Aperture's Blog, page 111

A Readymade World in the Heart of the Country

In a studio outside of Cape Town, photographer Nico Krijno refashions sculpture and performance.

By Matthew Leifheit

Nico Krijno, Edible plants growing outside my studio, 2016
Courtesy the artist

Douglas Sirk once said, “I’ve always trusted my audience to have imagination, or else they should get out of the cinema.” Nico Krijno, an artist who lives with his wife and young daughter on a farm outside of Cape Town, South Arica, seems to follow Sirk’s plea for the indirect, the open-ended, the gleefully imaginative. A selection of his photographs, characterized by botanical motifs and emphasizing Krijno’s uniquely lush mode of fracturing and flattening space, was featured in Aperture’s “Platform Africa” issue. In the accompanying essay, Sara Knelman wrote, “With a background in theater and film, Krijno is more inclined to invent new worlds than record this one.” And it’s true—a sense of play and a freedom of space permeates this work, but it’s devoid of specific geography, especially as geography might relate to a clearly defined politic. The work provides no answers; instead, it generates new and endless questions.

I first started speaking with Krijno in 2014 after admiring his work online, and eventually wrote the foreword to his first book of photographs, Synonym Studies (2015), which was subsequently was shortlisted for the Aperture Foundation-Paris Photo PhotoBook Awards. Since then, I’ve lived for the publications he’s been releasing on an almost yearly basis, as well as his presence on Instagram, where, with casual nonchalance, he releases scads of photos of astonishing quality and range.

Nico Krijno, Conductor, from The Fluid Right Edge, 2017
Courtesy the artist

Matthew Leifheit: What’s going on in your life?

Nico Krijno: I live out on a farm, an hour outside of Cape Town. I guess the move was brought on after the baby came, we just needed a change, and we felt it would be the best place to raise a child, which it is! The idea was to slowly migrate from the city, but life had other plans, so we made the move. It’s idyllic, but also very tough, and can be very testing on a relationship when two people are in such close proximity 24/7 while we are raising our daughter together.

It’s also slightly tricky to be based here and to make work from such a rural setting. I’m cut off from a face-to-face peer group to talk about work with. I think that’s important, the mirroring. It energizes. I don’t want to be the guy who goes to all the openings; I don’t want that life. For me it’s just about making the work, and I think the rest can be a distraction. There might come a time in the future where I would like to live in the “Big Smoke” again, or at least close to the real smoke. I don’t have a gallery in South Africa, and I don’t do a lot of commercial work here.

Nico Krijno, Boys in pool with masks, 2014
Courtesy the artist

Leifheit: What relationship does your work have to where you are?

Krijno: Because the work is so self-involved and personal, where I am plays a huge role. I think about it a lot, and I haven’t come up with a good answer yet. When I was in London recently, I had a show, and I was walking through the streets every day. It was familiar because I used to live there. But it was also seen through updated eyes, and I thought, What would my work be like if I still lived there? Because when I lived there, I was doing completely different things. But I was just finding my feet. I was making videos, and I was shooting models in my bedroom to pay the rent. If I was living in London now, I wouldn’t have all the time I have. And I do like washing my eyes in nature. I like the peace and quiet and the wildness of living this close to nature, not just looking for parking or free Wi-Fi. But it’s very important to keep a good balance.

Nico Krijno, Sculpture Study as Wooden Performance, 2017
Courtesy the artist

Leifheit: “Washing your eyes in nature”? Is that a thing people say in South Africa or did you just come up with that?

Krijno: Just feels right. Must have heard it somewhere.

Leifheit: From an outsider’s perspective, it does seem like you have a lot of space.

Krijno: I work from this tiny old cottage, probably an old farm worker’s cottage. It’s not very big, and when the sun is out I try to build my setups outside. I’m so happy to be able to do that. Because the light’s fantastic and I can schlep my lights and flashes outside with me. And when you’re in a city, and you have a tiny little studio on a busy street, you can’t have all of that.

Because I have the luxury of space, I’ve got a lot of junk and props and materials piled in my studio yard that I mine from. I go to the dump a lot, and I collect stuff—objects that speak to me, old wood, building rubble, et cetera. And they sort of amass outside. When I’m finished I take them back to the dump. People look at me strangely, like, Why are you taking things from the dump and bringing them back again?

I also like this life because it gets me to do things like gardening and building. I do a lot of physical labor, such as chopping wood or mixing concrete. Those are the things I want to be doing, they get me away from the desk, and also away from the studio. I want to be doing these things that I think we’ve all lost, which are important. These things give me a lot of time to process and think about what I’m working on.

Nico Krijno, Migonne in the flowers from above, 2013
Courtesy the artist

Leifheit: In your work, there is so much variation: there are things happening outside, in the studio, and in between—and there are things constructed in Photoshop. Everything could fit into the world of your vision and your work, which I find very liberating and exciting. You also make the tools of Photoshop apparent sometimes, like Lucas Blalock does. In the world we’re living in, appropriation and even sampling seem like dated terms to me. This is all material in your purview, material that you make your own and exceed. And there’s something exciting about that.

Krijno: The variation is what’s important to me. It’s all about a building up of a visual rhythm. Really it’s just the way my head works. Someone once told me in critique that my work is “too much.” There’s just too much variety in the work: a face, a table an object, some flowers. Where does it begin and where does it end? How are people supposed to engage and access the work? Maybe this person was looking for a clear and linear series—the kind where there are fifteen essentially similar images to really hit the point home. There’s work out there that does that to great effect, but I just don’t think in those straight lines. Maybe I think in circles that link up, forming some kind of Technicolor dream chain. I like to show an idea, and what also lies behind that idea, and sits right next to that idea.

Nico Krijno, The Porthole, spread from the photobook New Gestures, 2015
Courtesy the artist

Leifheit: Are the books you’ve published, Synonym Study and New Gestures, and the unpublished books you’ve shown me, The Fluid Right Edge 1 & 2, the core of what you’re doing?

Krijno: Yes, I think books are extremely important to the process, to making sense of the work as an outsider and to myself as well. They are the definitive lines in the sand for me. Because I don’t work in series, everything sort of bleeds into each other.

Leifheit: You make sculptures, too.

Krijno: I make sculptures, but I’m really just interested in photographing them. I’m interested in how the meanings of cast off objects can change. Dousing them in paint and removing their original use completely. And I am interested in fooling the eye. You’re not sure what you’re looking at, a painting or a photograph. I like the trickery, but I do make it quite obvious.

Leifheit: So part of the meaning of what you’re doing comes from the use of readymade objects, and of mashing them into something new?

Krijno: My work is very, shall we say, busy? But I don’t like to live with a lot of objects and trinkets and things. I prefer the photograph of them. I prefer a photograph of a sculpture to the sculpture itself.

Nico Krijno, Sculpture Study as Self-Portrait, from The Fluid Right Edge, 2015
Courtesy the artist

Leifheit: Yes, there’s the flatness, and a reductive quality to all photographs, but there’s a sense of democracy that comes with that. I also noticed that your butt recurs a lot in one of these new books, which is really working for me. And you’ve been in your photos before. How are you using yourself in the work?

Krijno: I’m starting to do it more and more. I see the work as a performance, with the camera as the viewer. I’m very physical in the studio; it’s like sculptural gymnastics. I’m in my body, and I feel it’s important to break that wall and become a sculptural object in the photograph. I don’t think about it at all; it just feels right.

Leifheit: A sculptor once told me, “I’m just trying to keep my practice one step ahead of what I can understand or explain.” With photography, if you allow yourself to be present in a situation and react to it, you can learn from what the camera takes in.

Krijno: That’s what happens when I’m editing a book. I see two images that are literally bounding off one another, and they might have been made in different years. I make so much work, and there really is something in the sum of the parts that happens when you look at all the images together. I have a lot of critique for the books I’ve made in the past, but I’m just trying to make better books. That’s why I’m making a book in two volumes. And I like to keep things simple when I make a book, in terms of the layout.

Nico Krijno, Sculpture Figure Study with Clay, from New Gestures, 2015
Courtesy the artist

Leifheit: It’s about the photographs.

Krijno: Yeah, it’s not about the design. It’s about the photographs. They’re picture books. And the works are not going to be propped up by any text, because I don’t think like that. I really think in images. It would be great if someone looks at the work and writes a great piece. But then I find that these are the only words that enter the work. Because the work is so abstract, sometimes these are the only words that stick. I find that it’s best to just ask questions, and not have too many answers.

Leifheit: Photographs are always, in the end, a mystery, and I think your books end up that way, too. They are mysteries I want to engage with.

Krijno: That’s what I want them to be. My images are part of the “Platform Africa” issue of Aperture, which is an honor, but somewhat strange to me that I’m included in that conversation. Because I don’t work in the typical South African tradition like some of the well-known and respected South African artists—like Zanele Muholi, Pieter Hugo or David Goldblatt. Their work is extremely important; I just don’t make that kind of work.

Nico Krijno, Two Telephones, 2013
Courtesy the artist

Leifheit: I expect the editors wanted someone who wasn’t going to fit peoples’ expectations of what photography in South Africa might be. I don’t actually think all art needs to be an activist project, which seems to be a common sentiment these days.

Krijno: But especially in South Africa, that’s the sort of the narrative that gets driven at the university level. Which is why I never studied photography here. I studied filmmaking and acting. You’re told that if you want to make it, you have to talk about the white guilt. The past, you know?

We live in a traumatized country that will take a century to heal itself. And I’m grateful for the local artists engaging with these issues in direct ways. But I don’t see myself as a South African artist. I’m just an artist. And being here feeds into the work, but I can’t post-conceptualize and overlay issues between black and white on my work. Because I know it so well, these textures and these people. And I deal with it on a daily basis. I am just trying to reinvent the world and make it strange and new again.

Matthew Leifheit is the publisher of MATTE 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 A Readymade World in the Heart of the Country appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

John Divola’s Upside Down Formalism

With dark humor, the photographer plays with perception, space, and surface.

By Travis Diehl

John Divola, Untitled 90UJ, 1990
Courtesy the artist and Gallery Luisotti

The titles of the two series by John Divola currently on view at Gallery Luisotti in Los Angeles could hardly be starker: the Five Prints Portfolio (1987), outdone for emptiness by Untitled (1990). These titles outline the bare minimum of photographic formalism—flat, rectangular prints—which his work then attempts to pry apart. Each of the five vertical photographs in Untitled has a vellum-smooth surface, mottled with abstract whites and grays. On closer inspection, the pictures show the brushed-on unevenness common in “alternative process” photographs, as if the chemistry had been slopped on by hand. Ditto the uneven top edge of three of the five images, which resemble mesas on a horizon. In fact, the subject of the photographs turns out to be a backdrop smudged with flour; what seems to be ragged tiers are actually brush strokes along the curled edge of the paper, held to white panels with pushpins. Divola introduces a confusion between additive and subtractive, positive and negative; it’s a “process” photograph, after all—if not quite an “alternative” one. The series offers a two-dimensional subject, a grisaille abstraction—the texture of a ridged, dripping black surface bearing its own dust-thin layer of gray marks—that then peels into depth.

John Divola, Untitled 90UC (detail), 1990
Courtesy the artist and Gallery Luisotti

Divola, born in Los Angeles, is known for photographs that document his vandalism-style interventions in abandoned buildings and other interstitial spaces with a wry eye towards painting’s collapse into photography. In the mid-1990s, he made a series titled As Far as I Could Get, comprising vertical landscape shots of a lone, distant, running figure with his back to the lens. Divola set the camera’s timer, then sprinted down its field of view. No matter how much distance Divola puts between himself and the film plane, the image always snaps flat. The grayscale images in Untitled, are also remnants of a weird performance. The clouds of grayish white that drift across the compositions, formless and out of focus, are also the main formal element of each: fogging the black ground, puffing up the scene into space-time. The suspension of this dust cloud places Divola’s series (like many of his others) within the space of an action. The flour hangs like a kind of fleeting sculpture, a distribution of matter in midair—and thus points to the gesture that put it there. How strange, artificial, and temporary is art, Divola seems to say. His dry titles take on a gallows humor.

John Divola, Flying/Falling, 1984
Courtesy the artist and Gallery Luisotti

In the Five Prints Portfolio, with brilliant dye-print color, Divola emphasizes “prints” and their icy flatness. Near the center of each square frame, hemmed in by the foliage of a forest or backyard, are pale, paper-like objects saturated by colored light. A cutout of a howling wolf—Wolf (1983)—is lit with red, and the strip of sky at the frame’s top—an echo of Untitled—burns orange. In Flying/Falling (1984) a human silhouette plummets toward a smoky pink patch of depressed reeds—or else they’re blown upwards, as if by a strong wind or a small explosion, by the pink strobe’s pop. This indeterminacy between flat and round, dead and alive, is the core vertigo of the photograph. In Cyclone (1984) a little cone, blasted with magenta light, stands upright in a spot of bare ground in the woods. The light source is visible: a flash, wrapped with a gel, hanging from the tip of a c-stand, which is not so different from the bare branches around it. Red light fills a branch, canting across the top right corner of the frame, as well as some of the leaves in the middle ground. But it’s a sunlit sky that punches cyan through the background. We’re in the woods, but not too deep.

Travis Diehl is a writer based in Los Angeles.

John Divola: Physical Evidence is on view at Gallery Luisotti, Los Angeles, through September 9, 2017.

 

The post John Divola’s Upside Down Formalism appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

John Divola’s Upside-Down Formalism

With dark humor, the photographer plays with perception, space, and surface.

By Travis Diehl

John Divola, Untitled 90UJ, 1990
Courtesy the artist and Gallery Luisotti

The titles of the two series by John Divola currently on view at Gallery Luisotti in Los Angeles could hardly be starker: the Five Prints Portfolio (1987), outdone for emptiness by Untitled (1990). These titles outline the bare minimum of photographic formalism—flat, rectangular prints—which his work then attempts to pry apart. Each of the five vertical photographs in Untitled has a vellum-smooth surface, mottled with abstract whites and grays. On closer inspection, the pictures show the brushed-on unevenness common in “alternative process” photographs, as if the chemistry had been slopped on by hand. Ditto the uneven top edge of three of the five images, which resemble mesas on a horizon. In fact, the subject of the photographs turns out to be a backdrop smudged with flour; what seems to be ragged tiers are actually brush strokes along the curled edge of the paper, held to white panels with pushpins. Divola introduces a confusion between additive and subtractive, positive and negative; it’s a “process” photograph, after all—if not quite an “alternative” one. The series offers a two-dimensional subject, a grisaille abstraction—the texture of a ridged, dripping black surface bearing its own dust-thin layer of gray marks—that then peels into depth.

John Divola, Untitled 90UC (detail), 1990
Courtesy the artist and Gallery Luisotti

Divola, born in Los Angeles, is known for photographs that document his vandalism-style interventions in abandoned buildings and other interstitial spaces with a wry eye towards painting’s collapse into photography. In the mid-1990s, he made a series titled As Far as I Could Get, comprising vertical landscape shots of a lone, distant, running figure with his back to the lens. Divola set the camera’s timer, then sprinted down its field of view. No matter how much distance Divola puts between himself and the film plane, the image always snaps flat. The grayscale images in Untitled, are also remnants of a weird performance. The clouds of grayish white that drift across the compositions, formless and out of focus, are also the main formal element of each: fogging the black ground, puffing up the scene into space-time. The suspension of this dust cloud places Divola’s series (like many of his others) within the space of an action. The flour hangs like a kind of fleeting sculpture, a distribution of matter in midair—and thus points to the gesture that put it there. How strange, artificial, and temporary is art, Divola seems to say. His dry titles take on a gallows humor.

John Divola, Flying/Falling, 1984
Courtesy the artist and Gallery Luisotti

In the Five Prints Portfolio, with brilliant dye-print color, Divola emphasizes “prints” and their icy flatness. Near the center of each square frame, hemmed in by the foliage of a forest or backyard, are pale, paper-like objects saturated by colored light. A cutout of a howling wolf—Wolf (1983)—is lit with red, and the strip of sky at the frame’s top—an echo of Untitled—burns orange. In Flying/Falling (1984) a human silhouette plummets toward a smoky pink patch of depressed reeds—or else they’re blown upwards, as if by a strong wind or a small explosion, by the pink strobe’s pop. This indeterminacy between flat and round, dead and alive, is the core vertigo of the photograph. In Cyclone (1984) a little cone, blasted with magenta light, stands upright in a spot of bare ground in the woods. The light source is visible: a flash, wrapped with a gel, hanging from the tip of a c-stand, which is not so different from the bare branches around it. Red light fills a branch, canting across the top right corner of the frame, as well as some of the leaves in the middle ground. But it’s a sunlit sky that punches cyan through the background. We’re in the woods, but not too deep.

Travis Diehl is a writer based in Los Angeles.

John Divola: Physical Evidence is on view at Gallery Luisotti, Los Angeles through September 9, 2017.

 

The post John Divola’s Upside-Down Formalism appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

10 Photographers Who Celebrate Black Identity through Fashion

“The word dandy may evoke ideas of bygone white men in waistcoats and multilayered blouses with puffy sleeves,” writes Shantrelle P. Lewis, in her new book, Dandy Lion: The Black Dandy and Street Style. Historically, dandyism has been outside the traditional tropes of masculinity—queer, in a sense—dandies also threatened the existing class structure by dressing up. A Black man employing this strategy is even more radical and subversive. By looking sharp, the Black dandy fashions a sense of pride, positivity, and self-worth that can transcend circumstances, as well as societal perceptions. He defies monolithic understandings of what it is to be a man—particularly a Black man—through a colorful and complex dance between race, class, gender, power, and style. Today, the fashion of Black dandies is more a nod to the style of their well-dressed grandfathers than the likes of Oscar Wilde or Beau Brummell. With styles as diverse as their subjects’, each of the following photographers portrays a striking relationship to dandyism.

Sara Shamsavari, Samson Soboye, 2014
Courtesy the artist

Sara Shamsavari

Sara Shamsavari has long photographed London’s Rude Boys as a way of shattering stereotypes of immigrants. Born in Tehran, Shamsavari is a British artist concerned with cultural identity and social justice. A bit of history—in England, eighteenth-century enslaved Africans were often dressed lavishly to reflect well on their owners, and they soon began personalizing those uniforms. Fast-forward to the 1960s, when waves of Black immigrants flocked to the UK from Anglophone countries in the Caribbean and West Africa, bringing their colorful and vibrant styles with them. The Rude boys were arbiters of style as soon as they arrived from Kingston, Jamaica. Modern-day Rude Boys come from all over and continue to influence global fashion.

Jody Ake, Untitled, 2003
Courtesy the artist

Jody Ake

Jody Ake, born and raised in the South but now living in Portland, Oregon, creates rare and delicate ambrotypes. Developed in the 1850s as a less-expensive alternative to the daguerreotype, the ambrotype is a labor-intensive process that requires creating, exposing, and processing an image on a glass plate over about fifteen minutes. Ake’s historic-looking portraits of twenty-first-century Black men convey self-actualization and identity. On first glance, it may even be easier to believe that the images were created in a past century than in the last decade.

Daniele Tamagni, from the series Gentlemen of Bacongo, Brazzaville, Congo, 2008
Courtesy of the artist and Marie Finaz Gallery

Daniele Tamagni

Daniele Tamagni photographs one of the oldest sartorial movements, the Sapeurs. It dates back to the late nineteenth century, when Europeans first colonized the Congo, and locals imitated their mannerisms and dress. Over the past hundred years, this cult of extravagant clothing and elegance became known as La Société des Ambianceurs et des Personnes Élégantes (The Society of Ambiance-Makers and Elegant People) or La Sape. Tamagni’s series Gentlemen of Bacongo (2009) has influenced style-based social movements around the world.

Rose Callahan, Barima Owusu-Nyantekyi at the King’s Head Club, London, 2013
Courtesy the artist

Rose Callahan

Rose Callahan has been well immersed in the world of dandyism since starting her blog The Dandy Portraits in early 2008. She explains the essential elements of dandyism: “Dressing is elevated to an art, and they have cultivated exceptional, refined personal style based in classic menswear, with a healthy dose of eccentricity and obsession. Dressing is a huge part, but it is never the whole picture. There is undoubtedly a strength of personality and a desire to cultivate a life according to one’s own rules.”

Andrew Dosunmu, Brooklyn, 2010
Courtesy the artist

Andrew Dosunmu

Photographer and filmmaker Andrew Dosunmu was born in Nigeria, moved to London as a teen, and currently lives in Brooklyn. He is deeply influenced by cinema, particularly the Senegalese filmmakers Ousmane Sembène and Djibril Diop Mambéty. His films present intimate and moving portraits of African immigrants’ stories. But, as Dosunmu explains, most projects begin with pictures: “Photos are my scrapbook. It gives me the freedom to make cinema on paper.”

Harness Hamese, V for Victory, Khumbula, 2014
Courtesy the artist

Harness Hamese

Self-taught photographer Harness Hamese belongs to Khumbula, a Johannesburg collective of vintage enthusiasts. Named after a Nguni word meaning “to remember,” the collective is inspired by the philosophy, aesthetics, and actions of anti-apartheid freedom fighters, such as Nelson Mandela and Steve Biko. Hamese explains, “We focus particularly on how our parents used to dress, and the integrity that’s attached to these expressions of individualism and independence.” His images communicate both the African past of the vintage clothes and the present of the wearers, breaking down stereotypes of what Africa was and is.

Hassan Hajjaj, Paris, 2011
© the artist and courtesy Taymour Grahne Gallery, New York

Hassan Hajjaj

Extraordinary and out-of-the-box, Hassan Hajjaj’s studio portraits show a clash of cultures, art forms, and expressions of creativity. A photographer, artist, and stylist, Hajjaj collaborates with his subjects as well as a tailor to conceptualize flamboyant ensembles through traditional clothes and suits. Hajjaj’s series is a conversation about how cultures collide and fuse—he is as influenced by Andy Warhol as he is by Malick Sidibé—and speaks to a childhood with memories of an African past and a European present. His Moroccan “rock stars” are as flashy as the commercial products that he uses to frame them.

Arteh Odjidja, Red Square, Moscow City, Russia, 2012, from the series Stranger in Moscow
© the artist and Arteh Creative

Arteh Odjidja

Arteh Odjidja’s Stranger in Moscow series tells the story of a young, African immigrant in Russia. Odjidja met Habdulay Vilhette, a young man from a small island off the coast of West Africa, at a local casting call for a fashion shoot. Odjidja became interested in what it was like for a Black man living in Russia. He fashioned him as “the stranger” in this visual essay, shot in an exquisite Ozwald Boateng suit, in which Vilhette’s dark complexion and six foot three inch height made for a striking juxtaposition against a mainly white Moscow.

Rog Walker, Self Portrait with Bee, 2015
Courtesy the artist

Rog and Bee Walker

Rog and Bee Walker have the makings of a timeless love story. They are celebrated as photographers, muses, style mavens, and sartorialists. On their first date, they went to see the documentary Bill Cunningham New York (2010) and, a year later, Rog proposed. Rog is best-known for his collaboration with the creative agency Street Etiquette, while Bee’s practice ranges from social documentary to lifestyle photography.

Omar Victor Diop, Alt + Shift + Ego, 2013
© the artist and courtesy of Galerie MAGNIN-A, Paris

Omar Victor Diop

Senegalese photographer and artist Omar Victor Diop situates his subjects in settings reminiscent of those of his Francophone West African predecessors Malick Sidibé and Seydou Keïta, who produced studio portraits of young, progressive West Africans in the 1960s and ’70s. His bold use of color, however, adds a contemporary twist. In one image, a set of twins, or a subject and his replica—one traditional, one Western—sit perfectly poised, their heads covered, in blue batik jackets.

Dandy Lion: The Black Dandy and Street Style (2017) is published by Aperture.

 

The post 10 Photographers Who Celebrate Black Identity through Fashion appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

All That Paradise Allows

In Crimea and the Caribbean, Nicholas Muellner’s new photobook is a tropical gothic of seduction and violence.

By Adam Bell

Nicholas Muellner, Untitled, from In Most Tides an Island, 2017
Courtesy the artist

Gracefully marrying image and text, Nicholas Muellner’s photobook In Most Tides an Island (2017) is a poignant meditation on loneliness, love, and isolation in our contemporary world. Structured in twelve chapters, the book tells two parallel but related stories: the real-life struggles of closeted, gay men in provincial Russia and Ukraine, yearning for a connection and love they can’t openly express; and the invented life of a solitary woman on a Caribbean island. Equal parts document, diary, and fictional invention, In Most Tides an Island defies easy categorization. Like Muellner’s previous books—The Amnesia Pavilions (2011) and The Photograph Commands Indifference (2009)—the work deftly combines image and text into a unique form, while, at the same time, poetically questioning the limits of each. The book’s parallel stories ultimately converge to offer a portrait of the heartrending reality of our disconnected, yet networked lives.

Nicholas Muellner, Untitled, from In Most Tides an Island, 2017
Courtesy the artist

Adam Bell: You describe yourself as an artist who “operates at the intersection of photography and writing.” How did you come to this relationship and how do you see it working in In Most Tides an Island?

Nicholas Muellner: I came to that intersection in my work by way of a circle: it’s precisely where I started. Long before I knew myself as an artist, I loved following threads of language, and I loved making pictures. They were better places to live than inside myself—richer, safer, more satisfying. Simultaneously, and for as long as I can remember, I have been both thrilled and heartbroken by the inviolable separateness of each human consciousness, no matter the physical or emotional proximity. For me, these facts were inseparable. Words and images became like two lovers lying next to each other in bed who can never know the other’s mind. And, at some point, without a formal declaration, I made it my life’s work—what an absurd claim!—to reconcile those two fraught lovers, by making a romance of the space between them.

That’s a lie. My work never hopes to reconcile language and image. More accurately, it deploys their unbridgeable autonomies as both a means and a metaphor. In the new book, the reticence and stillness of the photographs often amplifies the loneliness and repression of the written narratives. Other times, the emotion of an image confesses what cannot be expressed in words. The language and the photographs collapse into disjunctive double exposures and create a broken double vision, moving in and out of sensory alignment.

Nicholas Muellner, Untitled, from In Most Tides an Island, 2017
Courtesy the artist

Bell: The book combines two seemingly disparate bodies of work—encounters with closeted gay men living in the former Soviet Union, and a fictional woman living on a Caribbean island. The latter includes images from a project from 2013 titled The Nautiloid Heart, which you’ve exhibited, but haven’t published as its own book. How did these two projects come together? And what made you realize that this older work had a home as a key element of the new book?

Muellner: The work that has had an exhibition life as The Nautiloid Heart did not seem, in its original form, to call for a book. The tiny island where I photographed had passed, with little consideration, under the negligent rule of numerous colonial overlords. My spectral investigation was concerned with establishing what I call a “tropical gothic” mood through a particular photographic language: a beautiful seduction with secret violence at its core, echoing dark histories of exploitation and neglect beneath a canopy of waving palms.

The experience of photographing subsequently inspired an accompanying work of fiction. And, as I wrote, a different kind of narrative emerged: one about the construction of solitude, and the desire to penetrate the consciousness of a profoundly unavailable other. But the fiction and the photographs did not make a complete object, as each opened on ideas that were not echoed in the other. To become a book, I knew that a third element would need to emerge.

At the same time, I had started developing correspondences with gay men in various isolated and provincial parts of Russia and Ukraine. I perpetually think I am about to become a traditional journalist or documentarian, and this was a form of background research. But, when I began corresponding with several gay men in Crimea, on the unwitting verge of Russian invasion, a web of sudden possibility emerged. In my unfinished island fiction, I had attributed a dream of my own—almost unaltered—to the primary character, in the form of a bedtime story: the vision of an “almost-island” where beautiful men nurtured and murdered narrative. I suspected that the Crimean Peninsula was that almost-island, and that I needed to find those men.

Nicholas Muellner, Untitled, from In Most Tides an Island, 2017
Courtesy the artist

Bell: Central to the work, and the title, is the metaphor of an island, which stands for the places where, and ways in which, we connect, create community, or find shelter, but also remain isolated. This idea has resonance for the closeted men who live in a society that is deeply homophobic, but also for the fictional woman. It’s also a more universal experience. Can you talk about the significance of the title?

Muellner: I wanted a title for this book that signaled melodrama—think Douglas Sirk’s films All That Heaven Allows (1955), Written on the Wind (1956)—filtered through the muffled cry of a frightened heart. Emotional realism, for this project, entails caveats and compromise, both of which are alien to melodrama. The figure of the island has been central to this project throughout. It is, as you say, both a site of refuge and a place of entrapment. The island on which I photographed has served as a plantation-prison for slaves, a haven for their descendants, a hideout for European pirates and indigenous Caribs, a jail for Nicaraguan political prisoners, and a place for Western hippies to drop out. Exile and escape; imprisonment and safety. A more complicated dialectic than we might imagine.

The island is an isolated point from which the entire world can be imagined. Everything is out there, beyond the ocean horizon. The island is also the individual, home alone with her laptop.

Nicholas Muellner, Untitled, from In Most Tides an Island, 2017
Courtesy the artist

Bell: From Moscow Plastic Arts to The Amnesia Pavilions, much of your work has looked at the former Soviet Union and Russia. You first visited in 1990 and 1992, and have returned numerous times over the years, often searching for friends, revisiting cities, and, in this latest book, meeting and interviewing men you befriended online. What about this region attracts you?

Muellner: The closest thing to a valid answer would be: an accident of history. When I first went to the then Soviet Union, in 1990, it was in the throes of dissolution, and I was a heedlessly open, American twenty-year-old with a rough command of Russian, traveling through newly-opened provincial cities. Everyone wanted to talk to me, and I wanted to talk to everyone. That first trip produced an intense relationship between me and that culture. Relationships compel, even as things fail, change, go dark, morph.

Traveling to Russia always forces me to put my own brutal, angry, beautiful, benighted country in relief. The two nations represent two synthetic, conceptual ideas of identity, and all the wild distortions those fantastical nationhoods entail. Both identities have always been outrageous fictions, forced into reality through violence and projective imagination. That’s the fascination, for me, of current US–Russia relations: seeing both countries project onto each other again, and seeing how these projections create policies, actions, and chaos around the globe.

Nicholas Muellner, Untitled, from In Most Tides an Island, 2017
Courtesy the artist

Bell: As much as the work speaks about the lives of others and addresses a specific place, it’s also intensely personal. You never disappear as narrator, journalist, or artist. While all work is autobiographical, your use of text foregrounds this quality, and places you in a central and, often, autobiographical or confessional role. Was this a position you assumed easily, or is it one that arose naturally out of your desire to merge image and text?

Muellner: Your question reveals something obvious that I’ve never articulated to myself as such: I am drawn to using language because it allows for a kind of autobiography—a directly personal expression that is not available in my image-making, at least not in the same way.

Looking compulsively at Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1986) when I was nineteen electrified me. I was so gripped by that expression of erotic, frank, immediate visual intimacy. But I also learned, eventually, that I was nothing like that. My version of the personal, of processing intimacy, includes the awareness of doubts, paradoxes, and distancing effects. I am a middle child, prone to serially forgetting and re-learning that I have a body; born into the poetics of ambivalence . . . and language allows me to leverage that.

Counterintuitively, I think I found my way to a personal voice through anthropology. When I was in college, on the cusp of the ’90s, the field was in a state of paralyzed doubt, fueled by postcolonial critique. The necessary questioning of an outsider’s right or ability to assert any authoritative truth about another culture had brought it to that point. But unlike my despondent anthropologist classmates, I realized, as an aspiring artist, that framing my interest within the distortions of my limited perspective allowed for a different kind of insight, a relational discovery grounded in autobiography. What I learned, to my great liberation, was: disclose your position, and make pictures from within the exposed frame of your own experience. The audience then has license to let you take them by the hand, with arrogance and humility, and lead them into your images. I use the personal in my work because, as you say, all work is already autobiography—because I am already there, holding the curtain.

Adam Bell is a photographer and writer based in New York. 

In Most Tides an Island is published by Self Publish Be Happy Editions.

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Inside Aperture Connect Meet-Up with Photobook Collector David Solo

David Solo shares his photobook collection with Aperture Connect Members. Photo by Carly Lovejoy

On June 19, Aperture Connect Members joined Aperture trustee David Solo at his Brooklyn home for the second Connect Meet-Up of 2017.

Solo led a special tour and discussion about collecting photobooks, traveling to artbook fairs, and how his love for collecting books began. It was a treat to look through Solo’s vast library, which includes remarkable publications such as and everything becomes nothing again by Léa Habourdin, a scroll-format photobook by Rinko Kawauchi, and Fotografie1956 Prague by Josef Sudek. Aperture staff and Solo shared their love of photobooks, both contemporary and rare, and Members were exposed to a firsthand look at how photobook collections start, how they are organized, and how they are cared for—and witnessed the joy of living with books.

Aperture Connect is a dynamic group of engaged supporters (ages 21 to 37), residing in the New York Tri-State area, who seek to further their knowledge and understanding of photography, publishing, and the international photo community.

Click here to become an Aperture Connect Member today and to receive an invite to the next meet-up this September!

For more information on Aperture’s membership program, visit our website or contact the membership office at 212.946.7108 / membership@aperture.org.

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In Cameroon, A New Platform for Emerging Photographers

Max Mbakop, from the BMX series, 2016. Courtesy the artist and YaPhoto

Yvon Ngassam, from the Bandjoun series, 2017. Courtesy the artist and YaPhoto

Steve Mvondo, from the series Crown of Beauty, 2016. Courtesy the artist and YaPhoto

Romuald Dikoume, Untitled, 2017. Courtesy the artist and YaPhoto

Blaise Djilo, Feou Kake, 2012–2016. Courtesy the artist and YaPhoto

YaPhoto (Yaoundé Photo Network) is a new platform for photographers and lens-based artists in Cameroon. Launched in 2016 in Yaoundé by two Cameroonians, Christine Eyene and Landry Mbassi, the platform spotlights emerging photographers and exhibits their work both locally and internationally, starting with Tokyo in August 2017. “The idea of YaPhoto is to show what photographers are doing in and outside of Cameroon, and to provide a space for photographers to talk about their work,” Eyene said.

Earlier this summer, AMET (Elsa M’bala) sat down with Eyene and Mbassi to hear about the story behind this dynamic new collaboration. Listen to their conversation below.

Christine Eyene, an art historian, critic, and curator, is a Research Fellow in Contemporary Art at University of Central Lancashire. Landry Mbassi is a visual artist and curator based in Yaoundé. AMET (Elsa M’bala) is an artist, musician, and performer based in Berlin and Yaoundé.

This feature 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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Does the Venice Biennale Have a Problem with Photography?

At the world’s most prestigious contemporary art exhibition, photographers are on the margins.

By Annika Klein

Tibor Hajas, Flesh Painting No. 4, 1978. Photography by János Vető
© Estate of Tibor Hajas and János Vető
Courtesy Ludwig Museum, Budapest

“Taking photographs is an action,” János Vető noted in 1973, referring to his collaboration with Hungarian performance artist Tibor Hajas, currently on view at the 57th Venice Biennale. In their 1970s photographic series, Surface Torture, each piece shows a gridded progression of images, invoking the narrative of a film. In a particularly unnerving sequence, a dark figure against a black background pulls white goo—a mask? paint?—off his face. The gritty, high contrast images give the illusion that Hajas is peeling away his own skin. Taking a picture is an integral part of the performance, not just a tool for documentation: each action was performed for the camera. The two mediums work well together, and neither is upstaged. The wall text, however, tells another story: Hajas’s name appears at the top, where the artists’ names are usually listed, and Vető is relegated to a secondary status, appearing, in significantly smaller type, three lines below.

Almost every time photography appears in the Venice Biennale, especially in the marquee exhibition, VIVA ARTE VIVA, it’s either in service of something else—performance, collage, film, books—or it’s one element of a larger, multimedia project. Out of eighty-seven national pavilions, only three exhibitions are dedicated solely to a photographer: Australia, Belgium, and Poland. Perhaps this dearth of photography is a reflection of a contemporary art market that favors painting and sculpture. But the argument for photography as art was made, and won, a long time ago. At the Biennale, with its multistory sculptures and flashy installations, photographs alone can’t compete with the spectacle. Which isn’t to say that photography doesn’t work well in conjunction with other modes of art making, such as with Hajas’s performances. But, too often, it gets lost in the fray. Genre-bending multimedia work—where most new art seems to be headed—can be timely and powerful, and at the Biennale, there is painting and sculpture aplenty. Why is photography still denied the same consideration?

Mladen Stilinovic, Artist at Work Again, 2011
Courtesy Branka Stipancic

VIVA ARTE VIVA, a two-part extravaganza curated by Christine Macel, begins at the Giardini and continues into the Arsenale. Immediately upon entering the Giardini, visitors are faced with ten prints by Serbian artist Mladen Stilinović. In the first eight, Artist at Work (1978), Stilinović lies in bed in different positions. The last two, taken three decades later, Artist at Work Again (2011) show Stilinović slumbering on a bench in a white cube exhibition space. Stilinović appears to ask, how does a Western culture that values productivity over health and leisure affect art making? While these pictures offer a witty critique, Stilinović is a Conceptual artist, not a photographer. Conceptual art pushed for the dematerialization of the art object, to make the idea more valuable than the object. Appropriately, the prints don’t offer much in the way of formal accomplishment or visual pleasure. In 1978, this approach to photography would have been exciting. Now, it’s a one-liner, an amuse bouche for the more important work that follows.

Hajra Waheed, A Short Film 1-321 (detail), 2014
Courtesy of the Artist

Hajra Waheed’s piece A Short Film, 1–321 (2014) combines photography with archival material. Here, and in two adjacent works, the artist has collaged postcards into hundreds of blank slides, placed in neat rows on a wooden shelving unit. (A Short Film, 1–321 also includes two framed works comprised of cut photographs on cork, which are not on view.) Waheed grew up in Dhahran, a gated, residential compound for Saudi ARAMCO employees. According to the artist, the company strictly regulated civilian use of cameras and video equipment, but surveillance was pervasive. Waheed’s work often concerns geopolitics, and migration in particular, but the links to these topics can be difficult to trace. This lyrical and poignant work is part of a larger, multimedia project, Sea Change (2011–ongoing), sourced from the same set of photographic postcards from the 1930s and ’40s, and set in the Western Himalayas. A black-and-white landscape, often a lonely hill or mountain, juts into each frame; the rest is clear glass, representing the gaps in the story. The incorporation of photography works well here because the project itself is about who has the right to make images.

Thu Van Tran, Untitled, 2017. Installation at the 57th Venice Biennale
Courtesy La Biennale di Venezia

Elsewhere in the Biennale’s main exhibition, however, photography is often lost among the many materials in various multimedia projects. Thu-Van Tran, a French Vietnamese artist, presented an installation concerned with the global, geopolitical history of rubber trees. This topic could be a fascinating point of departure but, instead, veers into a clichés of contemporary art: large-scale installations, vaguely global projects, and a toothless critique of the West. Tran’s project is too broad in both idea and execution. Rubber casts of rubber trees lie atop coffin-like crates, and a dual projection video flickers nearby. Superficially, the installation looks polished, professional. Plus, it helpfully takes up a large amount of space in the capacious Arsenale. Candy-colored drip painted walls form the background for gigantic photograms, which resemble Anna Atkins prints from the mid-nineteenth century—but without her dexterity, grace, or eye for composition. There are too many mediums at play, and Tran has unfortunately dragged photography into the mix.

Eileen Quinlan, Super Moon, 2014
Courtesy the artist and Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York

WithinVIVA ARTE VIVA, Eileen Quinlan’s pictures of nudes were one of the few examples of freestanding photographs meant to be seen on their own. The seven prints, which are not a formal series, show her post-pregnancy body, as well as that of another young mother. Yet the wall text apologizes for this inclusion by explaining that Quinlan and her artistic peers, “felt the urgency to free the photographic medium of its technical hyper potential,” which sounds nonsensical. The didactic reads as if a camera were a shackle, from which the artist is desperately trying to liberate herself. Pushing the boundaries of the medium, and making images that are messy and unique, are both older strategies than the crisp, consumable images of the past one hundred years: think of wet-plate daguerreotypes, or Man Ray’s Surrealist photograms. Still, Quinlan’s subject works well with the dripping, black-and-white presentation. Achieving this effect by using vintage Polaroid film, she explained in an interview with Marie Sarre, “As the bodies depicted are undergoing the ravages of time, of child-birth, and even surgery, the film itself is also being transformed by its age.”

Shirin Neshat, Ilgara, 2015, from the series, The Home of My Eyes
Courtesy Written Art Foundation, Frankfurt am Main, Germany

An official collateral exhibition at the Museo Correr, Shirin Neshat: The Home of My Eyes, presents photographs from a 2015 series of the same name, and a video, Roja (2016). Situated on St. Mark’s Square, this civil museum occupies a building known as the Napoleonic Wing, resplendent with Neoclassical treasures. Following room after room of opulent nineteenth-century furniture and gilded religious paintings, Neshat’s grid of black-and-white photographs is striking—minimal, contemporary, powerful. A large sculpture of the Virgin Mary, ostensibly part of the museum’s collection, hangs in the middle of the wall. This gesture of religious cohabitation relates to the subjects’ poses, in particular, their hand positions, which were inspired by El Greco.

Throughout her career Neshat has focused on Iran, but this expansive series of photographs show people from neighboring Azerbaijan. During the sittings, Neshat interviewed her subjects, who varied in age and ethnicity, about cultural identity and the concept of home. Each portrait is inscribed with ink, and draws from these conversations, as well as from poems by Nizami Ganjavi, a twelfth-century poet born in present-day Azerbaijan. The script is difficult to discern, as most of the pictures are hung far above eye-level, and there is no translated text on the wall, or in a booklet. For visitors lacking extraordinary vision and a grasp of Farsi, these stories will unfortunately remain unknown. Though more context would have been illuminating, Neshat’s exhibition proves that, even in Venice, photography can be relevant and contemporary—if given the chance.

Annika Klein is the editorial assistant of Aperture magazine.

The 57th Venice Biennale, including VIVA ARTE VIVA, is on view through November 27, 2017. Shirin Neshat: The Home of My Eyes is on view at the Museo Correr, Venice, through November 26, 2017.

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Raw Land

How are artists rethinking documentary in North Africa?

By Morad Montazami

Zineb Sedira, Haunted House, 2006
© the artist and DACS, London, and courtesy the artist and kamel mennour, Paris/London

If we were to attempt to chart the photographic practices of the Maghreb region, it’s unlikely that we’d end up with the expected map, divided into three neat slices of national territory: Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia. Rather, we’d have an opaque diagram, tangled with intertwined roadways, hybrid landscapes, and fragments of experience to be retraced. Following Roland Barthes’s notion that “photography is unclassifiable,” it seems that a desire to classify this region geographically or culturally would lead inevitably to colonialist or neo-Orientalist stereotypes. How, then, might we avoid simply filling the need for “counterrepresentations” in the face of clichés that still feed art fairs and platforms? How might we consider the “inactive” or undesignated frontiers, rather than the current boundaries inherited from colonizers—such as the border between North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa?

Zineb Sedira (a Paris-born Algerian, now based in London) and Yto Barrada (a Paris-born Moroccan, living in New York and Tangier) are two prolific artists who are addressing the documentary image’s spaces of redefinition. They find themselves at the juncture of postcolonial studies and an aesthetic of territorial, fluvial, geological, and meteorological edges—a political ecology in which the scars of living beings are as valid as those of a country road or of an entire ecosystem. Just as Tangier and Algiers lock eyes in a vast oceanic mirror, the figures looking out at the great sea in Barrada’s 2003 triptych Belvédère seem to find their exact counterparts in Sedira’s 2006 diptych Transitional Landscape, where a figure also contemplates the sea. An encounter of two Mediterranean dreamscapes? But this dream has become a nightmare—a sea cemetery—as the migration crisis accelerates.

Yto Barrada, Ceuta Border, Illegally Crossing the Border into the Spanish Enclave of Ceuta, Tangier, 1999
© the artist and courtesy Galerie Polaris, Paris

There is another point of contact for these two artists—that of placemaking, of opening paths for a new generation of artists interested in inhabiting frontiers: of photography and film, sculpture and installation. Barrada is a cofounder, and director since 2006, of the Cinémathèque de Tanger, which has played a central role in the contemporary Arab art scene. In Algiers, in 2011, Sedira founded the Aria Artist Residency, which hosts artists from North Africa and around the world who are working across boundaries. Both ventures, as they plant the seeds of cultural development, have created new networks of practitioners, critics, and viewers in their cities through exhibitions, workshops, speaker series, and, at the Cinémathèque de Tanger, even a “viewing school” for children.

Long before the start of the 2000s, a new, medium-centered documentary photography began to emerge mainly in Morocco, less open to interdisciplinary hybridization yet symptomatic of a moment at which the photobook had a particular prestige and newness. We might cite, for example, the memorable photographs of Daoud Aoulad-Syad’s Marocains (1989) and Souad Guennoun’s Les incendiaires (2000), which had clear ties to the work of leading intellectuals and authors, such as Abdelkebir Khatibi and Zakya Daoud, respectively. Cultivating an alliance between street photography and metaphorical autobiography, these photographers were impacted by both travel literature and the haunting aura of “the decisive moment,” per Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Frank.

Wassim Ghozlani, Postcards from Tunisia, 2016
Courtesy the artist and Maison de l’image, Tunis

Tangier is the most captivating of “incendiary” ports of call for Guennoun, who with her camera follows Morocco’s vagabond children, without home or family, delivered into the claws of the street. Its status as a “transitional city,” a limbo zone between two worlds, attracts photographers eager to try to capture its mystique. In the same way that one never “sees” New York but can only “re-see” it (because of its innumerable photographic and filmic representations), Tangier carries the sense of déjà vu that is characteristic of particularly photogenic cities, with its teeming medina, its hushed 1970s-vintage hotels, its cinemas and abandoned theaters with their ghostly marquees, the traces of the Beat Generation and of Jean Genet, who described Tangier as a “fabulous city … the very symbol of treason.”

But the romantic myth of Tangier also warrants a more analytical gaze, as in the work of Barrada, which examines its zones of exclusion, its blind spots, its blank spaces. This task has been taken up by the new generation of Tangerine photographers, foremost among them Hicham Gardaf. Investigating the underside of urban development and the nonplaces of globalization, he seems almost to make a synthesis of photography that tells and photography that analyzes. For a bit, Gardaf manages to get us to “see” Tangier, finally. There is a connection here to Wassim Ghozlani’s 2016 series Postcards from Tunisia, which was featured at the 2016 iteration of Photomed, the annual festival of Mediterranean photography in Sanary-sur-Mer, France. Ghozlani’s antipostcards purport to show Tunisian tourist spots, but do so via mute images of nonevents: a deserted crossroads, a bottle on a shelf, a broken door, or a hostel where visitors pasted their snapshots to a wall. Whereas Gardaf takes great care in the portrayal of his characters—although their function is limited to inhabiting the landscape—Ghozlani often captures spaces devoid of human presence, evoking memories of photography’s earliest days.

Hicham Benohoud, La salle de classe, 1994–2002
Courtesy the artist and Loft Art Gallery, Casablanca

These photographers’ practices—which are linked more to a fabrication of “the real” than to the documentary tradition—have an instructive model in Hicham Benohoud’s series La salle de classe (The classroom). In this long-haul project, undertaken in two stages between 1994 and 2002 when he was an art teacher in Marrakech, Benohoud used the confines of the classroom as a setting, placing his young students in situations that are incongruous to the point of surrealism. It is as if the artist were seeking to mimic the dynamics of domination that reverberate throughout the society that lies just outside the four walls. The metaphorical power of these images—and the ingenuity of the “sets” cobbled together from the accoutrements at hand in an art classroom—have brought La salle de classe much attention: it was exhibited at the 2014 Marrakech Biennale and acquired by the Marrakech Museum for Photography and Visual Arts and London’s Tate Modern.

In addition to art fairs and museums, both crucial platforms, the development of photographic practices in Morocco can be credited to new exhibition and publishing ventures. Rabat’s Kulte Gallery & Editions, by creating a proper artistic research platform, articulated through a residency program, has proved influential since it opened in 2013. Its 2014 publication New Africa, a groundbreaking overview of the continent’s impulse for photography and video, perfectly illustrates founder Yasmina Naji’s rethinking of preconceived national and cultural boundaries. “The development of photography not only as a tool for identity tracing but also a catalyst for identities in motion,” she says, “is what we hope to highlight in our program, as we also need to overcome the artificial boundary between so-called North Africa and the sub-Saharan territory.”

Carolle Bénitah, muqueuse nasale (nasal mucosa), 2012
Courtesy the artist and Sous Les Etoiles Gallery, New York

With a clear commitment to women artists, Kulte recently showcased the refinement and compelling irony with which Carolle Bénitah infuses her embroidered photographs, turning intimate memories and archives into mechanical mementos (for example, in Le désert de Sodome, 2016). Also confirming Morocco’s step forward is Galerie 127 in Marrakech, the pioneering photography venue opened by Nathalie Locatelli in 2006. Locatelli’s experience and undisputable expertise have allowed her to bring together established local photographers (Malik Nejmi, Aoulad-Syad, Benohoud) with emerging ones, such as Hicham Gardaf, but also foreigners (DaeSoo Kim, Denis Dailleux). These proactive gallery spaces have paved the path for newly established larger institutions, such as the Marrakech Museum for Photography and Visual Arts. (The latter is temporarily closed in anticipation of resettlement on a new site, after a highly promising two years.)

During the 1990s, the magazine Revue Noire helped lead the way for the boom of galleries and art spaces occurring in North Africa today. Published from 1991 to 2001, it was one of the first independent media outlets to offer African photography a distribution platform, showcasing its artistic direction and cosmopolitanism (with a focus that included everything from Abidjan, Kinshasa, Johannesburg, and Marrakech to New York, Tokyo, and beyond). Its Paris-based—and thus French-speaking—editors facilitated exchanges with the photographers of the Maghreb. It was a role that was all the more important at the time, as news agencies did not welcome Arab photographers as readily as they do today, and galleries and biennials had not yet absorbed new approaches to documentary.

Zied Ben Romdhane, Site of phosphate processing, Redeyef, Tunisia, March 21, 2015, from the series West of Life
Courtesy the artist

However, the Arab Spring of 2010–11 provided photography with a new role, accelerating the emergence of “citizen photojournalism”—by violating the long-standing taboo against photography in heavily controlled and supervised public spaces of the Maghreb countries. In Tunisia, a postrevolutionary generation of artists and photographers is only now beginning to take shape. Last year, the Washington Post published a series titled West of Life (2016) by Zied Ben Romdhane, realized in Tunisia’s Gafsa region. The project, which received an unanticipated level of attention, shows with exceptional accuracy the stigmas and other “scars” left by phosphate mines on inhabitants and workers, as on the landscape itself. It reveals not only the photographic talents of Ben Romdhane, but also his ingenuity in distributing his images on social media without passing through an agency or other intermediary.

Speaking to new forms of image distribution, the project Cairo. Open City: New Testimonies from an Ongoing Revolution began as an exhibition at the Museum für Photographie in Braunschweig, Germany, in 2012, and traveled across the country, as well as to a gallery in Dubai. Its catalog (2014), edited by Florian Ebner and Constanze Wicke, is an archive devoted to the double revolution—political and visual—that took place at Cairo’s Tahrir Square in 2011, including news and blog images, Flickr accounts, anonymous photographs, and works by artists such as Lara Baladi and Randa Shaath. The project shows that if indeed “photography is unclassifiable,” it must “organize” in order to better operate in the outsider zones of insurrectional imagery.

The overlap of photography’s hyperdistribution with the dizzying sociopolitics of an entire region augurs well for a very wide range of formats and platforms still to be invented. Through this acknowledgment of infinite particularities, focus shifts to the idiosyncratic, individual voice. In 2010, Zineb Sedira completed her video installation Gardiennes d’images (Image keepers), an investigation into the photographic work of Mohamed Kouaci, notably his epic experiences as a photographer during the Algerian War of Independence. What Sedira tells us through the work of Kouaci—more than half a century after his photographs were made—is that photography can no longer be defined simply as a “fine art,” nor as purely subjective evidence. In the Maghreb, at least, documentary-style and humanistic photography have given way to an art of investigation in which one author’s subjectivity calls out to those of others, seeking to join his or her solitude with the solitude of others.

Morad Montazami is Adjunct Research Curator for the Middle East and North Africa at Tate Modern and Director of Zamân Books.  Translated from the French by Diana C. Stoll.

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

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Aperture to honor Kwame Brathwaite, Zackary Drucker, Inez & Vinoodh

Cohosted by Edward Enninful, Susan Gutfreund, Elizabeth Ann Kahane, Cathy M. Kaplan, Hari Nef, and Anja Rubik.

October 30, 2017

IAC Building, 555 West 18th Street, New York, N.Y.

Click here to purchase tables or tickets

Aperture’s 65th Anniversary Gala celebrates the contributions of four visionary artists working at the intersection of photography, style, and human potential.

Courtesy of Kwame Brathwaite

Kwame Brathwaite popularized the phrase “Black Is Beautiful” in the late 1950s and early ’60s through his photographs, his writing, and the activities of the two organizations he helped cofound: African Jazz Arts Society and Studios (AJASS, 1956) and Grandassa Models (1962). He also photographed numerous landmark events, such as the Rumble in the Jungle, Human Kindness Day, and Nelson Mandela’s inauguration. Brathwaite’s photographs were specifically intended to shape the course of American visual discourse and to foreground the idea that artistic and political vision can effect change in popular culture—and that popular culture can effect change on culture at large. He will be profiled by Tanisha C. Ford in the “Elements of Style” issue of Aperture magazine, to be released in September.

Photo by Jaesung Lee
Courtesy of Zackary Drucker

Zackary Drucker is an independent artist, cultural producer, and trans woman who breaks down the way we think about gender, sexuality, and seeing. She has performed and exhibited her work internationally in museums, galleries, and film festivals including the Whitney Biennial 2014, MoMA PS1, Hammer Museum, Art Gallery of Ontario, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among others. Drucker is an Emmy-nominated producer for the docu-series This Is Me, as well as a producer on the Golden Globe and Emmy-winning Transparent. She will be the guest editor of “Future Gender,” an issue of Aperture magazine to be released in December.

Polaroid by Eva Doll
Courtesy of Inez & Vinoodh

Inez & Vinoodh are among the most celebrated and influential photographers working within the fashion and art worlds today. In the early 1990s, they developed a signature style of visual seduction paired with provocative narratives, which infused new ideas into photography, and often upended gender conventions. They have created groundbreaking editorials for such publications as American, French, Japanese, and Italian Vogue; V Magazine; Visionaire; The Gentlewoman; W Magazine; and the New York Times Magazine, for which they recently photographed Chelsea Manning. Their innovative approach is also seen in campaigns and films for major fashion houses and their work has been exhibited in galleries and museums internationally including the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam; Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam; the Hayward Gallery, London; and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Inez & Vinoodh are featured on the cover of Aperture’s forthcoming publication Fashion Photography: The Story in 180 Pictures.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

About Aperture

Aperture, a not-for-profit foundation, connects the photo community and its audiences with the most inspiring work, the sharpest ideas, and with each other—in print, in person, and online.

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