Aperture's Blog, page 138

Does Mapplethorpe Still Matter?

Notorious for photographs that pushed private desire into the public realm, two major exhibitions in Los Angeles consider the artist—and the man—in full.

By Sayantan Mukhopadhyay

Robert Mapplethorpe, Self-Portrait, 1985. Courtesy the J. Paul Getty Trust and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art © Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation

The story of Robert Mapplethorpe is a tantalizing emblem of a vanished moment in New York’s urban history, shaded by the underground sexual hedonism of the 1970s and the pursuant AIDS crisis of the 1980s. Mapplethorpe’s status as a dominant figure in twentieth century photography is a product, in part, of the close circle of influential colleagues crucial to his biography: friend and former lover, Patti Smith; patron and partner, Sam Wagstaff; rival and idol, Andy Warhol. But Mapplethorpe was an artist responding to a particular sociopolitical climate, which has to be defined not only by the mythologized demimonde of downtown New York, but also the cultural flashpoint of his first posthumous retrospective, in 1989, which secured his position among a queer intelligentsia flourishing in a time of urgent need.

Robert Mapplethorpe, Two Men Dancing, 1984. Courtesy the J. Paul Getty Trust and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art © Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation

The Perfect Medium, two concurrent retrospectives of the work of Robert Mapplethorpe hosted simultaneously at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Getty Center, provides the richest narrative about the photographer to date. By centering on Mapplethorpe’s world—his network of affiliations—instead of resting on the artist’s brand of sexual bombast, the shows manage to lift Mapplethorpe out of the often facile discourse on pornography’s contentions with fine art. Together, the exhibitions form a monumental homage to the late artist that at once attempt to resuscitate the narrative of the enfant terrible of American photography, while challenging the grounds on which his fame has been earned. Mapping Mapplethorpe’s oeuvre onto Los Angeles’s diffuse sprawl in a show that spans two locations is a test of ambition, yet despite the miles of freeway separating the institutions housing the exhibitions, the result is a resoundingly cohesive image of the man.

Robert Mapplethorpe, Banana & Keys, 1974 Courtesy the J. Paul Getty Trust and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art © Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation

LACMA’s intervention begins with Mapplethorpe’s rarely seen early student work, featuring multimedia installation, collage, and new media. The growing pains of a young practitioner are on view in vitrines: a set of artist-made necklaces, as well as a trio of t-shirts, render the fabled photographer human. This biographical focus contributes to a three-dimensional approach taken by LACMA, allowing Mapplethorpe’s legacy to transcend his relationship to the camera. The first room in LACMA’s iteration of the show is successful in providing important and vivid contextual backdrops for the many developments in Mapplethorpe’s studio practice.

Robert Mapplethorpe, Calla Lily, 1988. Courtesy the J. Paul Getty Trust and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art © Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation

The remainder of the LACMA exhibition centers on the figures that oriented Mapplethorpe’s later work, before moving onto both his BDSM and flower series. On view in tandem with his sexually explicit photographs—labeled discreetly with an advisory warning as wall text—the Mapplethorpe Archive supplies treasures from the artist’s personal collection of knickknacks, including pornographic mail-order photographs. These souvenirs enliven an image of a man whose life’s work has had a resonant impact, in art history and contemporary visual culture, on ideas about the body and desire. The strength of LACMA’s contribution the retrospective is the context these illustrative objects add to the photographs themselves.

Robert Mapplethorpe, Joe, NYC, 1978. Courtesy the J. Paul Getty Trust and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art © Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation

The Getty offers a complimentary entry into Mapplethorpe’s life, sometimes doubling up on the subject matter addressed across town at LACMA. The most prominent feature in the Getty’s presentation is Mapplethorpe’s subversive X Portfolio (1978), a series portraying jarring acts of extreme sexual bravado. A moveable wall, mounted with an iconic flower photograph, decorously screens off images from the portfolio. The meeting of these two oppositional mainstays—the corporeal and the floral—is a poetic metaphor for the sensitive treatment that both the Getty and LACMA have given to the artist’s body of work.

Robert Mapplethorpe, Kathy Acker, 1983. Courtesy the J. Paul Getty Trust and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art © Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation

Descriptions of Mapplethorpe’s complicated identity are often crudely flattened into commentary on the uneasy line he towed between fine art and pornography. But this expansive, unprecedented exhibition never denies the complexities of Mapplethorpe’s trajectory as an artist, a celebrity, a friend, and a lover. Previous Mapplethorpe shows to approach this scale—notably The Perfect Moment, which traveled in the U.S. in the late 1980s and spawned rancor for its supposed peddling of erotic imagery as art—have been received reductively as valorizing the artist simply as a formalist quasi-pornographer, while ignoring the vast social make-up of his prominence.

The exhibitions at LACMA and the Getty, and the accompanying LACMA catalogue, address this history through essays that not only look to Mapplethorpe’s status as a queer revolutionary, but also a skilled portraitist, a pioneer of style, and a purveyor of fashion and fetish. The Getty Research Institute’s publication on the Mapplethorpe Archive serves to round out the discussion by narrating Mapplethorpe’s life story through objects from his personal collections.

Robert Mapplethorpe, Untitled (“Sam—I love you and I need you—hurry home”), 1974. Courtesy the J. Paul Getty Trust and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art © Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation

Through their delicate resurrection of the life and times of this art historical underdog, these exhibitions and attendant publications offer the viewer an opportunity to consider the headway that has been made in the discourse on queer visibility in America. While we become increasingly committed to the normalizing of peripheral identities—through same-sex marriage modeled on heterosexual partnerships, rallying around the rainbow flag that reifies a non-existent unified gay nationalism—Mapplethorpe reminds us of the truly radical power latent among queer communities to resist mainstream expectations. The progressive vision embodied by Mapplethorpe’s photographs has yet to be realized. The LACMA and Getty exhibitions are thus a spectacular portrait of a man whose short life fueled suspicion and excitement, and whose images lit an expansive array of incendiary debates in contemporary art and American culture at large. In The Perfect Medium, the embers continue to burn.

Sayantan Mukhopadhyay is a doctoral student in of Art History at the University of California, Los Angeles, where his research includes the exhibition history of modern art from South Asia.

Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Medium is on view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Getty Center through July 31, 2016.

The post Does Mapplethorpe Still Matter? appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

Inside the 2016 Aperture Spring Party & Dinner

Spring Party co-chairs Julie Meneret and Jessica Nagle, Photo by Owen Hoffmann/PMC © Patrick McMullan

Cathy Kaplan, Jim and Missy O'Shaughnessy, Jessica Nagle, Darius Himes, Julie Meneret, Photo by Owen Hoffmann/PMC © Patrick McMullan

Malú Alvarez and Celso Gonzalez-Falla, Photo by Owen Hoffmann/PMC © Patrick McMullan

Elizabeth and William Kahane. Photo by Patrick McMullan © Patrick McMullan

Bruce Barnes, Neal Slavin, Lisa Hostetler, Denise Wolff, Stephen Shore, Chris Boot, Stanley and David Zabar. Photo by Patrick McMullan © Patrick McMullan

Atmosphere. Photo by Max Mikulecky

Darius Himes. Photo by Max Mikulecky

Neal Slavin and Anita Slavin. Photo by Owen Hoffmann/PMC © Patrick McMullan

Nadiya and Whit Williams. Photo by Patrick McMullan © Patrick McMullan

Alexander Hurst and David Meneret. Photo by Owen Hoffmann/PMC © Patrick McMullan

Chris Boot and Lindsay McCrum. Photo by Owen Hoffmann/PMC © Patrick McMullan

Ashley Dennig and Brianna Martin. Photo by Patrick McMullan © Patrick McMullan

Emory Lecrone and Meredith Hinshaw. Photo by Patrick McMullan © Patrick McMullan

Yasu Nakamori, Barbara Tannenbaum, Darius Himes. Photo by Owen Hoffmann/PMC © Patrick McMullan

Stephen Shore with dinner guests. Photo by Max Mikulecky

Alvise Marino. Photo by Owen Hoffmann/PMC © Patrick McMullan

Sasha Frolova. Photo by Patrick McMullan © Patrick McMullan

Cathy Kaplan and Anne Stark Locher. Photo by Max Mikulecky

EXP. Photo by Patrick McMullan © Patrick McMullan

EXP, Karin Kuroda, Bora Kim, Samantha Yung Shao. Photo by Patrick McMullan © Patrick McMullan

Cathy Kaplan, Jim O'Shaughnessy, and Missy O'Shaughnessy. Photo by Owen Hoffmann/PMC © Patrick McMullan

Stefan Ruiz. Photo by Owen Hoffmann/PMC © Patrick McMullan

Zenith Richards. Photo by Patrick McMullan © Patrick McMullan

Ilva Heitmann. Photo by Patrick McMullan © Patrick McMullan

Aliza and Gabrielle Sena. Photo by Owen Hoffmann/PMC © Patrick McMullan

Severn Taylor, Martha Posner, Elizabeth Kahane, Susan Dumke. Photo by Patrick McMullan © Patrick McMullan

Laurent Claquin and Chris Boot. Photo by Owen Hoffmann/PMC © Patrick McMullan

Chris Boot and Deborah Barsel. Photo by Sita Fidler

Stephen Shore’s pie was just the beginning. Celebrating the pre-launch of The Photographer’s Cookbook, copublished by Aperture and the George Eastman Museum, the more than 325 guests who attended Aperture’s second annual Spring Party were treated to inventive fare by BITE inspired by some of the most photogenic recipes around. The event was co-chaired by Jessica Nagle and Julie Meneret and co-hosted by Aperture’s executive director Chris Boot and Darius Himes on behalf of presenting sponsor Christie’s. During the Host Committee Dinner, guests had the opportunity to chat with Cookbook contributors Stephen Shore and Neal Slavin.

Proceeds from the event support Aperture’s youth education programs and educational and community partnerships, including Aperture on Sight: Teaching Visual Literacy Through Photography, designed to cultivate visual literacy through photography and photo book creation. Under the sparkle of lights at Aperture Gallery in Chelsea, where the photographer Doug DuBois’s current exhibition, In Good Time, is on view, guests danced to disco music by DJ and photographer Stefan Ruiz or watched professionals—the K-pop phenomenon EXP—take the floor. Of the two night’s two prizes, one winner took home a basket with The Photographer’s Cookbook and sundries from Zabar’s, the iconic Upper West Side emporium and cosponsor of the Spring Party, and another guest won a Key Lime Pie Supreme straight from the kitchen of Shore himself.

Additional party photos are available on patrickmcmullan.com.

Click here to make a donation to Aperture’s Annual Fund.

For a sensational and sold-out evening, Aperture wishes to thank co-chairs Jessica Nagle and Julie Meneret; Presenting sponsors Christie’s and Zabar’s; contributing artists Stephen Shore and Neal Slavin; Bruce Barnes and Lisa Hostetler of the George Eastman Museum; AIPAD; Brooklyn Brewery; Hotel Americano; Espolon Tequila; Foto Care; Jean Perrier et Fils; Patrick McMullan Company; Pro Sho; and Smilebooth; DJs Stefan Ruiz & Al-Veez; and EXP (Bora Kim, Karin Kuroda and Samantha Y. Shao). Additional thanks to all of the Aperture staff, work scholars, volunteers, and ambassadors for their time and dedication.

Host Committee

Allan Chapin and Anna Rachminov

Andrew Lewin

Anne Stark Locher and Kurt Locher

Barbara and Donald Tober

Bill and Victoria Cherry

Cathy M. Kaplan*

Christine Symchych

Crystal McCrary and Raymond J. McGuire

D. Severn Taylor and J. Scott Switzer

Darius Himes, Christie’s*

David Solo

Elaine Goldman

Elizabeth and William Kahane

Frederick M. R. Smith

Jessica Nagle and Roland Hartley-Urquhart*

Julie and David Meneret*

Kasper

Kate Cordsen

The Lauder Foundation–Leonard & Judy Lauder Fund

Malú Alvarez

Marcy Morgan

Melissa and James O’Shaughnessy

Michael Hoeh*

Nion McEvoy*

Olivia Marciano

Peter Barbur and Tim Doody

Priscilla Rattazzi

S. B. Cooper and Rebecca Besson

Scott Martin and Lauralee Bell Martin*

Sondra Gilman Gonzalez-Falla and Celso Gonzalez-Falla

Stanley Zabar, Zabar’s and Zabars.com*

Susan Dumke

Whit Williams

Willard Taylor and Virginia Davies

*Leader

Spring Party Committee

Alexander G. Clark

Alexander Hurst

Dianna Cohen

Esther Zuckerman

Isabelle Friedrich McTwigan

Liz Grover

Olivia Marciano

Sarah Krueger

The post Inside the 2016 Aperture Spring Party & Dinner appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

Japan at the Edge of Reality

Five years after the devastating earthquake and tsunami, a group of visionary Japanese photographers responds to a national tragedy.

By Russet Lederman

Lieko Shiga, Rasen kaigan (Spiral Shore) 45, from the series Rasen kaigan (Spiral Shore), 2012 © Lieko Shiga. Courtesy the artist and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

On March 11, 2011, the world watched as the 3/11 Triple Disaster of the Great East Japan Earthquake, tsunami, and Fukushima nuclear reactor failure wreaked havoc and destruction across Japan’s northeast Tohoku region. Five years later to the day, Japan Society has opened In the Wake, a group exhibition that examines the various responses by seventeen Japanese photographers to the profound devastation and loss that mark the national tragedy.

In the Wake, conceived by and originally presented at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, has been reinterpreted into three distinct yet overlapping sections in the current installation at Japan Society: documentary approaches to the disaster, response through experimental photographic practices, and the development of a new narrative that blurs the boundaries between the actual events and representations. Intertwined and inescapable within all the photographs, projections, and installations on view are the larger issues of visible destruction and invisible harm.

Naoya Hatakeyama, 2011.5.2 Takata-chō from the series Rikuzentakata, 2011 © Naoya Hatakeyama. Courtesy Taka Ishii Gallery and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

As a photography exhibition about a widely photographed tragedy, In the Wake begins with images and texts by two photographers whose lives and families were directly affected by 3/11 loss. Naoya Hatakeyama, who lost his mother and family house when the tsunami decimated his hometown of Rikuzentakata, presents side-by-side projected images that chronicle the town before and after the devastation, and its slow progression toward recovery. Also directly affected was Lieko Shiga, whose works are prominently displayed at both the beginning and the end of the exhibition. As the resident photographer for the coastal town of Kitakama, Shiga was responsible for photographing local ceremonies and documenting the village’s aging population. Kitakama was hit particularly hard by the tsunami. Shiga’s journal-like text and small-scale black-and-white photographs introduce the magnitude of personal loss immediately following the tragedy. Her efforts to recover family photographs that were scattered by the tsunami are displayed in a large-scale image that shows the village’s assembly hall transformed into a photograph-drying center for retrieved memories.

Takashi Arai, April 26, 2011, Onahama, Iwaki City, Fukushima Prefecture, from the series Mirrors in Our Nights, 2011 © Takashi Arai. Courtesy Photo Gallery International and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Hatakeyama’s and Shiga’s focus on individual loss sets a humanizing tone for the images that follow in the north gallery. Taken by photographers who traveled to the Tohoku region to document the aftermath of 3/11, these photographs convey an overwhelming sense of loss and visible damage from a nonjournalistic stance. Large-format color photographs by Keizo Kitajima show the ghosts of homes and boats barely standing, while a central projection by Rinko Kawauchi sequences images from her Light and Shadow series of two pigeons flying above mountains of debris and a ravaged landscape. The devastation is enormous, but so is humankind’s capacity to recover. Yasusuke Ōta’s photograph Deserted Town, of an ostrich in the middle of an empty shopping street, reveals abandonment tinged with humor.

Yasusuke Ōta, Deserted Town, from the series The Abandoned Animals of Fukushima, 2011 © Yasusuke Ōta. Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Not all the photographers who ventured to Tohoku in the weeks after the disaster documented visible representations of destruction. An ominous silence pervades Shimpei Takeda’s abstracted, almost celestial images of irradiated soil. Takashi Homma also exposes unseen dangers in stark funereal photographs of mushrooms with high radiation levels from the forests near the Fukushima nuclear power plant. These nuanced approaches to documenting the invisible contrast strongly with the powerful personal voices and sense of renewal in Lost and Found, a full-wall installation of rescued snapshots from Tohoku debris by the volunteer-run Salvage Memory Project.

Nobuyoshi Araki, Untitled, from the series Shakyō rōjin nikki (Diary of a Photo Mad Old Man), 2011 © Nobuyoshi Araki. Courtesy Taka Ishii Gallery and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

A quiet moment for reflection is offered in the all-black gallery containing Takashi Arai’s iridescent daguerreotype images of scenes shot around Fukushima and at Hiroshima’s Atomic Bomb Dome monument. Arai’s contemporary interpretations of a nineteenth-century technique form a perfect segue to the south gallery, which showcases photographers whose images rethink established photographic conventions. All of the photographs in this section are by photographers who responded to the 3/11 disaster without traveling to the Tohoku area. Kikuji Kawada—who is well-known for his 1965 photobook Chizu (The Map), a response to the Hiroshima atomic bombing—is represented with a wall of highly saturated, ominously glowing images repurposed from news and television reports. Nobuyoshi Araki underscores the depth of the destruction in his large-scale black-and-white photographs with surfaces defaced by brutal black slashes. Material destruction in a process that combines analog with digital produces the degraded ghostlike images and artifacts in the work of Daisuke Yokota.

Lieko Shiga, Mother’s Gentle Hands, from the series Rasen kaigan (Spiral Shore), 2009 © Lieko Shiga. Courtesy of the artist and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Drawing upon the Tohoku region’s strong tradition of mysticism, In the Wake concludes with ten large color images by Lieko Shiga of elderly Kitakama residents caught performing mysterious acts against surreal landscapes. Suffused with a garish nighttime glow, their performances are an otherworldly manifestation of reality as it blends with a postapocalyptic fantasy.

For Japanese photographers, history repeats itself. National tragedy and its associated anxiety again act as a catalyst for a new visual language that pushes photographic conventions beyond the edges of reality into a fluid space that hovers somewhere between the unseen and abstraction.

Russet Lederman, a researcher and writer, teaches art writing at the School of Visual Arts, New York.

In the Wake: Japanese Photographers Respond to 3/11 is on view at Japan Society in New York through June 12, 2016.

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Adventure on the Danube

In 1958, Inge Morath set out to document the cultures of Central and Eastern Europe. Spanning four decades, her monumental project was the quest of a lifetime.

By Amanda Hopkinson

Inge Morath, Oyster farming near Danube delta, Romania, 1994 © The Inge Morath Foundation. Courtesy Magnum Photos

Several months after the end of World War II, Inge Morath joined a long caravan of displaced people heading south from Berlin. She hitched rides and spent days and nights walking. “It’s amazing how kind of crusty you get, with dirt and probably bugs,” she recalled. “You can feel nice and ready to drown yourself, and that night there was a little river nice and ready for the purpose.” Saved by a one-legged soldier—perhaps just a phantom—who hauled her off the precipice of a bridge, she continued the slow march to her parents’ home in Salzburg, Austria. It was, perhaps, the first occasion on which a river was to play a decisive part in Morath’s life.

Back in Austria in the late 1940s, Morath made her first journalism contacts by writing for the United States Information Service in Salzburg and Vienna, and later freelanced for national radio, as well as for the magazines Rot-Weiss-Rot and Der Optimist. In 1951, when she added Heute to her clients, she received a camera as a Christmas present. By then she had become acquainted with a fellow Austrian, Ernst Haas, who had joined Magnum Photos in Paris in 1949. Helping out in the picture agency’s office persuaded her that life was more vivid behind a camera. By 1952, she was working for Simon Guttmann’s legendary Dephot agency in London, where she was as likely to be asked to sweep the floor as to shoot a commission.

Inge Morath, A newly engaged girl, dressed in her Sunday costume and wearing a bridal crown, walks with two girl friends from house to house to announce the great event, Rumania, Near Sibiu, 1958 © The Inge Morath Foundation. Courtesy Magnum Photos

A year later, Morath was back in Paris, working as a researcher and assistant to Henri Cartier-Bresson. Considering her appetite for travel and spirit of adventure, her command of several languages, her burgeoning talent for editorial photography, and her close friendships with several Magnum members, Morath’s admission to the Magnum agency, in 1955, now seems inevitable. Yet, it was immediately clear that she was not going to be the token woman assigned to “soft stories” (animals and children); her first big story was on the worker-priests of Paris, followed by documentations of the London underworld and post-civil-war Spain. Soon her portfolio included Paris Match, Holiday, Saturday Evening Post, and Life, the most sought-after (and highest-paying) of all.

It was the very fluidity of her life—her frequent changes of location, her unbounded work across many media—that would enhance Morath’s fascination with the Danube River. According to the Austrian photographer Kurt Kaindl, Morath “bore within her an inchoate longing for the great cultural spread of Eastern Europe. From the moment she joined Magnum as a photographer, she repeatedly photographed parts of the Danube, especially in her native Austria and in neighboring Germany.” In 1958, as Morath wrote in her travel diary, the time had arrived: “The great adventure can begin.”

Inge Morath, On board a boat in the Danube, between Galatzi and Tulcea, Romania, 1958 © The Inge Morath Foundation. Courtesy Magnum Photos

The longest trans-European river, the Danube passes through communities with distinct cultures, languages, and work and life patterns, and has been a source of continuing fascination and inspiration at least since Roman times. Among the many regional inhabitants at the beginning of Morath’s work were Austrians, Bulgarians, Croats, Germans, Hungarians, Jews, Roma, Romanians, Serbs, Swabians, Ukrainians, and the Slovenians of the Morath family’s roots. On May 16, Morath opened her travel journal to write: “Departure from Paris. 21.20 sleeper train to Vienna. Orient Express. Or was it only called Orient Express after Vienna?” Trundling through Hungary to Romania, upon reaching Bucharest, Morath sharply anticipates what lies ahead as soon as she is met by her interpreter: “Roundtrip through town, visit the Village Museum. Bad lunch in Lido. Penelope not a good interpreter. … With this lady I am not going to go far. Courage. We’ll see.”

Courage, however, was an attribute Morath had in spades. Although undefeated, she was frequently frustrated. The journals, typed on an ancient Remington typewriter, are a polyglot mix of English, French, German, and the occasional Romanian, as she records her itinerary, weather reports, and personal commentary. She voyaged, as she wrote, “on foot, drove cars, hitched truck rides, rode trains, ferries, boats and steamers.” In practice it was almost entirely by train or car, the Danube being out of bounds to private travelers, with her program prescribed for her. Irritations, delays, and perplexity were endemic: “From Sinaia to Comarna, co-operative for carpet making. Up to a place called Costa. Great view. But no photos. I am driven crazy by not getting any material. Drive to Brasov, Kronstadt in German. Totally Germanic in aspect. Dinner with a Madame Thalmann. Don’t know why.”

Inge Morath, Liberation Hall, 34 victories in marble, one for each of the German states – from a circle, holding between them 17 tablets inscribed with the names of the battles fought in the victorious War of Liberation against Napoleon from 1813 to 1815, Kelheim, West Germany, 1959 © The Inge Morath Foundation. Courtesy Magnum Photos

Morath had no publication or exhibition planned when she made the Danube journey, nor any anticipated date to resume. Yet two months later, she embarked again on her quest. This time she was more assertive: “I am adamant. Finally obtain permit to sit on one of the tribunes to photograph the parade celebrating victory of Communism. Hot. I still suffer from a kind of isolation.” Exasperated by constant interruptions and requests to show her permit, Morath was a street photographer barred from photographing on the street, continuously reminded of how she was external to the events she witnessed. Hotels are so “grimy” she retires to bed without eating. Banned from accepting an invitation to a wedding party by her minder, casting a sad farewell glance at the delicious food on offer she retires to bed “to eat chocolate.”

Morath’s first voyage on the Danube followed the closing of the Iron Curtain; the last came in the wake of its opening, in 1993. The collapse of the Soviet Union coincided with a proposal from Kurt Kaindl and his wife, Brigitte Blüml, that together they retrace Morath’s tracks along the river. On the first expedition, Morath’s pictures had received their principal exposure in the form of a long photo-essay published in Paris Match in 1959. Kaindl also knew how Morath still longed to pursue her Danubian theme, her lifelong aim to create an extended photo-essay. He assembled the proposal for a book and an exhibition at the new national gallery of photography, the Fotohof, where he and his wife had formed part of a collective of curator-directors. Morath accepted with alacrity, sending a handwritten letter proposing she take a plane from her latest exhibition opening in Pamplona.

Inge Morath, Boys in the street, Nikopol, Bulgaria, 1994 © The Inge Morath Foundation. Courtesy Magnum Photos

While her first trips were self-financed and made alone when she was in her early thirties, on the later trip Morath was in her seventies and in failing health. Kaindl and Blüml, managing the project, took turns accompanying her on five trips over two years. They obtained funding and brought the publisher Otto Müller on board; Kaindl proposed a monograph similar to Claudio Magris’s magnum opus, Danube: A Sentimental Journey from the Source to the Black Sea (1986), and was at once accepted. The 1994 voyage, however, was marred by technical problems aboard a boat in the Danube Delta whose ignition kept cutting out as it dodged across shipping lanes, intermittently blocking the traffic and risking being mown down. Fuel shortages persisted, and whole villages banded together to supply enough for transport to the next stopping point. Kaindl’s photographs show Morath aboard yet almost indistinguishable, shrouded in borrowed hats, scarves, and fisherman’s oilskins against the penetrating cold.

Morath liked to point out how a photograph is made in a fraction of a second, yet the image may be the result of years of observation. When the Fotohof opened in Salzburg, in 2012, on the newly named Inge-Morath-Platz, an exhibition showcased Morath photographs. Behind fifty years of creative work was a lifelong yearning: “I secretly long for that stretch of land along the border,” she once said. “When someone asks me ‘Where are you from? Where do you feel at home?’ then—apart from where I’ve lived so long in America—here in these vineyards, my childhood paradise. But the land across the border, about which my mother Titti told me so much, is also a part of it. Strange that I’m rediscovering these things now.”

Amanda Hopkinson is Visiting Professor in Literary Translation at City University London.

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5 Exhibitions to See in April

Ellsworth Kelly, the Guerrilla Girls, and the Italian coast. Here are the must-see photography exhibitions in New York this spring.

Luigi Ghirri, Trevigliano Mazzano, Portoghesi, case, popolari, 1985 © Estate of Luigi Ghirri. Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery

Luigi Ghirri: The Impossible Landscape

Matthew Marks Gallery, 526 West 22th Street, New York

Through April 30, 2016

How do small, quiet images of idiosyncratic subjects and their strange textures—torn advertisements, tile arrangements, eccentrically manicured plants, and panes of blue sky—have the power to speak about the construction of memory? This is the enigma at the heart of Luigi Ghirri’s vernacular-style photographs taken predominantly in his home region of Emilia-Romagna, Italy, in the 1970s and ’80s. Informed by an earlier career in landscape surveying, where he learned to codify the emotional and associative sensations of unremarkable surroundings, Ghirri approached landscape photography with a pioneering conceptualism drawn together with affection for his northern Italian milieu. In his 1989 essay “The Impossible Landscape,” after which this show is titled (and anthologized in the recent book Luigi Ghirri: The Complete Essays 1973–1991), the artist suggests that when we are presented with the image of a place—even the sequential, banal elements of our everyday environment—our personal histories show up to complete the picture. The warm quality of Ghirri’s vintage chromogenic and cibachrome prints are documents of a time when color was only just becoming an expressive consideration in photography and amateur work, evolving out of a postwar snapshot generation. Ghirri, alongside other pioneers of color, shifted the way the photograph engaged the modern, everyday world. —Genevieve Allison

Hiro, Kelly Stewart, New York, 1994 © Hiro. Courtesy Pace/MacGill

Hiro

Pace/MacGill, 32 East 57th Street, New York

Through April 16, 2016

In a possibly apocryphal story, Richard Avedon is said to have watched Hiro stare at a single transparency all day. Although Hiro may not enjoy the name recognition of the giants he apprenticed under—Avedon and legendary Harper’s Bazaar art director, Alexey Brodovitch—he shares their obsession with formal and technical mastery. Hiro’s black-and-white portraits of notables from Jacques Costeau to Muhammad Ali project their subjects into the realm of the iconic (an Avedon signature). When he did leave the studio environment, he appears to have reigned in chance: one image of passengers crammed into a Tokyo metro feels as if the photographer organized the scene himself. But it’s with the still life form that Hiro thrived and pushed his capacity for invention. With their deeply saturated color and analog manipulation, these images elevate the ordinary to the monumental and surreal—an egg fries on the scabrous surface of a Utah Salt Flat, an ant perches atop a garish-red fingernail. 1970s supermodel Jerry Hall is caught in profile on a Saint Martin beach exhaling a sinuous smoke plume that merges with the clouds—an effortless gesture that is a hallmark of Hiro’s output, even if he might have been scrutinizing his transparencies all day, searching for formal perfection. —Michael Famighetti

Petah Coyne and Kathy Grove, The Real Guerrillas: The Early Years, AKA Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, 2015–16 © Petah Coyne and Kathy Grove. Courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York

Narrative/Collaborative

Galerie Lelong, 528 West 26th Street, New York

Through April 23, 2016

Each pair of artists in this imaginative group exhibition generates images with strikingly diverse methods. In the 1970s, Neville D’Almeida and Hélio Oiticica made “supra-sensorial,” multi-media environments using photographs that depict patterns of powdered cocaine on commercial images of Marilyn Monroe, Jimi Hendrix, and other celebrities. These photographs, printed decades later, were once projected on walls, ceilings, or even into swimming pools as viewers lay on foam mats or in hammocks. Twin brothers, and longtime artistic duo, Doug and Mike Starn share a studio and work side-by-side, essentially as one artist; here, they create labyrinthine patterns of tree branches on delicately layered Japanese paper. Lin Tianmiao and Wang Gongxin, married for thirty years before incorporating their artistic practices, show a series of photographs with figures in otherworldly costume. But the draw of Narrative/Collaborative is new work by Petah Coyne and Kathy Grove, artists with decades-long solo careers, who have come together to create The Real Guerrillas–The Early Years, a never-before-seen series that seeks to document and celebrate each woman who participated with the Guerrilla Girls collective between 1985 and 2000. Conceived as an ongoing project, the series presents fictionalized portraits of each Guerrilla Girl, masked and digitally imposed into an artwork by her artist persona—lesser-known art historical figures including Lyubov Popova, Élisabeth Louise Vigée le Brun, Chansonetta Stanley Emmons, and Remedios Varo. (The prints are accompanied by extensive narrative captions.) Only after a member passes away can her identity be exposed, when Coyne and Grove will reveal a second photograph, named and unmasked. Through this completed, future portrait of each Guerrilla Girl, and the powerful woman behind the mask, Coyne and Grove aspire to acknowledge each woman’s life of anonymity and her work within and outside of the collective. —Taia Kwinter

Ellsworth Kelly, Hangar Doorway, St. Barthélemy, 1977 © Ellsworth Kelly. Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery

Ellsworth Kelly Photographs

Matthew Marks, 523 West 24th Street, New York

Through April 30, 2016

Printed and prepared by Ellsworth Kelly just months before his death, at age 92, in December 2015, the thirty-one gelatin-silver prints presented in this fascinating exhibition—the first ever dedicated to the artist’s photography—are a revelation. Kelly’s little-known talent behind the lens displays the clarity and incisiveness of a vision that transcends mediums. Produced between 1950 and 1982, during a period of remarkable creative ferment when Kelly moved from France to upstate New York, the photographs, which he considered to be independent from his painting, nevertheless suggest the figurative origins behind his boldly abstract canvases. Like his paintings, they look squarely at the natural and built worlds, finding compositions that are at once self-evident and abstract. Architectural structures—doors, windows, roofs, and the shadows they cast—figure throughout, transformed into a language of binaries, diagonals, contrasts and surprising synergies. These forms exist everywhere, according to Kelly. You just don’t see them—until now. —Genevieve Allison

Nadav Kander, The Aral Sea I (Officers Housing), Kazakhstan, 2011 © Nadav Kander. Courtesy Flowers Gallery

Nadav Kander: Dust

Flowers, 529 West 20th Street, New York

Through May 7, 2016

While the splendid ruins of the ancient world provide inspiration to young architects and tourist dollars to local economies—unless they’ve been bombed by ISIS forces—the ruins in Nadav Kander’s photographs in Dust are recent enough to provoke a sense of anguished fascination. Kander discovered the previously unknown sites of Kurchatov and Priozersk, towns along the Russian-Kazakhstand border, on Google Earth, where the physical evidence of Cold War-era nuclear experiments is manifest in partially collapsed buildings—stadiums, administration buildings, or factories—revealed now as humble cenotaphs. A sequence examining the Polygon, an atomic test site opened in 1947, is especially disturbing for what Kander’s images do not or cannot portray. Contrary to official claims, a local population lived in close proximity to the Polygon, where nuclear testing took place, and the subsequent effects of cancer and birth defects are widespread. (The dimming rays of an electric pink sunset at the Polygon are apocalyptic.) In Kander’s images of the Aral Sea, once a thriving fishing port, where water has drained away for irrigation of cotton, the sagging tides bring up pink foam, perhaps the runoff of chemical waste. Summoning the horror of Hiroshima, in the accompanying catalogue Will Self claims that the landscapes in Dust do not aestheticize these ruins or “make beautiful what is not,” but instead they confront Western society with souvenirs of its hubris in science and politics. Many of the former military buildings in these test sites were destroyed to hide the past, but the remaining structures, floating on grasslands like abandoned boats, describe the perils of atomic warfare with subtle but unambiguous power. —Brendan Wattenberg

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Shooting the Holy Land

In a new documentary, Josef Koudelka turns to a divided landscape.

By David Levi Strauss

Josef Koudelka in Israel/Palestine. Still from Koudelka: Shooting Holy Land, 2015 © Gilad Baram

The genre of documentary films about documentary photographers has grown considerably and admirably over the last twenty-five years, including The Salt of the Earth (2014), about Sebastião Salgado, by Wim Wenders and Juliano Ribeiro Salgado; What Remains (2008) about Sally Mann, by Steven Cantor; War Photographer (2001), about James Nachtwey, by Christian Frei; and Pictures from a Revolution (1991), about Susan Meiselas, by Meiselas and Alfred Guzzetti, to name a few of the best.

To this list we can now add Koudelka Shooting Holy Land (2015), by the young Israeli photographer and filmmaker Gilad Baram. Baram was hired to assist Koudelka in Israel and the Palestinian territories by making travel arrangements and providing security, logistical support, and captions as the photographer worked on his epic project to document the building of the wall in Israel, culminating in the book Wall: Israeli & Palestinian Landscape, 2008–2012, published by Aperture in 2013.

Josef Koudelka, Rachel’s Tomb, 2009 © Josef Koudelka/Magnum Photos

Josef Koudelka, born in 1938, is arguably one of the greatest living photographers. He burst onto the international stage in 1968, when he photographed the Russian invasion of his native Prague. His photographs were smuggled out of Prague to Magnum and published anonymously, but they were so distinctive that they refused to remain anonymous. His later books Gypsies (Aperture, 1975) and Exiles (Aperture, 1988) changed how people view documentary photography. More recently, his work has focused on panoramic landscapes.

Koudelka is part of a generation of documentary photographers who believe fervently that if you show people what is actually happening in the world, they will understand and be moved to demand change. Social documentary photography has always been defined by this passionate subjective belief in democracy and action. Without it, the practice devolves into self-involved sensationalistic pandering.

Josef Koudelka, A crusader map mural, Kalya Junction, Near the Dead Sea, 2009 © Josef Koudelka/Magnum Photos

This makes the filmic documenting of documentarians a rather precarious process. If you shift the focus of your inquiry too completely to the photographer, and away from his or her subject, you risk the diminution of the subject and obscure the motive force of the work.

At first viewing, one might think that Gilad Baram has made a nature film, perhaps about a particular species of bird. Everything this creature does has one purpose: to make better images. Everything else is peripheral. So Baram lets the peripheral in. What is happening around the photographer becomes the filmmaker’s subject, and this periphery is loaded with meaning, because the social landscape impinging on the wall is an especially complex one: the enforced borders between the State of Israel and its Other within, the Palestinians of the occupied territories.

Josef Koudelka, Shu’fat Refugee camp, overlooking Al ‘Isawiya, East Jerusalem, 2009 © Josef Koudelka/Magnum Photos

Koudelka continuously and relentlessly points his formidable and precise beak, a Fuji GX617 panoramic camera, into the crevices and fissures of this fraught border, and the official enforcers react with increasingly menacing warnings. As we watch Koudelka repeatedly violate these boundaries as he attempts to get into position to make the best photographs, we recall Magnum cofounder Robert Capa’s famous injunction: “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you aren’t close enough.” When Koudelka gets close, a disembodied voice from a loudspeaker barks, “Photographer, move away from the fence! Go back, photographer. Move back!”

Koudelka is not photographing war here, but the visible wounds of war in the form of walls built to control the movements of the enemy within. His movements reflect the preemptive violence of these walls that shatters lives on both sides of the divide. “One wall. Two jails.”

At one point, seventy-five-year-old Koudelka painstakingly slides on his back under and inside a mass of razor wire, trying to get into position to compose a shot, as the barbs tear his clothes. All that matters is the photographs, because they’re the only thing that will last. The characteristically laconic photographer says little about the situation, directly. “I hate the Wall. But, at the same time, it is pretty spectacular, this Wall.” He speaks at one point about the necessity “to keep the healthy anger; to keep it as long as possible.”

Josef Koudelka in Israel/Palestine. Still from Koudelka: Shooting Holy Land, 2015 © Gilad Baram

But mostly, he only talks about the pictures: “In this place there is a picture waiting for me.” There is a lot of waiting. Waiting for the picture, waiting for the weather to break, waiting to get into position. Watching, looking, moving, waiting. “Sometimes it happens. Sometimes not.”

Rachel’s Tomb in Bethlehem; Qalandiya Checkpoint in Ramallah; “Detroit” (Al Baladiya) Urban Warfare Training Facility near Tze’elim; Shab Al Dar in East Jerusalem; the Judean Desert; the memorial site for the Israeli Army’s 679th Armored Brigade in the Golan Heights; Mount Gerizim in Nablus. Four frames on a roll of 120mm film. One day = 20 rolls. Focus to infinity.

David Levi Strauss is a writer and critic based in New York and the author, most recently, of Words Not Spent Today Buy Smaller Images Tomorrow: Essays on the Present and Future of Photography (2014).

Koudelka: Shooting Holy Land will be screened at Finale Plzen, April 15–21, 2016 and DOK.fest Munich, May 5–15, 2016.

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The Business of Photography: A Conversation with Mary Virginia Swanson

A leading photography educator shares essential advice for working artists.

 

Mary Virginia Swanson’s workshop To Be Published, or Self-Publish? at the Aperture Foundation, February 2016. Photographs by Becca Imrich

Aperture workshops bring students, professionals, and amateurs together with leading photographers working in a variety of fields and genres for intensive educational experiences. Registration is open for the two remaining sessions of the Business of Photography Series—Introduction to Multiple Markets and Your Work, Your Brand—taught by Mary Virginia Swanson, renowned author, educator, and consultant in the photography community.

Aperture Foundation’s Education Work Scholar, Becca Imrich, spoke with Swanson recently about her thoughts on the photography publishing market, favorite photobooks, and advice for photographers and photo enthusiasts looking to take their projects and careers to the next level.

Becca Imrich: When did you develop your affinity for teaching? What catalyzed your shift from being a photographer to an educator, and an advocate for other photographers?

Mary Virginia Swanson: As far back as graduate school, when I was the student director of Northlight Gallery [at Arizona State University], I was teaching professional rather than creative practices. I knew I wanted to work with photographs and with artists. It was after gaining a much broader perspective on our field when working at Magnum that I developed a class for NYU called “Career Options in Photography: A Pre-Professional Survey.” We spent two weeks meeting with individuals engaged with photography, and photographers—artists, of course, but also gallerists, curators, master printers, photo editors, art buyers, paper conservators, photo researchers, commercial studio managers, and more. The opportunities I have had to teach involved the business of being an artist—building on one’s strengths and understanding how to build a career. My teaching and mentoring today emphasize maintaining a smart professional practice.

BI: Can you speak about what it was like to work at The Friends of Photography with Ansel Adams during the 1980s?

MVS: Ansel was a lifelong teacher, from leading tours in the Sierras as a young photographer to our workshops in Carmel late in his life. He had an incredible curiosity about creativity and the science of photography, and was interested in what you were interested in. We had an amazing group of people around us and so many of our heroes came to Carmel to meet Ansel. I had the opportunity to meet many inspiring artists, historians, writers, publishers, curators, and gallerists, and came to understand and appreciate that together we are a community.

BI: Is there a particular photobook that initially sparked your infatuation for photobooks, and why?

MVS: My family gave me important photobooks for holidays and graduation—The Family of Man, of course, then later Szarkowski’s The Face of Minnesota was important to me as Minnesota is my homeland. In college I bought exhibitions catalogues as they were more affordable, and I could see the work of more artists. I love publications of collections, my first being A Book of Photographs of the collection of Sam Wagstaff. As I was fortunate to come to know Helmut Gernsheim and study with Bill Jay early in my studies, I still love reading great photo history titles. And lastly, I never tire of reading books about photobooks!

BI: What is a photobook that you’ve seen recently that really resonated with you?

MVS: It’s rare that a photobook doesn’t interest me in some way. I am excited about how photographers are beginning to explore the book form in a way that artist bookmakers have been working for decades. A friend since our college days, Susan kae Grant’s artist books opened that world to me, and two recent titles I love are Penelope Umbrico’s Range (Aperture, limited edition of 500) and the artist-book version of Jane Fulton Alt’s book The Burn called between fire/smoke (self-published, edition of 18). Both titles engage the viewer in an exploratory manner.

BI: While you were teaching the first session of your Business of Photography series at Aperture, I noticed that you’ve distilled these essential questions that get to the heart of what photographers should be considering as they move towards publishing their work. What questions should photographers ask themselves while they are in the process of conceptualizing and developing their projects?

MVS: At conception, understand what the work tells us, and what it does not. It is that unknown that drives one to engage, to push boundaries. At development, question the final presentation format and the vocabulary that one might bring to the work. To me, this is the place where one’s work expands and evolves.

BI: You have reviewed hundreds of artists’ projects over the years! One of the defining factors of our current climate is an inundation of information and images and the democratization of photography. In your opinion, what are the fundamental ingredients of a successful photography project—whether a photobook, exhibition, or both?

MVS: There is a lot of good work out there that fully satisfies the maker and their audience. Far fewer projects feel authentic, however, with their vision, craft and presentation fully resolved, causing the viewer to pause and ponder the work. Rarely do I see work that I have not seen before and when I do, it is memorable.

BI: In recent years, the photobook market has changed significantly and expanded. Still, the question of how to make this business profitable remains omnipresent. What is missing in the photography publishing market, and what is the je ne sais quoi that will keep sustaining it?

MVS: Distribution. If you know your audience, and you know their price point, and you know how to reach them you can make engaging photobooks. But if they sit in storage they are not going to reach any audience and the work and investment you brought to the project certainly won’t make a difference in your career.

BI: What advice do you have for people trying to find their niche in the photography community?

MVS: Take a good hard look at what inspires you in our field and work to get yourself into that aspect of this profession. Your contributions to our industry need not be measured in your accomplishments as an artist. Artists could not thrive if we didn’t have visually sophisticated, supportive professionals surrounding them at every step of the art-making and art-marketing process.

Registration for Introduction to Multiple Markets  will remain open until Sunday, April 17, 2016. Registration for Your Work, Your Brand will remain open until Sunday, May 1, 2016.

For more information on Mary Virginia Swanson’s Business of Photography Workshop Series, and other upcoming workshops at Aperture, please visit aperture.org/workshops or contact education@aperture.org. For information about Aperture’s Work Scholar Program, please visit aperture.org/internships.

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Along the Dinosaur Road: A Conversation with Yto Barrada

Is the trade in precious fossils the next frontier of Moroccan tourism—or just a ruse?

Yto Barrada, Untitled (Arizona Mineral & Fossil Show series, Ballroom, Arizona), 2014–15

A dual citizen of France and Morocco, the artist and photographer Yto Barrada examines the effects of political and economic currents, as in her first photographic series, A Life Full of Holes: The Strait Project (1998–2004), which documented the northbound flow of migration from Africa to Europe through the Strait of Gibraltar. Moroccan citizens, to whom the northern border is largely closed, are forced either to wait for the day they can legally emigrate, or “burn” their past and flee.

In her recent exhibition, Faux Guide, Barrada examines the exploitation of Morocco’s dinosaur trade through a myriad of mediums, including photography, film, and fabricated objects. (According to Barrada, Morocco runs a brisk trade in fake fossils.) Faux Guide also encompasses her Dinosaur Road series, which considers history, science, politics, and the construction of national identity. Previously unpublished, a selection of images from Dinosaur Road appears in “Odyssey,” the spring 2016 issue of Aperture. Introducing Barrada’s portfolio, Carmen Winant leads us along the route—from the tourist hoping to pick up a Middle Jurassic Period fossil to a mineral and fossil trade show in Tucson, Arizona. In Dinosaur Road, Winant sees Barrada’s subtle critique of this pitfall “as a cycle of discovery and myth, erosion and ruin. Some kind of full circle.” Part of Barrada’s series includes documenting Morocco’s unfinished national museums that would, if fully realized, house and protect its national paleontological treasures. Such ventures, possibly a boon to the tourist economy, might also risk degrading the very landscape the museums were built to preserve. I spoke with Barrada in December 2015 about her journey into Dinosaur Road. —Nicole Maturo

 

Yto Barrada, Untitled (Azilal Museum Project, Morocco), 2013–15

Nicole Maturo: What is Dinosaur Road, and how do your photographs published in Aperture fit into the larger artistic project Faux Guide?

Yto Barrada: Faux Guide (“false guide” in French) was the name of my show last year in London and Nîmes. Dinosaur Road is a group of images about the dinosaur fossil trade in Morocco. It’s also the title of a recent French-language book, La route des dinosaures, by a geologist and his wife, Michel and Jacqueline Monbaron. For years they were working on this project, and it was just published in Morocco. Their goal is to defend two museums that don’t exist yet, which are under construction to house two of Morocco’s main dinosaurs, including one of the biggest, called Atlasaurus.

My project came out of different experiments with recycling stuff collected on my road trip into collages, drawings, textiles, photographs, and books. The artistic avant-garde’s new way of looking at African ethnological artifacts and their collections was also an influence. But my current interests were about the invention of traditions and the question of authenticity. It could seem like a paradox: a tradition shouldn’t be invented; it should be something you pass on. Nationality is a nineteenth-century invention; the nation-state is a nineteenth-century invention. I’m interested in the artifacts, the histories, the stories that are linked to this construction. And the collections of a museum have often played a major role in that construction—how the museum displays the collections, what a museum chooses to put forward.

Yto Barrada, Untitled (Dinosaur Road series, Dinosaur Footprints, Iouaridene, High Atlas, Morocco), 2013–15

Maturo: Is “Dinosaur Road” a real place?

Barrada: It’s not one road; it’s a whole itinerary for fossil lovers in the Geoparc M’Goun, where there are lots of sites.

In the trade, if you decide to look at the pyramid of structure, if you’re going to look at the local lumpen proletariat that work to take these fossils from the ground and prepare them; you also have the scientists, and the missions of paleontologists from around the world who can come work, since Morocco is open, making great discoveries. And, in the pyramid of structure, at the top are the dealers, the big dealers who have everything sent to them outside of the country, and deal them at international trade fairs like the Arizona Mineral & Fossil Show.

Yto Barrada, Untitled (Arizona Mineral & Fossil Show series, Balloon, Arizona), 2014–15

The market is changing: natural history events are popular in major auction houses, as well as with the buyers themselves, the people who are decorating their homes with national treasures. That’s one of the big trends: people are buying dinosaurs not to put in a museum, but to put in their living room.

Maturo: How chic.

Barrada: How terrible! What’s interesting with paleontology or history is the way it’s instrumentalized in the construction of a national discourse. That’s what started my interest in dinosaurs. I mean, how come we don’t use the fact that one of the biggest meat-eating dinosaur comes from Morocco? Dinosaurs should be on the tourist poster boards, you know, “Spend your vacation in Morocco with a dinosaur!” The French companies hired to do advertising still talk about “Eternal Morocco,” and show you pictures of the spice markets in Fez. “Time passed everywhere in the world except in Fez.” You could add a dinosaur to the picture, and it would make sense.

On the other hand, if the Dinosaur Road became a popular destination, mass tourism might have tragic consequences by putting pressure on fragile Berber territories. It’s a complex issue because it’s not just about the scientific community wanting to protect the paleontological sites and make the heritage visible locally with museums, it’s also about thousands of families, farmers, and their kids living in these villages nearby: they need the fossil trade to complement their small income and survive.

Yto Barrada, Untitled (Salle des fêtes OCP, Khouribga) 2013–15

Maturo: What other forms has this project taken?

Barrada: The discovery of the fake fossil craft became a major part of the project. I made a film called False Start, with a grant from the Abraaj Group. This was also a project supported by the Peabody Museum at Harvard. The trip allowed me to look at the very hard work of the talented preparators and forgers who are making fake fossils. The tools they invent and build for this work are quite astonishing; there is a sequence in my film about the “beauties of the common tool.”

I was also learning a lot and interested in my own visual illiteracy and education. I didn’t know the rocks, the tools, the fossil layers, and the landscapes. Where does their scientific knowledge come from? Most of them are self-taught; they didn’t go to college, they’re shop owners who can bluff their way through—that’s where the Faux Guide title comes from. In Morocco, guys who propose their services to take you around are doing a performance.

Yto Barrada, Untitled (painted educational board found on site of Azilal Museum Project, Morocco), 2013–15

In Tangier, for example, in the pre-smart-phone-GPS-world, you get off the ferry, you have twenty minutes, and you want an oriental experience in the medina, so you would find a partner to tango with and a younger guy would be your “faux guide.” He would give you, for a little bit of money, the typical experience you expect. I have a friend, an anthropologist, who worked on Tangier “faux guides” fifteen years ago.

I’m currently working on a book called A Guide to Fossils for Forgers and Foreigners, to be released this spring. It will have a little section about the “faux guides.” I’m also doing a sort of portable museum, a box, like the Duchamp box museum, where I’m going to put the treasures of Moroccan paleontology. I’m interested in the format of educational material, so it has to be transportable.

Yto Barrada, Untitled (painted educational board found on site of Azilal Museum Project, Morocco), 2013–15

Maturo: You have an academic-oriented research approach to your topics. What did you study at the Sorbonne?

Barrada: I studied history, so with this methodology, I know how to do research, but I have a more inclusive and playful approach, too. I’m looking for new forms. Yet I have a wide scope in terms of forms because I’m always looking for the right shape to transform what I find.

But to get back to photography—on this filming trip, I was interested in the fact that I was totally illiterate in trying to decipher and read the extraordinary landscapes we saw, between the Atlas mountains and the desert—illiterate compared to a geologist, a paleontologist, or a local shepherd who sees so many stories in those rocks.

Yto Barrada, Untitled (Painted Sign series, Rock Shop) 2013–15

I would regularly ask my companions on our mission to describe what they saw. The paleontologists, for example, they see everything as if it was still underwater, so it was quite wonderful: the poetry of the scientific vocabulary is unlimited, you get any lithology book, and you just jump in. Or even a book on textile history. I was looking at a catalog and there was this whole thing on telling muslins apart. And there was this sentence that was incredible: “Muslins are made by walking.” I just want to put that in the middle of one of my texts! They’re talking about the way the fabric is made; I don’t know what “walking” means, technically, but it means something in the weaving industry, do you see what I mean?

Yto Barrada, Untitled (Arizona Mineral & Fossil Show series, Dino Bones, Arizona), 2014–15. All photographs courtesy the artist; Pace Gallery, London; Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Beirut and Hamburg; and Galerie Polaris, Paris

Maturo: Why is it that a lot of people don’t know about dinosaurs in Morocco?

Barrada: A lot of people do know, but they’re either specialists or local bureaucrats or kids. I’m saying there’s no instrumentalization by the state and that is odd. No airport posters, no school posters, no hotel posters. That’s why I made the series of posters, I made the communication—that’s material you can have. I made the toys for the museum so they’d be ready the day the museum opened, because you know that in the modern museum, if you don’t have a boutique, the museum will not survive.

Dinosaurs and fossils are fascinating to me because they involve fiction, forgery, tourism, and economy. You have something that has philosophy imprinted, and then you have the story of imprint—the imprint is like photography. Strangely enough, a fossil is a mold-and-a-cast all by itself; the fossil is already an incredibly faithful copy of the prehistoric creature.

There’s this thing in Morocco around filming or taking pictures—there’s this silly dogma of giving a “positive” image. I’m attracted to the other image, the bandit, the “faux guide,” the magician, the underdog, and the smuggler. In most of my films, the characters I chose are mostly figures of resistance. In a situation of domination, I am interested in how you find a way to keep your head up. Humor is one way; ruse is another.

Nicole Maturo, a former work scholar at Aperture magazine, is an executive assistant at the Aperture Foundation.

Yto Barrada’s exhibition Faux Guide will travel to Sfeir-Semler Gallery in Beirut from May 26 to August 1, 2016, and to The Power Plant in Toronto, beginning in October 2016. A Guide to Fossils for Forgers and Foreigners will be published in spring 2016 by Walther König.

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The Foto Cine Clube

In São Paulo, an exhibition explores the global reach of modern Brazilian photography.

By Paula V. Kupfer

German Lorca, Le diable au corps (The devil in the flesh), 1949. Period of circulation: 1949–53

Founded at dawn on a cool São Paulo night in April 1939, the Foto Cine Clube Bandeirante played a crucial role in the development of modern photography in Brazil. It was in the 1950s, however, in the midst of rapidly industrializing São Paulo, that its members arrived at the abstracted, formal, modernist style that became their signature. Foto Cine Clube Bandeirante: Do Arquivo à Rede, recently presented at the Museum of Art of São Paulo, is the first institutional nod to the club’s contributions; the curators describe it as a “decisive step in the process of legitimation of modern Brazilian photography.”

German Lorca, The devil in the flesh (verso), 1949

Shown on the second floor of the museum’s iconic Lina Bo Bardi building, 279 prints provide a chronological look at the work of FCCB photographers Thomaz Farkas, Geraldo de Barros, and German Lorca, among many others, from 1939 to the 1980s. The show was beautifully installed, with simple means for an elegant effect: sets of panels on thin metal rods leaned against each other, completely detached from the walls. While the early works betray the photographers’ pictorialist inclinations, subsequent ones demonstrate how their aesthetic morphed into a sharper look at geometry, shadow, and light. The photographs from the 1950s and ’60s that dominate the exhibition echo visual tropes of movements in Europe in the 1920s and ’50s, but capture a distinct Brazilian sensibility—an attitude reflected in ambitious architectural projects of the time and the new São Paulo Biennial (founded in 1951).

German Lorca, Apartamentos ou Apartamento na Mooca ou Apartamentos, rua do Oratório (Apartments, or Apartments at the Mooca, or Apartments, Oratório Street), 1951. Period of circulation: ca. 1951–53

Organized around the ideas of “archive” and “network,” the exhibition reflects both the vast FCCB archive and the global network of photo-clubs they were part of. Stickers, paper tags, and stamps on the backs of many prints confirm the photographs’ active journeys to salons throughout South America; international capitals such as London, Paris, and Singapore; as well as regional cities in the United States, including Louisville and Indianapolis. In what is arguably the curators’ boldest decision, a quarter of the photographs on view are displayed from the back only, their stories told not through imagery but via their travel marks. These stamps offer another way of reading history: their careful designs range from constructivist to art deco and suggest an awareness of international art.

Gertrudes Altschul, Folha morta (Dead leaf), n.d. Period of circulation: ca. 1952–59

Fans of the iconic image makers from the 1950s, including Farkas, de Barros, Lorca, and Chico Albuquerque, will be satisfied, but they’ll also learn about other remarkable figures like Roberto Yoshida, José Oiticica Filho (father of Hélio Oiticica), Kazuo Kawahara, Ademar Manarini, José Yalenti, and Eduardo Salvatore, longtime FCCB president. The show also offers a glimpse at women’s work in the male-dominated club, notably that of German-born Gertrudes Altschul, whose formal and elegant experimental approach is represented in twelve prints.

José Yalenti, Arquitetura ou Crepúsculo (Architecture or Twilight), ca. 1957. Period of circulation: 1957–64. All images courtesy the Museu de Arte de São Paulo

The “archive” aspect of the exhibition left this viewer wanting. A vitrine displays catalogues with stylish covers from the yearly Photography Salons, but the FCCB’s assiduously maintained bulletins, published from the ’40s onward, are nowhere to be seen. Extracted quotations related to photographic genres and techniques, questions about the medium, and the role of the photo club, are scattered across a wall, but it comes off as a modest effort masking a missed opportunity to highlight the group’s committed effort to record-keeping and critical discussion. (They diligently reprinted critical articles and reviews from local press and international publications, documented club events and excursions, and kept track of members’ inclusion in international salons.) That said, the exhibition places the photographs at the center, foregrounding the photographers’ work, and thus attests to their aesthetically innovative spirit and lasting contribution to the story of modern photography.

Foto Cine Clube Bandeirante: Do Arquivo a Rede was on view at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo from November 27, 2015 to March 3, 2016.

Paula V. Kupfer is a writer and editor based in New York. Formerly the managing editor of Aperture magazine, she is working on her master’s thesis on 1950s photography in São Paulo.

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From the Outside In

In exploring the lives of others, what are the virtues of an outsider’s position?

By Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa

Spread from Dana Lixenberg’s photobook Imperial Courts, 2015

What did the participants hope would result from their share in this common ritual? At the least, they knew themselves to be partnered in an open-ended but definite transaction.

— Max Kozloff, “Variations on a Theme of Portraiture,” Aperture 114, 1989

Dutch photographer Dana Lixenberg’s latest book Imperial Courts (2015) is a collective portrait of the inhabitants of a housing project in Watts, Los Angeles. The work began in the wake of the riots that exploded in April 1992 following the acquittal of four white police officers who were filmed beating Rodney King. By coincidence, Lixenberg completed the work in spring 2015, in the full heat of protests in Baltimore that followed the death of Freddie Gray from a spine severed while in police custody. In the book, as Lixenberg gradually introduces a large cast of individuals, we are struck by the complexity of reckoning with time mapped across faces over so many years. Imperial Courts grants us entry and proximity as outsiders to a small, neglected, inner-city community, raising a question addressed by the work itself, but pertinent to much contemporary photographic practice: What are the virtues of a photographer’s position on the outside of a world looking in?

Spread from Dana Lixenberg’s photobook Imperial Courts, 2015

With the exception of the book’s cover image, showing the extension of a highway intersection that opens onto Imperial Courts, Lixenberg made every photograph within the housing project. Across 343 pictures, she patiently tracks multiple generational changes: parents age, children are born, and daughters become grandmothers in the span of these pages. Lixenberg first photographed infant Dee Dee in 1993, wearing patterned braids and perched on her father Chin’s lap, then as an adolescent in 2008, and finally as a mother in 2013, proudly holding her infant son Emir. We see China, her hair neatly bound up in rollers in 1993, and her elegant daughter Keisha some seventeen years later, now mother to an infant Romeo, and sister to an adolescent Tye, whose oversized earrings hark back to the fashions of China’s youth.

Spread from Dana Lixenberg’s photobook Imperial Courts, 2015

Lixenberg’s photographs issue from the lengthy, purposeful collaboration required by a 4 x 5 camera. As such, they place particular emphasis on the formal presentation of the self. These individuals are intensely aware not only of the camera, but also, seemingly, its foreignness to their community—and, by implication, the foreignness of the photographer herself. In portraits of Trouble (2009), Jeff (1993), and Marylee (2010), we sense a relationship to Lixenberg shaped by circumspection and pride, which is complicated as Jeff reveals a small measure of sadness, or as J-50 warms to the camera over an interval of fifteen years.

Lixenberg’s rejection of the spectacle of ruination following the riots of 1992, and her use of portraiture to record changing American families, reflects her disavowal of the reflexive linkage of blackness with crisis. This choice does not redress the innumerable daily injustices of white supremacy, nor could it. But Lixenberg’s portraits underscore the value of individual and communal life, even as such life plays out in the abandoned urban zones that undergird economic “progress” in the United States. Imperial Courts momentarily closes the symbolic and physical distances inscribed in the landscape and culture that it traverses. It is work possessed of a degree of lucidity, specificity, variety, and beauty that is the equal of the many people depicted.

Spread from Petra Stavast’s photobook Ramya, 2014

While Lixenberg initially traveled from Amsterdam to Los Angeles to make portraits of unfamiliar people, her compatriot Petra Stavast turned to her upstairs landlady in Amsterdam, refusing the stable comfort of anonymity with a neighbor for the volatility that accompanies a more intimate relationship. Where Lixenberg became involved in the history of a foreign community, in Ramya (2014), Stavast immersed herself in the life an equally unfamiliar but proximate stranger—each artist was thus drawn into reciprocal and changing relationships with others by the inherently social nature of photography.

Spread from Petra Stavast’s photobook Ramya, 2014

Stavast’s desire to make portraits was the catalyst for her decade-long relationship with Ramya, the eponymous subject of her latest book. In it, she sketches the fascinating shape of Ramya’s life through an array of photographs, video stills, documents, and transcribed conversations. In Stavast’s early series of portraits, Ramya rejects any formal etiquette, while accommodating the camera’s presence with a mixture of bemusement, boredom, disbelief, and disinterest. While there are occasional intimations of mutual curiosity in these pictures, the cumulative effect of the series underscores the slippery imprecision of a portrait’s static address. Ramya is certainly aware of the camera, but apparently habituated to its presence. As she becomes successively less guarded, she reveals her mercurial, complex charisma.

Spread from Petra Stavast’s photobook Ramya, 2014

The book is marked by the somber fact that Ramya died during the making of the work, and its multi-layered composition results from the imperative Stavast felt, after her death, to delve deeper into the record of Ramya’s history. Thus Stavast discovered Ramya’s membership in the Rajneeshpuram commune in rural Oregon in the early 1980s, and that prior to this, Ramya had been known by another name. In stills from Ramya’s Oregon video footage, Stavast searches out the woman she knows to have been present, but can no longer reliably identify, selecting possible candidates from the crowd, and enlarging them to a point of degradation at which the pattern of a dot screen is legible, as if to revivify the gene of a past sealed away within the surface of the image itself. Ramya underscores the unpredictable nature of relationships facilitated by photography, but also the closeness that can come from the repetitive act of portraiture. Across the book’s pages, we are compelled to reckon with the mysteries of those people who are momentarily closest to us, and we are left with the compelling imperfection of memories and images.

Spread from Max Pinckers’s photobook Will They Sing Like Raindrops or Leave Me Thirsty, 2014

Amongst Ramya’s documents from her time in the commune are mental exercises on redefining the self, in one of which is written, “YOUR REALITY IS CREATED BY YOUR MIND!” These mantras speak to a faith in mental images as tools for creating unimagined futures. Such notions are taken up by Max Pinckers in his self-published book Will They Sing Like Raindrops or Leave Me Thirsty (2014), which explores forbidden romantic love within the Indian caste system through its relationship to the imagery of Indian cinema. Pinckers, born in Belgium and raised in Asia, photographed couples who hope to transform tradition by ignoring caste restrictions on marriage. Thus the love of his protagonists is a projection of faith in the prospect of change held over against an inflexible past.

Spread from Max Pinckers’s photobook Will They Sing Like Raindrops or Leave Me Thirsty, 2014

Will They Sing Like Raindrops retains a buoyant optimism in the face of the violent threat of repression to which these couples are all too frequently exposed, intimated in a photograph of bloody fingers or in gruesome news clippings scattered pointedly throughout the book. Pinckers’s recurrent use of what western art photography calls the “tableau” derives from his fascination with the populist force of Indian cinema, whose melodramatic affect has its roots in pre-medieval theories of Indian theater.

In his overtly staged melodramas, couples embrace alongside tumultuous seas beneath patterned fabrics “lit” by the mirrored glare of artificial light, or fling forbidden missives across rooftops above houses whose walls separate them from one another. Pinckers’s portrait of a star-gazing woman regally smoking atop a four poster bed recalls Larry Sultan’s pictures from The Valley, and speaks not only to the currency of cinema’s hold on human imagination, but also to the irrepressible yearnings unchained by the image’s capacity to enlist us in willful dreaming. In this way, Pinckers’s work reveals the disjuncture between the freedom of images and the rigidity of political will.

Spread from Max Pinckers’s photobook Will They Sing Like Raindrops or Leave Me Thirsty, 2014

Lixenberg, Stavast, and Pinkers’s books deploy an array of forms and strategies that seek to contextualize the people they depict, and to ground us in the individual and communal worlds their work outlines. In contrast to the pejorative books I explored in my essay “The Lives of Others,” published on this site in October 2015, these works reject the facile tropes common to deterministic treatments of the Other. Moreover, each of these three artists have rejected the liberal strain of determinism, which seeks to proscribe artists from making certain work on the basis of their ethnicity, gender, nationality, or relative wealth. Such proscriptions (commendably) attempt to mitigate the effects of real systemic inequalities, but they essentialize these categories as absolutes in the process.

Were we to accept a contemporary photography in which artists depicted only those people they resembled, we would be bereft of the diversity we rightly crave and defend in social life. We would be guilty of conforming human imagination to the rigidity of political norms. The representation of others affords us new means to claim a commonality that respects our differences, while reminding us, as Toni Morrison wrote of the portraiture of Robert Bergman, that “the stranger is … not alien but remembered.”

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.

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