Aperture's Blog, page 146

Issue 20 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 20:

● An excerpted essay written by New Museum curator Lauren Cornell from the “Performance Issue” of Aperture magazine

● A preview of questions and answers from Hank Willis Thomas’s Question Bridge: Black Males in America

● A gallery of images and an excerpt from the title essay from Photography Is Magic

● A Publisher Profile of Ania Natęcka from the latest issue of the The PhotoBook Review

● A review of John Divola’s “Despite Intentions” exhibition written by William J. Simmons

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 20 of the Aperture Photography App is Now Available appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

Report from Oslo

With a recent Tom Sandberg survey exhibition in the 2015 edition of the sprawling Fotobokfestival, the Norwegian capital’s photography scene is flourishing. This article first appeared in Issue 19 of the Aperture Photography App. 

By Michael Famighetti

Installation view of Diptych, Kunstnernes Hus, 2015. Installation shot by Christina Leithe Hansen

In early summer in Oslo the sun sits high and the light, almost tinted silver, is plentiful. By mid-September, the white nights are over and light is in dwindling supply. My summer was bookended by trips to the Norwegian capital. In June, I visited a Tom Sandberg exhibition at Kunstnernes Hus. Titled Diptych, the exhibition, curated by Sune Nordgren and Ida Kierulf, was divided between the venue’s two long rectangular gallery spaces, each amply flooded by skylights. The space was well suited for a show of work by the late Norwegian photographer (Sandberg died in 2014) who trained his camera on the surfaces of everyday objects and figures—a jet black sedan, a tunnel opening into a gentle curve, the varied texture of clouds, individuals turned away from the viewer—to create a singular body of quietly observed photographs.

Installation view of Diptych, Kunstnernes Hus, 2015. Installation shot by Christina Leithe Hansen

Sandberg had a knack for enigmatically rendering the world in abstract compositions, almost magically de-familiarizing the ordinary and elevating the mundane to the monumental through his exacting attention to light, form, and volume. The illuminated galleries of the functionalist Kunsternes Hus provided an apt space to celebrate a photographer whose work often meditates on modulations of light. With their quotidian subjects, and a puzzling lack of information about specific locations, Sandberg’s photographs often feel detached from time and place. Many images echo the pictorial clarity that defined the work by titans of modern photography, such as Paul Strand or Edward Weston. Sandberg, however, provides enough clues—a repeated theme of modern transportation, for example—to locate viewers in a contemporary moment. Though the show included a large number of works, Diptych wasn’t meant to be a retrospective, but instead served as an elegiac tribute to a beloved, influential—and now missed—photographer.

Installation view of Diptych, Kunstnernes Hus, 2015. Installation shot by Christina Leithe Hansen

When I returned to Oslo in mid-September, I attended the Fotobokfestival Oslo, a program aimed to engage the photobook as an artistic medium through a combination of exhibitions, workshops, lectures, and other activities. Organized by the Norwegian Association of Fine Art Photographers and Fotogalleriet, an artists-run space founded in 1977 by Tom Sandberg along with Dag Alveng and Bjørn Høyum. For this year’s iteration, German photobook expert Markus Schaden was invited to present the mobile edition of his new project The PhotoBookMuseum. Previously the proprietor of a Cologne-based specialty bookshop that earned a cult following before photography books became a fetishist’s delight, Schaden is an enthusiastic proselytizer of the photobook. At Fotogalleriet, he installed an annotated study of Dutch photographer Ed Van Der Elsken’s classic 1956 Love On the Left Bank, which tells a fictionalized love story. With the entire sequence of the book mounted to the wall, this footnoted presentation illuminated aspects of the book’s publishing history, picture editing (by showing marked up contact sheets), as well as the volume’s connections to contemporaneous counter-cultural activity, such as the rise of the Lettrist International and the publication of Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle.

Installation views of Fotobokfestival Oslo, September 11-20, 2015

Meanwhile, in Youngstorget, a main city square, Schaden and his team assembled a mobile version of their The PhotoBookMuseum, comprising six shipping containers organized in a radial formation. Each container featured a presentation of an individual photography title, including PIGS by the Spanish photographer Carlos Spottorno, a book about the 2008 economic crisis cleverly packaged to look like the Economist magazine, which has referred to the southern European countries of Portugal, Italy, Greece, and Spain with the derogatory acronym PIGS. Other featured books included Carolyn Drake’s Two Rivers, a project that follows two rivers in Central Asia to document the shifting political and economic conditions of the region; Oliver Sieber’s Imaginary Club; Ricardo Cases’s Paloma al Aire; Andrea Diefenbach’s Country Without Parents; and Ali Taptik’s Metropol Yesili.

Installation views of Fotobokfestival Oslo, September 11-20, 2015

The highlight of the installation, though, was the physical manifestation of a space seen inside a classic photobook: a facsimile recreation of Café Lehmitz, the grimy site seen in Anders Peterson’s classic 1978 book of the same name that documented the drunken antics of the café’s louche patrons. The recreated Lehmitz served up drinks and snacks for the sizable crowd that attended the opening of the Fotobokfestival, turning a photobook into a form of theater. The mobile PhotoBookMuseum drew large crowd of curious visitors, fulfilling the organizer’s stated aim of the bringing the narrative of the photobook to an audience beyond the aficionados, suggesting that Schaden may be on to something when he earnestly dubs the photobook a “visual Esperanto.”

Installation views of Fotobokfestival Oslo, September 11-20, 2015

The end of the festival also saw the launch of New Scandinavian Photography, a survey publication co-edited by Bjarne Bare and Behzad Farazollahi, founders of MELK, a non-profit space opened in 2009, that aims to connect the discourses of photography and contemporary art. “Oslo stands out because there is a strong generation of doers, who are creating spaces and a discourse that didn’t exist,” Bare, who is now based in Los Angeles, mentioned in a recent conversation. “Oslo is relevant and alive.”

Cover of New Scandinavian Photography (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2015)

The book features work made over the last decade by sixteen Scandinavian photographers, including figures such as Torbjørn Rødland (featured in the new issue of Aperture magazine) and Asger Carlsen, the New York-based Danish photographer known for his grotesque digital manipulations of the body. Other artists include Mårten Lange, Kristina Bengtsson, Nicolai Howalt, Marthe Elise Stramrud, among others, who, through a diverse range of practices, produce work that eschews traditional photographic observation in favor of exploring photographic ontology, or at least an expansive approach to the medium. With a number of essays by an international roster of curators and scholars, the volume is a useful introduction to a group of photographers whose work is very much aligned with some of the concerns animating contemporary photography today, underscoring the idea that the photography scene in Scandinavia, more broadly, is very much relevant and alive.

Pages of New Scandinavian Photography, including photographs by Nicolai Howalt

Pages of New Scandinavian Photography, including photographs by Mårten Lange

Pages of New Scandinavian Photography, including photographs by Marthe Elise Stramrud

Michael Famighetti is editor of Aperture magazine. 

The post Report from Oslo appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

Announcing the Winners of the 2015 PhotoBook Awards

Paris Photo and Aperture Foundation are pleased to announce the winners of the 2015 edition of the Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards, celebrating the book’s contribution to the evolving narrative of photography.

Winner of First PhotoBook ($10,000 prize)

Daniel Mayrit

You Haven’t Seen Their Faces

RIOT BOOKS • Madrid, 2015

Designed by Verónica Fieiras and Daniel Mayrit

riot-books.com

Daniel Mayrit plays with the semiotics of law enforcement in You Haven’t Seen Their Faces. Full-bleed close-ups of the declared “100 most powerful people in the city of London” are printed in the style of grainy CCTV footage, with condemning information against them scrawled on every image. The book is a response to police fliers handed out after the 2011 riots in London, when surveillance images of alleged rioters’ faces were publicly distributed in a presumption of guilt. Mayrit flips this visual language on those believed responsible for events that are arguably far more damaging: the recent economic crises that have wracked Europe. Yannick Bouillis calls the design “streetwise”; held together by screws at the top, the images are printed on lightweight brown pages akin to butcher paper, and fastened to stiff cardboard. A map of the suspects’ headquarters is tucked into the back.

 

Winner of Photography Catalogue of the Year

Diane Dufour and Xavier Barral

Images of Conviction: The Construction of Visual Evidence

LE BAL and Éditions Xavier Barral • Paris, 2015

Designed by Coline Aguettaz and Xavier Barral

le-bal.com • exb.fr

In this meticulously designed catalogue, photography itself is put on the witness stand. Published to accompany an exhibition of the same name that originated at LE BAL, Paris, Images of Conviction is a fascinating historical survey of the ways photography has shaped official versions of truth—from the Shroud of Turin to crime-scene photography of the freshly dead, to video evidence of drone strikes. The design is sedate but never boring, alternating between pale gray and clean white paper. The images are all reproduced in black and white, with a chilling negative image printed on the cover. “Everything is made so that the catalogue stays neutral, but not cold,” says Julien Frydman, who also praises the diverse, well-edited texts. The volume offers a variety of answers to the question posed by editor Diane Dufour in her introduction—“How does the image take shape in truth-seeking scientific and historical discourse?”—without losing its sense of mystery.

 

Winner of PhotoBook of the Year

Thomas Mailaender

Illustrated People

Archive of Modern Conflict and RVB Books • Paris, 2014

Designed by Thomas Mailaender and Rémi Faucheux

rvb-books.com

When artist Thomas Mailaender was given access to the Archive of Modern Conflict’s photo archives, he decided to “print” some of the negatives he found onto a whole new medium: the human body. Using a UV lamp, Mailaender projected these negatives onto models’ pale skin, leaving sunburnt imprints of the images. Full-color documentation of this performance alternates with archival images in Illustrated People, a playful softcover book encased in a translucent red plastic jacket. While the archival images have a faded appearance, printed in black-and-white on plain matte paper, the “sunburn” pages are bright and glossy. “What’s interesting to me is the relationship between the immaterial archive and the living bodies,” says Yannick Bouillis. “He made something that goes beyond just the selection of images—he’s putting pure culture onto something natural, the body.”

 

Special Jurors’ Mention

Will Steacy

Deadline

b.frank books • Philadelphia, 2015

Designed by Will Steacy

willsteacy.com

Will Steacy’s Deadline is a newspaper about a newspaper: the Philadelphia Inquirer, where he spent five years photographing the newsroom, employees, and printing plant. Thanks to the Internet, most newspaper staffs are a fraction of what they once were. The Inquirer is no exception, and Deadline chronicles its history—with texts by current and former staff, and archival photographs alongside Steacy’s own—through to its very uncertain future; the final pages see the formerly prominent newspaper moved into a much smaller office. For Steacy, who comes from a family of newspapermen, this story is personal—his father was an editor at the Inquirer for nearly thirty years, till he was laid off while Steacy was working on this project. The materials, design, and printing quality of his son’s contribution are all in line with family tradition (it was even printed at the Inquirer’s own press), but the focus has been turned inward. As Christoph Wiesner comments, “it serves both as a history of the journalism sector and a work of subtexts, revealing a process of deconstruction or mise en abyme.” Deadline is less a case study than it is a eulogy.

 

This year’s shortlist selection was made by Yannick Bouillis (founder, Offprint Projects), Julien Frydman (LUMA Foundation), Lesley A. Martin (creative director, Aperture), Mutsuko Ota (editor-in-chief, IMA), and Christoph Wiesner (artistic director, Paris Photo).

The shortlist was first announced at the NY Art Book Fair on September 18, 2015. All the shortlisted books are profiled in issue 009 of The PhotoBook Review, Aperture Foundation’s biannual publication dedicated to the consideration of the photobook. Copies will be available at Aperture Gallery and Bookstore, as well as through other distribution partners. Subscribers to Aperture magazine receive free copies of The PhotoBook Review with their summer and winter issues.

Shortlist Exhibition On View

Paris Photo: November 12–15, 2015

Aperture Gallery, New York: December 12, 2015–February 8, 2016

Huis Marseille, Amsterdam: December 2015–January 2016

Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival, Toronto: May 1–31, 2016

Self Publish Riga, Riga Photomonth, Latvia: May 12–June 3, 2016

15th International Festival of Photography in Łódź, Fotofestiwal 2016, Poland: June 9–19, 2016

Landskrona Foto Festival, Landskrona, Sweden: August 19–27, 2016

 

The post Announcing the Winners of the 2015 PhotoBook Awards appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

On Record: RoseLee Goldberg and Roxana Marcoci in Conversation

Performances are ephemeral; photographs are permanent. When is an image more than a mere document? How do images bring us closer to an event we never witnessed? In this excerpt from the upcoming Aperture magazine, Winter 2015, “Performance,” MoMA’s Roxana Marcoci and Performa’s RoseLee Goldberg examine these questions. This article also appears in Issue 19 of Aperture Photography App. 

Yves Klein, Leap Into the Void, 1960 © Yves Klein/ Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York/ ADAGP, Paris 2015/ The Metropolitan Museum of Art and courtesy Art Resource, New York

Roxana Marcoci: RoseLee, you pioneered the study of performance art with a landmark book, Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present (1979), and recently expanded it with an account of the technological, political, and aesthetic shifts in performance art that have occurred since the turn of the new millennium. What do you think the advent of photography did for performance? And why have photography and performance been so intricately linked? From its beginnings, photography has had a unique relationship to performance, which explains why we can chart a history of modern and contemporary performance art, while it’s more difficult to do so for premodern times.

RoseLee Goldberg: A fascinating place to begin, “the advent of photography.” Before the photograph, a painting or drawing would have captured the performances taking place in the studio or workshop—sometimes even those staged with an audience present, but more often done without a public. We need to activate our imagination to conjure the models and backdrops used to make so many of the great history and narrative paintings from the past. Performance since the 1960s became associated with the word documentation, as though the photograph was simply a record of an act, an afterthought, to capture an ephemeral event. But as we know from images of works by Yves Klein, Joseph Beuys, Yoko Ono, Carolee Schneemann, or Chris Burden, and so many artists of the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s, photographs of performances were often consciously staged for the camera, allowing them to become iconic and powerful images that would live on into the future.

Rineke Dijkstra, Kolobrzeg, Poland, July 23, 1992. Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery

RM: Gina Pane, a pioneer of performance art, from the start collaboratively worked with one photographer, Françoise Masson. In discussions with Masson, she prestaged the shots that the photographer then took during the live performance. Pane made the final selection of pictures and composed them into montages that she called constants d’action (proofs of action). Photography, beginning in the 1960s, signaled a critical change in its relationship to the discourses of performance, sculpture, writing, and film, as artists who did not consider themselves photographers in the conventional sense began to use the camera for projects that were not specifically photographic. This moment also coincided with the advent of Conceptual art. Performances are ephemeral; photographs are permanent. When is an image more than a mere document? How do images bring us closer to an event we never witnessed?

Gina Pane, Little Journey, 1978. Photographs by Françoise Masson Collection Frac Bretagne/ © ADAGP, Paris 2015

RLG: The anti-aesthetic of Conceptual art and performance, so-called documentation consisting mostly of black-and-white photographs drained of spectacle or framing, or carefully monitored lighting, was the beginning of the break—the separation of what we consider photography in its historical and conventional sense, and the photograph as created by visual artists of the 1970s and ’80s. Over the past fifty or so years there has been an incredibly rich history of performances made with the intention of being captured by the camera, or vice versa, photographs made of unforgettable performances, as you made so clear in your important 2011 exhibition, Staging Action: Performance in Photography since 1960, at the Museum of Modern Art. Roxana, as a curator and historian looking at photography in so many forms, what do you think distinguishes photographs of performance by visual artists? To me, it seems that no photographer could possibly come up with an image such as Marina Abramovic’s Balkan Baroque (1997), of her scrubbing 1,500 cow bones, wearing a white tunic that becomes gradually bloodied over time. It represents the horrors of ethnic cleansing in a way that is particular to a visual artist. A photojournalist or photographer might make the image far too literal; it would have none of its poetry. There is a formality to Marina’s photograph—and a visual imagination at work in interpreting its content—that would simply not come from a photographer. For me, photographs of performances reinforce that these performances are the work of visual artists. Consciously or not, the artist understands the visual impact of her performance, so no matter who is photographing the work, whether staged or captured live, by the artist or by an independent photographer, the content, the image that emerges from the performance, could only come from this genre we call artists’ performance.

Marina Abramović, Balkan Baroque, Performance, 4 days 6 Hours, XLVII Biennale Venice, June 1997 © Marina Abramović and courtesy the Marina Abramović Archives, Sean Kelly Gallery, New York, and Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

RM: The premise of Staging Action: Performance in Photography since 1960, and prior to it the section that focused on “The Performing Body as Sculptural Object” in the exhibition The Original Copy: Photography of Sculpture, 1839 to Today, which I curated at MoMA in 2010, was that photography plays a constitutive rather than merely documentary role when performance is staged expressly for the camera. The photograph of an event constitutes the performance as such. Artists working in front of and behind the camera—Bas Jan Ader, Eleanor Antin, Chris Burden, VALIE EXPORT, Gilbert & George, Yves Klein, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Ana Mendieta, Bruce Nauman, and Lorna Simpson—have engaged the “rhetoric of the pose,” a pose enacted for and mediated through the camera lens. Especially in the radicalized climate of the 1970s, when women’s liberation took center stage, artists such as Hannah Wilke reconfigured their bodies in the spirit of activism to comment on the power structure of gender difference. And they used performance and the camera to engender it. To make what she called “performalist self-portraits,” such as S.O.S. – Starification Object Series (1974–82), Wilke hired a commercial photographer to take pictures of her posed like a fashion mannequin in various states of undress, sporting here an Arab headdress, there sunglasses and a cowboy hat, there curlers in her hair. She also “scarred” her naked flesh with a swarm of labia-shaped chewing-gum pieces. Wilke’s pose as a stigmatized star in S.O.S. underscores the key role of the camera in the intersection of performance and photography. My question, then, is whether there is such a thing as unmediated performance.

RLG: Depends on how strictly you define mediated. As already mentioned, painting and drawing before the twentieth century, as well as text, word of mouth, are all forms of mediation.

RM: What would you say, then, about the work of Tino Sehgal, who insistently resists any kind of documentation of his time-based work?

RLG: Indeed, I cannot think of any performance today that is unmediated or not photographed, except for the work of Tino Sehgal, who, as you point out, has emphatically resisted documentation. Yet his position is as much a formal proposition as one of denial, which suggests that his concepts are more fully absorbed by those who watch and listen, and who are not distracted from their engagement with the performance by a camera or an iPhone in hand. In some ways, his refusal to allow photography works in favor of such submission to the work itself. It also forces writers to examine the work quite differently, filling in for the missing images. It’s important to remember that Tino’s starting point is dance—the transference of ideas, of body shapes, content that moves along a different trajectory, in muscle memory—and I believe he’s asking us to give his work that level of visceral and intellectual concentration.

RM: A year ago I organized a forum on contemporary photography at MoMA around the Pier 18 exhibition organized in 1971 by independent curator, activist, and publisher Willoughby Sharp. Sharp commissioned twenty-seven artists—all male, ranging from Acconci to Lawrence Weiner—to engage in performative actions on the pier. Realizing that the derelict structure could not accommodate an audience, Sharp envisioned the end result of the commission as a museum presentation, giving the photographic duo Harry Shunk and János Kender, who documented the performances, an integral role. Pier 18 foregrounds the degree to which photography actively contributed to the conceptual makeup of performance art in the 1970s. I invited Barbara Clausen, who teaches performance theory and history at the University of Québec, to be one of the guest speakers at this forum. She argued that what we perceive as “live” performance is always subject to mediation, since each performance is already built on the relationship between mediated and so-called authentic identities. Consider TV Bra for Living Sculpture (1969) or Concerto for TV Cello and Videotapes (1971), for instance, in which experimental cellist and performer Charlotte Moorman integrates live with mediated elements in performing Nam June Paik’s scores. I think she has a point. How do you see the photograph mediating the experience of the viewer?

Mike Kelley, Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #32, Plus, a Performa commission, 2009. Photograph by Paula Court and courtesy Performa

RLG: The photograph for me is like picking up a shard of pottery in Pompeii and finding the story of an entire civilization in a handful of material. The photographer is the first tier of the history of performance, the first line of record, and we need to learn how to read the photograph—as good art historians or archaeologists do—for its iconography, for its clues about the times, the politics, the communities in which the work took place, where it occurred: Were people seated on the floor or standing? Does this photographer give us a sense of audience, or not? The more we study the photographs of a performance from the past, the more details are revealed. Photographs give us back our experience of life. We see our own histories through childhood photographs and think that we actually remember the moment even if we were too young at the time to have registered the memory. So, yes, I think photographs have an extraordinary capacity to bring us closer to the work, to give us an experience of the work, and to allow us to build a reference bank of images and ideas as we move on to the next performance, whether witnessed live or not. They make our understanding of the world and of the values and sensibilities of the artists making this work more layered, more sophisticated, more complicated

To read the full interview, subscribe to Aperture magazine or purchase Issue #221, Winter 2015, “Performance.”

The post On Record: RoseLee Goldberg and Roxana Marcoci in Conversation appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

On Record

Performances are ephemeral; photographs are permanent. When is an image more than a mere document? How do images bring us closer to an event we never witnessed? In this excerpt from the upcoming Aperture magazine, Winter 2015, “Performance,” MoMA’s Roxana Marcoci and Performa’s RoseLee Goldberg examine these questions. This article also appears in Issue 19 of Aperture Photography App. 

Joan Jonas, Reanimation, 2013. Photograph by Paula Court and courtesy Performa

Roxana Marcoci: RoseLee, you pioneered the study of performance art with a landmark book, Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present (1979), and recently expanded it with an account of the technological, political, and aesthetic shifts in performance art that have occurred since the turn of the new millennium. What do you think the advent of photography did for performance? And why have photography and performance been so intricately linked? From its beginnings, photography has had a unique relationship to performance, which explains why we can chart a history of modern and contemporary performance art, while it’s more difficult to do so for premodern times.

RoseLee Goldberg: A fascinating place to begin, “the advent of photography.” Before the photograph, a painting or drawing would have captured the performances taking place in the studio or workshop—sometimes even those staged with an audience present, but more often done without a public. We need to activate our imagination to conjure the models and backdrops used to make so many of the great history and narrative paintings from the past. Performance since the 1960s became associated with the word documentation, as though the photograph was simply a record of an act, an afterthought, to capture an ephemeral event. But as we know from images of works by Yves Klein, Joseph Beuys, Yoko Ono, Carolee Schneemann, or Chris Burden, and so many artists of the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s, photographs of performances were often consciously staged for the camera, allowing them to become iconic and powerful images that would live on into the future.

Mike Kelley, Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #32, Plus, a Performa commission, 2009.

RM: Gina Pane, a pioneer of performance art, from the start collaboratively worked with one photographer, Françoise Masson. In discussions with Masson, she prestaged the shots that the photographer then took during the live performance. Pane made the final selection of pictures and composed them into montages that she called constants d’action (proofs of action). Photography, beginning in the 1960s, signaled a critical change in its relationship to the discourses of performance, sculpture, writing, and film, as artists who did not consider themselves photographers in the conventional sense began to use the camera for projects that were not specifically photographic. This moment also coincided with the advent of Conceptual art. Performances are ephemeral; photographs are permanent. When is an image more than a mere document? How do images bring us closer to an event we never witnessed?

RLG: The anti-aesthetic of Conceptual art and performance, so-called documentation consisting mostly of black-and-white photographs drained of spectacle or framing, or carefully monitored lighting, was the beginning of the break—the separation of what we consider photography in its historical and conventional sense, and the photograph as created by visual artists of the 1970s and ’80s. Over the past fifty or so years there has been an incredibly rich history of performances made with the intention of being captured by the camera, or vice versa, photographs made of unforgettable performances, as you made so clear in your important 2011 exhibition, Staging Action: Performance in Photography since 1960, at the Museum of Modern Art. Roxana, as a curator and historian looking at photography in so many forms, what do you think distinguishes photographs of performance by visual artists? To me, it seems that no photographer could possibly come up with an image such as Marina Abramovic’s Balkan Baroque (1997), of her scrubbing 1,500 cow bones, wearing a white tunic that becomes gradually bloodied over time. It represents the horrors of ethnic cleansing in a way that is particular to a visual artist. A photojournalist or photographer might make the image far too literal; it would have none of its poetry. There is a formality to Marina’s photograph—and a visual imagination at work in interpreting its content—that would simply not come from a photographer. For me, photographs of performances reinforce that these performances are the work of visual artists. Consciously or not, the artist understands the visual impact of her performance, so no matter who is photographing the work, whether staged or captured live, by the artist or by an independent photographer, the content, the image that emerges from the performance, could only come from this genre we call artists’ performance.

Rineke Dijkstra, Kolobrzeg, Poland, July 23, 1992. Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery

RM: The premise of Staging Action: Performance in Photography since 1960, and prior to it the section that focused on “The Performing Body as Sculptural Object” in the exhibition The Original Copy: Photography of Sculpture, 1839 to Today, which I curated at MoMA in 2010, was that photography plays a constitutive rather than merely documentary role when performance is staged expressly for the camera. The photograph of an event constitutes the performance as such. Artists working in front of and behind the camera—Bas Jan Ader, Eleanor Antin, Chris Burden, VALIE EXPORT, Gilbert & George, Yves Klein, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Ana Mendieta, Bruce Nauman, and Lorna Simpson—have engaged the “rhetoric of the pose,” a pose enacted for and mediated through the camera lens. Especially in the radicalized climate of the 1970s, when women’s liberation took center stage, artists such as Hannah Wilke reconfigured their bodies in the spirit of activism to comment on the power structure of gender difference. And they used performance and the camera to engender it. To make what she called “performalist self-portraits,” such as S.O.S. – Starification Object Series (1974–82), Wilke hired a commercial photographer to take pictures of her posed like a fashion mannequin in various states of undress, sporting here an Arab headdress, there sunglasses and a cowboy hat, there curlers in her hair. She also “scarred” her naked flesh with a swarm of labia-shaped chewing-gum pieces. Wilke’s pose as a stigmatized star in S.O.S. underscores the key role of the camera in the intersection of performance and photography. My question, then, is whether there is such a thing as unmediated performance.

RLG: Depends on how strictly you define mediated. As already mentioned, painting and drawing before the twentieth century, as well as text, word of mouth, are all forms of mediation.

Yves Klein, Leap Into the Void, 1960 © Yves Klein/ Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York/ ADAGP, Paris 2015/ The Metropolitan Museum of Art and courtesy Art Resource, New York

RM: What would you say, then, about the work of Tino Sehgal, who insistently resists any kind of documentation of his time-based work?

RLG: Indeed, I cannot think of any performance today that is unmediated or not photographed, except for the work of Tino Sehgal, who, as you point out, has emphatically resisted documentation. Yet his position is as much a formal proposition as one of denial, which suggests that his concepts are more fully absorbed by those who watch and listen, and who are not distracted from their engagement with the performance by a camera or an iPhone in hand. In some ways, his refusal to allow photography works in favor of such submission to the work itself. It also forces writers to examine the work quite differently, filling in for the missing images. It’s important to remember that Tino’s starting point is dance—the transference of ideas, of body shapes, content that moves along a different trajectory, in muscle memory—and I believe he’s asking us to give his work that level of visceral and intellectual concentration.

Marina Abramović, Balkan Baroque, Performance, 4 days 6 Hours, XLVII Biennale Venice, June 1997 © Marina Abramović and courtesy the Marina Abramović Archives, Sean Kelly Gallery, New York, and Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

RM: A year ago I organized a forum on contemporary photography at MoMA around the Pier 18 exhibition organized in 1971 by independent curator, activist, and publisher Willoughby Sharp. Sharp commissioned twenty-seven artists—all male, ranging from Acconci to Lawrence Weiner—to engage in performative actions on the pier. Realizing that the derelict structure could not accommodate an audience, Sharp envisioned the end result of the commission as a museum presentation, giving the photographic duo Harry Shunk and János Kender, who documented the performances, an integral role. Pier 18 foregrounds the degree to which photography actively contributed to the conceptual makeup of performance art in the 1970s. I invited Barbara Clausen, who teaches performance theory and history at the University of Québec, to be one of the guest speakers at this forum. She argued that what we perceive as “live” performance is always subject to mediation, since each performance is already built on the relationship between mediated and so-called authentic identities. Consider TV Bra for Living Sculpture (1969) or Concerto for TV Cello and Videotapes (1971), for instance, in which experimental cellist and performer Charlotte Moorman integrates live with mediated elements in performing Nam June Paik’s scores. I think she has a point. How do you see the photograph mediating the experience of the viewer?

RLG: The photograph for me is like picking up a shard of pottery in Pompeii and finding the story of an entire civilization in a handful of material. The photographer is the first tier of the history of performance, the first line of record, and we need to learn how to read the photograph—as good art historians or archaeologists do—for its iconography, for its clues about the times, the politics, the communities in which the work took place, where it occurred: Were people seated on the floor or standing? Does this photographer give us a sense of audience, or not? The more we study the photographs of a performance from the past, the more details are revealed. Photographs give us back our experience of life. We see our own histories through childhood photographs and think that we actually remember the moment even if we were too young at the time to have registered the memory. So, yes, I think photographs have an extraordinary capacity to bring us closer to the work, to give us an experience of the work, and to allow us to build a reference bank of images and ideas as we move on to the next performance, whether witnessed live or not. They make our understanding of the world and of the values and sensibilities of the artists making this work more layered, more sophisticated, more complicated

Click here to find Aperture magazine on the Aperture Foundation website.

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Hiroji Kubota Photographer

Hiroji Kubota Photographer is the first comprehensive survey of Magnum photographer Hiroji Kubota, who has spent his life traveling extensively and documenting the world around him. The book will also be the subject of an exhibition at Aperture Gallery, opening November 18 at 7 p.m. followed by a book signing there on November 21 at 3 p.m. From his coverage of the Black Panther Party in the mid-1960s, to his incomparable access to North Korea, Kubota has prolifically captured the histories of diverse cultures, traveling to China, Burma, the U.S., North and South Korea, and his home country, Japan. Here, in an excerpt from the book, Aperture Foundation’s executive director Chris Boot speaks with Kubota about his beginnings as a photographer.

Hiroji Kubota, Black Panthers, Chicago, 1969 © Hiroji Kubota/Magnum Photos

Chris Boot: So, there was a moment then, when you decided this is the life you want?

Hiroji Kubota: When I’d spent time with these guys and studied The Decisive Moment, yes, that’s what I decided. At the time, it was extremely difficult for someone Japanese to leave Japan but I decided: If I am going to be a photographer, then I have to go New York! I needed a guarantor and I asked Elliott Erwitt. He didn’t have to do it, he had to give a lot of personal details to the authorities, I don’t know why he did it.

View of a village located somewhere between Hyesan City and Mount Paektu, North Korea, 1982

CB: Because he’s a generous man and he helps people.

HK: Yes, and he recognized some quality in me, I guess. I’m lucky I went to him. Even with his help, it took time to get permission to leave Japan. Even to take five hundred dollars out of Japan. I had to go ten times to the Bank of Japan’s headquarters. You know, those bureaucrats, they can be nasty. They’d say, “Oh, you made a mistake. Come back.” When I went back: “Now we need this.” They tried to stop me. At that time only diplomats, some Fulbright scholars, and a very few business people who were earning hard currency were allowed to go abroad.

Shanghai, 1979

CB: Did your father support this plan?

HK: Yes. He didn’t like it, but he trusted me. I was very determined and he let me do what I wanted to do. He was very broad and open-minded like that. Which was quite exceptional at the time—going abroad at that time was almost unimaginable, such a crazy idea. On my way to New York, I got a job from Bungeishunjū magazine. There was one adventurous Japanese guy, Kenichi Horie, who sailed across the Pacific, alone, in a small yacht. It was a big, big story for the Japanese. So the magazine, they knew I was going to America, so they asked me to visit this guy’s parents in Osaka, first. And then meet him in San Francisco when he arrived, to finish the story. Then I visited middle America, staying with a former American GI in Pittsburg, Kansas. Elliott came to meet me at the TWA terminal when I arrived in New York.

Apart from the yachtsman story, for the first year in the USA, I didn’t take pictures. Because I wanted to learn. I learned about photography, not technically, but by visiting Magnum’s New York office, on Fifth Avenue and 47th Street. Wayne Miller was the president and he invited me to spend time there. “Hiroji, you do whatever you want to do.” I did two things. Religiously, I went through all the contact sheets of Henri Cartier-Bresson, absolutely carefully. And it was the time that Bruce Davidson did his East 100th Street work, and I studied his contact sheets too, very carefully, to understand what made good pictures. By studying Magnum photographers’ contact sheets, I learned that photographers do better work without a commission than with. Which is obvious really: You do better what you are compelled to do than what you are asked to do. I learned it is better to avoid assignments, and concentrate on what I feel compelled to do.

Kyaiktiyo, Burma, 1978

CB: You became very close to Cornell Capa. Did you meet him right away?

HK: I got in touch right away when I arrived in New York. He met with me, and gave me a glass of Spanish wine. It was the first glass of wine I ever drank. He and his wife Edie were very nice, and he gave me some assisting job. But how we struck up a relationship was because I could cook Japanese food. My mother taught me. And I offered to cook for him. He had many important people coming to visit him, and he would say “Hiroji, cook something interesting!” So, you know, I became his cook!

The other person I came to know, in 1963 or so, another really important relationship in my life, was André Kertész. I met him in the street at first. Then he used to hang around with the Magnum guys, and I came to know him. He became such a good friend. Though I don’t do the kind of photography he did—I don’t have that level of sensitivity—still, I learned a lot from him. I was the person to find him dead at his Fifth Avenue apartment in August 1985.

World’s Financial District, New York, 1989

CB: Describe your life in New York.

HK: Elliott’s father was Buddhist monk, you know, and he got me a room at first in the Buddhist temple. But it was a horrible place, absolutely depressing, with no privacy. So I moved out as soon as I could find a cheap one-room apartment. The rent was sixty dollars a month. And to learn, I would enroll in school. I wasn’t working toward a degree or anything, but I wanted to study, and to be among bright American students. I also stayed for one semester in Columbia’s graduate school boys’ dormitory while taking courses on the United Nations. I became good friends with many bright students, and they gave me much intellectual stimulation. Somehow I managed to pay for that.

CB: Are you earning money now, or are you still living on the five hundred dollars you came with?

HK: Well, the five hundred dollars didn’t last very long. I made money here and there. I got assisting jobs. Burt Glinn gave me twenty-five dollars a day to drive for him. Though I wasn’t cooking for Cornell for money, sometimes he would give me fifty dollars. And Magnum as a whole took care of me. The bureau chief at the time was the wonderful Lee Jones. She was so helpful to me—I don’t know why.

Visitors to the holiest temple, Jokhang, on Tibetan New Year’s Day, Lhasa, Tibet, 1981

CB: When did you start making pictures seriously?

HK: Someone at Newsweek said, “Hiroji, go to Atlanta to see Dr. Martin Luther King.” And I admit, I didn’t even know his name at that time. But I ended up going to Washington, D.C., for the March on Washington on August 28, 1963, where I heard Dr. King give his “I have a dream” speech. That was where I started to photograph America.

Sanja festival participants in the Asakusa district, Tokyo, 1967

CB: Was this a job from Newsweek?

HK: No. They just said, “You should go. Go, go, go!” And, they were right! Then from there I traveled by Greyhound bus and went to the Deep South, to Alabama and Mississippi. People there had never seen an Asian photographer, I was a novelty, and that helped me to move around quite easily and meet people. Black radicals welcomed me, and so did the FBI in Montgomery. At the same time, the Vietnam War was a serious matter. So I photographed demonstrations and draft card burning, those kinds of things.

CB: Were you selling your pictures to Newsweek, Life, or other magazines?

HK: No, I didn’t know those mechanics. My first job wasn’t until 1965. I applied for a job that I saw advertised for a new, well-funded research institute, called the Center for Urban Education in Greater New York, which studied learning among children with disabilities. They were looking for a photographer to document their work. Lee Jones helped me put the application together and acted as my proposer. I got the job. It was really my first job, and I was paid twenty thousand dollars, which was a lot of money for me. My work was well received, and then they immediately gave me another major job. It was my breakthrough, I suppose. At the same time, Magnum gave me accreditation, a press card, and a credit card.

Pyongyang subway train, North Korea, 1982

CB: Were there other young photographers hanging out at Magnum at the same time?

HK: There were three others in New York in a similar situation. Gordon Parks, Jr., the son of Gordon Parks. The South African, Ernest Cole. And Danny Lyon. Danny was the one other photographer who ended up with a long relationship with Magnum.

Old kimonos made of tsumugi or pongee silk in Shiozawa are returned there every fifty years or so to bring back the original colors. To get the maximum effect, the unassembled pieces are dried over snow under blue sky, Shiozawa, Niigata, Japan, 2003

CB: Cornell Capa and Lee Jones were the two dominant figures of the organization at the time?

HK: Lee Jones, yes, but by then Cornell was much more preoccupied with creating the International Center of Photography. He’d already started working with the Riverside Museum, which was the basis for ICP, and then he bought, out of his pocket, the landmark former Audubon house on Fifth Avenue and 94th Street, where he set up the ICP. For some reason I became the one person Cornell would listen to, so I was very close to everything going on. His lieutenants and even his wife would say to me, “Hiroji, please tell Cornell, don’t do this!” or “Do that!” Then one day he asked me to join the ICP staff. I said no. No matter what, I wanted to stay a photographer. I’m glad I did.

Mae Hong Son Province, near Burma, Thailand, 1997

CB: Did you see yourself at the time as a “concerned photographer”?

HK: I doubt it, but I want to give dignity to the people I photograph. I mainly used a 35 mm lens when I was working in black and white, in the early stages. I would photograph people, primarily, but the width of this lens means you also capture the social landscape around them, so it’s almost as if you’re telling this guy’s life, or fate. I think everybody has a great drama to talk about. Everybody. Even if people aren’t aware of it, or have no means to express it. But everyone reveals it, if only for a split second, in a facial expression. That says something about the kind of life they have gone through. I like to be so close to the person I am photographing that if he doesn’t like me, he can say so, or kick me. I like that distance—that emotional distance, physical distance. I am never unkind to my subjects. I don’t like brutal pictures.

Click here to find Hiroji Kubota Photographer on the Aperture Foundation website.

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Issue 19 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 19:

● A Publisher Profile preview from the latest issue of the The PhotoBook Review

● A report from Aperture magazine editor Michael Famighetti on Olso’s photography scene

● A conversation between RoseLee Goldberg and Roxana Marcoci from the upcoming “Performance Issue” of Aperture magazine

● An Aperture Beat on The Ballad Live, Aperture’s Fall Benefit

● An excerpt from Aperture Foundation’s executive director Chris Boot’s interview with Hiroji Kubota

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!

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Report from The Ballad: Live, Aperture’s Fall Benefit

On October 26, Aperture Foundation celebrated photography and Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency with live performances at the annual fall benefit.

Atmosphere. All photographs courtesy of media sponsor Patrick McMullan and Clint Spaulding

When Nan Goldin took the stage as the honoree of Aperture’s Fall Benefit on October 26, The Ballad: Live, she spoke about the beginnings of The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, first published by Aperture in 1985. The book’s publication, she said, was thanks to curator and writer Marvin Heiferman, who introduced her work to former Aperture publisher Michael Hoffman. “If it wasn’t for him the book would have never happened,” she said of Heiferman. “We spent six months with the pictures laid out on the floor, reediting and reediting and reediting.” The resulting book, a seminal work of documentary photography, was the focal point of Aperture Foundation’s annual fundraiser, which drew more than 800 guests and raised approximately $700,000 in support for publications, public programming, and educational initiatives. The event was co-chaired by Elizabeth Ann Kahane, Judy Glickman Lauder, and Anne Stark Locher. The evening, presented by U.S. Trust, centered on a live performance to accompany Goldin’s slideshow presentation of The Ballad, which depicts how her circle of friends and lovers lived during the late 1970s and early 80s. A performance by Laurie Anderson, Martha Wainwright, Pat Irwin, Samuel Rohrer, and The Bush Tetras scored the impactful, iconic images of a bygone New York City.

Laurie Anderson and Nan Goldin

Nan Goldin and Marvin Heiferman

Samuel Rohrer, Laurie Anderson, Pat Irwin, Martha Wainwright, Dee Pop, Pat Place, Cynthia Sley, and Julia Murphy

Laurie Anderson

Martha Wainwright

The influence of music on photography played into many other of the night’s festivities. The artnet-sponsored silent auction, “The Playlist,” gathered 100 photographs by artists such as Matthew Brandt, Olivia Bee, Hank Willis Thomas, and Larry Fink, inspired by songs from “Tiny Dancer” to “Blitzkrieg Bop.” A collection of songs about photographs, provided the soundtrack for DJ Bob Gruen, during the VIP preview, where guests mingled in Terminal 5 with prominent artists, gallerists, writers, and patrons in the world of photography. The benefit weekend had earlier kicked off with an array of VIP events, including an exclusive kick-off cocktail party at U.S. Trust, and studio visits with Letha Wilson, Hannah Whitaker, and Hank Willis Thomas.

Hank Willis Thomas and Chris McCall

Elizabeth Kahane, Leonard A. Lauder, and Judy Glickman

Lesley A. Martin and Celso Gonzalez-Falla

Lea Rizzo and Doug DuBois

Jim O’Shaughnessy, Aperture trustee Melissa O’Shaughnessy, Jamie Camhi, and Joshua Greenberg of U.S. Trust

Helen Nitkin, Joel Rosenkranz, Pamela Ellison, Herbert Kasper, and benefit co-chair Anne Stark

Aperture board chair Cathy Kaplan with Eve Reid

Sara Friedlander, vice-president and head of evening sale at Christie’s, presided over the live auction, which featured eleven works by artists such as Richard Learoyd, Stephen Shore, LaToya Ruby Frazier, and Nan Goldin. Guests enjoyed hors d’oeuvres and dinner by Pinch Food Design as well as tequila sunrises by Espolón Tequila and other libations by Anheuser-Busch, and Wölffer Estate Vineyard. A DJ set by Mick Rock closed out the night.

Jeff Hirsch with Michael and Cara Hejtmanek

Gina Nanni and Glenn O’Brien

Sara Friedlander

The 2015 Aperture Foundation Benefit Party and Auction was generously supported by: U.S. Trust (Presenting Sponsor), Foto Care, Anheuser-Busch, artnet, Christie’s, Espolón Tequila, Fine Art Frameworks, Hahnemuhle, LTI Lightside, Merissa Lombardo, Tekserve, Wölffer Estate Vineyard, and Patrick McMullan (media sponsor).

Mick Rock

Juliane Hiam and Gregory Crewdson

Chris Boot, Mary Ellen Goeke, and Tom Schiff

Aperture Benefit cochairs Judy Glickman Lauder and Elizabeth Ann Kahane

Additional party photos are available on patrickmcmullan.com

Tap here to learn more about Aperture Foundation’s fundraising events and Aperture Membership.

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Aperture Wins Lucie Award for Book Publisher of the Year for Tiny: Streetwise Revisited

By The Editors

Mary Ellen Mark, Tiny, 1983 All photographs © Mary Ellen Mark

Tiny holding Papas, Seattle, 1983

Tiny with her friends on Pike Street , 1983

Lillie and her rag doll on Pike Street, Seattle, 1983

White Junior and Justin, 1983

Erin (who previously went by her street name “Tiny”) pregnant with Daylon, Seattle, 1985

Erin and her mother Pat, along the road, Seattle, 1993

Rayshon and Erin on the couch, Seattle, 1999

Erin holding Kayteonna with Julian, E’Mari, and Ranaja on the couch, Seattle, 2004

On October 27, Aperture received the Lucie Award for book publisher of the year (classic) for Tiny: Streetwise Revisited, one of the last two books Mary Ellen Mark conceived and realized before her death. In 1983, Mark first photographed a group of homeless and troubled youth who made their way on the streets of Seattle as pimps, prostitutes, panhandlers, and small-time drug dealers. Streetwise was published in 1988, after the film of the same name by Mark’s husband, Martin Bell, premiered in 1985; it received critical acclaim for its portrayal of life on the streets and introduced us to “Tiny” (Erin Charles)—a thirteen-year-old prostitute with dreams of a horse farm, diamonds and furs, and a baby of her own.

After meeting Tiny thirty years ago, Mark continued to photographer her, creating what became one of Mark’s most significant and long-term projects. Today, almost forty-five, Tiny has ten children, the youngest five of whom are by her husband, Will, and her life has unfolded in unexpected ways. Texts in the book are drawn from conversations between Tiny and Mary Ellen Mark as well as Martin Bell. Streetwise Revisited is an examination of intergenerational poverty as well as homelessness, education, healthcare, addiction, mental health, and child welfare—in addition, the book gives insight into a relationship sustained between artist and subject for more than thirty years.

On November 4, at 6 p.m., Aperture will host A Toast to Mary Ellen Mark, a tribute to her life and work, at Aperture Gallery in New York. The slideshow above features work by Mark documenting Tiny, her friends, and her family from the 1980s into the present day.

Tap here to find Tiny: Streetwise Revisited on the Aperture Foundation website.

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Exhibition: Paul Graham on The Whiteness of the Whale at Pier 24 Photography

San Francisco’s Pier 24 Photography recently opened British photographer Paul Graham’s exhibition The Whiteness of the Whale, the venue’s first-ever presentation of a single artist. The show, which is on view until February 29, 2016, centers on three of the acclaimed photographer’s series, comprising a trilogy: American Night (1998–2002), a shimmer of possibility (2004–06), and The Present (2009–11). Through the more than sixty images on view, Graham approaches issues such as race, inequality, urban life, and poverty, while considering how the camera’s mechanics can be considered in relation to a subject. Allie Haeusslein, associate director at Pier 24, spoke with Graham about the exhibition and the thinking behind his work, his unique approach to installation, and reading Moby Dick.

The Whiteness of the Whale, 2015 (Installation View). Courtesy Pier 24 Photography, San Francisco

Allie Haeusslein: Your exhibition at Pier 24 Photography includes three bodies of work made in the United States—American Night (1998-2002), a shimmer of possibility (2004-06), and The Present (2009-11)—and is titled The Whiteness of the Whale, a reference to Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851). What was your experience reading that book?

Paul Graham: Well . . . I’m no lit graduate, but I think the book touches on many major subjects. Especially relevant here are issues of monomaniacal blindness, and how chasing one thing obsessively can drive to destruction. To be honest, I found it a hard read—inspired and crazy in places, insightful in others, racist and offensive in others again.

AH: Why did you decide to read Moby-Dick the first time?

PG: Because of American Night—the white images, the white whale, etc. We ended up using a quote from Moby-Dick on the back cover about seeing and whiteness. [“Pondering all this, the palsied universe lies before us a leper; and like wilful travellers in Lapland, who refuse to wear coloured and colouring glasses upon their eyes, so the wretched infidel gazes himself blind at the monumental white shroud that wraps all the prospect around him.”] It’s nice to return to that book now with The Whiteness of the Whale. Melville’s eponymous chapter is on the edge between genius and madness and that intrigues me.

Woman sitting on sidewalk, New York, from the series American Night, 2002

AH: So is American Night the first project that resulted from your serious focus on making work in the U.S.?

PG: If you’re talking about the first body of work, then, yes. But you don’t start out thinking, “I’m going to make a body of work about America.” You just start taking pictures and looking for truly interesting photographs. And that can take a month, or a year, or multiple years—to find some amazing, unusual, different image, which is the gateway through which you will pass into uncharted territory. In this case, I found these overexposed white pictures, which described a sort of invisibility of the dispossessed in this country. That was a fresh visualization worth pursuing—making near-invisible photographs.

AH: Where were you making these pictures?

PG: The locations in American Night were basically along the compass points across the United States. North was Detroit; South was Memphis and Atlanta; East was New York; West was greater Los Angeles. The pictures were geographically spread out so people didn’t think, “Oh, isn’t inner-city New York terrible, or Detroit . . .” It wasn’t about one location; it was about something pervasive across the country.

AH: You made these near-invisible photographs through deliberate overexposure. How did you decide to make pictures in this way?

PG: The idea principally came about during a visit to Memphis where a portrait from End of an Age (1996–98) was in a group show. One afternoon, I went to the cinema—lazy me—and when the movie finished, I walked out a side exit door that led straight into the bright afternoon sunlight. I stumbled around thinking, “What is going on here?” While completely blinded by the brightness, I noticed this slightly unhinged guy shouting to himself as he walked across the car park. And I realized how amazing this whole scene was. With my overwhelmed, burnt-out vision, this poor man appeared to be crossing a wasteland of whiteness, unnoticed by the world.

White SUV outside new house, California, from the series American Night, 2002

AH: There are also very dark photographs taken in cities and bright “Technicolor” images of large homes included in American Night. How do these three different kinds of pictures work together?

PG: The earliest pictures for American Night were the dark ones. In those pictures, I was working on the streets of New York like a classic street photographer, but didn’t have any purpose for them.

Two or three years later, I discovered the white pictures. And I realized that was the breakthrough. While I wanted the majority of the images to be these near-invisible white pictures, the dark pictures were important too, as a counterbalance, and I wanted to include the American Dream—presented as glorious full-color McMansions. I worked with these three types of imagery—white, dark, and “Technicolor”—looking for ways to integrate them. Ultimately, the white images predominate; they’re around seventy-five percent of the pictures.

New Orleans (Cajun Corner), from the series a shimmer of possibility, 2005

Allie Haeusslein: As you moved on to making pictures for a shimmer of possibility, did your working process and concerns feel like a departure from, or a continuation of, long-standing interests?

PG: In all my works, there is a similar engagement with the world through photography and the act of being in the world. shimmer also engages with the social fabric of the United States, so in that sense it’s not a departure. It is, however, structurally different with these extended, flowing sequences—the “visual haikus”—of images.

AH: You have linked the idea of the “visual haiku” to the short stories of Anton Chekhov. What is the connection?

PG: As I was reviewing scanned negatives on my computer screen, I started to notice these interesting flickering sequences. Even though I was still shooting analog, there was no traditional contact sheet. Instead, I was working with scans—digital files—of the work. As the pictures come on your screen, and you flick next, next, next, you get this stuttering sequence. The actual process of photographing, of seeing, is right there: the realization of the world as it arrives and departs on your screen.

As for Chekhov, well, he describes the most ordinary things in his short stories. There’s an openness to his simple descriptions of everyday moments. I realized these stories were connected to the sorts of pictures I was making—not nineteenth-century Russia, but today’s America—people waiting at bus stops, cutting grass, or scratching a lottery card in hopes of winning. It wasn’t so much an influence as a validation that this was a profound and worthwhile way of working, however humble it may seem.

San Francisco (Woman in Silver Jacket), from the series a shimmer of possibility, 2006

AH: As you designed the sequences in shimmer, did you always use consecutive images, or were there instances where you eliminated exposures from the final sequence?

PG: Some pictures are left out because there’s a pause or they’re repetitious. I’m not literally showing every frame from a five-second film. That’s not the idea.

In a haiku—there’s a moment where it breaks away and touches upon the weather or the season, like “blossoms,” just a word or two, hinting at something beyond the instant concern. I tried to integrate that breakaway into some of the sequences. For instance, in the pictures with the man cutting the grass, one frame looks at his brown minivan, in all its 1980s glory. In the pictures where I’m walking behind the couple carrying home their Pepsi, I glanced to the side at some children playing in the garden with plastic bags and took a picture of them. It’s a little glance aside from the main thread—to note the sunset or the rain falling or a child playing.

AH: Was the working process for The Present—a body of work made on the streets of New York—significantly different from when you were on the road making pictures for American Night or shimmer?

PG: I lead a weird artist’s life, so I don’t go to work in midtown or a regular job where I clock-in and clock-out. When I wander around Wall Street or Midtown and experience the city’s business life, it’s like another world. And one of the great things about New York is how you can travel on the subway for just fifteen or twenty minutes and find yourself somewhere else. When you come out through another hole in the ground, you are in Ghana or Israel or Pakistan because each different neighborhood has its own ethnicities and histories.

North Dakota (Moonrise at Garage), from the series a shimmer of possibility, 2005

AH: Many people are surprised to learn that the photographs in The Present were completely unstaged. Can you talk about the process of making those pictures?

PG: If you look at Winogrand’s contact sheets, he took five pictures of the same thing and then printed the one he thought was the most interesting. And that was great, of course. Likewise, I’m taking five pictures, but choosing two, or very occasionally three, to show this flowing consciousness of time, to get a different sense of the city, time, people, and life’s flow. It takes a different direction from Henri Cartier-Bresson or Winogrand, who worked to capture the singular instant, but it continues in that lineage and connects with their amazing work. In short, there’s an attempt to shift our awareness from a sort of spotlight to a floodlight.

AH: You draw our attention to the idea of seeing through repeated allusions to sight and blindness in The Present. Was that something you noticed during the editing process—that these subjects appeared in the work?

PG: It’s in American Night as well. The first and last pictures in the sequence of dark pictures in New York are of a blinded man and a woman whose eye is covered over with gauze. In The Present there are quite a few pictures of blind people with white sticks in the city. I’ve always been interested in notions of sight, seeing, and blindness. And American Night is primarily about blindness—willful blindness or psychological blindness.

The Whiteness of the Whale, 2015 (Installation View)

AH: The installation of your work typically differs significantly from traditional modes of presenting photographs, namely the ubiquitous single line on the wall. How did you develop this unconventional approach to installation?

PG: I think I learned how to install from working on books and figuring out how to lay them out in more exciting ways. In the 1980s, I laid out my publications in a fairly classical fashion. I then started working with Scalo and their editors in the 1990s. But those books were the Scalo look, rather than my look. From then on, especially with the advent of Adobe’s InDesign program, I managed layouts myself—with American Night, then with shimmer, where we produced a twelve-volume set, and then The Present, with its multiple gatefolds.

I realized I could take what I had learned in book layout and apply it to the wall—high, low, sizes floating around, no grid. You can transfer that approach to the wall and it works very well, using gallery corners in the same way one might use the edge of a page, or you can hang high on the wall or low on the wall in the same way as on a page. But slowly, my approach to installation became its own thing, related but different.

AH: Do you think anything about your relationship to American politics is reflected in the photographs you have made in this country?

PG: Most photographers worth their salt rely on empathy and concern for their fellow citizens on this planet, rather than on political ideology. Inevitably, that empathic connection with other human beings leads one to certain sympathies. But I’m certainly not a spokesperson or a mouthpiece for the Democrats or Socialism or anything like that.

AH: You did three bodies of work in Britain, and now there are three bodies of work you’ve done in the United States. Is there something about this three-part organization that suits the way you made work in these two places?

Paul Graham: I feel it’s just a coincidence. Though, with American Night, shimmer, and The Present, there is a connection to the three principal controls of the camera—aperture, shutter, and focus . . .

New Orleans (Woman Eating), from the series a shimmer of possibility, 2005

AH: At what point did you become conscious of the fact these three bodies of work touch on the three controls of the camera?

PG: It occurred to me toward the end of shimmer. I also realized by using very shallow focus on the street in The Present that I could deal with specific individuals in terms of one’s awareness very effectively. And that would neatly encompass all three respects. Of course, the three camera controls—shutter, aperture, and focus—are really not that interesting in themselves. I mean—so what? But when you start to think of them in terms of the shutter controlling time, the aperture adjusting light, and the focus directing our attention or consciousness, they become a lot more powerful and fertile: time, light, consciousness.

Art often does that—it speaks both of itself and of the stuff it is made of. I like that about this work. It speaks about America, about seeing, and about photography. That makes me happy.

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