Aperture's Blog, page 107

For Durimel, Black Humanity is Not a Fashion Trend

The young photography duo Jalan and Jibril Durimel are transforming the fashion world’s visions of beauty.

By Antwaun Sargent

Jalan & Jibril Durimel, Bigger then, Bigger Glenn, 2017
Courtesy the artists

It all began in front of the camera. In 2012, the French photography duo Jalan and Jibril Durimel created their streetstyle Tumblr Durimel. The blog announced the then eighteen-year-old twins to the world as a creative pair who ran around the streets of Paris taking pictures of themselves in the latest trends. They gained a following. Later that year, when they settled in Los Angeles for college, the twin brothers began modeling in campaigns for American Apparel, AXS Folk Technology, and Union Los Angeles, and made an appearance in the Japanese style tome Popeye.

As models, Durimel became frustrated by the contemporary reality that the commercial fashion image is dominated by trends and a brand’s ability to advertise a closeness to wealth, power, and idealized notions of beauty and cool. It’s a form of representation that diminishes the significance dress plays in telegraphing humanity. In an effort to resolve this tension, they stopped modeling and, like Gilbert & George, Doug and Mike Starn, and Inez & Vinoodh, began a collaborative artistic practice. Their mantra is to “help the world to familiarize itself with its neighborhoods” by “creating still beautiful moments.”

Jalan & Jibril Durimel, Untitled, 2017
Courtesy the artists

A Durimel photograph is distinguishable from the typical glossy fashion photography found on billboards as brand advertisements or seasonal editorials. The duo’s images are imbued with a surrealism derived from what they call a “sartorial interest in style, texture, color, and silhouette.” Pictures such as Kuoth (2015) further critique the notion of the promotional fashion image. As in all of Durimel’s work, the figures represent everyday black people cast from the streets of Jamaica, Sierra Leone, Miami, and Los Angeles as “characters,” not models, in diasporic narratives Durimel tell through dress.

For the R&B singer Sampha’s zine Shy Light, Durimel, in collaboration with the fashion designer Grace Wales Bonner, took natural images of the Process singer’s journey in his familial hometown of Freetown, Sierra Leone. Similar storytelling occurs in Black boys I knew who could self-reflect (2016), a landscape portrait shot on a grassy knoll in the San Pedro neighborhood of Los Angeles. The keen use of the sartorial grants the picture a transformative quality, challenging all who see it to access ordinary beauty through representations of black humanity.

Jalan & Jibril Durimel, Kuoth, 2015
Courtesy the artists

Over the last several years, Durimel have made character driven pictures concerned with evoking emotion and identity by blending interests in color theory, composition, and the politics of dress. “Our images share the story of life through blackness,” Jalan told me. Untitled (2017) and Daughters (2017), two images of the same group of women Durimel met while scouting in the historically black neighborhood of Watts in South Los Angeles, provide a glimpse into how the duo uses style in the characterization of blackness.

The conversations these women shared that day about life in public housing and raising children in those conditions resonated with the photographers, who, during high school, lived in public housing in St. Maarten. This dialogue inspired Daughters, an image of some of the Watts women, made with Durimel’s Pentax 67 medium-format lens, against a sandy-brown backdrop. Most of the women wear black suits, and one holds a baby boy. At first glance, Daughters seems like a conventional fashion image found in a magazine. But if you linger on the women’s sartorial togetherness and faces, they communicate the power, beauty, and importance of their lives, and yours.

Jalan & Jibril Durimel, Daughters, 2017
Courtesy the artists

To read more, buy Aperture Issue 228, “Elements of Style,” or subscribe to Aperture and never miss an issue. Limited edition prints by Durimel are available from Aperture Foundation. 

Antwaun Sargent is a writer based in New York.

The post For Durimel, Black Humanity is Not a Fashion Trend appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

The Poet of Black Baltimore

For Devin Allen, life in Baltimore is about the beautiful struggle.

By Jessica Lynne

Devin Allen, from the book A Beautiful Ghetto, 2017
Courtesy the artist

Beyond the hyperbolic narratives about Black Baltimore that tend to circulate in mainstream news cycles—the blight, the crime, the poverty—is a story of tenderness and resilience, of love and resistance. Devin Allen is interested in that story. And after capturing images of the Baltimore protests that occurred in the wake of the death of Freddie Gray, in 2015, Allen has amassed a vault of photographs that depict the complicated poetry of his city. Indeed, his new photobook, A Beautiful Ghetto (2017), is a visual love note to Black Baltimore that could have only been produced by a Black Baltimorean. On the occasion of the release of the publication and accompanying exhibition at The Gordon Parks Foundation, I spoke with Allen about his personal relationship to photography and the beauty of the city that he calls home.

Devin Allen, from the book A Beautiful Ghetto, 2017
Courtesy the artist

Jessica Lynne: Let’s start before Freddie Gray, before the uprising in Baltimore. One of the things I’ve been thinking about is the relationship we form with photography long before we become photographers or become interested in thinking about photographs critically. What was your early relationship to photography? Were you the kid taking photographs at family gatherings? What brought you to the medium?

Devin Allen: I started photography in 2013. My grandmother actually helped me get my very first camera. She would always carry around a camera and document everything as we were growing up—every family get-together, those moments at a family cookout—and that’s when I realized that my grandmother was actually a photographer. I understand how important it is to savor and keep those moments. But, as a kid, I never in a hundred years would have thought that I would become a photographer.

Devin Allen, from the book A Beautiful Ghetto, 2017
Courtesy the artist

Lynne: As you began documenting Baltimore, especially in the wake of Freddie Gray’s death, did you have a sense of how important your images would become, not only to the way we, as a country, grapple with Gray’s death, but also to these longstanding, systemic circumstances that led to this that tragedy?

Allen: In Baltimore, we already have a bad rep, we’re only known for the violence, we’re known for having a high murder rate. So, my goal was to tell the story of West Baltimore, not just the death of Freddie Gray, but also what Freddie Gray saw leading up to his death. I wanted to show the positive but also the negative aspects. I didn’t plan for everything to get as big as it did; I just wanted to show the world the Baltimore that I knew. I knew that those bigger publications and media outlets don’t actually know anything about Baltimore; they only want to focus on one aspect of a project. I wanted to tell everything else in between: I wanted to talk about the cookout, the block party. It’s not about a burned-down city; there’s so much more that happened after the death of Freddie Gray, and I wanted to show the resilience of the people. We were, like, hopped-up, and that’s one of the main reasons why I said I’d document it. I never thought it would get this big.

Devin Allen, from the book A Beautiful Ghetto, 2017
Courtesy the artist

Lynne: In her essay for your book, “The Boisterous Demand of Black Baltimore,” Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor writes something that really stuck with me: “Black life is not only about hardship, it is also about poetry, play, celebration, curiosity, tradition, and what some have referred to as, ‘the beautiful struggle.’” What should people know about the poetry of Black Baltimore that doesn’t necessarily get to exist in the mainstream media conversation?

Allen: The thing with Baltimore is that Baltimore is a very small city, everybody knows everybody. It’ll take you fifteen to twenty minutes to get around the whole city. A lot of people interact with people’s cousins, mothers, we grow up together and friends become family, and that’s the beautiful thing that people don’t understand. I’m really just talking about a city that has been neglected, forever.

There’s a thing we say: If you grow up here, you can survive anywhere. And I honestly believe that. I had my own trials and tribulations, like gun violence, which has heavily affected my life. I stopped counting at about twenty friends taken. I stopped counting. I lost my first friend at age sixteen or seventeen; he was shot. The death never stops. I buried two friends just over the summer this year.

You know, it’s like you said, it’s Black poetry, and that’s what it is. Violence is only one aspect of Baltimore. When the uprising was going on, a lot of people didn’t know that all of the basketball coaches, the popular hairdressers, people who have clothing lines, local business owners—they were all at the basketball courts figuring out how we can get our kids off of the streets. The reaction was that we should be proactive about it, to turn that negative into a positive. Baltimore is a city that fights for its own. That’s why I love my city so much.

Devin Allen, from the book A Beautiful Ghetto, 2017
Courtesy the artist

Lynne: I really like that—it’s the beautiful struggle. When did you realize that all of this documentation and storytelling work would become a book? And was it daunting to begin the process of sifting through all of your images to decide what was going to complete the final publication?

Allen: A Beautiful Ghetto started off with a hashtag, because I could not find the words to really describe my city. I met this guy named Mitchell Duneier, who wrote a book called Ghetto: The Invention of a Place, the History of an Idea (2016), and he came to Baltimore, and I took him to the local crab place. You know, being a kid from West Baltimore, I’m sitting here with Mitch Duneier from Princeton, just talking to him, and it was unreal. And he was like, “You should do a show. What would you name your show?” And I said, “I would name it A Beautiful Ghetto.” I wanted to put a bittersweet taste in your mouth. That’s the goal. And he said, “Do it.” And they took me to Philadelphia, and I did the show A Beautiful Ghetto, and that’s when I met Keeanga. I did a panel discussion and she basically narrated my show.

Devin Allen, from the book A Beautiful Ghetto, 2017
Courtesy the artist

Lynne: And the exhibition became the book? What was the selection process like?

Allen: Every image is very personal. The thing is, I don’t repeat frames, so every shot you see is as you see it. I don’t hold down the shutter and just let my shutter run. I literally go out and get the shot. I’m very particular and every shot is important to me; I didn’t want to take the easy way out. I also wanted to keep the book as cheap as possible, but I still wanted a good quality book. So, we started at like one thousand images, got it down to five hundred, and then 120, and then we had a book.

Devin Allen, from the book A Beautiful Ghetto, 2017
Courtesy the artist

Lynne: I love that the book, in some way, becomes a community ode to Baltimore. Looking at the images, they’re extremely sharp, but there’s also a deep feeling of tenderness, not only for the built environment of Baltimore, but also for the people. There’s an honesty and an urgency to them. How have people responded to the book, and your visual narrative of the city?   

Allen: You know, the response has been amazing. I shoot with my heart and my eyes. My heart is in everything. A lot of the people that you see in the book, they are my friends. These are the people that I know, that I see every day. So, the book, for me, is a love letter to Baltimore. This is my letter to Baltimore. This is how I feel, this is love right here.

And the biggest thing is that, for my generation, coming from Baltimore, there has never been a book like this, a book for Baltimore by somebody from Baltimore. You can get the book for fifteen dollars on Amazon, and you can’t beat that. When I first started photography, I wanted to get Gordon Parks’s book, but it was $125 at Barnes & Noble and I couldn’t afford it. I would go to Barnes & Noble and get a whole bunch of inspiration to bring back to my work. But for the kids who are on Instagram now and want to be photographers, they can peek at my book. I figure they can get inspired to document themselves. I teach, I give out cameras, and so hopefully there will be someone better than me, coming behind me.

Devin Allen, from the book A Beautiful Ghetto, 2017
Courtesy the artist

Lynne: I know that Gordon Parks is a big inspiration for you, but there’s another photographer by the name of Joseph Rodriguez, who I’m also reminded of when I think of your work. Are there other people who you are learning from at the moment, who you feel like you are in conversation with, either conceptually or formally speaking? Who else are you looking at for your own continued growth as a photographer?

Allen: Anthony Barboza, right now, because I want to get more into portraiture. Ruddy Roye, who’s one of my favorites, I always follow him. And, of course, Jamel Shabazz, with all his hip hop ’80s stuff and portraiture. I’m getting a lot of inspiration from a lot of older black photographers in helping myself grow.

Devin Allen, from the book A Beautiful Ghetto, 2017
Courtesy the artist

Lynne: What’s next for you? Are you still interested in working in some capacity with mainstream national publications? What does the next year look like?

Allen: Like I said, I always live life winging it. The biggest thing, now that the book is out, is to really get that moving, get it out as much as I can. Even though my career has grown, it’s still a struggle. I’m still a starving artist, you know I’m still struggling. I wanted to stay in Baltimore, I didn’t want to just disappear, move to New York, and forget my community, so I took a job with Under Armour as my nine-to-five, so it helps me stay in Baltimore. I’m learning about the commercial side of the business; I’m actually doing more photo-editing.

As a Black photographer, it’s always going to be difficult to navigate—so many people say this. Hopefully this book will open up opportunities for me to do more photojournalism, to get more stories, but I also definitely want to dive into the fashion realm, as soon as possible. I want to be one of the greatest photographers of my generation, that’s the ultimate, long term goal. And then, I want to get into directing. I definitely want to bring back those Spike Lee films, and work on projects like that. I just want to do it all.

Jessica Lynne is editor of ARTS.BLACK.

Devin Allen: A Beautiful Ghetto was published by Haymarket Books in September 2017.

The post The Poet of Black Baltimore appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

Humanity, Visibility, Power

Is the world finally ready for Collier Schorr’s women?

By Matthew Higgs

Collier Schorr, Picture for Women, 2010
© the artist and courtesy 303 Gallery, New York

Celebrated in the worlds of art and fashion, Collier Schorr has pushed photography to examine desire, sexuality, and beauty. From her work with teenage wrestlers, to her provocative advertising campaigns, to her exploration of the artist-muse relationship, she has exposed the fluidity and ambiguity of gender. In her images, boys appear girlish, and vice versa. Now sought after for her signature command of the gaze, Schorr’s interrogation of identity has broad reach—and great influence—in the pages of fashion magazines. Here she speaks about the evolving language of the fashion image and how her work challenges convention.

Collier Schorr, Image for Saint Laurent women’s summer campaign, 2017
© the artist and courtesy 303 Gallery, New York

Matthew Higgs: I am going to start with a quote you put on your Instagram feed. It says: “For anyone who wonders why I wanted to make fashion pictures, now you know.” And there is the hashtag #humanityvisibilityequalspower. What animated that? I think it’s worth mentioning that this conversation is taking place two days after Trump’s executive order on immigration.

Collier Schorr: For me, Instagram is a dual platform for showing your work and for showing what you stand for. The picture I made for Saint Laurent, which accompanied the post, was more typical of a documentary picture than a fashion advertisement. Any one element could be seen as typical, but the models were styled and encouraged to perform and play outside of what is traditionally seen: heteronormal women.

We all know that fashion is theater. But it felt like a real moment when I was with those models, Selena Forrest and Hiandra Martinez. Because I was working alongside filmmaker Nathalie Canguilhem, who was also directing them, I could watch as though I were a voyeur. Or, more correctly, there was a performance that seemed to be happening outside of my command. I wasn’t prepared for what it would feel like to see that image as a billboard. It took me back to when I first started making art. I wanted to essentially make a billboard in a gallery that talked about visibility and representation at a time when there was no real lesbian representation in the art world.

Collier Schorr, Blame (Jordan), 2015
© the artist and courtesy 303 Gallery, New York

Higgs: Your imagery circulates in the context of both the art world and the larger world of fashion. How would you characterize the differences between these cultural, social, and, I guess, political spheres?

Schorr: They are both places where you have an audience. I don’t really distinguish between the two audiences, because for the most part, they are the same people. More people look at advertising than go to galleries. But everybody who goes to a gallery looks at advertising.

Higgs: Do you think there’s a resistance, still, from the art context to artists who choose to work in the realm of fashion?

Schorr: I’ve always dealt with resistance, though not based on commercial work, but on making too many pictures of men and being seen as romantic. Or based on being an American artist working in Germany. Or not showing in Germany because the work was too American or because it was too dangerous. I’ve never had “permission” or been associated with a collective or a movement. The politics of the work left people uncertain of my identity. Was I a gay male? If I had been a gay male, I think there would have been more support for the work, because there is a tradition of gay men making work about male beauty.

Higgs: But that’s sort of the uncertain nature of the work in its totality. It remains disruptive to the stability the art world has sought.

Schorr: The last gallery show I did, 8 Women (2014), which was seventy percent archival commissioned work and thirty percent work that I made before I started doing fashion, was the most successful show I’ve had. It sold the most. It sold to museums. I walked away thinking, “Oh, of course it did well. They’re pictures of women, and that’s always been a comfortable spot for art.” I did feel like I was being radical by bringing in commercial work, but I was being really traditional by bringing in female nudes.

Collier Schorr, Jennifer (Head), 2002–14
© the artist and courtesy 303 Gallery, New York

Higgs: It seems almost every decade there’s an attempt to align or embrace the fashion image in the art world. There are exhibitions that address this, and everyone feels like it’s been done, and then a decade later it’s addressed again. Whereas now it seems it’s at its most interesting, most widespread, and hopefully—or potentially—most complex.

Schorr: In terms of destabilizing, my situation might be the result of not having an identity as an artist, a photographer, painter, et cetera. I became an artist really—I wouldn’t say “by accident,” but I didn’t study art. I didn’t train. I just had friends who were artists, and I worked in a gallery. I thought I was a writer. And I made work simply because I thought that the photo- and text-appropriation world made it possible for somebody to make something without having any talent.

I was working for Peter Halley and Richard Prince, and I had the opportunity to curate a show at 303 Gallery of friends of mine. I put myself in the show because there was a hole, a kind of representation, or protest, that wasn’t yet included. So I appropriated fashion imagery. It was a way of interacting with those images that I was drawn to from magazines. What I’m doing today is still the same thing. I never believed in a high-art position because I never fantasized about being an artist.

Collier Schorr, Image for Saint Laurent women’s summer campaign, 2017
© the artist and courtesy 303 Gallery, New York

Higgs: But a distinction would be that you’re producing those images now, as opposed to working with those images.

Schorr: Well, yes and no. My current Saint Laurent men’s campaign is collage. The images were shot as an advertising campaign, but by printing them out and cutting them up, they became commentary, a secondary text breaking down an original, static conceit. It’s an infiltration of representation, by bringing together a bunch of pictures made under one umbrella to create a dialogue on representation. The clothing is cut up, cut out; the characters become more important and have more authority. As though I were taking some Guess ads out of Vogue from 1989 and collaging them for an artwork. That was the proposition of my show 8 Women—images go out into the world in magazines, and then I take back those that I want to have a second comment on. I restage their being looked at.

Higgs: The commercial imperative of the fashion business dictates that it’s constantly in flux. Then there’s the market-driven flux, and the commercial realities of fashion. Is it possible to think about that when you’re trying to create an image within those structures?

Schorr: I think almost everything that’s bad about working in fashion is also good, depending upon the day. The fact that it moves. The fact that it’s disposable. The fact that you are so invested in something that you’re willing to have a huge fight over it. Then it gets thrown in the garbage. No matter how bad or no matter how good a picture is, it evaporates after six months. It’s not enshrined. I guess I keep what I love, by putting it into a frame.

Higgs: In the work you’ve done with Saint Laurent, do you have increasing license to make—this is a crude way to put it—more complicated images?

Schorr: I have the encouragement to do that, and that’s very rare. The designer at Saint Laurent, Anthony Vaccarello, was very interested and invested in seeing pictures come from the artist’s imagination rather than from the position of merchandising.

Collier Schorr, Image for Saint Laurent women’s summer campaign, 2017
© the artist and courtesy 303 Gallery, New York

Higgs: To return to #humanityvisibilityequalspower, that Instagram hashtag, what do you think about recent shifts in fashion casting and the bodies we’re seeing in this context?

Schorr: There is a real push toward diversity, but I think the fashion world has treated diversity in casting as a smoke bomb, because there is very little diversity in production. There are very few black fashion photographers in mainstream magazines. There are not that many black designers. But the casting revolution has been great because it’s releasing people who were stuck having to be represented by a certain ideal of beauty. I’m still very much concerned with the general ways I/we present women and sell an idea about them. How to shift what objectification does, how it functions. I’m suspect of merely propping up a picture by suggesting the woman has power.

Higgs: How do you approach the space of editorial work? To me, it’s substantially different from your approach to making a book, or making an exhibition, or even working with a client like Saint Laurent. The continuous narrative of editorial opens up a different agenda.

Schorr: For me, the best-case scenario of editorial work is being in a kind of consensual relationship with somebody else in which I can explore who they are, what they look like, and why they’re desirable.

Higgs: And the other person is the model?

Schorr: The other person is the model. Sometimes it’s a fleeting relationship, and sometimes it’s a sustained relationship. I’m really interested in a certain kind of seduction or flirtation. Like, you’re at a club, and you find your person, and you make this conversation, and then you get to do everything you want with them in this very consensual way. We fall in love with someone who is in love with themselves, and then we fall in love with our version of them. They can love you for a minute for recognizing them. Then some kid rips it out of a magazine, puts it on their bedroom wall, and has someone to dream about.

Collier Schorr, Laetitia with Leica, 2016
© the artist and courtesy 303 Gallery, New York

Higgs: The early weeks of the Trump administration left many people—and commentators, in the broader sense, including artists—stunned. How do you see fashion in relation to the current political reality?

Schorr: I’ve always had a really simple idea about what I wanted for my fashion pictures, because I think that they can only do so much based on the fact that it’s all fake, for the most part. Is it intimacy? Is intimacy a kind of gaze of empowerment, inclusion, and warmth?

Fashion basically promised me one day I would have a girlfriend, and she might be like that model in a sailor shirt with short bleached hair. She might not. But I could fantasize about it. And, at the same time, I could be repulsed by fashion images. I could be hurt by fashion images. And, I could be scarred by fashion images. I wanted to replace the pictures I found alienating with my pictures, so that I would somehow create a healthier pictorial environment for kids.

To continue reading Matthew Higgs’s interview with Collier Schorr, buy Aperture Issue 228, “Elements of Style,” or subscribe to Aperture and never miss an issue.

Matthew Higgs is Director and Chief Curator  of White Columns, New York.

The post Humanity, Visibility, Power appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

Chris Maggio’s Great American Facade

In a new body of work, the photographer confronts the postelection U.S. landscape with dark humor.

By Will Matsuda

Chris Maggio, Untitled, from the series Bored on the 4th of July, 2017
© and courtesy the artist

Spend enough time on the internet and you will come across a Chris Maggio photograph. It will probably be uncredited, torn from its original context, and memed endlessly. He’s OK with that, and in fact, he takes pride in it. His newly released series, Bored on the 4th of July (2017), blends fact and an extrapolation of truth in the postelection landscape. This ambiguity forces the viewer to confront the absurdities of American culture—what does it say about America that, within these images, it’s hard to discern where fact ends and imagination begins?

Will Matsuda: A lot of photographers have tried to address the current political climate, but these projects often feel heavy-handed. Your new project is both fresh and cutting. Why did you make Bored on the 4th of July?

Chris Maggio: I really appreciate that! I wanted to make a series that openly admits to communication by an unreliable narrator. My intent was for documentary and opinion to sit as some kind of uneasy emulsion—often within the same image—and to have the viewer at least a little in on the joke. A lot of news about “politics” that we see online burdens us with the responsibility of sifting for what is real amongst a maelstrom of opinion, fact, and presumption. But this series is more like an honest caricature: there’s truth floating around in there, but you’re aware that some of it’s exaggerated to make a point.

Chris Maggio, Untitled, from the series Bored on the 4th of July, 2017
© and courtesy the artist

Matsuda: You describe the series as “both real and imagined, about a summer where, no matter what their politics, everyone has an opinion of what it means to be an American.” Are the images grounded in a specific place? Or is the series more representative of a nameless place that liberals imagine when they think of the “other side”?

Maggio: The problems facing the country right now are pandemic; it would be unfair to root them in a specific place. Some of the pictures do point to issues that the GOP both embraces and ignores, but not without acknowledging how in this current, polarizing time, paranoia and hyperbole are nonpartisan.

Chris Maggio, Untitled, from the series Bored on the 4th of July, 2017
© and courtesy the artist

Matsuda: Last week on Twitter, I saw Ezra Koenig, the front man of Vampire Weekend (who has half a million followers), share your Blue Lives Matter photo without credit or context. Your images often get turned into memes. It happens so much that it seems like you create them for this reason, or at least have accepted it as part of your practice. What do you think when you see your images used in this way?

Maggio: To be a part of the fabric of someone’s day, even if your picture is fleetingly used to describe a “mood” or TFW, is really amazing. Whether it’s genuine or ironic, the image that you’ve created becomes part of their narrative, and even if your authorship is eroded in the process, there’s still a lot of pride there. People aren’t often inclined to research where these images originated from, but that’s the price you pay to have an idea snowball toward such a broad reach. Regardless, I just hope that folks garner something from the images that’s either emotionally positive or a catalyst for constructive thought.

Chris Maggio, Untitled, from the series Bored on the 4th of July, 2017
© and courtesy the artist

Matsuda: The Chris Maggio “worldview” is so distinct. Why do you think you see the world in the way you do?

Maggio: I think it stems from my pessimism about who controls our day-to-day lives. I’m really scared that, as a population, we’re losing our autonomy to huge entities whose profits are contingent on our obedience to them. I’ve been in conversations with people where we’ll talk about iPhone updates for fifteen minutes—it’s chilling. The amount of control that companies can have on us is increasing exponentially. I’m not saying that the smartphone is the main culprit, but when you can watch the Candy Crush game show at your house, followed by Beat Shazam, and then go to the movies with your sweetie to watch The Emoji Movie—all while ignoring her by being on your phone—it’s hard not to lead with that example. That’s why I like going to county fairs, landmarks, tourist traps, and the like (which are the basis for some of my other photo series). Seeing people do their own thing, misbehaving and running amok in spaces where there’s a prescribed manner in which they’re supposed to conduct themselves—it gives me this weird little hope that there are parts of all us that won’t fall in line. I know I sound like a guy wearing a tinfoil hat—but I just like seeing people make their own fun.

Chris Maggio, Untitled, from the series Bored on the 4th of July, 2017
© and courtesy the artist

Matsuda: I see words like “late capitalism” and “Internet culture” used to describe your work. Do you think that is correct?

Maggio: Ha! I wouldn’t disagree—the aesthetic of a lot of my work is geared toward the Internet because it’s where the majority of it is consumed. My pictures are often visually loud, center-framed, and have an easy, literal first read. However, if folks linger on them for a minute, I’d hope that the message of some of my stuff burrows a little deeper—there’s often something of that “late capitalism” idea in there. We’re living in a blatantly dysfunctional society; however, if you were to look at most of our billboards, TV shows, and music, you wouldn’t sense anything wrong at all—there’s a very thin facade. I like dwelling in that zone—imagery that often appears cheerful, but has a kind of doomed, sinister patina on it.

Chris Maggio, Untitled, from the series Bored on the 4th of July, 2017
© and courtesy the artist

Matsuda: The people in your photographs are caught in awkward, funny moments, and I assume they are unaware you are taking their picture. How do you navigate the ethics of that?

Maggio: Street photography has a long, established history of capturing folks unaware—from Cartier-Bresson to Worldstar Hip Hop to your friend’s Instagram feed. By no means am I saying that that’s the ideal relationship between subject and photographer, but I still see it as an important relationship that can be explored as a form of introspection. I really do try to capture stuff that I see myself in, or at least the embodiment of an emotion or idea I’m wrestling with. To me, it’s not about “Ha! That person looks funny.” I think that any good photograph needs to speak a little more broadly.

Plus, we live in a time where privacy no longer exists! There’s no point in my day where I assume that my behavior isn’t being recorded and used without my knowledge and consent—and I would argue that, from the NSA to targeted advertising, this newly accepted (and formerly unfathomable) invasion of our privacy is far more malicious.

It’s shocking to see yourself in an image that you didn’t know was captured. But for me, human nature itself is what’s being documented—it’s never about the indictment of a specific person. Most of the photographs I make are autobiographical—they just feature someone else’s face.

Chris Maggio, Untitled, from the series Bored on the 4th of July, 2017
© and courtesy the artist

Will Matsuda is the social media associate at Aperture Foundation.

The post Chris Maggio’s Great American Facade appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

A Century of Fashion in 12 Iconic Photographs

From Horst P. Horst to Viviane Sassen, fashion’s novelty, desire, fantasy, and seduction.

By Eugénie Shinkle

Félix studio, Robe Drecoll, ca. 1910
Courtesy Philippe Garner

Early Photographic Studios

Photographic records of fashionable dress began to appear within a few years of photography’s invention in 1839. Initially, such photographs would have been produced for private clients, or used as references for the engravers who supplied fashion illustrations for the press. However, by the 1880s, with the advent of mechanical reproduction, images of the latest fashions could circulate widely.

 

Séeberger Frères, Ensemble Welly Soeurs, Deauville, France, August 9, 1928
Courtesy Bibliothèque nationale de France

Séeberger Freres

The Séeberger Frères (active 1909–1975) began working as photojournalists in the 1870s, photographing fashionable subjects on the streets of Paris, at society events such as horse races, and at seaside resorts. Often credited with the invention of fashion photography, their work mixed the formal refinement of studio photographs with a relaxed and spontaneous attitude.

 

Horst P. Horst, British Vogue cover, August 9, 1939
Courtesy the collection of Vince Aletti

Horst P. Horst

The work of Horst P. Horst (1906–1999) embodied the formal, studio-based aesthetic that dominated fashion photography until after World War II. Strongly influenced by the culture of ancient Greece, Horst’s work celebrated the lines and shapes of the body as a sculptural object. Between 1935 and the 1960s, Horst produced numerous groundbreaking color photographs, including more than ninety covers for Vogue.

 

Jean Moral, Model in raincoat by Schiaparelli, Place de l’Opéra, for Harper’s Bazaar, October 1939
© Brigitte Moral, Paris

Jean Moral

By the 1930s, an aesthetic drawn from documentary imagery was making its way into fashion photography. Jean Moral (1906–1999) came from a documentary background, and, although he lacked formal training in photography, the visual language of early modernism, with its strong perspectives and unusual angles, came naturally to him. In 1933, he began photographing fashion as one of a number of realist photographers working for Harper’s Bazaar.

 

Lillian Bassman, Carmen, Merry Widow by Warner’s, outtake for Harper’s Bazaar article, “It’s a Cinch,” 1951
© Estate of Lillian Bassman

Lillian Bassman

Before taking up fashion photography, Lillian Bassman (1917–2017) worked as a graphic designer and assistant art director. She embraced an experimental approach to picture-making, and high-contrast, painterly images became her signature. Specializing in the photography of lingerie, her serene, sensual visual language evoked “a woman’s experience of undressing” and marked a fundamental shift away from the bland, sexless images traditionally used to advertise undergarments.

Jeanloup Sieff, Model Kellie Wilson Wearing an Outfit by Paco Rabanne, Nova, 1966
© Estate Jeanloup Sieff

Jeanloup Sieff

One of the key photographers of the “new realist” movement of the 1960s, Jeanloup Sieff (1933–2000) had a playful, surreal style that was influenced by the films of Michelangelo Antonioni and Ingmar Bergman. Born in France, Sieff first took up photography as a teenager and, after a short stint with the Magnum Photos agency in the late 1950s, returned to fashion photography, shooting for publications such as Queen, Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and Esquire.

Bruce Weber, Tom Hintnaus, Santorini, Greece, 1982
© the artist

Bruce Weber

Bruce Weber’s (born 1946) infamous image of Olympic pole-vaulter Tom Hintnaus—bronzed, sensual, and clad in nothing more than a pair of Calvin Klein briefs—was radical for its time. Displayed on an enormous billboard in Times Square in 1982, the image signaled a shift in Western cultural values and a growing acceptance of homoeroticism and male nudity in an industry that had, up until that point, tended to keep its male models fully clothed and conspicuously straight.

Coreen Simpson, Robert, The Roxy Club, NYC, 1985, from the series B-Boys
Courtesy the artist

Coreen Simpson

From an early age, Simpson had been drawn to individual and street style, and in 1982 she began her B-Boys series: “I wanted to photograph these kids and the whole break-dancing/rap genre,” she recalled. The B-Boys series explores the poise and self-possession of her subjects and the way that they expressed themselves through dress. On the other side of the Atlantic, alternative fashion titles like BLITZ, i-D, and The Face were also bringing street style to a young audience.

Corinne Day, Kate, 1990
© the artist/Trunk Archive

Corinne Day

Corinne Day (1962–2010) was a pioneer of the “grunge” aesthetic that dominated fashion photography throughout the 1990s. Shot in her signature lo-fi, documentary style, Day’s photographs often featured her friends and acquaintances posing makeup-free in dingy surroundings, casually styled in their own clothing. As Day remarked, “I never thought about the commercial aspect of fashion photography. I wasn’t recording anything more than the way we were living.”

Jason Evans, Untitled, from the series Strictly, 1991
Courtesy the artist

Jason Evans

“I was interested in the sociopolitical implication of making a fashion editorial that only featured black faces,” recalls Jason Evans (born 1968). Published in i-D in 1991, Strictly combined cultural perceptions of black youth and white suburbia with the nineteenth-century notion of the dandy. It was also driven by more serious questions about embedded social and racial prejudice in the fashion world.

Viviane Sassen, De La Mar Theatre, 2010
© the artist

Viviane Sassen

One of a handful of image-makers who redefined fashion photography in the early 2000s, Viviane Sassen (born 1972) broke with the increasingly restrictive rules and parameters that had come to dominate fashion advertising from the mid- 1990s onward. Sassen’s characteristic visual language of strong light and shadow, bright, saturated color, and extreme, angular poses has been widely emulated.

Collier Schorr, Andrej Pejic, Dossier 7, April 2011
Courtesy the artist

Collier Schorr

For Collier Schorr (born 1963), fashion photography is a natural extension of an art practice in which she has explored issues around gender, identity, and desire since the 1980s. “Gender, religion, nationality are all in flux in my work,” she has remarked. “The avenues to desire are skewed. I wanted to make work that spoke to as many people’s desires as possible.”

Eugenie Shinkle is Reader in Photography at Westminster School of Media Arts and Design, London. This feature is adapted from Fashion Photography: The Story in 180 Pictures, published by Aperture in September 2017.

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Italy’s First Photobook Festival

Gazebook brings contemporary photography to a remote village in Sicily.

By Giada De Agostinis

Marina Arienzale and Matteo Cesari, Self-organized afternoon dance with live music and snacks, Quinto Alto, Florence, 2015–17
Courtesy the artists

Once a year, in September, a photobook festival vivifies the quiet town of Punta Secca, a tiny fishing village in the southern region of Sicily. Photobook lovers flock here to discuss, brainstorm, teach, and learn about photobooks. Gazebook celebrated its third edition this year under the direction of photographer Lina Pallotta, and highlighted projects that are socially and politically engaged, especially with partners and artists in the Mediterranean. Here, Pallotta speaks about the latest edition of this burgeoning festival, where people bring their own chairs and sip lemonade under the trees.

Giada De Agostinis: The festival includes an open call for slideshows called Slideluck, organized by Mariateresa Salvati. Could you tell us more about this endeavor?

Lina Pallotta: The open call is a way to give visibility to new talents and projects. We want to empower multimedia, and not merely using one image after another with background music. As magazines now feature more multimedia stories, we feel the urgency of challenging photographers to explore how to use multimedia.

Marina Arienzale and Matteo Cesari, Card game, Sesto Fiorentino, Florence, 2015–17
Courtesy the artists

De Agostinis: One slideshow is Marina Arenziale and Matteo Cesari’s Casa del Pop. What is their project about?

Casa del Pop documents Tuscany’s community centers, originally linked to the Communist party, which became recreational centers within the cities. These photographs show a peculiar aspect of Italian culture and political history. I think it’s an important visual record of our country. The work is focused on Tuscany, where there is a widespread presence of these Casa del Popolo—meeting points where working-class people used to participate in social, cultural, and political activities. In some cases, especially in small towns, they were the places where people congregated, as opposed to the churches. Now, these recreational centers seem to have lost their original identity.

De Agostinis: Lina, I know you’re a photographer, an educator, and a curator, and that you divide your time between Rome and New York. How do you navigate your roles on two different continents?

Pallotta: I used to be a full-time photographer. I was working in editorial photography in Italy and doing freelance work in New York. Back then, if you didn’t photograph, you didn’t make money. Now, things have changed. Even if you photograph, you don’t make money! Teaching was the best way to convey my ideas about photography, of spreading my vision about images. I curate exhibitions in Italy so I can show projects that otherwise would not be seen here. The dialogue around photography in Italy is still narrow and concentrated on photojournalism and reportage, while the current exploration abroad opens the medium up to endless possibilities. In some ways, living between the U.S. and Italy has allowed me to travel through time.

Marina Arienzale and Matteo Cesari, Senegalese worker, Santa Croce, Pisa, 2015–17
Courtesy the artists

De Agostinis: You curated the third edition of Gazebook this year. It’s a challenge to start a photobook festival in Italy, and even more so in Sicily. Do you feel the village inhabitants are engaging with the festival? 

Pallotta: Yes, this year the population of Punta Secca really welcomed us for the first time. They actively participated in the talks, and even brought their own chairs to be sure they would have a seat! The situation in Sicily, and elsewhere in Italy, is depressing as funding for art and cultural projects is lacking. Nevertheless, the festival has grown in these three years. Although institutions don’t help, we see local people supporting us. In a way, it’s easier to find our own crowd there, rather than in big cities, where there is more competition.

De Agostinis: Gazebook is probably the first festival in Italy that has a focus on photobooks. How did you come up with this idea?

Pallotta: Books are extremely important in the contemporary photography landscape. Collaborating with different partners—designers, editors, publishers, et cetera—has become essential to photographers. Twenty years ago, print magazines had higher circulation, so there were many more photo stories being published. As magazine circulation has declined, self-publishing and photobooks have flourished.

Marina Arienzale and Matteo Cesari, Theatre of the House of the People, one of the largest theatres in the area, Grassina, Florence, 2015–17
Courtesy the artists

De Agostinis: The topic of this year’s festival was “Visual communication in uncertainty and chaos.” There was a wide representation of Muslim artists from around the world, and projects about Islamic countries, which resonates with Sicilian history, where the Arab influence was monumental a millennium ago. There’s also a proximity to those waters where migrants arrive each day. For example, photographer Karim El Maktafi’s Hayati (2015–17) considers his double identity being Italian and Moroccan. 

Pallotta: Yes, Karim El Maktafi was born in Italy from Moroccan parents. Through his work he tries to find a balance between those two cultures. Or, in her series Clothbound (2014), Leila Fatemi uses diptychs to show how she wants to direct the conversation about Muslim women. Fatemi is a Toronto-based photographer of Iranian, German, and Indian descent. On the left of each diptych, the­­ pattern of a woman’s veil merges into the background, obscuring her figure; on the right, her face is revealed and her power asserted through her gaze.

Amak Mahmoodian’s book, Shenasnameh (2016), investigates Iranian women’s individuality through a collection of Iranian birth certificates, which are also used to record marriage, divorce, and include fingerprints. In their official photographs, women must wear a veil and no makeup. Mahmoodian turns homogenization into a tool for asserting these women’s different stories. In Italy, the perception of the Islamic culture is a contested topic, and we are constantly debating about immigration. People do not dare to call themselves racist, but, once people with different skin colors and religions started flocking to our country, their attitudes became controversial.

De Agostinis: You also included a selection of book dummies from Istanbul Foto Festival.

Pallotta: Yes, this is one of the partnerships we’ve launched this year, together with other initiatives from the Mediterranean. For example, we hosted a talk by Issa Touma, a Syrian photographer and filmmaker who created the first gallery dedicated to photography in the Middle East, in Aleppo, Syria. Issa presented his new movie, Greetings from Aleppo (2017), which opened at the International Film Festival Rotterdam.

Marina Arienzale and Matteo Cesari, Billiard room, Rifredi, Florence, 2015–17
Courtesy the artists

De Agostinis: During the festival you hosted a talk with Jason Fulford, who presented his project Fake Newsroom (2017), a project inspired by Newsroom (1983), created by Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel, where artists were using images from a news wire photo service and re-contextualizing them in a gallery. How do you think this project relates to our current political climate? 

Pallotta: Back in the ’80s, the Newsroom project was conceived to let us question what we see in the media. Magazines dominated reportage and social issues, and the project showed us that nothing is objective. So, it was about opening up this monolithic culture of photojournalism. The current project has a narrower dimension, focusing on one binary: true or false.

Giada De Agostinis is an editor and communications specialist working in publishing and branding. Her work and research extends to photography and fine art publishing as well as new digital media platforms.

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From A.P.C., an “Owner’s Manual” for Minimalist Fashion

The French brand’s new book is a collage of postcards, snapshots, and influential commissions.

By Alistair O’Neill

A.P.C. Fall/Winter 2015. Model: Adrien Sahores. Photograph by Collier Schorr

A.P.C. is a French clothing company known for producing well-made, casual separates which have become the choice of creative people who care what their understated, minimalist clothes say about them. Founder Jean Touitou, who started the brand in 1987, has in recent years come to front the collection presentations, offering a running commentary on the looks shown to the audience in a manner indebted to the way clothes were once introduced in couture shows. His idiosyncratic comments on a variety of subjects including normcore, yoga trousers, and the intersections between black style and brand culture have lost him collaborations and customers along the way, but it has not dimmed the broad appeal of his clothes or his take on the world.

“Family,” a collage from A.P.C. Transmission, 2017

Now comes A.P.C. Transmission (2017), a deceptive book that looks like a standard survey of the brand’s output over the last thirty years. Which it is, but Transmission is also a personally-motivated project that Touitou describes as “some sort of owner’s manual of life instructions I wanted to leave to my children explaining our family’s origins and a bit of my feelings about being a human being. I had imagined that I would use a copy machine to print it, maybe fifty copies to give inside my family.” The book is split into three parts. The first pastes down Touitou’s early life, cut-out fragments of photographs, postcards, and doodles; the second reproduces typed-out texts by Touitou (including some of the presentation speeches); and the third is a chronological catalog raisonné of A.P.C. products and campaigns.

A.P.C. Fall/Winter 2001. Models from left to right: Jean-Philippe Delhomme, Lou Doillon, Nicolas Sabra, Theirry Planelle, and Christopher Niquet. Photograph by Takashi Homma

Transmission gives a sense of putting things in order, in the way a fashion brand might establish an archive, but Touitou’s impassioned address, his presence in little autoportraits and in the small details he pays attention to, override the organization. Transmission is more an ode to the materiality of print culture, as something that could be pinned to a wall—to a period when “transmission” could mean a music program listened to on a portable transistor radio, and to younger days when a favorite shirt could be worn too many times. For Touitou, this is not an exercise in nostalgia, but a means of challenging his “feeling that a machine is erasing the past,” that the digital is blurring reality. “For me, this triggers a will of surviving, and I chose to do it with a book.”

A.P.C. Spring/Summer 2001. Model: Jasmine Guiness. Photograph by Jean-Baptiste Mondino

Reading the book from front to back—the “1>2>3 way,” as Touitou describes it in the preface, or from 3>1>2, “from fashion to psychoanalysis to concepts,” or 3>2>1 “the Japanese way … going from the shallower to the deeper”—makes clear that Touitou narrates his interests and ideas by ordering images. The roll call of photographers he has keenly enlisted for A.P.C. campaigns, such as Collier Schorr, Alasdair McLellan, Inez & Vinoodh, Walter Pfeiffer, Bruce Weber, and Venetia Scott, only underscores the consistency of his way of working. Touitou is adamant that there is no strategy to how he commissions photographers: “I sort of run into people in a chaotic fashion.” And when laid out in part 3 of Transmission, the campaigns do have a collaged quality about them, as if they’re snapshots and keepsakes of a life that extends from Touitou’s own in part 1.

A.P.C. “Chiara de Sole,” Spring/Summer 2010 campaign poster. Model: Chiara Mastroianni. Photograph by Inez & Vinoodh

Transmission makes you realize that Atelier de Production et de Création is primarily a vehicle for Touitou. Its bestselling line is raw denim Japanese selvedge jeans, their slim fit reflecting Touitou’s distaste for the loose-fitting clothes of his contemporaries; the denim comes from the same factory Touitou first sourced in 1987, in Hiroshima, Japan. When I asked Touitou what fascinated him about growing up in Paris in the early ’60s, at a time of rapid change in France, he spoke of the shadow of the Second World War, growing up near the Hotel Lutecia in Saint-Germain-des-Prés on the Left Bank, once a repatriation center for concentration camp survivors. That reminded me of Chris Marker’s short film La Jetée, released in 1962 and composed from a montage of still images with a voiceover narrating a story, set in the future, of a man exploring his memories in the wake of a war. The film is a rumination on time, memory, and what the writer Brian Dillon has termed “the lure of images.” Like La Jetée, Transmission is also a sequence of still images narrated by a voice. It should be a much less compelling account of the banal nature of ordinary-looking clothes, but fashion, perversely, also marks time’s passing.

A.P.C. I was glad I gave Walter carte blanche – he came out with a goat. Spring/Summer 2014. Model: Adrien Sahores. Styling: Suzanne Koller. Photograph by Walter Pfeiffer

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

A.P.C. Transmission was published by Phaidon in September 2017.

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Christina Fernandez’s Lines of Sight

In two new bodies of work, the artist considers space, architecture, and the nature of collaboration.

By Jeanne Dreskin

Christina Fernandez, Steve, 2017, from the series reflect/project(tion)
© the artist and courtesy Gallery Luisotti, Los Angeles

A lifelong Angeleno, Christina Fernandez has, for decades, engaged the transformations of her city’s living conditions with a steadily perspicacious eye. Fernandez’s imagery has put her own experiential narratives into conversation with those of her ancestors, historical figures, and many members of Los Angeles’s Latinx communities, and often gestures to photography’s capacity for evidentiary “truth-telling.” Part of the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA initiative, Christina Fernandez: Prospect, currently on view at Gallery Luisotti, presents two new bodies of work that extend these themes geographically, into multiple desert regions around Southern California, and personally, into the artist’s life as a community college art professor. View from here (2016–ongoing) presents several closely cropped photographs of windows and doorframes within historical structures across the American Southwest. These architectural interstices echo both the photographic frame itself, as well as the perspectives of the buildings’s former inhabitants. The second series, reflect/project(ion) (2016–ongoing), includes portraits of the artist’s photography students, printed on stretched canvas. Collaboratively executed by Fernandez and her subjects, the series reorients economies of prestige that have historically circulated among the Los Angeles area’s renowned art schools.

Christina Fernandez, Coldwell II, 2009, from the series Sereno
© the artist and courtesy Gallery Luisotti, Los Angeles

Jeanne Dreskin: Much of your past work has drawn attention to the geographic specificities around the greater Los Angeles area. How has your relationship to the city’s social and economic concerns evolved over the course of your career, particularly in the last ten years, during which LA has seen unprecedented rates of development and gentrification?

Christina Fernandez: The Sereno series (2006), shot in El Sereno, in northeast Los Angeles, described my role as a participant rather than an observer of these phenomena you describe. There is a homelessness about the images, the sense of something lost, missing, or unattainable. El Sereno is a working-class Mexican and Mexican American neighborhood in Northeast Los Angeles. It is an enclave, a beautiful little space with rolling hills, winding streets, and modest homes with front and backyards. That is now being gentrified.

When I moved there in 2006, the gentrification process had not yet begun. It was simply a beautiful space that I could afford. But then, around 2008, the housing bubble burst and suddenly, within a few years, my home was worth far less than I had paid for it. Over the six-year period that I lived there, I photographed in these in-between spaces (of which there were many) where the refuse of outdated household items was dumped and people who could not afford even this modest community were forced to live outside. Sereno is absent of human figures and describes human presence through things left behind. By foregrounding the refuse against the backdrop of neighborhood homes, Sereno asks, “Who is this place for? Who has access? Who does not?”

Christina Fernandez, Noah (Joshua Tree), 2016, from the series View from here
© the artist and courtesy Gallery Luisotti, Los Angeles

Dreskin: Windows and doors have consistently appeared in your work. Beyond their functionality as architectural fixtures and purveyors of directed vision, what drew you to windows and doorways in View from here and reflect/project(ion)?

Fernandez: They are passageways into another place from where we stand, and a perfect way to break up space in a flat image. For View from here, I photographed Noah (Joshua Tree) (2016) at the Noah Purifoy Desert Art Museum of Assemblage Art, and the window frames another work on view. Cabot I (Desert Hot Springs) and Cabot II (Desert Hot Springs) (both 2017) were photographed at Cabot Yerxa’s Pueblo Museum, a Hopi-inspired pueblo built with repurposed materials in the 1940s. The windows worked to create a specific flow of air for cooling by opening and closing certain windows at different times of day, so the window is almost an instrument played at different intervals to produce the “sound” of cool air.

Yerxa’s building was his penultimate creative expression as an artist, musician, and writer, completely integrated into his daily life. Purifoy’s sculptural environments evoke the idea of home. Both completely take in and acknowledge the landscape as a collaborator, a significant factor in the formation of the structures they created.

Our relation to the built environment is an ongoing negotiation; a home can be a haven or a prison. I suppose the windows can represent a type of escape, but also the prospect of another day, another life, a dream, a vision. With reflect/project(ion), I wanted to evoke the idea of transition, of being on a threshold, to visually tie the two series together, and to connect the ideas in the View from here series. The reflect/project(ion) series depicts young art students. At their age, I always felt like I was an “emerging” artist, professional, adult. When I contemplate their evolution as creative people, I admire their ability to move from one thing to another, their fluidity and depth. I wanted their portraits to reflect this.

Christina Fernandez, CCJ (Leadfield), 2016, from the series View from here
© the artist and courtesy Gallery Luisotti, Los Angeles

Dreskin: In View from here, material characteristics of the window and its components—pane, frame, sill, et cetera—are thrown into sharp relief, while the landscape often remains blurred. These images hint at a given site’s histories through its architecture. How do these photographs function differently than a photograph of the unobscured landscape? Do they invoke a different kind of narrative?

Fernandez: The unobscured landscape is too interesting and specific in and of itself. I am trying to point to the portent or prospect. When the artist Noah Purifoy (1917–2004) or Courtney Chauncey Julian (1885–1934), an early twentieth-century prospector who was a founder of the mining town of Leadfield, CA, arrived at their remote places, what were they hoping to build?

Many of these photographs are taken in remote desert locations. These frames are the threshold between shelter and the elements, life and death, present and future, presence and vision. Photography’s unique ability to simultaneously obfuscate and document creates this tension and abstraction between now and then, here and there, clarity and the unknown, and reveals the problem with historical narratives as truth.

Dreskin: CCJ (Leadfield) (2016), titled after Courtney Chauncey Julian, immediately reminded me of Lee Miller’s photograph Portrait of Space, created near Siwa in Egypt’s Western Desert in 1937. Miller’s title raises questions about the intersections between portraiture and landscape photography. How do they intersect in your own practice?

Fernandez: I view both series as portrait works. The reflect/project(ion) series is more easily understandable as a portrait series. The View from here series—they are portraits in the sense that I imagine the people they are named after looking through these windows onto the outside and into the landscape. In View from here the view is obscured: literally obscured through a device of the camera, but, figuratively, through the passage of time and the changing landscape. Our view is also obscured through history and the formation of our understanding of these historical figures. The view is a stand-in for what they may have imagined, their vision of what they were doing, our interpretation of that moment. The window, because of its vertical orientation, is a stand-in for their bodies.

Christina Fernandez, Alice, 2017, from the series reflect/project(tion)
© the artist and courtesy Gallery Luisotti, Los Angeles

Dreskin: Thinking once more about questions of materiality, your decision to make prints of reflect/project(ion) on canvas lends them an acute tangibility. Why was this kind of tangibility important to you in this case?

Fernandez: Canvas is very different from paper in that it can be stretched over a frame and has buoyancy. I wanted to evoke skin. There is bareness to the photograph without a frame. In the image itself, I am breaking down space by using the projection in the image, but also by the use of the materials—using canvas instead of a traditional frames and matting supports.

The projections of the students’ cameras are phantom-like. At times, the projection partially obscures the photo-lab environment where I photographed. The projection bends and trails off. Because of this multilayered effect, I wanted the surface of the photographs to be more immediate, more accessible. Stretched canvas provides that effect, not only because of its materiality, but because of its familiarity, which we commonly see at coffee houses and grocery stores.

Bodies are evoked in both of these series: windows as portraits of historical figures, as imagined through the obscured views of the landscape, and portraits on canvas with the body of the “camera” projected into and onto the surfaces of the space and portrait subject.

Christina Fernandez, Joseph, 2017, from the series reflect/project(tion)
© the artist and courtesy Gallery Luisotti, Los Angeles

Dreskin: Ruin (1999­–2000) and Maria’s Great Expedition (1995–96) explore your own Mexican American background and reveal how disjunctions can arise between personal narratives and the predominant “official” ones. Reconciling these contradictions can be necessarily speculative, and thus new narratives can be produced. In this context, reflect/project(ion) introduces a new structure of inheritance between yourself, a Cerritos College art professor, and your students. Why did you decide to collaborate with your students? How does this collaboration visualize a particular kind of kinship structure?

Fernandez: There is a longstanding history or tradition in the arts of the student-teacher relationship, especially here in southern California, where museum and gallery affiliations get passed down to promising graduate students at certain universities. I teach at a community college. It is a strong program; however, the opportunity for making alliances and discussing work beyond the foundation level is difficult. So, my relationships with students whose work I love have to go beyond the classroom. We keep in touch; they work for me in the lab as technicians. I see them as creative and independent. But, in many ways, they are reflections of the photographic values I taught them. They reflect back ideas and values that they are invested in; my values are translated, reinterpreted, and changed.

In reflect/project(ion), I am photographing the students, but I am also projecting an image that they created onto them. Originally, I asked them to photograph their camera in front of a light-colored background. They brought back what I asked of them, but also other types of photographs: a camera attached to a cable release with a hand depressing the cable release, the back of the camera opened with film bursting out of it, an enlarger as or instead of a camera.

There are very few Latinx Americans in university teaching positions in the arts, so the opportunity for that kind of relationship at the university level is almost nonexistent. There is something to be said about shared experiences—cultural, economic, or academic—and it is especially important for students whose families have very little or no academic or art experience. I want them to know that their ideas are valuable. They are amazing, creative people who I care for.

Jeanne Dreskin, a writer and independent curator based in Los Angeles, is a PhD candidate in history of art at the University of Pennsylvania.

Christina Fernandez: Prospect is on view at Gallery Luisotti, Los Angeles, through November 22, 2017. The Getty initiative Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA is a collaboration across southern California institutions exploring Latin American and Latinx art in dialogue with Los Angeles.

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A Latinx View of Los Angeles

Christina Fernandez considers space and gentrification in her native city.

By Jeanne Dreskin

Christina Fernandez, Steve, 2017, from the series reflect/project(tion)
© the artist and courtesy Gallery Luisotti, Los Angeles

A lifelong Angeleno, Christina Fernandez has, for decades, engaged the transformations of her city’s living conditions with a steadily perspicacious eye. Fernandez’s imagery has put her own experiential narratives into conversation with those of her ancestors, historical figures, and many members of Los Angeles’s Latinx communities, and often gestures to photography’s capacity for evidentiary “truth-telling.” Part of the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA initiative, Christina Fernandez: Prospect, currently on view at Gallery Luisotti, presents two new bodies of work that extend these themes geographically, into multiple desert regions around Southern California, and personally, into the artist’s life as a community college art professor. View from here (2016–ongoing) presents several closely cropped photographs of windows and doorframes within historical structures across the American Southwest. These architectural interstices echo both the photographic frame itself, as well as the perspectives of the buildings’s former inhabitants. The second series, reflect/project(ion) (2016–ongoing), includes portraits of the artist’s photography students, printed on stretched canvas. Collaboratively executed by Fernandez and her subjects, the series reorients economies of prestige that have historically circulated among the Los Angeles area’s renowned art schools.

Christina Fernandez, Coldwell II, 2009, from the series Sereno
© the artist and courtesy Gallery Luisotti, Los Angeles

Jeanne Dreskin: Much of your past work has drawn attention to the geographic specificities around the greater Los Angeles area. How has your relationship to the city’s social and economic concerns evolved over the course of your career, particularly in the last ten years, during which LA has seen unprecedented rates of development and gentrification?

Christina Fernandez: The Sereno series (2006), shot in El Sereno, in northeast Los Angeles, described my role as a participant rather than an observer of these phenomena you describe. There is a homelessness about the images, the sense of something lost, missing, or unattainable. El Sereno is a working-class Mexican and Mexican American neighborhood in Northeast Los Angeles. It is an enclave, a beautiful little space with rolling hills, winding streets, and modest homes with front and backyards. That is now being gentrified.

When I moved there in 2006, the gentrification process had not yet begun. It was simply a beautiful space that I could afford. But then, around 2008, the housing bubble burst and suddenly, within a few years, my home was worth far less than I had paid for it. Over the six-year period that I lived there, I photographed in these in-between spaces (of which there were many) where the refuse of outdated household items was dumped and people who could not afford even this modest community were forced to live outside. Sereno is absent of human figures and describes human presence through things left behind. By foregrounding the refuse against the backdrop of neighborhood homes, Sereno asks, “Who is this place for? Who has access? Who does not?”

Christina Fernandez, Noah (Joshua Tree), 2016, from the series View from here
© the artist and courtesy Gallery Luisotti, Los Angeles

Dreskin: Windows and doors have consistently appeared in your work. Beyond their functionality as architectural fixtures and purveyors of directed vision, what drew you to windows and doorways in View from here and reflect/project(ion)?

Fernandez: They are passageways into another place from where we stand, and a perfect way to break up space in a flat image. For View from here, I photographed Noah (Joshua Tree) (2016) at the Noah Purifoy Desert Art Museum of Assemblage Art, and the window frames another work on view. Cabot I (Desert Hot Springs) and Cabot II (Desert Hot Springs) (both 2017) were photographed at Cabot Yerxa’s Pueblo Museum, a Hopi-inspired pueblo built with repurposed materials in the 1940s. The windows worked to create a specific flow of air for cooling by opening and closing certain windows at different times of day, so the window is almost an instrument played at different intervals to produce the “sound” of cool air.

Yerxa’s building was his penultimate creative expression as an artist, musician, and writer, completely integrated into his daily life. Purifoy’s sculptural environments evoke the idea of home. Both completely take in and acknowledge the landscape as a collaborator, a significant factor in the formation of the structures they created.

Our relation to the built environment is an ongoing negotiation; a home can be a haven or a prison. I suppose the windows can represent a type of escape, but also the prospect of another day, another life, a dream, a vision. With reflect/project(ion), I wanted to evoke the idea of transition, of being on a threshold, to visually tie the two series together, and to connect the ideas in the View from here series. The reflect/project(ion) series depicts young art students. At their age, I always felt like I was an “emerging” artist, professional, adult. When I contemplate their evolution as creative people, I admire their ability to move from one thing to another, their fluidity and depth. I wanted their portraits to reflect this.

Christina Fernandez, CCJ (Leadfield), 2016, from the series View from here
© the artist and courtesy Gallery Luisotti, Los Angeles

Dreskin: In View from here, material characteristics of the window and its components—pane, frame, sill, et cetera—are thrown into sharp relief, while the landscape often remains blurred. These images hint at a given site’s histories through its architecture. How do these photographs function differently than a photograph of the unobscured landscape? Do they invoke a different kind of narrative?

Fernandez: The unobscured landscape is too interesting and specific in and of itself. I am trying to point to the portent or prospect. When the artist Noah Purifoy (1917–2004) or Courtney Chauncey Julian (1885–1934), an early twentieth-century prospector who was a founder of the mining town of Leadfield, CA, arrived at their remote places, what were they hoping to build?

Many of these photographs are taken in remote desert locations. These frames are the threshold between shelter and the elements, life and death, present and future, presence and vision. Photography’s unique ability to simultaneously obfuscate and document creates this tension and abstraction between now and then, here and there, clarity and the unknown, and reveals the problem with historical narratives as truth.

Dreskin: CCJ (Leadfield) (2016), titled after Courtney Chauncey Julian, immediately reminded me of Lee Miller’s photograph Portrait of Space, created near Siwa in Egypt’s Western Desert in 1937. Miller’s title raises questions about the intersections between portraiture and landscape photography. How do they intersect in your own practice?

Fernandez: I view both series as portrait works. The reflect/project(ion) series is more easily understandable as a portrait series. The View from here series—they are portraits in the sense that I imagine the people they are named after looking through these windows onto the outside and into the landscape. In View from here the view is obscured: literally obscured through a device of the camera, but, figuratively, through the passage of time and the changing landscape. Our view is also obscured through history and the formation of our understanding of these historical figures. The view is a stand-in for what they may have imagined, their vision of what they were doing, our interpretation of that moment. The window, because of its vertical orientation, is a stand-in for their bodies.

Christina Fernandez, Alice, 2017, from the series reflect/project(tion)
© the artist and courtesy Gallery Luisotti, Los Angeles

Dreskin: Thinking once more about questions of materiality, your decision to make prints of reflect/project(ion) on canvas lends them an acute tangibility. Why was this kind of tangibility important to you in this case?

Fernandez: Canvas is very different from paper in that it can be stretched over a frame and has buoyancy. I wanted to evoke skin. There is bareness to the photograph without a frame. In the image itself, I am breaking down space by using the projection in the image, but also by the use of the materials—using canvas instead of a traditional frames and matting supports.

The projections of the students’ cameras are phantom-like. At times, the projection partially obscures the photo-lab environment where I photographed. The projection bends and trails off. Because of this multilayered effect, I wanted the surface of the photographs to be more immediate, more accessible. Stretched canvas provides that effect, not only because of its materiality, but because of its familiarity, which we commonly see at coffee houses and grocery stores.

Bodies are evoked in both of these series: windows as portraits of historical figures, as imagined through the obscured views of the landscape, and portraits on canvas with the body of the “camera” projected into and onto the surfaces of the space and portrait subject.

Christina Fernandez, Joseph, 2017, from the series reflect/project(tion)
© the artist and courtesy Gallery Luisotti, Los Angeles

Dreskin: Ruin (1999­–2000) and Maria’s Great Expedition (1995–96) explore your own Mexican American background and reveal how disjunctions can arise between personal narratives and the predominant “official” ones. Reconciling these contradictions can be necessarily speculative, and thus new narratives can be produced. In this context, reflect/project(ion) introduces a new structure of inheritance between yourself, a Cerritos College art professor, and your students. Why did you decide to collaborate with your students? How does this collaboration visualize a particular kind of kinship structure?

Fernandez: There is a longstanding history or tradition in the arts of the student-teacher relationship, especially here in southern California, where museum and gallery affiliations get passed down to promising graduate students at certain universities. I teach at a community college. It is a strong program; however, the opportunity for making alliances and discussing work beyond the foundation level is difficult. So, my relationships with students whose work I love have to go beyond the classroom. We keep in touch; they work for me in the lab as technicians. I see them as creative and independent. But, in many ways, they are reflections of the photographic values I taught them. They reflect back ideas and values that they are invested in; my values are translated, reinterpreted, and changed.

In reflect/project(ion), I am photographing the students, but I am also projecting an image that they created onto them. Originally, I asked them to photograph their camera in front of a light-colored background. They brought back what I asked of them, but also other types of photographs: a camera attached to a cable release with a hand depressing the cable release, the back of the camera opened with film bursting out of it, an enlarger as or instead of a camera.

There are very few Latinx Americans in university teaching positions in the arts, so the opportunity for that kind of relationship at the university level is almost nonexistent. There is something to be said about shared experiences—cultural, economic, or academic—and it is especially important for students whose families have very little or no academic or art experience. I want them to know that their ideas are valuable. They are amazing, creative people who I care for.

Jeanne Dreskin, a writer and independent curator based in Los Angeles, is a PhD candidate in history of art at the University of Pennsylvania.

Christina Fernandez: Prospect is on view at Gallery Luisotti, Los Angeles, through November 22, 2017. The Getty initiative Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA is a collaboration across southern California institutions exploring Latin American and Latinx art in dialogue with Los Angeles.

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The Midcentury Style

Fatoumata Diabate’s traveling studio revives the golden age of Malian studio portraiture.

By Dagara Dakin

Fatoumata Diabate, Portrait 03, Bamako, 2015, from the series Studio Photo de la Rue
Courtesy the artist

Fatoumata Diabate is one of a few women in Mali who practice photography professionally. Born in 1980, she first appeared on the photography scene in 2005 during the sixth edition of the venerable photography festival Rencontres de Bamako, also known as the Bamako Biennale, where her work was awarded the Afrique en Créations prize from the Institut Français. After studying at the Center for Photographic Education (Centre de formation de la photographie/CFP) from 2002 to 2004, she interned at the Center for Professional Education in Vevey (Centre d’enseignement professionel/CEPV) and another at Central DUPON’s professional printing laboratory in Paris. In 2010, following a World Press Photo training workshop in Senegal, she has undertaken various photo reporting projects.

As Franziska Jenni wrote in Aperture’s summer 2017 issue, “Platform Africa,” Diabate’s most recent project, Studio Photo de la Rue revives Mali’s famous portraitists Seydou Keïta and Malick Sidibé. Her mobile studio, where subjects pose in front of a textile backdrop, “is a stage-like, open-air installation” that become a performance. “The final portraits create something of a time lag: Diabate’s twenty-first-century clients enter her small time machine, which transports them back to the golden age of studio photography in Bamako.” When we spoke recently by email, I was curious to learn more about Diabate’s practice by revisiting her career and touching on her current projects.

Fatoumata Diabate, Portrait of Sali, Badialan 3, Bamako, 2012, from the series Sutigui (à nous la nuit)
Courtesy the artist

Dagara Dakin: What has the Bamako Biennale meant to you?

Fatoumata Diabate: The Biennale’s role is to make young photographers known internationally. I can testify that it has opened numerous doors for me: residencies, exhibitions, publications, et cetera.

Dakin: Do you think that this event still holds the same place that it used to occupy in the West African photography scene at the beginning of the 2000s, even though it was suspended after the 2011 edition before starting again in 2015, under the artistic direction of curator Bisi Silva?

Diabate: Mali is a very large country with a lot of cultural diversity. At the same time, it is a big family. Bamako, the capital, is a city that represents this rich mix of populations: Toucouleurs, Bambaras, Bozos, Dogons, Fula, Soninkes, Mandinkas, Khassonkés, Songhais, Tuaregs.

In the same way, Americans, Europeans, and Africans from across the continent come together during the Bamako Biennale to celebrate the love of life, the beauty of the encounter, and the need for the other’s gaze, in all its diversity. So, it is a major event of our time at the national level, the West African level, and on the international stage.

Fatoumata Diabate, Portrait of painter Abdoulaye Konaté, Bamako, 2015, from the series Studio Photo de la Rue
Courtesy the artist

Dakin: The Biennale is designed to serve as a showcase to the actors in the international art market. It also aims to enable healthy competition among the continent’s photographers. Do you have the sense that the Biennale is well-established at the local level, that the public supports the event?

Diabate: I can say that, thanks to the Bamako Biennale, other young people have found inspiration in me and my work, like at the presentation of the Afrique en Créations prize that I received in 2005, for example—people like Amsatou Diallo, president of the Association of Women Photographers of Mali, who, incidentally, has proposed to pass the torch to me in that position, or Bintou Camara, and so many others. All of these educational centers have been created to go along with the Bamako Biennale. In addition, to make the show even better established locally, my partners and I are in the process of setting up an “Inter-Biennale,” which will last a month and give pride of place to photography studios from Bamako’s various neighborhoods.

Dakin: You have done a number of photo reports, notably for World Press and Oxfam. Is that a way for you to take up a commitment in relation to the African continent?

Diabate: The reports for Oxfam and World Press, as well as for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Rolex, OMS, and others, allowed me to put my gaze to the service of humanist causes and to gain artistic autonomy.

Dakin: How do you reconcile the practice of photojournalism and NGO-commissioned reporting with your artistic process? What distinction do you draw between the two approaches?

Diabate: I work in and combine these two practices without difficulty. While taking into account the constraints of photo reporting, I allow myself to tell stories, to have personal points of view. The people who commission photo reports welcome so-called artistic images, such as detail-oriented work, for example, or sometimes abstract depictions.

Fatoumata Diabate, Caméleon.20, Senegal, 2015, from the series Caméléon
Courtesy the artist

Dakin: The question of the mask and, consequently, of identity reappears rather frequently in your photographic work, whether it is in the series L’homme en animal (Man as animal, 2011–13), L’homme en objet (Man as object, 2012–13), or Caméléon (Chameleon, 2015). Could you tell us more about that?

Diabate: Masks are tied to my culture and my personality. The sacred, ritual, even mystical dimensions speak to me and call me back to the world of my childhood. The tales that I have heard are still with me and are a source of creation for the series L’homme en animal or L’homme en objet.

Dakin: Do you ever establish a protocol or set rules for yourself that you force yourself to follow during a shoot, depending on whether your projects are of a documentary or artistic nature?

Diabate: For me, the protocol of a shoot comes down to respecting the main principle that I learned during my education: the subjects (the people) should recognize themselves in the image, and the image should speak to its viewers, whether it is abstract, a landscape, or a portrait.

Fatoumata Diabate, Portrait in a night club, Bamako, 2012 from the series Sutigui (à nous la nuit)
Courtesy the artist

Dakin: What determines the choice of black and white or color in the treatment of your subjects?

Diabate: Before anything else, I love black and white, especially the gelatin-silver process. Obviously, I do analog photography, but that doesn’t stop me from making color photographs, especially for my latest series, Caméléon. Depending on the subject, I feel at liberty to go back and forth between black and white and color, like in the series Sutigi (à nous la Nuit) (The night is ours, 2012). With that series, I showcase a way of life, a desire to make an appearance that is characteristic of a part of the youth, a testament to my era and to the subject’s ease in front of the camera. In view of our traditions, we feel better at night than during the day.

Dakin: What place do you give in your work to the condition of women in Mali or on the continent, and what form does that take?

Diabate: I want to bear witness as an African woman who practices photography. There are a few of us (Aida Muluneh, Joana Choumali, Zanele Muholi, Nontsikelelo Veleko, Ayana V. Jackson, Hien Macline, among others) who have gotten a solid reputation on a global level, but it remains difficult to make one’s place on the African continent, outside the shows dedicated to photography. In a more general sense, in Mali, the civil service gives women roles as secretaries, accountants, and the like. In Bamako, the capital of African photography, despite our results and our commitment to the field of the image, we are hardly given any consideration for our creations. If you compare the status of women photographers in West Africa to that of their peers in South Africa, you will see that the latter enjoy a great reputation, and that that has led to the emergence of a new generation of artists in South Africa.

Fatoumata Diabate, Mah-Traoré ka boutiki, Bamako, 2012, from the series Sutigui (à nous la nuit)
Courtesy the artist

Dakin: What are your current or future projects?

Diabate: I have recreated a mobile studio, Studio Photo de la Rue, which is an installation inspired by the photography studios of the 1950s and ’60s in Mali and West Africa, and which allows everyone to see themselves through the lens, alone or in a group. The participants leave with their prints as a souvenir. I offer lots of accessories and costumes, which I use to reveal another dimension, a hidden dimension within every man and woman!

Since its creation, Studio Photo de la Rue has been regularly invited to the biggest international photography shows—the Bamako Biennale, the Rencontres d’Arles, La Gacilly Photo Festival in France, and others—to put on a performance at the exhibitions of masters who used mobile studio photography throughout their existence—Seydou Keïta, Malick Sidibé, Mama Casset, Oumar Ly, James Bernon, Samuel Fosso—whose historic work we still revere today.

Dagara Dakin is a freelance writer and curator based in Paris. Translated from the French by Matthew Brauer.

This article is produced in collaboration with Contemporary And (C&) – Platform for International Art from African Perspectives.

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