Aperture's Blog, page 136

Design Books to Know

Designers and critics share the books that have inspired their work

Bruno Monguzzi on

John Szarkowski

The Photographer’s Eye

Museum of Modern Art • New York, 1966

I was asked to select a book that was eye-opening because of its content or its design. The Photographer’s Eye by John Szarkowski is my immediate answer—because of its content and its design.

When I first browsed through the pages of this book at the Museum of Modern Art in 1966, I was fascinated by the way the images had been connected, which for me is the fundamental aspect of photobook design. The page layouts are very diverse, ignoring the logic and rigidity of Swiss grids. Each image is very carefully sized and positioned in order to avoid the problems that often occur when placing images next to each other, particularly because of conflicting inner structures or scale.

John Szarkowski, The Photographer’s Eye, Museum of Modern Art, New York 1966

What is evident here is Szarkowski’s great capacity to read the photographic language, and his rare sensibility and intelligence in designing a sequence. An amazing lesson on the building of meaning—its definition through sensitive understanding of the complex interactions bridging the images displayed on a double page spread, or with the images of preceding and following spreads.

What is evident here is Szarkowski’s great capacity to read the photographic language, and his rare sensibility and intelligence in designing a sequence.

—Bruno Monguzzi

For decades, as a designer, my major goal when teaching has been to open people’s eyes, and for decades The Photographer’s Eye has been my very precious companion.

Bruno Monguzzi is a designer, typographer, and teacher. Monographs about his work have been published in Europe, the United States, China, and Japan. Member of the Alliance Graphique Internationale (AGI), he is the author of Lo Studio Boggeri, 1933–1981 (1981) and Piet Zwart: The Typographical Work, 1923–1933 (1987). In 2003 he was elected Honorary Royal Designer for Industry by the Royal Society of Arts, London.

Richard Hollis, About Graphic Design, Occasional Papers, London, 2012

Rick Poynor on

Richard Hollis

About Graphic Design

Occasional Papers • London, 2012

Richard Hollis’s About Graphic Design, a collection of essays and lectures spanning five decades, is not the most obvious choice for this author. A compelling case could be made for his earlier studies, Graphic Design: A Concise History (1994) and Swiss Graphic Design (2006), which any design library should include. As a distinguished practitioner-turned-design-historian, Hollis (born in 1934) is an unusual figure among designers. About Graphic Design, less tightly focused than his two surveys, displays the grain of his thinking, and this helps to lift the lid on the practice for readers without specialist knowledge. In essays about the French postwar designer Pierre Faucheux, Penguin Books designer Germano Facetti, the evolution of the Architectural Review, and many other subjects, Hollis demonstrates the challenge and complexity of page-building. His tone can be didactic, but he writes from deep practical and cultural engagement, and his measured assessments and seriousness are always illuminating.

Produced by Occasional Papers, a small independent publisher in London, About Graphic Design’s editorial direction and page layouts reinforce its arguments. Hollis gave visual form to John Berger’s Ways of Seeing (1972) and here he effortlessly integrates more than five hundred images, running small reference pictures (often all that is needed) in the book’s inner margins, alongside the text. The choice of primary typeface—a bold serif—perfectly complements the economy and directness of the writing, and the entire book seems to speak in Hollis’s voice: calm, refined, rational, and persuasive.

Rick Poynor writes about design, photography, and visual culture. His Exposure column appears weekly on designobserver.com, and he contributes the Photo Critique column to eyemagazine.com. His books include Obey the Giant: Life in the Image World (2001), Jan van Toorn: Critical Practice (2008), and Sergei Sviatchenko: Collages (2014). He is visiting professor in critical writing in art and design at the Royal College of Art, London.

Tom Holert and Mark Terkessidis, Fliehkraft: Gesellschaft in Bewegung–von Migranten und Touristen, Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne, 2006

Sven Ehmann on

Tom Holert and Mark Terkessidis

Fliehkraft: Gesellschaft in Bewegung—von Migranten und Touristen

Kiepenheuer & Witsch • Cologne, 2006

While I spend most of my time on the research and editing of design-related and highly visual books, my favorite publications about design are often text books. Books that widen my perspective. Books that make me reconsider what design is, could be, should be. Books about all sorts of things—sometimes closer to, but often further away from, the core of the term “design.”

Reading about the real challenges of migration … reminds me of the real issues out there—issues that matter, that I hope some of the smartest designers will take on.

—Sven Ehmann

I certainly spend my time with books about design history, theory, and thinking, as well as with numerous books about design trends. But the books on my desk right now are books about learning and migration. Design has opened up so much in recent years and claims to be the right tool to address all sorts of issues, yet for the large part it seems to be stuck with aesthetics. By contrast, reading about the real challenges of migration (as opposed to tourism) in Fliehkraft, a 2006 paperback by Tom Holert and Mark Terkessidis, reminds me of the real issues out there—issues that matter, that I hope some of the smartest designers will take on. One example of the way people are doing this is Workeer, a German job board for refugees which was recently created by two young design graduates.

For design to grow, evolve, and mature, I feel these paperbacks, with anonymous design but serious content, could be very influential.

Sven Ehmann is a freelance creative director based in Berlin. He has coedited over seventy books with publisher Gestalten, as well as working on exhibitions, writing, workshops, and lectures.

Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form, MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1977 (second edition)

Andrew Sloat on

Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour

Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form

MIT Press

Cambridge, Massachussetts, 1977 (second edition)

The revised 1977 edition of Robert Venturi, Denise 
Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour’s Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form is no one’s idea of a superficially beautiful book. But the story of how it came to look like this is both a cautionary tale and a corollary to the architectural argument found inside.

The authors were architects who led a studio workshop in the architecture school at Yale in 1968. The first section of the book summarizes their students’ dazzling documentation of late ’60s Las Vegas architecture, via photographic strategies of all kinds, experimental maps, historical images, diagrams, drawings, and collages. They prove that the tacky architectural and graphic mish-mash of Vegas is as rich with formal subtlety and ingenuity as the respectable architectural fantasyland of Rome. The second section builds on the authority of the first, landing wild swings at the monumental modern architecture of the era, in an effort to show that the radicalism of the 1920s had devolved into a repetitive formalism that met no needs beyond proving the architect’s (and client’s) fancy taste. The book’s imagery exemplifies an approach to vernacular and commercial architecture that would be explored by the photographers soon to be categorized as the New Topographics—including Stephen Shore, who would later collaborate with the authors on the 1976 exhibition Signs of Life.

The first edition of the book, designed by the legendary Muriel Cooper in 1972, was a hardcover monument filled with stylish typography and color images, and wrapped in a vellum dust jacket. Consequently it was very expensive, and out of reach of most students. Scott Brown, in the revised edition, dispatches with the hated original design in three dismissive paragraphs. The edition that survives today was designed by the architects themselves and represents the argument in the text: that available materials, inventively handled to serve their purpose, can be as beautiful as the repetitive superficiality of heroic modernist design.

Andrew Sloat is a graphic designer and filmmaker based in Brooklyn, and a frequent collaborator with Aperture’s books program. He teaches at the Rhode Island School of Design and was recently appointed the creative director of the Brooklyn Academy of Music. andrewsloat.com

Irma Boom on

Kunst der sechziger Jahre

Wallraf-Richartz Museum • Cologne, 1970

Jan Vermeulen

Horrible Tango

Meulenhoff • Amsterdam, 1968

Turks Fruit

Meulenhoff • Amsterdam, 1969

I often find inspiration in books from the past. About ten years ago, I found a binder of sorts called Kunst der sechziger Jahre (Art of the ’60s), a catalogue published in 1970 by the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne. The concept is simple: there’s a brief text about each artist followed by their portrait, then one or two images. The artworks are reproduced on white paper and tipped onto kraft paper pages. Each artist’s portrait is printed on a clear acrylic page. The binding is not very attractive, but very suitable for the book: a plexiglass spine held together with big screws. The cover is also transparent plastic, embossed with the name of the museum.

There are five editions of the book, with more artists and content added to each one. I have always been inspired by this. My own bibliography, which I publish as a small book, follows a similar logic: each time I have a new show, I make a new edition; it grows in size by 3 percent, and more books are added.

These covers were critical to my decision to become a designer . . .

I still think they’re amazing. Anything that is really good stays good.

—Irma Boom

In 2014, I was honored to win the Johannes Vermeer Award. I decided to use the prize money to build a library of my own personal reference books—as a type of research, and as a way of building my own source material. This allowed me to get further into the idea of the book itself and explore how my points of reference and my own work are interconnected. My library focuses on the 1960s, as well as older books from the 1500s and 1600s. Some of the key volumes are novels by the author Jan Wolkers, for which the covers were designed by Jan Vermeulen—Horrible Tango (1968) and Turks Fruit (1969), among others. They are typographic covers, with really vibrant colors. The avant-garde design matches the avant-garde content precisely.

These covers were critical to my decision to become a designer. I originally studied painting, and when that wasn’t working out, I started looking for something else I could do. A professor of mine mentioned book design, and immediately I thought of Vermeulen’s designs and realized I could do something like that—find the right form for content. I still think they’re amazing. Anything that is really good stays good.

Irma Boom is an Amsterdam-based graphic designer who specializes in making books. She has received many awards for her book designs, and was the youngest ever person to receive the prestigious Gutenberg prize for her complete oeuvre. The University of Amsterdam manages the Irma Boom Archive, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York has acquired her work for their permanent collection. She is a senior critic in graphic design at Yale University. irmaboom.nl

The post Design Books to Know appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

Editor’s Note

Arthur Herrman and Jeroen Kummer

(Kummer & Herrman)

Making photographs is an independent and often solitary practice. So it’s not surprising that many photographers are cautious when it comes to exhibiting or publishing their projects—they may want to have as much control over that as they do over the images. But one could also say that a photographer’s work isn’t finished until it has found its final form of presentation. Whether this is as an exhibition, book, or other medium, photographers often realize at this stage that their project could benefit from adding someone else’s expertise—another perspective. In our opinion, this can be the big advantage of working with a designer.

When Lesley Martin invited us to act as guest editors for this issue of The PhotoBook Review—the first designers invited to do so—it didn’t take long for us to say yes. We were flattered, but we also knew it would be a great opportunity to add yet another perspective to the flourishing practice of conceiving and producing photobooks. In particular, we wanted to focus on the large number of projects in which content and design decisions come together and reinforce one another.

We believe togetherness and mutual reinforcement are key for creating a successful project—especially in its realization in book form. When you find common ground with other people, to play, search, question, and debate, you simultaneously build trust between you and your collaborators, and create space to reflect, breed ideas, and think freely. These words may sound big, but we strongly believe the outcome always reflects the process of creation. That’s probably why the projects we identify with most strongly are very often the result of a sustained, long-term, collaborative processes. Taco Hidde Bakker talked to six groups of collaborators about the books they created together and how collaborating can push your work to the next level, beginning on page 10.

Of course, this issue also focuses on the role of design and designers. Starting on page 6, designer Ania Nałęcka discusses her involvement with Sputnik, an international collective of documentary photographers from Central and Eastern Europe. This issue also includes an interview with the legendary designer, publisher, and gallery owner Willem van Zoetendaal (page 4), who has been one of our big inspirations as we’ve set off on our own journey.

A huge thank you to all the contributors for their dedication and generosity, as well as to Lesley Martin and the entire Aperture team for their trust and patience. We hope you will enjoy this issue. In its diversity, it forms a powerful argument for collaboration—and that’s exactly what we had in mind from the very first start. Creating damn good projects requires teamwork, partnership, and collaboration. So, let’s team up!

Arthur Herrman and Jeroen Kummer are the cofounders of the Utrecht-based design office Kummer & Herrman. They both studied graphic design in Utrecht, the Netherlands, and began by working in print. K&H, established in 1998, has developed into a multidisciplinary office with expertise in print, spatial, and interactive design. The office has received international acclaim for its work, often in the field of documentary photography—including for its collaboration with Rob Hornstra and Arnold van Bruggen, of The Sochi Project. K&H also designed a comprehensive book of Hornstra and Van Bruggen’s work in 2013, The Sochi Project: An Atlas of War and Tourism in the Caucasus (Aperture), which will be released in a new edition this fall. Herrman and Kummer both lecture at HKU University of the Arts Utrecht. K&H has received numerous nominations and awards, and, in 2014, won a Dutch Design Award for The Sochi Project. kummer-herrman.nl

The post Editor’s Note appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

One Plus One Is Three: A Conversation on Collaboration

Taco Hidde Bakker

Many good photobooks result from sustained, long-term collaboration—the kind that goes much further than just calling in a designer to make the finishing touches. An initial concept can be carried beyond the horizon of what an artist or photographer might have fancied on their own, with surprising results that could transcend individual authorship. Editors, typographers, graphic designers, or other photographers may act as collaborators and valuable sparring partners, for everything from determining sequence to designing layouts—delivering valuable input during the process and, in a sense, becoming authors in their own right. However, there are compromises to be made too: collaboration requires trust, honesty, open communication, and the ability to let go of favorite images or ideas. One must delegate, not dictate.

Here, six teams who have made collaboration part of their photobook-making process discuss the books they worked on together, and how they perceive two important aspects of collaboration: seeing your work through different eyes, and what forms of communication seem necessary to complete a successful collaborative project.

– Artist Daniel Mayrit and artist and publisher Verónica Fieiras. Publication discussed: You Haven’t Seen Their Faces (RIOT BOOKS, 2015). • Shortlisted for a 2015 Paris Photo– Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Award Artist

– Sarah Entwistle and graphic designer Antonio de Luca. Publication discussed: Please send this book to my mother (Sternberg Press, 2015).

– Photographer Alejandro Cartagena, photographer and editor Fernando Gallegos, and typographer and editor Roberto Salazar. Publication discussed: Before the War (self-published, 2015).

– Artist and photographer Laia Abril and editor and art director Ramón Pez. Publication discussed: The Epilogue (Dewi Lewis, 2014).

– Photographer Rob Hornstra and graphic designer Jeroen Kummer of Kummer & Herrman. Publication discussed: The Sochi Project: An Atlas of War and Tourism in the Caucasus (Aperture, 2013).

How does collaborating get you out of your so-called “comfort zone?” To what extent does seeking the input of others help you see your work with different eyes, take a more objective stance toward it, and perhaps deepen your emotional engagement with a project?

Thobias Fäldt: There is always that point in the encounter at which “the other” reshapes the initial idea to the extent that things will get uncomfortable. We have learned to appreciate this moment of crisis. It has become crucial for the development of what we wish to achieve. And it involves a great deal of trust between us all.

Verónica Fieiras: It’s a challenge, because as an editor you usually start working on a project which is already clear and finished in the artist’s mind. However, many things need to be rethought and transformed in order to translate an exhibition project into a book, which needs a different language. I had liked Daniel Mayrit’s project You Haven’t Seen Their Faces since the first time I saw it, but thought it was too cryptic and needed to be a bit riskier. Daniel was open to it and we both gave it a twist.

Daniel Mayrit: When Verónica first approached me with the idea of making a book together, I told her I didn’t want to. At the time I was working on a dummy which was the opposite of what the book would finally become. A few weeks after the proposal, I agreed to listen to Verónica, and thought, Maybe I was wrong after all. From that moment on I had left my comfort zone, and every decision that followed was a piece of cake.

Alejandro Cartagena: For my book Before the War I wanted to let go of the images as much as possible—to see them in a different light. So I let Fernando Gallegos, with whom I had worked on Carpoolers [2014], crop and sequence the images as he pleased. This was an important step in order to detach myself from the images and not force any of my feelings onto them. After we had finished the dummy we brought in Roberto Salazar to look for loopholes in the design, but were primarily interested in his passion for typography. After multiple tests, the three of us decided which type would work best for our publication.

Fernando Gallegos: Being a photographer myself, I think there is always a need for fresh eyes, for new directions in which a project could go. We pushed ourselves to go beyond what the images actually portrayed. At the same time, we always pulled each other back to our original idea. The basis of our collaboration was keeping a balance between the initial idea and making things more complex, as well as abstract.

Roberto Salazar: First and foremost, collaboration is based on the notion that nobody possesses a 360- degree view—not of their own practice, nor those of others. I have an aesthetic and technical bias; however, my subjectivity is only relevant within the context of collaboration. As such, I’m able to enrich a project by adding to the gene pool, as it were.

Jeroen Kummer: Trust is a key factor and liberating to the creative process. You should be able to leave your comfort zone but also enter a new one together. As a designer, you should be aware of entering someone else’s creative space, but this doesn’t mean you should not get your hands dirty because you respect the work too much. For their part, photographers need to trust that their publication is in good hands with a designer and leave space for them to do their thing, so common ground can be found—this is crucial to making something special.

Rob Hornstra: If you are not capable of leaving your comfort zone, I’m afraid you will end up with a mediocre book.

Laia Abril and Ramón Pez: In each project we adapt our skills, responsibilities, research, and motivation, depending on what we think the project needs. Our process is based on continuously researching every aspect of the edit. We find the inspiration and the answers to every project’s difficulties by seeking new forms for narrative structures.

If anything seems important in a collaboration, it’s open communication. You need to be able to trust one another and clearly and honestly share your feelings, doubts, and hopes for a possible outcome. Continuous debate and discussion often sharpen the concept and shape the project. How do you engage in such dialogue?

Entwistle: I had worked with my grandfather Clive Entwistle’s archival material for a couple of years before deciding to make a book. It’s an unstructured and pretty intimate collection. Until Antonio de Luca and I began working together, I was so steeped in this collaboration with my late grandfather that I felt an urgent need to have a live dialogue with someone, but also a desire to delineate the book as an object. I wanted a graphic collaborator who would have an emotional and visceral engagement with the material.

I had already begun constructing the text component and was eyeing up a large hoard of visual material when our collaboration began. Working with Tony from an early stage of the project was a pragmatic necessity for me: I had to answer his questions and complete tasks that would allow him to access the project. Straight away, he encouraged me to bring the images into the process. The action of inserting groups of images into the text was a fairly crude and practical remedy for communicating via a Word document, where images would appear throughout the text.

de Luca: There are two voices in the book: Clive (the protagonist) and the caption information (the deuteragonist). Clive always passed judgment on himself and others, whereas the caption information never judges Clive; it supports him, regardless of the fact that most of the architectural and other projects he designed never did materialize. The challenge was to create a book that could be read linearly and intermittently while experiencing the two voices simultaneously.

Originally I had begun designing a photobook, but Sarah wanted neither a photobook nor a literary book. She wanted something in between. Because of the amount of material Sarah kept discovering and sending to me, the book took one year to design. The images were copied and pasted into a Word document, forming a long chain. Each element connected to another element, forming Clive’s lifeline—which meant that if even one element was deleted or added, the entire book would have to be redesigned. It slowed down the process and forced me to respect Clive as a man with faults and triumphs, Sarah as an artist and as his granddaughter, and the book as an artifact.

Fieiras: Collaboration is a continuous process of reaffirmation, because you need to constantly justify your decisions and adjust your points of view, which helps make your ideas stronger. It’s an enriching back-and-forth process which teaches me a lot—not only about my collaborative partner, but also about myself. It’s a way of testing my flexibility.

Mayrit: We both made it very clear what we wanted, which helped a lot in staying focused on the main goal. From the beginning we decided to keep the political statement I was making with the book, but we also wanted to make something useful for the audience, not just a book to be looked at.

Abril: We distinguish between a photographic project and the concept of a book. Usually, the book’s concept is shaped by more people—such as an editor, designers, and a publisher. The moment at which the photographer stops being afraid to share the concept and all the ideas is when the book begins to grow exponentially. But no matter which point our collaboration starts at, both of us need to know everything, as if we were together on the project since day one. In our experience, this way of working can bring a story to a higher plane.

Pez: If a photographer knows how to do a good edit, and comes with a clear book concept, it’s still interesting to collaborate and brainstorm about new ideas. With The Epilogue, Laia was already shaping the concept of the book before she even started to take photographs, which really makes a difference in helping to structure the book—the edit in this case is equal to the concept and the story.

Källström: The interplay between everyone involved shapes the concept, and the structures are chiseled out from our different experiences and expertise. In the actual book object, its form and the photographs cannot be reduced to the sum of their parts. To reach coherence, there must be constant discussion stemming from our various points of view.

Kummer: I see shaping the concept and story as the most important parts of bookmaking. Sometimes I come up with ideas at an early stage; sometimes images already carry a clear direction. But in whatever order you work together, a book needs to stand on its own and should in fact be the publication the photographer wants. And designers, who often have more technical knowledge than photographers with regards to printing, lithography, paper, etc., have an obligation to include photographers as much as possible in the decision process.

Hornstra: Designers are not really involved with the content of my projects—for example, The Sochi Project, which I did with writer Arnold van Bruggen. We usually invite designers to learn what our work’s about while we’re still making it. You then need to make your ambitions for the project clear, and why you want to turn it into a publication. It’s important to express your feelings concerning the publication—not just how it should look, but what kind of emotion it should generate. You also need to articulate your desired audience.

This all creates a healthy starting point for designers to start thinking about a communication concept. The moment we start talking about the book, designers are totally involved and equal to us. This often goes wrong, as photographers and artists can find it difficult to treat designers as equal partners. It’s a good thing to learn how to be equally invested in a book project.

Taco Hidde Bakker is a writer, translator, and researcher based in Amsterdam. He worked with Paradox and Dana Lixenberg on the book, web documentary, and exhibition The Last Days of Shishmaref (2008–10). He writes for magazines such as Camera Austria International, Foam, EXTRA, and the British Journal of Photography. He also runs the Amsterdam chapter of The Photobook Club and Circle Rules Football Amsterdam.

The post One Plus One Is Three: A Conversation on Collaboration appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

Rahaab Allana on Laura El-Tantawy In the Shadow of the Pyramids

A photobook is most immersive when it arouses an awakening in the reader—and In the Shadow of the Pyramids, Laura El-Tantawy’s instinctive, four-year journey through the crowd at Cairo’s Tahrir Square, is a riveting, intimate, and spatially engaging testimony. A compact yet densely designed book that alternates between full-bleed images and smaller photos centered on the page, it features family snapshots from El-Tantawy’s past alongside her own photographs—constantly suggesting departure, rupture, and the return to her hometown, Cairo. Skillfully unmasking the fragments of the city, the book’s Japanese-bound pages conceal the photos’ dates inside their folds; the images see El-Tantawy living and breathing the humanity that gathered in Tahrir Square, capturing the protests that have happened there since 2011 as she positions the personal in the historical moment.

In the Shadow of the Pyramids documents Egyptians’ resistance to state control, surveillance, unchecked corruption, and, in some respects, the global economic crisis, all of which create an outer context for the mesh of people seeking liberation. “How do you tell a story when the plot keeps changing?” El-Tantawy asks. But there are also other protests insinuated here, such as the 2008 workers’ strike, initiated in the city of Mahalla el-Kubra; this predated and inspired the sentiment at Tahrir in January 2011, when protestors demanded the overthrow of then-president Hosni Mubarak. El-Tantawy’s photographs of the square are strung together as though taken over the course of a single, erratic night; the narrative shuffles time and reorders incidents, generating a streaming, episodic account that could almost seem fictionalized. But these images don’t keep reality at bay.

Distinct sections within the book are punctuated by black pages of text trimmed shorter than the rest, and they can be cross-referenced: Pieces of Me (2007), from when the author decided to move back to her city after several decades away, can be read in conjunction with Innocence Lost (2013), in which the darkest hour of the revolution seems to unravel. A similar sense of contrast finds its way into Faces of the Revolution (2011–13), in which extreme close-ups are hauntingly juxtaposed with family photographs from El-Tantawy’s youth, and Lingering Sadness (2014), which begins with an image of blood-streaked pavement and ends with photos that evoke memories from her upbringing.

The section Letting Go foregrounds the euphoric haze of the 2011 Arab Spring. But it also recalls a similar sense of rising under one banner that was felt in the square in 2003, with the onset of the American invasion of Iraq—not to mention earlier revolts, such as those after the loss of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, when the Muslim Brotherhood began a series of incursions into city centers, only to be punished for rising against King Farouk. Tahrir Square also hosted student protests in the 1950s, against Israeli action in Palestine. It is no ordinary space, but one that triggers hope and aspiration.

For me, the aesthetic aspect of photography also draws attention to the power of images circulating in the public sphere. The protests that began in 2011 have been largely documented by the people rather than by news agencies, and have led to the establishment of activist-driven, citizen journalism organizations such as Mosireen and Thawramedia, which further substantiate the power of social media. They realign the contributions of other photographers who have documented the protests, such as Thomas Hartwell, Tarek Hefny, and Randa Shaath, as well as Heba Farid, coordinator of the Photographic Memory of Egypt archival program. This publication highlights the need to revisit such sites of contemporary history by reliving or re-viewing this space—not only with circumspection, but with emotion. A space that for El-Tantawy is always elusive, as she writes: “In the far distance, I catch sight of my dreams.”

Rahaab Allana is curator of the Alkazi Foundation for the Arts in New Delhi, India, and a fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society in London. He is the editor of the Indian photography quarterly and exhibitions platform PIX. In 2014, he copublished a book from his own private collection of cinema stills and ephemera, titled Filmi Jagat, A Scrapbook: Shared Universe of Early Hindi Cinema (in association with Art Heritage by Niyogi Books). pixquarterly.in

Image: Laura El-Tantawy

In the Shadow of the Pyramids

Self-published • Amsterdam, 2015

Designed by SYB • 440 pages

125 black-and-white and color images

6 7/8 x 9 in. (17.6 x 22.7 cm) • Hardcover

intheshadowofthepyramids.com

The post Rahaab Allana on Laura El-Tantawy In the Shadow of the Pyramids appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

Arnold van Bruggen on Carlos Spottorno Wealth Management

“There is no truer mark of financial success than making money work for you, instead of having to work for money,” reads one of the smooth opening lines of Carlos Spottorno’s book Wealth Management. This introduction sets the tone for a series of sumptuous, monochrome images that depict a world of tailored shoes and solutions, mega yachts and corporate jungles, antique shops and fur coats.

After his provocative, PhotoBook Award–shortlisted 2013 book The Pigs—a clever parody of the Economist magazine, illustrating the media stereotypes used to describe the economic woes of Portugal, Italy, Greece, and Spain—Spottorno now turns a mocking eye on the keepers of global wealth. Seen in this light, Wealth Management, a term used to describe the financial services offered to the superrich, is a sequel to The Pigs. The crimes have been documented; now the hunt for the perpetrators is on. It is a step that too few documentarians take, and for this reason alone Wealth Management would be worthy of attention.

The link between The Pigs and Wealth Management becomes even clearer after a visit to Spottorno’s accompanying website, wtfbank.com. “You don’t need money. All you need is credit,” says the bold type below the fictional WTF Bank’s slogan, “Live beyond your means.” If you click “I am looking for money” and fill in what you want on the simple online form—a villa in Portofino for 3 million euros, for instance, to be obtained with easy credit—you are redirected to the website for The Pigs, where you’ll be confronted with the bitter consequences of your hopes and dreams.

Wealth Management is more than a photobook; I leafed through it with the promotional video for WTF Bank and The Pigs website open on my computer. It’s a transmedia project that seems suspiciously akin to a prospectus: you consult the brochure, then check its credentials online. The “bank’s” promotional video is a slick version of the book, complete with a smooth commercial voiceover and stock music. Spottorno’s photographs take a sober, classic, documentary approach to the theme, detached from their subject; but their beautiful grays and grains almost make you want to be there, giving them the commercial quality needed for WTF’s promotional material.

Does it work? I read the book with a degree of irony and laughed out loud at the brilliant corporate-speak, both invented and borrowed from actual financial websites and advertising materials. I was initially puzzled by the choice of bank name: it’s almost too obvious. However, a second reading reminded me of the even-less-probable stories that have emerged since the start of the financial crisis, such as Goldman Sachs’s role in securing Greece’s place in the Eurozone by helping it to hide the true extent of its debt. Then the full irony became apparent of a slogan like: “At WTF Bank we don’t merely adapt to the circumstances, we determine the circumstances.” WTF, indeed.

Arnold van Bruggen is a writer, filmmaker, and founder of the Amsterdam-based documentary production agency Prospektor, which specializes in new forms of on- and offline storytelling. He is also a cofounder, with photographer Rob Hornstra, of The Sochi Project. A second edition of their summary book, The Sochi Project: An Atlas of War and Tourism in the Caucasus (Aperture, 2013), will be released this October. prospektor.nl

Translated from Dutch by Cecily Layzell

Image: Carlos Spottorno

Wealth Management

RM Verlag/Phree • Barcelona/Madrid, 2015

Designed by Jaime Narváez

9 1/2 x 13 3/8 in. (24 x 34 cm) • 64 pages

33 black-and-white images • Softcover

wtfbank.com

The post Arnold van Bruggen on Carlos Spottorno Wealth Management appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

Editor’s Note

Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa

My bookshelves are a repository that’s both retrospective and forward-looking. They represent numerous journeys I’ve already taken and hope to repeat, as well as others as yet unfamiliar, which I plan to make at some undetermined point in the future. My bookshelves are emblematic of my optimism about the future, in that they imagine one in which I might have more time on my hands. But they are also inherently social, in that the objects they collect are intended to be shared, pored over, passed around, debated, and discussed in the presence of countless others.

Wright Morris wrote in his book Time Pieces: Photographs, Writing, and Memory (Aperture, 1989) that “to form a meaningful unit, one begins with a measurable multitude.” I take this to mean that no measurable thing can be understood as singular—that we are bound together by interdependence, relativities, and our shared histories. Morris’s claim seems especially relevant to photographs, words, and memories themselves: each are historically circumscribed instances in a long chain of prior events; each are simultaneously from the past, for the present, and integral to the future.

Robert Adams once wrote, “Your own photography is never enough. Every photographer who has lasted has depended on other people’s pictures too—photographs that may be public or private, serious or funny, but that carry with them a reminder of community.” Adams’s conviction and the sentiment he rightly defends underscore an optimism embodied by the humble bookshelf. In an issue of The PhotoBook Review such as this, dedicated to the intersections of the photobook and the archives, Adams reminds us of the multiple unpredictable and irreducibly social possibilities inherent in the photographic book.

In his essay “Eye and Mind,” Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote that “we must take literally what vision teaches us: namely, that through it we touch the sun and the stars, that we are everywhere at once”—whether in the portrait studios of early-twentieth-century South Africa or in the trunk of a car in East Germany, on the silver screen or in some Springfield town in the United States. Merleau-Ponty continues: “Vision alone teaches us that beings that are different, ‘exterior,’ foreign to one another, are yet absolutely together, are ‘simultaneity.’”

I reach for such thoughts from the books on my shelves at moments when their insights seem most necessary: when a practiced cynicism represents the path of least resistance, in the face of the compounding complexities of everyday life. I imagine I will eventually donate my books to a family member, or to a friend, or perhaps to an institution where they might be of use to perfect strangers—at a point when they can better serve someone else. In this sense, my archive of books represents borrowed time, an interlude snatched from the inevitable succession of events. In this sense, the book is a reflection of ourselves: singular members of a vast multitude, small links in an immeasurable chain, moving falteringly together toward the future.

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.

Jane Mount published My Ideal Bookshelf, a collection of the favorite books of one hundred creative thinkers, with Little, Brown in 2012. idealbookshelf.com

Image: Jane Mount, Ideal Bookshelf #941, Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa

The post Editor’s Note appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

Vision & Justice: A Curriculum by Hank Willis Thomas

For Hank Willis Thomas—conceptual photographer and multimedia artist—American commerce is a perpetual source of slogans and spectacles. In his series Unbranded: Reflections in Black by Corporate America, 1968–2008, Thomas excised the logos from post-civil-rights-era advertisements for products marketed to African Americans, unveiling an array of stereotypes. Question Bridge: Black Males, an ongoing transmedia project cocreated by Thomas, Chris Johnson, and other artists, is a forum for black men to ask other black men questions about their lives. In Question Bridge: Black Males in America, published by Aperture in 2015, one participant asks, “What is common to all of us that makes us who we are?”

Photographer unknown, James Baldwin Sitting Smoking a Cigarette, February 5, 1963 © Bettmann/CORBIS

Deborah Willis, Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers, 1840 to the Present, 2000

This was my mother’s fifteenth book looking at the experiences and revelations of black photographers. It was the culmination of thirty years of research, through which she unearthed aspects of American history that had been intentionally hidden and overshadowed by mainstream culture. The fact that African Americans were on the cutting edge of art, science, and technology, creating photographs from the moment the medium was invented—almost three decades before the end of slavery—forces us to reimagine and rethink everything we were taught about black history.

Cover of Audre Lorde, The Black Unicorn, 1978

Audre Lorde, The Black Unicorn, 1978

I have always been drawn to intersectional and expansive expressions of “blackness.” In her own words, Audre Lorde was a “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet.” You couldn’t just pick one to define her; she was all things, at all times, and more. My love for this work is best expressed in the final lines of her poem “A Litany for Survival.”

and when we speak we are afraid

our words will not be heard

nor welcomed

but when we are silent

we are still afraid

So it is better to speak

remembering

we were never meant to survive

Anthony Barboza, The Founders of Kamoinge, 1973. Courtesy the artist and Schiffer Publishing

Kamoinge

Kamoinge is a collective of African American photographers based in New York. Their name comes from a word in Kikuyu (an East African language) meaning “a group of people acting together”; since 1963, they have been doing just that. (Their work is collected in the 2015 book Timeless: Photographs by Kamoinge.) These artists have been a profound and pervasive influence in my life, from childhood to today. They do it for love.

Eve Arnold, Malcolm X, 1962 © Eve Arnold/Magnum Photos

The Autobiography of Malcolm X, 1965

No other book has shaped the way I understand human experience like this one. Malcolm X is perhaps best known for his “militancy” and opposition to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s commitment to nonviolence in the civil rights movement, but this is a gross reduction of his life and work. What I love most about the autobiography is that in it, we watch Malcolm redefine himself completely, continually willing to evolve his ideas regardless of the risk. The most revolutionary thing a person can do is to be open to change.

Jim Goldberg, Rich and Poor, 1985

This project is ultimately about vulnerability. There are few books that speak so genuinely to issues of class, race, and gender in American society. Before I encountered this book, I had never seen a photographic project where the subjects critiqued the images and themselves, speaking both to the photographer and to viewers.

James Baldwin, The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction 1948–1985, 1985

A person is more important than anything else. That’s the bottom line.

Naomi Klein, No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies, 2000

This book became the manifesto for the work that I was doing about the corporatization of our lives. We are the first generation of humans whose lives are defined more by commodities than anything else. How did this come to be? How do we make sense of this, and what are we to do with this information?

DVD cover of Marlon Riggs, Black Is … Black Ain’t, 1995. Courtesy Signifyin’ Works

Marlon Riggs, Black Is … Black Ain’t, 1994

Along with Ethnic Notions (1987) and Tongues Untied (1989), this film by Marlon Riggs is the perfect merger of art, documentary, and activism. His films look at identity, intersectionality, and “postblackness” in ways that were, at the time of their making, groundbreaking and incredibly prescient. In the twenty-first century, we are still just beginning to address and understand what Riggs already knew then.

Stephanie Black, Life and Debt, 2001

This film gave me a foundation for understanding the ongoing devastating effects of slavery and colonialism, globalization and corporatization. We are often led to believe that “developing” countries are backward or just can’t get it right, while the truth is that “developed” countries (aka “mythmakers”) are still cheating, while also reaping the benefits of centuries of exploitation; the deck is stacked in their favor.

The odds for equality are slim.

The Watts Prophets, Rappin’ Black in a White World, 1971

Along with Gil Scott-Heron, Oscar Brown, Jr., and the Last Poets, the Watts Prophets are among the unsung pioneers of hip-hop. What I love about this album is how unafraid they were to speak truth to power and to express the rage of the beautiful struggle and their distaste for injustice.

Daniel Breaker and Eisa Davis in Passing Strange, 2007. Photograph by Sara Krulwich. Courtesy Sara Krulwich/The New York Times/Redux

Stew and Heidi Rodewald, Passing Strange, 2008

Yes, this is a musical. I saw it three times on stage and the film version five times. Every time I make anything, I want it to make people feel the way this piece made me feel when I first saw it. A lyric from the songbook: “What’s inside is just a lie. / Ideas are dependable, there’s a new one every week. / Emotions are expendable because they aren’t unique.”

Still from John Carpenter, They Live, 1988. Courtesy Universal Studios Licensing LLC

John Carpenter, They Live, 1988

No movie has had a greater impression on me. Yes, a Hollywood movie featuring pro wrestler “Rowdy” Roddy Piper and Keith David, in which they expose that aliens have been embedding subliminal messages in advertisements, turning us all into mindless consumers. “The Golden Rule: He who has the gold, makes the rules.”It opened my twelve-year-old mind to the ways consumerism and advertising create a culture of alienation, something I’ve been thinking about pretty much ever since.

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

The post Vision & Justice: A Curriculum by Hank Willis Thomas appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

Upcoming Workshops, Fall 2016

Upcoming Workshops for Fall 2016 include:

Jason Fulford

Friday, August 19–Tuesday, August 23

Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb

Artist Talk: Friday, September 23

Workshop: Saturday and Sunday, September 24–25

Shelby Lee Adams

Saturday, October 8–Monday, October 10

John DeMerritt

Saturday and Sunday, October 15–16

Matthew Connors

Saturday and Sunday, November 19–20

More information and details coming soon! Contact us at education@aperture.org.

The post Upcoming Workshops, Fall 2016 appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

Vision & Justice Online: Ming Smith and the Kamoinge Workshop

Routinely excluded from the mainstream art world, in the 1960s, a group of African American photographers formed a collective to promote and exhibit their work. For one promising young artist, the experience was transformative.

By LeRonn P. Brooks

Anthony Barboza, The Founders of Kamoinge, 1973. Ming Smith pictured first row, second from left. Courtesy the artist and Schiffer Publishing

In the early 1970s, Ming Smith was working as a model in New York City but becoming serious about photography. While on a go-see, she made an acquaintance that would change the course of her artistic development: one with Anthony Barboza, a member of the Kamoinge group and currently the group’s director. In due course, Barboza invited Smith to join Kamoinge and she began exhibiting with the group. Through Kamoinge, an association of black photographers formed in New York in the 1960s, Smith began developing her craft, eventually exhibiting with the group as its first female member.

Kamoinge itself began when two separate groups of young black photographers—including Louis Draper, Earl James, and Calvin Mercer, among others—gathered in 1963 to discuss ways of using their work to address the civil rights movement and the troubling conditions of black people in their communities. It was concurrent with other progressively minded black artist groups such as Spiral, also based in New York, which included painters Romare Bearden (whom Smith would photograph in 1977), Hale Woodruff, Norman Lewis, and Emma Amos, among others. Kamoinge was initially mentored by more established photographers such as Larry Stewart and Roy DeCarava served as its first director. More than just a photography collective, Kamoinge (named for a word from the Kikuyu language meaning “a group of people acting together”) was an important forum for creative political activity.

Ming Smith, Pass the Plate, Harlem, 1972. Courtesy the artist

Kamoinge was not as much an organization, strictly speaking, as it was an informal circle of trust, affirmation, and career development. For Smith, just at the start of her practice, the group provided important forms of peer-to-peer discourse, meaningful critiques, and exhibitions. It also provided what can only be described as a methodology of feeling. Draper, in particular, routinely asked to see Smith’s images and offered insightful notes and suggestions. During an era in which black artists were routinely excluded from the mainstream art world, Kamoinge—from one generation to next—exemplified the principle that black artists could not afford to dismiss, or be blind to, important realities within their communities.

The influence of Kamoinge, and specifically of the group’s aspirations for political change, can be clearly seen in Smith’s work. Her photographs reveal the underlying tensions between citizens and communities. She positions her subjects as intimates feeling their way through specific conditions and circumstances, and deliberately invokes this exchange in her images. “The magic of photography,” Smith told me recently, “is seeing and capturing the moment.”

Ming Smith, Brown Skinned Model and Steeple, New York, 1971. Courtesy the artist

Her photograph Family Free Time in the Park (1982), made in Piedmont Park, Atlanta, exemplifies this feeling, and is characteristic of her work. The viewer who examines this image hoping to find life as the accumulation of cold and pointed denotations will perhaps be disappointed that the photograph does not submit the totality of its implications to those who lack imagination. It is a startling interpretation of a black family placed between hard formal contrasts. There was jazz in the park. It was summer. The black and white clash like thrusts of heat and cold, sounds and silences. Smith, on an afternoon stroll, synced these impressions into an image of feeling and an uneasy beauty, and this treatment correlates with larger societal tensions in Atlanta.

When Smith made Family Free Time in the Park, Atlanta was in mourning. Twenty-eight black citizens—many of them children—had been murdered there between 1979 and 1981, and the city was preoccupied by a pervasive terror. Although Wayne Williams had recently been sentenced for the murders, questions lingered about the credibility of the evidence presented against him. President Reagan had met with city officials and allocated funds for the investigation; the FBI committed nearly forty agents to the effort. Psychics, bounty hunters, and the Guardian Angels had marched into the city offering their services, but left without verifiable clues or a suspect. The city was turned out, and nothing. Centuries’ worth of layers of systemic racism had rendered Atlanta’s black communities vulnerable to the kind of terror that thrives in the darkness. It was clear that invisibility had its consequences.

Ming Smith, Family Free Time in the Park, Atlanta, Ga., 1982. Courtesy the artist

In 1982, Atlanta had yet to shed the unease, and here a black family attempts triage as the terror of the recent past slumbers. They are present but semi-legible. Veils of partial social erasure cover their lives. Their skins, shaded by darkness, and the children’s eyes, also shaded, are plausible metaphors. Just above, light bristles through the leaves’ stillness and peters out in long edges. The parents have their backs to us. The arch of the father’s arm is a fragile covenant. Traces of sun extend from the large pool of light in the background; the light paces toward the viewer, carrying with it the impression of a nearness that does not exist. This psychological distancing persists even in such an overwhelming light. Ming Smith learned much from Kamoinge, but her photographic vision and this image have lives of their own.

LeRonn P. Brooks is a writer, art historian, and recipient of poetry fellowships from the journal Callaloo and the Cave Canem Foundation.

Timeless: Photographs by Kamoinge was published by Schiffer in 2015.

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

The post Vision & Justice Online: Ming Smith and the Kamoinge Workshop appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

2015 Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation Photobook Awards Shortlist Exhibition on view at Scotiabank CONTACT Festival

The post 2015 Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation Photobook Awards Shortlist Exhibition on view at Scotiabank CONTACT Festival appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.