Aperture's Blog, page 126

W.M. Hunt: Talking Pictures

 

“The most enjoyable afternoon of stories both personal and professional—he will delve into the photography world in the most unusual way. Learning should always be this fun.”



—Elaine Goldman, collector of photography and past workshop participant

 

W. M. (Bill) Hunt led a one-day workshop at Aperture Foundation, intended for people who look at photographs and who want to challenge and heighten both their sense of seeing and their ability to talk about what they see.  

The workshop offered photography lovers an insight into Bill’s personal collection and how he came into collecting. During the first half of the workshop, Bill discussed the challenges of finding a great photograph in a world filled with good photographs. He shared personal stories and encouraged the workshop participants to “find what excites you, and pursue it.” Bill explained to participants that a great photograph will do three things: make the hair on the back of your neck stand up, make your heart beat faster, and keep your feet planted in front of it. In his lecture, Bill showcased a wide variety of photographers including Richard Misrach, Bill Brandt, Sally Mann, and Nathan Lerner.

 

Participants had the pleasure of meeting Chris Boot, executive director of Aperture, and debated the role of photography in today’s current economic, political, and social state. During the second half of the workshop participants discussed photographs that they thought were great and why they felt that way. Bill challenged the participants to find photographs that were not necessarily their favorites but ones they thought were extraordinary. Peggy Roalf, former editor and curator at Aperture, joined the conversation and gave her opinion about what makes a photograph great, using Josef Koudelka’s work as an example. Gwyneth Degraf, former workshop participant, was also asked to speak with the group and shared photographs made by Damon Winter.

 

W. M. Hunt is a champion of photography and frequent presenter both in the U.S. and internationally, from Shanghai to São Paulo. He is a longtime adjunct professor at the School of Visual Arts, New York, and organizer of the W. Eugene Smith Talks at Aperture and the Your Picture . . . series for PDN’s PhotoPlus. Hunt’s Three Ring Circus: American Groups Before 1950 was exhibited in New York last year in collaboration with the ICP after traveling to Arles, Bologna, and Houston. His book The Unseen Eye: Photographs from the Unconscious (Aperture, 2011) was the basis for a large show that debuted at the Rencontres d’Arles, France, then toured to the Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne, Switzerland; FOAM, Amsterdam; and the George Eastman House, Rochester, New York.

Explore Upcoming Workshops

 

Contact education@aperture.org with any questions.

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William Christenberry, Poet of the Ordinary (1936–2016)

Aperture remembers the life of the Southern photographer, whose work evokes the power of passing time.

William Christenberry, Processing, Beale Street, Memphis, Tennessee, 1966

By Walter Hopps

In 1963, as director of the Pasadena Art Museum in California, I mounted a retrospective of the work of Marcel Duchamp, which was widely reviewed. I had put together a catalog and a poster for the show, and I was very proud of both of them, but we sold precious few, and almost none by mail order. One day, my secretary was going through the mail, and she said, “Here’s a strange one. Somebody in Memphis, Tennessee, has written requesting a catalog, and he’s sent fifteen dollars.” I said, “Who the hell in Memphis, Tennessee, would want a Duchamp catalog?” Duchamp, at the time, was not exactly a household name in the South. Because the catalog cost less than fifteen dollars, I told my secretary to throw in a poster as well.

William Christenberry, Signs in Landscape, near Marion, Alabama, 1975

Years later, I was in the atrium of the Corcoran Gallery in Washington one day when a lanky-looking man came up to me and said, “Excuse me. You’re Walter Hopps, aren’t you? I just wanted to thank you for that Duchamp poster you sent me.” He told me his name and explained that he was living in Washington now. I asked him what he did, and he said, “A little bit of everything. I draw. I make sculpture. I’ve done paintings. I take photographs.” In an age when everyone else looked like a hippie, he was short-haired and straitlaced and very polite in a southern way. I asked him if I could come by sometime and see his work. When I got to his house, I looked at everything he’d been doing, but the minute I saw the photographs—both black and white and some small ones in color—a light went on in my head, and I knew that they were special. As Walker Evans once said, they were like perfect little poems. I often wondered afterward whether I ever would have met Christenberry if I hadn’t sent him that Duchamp material. He was shy—it might have taken years.

William Christenberry, Double Cola Sign, Beale Street, Memphis, Tennessee, 1966

William Christenberry was born in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, in 1936, and spent a lot of his childhood in Hale County. He went to the University of Alabama at a time when many of the teachers there were former students on the GI Bill. One of those teachers turned out to be important in his life, a graduate of the California School of Fine Art named Lawrence Calcagno. Calcagno turned out not to be one of the majors himself, but he was a sophisticated, mature person, and he opened up all kinds of things for Christenberry. He sent him to the library and forced him to look at art he’d never heard of before. A couple of years after college, Christenberry moved up to New York to look for work. He got a job at Bella Fishko’s gallery. That didn’t work out. Then he got a job cleaning Norman Vincent Peale’s church. That was too depressing. Next he was taken on as a guard at the Museum of Modern Art. That was too boring. Finally, he heard that Walker Evans was working at Time-Life and Fortune magazine. This was late in Evans’s life, and he had been almost forgotten. Christenberry went over to the Time-Life Building and met with him. Evans, who never had a son, took to Christenberry right away—especially when he realized that his family lived right down the road from the people he’d photographed for his book with James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Evans had documented the lives of sharecroppers in the area; Christenberry’s family was just one rung up the ladder—they owned the land they worked on. So that was a real connection between Christenberry and Evans, and it was Evans who encouraged Christenberry to go back to the South for his work.

William Christenberry, Building with Nehi Sign, Stewart, Alabama, 1965

Agee, in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, called for the use of the most humble materials to create a lyric poetry of everyday experience. Words “are the most inevitably inaccurate of all mediums of record and communication,” he said. “Words cannot embody; they can only describe.” To convey the dignity of the lives observed, one must form a montage of details—scraps of iron, the wood from a table, a broken chair, chickens. This is the aesthetic principle that Christenberry has been developing since the 1950s, and he has done so in an extraordinarily wide variety of media. He has also devoted considerable attention to one particular fringe element of the American South: the Ku Klux Klan. Curator Thomas Southall has written of Christenberry’s Klan pieces, “This creation, like his other work, has a way of giving physical form to intangible feeling. We are left not with a simple polemic or documentary statement, but with a new sense of how complex and deeply rooted prejudice is.” For Christenberry, these fetishistic works seem to constitute a kind of exorcism of racism.

William Christenberry, Child’s Grave with Pink Rosebuds, Hale County, Alabama, 1975

What fascinated Christenberry about Duchamp was that Duchamp could make art out of anything. He was, to use the French word, a bricoleur—a fix-it man, an improviser of modest and humble materials, who can patch your chair or fix your chicken coop. In Christenberry’s work, Duchamp’s and Agee’s ideals come together: even the most modest of farmers knows inherently how to survive. If the plow breaks, he knows how to mend it. If he can’t find tar paper for his roof, he figures out how to insulate with newspapers. His life is an improvisation. When Christenberry saw all the found materials in Duchamp’s work—the old bottle racks, the bicycle wheels—he felt an instinctive rapport. It makes Christenberry nervous to call what he does art. For him to take a good picture is simply a matter of getting the right kind of crop planted and then harvesting it on time.

What a harvest.

This essay was originally published by Aperture in  William Christenberry (2006).

Walter Hopps (1932-2005) produced a number of legendary exhibitions, including the first retrospectives in America of Marcel Duchamp, Joseph Cornell, and Kurt Schwitters, and was the founding director of the Menil Collection in Houston.

The post William Christenberry, Poet of the Ordinary (1936–2016) appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

Elle Pérez

In the Bronx, New Haven, and Baltimore, nightclubs are spaces of queer liberation.

By Salamishah Tillet

Elle Pérez, Karila, 2015
Courtesy the artist

Euforia Latina. Bronx Underground. Autonomous queer spaces now disappeared from the American urban landscape. Rather than have them live on as remnants in the minds of those who found haven there, Elle Pérez insists on their presence. Her photographs are a form of counter-memory, a practice that philosopher Michel Foucault describes as actively reviving the past to resist historical obscurity and narrative death.

Pérez was born the year before Jennie Livingston released Paris Is Burning, a 1990 documentary initially heralded for its provocative characters and its unprecedented exposure of New York’s queer, black, and Latino ballroom culture to mainstream America. In retrospect, what was seen as the film’s innovation can now seem to be racial and class exploitation: Livingston neither turns the camera back onto herself nor turns it over to the stars. “As a twenty-two-year-old from the Bronx watching Paris Is Burning for the first time, it was like falling in love with yourself through a white gaze,” Pérez told me. “That’s what I am fighting against in my work.”

Elle Pérez, Curtain Peek, 2014
Courtesy the artist

And yet, Pérez’s photographs are more empathetic than embattled. Her close-up shots, a few staged, mostly improvised, capture the offscreen rather than the nightclub’s main attraction. Those moments before the moment. A stairwell before going in or leaving the party. Backstage pageant prep. Peering from behind the curtain. A Selina catsuit hanging midair. A slow inhale. A tight embrace.

That her photographs are from different places might matter for the official record. Some are taken at Euforia Latina, the Latin club night held at Baltimore’s popular Club Hippo, which first opened in 1972. Others are from the Bronx Underground, a punk show hosted at the First Lutheran Church of Throgs Neck, in the Bronx, for fourteen years. Both places permanently closed their doors in 2015, shortly after Pérez captured them for posterity. “In the beginning, I thought I was photographing for the future,” Pérez said. “Because these people would have been left out of the history of punk.”

That her photographs refuse their geographical specificity is the point. These images flatten space, giving us a sense that we are watching both the entertainers and their spectators in media res and waiting for each other. Even more poignantly, Pérez’s black-and-white portraits dislodge these scenes from their respective years of 2014 and 2015 and situate the viewer fully in the present or transport us back to the neopunk scene of the early 2000s or to the roaring Harlem ballrooms of the 1980s. Here, we are all part of an intimate experiment in out-of-timeness in which space and temporality are deconstructed, each moment rendered eternally new.

Elle Pérez, Kirsten, 2015
Courtesy the artist

Pérez’s counterarchive then becomes an alternative to erasure. Taken together, these photographs create their own imagined community, to use the phrase coined by historian Benedict Anderson, in which people are joined by shared experiences or collective memories rather than by the more traditional borders of the nation-state. Unlike the racial and sexual othering in Paris Is Burning, Pérez, working in settings of emotional familiarity, takes her subjects, their queerness, and their blackness and brownness for granted. By doing so, she recenters all LGBT individuals as normative, everyday, and utterly beautiful.

Amid the euphoria and exaltation there is now a stinging sadness as we juxtapose Pérez’s images against the backdrop of those brutally murdered on Latin Night at Orlando’s Pulse nightclub this past June. And while Pulse’s owner defiantly vows to keep its doors open, Pérez’s photographs are their own form of memory-justice, ones that we need now more than ever.

Salamishah Tillet is an associate professor of English and Africana Studies and a faculty member in the Alice Paul Center for Research on Gender, Sexuality, and Women at the University of Pennsylvania.

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

Aperture 225Aperture: The Magazine of Photography and Ideas
“On Feminism”

The winter issue of Aperture, “On Feminism,” arrives at a moment when the power and influence women hold on the world stage is irrefutable, and the very idea of gender is central to conversations about equality across the country, and around the globe. “On Feminism” focuses on intergenerational dialogues, debates, and strategies of feminism in photography and considers the immense contributions by artists whose work articulates or interrogates representations of women in media and society. Across more than one hundred years of photographs and images, “On Feminism” underscores how photography has shaped feminism as much as how feminism has shaped photography.

FRONT
Redux
Brian Wallis on Leonard Freed’s Black in White America, 1968

Spotlight
Eli Durst’s In Asmara by Alexandra Pechman

Curriculum
By Martha Rosler

Dispatches
Maria Nicolacopoulou on Athens

BACK
Object Lessons
Les Femmes de l’Avenir, 1900–1902

WORDS
On Feminism
Contributions by Catherine Morris, Zanele Muholi, Laurie Simmons, Johanna Fateman, Zackary Drucker, and A. L. Steiner

Modern Women: David Campany in Conversation with Marta Gili, Julie Jones, and Roxana Marcoci
The artists who redefined the course of twentieth-century photography

The Feminist Avant-Garde
In self-portraiture and body art, experimental pioneers of the 1970s
By Nancy Princenthal

Sex Wars Revisited
Lesbian erotica as critical rebellion
By Laura Guy

A Taste of Power: Renée Cox in Conversation with Uri McMillan
From Angela Davis to Beyoncé, the icons and avatars of black style

History Is Ours
The legacy of protest in video and performance
By Eva Díaz

On Defiance
How women have resisted representational photography
By Eva Respini

Beyond Binary
New visions of trans feminism
By Julia Bryan-Wilson

Our Bodies, Online
Feminist images in the age of Instagram
By Carmen Winant

PICTURES
Cosey Fanni Tutti
Introduction by Alison M. Gingeras

Gillian Wearing
Introduction by Jennifer Blessing

Yurie Nagashima
Introduction by Lesley A. Martin

Hannah Starkey
Introduction by Sara Knelman

Katharina Gaenssler
Introduction by Yvonne Bialek

Josephine Pryde
Introduction by Alex Klein

Laia Abril
Introduction by Karen Archey

Farah Al Qasimi
Introduction by Kaelen Wilson-Goldie

Martine Syms
Introduction by Amanda Hunt

Elle Pérez
Introduction by Salamishah Tillet




$24.95

The post Elle Pérez appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

A Portrait of the Artist as Claude Cahun

On the cover of Aperture’s “On Feminism” issue is a photograph by Gillian Wearing, who recreated a 1927 self-portrait by the French writer and artist Claude Cahun. Rediscovered in the 1990s, Cahun was known for her gender bending, theatrical photography. “Wearing, like Cahun, conceives of gender as multivalent,” Jennifer Blessing writes in an introduction to a portfolio of Wearing’s previously unpublished early work. Ahead of her latest exhibition, Wearing spoke about Cahun, feminism, and her “spiritual family” of artists with Nicholas Cullinan, director of the National Portrait Gallery in London, where Gillian Wearing and Claude Cahun: Behind the mask, another mask opens in March 2017.

Gillian Wearing, Me as Cahun Holding a Mask of My Face, 2012
© the artist and courtesy Maureen Paley, London

Nicholas Cullinan: I wanted to begin by asking you about Me as Cahun Holding a Mask of My Face, from 2012. When did you first discover Claude Cahun’s work, and what has it meant to you over the years?

Gillian Wearing: I read about Cahun in the mid-’90s; I think it was in an article in the Guardian. Her work was being written about as if it were a new discovery, although it was more of a rediscovery, as her photographs had been bought at an auction in the 1970s after her partner, Marcel Moore, passed away. The photographs seemed very playful, and also very apt for that moment, something that has not gone away over time. In fact, we are now finding new ways to look at her work.

In the ’90s I thought about her work as performed versions of the self—something that now feels innate and even commonplace to anyone with an Instagram account. I can track my own sensibility to this from my teenage years onward; I felt compelled to take photographs of myself posing in order to crystallize a perfect image of myself, and mainly for my consumption only. It was not always about vanity and creating an illusion, but also trying to get close to how I might look or be at a certain point in my life. A lot of this is captured in my series My Polaroid Years, which look very much like selfies but were all taken with a Polaroid camera between 1988 and 2005. So when I became aware and interested in Cahun’s work, I felt there was some kind of affinity, a need that she had to take images of herself that I related to.

It’s only fairly recently I found out that she did not exhibit her photographs, and that she saw herself primarily as a writer. We don’t entirely know why she took the images, although some fragments of her photographs did appear in her collages. With very little to guide us, a lot of what we can say and think about Cahun and her photographs is only conjecture.

Claude Cahun, I am in training don’t kiss me, ca. 1927
© Jersey Heritage and courtesy Jersey Heritage Collections

Cullinan: Leading on from that, why did you choose this particular image of Cahun’s to re-create? Could you talk a bit about the process behind making this work?

Wearing: I chose it because it was quite an emblematic photograph. I liked the way her face, which was painted, already resembles a mask, and that led me to thinking about introducing a mask of my own face into the work. So both of us are represented as masks in the image.

The whole process in creating the photograph takes about four months. A mask is made of Cahun’s face that will fit my face. So the sculpting of her face is done over a cast of mine. In the shoot I wanted to create a pose similar to her original one, with the head tilted down, the legs crossed. I didn’t want to have the text of “I am in training don’t kiss me,” as this image is about our relationship and shared interests in the masquerade. I shoot with film rather than digitally, and it was a ten-hour shoot. I think film makes me much more thorough. I know I can’t see the images before they are processed, so I try and have as many choices of shots and lens changes as possible.

Gillian Wearing, Me as Arbus, 2008
© the artist and courtesy Maureen Paley, London

Cullinan: It’s fascinating that you take on the roles of artists, as well as your mother, father, sister, and brother, and yourself at different ages. So, is Cahun part of your “family,” so to speak?

Wearing: In my series Me as … (2008–13), apart from Cahun, Warhol, Arbus, and Mapplethorpe, there is Weegee, Sander, and Fox Talbot. I classify them all as my spiritual family.

Cullinan: How have Cahun’s example and the way she addresses issues of gender politics, identity, masquerade, performance, and self-portraiture through her work resonated with you?

Wearing: Like a lot of people, apart from my scant knowledge of her in the ’90s, I didn’t really have much exposure to Cahun until the last fifteen years, when quite a few books have been published on her life and work. And it is within this time that I realized she was an activist, as well as an artist, writer, etc; that she was prescient in her ideas of renegotiating what gender means, and that it can be neutral. So there is a really interesting convergence of her life and art.

Gillian Wearing, Self-portrait as my brother Richard Wearing, 2003
© the artist and courtesy Maureen Paley, London

Cullinan: Is the fact that both of you work primarily using photography as your medium significant, or is photography simply a vehicle to explore both portraiture and self-portraiture?

Wearing: I have always classified my work as portraiture, from my filmic works to photography and sculpture. You could say the terminology is the vehicle. The word portrait is a very open term; it allows for experimentation, discovery, and the fact that almost anything can be a portrait, whether it is of a human face or a bouquet of flowers.

Gillian Wearing, Self-portrait of me now in a mask, 2011
© the artist and courtesy Maureen Paley, London

Cullinan: I want to ask you about the exhibition we are working on here at the National Portrait Gallery, which will open next March: Gillian Wearing and Claude Cahun: Behind the mask, another mask. Of course, in doing this, we are generating an intergenerational dialogue between two woman artists. As such, does you consider yourself a feminist? Do you identify in particular with one or more periods/waves of feminist art?

Wearing: Yes, I am a feminist. I believe in equality, and I believe anyone who thinks the same is a feminist. I am indebted to many women over the years who have achieved change for other women through feminist art, politics, and writing. I don’t identify with any one period, as I identify with different things over different moments in time.

I remember what I consider the first feminist artwork I became aware of: Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document (1973–79). It seemed very radical, both as an idea of what art was and that something that would have normally been private was being put on display. I think women artists have really pushed that envelope in terms of the personal being art. In my own work over the years, people have said to me, “You can’t show that, it’s too revealing.” This has happened with the confessional works and even with my series Signs, both from the early ’90s. But I am glad I never took heed, because art is about challenging and changing dominant cultural hegemony. I feel the same way about Cahun’s work. She has left us with these images that show how she was disrupting ideas of gender and reconstructing what identity means, which is very topical at this moment in time.

Claude Cahun, Self-portrait (kneeling, naked, with mask), ca. 1928
© Jersey Heritage and courtesy Jersey Heritage Collections

Cullinan: Can you share with readers a bit more about how this exhibition has taken shape, particularly your research trips to Jersey, where Cahun lived for the last twenty years of her life, and your curatorial involvement and “collaboration” with Cahun in the new works you are making for it?

Wearing: The exhibition has really brought me much closer to Cahun’s work and to her life. By going to Jersey with curator Sarah Howgate from the NPG, I saw the house where she lived, which was next door to the church where she was buried, which was next to the beach where she walked her cat on its lead. It was so unusual to have such a huge part of someone’s life in this small area of land. I was able to imagine those portraits of her being shot on the beach, at the cemetery, or on the wall of her garden, and from that create my own idea of her biography as an artist. Also, the Jersey Heritage Trust has the largest collection of Cahun’s works, many of which we have borrowed for the exhibition. The whole trip was a real treat, this tiny island with a treasure trove of this great artist’s life and work.

Nicholas Cullinan is the director of the National Portrait Gallery in London, where Gillian Wearing and Claude Cahun: Behind the mask, another mask will be on view from March 9 to May 29, 2017.

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

Aperture 225Aperture: The Magazine of Photography and Ideas
“On Feminism”

The winter issue of Aperture, “On Feminism,” arrives at a moment when the power and influence women hold on the world stage is irrefutable, and the very idea of gender is central to conversations about equality across the country, and around the globe. “On Feminism” focuses on intergenerational dialogues, debates, and strategies of feminism in photography and considers the immense contributions by artists whose work articulates or interrogates representations of women in media and society. Across more than one hundred years of photographs and images, “On Feminism” underscores how photography has shaped feminism as much as how feminism has shaped photography.

FRONT
Redux
Brian Wallis on Leonard Freed’s Black in White America, 1968

Spotlight
Eli Durst’s In Asmara by Alexandra Pechman

Curriculum
By Martha Rosler

Dispatches
Maria Nicolacopoulou on Athens

BACK
Object Lessons
Les Femmes de l’Avenir, 1900–1902

WORDS
On Feminism
Contributions by Catherine Morris, Zanele Muholi, Laurie Simmons, Johanna Fateman, Zackary Drucker, and A. L. Steiner

Modern Women: David Campany in Conversation with Marta Gili, Julie Jones, and Roxana Marcoci
The artists who redefined the course of twentieth-century photography

The Feminist Avant-Garde
In self-portraiture and body art, experimental pioneers of the 1970s
By Nancy Princenthal

Sex Wars Revisited
Lesbian erotica as critical rebellion
By Laura Guy

A Taste of Power: Renée Cox in Conversation with Uri McMillan
From Angela Davis to Beyoncé, the icons and avatars of black style

History Is Ours
The legacy of protest in video and performance
By Eva Díaz

On Defiance
How women have resisted representational photography
By Eva Respini

Beyond Binary
New visions of trans feminism
By Julia Bryan-Wilson

Our Bodies, Online
Feminist images in the age of Instagram
By Carmen Winant

PICTURES
Cosey Fanni Tutti
Introduction by Alison M. Gingeras

Gillian Wearing
Introduction by Jennifer Blessing

Yurie Nagashima
Introduction by Lesley A. Martin

Hannah Starkey
Introduction by Sara Knelman

Katharina Gaenssler
Introduction by Yvonne Bialek

Josephine Pryde
Introduction by Alex Klein

Laia Abril
Introduction by Karen Archey

Farah Al Qasimi
Introduction by Kaelen Wilson-Goldie

Martine Syms
Introduction by Amanda Hunt

Elle Pérez
Introduction by Salamishah Tillet




$24.95

The post A Portrait of the Artist as Claude Cahun appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

Separate Cars on the Open Road

Coinciding with Aperture magazine’s “Vision & Justice” issue, students in Sarah Lewis’s Harvard University class “Vision & Justice: The Art of Citizenship” contributed essays on the relationship between images of social unrest and landmark Supreme Court decisions. Here, Ian Askew reflects on Robert Frank and the freedom to travel.

Robert Frank, Indianapolis, 1956
© the artist, from The Americans, 1958

On April 13, 1896, Supreme Court Justice David Brewer left Washington, D.C. for his home in Leavenworth, Kansas, following news of his daughter’s untimely death. In all likelihood Brewer traveled by train, and in a car for only white passengers. Meanwhile, in D.C., the case of Homer A. Plessy v. John H. Ferguson was being argued in front of the eight remaining judges. Given Justice Brewer’s record, it’s likely he would have sided with Justice John Harlan, the single judge to dissent in the seven-to-one landmark ruling that upheld the “separate but equal” doctrine and would define the partially reconstructed United States. This decision would cement that public, specifically mixed-race spaces would be accessible but inhospitable to black citizens of the United States. For black activists, the ruling instilled a narrative that citizens seeking equality should do so through desegregation and by gaining access to shared facilities. Plessy sought to give black citizens the same kind of access to transportation, and therefore the nation, enjoyed by Justice Brewer.

Nearly sixty years later, in 1956, as Rosa Parks continued Homer Plessy’s legacy by fighting for equal access to public transportation in Montgomery, Alabama, the Swiss-born photographer Robert Frank visited Indianapolis, Indiana. Frank was there capturing images that would eventually be collected in his landmark 1958 photobook, The Americans. The book was a revelation to many, and featured images of the country as seen through a foreigner’s eye. Frank captured the essential complexity of American culture, a vision not advertised to the world, and revealed the growing pains of a country still in transition.

Frank’s 1956 image Indianapolis provides one of the book’s many revelations. His portrait of a young black man and woman, presumably a couple, presents a starling portrayal of black aspiration and style. Two young people sit astride a motorcycle. In their posture and downcast eyes, they perform a brand of coolness that seems to predict the aesthetic of the Blaxploitation films that would follow in the 1970s. Light darts off of the studded shoulder of the driver; the man and woman appear fused to the machine. The couple’s focus beyond the frame allows the viewer to consume their coolness, their modernity, their self-possession without meeting or confronting their gaze.

Frank’s image asks nothing of the audience but their attention. At the time, images of black neighborhoods and segregated public spaces, purveyed by popular media, served as “proof” of the failings of segregation, and argued that separation was tantamount to the death of black potential. Frank’s photograph does none of this. Instead, Frank pictures black people on their own terms, embodying the potential of travel—that most American ideal of freedom. They are not Plessy insisting on a place in the train car or Rosa insisting on a seat on the bus. They have a machine, and they’re ready to claim the open road.

Ian Askew studies history and literature at Harvard University.

The post Separate Cars on the Open Road appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

The Lyrical South of Shane Lavalette

Echoing the languid melodies of the South, Shane Lavalette finds fragments of oral tradition in the visual world.

By Tim Davis

Shane Lavalette, Domonique at Sunset, 2010
Courtesy the artist

Barons and earls traveled the world after gold and rubber and souls. They built big building wings and echoey halls, which they filled with curiosities: animal skins, sacred relics, and paintings of their armies’ exploits. The houses became museums. And in most cases, they still are. Walk through those labyrinths of gilt-framed canvases and you see occurrences. Things happen. Important things. A dove flies into a virgin’s bedroom window and she knows she’s been impregnated by God. Sailors cling to life and succumb to death on a ramshackle raft made from the mast of a wrecked French frigate. A severe wealthy man fans his finery. That was what painting was for: to yell “Echo!” from the heights of power, myth, and experience and let it ring in our ears down in the fancy rooms below.

Shane Lavalette, Ground Zero, 2010
Courtesy the artist

Along came photography, and out went the assumption that a work of art had to describe the apexes of experience. The camera is uncaring and undiscriminating. It likes all things (excepting the darkness) equally. The camera doesn’t care whether the man in front of it is a royal or a rube, or if that man is entirely inside the picture’s frame. It is fixed in one instant, from one vantage point, limited to places one human being can actually go while carrying equipment. It is not good at describing the scope of an important battle or sacred revelation, as any one photograph is always a diminishment of a great, epic event: one mouth’s utterance, rather than a heavenly choir. The camera didn’t care for history, mythology, religion, but its interpretation of painting’s lesser genres—still lifes, portraits, landscapes, folks in the fields—was not a diminishment. The camera raised those subjects up. And it did it over and over, with total devotion.

Shane Lavalette, Ready to Roll, 2011
Courtesy the artist

Shane Lavalette is the latest inheritor of photography’s devotion to the lyric potential of the barely occurring. A northerner, commissioned by a great southern museum, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta (with a big new wing of its own), to make a project about the South, Lavalette took as his point of entry the vernacular music of the region. It makes sense. Mark Twain was so moved by the sounds of southern voices he wrote in Life on the Mississippi that “A Southerner talks music,” and the oral is the South’s profoundest point of access. American music comes from the South. Blues, jazz, country, rock ’n’ roll, you know the story. From Stephen Foster to Sly Stone, the South is our musical source and subject.

Shane Lavalette, Ashley at Ben Burton, 2010
Courtesy the artist

And yet a photography project about music sounds like an opera about Helen Keller. The camera, being so single-mindedly visual, is an illogical tool to address music. Lavalette smartly decided not to make a documentary about musicians. He instead scoured the landscape looking for the feeling coming from the music. By avoiding the sanctioned, probing tropes of ethnomusicologists and photojournalists, this young northern artist avoided the conundrum Ma Rainey is supposed to have described: “White folks hear the blues come out, but they don’t know how it got there.”

Shane Lavalette, Binoculars, 2011
Courtesy the artist

Lavalette digs roots instead of picking flowers. He hunts for analogies, hints, circumlocutions. He is not preparing the epic history painting of Southern music; he is finding cunning, lyric fragments of an oral tradition in the visual world and letting them rattle together in his carrying case. There is smoke in the grass, but no fire. Skies only hint at tornadoes. A fence finds itself in fragments. The girls are pretty, the boys are rogues, but the photographer doesn’t fall for feints or flirtations. A tiny toy church sits mysteriously in a field, reminding us of Flannery O’Connor: “I think it is safe to say that while the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted.”

Shane Lavalette, Church, 2011
Courtesy the artist

This is a project about a project. Lavalette is accruing meaning about southern music by eschewing information. He moves through those “minor genres”—portraits, landscapes, agricultural scenes, still lives—content to let the project as a whole gather significances along the way rather than laying out a thesis and filling in bullet points. The pictures in Lee Friedlander’s Jazz People of New Orleans are about music not because they have musicians in them, but because they are formally polyrhythmic and alive. Shane Lavalette’s pictures are visually straightforward, obsessively clear, and devoted to the metaphysical idea that direct observation can be beamed through a lens to a viewer. They are quiet pictures that build to a boisterous whole. They speak from the endlessly renewed place of the photographic expeditioner who loves the world and knows it’s a well that never runs dry.

Tim Davis is a writer and artist who teaches photography at Bard College.

Shane Lavalette’s most recent book, One Sun, One Shadow, is self-published.

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A Chance Encounter with Mark Morrisroe

After years in a Boston attic, Mark Morrisroe’s dreamy, unpolished early work is on display in a rare exhibition in New York.

By Matthew Leifheit

Mark Morrisroe, Baby Steffenelli (John S.), 1985
Courtesy Alexander and Bonin Gallery

At the end of the stairway to the lower galleries of Alexander and Bonin’s new location in Manhattan’s financial district, there is a grainy color image of two men frozen in ecstatic embrace. Titled Untitled (John S. and Jonathan), the C-print, made in 1985 from sandwiched negatives, has some kind of life about it—an electric draw produced by its nubile highlights and off-kilter framing. The image is by Mark Morrisroe, who died in 1989 at the age of thirty, and it’s printed with a wide border, enshrined in frenetic pen marks, scratched emulsion, out-of-focus confetti in darkroom colors, traces of multiple negatives, and otherwise fanciful processing. Stashed in the attic of a private home in Boston for over thirty years, these unique works are now on view to the public for the first time.

Mark Morrisroe, Untitled (John S. and Jonathan), 1985
Courtesy Alexander and Bonin Gallery

The taller of the two figures in Untitled (John S. and Jonathan) is John Steffenelli, a subject with teen heartthrob allure who appears in three of the eight pictures on view in Mark Morrisroe: Works from 1982–85. The red-haired boy on the right is distinguishable as the artist Jack Pierson, former boyfriend and frequent muse of Morrisroe’s. “It was my first intense gay relationship,” Pierson told me recently. “It was two years solid of living together and then I moved to New York to get away from him. I mean we were both drug addicts and alcoholics. But he was, as far as I’m concerned, much worse than me. So it was kind of lunacy to be around him.”

Mark Morrisroe, Still Life with Marble Figures (In the Home of Stephen Tashjian NYC), 1985
Courtesy Alexander and Bonin Gallery

A climate of lunacy is apparent throughout much of Morrisroe’s work, particularly in his so-called “sandwich prints.” Figures dissolve into shadow and film grain, encircled in multilayered jabs of neon marker scrawling stars, symbols, dates, and locations, creating a dream world that is alive with sex and freedom. Standing amid such colors provides a glimpse into a more bohemian time, when artists in downtown New York were redefining the expressive possibilities of identity and gender in art making. (Always preferring the margins, Morrisroe himself moved from Boston to Jersey City.)

Mark Morrisroe, Janet Massomian, 1982
Courtesy Alexander and Bonin Gallery

These pictures also reanimate a brief, seemingly hedonistic era in advance of the AIDS crisis, which felled a generation of artists, including Morrisroe. Despite his short career, Morrisroe managed to leave behind more than six hundred color photographs and thousands of Polaroids, an archive replete with a sense of urgency, a sense that time was running out. Yet, for an artist of Morrisroe’s cult following, there are few opportunities to see work in depth. The only comprehensive Morrisroe retrospective in the U.S., presented in 2011 at Artists Space more than two decades after his death, was based on a 2010 survey mounted by the Fotomuseum Winterthur in Switzerland, where Morrisroe’s estate has been housed since being acquired by Collection Ringier in 2004. Because the vast majority of his work is held in Winterthur, only the few scattered pictures he sold or gifted during his lifetime tend to crop up in exhibitions. (Six additional sandwich prints are featured in Human Interest, the Whitney Museum’s installation of portraits from the collection.)

Mark Morrisroe, American Beauty, 1985
Courtesy Alexander and Bonin Gallery

The works on display at Alexander and Bonin were consigned through a neighbor of Morrisroe’s in Boston. “What he told me is basically that when Mark needed money to pay the rent, his neighbor would buy a photo,” gallerist Ted Bonin said. “The funny thing is, he never framed them, they were never exhibited, they were kept in a folder in his attic along with some Nan Goldins.” Even though eight C-prints might not compare to a retrospective, this modest exhibition is a rare opportunity. Unlike its digital counterpart, analog photography has a clear path of indexicality, where the light that touched the subject was absorbed by the negative and reborn onto paper. Seeing the end stage of this intimate process in person makes the prints appear more alive. In fact, they carry a human trace of the past: as is so unusual in contemporary photography, the margins allow us to actually see the artist’s hand.

Mark Morrisroe, John Steffenelli in the Bath, 1985
Courtesy Alexander and Bonin Gallery

If you ask the gallery staff, there are more Morrisroe prints to be seen in the back room. Since the exhibition opened in October, collectors have approached Alexander and Bonin with an offering of smaller works by Morrisroe, discrete Polaroids and the gauzy gelatin-silver prints he made from them. Perhaps these new finds, when collected, will be the basis of more exhibitions to come.

Matthew Leifheit, a graduate student in photography at the Yale School of Art, is the publisher of MATTE magazine.

Mark Morrisroe: Works from 1982–85 is on view at Alexander and Bonin, New York, through December 22, 2016.

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Announcing the Winners of the 2016 PhotoBook Awards

Paris Photo and Aperture Foundation are pleased to announce the winners of the 2016 edition of the Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards, celebrating the photobook’s contribution to the evolving narrative of photography.

Winner of First PhotoBook ($10,000 prize)

Michael Christopher Brown

Libyan Sugar

Publisher: Twin Palms Publishers, Santa Fe, NM, 2016

Designed by Michael Christopher Brown and Ramon Pez

A record of photographer and filmmaker Michael Christopher Brown’s life during the 2011 Libyan Revolution, Libyan Sugar serves as a trip through a war zone. “An impressive book—you feel as though you are in the war with the photographer,” Thomas Zander says. Katja Stuke adds, “Libyan Sugar offers a strong combination of the personal and the documentary.”

Winner of Photography Catalogue of the Year

Karolina Puchała-Rojek and Karolina Ziębińska-Lewandowska

Wojciech Zamecznik: Photo-graphics

Publisher: Fundacja Archeologia Fotografii, Warsaw, 2015

Designed by Anna Piwowar and Magdalena Piwowar

Polish-English catalogue Wojciech Zamecznik: Photo-graphics is the first complex compilation of work by Wojciech Zamecznik, the Polish graphic artist, architect, photographer, and interior designer. “A true discovery,” says Agnès Sire.

Winner of PhotoBook of the Year

Gregory Halpern

ZZYZX

Publisher: MACK, London, 2016

Designed by Lewis Chaplin

Moving from the desert east of Los Angeles, and moving west toward the Pacific, Gregory Halpern’s photographed Los Angeles as a site of fantasy that reflects the city’s ironies, chaos, and paradoxes. “Great photography is the ultimate arbiter,” says Paul Graham. “The outstanding work in Gregory Halpern’s ZZYZX carries the day.”



Special Jurors’ Mention

Annett Gröschner and Arwed Messmer

Taking Stock of Power: An Other View of the Berlin Wall

Publisher: Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern, Germany, 2016

Designed by Carsten Eisfeld

Taken by members of the East German Border Patrol in the 1960s, the photographs in Gröschner and Messmer’s expansive two-volume project Taking Stock of Power: An Other View of the Berlin Wall were originally intended to document weak spots along the wall. Over fifty years later, the images, which were left in undeveloped rolls and forgotten in federal archives, are brought to light and restored, complete with maps and texts.

This year’s shortlist selection was made by Christoph Wiesner (Artistic Director, Paris Photo), Lesley A. Martin (Creative Director of the Aperture Foundation book program and The PhotoBook Review), David Campany, Ann-Christin Bertrand (Curator, C/O Berlin), and Dr. Rebecca Senf (Chief Curator and Norton Family Curator of Photography at the Center of Creative Photography, Tucson).

The shortlist was first announced at the Opening Days of the European Month of Photography on October 1, 2016. The thirty-five selected photobooks are profiled in issue 011 of The PhotoBook Review, Aperture Foundation’s biannual publication dedicated to the consideration of the photobook. Copies will be available at Aperture Gallery and Bookstore. Subscribers to Aperture magazine receive free copies of The PhotoBook Review with their summer and winter issues.

 

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The Cotton Bowl and the Super Bowl

Coinciding with Aperture magazine’s “Vision & Justice” issue, students in Sarah Lewis’s Harvard University class “Vision & Justice: The Art of Citizenship” contributed essays on the relationship between images of social unrest and landmark Supreme Court decisions. Here, Eli Wilson Pelton reflects on Hank Willis Thomas and Dred Scott.

Hank Willis Thomas, The Cotton Bowl, 2011
Courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

How can one be free but not a citizen? This is the paradox that the Supreme Court codified with the 1857 ruling of Dred Scott v. Sandford, which declared “a negro, whose ancestors were imported into this country, and sold as slaves,” was “[not] a member of the political community formed and brought into existence by the Constitution” and therefore ineligible for citizenship, whether free or enslaved. This is the paradox that continues to manifest itself within our contemporary American landscape. The Dred Scott case reiterated citizenship as a contested site predicated on the body, one not found in the body’s relation to its surroundings, but in the very body itself. Dred Scott made explicit, via legal history, that which was implicit in everyday life: to be a black American was and always will be a shifting gradient of citizenship negotiated through the body.

Hank Willis Thomas’s photograph The Cotton Bowl, part of his 2011 series Strange Fruit, makes this legal history legible through the great American congregation that is football. His digital c-print closes the historical and imaginative gap between two fields familiar to black Americans: the cotton field and the football field. Two black male bodies, their faces obscured by a straw hat and a football helmet, respectively, face each other in similar poses: the slave crouching to pick cotton and the football player crouching as he waits for the ball. The anonymous bodies are mirror images of each other, strung like paper dolls against a jet-black background, and suspended in an environment of atemporality, spectacle, and artifice. The photo traces the lineage of black bodies as commodified tools of profit, and maps the genealogy of black ownership: yesterday it was massa, today the NFL. The figures’ anonymity reinforces their status as objects reduced to bodies and re-inscribes history on contemporary football parlance (players are bought, branded and traded, scorecards and stats are kept, chain gangs are made).

In interviews, Thomas makes clear that the field in The Cotton Bowl is intended to represent twentieth-century sharecropping instead of slavery, and is a greater rumination on “exploitation” and “spectacle.” His insistence on distinguishing between sharecropping and slavery points to his belief in the continual seepage of the historical past: black exploitation did not end with slavery, but continued with sharecropping, lynching, and redlining, and continues with the NFL, NBA, and police brutality. Thomas wants the viewer to imagine these legacies not as closed historical episodes, but instead as experiences on a continuum, shifting with time and always under constant, bodily negotiation. This is the paradoxical legacy of Dred Scott: freedom and citizenship continue to be a contested binary within the black body, regardless of the type of field.

Eli Wilson Pelton studies American history and literature at Harvard University.

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Inside Aperture’s October Paul Strand Circle Cocktail Party

On October 13, Aperture Foundation Paul Strand Circle Members, trustees, and staff, along with executive director Chris Boot and editor-at-large Melissa Harris, gathered to celebrate pioneer of social documentary photography Bruce Davidson’s thirty-year publication history with Aperture and the recent monograph Bruce Davidson: Survey. Founding Aperture Paul Strand Circle Members Judy and Leonard Lauder hosted the party with cocktails and hors d’oeuvres at their Manhattan home. The artist shared with the group eloquent and funny stories about working with famous subjects at different locations. Guests had the opportunity to ask questions of Davidson and his wife Emily, in addition to receiving private, curated tours of the Lauders’ magnificent art collection. Guests were also treated to a complimentary and signed copy of Survey.

Aperture Foundation is a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization that relies on the generosity of individuals for support of its publications, exhibitions, and public and educational programming. To join Aperture’s Patron Program, click here or contact Emily Grillo at egrillo@aperture.org or 212.946.7103.

All photographs © Yi Huang

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