Aperture's Blog, page 15

How Images Make the Objects We Desire Seem Irresistible

Imagine having lost a loved one in the New England of the 1870s. Then, a knock at your door: a salesman in a suit. He pulls out a bound catalog of albumen-silver prints, with as many photographs in it as you’ve maybe seen in a lifetime, each showing a tombstone ready to memorialize your loss. The trade catalog for the Vermont Marble Companies offers a purchase for your grief, documentation that something exists in the here and now to honor those in the here-after. This is an example of what the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s research assistant Virginia McBride calls “the truth claim of photography,” a way companies used the supposed veracity of photographic images to convince customers they would deliver what they promised.

Photographer unknown, Trade Catalogue for Producers’ Marble and Vermont Marble Companies (detail), 1870s–80s
Courtesy the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

It’s an early highlight of a Met show on view this summer that McBride has curated, The Real Thing: Unpackaging Product Photography, which tracks how pictures made people familiar with objects for consumption and then, with the arrival of modernism, rendered such objects radiantly unfamiliar. The show, which features work from the nineteenth century to the late 1940s, arrives at a moment when many artists have been drawing inspiration from the long history of how photography has been used to sell all manner of commodities. It’s a moment marked by a turn from the object for sale to the meaning of the sale itself.

H. Raymond Ball, Pocket Comb, ca. 1930s
Courtesy the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Edward J. Steichen, “Sugar Lumps” Pattern Design for Stehli Silks, ca. 1920s
Courtesy the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

But first you had to make the sale, and the best way to do that was to catch someone’s eye. A commercial photographer in Providence, Rhode Island, named H. Raymond Ball photographed a comb from an unknown manufacturer balancing mysteriously on its edge; in his Pocket Comb (ca. 1930s), the expanse of the object’s shadow somehow echoes both the architect Eero Saarinen’s Gateway Arch in St. Louis and the bob hairstyle favored by flappers. “It’s an object lesson in what the camera can do with the right light and the right shadow and any object at all,” McBride explained.

Corporate resources funded adventurous photographers to push things even further. Edward J. Steichen was commissioned by a Swiss textile manufacturer to lend their products a touch of the new. His “Sugar Lumps” Pattern Design for Stehli Silks, from the 1920s, staggers rows of the treat to cleverly arrange their shadows into a fresh take on a checkerboard; in 1927, Stehli made a textile with Steichen’s photograph printed upon it, and the advertisement itself became the product.

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August Sander went even further. For Osram Light Bulbs (ca. 1930) he composed a spiral of lightbulbs, creating a gelatin-silver print that seems lit vertiginously from within. If the bulbs could do that on a magazine page, what wonders they might lend to your house! In such advertisements, photography transcends its lifelike authority to become life itself, abuzz with a kind of optimism some Americans in the 1930s and ’40s might’ve found lacking in their daily lives, as they flicked through Depression-era fashion magazines and war-stricken newspapers.

Ralph Bartholomew Jr.’s carbo print Soap Packaging (1936) erects a cityscape of candy-colored packaged soap on newsprint in a bubbly anticipation of Piet Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie six years later. An unknown image maker gassed up a car ad with the latest editing techniques for Montage for Packard Super Eight (ca. 1940), which you can imagine zipping around that soap package city, even if that many people couldn’t possibly fit in a Packard that size. Modernism, with its emerging formal concerns of experimentation and abstraction, was an irresistible tool kit for a sales pitch.

August Sander, Osram Light Bulbs, ca. 1930
Courtesy the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Photographer unknown, Montage for Packard Super Eight, ca. 1940
Courtesy the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

This fizzy blend of commercial seduction and fine-art methodology reached a peak in the pages of Vogue, which commissioned Irving Penn’s Theatre Accident, New York (1947). “It’s not usually talked about as a product photograph, but rather sort of the be-all and end-all of photographic still lifes of the twentieth century,” McBride said. And yet, every object spilled from that purse is available for purchase—and has been purchased by the sophisticated kind of woman Vogue suggests you should be. “The idea that these amalgamated objects can really create an entire personhood is very explicitly spelled out,” she added. “Even with these inanimate objects, [Penn] could conjure a living, breathing woman.” In the eighty or so years between the tombstone catalog and the Vogue masterpiece, photography moved from the lifelike, to larger-than-life, to having the ability to conjure up life itself.

Modernism, with its emerging formal concerns of experimentation and abstraction, was a tool kit for a sales pitch.

And what happened in the many decades after the photographers shown in The Real Thing? Contemporary image makers—who are outside the focus of the museum’s presentation and the heirs to its heroes—grew up in thrall of the earlier history it explores. They now live and work in a world of hyperconsumerism, advertising, and targeted marketing that those photographs, and the related capitalist machinery, helped to build. The exhibition’s checklist offers a prompt to consider how they made sense of the tug and pull of art and commerce within a picture frame or, increasingly, the social-media grid.

Irving Penn, Theatre Accident, New York, 1947
Courtesy the Irving Penn Foundation and the Metropolitan Museum ofArt, NewYork Bobby Doherty, Oronamin C, 2022, from Dream About Nothing, 2023
Courtesy Loose Joints

“Sometimes it feels like all I’m really looking at is this strange reflection of what happens when a person is fed advertising their entire life and, weirdly, fetishizes it,” the photographer Bobby Doherty told me. His images—from eye-popping sweets and consumer goods of clients including Balenciaga and Apple to the still lifes filling his recent photobook, Dream About Nothing (2023)—draw on the legacy established by giants such as Penn but bring a sense of irony and intentional awkwardness. Doherty’s color palette is often hyperreal and exaggerated, but it can be muted to recall another era. “I just sometimes feel like there isn’t a new way to do it,” he said with a sigh. “The rules were really clearly laid out, and deviating from them just takes it to a place that isn’t advertising anymore.” His image Oronamin C (2022) features soda bottles and what appears to be a cheeseburger on a mirrored surface, and was inspired by 1960s food advertisements. The goal of his book, he added, was to create an experience of “subliminal advertising in a dream.”

For the conceptual artist Christopher Williams, histories of technology, production, and modernization are told through almost absurdist pile-ups of information, with captions elongated into campuses of text. His images re-create the aesthetics of a product photograph and the mechanics of image making, but often nod to political and colonial histories. His recent image of an IKEA kitchen treats a mass-produced interior model with a cartographical rigor you sense he might not quite think it deserves. Who would want to live in a world like this, with its banal perfection, the photograph seems to ask, while at the same time marshaling every resource of advertising. It’s less a swoon than a wink. Williams’s occasional photographs of models, seen in his work referencing a Kodak reflection guide from the 1960s, present them smiling broadly—a real no-no in the images used by fashion e-commerce sites, such as SSENSE, that feature both product and editorial. How could anyone in this world possibly be this happy?

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The impact, emotional or otherwise, of accumulation seems to fuel Sara Cwynar’s work as she plumbs e-commerce spaces for evidence of what, or maybe how, companies think people want now. Which might just be more: yesterday’s brand catalog is today’s social-media feed, with endless scrolls of SSENSE or Shein items presented by similar models in similar poses. These posts could be purses spilling out glamorous contents, but there’s little personality on display.

Cwynar’s series Marilyn (2020) included photographs she took of SSENSE models in the company’s signature trio of poses, re-created on larger scales and with harsher lighting, as if trying to blow out the halo effect. “You can’t figure out what’s real, or what something actually looks like, or whether you’re looking at the same person or just the same image with different outfits photoshopped on,” she said. “I like the confusion of different styles of commercial photography in one thing. That kind of digital plenitude, there being too much to contend with, so everything starts to feel kind of valueless.” And yet value is in the eye of the beholder: Dior invited Cwynar to collaborate on a handbag.

Christopher Williams, Blocking Template: IKEA Kitchen (Overhead Nr. 2) Studio Thomas Borho, Oberkasseler Str. 39, Düsseldorf, Germany September 7, 2022, 2023
© the artist and courtesy David Zwirner, New York Sara Cwynar, Ali from SSENSE.com (How to Marry a Millionaire), from the series Marilyn, 2020
Courtesy the artist and the Approach, London

In the 1990s, such a collaboration might have been decried as “selling out.” At that moment—when international corporations were consolidating media into the hands of a very few, and the techniques of modernism had become all-too-familiar, even sinister—artists’ efforts to resist the collapse between art and product often felt noble. Even if, as the Met show makes clear, photographers were always working across contexts. Roe Ethridge came up in the ’90s moment when selling out might be taboo; today, with fewer markets for photography, he thinks that notion is passé. Instead, he trades on the notion of value, working for high-end fashion brands and showing the same images in high-end galleries. Confusion might be the point— or, perhaps, a tactic to wrangle with the challenges he sees in commercial photography. “How do I depict a handbag in a way that’s not untruthful to me?” he asked. “Which is a weird thing to think about. Why would I like or not like a handbag?” As Penn’s handbag does, Ethridge hopes his work “could live without the caption.”

These days, images live without all kinds of context, unmoored from their origins and floating freely across our screens. The photographers who made the images in The Real Thing proved you could sell anything; today’s artists work in a world where you have to sell everything. In the end, we’re left with the same question as that salesman at the door: What makes you pay attention? Product photography works—today, when we see too much, it lingers in our minds—because it tells us something about ourselves. It’s not about the product itself but what the picture produces inside you. It’s not a proof, but a mirror.

This article originally appeared in Aperture, issue 255, “The Design Issue.”

Summer Party Celebrating “The Design Issue”

On Wednesday, June 12, Aperture hosted the Summer Party to celebrate “The Design Issue,” which introduces a new look for Aperture magazine. Aperture members, artists, writers, and friends, as well as cohosts Thessaly La Force, Camilla Molo, Jamie Savren, and Coreen Simpson, gathered at the Times Square EDITION, enjoying lively conversation, cocktails, and a shimmering sunset amid the energy of Midtown. The photographer Stefan Ruiz, profiled in the issue, provided music, sharing a fun set of selections from his collection of vintage records.

Coreen Simpson, Deborah Willis, Sarah Meister, Hank Thomas

Camilla Molo, Terry Greenberg, Esther McGowan, Andrew Lewin

Sophie Nitkin, Cathy M. Kaplan, Jamie Savren

Philip Montgomery, Dean Majd, Brandon Harris, Jarod Lew

Nadia Frye Leinhos, Jenn Hyland, Coreen Simpson, AnnaLiisa Benston

Lovia Gyarkye, Michael Famighetti, Nicole Acheampong, Sarah Meister

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In celebratory remarks, Michael Famighetti, Aperture’s editor in chief, expressed the importance of the evolution of the magazine’s design, as well as the intention to honor the editorial spirit driving the publication since 1952, as it upholds a mission to create community through photography. He gave a toast  to several of the issue’s contributors and featured artists present, including David Hartt, whose work is featured on one of the issue’s three covers.

Brendan Embser and David HarttAvion Pearce, Sarah Meister, guest, Dana Triwush, and Chris CoulthrustGuest, Naomieh Jovin, and Steven M. ContrerasEden Tesfamariam and Milena TekesteCrowd listening to remarksColette Veasey-Cullors and David HarttIsabelle McTwigan, Ava Donaldson, and Steven ChaikenMichael Londres and Suleman Sheikh AnayaAperture magazineLaetitia Adam, Áwet Woldegebriel, and Liz HorowitzNicole R. Fleetwood and Sarah MeisterQiana Mestrich, Accra Shepp, and Nona FaustineSelwyn Bach and Gabrielle StanfieldSaleen Saleh

To preview the issue visit aperture.org/magazines.

Venue and drinks generously sponsored by The Edition.

11 Photobooks that Reimagine Queer History and Visibility

Kelli Connell, Betsy, Provincetown Woods, 2011
Courtesy the artist

Kelli Connell: Pictures for Charis (2024)

In Pictures for Charis, Kelli Connell takes inspiration from the life of Charis Wilson and her collaborations with Edward Weston through the contemporary lens of a queer woman artist. Throughout the 1930s and ’40s, Wilson was Weston’s partner, model, and collaborator, working with the photographer on some of his most iconic images. 

Connell focuses on Wilson and Weston’s shared legacy, traveling with her own partner, Betsy Odom, to locations in the western United States where the earlier couple made photographs together more than eighty years ago. In chasing Wilson’s ghost, Connell tells her own story, finding a new kinship with the collaborative duo as she navigates a cultural landscape that has changed, yet remains mired in the same mythologies about nature, the artist, desire, and inspiration. Bringing together photographs and writing by Connell alongside Weston’s classic figure studies and landscapes, Pictures for Charis raises vital questions about photography, gender, and portraiture in the twenty-first century.

Nan Goldin, Twisting at my birthday party, New York City, 1980
Courtesy the artist

Nan Goldin: The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (2021 Edition)

Nan Goldin’s iconic visual diary The Ballad of Sexual Dependency chronicles the struggle for intimacy and understanding between her friends, family, and lovers in the 1970s and ’80s. Goldin’s candid, visceral photographs captured a world seething with life—and challenged censorship, disrupted gender stereotypes, and brought crucial visibility and awareness to the AIDS crisis.

First published by Aperture in 1986, Ballad continues to exert a major influence on photography and other aesthetic realms, its status as a contemporary classic firmly established. As Goldin reflects in an updated afterword from Aperture’s 2021 edition: “I took the pictures in this book so that nostalgia could never color my past. I wanted to make a record of my life that nobody could revise.”

Ethan James Green, Maria and Massima, 2017
Courtesy the artist Ethan James Green, Dara, 2017

Ethan James Green: Young New York (2019)

Young New York presents striking portraits of New York’s millennial scene-makers. Through his diverse cast of models, artists, nightlife icons, and queer communities, Ethan James Green redefines beauty and identity for a new generation.

Under the mentorship of the late David Armstrong, Green developed a sensitive yet confident style. For three years, he photographed his close friends and community, often in Corlears Hook Park on the Lower East Side. Reflecting the intense connections he formed with his subjects, Green’s black-and-white photographs display an inherently humanist approach—calling to mind Diane Arbus’s midcentury studies of gender nonconformists. “Green’s subjects are often in states of transition, whether the transition from youth to adulthood or a gender transition, visible in top-surgery scars or budding breasts,” writes Michael Schulman for the New Yorker. “Transitions render people vulnerable, but Green’s subjects are confidently beautiful, masters of style and attitude.”

Lyle Ashton Harris, M. Lamar, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, 1993
Courtesy the artist

Lyle Ashton Harris: Today I Shall Judge Nothing That Occurs (2017)

Throughout the late 1980s and ’90s, a radical cultural scene emerged in cities across the globe, finding expression in the galleries, nightclubs, and bedrooms of New York, London, Los Angeles, and Rome. As a young artist experimenting with different artistic mediums at the time, Lyle Ashton Harris began obsessively photographing his friends, lovers, and individuals who were, or would become, figures of influence, including Nan Goldin, Stuart Hall, bell hooks, Catherine Opie, and Marlon Riggs. Harris’s photographs offer a raw, authentic portrait of the cultural and political communities that defined an era and continue to resonate to this day.

In the 2017 volume Today I Shall Judge Nothing That Occurs, the artist’s archive of 35 mm Ektachrome images is presented alongside personal journal entries and recollections from artistic and cultural figures. It offers a unique document of what Harris has described as “ephemeral moments and emblematic figures shot in the ’80s and ’90s, against a backdrop of seismic shifts in the art world, the emergence of multiculturalism, the second wave of AIDS activism, and incipient globalization.” Together, Harris’s photographs and journals not only sketch his personal history and journey as an artist, but also provide an intimate look into this groundbreaking period of art and culture.

Peter Hujar, Susan Sontag, 1975
Courtesy the Peter Hujar Library, LLC; Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York; and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Peter Hujar: Speed of Life (2017)

Peter Hujar died of AIDS in 1987, leaving behind a complex and profound body of photographs. A leading figure in the cultural scene in downtown New York in the 1970s and ’80s, Hujar was admired for his portraits of people, animals, and landscapes.

Beginning his career in the ’50s as a commercial photographer, Hujar soon decided to abandon this field and pursue a more personal artistic practice. Most well known for his portraiture, he created iconic images of some of New York’s renowned artists and writers, including Susan Sontag, William S. Burroughs, David Wojnarowicz, and Andy Warhol. As Antonio Huertas Mejías writes in an introduction to Speed of Life: “Hujar’s black-and-white photographs, in their signature simple style, make his works at once deeply evocative and moving.”

Despite being closely associated with those who crossed into the mainstream, Hujar lived on the fringes of contemporary fame, maintaining a status of an underground legend. Now he is a revered icon of the lost downtown art scene. Peter Hujar: Speed of Life (2017) gathers photographs from his archive, alongside texts by Philip Gefter, Steve Turtell, and Joel Smith, to create a thorough history of Hujar’s life and artistic practice.

Zanele Muholi, Buciko I, 2019
Courtesy the artist

Zanele Muholi: Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness, Volume II (2024)

South African artist Zanele Muholi is one of the most powerful visual activists of our time. Muholi first gained recognition for their 2006 series Faces and Phases that documents the LGBTIA+ community, creating ambitiously bold portraits in an attempt to build a visual history and remedy Black queer erasure. From there, Muholi began to turn the camera inward, beginning a series of evocative self-portraits. Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness, Volume II (2024), is the follow-up to Muholi’s critically acclaimed first title featuring their self-portraits.

In their evocative self-portraits, Zanele Muholi explores and expands upon new personas and poetic interpretations of queerness, Blackness, and the possibilities of self. Drawing on material props found in their immediate environment, Muholi boldly explores their own image and innate possibilities as a Black person in today’s global society, and speaks emphatically in response to contemporary and historical racisms. “I am producing this photographic document to encourage individuals in my community to be brave enough to occupy spaces—brave enough to create without fear of being vilified,” Muholi states in an interview from the 2018 volume. “To teach people about our history, to rethink what history is all about, to reclaim it for ourselves—to encourage people to use artistic tools such as cameras as weapons to fight back.”

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Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Mirror Study for Joe (_2010980), 2017
Courtesy the artist, DOCUMENT, Chicago; team (gallery, inc.), New York; and Vielmetter Los Angeles Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Darkroom Mirror (_2070386), 2017

Paul Mpagi Sepuya (2020)

Paul Mpagi Sepuya’s studio portraits challenge and deconstruct traditional portraiture through the perspective of a Black, queer gaze. Through collage, layering, fragmentation, and mirror imagery, Sepuya encourages multivalent narrative readings of each image.

In 2020, Aperture and the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis co-published the first widely released publication of Sepuya’s work, and later this year Aperture will release a second volume with the artist in Dark Room A–Z (Fall 2024). For Sepuya, photography is a tactile and communal experience. His multilayered scenes come together through collaborations in his studio with groups of friends, fellow artists, and himself. Moving away from the slick artifice of contemporary portraiture, Sepuya’s frames are filled with the human elements of picture-taking, from fingerprints and smudges to dust on mirrored surfaces. Sepuya pushes this even further by directly inviting us to look inside the studio setting—while also considering the construction of subjectivity.

Shikeith, The Adoration (Never Knew Love Like This Before), 2020
Courtesy the artist

Shikeith: Notes towards Becoming a Spill (2022)

A visceral and haunting exploration of Black male vulnerability, joy, and spirituality, Notes towards Becoming a Spill is the first monograph by the acclaimed multimedia artist Shikeith. Following the lyrical artistic expressions of contemporary portraitists such as Deana Lawson, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, and Mickalene Thomas, Shikeith envisions his subjects as they inhabit various states of meditation, prayer, and ecstasy.

In work he describes as “leaning into the uncanny,” the faces and bodies of Shikeith’s subjects glisten with sweat (and tears) in a manifestation and evidence of desire. This ecstasy is what critic Antwaun Sargent proclaims as “an ideal, a warm depiction that insists on concrete possibility for another world.” Notes towards Becoming a Spill redefines the idea of sacred space and positions a queer ethic identified by its investment in vulnerability, tenderness, and joy.

Ryan McGinley, Liberation Not Deportation, October 2020
Courtesy the artist

Revolution Is Love: A Year of Black Trans Liberation (2022)

In June 2020, activists Qween Jean and Joela Rivera returned to the historic Stonewall Inn—site of the 1969 riots that launched the modern gay rights movement—where they initiated weekly actions known thereafter as the Stonewall Protests. Over the following year, brought together by the urgent need to center Black trans and queer lives within the Black Lives Matter movement, thousands of people across communities and social movements gathered in solidarity, resistance, and communion.

Gathering work by twenty‑four photographers from within the movement, Revolution Is Love is the potent and celebratory visual record of a contemporary activist movement in New York City—and a moving testament to the enduring power of photography in activism, advocacy, and community. As Qween Jean reflects in an interview from the volume: “We have been at every moment of history, we’ve been at every fight, at every social-justice movement. We’ve existed.”

Mickalene Thomas, Remember Me, 2006
Courtesy the artist

Mickalene Thomas: Muse (2015)

Mickalene Thomas’s large-scale, multitextured tableaux of domestic interiors and portraits subvert the male gaze and assert new definitions of beauty. Thomas first began to photograph herself and her mother as a student at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut—which became a pivotal experience in her creative expression as an artist.

Since then, throughout her practice, Thomas’s images have functioned as personal acts of deconstruction and reappropriation. Many of her photographs draw from a wide range of cultural icons, from 1970s “Black Is Beautiful” images of women to Édouard Manet’s odalisque figures, to the mise-en-scène studio portraiture of James Van Der Zee and Malick Sidibé. Perhaps of greatest importance, however, is that Thomas’s collection of portraits and staged scenes reflect a very personal community of inspiration—a collection of muses that includes herself, her mother, her friends and lovers—emphasizing the communal and social aspects of art-making and creativity that pervade her work.

David Wojnarowicz, Untitled (face in dirt), 1990
Courtesy the Estate of David Wojnarowicz and P.P.O.W. Gallery, New York

David Wojnarowicz: Brush Fires in the Social Landscape (Twentieth Anniversary Edition, 2015)

“History is made by and for particular classes of people. A camera in some hands can preserve an alternative history,” David Wojnarowicz wrote in 1991. Throughout his career, Wojnarowicz’s use of photography was extraordinary, as was his unprecedented ways of addressing the AIDS crisis, homophobia, and relentless fight against censorship. Before his death from AIDS-related complications in 1992, Aperture began collaborating with the artist on his landmark volume Brush Fires in the Social Landscape, which was published in 1994.

Brush Fires engaged with what Wojnarowicz referred to as his “tribe” or community, featuring contributions from artist and writer friends such as Nan Goldin, Kiki Smith, Vince Aletti, and Davide Cole (the lawyer who represented him in his case against Donald Wildmon and the American Family Association in 1990). Twenty years after its original publication, Aperture released an expanded, redesigned edition of Brush Fires, offering a new perspective on Wojnarowicz’s profound influence, courage, and legacy. “His responses were unique, thoroughly felt, and driven by an urgent necessity. In his time, his work was extraordinarily moving—it stunned,” writes Lynne Tillman in an essay from the expanded edition. “It will never be experienced again as it was then, in that very dark moment.”

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How Photography Influenced Duro Olowu’s Life in Fashion

The former lawyer turned designer Duro Olowu creates fashion moments on a resolutely human scale. Born in Lagos into a Nigerian Jamaican family, Olowu had a cosmopolitan upbringing, traveling to Europe and absorbing cultural influences ranging from album covers to Yves Saint Laurent. His tenacious curiosity, like his patternmaking, seems limitless—and his deep knowledge of photography has informed his fashion line.

Instead of flashy runway shows, Olowu prefers private viewings that allow him to discuss his patchwork dresses and jacquard coats with the coterie of cultural figures who wear his richly patterned designs. Like him, they appreciate clothes in a context that celebrates collecting antiques, paintings, and handicrafts over any proximity to trends or celebrity endorsements. Olowu has also curated exhibitions in New York, London, and Chicago. On each occasion, he staged a vibrant dialogue, juxtaposing photography and painting, or West African heritage textiles and the innovative fabric creations of contemporary sculptors.

The editor Dan Thawley recently spoke with Olowu from his studio in Mason’s Yard, in London. Olowu claims to have been a reluctant curator at first. Soon, however, he sensed a freedom in making exhibitions, the freedom to think about photography and fashion across genres and decades. The results offer a new way of seeing.

Installation view of Duro Olowu: Seeing Chicago, MCA Chicago, 2020
Photograph by Nathan Keay © MCA Chicago Yto Barrada, Fille en rouge jouant aux osselets (Girl in Red – Playing Jacks), 1999
Courtesy the artist

Dan Thawley: Duro, there are some things I am curious to ask you about your relationship with photography. I wanted to start with collecting.

Duro Olowu: I always shy away from the word collect. But I have quite a lot of photography, just because it was always a lot more accessible. In the 1990s and even up until the mid-2000s you could come across something one had always wanted, like an early Samuel Fosso or a Luigi Ghirri. Back then a lot of photography was just not recognized or put in the same category as fine art.

Thawley: What is your relationship to photography as a fashion designer? The image of clothing is something you need to continue to produce, but it’s also something that I can imagine is a powerful tool to inspire your creativity as well.

Olowu: There are two aspects to that. There’s a side of fashion photography which is very commercial, and then, of course, there’s contemporary art and photography in that realm. There’s overlap. The rela­tionship between design and fashion and other kinds of creativity has always been there since the 1920s and ’30s, and in the work of a lot of photographers that I look at now—Peter Hujar, Kwame Brathwaite, Cindy Sherman, Anthony Barboza—people whose work I find as important as, say, Man Ray. I think it’s a subcon­scious thing. 

For designers, you can only tell if you have succeeded when you look at a photograph of someone dressed in your clothes, and they look very comfortable and confident—almost as though the clothes have become their armor, their shield. With great photographers, I always found that this was what they were able to do. Claude Cahun used clothing, ob­jects, jewelry, and costume to empower herself as a very early pioneer of self-portraiture in photography and queer art. When you look at Malick Sidibé or Seydou Keïta or Carrie Mae Weems, you realize that they are using clothes as a language. So, as a designer, that is the language that I try to write with.

Clothing to me is not about fashion or trends. I’m designing for people who are interested in the culture of style, and people who want to use what I design to place themselves in the world in a cer­tain way. For something to look modern and for something not to date or age, it has to ref lect the times. I think great photography always reflects the present as much as the past. And in designing, that’s what I try to do with clothing—not to replicate. It’s my point of view. It’s not an attempt to replicate what’s in photographs. It’s more an attempt to emulate the power of the gesture of photographs.

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Thawley: Does the way that a photograph freezes a silhouette—perhaps a drape in movement—ever stimulate you to replicate that gesture?

Olowu: A great photograph—whether it’s a still life or a portrait or some other kind of composition—is never forced. A great artist knows not just when to click but when the subject and mise-en-scène is just right enough to capture. Clothed or nude, it’s incredibly emotional and pow­erful.

Fashion or clothing needs to emote, but it shouldn’t be nostalgic. What changes over time are emotions, how people express themselves. That’s what you see in great collections of clothing. If you looked at Madeleine Vionnet then, if you looked at certain things at a certain time, thirty years ago, for example, they probably didn’t seem so radical. Or Sonia Delaunay, or even Patrick Kelly. Today, they appear even more radical than one can imagine.

I think great photography is like that. Which is why, in looking at con­temporary photographers, whether it’s Ming Smith or Dawoud Bey, one needs to also be open to the incredible power, savoir faire, and freedom that the history of photography has made possible in the art world. Many great photographers either started as photojournalists or made commercial work, like Madame Yevonde or Eve Arnold. So, I think pho­tography is a very sinuous reference that is not bound by trends. I feel very lucky that I can look at Steven Meisel, who I consider to be one of the greatest fashion photographers ever, or Irving Penn or Clifford Coffin, in the same way I look at James Van Der Zee, Walker Evans, Mama Casset, or Tina Modotti.

Peter Hujar, Forbidden Fruit (David Wojnarowicz Eating an Apple in an Issey Miyake shirt), from the postcard set The Twelve Perfect Christmas Gifts from Dianne B, 1983
© the Peter Hujar Archive and Artists Rights Society, New York Eve Arnold, Charlotte Stribling waits backstage to model clothes designed in the Harlem community, Abyssinian Church, 1950
© the artist/Magnum Photos

Thawley: I’ve always appreciated how you spotlight portraiture on your social media. You post photographs of Black luminaries, amongst other fantastic images. How does that research estab­lish your frame of cultural references when designing? 

Olowu: There’s a kind of portraiture that involves a whole setup as a souvenir, and then there’s the kind of portraiture made by artists, which I find really powerful, particularly when it’s self-portraiture. Because there are two things at work. There’s the element of exposing oneself, but also that of not exposing too much of oneself, because you have many more years and a lot more ideas that you want to pursue. I approach design questions in the same way. 

Sometimes people can go through periods of their lives not being able to put a face to a writer or an artist. Look at Dawoud Bey’s portrait of David Ham­mons. When you look at these portraits, they are sort of an eye into the reasoning behind Hammons’s work. When one looks at the artist Lee Miller in Man Ray’s photographs, you are not looking at what you imagine to be the personality of the subject. You’re actually looking at what the person does in the real world, because that’s what emerges. The human body is restless. The human mind is laden. You never know what you’re going to get. When I see something that really emotes in that way, I’m always very conscious of how important it is in the context of contemporary art. Placed alongside portraiture in other mediums like painting or sculpture, it’s very important to have the element of the photographic print.

Joel Meyerowitz, Gold Corner, New York, 1974

© the artist and courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

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Thawley: You’ve curated some great shows, including Making & Unmaking at the Camden Art Centre in London in 2016 and Seeing Chicago at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago four years later. How do you go about manifest­ing your passion for photography in these projects? 

Olowu: I feel that what I do curatorially is a very important part of my whole oeuvre. I see it as an extension of what I do, and in the institutional shows I’ve done, the amount of photography is a testament to what we’re talking about. To have Henri Matisse and David Hammons and Brice Marden next to Dawoud Bey was some­thing that, even curatorially, I know a lot of the people, when I was putting the show together, couldn’t understand until they walked into the room. 

I consider photographers to be artists and artists to be photographers. I never think: Oh, do I have to create a special section for photography? I’m actually very anti that. I’m not saying museums shouldn’t have a Diane Arbus show, a Gordon Parks show, a Malick Sidibé show. I’m not saying that they shouldn’t have their own rooms. But I’m always surprised when the institutional shows that are not solo shows hardly ever include photography. Because I think it’s such a natural thing to include. That’s obviously changing a lot. You see a lot more of that now. 

I think photography is a very sinuous reference that is not bound by trends.

In looking at a body of work, say, in the ’80s, how could I look at David Wojnarowicz and not see Peter Hujar? How could I look at artists like Carrie Mae Weems even, and not think of Kara Walker’s work? It’s very different work, but it’s just as emotive: powerful stories of women of color, emoting how they feel, not just about themselves but how they’ve been thought of for centuries. The same way I look at Eve Arnold’s pho­tographs. I feel that the way she captured the model in Harlem, the way she even captured Marilyn Monroe, came from who she was as a woman, being able to understand what the camera needed to pull out of that. I couldn’t look at that sort of work and think it had to be in a separate section. I could only think of that work in relation to or mixed up with other things. 

It’s not such a new idea. I mean, Surrealists did that. You had Man Ray and Claude Cahun mixed up with Jean Arp and Hannah Höch, and the other Dadaists. It wasn’t unusual up until I think the ’60s, when a different kind of mindset came in. That’s changing, or that’s practically changed now. And I always feel it’s important for any show I curate to reflect this deep conversation between all the mediums that continue to exist amongst artists in real life.

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Thawley: We all consume so many images on-screen now. But the object of the photograph is such a dynamic thing as well. What do you appreciate about the printed medium, and how it has changed over time?

Olowu: It’s very interesting you bring that up. The first real contact we have with anything that will later sort of place itself in our lives as art is with photo­graphs and prints. As a child, you look at a magazine or you look at a postcard or you’re handed a photograph. Even prac­tically as a baby, you are often first shown what you look like in a photograph of yourself. Later, as you go from child­hood into adulthood, magazines, books, and other visual materials are filled with photographs that define your identity. 

I have so much awe and respect for the use of a nondigital camera, the labor and development of film, preferably with no retouching. In looking at the photo­graph as an object, you’re almost doing so as you would look at a 1920s Paul Poiret dress, Yves Saint Laurent haute couture jacket from the ’70s, or an embroidered midcentury Yoruba agbada robe. You’re looking at how it was made in the same way you look at the fabrication and finish of beautiful garments. So that when you come across it in a museum or gallery, you recognize that it is also powerful, beautiful, and important because of how it was made. Making & Unmaking was all about that human effort. The hand in the work.

Lisetta Carmi, I Travestiti, Genoa, 1965–70
© Martini & Ronchetti and courtesy Archivio Lisetta Carmi Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Adebiyi, 1989
© the artist and courtesy Autograph, London

Thawley: We would never know much about certain art practices and movements from the twentieth century if it weren’t for people like Ugo Mulas taking photographs of Lucio Fontana, and all of the Arte Povera artists. Photography reveals relationships and communities. And records from previous generations are so incredibly precious for that very reason.

Olowu: Of course. Once again, the Dawoud Bey photographs of David Hammons with the snowballs. If that hadn’t been documented, how would we know that those snowballs melted—and the political and social commentary therein?

Thawley: How have your interactions with cultural institutions informed your interest in and knowledge about pho­tography? 

Olowu: Finding great photography in museums, by both known and unknown artists, is exhilarating and inspiring. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the International Center of Photography, and the Studio Museum in Harlem have exceptional examples in their collections, as does the Art Institute of Chicago. When I’m in Paris, I always visit the Jeu de Paume. The Fondation Cartier presented the first really incredible museum-worthy show of an African artist in the photography world—that was Seydou Keïta’s show there in 1994. It was a beginning in many ways for how work by an artist from the continent was perceived and exhibited abroad.

I recently saw—and was blown away by—the artist Lisetta Carmi’s show at the Estorick Collection, a small muse­um in London for twentieth-century Ital­ian art. I have to also mention people like Rotimi Fani-Kayode, whom I love, whose work I’ve known for thirty years, and who only now is being recognized. Be­cause of the current possibilities for queer artists, photographers, painters, his work is being revisited and being shown in a very different way. But my favorite is the Photographers’ Gallery in London, a small but renowned museum that I’ve visited since my teens. It exposed me to the most amazing group of inspir­ing international artists working in this medium, many of whom have informed my fashion collections and curatorial projects.

A look from Olowu’s fall/winter 2014 collection
Photograph by Luis Monteiro. Courtesy Duro Olowu Duro Olowu’s boutique in Mason’s Yard, London, 2019
Courtesy Duro Olowu

Thawley: You touched upon the role of color earlier. Do you ever operate as a colorist, looking at photography when you put together your patterns and your different swatches and fabrics that you’ve created for your fashion line?

Olowu: Absolutely. I have to say that it’s photography and film, and photography is really important. It’s the Technicolor aspect of everything—a kind of faded Technicolor. It’s not jarring. When I design textiles, even if they’re monotone, even if they’re in very vivid colors, the whole idea is that it’s not jarring. It doesn’t make your eyes ache. Because it has to be easy on the eye—and on the heart. It’s a very emotional thing. So people like Joel Meyerowitz, I love. 

Like Gordon Parks, I love the way William Eggleston can transform a pain­ful photograph—a clear display of segre­gation or racism—into an empowering one for the person segregated against because they’re wearing the most beau­tiful, simple clothing in the most vivid color. It’s a very conscious effort, I think, on the part of the artist. It helps me see how color looks to other people, how color is represented. 

I learned very early that after I’ve designed a fabric and I’ve seen the first swatches, when I do the variations or we cut the outfits, I put the different looks together and shoot them. When I see the photographs, I have to say they look like what I designed, but the intensity of the color is a hundred times more. It’s a very empowering, exciting thing. Sometimes it’s black and red or yellow and blue. It’s not necessarily a whole cacophony of print. It could be solid colors, but when you see the luminosity, it reminds me of Luigi Ghirri’s photographs of a veranda, or an umbrella on the seaside, or of a curtain in the front of a mechanic’s shop. When you see your work photographed, you realize how the photograph has made it real to you. 

If you really look at a photograph by an artist, there’s something about the way they try to manipulate the color, even if it’s black and white. There’s Barkley L. Hendricks’s photographs. He’s one of the greatest painters ever. But he was also an incredible photographer. There’s a picture of the two women at the airport in mink coats, but also a man in Nigeria in 1978. Hendricks happened to go to FESTAC, the Nigerian arts fes­tival. He just stopped this guy in that fuchsia top and trousers and photo­graphed him. Now, if you look at that fuchsia, I don’t care whether you work with the best silk-dyeing mill, you never imagine that you can get that color. And then, when you look at it in the photo­graph, I think that is exactly the future that I want. It really helps me see fashion as more than just something flat.

Thawley: Do you take many photos your­self?

Olowu: Well, most of the pictures I put on Instagram that aren’t credited to some­one else, they’re my photos. It’s not something that I’ve ever thought I want to pursue as an art. I love taking photos because when I’m taking them, I’m not thinking. I’m just capturing that moment. All my photos on the streets of New York, Dakar, whatever, when I look at them later, I realize I wasn’t as familiar with certain things. That’s why I respect photographers. Because after a while, they somehow manage to sense what’s going on completely in that frame, before they take the picture. Nothing is really left to chance.

This article originally appeared in Aperture, issue 255, “The Design Issue.”

For Bertien van Manen, Photography Was All About the Heart

This interview was originally published in Aperture, issue 220, “The Interview Issue,” Fall 2015.

Born in 1942, Bertien van Manen began her career in the 1970s as a fashion photographer. Commercial photography, however, soon left her wanting and unfulfilled; like many photographers of her generation, inspired by Robert Frank’s The Americans (1958), she subsequently shifted toward an expressive and intimate documentary approach. Some of her earliest work addressed the lives of immigrant women in her home country, the Netherlands, and the curiosity that motivated that work prompted her to explore communities all over the world, from bootleggers in Appalachia to villagers in the former Soviet Union, for books including A hundred summers, a hundred winters (1994); East Wind West Wind (2001); Let’s sit down before we go (2011); Easter and Oak Trees (2013); and Moonshine (2014). Her photographs, made on trips throughout Eastern Europe, Russia, Asia, the United States, and, most recently, Ireland, often focus on the human experience of undertaking a journey.

Although van Manen’s work has been exhibited in many of the world’s leading museums and is held in major collections, she remained something of a photographer’s photographer. Of her unique snapshot sensibility, the Swedish photographer JH Engström notes: “If I’m distracted by all the photography out in the world, Bertien’s work reminds me that photography is all about the heart.”

On the occasion of Manen’s death on May 26, 2024, we revisit the photographer’s conversation with Kim Knoppers for Aperture’s “Interview Issue” in 2015. Knoppers, curator at Foam, Amsterdam, visited van Manen at her home studio, located on the third floor of a classic canal house on Amsterdam’s Keizersgracht, for a conversation about the path of her well-traveled career and what it means for her to revisit older bodies of work, including her mid-1970s Budapest photographs, which will form her next book project. —The Editors, 2024

Bertien van Manen, Budapest Metro, 1976, from the series Budapest

Kim Knoppers: You began making photographs in 1973, after you graduated from university, when you had a family with two small children. Why did you feel the urge to change tack?

Bertien van Manen: I’d done a lot of translation work and taught French, but I was continually at home. I wanted to get outside. While studying French at the University of Leiden, I worked as a model for a while. I lost interest in that and thought, I’ll turn things around—I’m going to get behind the camera instead of being in front of it. That’s when I started photographing my children.

We had a party at our house, and the fashion and advertising photographer Theo Noort was one of the guests. He saw my photographs and asked me to be his assistant. Later, I worked at an advertising studio in Amsterdam. I knew nothing about photography or how to develop film. I learned all that from Noort and the studio.

Knoppers: How did you end up as an independent fashion photographer?

Van Manen: I first earned money as a photographer for the Dutch women’s magazine Viva. There, I photographed Sylvia Kristel [the stylish star of the 1974 soft-core porn film Emmanuelle, one of the first erotic films to be released worldwide by a big Hollywood studio]. The story making the rounds in the Amsterdam bars was that at the age of sixteen Kristel had announced, “You wait and see: I’m going to be famous.” She did a great deal to make that come true [laughs]. Kristel appeared in the first soft-core porn film and was naked all the time. I was one of few female photographers in fashion in Amsterdam. The models appreciated working with a woman instead of all those guys. They felt freer and less like objects of desire. So I had an astonishing amount of work.

Bertien van Manen, Budapest, 1976, from the series Budapest

Knoppers: Why did you leave fashion again, this time as a photographer?

Van Manen: In 1975, the photographer Kenneth Hope showed me The Americans by Robert Frank, and everything changed. How can you capture in words what he does? He wasn’t at all in the business of making beautiful photographs, yet that’s what they are. The coincidental, the inadvertent—I thought his photographs were magnificent. The roughness of his work and the absence of the spectacular appealed to me enormously. I immediately wanted to travel. The children were slightly older and I had the romantic idea to go to Budapest in the mid-’70s. It was such an old, baroque city that was then behind the Iron Curtain. I have showed the pictures I made there only twice: at the former Institut Néerlandais, in Paris, and in the magazine Street Life, the British equivalent of Rolling Stone. At the moment, I am revisiting this work.

Around this time, I burned my bridges at Viva because I was fed up with fashion—it was hollow— and went to work for Avenue, Nieuwe Revu, and Panorama. [Avenue was a Dutch fashion magazine inspired by Vogue, moving between popular and elite culture. Renowned writers and photographers were associated with it, such as W.F. Hermans, Cees Nooteboom, and Ed van der Elsken. In the 1970s Nieuwe Revu steered a left-wing, rebellious course perhaps best encapsulated as “socialism, sex, and sensation.” Both Nieuwe Revu and Panorama are part of a strong Dutch tradition of social reportage.] But I was not very connected to the editors of these magazines. I took my photographs and delivered them. I felt more attached to the scene around the leftist publication De Groene Amsterdammer. Photography in this magazine was actually marginal, but the editor in chief was impressed by my Budapest work and from that moment I worked regularly for him. This was toward the end of the ’70s and the early ’80s. Photography became more important for De Groene Amsterdammer, and Dutch photographers like Hans Aarsman, Taco Anema, and Han Singels were involved. Everyone who was left-oriented started at De Groene Amsterdammer. We had a good time at the office. Once I was asked to take a photograph of the editorial team behind their desks without clothes. I traveled with the Dutch writer Geert Mak to the United States to portray leftist Americans. We had to find them with a lantern [a Dutch expression].

Bertien van Manen, Turkish girls, Amsterdam, 1979, from the series Vrouwen te Gast (Women who are guests)

Knoppers: What led you to embark on your first long- term, self-initiated project, Vrouwen te Gast (Women who are guests), in 1979?

Van Manen: I had had enough of the hectic life of working for magazines. I wanted to have more time to make less superficial photographs. I saw the 1975 book A Seventh Man: Migrant Workers in Europe by John Berger, which portrays the lives of guest workers. There are photographs in it by Swiss photographer Jean Mohr, Berger’s frequent collaborator. It remains relevant because the tension and effects of migrant labor are still major issues in Europe today. The introduction stated that unfortunately they hadn’t gotten around to documenting the women. No wonder, since it was made by two men! They hadn’t even made it through the door with the Muslim women.

That’s my subject, I thought, and in 1979 I started working on Vrouwen te Gast. I didn’t just photograph women who’d joined their husbands but also single women who’d come to the Netherlands to work. Suddenly those rural women were shut up alone in a tiny backroom apartment, unable to speak the language, and they sat there languishing behind closed curtains. I decided to group the women according to their countries of origin: Turkey, Italy, Spain, Morocco, Yugoslavia, Tunisia, Portugal, and Greece.

Knoppers: How did you manage to get into those women’s homes?

Van Manen: There were plenty of community centers for male immigrant guest workers. One center organized sewing lessons for their women. They helped me. The Muslim men wouldn’t let their wives be photographed casually in the house; for them an “official portrait” was enough. In the end the combination of posed and more spontaneous photographs worked well.

The book was published by the feminist publishing house Sara in Amsterdam. I had to spend a full day there defending the order of my edit in front of a collective of eight women. Ultimately I persuaded them that my edit was best. In the last paragraph of my text for the book, I noted that the Dutch women’s movement had done nothing for immigrant women. The book was a success because it got all sorts of things started for these women who were invisible and to whom no one had ever paid any attention before. It really had an impact. Dutch language courses for women were organized. Neighbors went to visit the women in their homes. The immigrant women came out of isolation.

Bertien van Manen, Tullan Beach, Donegal, 2014, from the series Ireland

Knoppers: Did you consider expanding the project to other countries?

Van Manen: Along with photographer Catrien Ariëns, I was commissioned by the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam to photograph the women’s movement in the Netherlands. Eva Besnyö [Dutch-Hungarian photographer, 1910–2003] rang me. They’d asked her first but she was unavailable. I felt honored and let myself be persuaded. But I’m not particularly proud of the book that came out of it. The texts are unbearable. For example, one of them explains what kind of ailments you get during menopause. I found myself in yet another of those halls full of gray-haired women in dungarees. Absolutely not photogenic.

Knoppers: Do you regard the early period of your work as a learning process in which you grew and reached full maturity with A hundred summers, a hundred winters [photographs taken between 1990 and 1994 in Russia]?

Van Manen: Yes, although there are also some really good photographs in Vrouwen te Gast. For A hundred summers, a hundred winters I started in black and white. But that didn’t work. Cartier-Bresson, and I don’t know how many others, had made nostalgic black-and-white photographs in Russia, but I found the colors there so extraordinary.

The colors of our Western clothing were synthetic, whereas there they were still making dyes from plants and flowers. The decision to photograph in color was extremely important.

Bertien van Manen, Kendra, Kentucky, 2007, from the series Moonshine

Knoppers: How was it that you ended up in Russia?

Van Manen: I’d wanted to go to Russia for a very long time. My grandfather lived in a big house on a country estate in North Brabant, and there his relations from Poland and Russia would visit him regularly. One of them I was told to call Uncle Eugène, but he was really a cousin. As a little girl I found Uncle Eugène unbelievably exciting. That must have had something to do with it, unconsciously. In 1982 I went to Poland to make an editorial for Vrij Nederland [a Dutch magazine] about women living behind the Iron Curtain. I went with a philosopher of Polish descent who wrote the article. It was exciting because we brought fifty IUDs from a friend of my husband’s who was a gynecologist. Women used medieval methods for birth control, like foam tablets. I must have a photograph of the small factory where they made these foam tablets. We were caught at the border, but after giving the customs official one of the IUDs for his wife, he let us enter Poland. The Russian influence there was huge, of course. In 1987 I traveled to Russia for the first time with a communist journalist from the British paper the Morning Star. By then I’d taken a course in Russian and could speak the language a little. We went to Donetsk, in eastern Ukraine, where there’s so much conflict now, a coal-mining region. I was keen to photograph the miners.

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I didn’t succeed in Donetsk. The union, which was heavily controlled by the communist government, arranged for a beautiful table with a white cloth and a buffet of Russian food at a woman’s house, and behind it stood a lady in traditional costume. It was a tourist attraction. One evening I literally broke out—I escaped from the people who were looking after me, the guards. During this time, the union was strongly orthodox and people were not allowed to talk to foreigners. I went and stood on the street and stuck up my hand. A car stopped and I said to the man at the wheel, “I want to go to where the shakhtery, the mineworkers, live.” He took me there. But they weren’t allowed to talk to foreigners, unfortunately.

I returned to Russia in 1989, to Moscow, to polish my Russian. My teacher asked if I’d like to come and live with his family. They had a spare room and it was a way for them to earn a little extra money. So that’s what I did. He lived there with his parents. I stayed in his house for several weeks. In total I went back fourteen times and traveled through Russia, Moldavia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Ukraine, Tatarstan, and Georgia. I always stayed in the houses of local people who became friends. I wanted to grasp the beauty and the mystery of daily life. “I haven’t seen you for a hundred summers, a hundred winters”—that’s what people in Russia say when they haven’t seen each other for a long time. It became the title of my book.

Bertien van Menan, Sister Nuala Bundoran, 2014, from the series Ireland

Knoppers: The people in your photographs seem to forget they’re being photographed. No doubt that has to do with the amateur compact cameras you use.

Van Manen: I started off working with Leicas and Nikons, but one day they were stolen from my house in Amsterdam. I took compact cameras but with good lenses with me because it was safer. They were just little toys, so they didn’t get stolen. People felt less threatened by them, anyhow. You’re with a guest who also takes photos, rather than with a photographer who’s your guest. I could leave them lying on the table and I always had about three of them with me. Sometimes people would start using the little cameras themselves. I was staying with Irina, who has since then become a good friend, and her aunt, and there were two boys of about ten. I arrived home in Amsterdam and looked at the contacts and thought: Was I so very drunk? Did I really make photos like that? Then I realized that the boys had been photographing each other, with bare bottoms and in other funny poses. Even the photograph of the little boy on top of the wardrobe that ended up in Let’s sit down before we go was made by them.

Knoppers: I find it extraordinary that you can get so close to people without making the observer of the book feel like a voyeur. Is that something you make a conscious effort to achieve or is it intuitive?

Van Manen: I’m always terrified I’m bothering people, and that they won’t like me.

Bertien van Manen, Weifang Travelling Yangsu, 1997, from the series East Wind West Wind

Knoppers: That’s difficult, considering the kind of photographs you make, but it’s probably also your strength.

Van Manen: Yes, but sometimes the things I haven’t done keep me awake at night. I was brought up in a very Catholic environment, of course, and I’m totally fascinated by all those Russian Orthodox churches. One day I heard music coming out of a church in the countryside. I went in and saw the priest standing there. All the women were on their knees in a line in front of him. My god, I didn’t dare photograph that. I’m fearful of everything that has to do with the church.

Knoppers: The Polish journalist Ryszard Kapus ́cin ́ski wrote the foreword to A hundred summers, a hundred winters. How did that come about?

Van Manen: Joseph Brodsky [the Russian-American writer] was supposed to write the foreword. He visited me here in Amsterdam and it was great to see how enthusiastic he was, but he fell ill and died. Kapus ́cin ́ski had written a book called The Emperor (1978), which I found tremendous. Not a bad replacement, but it’s still a shame.

Bertien van Manen, Couple and painting, Grooves Bar, Shanghai, 1998, from the series East Wind West Wind

Knoppers: You said that your fascination with Russia is very personal. After the publication of A hundred summers, a hundred winters, you went to China to work on your next big project, East Wind West Wind [photographs made between 1997 and 2000]. Was there a similar personal link with China

My attention was turned in that direction by Paul Wombell, who at the time was director of the Photographers’ Gallery in London. He was in Amsterdam and he invited me to put together an exhibition at his gallery, but I was in a black hole. A hundred summers, a hundred winters had been so intense. He suggested I should go to China because the country was changing so much. I went there ten times before I finally knew what I was looking for. I traveled to both the major cities in the east and south, as well as rural village in the west, wanting to depict the daily life of common Chinese people. I always came back with beautiful calendar pictures, but that wasn’t what I was after. The tenth time I was with my friend Xiao Feng at his friend’s home, an apartment on the twentieth floor in the city of Chongqing. We’d been inside all day. In the late afternoon we went out. We got onto the street and the heat, the crowds, and all those voices came flying at me. There was a buzz all around me. Suddenly I knew that I wanted to capture that vibrant feeling. I immediately started photographing things that at first you may not realize can be truly magnificent. One photograph was taken in a small movie theater where movies were shown twenty-four hours a day. Young people escaped their domestic environments and the gaze of their parents by going there.

Knoppers: All your books, with the exception of Easter and Oak Trees, which features black-and-white photographs of your family taken between 1970 and 1980, are set in areas and communities that are fairly closed.

Van Manen: In Siberia I walked through a village and people came out of their houses to greet me and invited me in for a cup of tea. In China, in a small town in the north, they announced through the town’s loudspeakers that a foreigner was around. “There’s a white woman who looks different. She’s a person too, just like us. Leave her in peace and don’t touch her.” My guide translated it for me. I thought that was fantastic.

Bertien van Manen, Pjotr and his family, Apanas, Siberia, 1993, from the series Let’s sit down before we go

Knoppers: For Let’s sit down before we go [photographs taken in Russia between 1991 and 2009] you asked the photographer Stephen Gill to go through all the contact sheets from your Russia archive. Why did you desire to look back?

Van Manen: I kept coming upon photographs and thinking, Why isn’t this in the book? There turned out to be far more intriguing photos than I’d expected. Of course I couldn’t be sure, because they’re my own photographs. So I asked Stephen. The expression “Let’s sit down before we go” comes from the Orthodox Church. People would kneel for a moment to pray before starting out on long journeys with horses and carts, because there were all kinds of dangers along the way, such as wolves and Siberian snow. It’s still the custom, but now they do it quickly as a kind of ritual. [Van Manen demonstrates, briefly sitting down and then getting up again.] I thought it was a good title for a project in which I too sit down and go through my archive. A moment of reflection.

Knoppers: The photographs in Let’s sit down before we go were made in the same period as A hundred summers, a hundred winters, but they’re very different in style. Why is that?

Van Manen: Stephen Gill and I paid attention to different things in the editing. Twenty years had passed since I took the photographs. A development had taken place in photography and in myself. This book is far freer than A hundred summers, a hundred winters. At that time certain things weren’t “allowed.” The Robert Frank method was far from accepted by everyone in those days. Nothing was supposed to be in the picture that didn’t “belong” there. Everything had to be neatly within the frame. Overexposure was a mortal sin. But overexposure produces a strange and exciting effect. In Let’s sit down before we go imperfections became a unifying theme.

Bertien van Manen, Willemijn Venrode, 1973, from the series Easter and Oak Trees

Knoppers: You always get very close to other people. And you’ve said that you sometimes have difficulty with that, with taking such intimate pictures. Easter and Oak Trees is based on family photographs from your archive. You reveal yourself and your family during intimate, private moments. What is the setting for Easter and Oak Trees?

Van Manen: At Easter I usually went with my family to my grandfather’s large country estate in the province of North Brabant. We have a favorite Joe Cocker song in the family, on the record Mad Dogs & Englishmen. At one point Joe Cocker says, “This izzzz Easter.” He can say that really beautifully. And the estate is full of oak trees.

Knoppers: Have you asked your children, now adults, what they think of the book?

Van Manen: They think it’s beautiful, but they have mixed feelings about some of the photographs.

Knoppers: Do you often find that people who end up in your books are ultimately shocked by how they appear?

Van Manen: People look so differently at themselves than the way I look at them. That’s why it’s often difficult when you send them the photographs. I think they look great, but there’s always something wrong with their figure or with their chin. Nowadays, of course, there are so many opportunities to photograph yourself. Everyone makes some kind of glamour photograph so that they’re shown to the best possible advantage and can direct every aspect. Those are of course very different types of photographs than the ones I make.

Bertien van Manen, Donegal, 2014, from the series Ireland

Knoppers: Moonshine, your most recent project with MACK, is about mineworkers’ families that you visited between 1985 and 2013 in the Appalachian Mountains in Kentucky, Tennessee, and West Virginia. Before that, you tried to get in touch with mineworkers in Donetsk. Why are you so interested in mining communities?

Van Manen: I grew up in the mining region of Heerlen, in the south of the Netherlands. My father worked at the state mines and I attended a local Catholic school where I was surrounded by miners’ daughters. I often visited their homes and I loved it there. At my friends’ houses everything happened in a little room where the windows were steamed up from soup on the stove. The mothers fascinated me. I found it so cozy there. At our place it was all a bit colder. I felt far more at home with those mineworkers’ families. Also, my very first photography project was on miners in a little mining village in West Yorkshire, UK, called New Sharlston.

Knoppers: For the last year and a half you have been photographing in Ireland. Do you have the feeling that you’ve already found what you’re looking for there?

Van Manen: Actually, I do, though I go back to perfect it and to have more material to choose from.

Bertien van Manen, Tullan Beach, Donegal, 2014, from the series Ireland
All photographs courtesy Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York

Knoppers: That’s relatively quick compared with your other projects. Why do you think that might be?

Van Manen: For my other projects I photographed people in their own environment. That was my great fascination. In Ireland I dispensed with the people and reflected more on the atmosphere and on the death of my husband Willem. He died seven years ago. I photograph the Irish west coast a great deal: It is the end of Europe, the end of the world. It’s about endlessness, about ruin and death. It’s poetic and mythical.

At the moment I’m reading everything I can get my hands on about Ireland. Much of the literature from Ireland is about families with lots of children, steamy relationships, Catholicism, a father who drinks and tyrannizes and lashes out. The mother is kind and cares for the children. There are of course beautiful lines about nature, by novelists like John McGahern, or about the sea, by John Banville. Or by poets like Michael Longley, with his poetic everyday directness, or Seamus Heaney, whose poems sometimes are mythical and go back to anonymous early Irish lyrics. But I also read a lot of French and German literature. There’s now a little French bookshop two streets away from me and it’s wonderful. I need literature when I’m traveling. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Bulgakov, Gogol—all those magnificent Russian books. They’ve all become friends of mine.

Translated from the Dutch by Liz Waters.

This interview was originally published in Aperture, issue 220, “The Interview Issue,” Fall 2015.

A Photographer’s “Spiritual Collaboration” with a Mysterious Mexican Archive

Gonzalo Reyes Rodriguez was in a used bookstore in Mexico City in December 2020 when a packet of vintage snapshots caught his eye. Most were self-portraits of a young man with luscious teen-idol locks, a supple pout, and the vulpine gaze of someone who can pose as well as compose. There were over two hundred pictures, including those with or of friends and lovers, all perceptibly queer, dressed up, playing dress-up, or in various states of undress. Handwritten on the backs of the photos were dates between 1987 and 1993, as well as the signature “Technoir.” Perhaps taken from the nightclub scene in The Terminator and that genre of dystopian thrillers, the pseudonym casts a pallid haze over otherwise effervescent vignettes. These blithe visions of youth appear in stark contrast to the reality of the time—the convergence of the AIDS epidemic and Mexican peso crisis. Rodriguez, curious and moved, procured the pictures for his studio.

Photographs from the Technoir archive in Gonzalo Reyes Rodriguez’s studio, 2021

Appropriating found ephemera is central to Rodriguez’s artistic practice. He was born and raised in Mexico, and his family moved to Chicago when he was thirteen. Before he was even conscious of art and the possibility of it as a career, he was obsessed with images. He cut out photos of Latin pop stars from his sister’s Eres magazines and plates from encyclopedias that his father purchased secondhand. “It was how I learned about the world,” Rodriguez says. “I knew I was gay, and it was my way of figuring out who I was because I constantly felt alienated.” Rodriguez eventually applied and was accepted into Chicago’s After School Matters program, which provides teens a stipend while they learn a trade skill of their choice. For Rodriguez, it had to be photography.

As Rodriguez went on to study art—he received his BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and MFA from the University of Pennsylvania—he became intrigued by the slippage of time and mutability of a photograph’s meaning . “When I started grad school, I didn’t really want to make photos anymore,” Rodriguez says. “I was less interested in making pictures than understanding how they function.” He discovered the works of artists like Nancy Davenport and texts by the theorist Ariella Azoulay, who writes about photography as a tool for social and political interrogation. For a self-titled show with Roots & Culture Contemporary Art Center, Chicago, in 2018, Rodriguez juxtaposed archival photographs from the Nicaraguan Revolution with production notes and stills from the Nick Nolte film Under Fire, text from a 1983 Playboy interview with the Sandinistas, and excerpts from declassified psychological-operations manuals. Emblematic of his more documentarian mode of working, the exhibition unraveled tidy, valorizing narratives about the United States’ intervention in Latin America.

Gonzalo Reyes Rodriguez, Untitled (Madonna), 2021

The Technoir archive inspired Rodriguez’s return to a more intimate way of engaging with pictures. “They’re private but can be read publicly,” he says. “They move through the personal and political in interesting ways.” What if, he wondered, their potential energy was intentionally harnessed to construct a shared history? His cheekily titled New Photographs series marks the first time he incorporated the Technoir archive in his work. He considered the found photograph an object of inquiry and elevated status, influenced by the Pictures Generation, particularly Sarah Charlesworth’s Objects of Desire (1983–89), in which she rephotographed iconic imagery sourced from antiquity to contemporary culture against saturated backdrops of pure color—semiotic gestures that sought to evoke and stimulate the cognitive process of desire. For New Photographs, Rodriguez superimposed Technoir’s images over his own, staging heart-to-hearts across time.

Gonzalo Reyes Rodriguez, Untitled (Dying Slave), 2021Gonzalo Reyes Rodriguez, Untitled (Formal Portrait), 2022

The tension between middle-class conformity and ecstatic self-liberation ripples on the surfaces of the works in New Photographs. In Untitled (Formal Portrait) (2022), a vibrant yellow blouse patterned with the childish scribble of a penis and balls looms behind Technoir in a tan suit. In Untitled (Dying Slave) (2021), the sterile, classical depiction of agony is disrupted by a gonzo shot of Technoir in a shower stall, donning a red silk bathrobe, with shoulder-length hair and a put-on expression of unrequited love. In Untitled (Madonna) (2021), an image of Technoir wearing a faded Madonna T-shirt overlays a photograph of a rumpled blanket printed with the portrait of a female Mexican revolutionary, creating a fun-house mirror of gendered power play. Clearly, for Rodriguez, the entanglements go beyond the intellectual and art historical. “Why did this person decide to make this photo?” he asks. “Why have I wanted to make the same photo in the past? There’s something there like desire, the unpacking of something.”

For his most recent show Survey, at David Peter Francis gallery in New York, Rodriguez diversified the milieu of images while dialing up negative space and what Charlesworth describes as “the coherence of photographic illusion,” expanding his visual dialogue with Technoir. He photographed what appear to be steel mobiles (some resembling Tom Burr’s abstract but sensual Addict-Love tableaux) on which hang photographs from art history, retro men’s magazines, the Technoir archive, and Rodriguez’s own portfolio and iPhone camera roll. These are not digital collages, Rodriguez clarifies, but installations he had photographed in the studio then dismantled, never to be exhibited in physical form. He cites as a reference the German art historian Aby Warburg and his Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, a collection of black burlap boards pinned with clusters of images that share motifs across geography and time. Warburg calls this spatiotemporal distance and one’s consciousness of it “Denkraum”—a room for reflection—and that is exactly what Rodriguez provides, more than he ever had before, in Survey.

Gonzalo Reyes Rodriguez, Figure II, 2024Gonzalo Reyes Rodriguez, Sleeping Boys I, 2024

The historical and biographical details add dimension to the constellations of images in the framed night skies that compose most of Survey, but the works resonate in their spareness. In Figure II (2024), two photographs depict a young woman in an ’80s power suit: imperious shoulder pads, ostentatious jewelry, and wild hair barely contained in a tight headwrap. In her mind, she is Linda Evangelista. “Is she a friend of Technoir’s? Is it Technoir in drag?” Rodriguez asks. The other two photographs in the frameare Rodriguez’s own. One is of a silhouetted monument to the Spanish dramatist Jacinto Benevente, of an actress lowering a Grecian mask onto her face. Another is of the Fuente de los Cántaros, a fountain in Mexico City that depicts the figure of an Indigenous woman holding pitchers from which water momentarily flows. She is modeled after Luz Jiménez, a Nahua woman whom scholars consider the face of twentieth-century Mexican art because she was the constant muse turned collaborator of artists like Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco. The Fuente is in Parque México, close to where Rodriguez’s parents currently live, and where he believes Technoir staged one of his guerrilla fashion shoots. The photographers, past and present, are captivated by moments of becoming and understand exactly how pictures are not only representational but are themselves conduits of power.

Installation view of Gonzalo Reyes Rodriguez: Survey, David Peter Francis, New York, 2024
All photographs courtesy the artist and David Peter Francis, New York

Rodriguez’s spiritual collaboration with the Technoir archive recalls Jonathas de Andrade’s Tropical Hangover (2009), an installation of found photography and writing guided by entries from a stranger’s diary which the Brazilian artist salvaged from the trash in Recife. The result is a collective reconstruction of a city crumbling in the wake of colonialism and rapid modernization, and the human drama that persists. Like those of de Andrade, Rodriguez’s works are constructs of empathy, divining meaningful and humane coincidences across time. To this day, Technoir’s identity remains a mystery to Rodriguez. He doesn’t know whether the young man died of AIDS-related illness or grew into normative obscurity. But in the great void of what is not known, there’s the possibility of redemption through remembrance and beauty. In the triptych Sleeping Boys (2024), Rodriguez uses the same arc structure to visually connect duos of young men in repose: Rodriguez’s friend, Technoir’s lover, some male models, The Sleeping Hermaphroditus. The arc suggests a projectile, perhaps a flare, a parabolic return, a threshold, the path of droplets in the atmosphere waiting to refract light into a rainbow, or an arm wrapped around you, drawing you into an embrace.

Read more from our series “Introducing,” which highlights exciting new voices in photography.

Paolo Gasparini on How Photographs Can Help Us Learn to See

In spring 2024, nearly thirty years after he represented Venezuela at the Venice Biennale, Paolo Gasparini returned to Venice to participate in the latest edition of the international exhibition, Foreigners Everywhere, curated by Adriano Pedrosa. Here, we revisit Gasparini’s conversation with Sagrario Berti in the magazine’s “Interview Issue,” originally published in fall 2015.

Although Paolo Gasparini was born in Italy, Venezuela is his adopted home. He has spent his life documenting the cities and people of Latin America, south of “the northern imperialist,” as he refers to the United States in the following interview. Born in 1934 in Gorizia, in Northeast Italy, he emigrated to Caracas in 1954 to join his mother and older brother. This was a time of oil fueled growth, prosperity, and urban expansion as well as inequality, poverty, and cramped living conditions in new housing complexes. Working alongside his architect brother Graziano, Gasparini sought to document both the transformation of the built environment and the city’s inhabitants.

In 1961, impassioned by the Cuban Revolution, Gasparini traveled there and stayed for four years. Later, in the 1970s, he was commissioned by UNESCO to photograph urban centers from Mexico to Argentina, focusing on both architecture and the stark social inequality he witnessed. The project resulted in the photobook Para verte mejor, América Latina (The better to see you, Latin America, 1972), now considered a classic.

Gasparini has continued to make work, often reinterpreting his still photographs through the use of sound and elements of performance. In 1995, he represented Venezuela at the 46th Venice Biennale. For this interview, Sagrario Berti, a Venezuelan photography curator, researcher, and longtime friend, met with Gasparini at his home and studio in the Bello Monte neighborhood in Caracas. They spoke about his recent book Karakarakas, which features six decades’ worth of Caracas work; what it means to identify as a Latin American photographer; and why, for Gasparini, photographs should still be seen as a product of ideology.

Paolo Gasparini, São Paulo, 1972, from the series Para verte mejor, América Latina (The better to see you, Latin America)Paolo Gasparini, Italian miracle, Rome, 1966

Sagrario Berti: What led you to immigrate to Latin America and settle in Venezuela?

Paolo Gasparini: In order to avoid enlisting in the army, before turning twenty-one I moved to Caracas. My father and two brothers were already living there. My mother traveled constantly to Venezuela where Graziano, one of my brothers, was working as an architect and photographer. He was conducting research on popular, indigenous, and colonial architecture of Latin America.

Berti: Were you already taking photographs?

Gasparini: Yes. After one of my mother’s trips to Caracas, she came home with a Leica camera for me as a gift from Graziano, and at seventeen I began photographing. In Gorizia, Italy, my girlfriend Franca Donda and I frequented a photography studio. That’s where we learned developing and copying techniques. I also took part in the exhibitions organized by Gorizia’s photo-club, where I showed photographs of fishermen, peasants, and circus workers.

Berti: And in Caracas?

Gasparini: Having only been in Caracas for eight days, thanks to Graziano’s architect friends, I began photographing the buildings of Carlos Raúl Villanueva, Venezuela’s great modernist architect: the Central University of Venezuela and the construction of the 23 de Enero [January 23] public housing blocks. I settled into a rich cultural world full of writers, philosophers, critics, and thinkers from the magazine Cruz del Sur (1951–61), a publication run by Violeta and Alfredo Roffé that linked cultural issues with societal problems and served as a focal point for leftist intellectuals who opposed the dictatorship of Marcos Pérez Jiménez (1952–58). I worked for Villanueva and for architects like Pedro Neuberger, Dirk Bornhorst, and Jorge Romero Gutiérrez on El Helicoide, a proposed shopping mall and industrial exposition center in Caracas built on a rock of gigantic proportions that was never finished. Now it’s a prison.

Paolo Gasparini, National Electoral Council, Caracas, 1968Paolo Gasparini, Potosí hill, Bolivia, 1991

Berti: You alternated between being an architectural photographer and documenting various neighborhoods. You also traveled around the interior of the country. Which work from this period do you consider most important?

Gasparini: My architectural work, without a doubt. Remember, this period marked the beginnings of publicity and advertising in Venezuela. I had offers to work in publicity that were much better paid, but I turned them all down because I was not, and am still not, interested in advertising photography used to sell products. I traveled either by myself or with Graziano. We went all over the Paraguaná. Peninsula, an arid territory, between 1954 and 1960. We traveled from Los Castillos on the Orinoco River—in the eastern part of Venezuela—and ended up enjoying ourselves and admiring the white houses of the Falcón State in the west. Then we moved onward to the market of Los Filúos in the Guajira Peninsula, on the border of Colombia, and crossed the Andes. Over the course of these travels I made two photo-essays: Las Salinas de Margarita (The salt mines/lakes of Margarita) and Bobare, el pueblo más miserable del Estado Lara (Bobare, the most miserable town in the State of Lara). Both were published in Cruz del Sur. I photographed Bobare under Paul Strand’s documentary influence. Franca, who was living in Paris at the time, contacted Strand—who was self-exiled in Paris, fleeing from McCarthyism in the U.S.—and showed him the work that had been published in the magazine, as well as other photographs that I had taken in Venezuela. Strand brutally criticized Bobare. At one point he told me, “I had to look at it under a yellow light in order to soften the unpleasant yellow hue of the print.” But he liked the other photographs. [Gasparini and Strand met later, in Orgeval, France, in 1956.]

Paolo Gasparini, Untitled, Ecuador, 1982

Berti: Aside from Strand, what were your influences?

Gasparini: When I was eleven, I saw the horrors of World War II: photographs of bodies that had been mutilated, hung, and shot. The photographs belonged to a Yugoslav partisan and guerrilla fighter. This was my first experience with photography and it caused a deep impression.

My visual imagination was also fed by magazine photography and film. During the postwar period I went to the Venice Film Festival; at the time, in the United States Information Agency offices, the American Army was projecting films in Gorizia and Trieste. In Venice I saw The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936); The River (1938), which was produced by the Farm Security Administration; [Robert] Flaherty’s film Nanook of the North (1922); The Photographer (1948), a documentary on Edward Weston; and the first images from the concentration camps. I saw films that hadn’t been screened in Italy because of the war, Gone with the Wind (1939) and Que Viva Mexico! (1930), for example, and, of course, the Italian neorealism of [Cesare] Zavattini, [Roberto] Rossellini, and [Vittorio] De Sica.

I became acquainted with the “American way of life” through magazines like Collier’s, Life, and Picture Post. I became enraptured by photography in the films of Paul Strand, such as Redes (1936), and I was especially drawn to the documentary photography, or rather the “social realism,” of his book La France de Profil [with Claude Roy, 1952].

So the basis of my imagination was the documentary propaganda disseminated by the United States army. I left Europe for South America with the war photographs that I’d seen, and with my head full of images of America—hence my constant need to represent both worlds in my photographic practice.

Paolo Gasparini, Untitled, Santiago de Cuba, Cuba, 1963–64, from the series Cuba, ver para creerPaolo Gasparini, Untitled, Havana, 1964

Berti: You lived in Cuba between 1961 and 1965, after the revolution. You photographed with Alejo Carpentier, the renowned Cuban writer, and published the book La ciudad de las columnas (The city of columns, 1970). What drew you to Cuba?

Gasparini: On the one hand, there was an interest in modernity, beauty, folklore, and the authenticity of American life—in magical realism. In 1958, on the other hand, the Cuban Revolution had exploded as a response to the deep social problems that existed in Cuba and the rest of Latin America. The Cuban architect Ricardo Porro and Alejo Carpentier—both exiled in Venezuela—invited me to visit Cuba. I went with Franca; we were married by then. We intended to stay six months but the trip was extended to four and a half years. Carpentier wanted to write a book about Havana, an archive of baroque Cuban architecture—that’s what became La ciudad de las columnas. He liked my “walking” work, he said, because I passed through all of the city streets, registering the stained-glass windows, hallways, and gates. I also befriended many of the fervent supporters of the first revolutionary wave.

Berti: Following the parties celebrating the Cuban Revolution, you shifted the content and style of your photographs, focusing on people living in poverty.

Gasparini: Yes, the speed of the social and cultural events in Cuba made me change my camera. I switched from medium- and large-format reflex cameras (which I used thanks to Strand) to a versatile 35mm, which obviously changed my way of seeing and capturing reality with tremendous speed. I became part of the artistic and intellectual circles, which included photographers, filmmakers, and architects such as Santiago Álvarez, Alberto Korda, and Iván Espín. In Havana I also met Cartier-Bresson, René Burri, Chris Marker, and Italo Calvino, all formidable intellectuals. This amplified my desire to expand the discourse of the Cuban Revolution throughout all of Latin America.

Paolo Gasparini, Brasília, 1972, from the series Para verte mejor, América Latina (The better to see you, Latin America)

Berti: How did your Cuban themes differ from those in your other Latin American work?

Gasparini: In Cuba I documented the celebration, euphoria, triumph, and hope following the revolution. In the rest of Latin America, I documented social contradictions.

Berti: When did you begin to expand your travel around Latin America?

Gasparini: In 1970, UNESCO hired me to photograph pre-Columbian, colonial, and contemporary edifices. I focused on the urban building projects being erected from Mexico to the Pampas, from Brasília to Machu Picchu, designed by great modernist architects. I insisted on photographing the lives of marginalized individuals, of those who have nothing, and the huge differences that coexist beside and around these huge building projects.

Berti: In addition to the book Panorama of Latin American Architecture (1977), you published the book of photographs Para verte mejor, América Latina. How did this project materialize and where did the title come from?

Gasparini: It came from an eagerness to document Cuba once again. Edmundo Desnoes wrote the text and Humberto Peña designed the book. The title paraphrases [Charles] Perrault’s story “Little Red Riding Hood” (1967).

Paolo Gasparini, Electoral campaign, Caracas, 1968, from the series KarakarakasPaolo Gasparini, Bite me, Paris, 1982, from the series Retromundo (Retroworld)

Berti: Tell me about Retromundo (Retroworld, 1986), your second book, which was about the representation of two worlds, Europe and Latin America. Here you juxtapose two ways of life: that of the inhabitants of Paris, New York, and Rome, and that of citizens in São Paulo, Mexico City, and Lima.

Gasparini: As I told you earlier, I left Europe with images of America. Later on, I returned to the first world carrying images of the Latin American reality. That’s where Retromundo came from—a book of photographs that doesn’t confront realities but rather tries to serve as evidence for what’s occurring on both continents.

Berti: And El suplicante (The supplicant, 2010)? Where did you get the idea of structuring a book according to your long travels through Mexico?

Gasparini: El suplicante was another adventure. I was invited to develop a project based on the urban culture of Mexico City. I took a photographic tour from the border of the northern imperialist to Subcomandante Marcos’s land of Chiapas.

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Berti: And your most recent book, Karakarakas [wordplay on Caracas that incorporates the “ka” sound from the words Kodak and Kafka] (2014), takes the form of a political manifesto about the city.

Gasparini: That book brings together photographs taken in Caracas between 1954 and 2014. I put together these photographs with il senno di poi, “the wisdom of hindsight.” I combined images, connecting them with different themes, places, and dates, in an attempt to organize a new discourse that—by way of architecture and certain aspects of daily urban life—would offer a reinterpretation of Caracas’s past and evolution, representing its social, political, and cultural contradictions. As in the previous books, I worked with a great team. The book managed to give significant shape to a politically urgent discourse on the circumstances Venezuela currently endures, from the incongruences of the Bolivarian Revolution to the so-called socialism of the twenty-first century. I also tried to reflect, through architecture, on daily city life in this country that’s so wealthy with oil and yet so poor—a failure of modernity—and on the empty commitments of the governments preceding Chávez.

Berti: You also include images of the last sixteen years, which comprise the Chávez and post- Chávez years (1999–present). Looking at Karakarakas, it seems that the situation has not advanced. We see no changes, and the misery and poverty continue.

Gasparini: Chávez was the product, precisely, of a nonworking democracy. He wanted to put an end to the bourgeois government and built a populist state that ended up dividing the people. The result has been the destruction of modern society, economic ruin, and the collapse of basic services: health care, education, work, among others. No one knows— nor can define—the economic, political, and social chaos we’re suffering.

Paolo Gasparini, Los Ruices, Caracas, 1967–70Paolo Gasparini, El oficio de vivir, Gorizia, Italy (The purpose of living, Gorizia, Italy), 1983, from the series Epifanías (Epiphanies)

Berti: In your Fotomurales (Photo-murals), which you began in the ’90s and are still working on, and in the series Epifanías (Epiphanies, 1980s–90s), you use audiovisual narratives. Why use an audiovisual component in a photography book project?

Gasparini: This allows me to incorporate spoken or written texts—poetry, music, sound, and imagery. Above all, it allows me to add a temporal shift. For me, audiovisual is the most complex and all-encompassing medium. The form helps deepen what I want to express. There I find what the photograph on its own doesn’t provide—with its claim to replace the disorder of the world with the balanced order of the composition.

Berti: Since the 1980s you’ve been presenting audiovisuals together with slide-show projections, synchronizing three carousels of slides in a cinematic way. You orchestrated the projection in museums as well, as a sort of in situ performance.

Gasparini: The performance is important because, as the author of the project, I am present. The projection allows me to establish a dialogue with the public. Before projecting the piece, I can insert or extract images and organize a loose discourse, one that’s mutable and changeable, different with every projection.

Berti: You have often framed writing in your photographs, be it publicity slogans or graffiti. Do you feel that the image is not significant in and of itself?

Gasparini: The image on its own nailed to a wall doesn’t interest me. My interest has always been to edit images in the same way as words or discourse. From a fleeting image I like to develop visual phrases.

Paolo Gasparini, Los Filúos market, Guajira Peninsula, ca. 1980Paolo Gasparini, Prontuario, Mexico City, 1993, from the series El suplicante (The supplicant)

Berti: In the series Fotomurales, in some of the audiovisuals (early 2000s), you appropriated the revolutionary iconography of the continent, depicting Che or Tina Modotti; you uplift heroes who were dedicated to the Cuban dictatorship, as in Che’s case. Is this a way of remembering or refreshing a political position?

Gasparini: What you’re asking corresponds with a specific moment and context in recent Latin American history. In the ’60s and ’70s, there wasn’t a single place in South America that hadn’t been invaded by a political or advertising message, to the point where Coca-Cola and Che both became hypercontaminated icons in Latin America’s cultural memory.

Berti: In Modotti’s case it seems more like a romantic relationship.

Gasparini: Tina is special. She was born in Udine, a city close to Gorizia, my native city. When I was very young, Strand spoke to me of her, describing her as a great heroine of the revolution and an extraordinary photographer. In Mexico, I was a friend of [Manuel] Álvarez Bravo’s, who studied, worked, and helped Tina with her Mexican ordeal, so full of betrayals. Edward Weston’s journals speak of Tina, and for years his journals were by my bedside. In addition, Tina was beautiful and her photography was beautiful. Tina is another love in the journey of my life.

Berti: You developed your photography practice in close collaboration with the women you shared your life with.

Gasparini: I’ve been lucky. With the women I’ve loved I’ve had relationships filled with complicity and mutual interests. They were all intelligent, passionate, curious about photography, and shared my concern for social equality. Franca was a great partner; she helped me with my lab work. Duda Ferrari, an Italian architect, complemented my architecture work and designed several political publications in Caracas in the 1970s. With María Teresa Boulton I began a project of promoting photography as art in Venezuela, through the Fototeca gallery (1977–82), later the Venezuelan Council for Photography. Finally, with Marianela Figarella, an intelligent and passionate researcher, I shared ideas about photography as art and cultural product.

Paolo Gasparini, The habitat of man, Bello Monte, Caracas, 1968Paolo Gasparini, Mexico City, 1971–72, from the series El suplicante

Berti: You still take pictures. Why?

Gasparini: In the end, after so many journeys, I believe there are some images that “bite,” or pierce you, as Barthes notes. I think photographs can help us learn how to look. How to think about and resist this world that’s consecrated to the grandiloquence of symbols that propagate lies and that, more and more, reduce and undervalue life.

Berti: How do you view the relationship between politics and photography?

Gasparini: Whether the formalists and Conceptualists like it or not, the image—the photograph—is a product of ideology. What is captured is in the mind of the person who triggers the shutter. Photography is the result of a thought process; it’s a serious subject. It’s not a click made with, say, a smartphone for uploading photographs to Instagram or Facebook.

Berti: Why take a political stance?

Gasparini: As Georges Didi-Huberman, a popular philosopher among the young Venezuelan Conceptual artists, says, “In order to know, you have to take a position. To take a position is to want, is to demand something, is to situate oneself in the present and aspire to a future.”

Berti: What do you think about being considered a Latin American photographer?

Gasparini: I’m eighty-one years old. I’ve lived for sixty years in Latin America and twenty in Italy. I’ve lived between two worlds and I travel frequently. Obviously I consider myself a Latin American photographer in the sense that my work is connected to the social and cultural events of the continent.

Paolo Gasparini, Guajira women in Maracaibo, Venezuela, 1969Paolo Gasparini, Untitled, Quito, Ecuador, 1982, from the series La calle (The street)
All photographs © and courtesy Paolo Gasparini

Berti: Is there such a thing as Latin American photography?

Gasparini: If we locate photographic practice in a given territory, evidently Latin American photography exists, in the same way people speak of North American or Japanese photography. Photography has a history here: The second half of the nineteenth century saw the rise of travel photography and its stubborn depiction of the “other.” The first decade of the twentieth century included Agustín Casasola’s extensive and unprecedented coverage of the Mexican Revolution. The Cuban Revolution expanded the drive to photograph every corner of Latin America. During the Cold War, the medium was used by those we now call the “Conceptualists of the South” as a tool for dissent against totalitarian regimes, such as Pinochet’s in Chile.

Recently, Alexis Fabry curated the exhibition América Latina: Photographs, 1960–2013 (2013) at the Fondation Cartier in Paris, and also organized Urbes Mutantes (Mutated metropolises, 2013–14), in Bogotá and New York; these were extraordinary exhibitions that covered a wide repertoire of photographs made in Latin America. Currently, many photographers work in the region, documenting diverse local realities, and they generate proposals that are comparable to those of photographers on other continents.

Berti: You’ve spent more than sixty years taking photographs. Do you have an opinion about contemporary photography?

Gasparini: Paul Strand, my teacher and friend, fought all his life for socialist ideals and for photography to be accepted in museums and purchased for its rightful commercial value. Now, in Latin America and in the rest of the world, socialism is dead or confined to museums. Photographs are sold at art fairs, veritable art supermarkets. Strand’s photographs sell for thousands at art auctions: they’ve gone for more than a hundred thousand dollars! It has all come to pass, cara Sagrario.

Translated from the Spanish by Elianna Kan and Paula Kupfer. This piece originally appeared in Aperture, issue 220, “The Interview Issue.”

An Unexpected Pairing of Francesca Woodman and Julia Margaret Cameron

This spring, the National Portrait Gallery in London has staged an unexpected pairing of Francesca Woodman and Julia Margaret Cameron, whose bodies of photographic work were made a hundred years apart. The lushly titled Portraits to Dream In, the result of a thoughtful and imaginative curatorial inquiry, provides a compelling guide to their posthumous resemblances and describes a cultural arc of Romanticism from the mid-nineteenth-century to the turn of the twentieth, from luminous and pastoral to haunted and opaque. Both artists were engaged with the past, and the exhibition places them in a shared classicism of figuration and myth—a revelatory insight for Woodman. Both practiced photography for less than fifteen years. Both of their biographies often eclipse their critical reception. At times their congruence feels magnetic; at times their differences are as illuminating as their similarities.

Francesca Woodman, Untitled, 1979
Courtesy Woodman Family Foundation/DACS, LondonJulia Margaret Cameron, The Dream (Mary Hillier), 1869
Courtesy the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

The exhibition is organized by curator Magda Keaney in tidy themes that support affinities between the two women, among them “Angels and Otherworldly Beings,” “Mythology,” “Doubling,” and “Nature and Femininity.” Much of this is informative and, indeed, suggests a universal lexicon beyond this survey of dual sensibilities. Some of the rhymes are less plausible: a section entitled “Men” fails to persuade that Cameron’s depictions of eminent male political and cultural figures mirror Woodman’s male portraits. Unclothed men make rare appearances in Woodman’s photographs, where they do little to diminish the images as self-portraits. Festooned with a seashell, egg, pomegranate, or dead bird, the men serve as playful surrogates for the photographer herself.

Julia Margaret Cameron, Sadness (Ellen Terry), 1864

Courtesy the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles Francesca Woodman, Polka Dots #5, 1976

Courtesy Woodman Family Foundation/DACS, London

Portraits to Dream In is an occasion to revel in the sumptuous texture of the photographic print, born from technologies decades apart. For both photographers, darkroom manipulation and tactility contribute to the pictures’ emotional mood, however diametric. For Cameron, the shallow depth of field and long shutter speed of the glass plate negative and wet collodion process renders a picture that flutters as if provisional, a vision subject to light glinting off an immaterial surface. They are as ethereal and transparent as Woodman’s are submersed in shadow; a moth bounding away from flame. One body of work, despite its soft patina, feels rooted in a sense of presence, the other by absence: fraught and confessional without evident disclosure.

Francesca Woodman, Untitled, 1977, from the series Angels
Courtesy Woodman Family Foundation/DACS, LondonJulia Margaret Cameron, I Wait (Rachel Gurney), 1872
Courtesy the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

One of the pleasures of the exhibition is that it inspires thinking about the diversity of photographic narrative—here, one illustrative and the other suggestive. So too, the formal characteristics of the medium as an embodiment of the values of its era. As an act of photographic theatre, Cameron’s portraits are famously a pictorialist stagecraft: a pantomime of Christian archetypes, Pre-Raphaelite aesthetics, and the influence of contemporary poets such as Shelley, Keats and Tennyson. What would be considered as potential subject matter for this nascent thirty-year-old medium was formative and cautious, and the conventions of beauty and gender, static.

In vivid contrast to this Victorian piety and virtue, Francesca Woodman’s theater is a modern dramaturgy of emotional monologue (and the staging of Samuel Beckett), of performance art and contemporary choreography and most crucially, an assertion of the female body into the social space, aligning with feminist thinking. The work was made at a time when the subjectivity of the medium and a photographic narrative for what was felt was emerging, and particularly embraced in art school, where self-expression and identity seemed obligatory. In the 1970s, a smart photography student would be absorbing the work of Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Duane Michals, Nancy Rexroth, and Deborah Turbeville. As a student, Woodman gathered this burgeoning photographic interiority to the self-absorption of youth.

Installation view of Francesca Woodman’s Caryatid series at the National Portrait Gallery, London, 2024. Photograph by David Parry

It’s possible to perceive both aesthetic contexts as a continuing exemplar of photography seeking its status as a high art form, contrary to its mechanical reputation. A meaningful presence in Portraits to Dream In is one of the last works of Francesca Woodman, from 1980, which departs dramatically from her more familiar small and elusive pictures. The monumental schema of the Caryatid series, an eight-foot-high construction of diazotypes—a form of blueprint—of draped female figures, referring to the carved figurative pillars in ancient Greek art: Here is a self-portrait of empowerment, of architectural strength, suggesting the future of her work with the benevolence of time. These last Untitled works connect the correspondences between the two artists—who shared a legacy of romanticism, rooted in the mythic antique—and their enduring power through their lifetimes and into our present.

Francesca Woodman and Julia Margaret Cameron: Portraits to Dream In is on view at the National Portrait Gallery, London, through June 15, 2024.

Avion Pearce Creates a World between Reality and Dreams

In her poem “A Litany for Survival,” Audre Lorde speaks of the precarious experience of living with the knowledge that one’s survival is not only without guarantee but actively, purposefully threatened. Avion Pearce borrowed a line from Lorde for the title of their series In the Hours Between Dawn (2022–24), an ode to the possibilities of the midnight hours. The experience of the queer and trans community of color in Brooklyn that Pearce photographs is a testament to Lorde’s words. Survival—half shrouded, yet insistent—can appear in forms both soft and strong.

Pearce, who works with 8-by-10 and medium-format cameras, considers how photography shapes ideas about identity and history. “I was looking at some of the tools that have been used to construct these ideas,” Pearce told me recently, describing their desire to use older photographic methods to address the way the form has influenced how we see and understand the world. The presence of other photographic documents—a film still, a poster, a backdrop showing men in suits outside a Harlem jazz club—within Pearce’s pictures is also notable, and seems to speak to the power, promise, and perils of imagery.

Avion Pearce, Caravan, Clinton Hill, 2023 Avion Pearce, Offerings, Both Ways, 2022

Merging analog techniques with political purpose and a poetic sensibility, Pearce creates a visual realm that operates somewhere between reality and dreams. How to express what goes purposefully unseen? The assault on trans and queer rights, recently emboldened in this country, requires new ways of thinking about visibility, Pearce said, describing a certain aesthetic associated with queer photography: subjects pictured in a straightforward and highly perceivable way. “That work is really important and necessary, but I also feel that, in this particular moment, it’s important to think about whether or not visibility is necessary, and when it’s harmful.” For some images, Pearce photographed at night, while in others, they used a day-for-night technique that approximates night, allowing for a selective exposure within the frame while leaving the rest in darkness.

The assault on trans and queer rights, recently emboldened in this country, requires new ways of thinking about visibility.

Born in Flatbush, Brooklyn, to Guyanese parents, Pearce now lives in New Haven, Connecticut. Growing up, their parents took many family snapshots of Pearce and their brother, and the photographer remembers bringing their father’s 35mm camera to middle school to make pictures of friends. World-building and an attraction to magical realism is an inheritance from their mother, who shared an interest in beauty, detail, and the cultivation of a space.

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Pearce attended Parsons School of Design for photography, and commercial photography, then advertising, before pursuing an MFA at Yale. It was there that Pearce was inspired by Abelardo Morell’s use of the camera obscura, which is deployed in one of Pearce’s particularly striking images: a figure lies in a dark bed, the Brooklyn skyline floating upside down on the wall above their head like a dream made visible. The camera obscura technique, employed for centuries by painters, recalls Pearce’s impressionistic use of light and shadow, focus and atmosphere throughout their imagery. Other influences include Ming Smith, Roy DeCarava, and Graciela Iturbide—photographers who innovated with light, motion, and ambiance—and the films of Wong Kar-wai and Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

Pearce’s series also tells a story of housing insecurity and displacement, with Brooklyn, and especially Crown Heights, a character in its own right. Exploring photography’s potential to chart the interplay between time, the body, and the borough’s transformation, Pearce’s expression relies as much on feeling as on fact. In the Hours Between Dawn inhabits multiple registers, a document of what is and a vision of what could be. As in Lorde’s “A Litany for Survival,” Pearce’s sight stretches, “looking inward and outward / at once before and after / seeking a now that can breed / futures.”

Avion Pearce, Ellington, Crown Heights, 2023

Beyond Lorde, there is a distinct literary quality to Pearce’s photographs. “Toni Morrison has this really beautiful way of describing light, of describing atmosphere, of describing the mundane,” said Pearce, who in a recent rereading of Beloved was particularly taken by Morrison’s depiction of the pulsing red light that fills the house at 124 Bluestone Road, where the ghost of Beloved returns to her mother.

“I just really wanted to know how that could translate to the process of making an image,” Pearce explained, considering how transcendent color might communicate feeling, sensation, even memory. “Is it possible,” they added, “to transport someone to a space or a time using something like light and color?” The luminous imprint of In the Hours Between Dawn lingers long after one’s eyes have left the artist’s world.

Avion Pearce, T, Crown Heights, 2023 Avion Pearce, Van, Shirley Chisholm Park, 2022. All photographs from the series In the Hours Between Dawn, 2022–24
Courtesy the artist

Avion Pearce is the winner of the 2024 Aperture Portfolio Prize. A solo exhibition of their work will be on view at Baxter St at the Camera Club of New York in June 26–July 26, 2024.

This piece appears in Aperture, issue 255, Summer 2024.

A Playful Investigation of Community and Territory

Since the sixteenth-century, mining has been a dominant part of the Bolivian landscape and economy. During the colonial era, silver mining played a vital role in establishing the dominance of the Spanish Empire, and to this day, the region has continued to see extraction for minerals such as tin, zinc, and lithium. In his series MITA (2022–ongoing), the photographer River Claure asks: What are the repercussions of five hundred years of colonial extraction on a person’s sense of identity, history, and territory?

Photographing throughout Llallagua, Uncia, and Catavia—all former mining communities in the Bolivian Andes—Claure explores the shifting dynamics between landscape and self. “With this project, I return to these sites to think about the inherent relationship between nature and history, and how what happened in these places can be and is an analogy of the world to come,” says Claure. “These images speculate about the end of the world, the memory of my family, and our colonial relationship with the land.” 

River Claure, Ocuri, 2023

Born in Cochabamba, Bolivia, where he is currently based, Claure studied graphic design and visual communication at Universidad Mayor de San Simón, before pursuing a master’s degree in contemporary photography at the Centro Internacional de Fotografía y Cine, in Madrid. Today, he considers his artistic practice to possess three main threads: identity, immigration, and territory. His previous series include Jinetes (2018), a body of work on identity and typology of the Bolivian Amazon, and Warawa Wawa (2019–20), a recontextualization of Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s 1943 novel The Little Prince within contemporary Andean culture.

When Claure began to delve into his family’s history in Bolivia, MITA came into focus. Both of Claure’s grandfathers worked in a silver mine in the region, having emigrated to Cochabamba in the early 1970s, fleeing political conflict and seeking better living conditions. “I began to have more intentional conversations with my grandmother about what our history had been like, how they had decided to migrate to the city, and what their memories of these places were,” Claure says. “There was something already brewing.” 

River Claure, Soccer Player 5, 2023

Claure immersed himself in the communities he was photographing for three months at a time. Seeking to work collaboratively, he shared his knowledge through photography and art workshops for high school children, many of whose families became subjects in MITA. “During my time there I became friends with the local radio station, and sometimes we ran announcements on the town radio, calling for people who wanted to participate in a teatro (theater),” Claure says, “the term teatro is friendlier than photography.”

Teatro is an accurate word for Claure, who describes his process of conceptualizing images as “writing directed games. I don’t have rigid or immovable ideas, they are games that trigger images or small stories that I would like to see visually.” There is a playful, fundamentally performative quality to the images. “‘Play’ for me is a space where the emotional, rational, and visceral meet.” 

Throughout MITA, Claure creates an amorphous blend of time, merging past, present, and future (or, as Claure puts it, “a post-apocalyptic future”). The resulting images feel like a mere second within a larger scene, a series of tableaux vivants inviting viewers to imagine what might transpire next. Two men, dressed in black and white, stand at odds against a bare landscape. A woman kneels with her face at the edge of a still pond disrupted by a mysterious splash, a foot ominously edging into the frame. A soccer player’s body leaps out of the image, with another player in motion on the ground, as if he’s propelled the player in the air.

River Claure, Virgen cerro 2, 2023

Images of the environment and towns offer rare moments of stillness throughout MITA, reminding us of the unfulfilled promises of modernity. In one of the few photographs in which a subject stares directly into the camera, a woman’s face peers out, palms open, from a large triangular sculpture made from sheepskin and adorned with metallic birds and stars. Here, Claure seems to draw from the imagery of both the eighteenth-century painting Virgin of the Mountain of Potosí and Pachamama, or Mother Earth, a revered goddess of the Indigenous people of the Andes—attending to the multiple layers that create one’s understanding of their identity. 

In MITA, Claure doesn’t seek to provide a form of “truth” often associated with photography. Rather than straight representations of the people and locations he encounters, Claure’s images question our assumptions to address the multifaceted way identity can be marked by territory—and what it means when that territory is mired by centuries of colonial violence. “What happens when the landscape is exhausted? What happens when industry and modernity have consumed everything? What happens when flags and nation states define us less and less?” asks Claure. “Is it possible to identify myself more with a mountain, with a sea, with a jungle than with the nationality written in my passport?”

River Claure, Untitled 3, 2023River Claure, Seven adults and one child in the landscape, 2023River Claure, Pianist, 2023River Claure, 26, 2023. All photographs from the series MITA, 2022–ongoing
Courtesy the artist

River Claure is a runner-up for the 2024 Aperture Portfolio Prize, an annual international competition to discover, exhibit, and publish new talents in photography and highlight artists whose work deserves greater recognition.