Aperture's Blog, page 127

In California, Trees as Witness and Living Memorial

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, Elizabeth Huber reflects on Ken Gonzales-Day and the history of lynching in California.

Ken Gonzales-Day, At daylight the miserable man was taken to an oak, 2003, from the series Searching for California’s Hang Trees
Courtesy the artist

Ken Gonzales-Day’s Searching for California’s Hang Trees is a series of photographs that depicts the possible or confirmed sites of lynching in California between 1850 and 1935. In one image from the series, At daylight the miserable man was taken to an oak (2003), Gonzales-Day photographed a Californian oak from a very low angle. Through this series, Gonzales-Day calls attention to the lack of historical memory regarding the lynching of Mexican Americans in California, as well as Native Americans, African Americans, and Chinese immigrants. Gonzales-Day visualizes the historical erasure of non-white, racialized bodies, and disrupts the traditional American understanding of race as a black/white binary.

Gonzales-Day cites the explicit use of photography as a tool for witnessing. In At daylight, he positions the oak as the subject of the image in a portrait-like manner: from a low angle perspective, the oak engulfs the entire frame. The close-up of the oak allows the viewer to examine the tree in great detail as an individual, living thing, set in contrast to the silenced lives that ended nearby. While the names of the lynched are sometimes absent in American history, the trees, as photographic subjects, become memorials to those who have died. The trees are conscripted as witnesses to an elided narrative: The trees were present before people were hung and they remained thereafter. This notion of the silent witness in conversation with the silenced victim further encapsulates the artist’s motivation to recover historical memory.

In choosing trees as subjects of his series, as well as through the composition of the images themselves, Gonzales-Day underscores both the pain and suffering endured by African Americans and Mexican Americans, and the additional violence of erasure from the official record. In speaking about his work, Gonzales-Day emphasizes how his work also functions as documentation. The work is able, as he puts it, to “relocate that history in the present.” Furthermore, he views Searching for California’s Hang Trees as a way of extending our historical understanding of race relations, rather than trying to “diminish or distract” from the historical legacies of lynching on the African American community. In this manner, Gonzales-Day challenges us to look back while we look ahead, and to reposition Latino bodies in the historical and cultural legacies of the United States.

Elizabeth Huber studies history and literature at Harvard University.

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Keith Lamont Scott and the Legacy of Police Violence

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, David E. White Jr. reflects on Sean Rayford and equal protection for African Americans.

Sean Rayford, Protests Break Out In Charlotte After Police Shooting, 2016
© the artist/Getty Images

Sean Rayford, a freelance photojournalist and commercial photographer based in Columbia, South Carolina, captured this photograph of a woman smearing blood on a police riot shield during a protest in downtown Charlotte, North Carolina at about 9:00pm on September 21, 2016. Citizens were protesting the death of Keith Lamont Scott, a black man, who was shot and killed by the police the previous day. Married for more than twenty years, and a father of seven children, Scott was forty-three years old and had worked as a security guard at a local mall.

Mindful that photographs must be “composed to be readable” by his audience, Rayford often relies on his subjects’ faces to capture the emotion of a moment. But in this frame, faces are conspicuously absent. Instead, the hand of a black woman, soaked in blood, is wiped across a military-grade police riot shield. Describing the scene leading up to the photograph, Rayford recalled, “It happened right in front of me. I was surprised. I thought, ‘She’s going to do this—she’s going to smear blood on the shield’ … It’s almost as if she was saying, ‘The blood’s on you.’” Rayford believes the blood on the woman’s hand belonged to twenty-six-year-old Justin Carr, a black protestor who was shot and later died while demonstrating Scott’s death at the hands of police.

This photograph of a bloody hand on the police shield underscores that black citizens have yet to attain full American citizenship in that blacks still suffer an equal protection deficit. The U.S. legal system continues to prove that, practically speaking, the snuffing out of black lives by police is legally permissible, and Screws v. United States (1945) is one of the leading cases for this proposition. In Screws, a county sheriff and other law enforcement officers detained Robert Hall, a black man, under the guise of a potentially fraudulent arrest warrant. Once in the officers’ custody, Sheriff Screws and his fellow officers beat Hall to death, allegedly over a grudge. When the State of Georgia refused to prosecute the officers, the federal government interceded and charged the men under 18 U.S.C. § 242, a federal statute making it a crime for “whoever, under color of any law … willfully subjects any person … to the deprivation of any rights, privileges, or immunities secured or protected by the Constitution or laws of the United States.”

In a plurality opinion, the Court adopted a sharply narrow reading of § 242, finding that the defendant must have acted with “a purpose to deprive a person of a specific constitutional right.” This cramped interpretation not only led to Sheriff Screws and his co-defendants’ acquittal, but also stymied federal prosecution of law enforcement under § 242 for the next several decades, including through the present day. And although some scholars have noted that the Screws decision helped speed the development of 42 U.S.C. § 1983, the civil analogue to § 242, police continue to kill black people with impunity and evade federal criminal conviction because of feeble constitutional protections. If blacks were once legally considered three-fifths of a person, perhaps today’s unchecked state-sanctioned violence proves they have yet to attain the elusive two-fifths that remain.

David E. White Jr. is a third-year law student at Harvard Law School and former Captain in the U.S. Army. 

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Envisioning the Right to Vote

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, Jonathan Karp reflects on Bruce Davidson and voter ID laws.

Bruce Davidson, Young man with “Vote” painted on his forehead walking in the Selma March, 1965
© Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos

Somewhere between Selma and Montgomery, in the first days of spring 1965, Bruce Davidson took a photograph of a young black marcher. The young man’s name is not recorded, but he appears in several of Davidson’s photographs of the march from Selma to Alabama’s capital. It’s no mystery why. The young man’s painted face illustrates the fight for voting rights in literal, stark relief: “VOTE.” The word is his skin, his blackness. Whiteness, in the photo and in the United States, is required for both the word’s legibility and the citizenship it represents.

In other photographs, the young man moves. He marches, eyes forward and fixed beyond the frame, his mouth open in mid-chant. The sound and action of these photographs makes the “Vote” photograph seem still in equal measure. Here, the young man looks directly at the photographer’s lens. Although Davidson was working in the context of documentary photography, the angle of his subject’s torso and his direct gaze places the image in the tradition of portraiture. It’s the combination of this formal stillness, the provocative face paint, and the context of the civil rights movement, which, paradoxically, suggests a relationship between the photograph and a Supreme Court case that would be decided fifty-three years after it was taken. In fact, Davidson’s photograph finds its echo in the modern debate on photo ID laws.

Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, decided in 2008, holds that an Indiana law requiring voters to show photo identification does not violate the Constitution. Though voter ID laws have existed in the United States since 1950, Indiana was among the first states to require photo IDs specifically. These laws serve to discourage or outright prevent those without photo IDs—a disproportionate number of whom are African American—from voting. What does it mean for the state to require a portrait in exchange for exercising one’s rights as a citizen? In this context, Davidson’s photograph reveals how photo IDs are merely the latest visual site where ideas of race, citizenship, and justice collide.

ID photographs are a form of portraiture, but also the portrait’s fraternal twin, the “type,” which establishes norms and compares subjects against those norms. Through a scientific gaze as dispassionate as any at the DMV, nineteenth-century types codified racial difference and justified racism. Photo IDs, as a contemporary type, are similarly relied upon for their accuracy, their ability to classify, and their existence as proof of citizenship.

In the spring of 1965, a young man marched to claim his rights. A half-century later, his image might now exist in a state archive, allowing him, in some states, to vote. A century earlier, his image might have entered an archive and marked him as subhuman. These multiple visions mark the end of slavery, the maintenance of state power, and the uninterrupted life of photography as an apparatus with which black Americans must negotiate their humanity and their citizenship.

Jonathan Karp studies race, protest, and performance in Harvard University’s Ph.D. program in American Studies.

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Racial Innocence in Postwar America

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, Maia Silber reflects on Gordon Parks, “doll tests,” and segregation.

Gordon Parks, Untitled, Harlem, New York, 1947
© and courtesy The Gordon Parks Foundation

In the 1940s, the psychologists Dr. Kenneth Clark and Dr. Mamie Clark designed the infamous “doll tests” to study the effects of racial segregation on children. In their tests, the Clarks asked African American children to express preferences for black or white dolls. Their discovery that the majority of black children chose white dolls played an important part in the 1954 Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education, which ruled against segregation in public schools.

Since Brown v. Board, the Clarks’ “doll tests” have become a fixture in both psychological study and popular culture. In the sixty years since Brown v. Board, journalists, talk show hosts, and amateurs have replicated the “doll tests.” They have seen the consistent results of the experiment as evidence of internalized racism that has persisted long after desegregation.

The pioneering photographer Gordon Parks documented the experiments in a 1947 series for Ebony magazine. In one image, he depicts a young boy seated alone in the experiment room. Above the boy, disembodied hands clutch the heads of two dolls. The boy points at the white one. His stoic expression confirms the tragedy of the Clarks’ experiment while complicating our understanding of its results.

The Clarks asked their audience to examine the psyche of the black child, and imagine his vulnerability and his suffering. Parks facilitates this intimate exchange by cropping his image closely—even uncomfortably—around the boy. He positions the viewer behind the pair of disembodied hands. They are the actual hands of the experimenter and the symbolic hands of the system that forces black children to make impossible choices every day. They become our hands, too. We are no longer disinterested observers but direct actors.

Forced into this role, we confront the boy’s suffering, and his vulnerability, but also something more. The boy’s left hand, resting under his chin, draws our attention to his expressive eyes. Those eyes do not look at the white doll. Instead, the boy seems to gaze back into the experimenter’s eyes. His expression suggests neither despair nor defiance, but rather recognition of his impossible and tragic role.

In her book Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights (2011), Robin Bernstein offers a different interpretation of the “doll tests.” Tracing a century-long history of children’s play, Bernstein argues that cultural scripts of both servitude and violence informed play with black dolls. Bernstein thus sees children’s choice of the white doll not as tacit acceptance of white superiority, but as conscious rejection of those demeaning play-acts. Their agency emerges not in defiance, but in compliance. By responding to the “doll tests” precisely as the Clarks expected them too, the children enacted their own form of resistance.

The Clarks constructed a performance of black childhood innocence, and black children, Parks suggests, understood their role in this performance. The boy appears to know that by pointing, he becomes both scientific evidence and legal testimony. A representative of childhood experience, he was asked to bear so much more than a child ever should.

Maia Silber studies history and literature at Harvard University.

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The Pleasure of the Text

Merging images and words, conceptual artists in the 1970s advanced a new visual language.

By Travis Diehl

Lew Thomas, Hollywood Castration, 1986. Ektacolor print, neon
Courtesy Cherry and Martin, Los Angeles. Photograph by Brian Forrest

The four artists featured in Photography and Language, recently on view at Cherry and Martin in Los Angeles, worked in San Francisco in the 1970s and ’80s in a scene anchored by NFS Press, run by Lew Thomas and Donna-Lee Phillips. With dry, structuralist wit, Thomas and Phillips, as well as Peter D’Agostino, Hal Fischer, and their peers, probed the confusion between “conceptual art” and the sometimes-maligned genre “conceptual photography.” This often meant both mocking and reaffirming the abilities of the medium. Included in the exhibition were six panels from one of NFS’s more famous titles, Hal Fischer’s Gay Semiotics: A Photographic Study of Coding Among Homosexual Men (1977), a subcultural typology of gay signifiers like key rings and amulets and silk shorts that pokes gentle fun at the clichéd language of cruising—and the limits of signs.

Hal Fischer, Basic Gay from the Street Fashion series from Gay Semiotics, 1977
Courtesy Cherry and Martin, Los Angeles

For the latest installation of Deposition (1974–76), Lew Thomas wallpapers one gallery wall with several copies of the August 3, 2016 Los Angeles Times. The splayed-out daily reveals its particular proportion of image to text, reiterating that the mystique of the photograph always comes connoted; in print and otherwise, we are told what pictures tell us. Mounted to this topical mess is a panoramic storyboard: a man has barricaded himself in his apartment during a string of racially motivated murders—the sensational “Zebra murders” of the mid-’70s—as if to protect against news itself. Strips of mundane photographs are captioned by increasingly involved, handwritten synopses. The denotative authority usually attributed to photos instead dissolves into a slurry of words. In another mode, Thomas’s LAVERNE’S PORTRAIT EQUALS 36 EXPOSURES (1972), a six-by-six grid of unflinching headshots, depicts the same man’s face thirty-six times, but Laverne remains a mystery.

Lew Thomas, PORTRAIT EQUALS 36 EXPOSURES, 1972
Courtesy Cherry and Martin, Los Angeles. Photograph by Jeff McLane

 

If the disembodied, technological nature of photography suggests systematic or even scientific control, these artists nonetheless found an eroticism in mechanized speculation. Peter D’Agostino’s Suburban Strategies: LA (Century City) (1980), is a kind of nonlinear soap opera shot in the style of surveillance cameras. A monitor plays the video beside a row of stills. Supposedly a romance, the story takes place in a granulated anonymity of freeways and malls. Whatever tenderness there might be is conveyed not so much through images as with plaintive intertitles (“Is everything alright?”). Both registers, text and image, leave us wanting: one definition of desire.

Donna-Lee Phillips, Muscle/Fascia, from the series Anatomical Insights, 1978
Courtesy Cherry and Martin, Los Angeles

 

In Donna-Lee Phillips’s Anatomical Insights: The Abdomen (1978), the artist overlays her own body with illustrated, labial incisions from a medical textbook. When process encounters the contingencies of flesh, desire offers an interface. Phillips’s piece is one part of thirteen total; as such, it feels like a token in a show that could have included work by JoAnn Callis, Ellen Brooks, and Barbara Kruger, among other women artists in the NFS orbit. Photography and Language takes its name from the press’s influential 1976 anthology of over a dozen artists, yet the show is weighted towards Thomas and Fischer, who are represented by Cherry and Martin, and augmented by just two more. Intriguing but unbalanced, Photography and Language is best considered a prompt for a full-scale treatment of this conceptualist coterie.

Travis Diehl is a writer based in Los Angeles.

Photography and Language was on view at Cherry & Martin, Los Angeles, from August 6–October 29, 2016.

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Tania Franco Klein’s Homage to William Eggleston

In advance of “Dear Bill,” Aperture Foundation’s 2016 Benefit Party honoring William Eggleston, Aperture asked photographers to submit their Eggleston-inspired images through the Instagram hashtag #aperturedearbill. Chris Boot, executive director of Aperture Foundation, chose the winner.

Tania Franco Klein, Untitled Self-Portrait, from the series Our Life in the Shadows, 2015
Courtesy the artist

We ran a little competition on Instagram, prompting people to post pictures that bore some inspired relationship to the work of William Eggleston. The winner, who I got to choose, received a pair of tickets to our benefit party on October 24, 2016.

I chose a strong self-portrait by—it turns out—a young Mexican photographer, Tania Franco Klein. Tania recently finished her Masters in Photography at the University of the Arts in London, and prior to that she earned a BA in Architecture in Mexico City. I thought no more of it, didn’t worry to check where she might be based, but Tania traveled to New York all the way from Mexico City. She came up to me to introduce herself in the course of the evening, with her mum, so happy to be there, and having the time of her life. Her face was one of the highlights for me of our benefit party!

We invited her in to Aperture to show us what she is up to. The series she had in her bag was striking and surreal. Called Pest Control, what would have been decent photographs of banal scenes of daily life—people in line at the post office line; a seat on a train; the reception desk at a seedy hotel—she has made strange and surprising by installing pigeon repellent spikes, as if a fashion accessory, or decorative detail. At some level, the series is a photographic response to the prevalence of pigeons in modern cities—and the pigeon spikes—and these photographs are a simple delight. —Chris Boot

Tania Franco Klein, Queue, Post Office NW10 2PX, from the series Pest Control, 2015
Courtesy the artist

Tania Franco Klein, Room 64, 88401, from the series Pest Control, 2016
Courtesy the artist

Tania Franco Klein, Front Desk, 28004, from the series Pest Control, 2016
Courtesy the artist

Tania Franco Klein, Customer Service, 10166, from the series Pest Control, 2016
Courtesy the artist

 

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From the Corridors of Power, A Portrait of Reagan-era Politics

With a once-in-a-generation election on the horizon, Aperture spoke with photographer Judith Joy Ross, whose series Portraits of the United States Congress, 1986-87 is currently on view at Tops Gallery in Memphis. Here, Ross reflects on photographing the men and women at the height of American leadership. —Emma Kennedy

Judith Joy Ross, Congressman James A. Traficant Jr., Democrat, Ohio, 1986
Courtesy the artist

Aperture: You made Portraits of the United States Congress, 1986–87 ten years after Richard Avedon’s The Family, a project about American leaders in politics, finance, and media, originally commissioned by Rolling Stone for the United States Bicentennial. But, unlike Avedon’s forensic treatment of figures such as Rose Kennedy and Ronald Reagan, your series is more intimate and sensitive, while being no less authoritative. Did you have Avedon in mind when you made this project? 

Judith Joy Ross: I bet you could never guess that it was the work by the great photographers Southworth and Hawes that compelled me to make Portraits of the United States Congress, 1986–87. I owned a book The Spirit of Fact: The Daguerreotypes of Southworth and Hawes, 1843–1862 (1976), by Robert Sobieszek and Odette Appel, published by Robert Godine. The overwhelming power and nobility of those faces, especially the portraits of Lemuel Shaw, was my guide to making congressional portraits.

The only thing I ever thought about Avedon is rather embarrassing: How come my pictures are not as renowned? But, I figured an Avedon portrait is like a magnificent and very costly arrangement of flowers. My work is like a backyard garden or wildflowers at the side of a road. One way isn’t better than another, just different. Avedon makes his subjects important with his form and style. I am more interested in our ordinariness, our flaws and strengths.

Judith Joy Ross, Congresswoman Pat Schroeder, Democrat, Colorado, 1986
Courtesy the artist

I made Portraits of the United States Congress, 1986–87 to deal with authority figures on my own terms. 1986 was the time of the Iran-Contra Affair. Ronald Reagan was President. Tip O’Neil was Speaker of the House. Congressional figures, just like today, promoted themselves with offensively banal photos. When I was photographing at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in 1983–84, the Capitol was visible in the distance. I wanted to know who these people were who were in our government, the people who were running our lives. They didn’t look real to me in the media except for on the MacNeil/Lehrer show (now PBS NewsHour), where the masks were off.

Judith Joy Ross, Senator Claiborne Pell, Democrat, Rhode Island, 1986
Courtesy the artist

Aperture: Could you tell us about your sessions with the Congresspeople? How did you describe your intentions to the politicians, and why do you think they agreed to be photographed?   

Ross: I contacted the appropriate staff of the Senator or Congressman or Congresswoman who I wanted to photograph, and I requested an opportunity to photograph them in their office during a fifteen-minute appointment. I stated that their subsequent portrait would be exhibited during the Bicentennial of the U.S. Constitution at America’s oldest art museum, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia. That’s all I had to offer them—a little bit of patriotic publicity. I had arranged an exhibition before I made the pictures. A very nervy thing.

I figured out who to photograph with the help of the wonderful Almanac of American Politics published by the National Journal. It is a 1,591-page compendium of information about the Members of the House and the Senate. There are tiny pictures of each member of the House and the Senate, with detailed informoation on how exactly they voted and who they represent. I picked people I disagreed with and people I agreed with. This was very inspiring.

Judith Joy Ross, Congressman George W. Crockett Jr., Democrat, Michigan, 1986
Courtesy the artist

During the year I worked on this, I would spend one week arranging for appointments from my home in Allentown, Pennsylvania. (This was back in the day of typewriters and telephones with push buttons.) It was very nerve-wracking. I am a very disorganized person, so this was an immense challenge. The alternate week I went to D.C. to shoot.

I shot in available light with an 8-by-10 view camera. I used film designed for copy negatives, which gave me more ability to shoot in terrible light. I set up the camera in five minutes. I had ten minutes to shoot and leave. It could take an hour or more to get from one appointment to another through all the halls of the House or the Senate. There was a lot of waiting, worrying, fear and excitement at wandering those halls, dragging my heavy equipment. When I finally met the Congressperson, sure I was scared, but I was invested in making it work. Finally it was my time! Time to see. Time to discover what was to be seen. Time to make a portrait!

Judith Joy Ross, Congressman Charles E. Bennett, Democrat, Florida, 1986
Courtesy the artist

Aperture: Why did you decide to make classical portraits, with minimal, almost generic context provided by their office settings, instead of, say, images of Congresspeople at work in the chambers or on the campaign trail?

Ross: I did not have any idea I was making “classical portraits,” but I can see what you mean. They are, to me, the kind of pictures that someone who loves Eugène Atget and August Sander as much as I do would likely make.

These pictures are made in the offices of each Congressperson. A place that could not be more intimate. Did I have to include what kind of decor to know who they were? I decided absolutely not. The person was the subject and getting as much of them as possible in the picture was the goal, a huge challenge in low room light.

Also, consider that when you use an 8-by-10 camera, there is so shallow a depth of field with a normal lens, which I used, that you have to eliminate environment unless you back up and make a three-quarters or full-length figure. The congressional office environments were telling, but something has to be sacrificed when you make a picture. In my preceding body of work, Portraits at The Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Washington, D.C. 1983–84, only rarely is the Vietnam memorial seen. The memorial is in the faces of those depicted.

Judith Joy Ross, Congresswoman Helen Delich Bentley, Republican, Maryland, 1986
Courtesy the artist

Aperture: Photography might be a great equalizer, but that doesn’t mean formal portraiture can automatically instill empathy. You’ve said that you made this series in part to “confront” your prejudices. Does your formal portraiture of Congresspeople invite us to imagine perspectives that might be at odds with our own convictions and opinions? And, in the divisive, seemingly intractable negativity of the current election season, what can your portraits tell us about our past—and our future?

Ross: Susan Kismaric states in her admirable book, American Politicians, Photographs from 1843 to 1993 (1994), “Ross had gone to Washington with mix of emotions—hoping that the camera would objectify her subjects and in turn identify some truths about them, and simultaneously wishing that her previously held ideas about who was ‘good’ and who was ‘evil’ would be confirmed. To her surprise, instead of an either/or record of good or evil, she came away with a series of portraits of very human beings. Her subjects appear to suffer the same complicated lives we all do.” Was I always fair or accurate? No I wasn’t. This is a group portrait of us as a nation, including that fact that we are squired in favor of white male representation.

Judith Joy Ross, Senator Strom Thurmond, Republican, South Carolina, 1987
Courtesy the artist

Aperture: Several of the elected officials you photographed, notably Strom Thurmond and Robert C. Byrd, remain controversial for their outspoken resistance to civil rights. How do your images—and the new exhibition—engage this history?

Ross: I am more often than not horrified by the beliefs and actions of others, as we all are on both sides of a position. But this is the deal we have. We are flawed. We can do great things and absolutely horrendous things. And we do not agree on what those things are. Back in the day, when I made these pictures, compromises were made in the Congress. It’s how government works; I don’t have to tell you.

As for Strom Thurmond, I utterly disagreed with him. So what. Here is a man with charisma, and he looked like he could have been a king. He even had what I assumed was Louis XIV furniture in his office. Does he not have that presence here with his enormous shoulders and tiny apple-shrunken head and gleam in his eye, a force to be dealt with and yet….

Judith Joy Ross, Senator Robert C. Byrd, Majority Leader, Democrat, West Virginia, 1987
Courtesy the artist

With Senator Byrd, his power also was overwhelming but strange. Yes, sadly at one time he was a member of the Ku Klux Klan. Years later Senator Byrd gave the best and only speech against the Iran–Iraq war. But I do not care about who I disagree with or not. It’s not an issue. Take a look at Senator William Roth. He was powerful and friendly; he looks like Walter Matthau. How about Senator Claiborne Pell. I thought he looked like the Buddha. He told me he was exhausted. I got so close to him because he was so astonishingly calm and beautiful. But I cannot talk about them all.

Judith Joy Ross, Senator William V. Roth Jr., Republican, Delaware, 1987
Courtesy the artist

I did my research, I had my opinion, and then I made discoveries. I believe it could be a truth that you are looking at in these portraits. But, perhaps you would like to know that there was one figure I disliked above all and from whom I walked away from a shoot appointment. I had an appointment to shoot Senator Jesse Helms. And it turned out this shoot was going to be on the Capitol steps, immediately after he was photographed with a high school group. I had my tripod and camera lying in the grass and trees below the Senate side of the Capitol at the right time I was to go up and photograph him. (I imagine I would have been shot by a sniper for such a thing today.) Anyway I walked off … just took my equipment and left. I was content not to make his portrait and to continue to demonize him in my mind. Yet, I was terrified of the responsibility and the incredible opportunity to deal with this site. I don’t know. I just continue to say to myself, I like that I walked away, because it gives me touch of self-righteousness I crave. Whereas the picture I might have made could perhaps have given a more complex and useful result.

Judith Joy Ross, Congressman Sam Gibbons, Democrat, Florida, 1986
Courtesy the artist

Aperture: How do you feel about exhibiting this series again, three decades later?

Ross: I am so pleased with the opportunity to get this work back out there in this politically charged and distressing time. Can these pictures tell us about our future? I can only tell you about me, and I am, as of this writing, terrified.

Emma Kennedy is a work scholar at Aperture magazine.

Portraits of the United States Congress, 1986–87 is on view at Tops Gallery, Memphis, through December 3, 2016.

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On Empathy: 10 Powerful Images from Magnum Photographers

Magnum’s Square Sale, Conditions of the Heart: On Empathy and Connection in Photography, now online through November 4, 2016, demonstrates photography’s ability to connect with others. For five days only, museum quality, 6-by-6-inch square prints are exceptionally priced at just $100. By using this link to make your purchase, a proceed from each sale will support Aperture Foundation. 

Can photography promote empathy? Photography’s most acclaimed theorists have long debated this question. More than any other medium, photography asks to be acknowledged as evidence. As Susan Sontag wrote in 1977, “A photograph passes for incontrovertible proof that a given thing happened. The picture may distort; but there is always a presumption that something exists, or did exist, which is what’s in the picture.”

Since 1947, the year Magnum Photos was established, Magnum photographers have been renowned for producing images that provide evidence of the atrocities of war, evidence of the resilience of refugees, evidence of a collective humanity. By chronicling world events and culture with influential narratives that defy convention, Magnum photographers have pushed the documentary tradition toward empathy and transformed lives in the process.

Selected by Aperture’s editors, here are ten highlights from the Square Sale.

Micha Bar Am, The return from Entebbe. Ben Gurion Airport, Israel, 1976
© Micha Bar-Am/Magnum Photos

Micha Bar-Am

“After terrorists hijacked a Paris/Tel-Aviv flight and forced it to land in Entebbe, Uganda, about 2,400 miles from its destination, Israeli commandos freed 268 hostages in a brilliantly planned and executed operation. The original code name for the mission was ‘Operation Thunderbolt’, but after the task force commander, Colonel Yonatan Netanyahu, was killed (Israel Defense Forces’ only casualty during the raid), it became known as ‘Operation Yonatan.’ In this image, passengers are welcomed by their relatives at the Ben Gurion Airport.” —Micha Bar-Am

Bieke Depoorter, Ou Menya, 2009
© Bieke Depoorter/Magnum Photos

Bieke Depoorter

“This photograph was one of the first I took where I finally could feel what photography means to me. Before, I had always treated people as pawns in my photography. I would wait for hours until they came into the right position. But I was never satisfied with the picture and felt that I was missing something… I took this photograph during a trip for my graduating project (Ou Menya), on one of the first nights spent with people I had met on the streets of Russia.

Without saying a word, she took me under her arm, brought me to her tiny house, fed me and showed me how to wash myself in a little basket. Still arm in arm, still in silence, we then went for the most peaceful walk I had ever taken. I remember us standing still over the icy fields. We came home and watched a Russian version of The Bold and the Beautiful. She was in the seat she would sit in every evening, I was in the seat next to her. She gave me pajamas to wear and took a picture of me. I took one of her. Everything seemed so simple, logical and beautiful.

That night I realized that all along I had been missing this connection with people in my photographs.” —Bieke Depoorter

Chris Steele-Perkins, Adam and Eve pub in Hackney, London, U.K., 1976
© Chris Steele-Perkins/Magnum Photos

Chris Steele-Perkins

“All of my working life I’ve been drawn to subcultures, small worlds which have the whole world in them. The Teddy Boys (Teds) were a major subculture in Britain in the mid-’50s and had a revival in the late-’70s, at which point I photographed them. I didn’t want to be like them, but I identified with their energy, their aggression and their style. I was interested in them. I wanted to know more so I hung out, had a few drinks, and soon enough they were not bothered to pose for me. As I became ‘The Photographer,’ I just got on with it.” —Chris Steele-Perkins

Bruce Davidson, Coney Island July Fourth Fireworks. New York City, U.S.A., 1962
© Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos

Bruce Davidson

“Sometimes they don’t tell stories, they simply speak as images. They express feeling, increase knowledge. Photographs can draw passion, beauty and understanding. And then there is love.” —Bruce Davidson

David Alan Harvey, French teenagers on a boat in the river Seine. Paris, France, 1988
© David Alan Harvey/Magnum Photos

David Alan Harvey

“I was commissioned by National Geographic for a piece for their special issue on France. I decided I did not want to present historic France, but rather modern, young France. French teenagers. So I did what I always do, reduce the scope. I chose one group of Parisian teenagers who formed a sort of gang. A nice gang. Friends. I became part of their group for several weeks. I went to school with them, hung out everywhere with them, saw them succeed, saw them fail. Judith, pictured here with the cigarette, was the leader. There is always a leader. I was especially happy with this shot. It was taken on their graduation day on the Seine in front of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s house. I was always referential to Cartier-Bresson, even when I shot in color during this era. Clearly I bonded with these young French. We were like family when I had to hug them goodbye, which for them was goodbye to their childhood.” —David Alan Harvey

Jim Goldberg, Prized Possession (#2). Democratic Republic of the Congo, Africa, 2008
© Jim Goldberg/Magnum Photos

Jim Goldberg

“This image was taken at the Mugunga refugee camp in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. At the time of my visit, in 2008, Mugunga had an estimated 90,000 inhabitants. The UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) was in the beginning stages of moving the entire population two kilometers away from the fast approaching rebel forces.

I climbed a hill on the north side of the camp to get a view of the thousands of makeshift shelters. Sitting alone at the top was Wembe, listening to his radio. Wembe had had this radio ever since escaping a rebel attack in his village, one year before. It was the only possession he was able to keep. Wembe told me that he climbed the hill every day to listen for good news.”—Jim Goldberg

Herbert List, Park of the Palazzo Orsini. Bomarzo, Italy, 1952
© Herbert List/Magnum Photos

Herbert List

“It is speculative for anyone but the ones involved to talk about empathy or emotional connection in a photograph. Once an artist is dead we rely on stories that surround certain images. In some rare occasions we hear from the person in the picture, who might tell us how the picture came about. This image of a shepherd in Bomarzo is such an example. After the book Italy was published with this image on the cover, we found out that the 12-year-old in the image was an orphan boy from Southern Italy. By then he had lived in Germany for the past 40 years and remembered Herbert List very well. He said List had been the first adult to listen to the sad and adventurous stories of his childhood life. The day after this image was taken, List brought him his first bag of candies.” —Peer-Olaf Richter, Herbert List Estate

Max Pinckers, She Will Use the Birds, from the series The Fourth Wall, 2012
© Max Pinckers/Magnum Photos

Max Pinckers

“She Will Use the Birds is a visual interpretation of a passage from Suketu Mehta’s book, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found, a non-fiction account of Bombay’s Bollywood underworld. The passage describes an encounter between a dancing girl and her client, who go on their first date outside of the bar where she works. The dancer invites her man into a taxi, buys a flock of songbirds from a nearby street vendor and lets them flutter around in the car. She then asks her man to play a game with her: catch the birds. This quickly turns into a flirtatious exercise of touching, gasps, laughter and giggles.

When reading stories like this one, it is in the instant imagination of a visual narrative that I find my satisfaction, in which my subjects also play out their own fantasies. When this materializes into a photograph, it is then up to the viewer to form their own interpretation of the scene.” —Max Pinckers

Susan Meiselas, USA. New York City. Little Italy. Dee and Lisa on Mott Street, 1976
© Susan Meiselas/Magnum Photos

Susan Meiselas

“I remember the day I met the Prince Street Girls, the name I gave a group of young Italian girls who hung out on the nearby corner almost every day. This is Dee and Lisa posing for me – or maybe for themselves. They were great friends, born the same month, they just ‘clicked.’ Growing up in Little Italy, they were always together, at school and on the street – and onwards. A friendship that’s now spanned 50 years.

Back then, I was the stranger who did not belong, but these girls would see me coming and yell, ‘Take a picture! Take a picture!’ For years, I was their secret friend, and my loft became a kind of hideaway when they dared to leave that corner, which their parents had forbidden.

It was important for me to keep on photographing them as they grew up, especially when I came back from abroad where I had been photographing wars. Looking at these pictures now reminds me of how difficult it was to integrate my two lives- family and friends at home, and my life as a photographer on the road. It was often a painful separation, though not one I regret having chosen.” —Susan Meiselas

Carolyn Drake, Crater Lake National Park Vista Point. Crater Lake, Oregon, U.S.A., 2015
© Carolyn Drake/Magnum Photos

Carolyn Drake

“For many years, I have been moved by the blue at the far edge of what can be seen, that color of horizons, of remote mountain ranges, of anything far away. The color of that distance is the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not. And the color of where you can never go.” — Rebecca Solnit

Support Aperture today through the Magnum Square Print Sale, open online October 31–November 4, 2016.

The post On Empathy: 10 Powerful Images from Magnum Photographers appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

From Stonewall to AIDS, Framing Queer Desire

A recent forum at MoMA reveals a rich, often-overlooked thread of queer history and photography.

George Dureau, Arthur de Silva, 1988, from George Dureau, The Photographs
© George Dureau and courtesy Arthur Roger Gallery and Higher Pictures

George Dureau, Earl Leavell, 1977, from George Dureau, The Photographs (Aperture, 2016)
© George Dureau and courtesy Arthur Roger Gallery and Higher Pictures

George Dureau, Roosevelt Singleton, 1974, from George Dureau, The Photographs (Aperture, 2016)
© George Dureau and courtesy Arthur Roger Gallery and Higher Pictures

George Dureau, Fred Temnel, 1976, from George Dureau, The Photographs (Aperture, 2016)
© George Dureau, Courtesy Arthur Roger Gallery and Higher Pictures

Jimmy DeSana, Storage Boxes, 1980. From Jimmy DeSana: Suburban (Aperture/Salon 94, 2015)
© and courtesy the Jimmy DeSana Estate/Salon 94

Jimmy DeSana, Four Legs with Shoes, ca. 1980, from Jimmy DeSana: Suburban (Aperture/Salon 94, 2015)
© and courtesy the Jimmy DeSana Estate/Salon 94

Jimmy DeSana, Thimbles, 1983, from Jimmy DeSana: Suburban (Aperture/Salon 94, 2015)
© and courtesy the Jimmy DeSana Estate/Salon 94

David Wojnarowicz, Untitled (face in dirt), 1990, from Brush Fires in the Social Landscape, photographs by David Wojnarowicz (Aperture, 2015)

© the Estate of David Wojnarowicz, Courtesy P.P.O.W. Gallery, New York

David Wojnarowicz, Arthur Rimbaud in New York (on subway), 1978-79, from Brush Fires in the Social Landscape, photographs by David Wojnarowicz (Aperture, 2015)

© the Estate of David Wojnarowicz, Courtesy P.P.O.W. Gallery, New York

David Wojnarowicz, I Feel a Vague Nausea, 1990, from Brush Fires in the Social Landscape, photographs by David Wojnarowicz (Aperture, 2015)

© The Estate of David Wojnarowicz and courtesy P.P.O.W Gallery, New York

Between the Stonewall riots of 1969 and the height of the AIDS crisis in the 1990s, what did queer desire look like in photography? In September, the Museum of Modern Art convened a Forum on Contemporary Photography focused on the homoerotic trajectory across two decades of rebellion, liberation, and activism. “Photography has played a central role in the articulation of queer desire,” said Chris Boot, executive director of Aperture Foundation. In his presentation at the forum, which also included panelists Vince Aletti, Philip Gefter, Sophie Hackett, and Lyle Ashton Harris, Boot discussed the work of American and British photographers who pushed the boundaries of representing queer lives and bodies.

“Looking back on the period between Stonewall and the onset of AIDS, we can see how particular photographers shaped a visual language that has become part of the vocabulary of male queer identity,” Boot recalled. “It’s is a thread of photo history we’ve looked at through a series of publications at Aperture—books by and about David Wojnarowicz, Jimmy DeSana, and George Dureau, and with a survey of the work of Peter Hujar coming out next spring. The discussion at MoMA revealed just how rich the subject is, and notwithstanding the attention that Mapplethorpe’s work is getting at the moment, how much there is still to be done.”

Click here to watch a video of the MoMA Forum, recorded on September 15, 2016.

George Dureau, The PhotographsGeorge Dureau, The Photographs is an album of the great photographic portraits made throughout the forty years of Dureau’s artistic career—a New Orleans romance between the photographer and his subjects.




$60.00

The post From Stonewall to AIDS, Framing Queer Desire appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

An Evening with William Eggleston at Aperture’s Fall Benefit

“I’ve never felt the need to enhance the world in my pictures, because the world is spectacular enough as it is.” —William Eggleston

Guest of honor William Eggleston Sr. Will Matsuda © Aperture

Bettye LaVette. Will Matsuda © Aperture

Guest of honor William Eggleston Sr. Will Matsuda © Aperture

Richard Renaldi, Bruce Davidson, and guest with Nan Goldin. Will Matsuda © Aperture

Alessio Bax. Patrick McMullan © PMc

Guests enjoying the photoset. Max Mikulecky © Aperture

Judy and Leonard Lauder. Will Matsuda © Aperture

Elizabeth Stribling and Cathy Kaplan. Patrick McMullan © PMc

Bonnie Lautenberg, Steve Leber, Bob Gruen, and Elizabeth Gregory. Patrick McMullan © PMc

Elizabeth Kahane. Patrick McMullan © PMc

Celso and Sondra Gilman Gonzalez-Falla. Jared Siskin © PMc

Guests enjoying the photoset by Emily Thompson Flowers. Max Mikulecky © Aperture

Chris Boot with guest and Thomas Schiff. Jared Siskin © PMc

Lee Friedlander and guest of honor William Eggleston Sr. Jared Siskin © PMc

Aperture's Benefit Auction featuring work by Inez & Vinoodh. Jared Siskin © PMc

Weyes Blood. Patrick McMullan © PMc

Chris Boot. Jared Siskin © PMc

Libby Calloway and Andra Eggleston. Jared Siskin © PMc

Melissa O'Shaughnessy and Anne Stark Locher. Patrick McMullan © PMc

William Eggleston III and Nicholas Eggleston. Patrick McMullan © PMc

Zanele Muholi. Jared Siskin © PMc

Ashlyn Davis, Suzanne Kilpatrick, and Jean Karotkin. Jared Siskin © PMc

Eggleston's grandchildren at the photoset. Max Mikulecky © Aperture

Elaine Goldman and David Raymond. Max Mikulecky © Aperture

Lesley A. Martin with Whit and Nadiya Williams. Jared Siskin © PMc

Christina Caputo with guest, Aliza Sena, and Sarah Haimes. Patrick McMullan © PMc

Michael Schmelling and Jason Nocito. Patrick McMullan © PMc

Aperture Benefit Party atmosphere. Jared Siskin © PMc

Lyle Ashton Harris and Chris Boot. Will Matsuda © Aperture

Darius Himes of Christie's. Jared Siskin © PMc

On October 24, Aperture Foundation’s benefit, “Dear Bill,” honored William Eggleston for his contribution to photography and his lifelong passion for music. Though his name is synonymous with the acceptance of color photography by the art world, William Eggleston is also a virtuoso piano player, and his work has appeared on several album covers. In Aperture magazine’s fall issue, “Sounds,” John Jeremiah Sullivan profiles Eggleston, who, looking at one of his photographs, muses, “either everything works or nothing works”—simple as that. Eggleston’s most recent book, the ten-volume Democratic Forest (2015), contains more than ten thousand photographs and is the basis for Eggleston’s first exhibition at David Zwirner Gallery, opening Thursday, October 27.

Eggleston’s prolific career was the focus of Aperture’s annual benefit, which drew more than six hundred guests and raised approximately $650,000 in support of its publications, public programming, and educational initiatives. The event was cohosted by David Byrne, Sb Cooper and RL Besson, Jeff Garlin, Sondra Gilman Gonzalez-Falla and Celso Gonzalez-Falla, Elizabeth and William Kahane, Cathy Kaplan, Judy and Leonard Lauder, Nion McEvoy, Jessica Nagle, and David Zwirner. Over the preceding weekend, the benefit festivities kicked off with a series of exclusive events: visits with photographers Adam Fuss, Richard Phibbs, and Richard Mosse, a cocktail party at Aperture’s Chelsea gallery, a private visit to Yale’s photography collection, and a reception at Steinway Hall.

Taking a cue from vinyl album covers, the Paddle8-sponsored silent auction included square, twelve-by-twelve-inch prints. Thirty-two artists, including Stephen Shore, Rosalind Fox Solomon, Alex Webb, and Penelope Umbrico, contributed prints, all of which sold. Sara Friedlander, Vice President and Head of Evening Sale at Christie’s, presided over the live auction, which featured a commission by Doug and Mike Starn, as well as photographs by Bruce Davidson, Zanele Muholi, and Juergen Teller.

A slideshow of photographs from The Democratic Forest set the stage for live music performances directed by Pat Irwin. Musical performers included Alessio Bax, Bettye LaVette, Weyes Blood, and Lafayette Harris. Chances with Wolves closed with an upbeat DJ set.

 

Additional party photos are available on patrickmcmullan.com.

 

Click here to make a donation to Aperture’s Annual Fund.

 

The 2016 Aperture Foundation Benefit Party and Auction was generously supported by: Christie’s, Foto Care, ropeadope, Steinway & Sons, Emily Thompson Flowers, Espolòn Tequila, Fine Art Frameworks, Ilford, LTI Lightside, and Paddle8.

 

Bene­fit Committee

Sponsors

Sb Cooper and RL Besson

Judy and Leonard Lauder

Leaders

Elaine Goldman and John Benis

Sondra Gilman Gonzalez-Falla and Celso Gonzalez-Falla

Elizabeth and William Kahane

Cathy M. Kaplan and Renwick D. Martin

Anne Stark Locher and Kurt Locher

Nion McEvoy

Scott Mead

Melissa and James O’Shaughnessy

Malú Alvarez

Ann Ames

Rita Anthoine

agnès b.

Peter Barbur and Tim Doody

Dawoud Bey

Allan Chapin and Anna Rachminov

Cheim & Read

Kate Cordsen

Fine Art Frameworks

Randi and Bob Fisher

Arthur Fleischer, Jr.

Foto Care Ltd.

Annette Y. Friedland

Barbara J. Goodbody

Elizabeth Grover

Agnes Gund

Hermès Foundation

Darius Himes, Christie’s

Michael Hoeh

Lynne and Harold Honickman

Ingram Content Group

Darlene Kaplan

Bonnie Englebardt Lautenberg

Susana Torruella Leval and Pierre N. Leval

David Levy and Amanda Bowman

Peter and Susan MacGill

Merideth W. McGregor and Kevin Flach

Patrick McMullan

Joel Meyerowitz

Jessica Nagle and Roland Hartley-Urquhart

Helen W. Nitkin

Lori Perlow

Sarah Gore Reeves and Enrique Norten

Ropeadope Records

Mara and Ricky Sandler

Thomas R. Schiff

Frederick M. R. Smith

David Solo

Steinway & Sons

Michael Ward Stout, The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation

Elizabeth Stribling and Guy Robinson

D. Severn Taylor and J. Scott Switzer

Willard Taylor and Virginia Davies

John C. Williams

Whit Williams

David Zwirner

Additional support from:

Renee Preisler Barasch

Andrew Craven and Rodger Hicks

Jean Karotkin

Kasper

Emily-Jane Kirwan, Marian Goodman Gallery

Philippe Laumont

Mark and Elizabeth Levine

Jack Lueders-Booth

Lauren and Michael Marrus

Jessica May

Sarah McNear and Ian Wardropper

Mauricio Morato

Yancey Richardson

Christine Traina

Tanya Wells

The post An Evening with William Eggleston at Aperture’s Fall Benefit appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.