Aperture's Blog, page 137

Tim Davis: About About

Tim Davis, The Collector, 2015

Join visual artist, poet, and photographer Tim Davis for this two-day workshop, About About, which is intended to help photographic artists understand, discuss, conceptualize, and write about their work. Photography has become so ubiquitous, and digital culture offers such easy receptacles for pictures, but it also allows artists to make work without thinking through what it really amounts to. This workshop is designed to help photographers craft their work into a meaningful project—whether a publication or an exhibition—that makes sense for their inner directives. While making photographs is a way to understand yourself, developing those photographs into a successful project is a way to communicate how you see the world.

 

The first day will be a series of discussions, as each participant gives a short presentation of his or her work, either in print or digital form. Davis will guide a critical analysis of each participant’s project, with an emphasis on how to make the work more relevant, true, comprehensible, and pointed. The afternoon will be left free for making new work using the new guidelines.

 

During the second day, participants will present their images created on the previous day, and discuss how to write about one’s own work. An artist’s statement will be crafted by each participant, to capture the ideas the workshop has generated.

 

Light refreshments and lunch will be served both days. Please contact Aperture staff regarding any dietary requirements and/or restrictions at least one week prior to the workshop.

 

 

Tim Davis is a photographer, writer, and musician living in upstate New York and teaching photography at Bard College. His recent exhibitions include a sound installation at the Tang Museum, Saratoga Springs, Unphotographable, for which he sampled the word unphotographable from dozens of versions of “My Funny Valentine” into a single composition. He is hard at work on a project called Cartoons, inspired by the cartoonist B. Kliban, in which he is turning jokes and comedic observances into photographs. His books include My Life in Politics (Aperture, 2006).

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

 

DEADLINE EXTENDED!
Register by Thursday, May 12.

Register here

Contact education@aperture.org with any questions.

 

 

 

GENERAL TERMS AND CONDITIONS

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

Aperture workshops are intended for adults 18 years or older.

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

 

Release and Waiver of Liability

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

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

 

Refund/Cancellation Policy for Aperture Workshops

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

 

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

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

Contact education@aperture.org with any questions.

The post Tim Davis: About About appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

Aperture Celebrates the Launch of Vision & Justice

Sarah Lewis, Guest Editor of “Vision & Justice,” introduces Aperture’s summer 2016 issue at the Ford Foundation in New York. Photograph by Margarita Corporan

On Tuesday, May 10, Aperture celebrated the release of “Vision & Justice,” the magazine’s summer issue. Guest edited by writer, curator, and art historian Sarah Lewis, “Vision & Justice” explores the role of photography in the African American experience, from Frederick Douglass to the rise of #BlackLivesMatter. “American citizenship,” Lewis writes in her foreword, “has long been a project of vision and justice.”

Hank Willis Thomas, Sarah Lewis, Darren Walker, and Sarah Jones at the launch of “Vision & Justice.” Photograph by Margarita Corporan

Hosted by Darren Walker, President of the Ford Foundation, the event had a centerpiece of a series of vibrant and moving readings by contributors and friends, staged in the Ford Foundation’s East River Room and framed by wide-angle views of the United Nations. Aperture’s editor, Michael Famighetti, welcomed the audience and recounted his first conversations with Sarah Lewis about the issue, before inviting Lewis herself to introduce the themes and images to be found in the pages of “Vision & Justice.”

Chelsea Clinton reads from an essay by James Baldwin at the launch of “Vision & Justice.”  Photograph by Margarita Corporan

The acclaimed actress and performer Sarah Jones opened the readings with a passage on Frederick Douglass from Sarah Lewis’s book The Rise. Artist Hank Willis Thomas, who said he likes to “shake things up,” asked everyone present to photograph the person seated beside them and post their pictures to social media with the hashtag #VisionJustice. Thomas then offered a tribute to his mother, Deborah Willis, the visionary photography historian and author of numerous books on African American photography and visual culture.

Diane Lewis and Deborah Willis at the launch of “Vision & Justice.” Photograph by Margarita Corporan

Writer and critic Margo Jefferson read from her essay in “Vision & Justice” on Lorna Simpson’s collages, which draw upon imagery from vintage issues of Jet and Ebony magazines. “I like to imagine that in the old world of black periodicals she might have been featured as Madame Lorna, designer extraordinaire, her creations sought for the top balls and fashion shows,” she said. Carrie Mae Weems, after reading a passage from her new book Kitchen Table Series, spoke of the artist as inventor, honoring all of the artists in the room, including Julie Mehretu, Deana Lawson, and Lyle Ashton Harris, among many others.

Garnette Cadogan introduces the work of Radcliffe (Ruddy) Roye at the launch of “Vision & Justice.” Photograph by Margarita Corporan

Garnette Cadogan read a profile of Radcliffe (Ruddy) Roye, the prolific street photographer who has accumulated thousands of images on his popular Instagram feed. Chelsea Clinton shared a passage from The Creative Process by James Baldwin. And the evening concluded with Khalil Gibran Muhammad’s stirring homage to the great New York street photographer Jamel Shabazz. “Present in [his] work is a fierce commitment to visibility,” Muhammad said. “His lens has always seen more joy, more life, more blackness than our own eyes are capable of.” A testament to the power of the artistic community in New York and beyond, the launch of Vision & Justice teemed with joy.

Margo Jefferson at the launch of “Vision & Justice.” Photograph by Margarita Corporan

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

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Vision & Justice Online: She Walked in Beauty

Amid the racial tensions of the 1960s, Jet magazine captured African American life with grace and power. For an influential screenwriter, one cover was personal.

By Susan Fales-Hill

Cover of Jet magazine, May 27, 1965

This is a picture that masks a thousand indignities. The year was 1965. The country was in turmoil in the wake of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The Vietnam War raged and the South was on fire with the civil rights movement. My family had recently returned to the United States from Rome, Italy, where my white Anglo-Saxon Protestant father, Timothy Fales, and Haitian American mother, Josephine Premice, hounded by a racist press and relentless hate mail in the wake of their “scandalous” marriage in 1958, had taken refuge. As punishment for his “misalliance,” my father was fired from his job at a shipping company and his name was permanently expunged from the Social Register, America’s answer to Debrett’s Peerage. In “deigning” to wed a black woman, he had forfeited his place in our country’s Brahmin caste.

At three, I was blissfully oblivious to my parents’ struggles in our “pigmentocracy,” as well as to the turbulence around me. My mother, a brilliantly gifted actress, singer, and dancer—and the family’s pied piper—created an oasis of love, beauty, and limitless possibility. This photograph, taken for the cover of the black-owned weekly magazine Jet, captures her indomitable spirit and mesmerizing influence. In this image, as in life, my brother and I looked to her to see our true selves and learn the way forward. She taught us by example never to let life’s circumstances break our stride.

Though upon returning to New York my mother spent her days being denied rental apartments in a city of de facto segregation, she refused to be defined by the willfully ignorant and blind. Each morning, she donned full makeup and an exquisite ensemble, her armor in a business that reduced nearly all black actresses to playing maids or prostitutes on-screen and in a world that treated her as a second-class citizen. In a land of injustice, “she walked in beauty.”

No mainstream publication at the time would have featured a black actress and her children on its cover, and even to this day such images are cause for jubilation. In the latter half of the twentieth century, Jet and its sister magazine, Ebony, captured the dimensions of black life and achievement the mainstream media rendered invisible, and thus gave black America a vital mirror in which to see itself. Through this family portrait, my ridiculous Minnie Pearl hat notwithstanding, Jet offered my mother the opportunity to remind her own children, as well as the larger black community, to heed the words of champion prizefighter Jack Johnson: “I was a brunette in a blonde town, but gentlemen, I did not stop steppin’.” We walk on.

Susan Fales-Hill is an author, screenwriter, and television producer.

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

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Recap of Connect Member Meetup

On May 3, Aperture Connect Members came together for the group’s second meetup at the private home of archivist and former documentary filmmaker Patrick Montgomery. Montgomery’s The History of Photography Archive is an impressive collection of more than ten thousand objects, including photographs and ephemera, relating to the first hundred years of photography’s history.

Connect Members handled rare albums and photographic works, including early carbon and salt prints, and the first documented school portraits, such as a daguerreotype of the class of 1861 from Paris’s École Polytechnique. Also noted was the important role Aperture’s founders Ansel Adams and Beaumont Newhall played in photography’s development as an artistic medium.

Amelia Lang, executive managing editor of Aperture Foundation’s book program, spoke to Connect Members about the foundation’s unique position in the publishing field, emphasizing that photography and the photobook is a platform for both photographers and photography enthusiasts to learn about the unfamiliar.

Aperture Connect is a dynamic group of supporters (ages 21 to 37), residing in the New York Tri-state area, who seek to further their knowledge and understanding of photography, publishing, and the international photo community.

Click here to become an Aperture Connect Member today and to receive an invite to the next meetup on June 28!

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Mary Virginia Swanson: Business of Photography Series

Promotional pieces for artist Lisa M. Robinson

 

 

Join Mary Virginia Swanson for one or both of the remaining sessions of the Business of Photography workshop series. Participants can register for the seminars individually, or as a package of two for a reduced price. Light refreshments and lunch will be provided.

 

 

Introduction to Multiple Markets

Saturday, April 23, 2016, 11:00 a.m.–6:00 p.m.

One of the most exciting recent developments for photographers is the growth of new markets for their work. Whether a fine print is shown in a museum or in a corporate office, reproduced as a book cover illustration or featured in product advertising, the value of that photograph is different for each buyer. In this seminar, Swanson will provide an overview of the opportunities for, and the value of, your work within today’s diverse photography marketplace. This session is sold out. Please fill out the form below to be added to the waiting list.

 

Your Work, Your Brand

Saturday, May 7, 2016, 11:00 a.m.–6:00 p.m.

In today’s world, making meaningful contact with industry professionals is challenging. A photographer’s work may speak for itself, but how can you effectively present your work in a productive and memorable way? During this session, you will learn what components comprise a successful brand, and learn how combining and even integrating your print and social media tools can make the strongest first impression with your targeted audience. Registration ends Sunday, May 1.

 

 

Mary Virginia Swanson is an author, educator, and consultant who helps artists find the strengths in their work, identify appreciative audiences, and present their work in an informed, professional manner. Her seminars and lectures on marketing opportunities aid photographers in moving their careers to the next level. Swanson is the recipient of the 2013 Focus Lifetime Achievement Award from the Griffin Museum of Photography, and the 2014 Susan Carr Award for Education from the American Society of Media Photographers. The Society for Photographic Education named her the 2015 Honored Educator. Swanson coauthored Publish Your Photography Book (revised edition, 2014) with Darius Himes. Swanson is currently working on a new publication, Finding Your Audience: An Introduction to Marketing Your Photographs.

 

 

To register, please complete the form below.

Please note: your registration is not complete until Aperture has received payment. An Aperture staff member will send you a confirmation e-mail with additional information regarding what to bring how and how to prepare for the workshop.

Fill out my online form.

Fill out my Wufoo form!

 

 

If you have any questions please contact us at education@aperture.org.

 

 

General Terms and Conditions

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

Aperture workshops are intended for adults 18 years or older.

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

 

Release and Waiver of Liability

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

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

 

Refund/Cancellation Policy for Aperture Workshops

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

 

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

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

The post Mary Virginia Swanson: Business of Photography Series appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

Revisiting Seydou Keïta

Celebrated for his studio portraiture in the 1950s, Bamako’s most prominent photographer mastered the elements of style.

By Julie Crenn

Seydou Keïta, Sans titre, 1949. © Seydou Keïta / SKPEAC. Courtesy CAAC, The Pigozzi Collection, Genève

This spring, Paris pays tribute to Seydou Keïta, a pioneering figure in West African and international photography. Along with Malick Sidibé, J.D. ’Okhai Ojeikere, Jean Depara, Philippe Koudjina, and many others, Keïta embodies the foundations of portrait photography in Africa. He belongs to the family of twentieth-century masters of photography, along with August Sander, Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, and Helen Levitt. Even though his work has been included, since the 1990s, in major surveys connected to photography or African art at large, the Grand Palais currently presents his second Parisian retrospective exhibition. Organized by Yves Aupetitallot, the selection of works comes primarily from the Contemporary African Art Collection, as well as from the personal collection of André Magnin. By making the choice to exhibit both original vintage photographs and larger prints, the exhibition underlines the memorial dimension of an oeuvre both personal and collective.

Seydou Keïta, Sans titre, May 21, 1954. © Seydou Keïta / SKPEAC / photo collection Alexis Fabry, Paris

For Keïta, a self-taught artist, portraiture became a passion. Born in 1921, he worked independently in his studio between 1948 and 1963, photographing all of Bamako with great inventiveness. (From 1963 to 1977, he was requisitioned by the Republic of Mali as an official photographer.) “Having your portrait taken was a big deal, it was really important to give the best possible image of each person,” Keïta stated in 1997. “Often they took on a serious air, but I think it was probably because they were intimidated—it was new.” The result, across thousands of portraits, reflects careful staging with various elements: the decor is set thanks to the arrangement of wax fabrics, hung, folded, or draped. Their motifs participate actively in the image composition. The poses were meant to define the sitter—nothing was left to chance. As odalisques, standing, hieratic, sitting, three-quarter length, on a scooter, the poses are taken from paintings and engravings or cinema.

Seydou Keïta, Sans titre, 1953 © Seydou Keïta / SKPEAC. Courtesy CAAC, The Pigozzi Collection, Genève

At the center of this exhibition are black-and-white portraits of women, men, couples, and families, forming a gallery where characters of competing elegance parade in front of our eyes. Large-format prints give way to the smaller, vintage images, which generate more intimate and precious relations. The subjects stare us in the eye and draw us in. Through these images, the face of a society that has been independent since 1960 is forged. They reflect dynamism, emancipation, and claims to identity. The clothes, accessories, and objects give a personal, and even intimate, dimension to the portraits. They account for a personality, a group, who they are and how they want to be seen.

Seydou Keïta, Untitled, 1949-1951. © Seydou Keïta / SKPEAC. Courtesy CAAC, The Pigozzi Collection, Genève

During colonization, photography was anthropometric; it was used to identify, classify, and sometimes humiliate the colonized peoples. Individuals were reduced to being objects of study, even sometimes photographed frontally in the most neutral manner. Keïta’s portraits have managed to free themselves from racist stereotypes, returning beauty and individual personality to Malian people. These photographs constitute a visual heritage imbued with great personal and collective wealth.

Seydou Keïta, Sans titre, 1959-60 © Seydou Keïta / SKPEAC. Courtesy CAAC, The Pigozzi Collection, Genève

Keïta’s portraiture has had an immeasurable influence not only on African photography, but throughout the world. Following Keïta’s heritage and his will to return a form of dignity to the subject in the image are artists such as Zanele Muholi, who presents the face of black LGBT citizens, often subjected to outrageous violence, and Leila Alaoui, the Franco-Moroccan photographer who died as a victim of a terrorist attack in Ouagadougou in January, and whose series The Moroccans, begun in 2011, allowed for the meeting of different tribes and generations that make up the Moroccan identity. Rather like in Keïta’s work, a critical and even political dimension can be found in the adornment of fabrics, play of traditional and modern clothing, ornamentation, and highly designed staging in the work of Samuel Fosso, Omar Victor Diop, Kehinde Wiley, and Baudouin Mouanda. There are countless others. As a consequence, this exhibition on Seydou Keïta instills the decisive legacy of his work and showcases the commitment of the next generation of artists on the African continent and in the diaspora.

Julie Crenn is an art critic and curator based in Paris. Translated from the French by Caroline Hancock.

Seydou Keïta is on view at the Grand Palais, Paris, through July 11, 2016.

The post Revisiting Seydou Keïta appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

Promised Lands

Are Israel and the West Bank an oasis, homeland, or colonial state? Twelve photographers set out to describe a contested territory.

By Ian Bourland

This Place, an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum curated by photographer Frédéric Brenner, opens with a monumental tableau by Jeff Wall. Daybreak (2011) restages a happenstance encounter with vividly garbed bedouin olive pickers, found sleeping on the ground near a prison in the Negev. Typically, for Wall, the scene juxtaposes the immediacy of documentary with the precision of cinematic postproduction. In spite of its artifice—Wall used a team of assistants over the course of several weeks to make the image—Daybreak isolates the uncanny moments and parallax of vision that This Place seeks to draw into view.

Frédéric Brenner, The Aslan Levi Family, 2012. Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York © the artist

The exhibition is an elaboration of a long-term project through which Brenner has charted the global Jewish diaspora—often by way of staged family portraiture that calls to mind both August Sander and Tina Barney. Brenner’s own work is included here, but complemented by and resituated amidst the projects of the eleven other photographers he invited to immerse themselves in Israel and the West Bank between 2009 and 2012. Recognizing the contested realities of quotidian life there, his ambition was to enact “une parole poétique,” attempting to transcend the stale binaries through which this landscape is often figured. Such a “poetic” approach risks a retreat into sentimentality, eliding the high stakes of a land inscribed by seemingly intractable conflict. But, taken as a whole, the discrete practices brought together in This Place are more than the sum of their parts: the resulting six hundred photographs on display produce a humane and at times revelatory counterarchive of a place known, by turns, as an oasis, a homeland, a colonial state, or a utopian site of return.

Martin Kollar, Untitled, from the series Field Trip, 2009–11. Courtesy the artist

With its telescoping levels of magnification, and its emphasis on the taxonomic or seemingly banal environments, This Place might trace its conceptual roots to the landmark 1975–76 exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape, at the George Eastman House. There are, in fact, overlaps in personnel from that earlier project, such as Stephen Shore and Thomas Struth. In This Place, Shore provides a suite of majestic desert landscapes. Struth contributes large-scale inkjet prints that oscillate between moody interiors, vernacular architecture, and crisp family portraiture; his Basilica of the Annunciation, Nazareth (2014) is at once hauntingly intimate and disconcertingly inert. The aesthetic virtuosity of such photographs might, as standalone images, either distance or romanticize contemporary Israel, but in the context of the exhibition’s larger framework, they underscore the ways in which the same topographies and streetscapes can be filtered or repurposed—say from Shore’s sublime promontories, or under Struth’s clinical scrutiny.

In a more explicitly conceptual register, Fazal Sheikh reprises the surveillance investigations of Ed Ruscha and Robert Smithson, strafing the open desert for signs of life. Desert Bloom (2015) is the most subtle and textually reliant work on display, comprising a large grid of beige imagery—denuded landscapes bearing scars of human intervention. Sheikh provides a brochure describing the coordinates of each photograph and detailed field notes researched upon return from his travels. The approach is systematic but not deadpan, and parlays the colonial logic of the aerial survey into a sustained psychogeographic history of seemingly “empty” space.

Gilles Peress, Contact Sheet, Palestinian Jerusalem, 2013. Installation view, detail © the artist

Throughout the exhibition, sustained looking on the part of both the photographer and viewer is counterbalanced with more documentary immediacy. For instance, for This Is Where I Live (2012–15), Wendy Ewald put the camera in the hands of constituencies—urbanites and villagers, children and elders—reproducing dozens of the results at roughly 5 by 7 inches. Ewald’s project is sociologically complex and politically audacious, but, like Gilles Peress’s grid of medium-scale street scenes in Palestinian Jerusalem (2013)—handheld, off-kilter shots that capture a cosmopolitan bustle—it lends itself less to museum viewing than to a more asynchronous, digital interface. Still, Ewald and Peress draw into sharp relief the subtle boundary between the archive as framework and as formal structure.

Jungjin Lee, Unnamed Road 083, 2011 © the artist

Such taxonomic intensity is, in turn, complemented by moments of old-school formalism and blunt humanism. Jungjin Lee’s panoramic registration of natural forms on handmade paper is gauzy and surreal, bearing uncanny traces, like latter-day rayograms. Celebrated Czech photographer Josef Koudelka frames the bleak surfaces of the partition wall being built by Israelis in the West Bank, which in high-contrast black and white evokes the carceral realities of his youth in Eastern Europe. Koudelka’s works literally partition the exhibition—the wide expanse of his panoramic shot is displayed faceup on an elongated wall in miniature. And THEM (2010–11), Rosalind Fox Solomon’s square format series, hearkens to a bygone golden age of street photography. Unabashedly lyrical and intimate, Solomon’s images would not be out of place in the great midcentury photography exhibitions organized by Edward Steichen or John Szarkowski.

Rosalind Fox Solomon, Jerusalem, 2011 © the artist

In many ways, Brenner’s project is of a piece with such vintage curatorial modes, which prioritized modernist finish and a roseate universalism, but also with the later work of Allan Sekula, who merged metaphor and unflinching realism. This Place is aware of the confounding nuance and high stakes of representing even the most banal scenes of everyday life in Israel and the West Bank, but the exhibition makes a confident claim for the capacity of art to address public debates in ways that photojournalism cannot. The danger, as curator T. Z. Toukan has noted, is in aestheticizing rather than confronting the complexity of this contested terrain. Speaking of art in Palestine in 2010, he wondered, “Does trauma—presented in an art context—become aesthetically appealing, telegenic so to speak, and, if so, can the telegenic aspect be a productive thing?” This Place, a compelling and dissonant experiment, leaves that question unanswered.

Ian Bourland, a historian of photography and critic of the global contemporary, is an assistant professor at the Maryland Institute College of Art.

This Place is on view at the Brooklyn Museum through June 5, 2016.

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The Pleasure of the Image: A Conversation with Isaac Julien

Isaac Julien, Mise en Scene No. 2, Looking for Langston (Vintage series), 1989/2016. Courtesy the artist and Jessica Silverman Gallery

One of the most innovative artists of his generation, Isaac Julien rose to prominence in the late 1980s with the debut of his film Looking for Langston (1989), a lyrical meditation on the poet Langston Hughes. Looking for Langston, made collaboratively with the photographer Sunil Gupta and the cinematographer Nina Kellgren, is set in the atmospheric, reimagined world of Harlem in the 1920s. Evoking Hughes as a queer icon, Julien pushed expressions of black male desire into visual culture through what he calls the “aesthetics of reparation”—the creation of a space where images of different identities and races can exist and flourish. Here, Julien speaks about returning to his early work in Vintage, an exhibition of photographs that recently opened at Jessica Silverman Gallery in San Francisco.

Isaac Julien, Film Noir Angels, 1989. Courtesy the artist and Jessica Silverman Gallery

Brendan Wattenberg: For Vintage, why did you decide to turn back to your earlier film and video work in the form of still images?

Isaac Julien: A lot of this emanates from working on my MoMA catalogue, Riot (2013), which comes out of the work I’ve been undertaking in my studio. In the mid-2000s, we began looking at my archive and trying to get that into order. That’s where the first interest began in showing the Langston photographs. That felt like a work that was kind of important to resurrect because it had just been gathering dust in the vault!

Wattenberg: In the exhibition, there are two scales for the prints.

Julien: Yes, these prints are showing two different kinds of photographic techniques—traditional gelatin-silver prints and larger-scale photographs, which are closer to the original cinematic experience of looking at the film. I wanted to make some larger-scale works from the series because, of course, new technology allows one to do that! I’ve been making photographic works in Germany, at Grieger in Düsseldorf—and I see the influence of that “New German Photography” school in my own practice. But, the Looking for Langston images were always meant to be images, which were shot both on Super 16mm film and on 35mm black-and-white film. All of the images made for both technologies were made to be seen at a large scale. There’s my premise.

Isaac Julien, Homage Noir, 1989. Courtesy the artist and Jessica Silverman Gallery

Wattenberg: Let’s go back to the origins of photography and the image for you. I’m thinking about the photographers you’ve mentioned, both in your MoMA catalogue and with regard to this exhibition: James VanDerZee, George Platt Lynes, and Robert Mapplethorpe. Were these the photographers you had in mind in the early part of your career? Or specifically when you set out to make Looking for Langston?

Julien: I know there’s a new documentary on Robert Mapplethorpe’s work, which I saw at the Berlin film festival, and it reminded me that my thesis, when I was at Saint Martin’s School of Art in London, was focused very much around Robert Mapplethorpe’s work. The thing I was trying to do, in the early ’80s, was to look for images that resonated with me. When I saw VanDerZee’s work, for example, I just knew it was very important in terms of vernacular of African American photography and black culture generally. So, it was when I was making Looking for Langston, when I was concentrating on the theme of the Harlem Renaissance, that my encounter with photography—with American photography, and with black-and-white photography in particular—became very important.

Wattenberg: Robert Mapplethorpe is having a moment right now. Do you still feel a strong connection to his work?

Julien: I see a return to Mapplethorpe, and indeed a return to analog techniques in photography, as a kind of recourse to the way in which digital technologies have become “over-spectralized” to such an extent. We’re completely intoxicated by images. So, there’s that return. But certainly thirty years has passed, and that creates enough critical distance where you can look at a photographer like Mapplethorpe anew. It’s very much about periodization and the shift that time affords and enables you to have a different gaze upon works of his kind.

Isaac Julien, Pas-de-Deux, from Looking for Langston (Vintage series), 1989/2016. Courtesy the artist and Jessica Silverman Gallery

Wattenberg: Do you see Looking for Langston in a genealogy of American portraiture?

Julien: Absolutely. That really comes out in the work. In Looking for Langston, it’s George Platt Lynes and black-and-white photography, which creates a kind of “cocktail”—VanDerZee is the strong aesthetic signature to the work. There are also all the other references—cinematic references to say film noir, or to the expressionism which belonged to German cinema, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari—that intersect the work. For all intents and purposes, the series in Vintage belong to a film set. So it’s also the lighting of Nina Kellgren, who shot the film, and the apparatus that cinema brings to the image, and the way you have to think about the black-and-white image in particular.

Wattenberg: What was the nature of your collaboration with Sunil Gupta on Looking for Langston?

Julien: The nature of the work was similar to working with Nina. I’m always looking to make work with people who are technicians, but in the case of Nina, she studied sculpture at the Slade School of Fine Art, she made black-and-white photography, and she taught photography. Sunil is a photographer himself. I was in dialogue with both artists when I was making Looking for Langston as they were performing and working and shooting the film. And to some extent, I carry that practice on to this day. But, I would say, in Sunil’s work, we were interested in the way that he was pushing certain questions around gender and sexual identity, in the same way that I was, in Sankofa Film and Video and the Black Audio Film Collective. We have a lot of friendships from those days, which were committed to lots of different struggles that were taking place, especially around the AIDS crisis and the decolonization of queer culture, which was very much attacked by Thatcherite forces. There was a common bond that we had.

Isaac Julien, Trussed series, 1996. Courtesy the artist and Jessica Silverman Gallery

Wattenberg: Could you explain what you mean by “aesthetics of reparation”?

Julien: When we’re thinking about the industries of film and photography, we know that we’re dealing with a technology that is particularly non-neutral in the way in which black subjects, specifically, have been treated. Not only by the technologies themselves, which were aligned to lighter skin tones, but we know that the rules of representation—and the technologies of representation—have to be rewritten if you want to articulate a certain aesthetic. So, I always view the making of works as an act of reparation, aesthetically. It’s the undoing of a very forceful regime of dominant effects, which are quite a bombardment for any person of color growing up or being part of a generally dominant white culture, particularly in the photographic and cinematic industries. Making work is about how one can produce the aesthetics of representation, which is about creating and sustaining spaces for different images to exist of black subjects, of queer subjects, of working class subjects. In the work of Langston Hughes, for example, I see a strong sense of the aesthetics of representation. His work is very much about looking at black life and the aesthetics that get drawn out, such as in VanDerZee’s Harlem Book of the Dead, a photographic book which I looked at very closely in the making of Looking for Langston. In some senses, I’m looking to recreate a certain mise-en-scène, which had an inspiration from those photographic images and from black modernism.

Wattenberg: You mentioned that you’re still working on your archive. But Riot contains a great quantity of photographs—it is an archive, in it’s own way. There are many pictures of the artists and intellectuals who surrounded you as you were making the works we’ve just discussed. Are you still thinking about another book project on your archives?

Julien: I’ve wanted to do a book on Looking for Langston. But, I think it would be fantastic to do a book just on the photographic side of my work, which of course includes lots of collaborators, such as Sunil Gupta, and also all the people I worked with on my films, such as Nina Kellgren. My work is rooted in photography. In the Vintage exhibition, that’s one of the things I’m trying to bring to the forefront.

Brendan Wattenberg is the managing editor of Aperture magazine.

Vintage is on view at Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco, through June 11, 2016.

The post The Pleasure of the Image: A Conversation with Isaac Julien appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

The Architecture of Desire

In her recent videos and installations, Amie Siegel navigates the threshold of art and commerce.

By Sabrina Mandanici

Amie Siegel, Circuit, 2013. Installation view, Ricochet #10: Amie Siegel, Double Negative, Museum Villa Stuck, Munich, 2016. Courtesy the artist and Simon Preston Gallery, New York

The word “ricochet” describes a moving object—such as a bullet—which, when hitting a surface, fails to penetrate it, and instead rebounds at an angle. It’s appropriate that Amie Siegel’s first large-scale survey exhibition in Germany, Double Negative, is presented as part of Ricochet, the exhibition series at Munich’s Villa Stuck, a museum housed in the former mansion of German fin-de-siècle painter Franz von Stuck. Like a ricocheting object, the power of Siegel’s works comes at you tangentially and strikes with unexpected force.

Amie Siegel, Double Negative, 2015. Installation view, Ricochet #10: Amie Siegel, Double Negative, Museum Villa Stuck, Munich, 2016. Courtesy the artist and Simon Preston Gallery, New York

Siegel’s seven works on view—in video, film, and photography—provide thorough insight into an artistic practice often considered an “interrogation of cinematic tropes.” Double Negative also reflects on, plays with, and undermines the narrative and formal strategies of visual storytelling and its media, as well as the iconography of the moving image. Yet that would discount, even ignore, the precise curating of Yara Sonseca Mas and Siegel herself and their nimble use of the villa’s challenging, ornately decorated, rooms. Over the course of the exhibition, each of Siegel’s works gradually resonates with one another to reveal their Janus-like nature.

Amie Siegel, Double Negative, 2015. Installation view, Ricochet #10: Amie Siegel, Double Negative, Museum Villa Stuck, Munich, 2016. Courtesy the artist and Simon Preston Gallery, New York

Rich and multi-layered in aesthetic and content, Siegel’s art observes the social and economic patterns that form and influence our relationship with object and image, architecture and archive. A meticulous image maker, precise in her framing and construction of thought-provoking tableaus, she questions our often-fetishistic habit to assign myths to material objects and thereby establishes both personal meaning and commercial value. Siegel illustrates this instinct explicitly in Provenance (2013), the first piece on view.

Amie Siegel, Provenance, 2013. Installation view, Ricochet #10: Amie Siegel, Double Negative, Museum Villa Stuck, Munich, 2016. Courtesy the artist and Simon Preston Gallery, New York

As the title implies, Provenance, a 40-minute HD video traces an object’s history, in this case the global trade of collectible designer furniture, mainly chairs and stools, to their origin at Chandigarh—the controversial 1950s modernist city in India, conceived by Swiss architect Le Corbusier—all the way down to its furniture. In reverse chronology, the video’s slow, opening tracking shots of upscale Western residences—the furniture’s present settings—proceed backward through auction previews and sales, photo studios, restorers’ workshops, shipping containers, and finally into Chandigarh’s office complexes, where the furniture originated.

Amie Siegel, Provenance, 2013. Installation view, Ricochet #10: Amie Siegel, Double Negative, Museum Villa Stuck, Munich, 2016. Courtesy the artist and Simon Preston Gallery, New York

Siegel’s complex power of observation lies not in offering judgment, but in a seemingly objective, almost passive presentation, a strategy of indirect disclosure. Provenance, however, has been unjustly criticized for its high-end aesthetics, and for obscuring details about locations, dealers, and collectors, and particularly for exploiting the insular logic of the art market. After the first exhibition of Provenance in New York, Siegel later auctioned off an edition of the video at Christie’s in London—and filmed the entire process. The result, Lot 248 (2013), retelling the preview and auctioning of Provenance, and Proof (Christie’s 19 October, 2013) (2013), a framed printer’s proof of the auction catalogue’s page for the Provenance lot, are also exhibited in Munich. Taken together, the entanglement of Provenance with the art market is merely a feint to decode something else: following our desire to possess or belong, objects become actors—or surrogates.

Amie Siegel, The Modernists, 2010. Installation view, Ricochet #10: Amie Siegel, Double Negative, Museum Villa Stuck, Munich, 2016. Courtesy the artist and Simon Preston Gallery, New York

A more intimate and humorous facet is present in The Modernists (2010), scenes from vernacular photographs and Super 8 films, made by a couple from the 1960s to the ’80s, who traveled to the world’s major museums and iconic art sites and posed with famous sculptures. Displayed in the villa’s remarkable former bathroom (with fragments of an antique frieze affixed to its walls), it subtly prompts questions about class, about economic power and the accessibility of culture, and the shifting status of souvenirs—from historic objects to photographic performance.

Amie Siegel, The Modernists, 2010. Installation view, Ricochet #10: Amie Siegel, Double Negative, Museum Villa Stuck, Munich, 2016. Courtesy the artist and Simon Preston Gallery, New York

Berlin Remake (2005) is a double-projection of scenes from films by the former East German State Film Studio, juxtaposed with her present-day “remade” versions. Deathstar/Todesstern (2006), five screens of slow-motion shots traveling through hallways of early German modernist buildings, constructed or appropriated by the country’s totalitarian regime, are loops that viewers can enter into at any point. Devoid of narrative, with no explicitly theatrical motivation or plot, they prompt viewers to confront the uncanny, somewhat menacing, architecture itself, and thereby reveal how our reaction is directed, if not manipulated by, the camera.

Amie Siegel, Berlin Remake, 2005. Installation view, Ricochet #10: Amie Siegel, Double Negative, Museum Villa Stuck, Munich, 2016. Courtesy the artist and Simon Preston Gallery, New York

The nexus of this exhibition’s cross-referential net is Double Negative (2016), a new two-part work commissioned by the museum. Two facing, 16mm films simultaneously project images of Le Corbusier’s all-white Villa Savoye, now a museum near Paris, and its all-black “replica” in Australia, which houses an aboriginal archive. As both films are projected from negative stock, our notions of original and copy, of black and white, are confused, and we are left to find our own answers of intent and meaning. The second part, a color video of the interior of the Australian archive, shows, in a melancholic tone, its ongoing digitization of ethnographic films and aboriginal cult objects.

Amie Siegel, Double Negative, 2015. Installation view, Ricochet #10: Amie Siegel, Double Negative, Museum Villa Stuck, Munich, 2016. Courtesy the artist and Simon Preston Gallery, New York. All installation photographs by Jann Averwerser

The questions ricocheting from Double Negative are what make this exhibition so satisfying, as well as its confrontation of our relationship to objects that surround us, and the importance we assign to them. Perceptive and self-reflexive, Amie Siegel skillfully navigates the threshold between art and economics—between the human impulse to leave a mark, or to own it.

Sabrina Mandanici is a writer and an Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach-Stiftung Fellow in the program “Museum Curator for Photography.” She currently lives in Germany.

Amie Siegel: Double Negative is on view at Villa Stuck, Munich, through June 5, 2016. Amie Siegel: The Spear in the Stone is on view at Simon Preston Gallery, New York, from May 1 to June 19, 2016.

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At San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art, a New Frontier for Photography

Snøhetta expansion of the new SFMOMA, opening May 14, 2016 © Henrik Kam. Courtesy SFMOMA

When SFMOMA reopens next month, the new Pritzker Center for Photography will become the largest photography showcase in an American art museum. The center will have double the original gallery space and new, state-of-the-art educational and storage facilities. At the heart of one of the nation’s leading fine art institutions, photography will take center stage. Glen Helfand recently spoke with senior curator Sandra Phillips about the Pritzker Center and upcoming exhibitions at SFMOMA.

Glen Helfand: How much discussion was there about the importance of photography as a medium in terms of its prime location in the museum?

Sandra Phillips: There’s a considerable group of Trustees who are committed to photography. I know that photography was something that SFMOMA director Neal Benezra and the Trustees were eager to present in an important and focused way in the enlarged museum, and it’s something we’ve stood for since the museum was founded in the 1930s. We have been very photography-oriented because it’s been our important community, both historically and now.

Lewis Baltz, Claremont, 1973 © Estate of Lewis Baltz. Courtesy SFMOMA

Helfand: What exactly is the Pritzker Center for Photography?

Phillips: It comprises the old galleries in the Botta Building that now showcase the permanent collection. It includes the Photography Interpretation Galleries, which will also include a coffee bar. And it includes the Temporary Exhibition galleries for photography, where we will present our own shows and those from other institutions. Finally it will also include the collection itself, the study room, a classroom, and two offices.

Helfand: What aspects are you most excited about?

Phillips: I think the whole thing as a unit, which unites the study of the original objects in the study room with work being shown in the galleries, together with an in-depth concentration on our permanent collection and a creative use of it. It will enable us to bring in more shows from other institutions. We will also be developing our archives and making all that accessible. The whole thing is like a dream come true.

Seiichi Furuya, Izu, 1978, from the series Portrait of Christine, 1978 © Seiichi Furuya. Courtesy SFMOMA

Helfand: What’s in the Photography Interpretive Gallery?

Phillips: There will be exhibits about aspects of the collection presented digitally. In the opening program one will feature examples of California photography in our collection, one of our strengths. It will present a kind of roadmap where you can figure out what pictures of Yosemite or Los Angeles we have. There will also be educational games to help people understand how photography actually works, for instance, a way to make a photogram with your cell phone to understand photographic process and photographic ideas. Then there’s access to other aspects of our collection, like films on and interviews with photographers whose work we own. We just went to Japan and interviewed ten photographers who we will be showing in the second permanent collection exhibition. These will be edited and put up online, and also available in the gallery, so you can see what these photographers have to say about their work when you see the show.

Stephen Shore, Market Street, San Francisco, California, September 4, 1974, 1974 © Stephen Shore. Courtesy SFMOMA

Helfand: What ways do you see the expanded facility shifting what the department can do moving forward?

Phillips: One of our strengths has been to think of ways to present all kinds of photography. I think that’s one of the great aspects of this medium—the technology is available to everyone. We haven’t shown much of our large vernacular collection and it deserves to be seen because it’s so relevant to the questions we ask of photography now. Now that we accept photography fully as art, the vernacular tradition might be rethought and put into the context of so-called “art photography.” I think this is a wonderful way to get people to think about the diversity of the medium, and what it can do uniquely.

Helfand: How many works are in the collection now, and how much activity happened in terms of growing it during the construction hiatus?

Phillips: Well, there’s something like 18,000 pictures in the collection. During the closure, we got a large and very wonderful group of pictures from Japan, the so-called Kurenboh Collection. I think it’s a very interesting collection, and it really adds to our commitment to Japanese photography, and helps us move forward into the current activity, where there is a vital group of young, important photographers. I think Japan is a very interesting community for photography.

Tseng Kwong Chi, Grand Canyon, Arizona, 1987 © Estate of Tseng Kwong Chi. Courtesy SFMOMA

Helfand: You concentrated on California for your opening exhibition California and the West, which includes mostly recent acquisitions and gifts. Can you talk about the concept of the show?

Phillips: When I did the show called Crossing the Frontier, in 1996, I realized how much amazing material there was that reflected the discovery and development of the West, and what had happened after it was initially developed. It was a show designed to present how we developed Western land for all kinds of purposes, to extract mineral or lumber or whatever, and what we’ve inherited from that. So there will be some of that kind of material in this show as well, but it does not stop there. Since this was a show about the gifts we were receiving, we also wanted to include pictures of the northern California landscape in photographs from people like Ansel Adams and Dorothea Lange and Minor White to the present. In California, there’s been a very interesting culture for photography, though it’s not generally recognized as coming from here. That was my stated aim—to discover the tradition and to put it into some kind of context that could be understood, and show how it developed.

Helfand: What are some highlights?

Phillips: There’s some very beautiful early work. Not only Watkins’ pictures of Yosemite, but also early pictures of the developed land. There’s a diptych of a corporate farm in southern California in the nineteenth century. We were also fortunate to receive the beautiful, very important, very modernist surf sequence by Ansel Adams. The show and gift campaign also enabled us to focus attention on photographers of this area associated with the New Topographics exhibition, and to pursue some of the great figures of the 1930s—Weston, Cunningham, Minor White—and add significantly to those holdings. And then we were able to add to the conceptual work that was going on here in the ’70s and ’80s—Bruce Connor, Hal Fisher, Lew Thomas, and finally what’s been happening here more recently with work by Larry Sultan, Mike Light, and Trevor Paglen.

Nicholas Nixon, The Brown Sisters, East Greenwich, Rhode Island, 1980 © Nicholas Nixon. Courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco and Yossi Milo Gallery, New York

Helfand: The California show is in dialogue with the other opening exhibition, About Time.

Phillips: About Time is really a show that considers this element of photography that’s constant to it, and pursuing the ideas that come out of it. The show looks at the whole medium and also examines the implications of these ideas in video and projection. I think it’s a really wonderful and important show.

Helfand: How will you be moving forward with the department?

Phillips: I’m officially retiring at the end of June. I will continue to organize shows that have been on the calendar. The show from our Japanese collection is an examination of gifts and promised gifts to the museum. After that, I will put up the Larry Sultan show that comes from LACMA. We’ll have a show I’ve been working on called American Geography that looks at how we live in and use our land. In any case, when the next person in charge of the department is selected, I hope I can have a relationship that is important to the museum. I’d love to do things like work on the history of the department, which I think would be useful to everyone.

Larry Sultan, Isleton, from the series Homeland, 2009 © Estate of Larry Sultan. Courtesy SFMOMA

Helfand: What else is coming up in the first year or two of exhibitions?

Phillips: There’s a wonderful show of Anthony Hernandez, a photographer in southern California who has never had the attention his work certainly deserves. My colleague, Erin O’Toole, will be doing that.

Helfand: What was it like to have a three-year moment of working behind the scenes versus public presentations?

Phillips: It certainly was not easy. We were divorced from our collection. We’d have to go down to the collection center and work there to see it. But I would say it provided a time for us to really think about the collection in a more abstract way—what it really needed, what the goals were. We spent some serious time doing a kind of analysis of our department, a strategic plan. We were given this opportunity to rethink the department’s goals, refine our collecting objectives, and to rethink how the department works. That was really, really hard, and really, really important. It was a difficult but worthwhile period for us and I think we made very good use of that time.

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

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