Aperture's Blog, page 141

Open Roads & Invisible Borders

Since 2009, a photography collective has embarked on five road trips across West and Central Africa, creating a kaleidoscopic portrait of everyday life. For their latest trek, the group drove from Lagos to Sarajevo, a bold endeavor that would test their resolve.

By Sean O’ Toole

Emeka Okereke, Waiting, Rosso (Mauritania–Senegal border), 2014

In early November of 2009, a group of ten Nigerian friends—among them photographers Uche Okpa-Iroha, Amaize Ojeikere, Emeka Okereke, and Ray Daniels Okeugo—piled into a black VW van christened “Black Maria” and headed east out of Lagos on the coastal expressway toward neighboring Benin. Their plan: to spend four days driving a 1,400-mile route from their home city to Bamako, the capital of Mali, where they intended to catch the opening of the eighth edition of the Bamako Encounters, Africa’s most important photography biennial. Four days to drive roughly the same distance separating New York from Miami. Plotted on a map it looks easy. But maps don’t account for muddy quagmires that sometimes pass as roads in the tropics, nor do they anticipate delays posed by lethargic and corrupt immigration officials staffing West Africa’s many border checks. Maps simplify reality; they can make the foolhardy seem doable.

A week after they embarked on their overland journey across Nigeria, Benin, Togo, Ghana, and Burkina Faso to Mali, the group of travelers participating in the inaugural road trip of the Invisible Borders Trans-African Photographers Organisation, an artist-led nonprofit that has now coordinated five completed expeditions, arrived in Bamako by interstate bus. Despite a breakdown in Accra, the Ghanaian capital, they had made it, albeit three days late. Bamako’s collegial photography biennial, which that year was thematically concerned with material and symbolic borders, was, however, still in full swing.

Ray Daniels Okeugo, Nna Olopa, Lagos, Nigeria, 2011

Unbeknownst to the travelers, during their journey their episodic blog had gained a small reading public among the photographic community gathered in Bamako. Predating the launch of the photo-sharing app Instagram by a year, their blog, which is still accessible online, is surprisingly text heavy. Updated by various members, notably the poet and writer Nike Adesuyi-Ojeikere, it detailed the group’s various encounters with feckless moneychangers and helpful strangers. It also chronicled the group’s cumulative frustrations as it navigated spatial and temporal thresholds, and crossed political and psychological boundaries. “We took off like a bunch of novices and thought we would be allowed to cross borders without a thorough explanation,” Okereke told me in 2012. The group’s idealism was dashed at Seme, a border post between Nigeria and Benin, where, Adesuyi-Ojeikere writes, they were held up for two hours and paid “official and unofficial taxes” before continuing.

By the time their van broke down in Accra, the group’s enthusiasm for observing Africa’s diverse realities, a core tenet of the project, waned as the “why not?” attitude that kick-started the inaugural journey ceded to the actuality of life on the road. “With no van, and living from minute to minute in the hope that the repairs would soon be done and we would hit the road again, we did not dare venture far from base,” remarked Unoma Giese, a former stockbroker turned artist, of the layover in Accra. The constraints of travel, she continued, demanded a continual regrouping and rearranging of priorities.

Ray Daniels Okeugo, Smuggler, Koussiri (Cameroon–Chadian border), 2011

Invisible Borders is a gregarious project. It is also, notably, a durable, Afrocentric, mobile photography platform that has outgrown its early origins as an informal Lagosian thing. At heart, though, it is a sociable aggregation of like-minded photographers. Named by photographer Uche James-Iroha, a participant in the first trip, this organization traces its origins back to an earlier photographic collective. In 2001, following their participation in that year’s edition of the Bamako Encounters, four Lagos-based friends—including James-Iroha and Ojeikere, son of the famed Nigerian portrait photographer J.D. ‘Okhai Ojeikere—founded Depth of Field (DOP), a loose affiliation of individuals rather than an aesthetic movement bounded by a common style. The collective later expanded to include Emeka Okereke, the current artistic director of Invisible Borders.

The remit of DOP’s photography was diverse, ranging in subject from James-Iroha’s allegorical portraiture to Ojeikere’s abstracted documentary studies of market goods and Okereke’s more naturalistic observations of urban soccer. After a brief flurry of exhibitions in Berlin, London, and New York in the mid-aughts, the collective’s momentum dissipated, prompting Okereke to act. “He felt that they were not doing enough artistically and project-wise to further their initial success,” says Akinbode Akinbiyi, a Berlin-based Nigerian photographer who is a key mentor and ally of the group. “Initially he launched the idea of the intercontinental travels to his closest colleagues in DOP.” They liked his idea. The maiden journey of Invisible Borders included three DOP members.

The warm response to the 2009 road trip project prompted Okereke to develop it into an annual event. In 2010, a journey was undertaken from Lagos to Dakar, the Senegalese capital city and host, since 1992, of Dak’Art, a visual arts biennial. Departing once again along the trans–West Africa coastal highway, the road trip included visits to Cotonou, Lomé, Accra, and Abidjan, before detouring inland to Bamako, bypassing the troubled states of Liberia and Sierra Leone. At Diéma, a Malian settlement between Bamako and Dakar, the group met three Nigerian women operating a roadside eatery, which they had opened after a smuggler abandoned them while en route to Spain. As was custom early on, a group portrait was produced of the Nigerian adventurers with their enterprising compatriots.

Ala Kheir, Equilibrium, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, 2011. All photographs © the artists and courtesy Invisible Borders

In its earliest iterations, Invisible Borders was overwhelmingly Nigerian in its makeup. Since 2011, however, when the group navigated overland from Lagos to Addis Ababa in Ethiopia to join the Addis Foto Fest (with one flight connection between N’Djamena, Chad, to the Sudanese capital city of Khartoum), they have taken on a more pan-African appearance. “It began with what seemed like a Nigerian collective, but the main idea is to make it a platform for artists from different parts of the African continent,” Okereke explained in 2012.

At the time, he was planning a fourth trip: from Lagos to Lubumbashi, a mineral-rich city in the south of the Democratic Republic of Congo and site of the Lubumbashi Biennale. This southerly trip, which included participants from Equatorial Guinea, Mozambique, Rwanda, and South Africa, was marked by an epic five-day struggle on muddy roads between Calabar, a city in southern Nigeria, and Mamfe, in neighboring Cameroon. Encountering roads of thick, golden-brown clay, they hired “mud workers” to aid their passages, and later argued with officials who imposed a fine when a vehicle owned by a Chinese construction outfit collided with them. The last-minute postponement of the Lubumbashi Biennale saw the trip rerouted to the port city of Libreville, Gabon, where participant Jide Odukoya, from Nigeria, made a portrait series of his expatriate countrymen living in this oil-rich state. By this time only Okereke and Ray Daniels Okeugo, a photographer and Nollywood actor who died in October 2013, remained of the original group of ten Nigerian friends who founded Invisible Borders.

The group’s malleable membership is less important than its modus operandi, which by 2011 had matured from spontaneous adventurism into a sustained exercise in transcontinental networking and photographic encounter. The latter action, to photograph, is an important facet of the collective, but also possibly the hardest thing to coherently track. Their work is widely and consistently exhibited—including appearances in The Idea of Africa (re-invented), a 2010 photography exhibition at Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland; The Ungovernables, the 2012 New Museum Triennial in New York; and All the World’s Futures, curator Okwui Enwezor’s exhibition at the 2015 Venice Biennale—but it is somewhat misleading to speak of an Invisible Borders style.

Often thought of as a photographic collective, Invisible Borders has evolved to include video, site-specific performances, and a good deal of writing. Although diverse, this creative output is linked by an impressionistic and sensorial thread, exemplified by Nigerian author Emmanuel Iduma’s blog posts and South African filmmaker Lesedi Mogoatlhe’s short web clip of Cameroon-based singer Danielle Eog Makedah. However, for the group’s career-defining Venice showcase, Okereke—assisted by Akinbiyi, Iduma, and photographer Jumoke Sanwo—emphasized the group’s lens-based work. Multiplicity and diversity trumped the discrete image in their photographic selection: a collage of densely clustered reportage, documentary, and pictorial images represented Invisible Borders.

Sean O’Toole is a writer and editor based in Cape Town, South Africa.

To continue reading the full article, buy Issue 222, Spring 2016, “Odyssey” or subscribe to Aperture and never miss an issue.

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Into the Void: Taryn Simon in Conversation with Kate Fowle

Since 2006, Taryn Simon has collected objects and documents in a black field measured to the exact dimensions of Kazimir Malevich’s painting Black Square (1915). Set to end on May 21, 3015, and created in collaboration with Russia’s State Atomic Energy Corporation, Simon’s newest iteration of the project, a journey into the future, is the ultimate homage—a black square of vitrified nuclear waste. Black Square XVII is now a permanent installation at Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow, where the ongoing series will be presented in spring 2016. With Black Square XVII, Simon explained, “I wanted to make a work not for my generation, nor my children’s generation, but for a distant future to which I have no tangible relationship.”

Taryn Simon, Black Square, 2006– Void for artwork. Permanent installation at Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow

Kate Fowle: Black Square began in 2006 and is ongoing, making it the longest running project you have embarked upon so far. At the same time, it has never been exhibited as a series, or perhaps it’s better to say not exhibited as a complete story. Does this project enable you to structure, or think out loud, about various subjects and ideas that become important to you during your research for other series? 

Taryn Simon: It was a needed liberation from the tight margins of my projects. I’ve worked for so long in very closed and serial projects—ones that take consecutive years to produce. The Black Square series has allowed me to think and work differently.

KF: It’s “action research.”

TS: I make the individual works for Black Square whenever I feel like it—not in a controlled time slot. Within the “black” I’m able to dig into the lists I collect of singular ideas. I guess the irony is that I couldn’t escape my taxonomic instinct, as I put all of these distinct subjects in the repetitive void of the black square. But, for me, it’s the messiest I’ve been.

Taryn Simon, Film still of Radon nuclear waste disposal plant, Sergiev Posad, Russia, 2015–ongoing

KF: Let’s talk about the premise of this series. Why did you choose to use Kazimir Malevich’s painting Black Square 1915 as an organizing principle? What is your own story in relation to this work?

TS: The Black Square—or the great nothing, a zero form, as Malevich described it—was the first icon without an icon in Russian painting. This average shape, size, and color was inscribed with countless political and mystical dimensions. A very simple, dull gesture became revolutionary. For years I’ve used the shape, color, and scale of Malevich’s square as background to a number of representations of man’s inventions, or man’s disruptive marks. Then the great nothing became a big something—researchers using X-rays have recently discovered that beneath the paint of the Black Square lay secret messages and earlier paintings. Ironically, the painting itself suddenly takes on overtly secretive and hidden characteristics, like many other subjects of my work. On a more personal note, Malevich’s Black Square was created during a period of Russian history that led to my family’s departure from the country.

KF: The works share a format, but their contents are all very different. 

TS: The subjects of the black squares come from my imagination, things I’m reading or lists I’ve made through the years of ideas to consider for projects. There’s no real reason behind them, just things that have a certain solitude or inherent contradiction.

Taryn Simon, film still of Radon nuclear waste disposal plant, Sergiev Posad, Russia, 2015–ongoing

KF: Can you describe a couple of the works and how they came about?

TS: Black Square IV pictures “The Blaster,” an anticarjacking system installed beneath vehicles in South Africa. It’s a flamethrower activated by a driver or passenger of a car under attack. Black Square V includes a shadowed image of Henry Kissinger. Black Square XII documents The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, which purports to be the minutes of a meeting between Jewish leaders outlining their plan to control the world. Despite having been exposed as a false document, it continues to be reproduced in many languages and distributed throughout the world. Black Square XIII pictures a functional 3-D handgun printed in my studio in nine hours and forty-eight minutes, using black ABS plastic. Black Square XVIII looks at the variations in dust from different nations.

Taryn Simon, Black Square VI, from Black Square, 2006– Blue buckets were mounted atop civilian vehicles in Moscow to protest the misuse of emergency blue rotating lights by VIP businessmen, celebrities, and officials to bypass Moscow traffic. All works courtesy the artist and Gagosian Gallery

KF: The most recent iteration of the Black Square is a sculpture. 

TS: Yes, its start was a fantasy that developed into a long-term project with Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow. The goal was to construct a black square made from vitrified nuclear waste that would hold within it a letter that I had written to the future. The process of vitrification converts radioactive waste from a volatile liquid to a stable, solid mass resembling polished black glass. It is considered to be one of the safest and most effective methods for the long-term storage and neutralization of radioactive waste. At long last, in 2015, we began fabricating the black square, which will be stored in a steel container reinforced with concrete, situated within a holding chamber surrounded by clay-rich soil, and then placed at the radon nuclear waste disposal plant in Sergiev Posad, located seventy-two kilometers northeast of Moscow. It will reside at the radon facility until its radioactive properties have diminished to levels deemed safe for human exposure and exhibition—approximately one thousand years after its creation.

Kate Fowle is the chief curator at Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow and Director-at-Large at independent Curators International in New York.

To continue reading the full article, buy Issue 222, Spring 2016, “Odyssey” or subscribe to Aperture and never miss an issue.

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Arrivals and Departures

On the Trans-Siberian Railway, Jacob Aue Sobol discovers the texture of societies in transition.

By Pico Iyer

Jacob Aue Sobol, Moscow, Russia, 2012

Fierce eyed in their filmy black dresses and off-the-shoulder numbers, the girls of Ulaanbaatar were strutting down the corridors of the gleaming new Shangri-La Hotel last August as if in Bangkok or Shanghai. Some were carrying bags from the shiny Vuitton outlet down the street; others had no doubt been pastoralists on the grasslands just years before. Every time the branch train of the Trans-Siberian Railway stops in the Mongolian capital, fresh faces—new thoughts of faraway worlds—flood out to transform a world of horses and heart-stopping emptiness. “You know,” a Mongolian friend said to me just before heading to the bar Naadam, “Genghis Khan was the WTO of the thirteenth century.” What he didn’t need to say was that what used to be a trade of spices and tea is now very often one of promises and dreams.

As I sauntered among the Thai massage joints and “Vegas” nightclubs of Ulaanbaatar last summer, I might have been in the stark and sometimes unsettling world that Jacob Aue Sobol has made his own. Since 2012, on one month-long trip after another, the Danish wanderer has been opening up a boldly contemporary Asia, as he rides the Trans-Siberian and its branch lines, taking us into Chinese, Russian, and Mongolian lives. At every stage, we feel not just the textures of societies in transition, but something inward and very private on the far side of the tracks. The mixed feelings of a traveler slipping out after a quickie, the unease of arriving in a place that is itself on the move (or even, in Mongolia, on the hunt). The view not through the window of the celebrated train, but from within a shuttered room, looking back.

Jacob Aue Sobol, Moscow, Russia, 2012

It’s easy—perhaps too easy—to say that the tourist wants to go somewhere while the traveler likes to linger. The tourist hopes to catch something through his lens, while the traveler seeks to surrender, even to be claimed by a surprise in very real life. Yet Sobol’s work goes even deeper than most travelers, by seeing what is left behind when the train pulls out, and by seeking out the shadows,

the unintended consequences, of a journey that leads not just to discovery but confrontation. Though the title of his ongoing series is Arrivals and Departures, he clearly has little interest in the names and times listed on railway-station announcement boards. Destinations are less important to him than those feelings—of guilt, of disquiet, of wanderlust—that arise whenever a wayfarer draws close enough to a local to feel (or impart) real hurt. I think of Jackson Browne’s haunting line about running for a morning flight “through the whispered promises and the changing light / Of the bed where we both lie.” With the emphasis on “lie.”

Jacob Aue Sobol, Moscow, Russia, 2012

As a traveler through the alleyways of contemporary urban Asia for the past thirty-two years, I’ve always sought out those scenes that can’t be caught on any screen. I’ve been interested in why, a few miles from the wind-whipped silences of Mongolia, a “Luxury Nail Spa” is opening amid crowds of Dubai-worthy glass towers, and why Mongolian Airlines is showing Two Night Stand, of all Hollywood comedies, as we fly into the land of Genghis Khan. But looking at Sobol’s work, I’m reminded of how we writers will always lag behind: it’s not so much that a picture is worth a thousand words as that it can grasp a thousand silences. The unspoken moment; the impenitent stare; every murmur or grunt or tremor that no words can begin to transcribe. In the age of the selfie, Sobol’s camera looks out—and finds a brazenness that conceals at least as much as reticence does.

Jacob Aue Sobol, Moscow, Russia, 2012

In China, bullet trains are being built to travel over 300 miles per hour; coming in from the airport in Shanghai, I rode a Maglev train that whisks passengers past avenues of skyscrapers at 268 miles per hour. In Russia, the ghostly gray monuments of Leninism have given way, almost overnight, to over-the-top dance clubs and, in Moscow alone, eight separate Rolex outlets. Even in Mongolia, I found last summer, the memory of the worldly conquerors known as the Golden Horde is being trumped by the prospect of hoarded gold. Yes, Sobol’s inky black-and-whites take us past the glitter of the twenty-first-century Silk Road into more uncertain moments that recall the elemental, even predatory street poetry of Daido Moriyama or Jack Kerouac. This comes from having the patience to step off the train and walk slowly into the lives and bewildering landscapes all around.

Jacob Aue Sobol, Moscow, Russia, 2012. All photographs © Jacob Aue Sobol and courtesy Magnum Photos and Yossi Milo Gallery, New York

These images stay with me in part because they give back so little, and what they do give back is not consoling. They’re antisnapshots of a kind about the displacing truth of travel—that places are often resistant to our gaze, and the deeper we enter them, the more we lose all sense of where we are. In this context, the stress on Trans-Siberian Railway falls emphatically on “Trans”—the sense of movement, of crossing frontiers, of stepping toward a human contact that will always remain out of reach. Less transcendence, you might say, than transgression. And—as in the most memorable trips—no answers, but questions that keep on turning inside of you, forever.

Pico Iyer is the author, most recently, of The Art of Stillness (2014).

To read more from “Odyssey,” buy Issue 222, Spring 2016, “Odyssey” or subscribe to Aperture and never miss an issue.

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Odyssey

Taiyo Onorato & Nico Krebs, Traffic, 2013, from the series Eurasia. Courtesy the artists, RaebervonStenglin, Sies+Höke, and Peter Lav Gallery

“The tourist hopes to catch something through his lens, while the traveler seeks to surrender, even to be claimed by a surprise in very real life,” celebrated travel writer Pico Iyer notes in his introduction to a portfolio of Jacob Aue Sobol’s photographs made while riding on the Trans-Siberian Railway. The unexpected route, the captivating spell of wanderlust, and the lure of the unpredictable bind the images in this issue. From early twentieth-century expeditions like those of Vittorio Sella, who created sublime views of the world’s most treacherous mountains, to the recent documentary projects of Invisible Borders, a West African photography collective, the camera is central to the journey—not just a means to prove the trip was made. Even so, for Emeka Okereke, the artistic director of Invisible Borders, “The purest form of the project is while we are on the road.”

Among the peripatetic wanderers brought together in these pages are Taiyo Onorato and Nico Krebs, who drove a four-wheeler from Switzerland to Mongolia, photographing unfamiliar landscapes and futuristic architecture, and Justine Kurland, who has crossed the United States in a weathered van, adding thousands of miles to her odometer while pursuing a chronicle of American drifters. Precedence can be found in the travelogues of Wilfred Thesiger, who opted for camel over automobile in his arduous midcentury expeditions throughout the Arabian Peninsula, slowly pushing forward into the desert. “I had no desire to travel faster,” he wrote. “In this way there was time to notice things.”

Likening her artistic process to an “unconscious journey,” Tacita Dean, known for her prodigious output in film, still photography, and other forms, is attracted by the hunt for found images. Her oeuvre is marked by references to personal quests: one in search of Robert Smithson’s then-submerged land work Spiral Jetty, another for a boat, languishing on a remote island, that once belonged to a doomed amateur sailor. Yto Barrada also traces the path of submerged relics. Following the “dinosaur road”—the lucrative trade of purloined fossils between Morocco and Arizona—Barrada constructs her own map of archaeological exploits, constructing a sequence of landscape collages and found paintings, published here for the first time.

Some journeys are undertaken at moments of upheaval; some maps extend past the realm of public knowledge,or into an uncharted future. In his latest project, Trevor Paglen has plunged beneath the ocean to document the Trans-Atlantic cables that carry the bulk of Internet traffic now heavily monitored by government surveillance. Taryn Simon’s Black Square contains a letter to the future, a project expected to achieve its full realization in one thousand years. But the odyssey emblematic of our time, perhaps the most pressing issue of contemporary international consequence, is the flow of mass migration across North Africa and the Middle East toward Europe. Powerfully represented by Samuel Gratacap in his series Empire, refugees from many nations have reached a standstill at Choucha Camp in Tunisia and await passage to an elusive haven. To their north, the islands of Lesbos, Kos, and Lampedusa, among many others that figured in the geography of Homer’s epic poem, form an archipelago of uncertainty. At the edge of the Mediterranean, the longest journey is still to come, the territory just beyond the horizon. — The Editors

To read more from “Odyssey,” buy Issue 222, Spring 2016, “Odyssey” or subscribe to Aperture and never miss an issue.

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On the Cover: A Conversation with Samuel Gratacap

A young photographer reports on the odyssey of our time.

The Spring 2016 issue of Aperture features a cover image taken by Samuel Gratacap at a transit camp in Tunisia. Since 2007, the 32-year old French photographer has followed the lives of refugees and migrants crossing the Mediterranean, documenting moments of departure—and the emotions of waiting—at sites including the Italian island of Lampedusa and a detention center in Marseille, France. At its peak of operation, the transit camp at Choucha, where his series Empire is set, received upwards of 200,000 migrants, many fleeing the crisis in neighboring Libya and others escaping conflicts in West Africa and Southeast Asia. One of the most pressing debates of current international consequence, the flow of political and economic refugees toward an elusive haven in Europe has been the subject of intense coverage in news media and photojournalism. Resisting the sensational, however, as Bronwyn Law-Viljoen writes in her introduction to Gratacap’s work in Aperture, “There is beauty in his images, but also an attempt to understand the bare-life fact of Choucha, and to avoid consigning the camp’s inhabitants to the realm of the poetic.” I spoke with Gratacap late last year, shortly after he returned from a reporting trip in West Africa for Le Monde. —Brendan Wattenberg

Samuel Gratacap, Departure day, Choucha Camp, Tunisia, 2012–14

Brendan Wattenberg: Do you consider yourself a photojournalist and an artist? How does your reporting on current events influence your long-term projects?

Samuel Gratacap: I’m a photographer. The main thing that pushes me to be more and more involved is the importance of the mass media in representing the topic of migration. Mass media should be concerned with making the complex issues around migration visible, but instead it is limited to making so-called news. However, some photo-editors are starting to create new ways of editing and publishing photography—at Le Monde, for instance—such as double pages dedicated to photography in the print version and portfolios online. For me, jumping between long-term projects and photojournalism is just a way to challenge my own practice, to find new fields and new forms of expression.

BW: Before Empire, you were already working on migration as a theme in Castaways and La Chance. What prompted you to become so interested and involved with this issue? How does Empire extend your previous work?

SG: Photography becomes interesting when making pictures is a difficult process, primarily for reasons of accessibility. I first became involved with migration issues when I was a student at the École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Marseille. La Chance (2007–2012), my first series, is a project I created in 2007 in a detention center in Marseille for “illegals.” The underlying reason for my decision to enter the detention center was the desire to understand the conditions of imprisonment and the judicial system in France with regard to undocumented immigrants. I felt like I was moving away from reality by reading newspapers and publications that distorted figures or images, anonymous and impersonal testimonies. I wanted to go in search of a reality on a human scale, make it visible, define the contours of individual stories beyond the numbers, flows, and figures.

Samuel Gratacap, Detention Center for Migrants, Zaouïa, Libya, 2014

Castaways (2007–2016) follows seven years of work about places of confinement and transit areas related to migration routes in the Mediterranean region. The idea is to reverse the concept of borders and create a proper map, within which emerging destinies and random trips take place. Having recorded the testimonies of migrants and asylum seekers throughout my travels, I’ve noticed that it’s often at the cost of freedom of expression and reduction of their basic rights that people choose to leave their country of origin. “Undocumented,” they are forced to hide. They fall into complete anonymity, finding themselves in constant struggle with a system that doesn’t give them the chance to get out and get papers.

Samuel Gratacap, Empire, Choucha Camp, Tunisia, 2012–14

Empire was my first long-term project. It was a natural extension of my previous work, but I had the desire to involve myself, like I had never done before, through a deep and immersive approach. It changed a lot about the way I photograph. I was already working on a project I started in southeast Tunisia, in the city of Zarzis, not far from Choucha. Zarzis was a port of departure for thousands of Tunisian migrants who fled to Italy just after the revolution in 2011. At the same time, the civil war and NATO attacks started in Libya. Hundreds of thousands of refugees moved to Tunisia, specifically to Choucha.

Choucha is symptomatic of the fate often reserved by the mass media for migration. These refugees and migrants went from an anonymous status to suddenly having the spotlight turned on them; they then became contemporary icons of what the media has too often presented as the “migratory drama.” But after the Libyan “crisis” and the death of Gaddafi, in October 2011, the media was much less interested in the fate of refugees. Set upon for a while, in an often spectacular time in which images play a crucial role, refugees became abruptly forgotten and undesirable.

Samuel Gratacap, Empire, Choucha Camp, Tunisia, 2012–14

BW: Empire is characterized by a form of guarded intimacy. The portraits and landscapes represent a closeness and immersion in the camp’s community. Still, you approach the story with the objectivity of an outsider. During the time you worked on Empire, how long would you stay at the camp? Did you live with refugees? How did you establish relationships and take testimonies?

SG: I first traveled to Choucha in January 2012 as a photographer accompanying a reporter. Confronted with the rules of short-term reporting, I faced difficulties in rendering an image. As a result, I decided to return to Choucha in July 2012 and start a long-term photographic and video documentary project. For two years I stayed a total of about twelve months in the field. I lived between the border city of Ben Gardane and the camp. A community of refugees from the Ivory Coast hosted me. I slept there during this time; I was very close to the people. This closeness was important for my understanding of daily life inside the camp. As my time in the camp passed, my photography evolved, but I wouldn’t say it was so intimate. I never considered myself an inhabitant of the camp. The main thing was to maintain a sufficient distance, to go further and push my work.

The reality of the camp was so complex; it was important to find a way to make it apparent, starting from a distance, and then getting increasingly closer. There is not one precise story of Choucha, but instead as many stories as the number of the people who’ve been there. I obviously missed some stories, some pictures. I forced myself to find the “right” approach and the “right” moment to document this place as the hostile environment it is. The desert, the sandstorms, the waiting, the everyday moments (the food, the hairdresser), the days of departure … Time passed slowly and people felt more and more abandoned until that decisive moment, in July 2013, when humanitarian organizations “closed” the camp and left more than three hundred people with no food, no water. Men, women, and children were rejected as asylum seekers.

Samuel Gratacap, Empire, Choucha Camp, Tunisia, 2012–14

BW: Even though Choucha is a “transit zone,” your photographs from the camp are mostly about the experience, as you say, of waiting. In fact, Karim Traoré, an Ivorian migrant who you interviewed, says that Choucha is full of “wandering souls.” The spaces they inhabit alternate between claustrophobic tents and wide-open desert horizons. In the image we’ve chosen for the cover of Aperture, of a man facing a bus, you capture a person seemingly at an impasse. Could you tell us what Choucha was like during your time working there?

SG: From 2012 to 2014, Choucha was still a refugee camp, but the living conditions had become worse and worse. The sand destroyed everything, cracking the fabric of tents that were too fragile. The wind swept everything away. This picture of a man walking in front of the bus leaving the camp is an image of a tearing, a prejudice. Departure days were both sad and beautiful for the fact that some people could go and some people no.

Samuel Gratacap, Empire, Choucha Camp, Tunisia, 2012–14

BW: In Empire and your previous series, you show quiet, often very personal scenes, such as a man having his head shaved in Choucha or young men seeking a moment of leisure in Zarzis. In contrast to news photography, which is concerned with action and conflict, why is it important to portray these moments between action?

SG: I try to portray these moments to reveal how people are occupying time. How life is still going on despite the difficulties people are facing. How they are organizing themselves to fight against the hostility of places they are passing through. At the camp, the body undergoes an “administrative” status. The evolution of the people in these areas often lasts for years: there’s zero stability; men, women, and children are in a state of precarious vulnerability. My work is about these territories of movement: the border crossings, the waiting zones for daily workers, the prisons. As well as the places related to the “rest” of the body, the paths toward a newfound identity. How does it feel when one person is, at the same time, not feeling at home and not being accepted as a foreigner? How does the body “store” both the rootlessness and the rejection?

Samuel Gratacap, Empire, Choucha Camp, Tunisia, 2012–14

BW: How do these projects integrate photography, video, and postcards together with found materials such as personal pictures, maps, and journals?

SG: The project to which you refer here, La Chance, is about the Italian island of Lampedusa, a place of shipwreck and a paradise for tourists. Lampedusa was a popular destination in the Mediterranean before becoming an emblematic place for the arrival of migrants by boat. With the series of postcards, I tried to reveal this paradox, showing the hidden side of the island. In parallel to this work, I created photographic reproductions of documents and photographs belonging to migrants, washed -up and recovered on the beaches of the island.

Samuel Gratacap, Cemetery of clandestine boats (fig n°4), Series of 8 postcards of Lampedusa, Italy, 2011

BW: Have you been able to stay in touch with any of the subjects of Empire? Have they seen your book?

SG: I stayed in touch with many people I met in Choucha. Some of them are still in the camp; some are in the capital, Tunis; some in Italy, in France. Social networks help to maintain contact. I think that only a few people I met in Choucha have seen the book yet, apart from some who are in Tunis and Paris.

Samuel Gratacap, Empire, Choucha Camp, Tunisia, 2012–14. All images courtesy the artist and Galerie Les Filles du Calvaire, Paris

BW: You are currently living between Paris and Tunisia and continuing to work in North Africa, particularly in Libya. What other projects are you working on now?

SG: I’m now pursuing my work about Libya and my assignments for Le Monde. The exhibition of Empire will travel to Tunis in 2016; this is the next step. At Le BAL, particularly through my project’s exposure in the press, I realized that the exhibition could reflect the situation of the refugees in Choucha for all visitors. That’s really important for me, because the project is about Tunisia. The camp still exists. People are still inside almost five years after their arrival.

Samuel Gratacap’s work is featured in Aperture Issue 223, “Odyssey.” Selections from his series Empire will be presented by Galerie Les Filles du Calvaire at AIPAD: The Photography Show from April 14­–17, 2016 in New York.

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A Celebration for John H. Gutfreund

Lauren Gutfreund and friend

Aperture executive director Chris Boot and board chair Cathy M. Kaplan

Jim and Meg Conner

Elizabeth and Mark Levine and Aperture trustee Frederick Smith

On February 11, Aperture trustees and friends gathered to celebrate John H. Gutfreund’s twenty years of service on the foundation’s Board of Trustees. Fellow board members Sondra Gilman Gonzalez-Falla and Celso Gonzalez-Falla hosted the fête, with cocktails and hors d’oeuvres, in their Manhattan home, where guests had the opportunity to share stories about Mr. Gutfreund and his earliest years as chairman of the Aperture Finance Committee.

Mr. Gutfreund received the warmest of receptions, as Aperture executive director Chris Boot and current board chair Cathy Kaplan toasted his remarkable record of service to Aperture, including his former post as board chair. Former trustee Mark Levine applauded Mr. Gutfreund for his leadership and warmly acknowledged his wife, Susan Gutfreund, for her invaluable contributions to the foundation. Mr. Gutfreund was presented with the Paul Strand print The Court, New York, 1924, signed by fellow board members, to commemorate the evening.

Mr. Gutfreund became a trustee of Aperture Foundation in 1996 and served as chairman from 2001 to 2005. Active in the worlds of finance, politics, and philanthropy, he serves as a trustee of Montefiore Health System and is an advisor of the Universal Bond Fund and president of Gutfreund & Company. He also served as vice chairman of the New York Stock Exchange and was the chief executive officer of Salomon Brothers. The UJA-Federation of New York has honored him for his charitable activities and contributions. Mr. Gutfreund will always remain a special part of Aperture’s community of loyal friends and supporters.

 

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Catherine Opie’s American Souvenirs

From the rush of Niagara Falls to Elizabeth Taylor’s bedroom, a chronicler of American life presents two psychologically striking exhibitions.

By Anne Doran

Catherine Opie, Mary, 2012 © Catherine Opie and courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong

For the last thirty years, Ohio-born, Los Angeles-based photographer Catherine Opie has been making formally assured and psychologically astute images of America’s landscape and people. Her subjects have ranged from the 1980s lesbian BDSM scene in San Francisco (of which she was once a part), surfers in Malibu, and high-school footballers in small towns across the U.S. to Los Angeles freeway overpasses, Minnesotan ice fishing houses, and downtown St. Louis at dawn. The notion of community with its attendant questions of identity and inclusion is a persistent theme in her work.

For her solo debut at New York’s Lehmann Maupin gallery, Opie presents two concurrent shows. Portraits and Landscapes at the gallery’s Chelsea space combines allegorical photographs of Opie’s friends and people she admires with oversized, out-of-focus images of mountains and waterfalls shot in national parks. At Lehmann Maupin’s Lower East Side outpost, 700 Nimes Road, titled after the address of Elizabeth Taylor’s former home in Bel Air, is a portrait of the actress through pictures of her house and her possessions. (Iterations of both exhibitions are currently on view in Los Angeles at the Hammer Museum and MOCA Pacific Design Center respectively.)

Catherine Opie, Untitled #9, 2013 © Catherine Opie and courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong

The portraits in Portraits and Landscapes, largely of people from the overlapping worlds of fine art, fashion, performance, and writing, consciously evoke Old Master paintings in style. Each subject poses against a black background, their strongly lit features swimming up out of darkness. Julie Tolentino and Stosh Fila (a.k.a. Pigpen) enact an S&M performance, Pigpen suturing Tolentino’s mouth closed with needles and red silk ribbon, while Kate and Laura Mulleavy, of the fashion house Rodarte, present a tableau in which one, in a man’s suit, works on an embroidery of a blood stain, as the other, dressed in white ruffles, looks on.

Viewed in conjunction with these former works, more straightforward portraits—of author and critic Hilton Als debonair in seersucker, artist Chuck Close flamboyant in a wildly patterned silk shirt, and endurance swimmer Diana Nyad muscular in nothing at all—cannily suggest that we are all, to some degree, and particularly in the age of personal branding and the Internet, performers. The blurred postcard vistas accompanying the portraits might also be seen as landscapes performing abstracted versions of themselves.

Catherine Opie, Hilton, 2013 © Catherine Opie and courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong

But in spite of their undeniable beauty, these works, in their too-heavy black frames, are underwhelming. The portraits’ lack of psychological complexity in favor of markers of profession or class—Nyad’s tan lines; tattoo-parlor owner Indexa’s body art—is mirrored in their painting-like flatness. Likewise, the landscapes, reduced to muddles of surface color, are revealing of nothing. In these works, at least, Opie elects to refute photography’s rather closer relationship to sculpture, particularly its ability to record, rather than render the illusion of, real space.

Catherine Opie, Bedside Table from the 700 Nimes Road Portfolio, 2010–11 © Catherine Opie and courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong

More satisfying is 700 Nimes Road. While engaged in documenting Elizabeth Taylor’s house, Opie never photographed or even encountered Taylor, who died three months into project. Thereafter the series took on a new dimension as Opie recorded the dismantling of Taylor’s home and the readying of her belongings for sale. While this series, too, focuses on performativity—in this case Taylor’s carefully maintained, ultra-feminine persona—it presents dichotomies at every level: between public and private, formality and hominess, perception and reality. There is humor here, too—a close-up of swagged pink curtains suggests the star’s famously ample cleavage—and acknowledgement of a life lived almost entirely in the public eye, summed up by the numerous “intimate” snaps of Taylor and Richard Burton taken by professional photographers.

Catherine Opie, Krupp Diamond from the 700 Nimes Road Portfolio, 2010–11 © Catherine Opie and courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong

Equally important, perhaps, are the spatial qualities of the pictures. Billed as Opie’s homage to William Eggleston’s photographs of Graceland, they display, if not Eggleston’s extraordinary sense of color and composition, a similar attentiveness to the relationship between objects in space. In images of hatboxes stacked on a lavender shag rug, gowns coffined in boxes with see-through lids, and those legendary jewels sorted into Lucite containers—all in preparation for auction—Opie shows her true skills as a photographer.

Anne Doran is a visual artist and writer living in New York.

Catherine Opie: 700 Nimes Road is on view through February 20, 2016 at Lehmann Maupin, Lower East Side. Catherine Opie: Portraits and Landscapes is on view through March 5, 2016 at Lehmann Maupin, Chelsea.

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Photography at the Altar: A Conversation about Diversity in Athens

A Greek photographer’s account of migrant communities in Athens reveals a new vision of multicultural Europe.

Tassos Vrettos, Hindu Sewa Sangh Mandir, Dilessi, 2012–15 © Tassos Vrettos

Amid the anxious media coverage of the migrant crisis in Europe, the Greek photographer Tassos Vrettos pursued an alternative vision. In 2012, he began an immersive account of faith-based communities in Athens, embedding himself in the spaces where followers of Buddhism, Islam, Christianity, Hinduism, and various other spiritual denominations congregate to worship. He collaborated with subjects originally from Ethiopia, Afghanistan, Egypt, Pakistan, Nigeria, and Senegal, determined not to represent the trials of arrival and departure associated with migration, but instead the intensely collective, sometimes improvised sites of religious experience. The resulting compendium of images, presented at the Benaki Museum, in Athens, in the exhibition Wor(th)ship. Tassos Vrettos, and collected in an expansive catalogue, is remarkable for its sustained balance between closeness and objectivity. Vrettos, known for his work in fashion and advertising, is neither a participant nor a voyeur. As Wor(th)ship spans a diverse spiritual network, Vrettos’s photographs invite viewers to consider Athens—considered the birthplace of Western civilization—as a cosmopolitan city of the future. I spoke with Vrettos and the curator Nadja Argyropoulou shortly after the closing of Wor(th)ship, on January 30, 2016, an event of testimony and song by many of the migrants and refugees pictured throughout Vrettos’s project. —Brendan Wattenberg

Tassos Vrettos, Bethel Divine Healing Ministry – House of God (Ghanese), Aiolou Street, 2012–15 © Tassos Vrettos

Brendan Wattenberg: How did this project begin? Why were you compelled to make a portrait of religious communities in contemporary Athens?

Tassos Vrettos: “Compelled” is a very good word, I think. I began this fieldwork, coincidentally, during Easter of 2012. I had read in a newspaper that a particularly beautiful Resurrection service was held at the Ethiopian church in Athens and I decided to attend. On Holy Saturday, following a rather eventful search, I found the place and walked into this wonderfully incongruous space. The paradoxical context created by the transitory lives of immigrants and refugees in Athens—both people who have been here for years and those who come and go—involves ecstasy, beauty, and accessibility in the same measure as their opposites. I realized I wanted to think about these spaces more widely, and most importantly, to show what matters to the people who inhabit them. I looked for a way in, and these communities were generous enough to welcome me—in garages and DIY field constructions, in derelict apartments and basements, in public fields, rented hotels, discos closed by crisis, courtyards, gardens, and pop-up temples. I have always worked with people in states of displacement, in borderline, precarious, or ambivalent situations. So, to conjure the familiar from within the foreign is what photography is for me.

Tassos Vrettos, Cultural Center – Sri Lanka, Neo Psychiko, 2012–15 © Tassos Vrettos

BW: In the catalogue, you write about maintaining a respectful distance to your subjects, while also immersing yourself, so as to produce a genuine and authentic representation. How did you gain access to these private sites of worship? Have you made long-term connections to your subjects?

TV: Wor(th)ship has been, and still is, a commitment-in-progress. This project is about storytelling, rather than methodical or exhaustive cataloguing. Yet it’s storytelling in a state of urgency and crisis. My explanations to the communities I approached were straightforward and genuine. I had no grand goal or complicated aesthetic-conceptual scenarios. We had ongoing conversations about how people navigate their lives. We had to trust each other. I showed them my photos as I was making them. I explained that I would try to make a book and an exhibition, and in maybe only two, out of more than sixty places, I received permission to photograph but not to use my material publicly.

Tassos Vrettos, Dahiraa Mouhabina Fillahi – Athens (Senegalese), Koliatsou Square, 2012–15 © Tassos Vrettos

My camera was a small and cheap one; I disappeared so that the worshipping people appeared; I became part of each church’s collective body, and by doing that I knew instinctively which line I should not cross, which photograph was given and which would have been stolen, forced. Some of the most interesting relationships, even friendships were forged in the process. I am invited to private ceremonies now, birthdays and weddings and major meetings of most of the communities.

Tassos Vrettos, Singh Shaba Gurudwara, Marathon, 2012–15 © Tassos Vrettos

BW: What was one of your most memorable encounters during the course of this project?

TV: I can hardly separate one from so many. I was in complete awe during the graceful Ethiopian and Eritrean ceremonies and exhilarated through the Nigerian Evangelical worshipping, with all its pure joy and phantasmagoria. I was deeply shaken while photographing a night during Muharram at the Shiite Afghani mosque, when I found myself in a forest of people crying, singing, undressing, and hitting their bodies with their fists or chains (the Matham). It was a collective burst of faith, sorrow and lament carried through centuries to their contemporary lives and experiences. Smells and sounds have also been very important since the beginning. I asked the musician Mihalis Kalkanis to accompany me and record them. We now have a material that extends the very fabric of the photographic experience.

Tassos Vrettos, Father Solomon Mesein Eritrean Orthodox Church Athens, Pangrati, 2012–15 © Tassos Vrettos

BW: Wor(th)ship appears similar to a work of ethnography, not unlike the long-term studies social scientists undertake to describe a particular community. How do your photographs, which in some cases concern ancient practices, also contribute to the photojournalism of the moment—and to our understanding of the politics of multicultural Europe?

TV: I did not chose my subject as a photojournalist and I do not possess the tools of an ethnographer. I cannot claim to be able to help understand, let alone change European politics. My practice is of a “threshold” nature. I want to know and I need to share. I yield and thus I see. I am ashamed by exoticism and folklore, so I have been very concerned about presenting this work during the recent media frenzy around the immigrant and refugee issues. I am content now because this material, as I’ve said, is about storytelling that goes beyond “happenings” and “episodes” and therefore I think it has escaped many such traps of sensationalism.

Tassos Vrettos, Fatima – Zahra Mosque, Marathon, 2012–15 © Tassos Vrettos

The reaction of Greek people, the residents of Athens who visited the exhibition and purchased the book, was a big reward. They were silent and bewildered; some cried, and then talked for a long time outside the exhibition space; some shared unaccounted for stories about their past or their own experience with immigrants. Some returned to the exhibition several times. I think people considered this project a revelation, one that is relevant to their lives and future, perhaps even in a positive way. Strangely enough, as the project threw light onto foreign societies, it also illuminated another aspect of Greek life.

Tassos Vrettos, Egyptian Orthodox Christian Copts – Church of Virgin Mary and Mark the Evangelist, Menidi, 2012–15 © Tassos Vrettos

BW: Nadja, why were you drawn to this project? How did you decide to organize the exhibition and catalogue, as you describe, in the form of a “narrative rhythm”?

Nadja Argyropoulou: The unknown material and raw process of this project inspired my interest. In my work as a curator, I have thought frequently about shifting identities and how Greece has recently become a “stage” for such transformations. I followed Tassos’s project from the start. I visited some of the spaces of worship with him, I participated in seeking them out, I met the people, I listened and then learned the dialogue on faith, aesthetics, politics. To speak “with” others—instead of “for” others—became a guiding principle in curating both the exhibition and editing the catalogue. There is rhythm in this exchange, a kind of tidal flow, as multiple visual narrations, mental images, and sensual content speak above the tyranny of language towards deep engagement and actual change.

Tassos Vrettos, Singh Shaba Gurudwara, Marathon, 2012–15 © Tassos Vrettos

Together with Tassos, co-curator Yorgos Tzirtzilakis, and the other collaborators, we decided to bring this material into one of the great and most open Greek museums, the Benaki. We prompted the organizing institution, as well as our major sponsoring partner, the Onassis Foundation, to think out of the box while avoiding the “spectacle” of representing refugees. We treated the communities involved as equals without the patronizing political correctness and over-protectiveness of current discourse. The exhibition is one of the most visited at the Benaki—and foreign communities, immigrants, and refugee groups attended in unprecedented numbers and diversity.

Tassos Vrettos, Safeena Puntjan Pak. (Pakistani Muslims), Peristeri, 2012–15 © Tassos Vrettos

BW: What do you hope for the future of this project?

NA: To continue being true to itself, the people in it, photographed or not. To travel the exhibition and to circulate the catalogue widely.

TV: For me, the most important part of the presentation of this project was January 30th, the closing day, when members of the communities—Senegalese, Nigerians, Syrians, Pakistani, Afghan, Indonesian, Christians, Muslims, Hindu, Buddhists, and many more—accepted my invitation to speak in public, at the Benaki museum, about their experience of this project, their view on the show and the book, and about their lives in Athens and their current status as citizens. The experience was overwhelming in its immediacy and uncharted qualities.

Tassos Vrettos, Angladeshis, New Year’s Eve, Koumoundourou Square, 2012–15 © Tassos Vrettos

Wor(th)ship. Tassos Vrettos was presented from November 20, 2015 to January 31, 2016 at the Benaki Museum in Athens.

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An Interview with Rosalind Fox Solomon

Rosalind Fox Solomon’s photographic career has been defined by an itch for travel and a desire to use the camera as a means of self-discovery, or, as she puts it, as a way of “talking to myself.” A student of photographer Lisette Model, who was known for her confrontational images of New York City’s street life, Solomon, over many decades, has photographed extensively in South and Central America, India, and Poland—as well as in places closer to home, like New York and the American South. Her work, however, is often metaphorical, transcending mere descriptions of place. For Aperture’s recent Interview Issue, novelist and critic Francine Prose met with Solomon last April at her Manhattan home, where the two spoke about the trajectory of Solomon’s career, her leitmotifs of ritual, religion, gender, and travel, and her relationship with Model.

Interview by Francine Prose

After 9/11, MacDowell Colony, New Hampshire, 2002, from the series Self-portraits

 

FP: How did you start working with Lisette Model?

RFS: Modernage lab led me to Lisette Model. Though I worked in the darkroom, I didn’t know what I was doing. So when I got to New York, I took my film to the Modernage photo-lab and had prints made. I went to their Christmas party in 1971 or ’72, and I met a photography agent, Henrietta Brackman. She made an appointment with me, saying, “Bring everything you’ve ever done.” I said, “I can’t. There’s too much.” She said, “You have to bring everything you’ve ever done.” I brought two huge suitcases full of things, and after she looked at my pictures, she said, “You have talent but you need help. You should study with Lisette Model. She was Diane Arbus’s teacher.” Diane Arbus and Ansel Adams were the only photographers I had heard of at that time. I got in touch with Lisette and she said, “The next time you come, meet me and bring everything you’ve ever done.”

Untitled, Oregon, 1985, from the series, Ritual

 

FP: You already had it packed in the suitcases.

RFS: The next time I got to New York, I brought everything I’d ever done. Lisette came to my hotel room, and she looked at my pictures from six o’clock until midnight. Finally, she was too tired to go on, but she told me that I could study with her. Whenever my husband came to New York on business, I came with him and brought my pictures to show to Lisette.

 

Engaged, near Jenin, 2011, from the series THEM

FP: And what did “studying” mean?

RFS: Before we began, Lisette spent a half hour talking about herself and her career. She was blunt and though she had much success early on, getting her work out had become more difficult. She talked about the work of other photographers—the ones she considered authentic and the ones whose work she did not like because it was commercial or derivative. I got impatient as I listened to her, but eventually, I realized that all of what she said was instructive. Finally, she would look at what I had done and critique the prints. Then she looked at my contact sheets to see what I had not chosen. She said to always go for the extreme. By this I think she meant, Be true to yourself as an artist. Don’t censor yourself. Don’t do your work to please others. She advised, Always make one picture you can give to a subject; otherwise be free in what you do. One of the most important things I learned from her was to take risks.

 

Untitled, Tokyo, 1985, from the series Ritual

FP: Did things change radically when you started working with her?

RFS: I was in my early forties when I met her. Lisette was a strong influence. She was my mother in art. My birth mother was overly concerned about convention and propriety. Lisette was the opposite. She convinced me that the most important thing in my life was my work. She would say, “You need a close-up lens.” And I’d say, “But that costs so much money.” She’d say, “Can’t you afford it, dahling?” She always pushed me to upgrade my darkroom, to get any kind of camera equipment that I needed, to keep moving ahead. And since my husband always felt it was important for me to buy modish clothes—he really cared about that—I knew that I could certainly afford to buy some camera equipment. I still remember a camera shop salesman who tried to convince me that I did not need to upgrade to a more professional enlarger. Lisette encouraged me to be oblivious to what people thought about me or my work.

 

White House Gates, Washington D.C. , 1977, from the series Outside the White House

FP: You start off taking pictures of dolls. They don’t talk. But when you begin to take pictures of the living, especially during festivals and rituals, what do you say to your subjects?

RFS: I don’t say very much.

FP: You just started shooting?

RFS: In the spring of 1978, I planned a week’s trip to Guatemala with my husband. It was a vacation for him, and an opportunity for me to speak Spanish and take pictures in an environment far removed from life in Washington. After the initial trip, I went back a number of times. I traveled alone with a driver guide. This enabled me to get deeper into my work.

Even though I speak Spanish, I didn’t say very much. I soon learned that if you engage very

much, you lose a certain tension in the picture. Rather than make people feel at ease, I find that

some tension between me and the person I am photographing yields something more complex. I always traveled with a local driver who spoke to people on my behalf as I began shooting. I carried a Polaroid always and took pictures to give to people after I finished making my pictures. I also brought back proof prints on subsequent trips and gave them to people I had photographed.

I photographed shamans in Guatemala. There was a personal connection. My husband had

a progressive congenital disease. Knowing that his mother, aunts, and an uncle had died of the disease, from the time that he found out during the first year of our marriage, I thought about this. I was interested in how other people dealt with sadness. In Guatemala, they coped with the help of shamans, ritual, religion. I encountered people who were in much more difficult circumstances than I could ever imagine. Once I was in a séance in Peru with two shamans, a man and a woman who were reputedly lovers. We were sitting around a little fire in a little hut for a coca séance. They incanted and sang, “Smoke your cigarette and cha-cha your coca.” I told them that my husband was sick. I mean, I didn’t really believe in this. I didn’t believe in it but I just—

Untitled, Guatemala, 1979, from the series Landscapes

FP: Everybody sort of believes in it.

RFS: I thought maybe it would be helpful. So I told them about my husband and they took it very, very seriously. They told me that I had to get a guinea pig and rub the guinea pig on the body part that was injured or sick, and presumably the illness would pass into the guinea pig. So they told me to get a guinea pig and rub it over his body.

FP: How did that play out when you got home?

RFS: Well—

Transformation, Bahia, Brazil, 1980, from the series Ritual

FP: So when you found these drivers, you would say, “Do you know any shamans?”

RFS: Yes. I photographed a lot of shamans in Guatemala. I also photographed landscapes,

farmers, and Easter processions. In Peru, my driver was a twenty-two-year-old Chilean named Pablo. His parents had been supporters of Allende and they had gone to live in Germany after Allende was assassinated. Pablo went to Peru and married a Peruvian. Our first trip was idyllic. I had a lot of fun with him. The road up into the Andes was beautiful and untouched. We encountered women carrying spindles and weavers on the side of the road. In reality, people were living hard lives in a subsistence economy, but what was going on then was from another time. On my next trip with Pablo, I planned to photograph carnival celebrations. He sang revolutionary songs and stopped to use binoculars to look up into caves in the mountains. I began to think that he must be involved with the Shining Path [a Maoist guerrilla group]. We got rooms for the night in a pension in a small village. I got up in the middle of the night and went out into the van. I was scared.

At dawn, I went out in the street and talked to a woman, saying, “I’m with a driver and I don’t

have confidence in him.” I was afraid to say anything more. She said, “Go to see the bishop.” I told the bishop that I had come to photograph carnival, but I had to leave my guide. He said, “Stay and take your pictures. We will help you.” He introduced me to Madre Rosa Cedro. For a few weeks, I lived in a house belonging to the church that was near the convent and had meals with the nuns.

A Heart Tattoo, Tel Aviv, 2011, from the series THEM

FP: Is there a photo of her? Standing by a horse?

RFS: Yes, I went with her on an overnight horseback trip to a remote area. I went back a number of times to that village.

To read the complete interview, click here to buy issue #220. Subscribe and never miss an issue.

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Thank You, and Come Again: Robert Frank in a New York Minute

The legendary photographer’s retrospective is here today, gone tomorrow.

By Nicole Maturo

Robert Frank, Funeral – St. Helena, South Carolina, from The Americans, 1959 © Robert Frank

“Don’t you think your gallerist will hate you?” Gerhard Steidl asked his longtime friend and collaborator, the acclaimed photographer Robert Frank, at the recent opening of Robert Frank Books and Films, 1947–2016, currently on view at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. All of Frank’s prints in this show will be destroyed at the end, on February 11, 2016, leaving nothing to be sold afterward. Frank didn’t seem to mind. The exhibition, created by Frank and Steidl Verlag in Germany specifically for academies and universities, presents the entirety of Frank’s photographic and film career on disposable newsprint—an ingenious concept designed to avoid the prohibitively expensive insurance fees that would be attached to edition prints by the ninety-one year old photographer, which command upwards of $600,000 apiece. The freedom afforded by displaying unsigned prints, crinkled from a buzz of students leaning against the prints between classes, allows viewers to finally see the breadth of Frank’s incredible career—rather than a reduced selection of his greatest hits.

Installation view of Robert Frank, Books and Films, 1947–2016, New York University, January 2016

Selections of photographs from each of Frank’s publications are printed on long horizontal sheets of newsprint, while a mobile of his photobooks swings gently from the ceiling. Some of these works are well known; others are obscure collectibles like Zero Mostel Reads a Book (Steidl, 2008). Frank’s legacy goes beyond the material; his work lives on in the minds of photographers and filmmakers everywhere. In producing an exhibition that ostensibly leaves nothing behind for resale value, Frank and Steidl have even extended the highly economical, pop-up concept to the catalogue. Together with the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, Steidl produced a special broadsheet for the exhibition in the same format as the German daily newspaper, down to the very last detail including the opening day’s weather and date: January 28, “The forecast: splendid.”

Robert Frank, Books and Films, 1947-2016, Steidl, 2015–16

The exhibition affords a rare opportunity to trace the trajectory of Frank’s early empathetic black-and-white documentary images, to his later interweaving of color and black-and-white domestic vignettes. Wall-length contact sheets reveal Frank’s legendary American road trip, complete with grease pencil marks across blown-out frames, question marks, and boxes around the perfect shot. Those now iconic images, filling the pages of the The Americans (Grove Press, 1959), were often a single frame, or one of two at most. In his later Polaroid works, we see his rushed modus operandi turned on himself, as in his two Polaroid self portraits dated September 2001. Mouth agape, glare on his glasses, no presumption—this is the unsentimental Frank after all these years of acclaim untouched by the lure of fame and fortune.

Robert Frank, 2009 Mabou, from the book Household Inventory Record, 2013 © Robert Frank

To the question about whether Steidl’s exhibition would displease his gallery, Frank answered, “I don’t think so. I’m happy to see the photographs live again and to be appreciated.” As if Frank hasn’t done enough for posterity, his latest enterprise is a reminder that all art is ephemeral. “Sometimes the photographs can live longer because it becomes an image that will live longer in people’s minds,” he said, by way of wrapping up his remarks at the opening. “And that probably is the best thing about my photography. So I’m here to say thank you, and come again.”

Nicole Maturo is the Aperture Magazine Work Scholar.

After closing at New York University, Robert Frank: Books and Films, 1947–2016 will be presented at Bergamot Station, Los Angeles, beginning March 31, 2016.

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