, and the still-pressing need, in postapartheid South Africa, to offer black museumgoers work that they might identify with. “I think it is a very effective way to say to our audience that not only are they welcome here, not only does this institution belong to you, but the images that we show and celebrate are you as well,” Coetzee said.

Athi-Patra Ruga, The Night of the Long Knives III, 2014
Courtesy the artist and WHATIFTHEWORLD, Cape Town and Johannesburg

Cape Town-based artist Athi-Patra Ruga’s eye-tingling triptych, The Night of the Long Knives I-III (2013), forms part of Coetzee’s group exhibition All Things Being Equal …, which also includes lens-based work by Malagasy artist Joël Andrianomearisoa, American Rashid Johnson, Briton Isaac Julien, and lesser-known South Africans such as twin brothers Hasan and Husain Essop, Mohau Modisakeng, and Thania Petersen. “I like the fact that the museum buys my black body, or the representation of it, so that it fills up these spaces,” Ruga said of his self-portraits, which portray him in a balloon costume astride a zebra in a lush tropical setting, and tell the mythical story of a future South Africa ruled by LGBTQI-friendly female monarchs. Underscoring Coetzee’s point about public engagement, Ruga added, with a seditious smile, “If a nephew walks into the space, he can send me a WhatsApp: ‘OMG, I saw your penis in Zeitz MOCAA!’”

New York-based writer Antwaun Sargent took a different view after visiting Zeitz MOCAA. Writing in an Artsy editorial, Sargent wondered if the “heavy focus on literal depictions of the black body in almost every room of the museum also runs the risk of essentializing it.” He put the question to Coetzee, who responded, “That’s a higher-level art problem.” Formerly a director at the Rubell Family Collection in Miami, Cape Town-born Coetzee joined PUMA as Chief Curator of puma.creative in 2009 and was a strategic advisor to Zeitz during a well-publicized buying spree that netted key works by Swaziland sculptor Nandipha Mntambo and South African sculptor Nicholas Hlobo, both on view in the museum.

Edson Chagas, Found Not Taken, Luanda, 2009
Courtesy the artist and Stevenson, Cape Town and Johannesburg

Another of Zeitz’s key acquisitions was a photographic installation by Angolan artist Edson Chagas. In 2013, Chagas won for his country the Golden Lion for best national pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale with his exhibition, Luanda, Encyclopedic City, comprised of twenty-three stacks of mass-produced photographs of urban detritus drawn from the artist’s series Found Not Taken (2009–13). Acquired at the biennale by Zeitz, this is the work’s first public showing since 2013. The Félix González-Torres-style arrangement of Chagas’s photographs is less interesting than their insistent focus on impersonal urban spaces. Africa is the second-fastest urbanizing continent after Asia. Three untitled urban landscapes by Johannesburg photographer and Market Photo Workshop-graduate Mack Magagane, all shot at night between 2011 and 2012, are the only other works in Zeitz MOCAA addressing the experiences and realities of this difficult transition.

Mack Magagane, Untitled XII, 2011, from the series in this city
Courtesy the artist and ROOM Gallery & Projects

Zeitz MOCAA does not have traditional museum departments defined by media, concentrating instead on six “focus areas” that include costume, moving image, performative practice, curatorship, art education, and photography. Nevertheless, the museum’s photography “area” is named after the New York-born, Johannesburg-based photographer Roger Ballen, who earlier this year made a financial gift to Zeitz MOCAA’s endowment, as well as donated one signed edition of all his photographs since 1968 to the museum’s permanent collection. “If you give it to a big international museum, the work sits in a storeroom,” said Ballen, whose work is held by the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and the Tate in London. “It also feels appropriate,” added Ballen, who met his South African wife in Johannesburg in 1974 and has spent much of his adult life in the country.

Roger Ballen, Dove Catcher, 2009
Courtesy the artist

Ballen is a controversial figure in his adopted country: since the publication of Platteland (1994), which included many of his best-known frontal portraits of poor whites, he was dogged by persistent claims of exploitation. Ballen’s outlier status, particularly among liberal documentarians, was rehabilitated—or merely superseded—when he shot “I Fink U Freeky,” a 2012 music video for controversial rap outfit Die Antwoord. “Tens of millions of people became aware of my aesthetic,” said Ballen, who has four photographs in All Things Being Equal…, including Dove Catcher (2009). Coetzee, who first met Ballen at the 17th Biennale of Sydney in 2010, has also allowed the photographer to create a series of environments filled with animatronics, wall drawings, and props that reflect this lanky photographer’s interest in outsider art (Ballen prefers the French term art brut) and will likely provide instant recognition for fans of Die Antwoord.

Mouna Karray, 34°43’56.0″N 10°32’29.4″E, 2012–15
© the artist and courtesy Tyburn Gallery, London

The Roger Ballen Foundation Centre for Photography’s debut exhibition is devoted to the work of Tokyo-trained, Tunisian artist Mouna Karray. Curated by Gcotyelwa Mashiqa, Off-the-Air presents a series of self-portraits of the artist obscured by a white sheet and posed in various arid landscapes in her home country’s southwest, in addition to three studio portraits that follow the same setup. Karray began working on the series in 2012, a year after the revolutionary ouster of Tunisian president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali; the work was first exhibited at London’s Tyburn Gallery in 2016. Karray’s series is informed by a postrevolutionary anxiety: the photographer has variously described her anonymous figure as a “captive” and “a figure of resistance, a figure pushing for freedom and the re-enchantment of a forgotten land.”

Kudzanai Chiurai, Genesis [Je n’isi isi] I, 2016
Courtesy the artist and Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg and Cape Town

Zeitz MOCAA has two full-time photography curators, Gcotyelwa Mashiqa and Bafana Zembe, assisted by a curator at large, Azu Nwagbogu. “Photography really matters today because it allows us to explore, enquire, and investigate truths,” said Nwagbogu, a Lagos-based art entrepreneur who founded LagosPhoto, an annual photography festival in Nigeria, and also heads up the nonprofit African Artists’ Foundation. Nwagbogu’s exhibition Regarding the Ease of Others offers an insightful overview of Zimbabwean multimedia artist Kudzanai Chiurai’s practice, which encompasses agitprop posters, painting, sculpture, and—since 2009, when he collaborated with fashion photographer Jurie Potgieter on bling portraits of a fictional governmental cabinet—David LaChapelle-inspired pop-political tableaus in photography and video.

Zanele Muholi, Bona, Charlottesville, 2015
© the artist and courtesy Stevenson, Cape Town and Johannesburg and Yancey Richardson, New York

“Photography has played a pivotal role since the liberation struggles of the 1960s up until the present,” said Coetzee during a July press conference. Despite a large showing of photography, the museum’s holdings are marked by key omissions. There are no works by South Africans Moshekwa Langa, Jo Ractliffe, and Nontsikelelo “Lolo” Veleko, all included in Okwui Enwezor’s 2006 group exhibition, Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography at the ICP in New York. Other notable absences include Pieter Hugo, Mikhael Subotzky, and Guy Tillim; as well as the Cameroonian self-portrait photographer Samuel Fosso, whose magisterial series African Spirits (2008), along with South African artist Tracey Rose’s self-portraits from her Ciao Bella (2001) video installation, underpin as much as clarify the self-reflexive, performative turn in African photography.

Absence and omission are not fatal in a new museum; indeed, they represent opportunities for future projects, or at least this is the hope. Among the highlights from Zeitz MOCAA’s debut showcase is a selection of five brooding self-portraits from Zanele Muholi’s ongoing series Somnyama Ngonyama (Hail, the Dark Lioness). First exhibited at New York’s Yancey Richardson Gallery in 2014, Muholi produces her frontal self-portraits alone, at home, and on the road. The darkened skin tones are achieved in postproduction. Muholi plans to produce 365 self-portraits; in January, she had achieved 120. “It is really difficult to look at yourself,” Muholi told me. “You face your demons in ways that you might never have done before.” The self-portrait, far from being procedural or obvious, can also be a fierce act of defiance.

Sean O’Toole is a writer and editor based in Cape Town. This article is produced in collaboration with C& (Contemporary And) – Platform for International Art from African Perspectives.

All Things Being Equal … is on view at Zeitz MOCAA, Cape Town, through February 19, 2018.

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