Aperture's Blog, page 130

Viral Images Ignite Calls for Social Change

In the wake of this summer’s violent shootings caught on camera, an exhibition at the Bronx Documentary Center considers the impact of citizen journalism.

By Amelia Rina

On August 6, 1988, New York City police attempted to enforce a curfew during a rally held at Tompkins Square Park. Clayton Patterson filmed the event on his VHS camcorder and his footage captured multiple incidents of police brutality, leading to the indictment of six police officers. Courtesy Clayton Patterson

On the Internet, there’s power in numbers. Viral images, videos, and even live feeds posted by ordinary people can upend mainstream media and drive political dialogue. But, the impact of citizen journalists isn’t a phenomenon unique to our hyperconnected era. When photojournalist and Bronx Documentary Center (BDC) cofounder Michael Kamber first conceived of the exhibition New Documents, he began with what he describes as the “disintegration of the traditional media and professional journalism [into] citizen journalism,” propagated on social media. “Increasingly,” Kamber explained to me recently, “ordinary citizens who happen to be on the scene with cell phones are not just influencing, but really controlling our national conversations and agendas.” Kamber worked with Danielle Jackson, former cultural director of Magnum Photos, to compile a selection of photographs and videos made between 1904 and the present. The images and their associated texts in New Documents, on view through September 18, demonstrate the indispensable role citizen journalists have played in the documentation of violence and social injustice, and, perhaps most importantly, the widespread circulation of evidence.

Videos recorded on mobile phones show the first protests in response to the suicide of 26-year-old Tunisian street vendor, Mohamed Bouazizi, who set himself on fire in front of a government building after his produce had been confiscated by the police. Bouazizi’s public suicide marked the beginning of the Arab Spring. Courtesy YouTube

The installation, like the cameras used to create its contents, boasts no extravagant bells or whistles. Situated in the 1,000 square-foot storefront of the BDC’s West 151st Street building, the exhibition chronicles the recent history of image capturing and sharing technology, from early cameras to Facebook Live. Along one gray wall, punctuated with recessed displays, visitors encounter photographs and magazines, as well as videos playing on a variety of devices. This combination of materials produces a potent contrast between the unspeakable, yet chillingly familiar horrors enacted by humans, and an invigorating optimism, offering a concentrated perspective on nonprofessional media and a sense that positive change is possible through visual activism.

One of four photographs secretly taken in August 1944 at the Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz by a special unit of prisoners known as sonderkommandos. They were charged with disposing corpses of gas chamber victims, and documented their activity using what an eyewitness has described as a Leica. Alberto Errera, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, Poland, August, 1944

Originally slated to open in mid-July, Kamber realized he needed to reevaluate New Documents after the first eight days of July saw the deaths of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and Philando Castile in St. Paul, Minnesota, and the shooting of five police officers by a sniper in Dallas. Kamber reached out to Jackson to steer a new curatorial agenda. (The exhibition later opened on July 28.) Together, revising the original criteria, they decided that each document in the exhibition must have been made by bystanders witnessing socially charged events—as opposed to state-owned cameras, perpetrators’ cameras, or surveillance cameras—and the distribution of the images must have been intended as a means of exposing injustice.

Nsala of Wala with the severed hand and foot of his five-year-old daughter, who was murdered by an ABIR (Anglo-Belgian India Rubber Company) militia, a result of King Leopold of Belgium’s brutal colonial rule, ca. 1904. Courtesy Alice Seeley Harris/Anti-Slavery International and Autograph ABP

New Documents begins with a 1904 image by the English missionary Alice Seeley Harris depicting a Congolese man, Nsala of Wala, sitting next to the severed hand and foot of his five-year-old daughter. Nsala’s daughter, son, and wife were killed and dismembered by sentries of the Anglo-Belgian India Rubber Company as punishment when the village did not meet the required rubber production quota. Seeley, who documented the shocking brutality of Belgian colonialism and the rubber trade in the Congo Free State, ignited social indignation when her photographs were published in Europe and the United States. One of the first examples of a human rights campaign in which photography was deployed as evidence, Seeley’s photographs greatly contributed to King Leopold II relinquishing his tyrannical control of the Congo to the Belgian government in 1908. The New Documents timeline ends with the video live streamed to Facebook by Diamond Reynolds as she recorded the death of her partner, Philando Castile, who was shot by a police officer after being pulled over in a suburb of St. Paul. By the next morning, the video was the lead story across media outlets in the U.S. and abroad, resulting in widespread protest, both online and in the streets.

From the front seat of a car, Diamond Reynolds livestreams to Facebook as her partner, Philando Castile, lays dying next to her from a policeman’s bullet. Reynolds confronts the police officer as she talks into the camera and recounts the moments earlier when the police officer fired on Mr. Castile. St. Paul, Minnesota, July 2016. Courtesy Diamond Reynolds/Facebook

Between these bookends, New Documents includes photographs such as the only existing images of Auschwitz taken by a prisoner, which show Jews being led to a gas chamber and their bodies being burned, and a 2004 photograph of the coffins of American service members killed in Iraq, extending far down the cargo hold of a plane returning to the U.S. The U.S. government had maintained a 1991 ban on the publication of images of military caskets, making this image, at the time, one of the few media representations of deceased soldiers. (The ban was lifted in 2009.) The videos on view range from infamous citizen recordings such as the 1963 assassination of president John F. Kennedy and the 1991 beating of Rodney King, to the 1978 secret dumping of nuclear waste by the British ship Gem, 400 miles off the coast of Spain, and the 2009 death of Neda Agha-Soltan, an innocent bystander passing through a protest in Tehran, Iran against then-president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

The coffins of American service members killed in Iraq sit aboard a cargo plane waiting to be sent back to the United States. Kuwait City, Kuwait, 2004. Courtesy Tami Silicio/Zuma Press

Though each of the many images alone carries tremendous weight, the most affecting element of New Documents is the illuminating dialogue between image and text. Apart from date and location, the texts accompanying each document describe the result of the image, effectively elevating the photographs and videos to a level of social relevance and accessibility. In her 2013 essay “Too Much World: Is the Internet Dead?” the filmmaker and artist Hito Steyerl argues against the notion that images are objective or even subjective representations of human experience. Instead, she writes that they are “nodes of energy and matter that migrate across different supports, shaping and affecting people, landscapes, politics, and social systems.” New Documents activates the energetic potential of photography—whether analog or digital—and encourages viewers to play an active role in the fight for individual autonomy and freedom.

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

New Documents is on view at the Bronx Documentary Center through September 18, 2016.

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Alex Webb’s La Calle Gives Voice to Mexico’s Streets

When photographer Alex Webb first visited Mexico in 1975, he was immediately captivated by the intense light, color, and energy of its streets. Over the next few decades, he would return numerous times, drawn to the U.S.-Mexico border, and then into southern Mexico in the 1980s and ’90s. Casting his preconceptions aside, he allowed his camera to lead him.

“I work extremely intuitively,” Webb said in a recent interview at the Aperture Gallery, where his exhibition La Calle is currently on view. “I wander, I respond. I don’t work rationally at all. Am I aware of certain elements rationally at times? Sure. But I think that often when I am more aware of them, it usually means that the picture falls flat.”

The resulting images are multilayered and evocative. In each of his street photographs, Webb distills gesture, light, and cultural tensions into single, mesmerizing frames that convey mystery, irony, and humor. Now, La Calle, a photobook and corresponding exhibition, bring together over thirty years of Webb’s images. The work commemorates the Mexican street as a sociopolitical bellwether—albeit one that has undergone significant transformation since Webb’s first trips to the country.

Throughout the photobook, commissioned texts by noted Mexican and Mexican-American authors Guillermo Arriaga, Álvaro Enrigue, Valeria Luiselli, Guadalupe Nettel, and Mónica de la Torre lend further insight into the roles the streets have played for generations, reflecting Mexico’s past, projecting into its future, and providing a stage for the theatre of everyday life.

“I think that their words, on some level, give voice to the streets of Mexico, specifically Mexican voices, which is distinctly different, and hence complimentary to what my photographs do,” Webb said. “I love the fact that Valeria Luiselli’s piece refers to the hideousness of a street, but how she loves the street because it’s hideous. I thought that was kind of wonderful.”

Alex Webb, Ajijic, Jalisco, 1983; from Alex Webb: La Calle (Aperture/Televisa Foundation, 2016) © Alex Webb / Magnum Photos

Alex Webb: La Calle, Photographs from Mexico is available here. The corresponding exhibition will be on view at Aperture Gallery through October 26, 2016.

Alex Webb: La CalleLa Calle brings together more than thirty years of photography from the streets of Mexico by Alex Webb, spanning 1975 to 2007. Whether in black and white or color, Webb’s richly layered and complex compositions touch on multiple genres. As Geoff Dyer writes, “Wherever he goes, Webb always ends up in a Bermuda-shaped triangle where the distinctions between photojournalism, documentary, and art blur and disappear.” Webb’s ability to distill gesture, light, and cultural tensions into single, beguiling frames results in evocative images that convey a sense of mystery, irony, and humor.

Following an initial trip in the mid-1970s, Webb returned frequently to Mexico, working intensely on the U.S.–Mexico border and into southern Mexico throughout the 1980s and ’90s, inspired by what poet Octavio Paz calls “Mexicanism—delight in decorations, carelessness and pomp, negligence, passion, and reserve.” La Calle presents a commemoration of the Mexican street as a sociopolitical bellwether—albeit one that has undergone significant transformation since Webb’s first trips to the country. Newly commissioned pieces from noted Mexican and Mexican American authors lend further insight into the roles the streets have played for generations: part arterial network, part historical palimpsest, and part absurdist theater of the everyday.




$60.00

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In Amsterdam, Predicting the Future of Photography

Ahead of the Unseen Photo Festival, beginning on September 16 in Amsterdam, Emilia van Lynden, Head of Artistic Affairs, speaks with Aperture about what to expect from this year’s edition of the pioneering photography fair, including a pop-up portrait studio, zine swapping, and young talents on the rise.

Christto & Andrew, The Rumble in the Jungle, 2016 © the artists

Aperture: Since its first edition in 2012, Unseen Photo Festival has set out to present unknown talents and unknown works by major, established artists. Or, as the campaign artist duo Christto & Andrew put it, to “‘predict’ the future of photography.” Now in its fifth year, what has changed? What can audiences expect from this year’s Unseen? Are there still unknown images to discover?

Emilia van Lynden: From its inception, Unseen has indeed aimed to show what is currently happening within the world of contemporary photography, to look to the future of the medium instead of focusing on its past. To predict the future of photography is, however, impossible as its future has many paths: there are multiple directions in which photography is moving and many of these futures are visible at Unseen.

One of them is the notion of embracing the history of the medium in completely new ways. We have seen more emerging artists who maintain the analog elements of photography: artists who reject the need to move completely into the digital realm, artists who instead step back into the darkroom to experiment with historical tools or methods. It is these artists who still primarily see the photograph as an independent object and want to focus on the craftsmanship of photography. This is why we have chosen to curate a show with the photographer and film director Anton Corbijn in this year’s Unseen Photo Festival, which highlights a range of artists who still believe in the intrinsic value of the photograph as an object. The exhibition will include artists such as Antony Cairns, Thomas Mailaender, Daisuke Yokota, and Taiyo Onorato & Nico Krebs. Additionally, the works of Nerhol, Adam Jeppesen, and Paul Kooiker will be included.

Paul Kooiker, History X (hxgfghv), 2016 © the artist and courtesy tegenboschvanvreden

We are also creating a project at the fair site that hones in on the future of African portraiture. There has been a recent resurgence in the presentation of African portraiture within the photography community, especially through the work of masters such as Malick Sidibé and Seydou Keïta. We want to show what emerging artists on the African continent are currently doing with portraiture. Some of these artists, such as Pierre-Christophe Gam, reference African photographic heritage but interpret it in their own completely different ways. Others have looked at the portrait in novel ways, not looking back at past practitioners. Their work raises the question: Is there such as thing as “African portraiture”? The project Face to Face, cocurated by the magazine OFF the wall, invites seven artists to Unseen to run a pop-up studio, including Atong Atem, Delphine Diallo, Laila Hida, Lebohang Kganye, Louis Philippe de Gagoue, Pierre-Christophe Gam, and Zanele Muholi, who will take portraits of visitors.

Unseen Festival visitors and Unseen Magazine readers can also look forward to discovering brand new work through Unseen Premieres, which we introduced three years ago. These are works that have never been seen before in a gallery, institution, or at an art fair. We are overjoyed to be able to premiere seventy-nine artists at this year’s edition of Unseen. This means that people will be viewing works that have never been physically seen before and this is, of course, a hugely exciting moment for us.

Atong Atem, fruit of the earth, 2016 © the artist and courtesy Red Hook Labs

Aperture: Each year, the location of the Unseen Photo Festival within Amsterdam changes in order to introduce audiences to different neighborhoods. Why was Spaarndammer chosen for this year and what does the neighborhood have to offer?

van Lynden: Spaarndammer has a fascinating social history. Renowned for being heavily socialist during the twentieth century, the neighborhood was extremely community-led and there was, and in many ways still is, a great sense of helping one another within the entire neighborhood which has made the community very close. Additionally, this geographical area is where the architectural style of the Amsterdam School was born in order to increase social housing opportunities for local families. Many of the breadwinners within these families were craftsmen and they were housed in what is now Het Schip, the neighborhood’s main museum. Having researched the history of Spaarndammer, we thought it was the perfect place to host our exhibition TOUCHED: Craftsmanship in Photography, curated by Anton Corbijn. This year we are also celebrating the 100-year anniversary of the architectural style, so the timing couldn’t be better.

Antony Cairns, LA-LV 45, 2015 © the artist and courtesy Roman Road

Aperture: In addition to the fair, what are the other events around photography taking place in Amsterdam, either at museums, bookshops, or pop-up spaces? What are some of the highlights of the public programs?

van Lynden: Unseen Photo Festival has an extensive program of pop-up exhibitions and workshops throughout Amsterdam. In one of Amsterdam’s public libraries, Zines of the Zone, which hails from France, will set up an exhibition showcasing the scope and variety of photography zines. They will also be leading a zine-making workshop introducing the public to the extensive possibilities of what you can do with recycled materials. This collaboration links to one of the Unseen Niches—presentations given over to artist-run initiatives or collectivest the fair, the New York-based 8 Ball Zines, will create an exhibition based on zine swapping. Christto & Andrew are inhabiting an outdoor public swimming pool, Het Brediusbad, to put on an exhibition entitled The Politics of Sport, which focuses on absurdities of the sports industry, particularly in countries that host major sports events despite having no tradition of this form of recreation. Another highlight is Artist Recipes that takes place in a community restaurant in the Spaarndammer neighborhood where visitors can have a three-course dinner curated and hosted by emerging artists. Lastly, Unseen is collaborating with sixteen of Amsterdam’s public institutions, ranging from the Stedelijk Museum to Foam and Huis Marseilles.

Thomas Albdorf, I Made This For You, 2016 © the artist

Aperture: The ING Unseen Talent Award spotlights young European photographers. What is special about this award and could you give us a preview of this year’s nominees?

van Lynden: This year we decided to make the ING Unseen Talent Award a fully European award, selecting scouts from across the continent to nominate their favorite young artists.

I think the most important aspect of the award is the coaching trajectory, which we set up with the nominees in the months leading up to Unseen. This year, American photographer Todd Hido is the coach of the award, guiding the five nominees over a four-month period to make one specific work to be presented at the fair. The nominees are also given advice from other photography professionals and therefore get a range of insights to which they might not have previously had access. The nominees also get the chance to give feedback to their peers, which I think is an exceptional way of working with artists who are at the same stage in their careers.

This year’s nominees are Thomas Albdorf, Felicity Hammond, Laurianne Bixhain, Miren Pastor, and Tereza Zelenkova. They all have approached the theme of this year’s award “Fool for Love” from completely different angles ranging from human relationships and the foolish side of adolescence to being fooled by the love we have for our urban surroundings.

Femke Dekkers, Vaas (1), 2016 © the artist and courtesy Galerie Bart

Aperture: What artists are you particularly excited to see participating in Unseen this year?

van Lynden: We present the work of over 150 artists and will be exhibiting more than seventy Unseen Premieres at the fair. I am looking forward to seeing all of our premieres, but to name a few, I am hugely excited about the newest work of emerging artists Juno Calypso, Femke Dekkers, and Jonny Briggs, as well as new or previously unexhibited work of more established artists Roger Ballen, Isaac Julien, and Christiane Feser.

Christiane Feser, Partition 48, 2016 © the artist and courtesy Anita Beckers

Aperture: Unlike most of the major art fairs in Europe and the U.S., Unseen is only focused on photography. Even though lens-based media has become integrated into so many contemporary, interdisciplinary art practices today, why do you think it’s still important to celebrate photography as it’s own art form? 

van Lynden: Unseen is a niche fair in the sense that we only work with photography and, on top of that, we only show work created in the last three years, with a definite focus on emerging talent. We put photography in the limelight because there are so many artists working within this medium and creating phenomenal works of art, tackling global issues, and telling relevant stories. Photography is moving at such a rapid pace—and we applaud and welcome new forms of interdisciplinary practice—but we believe it’s essential to come together once a year and focus solely on what is happening right now within the medium.

Unseen Photo Festival takes place in Amsterdam from September 16–25, 2016.

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No System

On the road with Vinca Petersen, who chronicled the raves, free parties, and traveling sound systems of ’90s-era Europe.

By Sheryl Garratt

Vinca Petersen, No System, 1999. Courtesy the artist

Vinca Petersen didn’t set out to be a photographer. Her pictures began as a visual diary, documenting her leaving home at the age of seventeen, moving into a London squat, and becoming involved in the free party scene that blossomed across Europe in the 1990s. She has built up an impressive archive that records the techno-fueled raves and the lives of the travelers who organized them, but she started taking pictures primarily as a way of recording her own life, preserving her memories of the parties, memories which otherwise—as anyone who has danced all night will know—tend to become a bit blurry.

In the U.K., free parties grew out of the rave explosion of 1989, when crowds of up to twenty-five thousand people would gather in the English countryside for illegal all-night events fueled by MDMA and techno music. Although the primary impetus was hedonism, it developed into an exhilarating wave of mass civil disobedience in which Britain’s young briefly united and partied in defiance of the Conservative government, which throughout the 1980s had thrived on divide and rule. When the authorities finally realized this was a battle they couldn’t win and consequently relaxed restrictions on dancing and drinking, most of these revelers returned to the cities and to newly legal, all-night dance clubs. But a marginalized minority—with no jobs to fund expensive nightclubs, and a liking for the vagabond lifestyle—took to the road and continued putting on free techno parties in the countryside. They organized themselves as sound systems—a term taken from reggae music that encompasses DJs, rappers, huge speakers, and all of the technology needed to put on a party anywhere, indoors or outdoors.

Vinca Petersen, No System, 1999. Courtesy the artist

Petersen had become involved in this scene while still in her teens in London. She did some modeling and as a result met the renowned fashion and documentary photographer Corinne Day, whose work had reacted against the gloss and artifice of the 1980s by exploring a different kind of beauty: young and edgy, but also awkward and flawed. The raw, personal style of Petersen’s photographs fit into this new aesthetic, and Day encouraged her to make more, giving her protégée film and even cameras. In 1994, when new, draconian laws were passed to suppress free parties in the U.K., most of the sound systems Petersen knew fled to mainland Europe. She followed soon after, taking her camera with her, and remained on the road for nearly a decade. Everyone in the free party scene had their own stories, their own reasons for staying on the move, from ideology to a simple lack of money to a yearning for freedom. Petersen enjoyed the lifestyle: “I liked the earthiness of it all, and the traveling. I loved the practicalities, like finding somewhere to park for the night, finding water, going to a new supermarket to buy food, and cooking together. For me it was about a desperate need for community, I think.”

Life on the road wasn’t easy. They wandered through France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, the Netherlands, and Germany, banding together with other sound systems to put on huge parties in remote countryside locations in the summer, then separating to seek out smaller, more urban venues, such as empty warehouses, when the weather got colder. The travelers played what Petersen describes as a constant game of cat and mouse with the police. As a result, they were wary of outsiders, especially those taking pictures. Cameras were routinely confiscated at parties, or film was removed. Of the few pictures by other photographers that exist of this scene, most were taken surreptitiously, and seem distant. Petersen’s images, by contrast, have been taken by an insider. Working with small, inconspicuous cameras, she sometimes didn’t even look through the viewfinder before clicking the shutter; other times she’d leave a camera on a bar overnight and retrieve it in the morning to see what had been recorded.

Vinca Petersen, No System, 1999. Courtesy the artist

The resulting pictures are intimate, warm, but also unflinching, celebrating the travelers without romanticizing them. Petersen shows the damage as well as the highs of drug use, the litter and destruction the travelers left in their wake, as well as the euphoria of their parties. It’s a time and place that already feels distant: a world without cellphones and distracting screens.

Petersen’s fellow travelers often criticized her for hiding behind a lens, saying that it stopped her from being fully present in the moment. “A photograph, especially if it’s not a digital one,” Petersen remarks, “is a recording of the moment for another point in time. I used to struggle with that. But then over the years, of course everyone started asking me for copies.”

Eventually she put together a book, No System (1999), going back on the road for another year in order to obtain permission from everyone featured before it was published. A second edition is due out this fall, and Petersen hopes that a new generation will see her pictures as a guide to an alternative way of life.

To read more, buy Aperture Issue 224, “Sounds,”or subscribe to Aperture and never miss an issue.

Sheryl Garratt has edited The Face and The Observer Magazine, and documented the rise of rave culture in her book Adventures in Wonderland: A Decade of Club Culture (1998).

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Noisy Pictures

 

What does a photograph sound like? In this sonic sequence, a group of leading curators, writers, and historians reflect on images that won’t stay quiet.

Robert W. Kelley, Teenagers screaming and yelling during Elvis Presley’s personal appearance at the Florida Theatre, Jacksonville, FL, August 1956 © the artist/The Life Picture Collection/Getty Images

They’re on their own Tilt-a-Whirl. The sound coming out of their mouths is deafening. There is so much spinning movement in the picture that the fact that you actually can’t hear anything, because you’re looking at a photograph, can feel like proof that the sound they’re making has overwhelmed your senses.

— Greil Marcus, music journalist and cultural critic

Wojciech Zamecznik, Light drawing, study for the design of an album cover, 1963. Courtesy the Archaeology of Photography Foundation

Light shining in black on a white ground; black circles, which leave a white trace on paper—transformations that Zamecznik developed to create a visual equivalent of contemporary music. Two great passions of this architect and graphic designer meet: music and photography, which, in dialogue with graphic design, became his trademark. What can we see under half-closed eyes while listening to Penderecki, Lutosławski, or Bacewicz? A thing becomes its opposite, a single line transforms into fog, a sequence of rhythms.

— Karolina Ziebinska-Lewandowska, Curator of Photographs, Centre Pompidou

Harold E. Edgerton, Antique Gun Firing, 1936. Courtesy Palm Press

Science during wartime changes art during peacetime. Such is the history of the electronic strobe light in the hands of artist-engineer Harold E. Edgerton, who made iconic photographs of bullets caught in midflight, bursting balloons, and exploding apples. The art and science of depicting loud, noisy, and murderous booms and bangs was Cold War business at its best—and Antique Gun Firing was a quaint prelude of what was to come. New cameras developed by Edgerton’s defense-contract company EGG would permit us to see some of the first hydrogen bomb explosions, not as deafening and deadly but as silent and cold.

— Jimena Canales, Thomas M. Siebel Chair in the History of Science, University of Illinois

Eliot Porter, Spotted Towhee in Flight, Tesuque, New Mexico, March 1952 © Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas, and courtesy the Art Institute of Chicago

“The camera offers a way of sublimating the indefinable longing that is aroused in me by close association with birds,” Eliot Porter once said. Sublimate: from the (medieval) Latin limare, to polish or perfect. Perfection must have meant stillness to Porter. That stillness mutes his scenes of woodlands and water, invariably enveloped in a deathly hush. Porter’s bird pictures convey instead the thudding whisper of air currents beaten into eddies by outspread wings. What Porter longed to possess, I imagine, is avian alertness. I can conjure that attentive state not by what I see—too fully or easily—but by the whoosh I almost picture myself hearing.

— Matthew Witkovsky, Curator and Chair, Department of Photography, the Art Institute of Chicago

Bruno Braquehais, National Guards and Communards at the Vendôme Column, 1871 © The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Chantons la liberté, / Défendons la cité! Deaf photographer Bruno Braquehais did not hear the special version of “La Marseillaise”—or the gunfire—that punctuated preparations for the destruction of the Vendôme Column in Paris on May 16, 1871. His picture exudes a dreadful silence that portends the suppression of the Commune during the Bloody Week that commenced five days later.

— Stephen Pinson, Curator, Photographs, the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Andreas Feininger, The Light Trail of a Helicopter, Anacostia Naval Air Station, Washington, D.C., February 1949 © the artist/The Life Picture Collection/Getty Images

Andreas Feininger sketches in the darkness using the light-tipped wings of a U.S. Navy helicopter. It’s a slinky tipped over the stairs by a three-year-old. It’s a single note, holding steady, wavering down to a flat, then ascending through the scale in joyous uplift. It’s a drone whose timbre changes, resonating first in your ear then in your chest. Light becomes line becomes sound, all in the space between eye and mind.

— Brian Sholis, Curator of Photography, Cincinnati Art Museum

Man Ray, The City, 1931 © Man Ray Trust/ARS, New York/ADAGP and courtesy the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

The City—one of ten photogravures that Man Ray produced for a portfolio commissioned by La Compagnie Parisienne de Distribution d’Électricité to promote domestic uses of electricity—pulses with energy. An illuminated Eiffel Tower is overlaid with neon advertisements, creating a visual cacophony of “voices” that compete for our attention.

— Virginia Heckert, Curator, Photographs, the J. Paul Getty Museum

Hatakeyama Naoya, Blast, 2005 © Naoya Hatakeyama and courtesy Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo

Confronted by Hatakeyama’s Blast, I can’t help but imagine the deafening explosion of dynamite that sent this barrage of limestone hurtling toward us and the impenetrable ear-ringing silence left in its wake. Blast is part of a series that traced the journey of limestone from quarry to cement works to Tokyo towers.

— Malcolm Daniel, Gus and Lyndall Wortham Curator of Photography at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

Charles David Winter, Éclair électrique produit par l’appareil de Ruhmkorff, ca. 1865. Courtesy Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain de Strasbourg

Crackling with potential, capturing a discharge equally capable of initiating life or dealing death, this photograph from about 1865, by French photographer Charles David Winter, records a spark of electricity generated at high voltage. An image much like this one was chosen by André Breton as an example of automatic writing to illustrate his essay “Beauty Will Be Convulsive,” published in the Surrealist magazine Minotaure in 1934. Here, science and art join forces in a cacophony of elemental visual static.

— Geoffrey Batchen, author, most recently, of Emanations: The Art of the Cameraless Photograph, 2016

Unknown photographer, Musical instrument from French Guiana, ca. 1910s. Courtesy Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford

This instrument, from French Guiana, is made from part of a calabash and three strings or cords. Henry Balfour, in The Natural History of the Musical Bow (1899) discusses the musical bow as being derived from the archer’s bow, a weapon of war: “We need not even despise the time-honored legend of the invention of the zither or lyre by Hermes, and we may still give to the son of Zeus and Maia due credit for originality in having discovered latent musical qualities in the sinews of a dead tortoise, stretched, in drying, across the animal’s carapace.”

— Philip Grover, Curator of Photograph and Manuscript Collection, Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford

Jason Evans, There Is Love in You, 2009. Courtesy the artist

Color spectrums, flowers, and fine grids. Digital labs use such images to test their printers. Jason Evans gathered some, pinned them up, photographed them on color film, hole-punched the film, arranged the tiny disks on glass, put the glass in a photographic enlarger, and made a C-print. It’s the cover of Four Tet’s 2010 album There Is Love in You. A digital/analog image for electronic/analog music.

— David Campany, author, most recently, of Adventures in the Lea Valley, 2016

Suzanne Dworsky, Sea Breeze, Cape Cod, MA, 1978 © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

While its title, Sea Breeze, conjures one specific sound, this picture suggests many others. They are faintly in the background, but just as vivid. There might be waves breaking, seagulls crying, and children’s voices. We are so close that there is also her breath. And overall, the indescribable sound of sunlight.

— Martin Barnes, Senior Curator, Photographs, the Victoria and Albert Museum

Al Vandenberg, Untitled, from the series On a Good Day, ca. 1980 © Al Vandenberg and courtesy Tate

Al Vandenberg’s series On a Good Day was made in Notting Hill in West London in the mid-1970s. His pictures look super cool in retrospect, and none cooler than this totally stylish girl with her portable cassette player. Music lovers of this generation will remember these things, how they sounded, and how quickly the batteries ran out!

— Simon Baker, Senior Curator, International Art (Photography), Tate, London

Christian Marclay, Untitled (R.E.M. and Sonic Youth), 2008. Courtesy the artist, Paula Cooper Gallery, and White Cube

Despite the title, the sounds that emanate from this picture are not the wailing chords of the eponymous rock bands. Whatever music was recorded on those magnetic tapes left no trace in Marclay’s cameraless cyanotype. Instead, it is the cracking of the plastic cassettes, the yanking of the tape, and the rustling of debris that still resonates. In a word: noise.

— Noam M. Elcott, Associate Professor, Department of Art History

To read more, buy Aperture Issue 224, “Sounds,”or subscribe to Aperture and never miss an issue.

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The Getty Sheds New Light on the Early History of Photography

Gustave Le Gray, Mollien Pavilion, the Louvre, 1859. Albumen silver print. Courtesy The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

The Getty Museum’s new exhibition Real/Ideal: Photography in France, 1847–1860 delves into the early history of photography at a moment when French photographers were making enormous strides in developing the medium’s technical and aesthetic possibilities. Drawn largely from the Getty’s significant collection of nineteenth-century photography—including an important recent acquisition of thirty-nine works of French and British photographs—Real/Ideal presents the work of four photographers: Édouard Baldus, Gustave Le Gray, Henri Le Secq, and Charles Nègre. In advance of the opening, Nicholas Robbins spoke with Karen Hellman, Assistant Curator in the Getty’s Department of Photographs and the organizer of Real/Ideal, about the genesis and themes of the show.

Nadar (Gaspard Félix Tournachon), Self-Portrait, ca. 1855. Salted paper print. Courtesy The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Nicholas Robbins: How did the idea for Real/Ideal come about?

Karen Hellman: I’ve always been interested in the idea of realism, in art and in literature. The era of realism in the mid-nineteenth century was an extremely important period in photography, following the “invention era” (1830s to the mid-1840s), but preceding the moment when more systematic and commercial means (paper, format, negatives, cameras, and lenses) became common in the 1860s. In her catalogue essay, Sylvie Aubenas calls the moment an “interregnum.” I’m also interested in questions about photography as opposed to other art forms. In mid-nineteenth-century France, photography was developed and debated as an art form at the same time that the realist writers and painters, such as Balzac and Jean-François Millet, were creating novels and canvases dealing with contemporary protagonists, whether Parisians or farmworkers. Such approaches to representing life seemed like the right framework for this exhibition.

Robbins: Given the Getty’s rich holdings of work from this period, I imagine it was difficult to edit the selection of photographs for the show. How did you choose to organize the show—thematically, or by maker?

Hellman: It was challenging to edit the selection for the show because it couldn’t be a comprehensive survey of the period—there were many photographers working at this time who were exploring the medium before there were established practices. To select four photographers that the Getty holds in depth was a way to compare four different approaches to the same subjects. For example, Baldus and Nègre both photographed the Cloister at St. Trophime in Arles, but while Baldus experimented with using multiple negatives to gain a wider perspective of the medieval corridor, Nègre photographed a vertical slice of the cloister with a greater interest in the dynamics of alternation between light and shadow than in a comprehensive view.

Charles Nègre, Tarascon, 1852. Waxed paper negative. Courtesy The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Robbins: I’m excited to see that the exhibition includes a number of paper negatives, which were part of a recent acquisition by the Getty. What drove the museum to bring these negatives into the collection? And how does seeing the “positives” with the “negatives” change our experience of the images or our understanding of their technical innovations?

Hellman: Negatives have, particularly in more recent years, been given short shrift in photography studies even though they were some of the earliest forms of photography. It’s harder to look at and read a negative image—we have to work a little harder to understand it—rather than the relatively straightforward ways we read the positive image. But I think that’s a good thing. The negative is an essential part of the history of photography and it is important for museum collections, particularly a collection like that of the Getty Museum, which holds a great deal of early photography, to recognize this and to preserve early paper negatives.

Charles Nègre, Organ Grinder at 21, quai Bourbon, Ile Saint-Louis, Paris, ca. 1853. Salted paper print from a paper negative. Courtesy The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Robbins: The exhibition has a compelling historical frame—looking at the paper negative’s invention and popularity between 1847 and 1860, a period of great social and political change in France. How do political and social histories, whether the revolutions of 1848 or the policies of Napoléon III, enter into the photographs? Or into the projects these photographers undertook?

Hellman: Nothing historically, artistically, or photographically works within perfect frames, of course, but this period in photography and in France was one that seemed to provide a good structure for a general audience to consider photography in a particular way. Political and social histories do and do not enter into these photographs. The photographic processes were too slow to create the photo-journalistic documents of, for example, the revolutions of 1848 in the way we are used to today. What I find interesting is that photographers of the 1850s explored many of the same social subjects as realist painters and writers—mostly because they had to. Those were the people around them or on the street, in quiet city squares, or in farm scenes. They also photographed the great historical architectural monuments of France for patrimony and were commissioned, under both the Republic and the government of Napoléon III, to photograph honorific views of France and French architecture. So they were capturing both the real and the ideal and in both endeavors they had great challenges to overcome.

Gustave Le Gray and Auguste Mestral, West Facade of the Cathedral of Saint-Gatien, Tours, 1851. Waxed paper negative. © RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY

Robbins: As the title suggests, the exhibition addresses the realism of photography as well as the idealism of art and of creative innovation. How do you think these photographs shaped an understanding of what realism is—especially in light of the contemporaneous debates about realism in visual culture—with the work of Courbet and others?

Hellman: Real/Ideal seemed to epitomize the basic binary that photography inevitably complicates and never resolves, being tied to the real—more so than other art forms—but also a medium that can be innovative and experimental just like other art forms.

Robbins: This show overlaps, briefly, with the Getty’s groundbreaking show on the French painter Théodore Rousseau (1812–1867). What interactions between French landscape painting and photography do you see developing in the works in the exhibition?

Hellman: There have been some wonderful exhibitions about the interactions between French landscape painting and photography, as that is the subject and the literal “terrain” that both painters and photographs actually inhabited in the 1850s (most famously in the forest of Fontainebleau outside of Paris). In this exhibition I purposefully steered away from the forest in favor of the built environment. What I find interesting about photography from this period is that it can’t help capturing certain aspects that painters would perhaps leave out or control in some way: a ragged path and variably focused blend of trees and rocks; a clothes line outside a building; merchants on the street; scaffolding and nineteenth-century signage outside an eleventh- or twelfth-century cathedral; as well as the unintended blur of a passerby or horse-drawn carriage.

Gustave Le Gray, Seascape with a Ship Leaving Port, 1857. Albumen silver print. Courtesy The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Robbins: The chemical and technological experimentation of early photography often present a corollary scientific challenge to current conservation and museum science, and the Getty is at the forefront of this work.

Hellman: Yes, and technical research played a big role in selecting works for Real/Ideal and actually inspired a larger project on paper negatives that will extend beyond the exhibition. In collaboration with museum colleagues in Paris, the Getty Museum and the Getty Conservation Institute will continue to collaborate over the next year on technical analysis of French calotypes, for which the negatives at the Getty are being analyzed along with a large selection of negatives in Paris institutions, including the holdings of French calotypes at the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Jean-Louis-Marie-Eugène Durieu and possibly with Eugène Delacroix, Draped Model, ca. 1854. Albumen silver print. Courtesy The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Robbins: In 1850, Le Gray predicted, “the entire future of photography is on paper.” How does the work of these photographers connect to the current status of photographic technologies, when, at the same time, we have advancements in digital printing as well as photographs completely dematerializing, existing only as numeric codes and pixels? Do you see ways in which the same issues are being posed in contemporary photography and art history—that is, the nature of photographic realism versus the presentation of ideal or technologically-advanced or altered images?

Hellman: Many of the same issues that photographers were tackling in the early decades continue to be issues for photographers and artists today. I’m thinking contemporary artists who refer to themselves as artists using photography, rather than as photographers, for example Cindy Sherman or Andreas Gursky. Comparing the work of these photographers from the 1850s (and the photographic technologies developed then) to digital and virtual today, the technology may be different but the debates are fairly consistent. Photography has always contended with its tie to the “real” and today, as it was then in the 1850s, those issues or contentions continue to inspire some of the most thoughtful and innovative works of contemporary art and photography.

Nicholas Robbins is a doctoral candidate in the History of Art at Yale University.

Real/Ideal: Photography in France, 1847–1860 is on view through November 27, 2016 at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.

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Midnight in Bamako

In search of the late Malick Sidibé and the rhythmic roots of his legendary photographs.

By A. Chab Touré

Malick Sidibé, Taximan avec voiture, 1970 © Malick Sidibé and courtesy Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

I knew that Malick Sidibé was unwell. An interview seemed out of the question; I couldn’t bear the idea of dragging the great photographer on a long and exhausting journey down memory lane through his work and life. Not now that the illness was transforming his body and mind progressively every day. But, hoping to get closer to Malick’s roots, I wanted to return to Soloba, the village in southwest Mali where he was raised, to look for testimonies or written accounts of his career that could compensate for the silence imposed by his failing health. I wondered what I might find: Traces of the colonial administrator who was the first to discover the talents of the young Malick at the very beginning of the 1950s, when the French still controlled the region? Fragments of Malick’s life as a teenager in the streets of this village? Jazzy sounding voices and riffs of the kamele ngoni, a six-stringed harp?

We have a proverb in Bambara: “If you don’t know where you are going, seek to find where you come from.”

I went to see Malick’s son Mody to ask for his advice. Malick’s studio is in a house on the corner of a street like all the others in Bagadadji, a working-class district of Bamako. A big sign advertises the studio, and a group of young men (Malick’s sons and their friends) drink tea and talk. Sometimes you encounter a toubab, a white man, who has come to have his portrait taken or to visit the studio. Amongst this activity, Mody explained his father’s daily decline and confirmed that an interview would be impossible. I sensed his reserve and a will to protect his father’s privacy and old age from outsiders.

When I asked Mody whom to contact to accompany me to Soloba, he went toward the door of the studio and called out, “Yacou! Yacou!” A young man came inside. He said hello and listened to Mody, who asked in Bambara: “Can you take Chab to Wassoulou?” Mody said “to Wassoulou,” not “to Soloba.” The Wassoulou are the inner lands of Mali; Mody’s choice of term indicated to me how much the people of the Wassoulou love their land and still have a sense of belonging—not to a village, but to a place, a history. The great Wassoulou Empire once spanned from Bouré (now Mali) to Siguiri (now Guinea). A nineteenth-century empire whose towns have gone to dust. The walls of the palaces and the walls of the slums were made of the same temporary earth from the foundations up, so they disappeared brick after brick, clod after clod. The still standing traces of these formerly glorious cities are shea trees and a few scattered baobabs resisting the harsh stories of mankind.

Malick Sidibé, Soirée familiale, 1964 © Malick Sidibé and courtesy Jack Shainman Gallery,
New York

Malick was born at the heart of the Wassoulou, where the ancient music of the Mandé people is connected, due to the slave trade, to the African American music of blues, soul, and funk. Sober and percussive, Wassoulou music juxtaposes the vocals of pentatonic female choruses with the equally pentatonic kamele ngoni. It mixes traditional and modern sounds, and is epitomized by the work of contemporary performers such as Coumba Sidibé, Nahawa Doumbia, Oumou Sangaré, and many other konos (birds). That generation sings about human suffering and heartache; they sing about women’s rights and the difficult realities of polygamy, which is commonplace in Mali. The warm enveloping voices of Soloman Sidibé (“the prince,” as his fans called him) and Aïchata Sidibé sang, “Chéri, viens plus près, chéri, approche toi … O diarabi, sensation. O diarabi, passion” (Sweet honey, be with me, honey, come closer).

As I drove, I listened to the Yanfolila FM radio station, called Radio Wassoulou. This radio has a very local program—local songs, advice to farmers about their crops, political information— but it does occasionally broadcast hip-hop or rap for its young listeners. At other times, the music program is retro, live from the 1960s. That morning, the Mercedes rolled along to the Temptations’ “Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone” and Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come,” until the radio waves slowly became blurred, and another station, broadcasting a song in praise of hunters, took over. But then the speaker was clear again, the coarse voice of Coumba Sidibé and her chorus in the background. The guitar notes mingled with those of the kamele ngoni, expanding the lyrical content of the song and bringing it close to the blues sound I heard just a bit ago in “A Change Is Gonna Come.” Did a confluence of sounds like these predestine Malick to become the photographer of Bamako’s 1960s soul nights? Otherwise, how could we explain the permanence of music and dance in the history and photographic work of the “eye of Bamako”?

To continue reading, buy Aperture Issue 224, “Sounds,”or subscribe to Aperture  and never miss an issue.

Chab Touré, a professor of aesthetics, is an art critic and director of the Malian galleries Carpediem, in Segou, and AD, in Bamako. Translated from the French by Caroline Hancock.

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Eight Facts You Didn’t Know About Photography and America’s National Parks

This year is the centennial of the National Park Service, established by President Woodrow Wilson. But 1916 was also an important year for photography of the parks. A century ago, at the age of fourteen, Ansel Adams took his first photographs of Yosemite with a Kodak No. 1 Brownie camera, the auspicious start to a lifetime of photographing America’s most stunning landscapes. The history of how the National Parks and photography are intertwined is explored in Aperture’s recent book, Picturing America’s National Parks, which includes stories about how photographers have made both their art and their living amongst the redwoods and the geysers. Here are a few of our favorites.

Roger Minick, Woman with Scarf at Inspiration Point, Yosemite National Park, 1980, from the series Sightseers © the artist and courtesy the George Eastman Museum

1. Carleton Watkins used the assistance of twelve pack-mules to carry his camera equipment through the natural vistas of Yosemite during his 1861 journeys.

Kolb Brothers, Jacob’s Ladder, 2255 Feet Below the Rim, 1913. Courtesy the George Eastman Museum

2. From 1885 to1905, Frank Jay Haynes operated a photography studio within Yellowstone National Park from a Pullman railroad car called the Haynes Palace Studio Car. With his “penny postals,” he established iconic views of Yellowstone—Old Faithful, the Grand Prismatic Spring—and gave rise to the popularity of the photograph in postcard form. Haynes’s studios remained a family-run institution within Yellowstone until 1966.

Frank Jay Haynes, Old Faithful Geyser, ca. 1900. Courtesy the George Eastman Museum

3. In 1904, Ellsworth and Emery Kolb had already figured out a way to sell same-day prints to hikers. They set up their photography studio at the top of Bright Angel Trail where they would photograph visitors at the beginning of their trip. Emory would then run down to the freshwater darkroom they had set up further down the trail so that, by the time the visitors finished their hike, the brothers could sell them the freshly-printed images.

David Benjamin Sherry, Sunrise on Mesquite Flat Dunes, Death Valley, California, 2013 © the artist and courtesy Salon 94, New York

4. Ansel Adams began his career in 1919 with the National Park Service by working as a custodian for one of the Sierra Club’s lodges, the LeConte Memorial Lodge in Yosemite National Park. By 1934, he held a seat on the Board of Directors.

Edward Weston, Death Valley, 1947 © Edward Weston Archive and courtesy of The Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona, and George Eastman Museum

5. In the late 1940s, when Edward Weston began to print color photographs of the parks, viewers found the images to be otherworldly and shocking, because black-and-white images of the National Parks had previously been so ubiquitous.

Rebecca Norris Webb, Badlands, 2010 © the artist and courtesy Robert Koch Gallery, San Francisco

6. Even the gift shops and parking lots have been well documented. In the 1980s and ’90s, Roger Minick photographed the way visitors interacted with the National Parks as consumers of nature.

Marion Belanger, Alligator in Swamp, 2002; from the series Everglades © the artist

7. Who knew that Yosemite National Park employs a Chipmunk Researcher? Michael Matthew Woodlee captures the behind-the-scenes lives of the caretakers of the National Parks, from postal workers to maintenance crews and rangers.

Michael Matthew Woodlee, Chris, Campground Ranger, Tuolumne Meadows Campground, 2014 from the series Yos-E-Mite © and courtesy the artist

8. Photographs of the National Parks were part of the effort to solidify the place of photography in the fine arts realm. The photography group f/64, which was founded by greats such as Edward Weston, Imogen Cunningham, and Ansel Adams used images of the National Parks to further their goals of establishing photography as a fine art medium in its own right.

Jeremy Friedland (@jsfried), Adventure Sandwich, Grand Canyon National Park, 2015 © the artist

While contemporary artists continue to change how these iconic American landscapes are pictured, Instagrammers everywhere have embraced the most famous vantage points, picturing themselves within the same views first photographed by Carlton Watkins, William Bell, and William Henry Jackson. To see a sampling, search for #findyourpark—a social media campaign launched by the National Park Service in 2014 to engage the public in continuing the tradition of supporting, respecting, and preserving the landscapes of the National Parks through photography.

Picturing America’s National Parks  was published by Aperture and the George Eastman Museum in 2016.

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Listening for Eggleston

A profile of the pioneering artist and his passion for music.

By John Jeremiah Sullivan

William Eggleston at his Bösendorfer piano, Memphis, 2016. Photograph by Stefan Ruiz

I remember the first William Eggleston photograph I ever saw, or the first that I knew was his, that it had been made by someone called “William Eggleston”—his images have percolated up into the culture so thoroughly, I guess it’s no longer possible to be an American without experiencing a few of them, if only as album covers (Big Star’s 1974 Radio City, most notably, but there are many), and certainly for anyone with the smallest interest in American art, it’s hard to avoid the name of a man whose work most credit with having legitimized color photography as an art form. Before Eggleston, there had been a sharp divide between black-and-white and color: artists used the former, tourists used the latter. After Eggleston, or with him, everything was altered.

In 1998, when I was twenty-three, I didn’t know anything about William Eggleston. I was a few months into my first magazine job, with the Oxford American (then in Mississippi, now in Arkansas). A woman named Maude (pronounced “Maw-dee”) Schuyler Clay was helping us as a photography consultant. She’s an excellent Southern photographer herself and happens to be Eggleston’s cousin. She also said a very perceptive thing about his work, namely that he started shooting the South just at the moment it began to look more like other places. Its banality, in other words, and not its exoticism, called to him first.

Maude came into the office one day. The magazine was doing a story on the great blues musician Mississippi Fred McDowell, and we wanted to run a memorable image of him, and probably the most memorable ever taken is one that Eggleston shot. It shows McDowell at his own funeral, in his coffin, wearing his spotless white Mason’s apron. Maude had been able, through family connections, to borrow an original print of this picture. I can see her carrying it through the offices. That scene in Pulp Fiction where the guy has the briefcase that glows like it’s full of magic gold? This was close to it. Every person in the office crowded around her as she pulled back the black cover of the portfolio she’d brought. The picture did, I think, literally give off light. Not gold, but pink, the pale pink of the satin around McDowell’s pinched, embalmed face. The whole corner of the art room glowed with that particular pink. I barely knew the brilliantly slashing music of Mississippi Fred McDowell at the time—I’d heard his signature “Shake ’Em On Down” and maybe one other song—but I was convinced that this photograph of his dead body was one of the most remarkable pictures my eyes had ever come up against. You knew a master had taken it, the same way that if you were to see a Caravaggio in a pawn shop one day without knowing who that painter was, you’d know it didn’t belong there, or that it belonged anywhere.

To continue reading, buy Aperture Issue 224, “Sounds,”or subscribe to Aperture  and never miss an issue.

John Jeremiah Sullivan is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and the southern editor of The Paris Review.

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How Not to Design a Photobook

Spread from Martin Parr, Hong Kong Parr (GOST, 2014). Courtesy Stuart Smith

After studying design and photography at the School of Documentary Photography at Newport (now part of the University of Wales), Stuart Smith worked as a designer for the Architectural Association School of Architecture and Phaidon Press. He later established his independent bookmaking practice in 1994. Smith has worked on over forty books with Aperture’s Executive Director, Chris Boot, at Phaidon, Chris Boot Ltd., and, now, at Aperture. In advance of Smith’s first workshop for Aperture, September 17–18, Boot talked with the designer about “how not to design a photobook.”

Spread from Larry Towell, The World From My Front Porch (Chris Boot, 2008). Courtesy Stuart Smith

Chris Boot: You’ve been editing and designing photobooks for almost thirty years. I’m guessing you’ve designed hundreds of books by now. Which books that you’ve designed are you most proud of, and why?

Stuart Smith: I think I have done around one thousand books, more or less, and in the last fifteen years mostly photography.

The books that give me the most satisfaction are the ones where they feels more like a collaboration, and where I have been instrumental in editing and steering the book, in terms of the sequence, the picture edit, the overall size and feel of the book, and the reproduction and quality of the printed images. This is where the magic and unexpected things happen.

I am not very interested in designing a book if the photographer only wants me to be a digital monkey. If I have nothing to bring to the plate then I don’t need to be involved.

With most books my team and I work on, we’re very involved in the creative thinking about what the book is. These are the books I have the greatest fondness for, for example Martin Parr’s Hong Kong Parr, Mark Power’s The Sound of Two Songs, Larry Towell’s The World from My front Porch, Hiroji Kubota’s Hiroji Kubota Photographer, James Nachtwey’s Inferno, and Eve Arnold’s All About Eve.

Spread from Eve Arnold: All About Eve (TeNeues, 2012). Courtesy Stuart Smith

Boot: Your workshop is titled “How NOT to Design a Photobook.” What is it that photographers often get wrong?

Smith: Because photographers are visual, they usually assume two things: that they can design and that they can edit. But they benefit by letting someone else in. It doesn’t matter how well-known a photographer is, the fact is all photographers need a good editor, someone who they can trust checking or proposing picture and sequence decisions. It’s probably the most important part of putting a book together. Often the photographer is too close to the work, or to certain images, and they have a tendency to want to use more images, when they should let some of them go. The reverse can also be true. A photographer can become fixed on particular pictures. I usually want to see a wider edit than the photographer initially has in mind, and quite often between ten and twenty percent of the final picture selection will come in from this broader selection. This doesn’t seem like much, but it can make the difference between the mediocre and the sublime.

I’ve assembled all my experiences of putting books together to present as a workshop, and, of course, it’s a kind of joke to talk about how not to do a book. The do’s as well as the don’ts are all in there. I hope I can help guide people towards the best book they’re capable of making.

Spread from The Sound of Two Songs: Poland 2004–2009 (Photoworks, 2010). Courtesy Stuart Smith

Boot: Sometimes you work as designer of some books when someone else is working as the editor. But you also work on many books as both editor and designer. Do the roles of editor and designer naturally belong together? Is your design better if you are also the editor?

Smith: If I design and edit the book, then much of the work is in the edit. By the time we get to the design, we have established an understanding of the work, and what type of book it is going to be, as well as what the range of pictures are that it will include. It is more likely to be nuanced, and have subtlety, compared to if I am given someone else’s selection of pictures. Also, how a book works, its pace and flow, will depend on pairings and I usually need options to make the book work.

Elliott Erwitt, Home Around the World (Aperture, 2016). Courtesy Aperture

Boot: The book you’ve most recently designed for Aperture and the Harry Ransom Center is Elliott Erwitt: Home Around the World. Is this about the tenth book you’ve done with Erwitt, even though only the first with us? What’s the secret to being adopted by a major photographer in this way?

Smith: I think it’s the fifteenth. The secret, as with most photographers, who are a skittish bunch, is to be there to catch them. If you are able to do that then you are going to have a great relationship; they trust you. And then they show you pictures that they may not want others to see. All that applies to my work with Elliott. Also I have to get on with the photographer to do good work. And we have to have fun too!

Spread from Hiroji Kubota Photographer (Aperture, 2015). Courtesy Aperture

Boot: Is there one recommendation you can offer a photographer reading this who won’t be able to attend the workshop that they should consider when preparing themselves for the making of a photobook? 

Smith: Do a tight edit but then also show a broader B edit. Unless you’re highly proficient as a designer, don’t try to do the graphic design on the book yourself. Don’t print your book via print-on-demand—this is only good for showing your grandmas 85th birthday party pictures, not for showcasing the beauty of your photographs.

Aperture will host a two-day workshop with Stuart Smith on September 17 and 18, 2016. Intended for photographers who are prepared to transition their images into book form, the workshop will focus on editing, sequencing, and pairing photographs, as well as how to design a successful and thoroughly considered photobook. Registration ends September 7.  For more information about Smith’s workshop and other upcoming workshops at Aperture, please visit aperture.org/workshops-classes or contact education@aperture.org.

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