Aperture's Blog, page 114

How Do Magnum Photographers Connect With Their Subjects?

Robert Capa once said, “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.” In the years since Capa co-founded Magnum Photos, in 1947, Magnum photographers have continued to shape the world’s visual narratives by getting closer than anyone else. For five days only, get signed and estate stamped, museum quality, 6-by-6 inch prints by acclaimed Magnum photographers for $100. Use this link to make your purchase and a proceed from each sale will support Aperture Foundation.

Selected by Aperture’s editors, here are ten highlights from the Magnum Square Sale.

Olivia Arthur, India, 2017
© Olivia Arthur/Magnum Photos

Olivia Arthur

“I had intended to make a portrait of Loren on her own, but she took me to a house she shares with other members of the hijra society—India’s ancient transgender community—and it was buzzing with people. They were all quite enthusiastic about having a photographer there, and after I had done the portrait, they started dancing and we all sat around talking a little. It was at that time that Loren, sitting in this embrace with Sheshan, caught my eye, and I took my camera back out again to take this image. It’s a situation that I feel has happened to me often: in the moment when the formality of the photoshoot is over, everyone feels a bit more relaxed. It’s as though I need to finish taking pictures in order to really start taking pictures. It’s not that I was so close to them in this moment, as I was only there for a relatively short time, but that I got to a point when they could let their barriers down and share their own closeness with the camera.” — Olivia Arthur

Max Pinckers, The Horse to be Sacrificed Must be a Stallion, from the series, Will They Sing Like Raindrops or Leave Me Thirsty, 2014
© Max Pinckers/Magnum Photos

Max Pinckers

“The man on the white horse in the middle of this image is clearly the center of attention. Bystanders know this and either attempt to discreetly remove themselves from the image frame in one swift body movement, or choose to become part of it by remaining still and addressing the camera with a faint smile or inquisitive glance. It is in the actions and reactions of the extras that a photographer’s presence and intentions can become apparent, something that would have been lost by following Robert Capa’s famous maxim. In this case, the man leaning into the edge of the image acknowledges the excluded space outside of the frame. The two men behind the horse are conscious of the scene that is taking place and choose to contribute, taking up their right to play an active role for a brief moment. These small gestures hint toward the construction of an image, and prick through our willing suspension of disbelief.” — Max Pinckers

 

Carolyn Drake, Ukraine, 2006
© Carolyn Drake/Magnum Photos

Carolyn Drake

“I made this image of Olya at a Ukrainian boarding house, where about sixty girls, judged to have disabilities, lived together tucked away on the edge of a forest near Ternopil. In the afternoons, as the weather warmed and the workday finished, the girls often plugged in a boombox on the balcony and spread out across the courtyard to dance. This was the only time of day when the girls’ attention drifted away from me, the visitor, toward another place. This image plays sweetly into the illusion that photography allows the viewer to get close to someone, to have access to them, through their image. It’s a fantastical escape mirrored by Olya, who appears to also be escaping into the music.” — Carolyn Drake

Elliott Erwitt, New York City, USA, 1955
© Elliott Erwitt/Magnum Photos

Elliott Erwitt

“In thinking about getting closer, weddings come to mind … at least initially. Afterward, and down the line, all bets are off.” — Elliott Erwitt

Jean Gaumy, Dune of Pilat, Arcachon Bay, France, 1987
© Jean Gaumy/Magnum Photos

Jean Gaumy

“I was on a Jeanne Labrune film (La part de l’autre, 1987), with Maïté Nahyr, one of the actresses in Fellini’s film City of Women (1980). I asked her, between two scenes of shooting, to come to the great Dune of Pilat with me. I was photographing Maïté from afar, up against the wind, in the middle of vast emptiness. This man and his dog appeared, confidently, passing very close by. She, them, and me. Close, afar. Different distances that worked perfectly for me.” — Jean Gaumy

 

Martin Parr, Mar del Plata, Argentina, 2014
© Martin Parr/Magnum Photos

Martin Parr

“I love Mar del Plata. It is safe to say the Argentines do as well. With seventeen kilometers of beaches and two thousand hotels, it is by far the biggest resort in the country. Indeed, it may be the biggest resort in the world. The real sun lovers, generally over fifty, are out in the hot January sun by 9 a.m.; this was a great time to shoot and to come up close on some of the real characters.” — Martin Parr

 

Robert Capa, Pablo Picasso with his nephew Javier Vilato and Françoise Gilot on the beach, Golfe-Juan, France, 1948
© Robert Capa and International Center of Photography/Magnum Photos

Robert Capa

“In these images of Picasso and his family, Robert Capa stresses the everyday human side of the man. These are warm friendly images with sharp flashes of the typical Capa gaiety. In this group of pictures, the hopeful aspirations of millions of family snapshot albums is realized by a master journalist photographer.” — Edward Steichen

 

Inge Morath, Pablín, nephew of Picasso, strums guitar next to a portrait of his uncle painted by Picasso’s great friend, Sebastià Junyer, Barcelona, Spain, 1954
© Inge Morath/Magnum Photos

Inge Morath

“Inge’s interests in exploring different regions, and their cultures, often led her into homes of local artists and writers. On one such occasion, she found herself on an assignment in Barcelona for the French magazine L’Oeil. Picasso’s sister, Lola Ruiz Vilato, amused by Inge’s shaky Spanish (over the phone), agreed to be photographed and invited her home. Inge was greeted by music, drinking, and conversation among Lola’s many children.

In this photo of Pablín, Inge creates not only a literal, but also an emotional invitation for the viewer to ‘get closer,’ so we can observe the subject’s surroundings. Pablín sits next to a portrait of his uncle, Pablo Picasso, with a deliberate visual narrative that showcases familial closeness.”  — Sana Manzoor

 

Jonas Bendiksen, Altai Republic, Russia, 2000. (Alternate Take)
© Jonas Bendiksen/Magnum Photos

Jonas Bendiksen

“I’ve always tried to follow Capa’s adage about getting closer. The irony is that my most well known image of a crashed spacecraft with butterflies was taken from afar with a big, long telephoto lens. Without that, the butterflies would be all but invisible in the image. I did, in fact, try some images with a wide angle lens, but the pictures just got worse and worse the closer I got. But there is wisdom in Capa’s idea outside of the frame as well. The best photographs are of the things that are close to you – in terms of what you are passionate about, what engages you. When I took this picture, in 2000, I was in the midst of a big love affair with Russia and the former Soviet Union. I had moved there to live in the middle of my story every day. This is an outtake that’s about 10 frames after the more well-known image. The same boys are ripping copper wire from the top of the rocket but, in this picture, a villager on a horse has shown up. I wonder if there was an even better picture that I missed if I’d gotten the horse in the frame when the boys were standing up.” — Jonas Bendiksen

 

Alessandra Sanguinetti, Cecilia, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1995
© Alessandra Sanguinetti/Magnum Photos

Alessandra Sanguinetti

“Back in 1993 I lived on a third floor, in an old building, on a narrow street, in downtown Buenos Aires. My bedroom had a little balcony that faced straight onto another third floor balcony of the building across the street.

Every day I’d see three young sisters hanging the washing out to dry on the railing, sweeping, playing, or throwing the keys down to someone waiting to get in. I started taking pictures of them when they came out, and we would wave at one another. The narrowness of the street between us made it seem like they were closer than they were. Eventually, I crossed the street and rang a few doorbells (there were ten third floor apartments). To everyone that replied I’d say I was the girl from in front that took pictures, until I rang the right bell and they let me in. This started a yearlong relationship with them and their Mom. We’d call each other from balcony to balcony and once in a while, we’d defy the gap and play ball over the traffic below.” — Alessandra Sanguinetti

Magnum’s “Closer” Square Sale runs from Monday, June 5, 2017 at 8 a.m. EST until Friday, June 9, 2017 at 6 p.m. EST. Signed and estate stamped, museum quality, 6-by-6 inch prints from over seventy artists will exceptionally be available for $100, for five days only. By using  this link  to make your purchase, a proceed from each sale will support Aperture Foundation. 

The post How Do Magnum Photographers Connect With Their Subjects? appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

Inside Aperture’s Annual Patron Cocktail Party

Elizabeth and Bill Kahane, hosts of Aperture's Annual Spring Patron Cocktail Party

Guests mingle at Aperture's Annual Spring Patron Cocktail Party

Larry Fink and Bill Kahane

Guests mingle at Aperture's Annual Spring Patron Cocktail Party

Guests view photographs at Aperture's Annual Spring Patron Cocktail Party hosted by Elizabeth and Bill Kahane

Chris Boot, Aperture's executive director, and Larry Fink

Elizabeth and Bill Kahane with Mike and Doug Starn

At Aperture’s Annual Patron Cocktail Party, held on May 24, 2017, Patrons, friends, and artists celebrated Aperture’s wonderful community while listening to the music of photographer Larry Fink. The evening’s hosts were Aperture trustee Elizabeth Kahane and her husband, Bill.

Guests toured the Kahanes’ private collection, including a recent commissioned portrait by Doug Starn and Mike Starn, generously donated to the 2016 Aperture Benefit Auction.

At sunset, Larry Fink and friends played a fabulous jazz set on the Kahanes’ rooftop with its panoramic views of Central Park. Over champagne and hors d’oeuvres, guests mingled with Aperture editors, trustees, and artists, including Elliott Erwitt, Jeff Chien-Hsing Liao, and Doug Starn and Mike Starn.

Aperture Patron Members gain insider access to publications, exhibitions, artists, and programs while supporting the foundation’s mission to connect the photo community and its audiences with the most inspiring work, the sharpest ideas, and with each other—in print, in person, and online.

For more information, click here or contact Hillary Beson at 212.946.7146 or membership@aperture.org.

The post Inside Aperture’s Annual Patron Cocktail Party appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

The Lives of Samuel Fosso

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

By Yves Chatap

Samuel Fosso, The Rocker , 1997, from the series Tati
© the artist and courtesy JM Patras/Paris

It all began with the high heels. In 1976, as a precocious teenager, Samuel Fosso traveled from Bangui, Central African Republic, where he operated his own photography business called Studio Photo Gentil, to visit his family in Nigeria. There he discovered a pair of platform boots similar to those worn by the popular Nigerian highlife musician Prince Nico Mbarga on the cover of his record albums. Fosso’s grandmother agreed to buy him the boots, and upon returning to Bangui he completed the look, ordering a pair of bell-bottoms from a local tailor. “I put on my new outfit and went out. In the street, I ran into a priest who said, ‘You look handsome. You look like an astronaut. Do you want to reach heaven?’ And I answered, ‘Yes!’”

For more than forty years, Fosso, like Cindy Sherman, Iké Udé, and Yasumasa Morimura, has focused on one subject: himself. In the 1970s, after making pictures for clients, he would finish off rolls of film by staging imaginative self-portraits, wearing sunglasses, bathing suits, and fashions that would have challenged the conservative sensibilities of ’70s-era Bangui. By playing with the cultural codes of style and pose, Fosso evoked the power of personal transformation. His early experimental images remained private until 1994, when he was invited to participate in the first edition of the Bamako Biennale. Since then, often using a team of stylists, Fosso has pushed his self-portraiture into new realms of gender-bending theatricality.

Ahead of his solo exhibition at London’s National Portrait Gallery in June 2017, Fosso spoke with Paris-based curator Yves Chatap about studio photography, artistic influences, and taking on the roles of a lifetime.

Samuel Fosso, Self-Portrait, 1976–77
© the artist and courtesy JM Patras/Paris

Yves Chatap: Your earliest exhibition dates back to the first Bamako Biennale in 1994. Can you tell us about that experience?

Samuel Fosso: For the first edition of the Biennale, emissaries were sent all over Africa to find photographers. There was a French photographer, Bernard Descamps, who discovered my work while visiting Bangui and invited me to participate in this exhibition. When we met, I was already working in color, but Descamps wanted to see my black-and-white images from the 1970s, which he then submitted to the jury. That’s how I got my first show at the Palais de la Culture in Bamako, which was inaugurated by then president of Mali, Alpha Oumar Konare.

During my stay in Bamako, we did workshops. Six months later, I learned that I had won first prize, which I was awarded in September 1995 in Paris, where I went for the first time. It was then that I had my first exhibition in Paris, with Martin Parr and Marie-Paule Nègre.

Chatap: How did this first visit to Europe go?

Fosso: It gave me the chance to meet photographers like Henri Cartier-Bresson, who congratulated me and advised me about my work. I didn’t know him, but that encouraged me to carry on, as did the support of Malick Sidibé and Seydou Keïta, because I came to understand that my process was an asset that I shouldn’t overlook.

Chatap: When did you become aware of the work of other African photographers?

Fosso: Before coming to Bamako, I didn’t know any other African photographers like Malick Sidibé or Seydou Keïta, but they seemed to have known my work, because my photographs were hung before I arrived. I have to admit, I didn’t know I was making artistic photographs. It was a discovery for me. It was a big surprise to have Malick Sidibé and Seydou Keïta coming to give me advice on my work and to encourage me about my future as an artist-photographer, explaining that it was rare to see a photographer photograph himself. I thanked them for their advice and encouragement and was able to get to know their works during the exhibition.

All of that opened my eyes. Once I got back to Bangui, I continued working, because I said to myself, If I don’t produce anything, they will forget about me. Those meetings still frame my career today.

Samuel Fosso, Self-Portrait, 1976–77
© the artist and courtesy JM Patras/Paris

Chatap: Let’s go back to the beginning. How did you get started in photography?

Fosso: I was born in Cameroon. As a child, I suffered from paralysis, and my mother was too ashamed to have my picture taken like other babies. I was cured under my grandfather’s care in eastern Nigeria, but then war broke out in Biafra in 1967. It was then that my uncle brought me first to Cameroon, then to the Central African Republic, where we worked making women’s shoes. On our street, there was a studio photographer who I began to spend time with. I asked him to teach me photography. I spent five months as an apprentice, after which I wanted to have my own studio. The problem was making prints without wasting too much paper because, as my uncle said, “You don’t do business for loss, you do business for gain.” But I found out that the owner didn’t want me to leave because he had stopped losing money when I started working in his studio. After learning that, my uncle told me to find a space for my own studio and he bought me an enlarger.

Chatap: You mentioned your childhood and your illness. Isn’t your self-staging today a form of therapy for that suffering body?

Fosso: It is indeed, because body movement is part of health, if you think about athletes, for example. For my body, it was the distress of illness and healing, but also the cure that my grandfather worked on me—perhaps I had to suffer from that. When you look at my work, it’s my body that is looking at me. It’s my way of seeing. Perhaps it’s my illness. I don’t know. But what matters is that it is my natural body.

Chatap: Do you see your grandfather as a hero?

Fosso: For me, yes, my grandfather is a hero because I am not the only person he had to heal. He was a healer his whole life and he took care of the mentally infirm. Whenever anyone brought an insane person to my grandfather, after two weeks the person would begin to respond and to recover their natural state and normal consciousness. Then, the family could come take them back. At that time, money was hard to come by, so people paid him in hundredths of a shilling. My family couldn’t really make ends meet. He healed many people. The whole village considered him a hero. He was an important figure who the village asked for advice on major decisions. For me, he’s a hero, and he is deserving of the term.

Samuel Fosso, The Businessman, 1997, from the series Tati
© the artist and courtesy JM Patras/Paris

Chatap: Why put this personal history into images?

Fosso: Simply because Westerners have never believed in traditional medicine. I bear witness to the idea that the healer can treat many things. It’s a way of educating about the practices of traditional medicine that have long been rejected.

Chatap: What was the motivation behind your first self-portraits in the 1970s?

Fosso: I opened my own studio on September 14, 1975. I started taking pictures of myself to make up for the absence of photography in my childhood. I used the last frames on rolls of film because I didn’t want to waste them. When I closed the studio for the day, I would take pictures of myself and send the images to my grandmother in Nigeria. I had clothing custom-made based on things I saw in magazines, mostly Afro-American ones.

Chatap: Your inspirations in adventurous fashion can be seen in your first images in the 1970s. Did you have icons in mind when you made those photographs?

Fosso: If you take the example of Nico Mbarga—I was mostly inspired by him, especially by his outfits. I had clothing made, and I bought shoes called talons dames that you couldn’t find in central Africa. As for Fela Kuti, it was political because there were denunciations. We still weren’t free, and so we couldn’t just do whatever we wanted. From 1977 to 1980, and especially before democracy, conditions weren’t easy, particularly because of the political denunciations. That scared me because I didn’t want to get arrested.

Chatap: So, you were aware that your approach could have political consequences?

Fosso: I was aware that there were political consequences and, as a result, I couldn’t just do whatever I wanted.

Samuel Fosso, La Bourgeoise , 1997, from the series Tati
© the artist and courtesy JM Patras/Paris

Chatap: In 1997, three years after you participated in the Bamako Biennale, you were commissioned by the Paris department store Tati to make a series of images. Tati contains some of the most famous images of your career. It’s about archetypes and characters, from the rock star to the businessman to the bourgeois woman. In this series, what message did you want to deliver?

Fosso: It’s a discourse about segregation and slavery and a demand for independence and freedom. I gathered all these ideas together, as you can see in the image La femme libérée américaine dans les années 70 (The liberated American woman of the 1970s), which I made before my first visit to the United States, and in the series African Spirits (2008), which follows the same path. In African Spirits, there is a desire to inscribe within the museum space all those figures who have marked the history of blacks in Africa and in America. It should be known that they all fought for civil rights and liberties for blacks. This is a heritage that we must not forget. I had to pay homage to them because they have allowed us to be free, in a way, and to give them their place in history so that our children may remember what has happened in the past and what is still happening today.

Samuel Fosso, La femme libérée américaine dans les années 70 (The liberated American woman of the 1970s), 1997, from the series Tati
© the artist and courtesy JM Patras/Paris

Chatap: Your series Mémoire d’un ami (Memory of a friend), about a neighbor in Bangui who was burglarized and killed, and Le rêve de mon grand-père (My grandfather’s dream), about your grandfather, are highly personal explorations. When you work with your body, do you experience it as a subject body or an object body?

Fosso: When I work, it’s always a performance that I choose to undertake. It’s not a subject or an object; it’s one more human being. I link my body to this figure, because I want to translate its history. I consider my body as a human being, but always belonging to other subjects, to the person who I am in the process of reproducing.

Chatap: And, technically, how do you work in the studio?  

Fosso: I work with a team consisting of costumers, makeup artists, and an assistant photographer to carry out my shoots. Before, as I said, I did photography without realizing that I was an artist. I created my self-portraits on my own with an eight-to-ten-second delay timer. Now my work is easier, since I use a remote-controlled camera, which lets me see if my pose matches the image that I want. It’s an advantage over the past, because the technique is the same but the shot is different in relation to the work.

Samuel Fosso, Mémoire d’un ami (Memory of a friend), 2000
© the artist and courtesy JM Patras/Paris

Chatap: You returned to Bamako in 2007 for a retrospective of your work. What were your impressions of that experience since the first Biennale? In particular, what was your relationship with the young photographers who saw you as le grand maître (the great master)?

Fosso: By 2007, things had developed very quickly, and this retrospective was important because I had changed since 1994. I had produced other works in keeping with the earlier series, so returning to Bamako in 2007 for a solo exhibition was a point of pride. I met many Malian photographers who wanted to meet me and talk about photography. They called me “the great master.” And the BBC had produced a documentary film about me in 2002. We discussed photography and the way that I made my images. This solo exhibition that began in Bamako toured all over the world for the next two years thanks to the French Ministry of Culture. My impressions of the young photographers were overall positive because they understood the importance of African photography. That left a strong impression on me because I knew that African photography would not die.

Samuel Fosso, African Spirits, 2008
© the artist and courtesy JM Patras/Paris

Chatap: In 2013, you made the series Emperor of Africa, in which you performed as Mao. The images were based on famous paintings of the Chinese leader. Why did you make this series?

Fosso: After enslavement by the West, there was colonization, then political independence, which is absolutely not economic independence and still besets us today. We find ourselves with China profiting from our lack of means without providing sufficient financing in return.

In Africa, no one realized what China would become on the continent. Every African country has been seized by China. I see what they’ve made of their own country with the production of coal and pollution. They came here with a fifty-fifty proposal to rebuild Africa, on the pretext that Europe no longer has the means to do so. Now, you see that they are destroying and looting the continent’s natural resources for their own interest, Africa having been unable to develop its own means of local production. But if China went away, what would Africa become without its money? That’s where the title emperor comes from, in view of the history of that country that has only ever lived under an imperial system.

Chatap: When you talk about relations between Africa and Asia, is there not a kind of fatality about the future of Africa, and also of the individual?

Fosso: This series translates the observation of a form of repetition of history around questions of autonomy and the exploitation of resources. We cannot accept the implantation of the Chinese empire in Africa out of fear of reproducing the past. Among African states, relations are complicated and agreements difficult, so if we ourselves can’t manage to find common ground, nothing will change.

Samuel Fosso, SIXSIXSIX (detail), 2015
© the artist and courtesy JM Patras/Paris

Chatap: In your latest series, SIXSIXSIX, the body is no longer in costume. The artist is without makeup. Why did you choose to orient yourself in this direction?

Fosso: This series collects 666 images in total, each of which is unique. It’s a work where photographic material has nothing to do with analog prints. The challenge was to make 666 different self-portraits with a different bodily expression in each.

In this series, there is unhappiness and happiness, misfortune and good fortune. I was very inspired by these two aspects. SIXSIXSIX refers to the number of misfortune. By that I mean in terms of what I’ve encountered in my life up to now. After my illness came the Biafra war; millions of people died, and I was fortunate to be saved. I went to the Central African Republic where I experienced the same thing during the conflicts of 2014, in which I could have died. So, 666 is a number of misfortune and at the same time is a number of good fortune. For all that I’ve been through, God has been with me and has saved me.

Chatap: In SIXSIXSIX, do we see Samuel Fosso or someone else?

Fosso: It’s neither the body that smiles, nor the body that cries, but a representation of life and all the misfortunes that strike us deep within. In the end, it’s about buried emotions that we ourselves create, and about exorcising my own resentment in the face of this situation. From 1976 to 2014, I have never been at peace in my life when faced with the actions of those who always sow misfortune among children and innocents.

Yves Chatap is an independent curator based in Paris.  Translated from the French by Matthew Brauer.

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.

The post The Lives of Samuel Fosso appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

Picturing the Early Days of Hip-Hop

Bronx legends Charlie Ahearn and Grand Wizzard Theodore discuss the rise of Hip-Hop at the Ecstasy Garage Disco.

By Miss Rosen

Charlie Ahearn, DJ AJ 2 from the series Scratch Ecstasy, 1980
© the artist and courtesy P.P.O.W.

Hip Hop came of age inside the cinderblock walls of the Ecstasy Garage Disco in the Boogie Down Bronx. By 1980, it was the place to be as the flyest DJs and MCs honed their skills among their peers. In tribute, filmmaker Charlie Ahearn has teamed up with Grand Wizzard Theodore, inventor of the scratch, to recreate their weekly slide show as the centerpiece of Ahearn’s exhibition Scratch Ecstasy, currently on view at P.P.O.W. Gallery. Miss Rosen, who worked with Ahearn on his 2007 book, Wild Style: The Sampler, speaks with Ahearn and Theodore about the interplay between sight and sound in the development of Hip-Hop culture during its formative years.

Charlie Ahearn, Funky four with Busy Bee at The Valley jam from the series Scratch Ecstasy, 1980
© the artist and courtesy P.P.O.W.

Miss Rosen: Could you tell us about the Ecstasy Garage Disco? What as the scene like?

Grand Wizzard Theodore: It was a place for groups like the Fantastic Five, the Cold Crush Brothers, and the Funky 4 + 1 to hone their craft. We had the audience so we were able to do what we loved. The Ecstasy Garage was like a gym for practicing and making ourselves better.

Charlie Ahearn: The Ecstasy Garage was like my clubhouse. It was completely dark in the room. The only light in the room was a single, sixty-watt light bulb that was over the DJ section. Listening to Grand Wizzard Theodore play music, I thought, “This is so experimental and so advanced intellectually and it’s being done by teenagers for teenagers in this really devastated place in the Bronx and nobody is playing any attention to it.”

The Ecstasy was a complete world unto itself. At some point early on, people recognized that they could do this themselves, that they could make money from it, that they could become famous from it, and that they could become stars. It was really bringing money into their households, and they had control over this. They had the means of production.

Charlie Ahearn, Fab 5 Freddy’s Campbell’s Soup Can homage to Warhol from the series Scratch Ecstasy, 1980
© the artist and courtesy P.P.O.W.

Rosen: How did you guys first connect?

Theodore: Busy Bee Starski met Charlie Ahearn and brought him around all of us. They said they were making a movie, Wild Style (1983). Once Charlie started taking pictures, we all took to him right away. We got to talk to him and he got to talk to us; we got to learn about each other and it was pretty cool. It was like, “Hey, take all the pictures you want.”

Rosen: What was the inspiration for the slide show?

Ahearn: I started bringing my slide projector stuff because I wanted to become part of the house, like the DJ. Usually I used rolls of paper on the wall behind the DJ. It was often projected as double slides and it was done as a performance. I was very inspired to see people like Kevvy Kev and Busy Bee seeing themselves up on a large screen over the DJ booth. They were superstars.

Charlie Ahearn, Scratch DJ from the series Scratch Ecstasy, 1980
© the artist and courtesy P.P.O.W.

Rosen: The slide show you made for Scratch Ecstasy opens with pictures from the original slide show, which is very meta. You were creating a social media experience for the people, taking pictures of the times and showing them.

Ahearn: The very next week! Every week I would have a couple of new rolls to add to the slide show and I would take things out that weren’t as good. I would always have shots that were either out of focus, too dark, or too bright. I thought, “This costs a lot of money. I’m going to make things out of these slides.” My idea was, “Let’s make the slides that were really bad the best slides instead of throwing them away.”

Rosen: So that’s where your version of “scratching” comes in.

Ahearn: It’s not very documentary, is it? It’s a way of saying, “Well, we’re making a show here, let’s do the best we can with what we’ve got. Let’s take these things that are not the best images but add things to them that make them really memorable.” Like the Busy Bee photo that says “ROCK ON.” It was too dark. So I scratched on it with a screwdriver on the reverse side.

Fred [Brathwaite aka Fab 5 Fredddy] and I would be sitting around talking about what we’re going to do [for Wild Style], and I’d take out these slides and Fred would be like, “Give me one of those!”

Charlie Ahearn, Funky Four in their Bronx neighborhood from the series Scratch Ecstasy, 1980
© the artist and courtesy P.P.O.W.

Rosen: How did the slide show influence the creation of Wild Style?

Ahearn: I had a stack of color Xeroxes of pictures I was taking for the movie and I would take them and pin them on the wall in order. I would go, “It opens in a subway yard and it ends over here somewhere at the amphitheater. Okay, what else is going to be in the movie?”

I’d have all these images and I wasn’t writing the script: I was creating a storyboard. The movie was to give a shine to a series of moments that people could be themselves on the film. The whole point of making the movie was to escape from plot and escape from dialogue and those other conventions of filmmaking and think of it more like a kung fu movie.

My first kung fu movie had way too much dialogue in it. [Laughs]. You don’t need all these plot points because people are in the present when they are watching the film. In a sense, it’s a series of moments when people have their two minutes where they are clearly being themselves and whatever got them in this place doesn’t matter. We’re moving through this—as you would in real life.

Rosen: The Scratch Ecstasy slide show has the same basic narrative arc as the film. We start at the Ecstasy Garage and travel through the creation and release of Wild Style. What’s it like looking back at these pictures?

Theodore: These photos remind me of where I came from, of how I grew up in the Bronx in a single parent home, gangs all around, abandoned buildings, buildings being set on fire, the city not wanting to put any money into the Bronx, all the graffiti all over the place, seeing the Bronx look like a war zone, poverty, drugs—all of this was my every day life. Seeing those pictures reminds me of how far I’ve come.

Charlie Ahearn, Rock on Busy Scratch from the series Scratch Ecstasy, 1980
© the artist and courtesy P.P.O.W.

Rosen: How did you choose the music for the Scratch Ecstasy slide show?

Theodore: I went to Charlie’s house and the first thing he did was show me the entire slide show. Then I pulled together a bunch of songs and he started to pick out the songs. He was like, “Oh wow I remember that song. We’re going to keep that one.”

Ahearn: Everything was played at the Ecstasy Garage. The songs I picked [like “Heaven and Hell is on Earth”] were made to create a feeling. There are different passages in the party and only some DJs knew this. The labels were covered and you didn’t know what was playing. The DJs wouldn’t tell you. Now everybody knows but at that time these were secret cuts. I wanted music that had this mystery to it.

I do play “Good Times” because we see Chic in the pictures and we’re going to the Roxy with Grand Master Flash. We’re not at the Ecstasy Garage anymore. We’ve entered the pop world. We’ve changed. I wanted it to be a performance by Theodore. What you hear is not edited. It’s a straight performance of the entire twenty minutes that Theodore mixed. You have to break it down to a feeling. Soundtrack is the heart of movies.

The music is by the world’s greatest musicians. You look at who’s playing on that list and you’ve got Booker T & the MGS with the organ. Is that Hip Hop? You’re damn fucking right it’s Hip Hop.

Miss Rosen is a journalist covering art, photography, and books for Vogue Online, Dazed Digital, The Undefeated, Feature Shoot, and Crave Online.

Charlie Ahearn: Scratch Ecstasy is on view at P.P.O.W. Gallery, New York through June 24, 2017.

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Martine Syms: Conscious Resistance

In photographs and videos, an artist pushes back against reductive stereotypes of black life.

By Amanda Hunt

Martine Syms, Stills from Notes on Gesture, 2015. Single channel video, 10:27 minutes (loop), color, sound
© the artist and courtesy Dominica Publishing and Bridget Donahue, New York

Another week, another video depicting the execution of a black man at the hands of a police officer goes viral. Another black man rendered absent: Walter Scott, Eric Garner, Alton Sterling, Philando Castile … when do I stop? And what of the black women who are prematurely disappeared? It is with this horrific backdrop of continued abuse of power—which has resulted in 559 deaths at the hands of U.S. law enforcement in 2016 alone (as of July 8, 2016), only a fraction of which have actually been visualized—that I can begin to talk about the positive power of Martine Syms’s art, feminism, and photographic presentation of black women, black life, black power.

Syms’s work, foremost, is a conflation of image and text—both are primary to her practice. For a number of years Syms was the director of Golden Age, a Chicago-based project space focused on printed matter. She later founded Dominica Publishing, an imprint for artists that continues today. This fundamental relationship to and engagement with language connects all of her endeavors. As with her writing, Syms’s development of a visual aesthetic references the structures of cinema and television. The artist states that she is creating a relationship between image and text in order to produce a resultant “third meaning.” Now based in Los Angeles, Syms is closer to the Hollywood apparatus; this proximity is evidenced in her art, almost having become a character itself. But the most constant character of all is that of a black, female protagonist.

Martine Syms, Fact & Trouble, installation at Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, 2016
© the artist and courtesy Dominica Publishing and Bridget Donahue, New York

Vertical Elevated Oblique (2015), Syms’s first solo exhibition in New York, at Bridget Donahue, offered an overtly technical installation comprising video, photographs, and staged objects, as well as a space for books from Dominica Publishing. For Notes on Gesture (2015), the featured video, Syms employed a female, black actor to enact gestures readily associated with black women and blackness. Interspersed with shocks of text (“DON’T JUDGE”; “WHEN IT AIN’T ABOUT THE MONEY”), Notes on Gesture is an exercise in nonverbal expression. The video essentializes the essentializing: black women as sassy, finger-snapping, mm-hmming folks. Gestures of blackness are often co-opted, but here we do not know which gesture is authentic or which acts as a quotation. Syms presents an intentional flatness to the image that supports the myth and refutes the dimensionality of its subject. But is this body and identity really just an empty vessel of expression?

The installation of Vertical Elevated Oblique smartly collapsed language and image, layering pop culture with enduring symbols of both Hollywood (industrial stands used in film production now held up Syms’s photographs) and the black resistance (a flock-covered black panther, originally intended as a support for a glass tabletop, co-opted from the Black Panther movement by the home and now repurposed by Syms).

Martine Syms, Stills from She Mad: Laughing Gas, 2016. Four-channel video installation, 6:59 minutes (loop), color, sound
© the artist and courtesy Dominica Publishing and Bridget Donahue, New York

Syms’s photography-based work is a conscious resistance that rejects what we see in the media— a construction of what is real— and flips the balance simply by the fact that it is Syms behind the camera, creating her images. If images of black people are going to continue to be fed into an endless and cruel cycle of stereotype, we may as well control the output—present them as mundane and normal, insert them into history, and reassert them in the contemporary. Syms’s video She Mad: Laughing Gas (2016), modeled on a silent film, Laughing Gas, from 1907, does exactly that. We follow Syms-as-protagonist to the dentist, where she engages with the hygienist, gets high on the titular gas, and is ultimately denied coverage for the visit by her insufficient health insurance. A distinctly American experience.

The power of what Syms does is not only in its visual strength, but also in its political implications in an art world marked by a dearth of diversity in proprietors and artists alike, and in a media universe that suppresses (whether consciously or not at this point) positive images of black life. Syms, by simply representing “herself”—and specifically black women—in the context of institutional, commercial, and codified spaces, is asserting her presence. And that, by nature, is feminist and political.

Amanda Hunt, formerly Assistant Curator at the Studio Museum of Harlem, is Director of Education and Public Programs at MOCA Los Angeles. 

Read more from Aperture Issue 225, “On Feminism,” or subscribe to Aperture and never miss an issue.

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Henri Cartier-Bresson’s Glimpse of India

Spanning decades, an exhibition of the iconic photographer’s work in India reveals the fraught nature of photojournalism.

By Emma Kennedy

Henri Cartier-Bresson, Astrologer’s Shop, Bombay, Maharashtra, India, 1947
© the artist/Magnum Photos

In 1947, Henri Cartier-Bresson embarked on a major three-year trip to Asia, to photograph on behalf of Magnum Photos. The same year, he cofounded Magnum and his early artistic work from the 1930s and ’40s was shown at the Museum of Modern Art in an exhibition organized by Beaumont and Nancy Newhall. In part thanks to his first wife, the Javanese dancer Ratna Mohini, Cartier-Bresson was particularly interested in Asia and the massive social and political changes resulting from the postwar collapse of colonial empires. Cartier-Bresson’s first stop was India, just after the country gained independence from Great Britain. Centered on his images of Mahatma Gandhi and his funeral procession, the exhibition Henri Cartier-Bresson: India in Full Frame, currently on view at the Rubin Museum in New York, is a sweeping chronicle of the iconic photographer’s sojourn in India.

Henri Cartier-Bresson, Gandhi leaving Meherauli, Delhi, India, 1948
© the artist/Magnum Photos

The day before Gandhi’s assassination, Cartier-Bresson photographed the leader, who had been fasting to call for an end to the violence over the India-Pakistan partition, as he was physically—and perhaps emotionally—supported by his nieces. Cartier-Bresson returned the next day to interview Gandhi about the fast. On January 30, 1948, hours after their conversation, Gandhi was assassinated by a Hindu nationalist. In the aftermath, Cartier-Bresson returned once again to Birla House to document Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s announcement of Gandhi’s death. Cartier-Bresson’s quiet pictures of Gandhi’s body lying in state led to a commission from Life to document the funeral. (The February 16, 1948 issue included nine of Cartier-Bresson’s photographs, compared to only five by Margaret Bourke-White, despite her close relationship to the magazine.) Cartier-Bresson captured silence and grief in a moment of chaos and noise. In Train Carrying Gandhi’s Ashes (1948), for example, a single figure stands in a mass of bodies with a look of anguish inscribed on his face.

Henri Cartier-Bresson, Train Carrying Gandhi’s Ashes, Delhi, India, 1948
© the artist/Magnum Photos

India in Full Frame, curated by Beth Citron, touches upon Cartier-Bresson’s well-documented awareness of his privileged position as a white, male foreigner. As he photographed the funeral proceedings—the cremation and scattering of the ashes—Cartier-Bresson attempted to remove himself from his place of advantage; he tried not to photograph the crowd from above, as he did not wish to project a western gaze. Cartier-Bresson’s awareness, however, does not extend to all his work in India, and the exhibition does little to challenge the photojournalistic frame within which he was working. By this omission, the suggestion is that Cartier-Bresson’s images from India avoid the clichés of journalistic photography.

Henri Cartier-Bresson, Untitled, Madura, Tamil Nadu, India, 1950
© the artist/Magnum Photos

In the exhibition, a handful of photographs lack context that would help them subvert such clichés. An untitled photograph from 1950 shows a malnourished child held by a woman, presumably his or her mother. The woman’s hand—monumental in comparison to the child’s frail body—cradles the head of the child, but little detail is provided by either the photographer himself or the curator. In effect, the child becomes a nameless, starving body and fuels the West’s stereotyped, reductive perception of India. As Jacque Rancière has noted, there are “too many nameless bodies, too many bodies incapable of returning the gaze that we direct at them, too many bodies that are an object of speech without themselves having a chance to speak.”

Henri Cartier-Bresson, Street photographer in the old city, Delhi, India, 1966
© the artist/Magnum Photos

While most of the photographs presented in India in Full Frame are situated more closely along the photojournalistic line than the artistic, works like Astrologer’s Shop (1947) and Street photographer in the old city (1966) resist the journalistic sensibilities Cartier-Bresson largely employed in India and lean more toward his earlier, surrealist work. Such images exist outside the typical visual associations of photojournalism, such as starving children and beggars with emaciated bodies. Street photographer (1966) displays Cartier-Bresson’s surrealist sensibilities by combining an imagined and real background. The work is a subtle, perhaps unintentional nod to the history of Indian studio photography practices.

Henri Cartier-Bresson, Refugee camp, Kurukshetra, Punjab, 1947
© the artist/Magnum Photos

Cartier-Bresson portrayed India as he found it, capturing the business of everyday life. He photographed everything from refugees performing their daily exercises, to women spreading saris out in the sun to dry. While India in Full Frame is centered on the mythic figure of Gandhi and the outpouring of emotion after his death, the exhibition also reveals Cartier-Bresson’s struggle to interweave art photography and photojournalism—an unwavering commitment, as he put it in his 1952 essay, “The Decisive Moment,” “to preserve life in the act of living.”

Emma Kennedy is the editorial work scholar at Aperture magazine.

Henri Cartier-Bresson: India in Full Frame is on view at the Rubin Museum of Art, New York, through September 4, 2017.

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Aerospace Folktales

From Allan Sekula, dreams and illusions of the postwar American economy.

By Drew Sawyer

Allan Sekula, from Aerospace Folktales, 1973
Courtesy Allan Sekula Studio and the Columbus Museum of Art

In 1973, a year that marked the beginnings of a national recession and the signing of a peace treaty to end the Vietnam War, Allan Sekula’s first major work took as its subject an aerospace engineer who had been laid off from Lockheed, then the single largest defense contractor in the United States. By combining intimate scenes of family life in a small Los Angeles apartment with various personal documents—family photo albums, a rental agreement, bookshelves filled with classic literature, the engineer’s CV, and job rejection letters—Aerospace Folktales explores the daily life of this unemployed white-collar worker and his family as their class identity is being thrown into question. Sekula then goes on to disrupt the usual objective distance of social observation and documentary politics by revealing that the unemployed worker is in fact his own father. The result is a group portrait of an artist and his family in relation to each other and to their surrounding social and economic structures.

Allan Sekula, from Aerospace Folktales, 1973
Courtesy Allan Sekula Studio and the Columbus Museum of Art

At its peak, in 1967, Southern California’s vast aerospace industry accounted for nearly half a million jobs. But the waning of the Vietnam War and of the Apollo space program, along with a recession, brought a sharp falloff in military and NASA procurements that resulted in a succession of layoffs during the early 1970s. Many of those employees were, like Sekula’s father, professionals and experts who had risen to the middle class after World War II by obtaining undergraduate and graduate degrees. Sekula forces both his subjects and viewers to consider the dissolution of the postwar American dream, and the artist himself wonders in an accompanying text what will become of his career as an “art engineer” once he completes his graduate degree.

In its original installation at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), in 1973, Aerospace Folktales consisted of 142 black-and-white photographic images and text cards, along with four sound recordings of interviews between the artist and his father, his mother, and his mother’s friend (whose husband was also unemployed). Sekula hung the 142 photographs in a single row with text cards breaking the sequence into smaller groups that suggested the narrative flow and format of a silent movie. In this first exhibition, the audio played in an adjacent room, but in a 1974 installation at the Brand Library &Art Center in Glendale, near the Lockheed plant, the speakers were hidden behind potted plants in the gallery. At UCSD, Sekula performed a reading of an explanatory text, typed on seven pages of letter-size paper and titled “a commentary,” serving as a general narration but also “filling in for earlier omissions … because of the limited representational range of the camera.” In 1984, the year he published his seminal book Photography Against the Grain, Sekula edited the work down to fifty-one photographs, often grouped as diptychs or in grids of four, and three sound recordings.

Allan Sekula, from Untitled Slide Sequence, 1972
Courtesy Allan Sekula Studio and the Columbus Museum of Art

Sekula referred to the work, with its deconstruction of the essential elements of a film, as a “disassembled movie.” He had already begun to experiment with this format in his 35mm slide show Untitled Slide Sequence from 1972. Here too he turned his camera on aerospace factory workers, but without the typical veneration associated with pictures of such laborers taken by photographers for the Office of War Information or popular magazines like Fortune during the 1940s. Instead, he chose to capture the workers just as they were leaving their shifts at a General Dynamics Convair Division factory in San Diego, where several of them likely helped produce the F-111 military planes that flew in Vietnam. The twenty-five images in this sequence depict a range of employees as they climb the staircase to a pedestrian overpass and are directly confronted by the artist’s camera. Sekula had originally envisioned Aerospace Folktales as a slide show as well, but ultimately decided to keep separate image, text, and audio “tracks,” allowing their formal discontinuities to underscore the contradictions inherent in the documentary genre as well as in contemporary life—both are their own kinds of folktales or mythologies.

To continue reading, buy Aperture Issue 226, “American Destiny,” or subscribe to Aperture and never miss an issue.

Drew Sawyer is the William J. and Sarah Ross Soter Associate Curator of Photography at the Columbus Museum of Art, where he organized  Allan Sekula: Aerospace Folktales and Other Stories, currently on view through July 2, 2017. 

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The Inspiring, Contested Legacy of Dorothea Lange

A major retrospective surveys the photographer’s career and social activism.

By Sarah M. Miller

Paul S. Taylor, Dorothea Lange in Texas on the Plains, ca.1935
© The Oakland Museum of California

On May 13, 2017, the Oakland Museum of California opened Dorothea Lange: Politics of Seeing, a major retrospective that surveys the photographer’s career through the lens of social activism. The exhibition draws on Lange’s vast personal archive, housed at the museum. Mixing a wealth of vintage prints with digital prints produced from archival negatives, the exhibition is supplemented with selections of Lange’s field notes, contact sheets, publication mock-ups, books, letters, and ephemera. Prints by three contemporary photographers influenced by Lange—Ken Light, Janet Delaney, and Jason Jaacks—round out the installation and remind visitors how powerfully she set the standard for engaged, empathetic documentary photography. A few weeks before the opening, I visited curator Drew Johnson to discuss the exhibition. The table was set for my arrival with the very first issue of Aperture—a reminder that the inaugural cover was a photograph by Lange.

Dorothea Lange, Shift Change 3:30 pm, Coming out of Yard 3, Kaiser Shipyards, 1942
© The Oakland Museum of California

Sarah M. Miller: Why is the Dorothea Lange archive housed at the Oakland Museum of California?

Drew Johnson: Last year was the fiftieth anniversary of the archive coming to the Oakland Museum. The museum was created in the mid-1960s to unite the existing collections of Oakland’s public history museum, natural history museum, and art gallery. It opened in 1969. Founding curator of photography, Therese Thau Heyman, brought the collection here before the museum even opened, in 1966. Therese approached Lange and Paul Taylor and there were a couple things that appealed to them about the museum. One, it was a local institution. Construction was about to begin, plans were being drawn up. It had been identified as the Museum of California and as a people’s museum. Last, Therese made it a big point that the Lange archive would be made accessible to the general public as well as to scholars and researchers, and that we would make prints from the negatives.

Dorothea Lange, Shipyard Worker, Richmond California, ca. 1943
© The Oakland Museum of California

Miller: Aside from the fiftieth anniversary of the acquisition, what do you hope to achieve with a Lange retrospective?

Johnson: Dorothea Lange has a permanent space in the gallery, but it’s been more than twenty years since we presented an extensive exhibition. Lange has always been relevant to current events. In the oral history interviews that Lange conducted with Linda Reese, Lange says she had seen recent images of migrant workers in the Central Valley, California in the 1960s and, if she didn’t know when they were taken, she would have thought they were from 1935. Nothing had really changed. One of the contemporary photographers included in the exhibition is Ken Light, who photographs Central Valley migrant farmworkers. If the subject wasn’t wearing a 50 Cent sweatshirt, it could still be 1935. And it’s not just about working conditions: Lange saw her mission during the Depression as understanding a refugee crisis in America, and generating empathy for refugees, which is also an issue of great relevance today.

The Lange archive at the Oakland Museum, as opposed to the collections in the Library of Congress and the National Archives, represents her entire career, from 1918 until her death in 1965. Twenty-five-thousand negatives. We spent a long time thinking about how to whittle down this huge archive, and that’s when we decided on the theme of photographer as social activist, and using photography to persuade. Lange is the prime example. Every documentary photographer I meet tells me how Lange inspired them, both in her technique and the issues she documented.

Dorothea Lange, Untitled (Oklahoma Mother in California), 1937
© The Oakland Museum of California

Miller: How is the exhibition organized?

Johnson: There is an introductory section where visitors look at her early life. She had polio and her father abandoned the family—a possible connections to her great capacity for empathy. Then Lange’s documentary photography is divided into three sections: The Great Depression, World War II at Home (the Richmond Shipyards series, and the evacuation and internment of Japanese Americans), and, last, postwar California which includes her least-known work.

Miller: People rarely discuss Lange’s work from the 1950s and beyond.

Johnson: She had a series of health challenges in the 1950s, but she also did these amazing projects that rarely see the light of day. She was fascinated by what she called the “New California,” this vast spread of suburbia and development. Death of a Valley (1956) with Pirkle Jones, which was about the removal of a community to build Lake Berryessa, presaged modern environmental photography. But she was interested in the development of the inner city, too. She explored it through street photography, as well as the Public Defenders (1957) series, shot right across the street at the Alameda County courthouse. That’s fantastic work, some of her best.

Dorothea Lange, Manzanar Relocation Center, Manzanar, California, 1942
© The Oakland Museum of California

Miller: Did you discover anything new in the process of planning this exhibition?

Johnson: I did uncover new information about Lange’s photographs of the wartime evacuation of Japanese Americans. The museum’s archive contains some of the best-known images, like the Japanese Owned Grocery Store and Japanese Children with Tags (both 1942), because Lange was working on her own before being hired by the War Relocation Authority (WRA). Most of that series was kept by the National Archives, but we also have a few examples from WRA negative envelopes that Lange seems to have borrowed and never returned.

From this body of work, I dug into the series of Japanese Americans being evacuated from their homes: they’re sitting on their porches with stacks of luggage, waiting to be loaded onto buses. I realized Lange was shooting houses on the site of what is now the Oakland Museum. In fact, some of them were shot from the window of the Alameda County Law Library right across the street. Those Japanese American families were living right here, at 12th and Oak.

Dorothea Lange, Oakland, California, 1942
© The Oakland Museum of California

Miller: The Oakland Museum’s exhibitions always have a strong education component. What will the points of engagement be? Are you planning interactive or educational activities in the galleries?

Johnson: There are two interactive activities. First, visitors will see examples throughout the exhibition of how Lange cropped a negative to increase its power. There will be sample images and movable frames so that visitors themselves can experiment with cropping Lange’s photographs. Especially late in her career, she would take the same negative and crop it three or four different ways. For Public Defender, there would be a portrait from the waist up, and then a version where she would zero in on the eyes, for example. For the other activity, there is a large magnetic bulletin board where visitors can sequence photographs with quotations, statements, and headlines—the way she did. There is a quote on the wall: “I used to think in terms of single photographs. No more.” Both in her home and her studio she had big bulletin boards, where she would group photographs and text in different ways until the sum was greater than the parts.

Dorothea Lange, Young Man at Manzanar Relocation Center, 1942
© The Oakland Museum of California

Miller: That’s an indication of how far Lange scholarship has come. In the ’80s and ’90s, Lange was a target of revisionist scholarship on documentary photography that treated cropping and sequencing like a crime—as though documentary forbade the shaping of information, and as though it were a coup to discover the means by which she editorialized. It’s nice to see her process resurface as a point of engagement, rather than a line of attack.

Johnson: Context and communication were crucial. She was frustrated when her photographs were shown in art museums, put on a wall without context—those images and words from interviews that she went to great pains to take down so precisely. Our thesis is that, through these techniques, she could make the picture more or less emotionally powerful. She could slant the meaning or emphasis in a certain direction. We are not putting a judgment value on that, other than by saying it illustrates her empathy, her desire to effect change, and her emphasis on the photograph’s use over its aesthetics.

For that reason, we’re actually going to look at how Migrant Mother (1936), her best-known photograph, became de-contextualized over time—and why that is atypical for Lange. How do individuals become icons? Visitors walk past the six preliminary photographs from that day and then come across Migrant Mother in its own niche, Mona Lisa style. After that, there is a case filled with Migrant Mother tchotchkes and memorabilia including t-shirts and mugs. There are also examples of how the image was adapted to later messages, like the Black Panther newspaper, where the mother is rendered as a black woman. On the wall, quotes from various people, times, and contexts form a montage. Roy Stryker says, “You can see anything you want to in her. She is immortal.” Florence Thompson laments, “I didn’t get anything out of it. I wish she hadn’t taken my picture.” Lange says, “I do not remember how I explained my presence … I did not ask her name or history. She told me her age, that she was thirty-two.”

Normally, Lange prized collaboration, as shown throughout the exhibition. She would talk with someone for fifteen minutes before taking her camera out. She would talk about their kids, talk about her kids. She let the children put their dirty fingers on the lens. It was important that her subjects knew why she was there and what she was trying to accomplish. Lange resisted making icons out of people, and yet this image inadvertently did that and caused distress for Florence and her family.

Dorothea Lange, Migrant Mother, Nipomo, 1936
© The Oakland Museum of California

Miller: It makes sense to address the icon question head on. The way Lange usually interacted with her subjects is often lost in the controversy over Migrant Mother, but the controversy is unavoidable. The photograph has become a flashpoint for cynicism about documentary more broadly—for equating documentary photography with the exploitation of strangers and their suffering.

Johnson: On the other hand, for many people, the image continues to be deeply moving.

In general, Lange does not appear to have been an ideologue. She simply acknowledged problems that needed to be addressed, and said: I have a way to contribute. That said, Lange had convictions that drove her to defy the mandates of her employers, which we show. The WRA didn’t want her version of America to be seen—meaning the racism driving the Japanese evacuation order and the injustice of internment. And before that, the FSA told her not to address issues of racial discrimination in the South. One of the critiques from the ’80s, when documentary photography was under new scrutiny from scholars, was, “Why didn’t she shoot any people of color?” Excuse me?!

Dorothea Lange, Crossroads General Store, ca. 1938
© The Oakland Museum of California

Miller: Will the exhibition be a corrective to that assumption?

Johnson: I hope so. We point out that the FSA specifically instructed her to concentrate on white migrants, according to the theory that doing so would produce more widespread support. But she wasn’t going to have any of that. Her husband, Paul Taylor, was a labor economist at University of California, Berkeley, specializing in agricultural labor. He studied Mexican farm workers for years. When Lange traveled across the South, she was fascinated by it. She shot from across the white side of segregated lunch counter to the black side. And she was attuned to the legacies of slavery and racism in southern agriculture. In the exhibition we juxtapose Ex-Slave with a long memory (1938) with Plantation Overseer and his Field Hands, Mississippi Delta (1936).

Dorothea Lange, Ex-Slave with a long memory, 1938
© The Oakland Museum of California

Miller: Tell me about the contemporary work in the show.

Johnson: We have chosen three photographers because of the issues they’re interested in, and because they all have connections to Lange. Ken Light’s Valley of Shadows and Dreams (2012) is about twenty-first century migrant farm workers. He is a journalism professor at Berkeley who was inspired by Lange as a young photographer. He has also been running the Dorothea Lange Fellowship at the University of California as a juror, as have I, for the past twenty years.

Janet Delaney is a former Dorothea Lange Fellowship juror and winner. Her work South of Market, San Francisco, Then and Now (1978–86 and 2011–present) is about gentrification, and connects to Lange’s investigation of the “New California.” Jason Jaacks is also a former fellowship winner. He documents the Tohono O’Odham Nation along the U.S.–Mexico border, including how the border wall both affects and divides the community. He also focuses on recently deported Mexican migrants in the area.

Dorothea Lange, The Road West, New Mexico, 1938
© The Oakland Museum of California

Miller: It must have been hard to choose just three?

Johnson: The main idea of the show—photography as activism—is liberating because it allows us see the enormity of Lange’s legacy, but also to zero in on particular ways it has been enacted. For Lange, it was about seeing injustice and getting others to see injustice. All three artists demonstrate that idea powerfully, and each speaks about the influence and inspiration Lange provided.

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

Dorothea Lange: Politics of Seeing is on view at Oakland Museum of California through August 13, 2017.

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Erik Kessels Celebrates the Mistakes of Amateurs

In an excerpt from The Many Lives of Erik Kessels, Simon Baker considers the value of mediocrity.

From The Many Lives of Erik Kessels, 2017
Courtesy the artist

I really don’t consider myself an artist. I make art, but it’s a job . . . this is one profession in which I can be a little bit stupid, and people will say, “Oh, you are so stupid, thank you, thank you for being so stupid.” —Maurizio Cattelan

Amateurs . . . never know what they might end up with, and they don’t particularly care. Nor should you. —Erik Kessels

In 2003 the French writer and critic Jean-Yves Jouannais published one of the most important revisionist histories of art to have emerged in the past fifty years. It was called L’idiotie (Idiocy) and true to the form of the kinds of art with which it was concerned, it was mostly ignored and misunderstood. Primarily it was ignored because no one translated it into English, and the Anglophone world is far too lazy and arrogant to take untranslated French books seriously: they, it is assumed, like public safety warnings on Japanese cigarette packets, are clearly not intended for us. But make no mistake, Jouannais’s book is full of important information. It may not save your life, but neither will learning to read warnings about smoking in kanji.

The gist of L’idiotie, to summarize with brutal brevity, is that there is (and has been) a radical third way for art production that has been dangerously misunderstood and underrated. Looking back to the early twentieth century from today’s vantage point, Jouannais makes clear, it is no longer necessary to posit the binary logic of creative genius (Picasso) versus nominalist genius (Duchamp). Rather, it has always been possible, in Jouannais’s opinion, to avoid the pitfalls of predictable (and successful) art by engaging fully in stupidity, loving mediocrity, and flirting with failure: “art did not become modern,” he claims, “until idiocy became its generative principle.” This strategy (or nonstrategy in most cases) also has the added benefit of dealing with, and resisting, the postmodern disappearance of the author into the work: “Idiocy in art,” he says, “itself a voluntary idiocy, revindicated and instrumentalized, constitutes . . . a manner of resisting disappearance.” But that’s enough bad translation of a brilliant book. Don’t be an idiot; find a copy, look at all the pictures, and then find a French person who’ll tell you what the words say . . .

From The Many Lives of Erik Kessels, 2017
Courtesy the artist

Anyone who knows Erik Kessels (or his work) should have bells going off in their heads by now. We all know (or at least suspect) that Kessels is not stupid, but then again, he seems to have the ability to do deeply idiotic things in the pursuit of a kind of hard-core resistant art production (up to and including photographing his own penis and then hiding it in a book of thousands of penis photographs). But as Kessels himself writes in his recent book on failure: “If you’re anything like me, you’re called an idiot at least once a day. And that’s OK. Because making mistakes, flirting with disaster and pure, outright failure is how you will get better. Without it, you’re stuck in a zone of mediocrity.” (Jouannais, incidentally, would probably have a problem with this, as he sees mediocrity itself as containing a rich vein of usually untapped creativity: truly stupid artists, perhaps, should have no need to “get better.”)

From The Many Lives of Erik Kessels, 2017
Courtesy the artist

There is, however, a dumb core of Kessels’s practice. Although there is probably no sense in which he’d ever feel licensed, like Maurizio Cattelan, to be “professionally stupid” as an artist. The wide range of Kessels’s activity, from advertising to art direction, graphic design, curating, collecting, and so on, is insurance against the notion of simply being an artist (or even more simply, a photographer). And even the small-scale photobook world, which Kessels has made his home, sees him as everything along the sliding scale from artist/producer to publisher/collector. The dumb core, then, can be found in Kessels’s ability to bracket out and suspend these categories in such a way that normative notions of production and consumption are interrupted or suspended. And this, at a time when the ubiquity of appro­priated content has made it almost completely impossible to tell who the next person to stumble from photographic stamp collector to conceptual artist is likely to be. There are brilliant stars in the Milky Way of found imagery (like Kessels’s friend and occasional collaborator Thomas Mailaender), but they’re horribly outnumbered by orbiting lumps of rock dying to be reclassified as planets.

From The Many Lives of Erik Kessels, 2017
Courtesy the artist

But Kessels was not just (or maybe not even) one of the first to mine the infinitely deep shafts of mediocrity constituted by the photographic albums of ordinary people. He seems always to have had the inexplicably positive attitude of a delusional alchemist: certain than he will succeed, where all others before him have failed, in turning giant piles of unremarkable dross into pure gold. In and of themselves, the photographs from which much of his work is assembled are unutterably dull, miserably inade­quate, obstinately occupying the space reserved for things diametrically opposed to art. But the apparently impover­ished nature of this material is magically reversed by the relentless optimism of Kessels’s dumb humor. Because he is determined not to care about individual images at the level of meaning or value, they become transcendent symbols of potential mobility and the mystical power of failure and stupidity to reverse value systems. This was particularly evident in the works selected for the exhibition and book Failed It! (2016), where Kessels shifts deftly from finding strange pictures that make us think or make us laugh, to finding other people who have already done the dumb legwork for him. Everywhere in Kessels’s work the normative logic of production is replaced by something better: something that refuses to obey the various indices of value that artworks love to be measured by. These include (but are not limited to) originality, uniqueness, expense, size, intention, formal organization, aesthetic sophistication, and even beauty.

From The Many Lives of Erik Kessels, 2017
Courtesy the artist

We could leave Kessels here, staring at us like a lost puppy from the other side of the border between art and rubbish. But Kessels, one suspects, would never abandon a lost puppy (even one that mysteriously failed to register on photographic film), just as he would never suffer the life of an image to be prematurely cut short. Among his most recent work, Unfinished Father (2015) stands out, both for its raw emotional content and Kessels’s evident need to take the real world seriously. Confronted by the long-term illness of his father following a stroke, Kessels constructed the installation Unfinished Father from parts of the vintage car his father was working on before his illness, including the photographs made in the restoration process. But even here, in the man-cave of emotional failure, Kessels makes a virtue of losing the plot: “we can attempt to control our circumstances,” he writes, in the book of the project, “but in the final analysis they control us.” Having proven, time and again, that un­leashing the tsunami-like flow of global image culture is an unpredictable and risky business, Kessels finds not only that it’s beyond his control, but that it has flooded his basement.

This essay was originally published by Aperture in The Many Lives of Erik Kessels  (2017).

Simon Baker is Senior Curator, International Art (Photography), Tate Modern, London.

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The Loneliness of the Darkroom

In his solo exhibition at the Venice Biennale, Dirk Braeckman turns toward the existential.

By Wilco Versteeg

Dirk Braeckman, E.N.-C.K.-12 – 2013, 2013
© the artist and courtesy Zeno X Gallery, Antwerp

Known for his large black and white analog photography of interiors, nudes, landscapes, and otherwise everyday subjects, the Flemish artist Dirk Braeckman doesn’t want his work to be defined by its formal qualities. Rather, the communication between audience and image is central to an artistic practice deeply involved with the material aspects of photography. Through his method and content—and images imbued with a sense of emotional distance—Braeckman criticizes the speed with which photographs are distributed and consumed. In advance of his solo exhibition at the Belgian Pavilion in the 57th Venice Biennale, I spoke with Braeckman about the loneliness of the darkroom, documentary photography, photobooks, and New York.

Dirk Braeckman, 27.1 / 21.7 / 026 / 2014, 2014
© the artist and courtesy Zeno X Gallery, Antwerp

Wilco Versteeg: Your work seems to be grounded in nineteenth-century photographic practices, while the performativity of your images and your engagement with the material aspects of photography seem distinctly of our time.

Dirk Braeckman: The nineteenth century informs my work foremost in a formalistic way. I shoot analog and solely black and white, and I make large, tableaux-like prints on baryta paper, but what I do with this is contemporary. I sometimes teach and some students are interested in the darkroom. I wonder if this interest is sincere, or just a nostalgic reflex. For me, this is how I started thirty-five years ago. These have always been my tools of the trade. The world and the distribution of images has sped up dramatically, but I have continued to make images in the same way. Also, the infinite combinations of Photoshop are dizzying to me. I am happy to work in complete solitude, in the darkroom. I don’t suffer anyone or anything around me while I develop.

Dirk Braeckman, B.O.-D.F.-17, 2017
© the artist and courtesy of Zeno X Gallery, Antwerp

Versteeg: So your work comes into existence in the darkroom, more so than during shooting?

Braeckman: The darkroom is where it all happens, but for me, the taking, developing, printing, and exposing of an image are in fact one and the same thing, separated by quite some time. I do not shoot a lot. Sometimes it takes me months, even years, to print a negative. I want to create a distance between the emotions I experienced when shooting and the final print. I have sworn never to tell anything about the time and place in which my images were made. The story of each image is made by looking at them. Each viewer creates his own story: I don’t tell stories, I just create images. The risk of talking too much about your images is that you destroy their core, you destroy what gives them their strength.

Anyone who looks at my images is free to do with them what they want. It is beyond my control. I only control what happens in the darkroom. I think my images take time to comprehend. What at first seems evident, like a curtain, an interior, or a nude, changes when you take the time to let the image work on you. This communication, rooted in the experience of confrontation with a work, is what finally counts. I try to create works that one can return to repeatedly. Works that are, even if that sounds presumptuous, timeless.

Dirk Braeckman, H.M.-H.P.-11, 2011
© the artist and courtesy Zeno X Gallery, Antwerp

Versteeg: Is it important that this encounter, this experience, happens in a museum, or will a photobook do?

Braeckman: By training I am a painter. At art school, a friend told me I could improve my painting by trying to master photography first. I had never touched a camera before that, but to this day I have never laid it down. However, I still look and experience the artistic process as if I were a painter, that’s why my prints are often so big. Looking at a small print is like looking at a small experience. For this reason, I am not too keen on making photobooks, and I have difficulties showing my work on my website. When you see a reproduction of a photo in a book, you are less likely to think of the actual dimensions of the work. It’s just a print of a photo. In Venice, we have tried to make full use of the space. Space and presentation is everything when viewing my work. My works take the physical space they need.

Dirk Braeckman, P.H.-N.N.-11, 2011
© the artist and courtesy Zeno X Gallery, Antwerp

Versteeg: Your work is often approached formally, but what is your relationship to documentary photography?

Braeckman: Documentary photography interests me because I can’t do it myself. I am too shy for it, perhaps. For a short time when I started out as a photographer I filled in as a photographer for a newspaper and soon found that this was not for me. When on assignment, the journalist needed to remind me to finally take my picture. I was too engaged with the situation to think about shooting. When I travel, it sometimes takes a week before I get my camera out. I need to feel connected to a place before I shoot.

All photography is documentary in a way, if we consider artistic practices as telling of the way we deal with images today. In the 1980s and ’90s, I often spent long stretches of time in New York, a city that continues to fascinate me but for which I have less need now, and Berlin. In these places, I took pictures of everything that surrounded me on the street. For instance, the images I made around the fall of the Berlin Wall were never meant to be documentary, but they have become so over time.  The passing of time changed the nature of these works. I never printed them, but I am considering making a book of them. For this project, a book would do.

Work that does not have the pretense to be art but becomes art nonetheless inspires me greatly. This is why Luc Sante’s work on New York crime photography has been so important to me. Especially the images that suggest an event are mesmerizing. A murder scene with the dead body already removed, for instance. In my own work, even if people are present, they are just part of the situation but do not stand out. I never make people pose for me; everything comes into existence organically.

Dirk Braeckman, Z.Z.-T.T.-17 #2, 2017
© the artist and courtesy of Zeno X Gallery, Antwerp

Versteeg: Your photographs are often described as autobiographical, even depressing.

Braeckman: The works are dark, no doubt. Some people ask me if I am depressed, and I tell them, “Yes, I am, but not more so than others.” I am not agonizing in my studio. The dark, existential melancholy qualities of the images attract people. I don’t think my work is depressive. Luc Sante said it very well: To him, my works are like unexploded bombs. There is a certain stillness, a timelessness, but they also are full of energy and tension.

Wilco Versteeg: Do you consider your exhibition at the Venice Biennale a highpoint in your career?

Dirk Braeckman: Yes, at least for now. I don’t know what comes next, but this is a big cherry on the cake. I am nearly sixty years old, but I don’t see this as a retrospective moment. I continue to work and to develop artistically. In Venice, I predominantly exhibit new work, but some older prints as well. My work will be unknown to 90 percent of the visitors, so I hope they will get a clear view of my artistic practice. For those who know me, the new works might shed a different light on what I have made before. Works are never finished, not even when they are printed and exhibited.

Wilco Versteeg is a PhD candidate at Université Paris Diderot.

Dirk Braeckman represents Flanders at the 57th Venice Biennale, in an exhibition at the Belgian Pavilion, from May 13–November 26, 2017.

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