Aperture's Blog, page 119

America’s Destiny in Pictures

What is the role of the photographer in our new political order? 
Alejandro Cartagena, Nancy Isenberg, Fred Ritchin, Julian Stallabrass, Jose Antonio Vargas, Susan Meiselas, and Sarah Lewis respond.

Alejandro Cartagena, Carpoolers #51, 2012
Courtesy the artist

Alejandro Cartagena

For most of the last century, the United States of America, at least as we have perceived it from Latin America, followed a formula to avoid (or to hide) blatantly corrupt governments. Was it the way the law seemed to be enforced? Was it the obscene amount of money that supposedly made things better? Was it just propaganda that portrayed the United States as a place to realize your dreams? I don’t really know, but it worked—until now. Somehow, as we say here in Mexico, se les viró la tortilla—the tortilla got flipped. It seems like a scene from a bad Hollywood movie. In Mexico we turn on our laptops with pirate IP addresses to watch American TV to contemplate the current state of things. Are we Latin Americans surprised of what is happening in the United States? I have to say, not that much. From here, the “American destiny” seems to be exactly that of the rest of the American continent: daily doses of in-your-face corrupt politicians, demagoguery, lies, and nepotism.

In a recent trip to San Francisco, after the travel ban was enforced, I found myself a bit scared to go to the United States. Just crazy. I went ahead and erased all social media from my phone and my search history from my laptop. I was stepping into a new type of war zone where anything could happen. I made a point to myself only to watch Fox News–type media. I wanted to see America becoming great again. In Latin America we see this happen all the time. I wanted to get a feel for the formula being used to create this “better” world. Such propaganda made me think of the urgency I feel here in Mexico to photograph the urban sprawl in the outskirts of most Mexican cities, or the tough travel and working conditions of Mexican day labors in Northeastern Mexico. It is through these images that we as photographers commit to visualize the lives of those who lack the power to represent themselves.

If the official story of the United States is now going to be written by the people in power, there is a pressing need to have photographers, artists, and writers create alternative story lines that can balance out those coming out from the regime. Photography can empower introspection, giving more options to the American people. Options, as we have been told, create possibilities of a better future. If the “American destiny” wants an opportunity to fulfill itself in a “good way,” it’s time to start looking inwards to the mess the country is in and see what you can say about it, even if Mr. T deems it fake news.

Alejandro Cartagena is a photographer based in Monterrey, Mexico.

 

Arthur Rothstein, Eroded land on tenant’s farm, Walker County, Alabama, 1937
Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division

Nancy Isenberg

I discovered a long history of seeing the poor through the metaphors of wasteland, vagrancy, idleness, inferior breeding, and impoverished minds while researching my book White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016). The oldest image, The Mapp of Lubberland or the Ile of Lazye (ca. 1670), portrays an imaginary territory where sloth is contagious and men are drained of the will to work. In the 1930s, when 40 percent of the American population were landless tenant farmers, WPA photographer Arthur Rothstein captured what Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace called “human erosion.” A hapless man is dwarfed before a barren landscape scarred with massive gullies. At the same time, the gully became the symbol of downward mobility. Land was never just a source of wealth, but the measure of civic identity and good breeding. Hence, people who lived on bad land—hillbillies and rednecks (people associated with swamps)—were dismissed as degenerate stock.

This is why the “eugenics mania” of the early twentieth century targeted poor white women as perfect specimens of white trash and perfect subjects of state-mandated sterilization. Nor did class language disappear. Orval Faubus, a controversial governor of Arkansas, embodied the conflicted message of social mobility. He was a poor country boy who rose to become one of the political elite. And yet, in the 1957 Life magazine spread about his rise, one photograph featured Taylor Thornberry, his cross-eyed kin in overalls. This one image made its point with perfect clarity: inheritance and pedigree mattered greatly, even in modern America. The country boy could never really escape his inferior roots.

“American destiny” has never been about the entire population, only those considered worthy enough of inheriting our country’s wealth and benefits. Planters in the antebellum South compared themselves to fine stallions, while eugenicists heralding IQ tests celebrated the rise of an aristogenic class of educated professionals. Sadly, even today we have not escaped this unappealing legacy. The best predictor of success in the United States remains the wealth and privilege passed down from ancestors/parents to children. Photography can play a valuable role in unmasking the truth behind the myth that all are created equal.

Nancy Isenberg is the T. Harry Williams Professor of History at Louisiana State University.

Peter van Agtmael, Max Pons, a biologist and manager of the Nature Conservancy in Brownsville, where the land is bisected by a border fence, Brownsville, Texas, 2016.
© the artist/Magnum Photos

Fred Ritchin

We now live in the world of “post-truth” and “alternative facts,” where much of the media is characterized by the U.S. administration as the “opposition party.” At its best the media, and especially photography, have served as credible witnesses to contemporary events, able to focus large segments of society on issues of importance.

Given, however, the diminished credibility of all news media today, what is a photographer of the journalistic persuasion to do? First of all, it seems that the medium needs to be reinvented. Only in photojournalism could someone working today in the style of the 1930s be awarded the World Press Photo award for the photograph of the year (see last year’s Robert Capa-like winner by Warren Richardson, for example). Documentarians and photojournalists must learn from the strategies used by artists, cinematographers, novelists, and poets—“f/8 and be there” is hardly convincing as a strategy when some four billion people are doing the same thing, often calling into question the credibility of all imagery with uncertain standards of fairness. Curators and editors must learn to practice a sophisticated form of metaphotography to make sense of the trillions of photographs and videos online so that the vast amounts of knowledge stored within them can be intelligently shared. And, most of all, everyone must stop communicating only with the groups with which they already agree. The wall that Trump is threatening to build between Mexico and the United States has already been put in place separating many of the denizens of the red states and those in the blue, between those living in rural and urban America; we live in different conceptual universes.

As for the U.S. economy, photographers have hardly begun to look at the systems that underlie much of what is happening, from automation to imports to the disintegration of labor unions, to the ways in which the very rich manipulate the political and economic systems. We need a “USA, Inc.” project, a more extensive version of Philip Jones Griffiths’s 1971 Vietnam Inc., to begin to understand our societal failures and potential. Right now the great hoax is that the Internet makes all things knowable; it certainly does not.

Fred Ritchin is Dean of the School at the International Center of Photography and author of the Aperture book Bending the Frame: Photojournalism, Documentary, and the Citizen (2013).

Milton Rogovin, Working People, Amherst Foundry, 1978-87
Courtesy the Rogovin Collection

Julian Stallabrass

In 1993, Sebastião Salgado published his monumental book, Workers, an elegiac testimony to a global world of manual labor that he saw passing away amid the tide of automation. With an economist’s eye, Salgado teased out in stories and text the structural relations of exploitation between corporation, boss, overseer, and worker, between consumers and producers, and between the global north and south. Behind the detail of the individual stories that made up the book, Salgado glimpsed a destiny in the form of an ending, and mourned two endangered activities: manual labor and humanist photography.

What would a photographic project about work’s destiny look like now? It would face the difficulty that among those enslaved to tailoring their human capital to corporate agendas, “work” has permeated everything, even and especially holidays, and involves regular self-display. Salgado’s project, as is true of other humanist photographers, like Milton Rogovin, was in good part about revealing what was hidden at a time of deep political reaction that sought to bury laborers in invisibility. While much remains actively concealed, one can imagine a project now taking the form of an analytical collage of found fragments, cast in the bright colors and cosmetic filters of digital self-advertisement.

Is there an American destiny in this work, which diverts the utopia of self-fulfillment to serving commercial conformity? The word’s grandeur, like that of fate, may momentarily swell the Trumpian chest, and seem apt to describe an empire in decline, with all its attendant dangers. Yet it is paradoxical when applied to the empire of neoliberalism. Destiny suggests that a destination is held in sight, in the way that the eyes of socialist-realist heroes were fixed upon the coming dawn. Yet neoliberalism outlawed such dreams: there can be no direction except that of the untrammeled market, which is nothing other than the rule of contingency. Even in neoliberalism’s present frailty, no future is glimpsed—only a return to an imagined past, oddly similar to Salgado’s Workers, in which brown skins are swapped for white and women for men, in a strange and barely plausible oil- and coal-begrimed nostalgia.

All cultural workers, including those who work with photography, should be building counter-narratives and subjecting “work,” “destiny,” and especially “America” to corrosive analysis. They could also point towards positive liberations from work dissolve the idea of America in its web of global social relations, and wrench the trajectory of capital away from the only destination it appears to offer: catastrophe.

Julian Stallabrass is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at The Courtauld Institute of Art, London.

Michael Conti, Great!, 2017
Courtesy the artist

Michael Conti, Great!, 2017
Courtesy the artist

Michael Conti, Great!, 2017
Courtesy the artist

Michael Conti, Great!, 2017
Courtesy the artist

Michael Conti, Great!, 2017
Courtesy the artist

Michael Conti, Great!, 2017
Courtesy the artist

Michael Conti, Great!, 2017
Courtesy the artist

Michael Conti, Great!, 2017
Courtesy the artist

Michael Conti, Great!, 2017
Courtesy the artist

Jose Antonio Vargas

Politics used to begin and end with the relative passiveness of red and blue lawn signs. Now weaponized words, heavy with histories of derogating others — “illegal,” “alien,” “tranny,” “gang-banger,” and “terrorist” (to describe Muslims exclusively) — have been accepted in the national discourse, all in the name of making our country “Great.”

As Toni Morrison said, “The systematic looting of language can be recognized by the tendency of its users to forgo its nuanced, complex, midwifery properties for menace and subjugation.”

In a world where the news has become a frontline of the American culture war, we must understand and honor the power of language if we are to live free of this menace. The words we choose to use do more than represent an idea. They represent who we are: our values, opinions, and the level of our love and empathy for others.

How can we communicate with one another when we are not speaking the same language? Where words fail us in this national crisis of communication, images transcend. This series of photos by Michael Conti entitled Great! (2017) is part of an ongoing effort by Define American to change the way we talk about our fellow Americans, to see each other for our stories, our work, our full lives.

An image can convey how a Wisconsin potato planter might love his undocumented siblings in the New Jersey tomato fields. How an embattled police officer might love the Black and Brown people they are sworn to protect. How a young immigrant, who will be part of 88 percent of our country’s population growth in the future, can feel love for a generation of older Americans who have seen their ways of life change at an unprecedented, exponential speed.

It will take radical empathy for the mainstream to trust the experiences of all those outside as authentic—and to give them the space to speak. It will take radical empathy for people of color to not quickly call White people “racist,” personalizing systemic racism. In order to understand one another, we must see one another first.

Jose Antonio Vargas is a journalist, filmmaker, and CEO of Define American and #EmergingUS.

Susan Meiselas, Sultan from Turkey, stitching button holes, Hickey Freeman, Rochester, New York, 2012
© the artist/Magnum Photos

Susan Meiselas

The Rochester chapter of the Magnum Photos project “Postcards from America” led me to the home of Hickey Freeman, one of the oldest and last surviving manufacturers in the nation. For more than one hundred years, the company has drawn on the finest tailors, first from Eastern Europe, then from Italy and Turkey, and now the world. The company has a long-standing history of supporting immigrant workers, through both seeking out master tailors and, more commonly, providing new workers with the skills to do the job.

Hickey Freeman is an institution that has weathered the near collapse of domestic American industry. In 1899, when the company was founded, nearly all clothing purchased by Americans was made in the United States; today it is just 2 percent. On a grand scale, the company has seen each new wave of U.S. immigrants come through its doors. Today, Hickey Freeman is the only apparel company left in Rochester, which was once a booming textile and apparel production center of America. It employs workers from nearly forty countries, all in one factory. These immigrants are the lifeblood of the company—each so specialized in a task that collectively it takes 160 actions to make a jacket.

Susan Meiselas, Sugar drive to process cane at Falk/Rexnord, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 2013
© the artist/Magnum Photos

Another project addressing the current state of American manufacturing took me just beyond the boundaries of downtown Milwaukee. In the surrounding suburbs, I drove around past huge anonymous boxes, manicured so as not to expose the mystery of what was being made inside. Few gave permission to come inside, but those who did offered a tour which often revealed an object whose function was nearly impossible to identify and too abstract in purpose for an outside observer’s eye. The pieces were remarkably odd. I couldn’t tell what a small piece or larger futuristic structure would become.

Unlike Hickey Freeman, the vast majority of the workers in Milwaukee were American, a striking number of them women. They all seemed removed from the objects they were responsible for creating. Their work environment is more insular. They too focus on a single piece with great care, but perhaps with less connection to the larger whole object they are contributing to, or to where it might in fact end up.

What is “Made in America,” and who is making it? This is what I am now just beginning to explore. Can the impact of globalization be turned around, especially in mid-America? This is the great question. There is the reality of broken lives and now new promises. Time will tell what the future holds for both.

Susan Meiselas is a photographer and member of Magnum Photos.

Mole & Thomas, The Human U.S. Shield; 30,000 officers and men, Camp Custer, Battle Creek, Michigan, 1918
Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division

Sarah Lewis

We often consider measuring a life by data—information gleaned from the census, statistics from social science metrics, demography—who lives where—and analyzing health disparities. We measure a life through mortality rates or earning power—the value of our labor. During times of crisis we often realize the power of images to measure progress in American life.

This is a concept that Frederick Douglass spoke about during the Civil War in a speech entitled “Pictures and Progress.” Douglass —whose work is, apparently, being recognized “more and more,” and here perhaps I should emphasize that he left us in 1895—understood that photography was both an artistic medium and a tool, an instrument of measurement that would help expand our concept of citizenship. When Douglass gave this speech, it was also the dawn of the photographic age. If combat might end complete sectional disunion, America’s progress would require encounters with pictures because of the images they conjure in one’s imagination, he argued. Douglass—the most photographed American man in the nineteenth century—was making a case for the epiphanic power of images to shift our vision of the world.

Much of the work by image makers of the last century has expanded the notion of citizenship by altering the living portrait of the nation. One could say that we are refuting the living portrait of the country laid out in 1918 by photographer Arthur Mole. In that year, Mole gathered 10,000 men from the army to create a portrait of American destiny through the image of Woodrow Wilson. On the grounds of Camp Sherman in Ohio, Mole turned human beings into dots, a collective into a single, undistorted image, with rigid exactitude. To take the photograph, Mole created towers nearly eighty feet high and took a week to plan, placing lace edging on the ground to mark where each person would stand. The image depended on Mole’s having bi-level vision: he paid close attention to individuals to create a sweeping, collective image. The dehumanizing exactitude with which Mole made individuals conform to the image of the national figurehead—some men fainted during the shoot—hints at the fragility of the idea of national identity. Mole created this among many other collective portraits—with sitters ranging from 10,000 to 30,000—during a time when the country was striving, struggling, and rioting over attempts to impose a reductive face on U.S. nationalism.

The men in Mole’s portrait of 10,000 Americans are exclusively white. If it can be argued that one effect of the American Civil War “was to replace the sentiment of section with the sentiment of nation,” as Louis Menand writes in The Metaphysical Club (2001), then one effect of America’s involvement in World War I was to expose the nation’s attempts to conflate the concept of “nation” with racial whiteness.

Perhaps it is no coincidence that the idea of America’s “manifest destiny”—the idea of expectant hope about the providence of America’s westward expansion—coincides with the birth of photography in the mid-nineteenth century. America at this time had a limited visual template for citizenship. The initial idea of American citizenship, after all, had been connected to whiteness and the ability to own property. The ways in which we’ve since expanded our concept of citizenship, of progress, and of destiny would become deeply tied to the new medium. For, as Douglass knew, it is during moments of encounter in the crucible of crisis that we see the role that pictures play in auguring American destiny.

Sarah Lewis, guest editor of Aperture’s “Vision & Justice” issue, is an Assistant Professor at Harvard University in the Departments of History of Art & Architecture and African and African American Studies.

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

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Along the Route of Fidel’s Funeral

When Fidel Castro died in November, photographer Noah Friedman-Rudovsky followed the final journey of Cuba’s comandante.

By Joshua Jelly-Schapiro

Noah Friedman-Rudovsky, The faces of a diverse nation lined up to watch Fidel’s remains pass by, Cuba, 2016
Courtesy the artist

What’s the geography of a life? The town where one’s born and where one is raised; the far-off cities or nearby states to which one later treks for pleasure or need; the house or humble flat where one ends up, and as they say, reproduces, dies: these are the sites, for most humans, that chart the trip from sunrise to ‘set. Some people’s maps expand little beyond where they start; some stride the globe. The details of most maps, either way, concern few beyond their subjects and their kin. Those of some people—the sort about whom biographies are written—occupy many more. A few maps, because of their worldly itineraries and their impacts, become allegories: they exemplify journeys that symbolize key currents in, or crucial truths about, their nations or age.

Fidel Castro Ruz was one such person. When Cuba’s late comandante died in November, at ninety, he had for nearly six decades been both his country’s foremost celebrity and its plenipotent leader. He was a villain to those who fled his rule, a hero to those who admired his courage and ideals, and an outsized figure on the world stage. His map touched places ranging from South Africa, where he is loved for sending Cuba’s troops to fight Apartheid in the ’70s, to Miami—the city his cousins built to loath him. But in Cuba itself, his story is also simpler. It is the tale of a rancher’s son, from the island’s rural east: a country boy who launched a revolt in that region’s Sierra Maestra mountains, and after his revolution’s victory in 1959, rode up this huge 700-mile island’s spine to seize its distant capital of Havana.

Noah Friedman-Rudovsky, Cubans gathered along the length of the nation’s highway for days to watch Fidel’s ashes make a cross country trip back to the region where we has born and where the revolution began, 2016
Courtesy the artist

When Fidel’s brother Raúl made a momentous speech to announce his death in that same city, fifty-six years later, the route between Cuba’s eastern heartland and its capital was the map every Cuban thought of—the map of both Fidel’s life and his revolution. On November 25, 2016, Raúl Castro spoke not as Fidel’s brother but as the current head of Cuba’s Communist Party. Raúl announced the “physical disappearance” of the party’s eternal comandante and then described how Fidel’s passing would be marked by his country. Fidel’s funeral cortège would trace the same route as their revolution, said Raul, but in reverse. Fidel’s remains would be cremated, per his wishes, and his ashes would be carted, behind a small Jeep like the one he rode to Havana in 1959, back from whence he came. This humble procession, over nine days of national mourning during which no alcohol would be sold or music performed, would roll Cuba’s length to bring the comandante home. Each mile of the way, Cubans lined the road. Noah Friedman-Rudovsky—a photographer whose experience with lefty leaders in Latin America includes working as personal photographer of President Evo Morales of Bolivia for the past decade, but who has been documenting life in Cuba for longer than that—accompanied the comandante’s ashes for their whole route.

Noah Friedman-Rudovsky, The ashes of the physically large Fidel were carried in a small, understated box, draped by a Cuban flag and dragged by a military Jeep, 2016
Courtesy the artist

The cavalcade of official grief got under way in Havana, with a mass gathering of Cuban citizens and visiting dignitaries in the great concrete expanse of the capital’s Plaza de la Revolución. As it did, the nation’s TV screens, which would for nine days devote round-the-clock coverage to Fidel’s farewell, aired the convocation’s boring speeches. But that night and the next morning, as the Jeep toting Fidel’s ashes left behind the dignitaries in the capital to commune with rural Cubans in el campo, live shots of the procession interspersed archival images from Fidel’s life, many of them rendered in slow motion and accompanied by aching string music. The images overlaid with the government’s official slogan of mourning, Yo Soy Fidel (“I am Fidel”). They recalled the main moments in a life—or at least the ones the state wanted Cubans to recall—that began in 1926 on the ranch of an immigrant from Galicia, Spain who got his start as an overseer in the sugar fields of Cuba’s Oriente before he grew rich owning them.

Noah Friedman-Rudovsky, The slogan “I am Fidel” rang out across the country, Cuba, 2016
Courtesy the artist

It was the ambition of Fidel’s mean rancher dad that saw him and his brothers sent to the top Jesuit boarding school in Cuba’s eastern capital of Santiago. It was Fidel’s own that took him from Cuba’s second city to its first, to attend law school at the University of Havana. As a brash and brilliant student activist, he became a prominent and fiery critic, leading with his barrel chest, of Cuba’s corrupt leaders in the 1940s. But then it was back home in Santiago where he launched his career as a revolutionary that saw him, in 1953, lead a doomed attack on an army barracks in which several of his friends were killed but that Fidel managed, by a form of luck either dumb or destined, not merely to survive but to declare to his countrymen, during his ensuing trial for treason, that “history will absolve me.” That saw him return to eastern Cuba, after a stint in jail and a stint in Mexico, in a little boat whose twelve surviving invaders stole into the mountains and gathered around their leader, like hirsute apostles of Christ, to convince Cuba’s poor and its liberals of his cause. That saw him ride west toward Havana, in his little Jeep and to the exulted cheers of all. That saw his revolution’s ambit quickly grow, for his crew of believers and zealots, to include such quixotic tasks as eliminating illiteracy on his poor island (which Fidel’s volunteers quickly did). After he nationalized Cuba’s land to estrange Havana from Washington, and then found a new Soviet patron, Castro expressed not relief but frustration when humanity avoided the nuclear precipice of October 1961: he was peeved that Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev backed down from launching missiles at the Yanks.

Noah Friedman-Rudovsky, Girls paint the words “I am Fidel” in marker in the town of Bayamo, Cuba, 2016
Courtesy the artist

This hard-headedness—what Cubans dub gallego and Brits would call bloody-minded—was always there, too. It’s what saw Fidel, in the revolution’s early decades, betray a grave intolerance for Cubans who were less Communist, or more gay, than he was. It’s also what helped him, when the Soviet bloc fell and with it the rusting Cuban economy’s lifeblood, not merely retain his firm grip on power but sustain his state’s vaunted systems for providing free healthcare and good schools for all Cubans. And it’s what also saw him, against all odds and after perhaps 600 distinct attempts on his own life, die not from an assassin’s bullet, or a poisoned cigar, but of old age in bed.

The life story reads like a fable. This befits a man who counted among his best friends Gabriel García Márquez. One used to wonder, hearing tales of Fidel dining in Havana with magical realism’s foremost exponent, what the comandante and novelist spoke of. It was hard not to suspect, learning of how Cuba planned to mark his demise, that one thing Fidel himself discussed with “Gabo” was how to imbue the aftermath of his death, long foretold, with optimal narrative symmetry and heft. The number of days of mourning proclaimed by Raúl—nine—wasn’t accidental: in Cuba, nine days is the sum of time that adepts of santería, the Yoruba-derived faith that is one of the island’s religions, believe a person’s soul takes to leave its body. And so it was, as Fidel’s soul rose from the little box wrapped in a Cuban flag, that his Jeep pulled his ashes the length of the island’s carratera central—its national highway—and through cities whose every name resounds, in Cuba’s history or Fidel’s story or both, with its own meaning.

Noah Friedman-Rudovsky, School children were bussed in en masse to attend the caravan, Cuba, 2016
Courtesy the artist

The caravan rolled past the old slave port that birthed Cuban rumba—Matanzas—and through the central city—Santa Clara—where Fidel’s great lieutenant during the revolution, Che Guevara, attacked a train to break the dictator Fulgencio Batista’s forces. It rolled from Sancti Spíritus to Ciego de Ávila to Camagüey; from Las Tunas to Holguín, and to Bayamo—the eastern city, site of a famous battle in Cuba’s nineteenth-century war for independence that now lends its name, in “La Bayamesa,” to its national anthem. Each mile of the way, Cubans lined the road. Friedman-Rudovsky rose before dawn to be ready when the cortège departed whichever well-guarded rural army base Fidel’s ashes spent the night, riding in, or often atop, a car rolling with them.

Noah Friedman-Rudovsky, On the final night of mourning, Cubans filled the plaza in Santiago de Cuba for official remarks by Raúl Castro, 2016
Courtesy the artist

Some of the faces his lens found belonged to people who had to be there: rural nurses or farmworkers employed by the state, bused to the roadside as a duty. Others—townspeople and students, retirees, and layabouts—came because they wanted to. Their tears said so; their aunts and cousins’ presence did, too. Theirs was a farewell to family, signaled with waving flags or smartphones: the parting of a grandfather who, resented or cherished or a complex mix of both, had earned the pause his death prompted. And as the comandante’s posthumous retinue reached the base of the Sierra Maestra by Santiago, the great square in Cuba’s oldest city filled, at sunset, with thousands of mourners. Some chanted “Yo Soy Fidel!” Many wore armbands noting the date in 1953—July 26—when Fidel launched his doomed attack on the Moncada army barracks here.

That night, Raúl Castro gave another speech to the assembled. He declared, in a homily to his brother’s role in Cuban history, how Fidel had decreed that no park or avenue or public site be named after him, so as to “avoid any manifestation of a cult of personality” in Cuba. This may have beggared belief: Raúl was invoking a man who thought it fit to dominate his country’s airwaves and its public sphere, for decades, with his hours-long speeches. But this was Fidel’s wish.

Noah Friedman-Rudovsky, A young military serviceman salutes the fallen leader’s caravan, Cuba, 2016
Courtesy the artist

Cuba now enters a new and uncertain age. Havana’s recent rapprochement with the administration of former president Barack Obama signaled a recognition, here, that attracting foreign capital—if not necessarily embracing capitalism—is increasingly key to the island’s future. Cuba now confronts a new leadership in Washington, whose buffoonish head has already tweeted his unwillingness to deal with his island neighbor. How the drama between these two will go is hard to say. But as Cuba’s ruling party confronts this new foe, Cuba will be without the leader who defined its modern history.

The morning after Raúl’s final speech, in a cemetery not far from where he and his brother went to high school, Fidel’s ashes were buried next to the grand mausoleum of José Martí, the poet-laureate of Cuba’s nineteenth-century war for independence. The simple granite boulder under which they were laid was inscribed with a single word—FIDEL. That is now his official monument. But the larger monument, at least in the days after he passed, was the faces of his people—weary or hopeful, wary or sad—who looked on. As his remains passed on their final journey, the people of Cuba saw themselves reflected in his ashes’ glass case or in the sympathetic lens of a photographer who, filling that map with them, was there for it all.

Joshua Jelly-Schapiro, who has written on Cuban history and arts for many years, is the author of Island People: The Caribbean and the World (2016).

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Exhibition

A student photo exhibition can be a rewarding public culmination for your Aperture On Sight students The execution doesn’t need to be complicated. Here are a few options:

A slideshow of a selection of the class’s photographs, set to appropriate music or accompanied by live or recorded student narration explaining what the class has done. Project each image for about four seconds: long enough to understand what you’re seeing. Keep slideshows to about three minutes. This could take place during a school-wide performance.
A gallery walk, with nicely printed student photographs on tables with Post-it notes on which visitors can write comments, as well as student books. This works well for parent-teacher conferences.
A formal exhibition at the school, in a café, at a library, or in a local politician’s office. Students can select and sequence photographs to hang on a wall, then use photo paper, an ink-jet printer, and frames or map pins. Include wall text and captions/titles printed on clear shipping labels.
A presentation of the student work and books with a talk in which a teacher or other adult interviews a panel of students about their projects.

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Resources

The resources below are provided as additional information for teachers:

“What’s going on in this picture?”: How to use visual thinking strategies in the classroom.
More information about Aperture On Site at Your Site!
Suggested photobooks for your library.
Sample: Letter to a Visiting Editor.
Blurb: Tips and tutorials.
Telephone Game: A fun activity for the classroom from the book Go Photo (Aperture, 2016).
Aperture’s educational publications.

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Workbook

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Lesson 20

In the last lesson of the program, students finalize their digital books and participate in a group critique, sharing honest and kind feedback about one another’s projects. Students will now know how to create a photobook, from concept to practice, along with the basic skills needed to use an online publishing program.

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Lesson 19

In lesson nineteen, students use online bookmaking software to bring their projects to life. Using their book dummies as a guide, students learn to use online tools to create digital versions of their books. Students also have time to write artist statements and captions for their images.

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Lesson 18

Lesson eighteen introduces students to the different caption forms that can accompany images, including picture titles, narrative captions, additive captions, and text. Using blank book dummies, students have the opportunity to place their images, along with written text, in the sequence they created in the previous lesson. This process encourages students to think about their photographs in book form, allowing them to make changes to the sequence and write text before the final version is made.

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Lesson 17

In lesson seventeen, teachers are asked to invite a guest editor—an artist, a photo editor from a magazine or nearby newspaper, a local professional photographer— to the class. The guest editor will give a presentation on book sequencing, share their favorite photobooks, and discuss how the order of photographs can affect their meaning. With the help of the guest editor, students will use printouts of their images to begin sequencing their work in a way that communicates an idea or feeling about their chosen theme.

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Sex Wars Revisited

An early platform for lesbian photography, On Our Backs was instrumental in shaping a culture of desire.

By Laura Guy

Leon Mostovoy, from the series Market Street Cinema, 1987-88
© the artist

“For years we as lesbian-feminists have been fighting male pornography,” a reader named Donna from Washington, D.C., wrote. “It shocks and abhors me to find that women have stooped to the same methods.” To scan the letters pages of the San Francisco–based magazine On Our Backs, published from 1984 to 2005, is to find lesbian erotica thrown into relief against the backdrop of the feminist sex wars. Antagonisms that characterized the movement in the 1980s play out in an epistolary exchange, and through the rancor, a contrasting story emerges. “How different—bold—and wonderful to see (for my first time) women enjoying women,” another reader commented. “It makes me remember that I’m not alone in my thoughts, although fairly secluded in South Carolina,” says another. One reader gets right to the point: “A splendid aid to masturbation! Thanks!” Nestled among these letters are whetted appetites and desires unmet, a request for clarification on attraction between butches, a note about racial integration in the San Francisco leather scene, even a complaint about proofreading errors. A field of lesbian desire appears, one that was contested, shared, and shaped by contributors and readers alike.

The publication emerged at a juncture in feminist history known as the sex wars, a time of high-octane tensions between “pro-sex” and “anti-pornography” feminists. The two terms obscure the complexity of these debates yet gesture toward a stark ideological rift. To summarize, pro-sex feminists sought new languages for female desire. Feminist anti-pornography groups, such as Women Against Violence in Pornography and Media and Women Against Pornography, campaigned for increased legal sanctions on the production and circulation of pornographic material. Photography figured predominantly in this debate, both as a catalyst for antagonism and a means by which feminist affinities might be established and fantasies explored. In the context of these fraught and painful divisions, On Our Backs contributed to a burgeoning media through which images of lesbian sexuality were constructed and disseminated, lusted after and spurned.

Bertie Ramirez, cover of On Our Backs, Summer 1987
Courtesy the Lesbian Herstory Archives

The magazine was an early platform for lesbian sex photography. Along with the Boston-based Bad Attitude, it carved out a space for others to emerge (Outrageous Women, Wicked Women, Quim, and Lezzie Smut, to name a few international examples that followed). In its first decade, On Our Backs was instrumental in shaping a culture organized around lesbian desire. The first editorial, written by Debi Sundahl and Myrna Elana, cofounding editor and publisher, respectively, introduces On Our Backs as an “offering” to the community with the aim of “sexual freedom, respect and empowerment for lesbians.” There were many who worked to realize this goal. Susie Bright, then the manager of Good Vibrations, a San Francisco shop selling sex toys for women, oversaw six years as editor in chief. Starting out as something of a sexual agony aunt, she wrote an advice column that became a trademark of the magazine. Nan Kinney, another founding editor, went to develop Fatale Media, a producer of lesbian erotica videos that by the end of the 1980s was the largest of its kind. Alongside essays, poetry, and graphic art, photography was key to realizing the ambitions of the magazine, and On Our Backs was shaped around a culture of image makers. Its smart black-and-white aesthetic was defined by photographers such as Honey Lee Cottrell, Tee Corinne, Morgan Gwenwald, Jill Posener, Leon Mostovoy, and Katie Niles. Photography stories, reportage, constructed scenes, and advertising images mixed with informative articles, erotic fiction, and, importantly, personals. Later, people like Lulu Belliveau and Phyllis Christopher would be instrumental in developing an ever more stylish visual language that continued to challenge the paucity of available images of lesbians in mainstream culture.

Phyllis Christopher, Alley South of Market, San Francisco, 1997
Courtesy the Artist

There are perhaps two intertwined genealogies here. One is within histories of feminism, the other within those of homosexual culture. As often happens in politics, the sex wars played out as a dispute not only between opposing factions but also different generations. This division caricatured second-wave lesbian feminism as desexualizing lesbian identity in favor of a political definition (“Any woman can be a lesbian,” sang lesbian separatist folk musician Alix Dobkin in 1974). Riffing on the politics of the 1970s, if not antagonistically, then at least with irreverence, On Our Backs appropriated their title from off our backs, a well-known feminist newspaper with roots in the women’s liberation movement. A series of images that Christopher produced for On Our Backs in 1992 announced a fetish for flannel. Christopher admits—with, one suspects, tongue firmly in cheek—to having suppressed her desire for the unfashionable check until seeing a documentary about Olivia Records, a record label synonymous with 1970s lesbian feminism. Getting off on history indicates a less complete break with the past than the idea of feminist waves first implied.

Tessa Boffin, The Angel, 1990, from the series The Knight’s Move
© the Estate of Tessa Boffins/Gupta+Singh Archives

On Our Backs also looked back to public sex cultures that emerged in the wake of gay liberation. Many photographers whose work appeared in the magazine subverted the visual language of the male-dominated BDSM community. Gwenwald’s fetish pictures, including a piece of lace reminiscent of a handkerchief or panties folded into a back pocket, offer a wry counterpoint to Hal Fischer’s record of homosexual dress codes collected in his book Gay Semiotics (1977). Christopher acknowledges the formal influence of Robert Mapplethorpe on her approach to visualizing lesbian sex and desire. But, however exciting it might be to consider this subversion of gay male culture, references to canonical figures like Mapplethorpe should not obscure the radical project pursued by Christopher, Gwenwald, and their colleagues. As the AIDS crisis took hold in the United States and elsewhere, the imperative to create publicly visible representations of queer sex became ever more vital. In the context of political disempowerment and medical crisis, lesbian sex photography would take on increasing political charge, as the magazine provided an essential platform for lesbian creativity during a regime of state censorship enacted during the period of the culture wars in the United States. Circulating in unmarked envelopes, On Our Backs networked lesbians internationally. An exchange took place between photographers in the U.S. and the U.K., where figures like Del LaGrace Volcano, Tessa Boffin, and Jean Fraser foregrounded lesbian identity within the theories of representation emerging out of schools such as the Polytechnic of Central London. If this was photography in the service of pleasure, it was also photography in the service of history. To engage in documenting lesbian sex in the 1980s was to advance the historically necessary claims of feminism and gay liberation into the public sphere. For example, Mostovoy’s images of lesbian sex workers at San Francisco’s Market Street Cinema might be viewed as part of a broader reworking of documentary practice in the 1980s, tied to the emergent debates around the politics of representation. Yet many lesbian practitioners regarded documentary with suspicion. Instead, pornography, which is peculiarly structured by both arch realism and pure fantasy, provided a space where the pathologization of lesbian sexuality could be resisted. For its ubiquity, its obscenity, perhaps even the material conditions of its production, pornography is a particularly degraded kind of image making in histories of photography, removed from the value systems of the academy as well as those of the art world.

Del LaGrace Volcano, On the Way There, London, 1988
© the artist

A collective project like a magazine is bound to be fraught with internal struggles, and from the outset On Our Backs lived with a degree of financial precarity that would lead to both a hiatus and change in management in the mid-1990s. The difficulty of running the publication was compounded by the mounting restrictions on queer spaces as moral hysteria surrounding the AIDS crisis intersected with pernicious gentrification in San Francisco, which had a homogenizing effect on the city. Revisiting this era through the pages of the magazine allows a different set of possibilities relating to queer identity to emerge. On Our Backs is but one chapter in a rich history that also includes the work of Cathy Cade, Ruth Mountaingrove, Corinne, and Volcano, whose vital contributions to queer photography began in the lesbian bars of San Francisco in the early 1980s. Trans or intersex-identified photographers like Volcano and Mostovoy started in the dyke scene alongside writers like Patrick Califia, known for his groundbreaking writing on BDSM subcultures and trans politics. Held within lesbian sex cultures of the 1980s are the kernels of the ongoing struggles for recognition—of trans folk, sex workers, fat activists—that continue to unsettle feminism today. At times it seems the magazine presents us with a lesbian feminist history of queer photography; at others, a queer history of lesbian feminist photography. Perhaps instead, the diverse record of lesbian desire produced through the photographs in On Our Backs shows us that the two are yoked together, far harder to separate than existing histories might have us believe.

Laura Guy is a writer based in Glasgow, U.K., where she is Lecturer in Art Context and Theory at the Glasgow School of Art.

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

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