Aperture's Blog, page 133

A New Documentary Turns the Lens on Robert Frank

In Don’t Blink–Robert Frank, Laura Israel delivers an intimate portrait of the artist who revolutionized photography with his trenchant 1958 book The Americans. Israel, who has worked with Frank since the 1990s, recently spoke with Aperture about the making of Don’t Blink, which opens this week at Film Forum in New York.

Robert Frank in Don’t Blink–Robert Frank, 2015, directed by Laura Israel. Photograph: Lisa Rinzler. Courtesy Grasshopper Film

Nicole Maturo: You’ve worked with Robert Frank on his films for a long time. How did you first meet him?

Laura Israel: It was through Run (1989), a music video for New Order. I used to edit a lot of music videos and a friend of mine who worked for Factory Records and New Order told me on this one I’d be working with Robert Frank. I remember the first day Robert came to my studio. At that time, we used to work in tapes, which you had to rewind and fast forward. It got really boring. So we used to make these little selects. I turned around to Robert and I said, “Once we make these selects, are we going to want to go back and change our minds? I’ll set up for that.” And he said, “No. Once we make a choice, it’s fate. First thought, best thought. We don’t go back. We only move forward.” And I remember thinking, This is my kind of director. That’s one of the things that’s so great about working with Robert: he’s so decisive. I admire that.

Also, I’m a big postcard collector, so after we worked together for the first time, whenever I got a good postcard, I would walk past his house on my way to my studio and I’d just throw a little postcard and a note in the door. And I think, in the end, that cemented our friendship.

Still from Don’t Blink–Robert Frank, 2015, directed by Laura Israel. Photograph by Lisa Rinzler. Courtesy Grasshopper Film

Maturo: Frank is a postcard collector, too.

Israel: I didn’t even know that he collected postcards. I had some really good ones that I had been saving up. There was one in particular of a flamingo, beautifully hand painted. And that was one of the first ones that I put in his door. A few years later he came out with a book called Flamingo (1997)—it wasn’t based on the postcard, it was based on this photograph he had taken of a flamingo in a bottle. But it was little things like that that were kind of like fate, for both of us.

Robert Frank in Don’t Blink–Robert Frank, 2015, directed by Laura Israel. Photograph by Lisa Rinzler. Courtesy Grasshopper Film

Maturo: Frank is notoriously anti-fame. Did this make it difficult for you during the making of the film? How did you convince him to go in front of the camera?

Israel: It was a little odd for me because I’m so used to sitting next to him, rather than sitting in front of him and putting a camera in his face. But I also told him it would be a really small crew. We kept the crew down to three people, which was really difficult under those circumstances, but we thought it was important because we were going into his house, going into his life. It was important we that we tread lightly. And sometimes we went there and we said, Oh, you want to take a break, and we all had tea and cookies and hung out. And I found out later on that that’s how Robert got the Rolling Stones to agree to Cocksucker Blues (1979): he said he would only bring one other person to shoot. The other thing that I did was I invited friends of his, so it was more of a conversation. So Robert and his friend Ed Lachman both look at the book together, or we go out on these photo trips so it’s more of an activity. And it was more fun that way. I hope it comes out in the film how much fun we had shooting the film.

But very early on we found that he didn’t take direction very well. He kept me on my toes, which made the shooting more organic. It was also a little nerve-racking to have three different plans for every day we shot. But I know why he did it. He did it so that it didn’t become one of those really staged interviews.

Still from Robert Frank’s film About Me: A Musical, 1971

Maturo: I was curious to see how the film handled the tragic loss of Frank’s children, Andrea and Pablo. When did it become necessary to include these details so that we can understand Robert Frank the man vs. Robert Frank the artist? Is there even such a divide?

Israel: One of the biggest strengths of Robert’s work, and people have remarked about it, is his embrace of creative work as the antidote to personal tragedy. I hope that comes off in Don’t Blink. That’s one thing that I’ve really learned from Robert: your life and your work can go together, and you can actually use your work to really help you through a lot periods in your life that are difficult. I think that’s what he was trying to say, after Andrea died, with Keep Busy (1975); that was the theme of that period of his life. He had to keep moving and keep working.

That was the hardest thing in the film to edit. I ended up using Robert expressing it through his work quite a bit because those are his innermost feelings, which are more poignant than someone sticking a camera in his face and asking, “How do you feel about this horrible thing that happened to you?” His work really expresses it much better.

When it comes including him directly talking about it, less is more. In a documentary, the most poignant thing that someone says is good to include. It hits me every time I hear Frank say, “Maybe to be in Mabou, it was more difficult to deal with Andrea’s death.” I know it’s this cold, lonely place and he’s in the middle of nowhere and going through that loss. It conjures up a feeling in me that is probably similar to the feeling that Robert had. I hope that I could do that with the film—make people feel what Robert was feeling. Not just have them hear what he was saying, but also to feel it in the film through the visuals. Which is what he tries to do with his photographs—to really convey what he’s feeling through his photographs not just portray what he’s seeing. I think that’s more in line with the feeling of Robert.

Detail from contact sheet, 1971. Photographs by Sid Kaplan

Maturo: Throughout your film, the use of jump-cuts is reminiscent of Frank’s filmography. Was there a particular Frank film that inspired your editing?

Israel: My editor, Alex Bingham, and I envisioned the film in three parts, and it had to do with Robert’s work, so I tried to have the film change. There was the more formal work, The Americans, black-and-white, very beautifully composed, very rough around the edges but also kind of lush. Then there was the period where he started to get into filmmaking but it was still film, it wasn’t video, and he also started scratching and painting words on photos and negatives. From the 1980s onward, he started shooting with polaroid, Super 8, and video cameras more often. The work sometimes resembled a personal diary, especially when he used his own voice to narrate. So I tried to see each part a little bit differently within the editing.

I had worked with Robert on The Present (1996). We had talked about editing the film as if you’re rummaging through drawers, looking for a photograph, or looking through old correspondence and memories. And you’re looking for something, but along the way you find other things that you’re looking through, so it’s seemingly random, but actually is has order. That’s what I was thinking about as the motivation of Don’t Blink as well. The other thing I tried to convey, which is true to Robert’s spirit, is the feeling of traveling along a road and then take a little detour but return to the road again, only to detour again and then go back. Nobody gets completely lost because of the signposts, yet you can take a little detour. That also was my motivation for the editing.

Robert Frank in Don’t Blink–Robert Frank, 2015, directed by Laura Israel. Photograph by Lisa Rinzler. Courtesy Grasshopper Film

Maturo: Many photography students are surprised when they learn that Frank gave up photography for a time in order to devote himself to film.

Israel: That was hard to portray in the film, but I understand why he did it because if you look at the sequencing of his work, as in the series From the Bus (1958), you can see he was practically shooting film, everything was movement, everything was this caught moment that was just about to move—you got this feeling he was going to move into film. That would be the natural next step. But also he has said, “I love difficulties and difficulties love me.” I think it was more difficult for him to pursue film. There’s one part of the film, it’s black-and-white footage from Frank at a conference at New York University in 1971. People were really giving him a hard time because he wanted to show his films, and they wanted to talk about The Americans. And he got really visibly annoyed with them. He said, “At least I’m trying to do something new and different, I’m not resting on my laurels. I’m not doing the same thing over and over again, I’m looking for something new.” I really respond to that, and I really respect that about him.

Robert Frank’s photograph of himself and wife, June Leaf, from Don’t Blink–Robert Frank, 2015, directed by Laura Israel. Courtesy Grasshopper Film

Maturo: What’s the essential film that every Frank fan should see, a primer for his cinematic style?

Israel: Well it has to be Pull My Daisy (1959), although I have a certain love for the documentary shorts because they have a personal quality about them that I really like. The diaristic quality about the videos—it’s something that I really respond to. I can’t pick one, but I can say Conversations in Vermont (1969) is also a film that I really love; Me and My Brother (1969), I think, was really the first music video ever made. Pieces of that are so groundbreaking. I started out working in music videos and I saw that film and I was like, Wow, those are techniques we thought we were discovering and Robert had already done them. Like running the film back in the camera, there’s some amazing stuff in that film, and there’s some amazing stuff in Pull My Daisy as well, as far as music videos go.

Robert Frank in Don’t Blink–Robert Frank, 2015, directed by Laura Israel. Photograph by Lisa Rinzler. Courtesy Grasshopper Film

Maturo: Do you have any future projects scheduled with Frank?

Israel: I don’t know. I’m going to visit him this summer, or it might be early fall. So, we’ll see. To be continued. I don’t know if it will be a film, but it might be a little something. I would work with Robert on anything.

Nicole Maturo is an executive assistant at the Aperture Foundation.

Robert Frank–Don’t Blink will be screened beginning July 13, 2016 at Film Forum in New York.

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The PhotoBook and the Archive

Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa

In what ways is the photobook a useful framing device for archival projects? If we restrict ourselves merely to archives of photographs, the sequential succession of the book seems inherently opposed to the archive’s static taxonomy of images. An archive of categories presents its user with a map of instances, without a narrative trajectory, yet the book form implicitly suggests—and inevitably produces—a sense of progression from beginning to end. How are these opposing dynamics reconciled and transformed when the archive is rendered in the form of the photobook?

It might be that the photobook, as a physical object, reenacts the processes of interpretation implicit in the organization of the archive itself, reflecting an instinct common to the breadth of photographic practice: a need to order, and thus make sense of the changing world. Looked at this way, the photobook functions as a means to give us some purchase on what Gerry Badger describes as photography’s “endless image bank,” allowing us to revisit and rearrange history in the face of modern life’s constant flux.

The photograph’s affinity with everything from criminology to space exploration makes editors and archivists of the countless millions of us who use it. Photographs themselves have become emblematic of the flux of modern life, in both their physical and digital form. In attics and airport databases; in albums, auction houses, and super-cooled server arrays; in corporate and governmental institutions; at black sites and on the deep web, they are continually aggregated, appropriated, arranged, and abandoned at an inconceivable pace.

If it is typical of photographs to accumulate, their circulation and transfor-mation are no less intrinsic to their nature. They migrate from the low resolution of the Internet to newsprint halftone to 42-by-78-inch gelatin-silver prints; they enter new systems of collection and revaluation, eloping from the pages of pulp novels to memory sticks to the uncoated surfaces of photobooks, only to be archived all over again. The single photograph, or the original file, eventually lives on in a multiplicity of forms. The volume of photographic images in the world proves, as Adrian Searle has written, “just how much we like to look, that looking drives us where it will, that we keep on looking.” Thus, it is through the considered articulation of the archival photobook that we are able to look again at our history of seeing the world.

In this issue, various artists, publishers, critics, and art historians examine archival photobooks that span both the history and contemporary shape of this resurgent form of photographic activity. While limitations of space make a full accounting of this history impractical here, we are delighted to have been able to include contributions from seminal figures and relatively new practitioners, as well as show a meaningful fraction of the wide range of books produced in this vein. From works of collage to re-photography, from typological strategies to cinematic modes of appropriation, these projects celebrate the plasticity of the photographic image, and the perennially open-ended nature of those meanings, which can be reconstructed from the orderly depths of the archive itself.

It is through the considered articulation of the archival photobook that we are able to look again at our history of seeing the world.

Giorgio Agamben writes in his essay “What Is the Contemporary?” that “the entry point to the present necessarily takes the form of an archaeology; an archaeology that does not, however, regress to a historical past, but that returns to that part within the present that we are absolutely incapable of living.” The resurgence of archival projects in the photobook suggests an eagerness on the part of many artists to explore the intersections, or indeed presences, of the past in the present tense. Whether these works take the form of “an allegorizing of the past by the present, or . . . an allegorizing of the present by a past it now claims as its own,” as David Campany has written, the works shown in this issue demonstrate that the photobook is an extraordinarily adaptable form with which to reexamine the temporality of the photographic image, in all its poetic strangeness and fascinating complexity. They show us that photographs have a multiplicity of irreducibly social lives, that our histories are malleable, and that those histories might be shored up against forgetting through the patient labor of rearticulating experience in the form of the photographic book.

STANLEY WOLUKAU-WANAMBWA, a photographer,

writer, and editor of The Great Leap Sideways, is a faculty member in the photography department at Purchase College, SUNY. www.thegreatleapsideways.com

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Marco Breuer on Mike Mandel and Larry Sultan’s Evidence

In 1977, Mike Mandel and Larry Sultan self-published Evidence (the imprint, Clatworthy Colorvues, was a joke: Mandel found that name on the back of a postcard). To better understand the context of this publication, I met with the wonderful Kelly Sultan, Larry’s widow. We went through boxes of prints from Larry’s archive. I called Mandel with a long list of questions. He mentioned a number of interesting influences—E. J. Bellocq’s Storyville Portraits (1970), John Szarkowski’s From the Picture Press (1973), and Michael Lesy’s Wisconsin Death Trip (1973), among others.

Starting at a local NASA office in California, Mandel and Sultan went to over one hundred archives across the country. They worked from opposite ends of the files and met in the middle. At the end of the day, they handed over a list of numbers. A couple of weeks later, they would get 8-by-10 prints in the mail.

Looking at the many outtakes in Sultan’s archive now, I began to understand why many standout images didn’t make the final cut. They were clearly chosen for their visual strength, but in the end they turned out to be too strong. Take the images of animal experiments: they are powerful but hard to look at, and, most problematically, they are too easy to connect to.

As the project progressed, Mandel and Sultan honed in on what it was they were looking for. They had an ongoing conversation about “hot” and “cold” images, about juxtaposition and sequencing, about which images can live next to each other without pushing too much onto the others. They were looking for photographs dealing with a particular paradox: you should be able to figure out what the image is about, but you can’t. It does not reveal what it should. Mandel and Sultan were able to find this singular quality again and again.

For me, the images in the book have always produced a powerful sensation: I see, but I do not comprehend. Looking through the book again this week made me think about how we process photographs. I picture the inside of my brain as a library card catalogue. Most images I encounter during the course of the day are swiftly filed away in the appropriate categories. Unclassifiable images like the ones in Evidence, however, create a strange delay: they seem to float in your head, stay with you longer.

But something is different now. My relationship to one of the images in the book has changed: a horse’s hoof being placed on a portable x-ray machine by a veterinarian. Not too long ago, I stood next to a vet during this procedure. It was an emotionally charged event—it was my horse. I now know too much about this scenario to appreciate the image for its other qualities. The sensation of encountering this newly familiar image is visceral and peculiar, a soap bubble bursting in front of my eyes.

I do not feel that I have gained something. Instead, I seem to have actually lost something.

MARCO BREUER is a German photographer and the inaugural recipient of this year’s Larry Sultan Photography Award. He is the author of Marco Breuer: Co*lor (Black Dog, 2015) and Early Recordings

(Aperture, 2005).

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Vision & Justice Online: The People’s Justice Murals

On the streets of New York, murals strike back against police brutality.

By Emily Raboteau

Nelson Rivas, aka Cekis, Washington Heights, Upper Manhattan, Wadsworth Avenue and 174th Street, 2009. “If you are detained or arrested by a police officer, demand to speak with an attorney and don’t tell them anything until an attorney is present.” “Ud. no tiene que estar de acuerdo con un chequeo de si mismo, su carro o su casa. No trate fisicamente de parar la policia. Solo diga que ud. no da permiso para el chequeo. Tienes el derecho de no aceptarlo.” “Ud. tiene el derecho de observar y filmar actividades policiales.” Photograph © Emily Raboteau

I pass this mural next to a laundromat every day on the way to my kids’ daycare in Washington Heights. It pops out from the gritty gray buildings surrounding it—a vision of blues. The mural is hard to ignore. Huge letters trumpet “Know Your Rights!” followed by basic information about what to do if arrested or stopped and frisked. Because I so appreciated the integrity of that message, and the beauty of the mural in my neighborhood, I took a picture of it. After that I set out to find others. There are currently ten (and counting) “Know Your Rights!” murals spread across four boroughs in New York City, typically in poor neighborhoods plagued by police misconduct. In the summer of 2015, I traveled to Harlem, Bushwick, Long Island City, Bedford Stuyvesant, and Hunt’s Point, to photograph them.

Dasic Fernández, Know Your Rights, Bushwick, Brooklyn, Irving Avenue and Gates Avenue, 2011. “If you are harassed by police, write down the officer’s badge number, name, and/or other identifying information. Get medical attention if you need it and take pictures of any injuries.” “All students have the right to attend school in a safe, secure, non-threatening and respectful learning environment in which they are free from harassment.” “No tenant can be evicted from their apartment without being taken to housing court.” “Si ud. es detenido o arrestado por un policia, pida hablar con un abogado immediatamente. No diga nada hasta tiene un abogado presente.” “Owners are required by law to keep their buildings safe, well maintained and in good repair. If not, call 911.” Photograph © Emily Raboteau

The murals were commissioned by a coalition of grassroots organizations called People’s Justice for Community Control and Police Accountability and financed by the Center for Constitutional Rights. Yul-san Liem, who works for the Justice Committee, explained to me that the murals are part of a broader project to counteract police brutality: “Our original goal was to highlight the systemic nature of police violence in communities of color.” People’s Justice formed in 2007 in the wake of the New York Police Department killing of Sean Bell, an unarmed black man, the day before his wedding. “It wasn’t an isolated incident,” Liem lamented, recalling the 1999 killing of Amadou Diallo, who was also an unarmed black man, and who was shot forty-one times by police, as well as the assault of Abner Louima, sodomized by police with a broomstick in 1997, among others. In response to this pattern of misconduct, Liem said, “We’ve taken a proactive approach to empowerment that includes organizing neighborhood-based Cop Watch teams and outreach that uses public arts as a means of education.”

Trust Your Struggle (collective), Trust Your Struggle, Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, Marcus Garvey Boulevard and MacDonough Street, 2010. “Justice or Just Us.” “LOVE/HATE.” “Stay calm and in control. Don’t get into an argument. Remember officer’s badge and patrol car number. Don’t resist, even if you believe you’re innocent. You don’t have to consent to be searched. Try to find a witness & get their name & contact. Anything you say can be used against you. Know Your Rights. Trust Your Struggle. Spread love. It’s the Brooklyn way. Didn’t pass the bar, but know a little bit; enough that you won’t illegally search N.Y.” Photograph © Emily Raboteau

As with protests organized via the Black Lives Matter movement since 2013, these works of public art convey how people on the street are responding to police brutality now. The deaths in recent years of Eric Garner, Freddie Gray, Tamir Rice, Trayvon Martin, Philando Castile, and Alton Sterling (to name but a few) have shown us the necessity of art like this, which attempts to save actual lives at risk. When I remarked to Liem that the murals struck me as an act of love for and by the people living in the neighborhoods in which they exist, she agreed. “Visual art communicates differently than the written or spoken word,” Liem told me. “By creating these murals, we seek to bring important information directly to the streets where it’s needed the most, and in a way that’s memorable and visually striking.”

Dasic Fernández, Know Your Rights, Long Island City, Queens, Thirty-fifth Avenue and Twelfth Street, 2012. “If you are HARRASSED by police, write down the officer BADGE number, name and/or other identifying information. Take PICTURES of any INJURIES.” “Ud no tiene que estar de aquerdo con un chequeo de si mismo, su carro o su casa. No pare fisicamente a la policia. Diga que ud. no da permiso para el chequeo.” Photograph © Emily Raboteau

Indeed, the murals are huge, colorful, and graphic. In each photo, I captured a local resident in the frame, walking past the mural to give a sense of its scale. I chose to respect that person’s anonymity in case they didn’t wish to be photographed by a stranger. Their face may be hidden by their phone, or turned toward the mural, or silhouetted by the angle of light. Sometimes it took hours to get the right shot; hundreds of photos for the one photo that worked.

Dasic Fernández, Know Your Rights, Hunts Point, Bronx, Barretto Street and Garrison Avenue, 2012. “You have the right to watch & film police activities.” “If you are detained or arrested by a police officer, demand to speak with an attorney and don’t say anything until attorney is present.” Photograph © Emily Raboteau

I shot these images with my iPhone 5s. Many of the subjects in the murals themselves are depicted shooting with their phones, too. The muralists meant to convey that we have the right to record police activity. These days our phones are crucial weapons in the fight for social justice. Over the course of this project, I was struck by how many of the murals figure cell phone technology as an agent of social change. When a bystander captured Rodney King being beaten by LAPD officers, prompting the Los Angeles Riots in 1992, that kind of footage was rare. People didn’t walk around with video cameras in their pockets. But as the footage of Michael Brown—who was murdered by officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri, and his body left for hours in the street—showed us in 2014, instant and widespread exposure via social media has the power to initiate nationwide protest. While it remains true that the police may still brutalize and kill us with impunity in this country, it is also true that we now have the ability to lift our cell phone cameras and shoot back.

Sophia Dawson, Know Your Rights, Harlem, Upper Manhattan, 138th Street and Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard, 2013. “Write down the officer’s badge #, name, and/or other identifying info.” “Get medical attention if needed and take pictures of injuries.” “You don’t have to answer any questions from police. When they approach, say, ‘Am I being detained, or am I free to go?’ If they detain you, stay silent + demand a lawyer. A frisk is only a pat down. If police try to do more than that say loudly, ‘I do not consent to this search.’” “You have the right to observe, photograph, record, and film police activity.” Photograph © Emily Raboteau

Emily Raboteau is a writer and street photographer living in uptown Manhattan. Her books include The Professor’s Daughter (2006) and Searching for Zion (2014), and her photographs have appeared in Apogee, Callaloo, Kweli, Buzzfeed, and Aster(ix). These pictures are part of a photo essay that will appear in The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks Out About Race in America, forthcoming in August 2016. They were documented by the photographer with the permission of People’s Justice for Community Control and Police Accountability.

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Vision & Justice Online: Nothing Personal

At the height of the civil rights movement, Richard Avedon and James Baldwin collaborated on a controversial photobook. But, was Nothing Personal a luxury object or a ruthless indictment of American culture?

By Brian Wallis

Cover of Richard Avedon and James Baldwin’s Nothing Personal (New York: Atheneum, 1964)

When it was first published in 1964, just months after passage of the Civil Rights Act, Nothing Personal promised to be a major statement on what was then called “the Negro problem.” Combining the fiery prose of James Baldwin, the nation’s most celebrated African American author, with the electric photographs of Richard Avedon, America’s leading fashion photographer, Nothing Personal was a Mad Men–era, pop-culture phenomenon. The book’s elegant design, by Marvin Israel, was meant to underscore its importance: Nothing Personal is an oversize, slipcased white album that alternates four brief texts with four thematic sections of lush gravure photographs. And yet the hot topic of the day, civil rights, is barely mentioned.

Richard Avedon, Julian Bond and members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Atlanta, Georgia, March 23, 1963. Spread from Richard Avedon and James Baldwin’s Nothing Personal (New York: Atheneum, 1964)

Avedon described the photographs in Nothing Personal as “some of my very best work,” and they include, among other things, his unforgettable portraits of a naked Allen Ginsberg, a dejected Marilyn Monroe, and an unflinching William Casby (born into slavery one hundred years earlier), often provocatively juxtaposed with one another. But the real surprise is Baldwin’s largely overlooked texts, an incisive series of short bursts that have seemingly little to do with Avedon’s photographs. Instead, Baldwin writes deeply personal ruminations and perspectives on the American psyche: its penchant for hollow myths and easy escapism; its aggravated assault on strangers and difference; its cultivated loneliness and constant self-renewal; its unbelievable ignorance and passion for violence; its suicide-inducing despair. These reflections, though coming on the heels of President Kennedy’s assassination and preceding Baldwin’s own exile from America, seem remarkably prescient today and have renewed urgency as we face a new plague of racial and sexual violence.

Fifty years on, it is easy to see why Nothing Personal was in 1964 as an elitist misfire, especially as compared to earlier politically charged photographic examinations of African American injustice such as Richard Wright’s 12 Million Black Voices (1941), Ernest Withers’s Emmett Till pamphlet (1955), or Danny Lyon’s The Movement (1964). But Nothing Personal aimed to go beyond stark observations of documentary photography and prose to experiment with a new notion of equality, and to reach for a more abstract, humanistic, or even philosophical take on the “unspeakable loneliness,” as articulated by Baldwin, of an increasingly depersonalized America.

Brian Wallis is a curator based in New York.

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5 Photography Exhibitions to See This Summer

From dream states to Russian decadence, here are this summer’s must-see photography exhibitions in New York.

By Genevieve Allison

Sasha Rudensky, Purple Suit, 2014. Courtesy the artist and Sasha Wolf Gallery

Sasha Rudensky: Tinsel and Blue

Sasha Wolf Gallery, 70 Orchard Street, New York

Through July 16, 2016

Since 2009, the Russian-born photographer Sasha Rudensky, who immigrated to the United States as a child, has traveled to Russia and the Ukraine to explore post-Soviet culture. In a stylized, quasi-documentary mode, Rudensky isolates figures amidst landscapes or settings meant to signify the effects of materialism. The predominance of the color blue unifies the work, which includes images of an exotic dancer (Snow Queen, 2014), a businessman being fitted in a suit (Purple Suit, 2014), and a lone grocery store squatting amongst dim residential towers (Night Market, 2010). Throughout these pictures, a cool, flinty atmosphere pervades scenes of bourgeois lifestyle in the former USSR, suggesting a pact between economic development and social cohesion defined largely by shiny surfaces. Indeed, the high gloss finish of the photographs—evocative of the work of Philip-Lorca diCorcia—amplifies the role mass media play in the construction of cultural narratives in postcommunist Russia and the figuration of stereotypes, commonly held in the West, of the country’s materialistic consumer class. In their sparseness, the scenes probe themes of isolation and distance. As with the outdated modernist high rises on a faded development sign (New Development, 2009), Rudensky ponders the anachronistically futuristic visions that still appear to frame the cultural landscape of post-communist Russia.

RongRong & inri, Tsumari Story No. 11-5, 2014. Courtesy the artists and Chambers Fine Art

Tsumari Story: RongRong & inri

Chambers Fine Art, 522 West 19th Street, New York

Through August 20, 2016

Most family photo albums confirm Eugène Atget’s lament that the snapshot works faster than we can think: not a whole lot of time, nor a significant amount of thought, goes into the creation of the images that illustrate a family’s life together. That is, of course, unless Mom and Dad are RongRong & inri. As husband and wife, the duo delicately explores their life as a couple and the growth of their family. In this joint exhibition, Chinese-born RongRong and Japanese-born inri present a series of black-and-white photographs created during the family’s extended stay in the rural area of Niigata Prefecture, Japan. Transported from their home in Beijing to an empty, snow-covered landscape, they embraced a traditional Japanese lifestyle. There, we follow the couple’s response to an environment that seems at once new and timeless. Using elaborate darkroom processes such as hand tinting and layering effects, the photographers manipulate the texture of the images to imbue intimate subjects with an atmosphere of detachment. In a notably poetic image, Tsumari Story No. 7-1 (2012), mother and child look out over a distant valley of stepped fields. In other photographs, the family gazes through windows and doorways toward the elsewhere that they are now a part of. These quiet images are less interested in telling us a story than in articulating the silent language of bodies as they communicate together in a room, or as they exist alone in the landscape.

 

Paul Graham, Senami, Christchurch, New Zealand, 2011 © the artist and courtesy Pace and Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York

Dream States: Contemporary Photographs and Video

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, New York

Through October 30, 2016

The entanglement between photography and the dream world, central to Surrealist experiments inaugurated nearly a century ago, is the deceptive subject in this exhibition of contemporary photographs and video drawn from the Met’s permanent collection. Jack Goldstein’s triptych The Pull (1976), suspends minuscule figures in an empty expanse of sky or water or some other unknown medium. Fred Tomaselli made the photogram Portrait of Laura (2015) by charting the eponymous subject’s astrological sign with pills on photosensitive paper. Such pieces, proposing to map states of interiority, stand in contrast to images by Robert Frank, Peter Hujar, Sophie Calle, Paul Graham, and Nan Goldin, among others, which dwell in a typology of sleeping figures. Darren Almond’s single channel digital video, Schwebebahn (1995) is a curious anomaly in the otherwise all-photography exhibition, but like some of the still images—such as Jim Shaw’s Dream Object (I Was Working on an Undersea Landscape) (1997)—the piece explores the world from its underside. Filmed on Super-8 on the Wuppertal Suspension Railway, Almond slowed, flipped, and reversed the footage to affect an inverted reality. Together, these works illustrate sensations of dreaming as defined by subconscious experience, as well as conscious fantasies of alternate states.

S. J. Moodley, Two women wearing party dresses, ca. 1978. Courtesy The Walther Collection

Who I Am: Rediscovered Portraits from Apartheid South Africa

The Walther Collection Project Space, 526 West 26th Street, New York

Through September 3, 2016

In 1957, Singarum Jeevaruthnam “Kitty” Moodley opened a photography studio in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, where he produced government passbook photos as well as studio portraits for the nonwhite community. Moodley, a South African Indian and ardent antiapartheid activist, opened his studio to poor and working class sitters, who would have been classified by apartheid legislation as “Black,” “Indian,” or “Coloured.” Dating from the 1970’s and early ’80s, this selection presents a uniquely personal portrait of life in South Africa at a time of momentous social and cultural change. Deadpan and playful, the portraits are evidently self-styled by the sitters, who express themselves in different guises, attitudes, and modes of dress. In contrast to more familiar depictions of South Africa from the same period, in particular the accounts of violence and political turmoil by photojournalists seeking to reach an international audience, the Kitty Studio photographs capture the mood of everyday life. Following Moodley’s death, thousands of portraits from Kitty’s Studio were bought by the Campbell Collections in Durban. But, deemed too contemporary for their archive, which focuses on the history of southern Africa and KwaZulu-Natal, the negatives were discarded before being salvaged from the trash by an intern. After fifteen years of storage in a residential garage in Johannesburg, the collection was ultimately acquired by the sociologist and Columbia University professor Steven Dubin. Like the photographs of his great contemporary, Malick Sidibé, who captured the exuberant youth culture of Mali embracing the rock ’n’ roll age, Moodley’s images present us with a window into the transformations of South African culture in the second half of the twentieth century.

Erin O’Keefe, Things as They Are #11, 2015. Courtesy Denny Gallery

Big Nothing

Sous Les Etoiles Gallery, 560 Broadway, New York

Through August 19, 2016

Since Man Ray and László Moholy-Nagy first succeeded in severing photography from its figurative and narrative conventions, abstract and cameraless photography has become a field unto itself. In this elegant group exhibition, organized by the photographer Richard Caldicott, six artists display their concern for technical and material process in generating “concrete” or nonobjective photography, from Karl Martin Holzhäuser’s Lichtmalerei (Painting with light) (2002) to the computer-generated pinhole work of Gottfried Jäger. Ellen Carey’s photograms and paper negatives explore the relationship between the aperture and the frame. A series of small works by Erin O’Keefe (Things as They Are, 2015–16), which appear at first to be finely rendered paintings, are in fact photographs of painted and translucent materials that the artist, who trained in architecture, has carefully arranged. Inverting historical techniques, Luuk de Haan experiments with light sources such as digital screens to create his grainy, amorphous prints. Although some of the cameraless techniques exemplified in this exhibition date to the earliest innovations of the medium, they appear fresh in an era of photographic culture shaped by mobile camera phones and a relentless stream of digital images.

Genevieve Allison is a writer and editor based in New York.

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Vision & Justice Online: Nicole R. Fleetwood on Prison Portraits

In America’s sprawling correctional system, where more than 2.2 million people are behind bars, prison studio portraits can hold a family together.

By Nicole R. Fleetwood

Deana Lawson, Mohawk Correctional Facility: Jazmin & Family, 2012–14. Courtesy the artist and Rhona Hoffman Gallery

One of the most voluminous sites for the production of contemporary black photography takes place in the visiting room of U.S. prisons. Makeshift photographic studios exist in jails and prisons across the nation and are an important, often the primary, arena for documenting incarcerated people and the loved ones—mothers, spouses, lovers, children, sibling, childhood friends—who visit them. Generally, prison photo studios are provisional spaces in the visiting room, or a waiting area, and are operated by incarcerated men and women whose job in prison is to serve as studio photographer. The studios are typically located near the guard booth and remain under the watchful eye of prison staff who monitor for suspicious activity, such as exchanging confiscated material or engaging in “inappropriate” physical contact.

Deana Lawson, Mohawk Correctional Facility: Jazmin & Family, 2012–14. Courtesy the artist and Rhona Hoffman Gallery

In Deana Lawson’s series Mohawk Correctional Facility: Jazmin & Family (2012–14), we see the power of prison studio portraits to document familial and intimate attachments for black Americans, who are disproportionately impacted by mass incarceration and the prison industrial complex. Lawson’s images, which she appropriated from photographs originally taken by a prison photographer, document her cousin Jazmin’s visits to her partner, Erik, who was incarcerated at Mohawk Correctional Facility in Rome, New York. In some of the photographs, Jazmin and Erik hold each other affectionately. They kiss and hug. In others, they stand together as a family with their young children in the frame. The composition of these portraits follows the tradition of family portraiture in which the patriarch stands at center with wife, or maternal figure, and children at his side. Keeping in line with conventions of the genre, prison portraits also incorporate fantasy backdrops, which are often painted by incarcerated artists.

Deana Lawson, Mohawk Correctional Facility: Jazmin & Family, 2012–14. Courtesy the artist and Rhona Hoffman Gallery

Taken together, prison portraits become a powerful archive representing the enduring struggles of black Americans to claim citizenship, kinship, love, and even hope in the face of multiple forms of racial injustice—poverty, profiling, failed economic policies, and mass incarceration. They also document important forms of self-expression for the many millions who have been locked away and whose images and profiles are otherwise strictly managed by bureaucracies enforcing criminalization and incarceration. Moreover, prison portraits, which are often sent between incarcerated and non-incarcerated loved ones, are important material objects to maintain connection and to communicate love in some of the most dire and punitive conditions, that is, the modern U.S. prison system.

Nicole R. Fleetwood is Associate Professor in the Department of American Studies and Director of the Institute on Women at Rutgers University. Her research into visual art practices in prison life is the subject of her forthcoming book Carceral Aesthetics: Prison Art and Public Culture.

Read more from “Vision & Justice” or subscribe to Aperture and never miss an issue.

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Inside Aperture’s Annual Spring Patron Cocktail Party

On Wednesday, June 1, Aperture Patrons, board members, and special guests gathered for the third annual Spring Patron Cocktail Party at the home of Aperture trustee Michael Hoeh. The evening featured the rare treat of a private presentation by celebrated photographer Gregory Crewdson about his newest body of work, Cathedral of the Pines, published recently to critical acclaim by Aperture and exhibited at Gagosian Gallery. Crewdson, alongside Aperture’s Creative Director, Lesley A. Martin, discussed the work and also addressed the omnipresent nature of photography and the shift that occurs when image-making moves from the private act of creation to a more public process. A cocktail reception followed, where Crewdson inscribed copies of his book and engaged the group by answering questions about his creative practice.

Aperture Patron events bring together Members, trustees, and photographers. To join Aperture’s Patron Program, click here or contact Emily Grillo at egrillo@aperture.org or 212.946.7103.

All photographs © Max Mikulecky.

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Queer Photography: A Reflection

For the “Queer” issue, originally published in spring 2015, Aperture asked artists and critics to reflect on the term queer and its relationship with photography. Here, Vince Aletti recalls Tomorrow’s Man, Peter Hujar, James Dean, and the thrill of discovering queer pictures.

Peter Hujar, David Wojnarowicz, 1981 © The Peter Hujar Archive LLC

The first queer photograph I ever saw excited and confused me. It was at a newsstand in the Jersey Shore town where my family spent the week of my father’s summer vacation, sometime in the late ’50s. Tucked between bodybuilder magazines like Strength & Health were some pocket-sized pamphlets with nearly naked men on their covers and titles like Tomorrow’s Man, Body Beautiful, and Fizeek. In one of them, I came across a picture of two dark-eyed young guys—they looked like regulars on Bandstand—in nothing but stripped-down jock straps, one slung across the other’s shoulder like a trophy. It was titled Victor and Vanquished, and I stared at it, mesmerized, until my mother called me away. I had no words for what that picture meant, certainly no classical references to fall back on. I’d seen kids horsing around in the locker room at school, but I’d never imagined anything as intimate as this. Maybe because I instinctively understood the way aggression masked tenderness, there was something thrilling about two naked men holding onto one another like that—something queer.

Queer was the word kids at school used to describe sissies or guys they didn’t like. It didn’t have anything to do with sex, homo or otherwise, until I was in high school, and by that time I knew they meant people like me: perverts (another period term, not yet reclaimed). By then I’d bought and hidden a cache of those little magazines and I knew that their pictures were about sex, although I had only the vaguest idea what that meant. I’d been going to the library and looking up homosexuality in the indexes of psychology books, which usually led to dry, alarming discussions of inverts, pathologies, regression, and abnormal urges. Physique magazines countered that tone of barely disguised clinical contempt with an upbeat, celebratory take on mid-century masculinity that was deeply queer but butch enough to pass as straight. With few exceptions, however, they weren’t holding up a mirror to their readers; they were providing us with all but unattainable objects of desire: handsome, heroic, almost supernaturally healthy young athletes (and mechanics, dancers, hustlers, pool boys, etc.). Physique pictures hinted—obliquely, teasingly—at homo sex but excluded homosexuals. We were outside looking in.

Around this same time, I came across another, even more potent image of naked men together in the pages of one of my father’s old U.S. Camera annuals. George Rodger’s famous 1949 photograph of a triumphant Nuba wrestler being carried upright on another man’s shoulders—the same totemlike image that Leni Riefenstahl said inspired her book The Last of the Nuba—was breathtaking. A real-world Victor and Vanquished, the picture’s body-to-body nudity was all the more stunning because it was so casual, so matter-of-fact. When I realized that the two men were surrounded by a milling crowd of other muscular, naked men, I felt like I’d tumbled through the looking glass. For a profoundly inexperienced fifteen-year-old, the erotic possibilities suggested by Rodger’s photograph were overwhelming. I went back to that image again and again, as if hypnotized, imagining myself in that naked paradise. Clearly, queer is in the eye of the beholder, and mine was wide open and avid. Having grown up with moving images of Elvis, Fabian, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, James Dean, Marlon Brando, Rock Hudson, Paul Newman, and Clint Walker, it would be reductive to say that my erotic imagination was shaped by two photographs. But the still image has always exerted a different sort of power for me, because a picture—in a book, in a magazine, in my hand—could be mine. To have and to hold. As they accumulated, those images began to define my life. The first thing I did in a new dorm room or apartment was tack pictures to the wall, claiming the space with Avedon’s portrait of the teenage Lew Alcindor from Harper’s Bazaar, a Warhol Flowers print, a cover of Body Beautiful, and the sleeve of a Frankie Avalon record. I wasn’t consciously queering the space, but as my rooms filled up with images of men, I realized I was queering the pictures. It didn’t matter who made them or with what intentions. Now that they were mine, they became expressions of my desire, my obsession, my imagination. They might not be gay, but they’d become queer. Context rules.

So what’s the difference? Until it, too, is reclaimed, gay remains the weaker word: fey, wishy-washy, limp-wristed. Screaming instead of shouting. Queer is more transgressive, more audacious, tougher, unsafe, unapologetic. And, it seems to me, more open, more comprehensive. Queer is hungry, insatiable. It doesn’t have a look, a size, a sex. Queer resists boundaries and refuses to be narrowly defined. Which is why, more often than not these days, queer absorbs and appreciates gay, embracing both Cecil Beaton and Peter Hujar, Duane Michals and Wolfgang Tillmans, Wilhelm von Gloeden and Ryan McGinley, Berenice Abbott and Zanele Muholi. And because queer doesn’t care who you’re sleeping with, it takes in Larry Clark, Nan Goldin, and Katy Grannan too. Like the photographs I couldn’t get out of my head, queer is unsettling and exciting and unforgettable. It bites hard and won’t let go.

Vince Aletti reviews photography exhibitions for The New Yorker and photography books for Photograph, Artforum, and W.

This article originally appeared in Aperture, issue 218, “Queer.” Subscribe to Aperture and never miss an issue.

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What Does Trans Love Look Like?

In a pioneering new book, Zackary Drucker and Rhys Ernst document their gender transitions and their lives together.

By William J. Simmons

Zackary Drucker and Rhys Ernst, Relationship, #23 (The Longest Day of the Year), 2011 © the artists and courtesy Prestel

Relationship, the photobook by Zackary Drucker and Rhys Ernst, is both a beautiful documentation of two lovers and an important intervention into the heterosexist, homophobic landscape of art history. Spanning from 2008 through 2014, the images expand upon the artists’ presentation in the 2014 Whitney Biennial, organized by Stuart Comer, who also provides an introduction. We know Drucker and Ernst from their collaborative performances, as well as their spearheading of trans visibility with a distinctly LA flair (they lived in Ron Athey’s old house in Silver Lake—which, as Comer notes, recalls the gloriously queer Southern California world of Athey, Catherine Opie, and Vaginal Davis). Drucker and Ernst are now producers on the wildly popular Amazon series Transparent, which has perhaps led to the optimistic assumption made by the book’s back cover that “trans has never been more accepted.” While that may be true within a certain progressive subset of the American population, the fact remains that any depiction of a gender-nonconforming body is an act of revolution that unsettles the biomedical heterosexist patriarchy.

Zackary Drucker and Rhys Ernst, Relationship, #35, 2008–13 © the artists and courtesy Prestel

What is even more explosive is the fact that Relationship represents two individuals who undergo their transitions simultaneously and remain together throughout the process. As Kate Bornstein mentioned at a recent conversation at the Strand bookstore in New York celebrating the release of Relationship, this is the first visual account of trans-trans love. It’s hard for even self-professed “experts” of gender theory to wrap their minds around that. Even Judith Butler, the influential philosopher and gender theorist, for instance, was recently asked to grapple with the latent transphobia of her movement-creating, but often misunderstood, theories about gender performance. But Drucker and Ernst allow us to see their journey as it happens. They don’t have to explain themselves or allow us any access; it’s not their responsibility to educate cisgender people, but it is certainly an act of generosity that they do.

Zackary Drucker and Rhys Ernst, Relationship, #33, 2008–13 © the artists and courtesy Prestel

However, explaining is often what we expect of gender-nonconforming artists. Comer’s assertion in the foreword is a distillation of what would likely be said by anyone who has taken Gender Studies 101. He describes Relationship as “a codex for how we might reconsider our families and relationships, not as fixed structures but as elastic communities capable of celebrating, rather than fearing, transformation.” But Relationship should not be viewed merely as a lens through which cisgender readers can deconstruct their own lives. As perhaps its first priority, Relationship exists for itself and for the community that can most immediately understand it, as well as the community still to come—the queer and trans youth who are growing up in a world where trans identities are no longer consigned to invisibility. The photographs are not a rubric for a queer theory checklist. These are not images of Others that cisgender people might marvel at from a distance; Relationship is not a “codex.” Bornstein’s assertion that “the book takes trans a step beyond acceptance into desirability” should instead be the key takeaway. In these pages, we see the wondrous complexity of human sexuality—a physically and conceptually vast phenomenon. The beauty of trans-trans love—the gentle caresses and lightly muscled stomachs, legs dappled with endearing hairs, supple asses, veined breasts, and narrow waists—becomes its own kind of criticality even though it doesn’t have to be. Love can simply be glamorous or horny or sleepy or, really, whatever it wants.

Zackary Drucker and Rhys Ernst, Relationship, #44 (Flawless Through the Mirror) © the artists and courtesy Prestel

Still, it is important that we do not lean on lofty concepts and attend to Relationship only as a photographic project. When I began looking at these images, my first instinct was to attempt to understand the historical underpinnings of the project. How do Drucker and Ernst compare to Larry Clark, Nan Goldin, and Cindy Sherman (the examples cited by the book’s cover)? Well, they don’t. All of those artists operate within the context of a normative art history that privileges established modes of sexuality. Sherman, Andy Warhol, and Marcel Duchamp don drag, but at their core is a reaffirmation of two fixed genders, if only ironically or as stereotype. Furthermore, although Clark and Goldin have produced important documentary images, Drucker and Ernst are not necessarily documenting; they are living. In Relationship, the term “documentary” might not even hold, given that the book is a record of two unique bodies in a state of mutual becoming. This defies the inherent fixity of the camera and points to what historian Ariella Azoulay has called photography’s “civil contract”—its ability to exteriorize previously unseen social relationships and differentials of power.

Zackary Drucker and Rhys Ernst, Relationship, #37, 2008–13 © the artists and courtesy Prestel

Most of the time, Drucker and Ernst are not in the picture together, but we understand a psychic relationship when a purely physical one is absent. The photographer is changing, even as the photograph is being taken, and so are the subjects, like two vines that slowly grow into each other and become unified. We come to understand the potential of the photograph to reveal bodies in flux but also modes of seeing in flux. This is more important, I think, than trying to find art historical precedents for Relationship, because what the book actually asks is that we rely not on outmoded visual cues and social narratives, but rather, like Drucker and Ernst, invent new ones.

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

Relationship was published by Prestel in June 2016.

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