Aperture's Blog, page 145

A Conversation with David Shields

From David Shields, War Is Beautiful (powerHouse Books, 2015) © Ozier Muhammad and courtesy the New York Times and Redux

In David Shields’s Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, a textual collage published in 2010 that is the most well-known of his twenty books, he argues for a more fluid form of literary expression as an antidote to the stagnation of traditional narratives. Shields’s latest project, a selection of New York Times war photography titled War Is Beautiful: The New York Times Pictorial Guide to the Glamour of Armed Conflict*—subtitled *(in which the author explains why he no longer reads The New York Times)—occupies an adjacent intellectual space to his previous work, arguing that the heightened aesthetic sensibilities of the depiction of military conflict sanctify the experience of war. It is a testament to the Times’s long-held position as one of America’s main arbiters of cultural opinion—as well as its carefully cultivated perception of unbiased reportage—that Shields felt it necessary to indict the newspaper as a main culprit in what he considers an unseemly descent into the “beautiful,” an easily consumed banalization of combat’s horrific actualities.

War Is Beautiful is made up of sixty-four photographs that ran on the front page of the Times between 1997 and 2013, and is divided into ten thematic sections (Beauty, God, Love, etc.), each framed with epigraphs eclectically culled from sources such as Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, an interview with Gerhard Richter, and a Gore Vidal quip (“The New York Times, the Typhoid Mary of American journalism”); also included is a brief introduction by Shields and an afterword by the art critic Dave Hickey. Though these spare parts may not coalesce into a whole, Shields does convincingly present a complex investigation that, at the very least, explicates a host of relevant questions for the digitized age. “Behind these sublime, destructive, illuminated images are hundreds of thousands of unobserved, anonymous war deaths,” he writes of his selected photographs in the introduction. “This book is witness to a graveyard of horrendous beauty.” I spoke with Shields by telephone last month, during the eastern leg of his promotional tour.

—Cody Wiewandt

CW: Do you think you are being unfair to the New York Times?

DS: Fairness to me is not exactly the point. I’m not a political scientist; I’m not a reporter; I’m not a photographer; I’m not even a photo critic—I’m someone who tries to come up with what strikes me as proactive metaphors. I looked at nine thousand photographs, and then I narrowed it down to 4,500 color pictures. I found one thousand war photographs on page A1, and of those thousand, seven hundred fit my criterion of glamorizing combat. Of the other three hundred, almost none contradicted my thesis. I was always looking for a course correction—it’s not generally thought to be a brilliant career move to publish a book-length criticism of the New York Times. So no, I don’t think I’m being unfair.

From David Shields, War Is Beautiful (powerHouse Books, 2015) © John Moore and courtesy Associated Press

CW: Yet it’s difficult to think of an alternative. What do you consider “good” war photography? What would be the antithesis of the images in the book?

DS: I think the Times pointed it out in a photo-essay they ran in 2013 of important images from the Vietnam War—photographs, according to the headline, that “made a difference.” It was implicitly saying: “Here are pictures that may have had an effect on the Vietnam War.” And during Vietnam, the Times published Pulitzer Prize–winning photographs that conveyed the raw, naked, visceral act of war, including an Eddie Adams photograph of an execution-style assassination of a South Vietnamese captain. There is a noble and great and impressive and rigorous tradition of war photography, from Mathew Brady to Robert Capa, Edward Steichen, and some of the people I mention in Vietnam: Eddie Adams, David Hume Kennerly. What I’m trying to do with the book is ask: “Where are such pictures for Iraq and Afghanistan?” They are definitely not in the New York Times.

I’m interested in pictures that are less stylized, less romantic, that have less of a tendency to mythologize and beautify. Picasso said “Good taste is the enemy of great art,” and so many of these pictures, almost without exception, seem to me exquisitely and problematically tasteful. Where is the war here? Many of these pictures are hugely under the sway of Abstract Expressionism and other modernist masterpiece paintings, so photo after photo feels like a direct rip-off or pale echo of Jasper Johns, Rauschenberg, Pollock, Rothko, etc. The effect is that these pictures feel beholden to a kind of swooning beauty. I’m arguing that the Times has abandoned trying to faithfully document some actually observed reality and is instead now producing a kind of empty, plastic beauty: war as screensaver, or war as wallpaper.

Look at the pictures that the Times ran of the Paris attacks. On Monday, November 16, there was a very bellicose, war-inclined headline from France, and underneath that headline was a photograph of hundreds of thousands of fallen bouquets of flowers, and then underneath that was the very embodiment of French beauty, a beautiful blonde French woman standing and mourning. I’m urging my fellow readers to ask, not necessarily if the Times is evilly and gleefully rubbing its hands together, thinking of how to disseminate state propaganda—it’s not Pravda, after all—but I’m urging us to think figuratively about what cultural messages are getting sent.

One of the photographs I’ve included is an image of spent gun cartridges [on page 58 of the book]. You could say that it is just a pretty picture, but it is an exact echo of a particular Jasper Johns painting. The picture was cropped from a much larger photograph by the Times, and the larger image was much less abstractly gorgeous, much less perfectly composed. That is a really interesting picture to put on A1. It could be an advertisement for cuff links or for a new retrospective of Jasper Johns, but it’s not. It’s spent gun cartridges from the war.

CW: There has been a somewhat logical critical response to your project that claims you may be overstating the negative effects of these types of photographs. What is the harm of that particular photo of the gun cartridges? Why is the cropping, or the way it might reflect a modern art aesthetic, problematic?

DS: That’s valid, and some people have pointed out that there are all kinds of aspects of war. Part of war is incredibly beautiful. It does adrenalize the senses. I looked at one thousand color pictures of combat from October 1997, when the Times started running color photography, until 2013, and if those images were balanced often, or even occasionally, by images that convey a more naked fidelity to observed experience, and less of a fidelity toward modernist paintings, I’d be a lot happier. In On Photography, Susan Sontag discussed how at an early age she saw a photograph of Holocaust survivors, and the photograph “lacerated” her. For me, very few of these pictures attempt in any way to lacerate the viewer with some sense of the human cost of war. This is how consent gets manufactured. And because the Times’s brand is pseudo-neutrality, I think they escape a lot of media criticism in general.

The Times recently ran a picture of post-attack Paris, and on the upper left corner there was a wine glass next to a bullet hole in a restaurant window. It was a powerful message to choose this picture to represent the Paris bombing. On the one hand, you have the bourgeois beauty of an untouched wine glass, and on the other you have a bullet hole through a glass window, which represents a clash of civilizations: do we want a civilization of beautiful wine goblets, or a civilization of bullet holes through restaurant windows? And if we want the civilization of a beautiful wine goblet, then war is necessary.

From David Shields, War Is Beautiful (powerHouse Books, 2015) © Joao Silva and courtesy the New York Times and Redux

CW: You quoted Susan Sontag, whose work critiquing war photography and aesthetics is among the most influential. Do you think that we still have that capacity to be “lacerated” by the horrors of a photograph, after having already been exposed to a long tradition of graphic depictions of war?

DS: If we are that completely benumbed and desensitized, then why bother being alive? I disagree with a huge amount of Sontag’s writing on photography, which to me throws out the camera with the bathwater. So it’s not as if I’m a huge Sontag acolyte and in no way do I want to take beauty out of the equation. Instead, I’m asking for a more hard-won beauty—a photography with a greater consciousness being brought out of an aestheticization of horror. A fully-considered production of beauty, more purposeful and intentional. I’m writing a kind of lover’s-quarrel letter to the Times. I’m saying, “You’ve got to be thinking about this a little bit more.”

Recently, there were images of a boy named Aylan Kurdi who drowned fleeing Syria and whose body was found dead on a Turkish beach. I’m not a huge fan of the photographs; there are all kinds of problems with them. There are some elements of kitsch and a fetishization of children in war photography—but, in any case, those pictures did apparently move people.

CW: You could argue that such images move people because they come from an iconographic tradition of suffering that we’ve become accustomed to—which is certainly an argument central to your book. That image of a child dying is certainly not reassuring, but naturally fits the way we think about pain and loss and suffering and war. Haven’t we seen images like this before?

DS: In a way the Times has a kind of show bible for their war photography. Soldiers as fathers, soldiers as God, war as a fashion shoot, war photos as outtakes from a movie, theater of war as playground—so in a way it does feel that the Times has a similarly limited repertoire of photographs. There are fifteen things on their playlist, and they just sort of seemingly shuffle between these fifteen tropes. I think your point from earlier—just because something is stylized, that doesn’t preclude the possibility to move us—is fair enough. But what I’m arguing is that these pictures have seemingly stopped trying, in any way, to faithfully document some kind of reality.

From David Shields, War Is Beautiful (powerHouse Books, 2015) © Mohammed Abed and courtesy Agence France-Presse and Getty Images

CW: One of the book’s sections is “War as Movie,” and is comprised of photographs that look as though they could be stills from a movie. This aspect of your project seems similar to Cindy Sherman’s early work of reappropriating Hollywood’s visions of femininity through the traditional female pose in American cinema. Do you feel that your aims are related?

I don’t want to compare this work to hers, since she took the actual pictures, but I think that by decontextualizing and recontextualizing and showing a cultural ideology that is getting disseminated and promoted—which for Sherman was an image of femininity that was being promulgated by American movies—I would say that my project is relatively similar. And like Sherman, I put these photographs into new categories to show how tropes occur over and over again. It wasn’t on her part to say that she was never going to watch a movie again, and it’s not on my part to say that we are never going to fight a war again. I rather ask: can we be somewhat more self-aware and self-critical and reflexive in our absorption and consumption of these images?

CW: A recreation of some of these images in the mode of Sherman could underscore the absurd or banal aspects of it.

DS: I would love to see someone do that. I would argue the underscoring isn’t totally necessary, in my view, probably because I’ve lived with these pictures for too long. The absurdity of it, the comedy of it, the tragi-comedy of it—“gross” might be a little strong, but gross ideological work is getting done here.

CW: In the current cultural climate, photography might have to become more aesthetically exaggerated in an incendiary sort of way to have an explicit impact.

DS: It almost has to break the frame first, and then it might actually move you.

From David Shields, War Is Beautiful (powerHouse Books, 2015) © Wathiq Khuzaie and courtesy Getty Images

CW:  This argument has rapidly expanded—when Sontag began writing about this, it was a completely different thing.

DS: Yes, I was going to say that her book Regarding the Pain of Others, which came out in 2002, already seems very dated given the rapid decline of print journalism and the rise of the web. Things are very weird now. Images can get uploaded and consumed instantaneously around the world. In a way, the Times plays it down the middle so that their pictures are quasi-unobjectionable: Here’s a wine glass and a bullet hole, we’re not taking sides. Or here’s a beautiful French woman and here are rose petals. But those pictures do take a side by not taking sides. That is a form of cheerleading and flag-waving—and can we please talk about it?

Cody Wiewandt lives in Brooklyn.

The post A Conversation with David Shields appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

Issue 21 of the Aperture Photography App is Now Available

The new issue of the Aperture Photography App is now available to download on your iOS device. Here’s a look inside Issue 21:

● An excerpted essay by Kaelen Wilson-Goldie from the “Performance Issue” of Aperture magazine

● A preview of images from the newly remastered edition of Joel Meyerowitz’s Cape Light

● An Aperture Beat on the design trends noticed in this year’s PhotoBook Awards

● A round up of design books to know from the latest issue of the The PhotoBook Review

● A review of the Guggenheim’s new exhibition, Photo-Poetics: An Anthology

Every issue of the Aperture Photography App is free– subscribers have new issues delivered to their device automatically. Select articles later appear here, on the Aperture blog. Click here to download the app today!

The post Issue 21 of the Aperture Photography App is Now Available appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

Photo-Poetics: An Anthology at the Guggenheim

In a new exhibition at the Guggenheim, ten contemporary artists investigate photography on the verge of transformation.

By Will Heinrich

Aperture Foundation NY.

The PhotoBook Review’s Publisher Profile

Willem van Zoetendaal did not become a photobook publisher out of a sense of vocation. Many of the activities that form an integral part of publishing are anathema to him. Cost balancing? Zoetendaal shrugs. If he feels the urge to bring out a book under his imprint, Van Zoetendaal Publishers, then that’s exactly what he does, even if the financing is not yet in place. Van Zoetendaal selected five books from his collection that, together, as told to Arjen Ribbens, tell the story of his publishing house. This excerpt comes from the latest issue of The Photobook Review.

Tulipa, L. Blok and Jasper Wiedeman, Basalt, Amsterdam, 1994

Tulipa

L. Blok and Jasper Wiedeman

Basalt • Amsterdam, 1994

This was the first book that I published myself. I set up a foundation, Basalt, for this purpose, together with the art historian Frido Troost (1960–2013), so that we could apply for grants. Why the name Basalt? Because I was born at The Hague’s breakwater. This is the first in a series of books in which I juxtaposed historical and contemporary photography. In this case, it was autochromes from the 1920s by Leendert Blok, a photographer who worked for flower bulb cultivators in the Netherlands’ Bollenstreek region, and photographs by Jasper Wiedeman, who had just graduated from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, where I was teaching at the time. By contrasting the two, you get differing perspectives. Contemporary photography can open a new window on history. I had the good fortune that there were a lot of students at the academy back then who felt connected to traditional photography. Many of them went on to achieve international renown, including Céline van Balen, Rineke Dijkstra, Hellen van Meene, Paul Kooiker, and Koos Breukel.

To Sang Fotostudio, Lee To Sang, Basalt, Amsterdam, 1995

To Sang Fotostudio

Lee To Sang

Basalt • Amsterdam, 1995

One day in the early 1990s, I passed a photography studio called To Sang Fotostudio in Albert Cuypstraat, Amsterdam. In the window, I saw a photograph of a fellow journalist with his daughter on his lap. The photographs in the window provided such a beautiful record of this colorful, largely immigrant neighborhood, that I gave my first- and second-year students money to go and get their portraits taken here. In 1995, I published a large-format folder of twenty-three portraits by the studio’s photographer, Lee To Sang. The design is entirely subordinate to the image. But the book works. Frido Troost and I put a lot of work into the picture editing. This publication made quite a stir: an exhibition about To Sang Fotostudio traveled to various photography festivals, Tate Modern acquired a number of the photographs, and Johan van der Keuken made a documentary about To Sang. His photography studio became a cult success. Martin Parr is one of many significant figures who went there to have their portraits taken. After he retired, Lee To Sang gifted me his archive—some seventy thousand negatives. So it is still a resource for publications to this day.

 

Quatorze Juillet, Johan van der Keuken, Van Zoetendaal Publishers, Amsterdam, 2010

Quatorze Juillet

Johan van der Keuken

Van Zoetendaal Publishers • Amsterdam, 2010

In Johan van der Keuken’s archives, I found thirty-three photographs of people partying in the streets of Paris. They were all made on July 14, 1958, the country’s national holiday. I arranged the photographs in such a way that they also form a dance. I love slim editions, so I use the negative format less and less—4-by-5 inches, for example, leads to a bulky format for a book. Over the years, I’ve moved away from using stiff paper. This book is printed on paper from Gmund, a German manufacturer whose products I love. It’s fine, uncoated paper: if you don’t want the pictures to show through it, you can only print on one side. So the pages have Japanese folds and are bonded with cold adhesive. There aren’t many pages, but the folded leaves give it a good volume. The cold adhesive binding allows the book to be unfolded easily.

Arthropoda, Harold Strak, Van Zoetendaal Publishers, Amsterdam, 2011

Arthropoda

Harold Strak

Van Zoetendaal Publishers • Amsterdam, 2011

Harold Strak is a photographer who has an almost scientific approach to his work. This book contains eighty photographs of the remains of insects that were ejected from spider webs after they were eaten. I chose a rectangular format so that I could show four photographs side by side on each double page spread. The lithography and printing technique were inspired by Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco. Their publication Seeing Things (1995), about the history of photography, is one of the most beautifully produced books I know: superior printing in eighty-eight colors, with each print run dried for twenty-four hours. I went to the same lithographer, Robert J. Hennessey, who also lithographs all the catalogues for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Massimo Tonolli, a top Italian printer from Verona, printed it beautifully in tritone.

Mädchen, Diana Scherer, Van Zoetendaal Publishers, Amsterdam, 2014

Mädchen

Diana Scherer

Van Zoetendaal Publishers • Amsterdam, 2014

I’m always present when a book is printed. It was especially important in this case. I like black to be really black, and printers don’t often print it to my liking. I had the cover of this book run through the press one more time in order to achieve the deep black. I made it this big (9 ½ by 15 inches) so that it would become a physical experience. I used two types of paper for the inside; the Japanese paper feels a little bit like the dresses in the photographs. No, there is no text in this book. An introduction would undermine the mystery. In my books, you never find texts about the photographs themselves. You can’t explain photographs. The magic of photography is precisely that you study images yourself and give them your own meaning.

Willem van Zoetendaal is the designer and editor of seventy photography books to date, many of which he published under his own imprint, Van Zoetendaal Publishers. Van Zoetendaal has also curated numerous photography exhibitions in Italy, France, Spain, the Netherlands, South Korea, and Japan, and ran a contemporary photography gallery under his own name from 2000 to 2014.

Arjen Ribbens is an art editor for NRC Handelsblad, the leading Dutch evening newspaper. He is also a part-time publisher specializing in art editions and books on stupidity (De encyclopedie van de Domheid, or The Encyclopedia of Stupidity, 1999).

Translated from Dutch by Heidi Steffes.

The post The PhotoBook Review’s Publisher Profile appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

The PhotoBook Review‘s Publisher Profile

Willem van Zoetendaal did not become a photobook publisher out of a sense of vocation. Many of the activities that form an integral part of publishing are anathema to him. Cost balancing? Zoetendaal shrugs. If he feels the urge to bring out a book under his imprint, Van Zoetendaal Publishers, then that’s exactly what he does, even if the financing is not yet in place. Van Zoetendaal selected five books from his collection that, together, as told to Arjen Ribbens, tell the story of his publishing house. This excerpt comes from the latest issue of The Photobook Review.

Tulipa, L. Blok and Jasper Wiedeman, Basalt, Amsterdam, 1994

Tulipa

L. Blok and Jasper Wiedeman

Basalt • Amsterdam, 1994

This was the first book that I published myself. I set up a foundation, Basalt, for this purpose, together with the art historian Frido Troost (1960–2013), so that we could apply for grants. Why the name Basalt? Because I was born at The Hague’s breakwater. This is the first in a series of books in which I juxtaposed historical and contemporary photography. In this case, it was autochromes from the 1920s by Leendert Blok, a photographer who worked for flower bulb cultivators in the Netherlands’ Bollenstreek region, and photographs by Jasper Wiedeman, who had just graduated from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, where I was teaching at the time. By contrasting the two, you get differing perspectives. Contemporary photography can open a new window on history. I had the good fortune that there were a lot of students at the academy back then who felt connected to traditional photography. Many of them went on to achieve international renown, including Céline van Balen, Rineke Dijkstra, Hellen van Meene, Paul Kooiker, and Koos Breukel.

To Sang Fotostudio, Lee To Sang, Basalt, Amsterdam, 1995

To Sang Fotostudio

Lee To Sang

Basalt • Amsterdam, 1995

One day in the early 1990s, I passed a photography studio called To Sang Fotostudio in Albert Cuypstraat, Amsterdam. In the window, I saw a photograph of a fellow journalist with his daughter on his lap. The photographs in the window provided such a beautiful record of this colorful, largely immigrant neighborhood, that I gave my first- and second-year students money to go and get their portraits taken here. In 1995, I published a large-format folder of twenty-three portraits by the studio’s photographer, Lee To Sang. The design is entirely subordinate to the image. But the book works. Frido Troost and I put a lot of work into the picture editing. This publication made quite a stir: an exhibition about To Sang Fotostudio traveled to various photography festivals, Tate Modern acquired a number of the photographs, and Johan van der Keuken made a documentary about To Sang. His photography studio became a cult success. Martin Parr is one of many significant figures who went there to have their portraits taken. After he retired, Lee To Sang gifted me his archive—some seventy thousand negatives. So it is still a resource for publications to this day.

 

Quatorze Juillet, Johan van der Keuken, Van Zoetendaal Publishers, Amsterdam, 2010

Quatorze Juillet

Johan van der Keuken

Van Zoetendaal Publishers • Amsterdam, 2010

In Johan van der Keuken’s archives, I found thirty-three photographs of people partying in the streets of Paris. They were all made on July 14, 1958, the country’s national holiday. I arranged the photographs in such a way that they also form a dance. I love slim editions, so I use the negative format less and less—4-by-5 inches, for example, leads to a bulky format for a book. Over the years, I’ve moved away from using stiff paper. This book is printed on paper from Gmund, a German manufacturer whose products I love. It’s fine, uncoated paper: if you don’t want the pictures to show through it, you can only print on one side. So the pages have Japanese folds and are bonded with cold adhesive. There aren’t many pages, but the folded leaves give it a good volume. The cold adhesive binding allows the book to be unfolded easily.

Arthropoda, Harold Strak, Van Zoetendaal Publishers, Amsterdam, 2011

Arthropoda

Harold Strak

Van Zoetendaal Publishers • Amsterdam, 2011

Harold Strak is a photographer who has an almost scientific approach to his work. This book contains eighty photographs of the remains of insects that were ejected from spider webs after they were eaten. I chose a rectangular format so that I could show four photographs side by side on each double page spread. The lithography and printing technique were inspired by Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco. Their publication Seeing Things (1995), about the history of photography, is one of the most beautifully produced books I know: superior printing in eighty-eight colors, with each print run dried for twenty-four hours. I went to the same lithographer, Robert J. Hennessey, who also lithographs all the catalogues for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Massimo Tonolli, a top Italian printer from Verona, printed it beautifully in tritone.

Mädchen, Diana Scherer, Van Zoetendaal Publishers, Amsterdam, 2014

Mädchen

Diana Scherer

Van Zoetendaal Publishers • Amsterdam, 2014

I’m always present when a book is printed. It was especially important in this case. I like black to be really black, and printers don’t often print it to my liking. I had the cover of this book run through the press one more time in order to achieve the deep black. I made it this big (9 ½ by 15 inches) so that it would become a physical experience. I used two types of paper for the inside; the Japanese paper feels a little bit like the dresses in the photographs. No, there is no text in this book. An introduction would undermine the mystery. In my books, you never find texts about the photographs themselves. You can’t explain photographs. The magic of photography is precisely that you study images yourself and give them your own meaning.

Willem van Zoetendaal is the designer and editor of seventy photography books to date, many of which he published under his own imprint, Van Zoetendaal Publishers. Van Zoetendaal has also curated numerous photography exhibitions in Italy, France, Spain, the Netherlands, South Korea, and Japan, and ran a contemporary photography gallery under his own name from 2000 to 2014.

Arjen Ribbens is an art editor for NRC Handelsblad, the leading Dutch evening newspaper. He is also a part-time publisher specializing in art editions and books on stupidity (De encyclopedie van de Domheid, or The Encyclopedia of Stupidity, 1999).

Translated from Dutch by Heidi Steffes.

The post The PhotoBook Review‘s Publisher Profile appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

Telling Time in Bamako

A report from the tenth edition of Rencontres de Bamako, West Africa’s venerable photography festival.

By Joseph Gergel

Rencontres de Bamako, Mali, 2015. Photograph by Joseph Gergel

How does one tell time? Telling time can be an action that points to a precise moment, a split second of a minute of an hour of a day. It can also refer to a grammatical tense, signaling now, before, or the future. Time is central to photography, inherently capturing the tension between the past and the present. And in relation to Africa, “telling time” might question the continent’s dynamic history and an imagining of what is to come in an increasingly globalized age.

Installation view of Nassim Rouchiche’s series Ça va waka (2015) at Rencontres de Bamako, 2015. Photograph by Joseph Gergel

In the tenth edition of Rencontres de Bamako (Bamako Encounters), the biannual festival of photography in Bamako, Mali, the thematic spectrum of “telling time” calls to the forefront photography’s symbiotic relationship with temporality and opens dialogues that transcend eras, geographies, and philosophical plateaus. Featuring thirty-eight artists working in photography and video, and spanning the African continent and the diaspora, the biennale explores the social, political, and ideological landscape of Africa today. Directed by Bisi Silva, a Nigerian independent curator and founder of the Centre for Contemporary Art, Lagos, together with associate curators Antawan I. Byrd and Yves Chatap, the biennale presents a diverse selection of lens-based artists that mixed documentary, performative, and conceptual practices. As Silva explained, Telling Time “allows us to chart a new beginning that takes cognizance of today’s realities.”

Georges Senga, from the series Une vie après la mort, 2012 © and courtesy the artist

In fact, the timing of the biennale speaks to Mali’s continued struggles in the present. In the wake of the festival’s three-year sabbatical and the cancelation of the 2013 edition due to political conflicts, this edition acted as a vehicle for interrogation and reconciliation at a pressing and urgent moment. No one could have imagined exactly how urgent this moment actually was. Only three weeks after the biennale’s official opening, Islamic extremists attacked one of Bamako’s luxury hotels, killing twenty people in a hostage siege that lasted over seven hours. Following the attacks in Paris and Beirut a week prior, such a catastrophe is not one that pertains to Mali alone but that extends as a global crisis.

This edition of the festival also marked its twenty-year presence as a leading photography festival in Africa, setting a precedent for artistic innovation that has cemented the careers of some of Africa’s preeminent photographers, including Seydou Keïta, Malick Sidibé, Samuel Fosso, and Santu Mofokeng, among others. Rencontres de Bamako is supported by Institut Français and the government of Mali, a rare arrangement given the dearth of regional state support for the arts.

Malala Andrialavidrazana, from the series Figures, 2015 © and courtesy the artist

A concurrent thread throughout the central exhibition focused on the reinterpretation of photographic archives, with artists blending personal and cultural histories to question their relationship to the past. In her series Heir-Story, South African artist Lebohang Kganye posed amid life-size cardboard cut outs of black-and white-photographs. Reimagining episodes of her grandfather’s life in South Africa under Apartheid (based on oral recollections from her grandmother’s stories), Kganye wears her grandfather’s clothes as she interacts with the figures and objects in the images that surround her. Congolese artist Georges Senga created diptychs that juxtapose archival images of a young Patrice Lumumba, the first democratically elected prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, with the artist’s own photographs of an aging professor who bears a striking similarity to Lumumba. While there are visual similarities between the two representations, the newer images clash against the visible decay of the historical prints. Imagining an older Lumumba if he had not been abruptly assassinated in 1961, Senga’s series plays with photography’s ability to create fictions and form alternative narratives, circumventing the Congo’s history of political instability after independence.

Other artists embraced the physicality of the photographic archive as a tangible object. Malian photographer Seydou Camara photographed figures sifting through the torn and faded sheaves of the Timbuktu manuscripts, which date back to the twelfth century and document African and Islamic history. Héla Ammar embroidered vernacular images of Tunisia, using both aged documents and artificially tinted contemporary images, to create a recurring design element in red silk that recalls the color of the Tunisian flag. Madagascan artist Malala Andrialavidrazana appropriated old maps, currency, and album covers to form overlapping collages, and Ibrahima Thiam created an installation of aged portraits, from the 1940s to 1960s, originating from Senegalese photo studios. These artists don’t approach the archive as a factual and static entity but rather one that is malleable and open to interpretation and reinvention.

Aboubacar Traoré, from the series Inchallah, 2015 © and courtesy the artist

Photographic performance also featured prominently in the central exhibition. Nigerian artist Uche Okpa-Iroha, who won the festival’s Seydou Keïta Prize for his series The Plantation Boy, reimagined Francis Ford Coppola’s 1972 film The Godfather, by digitally inserting himself into stills, thereby questioning the dynamics of race in Western cinema. Addressing the subject of religious fanaticism in Mali, Aboubacar Traoré won the Young Francophone Photographer Prize for Inchallah, a series of staged scenes in which figures dressed in religious attire wear black circular helmets to shield their identities.

Studio Malick Sidibé, Bamako, Mali, 2015. Photograph by Joseph Gergel

As an international photography festival, Rencontres de Bamako remains rooted in the local culture and included many of its artists and art spaces. The festival launched an ambitious project that involved one hundred schools and ten thousand students through workshops and exhibition visits hosted by Malian photographers. A satellite project, Studio Mali, brought together local photographers to exhibit images in their studios. The Focus Mali section shed light on the younger generation of emerging local photographers. By inviting a diverse group of participants from throughout Africa and the diaspora, as well as garnering a significant international audience and incorporating the local community as an integral part of its programs, Rencontres de Bamako set the stage for the encounters, dialogues, and exchanges that make this festival so important.

The biennale has also created a standard for art festivals in Africa to push for a deeper reading of contemporary African photography, in particular through the accompanying catalogue, which includes an indispensible appendix of essays and an illustrated chronology reflecting upon the biennale’s tenth anniversary. As contemporary art from the continent commands a renewed focus on the global stage, Telling Time attests to the festival’s rigorous engagement with new ways of approaching photography’s complex relationship to Africa.

Rencontres de Bamako is on view through December 31, 2015.

Joseph Gergel is an independent curator and writer based in Lagos, Nigeria.

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On Paper Airplanes: The Collections of Harry Smith

By Sophie Butcher

All photographs paper airplanes from the book Paper Airplanes: The Collections of Harry Smith, Catalogue Raisonné, Volume I edited by John Klacsmann and Andrew Lampert and published by Anthology Film Archives and J&L Books

For more than twenty years, Harry Smith (1923–1991) collected paper planes that he found on the streets of New York. Now 251 planes have been documented in Paper Airplanes: The Collections of Harry Smith Catalogue Raisonné, Volume I, a book showcasing Smith’s collection. Jason Fulford, co-founder and publisher of J&L Books, photographed the planes before Anthology Film Archives  donated them to the Getty Research Institute, in California. Fulford, who did not know Harry Smith during his lifetime, was taken by the planes and their whimsical nature. As the photographic process unravelled, the idea of sharing the photographs to a wider audience became inevitable.

According to various sources there are countless more planes waiting to be found. When Smith’s “spiritual wife,” the Beat muse Rosebud Feliu Pettet was interviewed by Andrew Lampert, an editor of the book and Curator of Collections at Anthology Film Archives, she said that there were “multiple” boxes full of planes, “meaning more than two, less than 50.” According to a 2003 article in Frieze, Smith catalogued and filed planes away in five large cardboard boxes, and in 1984, donated his collection to the National Air and Space Museum in Washington D.C: “Then, as if lost in a pulp-hungry Bermuda triangle, they disappeared.” In 1994, when Anthology Film Archives requested the planes, only one box appeared. Despite that, when Andrew Lampert and John Klacsmann, both editors of the book, spoke to paper aeroplane experts they reassured them that there has never been such a thorough collection.

Each of the planes tells a different story, through different materials — yellow telephone book pages, notebook paper, colored construction paper, a menu for the nightclub Max’s Kansas City. The planes carry New York’s unique history, having survived the dirty, busy streets before being salvaged from an uncertain fate by Smith. Smith’s core interest in collecting was always anthropological: on his planes, he logged the location and time of each discovery, sometimes including detailed descriptions such as which side of the street the plane was found. Another note accompanying the paper planes included a classification system to denote the number of folds used to make the paper planes. In addition to collecting paper planes, Smith avidly sought after other obscure objects, including Ukrainian easter eggs, Seminole textiles and tarot cards. Showing the paper planes is simply discovering “the tip of an iceberg,” says Lampert. Indeed, after photographing the planes, Fulford continued to explore and document Smith’s massive collection of string figures, which led to String Figures: The Collections of Harry Smith Catalogue Raisonné, Volume II.

Defining Harry Smith is no easy feat: he was an artist, filmmaker, musicologist, anthropologist, and occultist — and was therefore known and respected in a variety of different artistic communities. He was, “an underground superstar whose fame rests in the ability to not pin him down as one thing or another,” according to Lampert. The photographs in these two volumes continue to piece together Smith’s vast, mysterious, and impressively creative character.

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Self-Portraiture in the First-Person Age

All users perform a version of themselves on Instagram. But how are artists today using the commercial platform to calculated effect? In this excerpt from the new Aperture magazine, “Performance,” New Museum curator Lauren Cornell looks at how some artists, including K8 Hardy, Juliana Huxtable, Xavier Cha, Amalia Ulman, and Eileen Myles, deploy strategies of role-play, humor, withdrawal—or relish in the messiness of everyday life—to unravel social media’s conventions of self-presentation.

By Lauren Cornell

K8 Hardy, IMG_2/10/15 9:22PM, 2015. Courtesy the artist

K8 Hardy’s video Outfitumentary (2001–11/2015) is a montage of hundreds of self-portraits shot over the course of a decade in whatever location the Brooklyn-based artist happened to be living or working at the time. In one early scene, alone in her bedroom, she positions her video camera for a wide-angle shot, then leaps onto a chair and, standing in profile with one leg hoisted onto its back, gazes at the camera with a mix of ferocity and knowing wit. Dressed in a black-and-white checked miniskirt and red thrift-store tee with the sleeves ripped off, her hair in a flowy mullet, her look is a combination of DIY punk, ’90s indie, and femme lesbian, plus a dash of Texan dude.

When I saw Outfitumentary in 2015, it hit a nerve. Hardy’s self-portraits are, in their rawness, vulnerability, and trial-and-error fashioning, very different from today’s selfie culture. The key difference is one of audience: in a 2015 Artforum interview, Hardy said she took the portraits only for herself without caring who might see them. “Only for me” now seems an outmoded or rare sentiment in a culture in which personal archives accumulate in public, not in bedrooms or on dusty hard drives. Her vignettes don’t only offer a glimpse of her life and milieu, they reflect an intimate approach to self-portraiture that has yielded to a pop culture that compels us to narrate our lives in the first person. When we take photographs today, we always care about who, besides us, might see them.

Now that we are at the end of the only for me era, what strategies of artistic self-portraiture are viable? How to distinguish art from selfies in the big scroll? Instagram, for example, is a buffet of genres: documentary, appropriation, political commentary, role-playing. But its inherent immediacy, sociality, and instant commodification (every stroke from liking to tagging creates community for us just as it creates value for Instagram) changes the nature of these gestures. Here, humor, mundanity, and abjection play against more rule-abiding images, even as the rules for a winning image continually evolve. For instance, polished selfies give way to the casual, and meta-commentary now supersedes “genuine” expression. Amid this push and pull—images in lockstep with Instagram’s optimized-for-advertisers creativity competing with those who critique such blatant consumerism—what does it look like to carve out a space for abstraction, dissonance, and transgression: in other words, for art? Several artists today are offering answers to this question.

K8 Hardy, IMG_5/27/15 5:41PM, 2015. Courtesy the artist

“TMI is the best way to enjoy some privacy,” predicted artist Amalia Ulman of life in 2020 in a text published within the online journal e-flux’s supercommunity series in 2015. “Posting confusing information, over posting, over-sharing, and over-tagging are used as strategies for diverting attention.” Ulman’s TMI (too much information) approach seems like a sound strategy and also happens to describe her performance and visual art, which often involves excessive self-exposure where the originary self is deeply in question. In Excellences and Perfections (2014), for instance, she stages an Extreme Makeover–style transformation—allegedly involving facial surgery, breast augmentation, dieting, and pole-dancing classes—and documents each step.

When I first saw this work, I thought of feminist artists who were active in the ’70s, like Orlan, who underwent physical transformation for her art, or Hannah Wilke, who documented her body after being diagnosed with breast cancer, and I couldn’t see how Ulman’s work transcended that of her predecessors. But I came to understand it as a site-specific intervention, one born out of the mores of self-creation and consumption on Instagram.

Excellences and Perfections amplifies the coercive prompts that inform photography here; these prompts are wildly contradictory and include being beautiful, being real about pain, exposing every detail of one’s life to the public, and retaining a sense of mystery. Of course, this mode of calculated, mediated self-presentation is not heretofore unknown. But when Rosalind Krauss described “the aesthetics of narcissism” associated with video art in a 1976 essay for October journal, it would have been hard to predict the mass habitation of narcissism we know today—a state Ulman’s work consciously emerges from. Another aspect of site specificity is how her work is constituted not just by photographs but by an ongoing call and response.

Like so many projects on social media, it only signifies as art when seen as a dialogical series—or, more aptly put, a feed that includes comments, tags, and likes. Here, the self is nothing without its followers. And, in this case, it’s unclear how Ulman’s audience sees her: it’s likely some of her followers see the work as performance while others see it as the true story of a relatable blonde in search of the perfect “after” shot to the extreme makeover process.

Amalia Ulman, Excellences and Perfections, 2014

A counterstrategy to TMI is total retreat. In an interview published in DIS Magazine in 2015, choreographer and visual artist Xavier Cha wrote, “I personally don’t feel a need at the moment to add to the excessive inundation; that’s why I’m more inclined to create experiences and open up ways of thinking rather than add to the clutter of objects and images. To me, most of that has grown mute.” For Instagram, Cha conceived of a project consisting of seventeen sound files each comprising an individual post. Their visual aspect is minimal, featuring only a play button and clip timeline, but the texts are dense: each one is a captivating performance in which a hired actor reads a pornographic or violent passage, her voice stripped of any inflection or emphasis. The quick sound bites evince states of desire, rage, and psychological intensity rarely found on Instagram. The script of one audio piece reads, “A beautiful young man’s face, cradled by a hand, grasping his scalp, his mouth longingly agape for one of the hard cocks, coming on his face, from every angle of the frame.”

Cha has long been interested in how the self forms in relation to technology. Previous performances include Ring (2010) in which a throng of photographers, with cameras rapidly, loudly flashing, snake around a gallery with no incentive, i.e., no notable person or event in sight. Or Body Drama (2011), in which a performer writhes on the floor as a video camera, strapped tightly to his or her body, records the performer’s facial expressions, which are projected live and large onto a nearby screen. In her new work, Cha displaces herself to represent what is unrepresentable—or off-limits—on Instagram. If these were images, they would be rapidly censored.

Juliana Huxtable, Untitled, 2015 © and courtesy the artist

As sound, they escape the trawling bots that would deem them pornographic and delete them. They offer a counterpoint to the “excessive inundation” of visual imagery in social media that, in her opinion, becomes neutered and voiceless. The work points to how sound and language open up a territory where codes of conduct are nascent if at all existent, and 1:1 representation is irrelevant. Her retreat, or visual erasure, also dovetails with an artistic conversation related to feeling under threat—artistically or personally—by a relentless 360-degree gaze peering out from multiple devices (see the work of Zach Blas or Adam Harvey, artists who are interested in privacy issues and so-called digital dark spaces). Withdrawal of the body and substitution of the voice in Cha’s work emerges as a potent form of self-protection from Instagram, and other commercial entities, that are continually tracking our interests and quantifying our movements to better advertise to us, or sell our data to another source. Without a body, she is untraceable.

Self-portraiture in the arts has long been linked to political questions of visibility and representation. Artists associated with identity politics of the late ’80s and ’90s contested the essentialist discourse of multiculturalism that would have them reduced to narrow social categories with attendant stereotypes. In a sense, artists emerging today have similar battles to wage—presenting themselves as more complex than their social appearances—but these battles are now often staged within highly branded and commercial spaces of social media that harden old pressures and add challenges. Faced with the vicissitudes of self-branding, artists often respond or resist with depictions of highly flexible, liminal selves. Photographer Cindy Sherman, who since the ’70s has seamlessly inhabited various female archetypes, drawn from Hollywood films or mass culture, is frequently invoked as an important precedent to this younger generation of women artists, such as Hardy. But a more suitable precursor might be Claude Cahun, the early twentieth-century Surrealist, whose pliable self-portraits released her from strict gender types and evoked the vast inconclusiveness of her subjectivity.

Juliana Huxtable, Untitled (Instagram Photo), 2015 © and courtesy the artist

Cahun was also an expert of collage, of the cuts and edits now associated with digital editing programs. Her spirit hovers over several of the most poignant self-portraitists on Instagram, all of whom use editing tools—cropping, filtering, highlighting— techniques that weren’t available so freely only a decade ago (one used to have to buy and master Photoshop, whereas Instagram simplifies basic special effects). These include the searing poet and artist Juliana Huxtable, whose photographs project her into fantasy realms in which she channels divergent cultural eras and their attendant fashions, from the 1960s and ’70s Black Power movement to the 1990s stylization of black militancy in hip-hop as seen through camouflage clothes. The performance artist boychild’s performances take on the hard and heavy feel of a club, with immersive lighting—pink, green, or black, all shot through with white light—and remixed pop songs, for instance a guttural version of Destiny Child’s airy track “Say My Name.” Center stage, boychild mixes futuristic, sci-fi effects—her mouth and hands glow as she dances—with the simmering vengeance and wild energies of what one imagines a recently hatched posthuman might feel. Her performances often seem to be rehearsed or tested out on Instagram, where her feed is rife with images that look otherworldly: she shimmers holographically, submerges herself in color fields, and appears splattered in red paint that looks like blood from an unknown source. These images punch out of traditional gender binaries with a new set of terms; boychild seems to invent new gender options that blend heretofore unpaired modes from gladiatorial warrior to ethereal hologram. In their constant mutability and careful composition, they eschew rawness and, instead, become self-fashioned icons: half self, half shareable possibility.

Click here to read the complete article in Aperture magazine, available on the Aperture Foundation website.

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Segregation Story at Salon 94

A new exhibition at Salon 94 in New York brings to light Gordon Parks’s long-lost photographs from a breakthrough 1956 Life photoessay.

By Jessica Lynne

Gordon Parks, Mr. and Mrs. Albert Thornton, Mobile, Alabama, 1956. All photographs by Gordon Parks courtesy the Gordon Parks Foundation and Salon 94, New York

When it comes to matters of race in the United States, our society’s capacity to confront the darkest moments of history can be limited. There’s a perilous tendency to imagine that the injustices of the past live far behind us, beyond the reach of a pervasive postracial rhetoric that clouds our ability to remember honestly—and collectively. Gordon Parks’s Segregation Story, on view through December 20 at Salon 94 Freemans in New York, is an arresting portrait of the consequences of racism in the South, in the distinctive manner that has always defined Parks’s photojournalism.

Installation view of Gordon Parks: Segregation Story at Salon 94 Freemans, New York. Courtesy Salon 94

The twenty-three photographs that comprise the show were originally part of a 1956 photo essay published by Life magazine entitled “The Restraints: Open and Hidden,” which profiled the lives of members of an intergenerational, extended family in Mobile, Alabama. In its first iteration, Parks’s series was accompanied by a story by the journalist Robert Wallace. The original images were long thought to be lost. But, in 2012, archivists at the Gordon Parks Foundation discovered a box of color slides related to “The Restraints,” from which the prints for this exhibition were made. They remain startlingly potent. Unlike most images of the segregated South and the Civil Rights Movement, which were printed in black and white, “The Restraints: Open and Hidden” featured color photographs—a departure in editorial policy for Life, at the time one of the most visible influential news magazines.

Installation view of Gordon Parks: Segregation Story at Salon 94 Freemans, New York

The risks surrounding the assignment were considerable. Parks was dispatched to the place he once referred to as “the motherland of racism” with the specific intention of exposing the ills of white supremacy. And his role as a photojournalist did not prevent him from experiencing the very fear that many of his subjects faced on a daily basis. That Parks had the ability, through photography, to center on the voices of the South’s most vulnerable only increased the anger of the white community in Mobile. In an attempt to ensure his safety, Life enlisted Sam Yette, a Mobile native, to guide Parks throughout the duration of his stay. There was, however, no guide to protect Parks’s subjects who, despite viewing their participation in “The Restraints” as an important act of resistance, had to contend with job loss and other forms of harassment in the wake of publication.

Gordon Parks, Department Store, Mobile, Alabama, 1956

Segregation Story poignantly chronicles black life in the face of stark subjugation from which we are but a mere three generations removed. It’s precisely this fact—this not so recent past—that lends the exhibition its gravitas. The show begins with an untitled photograph of an advertisement for a plot of land and as one walks clockwise throughout the gallery, one moves from images of the playground to images of the bedroom. It is an exhibition that takes care to frame the public and the private as active sites of struggle.

Gordon Parks, At Segregated Drinking Fountain, Mobile, Alabama, 1956

In At Segregated Drinking Fountain, Mobile, Alabama (1956), Parks captures three young girls and a man who is presumably their father drinking from a “Coloreds Only” water fountain as two young women off to the side look on. In Department Store, Mobile, Alabama (1956), Joanne Wilson and her niece stand stoically beneath the “Colored Entrance” sign at the local movie theater. Parks’s portrait, Mr. and Mrs. Albert Thorton, Mobile, Alabama (1956) is an image replete with grace and eloquence, capturing the couple as they stare directly into the camera. Meanwhile, the world outside rages and the threat of violence is palpable for blacks in the South, as seen in the portrait of Willie Causey Jr. fumbling with a shotgun in Willie Causey Jr., with Gun During Violence in Alabama (1956).

Gordon Parks, Willie Causey Jr., with Gun During Violence in Alabama, Shady Grove, Alabama, 1956

Though Salon 94 is primarily dedicated to contemporary artists, Parks’s exhibition at the gallery comes at a timely moment. In 2015 alone, several institutions revisited Parks’s work, including the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and The High Museum of Art in Atlanta. (The High Museum recently co-published, with Steidl, a new monograph of Segregation Story, with essays by Charlayne Hunter-Gault and Maurice Berger.) As the U.S. finds itself in the throes of a cultural moment where young people of color are aggressively utilizing photography, video, and new media to shine a light on continued black violence at the hands of the state, it seems only right to see this renewed focus on Parks’s legacy as a bridge between the past and the present.

Installation view of Gordon Parks: Segregation Story at Salon 94 Freemans, New York

Three years after the tragic 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, two years after the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Plessy v. Ferguson, and one year after the Montgomery bus boycotts, “The Restraints: Open and Hidden” offered a nuanced glimpse of black life in the midst of Jim Crow South. Now, nearly six decades later, these photographs humanize the narrative of racial injustice, just as they did in 1956. The political is simultaneously deeply personal.

Jessica Lynne is a writer based in New York and an editor of ARTS.BLACK.

Segregation Story is on view through December 20.

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John Divola at Galeria Pedro Alfacinha

On John Divola’s exhibition Despite Intensions at Galeria Pedro Alfacinha, Lisbon, and its connections to the New Museum’s recent Sarah Charlesworth survey Doubleworld.

By William J. Simmons

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Comprised of nine largely unseen diptychs produced from 1983 to 1984, John Divola’s inaugural exhibition at Galeria Pedro Alfacinha in Lisbon is a unique opportunity to view his deft synthesis of minimalism, expressionism, and photo-conceptualism. As cibachrome prints—now an obsolete medium—the photographs announce their age while retaining a fleshy, immediate sheen, offset by the humble domesticity of the gallery space. Though the images recall the heyday of the cibachrome in the 1980s, pioneered by artists like Laurie Simmons, Jimmy DeSana, and Sarah Charlesworth, there is nevertheless a prescient force in this work that prefigures contemporary questions of beauty, identity, and the medium. Despite Intensions, which is on view through November 21, highlights Divola’s wide-ranging interests that move seamlessly from the origins of postmodernism in the visual arts into today’s debates.

The diptychs juxtapose darkly sardonic scenes that Divola lights dramatically with colors evoking a disco sunset. These saturated pigments have since been attributed to the neo-noir Americana aesthetic of David Lynch, and pushed even further by contemporary imagery surrounding Lana Del Rey and True Detective, but there is an unassuming intellectual presence that sets Divola apart. Akin to the deadpan conceptualism of John Baldessari, these photographs cause one to chuckle at their combinations: theatrical portraits of a woman and a goat, or a close-up of a lavender dolphin beside a flamboyant cousin of Richard Serra’s One Ton Prop (House of Cards) (1969). A pairing of a paint-splattered studio with a blockish sculpture on the floor—the kind one would see in canonical images of macho modernists—with a lime-green brick inching toward the edge of a table, signals that something deeply serious is also taking place.

This deliberate precariousness places Despite Intensions in conversation with Sarah Charlesworth’s recent retrospective Doubleworld, which was presented by the New Museum in New York. Her series Modern History (1977–79) and Stills (1980), examples of her simultaneous occupation of analytical conceptualism and proto-“Pictures Generation” appropriation strategies, were highly lauded. Objects of Desire (1983­–­88)—contemporaneous with Divola’s project—as well as Charlesworth’s final series, Available Light (2012), were conversely characterized as, at best, purely one-dimensional and self-referential commentaries on commodity culture, and, at worst, overly decorative and feminine.

A female artist who makes anything that could be called “pretty” often finds herself placed in the traditionally undervalued arenas of decoration, applied art, luxury goods, or crass commercialism. This is especially true for female members of the Pictures Generation, for whom hyper-intellectual criticality is a prerequisite for inclusion in the canon. Charlesworth, like Divola, does indeed underline the photograph’s capacity to become a lush and beautiful object, especially in her use of cibachrome in Objects of Desire; she even matched her lacquered wood frames to the prints, creating what is, at times, an uninterrupted chromatic unison. Similarly, Divola’s simple wood frames have their own craft-like connotations. It is exactly in this excess, however, that Divola’s and Charlesworth’s foundational contribution becomes apparent, inasmuch as they require us to reconfigure our expectations about what kinds of artworks are deemed avant-garde.

Viewing Divola’s images in this context clarifies the importance of gendered discourses and value judgments surrounding photo-conceptualism. What would happen, for instance, were we to read Charlesworth’s Buddha of Immeasurable Light (1987) like we would one of Divola’s equally engrossing diptychs? Would we see it not as some simplistic consummation of the slickness of the photograph with the shallowness of late capitalism, but rather as a questioning of the masculinist, quasi-religious aspirations of minimalism? Or even, perhaps paradoxically, the mystical interweaving of abstraction and figuration in Jackson Pollock’s Cut-Outs (c. 1948–50)? Both Divola and Charlesworth could be seen as discussing the possibility of reabsorption into the capitalist regime and examining discursive inequities regarding what counts as a “critical” body of work. Revisiting Divola’s earlier work at this moment is a deeply important exercise in rethinking not only his career, but also the presumptions surrounding an entire group of artists who sought to posit a new kind of engagement with identity and history, using the camera as an inquisitive tool.

Despite Intensions was on view at Galeria Pedro Alfacinha from September 24 to November 21.

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