Aperture's Blog, page 131

Aperture On Sight Student Exhibition: Final Week on View

In New York’s schools, Aperture introduces photography to the artists of tomorrow.

For the past three years, Aperture’s team of teaching artists has fanned out across Queens, Brooklyn, the Lower East Side, and Harlem to teach visual literacy in a range of school-based and after-school programs. This expansion of our education programming brings a year-long curriculum to middle and high school students in underserved communities. Aperture’s approach uses the reading and making of photographs as an avenue to acquiring visual literacy: the ability to understand an image’s meaning by thinking about its form, content, and context.

Aperture’s program this year reached over one hundred students at seven locations, which include Brooklyn Community Arts and Media High School (BCAM), Highland Park Community School, I.S. 61 Leonardo da Vinci, M.S. 136 Charles O. Dewey, Storefront Academy Harlem, East Side Community High School, and Grand St. Settlement’s after-school programs, facilitated by the Beacon Community Center and School’s Out New York City (SONYC). These students learn how to visually communicate their ideas and create photographs with intention and meaning; with these skills, students have the ability to make findings and interpretations when it comes to viewing art. Upon completing the program, students have the opportunity to be a part of an exhibition hosted by Aperture, showcasing the photographs and photobooks created throughout the year.

Alice Proujansky is Educational Partnerships Coordinator and Emily Stewart is Education Work Scholar, Aperture Foundation.

Aperture On Sight: Teaching Visual Literacy through Photography is on view at the Aperture Gallery through August 11, 2016.

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Matthew Connors: The Ordering of Intensities

Matthew Connors, Fire in Cairo, 2015

 

“Even the most elevated plateau is less interesting than a mountain.”

 

—Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction

 

 

Join Matthew Connors for a two-day workshop on the process of transforming existing collections of photographs into publishable book dummies. Emphasis will be placed on the process of editing and sequencing images, incorporating text, and visualizing the final book as an object. Connors will present various literary and film techniques—voice, unreliability, plot progression, narrative structure, etc.—and discuss how they can inform the anatomy of a photobook. Numerous examples will be presented as a means of thinking about diverse approaches to structuring books. He will also show a collection of photobook dummies and discuss their evolution from rough-hewn objects to published books. Material considerations and publishing models will also be explored throughout the workshop.

        Participants will be required to submit high-resolution image files in advance of the workshop and be prepared to present their work to the group. Their presentations will be the basis for individualized editing/sequencing sessions that will lead to the creation of basic dummies with the help of an InDesign assistant. The aim is for participants to emerge from the workshop with a working methodology for structuring their books.

Lunch and light refreshments will be served both days. Please contact Aperture staff at education@aperture.org with any dietary restrictions at least one week before the start of the workshop.

Matthew Connors (b. 1976, Port Washington, New York) lives and works in both Boston and Brooklyn. His work has been exhibited in galleries and museums worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; DOX Centre for Contemporary Art, Prague; and the Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York. He has received the MacDowell Colony Fellowship, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts Fellowship, the William Hicks Faculty Fellowship from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, and the Alice Kimball English Traveling Fellowship from the Yale School of Art. Most recently he was awarded the 2016 ICP Infinity Award for his publication Fire in Cairo, which was also on the shortlist for the 2015 Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation First PhotoBook Awards.

        He received a BA in English literature from the University of Chicago and an MFA in photography from Yale University. Since 2004 he has been teaching at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston, where he is currently the chair of the photography department.

Tuition: $500 ($450 for currently enrolled photography students and Aperture Members at the $250 level and above)

 

 

Early Registration Special

Register before August 8 and receive a 10% discount.

Use the code EARLYWORK10 at checkout.



If you are a currently enrolled photography student or an Aperture Member at the $250 level or above,
contact us at education@aperture.org to receive a special code for an additional 10% discount on workshop tuition.

Register here

 

 

Registration ends on Wednesday, November 9
Contact education@aperture.org with any questions.

 

 

GENERAL TERMS AND CONDITIONS

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

Aperture workshops are intended for adults 18 years or older.

If the workshop includes lunch, attendees are asked to notify Aperture at the time of registration regarding any special dietary requirements.

 

Release and Waiver of Liability

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

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

 

Refund/Cancellation Policy for Aperture Workshops

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

 

Lost, Stolen, or Damaged Equipment, Books, Prints Etc.

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

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Justine Kurland on Mariken Wessels Taking Off. Henry My Neighbor

If there is one part of a woman’s body available to anyone as a site of erotic fantasy, it is the breast. We all either did or did not satisfy our needs for nutrients from its voluptuous, pendulous amplitude. Drunk from milk, my son used to push his Hot Wheels car over the then-mountainous terrain of my chest. Or he might hold fast to the left nipple while sucking the right, as if trying to reconcile the doppelgängers with his little fist—the good mommy that nursed him, and the bad mommy that took it away. There are a hundred different scenarios that lead to the same fetish. The titular artist of Mariken Wessels’s Taking Off. Henry My Neighbor, Henry, was a boob man. More specifically, he loved his wife Martha’s breasts.

Of the three-hundred-plus pages, edited and arranged by Wessels from Henry’s archive, over a hundred pages show repetitive grids of middle-aged Martha posing in quasi-erotic positions, in states of undress at their home in New Jersey, from 1981 to 1983. She stiffly offers herself to her husband’s camera, exhibiting more of a clinical awareness of her body than any real pleasure in it. Her gaze never meets the lens, but seems to follow directions to look stage right or stage left. There is nothing extraordinary about these pictures, aside from their immense number. Anyone with an iPhone might have many similar images. By 1984 Martha had left Henry, maybe tired of the constant attention of his mammogram-like camera, or maybe simply tired of Henry. A photograph shows her now-familiar arms, stretching out from an upstairs window and throwing streams of photographs down to the street below. We see the objects of Henry’s fantasy unhinged from the person of Martha, literally blowing away.

Mariken Wessels, Taking Off. Henry My Neighbor, Art Paper Editions. Ghent, Belgium, 2015. Designed by Mariken Wessels and Jurgen Maelfeyt.

What happened after Martha left marked Henry as an artist. He recycled his archive of photographs and collaged together fantastic mutations, recombining body parts into sprawling new forms. These images enact Martha’s symbolic death, engendering a battalion of phantasmagoric monsters in her place. She becomes a mostly headless totem of bulbous flesh, an orgy of breasts, a psychosexual grotesquerie. Henry then used these composites as studies for clay figures, which are also documented here. These sculptures complete the process of abstraction. Martha remains only as a disembodied breast-phallus with a striking resemblance to modernist sculpture.

What is clear is this: Henry’s long obsessive relationship with his wife allowed him to develop a voice that gave rise to a powerful and complex body of work. It is less clear what Wessels’s relationship with Henry yielded. We are told only that Henry left his work in his house under a neighbor’s care, and the neighbor later gave the work to Wessels. Henry is not given a last name, and the neighbor remains anonymous. How did Henry, an artist from New Jersey, end up having his life’s work published by a Dutch artist? What distinguishes her work from that of an editor or curator?

Mariken Wessels, Taking Off. Henry My Neighbor, Art Paper Editions. Ghent, Belgium, 2015. Designed by Mariken Wessels and Jurgen Maelfeyt.

After Henry abandoned his work he built a cabin in the woods to live out his last days. This follows a fantasy dear to my heart, one of isolation and self-reliance—a trope as familiar for visionaries and outsiders as the proverbial ride into the sunset is for cowboys. The final sequence in the book, presumably made after Henry had retreated to his cabin, shows traps laid in the forest and the animals caught in them. These pictures can be read as a final objectification of Martha, or as a reflection of Henry’s own emotional state. In either case he seemed to repudiate carnal pleasure, finally reducing the body to the raw condition of meat.

JUSTINE KURLAND is a Brookyln-based photographer. She has published several books, including Spirit West (Coromandel, 2000), Black Threads from Meng Chiao / Threads, a collaboration with poet John Yau (TIS, 2015), and in October 2016, Aperture will publish Highway Kind.

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Publisher’s Profile: Ruben Lundgren in conversation with Yuan Di, Jiazazhi Press

On a smoggy afternoon in Beijing, I meet with Yuan Di for a chat about his independent publishing house, Jiazazhi Press. We meet at the restaurant Timezone 8, which was once home to Beijing’s first specialized art and photobook store, as well as the influential Timezone 8 publishing house, run by Robert Bernell. Bernell gave up publishing a few years ago, around the same time that Yuan Di started. The thirty-two-year-old is based in Ningbo, a city just south of Shanghai, where he runs a small photobook store and will soon launch a photography magazine, both under the name Jiazazhi. Yuan Di seems somewhat shy upon first impression, but he is a man with a clear mission: to bring the Chinese photobook scene to a higher level.

Ruben Lundgren: How did you start your career as a photobook publisher?

Yuan Di: In 2007 I started a blog called Jiazazhi. The word jia in Chinese means “fake,” and zazhi means “magazine.” I used the word fake because my feeling toward the online platform was that it was somehow not quite real. At the time I was working as an editor for O2, a bilingual cultural magazine, and later for the Outlook Magazine. But I felt the need to work for myself. Although I started as a photographer, I quickly gave up that idea when I saw the high quality of work being made by others. I felt the desire to help introduce their work to the rest of the world.

RL: What was the first book you published?

YD: That was in 2011, a book called Obsessed, featuring the work of Sun Yanchu. Sun Yanchu and I were friends, and he gave me a copy of a photocopied book that he made himself in a small edition. It was a bit of a coincidence, really. I decided to help him make an offset book out of his dummy, with the same title and roughly the same edit, in a print run of five hundred copies. Although it was a relatively cheap book to print, it was a lot of money to me at the time. But I remember I made a calculation that we would be able to break even if we sold it for about $10 [U.S.] a book. The most popular platform to promote the book was [the microblogging website] Weibo, and of course the Chinese equivalent to eBay, Taobao. The book sold out within a few months.

Sun Yanchu, Obsessed. Jiazazhi Press, Ningbo, China, 2011

RL:Was it a big step to give up your job at the magazine and become a full-time publisher? I can imagine your family might have had doubts about this step away from a fixed income.

YD: Yes, absolutely, especially because it was just after my son was born in 2012 and I had moved back to Ningbo. But I had a clear desire, a dream, to become a publisher myself. One part of that was to help out friends, but most important, I wanted to make real books by myself, with photography that interested me. Before I started I made a calculation of potential business, and I strongly believed that I could make it, based on successes like Obsessed and They by Zhang Xiao [another early book]. I have been lucky with some books. In June 2014 I published The Yellow River, by Zhang Kechun. The month it came out we only sold thirty-seven copies, but a month later it won the Arles Discovery Award. People jumped on the book, and it sold out very quickly.

Zhang Kechun, The Yellow River. Jiazazhi Press, Ningbo, China, 2014

RL: In recent years you have participated in a number of international fairs, such as the New York Art Book Fair, Polycopies in Paris, and the Tokyo Art Book Fair. Why do we rarely see independent publishers from China at this type of fair?

YD: Well, I can only guess. The first reason is probably financial, as flights and hotels are expensive. But, more important, the idea that it’s possible to actually just do this kind of thing is not really present [in China]. There is not a big photobook market in China yet, and with my photobook ideas it can feel a little lonely sometimes. At the fairs I can share my experiences with other publishers from all over. It’s more than just the money—it’s really like a family setting. I was the first independent publisher from China to have a booth at the NYABF. People seemed to be surprised and kept asking me if I was from Taiwan.

RL:Would that be because, especially in recent years of political change, it has actually become harder to be an “official” independent publisher? Your ISBN, for example, is registered in Hong Kong and not on the mainland.

YD: Yes and no. It has always been very clear that as long as you don’t cross the line, it’s OK to publish independently. The problem is that even officials often don’t know what that line looks like and where to draw it. I recently talked with the head of a major publishing authority, and he said he had been following my publications for years and liked them very much.

Thomas Sauvin, Until Death Do Us Part. Jiazazhi Press, Ningbo, China, 2015

RL: What is your take on the contemporary photobook market in China?

YD: It’s still a very traditional market, with opportunities to sell classic works from photographers such as Robert Frank and Daido Moriyama. My belief, however, is that the market is a little bit self-fulfilling. The assumption is that the market is keen on these traditional works, therefore publishers import or produce books that are like those books—and therefore the audience is not exposed to a wider perspective on contemporary photobook publishing. I see it as part of my job to introduce a larger variety of books. This is also the reason I’ve started to distribute books from other publishers. I think the reason is not that people don’t want to buy these books, but that those who supply the market are too conventional in their thinking compared to how smart the audience has become.

RL: What does the future hold for Jiazazhi?

YD: We recently published two new books, Fountain by Cai Dongdong and Qu Jing by Lin Shu, both very exciting. This year I am aiming to publish at least another five publications. Upcoming is the book Bees & the Bearable by Chen Zhe, designed by the awardwinning curator and designer Guang Yu. Besides that, I am planning a new book with the photographer [known as] 223, and I want to publish the 3-D portraits that Matja Tani made in North Korea. I am also working on a Jiazazhi magazine. The first issue is organized around the theme “Untouched.” We have an interview with my hero Alec Soth, and will show the work of Chinese photographers such as Zhou Jungang and You Li. There’s so much to do!

Chen Zhe, Bees & the Bearable. Jiazazhi Press, Ningbo, China, 2016

RUBEN LUNDGREN is a Dutch photographer based in Beijing. He works in collaboration with Thijs groot Wassink, who is based in London, under the name WassinkLundgren. Their work together includes book projects, exhibitions, and photography commissions. They have produced over a dozen books, including Empty Bottles (Veenman Publishers, 2007), Tokyo Tokyo (Kodoji Press and Archive of Modern Conflict, 2011), and Hits (Fw: Books, 2013), and in collaboration with Martin Parr, edited The Chinese Photobook (Aperture, 2015), a history of photobook publishing in China since 1900. www.wassinklundgren.com

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Subversive Novelist Seeks Her Muse in Pictures

In San Francisco, Hanya Yanagihara stages an exhibition about loneliness and beauty.

By Glen Helfand

Richard Misrach, Untitled (Hawaii XV), 1978 © the artist and courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Hanya Yanagihara’s novel A Little Life is seemingly everywhere, from bookstore displays to a shelf in my therapist’s office. On the cover is a powerful, closely cropped photograph of a man in the throes of petit mort. His eyes are tensely shut, his hand gracefully splayed along his cheek in a classical pose fit for a Greco-Roman sculpture. I’d seen this picture in Fraenkel Gallery’s 2014 Peter Hujar exhibition, Love & Lust, which positioned male nudes and erotic works in the context of gay history and bohemian New York. Hujar’s Orgasmic Man (1969) makes a particularly enthralling icon for A Little Life, leading one to imagine this unnamed man is the emotional focus of a feverishly addictive book. Yet the choice of a man in ecstasy is ironic; the book itself reveals a plot focused on pain, addiction, and abuse. (The Guardian’s laudatory take is headlined “relentless suffering.”)

Alec Soth, Riverview Motel, 2005 © the artist and courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Yanagihara has been visiting Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco for seventeen years, so the appearance of a summer group show curated by the author isn’t entirely out of left field. Her history with the gallery suggests she is clearly aware of Fraenkel’s large stable of photographers. Yet the resulting exhibition, How I Learned to See: An (Ongoing) Education in Pictures, doesn’t offer many surprises—most of the photographs by Diane Arbus, Robert Adams, Katy Grannan, Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Nicholas Nixon, and others, including Hujar, have been shown here before—but Yanagihara’s exhibition has a literary bent that gives the works a minor new spin.

Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Lucybelle Crater and bakerly, brotherly friend, Lucybelle Crater, 1970–72 © The Estate of Ralph Eugene Meatyard and courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

How I Learned to See takes the dialogue between image and text in the opposite direction as the cover of A Little Life by using words as an entry to the pictures. The show is installed in thematic chapters named after the kind of big themes that fuel great novels: Loneliness, Love, Aging, Solitude, Beauty, and Discovery. Each begins with its own text panel, written by the curator. The first reveals how Yanagihara is casting a wide novelistic net with her headings, describing them as “the things that define any life, and therefore the things that define all of us, a chronicling of the perpetual mystery of being alive.” It’s a serviceable, if broad, premise, though not quite as free as one would expect from an outsider set loose in a trove of major works.

Robert Adams, Colorado Springs, Colorado, 1968 © the artist and courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

In many ways, the result feels like the works are selected simply to illustrate themes. The “Loneliness” chapter, for example, features Robert Adams’s Colorado Springs, Colorado (1968), a classic, Edward Hopper-esque black-and-white image of a suburban ranch house façade with a woman’s silhouette framed in a window. It’s a great picture that declares loneliness straightforwardly. So does Alec Soth’s Riverview Motel (2005), a color image that presents the noir narrative setting of fleabag lodgings where some solitary character is holed up on the lam, perhaps the worn, gender fluid character in Grannan’s blaring sunlit Anonymous, Los Angeles (2008).

Katy Grannan, Anonymous, Los Angeles, 2008 © the artist and courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Portraits of same-sex couples populate the “Love” section. Pictures by Nan Goldin and Arbus, and a Meatyard photo of his wife “in a hideous hag’s mask.” Yanagihara’s wall text points to illegal, ambiguous, tortured, damaged, artistic, parental, and defiant versions of love. These images are narrative provoking; they invite us to imagine a particular scenario for each. As such, the exhibition sometimes feels like a collection of writer’s prompts.

Peter Hujar, Joseph Raffael at the Botanical Gardens, 1956 © The Estate of Peter Hujar and courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

The best moments are when Yanagihara uses the exhibition as a platform to ask questions. In the “Beauty” section, she ponders what that concept means to the camera: “Is it a lovely face? Or something else: a child captured in a moment of self-generated ecstasy; a wooden house piebald with shadows; a second of abandon we shouldn’t be witness to . . . but are?” Among the few surprises are two Hujar photographs from the 1950s. One is Joseph Raffael at the Botanical Gardens (1956), a portrait of a handsome artist sitting amidst foliage: a young man captured in a moment of thrilling contemplation. Yanagihara understands that seeing such potent images are as rooted in time as reading a novel. “The fact that what makes something beautiful is, after all, its temporality,” she writes. “Blink, turn your head, and it’s gone.”

Glen Helfand is a freelance writer and Associate Professor at California College of the Arts.

How I Learned to See: An (Ongoing) Education in Pictures is on view at Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco through August 20, 2016.

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Photography is Magic: An Inside Look at the 2016 Aperture Summer Open

Aperture’s 2016 Summer Open was a call for contributions to the idea of photography as a magical form. This optimistic premise attracted a diverse scope of magical contemporary approaches—from pictures found in the happenstance of everyday life to elaborate stagings of studio or desktop experiments.

“What I really love about this exhibition is the conversation that happens between individual practitioners’ work,” said curator Charlotte Cotton. “It feels like there are a lot of people thinking along very similar lines, experimenting in similar ways, and it’s just a really beautiful reflection of how vibrant photography is at the moment.”

The works chosen by Cotton for the exhibition include a wide range of approaches to the theme, among them snow+concrete XIV, 2013, a series of black-and-white prints infused on glass by German photographer G. Ronald Biermann, and Your White Light, 2015, archival pigment prints on vinyl by Milwaukee-based artist Sonja Thomsen.

During the exhibition’s opening week, Aperture caught up with several of the participating artists, many of whom expressed a fascination with the illusory nature of photography, and the impact it’s had on their practice. “Our perception of the world can really only go as far as photography can,” said New York City–based artist Megan Paetzhold. “So, as long as we keep pushing, I think that our perception will keep broadening.”

See the 2016 Aperture Summer Open on view at Aperture Foundation through August 11, 2016.

 

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Arbus Before Arbus

A new exhibition at the Met Breuer, featuring previously unseen prints, reveals the early impulses of a modern master.

By Will Heinrich

Diane Arbus, Jack Dracula at a bar, New London, Conn., 1961 © The Estate of Diane Arbus, LLC

Diane Arbus was looking for a mirror. By 1967, when her photographs were included in New Documents at the Museum of Modern Art, that search had settled into an intricately artificial kabuki of performed self-awareness. The photographer’s presence in her subject’s gaze was just as important as the subject’s presence in hers. But in the Met Breuer’s cautiously stunning new exhibition, diane arbus: in the beginning, she is just learning to catch a stranger’s eye. This show, curated by Jeff Rosenheim, consists of more than one hundred velvety, black-and-white photographs shot and printed by Arbus between 1956 and 1962 and mounted, each in its own spotlight, on an expansive zoetropic stagger of individual panels clipped between ceiling and floor. The lion’s share of the prints belongs to the Diane Arbus Archive, Doon Arbus and Amy Arbus’s 2007 gift to the Met, and has never been shown before.

At the very beginning, it seems, Arbus was barely there herself. Frozen tableaux showing the mechanics of representation—like the sharp-edged light of a movie projector hanging across a theater, or Bela Lugosi as Dracula on television (1958)—alternate with minuscule sparks of mutual recognition. Boy Stepping off the Curb (1957–8) looks as if he’s just seen a ghost, while Blonde receptionist behind a picture window (1962) confronts the same ghost with more sangfroid. Little man biting woman’s breast (1958) gazes into the lens like a child making sure his mother’s still watching, while Woman in white fur (1958) is haughty and indignant.

Diane Arbus, Lady on a bus, N.Y.C., 1957 © The Estate of Diane Arbus, LLC

Of course they’re all just reacting to the camera. But Arbus makes these fleeting, fragmentary reactions into incandescent moments of radical self-consciousness, sudden shocks of lucidity in the long waking dream of life. She pours so much desperate attention through her lens that some of it is bound to bounce back; even the carcass in Dead pigs hanging (1960) is animated and human. This exhibition also includes an annex of two unfortunately didactic rooms that display a handful of works by Arbus’s contemporaries (such as Garry Winogrand) and influences (August Sander), as well as some of her own later, more famous work. But those long-canonized pictures only serve to distract from the fresh, unexpected sincerity of Arbus’s early forays into the form.

Sometimes a flickering encounter is broad enough to support a textured revelation. Taxicab driver at the wheel with two passengers (1956), for example, is a chamber drama. A male passenger on the far side is confident and self-contained. His female companion, in the near window, is also self-contained, but hers, as she bites a thumbnail and burns down a cigarette, is a bubble of anxiety. And the driver, our Virgil through the ecstatic chaos of New York, looks at the camera with a confidently hopeless camaraderie, as if to say, Here’s another poor soul who can’t help me and whom I can’t help.

Diane Arbus, Taxicab driver at the wheel with two passengers, N.Y.C., 1956 © The Estate of Diane Arbus, LLC

And sometimes the flickers burst forth into fully formed portraits of people on the social fringes: the Human Pincushion, the Madman from Massachusetts, the Man Who Swallows Razor Blades, socialites, female impersonators, and a host of others—all living symbols of the alienation of being alive. But why did such serendipitous candid shots become, in Arbus’s later phase, posed portraits? Did Arbus’s search for connection simply crystallize into an empty ritual? Or did her fascination with unique human expressions curdle into a kind of nihilistic cynicism? At times, Arbus’s view shifts from the humanely documentary to a baffled disbelief in our shared social conventions, the language we use to live and communicate. A gaping old woman in her hospital bed, for example, looks as if she’s faking for the camera, or wax-work, and several shots of adults carrying sleeping children like corpses in their arms seem to imply that death itself is nothing but another false performance.

Miss Stormé de Larverie, the Lady Who Appears to be a Gentleman (1961), which shows a slender woman in a dark men’s suit, black boots, and a thin black tie sitting on a park bench, demonstrates what happened. The photo’s narrow palette and shallow depth of field flatten the bench and tilt the lawn and concrete walkway upward, as if all of Central Park were nothing but a painted backdrop in an indoor studio. Miss Stormé’s pose is casual but deliberate, self-possessed but carefully defended: she leans forward slightly, facing the lens but not quite looking into it, turns her crossed legs almost sideways, and crosses her hands over her lap for good measure. On her left hand is a pinky ring and a wristwatch. A cigarette burns between her fingers.

Diane Arbus, Man in hat, trunks, socks and shoes, Coney Island, N.Y., 1960 © The Estate of Diane Arbus, LLC

The photograph amounts to a collaboration, a relic of Arbus’s and de Larverie’s temporary agreement to create a particular character. But this kind of connection between Arbus and her subject is one that comes at the expense of their connections to anything else. What happened is that Arbus’s instinct for the spontaneous and human transformed itself, through an escalating cycle of self-consciousness and introversion, from a search for meaningful encounters to a method of entombing them. By the time she found her mirror, her vision was too sharp.

Will Heinrich is a critic and writer based in New York.

diane arbus: in the beginning is on view at the Met Breuer through November 27, 2016.

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Doug DuBois on Chris Killip In Flagrante Two

My first encounter with In Flagrante (1988) was in San Francisco, where the year it was released I made regular visits to Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights bookstore, and to the used bookstores sandwiched between the strip clubs on Broadway. It worked like this: I would go to City Lights to touch and ogle the unaffordable photobooks, read a few pages of an ever-growing list of post-structuralist or feminist literary theory and postmodern art criticism, then head over to Broadway to scour the bins in hopes of finding something more affordable (one such find was a $14.95 copy of Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel’s Evidence, from the True Crime section of Columbus Books).

In Flagrante, released by the progressive British imprint Secker & Warburg, known for publishing first editions of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, Simone de Beauvoir, J. M. Coetzee, etc., found its way into the photography section at City Lights. I remember thinking, I should buy this, but I didn’t. So, like many people, I came to study the book in earnest through the Errata Editions facsimile from 2008. Here’s what I Iearned:

1. You can shift an image wherever you need—left, right, or off-center—so that the gutter bisects the photograph precisely where you want it, not simply where it lands relative to the page border. (While hardly an innovation unique to Killip or this book, this was a revelation for me.)

2. Photographs of children can be more than ciphers for innocence and suffering.

3. Anger, attenuated by art, holds fast.

Chris Killip In Flagrante Two Steidl • Göttingen, Germany, 2015 Designed by Chris Killip and Victor Balko 14 1/4 x 11 1/4 in. (36.1 x 28.6 cm) • 110 pages 50 tritone images Hardcover with jacket • steidl.de

In a recent interview with Martin Parr, Chris Killip shared a memorable (and snarky) comment from photographer Brian Griffin about the layout of In Flagrante: “I always knew that you were very fond of the gutter but I had no idea that you’d end up in it.” In this year’s newly designed, discreetly re-edited edition, In Flagrante Two, Killip reorients the book from portrait to landscape format, placing all the photographs on the right-hand page. The vertical images are sidewise to maintain their scale. I have to admit that I miss the choreography of the first edition; the engagement of the photographs with the gutter contributed to a restless dynamic that carried through the sequence of images. With its vastly improved reproductions and unencumbered views, however, In Flagrante Two invokes the statelier rhythm of a print portfolio.

Over the years, much has been made of Killip’s terse introduction to the original In Flagrante, especially its final sentence: “This book is a fiction about a metaphor.” That introduction, as well the other texts (by W. B. Yeats, John Berger, and Sylvia Grant), are absent from this new edition. The Scottish poet Don Paterson, writing for the Financial Times, celebrated this paring away with a parenthetical aside reserved for Killip’s best-known line: “I have still no idea what he means. The work is not a fiction, nor is it concerned with metaphor, if either of these words are to be conventionally defined.” However, in the first edition, Grant and Berger had argued together: “Fiction, I think, because it is a story, not just information. About a human tragedy not an accident. Metaphor because it is through metaphor that, at first and last, we seek for meaning.”

The photograph May 5th 1981, North Shields, Tyneside, is one of the three images newly added to In Flagrante Two. The date commemorates both the day the photograph was made and the death by hunger strike of IRA leader Bobby Sands, in HM Prison Maze. The image is placed within a sequence of photographs depicting food (grown, harvested, canned, and eaten), families at rest, dogs, children, and young adults at play. In the photograph May 5th, there are five children, two standing on a wall posing for the camera, the other three in various stages of either climbing up to pose, or clambering down to leave. Killip is at a distance and well above the children, so the background opens up behind them to reveal a housing estate with burned-out flats and the graffitied slogans “Bobby Sands Greedy Irish Pig” and “Smash the IRA.”

In 2012, the filmmaker Michael Almereyda interviewed Killip on the occasion of his retrospective exhibition Arbeit/Work at the Museum Folkwang in Germany, in which many photographs, including May 5th, were being shown for the first time:

Killip: I . . . went to the only place I knew that Bobby Sands was memorialized in any way. It was in a public housing project in North Shields, which is fiercely Protestant, and I photographed the graffiti in its context. Kids came up and asked could they be in the picture, and I said sure. For me, it was a very sad picture. . . . it’s about how history is lived by working-class people, and how bigotry is passed down, restraining and constraining lives.

Almereyda: The children seem kind of innocent of it.

Killip: They could be innocent of it, but they’re not unaffected by it. Your innocence can’t last. Bigotry is powerful.

Killip goes out to photograph graffiti in reaction to the death of Bobby Sands. He allows a group of children to enter the frame and pose for him. Undoubtedly oblivious to the graffiti behind them, the children think the photograph is of, if not for, them. Killip, however, is quite aware that the children’s presence enlarges the meaning of the image from an angry, ironic commemoration to a more conflicted image about the etiology of bigotry, nationalism, and the conflict in Northern Ireland. The belated inclusion of this photograph within the new sequence shifts meaning in the book, just as a novelist might by adding or excising a paragraph, a poet by removing a stanza, or the painter in Len Tabner painting, Skinningrove, N Yorkshire, who busily paints a roiling storm in front of an overcast seascape. All are fictions and metaphors at work and play.

Chris Killip In Flagrante Secker & Warburg • London, 1988 Designed by Peter Dyer 9 5/8 x 11 7/8 in. (24.6 x 30.2 cm) • 96 pages 50 black-and-white images • Softcover

Perhaps the central motivation and best measure of Killip’s photographs are their distillation of inchoate feelings—anger, righteousness, respect—into a carefully considered argument and concise form. In 1989, poet and critic Daniel Wolff concluded his review of In Flagrante with the question: “What can we do to respond to the kind of public neglect documented in Chris Killip’s book?” In February of this year, poet and critic John Yau titled his review of In Flagrante Two “What Will You Do About Chris Killip’s Challenge?” Dana Lixenberg, Khalik Allah, Zoe Strauss, Dave Jordano, LaToya Ruby Frazier, and Stephen Gill are just a few of the artists answering this challenge, and presenting their own. But whether or not we do anything in response to Killip’s photographs is hardly a measure of their worth, nor is the negligible change in conditions that gave rise to their making a cause for indifference. The project of art is long, and my answer to Yau’s question is simple: keep working.

DOUG DUBOIS has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, MacDowell Colony, and National Endowment for the Arts. DuBois teaches in the College of Visual and Performing Arts at Syracuse University, and his most recent book is My Last Day At Seventeen (Aperture, 2015). A survey of his work, In Good Time, opened at Aperture Gallery in March 2016.

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Vicki Goldberg on Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby Enduring Truths: Sojourner’s Shadows and Substance

In 1826, a thirty-year-old slave named Isabella Baumfree escaped from captivity, taking her baby with her but leaving behind her husband and three other children. She would become someone else: legally free, an outspoken and effective supporter of the abolitionist cause, and a woman who fully understood and astutely utilized the rising power of photography and of the press. Although she was and remained illiterate, she was also a much-published writer and sought-after lecturer. Changing her name to go with her changed circumstances, she entered history as Sojourner Truth.

Darcy Grimaldo Grimsby’s Enduring Truths: Sojourner’s Shadows and Substance is an admirable and admirably expansive scholarly enterprise that tracks down twenty-eight different photographic portraits Sojourner sat for, which she had reprinted multiple times and sold (for 25 to 40 cents apiece) to support her lectures and her life. Grigsby also teases out the message Truth meant to convey, then fills in a fascinating history on the uses and impact of photographs on abolitionism and the post–Civil War era.

Assisted by friends and relatives, Truth wrote innumerable letters to newspapers, asking that they be published. That an illiterate ex-slave in the mid-to-late nineteenth century should have had such a clear, such a modern, understanding of the persuasive (and propagandist) power of both photographs and the press is a fact to be engraved upon the mind. This book should be read in tandem with John Stauffer, Zoe Trodd, and Celeste-Marie Bernier’s Picturing Frederick Douglass (Liveright, 2015), discussed in the Spring 2016 issue of Aperture magazine, “Vision & Justice.” Together, these two books generously enlarge the story of photographic and racial history in this country. (Full disclosure: John Stauffer is a friend, but anyone should find this book remarkable.)

Truth was an activist; she lectured and wrote on behalf of abolition and, during the war, on its behalf as well, for she believed it was being fought to abolish slavery. When her grandson enlisted in a colored regiment, she posed for portraits with his framed photograph on her lap—until he was captured, which often meant death at Confederate hands. The photograph within the photograph indicated a direct contribution to the cause, the closest a woman could come to actual soldiering. After his disappearance, Truth posed with her knitting, another sign of patriotism, as women knitted to keep soldiers warm. She also taught knitting to black women to give the unskilled a skill—slaves did not knit. Always she presented herself as a respectable, intelligent woman, far removed, and properly so, from the imagery of slavery.

Truth’s photographs were mostly cartes de visite, cheap and easily disseminated through the recently reformed post. (How apt that she named herself Truth at a time when photographs were thought to be truth incarnate.) Cartes de visite, which had been crucial to Lincoln’s first election and were key elements in the first celebrity craze (as discussed in my 1991 book The Power of Photography), were the first mass-produced photographs. Truth copyrighted hers and added the text: “I Sell the Shadow to Support the Substance.” Like many an entrepreneur, she ran her sales as a private business. She also made extensive use of the nascent mass media, the newspapers and journals that proliferated in the North.

Her portraits (and Douglass’s) were civil rights photographs: some to propagandize for the Civil War, all to announce that black Americans deserved the same respect that whites did. Photographs have continued to contribute heavily to that cause. In the 1960s, pictures of fire hoses and dogs loosed on black Americans helped spur government action, and more recent smartphone and police body-cam videos of police action against black people have ignited peaceful protests, riots, dismissals, trials, and investigations. Enduring Truths illuminates the resourcefulness and importance of one woman at an early stage of this struggle, limns a detailed map of her sojourn, and underlines the vital role photography has played from the moment when technologies, history, and social change first put it on center stage.

VICKI GOLDBERG’s forthcoming bio of Bruce Davidson, part of a series on Magnum photographers, will be released this spring as Bruce Davidson: Magnum Legacy (Prestel, 2016).

Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby

Enduring Truths:

Sojourner’s Shadows and Substance

University of Chicago Press • Chicago, 2015 Designed by Ryan Li

10 7/8 x 8 1/2 in. (27.6 x 21.6 cm) • 240 pages

156 black-and-white and color images

Hardcover with jacket • press.uchicago.edu

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Eugénie Shinkle on Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin Spirit is a Bone

The images in Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chagrin’s Spirit is a Bone were made using advanced facial recognition software, which gathers data from four separate lenses and builds a model of the face according to the configuration of the skull—the spaces, unique to each face, between eyes, nose, and mouth. The resulting three-dimensional images, all depicting citizens of Moscow, are data visualizations rather than photographic portraits per se. Usually taken without the subject’s knowledge, they are euphemistically termed “non-collaborative” by the Russian engineers who designed the software used to create them.

The book takes its title from Hegel’s claim, in The Phenomenology of Spirit, that “spirit is a bone”—that the essence of the human subject is revealed not through the physiognomy of the face, but through the enduring material of the skull. Both facial recognition and forensic anthropology also rely on the shape of the skull to establish identity. The fleshy parts of the face are said to be capable of deceit through camouflage, decay, or shifts in expression; the bony structure beneath is not.

Similarly, the cameras that generate these images treat the tissue of the face as a thin layer of ephemeral material—a mask worn over the skull. Glossy and slightly elevated from the matte, white ground of the page, Bloomberg and Chanarin’s portraits seem just as easily stripped away from their substrate. Identified only by labels based on each individual’s position in Moscow society—machine operator, philosopher, city dweller—they recall attempts by earlier photographers, such as August Sander, to use the photograph as a tool for sorting and classifying. But here these designations are as inconsequential as the facial features of the subjects they name.

The subjects of these portraits wear the unguarded expressions of those who are unaware of the camera, but the odd, oblique angles and heavy foreshortening make their faces difficult to recognize. The distortions introduced by the software—features warped and doubled, lips clamped tightly—appear grotesque to human viewers, but not to the algorithms that will read the data the images contain. These portraits were not intended for human eyes.

Spirit is a Bone offers a biting commentary on the predictive and preemptive use of imaging technologies by military and law enforcement agencies. Facial recognition is part of a global surveillance industry, generating images that are gathered by the state for future use against its own citizens. The resulting archives are political instruments designed to manage the social body—in this case, as Eyal Weizman remarks in conversation with the artists, by “interrogating the future before it is materialized.”

Barthes’s famous dictum about the portrait photograph as a “closed field of forces” is couched entirely in the personal pronoun “I.” For Barthes, the portrait was a form of social exchange. “Non-collaborative” portraiture belongs to a new field

of forces, in which the face is no longer a living expression of humanity, but yet another digital trace left by the subject in a society increasingly preoccupied with the management of risk and the possibility of threats from within.

EUGENIE SHINGLE is reader in photography at the Westminster School of Media, Arts, and Design in London. She lectures and publishes widely about a number of areas related to photography, including fashion, landscape, globalization, and body/technology relations.

Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin

Spirit is a Bone

MACK Books • London, 2015

Designed by Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, with Grégoire Pujade-Lauraine

6 1/2 x 8 1/4 in. (16.4 x 21 cm) • 240 pages

134 black-and-white images • Hardcover

mackbook.co.uk

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