Aperture's Blog, page 110

Martine Stig’s Sun-Drenched Amsterdam

In an unusual photobook, images move like the rhythm of free jazz.

By Taco Hidde Bakker

Martine Stig, Noir, Fw:Books, Amsterdam, 2016

Despite its matter-of-fact appearance, Martine Stig’s Noir is a rather offbeat photobook. A quote from Jacques Aumont’s Montage Eisenstein (1987), about Sergei Eisenstein’s art of montage, is printed on the spine of the small, canary-yellow paperback: “The essence of cinema,” Eisenstein wrote, “does not lie in the images, but in the relation between the images.” This seems to be an instruction for how to read this book as well as a source of inspiration for its edit, carried out by Stig in collaboration with book designer Hans Gremmen.

Between 2014 and 2016, Stig shot candid, contrasty, black-and-white photos on the streets of Amsterdam. They seem to have been taken mostly during sun-drenched summer days. The highly suggestive images are filled with shadow play, and when people are shown, it is mostly in isolation, their eyes closed and lost in thought. The thoughtful, seemingly “empty” compositions are a far cry from the familiar hustle and bustle of Amsterdam. But the images, taken together, also breathe uneasily, projecting a dystopian tale of disconnectedness.

Martine Stig, Noir, Fw:Books, Amsterdam, 2016

It is perhaps not accidental that so many of Stig’s images are eerily reminiscent of Chris Marker’s influential photo-film La Jetée (1962), set in postapocalyptic Paris. But whereas La Jetée is propelled forward by compelling narration and the force of linear editing—despite its theme of time travel, in which the past and future are “call[ed] . . . to the rescue of the present”—Noir is on a completely different narrative track. When they sat down to feed Stig’s sixteen image quartets (as shown grouped in the end of the book) into the book layout, Stig and Gremmen arrived at an editing style more akin to the syncopated rhythms of free jazz. Every set of images interlocks with the others, unsupported by any orderly scheme. Most of the images take up slightly less than a quarter of a spread and reappear two or three times, each time in different juxtapositions. Because the editing scheme is so irregular, each new image that is introduced is a surprise. With every turn of the page, I also found myself leafing back a few spreads—refreshing my memory of an earlier appearance of an image or combination of images—before moving on.

Martine Stig, Noir, Fw:Books, Amsterdam, 2016

While this little photonovel references cinema on multiple levels, from its title to its focus on montage, it is also rather anticinematic. Insofar as we can even speak of narrative flow, that flow is constantly being frustrated on a productive and reflective level. The sequencing plays with the Kuleshov effect, in which one’s perception of an image is affected by the images paired with it: “Each time you think you’re encountering the same photograph again, the meaning you might have attached to or projected onto it is put into question by its shifting conjunctions.”

Whether an image’s essence can only be found in its relationship to another remains an open discussion. However, this exciting experiment in photo editing strengthens my belief that printed photographic intelligence and cinematic intelligence are miles apart. In a book, the in-between of images conveys a dimension that is not only mental but spatial, too.

Taco Hidde Bakker is a writer, translator, and researcher based in Amsterdam. He worked with Paradox and Dana Lixenberg on the book, web documentary, and exhibition The Last Days of Shishmaref (2008–10). He writes for magazines such as Camera Austria International, Foam, EXTRA, and the British Journal of Photography.

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Rick Sands: Breaking the Light Barrier

“I always call him ‘the genius of light.’ He puts all of the lighting scenes together. He thinks differently than everyone else I know. He just responds to light. It’s remarkable.”

—Gregory Crewdson on Rick Sands

In a five-day workshop at Aperture Foundation, twelve participants worked with and learned from director of photography Rick Sands, whose masterful lighting illuminates scenes and narratives in photography, film, and television. “I don’t see natural light,” Sands quipped as he spoke to students, explaining that when he scouts locations he envisions them as dark; the only light he sees is the light that he adds to a scene.

Sands’s early background in theater and stage lighting taught him to look at scenes and settings holistically in order to create elaborately conceptualized lighting scenarios. On the first day of the workshop, Sands explained his take on the five properties of light—quantity, quality, color, direction, and shape—guiding workshop participants in the hands-on learning that they took part in throughout the session. With the help of Sands, students worked in groups to re-create the lighting found in images they had selected from fashion magazines, film stills, and fine-art photographers such as Cindy Sherman and Alessandra Sanguinetti. The images were eclectic, giving students the opportunity to re-create a diverse array of lighting scenarios. The workshop also consisted of informal lectures and slide viewings, lighting demonstrations, and question-and-answer periods. By the end of the workshop, students were not only confident in emulating the lighting found in the images of other photographers, but also in creating lighting to match their own personal photographic visions.

Students say…



“Rick is incredibly knowledgeable about lighting gear and I feel very confident working with lights after the workshop.”

“Rick is the ultimate king of lighting, period. It was so generous of him to have shared his invaluable experience and knowledge with all of us, with tremendous patience and great efforts. It was a life-changing workshop!”

“He’s a very good teacher. He gave everyone enough flexibility to explore how they might do something, he wasn’t dogmatic about an approach, but he also knew when to help us get back on track.”

Richard Sands is a director of photography whose roots are in cinema production. He has accomplished the lighting on 35 theatrical motion pictures with directors such as Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola, and Sam Raimi; 47 television movies; over 100 one-hour television episodes; and numerous advertisements. He was responsible for many award-winning projects, including three commercials he shot that have won ADDY Awards. For nearly twelve years, Sands has created the elaborate lighting for the fine-art narrative photographs of artist Gregory Crewdson. Through this unique collaboration, Sands’s lighting has been featured in four books and several international photographic exhibition tours.

Explore Workshops

 

 

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Designer Spotlight: Sebastian Hau in conversation with Pierre Hourquet

How does the designer of the sold-out Provoke catalogue conceive of new photobooks?

By Sebastian Hau

Lewis Baltz, Common Objects, Steidl and LE BAL, Göttingen, Germany, and Paris, 2014

Pierre Hourquet has designed books for and with Daido Moriyama, Susan Meiselas, Lewis Baltz, Alberto García-Alix, Sylvain Couzinet-Jacques, Guillaume Belvèze, Maciek Pozoga, Olivier Cablat, and Victor Boullet, as well as the recent sold-out Provoke catalogue that accompanied several exhibitions. I first met the Paris-based designer in 2010, when he was helping to set up Publish It Yourself, an exhibition that brought together a selection
 of important self-published titles. From that point onward, I’ve followed his work and—full disclosure—we have since collaborated on several projects together. Most notably, we cocurated the exhibition Open Book (2014) for Paris Photo, which attempted to break down the longstanding barrier between the histories of artists’ books and photobooks, and document and visualize the hidden influences between the two.

I remain fascinated by Hourquet’s wide interests in film, music, art, and photography, and by how he manages to bring them together in his work. In 2013, Hourquet created Temple Gallery and Editions, which he runs with his partner, Anna Planas. Their regular exhibitions feature young photographers in a small but well-thought-out and organized space in the Marais, Paris. Each exhibition is accompanied by a small publication conceived for the occasion. Hourquet is currently working as a curator for The Hobbyist, an exhibition that will open at Fotomuseum Winterthur this September.

Lewis Baltz, Common Objects, Steidl and LE BAL, Göttingen, Germany, and Paris, 2014

Sebastian Hau: What is the specificity of a photobook?

Pierre Hourquet: You can look at a book as an intimate object—the polar opposite of an exhibition. You can look at them longer and harder, without distractions, and return again and again. As a designer, I also like to consider books as containers, as specific spaces.

SH: Is a book an end in itself, or is it connected to other forms of expression?

PH: A book is not an end in and of itself. It’s a useful tool. At Temple, our publications are complementary to the exhibitions, but they’re also starting points. With Sonia Berger, we launched the collection “A Companion To,” related to some books that the Spanish publisher and bookshop Dalpine had published. Books make connections. They can share ideas and messages. They contain great educational and cultural potential.

SH: What’s the first thing you do when you see photographs you will work with? What’s the last?

PH: First I try to learn more about the work, looking for other books, interviews, or articles about the artist. I designed a book for Lewis Baltz for his exhibition at LE BAL. He was very sick at that moment, so we could not meet often. The first thing I did was watch all the films he had selected for the show from filmmakers who inspired him. It was really helpful for understanding his work and designing his book. When I showed him the final book, Common Objects (2014), he remarked with gentle irony that he couldn’t tell whether it was an artist’s book made by him or by me. That was an ambiguous compliment, but put forth in a very warmhearted way.

Another important thing is to create a structure for the book. For the Provoke catalogue, the first thing I did with Diane Dufour, the director of LE BAL and cocurator of the show, was organize everything. However, she also wanted to add more books and photographs to the initial selection of content. We were looking at more and more material and, as a result, we reconceived the structure several times! The final book holds more material than the actual shows. The last thing I do? The book cover!

Diane Dufour and Matthew Witkovsky, eds., Provoke: Between Protest and Performance, Photography in Japan 1960–1975, Steidl, Göttingen, Germany, 2016

SH: Can you describe the process of working on Susan Meiselas’s Prince Street Girls (2013)?

PH: I was experimenting with making books with a group of friends. We called ourselves Yellow Magic, inspired by the Japanese [music] group Yellow Magic Orchestra. We had already organized a printing show for Daido Moriyama and made a special book project for him. Susan had selected some images from the Prince Street Girls series for a solo show she had in a Parisian gallery. She wanted to make a small publication. One of her assistants had designed a very basic dummy, which she showed me. We kept the idea of a simple zine and made a more sophisticated version for Susan. It was the second book made by our group. We designed it, printed it, bound it, and sold it on our own. We assumed the responsibility for the whole process. A great performance!

SH: Do you find your work on book projects is changing over the years?

PH: As a designer, I’ve gotten more involved
in the whole process, from editing to printing. I find I’m strongly interested in working on the content of the books—not just their graphic design. We are now in charge of the catalogue for an upcoming exhibition at Winterthur [The Hobbyist] that I will cocurate with Anna Planas. We have to bring all the content to create a publication that will enrich the purpose of the show. At Temple a few years ago, we started linking more and more exhibitions to accompanying publications, as most of
the time we were showing works that had not been published before.

Susan Meiselas, Prince Street Girls, Yellow Magic Books, Paris, 2013

SH: What are your ideas about the relationship between words and images in books?

PH: For each project, I try to find the right relationship between text and images, even if there are only captions. With Yellow Magic, we tried to make a book project with a text from Jean Giono (The Man Who Planted Trees, 1954) and images from Robert Adams. The hardest thing was not putting images as an illustration of the text. We wanted to build a book where images could be readable as text—to find a narrative sequence where text and image were joined in a general story. Although Robert Adams likes the text by Jean Giono very much, in the end we didn’t manage to find the balance between these two languages—the first project we couldn’t finish.

SH: You work with both physical dummies and digital design tools. Can you explain the role of these techniques and how they come together?

PH: Even if I spend most of my time designing and working with files on my computer, I still like the materiality of the dummy. You cannot make a book without doing a paper dummy. It gives you a preview of the object you will get at the end. Digital tools bring technique, exactitude, and precision to the project. However, I have often done dummies without digital tools, made only with photocopies and Scotch tape. I like the raw aspect of them.

Susan Meiselas, Prince Street Girls, Yellow Magic Books, Paris, 2013

SH: You have published around seventy books yourself, online, 
with Temple, and as fanzines. How do you feel about the difference between self-publishing and publish- ing in general?

PH: I think all these books are really related to DIY. Self-publishing is about self-reliance. You can take things in hand and make
 a book by yourself. We publish books at Temple in this spirit of independence. I also like the urgency of self-publishing: you have to do something, so you do it.

Sebastian Hau publishes, curates, sells, writes about, and teaches classes about photography and photobooks. In collaboration with Olivier Cablat, he organizes the photobook fair Cosmos for the Rencontres d’Arles, as well as the photobook fair Polycopies Paris with Laurent Chardon. 

More on Pierre Hourquet’s work and his collaborations can be found at templeparis.com and booksonline.fr.

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Ed Ruscha on Stephen Shore’s America

Stephen Shore, Second Street and Matheson Street, Kenora, Ontario, August 15, 1974
© the artist

Stephen Shore, Fort Worth, Texas, June 2, 1976
© the artist

Stephen Shore, 2800 South Hayden Street, Amarillo, Texas, August 17, 1973
© the artist

Stephen Shore, Sixth Street, Orlando, Florida, November 7, 1977
© the artist

Stephen Shore, Room 38, Curly Redwood Lodge, Crescent City, California, September 1, 1974
© the artist

Stephen Shore, Hiawatha National Forest, Michigan, July 8, 1973
© the artist

Stephen Shore, Third Street and Hancock Street, Ithaca, New York, August 11, 1977
© the artist

Stephen Shore, Kelly’s Barber Shop, Key Largo, Florida, November 11, 1977
© the artist

Stephen Shore, Market Street, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, July 4, 1973
© the artist

Stephen Shore, Ginger Shore, Aspen, Colorado, June 20, 1978
© the artist

From this large collection of wide-ranging photographic subjects, no attempt was made to select images that displayed either civic America or variety, but rather ones that had a distinct voice on their own. Looking at one picture you could hear a pin drop. Another would roar with noise and yet another would hum along quite ordinary-like.

I seem to have favored scenes that were oblivious to the camera or forgot it was even there.

Ed Ruscha is an American conceptual artist. This feature is adapted from the Aperture book Stephen Shore: Selected Works, 1973–1981.

Stephen Shore: Selected Works, 1973–1981Stephen Shore’s Uncommon Places is indisputably a canonic body of work—a touchstone for those interested in photography and the American landscape. Remarkably, despite having been the focus of numerous shows and books, including the eponymous 1982 Aperture classic (expanded and reissued several times), this series of photographs has yet to be explored in its entirety. Over the past five years, Shore has scanned hundreds of negatives shot between 1973 and 1981. In this volume, Aperture has invited an international group of fifteen photographers, curators, authors, and cultural figures to select ten images apiece from this rarely seen cache of images. Each portfolio offers an idiosyncratic and revealing commentary on why this body of work continues to astound; how it has impacted the work of new generations of photography and the medium at large; and proposes new insight on Shore’s unique vision of America as transmuted in this totemic series.




$80.00

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In Rwanda and Europe, Images of Creativity and Survival

Amelia Umuhire, still from Mugabo, 2016
Courtesy the artist

Amelia Umuhire’s fictional web series Polyglot (2015) explores the lives of young black artists in Europe. The cinematic series is set in Berlin and London and focuses on ideas of home and identity in an increasingly hostile environment. Polygot was screened at various international festivals such as Film Africa London, Tribeca Film Festival, Festival D’Angers, and the Geneva International Film Festival, where it went on to win Best International Web Series 2015.

Umuhire’s most recent project, Mugabo (2016), set in Kigali, Rwanda, is an experimental short film about the return to the homeland and the question of what to do with our past. Umuhire, who survived the Genocide against the Tutsi in 1994 with her sisters and mother, explores the millennial survivor experience with unconventional sound and dialogue collage, mixing genres and tones to convey the complexity of loss, uprooting, and finally acceptance of the collective and individual past. Mugabo premiered at the 2016 Film Africa festival in London and recently won Best Experimental Film 2017 at the Blackstar Film Festival.

In this podcast, the first episode of Contemporary And (C&)’s conversation series “Second Glance,” Aïcha Diallo sat down with Umuhire in Berlin to talk about her practice as an image maker and storyteller. Listen to their conversation below.

Podcast by Aïcha Diallo and Bassano Bonelli; editing by Bassano Bonelli; mixing by Manuela Schininá; music by DJ Zhao, Cecile Kayirebwa, Daz baba ft. Ferooz, and Isang Yun; texts by Mara Senaga and Françoise Vergès.

Aïcha Diallo is Associate Editor of Contemporary And (C&) and contributing guest editor of Aperture’s summer 2017 issue “Platform Africa.” Amelia Umuhire is a Rwandan-born filmmaker, raised and educated in Germany.

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

Read more from Aperture Issue 227, “Platform Africa,” or subscribe to Aperture and never miss an issue.

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The Book of Film

How do filmmakers such as Jean-Luc Godard and Sofia Coppola translate moving images to the printed page?

By David Campany

Jean-Luc Godard, Journal d’une femme mariée, Méril, Paris, 1965

We have all heard photographs described as poetic, sculptural, painterly, literary, or cinematic. It is commonplace to look outside the medium when trying to account for it. But it will only get us so far. If a photo- graph is described as “painterly,” what might that mean? Caravaggio, Constable, or Kandinsky? If it is “cinematic,” does that suggest Kurosawa, Kubrick, or Cronenberg? Raised on a diet of Alfred Hitchcock and David Lynch movies, you might reasonably feel a Gregory Crewdson photograph was “cinematic.” If that diet was movies by Claire Denis and Béla Tarr . . . maybe not.

Beyond the single image, we often reach for filmic comparisons when discussing photo editing and publications. Of his book New York (1956), William Klein once declared: “Only the sequencing counts . . . like in a movie.” Given its flowing layout and informal framing, we can see what he meant. But it’s also nonsensical—how can only the sequencing count? On page or screen, there can be no sequencing without the images themselves. The late Allan Sekula thought of his photo-text works as “disassembled movies,” but he didn’t say which movies, and some of the directors he admired—Jean-Luc Godard and Jean Rouch—described their own movies as “disassembled.” Cinema’s aesthetics and modes of production are no more unified than those of photography. All the arts can be anything—and they can be like anything.

Arnold Fanck, Wunder des Schneeschuhs, Enoch, Hamburg, 1925

Such happy confusion aside, there is a particular kind of photographic book we can legitimately call cinematic, and that’s a book derived directly from cinema. Film became a form of mass entertainment alongside the emergence of the popular illustrated press. By the 1920s, all kinds of books related to movies were appearing, both mainstream and avant-garde. Across the ensuing decades, “cinema on the page” became a familiar part of visual culture.

The most popular publications presented movies much like cartoon strips of images and text. Sometimes the photos were frames of the movie itself; sometimes they were shot as stills, by specialist photographers on set. Peaking in the 1940s and ’50s, these cheaply printed magazines and little books were perfect for viewers hungry for a physical souvenir of the movie theater’s projection of pure light. Holding something cinematic in your hands was exciting. In Italy especially, these fotoromanzi of the latest releases were consumed in vast numbers.

Arnold Fanck, Wunder des Schneeschuhs, Enoch, Hamburg, 1925

There were also more graphically adventurous experiments. Printed movie frames featured in many interwar avant-garde publications, notably László Moholy-Nagy’s landmark Malerei, Photographie, Film (Painting, Photography, Film, 1925). Moholy-Nagy took inspiration from a remarkable project about skiing, of all things: in 1920, the photographer and filmmaker Arnold Fanck had made an instructional film and was experimenting with printing frames from it. Fanck became fascinated with the dilemma of whether action was better expressed by a single, well-timed photograph or a sequence from a movie camera. The two-volume Das Wunder des Schneeschuhs (The miracle of the snowshoe, 1925) presents copious examples of both, with filmstrips printed on spectacular, unbound foldouts. Studying this book in your lap may not be the best preparation for launching yourself down an alp, but it’s a fascinating presentation of a visual problem.

Indeed, the challenge of how to present the time of moving images on the page has never gone away. It is bound to fail, but there are endless ways of failing which can still be instructive, and attractive. The video artist Martin Arnold works with found footage from classic movies. He’s interested in cutting, combining,
 and repeating shots, often toggling back and forth so 
the image appears to flutter on the edge of perception. The effect cannot work in print, and yet his 2002 book Deanimated, designed by Anna Bertermann, is remarkable. The pages have a timeline marked out in dots. Along this line, the shots from his films are reproduced in sequence. The longer the shot is held on the screen, the more dots it must span, and thus the larger it appears on the page. In this way, image dimension corresponds directly to image duration. Clever.

Martin Arnold, Deanimated, Kunsthalle Wien and Springer, Vienna and New York, 2002

In general, most movie-related publications have not attempted that kind of equivalence. The elegant book
 of Le sang d’un poète (The Blood of a Poet, 1930), Jean Cocteau’s first film, is an elegant example, with elliptical moments from the script punctuated by striking photos shot on set by Sacha Masour. With its antireligious sub- text, the film caused a scandal upon release, but it gained a reputation as one of the key Surrealist films. Published much later, in 1948, the book is a recognition of this. It doesn’t attempt to recreate the film; the relation between page and screen here is complementary rather than supplementary.

With the rise of television in the 1960s, such books began to die away. Then VHS made films “possessable,” and DVD supplied the supplements beloved of fans and scholars. But as the cinematic book waned, European filmmakers began to make books as a means of revisiting and expanding their movies. Alain Robbe-Grillet converted his scripts written for films directed by Alain Resnais—including L’Année dernière à Marienbad (Last Year at Marienbad, 1961)—into what he called “ciné-novels,” halfway between illustrated script and novelization. Although radically hybrid, the ciné-novel has qualities all its own. Here is Robbe-Grillet explaining in the foreword to his self-directed L’Immortelle (The Immortal One, 1971):

“[A] detailed analysis of an audio-visual whole that is too complex and too rapid to be studied very easily during the actual projection. But the ciné-novel can also be read, by someone who has not seen the film, in the same way as a musical score; what is then communicated is a wholly mental experience, whereas the work itself [the film] is intended to be a primarily sensual experience, and this aspect of it can never really be replaced.”

Alain Resnais and Alain Robbe-Grillet, L’Année derniére á Marienbad, Calder, London, 1961

The translation of a film into illustrated text opens up an interpretive gap; cinema’s fixed duration is converted into the more flexible time of reading. On the page,
 text and image can be contemplated at will and, in the process, the film can be “laid bare” for analysis. In 1965, Godard suggested that “one could imagine the critique of a film as the text and its dialogue, with photos and a few words of commentary.” Godard published print versions of nearly all his films of the 1960s. The book based on Une femme mariée (A Married Woman, 1964) recreates the episodic, first-person structure of the film. Whereas the film showed the married woman confronted with representations of consumer femininity (on billboards, magazines, and movie posters), the book appropriates various styles of layout from popular culture.

Jean-Luc Godard, Journal d’une femme mariée, Méril, Paris, 1965

In the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s, the decades of European “auteur cinema,” dozens of illustrated books appeared for films by the great directors—Antonioni, Pasolini, De Sica, Tati, Truffaut, Bresson, Rohmer, Fassbinder, Bergman, Buñuel. I should confess here: this is where my affection for photography began. The film stills in these old books were the first images that really impressed me. Cinema seemed to be the means of making the sorts of photographs I wanted to look at. Years later, I was thrilled to come across a video of a 1974 lecture in which Walker Evans described Robert Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971) as “a marvelous bunch of photography.” He was right. Vilmos Zsigmond’s impressionistic camerawork on that film was a kind of photography not seen before, or since. For many years, I knew it only though images in books.

It is important to note that cinematography was included in many of the early books on the history of photography. Then, as film history began to establish itself, the two were split. For example, the first edition of Beaumont Newhall’s Photography: A Short Critical History (1937) included a chapter titled “Moving Pictures,” and even featured Eadweard Muybridge’s sequential locomotion studies on its dust jacket. That chapter was dropped from later editions.

Sofia Coppola and Corinne Day, The Virgin Suicides: A New Generation’s Companion to Film, vol. 1, no. 1, American Zoetrope, 1999

If our histories of photography were to include the innovations of cinematography, the whole map of the medium would need to be rewritten. The exploration of light, composition, visual rhetoric,
 and communication has always been far more advanced in cinema than in still photography, especially when it comes to color. You only have to look at Jack Cardiff’s Technicolor cinematography for the films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger to see this: A Matter of Life and Death (1946), Black Narcissus (1947), The Red Shoes (1948)—nothing in the still photography of the 1940s came close. In working with light projected through a subtle positive-transparency film, color cinema made enormous leaps, aesthetically and technically. Meanwhile, color still photography was held back severely by the practical problems of color print reproduction, which was not very good until well into the 1980s. If you want to see the very best color imagery that was possible between the late 1930s and the late 1980s, look to cinema. But the printed publications dedicated to those color movies are awful!

Surprisingly few cinematographers have made visual books about their work. Man with a Movie Camera (1984) is Néstor Almendros’s illustrated account of how he shot some of the most beautiful films of the 1960s and ’70s. (He won an Academy Award for Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven from 1978.) Christopher Doyle, renowned for his work with director Wong Kar-wai, has published books of his collages and photos taken on set. A Cloud in Trousers (1998) is his remarkably honest and sidelong account of how he understands images.

Sofia Coppola and Corinne Day, The Virgin Suicides: A New Generation’s Companion to Film, vol. 1, no. 1, American Zoetrope, 1999

The “book of the film” remains split between tedious Hollywood blockbuster franchise cash-ins and more experimental publications for art-house movies. Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Wim Wenders, David Lynch, Larry Clark, Wes Anderson, Mike Mills, and Sofia Coppola have issued innovative books related to their films (little coincidence that all these directors have had a deep love of still photography). The sumptuous photographs taken by Roger Fritz on the set of Fassbinder’s highly theatrical Querelle (1982) predate by a few years the seedy glamour of Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1986). The book of Wenders’s Paris, Texas (1984) tells the road movie in double-spread frames. In this form, it is easy to see just how much he and cinematographer Robby Müller had learned from the imagery of photographers Walker Evans, William Eggleston, and Stephen Shore.

Two years later, some of Eggleston’s photos appeared in the book of the musician David Byrne’s only feature film, True Stories (1986). Along with Eggleston’s photography, there are images by Len Jenshel, Mark Lipson, and Byrne himself. At once script book, scrapbook, and photobook, it’s a thoroughly idiosyncratic publication, entirely in keeping with the film. (The True Stories revival starts here!)

Alain Resnais, Repérages, Éditions du Chêne, Paris, 1974

Eggleston’s photography has influenced many filmmakers of the last twenty years, but none more so than Sofia Coppola. All her films are accompanied by publications. One of the most engaging is the fake teen zine of The Virgin Suicides (1999), with Eggleston-esque photos by the late Corinne Day.

I have barely scratched the surface here. Cinema has given rise to such a great range of photographic books. I finish with my favorite, Alain Resnais’s Repérages (1974). It is a collection of photographs
 shot over many years in New York, Paris, Lyon, Hiroshima, and London while looking for locations for his films. The majority are for projects he never completed. The format is wide and the full-bleed images with black pages help to suggest a screen in a darkened room. The photographs are documents: raw, grainy, and factual. They are also richly evocative promises that the late director never managed to keep—love letters to the future of cinema. Perhaps someday someone else will pick up this book and make those movies.

David Campany is an author, photographer, and curator. His books include Photography and Cinema (Reaktion Books, 2008) and The Cinematic (Whitechapel Gallery and MIT Press, 2007). He recently cocurated The Still Point of the Turning World: Between Film and Photography for Fotomuseum Antwerp, which was on view from June 23–August 10, 2017.

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The Unsung Hero of South African Photography

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

By Bongani Madondo

Andrew Tshabangu, Portrait of a Young Thwasa, from the series Bridges, 2008
Courtesy the artist and Gallery MOMO

Andrew Tshabangu’s two decades-plus visual repertoire, the best of which was showcased earlier this year at Johannesburg’s Standard Bank Gallery and Gallery MOMO in Footprints, is provocative and ultimately liberating. With its exploration of blackness as a lived, if banal and mundane experience (just as it is with any other racial group), Footprints, which was curated by Thembinkosi Goniwe, is also notable for its simplicity and aching, often sweeping quietness, and clarity. In “The Value of Andrew Tshabangu’s Photography,” an essay in the accompanying monograph, published by Fourthwall Books, the curator, critic and novelist Simon Njami tells us that Tshabangu’s journey began in the place where he was born, namely, South Africa. “While biography is never a trivial part of the analysis of any artist’s work,” Njami writes, “in Tshabangu’s case the contextual elements seem to render fundamental clues to a deeper understanding of his universe.”

Who is Andrew Tshabangu and why does he matter? Tshabangu was born in 1966 in Soweto, Johannesburg, where he currently works and lives. His lifelong visual subject is the city and its satellite township on the southwest frontier of the African megalopolis. Tshabangu studied photography in the Eastern part of the city, at the Alexandra Community Art Centre, in 1990; he later studied photojournalism at the Institute of Advancement for Journalism, shortly in the wake of the new democratic dispensation. He would go on to make his name as a photojournalist mainly at the then-exulted New Nation, an alternative weekly published by the South African Catholic Bishops’ Conference.

Andrew Tshabangu, Shembe Church Elders, from the series Bridges, 2008
Courtesy the artist and Gallery MOMO

“Without doubt,” writes Njami in Footprints, “a journey into the past is always necessary to get a better understanding of any photographic practice.” Njami then lets loose an obvious fact: “Tshabangu is black, and yet this biographical detail could seem almost irrelevant.” It isn’t—at least in the South African (or global) context. On March 21, 1960, six days before Tshabangu’s birth, the South African Police mowed down hundreds of unarmed civilians who were marching peacefully in Sharpeville to protest against the Pass Laws. When he was ten years old, in June 1976, half of Soweto, and by extension the country, was engulfed in fire as students marched against the government’s enforcement of Afrikaans as the language of instruction across the education system. The white regime again responded by shooting the youths and setting raging dogs on them. But, instead of heading into exile, like many teens slightly older than him who skipped the country at that time, Tshabangu, who grew up in a Catholic family, prayed and wished for inclusion in the one calling he felt would offer salvation to his tumultuous country—the priesthood.

Time would pass until he found other ways to tell and preach about the conditions of his people. Upon leaving high school, he applied to Wits University’s School of Dramatic Art, to study performance. “Alas, I was terrible at it. I was rejected, ” he told me recently. “And yet I kept on searching for ways I could train as a creative and tell my people’s stories. Hence I arrived at the Alexandra Community Art Centre where I took up taking up photography. It was not a complex decision to make.”

Andrew Tshabangu, Butchery, Traders and Taxis, from the series City in Transition, 2003
Courtesy the artist and Gallery MOMO

In a way, Footprints is both an accumulation, as well as a visual testimony, of the journey he has walked. Thematically divided into six chapters, “City in Transition,” “Bridges,” “Emakhaya,” “Hostel Interiors,” “Hostel Exteriors,” and “Water is Ours,” the exhibition and catalog comprise selections of Tshabangu’s photographs taken since 1994, a year of both personal and political resonance. The beginning of South Africa’s democracy, 1994 also marked the beginning of the end of foreign, NGO-supported African, feminist, and workerist independent media engaged in the antiapartheid movement. Tshabangu is a survivor of that “struggle photography” culture spawned by the activist literary titles such as Staffrider, Weekly Mail, Labour Bulletin, New Nation, and Learn & Teach, and he is stoically steeped in the social documentary mode exemplified by Afrapix, a collective of politically-conscious photojournalists active from 1982 to 1991. His work refuses easy categorization and defies agitprop politics, while remaining cognizant of  his subjects’ undeniable blackness; his project, per the Du Bois-esque adage, is the soul of black folks.

Andrew Tshabangu, Naledi-Bree Street Bus, from the series City in Transition, 2004
Courtesy the artist and Gallery MOMO

Stylistically, and by this I mean in terms of both aesthetic veneer and disciplinary strictures, Tshabangu can be said to have evolved within the social documentary genre. Early on, as testified by the section “City in Transition,” his camera was trained on black folks’ mobility—by taxi, train, or on foot—in and out of the city. Confident, he moved on to focus on a people dealing with the meaning of freedom via their age-old mysticism and African spiritual practices, before breaking out into the hostel dwellers’ digs and rural environs. By all intents, even in the post-1994 work displayed in Footprints, Tshabangu is a man of the 1980s, and in character and language, he appears stuck in there. There’s nothing extravagantly contemporary, hip, arty, current, or fashionable about his photographs, and yet his work is revolutionarily refreshing for its timelessness. It shouldn’t work wonders, but it does. There’s a backstory to this.

In the immediate postapartheid years, from 1994 to 2004, cultural spaces in South Africa metamorphosed from the tyranny of the apartheid-era single story—benign blacks doing nothing but enduring suffering from evil whites (when not burning everything in sight)—to an idealized narrative, One Nation Under a Groove. Of course, the entire project was optimistic at best and fictive at worst. Artists, the media, and the general public were exhorted to imagine the country anew. The process of re-imagining demanded of the newly democratic country to move the narrative from who we are to who we can be. In that period, the theory held that the past is a divisive if ugly country, a place we had better hurry to escape from, just in case it derails our march into cultural and social nirvana. Like all modern cultural and artistic expressions, photography as art or document found itself exposed and manipulated for propaganda purposes—this time propagating the Rainbow Nation Groove.

Andrew Tshabangu, Fantasy, from the series Hostel Interiors, 2009
Courtesy the artist and Gallery MOMO

In Tshabangu’s South Africa, the South Africa in his Footprints, photography, literature, and all modes of storytelling were no less besieged by the end of apartheid’s reconciliation project. Everyone was besieged. The new age of political correctness had arrived. Exhortations to ideological good manners grew all the louder. No matter what the economics and historical baggage your life might have been shaped by, the message was clear: You have to forget the past, you have to love thy neighbor, you have to believe in the untested miracles of the Nelson Mandela’s fantastical promise.

All attempts at wholesale loving and cultural kumbaya, with no solid legal or spiritual recourse to past injustices, kicked off with blistering immediacy in mid-1994. This is the era on which Tshabangu focused his lens. It was around this time that a question arose (with an implicit “nay” as its answer), a question that persists to this day, as galleries and commercial media wrestle with the conundrum: Does social documentary as a means of visual expression still matter? Is socially engaged art devoid of creative imagination? Is it propaganda?

Andrew Tshabangu, Women Praying at the Crucifix, from the series Bridges, 2001
Courtesy the artist

Out of the cultural turbulence brought about by the politics of hope, social documentarians such as the Afrapix vanguard Omar Badsha, Paul Weinberg, Cedric Nunn, Santu Mofokeng, and Peter McKenzie, among others, all Ernest Cole’s affective heirs, were relegated—while simultaneously valorized by academic theorists—into museum fare and college syllabi. Only the newspaper- and street-hardened, photo-punk collective called the “Bang Bang Club”—which specialized in photographing the police’s jackboot behavior, the disruption of workers and church organisations work, random shootings and arrests of young black males, and the township youth’s militant response to it—achieved glorious infamy.

The “Bang Bang” crew—notably, Kevin Carter, Greg Marinovich, Ken Oosterbroek, and João Silva—were mostly white men working in the black townships. They were treated with suspicion, even though they were often the most reliable visual agents the burning ghettoes could hope for to beam tales of their daily woes to the outside world. (They were later immortalized in The Bang Bang Club [2010], a Hollywood flick that curator-critic Khwezi Gule eviscerates in his essay “Bureaucratization of Memory” in Okwui Enwezor and Rory Bester’s exhibition catalog Rise and Fall of Apartheid [2013]. Gule calls out the photographers for “aestheticizing” as well as “commodifying” township folks’ suffering.) Through all these changes and aesthetic re-imaginations, Tshabangu pushed on quietly, alchemically, working through the raging trends, walking throughout the streets of Johannesburg, almost anonymously.

Andrew Tshabangu, Mielies, Stove and Heater, from the series Hostel Interiors, 2011
Courtesy the artist and Gallery MOMO

A twenty year survey (“and not retrospective,” Tshabangu insists), Footprints is perhaps the most fully realized and groundbreaking solo photography exhibition in South Africa in recent memory. Tshabangu circumvents all the cherished tropes of twentieth-century popular “black life” in Africa: sex, drugs, alcohol, cars, and witchcraft, or the joie de vivre of the stylized natives, as per Malick Sidibé’s postindependence nouveau noir aesthetic affirmation. Groundbreaking as Sidibé’s James Brown-inflected portraiture (in West Africa) and some of Drum magazine’s 1950s shebeen and fashion show photospreads (in South Africa) were—especially to the racist gaze that never expected outward self-celebration and dandified genius from the native—ultimately that vision was, and is still, susceptible to the single story trap, too.

Tshabangu directs his camera to the same hard done Africans, street idlers, and Johannesburg’s legendary traffic-disregarding minibus taxis at the ranks, or in motion, though he chooses to show neither the ugly nor its opposite, poverty chic. Take, for example, his hostel series, subdivided into “Interiors” and “Exteriors.” His photographs of the exteriors of the low wage workers’ compounds entitled Hostel Exterior I–IV (2008) give off an indifferent feel: trains of architecturally lackluster dwellings, windswept rows of laundry hung out to dry, no people in sight. In an interior view, Mielies, Stove and Heater (2011) depicts a kitchenette upon which stands a table decorated with a check-cloth covering, a bunch of mielies resembling a ponytail of a city slicker or Mafia hitman hung up above a whitewashed wall, and a long electric cord snaking around the table down to a makeshift tin stove that might work as both a tea-heating appliance or a DIY heater. It’s a stripped-down atmosphere: it’s minimalist without the trendy implication; here, minimalism implies a lack of material possessions, but also a willful commitment to “make it” by any means necessary.

Andrew Tshabangu, Brazier, Joubert Park, from the series City in Transition, 1994
Courtesy the artist and Gallery MOMO

At the core of Footprints is a narrative of spiritual and ritual experience. The work speaks for itself like nothing else in current in South African social documentary. Why? The composition is specifically an oxymoron—motionless, mystical cinema, 1930s black-and-white Hollywood, a style reminiscent of Isaac Julien’s earlier work, and the process by which he has revisited his iconic film, Looking for Langston (1989), nearly thirty years later, with the emphasis on stills rather than video. There’s Tshabangu’s three-part series Brazier, Joubert Park (1994), which is is imbued with cinematic visual attributes. In the three frames, we see a random woman. She could be a grilled corn trader. She’s dashing across the frame carrying a random box. Behind her is a loose cast of several figures, figures almost blurred off under a haze of smoke, or cast behind a huge transparent smoke curtain. They are going about their interests, around open-fire braziers with raging fire emitting smog and additional smoke.

Brazier, Joubert Park is tricky, perhaps even throws up its own visual phantom jive. It’s as if, after printing it in the darkroom, Tshabangu continued to paint the cloud curtain of smog in it to trick the eye, or emotionally swindle us to connect with the image in a visceral way. Nothing could be further from the truth. Unlike the exuberant and performative visual language of say, Zanele Muholi, neither Tshabangu, nor his curator and gallery, are interested in moving the work from its reportorial grounding. That might seem to foreclose other readings, but, conversely, it also proves to be the only way Tshabangu’s magical realist work assumes its poetic potency, when not otherwise exulting in transcendental otherworldliness.

Andrew Tshabangu, Boy at the Window, from the series Emakhaya, 2004
Courtesy the artist and Gallery MOMO

Tshabangu grew up with ambitions of serving as an ordained priest. Instead, he might have become something else within that pantheon of the spiritual realm: the visual marabout. Haunted by this idea of humanity and dignity as something that can be imbued, passed on, gifted to, rather than an innate virtue and spiritual property, I revisited Footprints a month after it opened. The second time around, I started from the end and moved my way to the beginning, like loving backwards. Both the photographs as objects and the photographed spirits—shadows and figures, eyes daring the camera to get it wrong, or eyes trained far off beyond the horizons of the soul—are more than visual metaphors of a country. The work opens up like a flower, drawing the viewer into an omni-enfolded space from whence the bud, spurred by the gardener’s care and caress, reveals its secrets: bare, undemanding beauty. Which strains credulity, for what sort of beauty is undemanding? Yet, that is what bestows on Footprints its unimpeachable artistic and social gravitas. Tshabangu’s images pry the lid from our position as passive viewers. In other words, although we cannot simply swap places with his subjects, in looking at his photographs, we are participants, gazing at ourselves.

Bongani Madondo is the author, most recently, of Sigh, the Beloved Country (2016). He is an associate researcher at Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research, as well as contributing editor at the Johannesburg Review of Books. Footprints is on view at Gallery MOMO, Cape Town, through August 20, 2017, followed by a presentation at Iziko National Gallery, Cape Town.

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

Read more from Aperture Issue 227, “Platform Africa,” or subscribe to Aperture and never miss an issue.

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10 Exhibitions to See This Fall

From Malick Sidibé to Stephen Shore, here are the must-see photography exhibitions in New York, Los Angeles, Paris, and beyond.

Liliana Porter, Untitled (Self-Portrait with Square), 1973/2012
© and courtesy the artist

Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985

The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles

September 15–December 31, 2017

As part of the Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA initiative, which will involve dozens of museums across Southern California, the Hammer will open a survey of more than one hundred female Latin American artists. Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985 focuses on a turbulent twenty-five-year period when much of Latin America suffered under forms of military dictatorship, and the emboldened work of female artists, in particular, challenged the status quo. While the work ranges across a wide variety of practices, a number of important artists celebrated for their photography, including Liliana Porter, Regina Silveira, and Paz Errázuriz, will be featured.

Stephen Shore, Santa Fe, New Mexico June 1972
© the artist

Stephen Shore

The Museum of Modern Art, New York

November 19, 2017–May 28, 2018

This ambitious survey, featuring numerous unpublished and previously unexhibited works, covers five decades of Stephen Shore’s photography. It begins, of course, with the gelatin-silver prints from his teenage years—famously purchased by MoMA when he was fourteen—and includes his photographs of Andy Warhol’s factory, his pioneering work with color photography, his eventual transition to digital tools and social media, and everything in between. As Britt Salvesen writes in Stephen Shore: Selected Works, 1973–1981 (2017), “he was trying to understand the meanings people attach to places, things, and practices—pondering their scope of knowledge, sense of urgency, and expectations of satisfaction.”

Nobuyoshi Araki, Untitled, 1971, from Tokyo
© the artist

Araki. Tokyo

Pinakothek Der Moderne

October 26, 2017– March 4, 2018

Nobuyoshi Araki’s series Araki. Tokyo is composed of formative photographs made from 1969 to 1973, included in one of his earliest books, Tokyo (1973). Araki, known for his erotic depiction of Japanese culture, made these photographs as if producing a diary. The twenty-eight diptychs to be featured at the Pinakothek Der Moderne juxtapose intimate portraits of nude women with the bustling streets of Tokyo. Araki. Tokyo foreshadows Araki’s recent work made after going blind in one eye, which more blatantly examines the disparity between sight and memory.

Manuel G. Barrera Jr., Evening vigil at LAPD Parker Center, ca. 1971
© the artist and courtesy the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center

La Raza

Autry Museum, Los Angeles

September 16, 2017– February 10, 2019

La Raza, the bilingual newspaper published from 1967–77 in Los Angeles, was an essential platform for the visibility of the Chicano civil rights movement. Spanish for “the people,” La Raza envisioned a multicultural image of Latin American identity in the midst of a revolution. Photographers were a crucial part of the movement, incentivizing readers to join the cause through images of determined artists and activists. This exhibition at the Autry Museum will feature an extensive archive of over 25,000 images from the Chicano Studies Research Center of UCLA, illustrating an often-overlooked vision of American history.

Lauren Greenfield, Secret Moneii, 28, a stripper at Magic City who made nearly $20,000 during her first week at the club, Atlanta. Before coming to Magic City, the single mother of two was working two jobs and struggling, 2015
© the artist and courtesy Institute

GENERATION WEALTH by Lauren Greenfield

ICP Museum, New York

September 20, 2017–January 7, 2018

“I’m looking at how the values of our culture have shifted in a way that affects people beyond socioeconomic status, race, or nationality,” Lauren Greenfield, director of the celebrated 2012 documentary The Queen of Versailles, said in a recent interview with Aperture. GENERATION WEALTH, Greenfield’s first major retrospective, presents her twenty-five-year, multimedia exploration of consumerism—in the U.S. and abroad. The exhibition originated at the Annenberg Space for Photography in Los Angeles, and includes photographs, first-person interviews, and documentary film footage, all of which reveal the tremendous level trust she has built with her subjects.

Albert Renger-Patzsch, Stapedia variegata. Asclepiadaceae, 1923
© the artist and Archiv Annund Jürgen Wilde/ADAGP, Paris

Albert Renger-Patzsch: The Perspective of Things

Jeu de Paume, Paris

October 17, 2017–January 21, 2018

This exhibition of 190 photographs marks one of the largest to date of the work of photographer Albert Renger-Patzsch, a crucial figure in the New Objectivity movement during the Weimar Republic in 1920s Germany. In his stark images of nature, architecture, and commercial items— from orchids to shoe-factory machinery—Renger-Patzsch sought to precisely depict the “essence of the object.” His 1928 photobook, Die Welt ist schön (The world is beautiful), helped define the movement. Albert Renger-Patzsch: The Perspective of Things will also include a selection of the photographer’s postwar works.

Walker Evans, Truck and Sign, 1928–30
© The Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Walker Evans

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

September 30, 2017–February 4, 2018

A major retrospective of Walker Evans’s vernacular style comes to San Francisco this fall and will include more than four-hundred works from the 1920s to the 1970s that illuminate the seminal photographer’s facility for capturing the everyday. SFMOMA will mount the exhibition’s only U.S. engagement, following a presentation at Centre Pompidou. The museum’s new senior curator of photography, Clément Chéroux, curates a textured look at Evans’s practice, including not only his photographs, but also personal items such as postcards and clipped images that influenced him.

Sarah Charlesworth, Still Life with Camera, 1995, from the series Doubleworld
© The Estate of Sarah Charlesworth

Sarah Charlesworth: Doubleworld

Los Angeles County Museum of Art

August 20–November 26, 2017

Can pictures be more important—and more powerful—than reality? Sarah Charlesworth (1947–2013), along with her Pictures Generation peers, revisited this question throughout her career. Charlesworth’s first major retrospective in Los Angeles, Sarah Carlesworth: Doubleworld, organized by the New Museum, surveys four decades of work across ten series. In 1977, Douglas Crimp included Charlesworth in the now-legendary Pictures exhibition, among artists such as Sherrie Levine and Laurie Simmons, who shared her fascination of representation and symbolism, as well as in how images are constructed and distributed. “I use images drawn from the culture,” Charlesworth said in 1990, “because I’m interested in each piece being an interface between my personal subjectivity and a given world.”

Hiroshi Sugimoto, Staircase at Villa Farnese II, Caprarola, 2016
© the artist and courtesy of the Polo Museale del Lazio-Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Italian Tourism

Hiroshi Sugimoto: Gates of Paradise

Japan Society, New York

October 20, 2017–January 7, 2018

More than four hundred years ago, in the 1580s, Jesuit missionaries sent four Catholic-convert Japanese boys on an eight-year tour of Europe. After discovering a fresco portraying this envoy, Hiroshi Sugimoto retraced their steps, and captured the sites that this “Tenshō Embassy” visited. Conceived by the artist, Hiroshi Sugimoto: Gates of Paradise couples new, unseen work by Sugimoto and classical masterpieces from Japan. Considering the history of cultural exchange between East and West, the exhibition celebrates the Japan Society’s 110th anniversary. In addition to these black-and-white photographs, Gates of Paradise also includes several Japanese screens, which depict Christian and Western themes, from the same era.

Malick Sidibé, (Je l’appelais) La gazelle / Avec mon chapeau et mes pattes d’éléphant, 1974
© the artist and courtesy Magnin-A

Malick Sidibé: Mali Twist

Fondation Cartier, Paris

October 20, 2017–February 20, 2018

Known as the “eye of Bamako,” the late photographer Malick Sidibé (1936–2016) fused the American rhythms of James Brown with the fashions of 1960s-era postcolonial West Africa. Two decades after his first solo exhibition at Fondation Cartier, Sidibé’s vivacious studio portraits and a dizzyingly spectacular account of 1960s nightlife in Mali’s capital return to the glossy Jean Nouvel-designed museum in a retrospective organized by André Magnin and Brigitte Ollier. Sidibé was famous for staying out late, and his most iconic photographs project irrepressible joie de vivre. “I was the only young reporter in Bamako taking photos at surprise parties,” Sidibé once said, referring to the clandestine gatherings organized by the city’s youth. “I was always on the lookout for a photo opportunity, a lighthearted moment, an original attitude, or some guy who was really funny.” If the preview this spring at Red Hook Labs was any indication, the expanded version is not to be missed.

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Can African Critics Rewrite the Story of African Photography?

M. Neelika Jayawardane speaks with Emmanuel Iduma about the influential role—and responsibility—of art criticism in Africa today.

Namsa Leuba, Untitled I, 2011, from the series Cocktail
Courtesy the artist and Art Twenty One, Lagos

Since the early 1990s, when Malian photographers Malick Sidibé and Seydou Keïta began to attract international attention for their stylish, midcentury portraiture, there has been an upwelling of interest in photography and lens-based media from African and African diaspora artists. Today, more than two decades after the first Rencontres de Bamako (commonly known as the Bamako Biennale), in 1994, as photography from Africa has become intrinsically tied to the global flows of art fairs, biennials, and magazines, certain geographies on the continent have remained locations of aesthetic innovation. Cities like Accra, Addis Ababa, Cairo, Lagos, Nairobi, Bamako, Dakar, Johannesburg, and Cape Town are now home to multiple exhibition platforms and educational programs, and have become centers of photography, despite financial and political pressures. Platforms and events—such as LagosPhoto in Nigeria, Addis Foto Fest in Ethiopia, RAW Material Company in Dakar, Kulte Gallery & Editions in Rabat, and the roving Àsìkò Art School and the Photographer’s Master Class—are producing their own cartographies of knowledge about art through distribution channels across Africa and beyond.

Within this ecosystem of image production, art writers play both peripheral and central roles in creating counternarratives and producing new ways of thinking about African photography. Writing about African photography has, traditionally, been the realm of an exclusive group of North American and European academics and critics. However, just as the camera, in the hands of an African photographer, produces a different image of “home,” African and African diaspora critics who write about photographs of their home produce necessary interventions in academic and critical writing. By ensuring that Africa-based and diasporic writers’ thoughts are published, we as writers create a home for our own ways of thinking about our images of self. With these thoughts in mind, I recently spoke to Emmanuel Iduma, an art writer whose work I’ve been following with deep respect for several years. — M. Neelika Jayawardane

Oumar Ly, Untitled, Podor (Senegal), 1963–78
© the artist and courtesy (S)ITOR

M. Neelika Jayawardane: Last year, in a conversation at the Armory Focus: African Perspectives in New York, we spoke about writing about art. There, I wanted to open up a discussion about the role that art writers might play in enriching dialogue and shifting pervasive attitudes—in the geopolitical West—about African art and African artists, given the surge of interest in contemporary African art in recent years. You have been involved in several platforms for photography and art writing in Africa, Europe, and North America, in particular Invisible Borders and the online magazine The Trans-African. What is your approach to writing about photography?

Emmanuel Iduma: In my writing on photography, I am probably closer to a novelist than to an art historian. I begin each essay on a photograph or a photographer with the assumption that I’m trying to tell a story, and to elucidate an experience. For instance, my essay on LagosPhoto for Aperture’s “Platform Africa” issue begins with a quote from the Nigerian novelist and playwright Sefi Atta, who asks, “Who was I to think that art could save anyone in Lagos?” The photograph, in my thinking, is connected with how it was made, where it was first published, or the event that occasioned it. What has always drawn me to thinking and writing about photographs is the sense that the people depicted are their truest selves in the light of another’s imagination—the photographer, the person who looks back. I always wonder about the tenuous relationship between image and text, especially what the text, in approaching an image, cannot unravel.

Nomusa Makhubu, Imfundo Impahla neBhayibheli (Education Apparel and the Bible), 2007/2013
Courtesy the artist

Jayawardane: How people are “depicted are their truest selves in the light of another’s imagination” is a great sentence about photography! What about the long legacy of colonial ethnography, in which the colonial imagination and the regimes of fantasy surrounding the African other actually became intrinsic to colonial propaganda, scientific study, and education, and formed the basis for white supremacist ideology? Would you be able to unpack the ways in which this influential body of photography informs our own picture of ourselves?

Iduma: As writers, thinkers, and image makers, we have to be willing to confront the ambiguity of our relationship with the archive, to realize that, more often than not, our bodies were pictured in denigrating ways. And how we were seen has shaped our perception of who we are. I hope for my work to begin by engaging with this complicity, but then surpassing and counteracting it. I think now of a certain photograph by the South African artist Nomusa Makhubu, Imfundo Impahla neBhayibheli (Education Apparel and the Bible) from The Self Portrait Project (2007/2013). In the image, she projects her silhouetted body on a colonial photograph of five men and a boy, taken by A. James Gribble in South Africa. It’s a metaphorical lodestar for me. At once repudiation as reclamation, the outline of her body is imposed on the archive; but equally, she can no longer be seen apart from it.

Edson Chagas, Marcel D. Traoré, Tipo Passe, 2014
Courtesy the artist and APALAZZOGALLERY

Jayawardane: Yes, Makhubu did not pick a simple archetype from colonial images. As a contemporary South African artist and academic, she is well aware of the imprint of that colonial archive on the ways in which her present body and person are “read,” seen, and acted upon, especially in the Cape. She inserts herself into the narratives handed down to us from family members and authority figures, who tell us what our collective memory should be, and draws attention to how photographs like this were used to illustrate how the “native” could be “civilized”—and made docile—through European clothing and educations. Those ideas return to us through what we today call “respectability politics”: we all, and especially young, black men, still get told that if we dress the part and behave the part, we won’t run afoul of the law, or get harassed by the state.

Shifting the center of image production is important, but it is equally important to ensure that interpretation and the critical dialogues around those images now also include writers, academics, and critics from “home spaces.” Why it is just as important for African and African diaspora writers to write about African and African diaspora photographers?

Iduma: The question is one of accessibility. How might our writing on photography reach an audience in our “home spaces?” What sort of writing style can help us achieve that? More importantly, what publications are open to that kind of writing, in which lucidity is privileged over jargon? Considered together, all three questions point to insisting on work in which the means of production is controlled by African writers, editors, and critics interested in the long term—a fifty-year argument, I would say. It is a question of how the lineage of criticism expands from Transition to NKA: Journal of Contemporary African Art to Chimurenga, from a journal that celebrates African art as an academic discipline to one in which culture takes a pan-African, mainstream bent.

And then, besides presentation, why is art writing by African and diaspora writers urgent? Is there a political necessity they express in their writing that is otherwise unclear in criticism by white writers? My inclination is to say yes. We begin our writing in response to despair we feel in our body. Art writing in any form isn’t exempt from that.

Dawit L. Petros, Single Cube Formation No. 4, Nazareth, Ethiopia, 2011
Courtesy the artist and Tiwani Contemporary, London

Jayawardane: When you write, do you begin by reading all you can find about the photographer and possibly interviewing her or him? Do you share a draft with the photographer to get feedback, or do you feel it is important that you remain autonomous? If the latter, can you speak about the importance of maintaining that autonomy and objectivity?

Iduma: I do my best to read all I can find on the photographer. However, because I have often written about photographers who are fairly young, and whose work hasn’t already received a lot of critical attention, the process of research hasn’t been as exacting. I rarely interview the photographers—I often share what I have written with them, but only at a later stage. I wrote recently about the work of Dawit L. Petros for the exhibition catalog published to accompany his solo show at the Kansas City Art Institute. Another essay, for The Walther Collection’s exhibition catalog Recent Histories (2017), focused on photographs by Mame-Diarra Niang, Michael Tsegaye, and Edson Chagas. For ARTNews, I have written about the work of Aida Muluneh, Iké Udé, Oumar Ly, Zina Saro-Wiwa, among others.

My work has also included writing on images published in newspapers and websites, which require a different kind of research. For example, “If I Could See Your Face” in the November 2016 issue of The Trans-African, or earlier in the March Issue, “Image of Displacement.” In those instances, I read almost everything I could find on the manner in which the photographs were made, and proceeded from there. I do not wish to be ignorant about those portrayed or the event depicted, but I also see the value in reaching a dead end in the historical or journalistic record. From there I make detours, guided by the conceit of my imagination.

Like Nomusa Makhubu, I also return to images of my Nigerian forebears in the National Archives of the U.K., aware of the ethnographic, patronizing gaze of the colonial photographer. To write about those images—to respond with my experiences as a decolonizing body—is to turn the archive on its head.

Emeka Okereke and Emmanuel Iduma, A Walk in a Daraa, 2014
Courtesy the artists

Jayawardane: You have participated in several road trips with Invisible Borders, which began in 2009. Did the intimacy of that geographic journey with other writers and photographers open possibilities for creative communication? Or create conflicts that exposed the fact that people’s vastly different expectations and boundaries?

Iduma: I participated in four editions of the road trip project, each time with a different set of participants. In 2011 we traveled from Lagos to Addis Ababa; Lagos to Libreville in 2012; Lagos to Sarajevo in 2014; and, in 2016, across fourteen Nigerian states. The travels placed exacting demands on how you work and how your body responded to that work—this was a promising challenge for us, from an organizational perspective. For me, as a writer, the trips offered an opportunity to reflect on what it meant to be a stranger, to move as a stranger through African countries. But, I have been uninterested in recalling the closed lines of communication during the trips—the grouses and disagreements. I think some of that might have resulted from the nature of the project, and its constraints. Whether or not they were inevitable is a different matter.

Aida Muluneh, Local Understanding, 2016
Courtesy the artist and David Krut Projects

Jayawardane: Who are the photographers or works you’ve most enjoyed writing about? Can you speak about what was enriching about these particular experiences or interactions?

Iduma: One of my favorite essays in The Trans-African is “Face in the Archive.” Since about 2012, I have spent a considerable amount of leisure time browsing the images from the Colonial Office of the National Archive on Flickr, especially those from Nigeria. One of the first images that struck me was that of three Kamberi boys, in a village somewhere in today’s northwestern Nigeria. In the photograph, a boy looks back at the camera. His glancing back bore, in my estimation, a particular anxiety. What I came up with, by the end of writing the essay, was that the task of decolonization isn’t quite done.

Eric Gottesman, Beletu, from the series If I Could See Your Face, I Would Not Need Food, 2000
Courtesy the artist

Jayawardane: The scholars and writers whose work I encountered during my literature degrees were enormously influential: James Clifford’s The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art. And without Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, and Chinua Achebe, and Edward Said to give us the language of decolonizing our own practices and minds, where would we be? Without feminist theory, I’m not sure I’d have the critical acumen necessary for speaking about why power structures and the gaze—and whose gaze—are necessary parts of a conversation about any photograph. Njabulo Ndebele’s Rediscovery of the Ordinary helped me understand that a photograph that seems to be about “nothing” contains so much. Who are some of the writers you look to? Whose writing influences you?

Iduma: I am enthused by the work Teju Cole has done in the last two years as photography critic of The New York Times Magazine, the rigor and reach of his essays. Maaza Mengiste has written a number of short essays on photography, some in the Guardian, which are compelling and prescient. One of my favorite books on photography is Double Negative by Ivan Vladislavić, a response to David Goldblatt’s photographs. I like to think that my work is possible because of books by John Berger and David Levi Strauss.

Emeka Okereke and Emmanuel Iduma, A Walk in a Daraa, 2014
Courtesy the artists

Jayawardane: In January 2016, you and a couple of other collaborators—fellow writers and editors Serubiri Moses and Ndinda Kioko—began a new online journal The Trans-African. It is dedicated to the reflections of independent art writers from Africa on the photographs, images, and other visual cultures of Africa. In our Armory Show conversation, you mentioned that you were interested in the work of “recuperation,” which is possible through archival work. You mentioned that the thought process as a writer is an imaginative endeavor, which does “not merely involve linear time, but time as in a dream, or a photograph.” This was especially important considering that the much of our history have a life outside archives, and outside the Web.

Iduma: “The past does not change, nor our need for it. What must change is the way of telling,” writes Anne Michaels. I wonder about a way of telling that reflects on histories that, as Brent Hayes Edwards once wrote, fell on the wayside. This work can only be done when one looks back, when the future casts its shadow on the past. Consider, for instance, the similarities in how dissident men in Nigeria are pictured upon arrest. You have General Ologbosere in 1899, Isaac Adaka Boro in 1966, and Mohammed Yusuf in 2009: all three are bound, placed between armed soldiers, and stripped to the waist. Writing about those photographs (in my essay “Regarding Insurgency”), I wasn’t particularly interested in their villainy, or the morality of their claims, but in the nature of their disillusionment with the status quo, which is a particular Nigerian anxiety. The work of recuperation is really an attempt to study the present. If we don’t cultivate skepticism for the historical record, we run the risk of perpetuating narratives tainted by colonialism and patriarchy.

Mimi Cherono Ng’ok, Untitled, 2014
Courtesy the artist and Tiwani Contemporary, London

Jayawardane: In a more recent conversation at the School of Visual Arts, you mentioned that there are “pitiably few” platforms for writing about African art outside of academia. “I knew I was a product of the academy in terms of my education and research interests,” you said, “but I also knew I belonged to a literary tradition invested in the mainstream, in writing that’s accessible in language and form.” Thinking about this media environment, can you speak about the significance of The Trans-African?

Iduma: The Trans-African is a journal published by Invisible Borders. For most of last year, Moses Serubiri, Ndinda Kioko, and I published essays on visual culture. We used our home countries—Uganda, Kenya, and Nigeria, respectively—as the basis of our reflections. In July of last year, we had a three-way conversation on “Writing and The Trans-African.” It’s a good starting point to understand the guiding principles for the journal. There are thirty-plus essays on the site, which I’m proud of.

For now, the journal is on a fundraising hiatus. To put it simply: we founded the journal as a non-traditional platform for criticism. The influences for the journal are more literary than academic. By thinking through wide-ranging sources—poetry, philosophy, history, fiction—we expected our writing on visual culture, such as album covers, photographs, and film, to expand the scope of African literature.

M. Neelika Jayawardane is Associate Professor of English at the State University of New York–Oswego and arts contributor to Al Jazeera English. Emmanuel Iduma is a Nigerian writer based in New York and editor of Saraba Magazine.

This article is part of a series produced in collaboration with Contemporary And (C&) – Platform for International Art from African Perspectives. Limited edition prints by Nico Krijno are available from Aperture Foundation.

Read more from Aperture Issue 227, “Platform Africa,” or subscribe to Aperture and never miss an issue.

The post Can African Critics Rewrite the Story of African Photography? appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

At Documenta, Blurred Lines Between Art and Politics

An ambitious exhibition grapples with the conditions of our time—but can images provoke social change?

By Kaelen Wilson-Goldie

Akinbode Akinbiyi, Victoria Island, Lagos, 2006
Courtesy the artist

Some of the most provocative images in the latest edition of the quinquennial exhibition Documenta, first presented this spring and summer in Athens, show a man kneeling on top of a table with a hoop and a stick in his hands. He wears a moustache, has scars on his face, and his torso is bare. In a series of twelve black-and-white photographs, which until last month were all squished into a tight spot on an upper floor of EMST, the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens, he strikes various poses animated by anger, bemusement, and agony. The figure in the photographs could be an avant-garde artist—male, of course—experimenting with modes of conceptual performance and minimalist sculpture in the makeshift lofts and factory spaces of downtown New York in the early 1970s. In fact, he is the revolutionary anthropologist Franz Boas, mentor of everyone from Margaret Mead to Claude Lévi-Strauss, and famed for the ethical foundations he laid for the field. Though still underappreciated, Boas was also crucial for his tireless disputations against eugenics and other bogus theories of racial superiority, which, in the first half of the twentieth century, bent scientific findings to fascist doctrines.

Franz Boas posing for a figure in “Hamatsa Coming Out of Secret Room,” 1895
Photographer unknown. Courtesy the National Anthropological Archives, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution

The Boas photographs date back to the turn of the twentieth century; the photographer is unknown. The images were taken as studies for a sculptor who was helping Boas to build a diorama for what is now the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., part of the Smithsonian Institution. The diorama—one of the fabled “life group” displays for which the anthropologist became known—was meant to represent the Hamatsa, a dance performed by initiated members of the Kwakwaka’wakw tribes of northwestern Canada. Set on the threshold of the human and spirit worlds, the dance demanded performers to emerge from the “mouth” of a supernatural, cannibal creature. (Because expectations are perhaps higher at Documenta than anywhere else, a colleague who admired the inclusion of the Boas photographs quipped, to the side, “I mean, they could have shown the diorama, too. That would have been amazing.”)

Ulrich Wüst, from the series Flachland, 2013
© and courtesy Loock Galerie, Berlin

Throughout his career, Boas returned again and again to the notion that indigenous peoples, as the subjects of ethnographic study, had much to teach the anthropologists who all too often depicted them as primitive. According to the writer Claudia Roth Pierpont, who profiled Boas in The New Yorker in 2004, “he demolished the standard claim that Indian and Eskimo speakers used different sounds for the same word at different times, and showed that the purported vagueness of ‘primitive’ speech was actually a characteristic of the primitive ears of anthropologists, who transcribed different approximations of what they heard at different times.” In the context of Documenta—organized by Adam Szymczyk with a team of some two dozen curators and staged, in Kassel, where the event was established in 1955, and, for the first time, in Athens, a city beleaguered by messy politics and financial strain—the Boas photographs carry many curatorial assertions and arguments, about art’s role in reckoning with colonialism, injustice, and conflict.

Hans Eijkelboom, Par 79 October 16, 2006 Boulevard Haussmann, from the series Paris, 2007
Courtesy the artist

The Boas photographs are also emblematic of an exhibition that draws on photography both for its record-keeping, archival function, and for its malleability. As a medium, photography is uniquely fit to capture the process of long term artistic pursuits, such as Hans Ejikelboom’s dizzyingly repetitive, typological photographs of street fashion from the 1970s until today, which double as a ruminative and sustained critique of global capitalism. Ejikelboom’s Photo Notes 1992–2017, on view in Kassel’s Stadtmuseum, brings direct, almost overwhelming evidence of his project into the exhibition space. But at Documenta, other such labor-intensive projects often, by necessity, happen far outside of the museums or galleries where people otherwise encounter them, learn about how they transpired, and consider what they mean, and so the work enters those places as small pieces of a much larger puzzle.

Ulrich Wüst, from Stadtbilder (Citybuilder),1980–83
© the artist and courtesy Loock Galerie, Berlin

The archival function of photography in this Documenta is wonderfully represented in the pairing of archival material showcasing Maya Deren’s research on voodoo rituals in Haiti with a portrait of the voodoo painter Andre Pierre, whom Deren met in the 1940s. Photography as a record of long term projects finds expression in two expansive series by Moyra Davey and Akinbode Akinbiyi, which register, respectively, transmissions through the mail system and public space. A bit of both applications—the archive and the time-based study—comes through in Douglas Gordon’s intriguing film on Jonas Mekas, I Had Nowhere To Go (2016), which relies so heavily on the black space between barely moving images that it might well be a series of photographs.

Ahlam Shibli, Untitled (Heimatno. 27), Nordhessen, Germany, 2016–17
Rathaus Kassel, March 3, 2017. Murat Çakır’s presence as a translator is required at the wedding of Çiğdem Yalcin and Göksel Akgül at Kassel City Hall because the groom, originating from Izmir in Turkey, doesn’t speak German. The young people met during the bride’s vacation in Turkey and decided to establish themselves at the center of her life. Mr. Akgül will work in Kassel at the bride’s father’s advertising agency. Mr. Çakır considers this photograph of the wedding ceremony important because the presence of the translator demonstrates that Germany is, and has been for long a time despite all political denial, a country of immigrants. The bride’s father is called Hüseyin Yalcin and belongs to the second generation of guest workers. The witnesses are Jessica Seitz and Senem Korkmaz
© and courtesy the artist

The works on view in Kassel’s Neue Gallery plot out a notably coherent argument and worked, for me, as the key to unlocking the meaning of this two-city, seventy-venue exhibition. Woven into the Neue Gallery display are Tina Modotti’s photographs of a radical Indian agronomist exiled to revolutionary Mexico who was experimenting with wheat production, and Sunil Janah’s photographs of the Bengal famine in 1945, a documentary project he undertook alongside Margaret Bourke-White. Extending a thread that runs throughout Documenta, these works explore the effects of hardship and hunger. In the Neue Neue Gallery, Kassel’s old Brutalist post office, two very different, but equally ambitious, photography projects occupy large spaces on the upper and lower floors. Upstairs, Ulrich Wüst’s black-and-white photographs of abandoned East German cityscapes before the fall of the Berlin Wall are classical and restrained, yet packed with drama and tension. Downstairs, Ahlam Shibli’s portraits of successive waves of immigrants to Kassel tell, in their extensive captions, a rich and complex history of assimilation, rejection, homesickness, and shocking violence.

Gauri Gill, Untitled, from the series Acts of Appearance, 2015–ongoing
Courtesy the artist

But photography as a tool of contemporary art shimmers in Gauri Gill’s Acts of Appearance (2015–ongoing), a series of lush, large-scale color portraits of the residents of a village in Maharashtra, which is known for making Adivasi masks. Instead of requesting the likenesses of gods and demons, however, Gill asked the residents—including the master mask-makers Subhas and Bhagavan Dharam Kadu, their families, and fellow volunteers—to make masks that portray their own lives. Then, she painstakingly orchestrated medium-format portraits of the makers wearing their masks in everyday settings. The resulting images unfurl narratives—vast commentaries on time, leisure, work, pleasure, hopes, dreams, fears, and futures—without uttering a word. Gill’s photographs occupy the same threshold between human and spirit as the Boas photographs enacting the Hamatsa dance, and depict the frozen moment of an elaborate performance to be a powerful—and politically consequential—thing indeed.

Artur Żmijewski, still from Realism, 2017
Courtesy the artist and Foksal Gallery Foundation, Warsaw

Around the corner from Wüst’s photographs is a room filled with a six-screen video installation by the Polish artist Artur Żmijewski. His work is as galvanizing in Kassel as it was in Athens, where he showed the video Glimpse (2016–17), a silent, black-and-white excursion into the evacuated refugee camps of Calais, among others. The film walks a fine line between documentation and provocation, exposure and voyeurism: Żmijewski riffles through the belongings that people have left behind, daubs a black man’s face with white paint, and hands a broom to another man as if to put him to work. Żmijewski’s work in Kassel, Realism (2017), shows six men with amputated limbs, moving about their days, exercising, going to work, and returning home. The films, both silent, were shot on 16mm film and transferred to video; both toggle between moments of pathos, beauty, and pure repulsion. At times, Żmijewski nearly seems to push viewers away.

Artur Żmijewski, Realism, 2017. Six-channel video. Installation view at Documenta 14, Kassel
Courtesy the artist and Foksal Gallery Foundation, Warsaw

Żmijewski’s films capture the essence of Documenta 14, and epitomize the role of photography—and, by extension, related styles of filmmaking—throughout the sprawling exhibition. Adam Szymczyk and his curatorial team appear relentlessly concerned with pulling together two modes of image making: the document of an action and the action as art. If the argument posed by the theme of this Documenta, “Learning from Athens,” is to urge us all to become political actors, Szymczyk’s treatment of photography seems to insist that images must occupy our social and political lives. Following the line of photographs from Athens to Kassel, art and politics are endlessly intertwined.

Kaelen Wilson-Goldie is a writer, critic, and contributing editor of Bidoun.

Documenta 14 was on view in Athens from April 8–July 16, and is on view in Kassel, Germany, from June 6–September 17, 2017.

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