Aperture's Blog, page 117

A Witness to Resistance

From student demonstrations to farmers in revolt, Kazuo Kitai captured the social tumult of 1960s Japan.

By Tsuyoshi Ito

Kazuo Kitai, Childrens’ Resistance Corps, 1970, from the series Sanrizuka, 1969–72
© the artist

“I wanted my pictures to be just the opposite of what passed then for excellence,” Kazuo Kitai remarked in the introduction to Barricade, his 2012 monograph. His blurry, out-of-focus snapshots from the 1960s were radical in style and substance. In 1965, at the age of twenty, Kitai published his first book, Resistance, which pictured the 1964 demonstrations near the U.S. Navy base in Yokosuka. From 1966 to 1967, he worked exclusively for political student groups, documenting their protests. When Zenkyoto, or All Student Union, came to power in 1968, he joined the students occupying Nihon University. The following year, he moved to a village east of Tokyo called Sanrizuka, where local residents clashed, often violently, with the government over the construction of a new airport. In the ’70s, Kitai left Tokyo and shifted focus to photograph rural landscapes and families. Tsuyoshi Ito of A/fixed spoke with Kitai about his engagement with photography and protest.

Tsuyoshi Ito: How did you first get into protest photography?

Kazuo Kitai: In 1964, during my second year at Nihon University, an acquaintance invited me to photograph the anti-nuclear submarine demonstrations. I shot seven rolls of film that night, and developed them right away. I thought, “Wow, these aren’t bad!” I continued my photographing protests, but at first my subjects weren’t pleased with my photographs. At the time, the student movements were treading water. But things began to heat up in 1968 when the All-Campus Joint Struggle League formed and the Barricade Strike demonstrations started taking place throughout Japan.

Ito: Were you working independently?

Kitai: At first, yes. The Asahi Journal and Asahi Graph magazine were covering the student movement and selling quite well. The editors were pleased, but found the accompanying photographs, shot from afar with telephoto lenses, to be sterile and lacking. My first assignment was shooting inside the barricades of the student protest at Nihon University’s College of Art. The publication dedicated a six-page spread to my photos. They titled it something ridiculous like, “Violent Radical Student Protest.” No one on the outside knew what the conditions were like inside the barricades. People were interested in that. My photographs started to develop a good reputation, and I soon had a monthly assignment.

Kazuo Kitai, In front of the Basement Gates, Yokosuka Kanagawa, 1964, from the series Teiko (Resistance), 1964–65
© the artist

Ito: You published several books on the student protests. How were they received by your subjects?

Kitai: Barricade (1968) was one of my first collections of protest photography. At first, there was tension in the air. But as time passed, people became accustomed to life inside the barricade. It was common to see laundry hanging out to dry, people’s beds, and living spaces. Many of my photographs from inside the barricade depicted daily life. I thought that was cool, but the student protesters didn’t like those photos. On the other hand, the collection Agitators (1968), contained intense scenes of protest, and was a hit among the students.

Ito: What was your next stop after photographing the student movements?

Kitai: In the late ’60s, the government had plans to build a new international airport (near Tokyo), Narita, and the farmers in the area fought to defend their land from appropriation. I began visiting Sanrizuka, a farming village at the center of the struggle. I contacted the editors of the Asahi Graph with a proposal that I stay and shoot in Sanrizuka for two years, and they agreed. From 1969 to 1972, I photographed the daily lives of farmers as well as their protests.

Kazuo Kitai, Old Lady Faces the Water Cannon, 1970, from the series Sanrizuka, 1969–72
© the artist

Ito: How did that experience influence your photography?

Kitai: My perspective changed completely. A common perception is that photographs simply record events as they unfold. But I came to believe that a photograph is a conversation between the photographer and the subject. That really influenced me, and even today I try not to force my shots. I prefer that both my subject and I both act naturally, and I think my photographs capture that.

Ito: What was the political climate at the time of the student protests?

Kitai: There were two major student movements at the time: the Liberal Revolutionary Student Movement, which was very political, and the All-Campus Joint Struggle League, which was more focused on the democratization of universities. I photographed them both. Requests started to pour in from newspapers, always wanting more and more provocative photographs. But I wasn’t really interested in that type of photography. I was living with the protesters, but I never really got radicalized. I wasn’t there for the action.

Slowly, the photos that were requested of me and my idea of what my photography should be began to diverge. And I was fine with that. I realized that if I wanted to become a professional photographer, I would have to be serious about my craft. Shooting a demonstration is simple. There’s always something happening, you just point and shoot. I wanted to come up with a theme that resonated with me, and the first thing that came to mind was Eugène Atget and his photography of everyday people in Paris. That really appealed to me and I thought I could try something similar.

Kazuo Kitai, Women Facing the Police on a Hilltop, 1971, from the series Sanrizuka, 1969–72
© the artist

Ito: But before you changed direction, you were very involved in the protests?

Kitai: Behind the barricades I threw Molotov cocktails along with the student protesters. In Sanrizuka I was ready to be arrested at any time. I was a photographer, but I was also a part of the resistance.

Ito: So you wanted to bring about societal change through your photography?

Kitai: I never even considered that. Of course photography is a form of expression. It has the power to influence people and even change society. But I never took a picture with that in mind. I think that if you take photographs with that kind of intention, then your product will be necessarily altered.

Ito: You didn’t see your photography as political expression?

Kitai: Politics is power and violence. Strength passes for power in politics. But I was only armed with what I could express through my lens. There was no overlap between politics and the pictures I was interested in taking. I don’t like depressing photography. I prefer photos with more humanity—photos that encourage empathy with the subject. You can see this in my series To the Villages (1973–81).

Kazuo Kitai, Washi Village, Agawa district, Kochi prefecture, 1973, from the series Mura e. / To the Village, 1973–81
© the artist

Ito: The human element is important to you?

Kitai: Yes. I don’t have many critically acclaimed photographs, even from my days as a protest photographer. But my subjects would often ask me to send them prints. It was a different time then, as opposed to now where photos are readily available to anyone. My subjects would keep it as a memento, showing their friends, “Look at this picture that one famous photographer took of me!” I knew how important it was for them, so I made it a priority.

Ito: How did your subjects react upon seeing To the Villages?

Kitai: They loved the photographs, same with the farmers and protesters from Sanrizuka. I think it was because I lived with them. I understood them and respected their lifestyle, and my photos mirrored their own perspective in an intimate way. It was popular at the time to appeal to viewers by highlighting someone’s hardships—showing the wrinkles on their sunburnt faces and their leathery hands. But the subjects themselves didn’t like that. I prefer to highlight the good side of people, to capture their presence and the reality of their existence.

Tsuyoshi Ito is founder and managing editor of A/fixed, a leading resource on the history of Japanese photography.

A/fixed’s inaugural publication, Provoke Generation: Japanese Photography, ’60s-’70s will be released in April 2017.

The post A Witness to Resistance appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

Inside the 2017 Aperture Spring Party and Dinner

Photo by Will Matsuda/Aperture © Aperture

Photo by Gonzalo Marroquin/PMC © Patrick McMullan

Photo by Gonzalo Marroquin/PMC © Patrick McMullan

Photo by Gonzalo Marroquin/PMC © Patrick McMullan

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Photo by Gonzalo Marroquin/PMC © Patrick McMullan

Photo by Gonzalo Marroquin/PMC © Patrick McMullan

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Photo by Gonzalo Marroquin/PMC © Patrick McMullan

Photo by Gonzalo Marroquin/PMC © Patrick McMullan

Photo by Gonzalo Marroquin/PMC © Patrick McMullan

Photo by Gonzalo Marroquin/PMC © Patrick McMullan

Photo by Will Matsuda/Aperture © Aperture

Photo by Carly Lovejoy/Aperture © Aperture

Photo by Carly Lovejoy/Aperture © Aperture

Photo by Carly Lovejoy/Aperture © Aperture

Photo by Will Matsuda/Aperture © Aperture

Photo by Carly Lovejoy/Aperture © Aperture

Photo by Will Matsuda/Aperture © Aperture

Photo by Will Matsuda/Aperture © Aperture

Photo by Will Matsuda/Aperture © Aperture

Photo by Will Matsuda/Aperture © Aperture

Photo by Gonzalo Marroquin/PMC © Patrick McMullan

Photo by Gonzalo Marroquin/PMC © Patrick McMullan

Photo by Carly Lovejoy/Aperture © Aperture

Photo by Will Matsuda/Aperture © Aperture

Photo by Carly Lovejoy/Aperture © Aperture

Photo by Gonzalo Marroquin/PMC © Patrick McMullan

Photo by Gonzalo Marroquin/PMC © Patrick McMullan

 

On March 31, Aperture’s Spring Party and Auction was awash with brightly colored ensembles, whimsical fedoras, turbans, and many a bow tie. Celebrating the pre-launch of Aperture’s forthcoming book Dandy Lion: The Black Dandy and Street Style, the more than 325 guests who attended were treated to an evening with Shantrelle P. Lewis, Dandy Lion’s curator and author. The event was co-chaired by Taymour Grahne, Darius Himes, and Thomas R. Schiff. During an elegant Host Committee Dinner on the rooftop of the NoMad Hotel, guests were seated at the table with Dandy Lion contributors, including Lewis, Iké Udé, Erik Carter, Ouigi Theodore, Rose Callahan, Sara Shamsavari, and Dandy Wellington.

At the Spring Party, guests danced late into the night under a disco ball at Aperture Gallery, where The Library Exhibition is on view. Accompanied by a surreal dance performance, the Afro Cuban rapper Kool A.D. got the crowd moving, along with the old-school hip-hop played by DJ Lumumba a.k.a. Revolution. The print Flower Girl by Hassan Hajjaj, in a unique red Michelin tire frame, as well as a pet portrait session with Richad Phibbs at the Humane Society of New York, were sold in the silent auction. Guests also vied for the special raffle items, including two custom bow ties designed by Lewis herself and a copy of Dandy Lion, signed by select contributors.

Courtesy of Patrick McMullan Company, click here to view Host Committee Dinner photos and click here to view Spring Party photos. Additionally, view all of the PHHHOTO booth photos by clicking here. If you would like to support Aperture, but weren’t able to join the fun at the Spring Party, we invite you to donate to Aperture’s Annual Fund.

For this brilliant and stylish event, Aperture wishes to thank co-chairs Taymour Grahne, Darius Himes, and Thomas R. Schiff; Shantrelle P. Lewis; Christie’s; all of the contributing dandies; AIPAD; Destination Artists Touring Agency; Patina Rentals; Patrick McMullan Company; PHHHOTO; photograph magazine; Stella Artois; Ziobaffa; KOOL A.D.; and DJ Lumumba a.k.a. Revolution.

Special thanks to the Host Committee and the Spring Party Committee, and to all of the Aperture staff, work scholars, volunteers, and ambassadors for their time and dedication.

Host Committee

Andrew Craven

Anne Stark Locher and Kurt Locher

Barbara and Donald Tober

Bradford Richardson

Cathy M. Kaplan*

Chris Boot and Tony White

Dandy Wellington

Darius Himes, Christie’s*

Darlene Kaplan and Steve Zuckerman

Darnell Moore

Ed Messikian, Fine Art Frameworks

Elaine Goldman and John Benis

Emily Bierman, Sotheby’s

Howard Greenberg

Iké Udé

Jessica Nagle and Roland Hartley-Urquhart*

Kasper and Linda Lindenbaum

Lori Grover

Magic Group Media*

Malú Alvarez

Michael Hoeh

Missy and Jim O’ShaughnessyNion McEvoy

Ouigi TheodorePatrick McMullan

Peter Barbur and Tim Doody

Raymond Learsy

Rita Anthoine

Rose Callahan

Sb Cooper and R.L. Besson*

Shantrelle P. Lewis and Tony Oluwatoyin Lawson

Sondra Gilman Gonzalez-Falla and Celso Gonzalez-Falla*

Drs. Stephen and Marsha Silberstein

Susan Gutfreund

Tabitha Soren

Taymour Grahne*

Thomas R. Schiff*

Whit Williams

Willard Taylor and Virginia Davies

*Leader

Spring Party Committee

Alice Finnerty

Aliza Sena

Esther Zuckerman

Mike Tan

Sam Pritzker

Sarah F. Haimes

The post Inside the 2017 Aperture Spring Party and Dinner appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

The Surreal Landscapes of California City

From the air, photographer Chang Kim discovers a city that never was.

By Geoff Manaugh

Chang Kim, Utopia incomplete 160616_05, California City, CA, 2016
Courtesy the artist

In his recent book, The City That Never Was: Reconsidering the Speculative Nature of Contemporary Urbanization (2016), architect and urbanist Christopher Marcinkoski writes about the strange fate of entire cities created for the speculative possibility of future financial gain. For Marcinkoski, these are places of urban development predicated not on real, existing demand in the current marketplace, but on projected possible consumer interest in an unrealized tomorrow. They are cities for people who don’t exist yet, funded by “increasingly complex transactional instruments” whose value is divorced from anything resembling civic good or democratic well-being.

The resulting developments often fail before reaching the point of being even partially inhabited, Marcinkoski warns. At times, they are abandoned long before construction is complete, deserted by their heavily leveraged investors and left in an eerily half-finished state that has no clear resolution. The result is a kind of zombie urbanism, both undead and stillborn at the same time.

Chang Kim, Utopia incomplete 160629_05, California City, CA, 2016
Courtesy the artist

California City is roughly two hours north by northeast from the desert edge of Greater Los Angeles. It was launched in 1958 as the dream of real-estate developer Nat Mendelsohn, who saw it not just as a healthy investment, but as a place that would someday exceed Los Angeles itself in both scale and quality of life.

By land area alone, California City is today the third largest municipal area in the state of California. Yet outside of its small, developed core—complete with a park, fast-food restaurants, liquor stores, and a pharmacy—it is fantastically, surreally, even unsettlingly incomplete. You can drive through California City for twenty minutes or more without even knowing it’s there.

Chang Kim, Utopia incomplete 160603_16, California City, CA, 2016
Courtesy the artist

Seen from an aircraft, however, as in this ongoing series of aerial images taken by photographer Chang Kim (born in Korea in 1974 and now living in Los Angeles), California City’s true scale is revealed. It is, in fact, a bewildering array of gridded streets and culs-de-sac—many named after American automobile companies, such as Buick, Oldsmobile, and Pontiac—scratched into the arid terrain. At times, it seems endless, an immersive geometry textbook of primary shapes all but invisible from the ground, extending forever. The houses meant to appear along these roads and avenues never materialized, of course; the residents meant to live there have yet to arrive.

Sites like California City—or the many failed superdevelopments discussed by Marcinkoski—have, in a sense, become ruins in advance of their own construction. Although radically incomplete, these ghostly locations are not so much remnants of a place or city that once was; they represent the spatial by-products of abandoned financial transactions. They are 3-D receipts for business deals that went nowhere, tragic accounting errors in urban form.

Geoff Manaugh is the author of BLDGBLOG and A Burglar’s Guide to the City (2016).

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Against Occupation

Japanese curator Rei Masuda discusses how postwar Japanese photographers adapted to a new era.

By Tsuyoshi Ito

Hitomi Watanabe, from the series Shinjuku Contemporary, 1967-68
© the artist

In 1960, the U.S. and Japan re-signed a security treaty known as Anpo, which maintained U.S. dominance in East Asia, and allowed American troops to be stationed in Japan—indefinitely. In a few short years, the U.S. had flipped from being an enemy to an ally. At the same time, American culture was becoming increasingly pervasive in the country. Protests were staged across Japan in response to these societal shifts—and photographers were soon engaged.

Rei Masuda, head curator of photography at the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo, has long studied the rich photography of this period, producing traveling exhibitions such as Gazing at the Contemporary World: Japanese Photography from the 1970s to the Present that have introduced an international community to key ideas and figures. Here, Tsuyoshi Ito of A/fixed speaks with Masuda about his work about post-war photography from Japan.

Tsuyoshi Ito: What first drew you to photography, and which photographers had an influence on you?

Rei Masuda: In 1989, while I was attending university, there was an exhibit on the 150-year anniversary of the invention of photography. More than the photographs themselves, it was that visceral expression of culture and history that inspired me. When I was young, I greatly admired Walker Evans and Robert Frank.

Kazuo Kitai, Flag, Yokosuka, Kanagawa, 1964, from the series Teiko (Resistance), 1964-65
© the artist

Ito: When people think about the radicalism of 1960s and ’70s Japan, student protests are usually the first thing that come to mind. Many segments of society were taking part in the political movements. What’s your take on this highly fluid period during which not only students, but also ordinary citizens from all walks of life, were spurred to action? What kind of influence did that dynamic have on photographers?

Masuda: During the ’60s and ’70s there were many influences on photographers, not the least of which was the protest against the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security between the United States and Japan, known as Anpo. That time of unrest gave birth to many exceptional documentaries criticizing the heavy-handed powers that prevailed. In the decade that followed (i.e., the 70s), Japanese society became ever more complex, as did the causes of unrest. Protests expanded to include anti-Vietnam War activism, campaigns to return Okinawa to Japanese control, and anti-Narita Airport movements, among others. Just as in the ’60s, photographers were there to document it. The photography magazine Provoke is often seen as a symbol of these times, but it hardly stood alone. Photographers were documenting events, people, and movements in various, unique ways. It was really a special era.

Kazuo Kitai, Sanrizuka Protesters, 1969, from the series Sanrizuka, 1969-72
© the artist

Ito: During the ’60s, when Anpo was ratified, the aims of both photographers and ordinary citizens had a common cause. At that time, what attracted you to Provoke?

Masuda: Provoke rejected the established photographic aesthetics. Daido Moriyama and Takuma Nakahira were embracing a radical new form of photographic expression. This style was a reflection of the times, of the counterculture and political movements that were peaking in the late ’60s.

Ito: The campaign against the Anpo Treaty was one of the more visible aspects of Japanese–American relations, and the most polarizing social issue of the time. Many Japanese people appreciated American artists and desired American material affluence, but simultaneously resented the pervasive American presence in Japan. What kind of influence did this have on Japanese photography?

Masuda: Japan’s relationship with America was inextricably linked to both photographers and photographic works produced at the time. This is especially evident when looking at the work of photographers like Shomei Tomatsu, for whom the American occupation of Okinawa was a major theme, and Miyako Ishiuchi, who grew up in Yokosuka, in the shadow of an American military base. They were a generation apart and not geographically close, yet Japanese–American relations had an impact on both of them, and not just on their characters. I can’t say that all Japanese photographers were affected in the same way, but the changes in post-war Japanese society are certainly reflected in the people and photography of the time.

Kazuo Kitai, Injured Protestor, Yokosuka, Kanagawa, 1964, from the series Teiko (Resistance), 1964-65
© the artist

Ito: Are there any other photographers that come to mind when you think of American influence on Japan?

Masuda: Take Daido Moriyama, for example. You can clearly see the influence of American contemporaries like Andy Warhol in his photography. At first glance some of his work seems critical of America as well. Though I think that it is more a criticism of America’s influence on and occupation of Japan, rather than America itself. If you consider his formative years, it’s easy to see how he could have such mixed feelings. As a teenager during World War II, he knew that should the war continue, his fate would be to give his life for his country in the fight against America. In post-war Japan, during the occupation, his view necessarily changed as he lived in close contact with the former enemy. Photographers of the day had very complex and unique relationships with America.

Tsuyoshi Ito is founder and managing editor of A/fixed, a leading resource on the history of Japanese photography.

A/fixed’s inaugural publication, Provoke Generation: Japanese Photography, ’60s-’70s will be released in April 2017.

 

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The Joy of Photography

An exhibition in Amsterdam revisits Ed van der Elsken’s passionate vision of twentieth-century life.

By Wilco Versteeg

Ed van der Elsken, Nieuwmarkt Fair, Amsterdam, 1963
© the artist and courtesy the Ed van der Elsken estate and Nederlands Fotomuseum

The most famous photographer in the Netherlands, Ed van der Elsken showed the Dutch as they like to see themselves: diverse, open, and rebelliously normal. In the decades after World War II, his photographs effectively defined Dutch identity. Van der Elsken’s idiosyncratic style of street and documentary photography displays his tenderness and love for the world, which is why Camera in Love (De Verliefde Camera), the title of the Stedelijk Museum’s retrospective, the largest exhibition of the photographer’s work in twenty-five years, is well-chosen.

Ed van der Elsken, Selfportrait with Ata Kandó, Paris, 1953
© the artist and courtesy the Ed van der Elsken estate and the Nederlands Fotomuseum

Camera in Love highlights the joy that is apparent throughout van der Elsken’s photography. Many treasures are to be found. In the big, central rooms, his famous photographs are displayed as prints, while the more intimate, adjacent rooms present the genesis of his well-known photobooks through personal notes, contact sheets, and dummies. The exhibition also includes much of van der Elsken’s video work, which is often as personal as his photography. Bye (1990), for instance, shows the photographer in the last stages of a terminal disease.

Ed van der Elsken, Vali Myers with cigarette, Paris, 1953
© the artist and courtesy the Stedelijk Museum and the Nederlands Fotomuseum

The variety of the work allows everyone to choose their own version of van der Elsken. He documented the life and existential crises of youngsters flocking to the Paris in Love on the Left Bank (1956); photographed Equatorial African life in Bagara (1958); and took dramatic and iconic close-ups of musicians in Jazz (1959). Known for his big mouth and upfront attitude, van der Elsken often provoked the people he met on the street. His best work catches the expression when a subject realizes a camera is aimed at them, but before they are able to strike a pose. Today’s street photographer, by contrast, is challenged to find a way around the banality and self-censorship that comes with the ubiquity of the camera.

Ed van der Elsken, Girl in the subway, Tokyo, 1984
© the artist and courtesy the Stedelijk Museum and the Nederlands Fotomuseum

Van der Elsken’s more political work—documenting riots, police violence, and the down and out—is not overtly didactic. While showing the marginalized, his engagement is not systematic and does not provide a clear-cut critique of capitalist society. But what is most striking is the intimacy of his portraits. Of a photograph of Dutch counterculture writer Simon Vinkenoog and his girlfriend enveloped in each other’s arms, Nan Goldin writes, in the accompanying catalog, “They are so naked, I can feel the flesh.” In fact, the connection between van der Elsken and Goldin is revelatory. “I realized I had just met my predecessor. My real predecessor,” Goldin continues. “The feeling was similar to that of meeting a lover, or of finding a brother.”

Ed van der Elsken, Bargirls, Cebu, Filippijnen, 1960
© the artist and courtesy the Stedelijk Museum and the Nederlands Fotomuseum

Van der Elsken introduced a crucial pivot in documentary photography, and Camera in Love marks a renewed interest in a photographer who, in Dutch culture, is never far away, but who can only be fully understood in an international context and alongside such seminal image makers as Weegee and Edward Steichen. With the full breadth of van der Elsken’s work, Camera in Love is the most spectacular photography exhibition in the Netherlands has seen in decades.

Wilco Versteeg is a PhD candidate at Université Paris Diderot.

Ed van der Elsken: Camera in Love is on view through May 21, 2017 at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.

The forthcoming issue of The PhotoBook Review (Issue 012/Spring 2017), guest edited by independent curator Daria Tuminas and developed in partnership with the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, focuses on the intersection of cinema and the photobook, inspired in part by Ed van der Elsken’s landmark work in both photography and film. Complementary issues will be available on site at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam as well as at the Aperture Gallery, New York, beginning April 3, 2017.

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Video Response: Amos Mulder on Inka and Niclas Lindergård, The Belt of Venus and the Shadow of the Earth

Amos Mulder is a video artist whose works include visual responses to found footage, texts, and photographic images; he describes his series as “video haikus,” adding that “I love to explore these parallel universes and catch their atmospheres and governing principles in short films. While rooted in the history of cinema, these films are also inspired by (and combined with) other nice things such as music, photography, and philosophy.” For this issue, he accepted guest editor Daria Tuminas’s assignment to create a video response to Inka and Niclas Lindergård’s The Belt of Venus and the Shadow of the Earth. The video work, created with a single camera, ambient light, and—echoing the artists’ process as featured in the book—no visual effects added in postproduction, is presented here.

The post Video Response: Amos Mulder on Inka and Niclas Lindergård, The Belt of Venus and the Shadow of the Earth appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

How Soon Is Now?

A sprawling exhibition showcases Wolfgang Tillmans’s restless curiosity—about everything.

By Aaron Schuman

Wolfgang Tillmans, Central Nervous System, 2013
© the artist

Wolfgang Tillmans: 2017, which opened last month at London’s Tate Modern, is a genuinely overwhelming and immersive experience. Incorporating works made between 2003 and 2017, the show spreads ivy-like across the walls and vitrines of fourteen of the museum’s immense galleries, charting Tillmans’s wide-eyed engagement with new forms of technology (photographic and otherwise), artistic practice, geopolitics, notions of “truth,” community, media, migration, and more. Tillmans insists that the exhibition is in no way a retrospective, but is instead a new and complex artwork in itself. “I spend all of my days thinking about these objects,” he explained at the press preview in February, “and making this show reminded me that art is at the center of what I do; it’s about the Now.”

Wolfgang Tillmans, Juan Pablo & Karl, Chingaza, 2012
© the artist

Throughout the exhibition—in the “Playback Room,” for example, where various bands’ studio recordings can be absorbed at their highest fidelity, or in Instrument (2015), a video and sound piece that converts Tillmans’s rhythmic footsteps into a throbbing soundtrack—music and photography are aligned and celebrated. The exhibition itself functions as a brilliant visual album, with each gallery serving as a distinct “track” with a particular mood, tempo, or theme. And like an accomplished musician, Tillmans is careful to avoid being too literal or pedantic. “I don’t expect anybody to understand this exhibition,” he remarked. “It’s about resonances, and the connections between us.”

Such connections have long been at the foundation of Tillmans’s work, and were foregrounded in his 2003 Tate Britain exhibition called If one thing matters, everything matters. As both that title and his signature installation strategy (constellations of prints of various scales and mediums, hung at different heights and by multiple means, from traditional frames to bulldog clips) suggest, he is not particularly concerned with the power of any individual image, but rather with the relationships between and collective effect of groupings of observations and encounters as captured through photography.

Wolfgang Tillmans: 2017, installation at Tate Modern, London
Courtesy Tate Photography

The first two galleries at Tate Modern meditate on new forms of digital image production. A series of kaleidoscopic collages, Double Exposure (Fespa Digital / Fruit Logistica) (2012), juxtaposes images from trade fairs for digital printers with those from trade shows for fruits and vegetables. In an adjacent gallery, amongst photographs of the artist’s own studio, a large-scale, framed print of Tillmans’s defunct color photocopier—CLC 800, dismantled (2011)—exposes the elaborate inner-workings of the most basic of contemporary image-generating machines. And, later in the exhibition, several spaces are exclusively dedicated to Tillmans’s experiments with photographic materiality, abstraction, and repetition, incorporating many of his darkroom manipulations and photo-paper sculptures from four ongoing series: Lighter, Paper Drop, Silver, and Abstract Pictures.

Wolfgang Tillmans, paper drop Prinzessinnenstrasse, 2014
© the artist

But Tillmans’s interests extend far beyond explorations into photography’s nature and permutations. His genuine dedication to both political and cultural engagement are also strongly highlighted, through displays of his prolific contributions to pop and print culture via books, posters, album covers, and magazines, as well as through works that address today’s political tensions and humanitarian crises. In the final gallery, a photograph of a shipwreck left by refugees on the Mediterranean island of Lampedusa hangs among images of various airport border controls and sublime seascapes of the borderless Atlantic Ocean. These of-the-moment concerns are presaged by earlier series such as Neue Welt (2012) and truth study center (2005–ongoing). The former represents Tillmans’s own travels through five continents, but in a dreamlike way, with the intention of exploring “the surface of things as they appear in those lucid first days of being in a new environment.” The latter consists of photographs, newspaper clippings, and documents that explore how political and socical “truths” are constructed and distributed, from mainstream media justifications for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to far-out conspiracy theories.

Wolfgang Tillmans, Lampedusa, 2008
© the artist

But it is in one gallery (Room 11), which lacks any obvious theme, where Tillmans improvises most freely and is at his most virtuosic. According to the exhibition leaflet, this is a space where Tillmans “highlights the coexistence of the personal, private, public and political spheres in our lives.” Here disparate images intermingle and harmonize: tender nudes, wispy clouds, a grid of small portraits (including those of Patti Smith and Morrissey), a group of Black Lives Matter protesters, complex still lifes, a seductively lit windowsill, and probably the most beautifully rendered photograph of a man’s buttocks and scrotum as one is likely to encounter. The space visually sings, overwhelming not only one’s vision, but the totality of the senses.

Although Wolfgang Tillmans: 2017 encompasses large social, cultural, and political issues, the exhibition is ultimately about how such concerns touch even the smallest moments in our everyday lives and reverberate to the core of human experience. “The artist is the hand that plays,” the painter Wassily Kandinsky once wrote, “touching one key or another, to cause vibrations in the soul.” Walking out of Tate Modern and back into “the Now,” one’s soul can’t stop buzzing.

Aaron Schuman is an artist, writer, and curator based in the United Kingdom.  

Wolfgang Tillmans: 2017 is on view at Tate Modern, London, through June 11, 2017.

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Publisher Profile

TBW Books

Matthew Leifheit in conversation with Paul Schiek

So often in art—as in life—the decision to prioritize someone else’s dreams, even temporarily, is looked at as if it means one’s own artistic vision and conviction may be wavering. Paul Schiek, a photographer and independent publisher based in Oakland, California, has been curating, writing, and publishing under his imprint TBW Books, in addition to making his own photographs, for the past ten years. He seems to see this varied outpouring as a medium in its own right. His generous vision is perhaps most evident in TBW’s Subscription Series, an annual set of four distinct books that share a common format and design. The series acts like a less ephemeral form of periodical: evolving, sequential, and malleable. Specifically, TBW’s Subscription Series brings to mind Wallace Berman’s Semina—not only because that was also a Bay Area publication that brought together disparate artists under a sort of hand-hewn umbrella, but because Berman himself was an artist bashful about showing his own work. Over the course of an hour in early September, Paul Schiek and I talked about the evolution of TBW Books in relation to his life since 2006.

 

Subscription Series No. 4
Includes Christian Patterson, Bottom of the Lake; Alessandra Sanguinetti, Sorry, Welcome; Raymond Meeks, Erasure; and Wolfgang Tillmans, Utoquai • TBW Books • Oakland, CA, 2013

 

Christian Patterson

Matthew Leifheit: So, the big question: why publish books?

Paul Schiek: I did my undergrad at California College of Arts and Crafts [now California College of the Arts]. I studied under Jim Goldberg and Larry Sultan, and another guy named Abner Nolan. All three of those people had a profound impact on my thinking about photographs and why I make photographs today. We looked at books a lot, and we talked about books, and thought about books. There were classes dedicated specifically to photobook-making, which were really shape-shifting for me.

ML: Had you published zines previously?

PS: I came up in—I hate to use the term—the “punk” world. I grew up being around zines, collecting zines, making little zines. As I was around music, I was taking photos with point-and-shoot cameras. I had no idea what I was doing, but I was taking pictures of what was happening around me and then making things with them. Then, in my senior year at CCA, rather than hanging a show—which was our requirement for graduation—I asked Jim and Larry if they would agree to me publishing a book instead. I thought that was a much more responsible way of distributing my work, because no one knew who I was. No one had any interest in looking at my photos in a gallery setting. The book was called Good By Angels. I had to edit it down to a really concentrated set of images because I couldn’t afford to print five hundred pages. I didn’t have the money for a cover, so I decided to hand-stamp each cover with a rubber stamp. I had watched friends who were in bands do that with their records. It just made a lot of sense to me. Since photography was becoming my medium, I started applying those practices to making books.

ML: When was the first time you thought of publishing someone else’s work?

PS: After school spit me out into the world, I tried to figure out what I was doing. I was making photos, and I wanted to show them, but didn’t know who the audience would be. So that’s when I came up with the idea of the Subscription Series, which was simply to align my work with the work of three other artists. If people were interested in any of the work, then they’d see it all by default. Because they’d subscribed to this thing that’s four books, even if they only wanted one or two of the books, they’d also be forced to look at the book of my own work as well. So that’s how the Subscription Series started. It was a tool, a mechanism, to create a space for people to be exposed to my work.

ML: That method also benefits the other less famous artists you publish.

PS: Yes. By Subscription Series No. 2, I felt that my work couldn’t be in it again. So I started getting other photographers to participate.

We just finished Subscription Series No. 5, which we’re very proud of. Every body of work included is over thirty years old but has never been shown before. We’re also starting to focus a bit more on special editions and singular, one-off monographs. I no longer have much interest in showing my own work; I’m way more excited and fulfilled by working on editing other people’s work, and bringing their ideas to fruition. It’s this evolving sort of thing.

Raymond Meeks

ML: I don’t think that’s a lesser art than going out and taking pictures, actually.

PS: I was taught by Jim and Larry that the actual making of photographs is only 50 percent of it, and the other 50 percent are these small, very deliberate decisions that you make about presentation, editing, sequences, paper choices, installation—all these crucial things that, in certain cases, the photographer might not be good at. They shouldn’t necessarily be expected to be good at all those things. That’s why it’s important for publishers, editors, and designers to be able to step in and round out the project.

ML: How has the Subscription Series evolved?

PS: In the beginning, it was me approaching people I was interested in working with, or friends would introduce me. To this day, reputation and personal relationships with people are a huge factor. It’s also the way I like doing business. I’ve certainly reached out to people I want to work with, and as you know, there are a million e-mails involved. These things take a lot of time on the part of the publisher, and there are people who I started working with four years ago who I might just be publishing now. Sometimes it takes that long for it to gel and get to a place where everybody is comfortable. That’s how this stuff works. In the meantime, my job is to make a better product—become a better editor, publisher, and designer—so that people will continue to trust me.

Alessandra Sanguinetti

Wolfgang Tillmans

ML: You’re not just asking people to send you some files—you want to work with artists very closely.

PS: I’m very, very close to the process, out of respect for the book and the artist’s time, but also out of respect for myself and my time. Going back, it was always a dream of mine that doing a studio visit with someone and editing a book with them could be a job. Now I do a lot of different things in the photo world under the umbrella of TBW, and I have a full-time employee, Lester Rosso. I’m really proud that there are two of us working full-time on publishing now.

And so, if I’m just treating it as a business, yes, it’s much easier for me to ask people to send us the files and we put out the book and it’s done. But for me to be fulfilled and stimulated and feel like I’m doing the best job I can do with these books, I need to work as closely with the artists as possible. I enjoy packing orders, I enjoy sending e-mails, I enjoy choosing paper and being on press. I enjoy running to the post office to get more stamps. All the minutia that it takes to run a business—as long as it’s a business that’s surrounded by photography—I’m happy to do. But the most important part of that is getting to work with the artists. When you’re working with an artist, you can have dinner together, they might stay at your house, and then you fly together to do a signing. All those things that some people might call work are, to me, very luxurious. Because there are a million other shitty jobs out there that you can do, and if you’re not doing those and instead you’re talking about photography with another artist and sharing ideas—talking about what photos actually mean to them—that’s a luxury. And that’s why I need to stay super-close to this.

Matthew Leifheit is a photographer, curator, publisher, and interviewer currently studying photography at the Yale School of Art. He has published MATTE magazine, an independent journal of contemporary photography, since 2010. He is also photo-editor-at-large for VICE magazine. matthewleifheit.com

 

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Editor’s Note

Denise Wolff

Jane Mount, Ideal Bookshelf #968: Denise Wolff

The essential goal of publishing is to make public. But when publishing photobooks, who do we consider our public to be? This is a question I ask myself a lot in my work as an editor: who is this project for and how do we reach them? What many would consider a photobook, those who read this publication might not recognize as such.

As I write this, the top “Photography & Video” book on Amazon is Pumpkin: The Raccoon Who Thought She Was a Dog (2016). The title says it all. A wall calendar is also available! Also in the top ten is a book called People Knitting: A Century of Photographs (2016)—another book whose topic is self-evident and which, I must admit, I’ve added to my cart. Meanwhile, on photo-eye, the top-seller this week is Ron Jude’s Vitreous China (2016), which I bought at the New York Art Book Fair and recommend highly. It is a lovely, unassuming object—delicate, saddle-stitched pages, contained in a gray paperboard clamshell box—with Jude’s pictures of industrial areas in midwestern American cities, accompanied by raw, moving text vignettes by Mike Slack. It was printed in an edition of 375 copies. photo-eye’s other top-sellers include some self-published titles. This snapshot comparison between Amazon and photo-eye reveals that our community exists worlds apart from the greater public. We live in our own photobook bubble.

I may be inside that bubble, but I am also interested in how to make photobooks public, and reach a wider audience. My first experiences of photobooks were the books about life under the sea that we had around the house because of my grandfather’s interest in diving. (In fact, he was the inventor of saturation diving.) As a child, I loved entering the underwater world of corals, sharks, and shipwrecks. I also vividly remember when my mother brought home A Day in the Life of America (1986), and how captivated I was by the different lives and livelihoods across my country, all captured in a single day, morning to night. These mass-market and special-interest books probably shaped my abiding interest in photography more than The Americans did. As a student, another early favorite of mine (a “real” photobook) was Eggleston’s The Democratic Forest (1989)—given to me by a friend, Darius Himes, when I was first learning photography. I was astonished to discover that anything could become subject matter for the camera. These first loves continue to impact what I commission for Aperture now—books like The Open Road: Photography and the American Road Trip (2014), The Photographer’s Playbook (2014), and the forthcoming Feast for the Eyes: The Story of Food in Photography (2017). I hope they reach not only the photographic audience, but also a wider public, allowing them to encounter and engage with photography.

This issue is about the accidental photobook— books that use photos, but are not generally awarded the status of photobook proper. As we were putting it together, I discovered that almost everyone in our community had a favorite book in this category that they were eager to share. I am delighted that these humble, unlikely photobooks share these pages with the Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards shortlist, reflecting the kind of divide I describe above. I hope this collision reminds us how democratic, how generous, how expansive both the medium of photography and the form of the book really are. Enjoy.

 

Denise Wolff is a senior editor at Aperture. Some recent books she has commissioned include The Photographer’s Cookbook (2016); The Photography Workshop Series books; and Seeing Things (2016), a children’s book by Joel Meyerowitz.

 

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

Image credit: Jane Mount, Ideal Bookshelf #968: Denise Wolff

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Witness: LaToya Ruby Frazier in Conversation with Kellie Jones

In photographs from Selma to Flint, the unfinished work of the civil rights movement.

LaToya Ruby Frazier, Shea Cobb with her daughter, Zion, and her mother, Ms. Renée, outside the Social Network banquet hall, 2016, from the series Flint is Family
Courtesy the artist, Gavin Brown’s enterprise, New York/Rome, and Michel Rein, Paris/Brussels

Kellie Jones: Let’s start with your 2014 book, The Notion of Family. Did the popularity of The Notion of Family surprise you, especially given the subject matter? Members of your family have been supportive and willing subjects. Sometimes in such exposés we might feel victimhood. How have you crafted your approach differently?

LaToya Ruby Frazier: Initially, when I started The Notion of Family, I knew that I needed to make something on behalf of my relationships with my mother and my grandmother, and something that was for me.

Growing up in the 1980s in the Rust Belt in Braddock, Pennsylvania—a time when cities are shrinking, all the factories have been outsourced, all your social services have been cut, the schools are closed, the library is barely functioning—I was already dealing with an invisibility complex. And I didn’t really understand why we were next to this factory, caught in the shadow not only of the Edgar Thomson steel plant, but also caught in the shadow of Andrew Carnegie. What does that mean to have to measure yourself, or try to be seen, through an industrial capitalist?

Even though I was a teenager and I didn’t have the language to articulate what I was seeing, I knew that I was dealing with shadows and invisibility, and dealing with toxicity and pollution, and then dealing with three generations—or really four, but I didn’t meet my grandmother’s mother—of women who grew up in three different social and economic periods. For my grandmother growing up in Braddock in the 1930s it was very different, because it was a bustling melting pot. None of us are fully black, but we’ve led our lives as black women. Then my mother growing up during the 1960s period of segregation, and then myself growing up there in the 1980s during the “war on drugs” and the abandonment.

The Notion of Family is the book of speaking to my younger self as an adult now, understanding what I know now, but also the coming-of-age story of what it means to grow up in a postindustrial, post-Fordist society, and the post-Reagan era. And what does it mean to be a black woman, inserting yourself, talking about the politics, talking about the toxicity, talking about industrial capitalism?

LaToya Ruby Frazier, Mr. Jim Kidd (Campaign for Braddock Hospital; Save Our Community Hospital), 2011
Courtesy the artist, Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York/Rome, and Michel Rein, Paris/Brussels

KJ: How was it collaborating with your family?

LRF: It’s a precarious situation. Grandma didn’t like to be photographed. She always said, “Go photograph yourself.” That’s what caused me to start doing self-portraits. My mother, as soon as I came in with the camera, instantly had ideas. But a lot of it revolved around surgery or operations, or having cancer removed from her breast, or just coming out of the hospital, and the same thing for my grandmother, except I didn’t realize that she was dying from pancreatic cancer, because she never said anything. And I’m trying to figure out who I am between these two women, but at the same time our bodies are deteriorating in the landscape, because the three of us all have terminal illnesses.

KJ: Has your practice always combined issues of environmentalism and race?

LRF: When you’re a teenager making portraits, you don’t realize that. You’re just taking the class, trying to get the composition and the formal language. But it became very clear to me the day I went into the Carnegie Library. I pulled out this book, Braddock, Allegheny County. I took it back to my studio, and I’m turning through the pages. I knew the editor. I knew everyone who contributed to it. I knew everyone who wrote for it. And I got to the end and there wasn’t a single African American in this book. And it was published in 2008 and I just couldn’t understand how that was possible. So here I was innocently, quietly making these portraits of my mother and grandmother, and then it all changed when I saw the book. And it hit me: Okay, this has a bigger significance. This is not about you. You’re in it, but really you’re talking about how to rectify the fact that a large population of people has been omitted and erased from history, and continually silenced. So I felt intimidated by it, but I also was so outraged by it. I had a bigger mission.

And that’s when The Notion of Family started to come into my mind, thinking about The Family of Man and what that show meant to American history, and the timing of the show in 1955, and thinking about Emmett Till being killed months later and the power of that photograph, and how images do spark memory, history. Activism starts to take place because images become available of something that wasn’t visible.

LaToya Ruby Frazier, Flint residents and students from Northwestern High School await the arrival of President Barack Obama, May 4, 2016, from the series Flint is Family
Courtesy the artist, Gavin Brown’s enterprise, New York/Rome, and Michel Rein, Paris/Brussels

KJ: Can you talk about the impact of the MacArthur grant and how that changed your relationship to Braddock and Pittsburgh?

LRF: Prior to the MacArthur I was seen as an angry, disgruntled little black girl who doesn’t know what she is talking about, and doesn’t have the right to talk about civic duty, and isn’t allowed to point out how Braddock is being gentrified, and isn’t allowed to point out the rebranding of it, and how it’s becoming homogenized and not including the people of color, and the working class, and the elderly, who have always occupied this community. I kept being reduced and dehumanized and silenced. It wasn’t until I got the phone call that day and it became public, that all of a sudden Pittsburgh was proud. I was seeing my name in the paper. I had just moved to Chicago, but they were claiming it, and then so was Chicago. I was having to do interviews in both places. One time they said, “Well, is there anything left you would want to say, LaToya?” And I was like, “Yeah, I hope I make Pittsburgh proud.” [Laughter]

August Wilson was on my mind when I received the MacArthur. And when I think about it, even though I’m using photography and performance and video, it is speaking exactly to what he was doing, which was telling and narrating the daily stories and lives of working-class black people that are constantly overlooked. I really believe that if you can talk about the history of this country and the steel industry through Andrew Carnegie and all these other Scotsmen, then you can talk about America and its history through black women, through black men, and through black children.

I’m talking about being working class. I’m talking about being poor. I’m talking about being blue-collar. Our own presidents don’t say “poor” or “poverty.” They say “middle class,” and I’m very agitated about that.

Gordon Parks, American Gothic, Washington, D.C., 1942
© and courtesy The Gordon Parks Foundation

KJ: You’re certainly bringing that into view for a lot of people. I’ve taught your work in a course on Gordon Parks. I’ve seen you, along with Hank Willis Thomas and Mickalene Thomas, as heirs not only to his photography practice, but also to his sense of interdisciplinarity, as well as social justice. How does your interest in photography and video differ from his?

LRF: Parks’s American Gothic (1942) was one of the first images that I saw by him, in my photography class in undergrad, and it shook me up. To see Ella Watson standing there mimicking Grant Wood’s American Gothic (1930)—I realized that this is a photographer in conversation with a painting, and a painter. Then I also noticed: Here is this woman, working in a government building in Washington, D.C., and nobody sees her, and she’s the janitor who’s cleaning and sweeping every night. But Gordon saw her, and it was the first time I realized that I can speak through a photograph. It’s not about taking the picture. It’s about making the image because you have something to say. She was only making what is equivalent now to $15,000 a year, and she had her children.

KJ: And grandchildren.

LRF: And that’s how she was supposed to survive? So that image really pushed me to start to become more accountable and more responsible to what I wanted to say. But importantly, I learned about Gordon Parks from a homeless woman. I was photographing in a homeless shelter and when I handed this woman her portrait she said, “This reminds me of a photographer I saw on TV on PBS. Do you know Gordon Parks?” And I didn’t, but as soon as I left I went and bought all of the books I could get my hands on. It was because of my encounter with all of his works and reading A Choice of Weapons (1966) that I changed. I’m in pursuit of what Gordon Parks achieved. I’m trying to add to that legacy, but add to it as a young woman and a young practitioner giving voice and collaborating with more women, more populations, but also seeing them as equals.

I want to ask you about Witness: Art and Civil Rights in the Sixties, the exhibition you curated at the Brooklyn Museum in 2014. When I came to Witness and saw the Bruce Davidson, the Gordon Parks, the Charles White, it all really started connecting for me in terms of what I was doing. I realized, Okay, LaToya, you are doing social activist work. I always had this feeling like it just wasn’t enough. And then I saw the exhibition and I realized I was part of a long tradition and a long conversation, and it brought me so much more insight and confidence. Could you talk about the timing of the show and bringing this period, the 1960s, forward through the museum?

Bruce Davidson, Led by Martin Luther King Jr., a group of civil rights demonstrators march from Selma to Montgomery to fight for black suffrage. A young African American man with the word “VOTE” on his forehead, Alabama, 1965
© the artist/Magnum Photos

KJ: Witness celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of the Civil Rights Act, which was about guaranteeing civil rights for all in this country, regardless of race, creed, or color. So we started with that 1964 date.

What was exciting to me was to see so many interesting things that happened in that year artistically. It was Romare Bearden’s breakout moment. He’s been painting for years. He’s in his fifties. People decide they love his collages. He’s also using photographic material in these works.

One of the major things when we think about photography is that most people know the civil rights movement through it, through the photography of Danny Lyon, of Gordon Parks, and through television, but they didn’t know about it through painting and sculpture.

LRF: I was definitely enlightened, and wish I got to study with you. When I was speaking earlier about being held accountable and responsible, not only was I challenging the narrative from my hometown and the narrative that we were all presuming to understand about how the Rust Belt is being developed, or the difference between working-class and creative-class theory, and our complacency as people from the creative sector and industry within that. I was also making it a point to bring people from my community into the institution.

Danny Lyon, John Lewis, future chairman of the SNCC, and others demonstrate at the Cairo pool, which did not allow blacks Cairo, Illinois, 1962
© the artist/Magnum Photos

So you have Witness, and Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles, 1960–1980 (2011), which you curated for the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, happening right in the midst of this other burst as Obama’s leaving, and you’ve got Black Lives Matter, and you’ve got “riots” coming out because of people resisting police brutality, understanding that the boys in blue could be a gang like the Bloods and Crips. All this realization happening in the American psyche. And the fact that everyone is having this meltdown, even considering Trump and Clinton. We’re just so disillusioned and unhappy, and also desensitized at the same time about the history, the murderous onslaughts that we’ve done in this nation. Am I one of those artists contributing and being a witness to my time?

KJ: You’re definitely a witness to your time. You’re telling us about Braddock. Many of us didn’t know about it. And, like you said, it’s representative of places all over the country, and really all over the world.

LRF: I want to close on the Flint work. I had been tracking the Flint story, and then Mattie Kahn, who profiled me for Elle after the MacArthur, reached out and said she wanted me to cover the story. I initially said, “No way. This is Elle. It’s fashion. Why in the hell would I, of all people, want to deal with you?” Then I started thinking about Gordon Parks. Well, he was with Life; he was with Vanity Fair and Vogue. This is the next step, right? You want to impact mainstream culture, the masses. You want to get these things in front of them. So I decided to go.

LaToya Ruby Frazier, Denise and Rodney Clay, Shea’s aunt and uncle, watch President Obama take a sip of Flint water on television, 2016, from the series Flint is Family
Courtesy the artist, Gavin Brown’s enterprise, New York/Rome, and Michel Rein, Paris/Brussels

And the fact that this is contaminated water: Water is a human right. Water is life. And the fact that no one’s even looking anymore. Clinton is not there. Bernie Sanders is not there. No more free concerts to raise money. As I was packing up to leave, a kid grabbed this poster of Governor Snyder and brought it over to me. He wanted me to see something. He had something to say. He wanted me to document it, and I thought about Witness. I thought about all those photographs, because when I looked at him, I could see that language of the civil rights era, and I couldn’t help but shoot it. Everything from that exhibition came forward and I thought, You have to shoot this. So I grabbed my camera back out and I shot it. I’m thinking about the fact that Gordon was also mindful. Just because people were living in what looks like squalor, which is really the landlord’s fault, they were still educating themselves. They were reading; they were studying; and he was making photographs of people reading their books and studying, in addition to going through the whole system that keeps you trapped. Then there’s the image of Obama drinking the Flint River water. I was dying to get that photograph. I kept asking, “Where is someone I can photograph watching him drinking the water?” I knew I needed it to be this historic image.

Kellie Jones is Associate Professor in Art History and Archaeology and the Institute for Research in African American Studies at Columbia University and the author, most recently, of South of Pico: African American Artists in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s (2017).

This conversation is adapted from a public talk between LaToya Ruby Frazier and Kellie Jones at the Strand Book Store, New York, in October 2016.

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

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