Aperture's Blog, page 128

Louis Faurer’s Postwar New York

In the late 1940s, the photographer’s photographer reveled in the contradictory energies of urban life.

By Wilco Versteeg

Louis Faurer, Untitled, New York, 1949
© Louis Faurer Estate

“These photographs make me think of that long gone time—the fifties in New York City,” Robert Frank wrote in 1994 about the photographer Louis Faurer. “His eye is on the pulse.” Frank was writing to the editors of the Japanese magazine déjà-vu, who dedicated a special issue to Faurer. Some twenty years later, Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris returns to Faurer, the photographer of the in-between, whose photographs might be a visual expression of T.S. Eliot’s sentiment in The Hollow Man: the shadow falls between the idea and the reality, between the motion and the act, between the emotion and the response.

Louis Faurer, New York, 1949
© Louis Faurer Estate and courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery

Writing in the accompanying catalogue Louis Faurer, Walter Hopps considers the first decade of Faurer’s career as an open space in the history of American photography bookened by Walker Evans’s American Photographs (1938) and Robert Frank’s The Americans (1958), a period otherwise defined by abstract expressionism rather than by photography. The ideological documentary of the Farm Security Administration had left its imprint on the artistic map, while the boom of postwar youth culture hadn’t yet delivered its own expressions in the fine arts. Not only was his career formed during this in-between moment, Faurer’s work itself is concerned with suspension.

Louis Faurer, Win, Place, and Show, 3rd Avenue El at 53rd Street, New York, ca. 1946–48
© Louis Faurer Estate

Even at a safe distance from the battlefields, war made of Louis Faurer the photographer he came to be. Born in Philadelphia in 1916, he came of artistic age during the Second World War. He perfected his printing techniques while serving as a civilian photographic engineer in the U.S. Army Signal Corps for most of the war. Never having photographed an actual battlefield, Faurer nonetheless captured the human and social impact the war had on New York in the last half of the 1940s, exemplified both by survivors recovering from extreme injuries and by the visible increase in wealth often associated with those years.

Louis Faurer, Champion, New York, 1950
© Louis Faurer Estate, Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery

Louis Faurer shows downtown New York as a city reveling in the contradictory forces of postwar financial and political optimism, and witnesses the rise of a more pessimistic and critical counter-culture. He creates a subtle play with text and public space: banks, cinemas, and all kinds of street vendors use the same visual language of typography to sell what they have on offer. Faurer cleverly maneuvered around this overwhelming sensory experience and tried to avoid the irony that made some Depression-era photography so piercing, such as Margaret Bourke-White’s famous Kentucky Flood from 1937. Irony, as a disruptive and distancing communication strategy, does not fit Faurer’s humble and subtle view of humanity. In his work, instead of irony, we are often confronted with a silver lining of lightness around a somewhat darker human condition of constant suspension and expectation.

Louis Faurer, Deaf Mute, New York, 1950
© Louis Faurer Estate

Faurer himself spoke of his “intense desire to record life as I see it” as his only motivation: “As long as I’m amazed and astonished, as long as I feel that events, messages, expressions and movements are all shot through with the miraculous, I’ll feel filled with the certainty I need to keep going.” He offers us a peak behind the masks and appearances of daily life, such as New York (1948–49), in which a wife adjusts the hair of her husband to cover his bald spot, or in the various images of people waiting for an unknown someone or something. Faurer is the photographer of expectation, of finding that Eliotesque shadow that precedes the actualization of a hoped-for future whose impact cannot be yet be grasped. Indeed, the frailty and sweetness of human beings becomes graspable in Eddie, New York (1948), Deaf Mute, New York (1950), and Accident, New York (1952).

Louis Faurer, Accident, New York, 1952
© Louis Faurer Estate, Courtesy Deborah Bell

Even when Faurer portrays the physically, mentally, or financially unlucky, he never does so in isolation. Whereas Diane Arbus, whose work bears resemblance to Faurer’s, at times isolated her subjects from society by photographing them in enclosed environments such as homes or institutions, Faurer grants them their just place in the grand décor of the city. In Faurer’s work, all and sundry contribute to New York: its dwellers, its texts, its windows and mirrors, its reflections, its masks, its fictions, and finally its realities. Long considered a photographer’s photographer, Louis Faurer is a pivotal artist of this in-between period. He de-politicized a documentary aesthetic that preceded him, and opened up new possibilities for the future. In his work, no one is weak or strange. Faurer extends his gift of humility to us, who are then invited to look at the world as he did.

Wilco Versteeg is a PhD candidate at Université Paris Diderot.  

Louis Faurer is on view at Fondation Cartier-Bresson, Paris, through December 18, 2016.

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Glamour and Destitution in Los Angeles

In his first museum retrospective, Anthony Hernandez finds melancholy beauty in a city of contrasts.

By Glen Helfand

Anthony Hernandez, Discarded #50, 2014
© and courtesy the artist

The paradoxes of Los Angeles, its polarities between glamour and destitution, are not lost on Anthony Hernandez. Since the late 1960s, Hernandez has revealed, with formal integrity and bleak beauty, the harsh realities of his Southern California environs. His retrospective at SFMOMA derives its power from an unerring eye. A native of East LA, Hernandez has been less widely known than other California photographers—he met peer Lewis Baltz in the early 1970s—but this survey makes for a satisfying and timely look at an artist whose innovations are subtle yet significant riffs on key themes in contemporary photography.

Anthony Hernandez, Los Angeles #14, 1973
© and courtesy the artist

The bodies of work on view, ranging from early figurative works to forms of landscape and still life, together form a dour, formally impressive vision that frequently achieves a quiet balance between aesthetic and social concerns. The exhibition initially draws an apt connection to street photography traditions, and the catalog notes that Hernandez met Garry Winogrand in the late 1970s when the elder photographer lived in LA. In the 2013 Winogrand retrospective, also at SFMOMA, Winogrand’s photographs of Los Angeles contained a profound sense of melancholy. In contrast to his pictures of the vibrant sidewalk culture of New York, Winogrand’s LA work reveals a place where those without automobiles are stranded on wide, otherwise empty sidewalks, and in failed Hollywood aspiration.

Anthony Hernandez, Santa Monica #14, 1970
© and courtesy the artist

Similarly, the first powerful iteration of Hernandez’s vision is a 1969–70 series of black-and-white beach photographs that depict sleeping figures adrift on fields of sand—a form of prostrate street photography. Most of the subjects are fully clothed, as though the beach is a safe site to nap, when necessary. In Santa Monica #3 (1970), a male figure seems to be destitute, crawling through the desert with paralyzed legs. In another, even sunbathers appear troubled: bikini-clad women are isolated from their environment and strangely exposed.

Anthony Hernandez, Rodeo Drive #3, 1984
© and courtesy the artist

Nearby is Hernandez’s first foray into color—which became his signature mode—a 1984 series of photographs shot on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills. The tony setting, with pops of red and gold, poses a striking contrast to the beach pictures, heightened by the camp factor of ’80s fashion. Still, the figures exude an existential hollowness; they are people slipped into an empty but overpriced lifestyle. Even if their hair is teased to mercilessly comic effect, the success of these pictures is in their cool humanity.

Anthony Hernandez, Forever #74, 2011
© the artist and courtesy San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

The show then backtracks chronologically to Hernandez’s transitional work in black and white. These photographs, in a section titled Absence and Presence (1978–1990), were shot with a large format camera and depict the vastness of the Southern California landscape. In content and style, they relate to the “New Topographics,” the term that coalesced around a group of photographers including Robert Adams and Stephen Shore, who reimagined the postindustrial American landscape. Hernandez’s Public Transit Areas pictures, from 1979–80, reveal the isolation of Angelenos as they congregate at bus stops on wide, desolate, smoggy boulevards. There’s more formal innovation to two other late 1970s series, Automotive Landscapes and Public Fishing Areas, which show, respectively, rough and tumble car repair shops and prosaic recreation areas from a slightly elevated perspective atop Hernandez’s VW van.

Anthony Hernandez, Landscapes for the Homeless #1, 1988
© the artist and courtesy San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

The centerpiece is Hernandez’s Landscapes for the Homeless (1988–91), a powerful group of images that capture makeshift domesticity in wooded areas devoid of their inhabitants, who have seemingly gone about their daily business, and left their “homes” vulnerable. There’s a palpable sense of trespassing upon a private space, but it’s a revelation to see a vast pit of cigarette butts surrounding a rumpled blanket, or brushes and combs laid carefully on a plastic bag on the dirt. In its drive to consider urban planning and social observation, Landscapes for the Homeless anticipates such practices as the Center for Land Use Interpretation.

Anthony Hernandez, Pictures for Rome #17, 1999
© and courtesy the artist

Hernandez’s late-’90s work, set in abandoned buildings in Oakland, Rome, and Baltimore, and along the Los Angles river, become more abstract visions of locations buffeted by economic conditions—stalled construction sites, and abandoned buildings and sewage culverts. These photographs are less immediate but more poetic in their power. They provide evidence of beauty within fraught locations—a view from a homeless person’s bed, for example—though the aesthetic value of such a perspective seems as difficult to parse as redressing the social condition. Taken together in the sweep of this exhibition, Hernandez’s persistent vision rewards with its resolve.

Glen Helfand is a writer, curator, and an associate professor at California College of the Arts.

Anthony Hernandez is on view at SFMOMA through January 1, 2017.

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The Limits of Representation

Can Conceptual art speak to activist issues in new ways? Victor Burgin tests the connection between ideas and action.

By William J. Simmons

Victor Burgin, Still from Mirror Lake, 2013. Digital projection, 14:37 minutes
Courtesy the artist and Cristin Tierney Gallery, New York

No one is associated more forcefully with a cool academicism than Victor Burgin. His highly theoretical writing, as well as his pioneering use of politically inflected text in photography and video, has been a hallmark of Conceptual art since the early 1970s. However, Conceptual art, in foregrounding its ideas in self-referential forms, is usually understood as devoid of energetic, activist politics. In a recent review in Artforum of John Baldessari’s exhibition at Sprüth Magers in Los Angeles, for example, Nicolas Linnert makes a shortsighted attack on conceptualism, “What exactly is gained today by continuing to exploit the capacity of images to free themselves from meaning? To avoid a stance?” Linnert suggests that only representational art has any worthwhile affective power, thereby precluding artists like Sarah Charlesworth—who worked with found images and abstraction, often simultaneously—from being considered socially-engaged. Nevertheless, it’s a thought experiment worth applying to Victor Burgin’s concurrent shows shows in New York at Bridget Donahue and Cristin Tierney. What is at stake in both presentations is whether Conceptual art can transcend hyperintellectual concerns and speak to activist issues, and whether artists can express their politics in forms other than pure representation.

Victor Burgin, UK 76 (detail), 1976
© the artist and courtesy Bridget Donahue, New York

Burgin’s exhibition at Bridget Donahue is comprised of archival inkjet prints from the series UK76 (1976) carefully wheat-pasted to the wall. Each photograph, in characteristic Burgin style, consists of text—some found, some composed by the artist, some deadpan, and some florid—placed above an image, each wonderfully reminiscent of film noir in their monochromatic grandeur and allusions to surveillance and violence. Though straightforward, these texts have a lyrical and poetic quality that, no matter their source, becomes strangely poignant. The texture of the paste also lends a corporeal element, as if a very thin skin has affixed the images; in a reference to the original presentation of UK76 four decades ago, the images will be scraped from the walls when the exhibition closes.

Victor Burgin, UK 76 (detail), 1976 
© the artist and courtesy Bridget Donahue, New York

One photograph depicts a woman at a bus stop with the same disinterested glance that so interested Walker Evans in his Subway series (1938–41) and Cindy Sherman in her Bus Riders (1976/2000). The text watches over the scene like a forlorn vulture: “Evening is the softest time of day. As the sun descends the butterfly bright colours which flourish at high noon give way to moth shades.” This rapturous prose gives way to the sales points of an advertorial. “The look is essentially luxurious, very much for the pampered lady dressed for a romantic evening with every element pale and perfect.” But, are the unsubtle allusions to whiteness (“pampered lady”; “pale and perfect”) incongruous with the photograph’s black, presumably working-class protagonist? Like any advertisement, the first instinct is to read the text and image as related, despite their obvious dissonance. Yet this isn’t some valorization of the working class, or an elevation of the humdrum daily commute to the status of poetry. We are swept up in beautifully saccharine imagery—we believe the drama—until we discover that the directive to feel moved comes not from true emotion, but from advertising.

Victor Burgin, Still from Prairie, 2015. Digital projection, 8:03 minutes
Courtesy the artist and Cristin Tierney Gallery, New York.

Mirror Lake (2013), one of two digital projections on view at Cristin Tierney in Burgin’s exhibition Midwest, has a similar emotional impact, if more melodramatic. It opens with an interior shot of a train car, a favorite film setting from Alfred Hitchcock to Lars von Trier. A story of interconnected lives enacted by the theft of Native American land ensues, based only on a series of dour, almost ethnographic shots that receive their resonance from applied text. Burgin presents quietly rhapsodic words that emolliate the silence: “There is enchanter’s nightshade and maidenhair fern, blue marsh violet and marsh marigold, orange jewelweed and sarsaparilla, creeping snowberry and wintergreen… The Winnebago once lived here.” There is no joke, no sardonic twist—only a serious narrative (be it fact or fiction) delivered with harrowing and compelling sentimentality.

Victor Burgin, Mirror Lake, 2013. Installation view at Cristin Tierney Gallery, 2016
Courtesy Cristin Tierney Gallery

Burgin allows us to think emotionally and emote intellectually; the distinction between conceptualism and social engagement is no longer a useful division. While his work may not incite protests, from these two exhibitions there emerges an active, politically inflected photographic formalism: the viewer must take a stance, simply by bearing witness to his interplay of feeling and imagery. Revealing Conceptual art’s capacity for excess, emotion, and affect, Burgin’s work is a study of how we relate to traumas both personal and social.

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

Victor Burgin: Midwest is on view at Cristin Tierney through October 22, 2016. Victor Burgin: UK76 is on view at Bridget Donahue Gallery through November 6, 2016.

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Pushing the Boundaries of Gender Performance

Spanning over eighty years of photographs, an exhibition explores the gender non-conforming potential of the word “they.”

By Alicia Eler

Yasumasa Morimura, Jane Fonda 5 (Barbarella), 1995
© the artist and courtesy ROSEGALLERY

The singular gender-neutral pronoun “they” was named word of the year in 2016. Judging from the social and historical depth of photography and archival imagery in the exhibition He/She/They, currently on view at ROSEGALLERY, which includes work by more than fifteen artists, it’s crazy to think that it took this long to get American culture at large to recognize life outside the gender binary. Ranging from the early 1930s to the present, the works exhibit a wide array of bodies, locations, gazes, and socioeconomic perspectives, and consider the intersectional influence of race and class on notions of gender.

Lise Sarfati, Malaïka #7, Corner 7th Street and Spring, from the series On Hollywood, 2010
© the artist and courtesy ROSEGALLERY

Since this exhibition is presented in Los Angeles, Lise Sarfati’s Malaïka #7, Corner 7th Street and Spring from the series On Hollywood (2010), is appropriately local and captures a woman trying to make it in the entertainment industry. In this startling photograph, a young woman appears forlorn, perhaps returning from an audition, unsure of what to do next. The actress’s face, and the low-angle perspective, is reminiscent of Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Still #21 (1978), in which a young woman, who could be any (white) woman, looks intently beyond the frame, with an imposing block of skyscrapers forming the background. Marrying visual art and Hollywood icons, her dress and hairstyle reference Marilyn Monroe and the “dumb blonde” archetype.

Katsumi Watanabe, KW 164, 1965
© the artist and courtesy ROSEGALLERY

For her series Carnival Strippers (1972–75), Susan Meiselas captured a type of femininity less visible during the women’s liberation era. One of her primary subjects was Mitzi, a woman who worked as a stripper at carnivals; Meiselas documented Mitzi’s public work and private life. Earning money from a performance of sexuality as dictated by the male gaze, Mitzi capitalizes her body under a patriarchal society. Around the same time, Katsumi Watanabe was photographing Tokyo’s queer nightlife scene, creating vivacious images of drag queens, gangsters, prostitutes, and entertainers in Shinjuku Ni-chome, Japan’s largest gay district. His subjects often commissioned the pictures themselves. The locations—outdoors in front of cars or posing inside scuzzy backrooms—suggest a contrast between the dazzling outfits and the milieu, a queer underworld area of Tokyo. Meanwhile, Manuel Álvarez Bravo’s elegant, perfectly contoured black-and-white portraits offer a singular focus on his subjects’ gender presentations. He pictures individuals like Frida Kahlo, as well as the tuxedo-clad authors Salvador Novo and Xavier Villaurrutia. Their gender presentations are both very masculine, but in the context of this show, they could easily be read as trans men or individuals in male drag.

Nikki S. Lee, The Hip Hop Project (1), 2001
© the artist and courtesy ROSEGALLERY

Well-known names of ’90s identity politics appear like anthology entries, though they remain relevant today. Yasumasa Morimura creates images of himself in drag as various female celebrities such as Elizabeth Taylor, a critique of both the perceived emasculation of the Asian male body and a global obsession with Hollywood. Nikki S. Lee takes masquerade and cultural identity to another level with her chameleonic (and controversial) self-portrait projects about “passing” in various American subcultures, from hip-hop girls to exotic dancers. In his series Orchard Beach: The Bronx Riviera, Wayne Lawrence portrays glistening beachgoers at the only public beach in the Bronx. Lawrence’s work is among the few representations of African American subjects in the exhibition, but the connection to a critique of gender of this context is unfortunately vague.

Wayne Lawrence, Cathy, Ocean Drive, South Beach, 2010
© the artist and courtesy ROSEGALLERY

Other works in the show focus less on the performance of gender, and more on people who defy normative gender distinctions. Nineteenth-century photographs depict Native American “two-spirit” individuals—those who participate in gender roles not assigned to their sex—but the accompanying text explains that intersex, androgynous, and gender non-conforming people could be held in high regard outside of Eurocentric, heteronormative cultures. In photographs by Mexican artist Graciela Iturbide, Magnolia, who identified as Muxe (Zapotec for homosexual and “genderqueer”), poses for the camera wearing a dress and sombrero, a traditionally male accessory.

Graciela Iturbide, Carnaval, Tlaxcala, Mexico, 1974
© the artist and courtesy ROSEGALLERY

He/She/They leans heavily on the visual language of portraiture, which might suggest a desire for authenticity in documentation, in contrast to much of the dynamic content found online, where self-expression by social media sensations, celebrities, and everyday people appears to be constantly evolving. The photographs in this show offer a fixed moment in time, declarative and definitive, but also remain open to the many shades of identity, the gender non-conforming potential of the word “they.”

Alicia Eler is a journalist based in Los Angeles. A contributor to New York Magazine, The Guardian, VICE, LA Weekly, Hyperallergic, Art21, and Artforum, she is currently working on her first book, The Selfie Generation (Skyhorse).

He/She/They is on view at ROSEGALLERY, Santa Monica, through November 12, 2016.

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Justine Kurland’s Great American Road Trip

Justine Kurland crossed the United States in a weathered van, adding thousands of miles to her odometer while pursuing a chronicle of American drifters.

By David Campany

Justine Kurland, 280 Coup, 2012
Courtesy the artist and Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York

The actualities and the myths, the facts and the metaphors. Justine Kurland photographs America’s tangled sense of itself. How do we see when seeing has been so anticipated by images? Through the filter of all that has gone before, can a photographer describe lives and places anew? In the last few years Kurland’s pictures have emerged in groupings, with names like This Train Is Bound for Glory and Sincere Auto Care. Gathered here in eloquent sequence is a small sample from her forthcoming book with Aperture.

A train snakes like a toy across the desert between Nevada and Utah. The view looks unchanged for decades but those are boxcars of cheap consumables from China, bound for Walmart. The photographer’s son, Casper, a regular companion on these trips, throws back his head and refreshes himself. He looks like a feral creature, a pioneer, and a twenty-first-century boy, chugging juice from a plastic bottle. The excess trickles down his belly to his diaper. When Casper was six, Kurland took a teaching job. It reconnected her with the work of Eugène Atget, Walker Evans, and the long tradition of intelligent documentary photography. For now, this is her idiom—wide, generous, and testing.

Justine Kurland, Black Snake, 2008
Courtesy the artist and Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York

Her road trips are long and her van is eleven years old. With 250,000 miles on the clock, it gets patched up often. Since nobody feels entirely positive about cars these days, breakdowns and crashes feel like larger symbolic deaths. But as Evans wrote in “The Auto Junkyard,” a 1962 photo-essay published in Fortune, “There is a secret imp in almost every civilized man that bids him delight in the surprises and in the mockery in the forms of destruction. At times, nothing could be gayer than the complete collapse of our fanciest contrivances. Scenes like these are rich in tragicomic suggestions of the fall of man from his high ride.”

The auto yard is a place of pragmatic resurrection. Indeed, the fall of man, or more exactly fallen men, have their own erotic pathos. Kurland’s pictures of mechanics and car culture are touching and affectionate. They leave the ambivalence to us. Casper had his own little fall from Mom’s parked van, catching his mouth on the bumper. That’s his tooth in his hand.

Justine Kurland, Cuervo Astride Marna Burro, Now Dead, 2007
Courtesy the artist and Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York

One day she met a man who looked uncannily like Casper, all grown up and coming down from a junkie’s high. With a head full of worries about keeping her boy safe and the knowledge that he won’t be hers forever, she photographed this man. She accepted him, watching him almost pray with his hands around a Coke. Her camera is respectful but it wards off the fears.

And here is Cuervo, on horseback, no car in sight. Kurland got to know him and photographed him over three years. He can hunt, prepare food, and light fires without matches. His past includes drug running and incarceration in Mexico. He has just crossed the Sierra Nevada with his animals. Kurland recalls his words: “I’m a man with a man’s needs, and if you want to get some photography done you are going to have to satisfy my needs.” She walked away. “When I came back he was completely naked. Somehow that was the final straw. I haven’t talked to him since.”

We all know the easy failings of men. The pride, arrogance, narcissism, and fragile vanity. Yet, nobody is quite sure what a man is supposed to be. Myth and history were once on his side but no longer. In these photographs, made with young Casper at her side, Kurland offers her own brave contemplation of it all.

David Campany’s books include the Aperture titles The Open Road: Photography and the American Road Trip (2014) and Walker Evans (2015).

To read more, buy Aperture Issue 222, “Odyssey,” or subscribe to Aperture and never miss an issue.

Highway Kind




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Are You Ready For Love?

Four exhibitions celebrate feminist artist Ellen Cantor, who explored the subversive potential of female sexuality.

By Maika Pollack

Ellen Cantor, Pinochet Porn, 2008–16
Courtesy the Estate of Ellen Cantor

 

Dirty Joke or Art? That was the headline in one Swiss newspaper when Ellen Cantor’s show was censored by the mayor of Zurich in 1995. Cantor, the downtown artist who died in 2013, and whose work is featured in four exhibitions in New York this fall, receives more reverence than reproach these days, but she still has an edge. Organized by Participant Inc., Foxy Production, 80 WSE Gallery at New York University, and Maccarone, together with the Cantor Estate, the concurrent exhibitions are complemented by public programs at Skowhegan and Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI). The Participant Inc. exhibition, perhaps the opening salvo, sets off Cantor’s interest in explicit depictions of female sexuality as a politically transgressive act.

Ellen Cantor, Within Heaven and Hell, 1996. Video/audio plays over Bil Baird’s “Maiden and Adult Male Goat,” from the original motion picture The Sound of Music, 1965. Installation view at 80WSE Gallery, 2016. Photograph by Jeffrey Sturges
Courtesy the Estate of Ellen Cantor and the Charles H. MacNider Art Museum

Participant Inc. presents several dozen early Cantor paintings and sculptures. With frames bejeweled and bedazzled with pom-poms, glitter, and feathers the paintings depict lesbian orgies, seemingly from above. They also exist as fetish objects and interrupt the serious, presumably masculine dialogue of painting, and conjure what Cantor called a “girl world.” In a separate space, several vitrines display ephemera from the 1995 Zurich controversy in which Cantor’s work was declared pornographic.

Ellen Cantor, Be My Baby, 1999. Three-channel video installation, 12:39 minutes. Installation view at Foxy Production, 2016
© the Estate of Ellen Cantor and courtesy Foxy Production, New York

A revelatory exhibition at Foxy Production displays photo collages made during the 1990s and a three-channel video, Be My Baby, from 1999. The video, with ’90s-era special-effect flourishes, merges reels of 1960s space exploration and 1940s Hollywood movies featuring heterosexual love scenes, and asks how solitary and “masculine” gendered pursuits, like space exploration, can be understood as constructed through the lens of “feminine” and inward-looking experiences like love. It sounds trite, but Be My Baby, in fact, is personal and beautiful. For the six black-and-white photo collages, Cantor used thumbtacks to create grids juxtaposing commercially-developed snapshots of TV screens playing soap operas and porn, revealing an expanded world in which hardcore sex and treacle sentimentality coexist.

Ellen Cantor, Hold Me My Love, I Want to Die With You, 1996. Photo collage, diptych
© the Estate of Ellen Cantor and courtesy Foxy Production

On the other hand, ostensibly the most ambitious of these shows, 80WSE’s Ellen Cantor: Are You Ready for Love?, which features Cantor’s last, incomplete multichannel video work, turned out to be the most poorly curated. The five-chapter Picochet Porn (2008–16) is projected so high and so small as to be unviewable; one “chapter” plays while other projections display the titles of other chapters in bright white fonts, distracting from whatever is playing. (The exhibition does, however, include numerous rich drawings.)

Patricia Cronin, girls, 1993
Courtesy David and Monica Zwirner, New York

At Maccarone, the parade continues with Coming to Power: 25 Years of Sexually X-Plicit Art by Women, a restaging of the 1993 exhibition Cantor curated at David Zwirner gallery on the theme of sex-positive feminist artwork. Organized by Pati Hertling and Julie Tolentino (cofounder of the ’90s landmark lesbian bar Clit Club), Coming to Power encompasses several generations of feminist pioneers, from Carolee Schneemann (represented by several photographs as well as her tattered and iconic 1975 Interior Scroll) and Alice Neel (with a very early 1933 painting of a pregnant female nude), to Lynda Benglis, Louise Bourgeois, and Marilyn Minter. Not all the work in this contemporary facsimile is the same as in the original, but all date from before 1993. Together, the works give a quick guide to a second wave feminist genealogy for Cantor’s painting, photographs, and videos.

Zoe Leonard, Frontal View Geoffrey Benne Fashion Show, 1990
Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

While some photographs in Coming to Power, like those by Nan Goldin and Cindy Sherman, will be familiar chestnuts to New York audiences, Zoe Leonard’s upskirt shots of fashion shows from the 1990s feel especially fresh in an age of outrage at boasts of assaults carried out by Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump. And Patricia Cronin’s grids of Polaroids of herself thrusting a strap-on at the mouth of a televised George H. W. Bush, or pointing her prosthetic dick at a magazine image of Madonna, are great point-of-view shots that remind us of a time when developing film at a lab risked censorship and the immediacy of the Polaroid provided material for radical subversion.

La Chica Boom (Xandra Ibarra) performing Nude Laughing as part of Coming To Power: 25 Years Of Sexually X-Plicit Art By Women, Maccarone, October 8, 2016. Photograph by Julie Tolentino
Courtesy Maccarone

The restaging of Coming to Power also includes a lively rotation of performances and events. Younger artists who make their names on the “rediscovery” of historical artists and events might be seen as agents gentrifying the past. But, one event featuring the dynamic Xandra Ibarra (aka La Chica Boom) brought together a diverse crowd who transformed Cantor’s seeming interest in gender binaries into a more fluid and encompassing community of non-normative gender identity. Ibarra walked the gallery wearing only yellow high heels and a prosthetic chest, laughing hysterically and dragging a large nylon sack behind her. As the crowd surrounded her in a tight knot, both protective and prurient, Ibarra entered the sack and engaged in a seemingly masturbatory episode with the wigs, ballerina slippers, pearls, and furs inside. The moment conjured the radicality of a queer downtown culture and New York communities largely lost to time. Such interventions illuminate contemporary motivations and politics playing out over a body of work belonging to an artist no longer present, and celebrate Cantor’s newfound, and perhaps newly essential visibility, as they also mourn her loss.

Maika Pollack is an art historian teaching at Sarah Lawrence College.

Coming to Power: 25 Years of Sexually X-Plicit Art By Women is on view at Maccarone through October 16, 2016. Ellen Cantor is on view at Foxy Production through October 23, 2016. Ellen Cantor, Lovely Girls Emotions is on view at Participant Inc. through October 30, 2016. Ellen Cantor: Are You Ready for Love? is on view at 80WSE through November 12, 2016.

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Vanguard of the Revolution

In the era of Black Lives Matter, what is the legacy of the Black Panther Party? Stephen Shames revisits his chronicle of American activism.

By Jessica Lynne

Stephen Shames, Kathleen Cleaver, Communications Secretary and the first female member of the Party’s decision-making Central Committee, talks with Black Panthers from Los Angeles, in DeFremery Park, West Oakland, California, July 28, 1968
Courtesy Steven Kasher Gallery, New York

Fifty years ago, on October 15, 1966, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale founded the Black Panther Party for Self Defense in Oakland, California. Fifty years ago, it seemed, the world was poised for revolution. And for Newton, the revolution would belong to the people. “The Black Panther Party is simply the vanguard of the revolution,” he declared. It was a statement that perfectly encapsulated the Party’s unprecedented influence in the social, cultural, and political psyche of the United States.

Stephen Shames, Free Breakfast Program, Panther Jerry Dunigan, known as “Odinka,” talks to kids while they eat breakfast on Chicago’s South Side, Chicago, Illinois, 1970
Courtesy Steven Kasher Gallery, New York

Hindsight affords a particular kind of clarity. Years after its first utterance, Newton’s claim remains the most definitive statement regarding the ethos that guided the Panthers. Established on the heels of the civil rights movement, the Panthers were a political party committed to dismantling antiblack structures and policies that had afflicted black people for centuries. The Party espoused a Marxist political stance, manifest in programs such as the Free Breakfast for Children Program and the People’s Free Medical Clinics. Yet, the further we travel away from the Panther era, the greater our chance to distort that reality. The Party was not immune to the surveillance of the federal government; former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover made it his mission to cripple the Party through his COINTELPRO program. The legacy of Hoover’s actions—infiltration, assassinations, criminalist discourse about the Panthers—still lingers. Should you ask any two people to share their thoughts on the Panthers, you’re likely to receive divided answers about strategy, effectiveness, and importance. They were radicals. They were freedom fighters. They were dangerous. They were gun-toting fanatics.

Stephen Shames, Memorial mural for Jonathan Jackson, who was killed on August 7, 1970, during an attempt to kidnap California Superior Court judge Harold Haley and three others to exchange for the freedom of his brother, George Jackson, Roxbury section of Boston, Massachusetts, 1970
Courtesy Steven Kasher Gallery, New York

At a time when racial tension again hovers over our national consciousness, Power to the People: The World of the Black Panthers, currently on view at Steven Kasher Gallery, reconsiders this revolutionary movement. In the exhibition, Stephen Shames’s photographs are mounted alongside ninety-eight covers of Emory Douglas’s The Black Panther, the newspaper vital to the Party’s communications and outreach. The collaboration between Shames and Seale, together with Douglas’s graphics, forms an illuminating self-portrait of a group of young women and men who sought to create a new, better world for themselves.

Stephen Shames, Black Panther member sells “The Black Panther,” the Party’s newspaper, in the Roxbury section of Boston, Massachusetts, 1970
Courtesy Steven Kasher Gallery, New York

Shames’s photographs—vintage and contemporary gelatin-silver prints—are displayed thematically and loosely follow the timeline of the Panthers’ rise and most active periods of operation. Some of the first images on view depict aspects of Newton’s private life, a welcome departure from his highly visible public persona. In one image from 1970, Newton, the former Minister of Defense for the Party, stands in his living room shortly after his release from prison. Another striking photograph from the same day shows Newton and Central Committee Member Elaine Brown sharing a victorious embrace. In a series of four images, Newton and Seale pose for the photographer, unable to hold their laughter as they prepare for a portrait. They are sensitive, precious photographs of two friends, two young, black men who were confronting the perils of a racist, capitalist empire.

Stephen Shames, Black Panther co-founders Bobby Seale & Huey Newton pose in Huey’s penthouse apartment, Oakland, California, 1971
Courtesy Steven Kasher Gallery, New York

Shames accesses the intimacies of the Party’s interior world, and his photographs evoke a tenderness that is hard to shake. This sense of empathy comes across even in scenes of funeral processions, a testament to Shames’s commitment as a documentarian. We also encounter former Party member Ericka Huggins in the midst of a deep laugh while attending the Party’s Community Survival Conference in Oakland; Party members Ila Mason and Jamal Joseph leading a political education class in Harlem; and a Panther child smiling at the camera in the classroom of the Panthers’ Oakland school. “One thing people don’t understand about the Black Panther Party is that the median age of a Party member in 1969 was nineteen years old,” Huggins notes. The youthfulness of the Panthers was an asset, a potency that enhanced the reach of their radical actions.

Stephen Shames, Black Panthers carry George Jackson’s coffin into St. Augustine’s Episcopal Church for his funeral service as a huge crowd watches, Oakland, California, August 28, 1971
Courtesy Steven Kasher Gallery, New York

Shames and Seale’s accompanying book, Power to the People: The World of the Black Panthers (2016), chronicles the Party’s founding up until Bobby Seale’s Oakland mayoral campaign in 1973, and privileges the personal accounts of Gloria Abernathy, Kathleen Cleaver, Barbara Cox, Elbert “Big Man” Howard, Ericka Huggins, and Khalid Raheem, among others. The book also incorporates excerpts from Newton’s interviews and speeches into a roundtable of recollections from still-living Party members.

Stephen Shames, Angela Davis, who was a Black Panther for six months, speaks at a Free Huey rally in Defremery Park, Oakland, California, November 12, 1969
Courtesy Steven Kasher Gallery, New York

The exhibition, however, resists sustained analysis in favor of the images. Instead of consistent labels denoting the names, locations, and dates of Shames’s subjects, the decision to display only selected interview excerpts on the gallery walls, drawn from the book, curtails an objective interpretation. (Basic information for each photograph can be found in a gallery guide.) Without the kind of authoritative context a museum or historical institution might provide, this presentation fails to engage with internal rifts and conflicts, a much-needed perspective on gender politics, or the Party’s eventual demise. Perhaps this missed opportunity is a consequence of hindsight. We only immortalize what we think is necessary to immortalize.

Stephen Shames, Children at a Free Huey, Free Bobby rally in front of the Federal Building, San Francisco, California, February, 1970
Courtesy Steven Kasher Gallery, New York

Still, the Panthers’ legacy looms large. As we witness the rise of a new group of young, black, activists in the U.S., and as we continue pursuing a vision of liberty that includes all Americans, the story of the Black Panther Party remains a vital point of reference. We see traces of their actions in the interventions of the Black Lives Matter movement, asserting the humanity of black people in the face of incessant state-sanctioned violence, or in the vision of The Black School, a new experimental art school which foregrounds radical black politics and socially engaged art as methodology for educating students. But, the world the Panthers imagined is yet to come. If the lessons of the Party’s successes and failures can offer us any insight, it would be their insistent demand to organize, resist, and ultimately, to act.

Jessica Lynne is a writer and arts administrator based in Brooklyn.

Power to the People: The Black Panthers in Photographs by Stephen Shames and Graphics by Emory Douglas is on view at Steven Kasher Gallery, New York, through October 29, 2016.

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Before They Were Stars

In his new memoir, the critic Douglas Crimp revisits the origins of the Pictures Generation, a fabled era of art, sex, and experimentation.

By Travis Diehl

Douglas Crimp with Cindy Sherman and Robert Longo, 1977. Photograph by Helene Winer
Courtesy Douglas Crimp

The canniest thing he did with his milieu-making exhibition Pictures, writes Douglas Crimp in Before Pictures, his new memoir, was to choose a generic title. The 1977 outing at Artists Space in New York featured just five artists. Yet Pictures would come to embody an epochal attitude toward appropriation and mass culture in contemporary art, and absorbed the likes of Cindy Sherman and Richard Prince, who weren’t, in fact, part of the original. By 2009, when Douglas Eklund mounted a survey of the era at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Pictures Artists” was a category and the “Pictures Generation” a brand.

Crimp had something to do with this. In 1979, he rewrote his catalog essay for the poststructurally-inflected journal October, cutting Philip Smith and annexing Sherman, and elaborated his theory of the postmodern. The processes of “quotation, excerptation, framing, and staging,” he declared, had become the predominant sensibility of younger artists “committed to radical innovation.” Forty years on, Crimp’s memoir adds little to what even he calls an “overblown” discourse. Instead, the critic and art historian spends much of Before Pictures fitting that pivotal moment—the decade before the Artists Space exhibition—into a less academic setting.

Opening of Pictures at Artists Space, September 1977. Photograph by D. James Dee
Courtesy Artists Space

Crimp’s recollections of his art world and gay world educations, sometimes parallel, sometimes in concert, meander through an idyllically derelict, 1970s New York. The cast is familiar: ArtNews and October, the Flamingo and Max’s Kansas City, Jonas Mekas and Vito Acconci. Yet the book also fuzzes up the willful clarity of formal art history with sometimes awkward, personal asides. Crimp’s mother, for instance, helped him proofread the first Pictures on her front porch. When he revisited the text for October, he was laid up with a broken hip from the roller disco.

As Crimp tells it, his “first job” in the city was as a curatorial assistant at the Guggenheim. He was there when Daniel Buren’s giant striped banner, Peinture/Sculpture, unfurling decisively from the rotunda at the final Guggenheim International in 1971, tweaked the pride of his fellow artists—Dan Flavin called it “drapery”—and so rattled the institution that they took it down before the public opening. (The Guggenheim soon fired Crimp, he suspects, for “knowing too much.”) He writes, with tender self-mockery, “It was a famous museum, one of the most famous, because it had a famous building, one of the most famous, and that made my first job seem glamorous.”

Douglas Crimp in his office at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, ca. 1970
Courtesy Douglas Crimp

Meanwhile, his actual first job was a short stint with the couturier Charles James, “designer of the purple and green evening cape,” who was living in bohemian squalor at the Chelsea Hotel. Crimp ran errands and walked James’s beagle; instead of cash, he was offered payment in credit at Barneys. In 2005, when Buren fitted the Guggenheim’s skylight with green and purple gels for his retrospective, Crimp was ready to call it a vindication of decor. The story reads like a lecture pegged to biography. Illustrating the chapter, and providing its hinge, is a vintage picture of Crimp slumped in a chair in purple sweater and green slacks. (It’s the first of numerous pictures of the author.) Crimp’s account sometimes drags with nostalgia; such well-rehearsed episodes contain the desire for critical politics at museum scale—yet reactivating this desire is another matter. At a tie-in “Before Pictures” exhibition, presently at Galerie Buchholz in Manhattan, Buren’s censored piece appears for the first time since 1971. Its striped square meters sit neatly folded on a plinth.

Douglas Crimp: Before Pictures, New York City 1967–1977. Installation view at Galerie Buchholz, New York, 2016. Photograph by Thomas Müller
Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne/New York

The choreographer George Balanchine and painter Agnes Martin receive similar analysis. History and plain life coincide; they rarely seem to blend. During the first Watergate hearing, Crimp was glued to a portable transistor radio in a Water Island cabin. He spends several pages recounting the proceedings blow-for-blow, the only reward coming with an account of Nixonites gathered in the basement of the White House watching Tricia’s Wedding, the Cockettes’ camp send-up of Tricia Nixon’s televised wedding.

There are also breezier chapters. One passage details Crimp’s and his Parisian boyfriend’s try at writing a Moroccan cookbook. (Tajin recipe included!) But his more gossipy memories, like a dalliance with Ellsworth Kelly or buying a fridge that belonged to Jasper Johns, feel dutifully wedged between the intellectual debates that Crimp apparently found more compelling. “I resisted disinhibition probably because I was trying to get serious about being an art critic right at the time I became a disco bunny,” he writes. It’s a fair description of himself, and of his approach to writing this memoir, which swerves between the salacious and the cerebral. “I fought the effect of the drugs I took. I thought at the disco.”

Alvin Baltrop, Untitled, from the series Pier Photographs, 1975–86
© the artist and courtesy the Alvin Baltrop Trust

But where Crimp’s cultural, erotic, and quotidian searches wend through the city itself, his thinking builds on sensation. He spends a few lines reading a couple of Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills through the picturesquely abandoned New York buildings in their backgrounds. His “disco years” in Greenwich Village are marked by the resonance of decidedly avant performance venues with the rituals of barely appointed, underground clubs. Cruising on the West Side piers took him where Gordon Matta-Clark’s sunlit cuts met Alvin Baltrop’s photos of sex acts and sunbathers on collapsing wharfs. Here, Crimp’s almost architectural phrasing strays toward lust:

But the point of cruising, or at least one point of cruising, is feeling yourself alone and anonymous in the city, feeling that the city belongs to you, to you and maybe a chanced-upon someone else like you—at least, like you in your exploration of the empty city. Is there by chance someone else wandering these deserted streets? Might that someone else be on the prowl? Could the two of us find a dark corner where we could get together? Can the city become just ours for this moment?

Before Pictures isn’t chronological so much as geographical: Crimp’s interests follow his moves from one neighborhood to the next. Each chapter begins with moody photographs, taken for the book by Zoe Leonard, of the buildings where Crimp lived and the nearby subway stations. When he left the West Village for Tribeca, it was to party less, write more. Once Crimp found an apartment on Nassau Street, where he still lives today, he got down to the work of Pictures.

Peter Hujar, Leroy Street, 1976
© The Peter Hujar Archive LLC and courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York, and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

The book trails a bit beyond its destination. In the 1980s, as the AIDS crisis gutted the gay world and art world alike, Crimp took up the activism that has defined the rest of his career—figured in 1987 by another October milestone, the special issue he edited on AIDS. New York, too, had changed beyond recognition. In the 1970s, the city was nearing bankruptcy. Today, those streets walked by Crimp and the rest have been redefined by boom. As Crimp writes of Joan Jonas’s 1973 film Songdelay, “We glimpse the city in pieces, in the background, in our peripheral vision—and in recollection.” That is the city “Before Pictures.”

Travis Diehl is a writer based in Los Angeles.

Before Pictures is published by Dancing Foxes Press and the University of Chicago Press. Douglas Crimp: Before Pictures, New York City 1967–1977 is on view at Galerie Buchholz, New York, through October 22, 2016.

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A Portrait of New York in Rocks and Clouds

In his latest series, Mitch Epstein reveals the natural world within the urban grid.

By Joanna Lehan

Mitch Epstein, Clouds #33, 2014
Courtesy the artist and Yancey Richardson Gallery

Unlike the frenetic energy of Garry Winogrand, one of his early teachers, the work for which Mitch Epstein is known reflects a contemplative approach to sweeping societal observations. Though he has pursued projects both intimate and far-reaching—Family Business (2004) documents his father’s furniture store and real estate firm and American Power (2009) concerns energy production in the United States—every few years it seems his abiding home of New York City demands his sustained attention.

Epstein’s New York Arbor (2011–12) engages his interest in the ways elder trees inhabit the city’s landscape. Shot in large-format, black-and-white film, these trees were witnesses to the city’s development as they grew, gorgeous and ungainly, accommodated by the structures around them. His newest series, Rocks and Clouds (2014–15), currently on view at Yancey Richardson Gallery, can be seen as an extension of this interest: the natural world as it bears witness and participates in the business of New York—the rocks, patiently, for eons; the clouds, for minutes at a time.

Mitch Epstein, Central Park, New York II, 2014
Courtesy the artist and Yancey Richardson Gallery

Joanna Lehan: I was intrigued to read in your artist’s statement that Rocks and Clouds was inspired by both ancient Chinese painters and modern earthwork artists. Which works were you thinking of, and what inspired you about them?

Mitch Epstein: It was Robert Smithson’s essay about Frederick Law Olmsted, “The Dialectical Landscape” (1973), that got me thinking about rocks. Smithson cast Olmsted as the original Earthworks artist and Central Park as avant-garde. Olmsted had moved huge glacial erratic rocks there and uncovered mammoth geological formations, which he used to add a primeval quality to the park’s fields, forests, and ponds.

In Chinese painting and calligraphy, I was interested in the soft horizon, how sky and ground mimic each other and run into each other. Things that are opposite are somehow the same and it’s hard to tell where one stops and the other begins.

The Chinese scholars’ rocks and Isamu Noguchi’s found rocks encouraged me to see the inherent sculptural qualities in found rocks. Carleton Watkins’s wondrous photographs of rock formations in the Western frontier were also inspirational; and Michael Heizer’s enigmatic Levitated Mass (2012) at LACMA reminds me of Olmsted’s park erratics; it’s disorienting and humbling, too.

Mitch Epstein, Clouds #96, New York City, 2015
Courtesy the artist and Yancey Richardson Gallery

Lehan: We’ve spoken before during the production of other work, and I know that you take your time on the research phase and plot carefully where you will make photographs, at least you did with American Power and New York Arbor. How did you research Rocks and Clouds? Is the research portion exciting? Fun? Or is it more something you do dutifully to try to manage the results?

Epstein: I did extensive Internet research on the geological past of the city and where to find visible rock formations. My studio manager, Ryan Spencer, made an iPhone map identifying sites to scout, and I visited several hundred locations looking for rocks, but only photographed a fraction of them. Although I set out in the morning with a clear plan, I often wandered off track and made unexpected discoveries, which was fun! I’m not beholden in my approach to any fixed pictorial idea or typology: my pictures take shape as I compose them on the 8-by-10-inch ground glass.

Mitch Epstein, Rockaway, Queens, 2014
Courtesy the artist and Yancey Richardson Gallery

After six months photographing rocks, I knew the project called for a counterpart. I chose clouds as an opposite to rocks. I thought about ancient time versus contemporary time. Clouds opened up a much broader canvas for the project; they are the most democratic form of nature in the city—they’re accessible. I could photograph them anywhere and in conjunction with anything. I also had a “cloud map” on my iPhone referencing sites that would enable me to photograph clouds in tandem with meaningful elements of the city, be they architectural, human, or natural. The hardest part about clouds was predicting when they’d show up. I had nine weather apps, but none were completely reliable. So research has its limits. A lot of my work is serendipitous.

Mitch Epstein, Indian Prayer Rock, Pelham Bay Park, Bronx, 2015
Courtesy the artist and Yancey Richardson Gallery

Lehan: A rock, in particular, seems a challenging subject, but your rocks have a dynamic presence. They are monuments and they are—maybe characters?—notably in Central Park, New York II (2015) and Indian Prayer Rock, Pelham Bay Park, Bronx (2015). How did you achieve this? As you were editing your film, how did you know when you got the rock right?

Epstein: How to animate a rock and infer its unfathomable timeline of hundreds of millions of years was daunting. I often returned to photograph rocks multiple times, and there were rocks that I never photographed well. I looked for their kinetic qualities and what distinguished them. Traces of the human hand also mattered; like the Weeping Beech, Brooklyn Botanic Garden (2011) in New York Arbor, the Indian Prayer Rock has many layers of graffiti that have been painted over in a slapdash fashion by Parks Department workers, which give the rock’s surface an odd patina.

Mitch Epstein, Weeping Beech, Brooklyn Botanic Garden, 2011
Courtesy the artist and Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York

I’m a proponent of a slow, introspective approach to photography. I think I avoid clichés by taking time to develop a relationship with my subject—repeat visits help. I consider carefully where to set the camera in relation to my subject, and how focus and depth of field will define and give dimension to my subject. Editing is central to my practice. I never know what my pictures will look like until I see them as contact sheets, and then I study them and work hard at seeing them with detachment and clarity.

Mitch Epstein, Clouds #89, New York City, 2015
Courtesy the artist and Yancey Richardson Gallery

Lehan: But clouds are freighted with photo history, from Stieglitz on. How did you avoid clichés with those?

Epstein: The history of art and photography, and my own past, are crucial reference points; however, I’m not consciously thinking about other photographs or photographers when I’m out in the real world with my camera. Photography, practiced with diligence and an open mind, is capable of transcending the heavy burden of photographic clichés.

My rocks and clouds, like my trees in New York Arbor, exist (photographically) in relation to human enterprise. I’m not a nature photographer. It’s the inextricability of human society and nature that interests me. How do they accommodate and alter one another? For decades, New York City has been a trope for me, a stand-in for all human society. The three series taken together—rocks, clouds, trees—invert a cultural mecca into an elemental city; they flip people’s characteristic self-importance, so that in these photographs, people (and the signs of their hand) are secondary.

Mitch Epstein, Clouds #18, New York City, 2014
Courtesy the artist and Yancey Richardson Gallery

Lehan: The work in New York Arbor, and these new works even more so—they seem to represent an evolution in your work, or maybe it’s a distillation. How do you characterize this shift?

Epstein: My evolution has led to a distillation, yes. The formal complexity of my older work, like Family Business and American Power, isn’t gone: it’s set deeper inside the image—there’s a metaphysical layering now, and many of the actual images are deceptively direct. Like certain poems that sound simple but aren’t.

Mitch Epstein, The Hernshead, Central Park, 2014
Courtesy the artist and Yancey Richardson Gallery

Lehan: While everything you’ve done shows a masterful ability for sociopolitical observation—these are more existential, more concerned with time. Has this been a conscious movement? Of course that one begs the question—after Rocks and Clouds, what has now captured your imagination?

Epstein: Time is as inescapable in life and as it is in picture making. In the winter of 2014, I ruptured my Achilles tendon and time, as I knew it, came to a halt, which forced me to think about my own human timeline in relation to the long duration of rocks. And later, I considered the speed of clouds—how they come and go so fast.

What I am doing now? Believe it or not, I’m recovering from a calcaneus fracture, only three years after rupturing my Achilles tendon. So who knows where this will lead me. I’m about to go back to a long-term project about the meeting of the animal and human worlds; and I’m also taking on some commissioned work for the first time in many years, and enjoying the challenges of making pictures within the constraints of an assignment, often in unfamiliar territory.

Joanna Lehan is a writer and an adjunct curator at The International Center of Photography. She teaches in the ICP-Bard MFA program.

Rocks and Clouds is on view at Yancey Richardson Gallery through October 22, 2016.

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The Archipelago of Desire

In Cape Verde, a Portuguese photographer documents the trans community with candid intimacy.

By Amelia Rina

Pauliana Valente Pimentel, Quel Pedra, 2016
Courtesy the artist and Museu Coleção Berardo, Lisbon

On the remote island of São Vicente, in the archipelagos of Cape Verde off the coast of West Africa, there is a rock referred to as Quel Pedra, or “that stone.” According to a local legend, anyone who sits on the stone instantly becomes gay. Such legends have lead to the discrimination against individuals who don’t conform to heteronormative gender roles, but on São Vicente a more inclusive perspective has developed.

When the Portuguese artist Pauliana Valente Pimentel traveled to São Vicente in 2014 as an artist-in-residence for the Cape Verde International Photo Festival, she was inspired by photographs of the island’s first gay pride parade the previous year. Once on the island, she befriended a group of young gay men and trans women, ages seventeen to twenty-five, and began to document their lives. In Quel Pedra (2016), her new series featured in the Novo Banco Photo prize exhibition at the Museu Coleção Berardo in Lisbon, Valente Pimentel portrays a distinctive community with insight and intimacy. When I visited the exhibition recently, which included the work of her fellow prize nominees Félix Mula and Mónica de Miranda, I was struck by Valente Pimentel’s candid view of young people experimenting with gender and sexuality.

Pauliana Valente Pimentel, Quel Pedra, 2016
Courtesy the artist and Museu Coleção Berardo, Lisbon

For over a decade, Valente Pimentel has immersed herself in the lives of others as a way to explore relationships, especially those between adolescents. Thinking about today’s global economic and migration crises, Valente Pimentel explained to me recently, she has been particularly attracted to the earnest nature and mutability of young people. (Her interest in fluid identities extends from previous work documenting transsexual prostitutes her hometown of Lisbon.) In Mindelo, the capital of Quel Pedra, Valente Pimentel was surprised to find members of the LGBTQ community living with the support of their families and friends.

Unlike the neighboring islands and mainland countries, São Vicente has developed an unusual acceptance of non-binary gender identities and sexualities. (In Santiago, Cape Verde’s capital, intolerance toward the LGBTQ community persists, despite the legalization of same-sex sexual conduct in 2004; same-sex marriage is still not recognized). During her time on the island, Valente Pimentel observed the hybrid influences of both European and African cultures within the city’s small population, which might account for an environment in which individuals have more latitude to define their identities on their own terms.

Pauliana Valente Pimentel, Quel Pedra, 2016
Courtesy the artist and Museu Coleção Berardo, Lisbon

The spirit of hybridization saturates Valente Pimentel’s untitled photographs from São Vicente of Steffy and her seven friends Edinha, Gi, Elton, Sindji, Suzy Marie, Henio, and Jason. In one image, we see Suzy Marie wearing a leopard-print jumpsuit and mint, snake print heels; on a rocky hillside, she sits atop a rusting oil barrel, in front of her small, shed-like house. Her gaze is one of calm confidence, and her muscular body rests comfortably in a pose that exudes feminine strength and dignity. Through experimenting with fashions and poses, Valente Pimentel’s subjects consider ways to perform identities such as “sexy,” “feminine,” “tough,” or “masculine.” In another photograph, Suzy Marie wears a white bra with pulled-down straps and blue boxer briefs that read “MEN” on the waistband. Behind her hangs a garment bursting with pink and white feathers, pink satin, and jewels. The soft, light pose, luxurious textures and tones imitate the casual opulence of classical painting and sculpture. In this way, Valente Pimentel’s investigation of identity pays tribute to luminaries of queer and feminist theory such as Simone de Beauvoir, who famously wrote, “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.”

For her video Catwalk (2014), Valente Pimentel filmed an improvised runway show put on by the eight friends. They chose a former Portuguese fort called Fortim d’El-Rei (King’s Fort) as their stage, effectively contrasting the island’s militaristic and capitalist colonial history with its creative and sympathetic—though economically depressed—present. The unrehearsed film’s use of slow motion renders dreamlike choreography, alluding to the act of living between reality and fantasy. Taken together with the photographs, Valente Pimentel’s project captures a community that embraces the confident blurring of gender binaries. Unencumbered by the supposed obligation to be either a singular thing or its opposite, Steffy, Edinha, Gi, Elton, Sindji, Suzy Marie, Henio, and Jason each demonstrate the innumerable ways of being human.

Amelia Rina is a writer, critic, and editor based in Brooklyn.

Novo Banco Photo 2016 is on view at the Museu Coleção Berardo, Lisbon, through October 10, 2016.

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