Aperture's Blog, page 116

Rich, Famous, and Faking it

For twenty-five years, Lauren Greenfield has chronicled the rise and fallout of consumerism and celebrity culture.

By Katie Booth

Lauren Greenfield, Film director and producer Brett Ratner, 29, and Russell Simmons, 41, a businessman and cofounder of hip-hop label Def Jam, at L’Iguane restaurant, St. Barts. Few establishments on the island accepted credit cards, and visitors often carried large amounts of cash, 1998
© the artist and courtesy the Annenberg Space for Photography

Few photographers have cast as unflinching an eye on the outrageously wealthy as Lauren Greenfield. Her 2012 film The Queen of Versailles follows billionaire “Time Share King” David Siegel and his wife, Jackie, as they attempt to build the largest home in America, only to be sidelined by the 2008 financial crisis. But Greenfield’s fascination with the trappings of consumerism began in the early ’90s. On the heels of a National Geographic assignment in Chiapas, Mexico, Greenfield made the choice to focus closer to home: on a group of teenagers in her hometown, Los Angeles. The resulting body of work, Fast Forward: Growing Up in the Shadow of Hollywood (1997), offered a look into youth culture that was at once hopeful, tragic, and wholly American. Present throughout Greenfield’s work over the last twenty-five years is a dedication to bringing forth deeply personal narratives—a testament to the intimate and long-standing relationships she forges with her subjects. I spoke with Greenfield as she prepared for her retrospective, Generation Wealth, currently on view at the Annenberg Space for Photography in Los Angeles.

Lauren Greenfield, Jackie and friends with Versace handbags at a private opening at the Versace store, Beverly Hills, California, 2007
© the artist and courtesy the Annenberg Space for Photography

Katie Booth: Did you feel like an outsider in the worlds you’ve entered? How has your own background shaped your photography?

Lauren Greenfield: In a way it was really the opposite. My parents didn’t buy into the materialistic values of LA, but as a teenager wanting to fit in, I still wanted designer jeans, and to have a car at sixteen like my friends did. My work comes from that contradiction: even growing up with parents who did not participate in conspicuous consumption, I was interested in symbols of wealth and glamour. As a photographer, even in the most extreme places, I feel a mix of empathy and ability to relate. The work is about the aspiration for wealth and luxury, and the striving to be “other” than you are. Whether it’s the patients in the anorexia clinic from Thin (2006), or Jackie Siegel from The Queen of Versailles, I had to like the people to spend so much time with them. When I’m with my subjects, I focus on what makes them tick, and their behavior, rather than my status as an outsider. I’m more interested in the common ground, and how we’re all complicit in this story.

Booth: Your photographs expose the dark side of wealth, but typically these people control their own images. What do you think motivated your subjects to let their guard down, such as the Seigel family in The Queen of Versailles? Is it because they trust you as a photographer, or something more?

Greenfield: A lot of the work in Generation Wealth is longitudinal, so I think part of it is developing trust and relationships. Many people who I document desire fame and recognition. More profoundly, people want to share their stories, which I’ve tried to do in a long-term, respectful way. I think with The Queen of Versailles and with Thin, my subjects could sense that I’m not seeking to criticize them. I’m interested in the humanity of their stories, how their stories reflect all of us. In the case of The Queen of Versailles for example, the story of David and Jackie wanting more—a 90,000-square-foot home inspired by the château of Versailles, rather than the 26,000-square-foot mansion they lived in—and being willing to overextend to get it, was an allegory that spoke to, in supersized terms, how many Americans from a variety of backgrounds (and even others I documented internationally in Ireland, Iceland, and Dubai) get wrapped up in the same cycle of addictive consumerism.

Lauren Greenfield, Xue Qiwen, 43, in her Shanghai apartment, decorated with furniture from her favorite brand, Versace, 2005
© the artist and courtesy the Annenberg Space for Photography

Booth: Your work connects threads that might, in another context, seem disparate: alongside images of millionaires and celebrities in Beverly Hills are pictures of migrant workers, squatters, and strippers. Is there a unifying quality or feeling present in your subjects that transcends their socioeconomic status?

Greenfield: Definitely. I’m looking at how the values of our culture have shifted in a way that affects people beyond socioeconomic status, race, or nationality. In the United States, we have a culture that has been deeply influenced by materialism, the cult of celebrity, the importance of image. Globalism and mass media have disseminated these values across the world. I look at how girls are affected, how kids are affected, how people in communist countries are affected, and how we all made the same mistakes that led to the 2008 crash.

Booth: In this project, and much of your work, you focus on women and girls. Juliet Schor, in her introduction to Generation Wealth, notes that “sex greases the wheels of commerce” and that the performance of wealth is typically by men, while “women serve as props and audience for their acts.” Do you agree with these statements?

Greenfield: I think that’s part of the story. I’m interested in how girls are marketed to, but also how they are sold. When girls learn from a young age that their value comes from their body, their reaction is to leverage that value, whether it’s by posting a sexy picture on Instagram, or actually selling their body. In the “Sexual Capital” chapter, there’s a story of Brooke Taylor, a college-educated, Midwestern woman who was working as a social worker making four hundred dollars a week, and who decided to become a prostitute. She makes ten thousand dollars a day, and is happy with her choice. In a world where money is the metric of success, and people don’t feel as bound by traditional conventions of morality, that choice becomes rational. I’m interested in the culture that creates that.

Lauren Greenfield, Crenshaw High School girls selected by a magazine to receive “Oscar treatment” for a prom photo shoot take a limo to the event with their dates, Culver City, California, 2001
© the artist and courtesy the Annenberg Space for Photography

Booth: Do you think consumerism places a disproportionate burden on women?

Greenfield: Well, I think capitalism thrives on insecurity, and where you have insecurity, you have a great consumer. If you tell somebody they’re not good enough, but if they buy this product, they will be, that’s a perfect way to sell. Women and girls are particularly vulnerable, because of their insecurity about body image, and self-esteem, but I don’t think they’re the only ones. Boys are becoming increasingly vulnerable because they are being objectified, too. Older people as well. We live in a culture that values youth.

Booth: Your ad for Always, “Like a Girl,” was the first feminine product ad to run during the Superbowl, and was proven to have a positive impact on the way girls perceived themselves. What do you think will be the most powerful effect of bringing all of this work together in the context of a book and exhibition?

Greenfield: I think we’re at a critical moment in history, and our path is not sustainable. Popular culture is ubiquitous and all-consuming. Questioning and discussing this culture makes us less vulnerable to its influence, decreases its power, and increases our agency. “Girl” is often used as an insult and nobody thought about it. That campaign showed how disempowering that is.

Lauren Greenfield, Ilona at home with her daughter, Michelle, 4, Moscow, 2012
© the artist and courtesy the Annenberg Space for Photography exhibition

Booth: In On Photography, Susan Sontag writes, “Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted.” With the rise of social media, how have you seen photography, and images of ourselves, fit into consumer culture?

Greenfield: That’s a prophetic statement. Photography has been completely democratized, and has become part of everyone’s personal branding. The way kids brand themselves is kind of a natural extension of this work. When you ask kids what they want to be when they grow up now, the most common response is “rich and famous.”

Booth: You’ve drawn parallels between David Siegel and President Trump. Many liberals and pundits expressed shock at the impossibility of his win, but, looking through Generation Wealth, are you at all surprised at his massive political following?

Greenfield: I had the same reaction. I was completely shocked. But Trump’s election also validates my work. It looks like a straight line, from the early work in LA, to the rise of celebrity worship and the idea of “fake it ’til you make it,” with the backdrop of inequality and the feeling of the loss of the real American dream and real social mobility. On a personal level, I was surprised, because I was probably in the West Coast bubble like so many others, but I also feel like that makes the work important to think about now. I hope that people have the same reaction, and that this project can shed light on where we’re at now, in a culture that brought about Donald Trump.

Katie Booth is the digital manager at Aperture Foundation. 

Generation Wealth is on view at the Annenberg Space for Photography, Los Angeles, through August 13, 2017.

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Editor’s Note

by Daria Tuminas

 

Jane Mount, Ideal Bookshelf 1012: Daria Tuminas

A book with “cinematic flair”; “a quasicinematic, nonlinear narrative”; “raw, cinematic, stream-of-consciousness”—you hear these things about photobooks all the time. But what exactly is this cinematic aspect of these publications? And what is the relationship between cinema and the photobook at large?

The historical interconnection goes back to the very beginning of both mediums. As Olivier Lugon points out in Between Still and Moving Images (2012), “already, before the advent of the Lumière cinematograph, paper had been the privileged medium for cinematic movement, from the plates of the phenakistoscope and the zoetrope, to cards for Mutoscope machines, to the pages of flip-books.” The dynamic between the two forms has been explored for nearly a hundred years, from the work of avant-garde artists in the 1920s, to the phenomena of fotoromanzi and photonovels in the 1950s, to cinema theory in the 1970s, and beyond.

At the same time, classical cinema has been radically transformed due to technological change—such as the explosion of digital that resulted in interactivity and virtuality, starting in the 1980s and ’90s. Cinema as something that, in Chris Marker’s words (Immemory: A CD-ROM, 1997), is “bigger than we are, what you have to look up at,” has long vanished. We watch movies on our smartphones, turning cinema into a mobile, manipulable, and intimate matter. Add to that an everevolving number of possible presentation modes, from multiscreen installations to projection domes. With this new state (or should I say “states”?) of cinema in mind, it’s interesting to think about how photobooks have also changed in turn, and to question whether they have mirrored the processes taking place in cinema. David Bate, in Imprint: Visual Narratives in Books and Beyond (2013), claims that “many photobooks operate like silent movies, with a main title, introduction text, and short captions or ‘intertitles’ to signal the direction and flow of the ‘movie.’” While this silent-movie pattern is indeed recognizable in a number of publications, there is probably even more to the relationship between cinema and the photobook now, when physical books have started to cross-fertilize with the digital.

Both cinema and photobooks belong to the history of image seriality and ordering; they can also be analyzed alongside slide shows, photo-essays, and other kinds of sequences. As David Campany outlines in Photography and Cinema (2008), “Any orchestration of images is montage.” Do the principles of montage in all of these different types of assemblies—from the turn of a page, to the click of a slide—correlate? If so, how? Does the photobook borrow from cinematic montage techniques, or does it have its own specific ways of sequencing?

These core questions serve as a framework for inquiry, rather than an attempt at comprehensive answers, for this issue of The PhotoBook Review. They also serve as the impetus for inviting a host of curators, artists, and writers—all of whom have spent time thinking deeply about these matters— to participate. Additionally, I have proposed another angle for discussion in this issue, picking up on an approach introduced by the guest editor of the last issue, Denise Wolff. That issue focused on “accidental photobooks”—those publications that have not been “awarded the status of photobook proper.” Following Wolff’s “recipe,” I would like to open the floor to publications that normally exist in a world parallel to the classic photobook, and yet can address, in their own ways, similar themes: books made by video artists, artists’ books (works of art experimenting with the book form), and books made by film aficionados, experts, and scholars. At times, the photobook world can seem isolated, and the subject of the current issue gives us the opportunity to explore and intertwine with other types of visual publishing. We will see how the book form can play with the moving image, serve as an analytical tool to interpret cinema, or exist in tandem with a video. In addition to the artists and authors who have contributed to this issue, I would also like to express my gratitude to the Mondriaan Fund for their support of my research; to curator Zhenia Sveshinsky, who served as my partner during brainstorming sessions in the early stages of my research; to Johan Deumens, a passionate book lover and gallerist, through whom I was introduced to the wide world of artists’ books; to Hripsimé Visser, who—together with the museum’s public-program team—has shared my interest in the subject and generously supported my initiatives.

Daria Tuminas is a freelance curator and researcher. In 2014, she co-organized a yearly program, Dutch Photography Experience, which included a series of educational events in St. Petersburg as well as an exhibition on Dutch photobooks, Undercover. Tuminas continued Undercover with the next photobook-related project and exhibition, Reading a Photobook, and currently is busy with researching the relations between cinema and photobooks.

Jane Mount (illustration) makes things for people who love books. idealbookshelf.com

Image credit: Jane Mount, Ideal Bookshelf 1012: Daria Tuminas

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A History of White Men in South Africa

In a new film, photographer Mikhael Subotzky takes on two hundred years of white masculinity.

By Ian Bourland

Mikhael Subotzky, Maplank and Naomi, Pollsmoor Maximum Security Prison, 2004
Courtesy the artist and the Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg

Mikhael Subotzky came to prominence in the mid-2000s with large color photographs and monographs that investigated themes of incarceration and punishment in postapartheid South Africa. From scenes in the Pollsmoor Maximum Security Prison outside of Cape Town, collected in the series Die Vier Hoeke (2004–5), and in a frontier town prison in Beaufort West (2006–8), Subotzky produced highly-polished, arresting portraits of people and places bearing the legacy of structural violence. A collaborative project on the Ponte Tower—the “hijacked” Johannesburg skyscraper at the center of Ponte City (2008–10)—considered architecture, segregation, and social identity in the urban landscape.

In 2012, with his turn to filmmaking, Subotzky’s practice shifted markedly to more overt considerations of the power of vision itself. His ongoing series of what he calls Sticky-tape Transfers began in 2014 when Subotzky used adhesive to literally prize apart the typically window-like surface of his photographs. Twenty-nine of those collaged transfer images were exhibited earlier this year at the Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg. But at the center of the exhibition was the three-channel feature WYE (2016), on which Subotzky collaborated with the legendary cinematographer Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein, perhaps best known for his work with German auteur Werner Herzog.

WYE, which was commissioned in 2016 by the Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation in Sydney, is named for a river in the western U.K., immortalized by Wordsworth in the nineteenth century. Over the course of forty-eight minutes, WYE draws together three seemingly discrete narratives by centering on a single coastline in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, where the lighthouse keeper Hare spends his days writing and sounding for metal on the beach. Hare’s section of WYE depicts the discovery—with the help of recurring Subotzky collaborator Hermanus—of a buried chest, left behind by the British settler Lethbridge in 1820. Hare’s uneasy encounter prompts him to write to a woman who has left South Africa for Australia, which is analyzed by an archivist of the future, Feio, who provides voice-over narration. Deftly interweaving the stories of Hare, Lethbridge, and Feio, Subotzky produces a timely and compelling account of the British colonial legacy, and its reverberation in a country still making its uneasy transition to freedom.

Mikhael Subotzky, Still from WYE, 2016. Film projection, 48:30 minutes
Courtesy the artist and the Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg

Ian Bourland: WYE is a big jump in genre for you. You made a film in 2012, Moses and Griffiths, but that was more of a non-fiction project. Why was film the medium for this particular project?

Mikhael Subotzky: In the case of both my films—Moses and Griffiths and WYE—the choice of medium just seemed to make sense in relation to what interested me about the subjects. Moses and Griffiths deals with overlapping narratives that seemed better suited to moving images and recorded sound, while with WYE, it felt necessary to write fictional characters to really get inside the colonial mindsets of the past, present, and future.

Bourland: In much of your work, you use acute metaphors of precision and vision that you often also undermine. It seems the “Feio” section of WYE reveals all these blind spots.

Subotzky: Totally. When I was at UCT [University of Cape Town], both my girlfriend at the time and my best friend were studying anthropology. I think I learned a huge amount from what they were reading and the discussions around representational responsibility. At the same time, I felt that the degree to which anthropologists get submerged in theory and react to anthropology’s own very fraught history really shut them down. Feio is a “psycho-anthropologist” of the future whose manner expresses the arrogance of progress, of being freed from bodily needs. And yet the experience of embodiment through the “deep enactment” seduces Feio to some extent. I’ve almost exaggerated the blind spots you mention to undermine this arrogance of progress, which is postulated as a colonialist gaze of the future.

Mikhael Subotzky, Still from WYE, 2016. Film projection, 48:30 minutes
Courtesy the artist and the Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg

Bourland: There is a moment in WYE where the Hare character is reading an antique letter by a white settler and is embarrassed to be reading it in front of Hermanus, who is black. Is that a reflection of a feeling you had about your work?

Subotzky: I think less in relation to my work but more in relation to being a white South African man. With this project, I wanted to take on white masculinity and collapse or explode it from within the mindset of these three protagonists. I was very much trying to engage with my own sense of shame and guilt in relation to the history of white masculinity, particularly in South Africa.

Bourland: Is the relationship between Hare on the beach and Hermanus indicative of your actual encounters with Hermanus when you were younger? That ambivalence struck me as a sort of typical South African or even white American encounter.

Subotzky: That’s exactly what I was trying to write in that scene. I did it as an exaggeration of that kind of experience; Hare is really like a typical white South African. Hermanus walking up to him is an exaggerated dramatization of how I actually met the real Hermanus. He was behind a wall that he was bricklaying on a building site. He asked me, “What are you doing?” That was the first thing he said to me. And he was genuinely interested in what I was doing with a camera, and then he asked me to take his photograph, and that’s how we got to know each other. In the film, Hare assumes that Hermanus is begging, but he is actually just interested in what Hare is doing—metal-detecting on the beach. Then Hare feels this kind of guilt at the assumption and overcompensates, but he’s very patronizing in explaining what he is doing with the metal detector.

Mikhael Subotzky, Still from WYE, 2016. Film projection, 48:30 minutes
Courtesy the artist and the Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg

Bourland: There’s an irony, then, with the “Lethbridge” section, which suggests that the British colonialist may be an irrational figure.

Subotzky: Absolutely. Lethbridge comes with that very particular early-nineteenth-century combination of the occult and the scientific. The title WYE alludes to the Romantic era—especially in painting and poetry—and the Romantic way of looking at the landscape, and also to Wordsworth’s poem “Tintern Abbey,” which was written on the River Wye and became a foundational text of the Romantic gaze. With Lethbridge, it was a real balancing act to write him in a way that he wasn’t just a bad person—so you could kind of identify with him—but also to reveal the arrogance that the land was there for him to study and do experiments on, and then he goes mad.

Bourland: The film is set in three time periods on one beach in Port Elizabeth. Is the Eastern Cape especially significant?

Subotzky: I grew up in Cape Town and moved to Johannesburg in 2008 because I hate how pervasive the physical structures of apartheid still are in Cape Town, the sense of separation, everyone pretending they are in the south of France. Grahamstown—the town where I shot Moses and Griffiths which is in the Eastern Cape—is even worse. It’s literally this figure of eight shape with these two bowls: the British colonial town is in one bowl and the black township is in another. WYE really emerged out of Moses and Griffiths. I wanted to link three temporalities and geographies to the gaze of the white colonial body, so using the backdrop of the Eastern Cape and the 1820 Settlers made sense. The beach that 1820s Settlers landed on was literally the beach in Port Elizabeth where we shot.

Mikhael Subotzky, WYE, 2016. Installation view at the Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg, 2017
Courtesy the artist and the Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg

Bourland: The 1820s Settlers being the people sent down from England to populate South Africa. 

Subotzky: Exactly. And more specifically to populate the particular part of South Africa where there was a lot of conflict between the Afrikaners and the Xhosa. The colonial government was struggling to police that frontier and they really fucked everyone over, including their own countrymen. They brought working-class people over from England to act as a buffer with the promise of land, but it turned out to be poor farming land given to people who weren’t skilled farmers. But the fictional Lethbridge, an 1820 Settler, never makes it off the beach onto the land proper; instead, he goes mad in the liminal zone between the sea and the landscape.

Bourland: WYE connects this history to similar histories around the Indian Ocean and specifically in Australia.

Subotzky: In 2016 I was invited to go to Australia by the Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation in Sydney. In going there, I read The Fatal Shore (1986) by Robert Hughes, an exhaustive, amazing history of the Australian penal colony. I was deeply struck by one of the early chapters called the “Geographic Unconscious,” which describes how the British had to imagine the Australian landscape as upside down, inhospitable, and unfriendly in order to politically justify the use of Australia as a dumping ground for criminals. This “otherization” of the landscape contrasted so strongly with my experience of the way that contemporary white middle-class South Africans idealize the Australian landscape as being “just the same” as ours here, but without all of the “problems.” So it was really that part that got me thinking about the complete turning around of that projection onto the Australian landscape over a couple of hundred years. I literally saw that in my mind on the map as two sides of the triangle. And I drew a line between England and Australia, South Africa, and Australia, and then started thinking about the third side of that triangle, which was the English projections onto the South African landscape.

Mikhael Subotzky, WYE Study 3, 2015
Courtesy the artist and the Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg

Bourland: WYE follows your recent project Ponte City (2008–14), created with Patrick Waterhouse, which tracks the iconic Johannesburg apartment tower of the same name through photography, installations, and archives. Since you began work on Ponte nearly a decade ago, how do you feel about the direction Johannesburg is moving today?

Subotzky: This is an important moment in our history because the political corruption of our liberation movement is combining with the student protests and a stagnant economy to create a lot of conflict. Issues are coming up that really need to be addressed—how little has changed economically for the majority of people, the pervasive racial problems, and the depth to which colonial thinking has seeped its way into all of our institutions. Some people are very, very pessimistic today. But Johannesburg is amazing. Between my studio in Maboneng and Ponte, which is only a couple of kilometers away, they’re about to open this beautiful new residential building that David Adjaye has designed. There is so much going on that is dynamic and engaged.

Mikhael Subotzky, Boat 2, 2008
Courtesy the artist and the Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg

Bourland: Have you heard anything in South Africa about the controversy at the Whitney Museum over the inclusion of Dana Schutz’s painting of Emmett Till in the current biennial? Many South African artists, such as yourself and Pieter Hugo, have been thinking for a long time about this question of who can represent whom, who can represent scenes that might actually cause trauma.

Subotzky: Well, I have totally been thinking about it. And those kinds of ideas have been in my thoughts throughout my career. But very, very consciously, I mean, for part of Retinal Shift (2012), I did a wall of a hundred photographs which was called I was looking back; they are all taken from my archive from the eight years of working before that. One of them was a photograph of a prisoner who had been burned to death in a cell. His mother had actually asked me to take that photograph, and even though she was grateful to me for taking it, and it felt very important to her, I felt very uncomfortable. I was literally haunted by the photograph, but I also felt very uncomfortable in terms of the kind of issues that came up around that Dana Schutz painting. I had this instinct that I wanted to smash the photograph; I don’t know where it came from.

In retrospect, it was about writing my own feelings into that work. It had its function in documentary terms, but it also had its function in personal terms for the mother who was so grateful for me giving it to her. But my own trauma of seeing this violently burnt body was written out of that narrative, so I smashed it. And in smashing it—I mounted glass in front of it and smashed the glass—it felt terrifying and felt like I might be reenacting the trauma and violence that was done to that man. But I realized what I was doing in smashing it was covering up the representation that in many ways I wished hadn’t made and kind of “re-shrouding” of that body.

There’s a battle between being sensitive to all the issues of representation, but also wanting to be brave enough to make representations and think about the positive functions that representations can make. And for me, living in South Africa, it would be ridiculous to, for instance, only photograph white people because white people are less than ten percent of the population.

Mikhael Subotzky, Sticky-tape Transfer 13, Quiver Tree / Robert Jacob Gordon, 2014 (detail)
Courtesy the artist and the Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg

Bourland: In describing your process, there is at times a sense of anxiety or ambivalence that comes out, a masochism towards the work. As a white artist now, is all that there is left to deal with guilt or shame?

Subotzky: We have to engage as citizens. So many white people are on social media commenting and writing in columns and participating in “virtual politics,” but we haven’t delved nearly enough as white people into how pervasive our privilege is. And how we are quite desperate to hang onto it. I think it’s more about shame than guilt. Guilt is very particular; there is nothing one can really do about guilt. Shame can be understood. It’s a starting point in relation to where we are now with the political climate and these student movements. It is something that has to be done before we can move onto actually thinking about our broader place in society.

Ian Bourland, a critic and historian of photography and the global contemporary, is Assistant Professor at the Maryland Institute College of Art.

WYE was on view at the Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg, from March 2–April 2, 2017.

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On the Edge of the American Dream

How have West Coast photographers subverted the mythology of California?

By Will Matsuda

John Divola, Untitled (woman watering, striped top), 1971–73
Courtesy the artist and Gallery Luisotti, Santa Monica

When most people hear “Golden State,” they think of sunshine and Stephen Curry, but curator Drew Sawyer was thinking about the 1940s internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. He was also thinking about how photographers, since the 1970s, have challenged romanticized images of California. Currently on view at Marianne Boesky Gallery, his group exhibition Golden State includes photographs by Anthony Hernandez, Catherine Opie, Larry Sultan, and other California-based artists. At a moment when California is being heralded as a leader of “the resistance,” these photographers focus on various marginalized communities, demonstrating how not all Californians have access to a utopic, liberal vision of the Golden State. People there are still struggling to be recognized as citizens, to feel like they belong, and to survive.

Christina Fernandez, Lavanderia #11, 2003
Courtesy the artist and Gallery Luisotti, Santa Monica

Will Matsuda: Why an exhibition about California? Why now?

Drew Sawyer: When the gallery asked me to organize a show, it was the day after the presidential election. I knew I wanted to do something that was timely but that wouldn’t feel dated by the time it opened in April. Already within the first week after the election, California was emerging as a state of resistance. There was talk of “Calexit.” In recent years, the state seemed to have become this liberal bastion. But many conservative movements have originated in California, and one would only have to go back ten years to when the state attempted to ban same-sex marriage.

Catherine Opie, Flipper, Tanya, Chloe, & Harriet, San Francisco, California, 1995
Courtesy the artist; Regen Projects, Los Angeles; and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong

California, in some ways, represents the country as a whole, and also the country’s ideals. Many of our ideas of California, influenced by Hollywood shows like HBO’s Big Little Lies, have to do with an idealized vision of the American Dream. So I was particularly interested in the contradictions of the state. California has one of the largest economies in the world, and it has one of the greatest number of billionaires. At the same time, it has the highest rate of poverty in the country. It felt necessary to think about these polarities, since the country is so polarized right now.

From an art historical standpoint, the state also seems relevant because many of the California photographers I ended up selecting have had major survey shows in the last few years: Anthony Hernandez at SFMoMA in 2016 and Larry Sultan at LACMA in 2014 (and now currently at SFMOMA). But neither of those shows have travelled to the East Coast. Neither of those artists even have commercial galleries that represent them on the East Coast. It seems like the perfect time to bring this work to New York.

Anthony Hernandez, Rodeo Drive #19, 1984
© the artist and courtesy Galerie Thomas Zander, Cologne

Matsuda: The title, Golden State, evokes the usual California connotations: sun, surfers, and LA. But the exhibition seems to attack these romanticized visions straight on with images portraying the hardships endured by Latino day laborers, Japanese Americans facing internment, and other marginalized identities. What were you looking for when you were selecting photos?

Sawyer: I wanted to complicate that idea of California, the one that gets represented so often. You mentioned the Dorothea Lange photographs of the internment of Japanese Americans, and those really were the inspiration for the exhibition. This spring is the seventy-fifth anniversary of the internment. In 1942, the federal government commissioned Lange to document the process of interning over 100,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans. Even before she started photographing the roundups and the camps, Lange photographed Japanese Americans in their homes and at their workplaces. The mandatory internment announcement had already been made, so the people in these photos knew what was coming and knew what they would be forced to leave behind: their homes, their businesses, their jobs, their college educations. Those are the photographs I ended up choosing. In some ways, I think they are the most subversive because Lange really showed the degree to which these individuals were truly American and so fully integrated into the economy and American society.

Dorothea Lange, College students of Japanese ancestry who have been evacuated from Sacramento to the Assembly Center, Sacramento, California, 1942
Courtesy National Archives

Matsuda: I know this history because I am Japanese American and I know Lange’s work. But for people walking into the gallery, the context of internment is not entirely clear. A suburban family poses on a manicured lawn, or two hip guys strike a pose for the camera. There are no captions to explain that these were taken right before their entire communities were uprooted and imprisoned. Don’t you think these kinds of photographs need context?

Sawyer: I did think about that, but of course commercial galleries don’t usually have wall labels, so the full captions are on the checklist and in the accompanying catalog. In the end, I also wanted the show to be beautiful, to be visually enticing, and I think those contradictions are even more interesting. I could’ve shown work that was more explicitly about internment, but I selected a series of portraits that felt more cohesive with the rest of the exhibition.

Matsuda: Right, your focus is on people. But, another common vision of California is the grandeur of the landscape—places like Big Sur and Yosemite.

Sawyer: The landscape, particularly the suburban landscape, does appear. When you think of California photography, you may think of Ansel Adams or nineteenth-century photographic surveys of the landscape. But for me, that is a separate tradition. Since Lange was my starting point, I really wanted to look at images that examine California’s economic systems, and that might be more rooted in cultivated landscapes than in natural ones.

Buck Ellison, Pasta Night, 2016
Courtesy the artist and Park View, Los Angeles

Matsuda: John Divola, Buck Ellison, and even Larry Sultan’s images feel quite suburban. What is it about this setting that makes it a productive backdrop for the exhibition?

Sawyer: I think the idea of suburbia and California are linked with the American Dream. Even looking through the current issue of Aperture, “American Destiny,” a lot of the photographers or photographs are actually from California. But each of those photographers gives a very different picture of suburbia. In John Divola’s work from his San Fernando Valley series, from the early 1970s, there seems to be a certain sense of postwar conformity in the pursuit a middle-class life. I chose several images of people watering their lawn. They are comical but also a bit sad.

Buck Ellison, the youngest photographer in the show by far, has a very different portrayal of suburbia. He’s concerned with depicting a very specific elite, white culture—not the middle class. And to me, his work provides a really interesting dialogue with Dorothea Lange’s photographs. While Lange’s photographs show the failure of liberalism in the face of war, Buck’s photographs seem to capture how certain progressive or liberal ideals have not only succeeded to some extent but also become commodified into identities, brands, and luxuries. In Buck’s staged photograph of the gay couple making pasta, it’s sort of like, “Oh, they’ve won their equality, and now all they want to do is make homemade pasta with their expensive culinary equipment in their beautiful suburban kitchen.”

Larry Sultan, Canal District, San Rafael, 2006
Courtesy the Estate of Larry Sultan, Casemore Kirkeby Gallery, San Francisco, and Galerie Thomas Zander, Cologne

A lot of Sultan’s work also has to do with home and suburbia too, especially the San Fernando Valley where he grew up. I chose work from Homeland (2006–9) partially because it was his last show and he hasn’t had a show in New York since he passed away in 2009. He shot the work in Marin County, a wealthy and liberal enclave just north of San Francisco where Buck Ellison happens to be from. I thought the series also provided another conversation with Lange’s photographs, since he hired immigrant day laborers to act out scenes in these sort of interstitial suburban spaces, like fields and creeks between housing developments. He made the series both before and after the subprime mortgage crisis, so the landscapes probably took on new meanings for him. And these images of immigrants walking in fields probably take on new meanings for us today. I hope the show provides a variety of perspectives on suburban lifestyles.

Matsuda: And who has access to it.

Sawyer: Exactly.

Will Matsuda is the Social Media Associate at Aperture. Drew Sawyer is the William J. and Sarah Ross Soter Associate Curator of Photography at the Columbus Museum of Art and the Arts Editor at Document Journal.

Golden State is on view at Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York, through April 27, 2017.

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Robert Adams on Gregory Halpern, ZZYZX

D. H. Lawrence admired the American Southwest but found Southern California troubling: “In a way, it has turned its back on the world, and looks into the void Pacific. It is absolutely selfish, very empty, but not false.”

Gregory Halpern records an aspect of what still seems to be its emptiness—a careless isolation from one another. The idea of community appears to be almost beyond our imagination.

Halpern’s Southern California is, however, in another sense, far from empty. Despite our neglect of what we might improve—others’ lives, and the places we share—there is frequently evident an unorthodox beauty. No matter the smog, the view from the junky chairs is one of distant harmony. The blackbird, though at risk next to the street, is for the moment a shape perfectly whole. And the young man with arms outstretched in the sun is worthy of Donatello.

Beauty and its implication of promise is the metaphor that gives art its value. It helps us rediscover some of our best intuitions—the ones that encourage caring.

Robert Adams has worked as a photographer of the changing American landscape for the last five decades. He has received numerous awards for his work, including the Deutsche Börse Prize in 2006 and the Hasselblad Award in 2009.

 

Gregory Halpern

ZZYZX

MACK • London, 2016

Designed by Lewis Chaplin

9 3/8 x 11 3/8 in. (24 x 29 cm) • 128 pages

77 color images • Silkscreened hardcover

mackbooks.co.uk

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2017 Aperture Portfolio Prize Shortlist

Emmanuelle Andrianjafy, Untitled, 2016, from the series Nothing's in Vain

Nancy Floyd, Moving, 1983-1999, 2015, from the series Weathering Time

Kris Graves, Francis, 2016, from the series The Testament Project

Balarama Heller, Cuban Knight Anole, 2017, from the series Zero at the Bone

Natalie Krick, Me posing as Mom posing as Marilyn, 2014, from the series Natural Deceptions

We’re pleased to announce the five finalists for the 2017 Aperture Portfolio Prize, an international photography competition whose goal is to identify trends in contemporary photography and highlight artists whose work deserves greater recognition:

Emmanuelle Andrianjafy

Nancy Floyd

Kris Graves

Balarama Heller

Natalie Krick

This year, Aperture’s staff reviewed more than 700 portfolios. Our challenge is to select one winner and four honorable mentions from this overwhelming response. One finalist will be selected as the winner and will be published in Aperture magazine, receive a $3,000 cash prize, and present an exhibition at Aperture Gallery and Bookstore in New York.

We are delighted to welcome these five finalists to our ranks of illustrious past winners and finalists, joining such artists as Eli Durst, Drew Nikonowicz, Amy Elkins, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Alexander Gronsky, Sarah Palmer, Louie Palu, Bryan Schutmaat, and many others. The winner of the 2017 Aperture Portfolio Prize will be announced in May 2017, and the finalists’ portfolios and statements will be featured on aperture.org.

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Guilty Pleasures/Hidden Treasures: Darius Himes and Frish Brandt

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Darius Himes on Robert Spector

The Pizza Hut Story

Melcher Media and IPHFHA

New York and Wichita, KS, 2008

The official geographic center of the continental United States of America is in Lebanon, Kansas, a mere 199 miles from Wichita, the birthplace of Pizza Hut. It somehow seems fitting that a chain restaurant with such national (and global) reach emanated from smack-dab in the center of the country. In 1958, the Carney brothers borrowed $600 from their mother to open a restaurant after seeing an article in the Saturday Evening Post about a new phenomenon: pizza. The name? Well, the sign of the building they rented only had room for eight letters—and a classic was born!

Having survived college on two-for-one coupons for medium-sized pizzas, I readily welcomed this book into my library. The Pizza Hut Story, an illustrated history of the company, was produced for its fiftieth anniversary and released only internally. This glossy book—loaded up like a Meat Lover’s pizza with historical photos, kitschy logos, and an earnest love for building a popular business—is devoid of any irony and is the perfect way to simply celebrate their success. It comes delivered, obviously, in a cardboard pizza box. Scrumptious!

Darius Himes is the international head of photographs at Christie’s.

 

Frish Brandt on Paul Bertolli with Alice Waters

Chez Panisse Cooking

Random House

New York, 1988

Chez Panisse is practically an adjective, not just a proper noun. The soul of this restaurant in Berkeley, California, is in the ingredients, not the technique. It all started when the now-revolutionary food-wizardess Alice Waters simply wanted to cook for her peers while hosting political gatherings during the Free Speech Movement that rocked UC Berkeley in the 1960s.

By the time this book came out in 1988, a lot of that political unrest had gone to bed, and other unrest had taken shape. But what transpired in those nearly twenty years is a completely new understanding of what we put on the table—and why. The book’s pictures, by Gail Skoff, give us this in the most elegant and elegiac way. Take the monochromatic picture of two legs straddling a wooden bowl of langostino that leads us to the lobster ravioli recipe. The picture doesn’t tell us anything about technique. There’s no photograph of shelling, or rolling, or cutting—just this: a visual poem to the ingredients, and to the participant. Or what about the picture of levain bread, from back when Wonder Bread was most prevalent? The loaf resembles a boulder in a landscape, with a snow of flour upon it. The bowl of wild mushrooms could be an ode to Proust, if only he had felt about mushrooms as he did about madeleines. But mostly the pictures are simply pure metaphor. Their ingredients drive the picture, just as they drive the kitchen of a place that has revolutionized the way we think about food. I’m not just talking about glorious palate experiences—I’m talking about politics. From UC Berkeley to Waters’s life-changing, school-based Edible Schoolyard Project, politics are where it began and where it leads.

Frish Brandt is president and co-owner of Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco. fraenkelgallery.com

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Frédérique Destribats on Children’s PhotoBooks

 

Lulu Meusser, Seelchens gute Tat (Berlin: Hermann Meusser, ca. 1920)

As photography developed in the wake of its invention in 1839, constant improvement in processing and printing techniques, quality and production, accelerated the distribution of the photobook and contributed to its success. Naturally feeding on this history, photographically illustrated books for children were introduced by the end of the nineteenth century. Their expansion was encouraged by such events as the gradual introduction of laws implementing compulsory schooling, which led to a rising demand for illustrated books from the growing numbers of young readers and educational institutions.

The first photographically illustrated books for children came in the form of photo albums carefully created and crafted by parents. These would sometimes be published for a larger audience, as was the case for Seelchens gute Tat by Lulu Meusser (privately published by Hermann Meusser in Berlin circa 1920)—a charming example of an early photo album for young people, with original photographic prints and a creative, if somewhat conformist, story about motherless girls and their quest to reach heaven. Youth literature, which had long focused on matters relating to religion, morality, conventional behavior, and education, experienced a shift in the twentieth century, opening up to whimsical storytelling and design, while also introducing sensitive societal issues.

Photographically illustrated books for children evolved over time and came to encompass every photographic style and genre: straight documentary photography; fabricated images and staged scenes with children, animals, figurines, etc.; visual and graphic experiments; photomontage; and so on. Whether professional or amateur, famous or anonymous, a long list of authors, poets, illustrators, and artists have explored the children’s photobook genre. Illustrious names include Laure Albin-Guillot, Claude Cahun, Edward S. Curtis, Dominique Darbois, Robert Doisneau, Tana Hoban, Frank Horvat, Eikoh Hosoe, André Kertész, Danny Lyon, Duane Michals, Sarah Moon, Aleksandr Rodchenko, Claude Roy, Cindy Sherman, Edward Steichen, William Wegman, and Ylla, to acknowledge but a few. Their topics ranged from the magical to the ordinary, with a large range of creative stories, artists’ books, textbooks, illustrated dictionaries, pictorial alphabets, how-to manuals, and educational guides covering the full range of youth-related concerns and interests. These books not only function as tools allowing children to nurture their imaginations and improve their understanding of the world, they also constitute fascinating commentaries on society. An extensive history of the genre would show that children’s photobooks are in tune with, and often even ahead of, their time.

Since the mid-1980s, however, photography has largely disappeared from children’s and young adults’ bookshelves. The medium seems to have been mostly abandoned for these audiences, while the number of titles intended for the same demographic but based on text and hand-drawn or digital illustrations—graphic novels and manga, for example—has steadily grown. I find this odd, considering that this is a time when the flow of images has been growing; it’s a disconcerting development for a genre that has proven to be highly creative and innovative.

Will McBride, Zeig Mal! (Wuppertal, Germany: Hammer, 1990)

Here are but two examples of photobooks from the late twentieth century that strike a decidedly sociological tone, while eschewing the potentially infantilizing tone of books for children. First is Zeig Mal! (Show me!), which was released by the Wuppertal Evangelical Youth Book Publisher in 1974 and is a stunningly poetic, realistic guide to sexual education. The large-format book is illustrated with black-and-white photographs by Will McBride, keen observer of sexuality and proponent of sexual liberation. A foreword by child psychologist Helga Fleischhauer-Hardt advocates the need for psycho-pedagogical, ethical, and enlightened sex education. Delicate close-ups of nude babies, toddlers, kids, teens, and adults in candidly tender scenes, in the many stages and variants of our sexual lives—parts of the universal, natural cycle—are printed alongside spontaneous quotes from children, used as captions for the images. Nothing is deemed “too adult” (although the English version, released six months after the original German, was slightly “polished”). The book was, for the most part, well-received upon its release, and McBride was initially praised for his photographs. Soon enough, however, this uninhibited approach ignited morality fires. The book faced sensationalistic critics and multiple accusations—including that it allegedly had pornographic intent—and was finally removed from the market in 1996. Incidentally, so has photography from subsequent such publications, generally to be replaced by hand-drawn illustrations.

Jesper Höm and Sven Grønlykke, Børnenes Billedbog Forlaget Per Kofod (Denmark: Helsingør, 1996)

Børnenes Billedbog (The children’s picture book) by Jesper Höm and Sven Grønlykke is a relatively small yet thick volume of black-and-white images and no text, save for the title and copyright information. Originally published in Denmark in 1975, it has been reissued several times, including in the United States as For Kids Only: An Adventure in Reading without Words. The raw production and average printing set it apart from the graphic, colorful design standards of most children’s photobooks. This little-known and poetic photographic ode is a gem: it contains roughly five hundred full-bleed pages of photographs from all over that display a collection of plants and animals, still lifes, children and dolls, clowns and skeletons, bits and pieces of everyday life, and details of all kinds, loosely composed in short sequences or free associations. It’s a whimsical, kaleidoscopic vision of the world. Nothing is explicitly suggested or narrated—rare for a children’s book. Readers are simply invited to ruffle through the pages at will and create their own associations, stories, and interpretations, on their own or with the help of a grown-up.

Frédérique Destribats is a translator for numerous photography books, publications, and magazines, including ELSE magazine, published by the Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne, Switzerland. She is the guest curator for the forthcoming second issue of Co-Curate Magazine.

Lulu Meusser

Seelchens gute Tat

Hermann Meusser • Berlin, ca. 1920

Will McBride

Zeig Mal!

Hammer • Wuppertal, Germany, 1990

Jesper Höm and Sven Grønlykke

Børnenes Billedbog

Forlaget Per Kofod • Helsingør, Denmark, 1996

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Around the World in Six Photographs

Renowned travel writers and editors on the photographs that transport them.

 

Brian Finke, Don Lorenzo Angeles taking a break with a machette, Mezcal Real Minero, Santa Catarina Minas, Oaxaca, Mexico, 2016
Courtesy the author

Tara Guertin

Brian Finke’s work was on my mind for fifteen years before I commissioned this photograph. I first noticed Finke in the late ’90s, soon after I moved to New York, when we were both in our mid-twenties. Over the next decade and a half, I watched him refine his sharp, high contrast style while straddling the art and editorial worlds. Cheeky and dark, his photographs are impressively consistent and instantly recognizable.

When Brian and I finally met in 2013, I was working as the photo director at the then fledging travel magazine AFAR. On a visit to New York, he and I chatted over a few bourbons at a local barbecue joint. Brian shoots vices, often sex-related, but not always: frat boys half naked, dripping in beer; women in hip-hop videos or beauty pageants; and marijuana producers. I considered him for many assignments, but AFAR focuses on experiential travel, rather than these nefarious pleasures. Nothing seemed right. So I waited—until a story about one of my own weaknesses crossed my desk.

Mezcal wasn’t something Brian was particularly familiar with, but I had a feeling that the Mexican liquor and its culture would be right up his alley. He returned with a body of work that thrilled me. Recently, we met again. Waiting for me on the bar was a glass of mezcal, neat, and a print of this photograph. Maybe Brian has discovered another vice?

Tara Guertin is Director of Photography at AFAR.

Brigitte Lacombe, His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, Dharamsala, India, 2003
Courtesy the artist

Pico Iyer

Every portrait is a self-portrait, so they say; I cherish that idea every time I look at the oversized photograph that beams down on my desk. As I chatted with the Dalai Lama in his home in 2003—I’ve been lucky enough to visit him there regularly since 1974—my old friend Brigitte Lacombe sat quietly on a sofa, taking everything in. Then she asked His Holiness if he’d mind stepping out onto his terrace for five minutes. Silently, as relaxed and full of soft smiles as he was, she snapped a few frames on a small camera. When she sent me the result, I noticed one eye all kindness, one all penetration—on both sides of the lens. No amount of fancy equipment or elaborate setup can conjure something as piercing as this.

Pico Iyer is the author, most recently, of The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere (2014).

 

Photographer unknown, William Finnegan, Padang Padang, Bali, Indonesia, November 6, 2015
Courtesy the author

William Finnegan

I was in Bali for work, but the surf was big, so I borrowed a board. This photograph was taken at a fabled country spot called Padang Padang. It was my first wave of the morning. At the captured moment, I am about to make a mistake. Farther down the reef, Padang has two bowling sections—shallow spots where the wave becomes a violent barrel—and the correct line of attack for those sections is high on the wave’s face. When I look at this image, my heels dig into the floor, my shoulders turn—what I should have done. But I was unfamiliar with the reef, and the board, and instead I held the low line you see, which did not work out well. What did work out well: several hours later, while I was hiking back to the road, a local teenager accosted me with a laptop computer. He had been shooting pictures from a cliff above the break, he said. He sold me this shot, on a flash drive, for eight bucks. It’s been on my laptop, haunting me gently, for the year since.

William Finnegan is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author, most recently, of Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life (2015).

Samuel Levine, Parisienne, 1951
Courtesy the author

Sasha Levine

My older sister found this photograph of a Parisian woman in an old album, tucked away in our childhood home. She scanned it and reprinted the wallet-sized image at about three feet tall. It hangs in my bedroom in a simple, handsome walnut frame, catty corner from a second picture of the same woman reclined in an even more suggestive pose. My grandfather, Papa Sam, took these photographs in 1951, just two years before my father was born. He was thirty-seven years old and still a bachelor, traveling to Europe after World War II to import cameras for his family’s pawnshop in downtown Boston. Rumor—or dark family secret—has it that he may have had a German lover, of whom his parents didn’t approve. Perhaps there were others, too, including this Parisienne. I never met my Papa Sam, but my father tells me that he never thought of himself as an artist. I wonder what he’d think about having his work hanging in his granddaughter’s home.

Sasha Levine is the Digital Editor of Departures magazine.

 

Steve Berman, La Gioconda, 2014
Courtesy the artist

Stephanie Rosenbloom

I go to Paris once a year and one of my favorite things to do is walk alone on quiet streets and through lesser-known museums. This photograph, by my friend and colleague Steve Berman, was taken in the Louvre, perhaps the city’s busiest and best-known museum. Visitors who have come to see the Mona Lisa are gazing at camera lenses or at themselves rather than at the centuries-old da Vinci masterwork at their backs. In an age of Instagram and Twitter, this image, a gift to me from the photographer, serves as a personal reminder to look outward; to be present; to experience, not tweet, the moment.

Stephanie Rosenbloom writes the column “The Getaway” for the New York Times.

 

Betsy Karel, Hanging Gardens, 2006
© the artist and courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery

Suketu Mehta

I don’t know the people in this photograph by Betsy Karel, which hangs in the living room of my Manhattan apartment, but I know them. They could be any of the groups of retired men that go for a daily walk: before the sun starts loaded for bear in the morning, or after it has admitted defeat and is sliding down the Bombay sky. The place is Hanging Gardens, green oasis of my boyhood. I can’t listen to what’s being said in the photograph, but I know the dialogue. The Parsi wit in the black cap has just cracked an off-color joke about a politician or film star. They’ve known each other for half a century now, and done what they’ve needed to in life. They can now leave their wives and their grandchildren behind to enjoy this daily constitutional, argue agitatedly about the state of the country, and laugh uproariously at the Bawa’s remarks. On the right is a group of youngsters also hanging out, but not having half as much fun as the geezers. This is a photograph that makes me look forward to growing old.

Suketu Mehta is Associate Professor of Journalism at New York University and the author of Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found (2004).

 

Read more from Aperture Issue 226, “American Destiny,” or subscribe to Aperture and never miss an issue.

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Dispatches: Istanbul

In Istanbul’s photography scene, the anxious aftermath of a violent year.

By Kaya Genç

Charlie Kirk, Okmeydani, Istanbul, Berkin Elvan protest, 2013
Courtesy the artist

“A photograph can be incredibly intimidating for cops,” Tuğba Tekerek, a Turkish journalist, told me recently. “They can use it to crush you.”

The last twelve months have seen Turkey navigate an accumulation of violent incidents and growing surveillance; with them, the environment for photographers has changed for the worse. In this country, which occasionally tops the New York–based Committee to Protect Journalists’s annual list of the world’s leading jailers of journalists, taking pictures is an increasingly political and dangerous act.

Tekerek, arrested twice last year for photographing people in public spaces, was speaking from experience. When we met at a Caffè Nero one quiet morning last September, Istanbul had not fully awoken from the nightmares of 2016. ISIS suicide attacks on Istanbul’s main shopping avenue in March and in its airport last June, followed by a coup attempt by a religious cult that ended up killing hundreds of civilians in July, unsettled the city.

“Taking pictures here has turned into a big problem only in the past three years, following Gezi,” she said, referring to violent protests around Istanbul’s Taksim Gezi Park in 2013. Intent on documenting human rights violations, Tekerek often photographs in civic areas—the corridor of a courtroom, the garden of a police station. But these are the kinds of images likely to land the reporter behind bars. On the occasions Tekerek has been taken into custody, police officers have asked whether she is a terrorist studying the area for an attack. Twice, cops confiscated her camera and placed her in a locked room. Tekerek’s supposed crime, meanwhile, stays the same: her pictures contain images of uniformed or plainclothes police officers.

Bülent Kılıç, A young girl wounded with tear gas after the funeral of Berkin Elvan in Istanbul, March 12, 2014
© the artist/AFP/Getty Images

Charlie Kirk, a British photographer, made the same discovery when he arrived in Istanbul in the summer of 2012, following a career as a derivatives lawyer. “I was amazed by the number of protests on İstiklal Avenue,” Kirk recalled. The 2013 protests at Gezi Park were a revelation for him. His first night photographing, on May 29, when tens of thousands packed the avenue and helicopters dropped tear gas on them, was burned onto his mind. Kirk produced a series of images using what the Australian photographer Rob Vallender describes as Kirk’s gonzo style: an aggressive approach toward his subjects, whose unsuspecting faces he illuminates with an off-camera flash. With raw and clear-eyed realism, Kirk captured protests in the wake of the suppression of the Gezi uprising and the unrest in ethnically diverse Istanbul neighborhoods. He plans to publish his protest photographs in a book, but not in Turkey, where he fears censorship.

A few days after speaking with Kirk in September 2016, I paid a visit to the offices of Geniş Açı, a collective and formerly a prestigious photography magazine that ceased publication after producing fifty issues between 1997 and 2006. Refik Akyüz and Serdar Darendeliler, the duo who run the initiative, had sad news to share: the World Press Photo traveling exhibition, which they had been responsible for organizing at Forum Istanbul since 2009, usually opens every August, but there was no attempt by World Press Photo to renew the contract for an exhibition in 2016.

“The photography community here is used to attending the premiere every year at the end of August,” Darendeliler said. “People were telephoning us to ask when the opening would be.”

Mauricio Lima, A doctor rubbing ointment on the burns of a 16-year-old Islamic State fighter named Jacob in front of a poster of Abdullah Öcalan, the jailed leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, at a Y.P.G. hospital on the outskirts of Hasaka, Syria, August 1, 2015
© and courtesy the artist

Akyüz and Darendeliler felt that the nonrenewal must have been political. In particular, they suspected the presence of a singular image by Mauricio Lima in the exhibition as possibly being the cause. Lima’s photograph shows a doctor treating a sixteen-year-old ISIS militant at a hospital in northern Syria. A framed portrait of Abdullah Öcalan, the imprisoned leader of the Kurdish armed movement PKK, hangs in the background. (Turkish officials consider PKK—which routinely attacks Turkish security forces—and ISIS to be equally violent terrorist groups.) When Lima’s photograph won the World Press Photo Contest’s first prize in the general news category in February last year, Akyüz and Darendeliler received an email from the organization’s Amsterdam office, inquiring whether the image would cause an issue. But World Press Photo, in response to my question about the exhibition, stated, “Our exhibition requires local partners for it to be organized in each location and local partners are not always available.”

“We have never encountered censorship while editing our magazine,” Akyüz said. “In 2007, we organized an exhibition in Bursa, with lots of nude images. The mayor, a member of the conservative ruling party, came to visit, looked at the images, and just walked by.” In 2015, Bülent Kılıç’s photograph of a young girl wounded during clashes in Istanbul received a World Press Photo Award and was exhibited without any problems.

Whether censorship or conservative caution was at play with the failure to present the exhibition in Istanbul, the atmosphere is more stark in eastern Turkey. Tuğba Tekerek told me of photographers who, when attempting to take pictures in war-ridden areas, were met with willful intimidation from military snipers. In one case, a photographer visibly shaken by the riot gear and machine guns was asked by a special operations police officer, “Why are you so scared of my machine gun? Your camera is more powerful than my gun, and much scarier.”

Kaya Genç, a novelist and essayist based in Istanbul, is the author of Under the Shadow: Rage and Revolution in Modern Turkey (2016).

Read more  from   Aperture   Issue 226 “American Destiny,” or  subscribe  to  Aperture   and never miss an issue.

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