Aperture's Blog, page 147

August Sander: Prints for the Aperture Monograph, Printed by His Son Gunther Sander

August Sander’s profound influence on the history of photography is impossible to overstate. But, in the mid-1970s, when Aperture published a volume of his work, only a handful of books on the German photographer’s work were in print. Exhibited in New York for the first time, the prints made by Sander’s son, Gunther, for the Aperture monograph are the subject of an exhibition at New York’s Deborah Bell Photographs, which features some of the most iconic portraits of the twentieth century.

This article originally appeared in Issue 18 of the Aperture Photography App. 

By Brendan Wattenberg

Pages from August Sander: the Aperture History of Photography Series (1977). Photograph by Cassidy Paul.

In 1977, Aperture published a slim volume of photographs by August Sander, for the seventh entry in the Aperture History of Photography Series. With a selection of forty-three portraits from the German photographer’s expansive, early twentieth-century study of German society, the Aperture book was then one of the few available introductions to Sander’s work. At the time, his son Gunther Sander had prepared a set of prints for the bookplates, following his father’s technique. The younger Sander deposited the prints in Cologne with Könemann, the publisher of the German edition, and they were soon forgotten. More than thirty years later, after their discovery in a private collection earlier this year, Gunther Sander’s prints are now the subject of a jewel-box exhibition at Deborah Bell Photographs in New York.

Installation view of August Sander: Prints for the Aperture Monograph, Printed by His Son Gunther Sander. Courtesy Deborah Bell Photographs.

August Sander was born in 1876 in Herdorf, a mining region near Cologne. In his youth, as an apprentice to a foreman, Sander was chosen to assist a landscape photographer contracted by a local mine. He soon became fascinated by photography. After a stint in the army, he worked for a photographer in Linz, Austria, and later bought the studio. By 1910, having returned to Cologne, Sander began cycling around the rural lands of the Westerwald to make portraits of local farmers and tradespeople. These images, the first entries into Sander’s prolific catalogue of German types, display the clarity and precision that would later become the hallmarks of New Objectivity, a Weimar-era artistic response to the chaos of World War I.

August Sander, Confirmation Candidate, Westerwald, 1911. All following photographs courtesy Galerie Julian Sander / Die Photographische Sammlung / SK Stiftung Kultur – August Sander Archiv, Cologne

Prior to Aperture’s monograph, the primary book on Sander’s portraiture was Antlitz der Zeit (“Face of Our Time”), published in 1929 by Transmere Verlag in Munich. Sander intended the sixty images of Antlitz der Zeit to be a preview of his anticipated multivolume series, which would divide his photographs of German citizens into seven major categories and numerous subgroups. In contrast to Antlitz der Zeit, which is sequenced according to the structure of Sander’s portfolios—beginning with the farmer, ascending through the classes and professions, and concluding with the “last people,” the destitute and the dying—the Aperture book contains a populist, illustrative combination of memorable portraits. Many images are masterpieces, ranking among the most iconic photographs in the history of the medium.

The exhibition at Deborah Bell Photographs presents all forty-three prints in the same order as in the Aperture book, elegantly framed and set in the window-mats of pebbled white paper favored by Sander. The modestly scaled images and the narrow salon of the gallery belie the arresting power of the portraits, which collectively provoke a peerless, insatiable curiosity. Seeking to portray every type of German citizen with the same amount of concentration, Sander provided an immensely detailed transcription of German life, from the clothing and hairstyles of the time, to the physiognomy that characterized the conditions of a subject’s working life.

August Sander, Bicyclists, Cologne, 1924.

Sander’s lucid approach no doubt owed to his consistent use of glass plate negatives, which allowed for extreme detail. For the expert viewer acquainted with the sociology and material culture of early twentieth century Germany, the images contain a wealth of information to be endlessly scrutinized. The painters, sculptors, musicians, and prominent intellectuals to be filed under “Trades, Classes and Professions” were often identified in later publications on Sander, which opens up the possibility of reading deeply into their work. But, for the unnamed peasants, clergymen, high school students, athletes, and homeless figures, who appear as living sculptures, what can we possibly learn about their inner lives? Though New Objectivity photography aspired to transparency without adornment, Sander’s portraits protect as much as they reveal. Like the comparative industrial studies by Bernd and Hilla Becher, who referred to New Objectivity as a model for their systematic typologies, Sander never goes out of style.

Circus People, Düren, 1930

The exhibition, which follows Gerd Sander’s selection, is notable for its differences from the sequence Sander originally chose for Antlitz der Zeit. The indelible classics, Young Farmers (1914) and Boxers (1929), are there, but so is Circus People, Düren (1930), an extraordinary multiracial portrait of seven performers listening to a gramophone, which wasn’t included in Antlitz der Zeit. By the mid-1930s, the Nazi party had declared Sander’s project antisocial, halting sales of the book and destroying the printing plates, ostensibly in retaliation for the resistance politics of Sander’s son, Erich. In a portrait such as Circus People, it’s easy to see how Sander’s democratic vision of Germany, which brought all types into its genealogy, implicitly defied the idealized Aryan body of Third Reich propaganda.

Working Students, Cologne, 1926 (Sander’s son Erich is at far left.)

For Working Students, Cologne (1926), one of the final images of the exhibition and the Aperture book, Sander photographed his son Erich together with three young men. With its comparative approach, and its voluminous yet subtle range of poses and facial expressions, Working Students is a precedent for Rineke Dijkstra’s portraits of adolescents, Nicholas Nixon’s multi-decade series The Brown Sisters, and Thomas Ruff’s untitled 1980s portraits of artists and friends at the Kunstacademie Düsseldorf. The wake of Sander’s influence is impossible to measure. Sander’s subjects are types and originals, individual and universal. “The portrait is your mirror,” Sander told his grandson, Gerd. “It’s you.”

Brendan Wattenberg is managing editor of Aperture magazine. 

August Sander: Prints for the Aperture Monograph, Printed by His Son Gunther Sander is on view at Deborah Bell Photographs, New York, through October 31.

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7 Exhibitions to See in October

By Freddy Martinez

The Atlas Group/ Walid Raad, Hostage: The Bachar tapes (English version), 2001; Video (color, sound), 16:17 min, The Museum of Modern Art, New York. © 2015 Walid Raad

Walid Raad at the Museum of Modern Art (through January 31):

The Museum of Modern Art is staging the first comprehensive American survey of the Lebanese artist Walid Raad. The displayed work includes photography, film, sculpture and performance made during last twenty-five years for two long-term projects The Atlas Group and Scratching on things I could disavow. The exhibition focuses on Waad’s use of fiction and narrative, while also exploring the political tensions of the Middle East. The photographs imagine as much as they inform. They are both poetic retellings of history and troubling documents of conflict.

Still from Dziga Vertov, Man with a Movie Camera, 1929, black-and-white film, 68 min. Image provided by Deutsche Kinemathek

The Power of Pictures at the Jewish Museum (through February 7):

It’s no secret that photography has an ugly, propagandistic side: the camera was even once declared just as important as the gun for “class struggle” by Lenin. And, in Russia, from the time after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 through the 1930s, artists worked for and caused great social change. The Power of Pictures, on view at the Jewish Museum, explores how thirteen Soviet photographers as well as ten filmmakers from this period of history used photographs to spread Communist ideologies. In addition to the photographs and cinematic works, film posters, vintage books, and newspapers also showcase examples of art working in hand with politics.

Yu Lik Wai: It’s A Bright Guilty World at WhiteBox gallery (through November 8):

The Hong Kong-born, Beijing-based artist Yu Lik Wai has his first solo U.S. exhibition at Whitebox gallery. A renowned filmmaker and cinematographer, Wai is known for depicting scenes of contemporary urban life in China, often of existential despair. His images of empty built environments, already symbolic of neglect, signal alienation more absurdly when shot in flourishes of color. Alongside his richly chromatic photographs, a three-channel video holographic installation entitled Flux is also on view.

Ishiuchi Miyako, 1·9·4·7 #61, 1988 – 1989; Courtesy of The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles © Ishiuchi Miyako

Ishiuchi Miyako: Postwar Shadows at J. Paul Getty Museum (through February 21):

Ishiuchi Miyako, interviewed in this fall’s  “Interview Issue” of Aperture magazine, has a solo exhibition of photographs at the J. Paul Getty Museum, in Los Angeles. With the last forty years, Ishiuchi Miyako: Postwar Shadows spans nearly Miyako’s entire career. From her stunning early work through to her most recent series, “???/hiroshima,” the retrospective presents thirty-eight photographs that give a satisfying taste of her evocative and haunting output.

Kadir van Lohuizen, Via PanAm, Panama; © Kadir van Lohuizen

Via PanAm at the Bronx Documentary Center (through December 13):

After stops in Chile, Costa Rica, and Luxembourg, the award-winning exhibition Via PanAm visits New York at the Bronx Documentary Center. Combining audio-visual installations and photographs, the exhibition showcases the photographer Kadir van Lohuizen’s journey from southernmost Chile to the top of Alaska, as he documents stories of historic and contemporary migration to the United States. Shot with personal intimacy, the videos and photographs bluntly depict the 40, 000 kilometer path to reflect the complex stories behind migration.

Graciela Iturbide, Cementerio / Cemetery, Juchitán, Oaxaca, 1988; Courtesy of Throckmorton Fine Art © Graciela Iturbide.

Women Pioneers: Mexican Photography I at Throckmorton Fine Art (through November 14):

The first gallery to exhibit artwork by Frida Kahlo anywhere in Mexico was run by Lola Álavarez Bravo. Years later it was Graciela Iturbide who elevated Mexican photography to the top of the world. Both women were photographers in a field dominated by men.Women Pioneers:  Mexican Photography I, on view at Throckmorton Fine Art, presents their work, as well as seven other women working in Mexico, from the early 20th century to today, including Tina Modotti, Kati Horna, and contemporary artists such as Cristina Kahlo. Together the exhibition highlights the storytelling, humanity, and spirit present in the work of these trailblazing women.

Andy Goldsworthy, Kelp thrown into a grey, overcast sky, Drakes Beach, California, 14 July 2013; Courtesy of Galerie Lelong, New York © Andy Goldsworthy

Andy Goldsworthy: Leaning into the Wind at Galerie Lelong (through December 5):

Andy Goldsworthy will have his largest exhibition of work to date at Galerie Lelong. The exhibition of photography and films includes recent work made in the last three years, some never before seen, and vintage work made in the 70s and 80s. Uninterested in outcome or planning, Goldsworthy, in both his new and early work, shows his body in various states of action—whether throwing, spitting, or jumping—to engage the photographic frame with movement and energy.

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Issue 18 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 18:

● An interview with Rosalind Fox Solomon from “The Interview Issue” of Aperture magazine

● A report on an exhibition of work by August Sander

● An interview with Paul Graham

● An excerpt from Jimmy DeSana’s Suburban

● A portfolio from Tiny: Streetwise Revisited

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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Wolfgang Tillmans at David Zwirner

By Gabriel H. Sanchez

Wolfgang Tillmans, Installation view from the 2015 solo exhibition PCR at David Zwirner, New York. All photographs courtesy David Zwirner, New York

 

PCR, Wolfgang Tillmans’s first exhibition with David Zwirner Gallery, captures a sensibility fixed on examining the pliability and immediacy of a photographic document. Its title is taken from a procedure in molecular biology called “polymerase chain reaction,” which in a manner similar to a photographic process is capable of amplifying a single strand of DNA into millions of identical copies. The show taps into themes Tillmans has explored since the early 1990s–vibrant images of bustling nightclubs, casual snapshots of friends, the obscurity of his surroundings, and the ephemeral moments only a photograph is capable of documenting– rendered still with a swift, voyeuristic perspective. Among these images are abstractions and photograms from his Table Works, (2005-ongoing), and Silver series, (1998-ongoing), that also demonstrate how his practice has evolved over the years to encompass a more self-referential approach to his photography.

 

Wolfgang Tillmans, Installation view from the 2015 solo exhibition PCR at David Zwirner, New York.

Through both of Zwirner’s gallery spaces, seemingly disparate photographic elements of his output­–abstractions, personal snapshots, sculptural gestures, and even magazine cutouts–are hung in Tillmans’s recognizable and erratic style across the gallery walls. The manner in which they are shown invites viewers to contemplate images as objects in their own right, a reoccurring theme in Tillmans’s work that has become increasingly poignant as more and more of today’s digital images lack any physical form at all. In the same way that digital images now roam today’s social web without any context or intention, Tillmans creates a mosaic of subject matter­ without any form of observable reason. For instance, a forceful and sensual encounter with a lover in arms and legs, 2014, receives the same treatment and reverence as a seemingly benign encounter with weeds budding from between cracks in the sidewalk in Weed, 2014.

 

arms and legs, 2014

Among the over one hundred works on view, we also find several unexpected curiosities that demonstrate how Tillmans has continued to broaden his practice. A new multipart sculpture titled, I refuse to be your enemy, 2015, takes an ultra-reductive approach in acknowledging the physical nature of photography. The installation consists of eight wooden tables with neatly laid rows of blank sheets of paper laid on top: here, Tillmans bring our focus to the slight differences of the papers’ varying size, color, and opacity. One could read each of these sheets of paper as the shell of an image, the physical form left behind as photographs are digitalized and continue to transcend their material form.

Wolfgang Tillmans, Installation view of Instrument, 2015

In a darkened room of the gallery, a new multi-channel video called Instrument, 2015, shows a man a dancing in a repetitive ritualistic fashion, wearing nothing but pair of briefs. The right channel of this nearly six-minute film reveals the man’s bouncing shadow reflecting on an adjacent wall within the video. For audio, Tillmans has put the repetitive tapping of the man’s feet though a digital feedback-loop, continuously building on itself until it becomes a droning dance track. The effect reflects the cyclical, and at times willfully repetitive, nature of Tillmans’s presentation. With that, each channel appears gritty and framed with minimal production value, which once again steers towards a sensibility fixated on documenting reality, or at least what appears to be real.

Adalbert Garden, 2014

From this video to the cascade of images throughout the gallery, it can be difficult not to feel completely overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of images–photographs that were once invariably chained to their context stripped of meaning. But with that, Tillmans reassess the value of his subjects. A picture of budding sprouts from his garden, is allowed the same attention as a political protest against Boko Haram in Berlin; while still lifes of fruit and foliage are valued with the same respect given to the dirty laundry shown in Wäscheberg, 2012. Several pictures are found replicated in various sizes in the gallery, as if balancing the scales to any hierarchies that might develop. With that, PCR illustrates the complex networks of images on today’s Internet, our unprecedented documentation of the world around us, and our concession to forfeit context in favor of distribution.

PCR is on view at David Zwirner through October 24.

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The Lives of Others

A look at how some recent photobooks, featuring African subjects, rehash pejorative tropes. This article first appeared in Issue 17 of the Aperture Photography App.

By Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa

The cover of Jan Hoek’s New Ways of Photographing the New Masai (Art Paper Editions, 2014)

Dutch photographer Jan Hoek’s New Ways of Photographing the New Masai (Art Paper Editions, 2014) has the appearance of a handwritten school notebook. Its spine and cover are adorned with a mishmash of spidery letters that spell out the title in an irregular and child-like script. The book scarcely contains any writing to contextualize the project and define for readers what is meant by “old” versus “new” ways of photographing this traditionally semi-nomadic tribe of Kenyan people, save for a very small image of leaping tribesmen that appears on the book’s first page. That image is uncredited, and appears to be a fairly conventional travel photograph in which the Masai are photographed jumping skyward in traditional red costume while grinning for the lens. Hoek’s website offers some more information:

“The Masais are always photographed the same: jumping in nature while wearing traditional outfits and jewellery. Almost like it is a group of animals. But more and more Masai start to live in towns and buy their first Nikes and put mobile phones in their stretched ears. Together with seven urban Masai I tried to find a new way to photograph the new Masai.”

Hoek’s book contains a series of portraits of seven Masai tribespeople, made according to what we are told are their preferences as to how to be pictured:

Filemon: “Doesn’t like: To be photographed naked.” Seuri: “Doesn’t like: To be photographed naked.” Mike: “Likes: Masais [to be] photographed in a modern way.”

We later discover only six are true Masai tribesmen, and that the seventh individual falsified his identity. His portraits are still included but appear struck through with thin black lines, so that his deception is theatrically punished, while the competence of whomever he deceived is left excluded from the record, along with the nature of the relationships and intentions that led Hoek to make this book.

Pages from New Ways of Photographing the New Masai

The provenance of these pictures; the very reason for their having been made at all; the manner of their making; the nature of the “collaborative” relationship with the photographer; the necessity that Westerners see Masai tribesmen according to Hoek’s “new way”—none of these crucial but unstated questions—are deemed worthy of an answer. Hoek’s “New Masai” are left as protagonists and independent actors, reaching out to us (apparently) at their own behest, and ostensibly in the manner of their own choosing. The specific hopes, desires, and experiences of seven people are reduced to an itemized list that continually restates their desire not to be forced to strip naked for the delectation of a Western lens. In this way, these individuals are imagined within the confines of their role as objects for visual representation. Their lives as people are pared back to the narrow parameters of how they choose to live as images.

These seven people are left to respond to the unstated prerogatives of an artist whose virtual silence within the written content of the book confers on them responsibility for their unskilled appearance. They are rendered in poorly lit, poorly exposed, technically mediocre images, which only succeed in demonstrating their inexpert grasp of new technology. The only choices declared in the book are those of the individuals who are the subjects of images credited to Hoek as the photographer. Thus, in “addressing us” through a premise constructed so that Hoek might show his new way of seeing black bodies, these individuals take up the centuries-old mantle of the colonial subject responding to white Western preoccupations. And as in so much orientalist imagery, their bodies exist purely to serve.

Pages from New Ways of Photographing the New Masai

There has latterly been a recurrence of pejorative photography of the black body in contemporary photobooks. Such work operates on the implicit premise of the primitivism of the Other, according to which blackness and black bodies are defined by a rudimentary existence in a premodern, mystical world. Such work depends upon this assumption in order to celebrate the vibrancy of African culture, the athleticism of the black body, or to delight in the richness and beauty of black skin. In this way, the black Other serves to alleviate the complexities of modern Western life, by offering an anachronistic alternative to white Western identity.

New Ways of Photographing the New Masai is characteristic of this growing corpus of photographs that portray the black body as “a socius without writing or the Word, history or cultural complexity,” as Hal Foster wrote in his 1985 essay “The ‘Primitive’ Unconscious of Modern Art, or White Skin, Black Masks.” Foster’s essay title underscores the way in which blackness serves as a theatrical mask that conceals a troubled white identity. His essay critiqued the decontextualization necessary to argue for an affinity between ritual tribal objects and the products of modernist art, and argued that the “primitive” is instead made to serve as a phase in the development of properly Western traditions. The primitive serves as a marker of the antiquated, the uncivilized—as a point of abjection against which Western modernity can be mapped and celebrated. Recent instances of such primitivism in contemporary photography tend to depend on the unstated clause of white Western intellectual superiority, as it is contrasted with the inherently retrograde sensuality of the black body. Such work often stresses the earthly, folkloric, and animalistic as inherent virtues of the black body and its attendant “culture,” although any contextualization of such culture is habitually excluded.

Pages from Viviane Sassen’s Pikin Slee (Prestel, 2014)

These tropes are also apparent in the work of Dutch photographer Viviane Sassen, in books such as Flamboya (contrasto, 2009), Parasomnia (Prestel, 2011), and in her latest Pikin Slee (Prestel, 2014). Made at various points in Africa and across the African diaspora, the black body is repeatedly rendered as an anachronistic contrast to Western norms, whether these are intimated by architecture, by fashion, or by other commonplace commercial goods. Sassen’s photographs are characterized by the solubility of blackness into shadow, or by its vivid difference from garish color. Her portraits incessantly emphasize the black body’s pliability and malleability in a series of strange gestures of physical contortion. In her photographs, the black body is mute, dark, gestural, and inanimate: an object made up exclusively of deep brown and black contours, pools of impenetrable shade, counterpointed by vibrant dollar-store goods, lurid paint, or the patterned effects of light and shadow.

Pages from Pikin Slee

In photographs such as Anansi (2007) or Ivy (2010), supine black bodies fuse together into sculptural oddities that are born out of a soluble relationship to the earth. And yet a certain ironic dissonance is produced by the whiteness of a shirt in shadow, or the presence of England’s Three Lions on a pair of football shorts. The antinomies of blackness and whiteness, of the earthly and the intellectual, the savage and the savior, are here overt structuring elements of the image. But such aesthetic tensions as these contrasts evoke do not trouble a long history of ethnic degradation; they reinforce it as a further instance of the theatrical acquiescence we have come to expect from subservient, primitive blacks.

Pages from Pikin Slee

Sassen’s black bodies are very frequently abstracted into postures that intimate strange bodily rituals, invoking a kind of voodoo ergonomics of spontaneous contortion, and frequently displaying acts of apparently voluntary self-effacement. They are cast as primitives, denuded of any locally specific cultural history. Sassen herself has said in an interview with Planet magazine in 2010:

“I never intend to dismantle misconceptions of the ethnic ‘Other,’ though I like to play with these preconceived ideas people in the West have. I show them things they think they know or they don’t understand (like the paint), and in that way [my photographs] indirectly provoke questions about our Western view of the ethnic ‘Other,’ which is often a very limited view.”

Pages from Pikin Slee

It is apparent from the figurative language of Sassen’s images that she plainly does not seek to “dismantle misconceptions” of the “ethnic Other,” but rather to use the black body as one among many manageable objects in a series of portraits perhaps better understood as still lifes. However, it is extraordinarily difficult to avoid the conclusion that her photographs regurgitate a limited view of alterity, which frames the black body as an object and not as an individual.

Pages from Cristina de Middel’s The Afronauts (self-published, 2012)

Cristina de Middel’s The Afronauts (self-published, 2012) set out to lament “the fact that nobody believes that Africa will ever reach the moon,” by re-staging images derived partly from documents she discovered recording an aborted attempt to launch a Zambian space program in 1964. De Middel’s project was photographed in Spain following her discovery, in 2009, of the story of Edward Makuka Nkoloso, founder and sole member of Zambia’s National Academy of Science, Space Research, and Philosophy. His goal was to launch a woman, two cats, and a missionary to the moon, and then on to Mars.

De Middel’s book relates an approximate version of this story from elements that are sometimes factual but often fictitious, incorporating diagrams and news stories alongside images of “afronauts” in garishly patterned spacesuit costumes sewn by her grandmother. This space program is recreated in the midst of a wild landscape that lacks any traces of aeronautical infrastructure, but contains a strangely pliant elephant. While the photographs delight in a farcical retelling, De Middel’s description for the book on Amazon.com argues that this work contains a “subtle critique” of “our position towards the whole continent and our prejudices.”

Pages from The Afronauts

Ostensibly this is a story about the unbridled ambitions of African people, and about the injustice of their relative lack of freedom in achieving them. The absurd and implausible attempt at space flight depicted in the work underscores a profound disjuncture between Africa and the West. The riches of the slave trade provided the capital for the Industrial Revolution, without which space flight would have remained a pipe dream. The farcical tenor of the The Afronauts acts as a comic reprieve and disguises the formative role of exploitation in the production of poverty on one continent, and unbridled freedom on another.

If the past decade of extraordinary photographic production has demonstrated any one thing in the arts, surely it is the apparently inexhaustible adaptability of the photographic book to contextualize and address the specificity of an artist’s own intentions? In the photobook we have a form capable of embodying, rather than vaguely approximating, the vision of those artists who seek to use it. The recurrence of orientalist work that deals with race and its representation in such a willfully tenuous fashion suggests the spectacle of the primitive is resurgent in contemporary visual culture. This recurrence stands at odds with other meaningful advances in the general discussion around race and politics, but it also highlights the deeply contested and complex nature of the issues at hand. Just as modernity is inseparable from colonial history, so too is the abjection of “primitive” blackness inseparable from white privilege. We would do well to question the contextualization of race in such photographic work, so that we might more clearly see the white skin lurking beneath its black masks.

Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa is a photographer, writer, and editor of The Great Leap Sideways where portions of this essay originally appeared. He was an artist-in-residence at Light Work in 2015; has contributed essays to catalogues and monographs by Vanessa Winship, George Georgiou, and Paul Graham; and is a faculty member in the photography department at Purchase College, SUNY.

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Hilla Becher (1934–2015)

Portrait of Bernd and Hilla Becher, 1985. Courtesy of Sonnabend Gallery

By Brian Wallis

When Hilla Becher appeared on stage at the Paris Photo Platform in 2012, the event was something like a coronation. With her silver-bobbed hair and infectious intelligence, she deftly answered questions in precise English, and left to a standing ovation. The public lecture accompanied two exhibitions of work that she and her husband Bernd Becher, who died in 2007, had produced over the past half-century. Her rare public appearance and the twin exhibitions were a reminder of the extraordinary public regard for the Bechers and of their broad impact on postwar art and photography. For this reason, the death on October 10, 2015 of Hilla Becher at age 81 felt not only like a profound loss but also like an abrupt end to a unique way of seeing the world.

Hilla Wobeser was born in 1934 in Potsdam, in what was later East Germany. From the beginning, she was immersed in photography. Her mother was a photographer, as was her uncle, who left a young Hilla his darkroom. After moving to Berlin, Hilla enrolled at Lette-Verein, the technical design school where her mother had also studied. By then she was skilled in operating heavy glass-plate cameras, and in 1951 she secured an apprenticeship with the conservative Berlin photographer Walter Eichgrun. Later, while working in advertising photography in Düsseldorf in 1957, Hilla met Bernd Becher, who was then a student at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. The following year, Hilla also enrolled in the Kunstakademie and they began working together. They married in 1961.

In 1957, Bernd and Hilla Becher launched a campaign to document the anonymous and often-disused manufacturing and domestic buildings they encountered in the abandoned wasteland of postindustrial Europe. Starting with the mining and steel-producing region around Siegen, Bernd’s hometown, and radiating out through the Ruhr Valley, the Bechers discovered an extraordinary proliferation of unique, anonymously designed vernacular structures in plain sight. In the coal-mining regions of England, France, Belgium, Italy, and ultimately the United States, the Bechers later photographed an encyclopedic range of industrial architectural forms, taking care to honor the generic categories while recording the subtle differences and the often idiosyncratic variations invented by local builders. In 1966 alone, the Bechers traveled for six months through England and Wales, visiting coal mining regions and industrial revolution relics around Manchester, Sheffield, and Nottingham. They were industrial archeologists, meticulously recording blast furnaces, lime kilns, cooling towers, water towers, gasometers, silos, factory buildings, timber-frame houses, pit winding towers, and coal tipples.

Bernd and Hilla Becher, Typology of Slate and Framework Houses (diptych), 2011 © Bernd and Hilla Becher. Courtesy Sonnabend Gallery

Working methodically, the itinerant Bechers followed a very deliberate practice depicting these architectural forms and complexes, producing sequences of separate photographs that looked at individual structures from every side, as well the surrounding natural and manmade contexts, though never showing workers or any other people. They derived inspiration from the precisionist approach of the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) photographers August Sander, Karl Blossfeldt, and Albert Renger-Patzch of the 1920s, and utilizing a bulky large-format camera on a tripod, the Bechers photographed the specific character of each example of a type of construction as scientifically as possible. Every building was framed in exactly the same way: frontally, in isolation, from a reasonable distance, against a gray overcast sky.

Relating similar buildings according to their structural forms and original purposes, the Bechers created a vast taxonomy of modern architectural types facing eradication. “We didn’t really see it as artists, we saw it as something like natural history,” Hilla Becher noted in 2012. “So we also used the methods of natural history books, like comparing things, having the same species in different versions.” The Bechers exhibited these images in large, strictly ordered grids of nine, twelve, or sixteen photographs of nearly identical structures. They called these grids “typologies.” “The Typology is nothing but comparing and giving it a shape, giving it some sort of possibility to be looked at,” Hilla Becher said. “Otherwise, it would just be heaps of paper.” For the Bechers, these typologies were conceptual categories based on the general ideas used to sort a large body of information. For the rest of the world, the typologies were a revelation. Their structuralist approach and their interest in ordered sets and serial presentations were unusual in photography at the time; as a consequence, the Bechers often presented their work elsewhere, in austere Conceptual Art publications and exhibitions rather than the contexts of photography or architecture.

Bernd and Hilla Becher, New York Water Towers, 2003, © Bernd and Hilla Becher. Courtesy of Sonnabend Gallery.

Among the first to recognize the artistic significance of these typologies was American Minimal artist Carl Andre, who wrote in Artforum in 1972: “A partial catalogue of the typological subjects of Bernd and Hilla Becher includes: structures with the same function (all water towers); structures with the same function, but with different shapes (spherical, cylindrical, and conical water towers); structures with the same function and shape, but built with different materials (steel, cement, wood, brick, or some combination, such as wood and steel); structures with the same function, shape, and materials; comparative perspective views of ore and coal preparation plants; comparative frontal views of pithead towers; comparative and perspective views of pithead towers, high tension electrical pylons, blast furnaces, and factory buildings.” Andre’s straightforward listing conformed to his own rejection of narrative and style and his preference for neutral systemic or serial practices. Such an approach had long been advocated by the Bechers, who in 1970 called their first book on vernacular architecture Anonymous Sculptures and who eagerly participated in Conceptual and Minimal Art exhibitions. The photographs by the Bechers, and the artists surrounding them, were critical statements, which in part challenged the normative ideals of the postindustrial American culture of the 1960s and its emphasis on bland repetition and mechanical reproducibility.

Today, the influence of the Bechers is everywhere: in the widespread contemporary tendency toward serial documentary photography and in many artists’ interest in creating typologies or archival sequences of photographs. And, of course, they mentored a generation of students—the so-called Becher School—at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf from 1976 to 1996. Among the students who assimilated the Bechers’ approach but often produced very different, large-scale color photographs in series were Andreas Gursky, Thomas Ruff, Thomas Struth, Candida Höfer, Caio Resiewitz, and Elger Esser. Yet, despite this cadre of followers and the many accolades at Paris Photo and elsewhere, Bernd and Hilla Becher were outliers. They were uninterested in prevailing trends in art and photography, but offered instead a model for disciplined living and seeing. For five decades they pursued their singular project with astonishing tenacity and rigor, adhering to two simple guidelines: to record with exacting fidelity specific overlooked elements of everyday life and to organize that potentially ephemeral information into a form that creates new meaning. In essence, fleeting time was their subject, and photography allowed them to rescue sights that time has by now eradicated. In their elegant typologies, the blueprint of their attitude toward life endures.

Brian Wallis is the former Director of Exhibitions and Chief Curator of the International Center of Photography in New York.

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Richard Misrach on Border Cantos

In early 2016, Aperture will release the latest addition to Richard Misrach’s ongoing Desert Cantos series: an examination of the U.S.–Mexico border that is both document and interpretation, a collaborative undertaking with composer Guillermo Galindo. Misrach stopped by Aperture to finalize critical details of the book.

Richard Misrach visits the Aperture offices for a presentation of work that will appear in Border Cantos. Photograph by Max Mikulecky.

After his presentation, Misrach held a book signing at Aperture Gallery. Photograph by Max Mikelucky.

Misrach’s studio serves as a staging ground for image grids, Galindo’s instruments, and other works in process, April 2015

Richard Misrach, in his studio, showcases a draft of one of Guillermo Galindo’s graphic scores, April 2015

A grid of Misrach’s photographs of artifacts found along the U.S.-Mexico border, and in the foreground, one of Galindo’s instruments created from bullet casings found at Border Patrol shooting ranges, April 2015

Border Cantos in raw dummy form. The first dummy initially filled three sketchbooks, April 2015.

Reviewing first proofs of Border Cantos at Aperture with production expert, Matt Harvey, September 2015

By the Editors

In the early days of a presidential campaign in which immigration is a heated issue, and on the heels of Pope Francis’s U.S. visit in September—when he urged Congress to show compassion toward those who “travel north in search of a better life,”—Richard Misrach visited the Aperture Foundation to scrutinize the design and production details for his forthcoming book, Border Cantos. This project focuses on the U.S.–Mexico border and has been developed over several years in close collaboration with the Mexican American composer Guillermo Galindo. In between looking at color proofs and signing copies of his last Aperture publication, The Mysterious Opacity of Other Beings, Misrach gave a presentation in which he walked the Aperture staff through the layout of the book-in-progress. The book will accompany a traveling exhibition of the work, opening at the San Jose Museum of Art in February 2016. The exhibition will also include handcrafted instruments created by Galindo out of discarded materials Misrach collected from the border.

Since 1979, Misrach has worked on his Desert Cantos series, exploring unseen aspects of the American West, specifically its vast deserts. His Border Cantos project specifically focuses on the narrow strip of land where hundreds of people die each year attempting to cross into the U.S. from Mexico, which Misrach called “a huge humanitarian disaster every day.” He explained how most of what he saw was surprising and goes mostly unreported: unexplained scarecrow-like sculptures made in the desert, water stations set up by humanitarian-aid groups, ephemera left strewn across the desert during various crossings. Misrach began to collaborate with Galindo to create a score for a series of compositions intended to be performed entirely on handmade instruments made out of what Misrach picked up along the border, including, in one case, a piece of the border wall itself. Despite the border’s divisive, prominent place in the current political conversation, Misrach emphasized the unseen stories behind the policy—one he believes will be widely regretted in years to come. “There’s all this activity no one knows about,” he said, of the photographs that will make up Border Cantos.

The above slide show includes images from Misrach’s visit and from the project in various stages of development.

Tap here to find The Mysterious Opacity of Other Beings on the Aperture Foundation website.

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The 2015 Aperture Portfolio Prize Short List

We’re pleased to announce the four finalists for the 2015 Aperture Portfolio Prize, an international photography competition whose goal is to identify trends in contemporary photography and highlight artists whose work deserves greater recognition. This year, Aperture’s editorial and limited-edition print staff reviewed more than seven hundred portfolios. Our challenge was to select one winner and three honorable mentions from this overwhelming response. Of the following exceptional finalists, one will be selected as the winner of the 2015 Aperture Portfolio Prize, receiving a cash prize and an exhibition at Aperture Gallery in New York:

Lisa Elmaleh

Heikki Kaski

Drew Nikonowicz

Laurence Rasti

The winner of the 2015 Aperture Portfolio Prize will be announced in April. The finalists’ portfolios and statements will be available to view on aperture.org. In the meantime, view past Portfolio Prize winners. 

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The Dark Landscapes of Don McCullin

In this interview from the Summer 2009 issue of Aperture magazine, Don McCullin speaks about his experience documenting war and conflict in Biafra, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Cyprus, Lebanon, Northern Ireland, and Vietnam, among other places, with Fred Ritchin, now dean of the School at the International Center of Photography. As Ritchin writes in his introduction, “McCullin rebels against the moniker ‘war photographer.’ He is not content with the impact of his decades’ worth of images, particularly their insufficient role in diminishing the very violence they depict.”

Coinciding with the release of Aperture’s Don McCullin, a chronological survey first published in 2001, now expanded on the occasion of McCullin’s eightieth birthday, we reprint an excerpt from their conversation. This excerpt also appears in Issue 17 of the Aperture Photography App.

The battlefields of the Somme, France, 2000, All images © Don McCullin

Fred Ritchin: Today we’re going to talk about you being a photographer, a larger career than that of a war photographer.

Don McCullin: I’d like to get away from the awful reputation of being a war photographer. I think, in a way, it’s parallel to calling me a kind of abattoir worker, somebody who works with the dead, or an undertaker or something. I’m none of those things. I went to war to photograph it in a compassionate way, and I came to the conclusion that it was a filthy, vile business. War—it was tragic, and it was awful, and I was witness to murder and terrible cruelty. So do I need a title for that? The answer is no, I don’t. I hate being called a war photographer. It’s almost an insult.

I wasn’t trying to pick up the Robert Capa mantle; I went to war because I felt I was suited to do it. I was young and ambitious, but the ambition started to fade away when I saw people coming toward me carrying dead children, or wounded people coming toward me holding their entrails . . . things like that. Things the average man in the street simply wouldn’t understand, because he’s never been there, thank God.

FR: In the work you’re doing now, the Roman work and the landscapes, it’s as if life has more to offer than simply death. Your sense of time is different. You’re working much more slowly. The time passes over thousands of years. These are traces of things. Before, it was quick, instantaneous, news.

DM: It was like what we would call a head-butt. It was about butting somebody in the head and showing them my images. Now I’m behaving in a much more dignified way. Naturally, I’m getting older and coming to the end of my life, so I’ve slowed down. I’ve reinvented myself. The reason I am doing these new landscapes, this new Roman project, is because it’s a form of healing. I’m kind of healing myself. I don’t have those bad dreams. But you can never run away from what you’ve seen. I have a house full of negatives of all those hideous moments in my life in the past.

So now my challenge is the landscape, the archaeological landscape of Rome . . . it’s very challenging and it’s very beautiful. When I can get into the pariah nations—Syria and Lebanon, they’ve eased up a bit, though Syria is a notorious police state—but when I’m there, I am totally safe and alone. I am constantly pushing the barriers, simply for the privilege of getting my cameras out and taking beautiful photographs.

FR: Of stuff that happened two thousand years ago.

DM: Yes. Because it’s not as if I’m trying to photograph today’s political struggles. In a way, I am trying to do justice to the culture of these historical sites.

FR: But it seems to me you’re also trying to find a meaning in life, what’s good in life or what’s important, or as you say, dignified. The war itself is the abattoir. War itself is the meaninglessness of life, and somehow that is there, even in your landscapes and the Roman work. You’re finding something else, something spiritual, some other kinds of answers in life.

DM: My landscapes are dark. People say: “Your landscapes are almost bordering on warscapes.” I’m still trying to escape the darkness that’s inside me. There’s a lot of darkness in me. I can be quite jovial and jokey and things like that, but when it comes down to the serious business of humanity, I cannot squander other people’s lives.

Vietnamese family after a grenade-attack on their bunker, Hue, 1968

FR: Is that because of what you’ve seen in life, or because of where you’ve come from in life? Are you talking about your life as a war photographer, or are you talking about the neighborhood where you grew up—a sense of fairness of play?

DM: Well, there wasn’t any of that where I grew up. The boys I grew up with were determined to become criminals. I never really wanted to be incarcerated in prison. I spent a few days in prisons in Uganda, and got beaten by the soldiers. Freedom was paramount to my dreams.

And in England we have this class structure. It’s very much there—though it’s being exchanged for new racial structures and religious structures that have come in. England is quite a racial country: it was never really on your side if you didn’t have white skin. So I grew up with all those things, and I’m still living with them, even though I live in the countryside. There are many hurdles in my country; you’re never really going to be free of the hurdles.

FR: But in a way, then, maybe you’ve turned to a kind of poetry of the image, or a kind of lyrical photography, with tonal ranges that are different, more studious, larger formats. . . . In other words, you talk about it as informational, the “Roman Empire,” but you’re doing something else. You’re showing the light and the beauty, the metaphors. You’re working in a broader way. It’s like you have a bigger palette now.

DM: Yes, it is a bigger palette. The Roman Empire as it was, was extraordinary, apart from the fact that it was based on cruelty and horror. . . . You know, when I’m in these great Roman cities, which earthquakes and time have destroyed, I like the fact that I am there, I am enjoying the challenge—but all the time I feel as if I can hear the screams of pain of the people who built these cities. It doesn’t go away. The Roman slaves were paid nothing. All they probably expected was a bowl of food. So when you’re in these remarkable cities, you’re not comfortable really.

You could say: “Well, why are you doing this?” I’m doing it because I have never collectively seen several Roman cities in the Middle East. What I’m getting at is that when I first started as a photographer, I thought: “This is going to be good. I’ll get behind this camera and I won’t have to worry about academia. I’ll just take pictures. It will be easy. And of course, there’s no politics involved!” I’ve done nothing but political assignments in my life. Even going back to ancient Rome, it was steeped in politics and evil.

I feel comfortable doing landscapes in England. I don’t have any apologies, I don’t have problems. And I never do landscapes in England when it’s sunny. I always do them in the winter when the trees are naked. It’s more Wagnerian. I don’t know . . . I like drama and I like darkness.

Fishermen playing during their lunch break, Scarborough, Yorkshire, 1967

FR: Eugene Smith used to listen to Wagner when he was printing. That’s how he’d stay up for nights in a row, listening to Wagner, and he’d get those deep prints, like yours—deep skies, your dark skies.

DM: Well, I was influenced by Eugene Smith, as much as I was by Bill Brandt. I like the great prints that Steichen made. I really studied photography in depth. [I brought a stack of books] home to where I lived, in a Hampstead Garden suburb, and they were as tall as this table—and my God, they were full of information.

I used to sit nightly when my children went to bed, studying those books. They became my university. I taught myself everything in photography that I know. Don’t get me wrong about this, I still take a stand—but I am still a student of photography. The moment I think that I have arrived, I’ve had it. I am never going to arrive.

Don McCullin will appear in conversation with Sebastian Junger at the 92nd Street Y in New York on October 30: click here to learn more.



Click here to read the complete interview from Aperture magazine on the Aperture Digital Archive, free through November 6.

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Doug DuBois: The Intimate Photograph

Doug DuBois, Lise and Spencer, Ithaca, NY, 2004

 

 

 

 

“In the end, we may come to the conclusion that intimacy cannot be photographed directly (as we experience it) because, quite simply, the camera is always in the way. The trick, perhaps, is to understand intimacy as an imaginary space—an illusion that exploits our very real longing for a profound and authentic encounter with another.”

—Doug DuBois

 

Join photographer Doug DuBois for a two-part workshop through which students will gain a better understanding of how to articulate intimacy and explore ways of creating photographs that demonstrate a certain closeness between photographer, subject, and viewer. Students will work with DuBois to assemble a rhetorical rather than purely emotional guide to photography’s intimate claims.

        The first day will consist of both group and individual critiques of each other’s photographs, as well as a discussion of specific photographers and images which offer insight into the challenges, tropes, and problems of making intimate photographs. Some discussion topics and photographers include: “The Bad and the Beautiful” (Hiromix, Corinne Day, Lise Sarfati, and Juergen Teller); “Dirty Old Men” (Larry Clark and Nobuyoshi Araki); “Family Business” (Larry Sultan, Elinor Carucci, Mitch Epstein and Leigh Ledare); and “Intimate Pairs” (Alessandra Sanguinetti, Kelli Connell, and Laura Letinsky).

At the end of the first day, DuBois will offer students a selection of specifically designed assignments to test theories of intimacy as discussed. On the second meeting, two weeks later, students will present their work created from the assignments given during the first session, and discuss their experiences of responding to the assignment and creating new work.

Doug DuBois (born in Dearborn, Michigan, 1960) has photographs in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; and Los Angeles County Museum of Art. He has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, MacDowell Colony, and National Endowment for the Arts. DuBois has exhibited at the J. Paul Getty Museum and MoMA, The Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin and the Museo d’Arte Contemporanea di Roma in Italy. He has photographed for magazines, including the New York Times Magazine, Time, Details, and GQ. He has published two books with Aperture: All the Days and Nights in 2009 and My Last Day at Seventeen, which will be available in the fall of 2015. DuBois teaches in the College of Visual and Performing Arts at Syracuse University and in the Limited Residency MFA program at Hartford Art School.

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