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September 10, 2015
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September 3, 2015
Grand Illusions: Staged Photography from the Met Collection
By Freddy Martinez
Pierre-Louis Pierson and Aquilin Schad, La Frayeur (Fright), 1861–64
A new exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York surveys the history of staged photographs from the first 170 years of the medium. The surveyed photographs, forty from the museum’s collection, highlight a range of artifice shaped by the photographers during pre-production. In examining both the blatantly fantastic and the inconspicuously manipulated, “Grand Illusions: Staged Photography from the Met Collection” draws attention to each photograph’s factual and fictional elements of design. Staged scenes such as Lewis Carroll’s St. George and the Dragon (1875), a tableau vivant of the titular Christian legend, and René Magritte’s ominous self-portrait, La Mort des Fantômes (1928), which served as the basis for a painting he made that year, provide the most direct counterpoints to straight documentary photography. Both photographs’ prominent mise-en-scènes, as well as their creators’ connections to fiction, unveil a clear staging of fantasy, and connects to contemporary work on view such as Laurie Simmons’s First Bathroom/Woman Standing (1979), one of her illusionistic scenes of a figurine in a dollhouse.
Laurie Simmons, First Bathroom/Woman Standing, 1979 © Laurie Simmons
The idea for the exhibition was sparked by the museum’s purchase of nineteenth-century daguerreotype studio operator Pierre-Louis Pierson’s La Frayeur (1861-64). The photograph’s subject, Virginia Verasis, Countess of Castiglione, directed the painter Anquilin Schad to embellish her portrait with a scene of her fleeing a fire. “Fiction and reality are like the lines of a V that endlessly approach each other and never touch,” Doug Eklund, curator of the exhibition, explained. “Every generation experiences that crisis—the first photographs and moving pictures seemed to suck the reality out of existence . . . the camera threatened to steal a layer of your soul.” Manipulated reality may no longer convince nor surprise a current generation of viewers, for whom the meaning of photographs can be more flexible, but taken together, the exhibited work reveals the clever ways photographers have designed fiction to appear as fact for centuries. An expertly staged photograph, like a good lie, uses just the right amount of fantasy to go unnoticed.
Ralph Bartholomew Jr., Eastman Kodak Advertisement: Summer Lake Scene of Teenager with Camera Making a Snapshot of Her Friends in Bathing Suits on a Dock, 1946–52 © Courtesy Keith de Lellis Gallery, NY Copyright Estate of Ralph Bartholomew
“Artists who make staged photographs are taking advantage of the assumed facticity of the medium—what you see is what you see,” Eklund said. “Roland Barthes called these ‘reality-effects,’ and they don’t always have to be consciously deployed.”
René Magritte, La Mort des Fantômes, 1928 © 2015 C. Herscovici / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
“Grand Illusions: Staged Photography from the Met Collection” runs through January 18, 2016
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August 31, 2015
An Archival Interview with Richard Misrach
The following interview was edited from a tape-recorded conversation between Aperture Foundation editor-in-chief Melissa Harris and Richard Misrach at his California studio in March 1992 and appeared in the book Violent Legacies (1992), which includes three “cantos” in his series of photographs that explore the American West. This spring, Aperture released Misrach’s The Mysterious Opacity of Other Beings in which the photographer focuses on the gestures and expressions of faraway bathers, adrift in the oceans of Hawaii. Here, he and Harris discuss this earlier project that brings together the landscapes of Utah deadlands, a former nuclear test site in Nevada, and copies of Playboy magazine.
This article originally appeared in Issue 14 of the Aperture Photography App.
Spreads from Violent Legacies (1992).
Melissa Harris: How does Violent Legacies fit into your ongoing Desert Cantos project?
Richard Misrach: I began the Desert Cantos project around 1979. For over a decade, I have been searching the deserts of the American West for images that suggest the collision between “civilization” and nature. The three cantos that make up Violent Legacies are part of this larger project, but deal specifically with militarism and cultural violence.
The “canto” idea is actually very simple. It’s a structural term meaning the subsection of a long song or poem. Throughout the history of literature it has been repeatedly used. Most people are familiar with Ezra Pound’s epic poem, The Cantos, or Dante’s Inferno, which is subdivided into cantos.
I found that, photographically, my work in the desert naturally broke into subseries. Each subseries, or canto, was independent, but related to the others. Combining the cantos created an epic, comprehensive relationship. Now I’m on “Desert Canto XIV.”
I tend to work on several cantos simultaneously. I give them numbers upon completion, instead of when they are initiated, because they can change significantly as they evolve. The three cantos that comprise Violent Legacies are: “Desert Canto IX: Project W-47 (The Secret)”; “Desert Canto VI: The Pit”; and “Desert Canto XI: The Playboys.”
Thus far, there are fourteen fully defined cantos (although some are still in progress) and a prologue. From one to fourteen, the cantos are: “The Terrain”; “The Event”; “The Flood”; “The Fires”; “The War (Bravo 20)”; “The Pit”; “Desert Seas”; “The Event II”; “Project W-47 (The Secret)”; “The Test Site”; “The Playboys”; “Clouds (non-equivalents)”; “The Inhabitants”; and “The Visitors.”
Spreads from Violent Legacies (1992).
MH: I know that some of your pre-cantos work was also done in the desert. There was a whole series of night desert landscapes of cacti and palm trees that were made in the mid-’70s. What is it about the desert that holds such a fascination for you?
RM: I am not certain what it is that makes it so compelling. It does seem that the severity of the landscape sets cultural artifacts off in dramatic relief. The paucity of life there—in comparison with other environments, like forests and cities—is a reminder of how fragile human existence is. The desert has always provided rich material for literature and the visual arts, from the Bible to science-fiction films, probably because it epitomizes the extremes of the human condition.
And the deserts of the American West are particularly interesting because of their role in determining a peculiarly American identity and mythology. But I don’t think I could have sustained this project for as long as I have if I didn’t enjoy the process of working in the desert so much. It’s the heat, the feel of the earth, the rich solitude and silence, and the remarkable scale of everything that makes being there so deeply fulfilling. I’ve always had this strange sensation of being a small figure in a vast landscape—as if I were seeing myself from the air. My best ideas seem to come when I’m driving those long stretches of desert highway. Physically and mentally, that’s where I feel the most alive. . . .
MH: What are the relationships among your artistic intentions, your political activism, and your evident desire to uncover truths? Is your work journalistic documentation? Is it about aesthetics? Or is it a sort of hybrid?
RM: First off, all art reflects one’s politics, whether consciously or otherwise. Certainly, some images are more overtly political than others. Sometimes the politics are layered, problematic, and very complex. Being a white, male, American artist affects or skews my perspective on everything I do from the outset. The best I can do is try to keep this self-consciousness at the forefront while I work, and not assume that the “truths” I discover are objective or universal.
The very act of representation has been so thoroughly challenged in recent years by postmodern theories that it is impossible not to see the flaws everywhere, in any practice of photography. Traditional genres in particular—journalism, documentary studies, and fine-art photography—have become shells, or forms emptied of meaning. Victor Burgin underscored a significant point when he made the distinction between the “representation of politics” and the “politics of representation.” Nonetheless, despite the limitations and problems inherent to photographic representation (and especially the representation of politics), it remains for me the most powerful and engaging medium today—one central to the development of cultural dialogue.
The Desert Cantos project of the last decade has shifted somewhat in the nature of its representation. The earliest series, “The Terrain,” “The Event,” “The Flood,” and “The Fires,” for example, were more or less aesthetic metaphors. Recent cantos, however, have become more explicitly political. The “Bravo 20” project points a finger directly at military abuse of the environment. I think the three cantos in Violent Legacies hover between the two.
Spreads from Violent Legacies (1992).
MH: Richard, your photographs are visually very seductive. Yet your subjects are death, contamination, and violence. Are you perhaps aestheticizing the horrific, and thus exploiting it?
RM: Probably the strongest criticism leveled at my work is that I’m making “poetry of the holocaust.” But I’ve come to believe that beauty can be a very powerful conveyor of difficult ideas. It engages people when they might otherwise look away.
Recent theory has been critical of the distancing effect of artistic expression—“Create solutions, not art.” But the impact of art may be more complex and far-reaching than theory is capable of assessing. To me, the work I do is a means of interpreting unsettling truths, of bearing witness, and of sounding an alarm. The beauty of formal representation both carries an affirmation of life and subversively brings us face to face with news from our besieged world.
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August 28, 2015
Closing Deadlines for Fall 2015 Aperture Workshops
The Aperture Foundation workshop program continues a valued tradition originating with Aperture magazine’s founding editor and legendary teacher, Minor White. Known for his open-minded, inventive, and insightful approach to teaching, White leaves a legacy that defines the workshop program at Aperture. The workshops bring students, professionals, and amateurs together with leading photographers working in a variety of fields and genres for intensive educational experiences. Our classes focus on topics related to photobook design and history, current photographic practice, and the history of the medium.
Jamey Stillings, Nevada Arch Segment, April 29, 2009; from the series The Bridge at Hoover Dam
Mary Virginia Swanson: Securing Support for Your Long-Term Project
Saturday, September 12, and Saturday 19, 2015 11:00 a.m.–6:00 p.m., both days
Registration ends Sunday, September 6, 2015
Join Mary Virginia Swanson for a two-part workshop designed for photographers who would like to learn how to secure funding for a long-term personal project through drafting a successful proposal and budget, as well as learn how to build awareness for that project. The workshop will also explore various types of funding, as well as different approaches to expanding your audience.
Mary Virginia Swanson is an author, educator, and consultant who helps artists find the strengths in their work, identify appreciative audiences, and present their work in an informed, professional manner. Her seminars and lectures on marketing opportunities aid photographers in moving their careers to the next level.
Swanson is the recipient of the 2013 Focus Lifetime Achievement Award from the Griffin Museum of Photography, and the 2014 Susan Carr Award for Education from the American Society of Media Photographers. The Society for Photographic Education named her the 2015 Honored Educator. Swanson coauthored Publish Your Photography Book (revised edition, 2014) with Darius Himes. Her latest publication, Finding Your Audience: An Introduction to Marketing Your Photographs, will be released in 2015.
The featured image, Nevada Arch Segment, April 29, 2009 is from Jamey Stillings’ exhibition and book of the same name, The Bridge at Hoover Dam, a project that is featured as a case study in Swanson’s upcoming publication, Finding Your Audience: An Introduction to Marketing Your Photographs.
Photograph by Brendon Baker and Daniel Evans, from Self Publish, Be Happy (Aperture, 2015)
Bruno Ceschel: The Self-Published Photo Book
Saturday and Sunday, September 26-27, 2015 11:00 a.m.-6:00 p.m., both days
Registration ends Sunday, September 20, 2015
Join Bruno Ceschel, founder of Self Publish, Be Happy—and author of the book of the same name, to be published by Aperture in fall 2015—for a two-day intensive workshop conceived for people interested in publishing their own photobooks.
Bruno Ceschel is a writer, curator, and lecturer on photography at the University of the Arts London. He is the founder of Self Publish, Be Happy (SPBH), an organization that collects, promotes, and studies contemporary self-published photobooks. SPBH’s library contains more than two thousand publications, and the organization produces an extensive series of workshops, talks, and projects. Self Publish, Be Happy has organized events at a number of institutions around the world, including Aperture, Tate Modern, The Photographers’ Gallery, Serpentine Galleries, C/O Berlin, and Kunsthal Charlottenborg, among others. Ceschel is also the director of SPBH Editions, which has most recently published books by Cristina de Middel, Lucas Blalock, Mariah Robertson, Gareth McConnell, and Lorenzo Vitturi. Ceschel writes regularly for a number of publications, such as Foam, the British Journal of Photography, and Aperture magazine, and has guest-edited issues of Photography and Culture, OjodePez, and The PhotoBook Review.
Doug DuBois, Lise and Spencer, Ithaca, NY, 2004
Doug DuBois: The Intimate Photograph
Saturday, October 3, Saturday, October 17, 2015 11:00 a.m.–6:00 p.m, both days
This workshop is sold out. Please contact education@aperture.org to be placed on the waiting list.
Join photographer Doug DuBois for a two-part workshop through which students will gain a better understanding of how to articulate intimacy and explore ways of creating photographs that demonstrate a certain closeness between photographer, subject, and viewer. Students will work with DuBois to assemble a rhetorical rather than purely emotional guide to photography’s intimate claims.
Doug DuBois has photographs in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; and Los Angeles County Museum of Art. He has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, MacDowell Colony, and National Endowment for the Arts. DuBois has exhibited at the J. Paul Getty Museum and MoMA, The Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin and the Museo d’Arte Contemporanea di Roma in Italy. He has photographed for magazines, including the New York Times Magazine, Time, Details, and GQ. He has published two books with Aperture: All the Days and Nights in 2009 and My Last Day at Seventeen, which will be available in the fall of 2015. DuBois teaches in the College of Visual and Performing Arts at Syracuse University and in the Limited Residency MFA program at Hartford Art School.
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August 26, 2015
An Interview with Bruce Davidson
The fall issue of Aperture magazine comprises nine in-depth interviews with major photographers who have spent their lives working as image makers; some subjects have doggedly been at it for more than six decades. Here, we offer a preview of one interview, conducted by curator Charlotte Cotton, with the legendary documentarian Bruce Davidson. “Too much in photography is shoot and leave,” Bruce Davidson says in this candid conversation, referring to how he has remained in contact with the subjects seen in many of his now-iconic projects, including his work on the civil rights movement. Now eighty-one, Davidson has been looking back through his archive, revisiting older projects, including a series shot in Los Angeles 1964. For this interview, excerpted below, Cotton visited Davidson at his home on Manhattan’s Upper West Side last April, where the two spoke about the arc of his extraordinary career that began in the 1950s and continues today.
This article originally appeared in Issue 14 of the Aperture Photography App.
New York City, 1959, from the series Brooklyn Gang
Charlotte Cotton: How did you develop your skills as a photographer when you were young?
Bruce Davidson: There was a camera store in town—Austin Camera. They took me on as a stock boy: I dusted the cameras, cleaned the toilets and the floors. And an old country gentleman came in. His name was Al Cox and he had a studio in the town. He told me, “Anytime you want to come by, kid, I’m there.”
So I did. He was an incredible craftsman. First of all, he could make dye-transfer prints, so I was exposed to the process. He was a commercial photographer working for the newspaper and I’d go along with him. He would shoot with a Rolleiflex and a flash. Whenever my mother called to find me, I was always with Al Cox. When I was admitted to RIT [Rochester Institute of Technology], Al read somewhere that the first thing I would be doing was pinhole photography, so he made me a pinhole camera with interchangeable pinholes. So he sent me off to college. He could also build strobes and was a ham radio operator. He was a genius old guy—he was an old guy to me.
Selma, Alabama, 1965, from the series Time of Change
CC: Tell me about the relationship you were forming with cameras and all the material stuff of photography, like chemicals. It’s one thing—which I’m sure we will come back to—to think of photographic capture, of looking and learning about the world through photography. But it sounds like you were also learning through Al Cox about technology and materials of photography and about how to render something, not just capture it.
BD: It meant a lot to me. I bought an old 35 mm Contax camera when I was at RIT. Walking the streets at Rochester, I found the Lighthouse Mission. It was very atmospheric—a place where these vagrant men would come to get a bologna sandwich and listen to the sermons. I was already exposed to the idea of not a picture but a series.
CC: And that would have meant the picture magazines at that time, such as Time?
BD: Well, yes. My hero was Gene Smith [W. Eugene Smith]. There were two young women in my class at RIT and one of them had a copy of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s 1952 book The Decisive Moment, and she showed it to me. There was also an inspiring teacher, Ralph Hattersley. He showed us Smith, Cartier-Bresson, Irving Penn, and others. This really sent me in that direction—not imitating, but finding the way I wanted to photograph.
Blonde girl sitting in the park, London, 1960
CC: What did you feel you were seeing in Cartier-Bresson’s photographs? What resonated with you?
BD: The way he saw life. Life was moving; the world was in flux.
James Duffy and Sons Circus, Ireland, 1967, from the series Circus
CC: So did this feel attainable to you—did figures like Smith and Cartier-Bresson seem close to you?
BD: Oh yes. There was a gallery in New York called the Witkin Gallery. And Gene Smith used to go there. I used to go up to the gallery and see him and I just couldn’t say anything. He saw that I was doing good work but I couldn’t touch him. Later I really got to know Cartier-Bresson. After college at RIT, I spent some time in the photography department at Yale—I was in the graphic designer Herbert Matter’s class. I was drafted and sent to the Arizona desert, but before I went I photographed the Yale football team, not the game, but the tension and the mood among the players. I submitted the pictures to Life magazine. A year went by, and then they ran them. The captain in charge of the labs had been in the barbershop and had seen my pictures in Life. He burst into the darkroom and said, “Private, did you take these pictures?” I said, “Yes, sir, I did.” And he said, “Take that mop away, you are photographing the general this afternoon.” That was a real decisive moment.
Yale football, New Haven, Connecticut, 1954, from the series Yale Football
Somehow, I got really lucky and I was sent to the photo-labs for the Signal Corps in Paris. I was in the supreme headquarters in Paris and there were French soldiers in this international camp and I took up a friendship with a French soldier who was a painter. He took me home to his mother’s house in Montmartre to have lunch. And that’s when I saw the widow hobbling up the street. “This woman lives above us in a garret,” he told me, “and she knew Toulouse-Lautrec and Gauguin.” I had a motor scooter, so I would go up from the fort to Montmartre to photograph her. That’s when I submitted my work to Cartier-Bresson at the Magnum Paris office. It took a couple of weeks before I got an appointment with him. He was very interested in the contact sheets and the rhythm implicit in shooting. Then I walked outside with him and it was like the street was made up of his pictures. All those moments were there if you could just take a chance.
Click here to find the complete interview from Aperture magazine on the Aperture Foundation website.
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August 25, 2015
The Interview Issue Aperture #220 – Editors’ Note
The following note first appeared in Aperture magazine #220, Fall 2015. Subscribe here to read it first, in print or online.
Clockwise from top left: William Klein, 1978; Boris Mikhailov, 2014; Rosalind Fox Solomon, 2002; Ishiuchi Miyako, 2012; Guido Guidi, 1997; David Goldblatt, 2009; Bertien van Manen [Eikenhorst], 1973; Bruce Davidson, 2015; center: Paolo Gasparini, 1978.
What compels someone to become a photographer? And what drives someone to continue to be one, for as many as seven decades? How does a veteran photographer describe years of questioning politics, personal experience, social unrest, landscape, and history through the camera?
For this issue we have broken with our usual “Words” and “Pictures” format to offer nine in-depth interviews, firsthand accounts that underscore the generosity and intelligence of their speakers. Born between 1928 and 1947, the nine photographers here—Bruce Davidson, Paolo Gasparini, David Goldblatt, Guido Guidi, Ishiuchi Miyako, William Klein, Bertien van Manen, Boris Mikhailov, and Rosalind Fox Solomon—are still active today, adding to their already unparalleled bodies of work. In these pages, the medium is considered from various points of view, offering a range of philosophies, values, and perspectives, yet for all the differences within this group, they share a fundamental curiosity about the human experience.
The interviews took place around the globe, and five of the nine were conducted in languages other than English, in the photographers’ native tongues: Japanese, Russian, Italian, Spanish, and Dutch. No matter the language, an underlying passion and drive come through in the force of each speaker’s words. William Klein, for example, now eighty-seven, is sharp-witted and voluble; his anecdotes project ecstatically. No surprise, then, that we learn through the course of his conversation with writer Aaron Schuman that Klein had been out until very late the previous evening at filmmaker David Lynch’s club in Paris.
That kind of restlessness characterizes each speaker. Solomon and van Manen are both peripatetic, having traveled throughout the world to focus on questions of community, ritual, place, and gender identity. Guidi, known for his understated images of European towns, meditates on how the mechanics of images, specifically perspective, allow for a description of the world—a world that is often politically fraught. Goldblatt has long used the camera to reflect the social realities of apartheid and postapartheid South Africa. For Gasparini, who has documented social conditions in his adopted city of Caracas, postrevolutionary fervor in Cuba, and experiments in architecture across Central and South America, photography cannot be split from ideology. Empathy for others has likewise motivated Bruce Davidson, who remarks that the joy of photographing, and returning to former subjects, sustains him. Ishiuchi was a reluctant photographer at first, but succumbed to the physical presence of pictures and their ability to trace history and time, from the personal (her relationship to her mother) to history on an incomprehensible scale (the bombing of Hiroshima).
These lifetimes of seeing through the lens might best be summed up by Boris Mikhailov, who made much of his work under oppressive Soviet rule. “When you’re open to life, it responds to you,” he remarks. “That is what an intuitive possibility of photography is—to crawl deeper into the depths of life.”
—The Editors
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Aperture #220 – Editors’ Note appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.
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