Aperture's Blog, page 124

Surreal Sexuality

In his staged, gel-lit nudes, Jimmy DeSana explored the body as object.

By William J. Simmons

Jimmy DeSana, Storage Boxes, 1980
Courtesy the Estate of Jimmy DeSana and Salon 94, New York

Lit by raking color that recalls the strangest drag show you have ever seen, Instant Camera (1980) tells an incredible story. A nude woman holding a camera stands atop a nondescript couch, assuming the pose of an ersatz classical statue. Her curved body, muscles taut in an effort to maintain balance, is echoed by a circular nimbus of angelic light. This figure directs her camera toward a contorted entity, whose crumpled pose surely frustrates any attempt to take a picture. A picture of what? Since the second figure’s face is hidden, we can only guess. Lurking somewhere between the mundane and the extraordinary is Jimmy DeSana’s world—a surreal display of the desires coursing through the veins of everyday life.

Jimmy DeSana, Coat Hanger, 1980
Courtesy the Estate of Jimmy DeSana and Salon 94, New York

Born in 1949 in Atlanta, DeSana moved to New York in 1972 after studying art at the University of Georgia, and immediately became a fixture in multiple worlds that he mediated and processed with ever-present camera. He was a beloved member of New York’s East Village scene, what some have called the last avant-garde. Friends remember him as sensitive and kind. Perhaps most important for a photographer, he never took someone’s picture without permission. DeSana did much of his own printing, and cultural figures as diverse as Kathy Acker, Kenneth Anger, Richard Hell, David Byrne, Laurie Anderson, John Giorno, Debbie Harry, John Lurie, and Patti Astor cherished his portraits both for their commercial appeal and their skilled and flamboyant punk sensibility. His commercial work for venues like East Village Eye, File, New York Rocker, SoHo News, and the Village Voice exhibited the same formal rigor and imagination as his art photography, which he showed at Stefanotti Gallery and Pat Hearn Gallery.

Jimmy DeSana, Contact Paper, 1980
Courtesy the Estate of Jimmy DeSana and Salon 94, New York

DeSana’s camera was as dear to him as his sexual life; the two were mutually constitutive, and his engagement with the BDSM subculture provided boundless inspiration to him, both as an artist and as a gay man. DeSana complemented his colorful commercial and portrait images with a set of black-and-white silver-gelatin prints depicting BDSM scenes. Published as a book titled Submission in 1979, the photographs are intentionally ambiguous. Refrigerator (1975) is exemplary; composed of intermingling angles and shadows, the photograph cracks open the doors of respectability and shame, and inside we find the body deliciously bound. In his introduction to Submission, William S. Burroughs mistakenly claimed that these were documentary images of sex acts in progress. In fact, each photograph, no matter how lifelike, was staged, with DeSana and his friends acting as models. DeSana is thus at the crossroads of multiple avenues of representation, neither documentary nor purely artistic, neither commercial nor high art.

Jimmy DeSana, Cowboy Boots, 1984
Courtesy the Estate of Jimmy DeSana and Salon 94, New York

DeSana was an incisively critical of the photographic medium, normative sexualities, and commodity culture as his Pictures Generation colleagues, but the narrative of conceptual photography has been conspicuously devoid of an appreciation of queerness as a critical tool. It would seem that, in art-historical discourse, gay men are only friends, lovers, curators, or artists with a single platform: AIDS. This engenders a ghettoized history that excludes queer artists from these formative years of photo-conceptualism. Revisiting DeSana allows us to repair these oversights and restructure the long-standing Pictures narrative.

Jimmy DeSana, Instant Camera, 1980
Courtesy the Estate of Jimmy DeSana and Salon 94, New York

As a gay man, a photographer, an artist of the AIDS era, a lover, a son, and a friend, DeSana is as beautifully complex as his work. After he died of AIDS in 1990, DeSana left his estate to his best friend and muse, the artist Laurie Simmons. Simmons told me, “I gave myself twenty years to sort out a lifetime’s worth of breathtaking material. I also felt certain that the work would look as fresh twenty years later as it did at the time of its making.” The resurgence of DeSana’s revolutionary career could not come at a more opportune moment; his oeuvre is exemplary of new outlets for reconstituting the Pictures Generation with queer modes of vision and critique.

William J. Simmons is an adjunct lecturer in art history at the City College of New York, and a PhD student in art history and women’s studies at the Graduate Center, CUNY.

This article first appeared in Aperture Issue 218, “Queer.” 

Jimmy DeSana: Late Work is on view at Steven Kasher Gallery, New York, through February 18, 2017.

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Mary Virginia Swanson: Marketing Your Photographs

 

Conceiving, researching, and creating long-term photographic projects is an enormous accomplishment. Sharing the work with the public is the next step.

Join mentor and educator Mary Virginia Swanson for a two-day workshop that will teach photographers to identify appropriate audiences for specific photographic projects and how to effectively reach them.

Swanson will explore a wide range of venues for photography in public, institutional, and private sectors while focusing strongly on learning to “read” their websites for clues to the demographics they reach. She will also discuss the importance of building, rather than buying, a mailing list with well-researched individuals, frequency of contact, and best practices for communication, whether via direct contact or utilizing social media platforms.

On the first day, Swanson will present an overview of the different types of venues as well as various audiences that extend beyond the fine-art market. The second half of the first day is reserved for participants to present their project statements, images, and a description of their desired audience. Swanson will offer suggestions on what additional information or services they could provide to the public, such as lectures, workshops, or other educational components in order to enhance one’s relationship with their audience. She will also advise participants on various audiences they may not be aware of in order to expand and diversify their reach.

On the second day, participants will present revised project statements and a list of venues they are interested in contacting, and share why they seem likely to be appreciative audiences for their work. Participants will also share their websites with the group while Swanson leads a discussion on what elements can be improved upon for clarity of intention. In the afternoon, she will discuss how to conduct project-specific research to develop a larger audience, establish a targeted mailing list, and discuss the language of funding and site-specific proposals.

Mary Virginia Swanson is an author, educator, and advisor who helps artists find the strength in their work, identify appreciative audiences, and present their work in an informed, professional manner. During her career, she has worked in the fine art, documentary, photojournalism, and licensing arenas, having launched an innovative agency to manage licensing rights for artists called “Swanstock” in 1990, and launching her consulting business in 2000. Swanson coauthored with Darius Himes the acclaimed Publish Your Photography Book: Revised & Updated (2014). Swanson is known for staying current in today’s diverse marketplace for photographs. Her current book project is Finding Your Audience: An Introduction to Marketing Your Photographs (2017), a major update to her earlier Business of Photography: Principles and Practices (2008) that will guide photographers through the changes taking place in nearly every aspect of our industry, preparing them for new opportunities in today’s photography-rich culture. She is the recipient of numerous honors including the 2015 Honored Educator Award and the 2015 Insight Award from the Society for Photographic Education, the 2014 Susan Carr Award for Education from the American Society for Media Photographers, and the 2013 Lifetime Achievement Focus Award from the Griffin Museum of Photography. An active contributor to the photography community, Swanson aids numerous organizations in our industry to provide relevant programming and plan for their future. She is based in Tucson, Arizona, and NYC.

 

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Objectives:

Upon completion of this workshop, participants can expect to be able to:

clearly define their project in the language of their desired audience

establish a targeted mailing list and develop a successful strategy for communication

engage their audience with their work via new and varied opportunities (i.e., print sales, exhibitions, public speaking, workshops, and more)

identify a diverse range of venues to share their work in public, private, and institutional sectors

How to prepare:

In advance of the workshop, participants will need to:

Write a statement about their project in 100 words or less

Define the demographic of that project’s targeted audience. Address questions such as, Who would want to see this work? Where can those people be found? If possible, list specific venues

Send 10–15 images and the project title to education@aperture.org

Tuition:

Tuition for this two-day workshop is $500 and includes lunch and light refreshments for both days.

Currently enrolled students and Aperture Members at the $250 level and above receive a 10% discount on workshop tuition. Please contact education@aperture.org for a discount code. Students will need to provide proper documentation of enrollment.

 

 

REGISTER HERE

 

 

Registration ends on Wednesday, March 29, 2017
Contact education@aperture.org with any questions.

 

 

GENERAL TERMS AND CONDITIONS

Please refer to all information provided regarding individual workshop details and requirements. Registration in any workshop will constitute your agreement to the terms and conditions outlined.

Aperture workshops are intended for adults 18 years or older.

If the workshop includes lunch, attendees are asked to notify Aperture at the time of registration regarding any special dietary requirements. Please contact us at education@aperture.org.

If participants choose to purchase Aperture publications during the workshop they will receive a 20% discount. Aperture Members of all levels will receive a 30% discount.

 

RELEASE AND WAIVER OF LIABILITY

Aperture reserves the right to take photographs or videos during the operation of any educational course or part thereof, and to use the resulting photographs and videos for promotional purposes.

        By booking a workshop with Aperture Foundation, participants agree to allow their likenesses to be used for promotional purposes and in media; participants who prefer that their likenesses not be used are asked to identify themselves to Aperture staff.

 

REFUND AND CANCELLATION

Aperture workshops must be paid for in advance by credit card, cash, or debit card. All fees are non-refundable if you should choose to withdraw from a workshop less than one month prior to its start date, unless we are able to fill your seat. In the event of a medical emergency, please provide a physician’s note stating the nature of the emergency, and Aperture will issue you a credit that can be applied to future workshops. Aperture reserves the right to cancel any workshop up to one week prior to the start date, in which case a full refund will be issued. A minimum of eight students is required to run a workshop.

 

LOST, STOLEN, OR DAMAGED EQUIPMENT, BOOKS, PRINTS, ETC.

Please act responsibly when using any equipment provided by Aperture or when in the presence of books, prints etc. belonging to other participants or the instructor(s). We recommend that refreshments be kept at a safe distance from all such objects.

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Dispatches: Athens

A collective of artists reimagines contemporary Greece.

By Maria Nicolacopoulou

Georges Salameh, Broken Nose, 2012, from the series Spleen
Courtesy the artist

Art flourishes in times of adversity. In the charged political landscape of Athens, austerity measures and the prevailing division in the European Union have taken an irreversible toll on the city often referred to as the cradle of democracy. Yet, there is a pulse of creative inspiration and artistic production. On ghostlike streets where businesses are closing down and rental signs are ubiquitous, new artist-run spaces have emerged and collectives are being formed.

Depression Era is one of the products of this condition. Formed in 2011 and with almost thirty members to date, the collective operates in a unique format: its members are professional artists, photojournalists, architects, activists, and filmmakers who are joining forces in their free time. By resurrecting and embracing the value of communal ideals, strangers from different backgrounds and disciplines come together to experiment collectively—a configuration quite unknown to the mantra of neoliberalism and individualism heard throughout the art world.

Aperture Foundation NY.

The Kids Aren’t All Right

In a region where women are regarded as an economic burden, Gauri Gill photographs girls in acts of quiet daring.

By Prajna Desai

Gauri Gill, Virpal and Sunita, from the series Balika Mela, 2003/2010. Courtesy the artist

Gauri Gill, Sunita, Kalavati, Sita, and Nirmala, from the series Balika Mela, 2003/2010. Courtesy the artist

Gauri Gill, Goga, from the series Balika Mela, 2003/2010. Courtesy the artist

Gauri Gill, Kanta, from the series Balika Mela, 2003/2010. Courtesy the artist

Gauri Gill, Manju and Parvati, from the series Balika Mela, 2003/2010. Courtesy the artist

Gauri Gill, Indira and Murali, from the series Balika Mela, 2003/2010. Courtesy the artist

Gauri Gill, Sharda, Baby, and Krishna, from the series Balika Mela, 2003/2010. Courtesy the artist

Gauri Gill, Bhanwari and Licchma, from the series Balika Mela, 2003/2010. Courtesy the artist

Gauri Gill, Sita and Sharda, from the series Balika Mela, 2003/2010. Courtesy the artist

Gauri Gill, Savitri and Poonam, from the series Balika Mela, 2003/2010. Courtesy the artist

Gauri Gill, Manju, Amri, Jyoti, Dhaapi, and Maghi, from the series Balika Mela, 2003/2010. Courtesy the artist

One of the best things about Gauri Gill’s photobook Balika Mela (2012), named after a fair for girls in the arid state of Rajasthan in western India, is how it resists the idea that the kids are all right. In the black-and-white portraits headlining the book, rural adolescent girls are sometimes posed solo, with spare accessories—a watch, a newspaper, some plastic flowers. Some pairs and groups hold hands in obvious fellowship, while one wears paper hats. One picture shows a pair playing out heterosexual coupledom. Elsewhere, two girls staring intently into their own ring-around-the-rosie formation appear unconcerned with the world they inhabit. Solidarity, thrill, and resoluteness are all in evidence here. Yet, even while the girls’ frank gazes master the gaping desert light, these economical, almost silver-toned photographs refuse the implication of the girl ascendant.

Gill’s book is a document of her collaboration with the rural non-profit Urmul Setu Sansthan, which organized Balika Mela (Girl’s Fair) in 2003, in the town of Lunkaransar, Rajasthan. Some of the over fifteen hundred girls milling around the fairground wandered into Gill’s spartan, makeshift studio for photo shoots that resulted in the black-and-white images, and several weeks of mentorship in photographic technique alongside discussions about photography. When invited back to a new installation of Balika Mela in 2010, Gill shot a new set in color, injecting unexpected theater into the girls’ hand-embroidered jeans, puffy jackets, and tennis shoes peering out from under loose pantaloons. The most swaggering image is not of the girl straddling a motorbike, but of a pair in blue, the seated girl slouched like a hip-hop artist, her hand lightly clasping that of an impassive escort.

Critics like to cast Balika Mela as a modern replay of the emancipatory mid-nineteenth-century zenana photo studio, where mainly female Indian photographers shot performative pictures of elite Indian concubines from palatial harems who otherwise lived in purdah (wearing the veil). The comparison ignores the fact that her subjects have nothing to do with orientalist identity politics or feudal concubinage. The images do, however, have a feel for the region’s dizzying rates of female infanticide, but also for the corollary: that women just want to be. Their skits of aspiration and quiet daring, while certainly quite a bit of fun, would also become pragmatic weapons while they eventually struggle to get jobs, as some do. Indeed, one workshop participant, Manju Saran, who went on to reject purdah after marriage, also established a successful photo studio. The book concludes with Manju’s first-person account, delivered partly in the third person, like a split personality negotiating the gap between an ideal state of freedom and the knowledge it is not quite hers yet, not unlike Gill’s portrayals of the same.

Prajna Desai is an art historian based in Mumbai and curator of the Call for Entries exhibition for the 2017 FOCUS Photography Festival Mumbai.

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

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Here Comes the Sun

At the Columbus Museum of Art, photographers look to the light in the sky.

By Ian Bourland

John Divola, Zuma #21, 1977
Courtesy the Columbus Museum of Art

Charles Baudelaire once derided photographers as “sun worshippers”—mere transcribers, rather than visionary creators. And indeed, for most of its short history, photography has been defined by light—the play of shadow, the capture of tonal range or photonic energy, while the sun has long endured as a metaphor, down to the medium’s first name, heliography, the “sun writing” coined by the Niépce brothers in 1820s France. But can the sun itself be the subject of a photograph? Can it be charted only indirectly, by its various reflections and refractions? Staring into its fiery depths, are we blinded in the act of looking, all recognizable forms obliterated into abstraction?

These questions are taken up in The Sun Placed in the Abyss, the recent exhibition organized by Drew Sawyer at the Columbus Museum of Art, which draws together dozens of works made not in the age of Niépce or Baudelaire, but since 1970. January 27, frame 9 (2012) is an image and a prompt by Zoe Leonard: a field of gray, diffuse but punctuated with a halo of white, like the pinprick orbs that float on the retina on a cloudless day. The photograph is a large gelatin-silver print, but it could easily be mistaken for a painting in its near-total abstraction. The accompanying text reminds us that the sun is “what makes photography possible, but it is impossible to really depict it.” Most of The Sun Placed in the Abyss is a spectrum of solutions to this problem, from dead-on looking to the deep parallax of allegory and irony.

Wolfgang Tillmans, Venus transit, 2004
Courtesy the Columbus Museum of Art

What’s refreshing here is Sawyer’s embrace of crucial horizons in photography that had long fallen out of fashion yet stubbornly persist in many contemporary practices, most notably the Romantic tradition in landscape (think Turner or Bierstadt) or the material splendor of analogue, alternative, or antique processes. To this extent, the obligatory Richard Prince montage, or Anne Collier’s appropriation of kitsch postcards of sunsets, tick the right boxes—of dutiful scrutiny, or knowing irony. But the most interesting conceptual strategy here is Dan Graham’s 67-second super-8 Binocular Zoom (1969-70), which merges otherworldly lens flare with a Warholian banality of city rooftops.

Instead, The Sun Placed in the Abyss shines when it includes photographers who unabashedly take on heliography as a formal route. The Californian Chris McCaw is here, with one of his silver gelatin photograms—the images he makes with military lenses and custom paper in which solar radiation burns holes in the negative. McCaw’s work is in dialogue with peers like Ryan Foerster and forebears such as Hiroshi Yamazaki, whose ’70s-era series Observation: The Sun captures the sun’s arc as a searing tracer on the horizon. Foerster’s Sun Blast (2013) is the monotypic husk of chromogenic chemistry left in the sun—it lands somewhere between surrealist experiment and nuclear incident.

Trevor Paglen, Reaper in the Sun, 2013
Courtesy the Columbus Museum of Art

Contemporary artists who engage with such solar lineage find unexpected trajectories in their otherwise familiar practices. Catherine Opie’s Sunrise and Sunset pictures from 2010 are taken from the deck of a transoceanic voyage on a cargo ship. Opie reinvigorates the genre of sublime seascape, charting distant horizons and moody shifts in light and shadow, but she also visualizes the flows of capital that define the Pacific Rim.

Wolfgang Tillmans looks to the heavens, and follows the transit of Venus across the Sun—a not-quite eclipse usually invisible to the naked eye, but rendered here in lavender hues and on a monumental scale. Others ponder the all-seeing sky. Trevor Paglen’s striking Reaper in the Sun (2013) is a print on the scale of history painting. From across the room it’s as alluring and abstract as a Rothko, but on closer inspection there is a faint trace of a new world order, of two decades of warfare fought from above by unseen forces. Omnipresent and elusive as the sun itself, a tiny drone strafes a bleached sky.

Ian Bourland is an assistant professor at the Maryland Institute College of Art.

The Sun Placed in the Abyss is on view at the Columbus Museum of Art through January 8, 2017.

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Our Bodies, Online

Feminist images in the age of Instagram.

By Carmen Winant

Petra Collins, from the series Selfie, 2013-2016
© the artist

What are the qualifications of being a feminist artist today? This is an impossible question, which is, in many ways, the point. One of the defining doctrines of third-wave feminism (or fourth-wave feminism, or postfeminism, or whatever you call our current moment) is its persistent unwillingness to be defined. Whether you make abstract photograms or stag films, label your work feminist, and it is.

As a feminist contrivance, this idea is either liberating or naive, depending on whom you ask, and, likely, in which decade you were born. In either case, it’s a jagged break from the secondwave feminist art movement that predated it—a movement that adhered, by its very design, to a strict set of ideological guidelines. Much like the activist organizations from which this movement grew (which aimed to achieve specific goals like legalizing abortion, passing the Equal Rights Amendment, establishing equal pay and free, universal childcare), feminist art of the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s was determined to raze oppressive structures with a new and defined set of rules all its own. “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house,” Audre Lorde famously declared in 1979. According to both the political and creative arms of the movement, any device that utilized patriarchal means was pointedly unfeminist and thereby an inadmissible agent of real social change.

Mayan Toledano, Emma, 2015
Courtesy the artist

Though born from a desire to achieve equality, some of these mandates around what feminism could and could not be eventually became exclusive, limiting, and problematic. Activist groups such as New York Radical Women came to regularly vote out their leaders for being “unsisterly,” leaders of the National Organization for Women distanced themselves from lesbian feminists—whom Betty Friedan labeled a “lavender menace”—and male children were banned from feminist separatist communes such as Womyn’s Land. At its zenith, this essentialist dogma thwarted the momentous gains of the second-wave movement. At the same time, artists like Betty Tompkins and Anita Steckel, whose paintings were considered too explicitly pornographic and thereby aligned with the patriarchal gaze, were largely excluded from the pale. Hannah Wilke was criticized for being too stereotypically beautiful (and thereby narcissistic) to represent her work’s feminist politics.

Almost half a century later, Instagram, the rise of selfie culture, American Apparel aesthetics, and amateur pornography—channels of visual communication that would have been impossible to fathom within the context of the pre-Internet women’s liberation movement—have come into being. An emerging guard of young, female photographers has carved out a new brand of feminism with a new set of definitions: Amalia Ulman created “hipster lifestyle” porn, to be viewed only within a gallery setting titled International House of Cozy (2015). Arvida Bystrom’s series There Will Be Blood (2012) pictures women in their lacy, period-stained underwear (she also regularly photographs herself and other young women in various states of undress in front of bright, pastel backdrops). Molly Soda’s project Should I Send This? (2015) is comprised of titillating, seminude, and headless selfies that the artist took but never forwarded on to romantic partners. Audrey Wollen’s series Repetition (2014–15) features the artist posing nude or seminude as she imitates and embodies historic works of art made by men such as Bas Jan Ader, Botticelli, and Velázquez. Mayan Toledano’s photographs for her brand Me and You—cocreated with Julia Baylis—are of young women posing topless in bed while wearing Me and You’s most recognizable product: women’s underwear that has the word feminist printed across the backside in pink. These artists frequently collaborate, curate one another into exhibitions, tag and promote each other on social media, and appear as subjects in each other’s work. The commercial, editorial, and creative ventures are part of a larger, allied cohort that is rapidly gaining popular visibility.

Mayan Toledano, Sherris in Palm Springs, 2014
Courtesy the artist

Among them, Petra Collins’s work is perhaps the most prominent. In addition to a creative practice—a recent project is of adolescent girls in the process of taking selfies—Collins counts Vogue, Elle, Wonderland, and i-D magazines as editorial clients, and has shot advertising work for Levi’s, Adidas, Stella McCartney, and Calvin Klein. Across all of these practices, her 35mm images are recognizable as crude and dreamy. Collins’s use of gel filters, pastel palettes, and high grain is uncannily reminiscent of Bob Guccione’s signature Penthouse magazine style, and likewise owes a debt to Ryan McGinley (for whom she has posed on numerous occasions) and Nan Goldin before that. However, unlike Goldin’s women, whose whole bodies project a wild and gleeful pathos, Collins—when she shoots commercially—often zooms in on her subject’s breasts, lips, or asses, their bodies bathed in warm, gauzy light. For all their sexual potency, Goldin’s photographs of Greer Lankton and Cookie Mueller don’t resemble other popular images of women; they feel at once beaten down and ferocious. Collins’s photographs of female subjects for fashion magazines, in which models pose in sauna-soaked underwear and lacy negligees, are notably more domesticated.

Yet Collins consistently makes the case for her work as being driven by her deeply rooted feminist ideals, as do many—if not all—of the photographers of this cohort. The question, then, of what qualifies work as feminist art in today’s cultural landscape circles closely around this group of artists. Bystrom, the Swedish photographer and self-defined “strident feminist” who has posed for Toledano and collaborated with Collins, told Dazed, “You can’t just make ‘feminist art’ because feminism is more like a spectrum of things; it changes and depends on its context.” This notion—that feminism can be whatever you want it to be, and that there are as many feminisms as there are women—appears to sharply contradict the exacting boundaries and idealistic aspirations of the preceding movement. It is, perhaps, the prevailing definition of feminism embraced by Collins and her peers.

Mayan Toledano, Lindsay, Long Island, 2015
Courtesy the artist

Prestel, the publisher of Babe—a 2015 Collins-curated book that includes work by over thirty artists who have been part of her online collective, the Ardorous—promotes the collection as “reflect[ing] an all-accepting, affirming, distinct point of view that teens and young women everywhere can respond to.” Barnes & Noble blurbs Collins as “leading the way in a contemporary girl power revolution that proves feminism and sexuality aren’t mutually exclusive,” and various places online promote the book as “help[ing] us to refocus and remember that we are all a part of the struggle together.” This publisher-scripted language is not far removed from the manner in which the photographers and their surrounding community describe their work. For instance, Collins did an interview with the site StyleLikeU titled “Sorry Not Sorry, Women Have Body Hair” (and subtitled, “Another female power house is stripping down in the name of self-love, femininity, and body acceptance”) while slowly disrobing down to her underwear. Posted on YouTube, it drew several comments by men bemoaning the fact that she never removes her bra.

In her essay “Censorship and the Female Body,” published in 2013 by the Huffington Post, Collins rebukes Instagram’s decision to remove her profile based on a photograph she posted showing her crotch with some exposed pubic hair, writing:

I know having a social media profile removed is a 21st century privileged problem—but it is the way a lot of us live. These profiles mimic our physical selves and a lot of the time are even more important. They are ways to connect with an audience, to start discussion, and to create change…. To all the young girls and women, do not let this discourage you, do not let anyone tell you what you should look like, tell you how to be, tell you that you do not own your body. Even if society tries to silence you keep on going, keep moving forward, keep creating revolutionary work, and keep this discourse alive.

Amalia Ulman, Excellences & Perfections (Instagram Update, 2nd July 2014), 2014
Courtesy the artist, James Fuentes and Arcadia Missa

Collins shows real dedication to challenging censorship and promoting body positivity through her work (and is aware that her position is a privileged one), which is focused on reclaiming the female body by utilizing the techniques and tools of the male gaze. Censorship is, of course, a crucial feminist issue, as is sexual expression, freedom, and agency—all addressed head-on by these photographers. The characterization of this particular case of censorship being a “21st century privileged problem” that nevertheless represents “the way a lot of us live,” though, hints at the paradox inherent in much of this work. Can an inclusive and far-reaching feminism develop within the confines of a Westernminded social-media universe that upholds the status quo of capitalism—the begetter of privilege and the patriarchy alike?

If the rhetoric surrounding this kind of imagery is under question, the images themselves flirt with something undeniably interesting: the tension between provocation and objectification. Audre Lorde’s essay “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” now almost four decades old, might have been written about this very charge:

The erotic offers a well of replenishing and provocative force to the woman who does not fear its revelation, nor succumb to the belief that sensation is enough. The erotic has often been misnamed by men and used against women. It has been made into the confused, the trivial, the psychotic, the plasticized sensation. For this reason, we have often turned away from the exploration and consideration of the erotic as a source of power and information, confusing it with its opposite, the pornographic. But pornography is a direct denial of the power of the erotic, for it represents the suppression of true feeling. Pornography emphasizes sensation without feeling.

Mayan Toledano, Tessa in Mizpe, 2014
Courtesy the artist

Locating the boundary between the erotic-as-power and the erotic-as-bondage can be a complex task, as is manifest in a recent project by Amalia Ulman. For Excellences & Perfections (2014), she posted hundreds of hypersexual, blank-faced selfies on Instagram, accruing up to six hundred likes on a single photograph. In describing how young women now self-present in images on the Internet, Peggy Orenstein’s book Girls and Sex (2016) aptly pins the type of account that Ulman’s spoofs as “a commercialized, one-dimensional, infinitely replicated, and, frankly, unimaginative vision of sexiness … [set to] perform rather than to feel sensuality.” By the time that Ulman eventually revealed that she was playing a fictional character in an act of cultural sendup, she had accrued almost 90,000 new followers. In a moment in which feminist art is defined primarily by its immediate context and authorial claims (Ulman herself does not identify her practice as “feminist” or ascribing to any other political categorization), this work—which has been digitally archived by Rhizome at the New Museum and will be exhibited at the Tate Modern this year—could be considered incisive or lacking rigor. In any case, by reveling in the exhibitionism she seeks to critique, Ulman’s work gets to have it both ways.

Feminist curator and critic Helen Molesworth told me recently that “in addition to the understanding that feminism is structured on absence—the absence of women’s experience, of bodies of color—a feminist is someone who is aware that you can’t change the patriarchy just by inserting women into it.” Is the fact that it was made by a woman enough to qualify it as progressive or political? Would we read these same images differently if Terry Richardson or Richard Kern—a mentor of Collins—made them? Is it possible to at once challenge codified systems of feminized beauty while photographing for the very fashion magazines that reinforce them? Can feminism successfully protest sexism through the personal choice of self-objectification, using what Zoë Heller described skeptically in her New York Review of Books essay “‘Hot’ Sex & Young Girls” as “the emancipatory possibilities of hotness”?

Audrey Wollen, Rokeby Venus, repetition of Rokeby Venus by Diego Velázquez, 2015
Courtesy the artist

When untangling the complex questions posed by the work of these artists, it’s important to recognize that these women deliberately take control of the master’s tools (porn, Instagram, high-end fashion advertising, lifestyle magazines, other corporate and commercial entities) to dismantle the master’s house (patriarchal expectations of gender). Let’s remember that Audre Lorde and the antipornography activist Andrea Dworkin, who passed away in 1992 and 2005, respectively, would have been old enough to be grandmothers to this new generation of feminists. Movements evolve and revolt against themselves; axioms shift over time and in relationship to culture. Rather than ask this group of artists to resemble the feminists that came before them, critics, consumers, and practitioners alike should be promoting an unabashed and exacting dialogue around the politics of looking and image making.

This is a generation that has had access to mobile devices and image-centric web platforms from preadolescence as a part of daily life; this technological and commercial divide naturally shapes their creative instincts, and sets them apart from previous makers. Molesworth concluded our conversation by reminding me, “Though there are some basic operating principles and values, there is no one theoretical position on feminism that works for everyone.” So long as it is self-critically vested in challenging modes of power, feminism can, and must, be a continually evolving phenomenon. No matter the generation of feminism to which one ascribes, expansive and rigorous definitions do exist; let’s set about reclaiming them.

Carmen Winant is an artist, writer, and Professor of Visual Studies and Contemporary Art History at Columbus College of Art and Design.

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

The post Our Bodies, Online appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

Notes on a Scandal

After weathering the media firestorm surrounding a series of provocative self-portraits, Lebanese photographer Rasha Kahil turns comments from online trolls into a powerful exhibition.

By Rayya Badran

Rasha Kahil, Hackney Wick, E9, London, from the series In Your Home, 2011
Courtesy the artist

For her photographic series In Your Home (2011), Rasha Kahil a London-based, Lebanese artist, photographer, and art director, depicted herself in seminude poses in people’s homes in London, Berlin, and Beirut. Kahil presented the work in Beirut and Istanbul and self-published the series in London in 2011. Confined at first to art world circles, In Your Home later caught the attention of local Lebanese news outlets when, in 2013, Al-Jadeed TV produced a report on Kahil. Her images became an instant sensation and the coverage subsequently catapulted Kahil into the ruthless public domain of social media. Anatomy of a Scandal, Kahil’s new work, is a multimedia installation that delves into her response.

Rasha Kahil, Kastanienallee, Mitte, Berlin, from the series In Your Home, 2011
Courtesy the artist

Rayya Badran: In Your Home, made between 2008 and 2011, is a series that challenges issues of intimacy and private space. Yet, the later occultation—censorship—of the erotic parts of your body was itself a violation, not merely bestowed upon your body, but also a violation of what your work had intended to do in the first place. Your reprisal of these reworked, retouched works sheds light on the ease with which the Internet can appropriate and deconstruct images at will. Instead of actively challenging them, you chose to surrender, if one can say that, to that noise. I wonder about the subversive potential in such a decision. Radio silence as a position of power.

Rasha Kahil: As the “scandal” happened online, I did choose to stay silent. It wasn’t so much an act of resistance at first, but instead a realization that the power of the Internet, and the free-flow of voices who either choose to condemn or champion, is a torrential force that can only be observed in real time, not one I can actively engage in. Observation was my only recourse; documentation my only tool.

Being at the center of a such a vigorous media storm and witnessing the flurry of comments aimed at my body, my work, my being, was at first extremely harrowing, especially because there were many attempts to contact me directly, rather than just “reading” my person being dissected online. I was hounded by TV talk show hosts who asked me to participate in live TV panels and “defend” my work, give my side of the story. Of course, I was never going to do that, and I chose to remain silent, as not only is attempting to engage with the strength of the online voices a futile exercise, but, of course, agreeing to add my own voice to the discourse would only mean that I was giving validity to the wider discussion.

Therefore, proactive silence was my only course of action, and my strongest tool. I actually found the deconstructed images of my original In Your Home series churned out by the media outlets online—with their liberal use of pixels, black bars, and Photoshop blurs and splodges—quite fascinating. I am not sure “surrender” is the right word, as my silence was my own form of attack: it never crossed my mind to issue an apology to the singular “mass,” as seems so customary an outcome in these types of online scandals.

Rasha Kahil, Caledonian-Road, N7, London, from the series In Your Home, 2011
Courtesy the artist

Badran: Before you moved onto the dissection of people’s responses to your work, and aside from the very polarizing, yet somewhat predictable opinions out there, was there a response among those that were sent or posted that particularly marked you or made you pause? And could you explain why?

Kahil: Yes, it is a comment left on a blog post that I actually used as a stand-alone vinyl piece in the exhibition:

unfortunately, none of Rasha’s so-called artistic pictures meet the conditions needed for a piece of work to be considered as art:

art: something that is created with imagination and skill and that is beautiful or that expresses important ideas or feelings/works created by artists: paintings, sculptures, etc., that are created to be beautiful or to express important ideas or feelings. [from the Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary]

Obviously, these pictures only display vulgarity, fruitlessness and lack of creativity, which are the complete opposites of the two definitions of art mentioned above (that’s just to say a little about her pictures). Plus, they serve no important or noble purpose and are thus pure garbage porn.

Last point I want to make is, looking at this girl’s pictures, all I could possibly see is a stupid, wrathful, disguised feminist rebelling at the very end of the continuum and more importantly, a promising Arab porn star … wow! Very honorable and educational material for generations to come …

It is the violence of the tone in the comment that really struck me. Most of the comments left online were throwaway remarks, using my body as a springboard for “locker-room banter” (as Trump would say, defending this type of discourse). But this particular comment is considered. It reads like a mini-essay, with a moderate intro, a heated argument, and a progressively more vociferous closing statement. There seems to be deep-rooted revulsion towards my work and persona, manifest in an attack not only on my practice, but also my intellect, my body, my gender, and my intentions all at once. It unsettled me deeply, not because it zoomed in on me personally, but because I feel it to be a violent attack on women in general and vocal, outspoken women in particular.

Rasha Kahil, Anatomy of a Scandal, installation at Art First Projects, London, 2016
Courtesy the artist

Badran: Did you place any criteria for selecting the posted comments? What was the narrative you sought to bring to the surface from the flurry of online opinions?

Kahil: I incorporated all the emails I received as part of the framed wall installation. Since they are private, one-to-one emails, the names are cut out of the paper printout to protect the identity of the sender. As for the Facebook comments I used in the video, it was a question of using a diverse selection, so as to give the most accurate representation of the sheer volume, as well as the overarching themes, of the discussion that was happening. Some of the comments I narrate in my own voice are also arguments that happened between commenters amongst themselves, and I embody both polar positions through my voice.

Rather than a narrative, the installation is a documentation of the happening itself. I am the author of the installation and my arrangement of the different “scandal” elements constitutes a form of storytelling. In a sense, it’s a translation of a virtual experience into a physical experience. The elements are all there, untouched—the comments, the emails, the censored images—but my architectural layout of the components is my way of re-appropriating this experience, neutralizing it, and displaying back to the original creators. The work is the result of my sustained forensic collecting of these artifacts during my “radio silence” and their subsequent transformation into physical objects.

Rasha Kahil, Anatomy of a Scandal, installation at Art First Projects, London, 2016
Courtesy the artist

Badran: You display comments from those in your defense and from those who attacked your photographs. Why was it important for you to re-enact the social media comments yourself, with your own voice?

Kahil: I wanted to start a dialogue about what it is to be an artist and a woman in a patriarchal society. So, the use of my voice to narrate the different comments, both in defense and in condemnation of my work, is my way of owning the orchestra of voices, in contrast to having remained silent while it was underway. Personally collecting, transcribing, and retelling the running commentary in my own voice seems to have disarmed the violence inherent to the commentary, and revealed its farcical undertone. There was a lot of giggling and laughter at the opening of Anatomy of a Scandal in London last year, which was something I had sensed would happen and very much welcomed. Is laughter the best medicine? Not always, but in the case of this scandal, turning it from a violating experience into a tragicomedy laced with absurdity was the best way to move beyond the initial violent assault.

Rasha Kahil, Whiston Road, E2, London, from the series In Your Home, 2011
Courtesy the artist

Badran: Nina Power, a British writer, teacher, and critic, recently wrote as a preface for an essay entitled “How do you visualise a woman in the 21st century?”:

The battle to visualise ‘a woman’ or to give shape to the category of women in the 21st century will take place mostly virtually and linguistically but the consequences will be material, as they always are. We must go through the violence of the image in order to arrive at something else—a non-violent, non-image that can still, somehow, be understood.

Do you align yourself with this notion that one must go through the violence of the image in order to topple our understanding of visualizing women? Is this even possible in our context?

Kahil: I think this applies to what happened with my series In Your Home as it went through the motions of online scrutiny. In parallel to the verbal attacks—a great majority of them attacking my body and its “unworthiness”—the original images themselves were censored and visually maimed as the story spread to online news channels. I addressed this component of the scandal by recreating the censorship over the glass of the original framed prints using spray paint or blurred vinyl. In that way, the original images remain untouched underneath the glass, but the new layer sits atop, like a bruised skin.

I’ve often noticed that most work by women that addresses sexuality, the body, femininity, or feminist notions tends to attract verbal abuse online on a superficial, denigrating level. Shaming the artist, the work, the flesh with disparaging, overtly misogynistic remarks, or “Here’s another one getting her kit off” type of way, even on reputable sites that deal with art and photography. This happened when a review of Anatomy of a Scandal was posted on the British Journal of Photography’s Facebook page. Scrolling through that page, I noticed these comments propped up whenever a link to an article about a female artist dealing with the body in her work came up. My intention with Anatomy of a Scandal was to bring to light this phenomenon, which has always existed at a macro level, but is now amplified and globally visible through social media.

Badran: Are you thinking about certain feminist artists in your practice?

Kahil: One of the first feminist artists whose work resonated with me was that of Sophie Calle, which I discovered as a young teenager growing up in Beirut. I was blown away by the intimacy of her projects, and by their accessibility. Even without any background in art history or theory, I could understand and relate to her work as a woman and as a human. I understood that you could touch your audience and make thought-provoking work through the simplest of concepts, through personal storytelling, and create a body of work that ranges from performance to photography to text. This is a line of thought that I’ve carried throughout my practice.

Rasha Kahil, Potterells Farmhouse, AL9, Hertfordshire, from the series In Your Home, 2011
Courtesy the artist

Badran: Do have any advice for young women artists who are constantly at risk of exposing themselves to the barrage of anonymous trolls online, and who must navigate the wide web of misogyny?

Kahil: It is now impossible to have an online presence, whether through social media or even just by the fact of having a website, without coming into contact with the “mass web voice,” especially if the work deals with “inflammatory” subjects—and by using that word, I am just qualifying it from the point of view of the conservative masses. But I think that having confidence in one’s work, knowing what it communicates, who its audience is and why it exists, intrinsically protects from the consequences of online onslaught and creates an immovable wall against petty banter. The most important thing I learned from being the subject of an online scandal is that it’s not personal. Actually, emails that were sent to me personally and addressed to my face were almost always encouraging and supportive. The virulent comments were the ones that were simply thrown into the mass anonymous online conversation, and thus held no weight. As artists and as women, a little scandal is no excuse not to use our voices and our work to fuel the conversation, especially in the current climate.

Rayya Badran is a writer, translator, and teacher based in Beirut.

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

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Spotlight: Eli Durst

In Eritrea, a young photographer pursues a cinematic vision.

By Alexandra Pechman

Eli Durst, Photographer, from the series In Asmara, 2015
Courtesy the artist

Eli Durst spent his summers during high school and college assembling asylum applications at the Austin immigration clinic where his mother works as a legal advocate, often for refugees from Eritrea. Durst took passport photographs and met dozens of people who had crossed the U.S. border from Mexico after landing there by circuitous journeys and illegal means, fleeing Eritrea’s authoritarian government and standstill economy. Yet, some Eritreans spoke wistfully about the underrecognized allure of Asmara, the nation’s capital and a time capsule of early twentieth-century colonial Italian architecture.

In the 1930s, following four decades of colonization, Italian fascist forces imposed the charge of futurism on Asmara through hundreds of new buildings, often shaped like the era’s latest technology: airplanes, radios, trains. The invasion of British troops in 1941, during World War II, brought an end to the Italian colony and the architectural explosion. Today, buildings remain remarkably undisturbed after years of war and undemocratic regimes.

“That really interested me, this kind of a duality of people’s love for this place while they are doing everything they can to leave,” Durst told me recently. In the summer of 2015, Durst visited the city for the first time, arranging for the brother of an Eritrean translator who works with his mother’s clinic to serve as a guide. He showed Durst the city for a few days, but then was forced to report for military training—another reason Eritreans leave the country.

Eli Durst, Samson and Winta, from the series In Asmara, 2015
Courtesy the artist

Durst toured Asmara using a 2003 architectural survey, but found he was not allowed to photograph iconic buildings. Though still standing, the majority have fallen into disrepair. A 1930s swimming hall he wanted to photograph had, he learned, been closed for a decade, and buildings converted for government use were restricted. With limited accessibility, Durst focused on silent details, and took cues from the cinematic styles of Federico Fellini, Roberto Rossellini, and, most of all, Michelangelo Antonioni. “I couldn’t not see it that way,” Durst said. “Asmara looks so much like the world I’ve seen in these midcentury Italian films. Antonioni, particularly, conveys a certain beauty with an underlying tension, where you have this setting but it’s disintegrating.”

Durst’s sharply contrasted black-and-white images from Asmara are often devoid of people, though the sense remains that someone has just left or is soon to appear in the frame. The Roman lettering of AMOR on a building reflects up from a puddle of standing water. Untouched coffee cups crowd a brimming ashtray on a table. A place setting of food awaits a diner.

“All you can talk about is how beautiful it is, because everyone is afraid of being critical,” Durst said. Eritrea has no free press and one of the world’s worst records for free speech. Journalists who speak out against the government are imprisoned, email and Internet use are closely monitored, and foreign journalists are not allowed to enter the country. (Durst traveled under a tourist visa.)

Durst, a native Texan, took photography classes at Wesleyan University. After graduating in 2011, he moved to New York to learn more about photography, working at Griffin Editions and as an assistant for Joel Meyerowitz, whom he cites as an influence. Durst later attended the Yale University School of Art for his MFA, where he began to work on his Asmara portfolio.

Eli Durst, Steak, from the series In Asmara, 2015
Courtesy the artist

The retouched passport photographs that Durst took over the years in Austin (and now uses in his work, with applicants’ consent) punctuate the series and connect Durst’s engagement with Eritreans in Austin and Asmara. Other images have faces and bodies that are clipped, cropped, or seen at a distance.

In a photograph taken in the dining room of his nearly unoccupied hotel (tourism to Eritrea is made difficult by a government wary of Western agitators and influence), a waiter in suit and tie stands in front of a contemporarily dressed man seated alone among empty tables.

Durst’s trip coincided with Ramadan, and on Eid al-Fitr local photographers take pictures of celebrating families. One took notice of Durst. “All the younger photographers had digital and he had this old Olympus,” Durst said. “He saw me and I stood out. He took my picture and then pulled me aside and led me around the city.” The man didn’t speak English and Durst was without a translator, so during their hour-long tour Durst never learned his name. In Durst’s image of their encounter, the unknown photographer, his face obscured by the Olympus, trains his analog lens on Durst, a seeming nod to the obscured face of Thomas in the popular imagery from Blow-Up (1966), Antonioni’s seminal meditation on the medium of photography.

“With Antonioni, there are these complicated and often very scary political undercurrents,” Durst said. “That photographic tension exists in his films. That’s what was driving me.”

Alexandra Pechman is a writer based in Rio de Janeiro and New York.

Eli Durst is the winner of the 2016 Portfolio Prize. His exhibition In Asmara is on view at the Aperture Gallery through February 4, 2017. Click here for more information about the Portfolio Prize, now open exclusively to Aperture subscribers.

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John Berger’s Intimate Greatness

Aperture remembers the life of John Berger, whose narrative approach to art criticism reached far beyond photography.

By Geoff Dyer

Jean Mohr, John Berger, 1967
Courtesy the artist

I became interested in photography not by taking or looking at photographs but by reading about them. The names of the three writers who served as guides will come as no surprise: Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, and John Berger. I read Sontag on Diane Arbus before I’d seen any photographs by Arbus (there are no pictures in On Photography), and Barthes on André Kertész, and Berger on August Sander without knowing any photographs other than the few reproduced in Camera Lucida and About Looking. (The fact that the photo on the cover of About Looking was credited to someone called Garry Winogrand meant nothing to me.)

Berger was indebted to both of the others. Dedicated to Sontag, the 1978 essay “Uses of Photography” is offered as a series of “responses” to On Photography, published the previous year: “The thoughts are sometimes my own, but all originate in the experience of reading her book.” Writing about The Pleasure of the Text (1973), Berger described Barthes as “the only living critic or theorist of literature and language whom I, as a writer, recognise.”

For his part, Barthes included Sontag’s On Photography in the list of books—omitted from the English edition—at the end of Camera Lucida (1980). Sontag, in turn, had been profoundly shaped by her reading of Barthes. All three had been influenced by Walter Benjamin, whose A Short History of Photography (1931) reads like the oldest surviving part of a map this later trio tried—in their different ways, using customized projections—to extend, enhance, and improve. Benjamin is a constantly flickering presence in much of Barthes’ writing. The anthology of quotations at the end of On Photography is dedicated—with the kind of intimate relation to greatness that Sontag cultivated, adored, and believed to be her due—“to W. B.” At the end of the first part of Ways of Seeing Berger acknowledges that “many of the ideas” had been taken from an essay of Benjamin’s titled “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” (This was 1972, remember, before Benjamin’s essay became one of the most mechanically reproduced and quoted ever written.)

Photography, for all four, was an area of special interest, but not a specialism. They approached photography not with the authority of curators or historians of the medium but as essayists, writers. Their writings on the subject were less the product of accumulated knowledge than active records of how knowledge and understanding had been acquired or was in the process of being acquired.

This is particularly evident in the case of Berger, who did not devote an entire book to the subject until Another Way of Telling in 1982. In a sense, though, he was the one whose training and career led most directly to photography. Sontag had followed a fairly established path of academic study before becoming a freelance writer, and Barthes remained in academia for his entire career. Berger’s creative life, however, was rooted in the visual arts. Leaving school possessed by a single idea—“I wanted to draw naked women. All day long”—he attended London’s Chelsea and Central schools of art. In the early 1950s he began writing about art and became a regular critic— iconoclastic, Marxist, much admired, often derided—for the New Statesman. His first novel, A Painter of Our Time (1958), was a direct result of his immersion in the world of art and the politics of the left. By the mid-1960s he had widened his scope far beyond art and the novel to become a writer unhindered by category and genre. Crucially, for the current discussion, he had begun collaborating with a photographer, Jean Mohr. Their first book, A Fortunate Man (1967), made a significant step beyond the pioneering work of Walker Evans and James Agee in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), on rural poverty in the Great Depression. (A Fortunate Man is subtitled “The Story of a Country Doctor,” in homage, presumably, to the great photo-essay by W. Eugene Smith, “Country Doctor,” published in Life in 1948.) This was followed by their study of migrant labor, A Seventh Man (1975), and, eventually, Another Way of Telling. The important thing, in all three books, is that the photographs are not there to illustrate the text, and, conversely, the text is not intended to serve as any kind of extended caption for the images. Rejecting what Berger regards as a kind of “tautology,” words and images exist, instead, in an integrated, mutually enhancing relationship. A new form was being forged and refined.

A side-effect of this ongoing relationship with Mohr was that Berger had, for many years, not only observed Mohr at work; he had also been the subject of that work. Lacking the training as a photographer that he’d enjoyed as an artist, he became very familiar with the other side of the experience, of being photographed. With the exception of one picture, by another friend—Henri Cartier-Bresson!—the author photographs for his books have almost always been by Mohr; they constitute Mohr’s visual biography of his friend. (The essay on Mohr included here records Berger’s attempt to reciprocate, to make a sketch of the photographer.) His writings on drawing speak with the authority of the drawer; his writings on photography often concentrate on the experience, the depicted lives, of those photographed. Barthes expressed the initial impetus for Camera Lucida as photography “against film”; Berger’s writing on photography hinges on its relationship to painting and drawing. As Berger has grown older, his early training—in drawing—rather than fading in importance has become a more and more trusted tool of investigation and inquiry. (Tellingly, his latest book, published in 2011 and inspired in part by Spinoza, is called Bento’s Sketchbook.) A representative passage in “My Beautiful” records how, in a museum in Florence, he came across the porcelain head of an angel by Luca della Robbia: “I did a drawing to try to understand better the expression of her face.” Could this be part of the fascination of photography for Berger? Not just that it is a wholly different form of image production, but that it is immune to explication by drawing? A photograph can be drawn, obviously, but how can its meaning best be drawn out?

This was the goal Barthes and Berger shared: to articulate the essence of photography—or, as Alfred Stieglitz had expressed it in 1914, “the idea photography.” While this ambition fed, naturally enough, into photographic theory, Berger’s method was always too personal, the habits of the autodidact too ingrained, to succumb to the kind of discourse- and semiotics-mania that seized cultural studies in the 1970s and ’80s. Victor Burgin—to take a representative figure of the time—had much to learn from Berger; Berger comparatively little from Burgin. After all, by the time of About Looking (1980), the collection that contained some of his most important essays on photography, Berger had been living in the Haute-Savoie, France, for the best part of a decade. His researches—I let the word stand in spite of being so thoroughly inappropriate—into photography proceeded in tandem with the struggle to gain a different kind of knowledge and understanding: of the peasants he had been living among and was writing about in the trilogy Into Their Labours. Except, of course, the knowledge and methods were not so distinct after all. Writing the fictional lives of Lucie Cabrol or Boris—in Pig Earth (1979) and Once in Europa (1987), the first two volumes of the trilogy—or about Paul Strand’s photograph of Mr. Bennett (p. 44), both required the kind of attentiveness celebrated by D. H. Lawrence in his poem “Thought”:

Thought is gazing on to the face of life, and reading what can be read,

Thought is pondering over experience, and coming to a conclusion.

Thought is not a trick, or an exercise, or a set of dodges,

Thought is a man in his wholeness wholly attending.

In Berger’s case, the habit of thought is like a sustained and disciplined version of something that had come instinctively to him as a boy. In Here Is Where We Meet the author’s mother remembers him as a child on a tram in the London suburb of Croydon: “I never saw anyone look as hard as you did, sitting on the edge of the seat.” If the boy ended up becoming a “theorist,” then it is by adherence to the method described by Goethe, quoted by Benjamin (in A Short History) and requoted by Berger in “The Suit and the Photograph”: “There is a delicate form of the empirical which identifies itself so intimately with its object that it thereby becomes theory.”

This is what makes Berger such a wonderful practical critic and reader of individual photographs (“gazing on to the face of life, and reading what can be read”), questioning them with his signature intensity of attention—and, often, tenderness. (See, for example, the analysis of Kertész’s picture A Red Hussar Leaving, Budapest, June 1919.) To that extent his writing on photography continues the interrogation of the visible that characterized his writing on painting. As he explains at the beginning of the conversation with Sebastião Salgado: “I try to put into words what I see.”

This essay is adapted from the introduction to John Berger’s  Understanding a Photograph , published by Aperture in 2013.

Geoff Dyer’s most recent book is White Sands: Experiences from the Outside World (2016).

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The Accidental PhotoBook

Denise Wolff

 

We are at a moment when the community of photobook makers and collectors is expanding rapidly, yet also becoming more insular. We’re ever searching for that handmade artist book created just for the art fair, available in limited copies that are going fast. For many years, the Martin Parr/Gerry Badger Photobook: A History and other books about books have served as a shopping list, bestowing value on the included volumes. Looking back through The Photobook: A History, however, it’s worth remembering that they cast a wide net, including among the shimmer of possibilitys and Sleeping by the Mississippis, mass market books, commercial books, books on food, and propaganda.

It’s been over a decade since the first and second volumes of The Photobook: A History came out, and our community has developed a finely tuned connoisseurship of the artist monograph. For this reason, it is a good time to consider other types of books that use photography, but are not considered photobooks qua photobooks—books that are unlikely to end up on anyone’s yearly top-ten list (and never aimed to). These books are often outside the photobook radar for a variety of reasons, whether they be too idiosyncratic, mass market, or useful (cookbooks, lifestyle, science), but their impact relies heavily on photography. Some of these fall into a guilty-pleasure category, but many, freed from an artist’s agenda and the conventional earmarks of an artist book, present a more direct use of photography and are successful in their own right. In the pages that follow, we have invited photobook aficionados to talk about their favorite niche within the larger universe of photo-illustrated books, and a handful of others to introduce their favorite non-photobook photobook—their own guilty pleasures. In short, this issue will address the unlikely, even accidental, photobook.

My own interest in the category of the accidental photobook began with cookbooks. I bought the 1958 Time Life Picture Cookbook as a joke. Maybe it appealed to me as a reaction against the kinds of photobooks I engage with on a daily basis. From there, I gathered many more cookbooks of a similar ilk—those that had clearly paid as much attention to the staging and photographing of the food as to the presentation of recipes. When the habit grew from a few books on a shelf to an entire bookshelf, I had to admit, it was no longer ironic, but true love. I take more pleasure in a few of these cookbooks than I do with some of the more proper photobooks, many of which are languishing on my shelves in Mylar sleeves. The following are a few of my favorites.

LIFE Magazine ⋅ Time Life Picture Cookbook
Time Inc. ⋅ New York, 1958

Some context is needed to fully appreciate the Time Life Picture Cookbook. Picture cookbooks became popular in postwar America. Women were supposed to get back into the kitchen with new vigor, entertaining needed to start again, national taste and culture had to be re-established. Photographs, particularly of food and feasts, were part of that. The most well-known was the 1950 Betty Crocker Picture Cookbook. It’s bound in a loose-leaf ring binder and chapterized into subject files, so you can quickly get to the Pie section and remove the recipe for cooking. Throughout, decadent color photos burst at the seams with American bounty. Buffet-style spreads are in full force and meant to feed an army of guests: epic picnics and breakfast feasts, rows of frosted cakes and jellyrolls, and salads galore. They are more exuberant than they are appetizing, speaking more to tastefulness (or perhaps the lack thereof) than taste itself. The photos are often set in the home, showing the newest appliances and wares. Here, America presents itself as plentiful during the Cold War, in direct contrast to communism. Despite all the messaging, the book remained a functional cookbook, one that was bought primarily for the recipes and was engineered to be useful. The pictures are a punchy bonus. The tables and counters full of food are aspirational, but still seem achievable.

LIFE Magazine ⋅ Time Life Picture Cookbook
Time Inc. ⋅ New York, 1958

By 1958, the Time Life Picture Cookbook had become decidedly more about the pictures. Sure, it contains lots of recipes, but at fourteen inches tall, this is not the book you’re reaching for in the kitchen. It’s not being bought or produced for the recipes, which are all run together, small. The pictures, however, go across the double-page spreads gloriously, presenting a tableau of food more aligned with still life than with interiors. The production on each shoot is impressive, not accomplishable by any home cook anywhere, with twenty plates of flambé presented in the same shot for the “Flaming Foods” chapter opener or with pineapples frozen into blocks of ice for “Cooking on Ice.” The pictures here are spectacular in the truest sense of the word. They present a wonderful fantasyland of food. Scales and hourglasses appear with perfectly textured Baked Alaskas and Petits Fours in pastel and desert backgrounds, depicting low-calorie and time-saving desserts. The book still operates within lifestyle and taste, but instead of presenting recipes you can accomplish with the help of this book, the Time Life Picture Cookbook is something you would more likely display in your home rather than actually use. Hence, the book is more photobook than recipe book. And the pictures are a joy to look at beyond their nostalgic value. The watermelon on ice with roses is a gorgeous still life that still holds up today; the “Drinks and Hors D’oeuvres” opener could pass as an Irving Penn (it’s by H. I. Williams). Time Life would go on a decade later to publish the Foods of the World Library, which also focused on the photographs—though more documentary in hopes of creating an armchair travel experience of culture through food.

Ernest Matthew Mickler ⋅ White Trash Cooking
The Jargon Society and Ten Speed Press ⋅ Berkeley, CA, 1986

White Trash Cooking (The Jargon Society and Ten Speed Press, 1986), by contrast, is the antithesis of the Time Life Picture Cookbook, a spoof, but one with a great deal of love at its heart. (The Jargon Society, founded by the late North Carolinian poet and Black Mountain College alum Jonathan Williams, was better known for publishing avant-garde books of poetry and photography.) The book is a satirical counterpoint to the more serious cookbooks of the day that had begun fetishizing freshness and local ingredients with the rise of Chez Panisse. The recipes, like Tutti’s Fancy Fruited Porkettes, Mock-Cooter Stew, Oven-Baked Possum, and Four-Can Deep Tuna Pie, are written in a down-home voice. But through the tongue-in-cheek, it is clear there is genuine affection for the people and respect for the country dishes. Nothing reflects this more than the surprise center section of color photographs, taken by the author, Ernest Matthew Mickler, on his travels through the South as he collected the recipes. There is no irony here. The pictures are casual, direct, and elegiac. They reference FSA pictures from the region and resemble William Christenberry’s pictures of Alabama with their sense that this way of life is becoming a memory. Bushels of peaches, old stoves, rusty bedframes in the landscape, people on porches, cornpones on the stove show a different kind of local lifestyle. Though the pictures would still work in a traditional photobook context, in the cookbook they operate to both cut the edge of the White Trash Cooking’s joke, and to deepen the satire against other lifestyle cookbooks, by revealing something much more sincere. In the last picture, the two devil’s food cakes cooling on the counter look like black portals into another time. That Mickler could convey such depth in front of a tub of Crisco is remarkable. Publishers first rejected the book and the New Yorker refused to run an ad for it, but it became an instant classic.

Ernest Matthew Mickler ⋅ White Trash Cooking
The Jargon Society and Ten Speed Press ⋅ Berkeley, CA, 1986

Today if you walk through the cookbook section of any store, you will notice that the books there look a lot like art books. This trend may have started out of necessity; with the rise of digital books, printed books needed to justify their existence and amplify their shelf appeal to entice consumers. To achieve that, publishers have reached into the bag of tricks established in art and design books, including photobooks. An early adopter of this recent trend is Breakfast Lunch Tea (Phaidon, 2006). This was the first cookbook wholly originated by Phaidon, after its success with Silver Spoon (a buy-in with Editoriale Domus for the 1950 Italian classic Il Cucchiaio d’argento). It is no surprise that this book takes the form of an artbook since this is what Phaidon knows best. Toby Glanville, a wonderful British portraitist, took the photographs and presents an utterly lovely portrait of a bakery: those who work there, the regulars, the purveyors, the ingredients, the process, and the finished food. Glanville’s unusual color palette, striking angles, and unassuming portraits make for a beautiful book. This, combined with the high quality paper and printing, elevate the cookbook into more of a photobook. Phaidon continued this type of treatment in their future cookbooks, and many other publishers have followed in their wake.

Brooks Headley ⋅ Brooks Headley’s Fancy Desserts: The Recipes of Del Posto’s James Beard Award-Winning Pastry Chef
W. W. Norton ⋅ New York, 2014

Perhaps in reaction to this movement, Brooks Headley’s Fancy Desserts (W. W. Norton & Company, 2014) is a serious cookbook, but also pokes fun at today’s delicate pastry cookbooks with their restrained color palettes and selective focus. Instead, the Fancy Desserts pictures, a collaboration between photographer Jason Fulford and illustrator and author Tamara Shopsin, are playful, each with their own deadpan joke, and shot almost entirely against a plain white background. The red cover says it all with sticky hands, sauce poured out from proportionally tiny creamer, dripping chocolate from poorly painted fingernails, and a rather unappetizing mystery dough (cheese, actually). The book feels more punk than lighthearted with clever inside references and, at times, a gross-out take on pastry, more akin to a food fight than a white table experience. We rarely see the fragile and fancy final dishes, just the crazy process, complete with a condensed milk bomb. The book is purposefully not tasteful, deflating the very notion of fancy, and subverting the increasingly precious cookbooks-as-artbook genre. The fact that the book accomplishes this with art stars Jason Fulford and Tamara Shopsin at the design helm is a large part of its genius. Sadly, the publisher just released a paperback edition replacing the original cover with a more expected picture of fancy dessert. Chickens!

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.

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