Aperture's Blog, page 152

Watch: Imaginary Club, Winner of PhotoBook of the Year 2014

Imaginary Club, last year’s winner of the Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards PhotoBook of the Year, sold out within months of winning the award. In 2016, Gwinzegal and Böhm/Kobayashi will reissue the photobook, which will only be available via pre-order. In this video, Sieber talks about the photobook and what went into his work.

Enter now for your chance to win in one of three categories of the Paris Photo-Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards. Since 2012, the PhotoBook Awards have granted prizes in the categories of PhotoBook of the Year, First PhotoBook, and starting last year, Photography Catalogue of the Year. The call for entries began May 4 and ends September 11.

Click here for more information about Imaginary Club and to place your pre-order.

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Review: Heritage and Home: Photographs of Hickory Nut Gap Farm

Diana C. Stoll reviews Ken Abbott’s new exhibition at the Asheville Art Museum, North Carolina, which focuses on the day-to-day of a prominent local farm and its inhabitants.

By Diana C. Stoll

All photographs Ken Abbott, Hickory Nut Gap Farm series, 2012. Courtesy the artist.

Our place here is just a dream, darling, and some day we will be sitting [you] . . . down on a wide porch with a whole stretch of superb mountains out in front. Then dear, you’ll be set down to a table full of country food & after that tucked into bed . . . & you’ll sleep as you haven’t slept in years.

A 1916 letter written by Elizabeth McClure, enticing her cousin Martha to visit her new home, describes a former stagecoach stop known as Sherrill’s Inn located in the hills of western North Carolina. Elizabeth and her husband, Jim, were newlyweds from the North traveling on their honeymoon when they first saw the big house—perched at the top of a slope overlooking acres of fields and farms. North Carolina was not familiar territory for them: Jim McClure was a Yale- and Oxford-educated Presbyterian minister, his young bride a painter who had studied in Europe. Yet they were smitten, and purchased the inn and surrounding land, thus beginning a chapter in the life of Hickory Nut Gap Farm that continues today, a century—and five generations of family—later.

The legacy of a single house can be more enduring than its transitory inhabitants, but in the case of the McClures and their offspring, there has also been a sustained tribal ethos over the decades that seems to have permeated the very walls. The family has been a hub of the community since 1920, when the McClures founded a regional Farmers’ Federation. Later scions of Hickory Nut Gap include the late James Clarke (farmer and congressman in the 1980s) and John Ager (farmer and Democrat in the North Carolina House of Representatives). And yet, whatever local prestige their status might imply, this is a place of groundedness. Everyone tends the land, and in the house, today’s residents live their chaotic lives: beds are sometimes left unmade and sinks are often filled with dishes. It is a place, however, with a perceptible aura of history and lore.

Photographer Ken Abbott first visited the house and farm in 2004 on a trip with his daughter’s preschool, determined to return with his camera. And so he did—again and again, over a decade, discovering new corners with each visit. With his ever-deeper visual understanding of the place and the family, Abbott’s photographs do great justice to the complex life of Hickory Nut Gap Farm, as seen in his book Useful Work (Gooseberry Studio & Press, 2015—with essays on the family’s story by historian Rob Neufeld) and in the exhibition Heritage and Home, currently on view at the Asheville Art Museum.

Abbott’s background has equipped him well for this project: as an undergraduate at Colorado College in the late 1970s, he studied with Frank Gohlke, and after attending Yale’s MFA program in photography, Abbott returned to his native Colorado, where he found an advisor and friend in Robert Adams. Abbott’s mentors seem to have provided him both inspirations as well as aesthetic and emotional stances against which to press. Like Gohlke and Adams—and like Eugène Atget, Lewis Baltz, Walker Evans, and many others—Abbott deftly straddles a line in his work between document and art. Unlike them, he rarely adopts a visual tone of dispassion, and instead revels (and allows us to revel) in the sheer handsomeness of colors, forms, depths, and nostalgic narratives. The elements the McClures surely fell in love with a century ago are palpable in Abbott’s images.

Abbott investigates the near and the far: from the weathered, wooden exterior walls of a smokehouse to the voluptuous gray swells of the distant mountains. Day-to-day implements and chores—the “useful work” of Hickory Nut Gap Farm—are shown to be embodiments of beauty: a wood-burning stove in the kitchen (undoubtedly a nod to Evans); rag rugs hung on a fence to dry; a triangular barn behind a white-picket proscenium. One senses some obligation in his images of visiting children—they are almost jarringly of the present—whereas other portraits, of farmworkers and family members, seem absolved from debt to any particular era. A young farmer presses a shovel into a row of carrots with a purposeful gesture; another lifts a young lamb, checking its belly with all the heedfulness of a new father. This is not for show; it is how farms have operated for millennia.

The meaning in these photographs derives mainly from the layered histories they reveal. In one image we encounter an antique highboy dresser—a venerable old Queen Anne specimen, so tall it nearly touches the ceiling of a book-lined room. Its drawers are all ajar, exploding with clothes, a captain’s hat slung on one side and a keffiyeh on the other; and perched on top is what looks like a purple-velvet dog bed. Here the old and the new coexist, sometimes humorously, in jumbled harmony.

One of the most lyrical photographs in Abbott’s collection is of a silver pitcher sitting on a blue Formica kitchen countertop. The pitcher, its curves reflecting white light from the window and the blue of the counter, sits by a glass of water, a Mason jar, a dish drainer stacked with pots, and a plastic bottle of dish soap. Abbott informs us that this pitcher, which once belonged to Elizabeth McClure, is still used by the family every day to bring water from the springhouse to their table. It is, he writes, “an aesthetic connection for the family to Elizabeth, but also . . . a connection to the place.” Like many of the images in this series, the photograph captures the intimate, living spirit of this home, where the now collides so propitiously with the then.

Heritage and Home: Photographs of Hickory Nut Gap Farm is on view at the Asheville Art Museum, North Carolina, July 18–October 11, 2015.

Diana C. Stoll is a writer and editor based in western North Carolina. 

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Inside the PhotoBook Award Entries

By Freddy Martinez

Photobooks from around the world—from Tokyo to Paris to Los Angeles—are currently arriving at Aperture’s Chelsea office as entries to this year’s Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards, an annual celebration of the photobook’s contribution to the evolving narrative of photography. Since 2012, the PhotoBook Awards have granted prizes in the categories of PhotoBook of the Year, First PhotoBook, and starting last year, Photography Catalogue of the Year. The call for entries began May 4 and ends September 11. On September 18, thirty-five short-listed photobooks, chosen by representatives of both Paris Photo and Aperture Foundation, will be announced at the NY Art Book Fair.

On July 30, Aperture’s creative director Lesley A. Martin, photographer Penelope Umbrico, and digital media assistant Max Mikulecky, unboxed twenty entries at the Aperture offices, in part to record the details of the arrivals but mainly to preview the photobooks inside. The various packages tell a story of their own. They arrive with handwritten addresses, from meticulous uppercase to functional cursive, bearing a notable array of stamps from a Polish astrological-themed scene of a Capricorn goat sitting at a desk, to a sampler of stamps from Brazil that honors six species of stingless bees.

“The first thing I do is flip through,” Martin said after unboxing the first package. “I want to see the overall universe of it. And then I go back and look more carefully at all its individual components. I try to figure it out.” The above slideshow offers a look at the first few entries.

Click here to find out more about how to submit to the PhotoBook Awards.

Freddy Martinez is the Digital Media Work Scholar at Aperture Foundation. 

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Issue 14 of the Aperture Photography App is Now Available

The new issue of the Aperture Photography App is now available to download on your iOS device. Here’s a look inside Issue 14:

● An interview with Bruce Davidson from the upcoming fall issue of Aperture magazine

● An inside look at the entries arriving for this year’s PhotoBook Awards

● A review of Ken Abbott’s exhibition at the Asheville Art Museum, North Carolina

● An interview with Richard Misrach from the Aperture archive

● More about Aperture’s rerelease of Sebastião Salgado’s Other Americas

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

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Edward Weston’s The Flame of Recognition

The Flame of Recognition, the classic monograph by Edward Weston, first issued as a hardcover in 1965, began its life in 1958 as a monographic issue of Aperture magazine in celebration of Weston’s life. Weston (1886–1958) began to earn an international reputation for his portrait work in 1911, and from 1923 to 1926 worked in Mexico and California, turning to subjects such as nudes, clouds, and close-ups of rocks, trees, vegetables, and shells. Now, fifty years later, Aperture reissues this volume, covering Weston’s greatest works, from the portraits and nudes to the landscapes and still-lifes. Photographer and founding member of Aperture Ansel Adams contributed the following essay, written in 1964, a posthumous tribute to the artist.

This article originally appeared in Issue 13 of the Aperture Photography App. 

By Ansel Adams

Cabbage Leaf, 1931

 

In the six years since Edward Weston passed away in Carmel, California, he remains in memory as a man of great spirit, integrity, and power. To me, he was a profound artist and friend in the deepest sense of the word. Living, as I do now, within a mile of his last home, sensing the same scents of the sea and the pine forests, the grayness of the same fogs, the glory of the same triumphal storms, and the ageless presence of the Point Lobos stone, I find it very difficult to realize he is no longer with us in actuality.

Nude, 1926

Edward understood thoughts and concepts which dwell on simple mystical levels. His work—direct and honest as it is—leaped from a deep intuition and belief in forces beyond the apparent and the factual. He accepted these forces as completely real and part of the total world of man and nature, only a small portion of which most of us experience directly. As with any great artist or imaginative scientist, the concept is immediate and clear, but the “working out” takes time, effort, and conscious evaluations.

Edward Weston’s work stood for him as a complete statement of the man and his art. He favored the grand sweep of creative projects. He was aware of the loneliness of the artist, especially the artist in photography, photography where out of the uncounted thousands of photographers only a handful of workers support the best of photojournalism, illustration, documentation, and poetic expression. And it was Weston who accomplished more than anyone, with the possible exception of Alfred Stieglitz, to elevate photography to the status of fine-art expression.

South Shore, Point Lobos, 1938

His approach bypassed the vast currents of pictorial photography, photojournalism, scientific-technical photography, and what is generally lumped together as “professional photography” (portraits of the usual “studio” kind, illustrations, and advertising). Through his kind of photography he opened up wonderful worlds of seeing and doing.

Tina Reciting, 1924. All photographs by Edward Weston, Collection Center for Creative Photography

Many were the students and experts whose lives and concepts were profoundly modified by Edward’s nonaggressive, non-preaching, but ever-comprehending approach to people and their expression problems. “Seeing” the Point Lobos Rocks was one thing, but encouraging another person to “see” something in his own way was the most important thing of all. Edward’s works need no evaluation here. I would prefer to join Edward in avoiding verbal or written explanations and definitions of creative work. Who can talk or write about the Bach partitas? You just play them or listen to them. They exist only in the world of music. Likewise, Edward’s photographs exist only as original prints, or as in this monograph, in superb reproductions. Look at his photographs, look at them carefully, then look at yourselves—not critically, or with self-depreciation, or any sense of inferiority. Read the material from his Daybooks and letters so carefully compiled, edited, and associated with the photographs by Nancy Newhall. You might discover through Edward Weston’s work how basically good you are, or might become. This is the way Edward Weston would want it to be.

Click here to find The Flame of Recognition on the Aperture Foundation website.

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An Interview with Richard Learoyd from the Archives

In Aperture magazine #199, from 2010, writer Peggy Roalf interviewed Richard Learoyd about his life-size portraits made with a room-size camera obscura, on the occasion of his first U.S. solo exhibition. This fall, Aperture will release Day For Night, a deluxe monograph of Learoyd’s photographs, to coincide with a solo exhibition of the artist’s work at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London. “Time, motion, speed—some of photography’s attributes that are enhanced by the effect of a frame, and that often distance this medium from painting—are absent,” Roalf writes in the introduction to her interview. “But the massive scale and surface quality of Learoyd’s portraits share features with both the painting and the photography of nineteenth-century France; they have an intentionality that is imposed by the maker rather than received from the sitter. This is perhaps why his photographs invoke the sublime.”

This article originally appeared in Issue 13 of the Aperture Photography App.  

Harmony in White, 2012

 

Peggy Roalf: I was reading an essay by Mark Haworth-Booth recently about William Henry Fox Talbot. He was onto the magic of photography and talked about his invention as if it were a fairytale, and about nature as “a field of wonders past our comprehension.” I was wondering, have you found inspiration in Fox Talbot’s work and writings?

Richard Learoyd: I think many contemporary photographers would be foolish to deny the influence of Fox Talbot. Andreas Gursky and the Prada series, for example, or Robert Mapplethorpe’s ladders, and now Hiroshi Sugimoto with his new positive images.

I often muse over what might have come about if Fox Talbot had not invented the means to reproduce photographic images as multiples; maybe a completely different way of seeing would have emerged, leaving photography as a more singular viewing experience, where the value of the photographic object was maintained. But what Fox Talbot did was to introduce larger issues of mortality and religion into photographic imagery. The sometimes clumsy symbolism—which could seem irrelevant in our time—undoubtedly speaks of someone inventing a new visual language. The ladder rising into the blackness of a hayloft (from hisPencil of Nature) is a strong influence; for me it is the first word in an emerging photographic language.

I see my work more in the lineage of the French—referring to daguerreotypes: those non-reproducible photographic objects whose multi-planed surface and miraculous depth of field fascinate me. With my work I am interested in the moment when the image becomes dye and color, when the illusion of it being a reflection or projection breaks down. I think you get that sense with daguerreotype images: you see the object before the illusion. With my pictures, the illusion is very strong and breaks suddenly, and often only momentarily, which is something I like.

PR: The nature of film photography today generally excludes any sense of the surface from its describable qualities. When and how did you realize that you could bend traditional photographic processes to create the sense of mass and volume that’s evident in your photographs?

Agnes in Red Dress, 2008

RL: I was lucky enough to be in the generation before computers became the norm. I studied at Glasgow School of Art under Thomas Joshua Cooper, who is a wonderful landscape artist. During that time the frontier seemed to be a place of ideas realized with persistence and craft, where all was valued until proved useless. I look back at the time I had there and realize that’s when my life really began.

I first started experimenting with the camera obscura, or the room-camera method that I use now, during my postgraduate year at Glasgow. It was Cooper who lent me the lens from a nineteenth-century portrait camera he had in his office. At the time postgraduate students were given studios; this enabled me to experiment with a different set of ideas instead of being out in the world searching for something to photograph. Until then, my work had been landscape-based; it was fairly quiet and thoughtful, almost reticent in a way. I suppose something in me craved a sense of power or directness in my work that I felt was lacking in my landscape photographs. Working with the camera obscura seemed to satisfy this need.

For the next several years I taught photography at a university and worked as a commercial photographer. At a certain point I had learned what I could from that and it was time to get on with being an artist. In 2004 I built the first version of the camera I use now, as an extension of the work I had begun fourteen or so years earlier. But now I knew what I was doing. I was inventing photography for myself in a way that I could, and began making the photographs I had imagined could be made. I don’t know why, but the camera obscura seemed to me the most natural of methods. The apparatus I use consists of a lens, some lights, and a processing machine. The process has certain built-in qualities to do with physics and optics, but the most important quality for me is that it is capable of producing photographs that fascinate me, that match my vision.

It is an incredibly restrictive process and there are many things you simply can’t do. It’s slow and painstaking, with much that can go wrong. The method gives parameters of what you choose to photograph. It’s very liberating to have limited choices, and the technique offers immediacy as it jumps past the printmaking process.

Man with Octopus Tattoo, 2011. All photograhs © Richard Learoyd

PR: At one point you mentioned that people in charge of their bodies, such as dancers, seem to have a different center of gravity. How does this observation manifest in your work?

RL: One thing that this process, at best, can do is to translate weight, density, and mass—not only in a physical sense, but in a more psychological way. When a picture is successful, the mental state of the sitter seems to radiate from that person’s physicality.

PR: The surface quality of your photographs is remarkable, in its sharpness, and in the way that you adjust the focal plane to shift back and forth within an extremely shallow range. Can you point to a moment when you found that this was possible on a large scale?

RL: While I must admit to disliking the use of shallow focus in most conventional photographs today (it seems like a device within a device), I think a big influence on my understanding how the focus issue could work for me was revisiting some early Lewis Baltz pictures of scrubland. Don’t ask me why, but they stuck in my mind. The minute depth of field in these pictures is part of a restrictive practice; it’s quite simply physics. Every artist, whatever their medium, has to deal with the rules of the universe. I think the secret is to accept it and move on. For me, in my work, the implication or meaning of this shift between extreme sharpness and blur is an emerging and submerging of a person’s consciousness, and emphasis of their immediate presence.

 Click here to find Day For Night, available this fall, on the Aperture Foundation website.

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“Conflict” at Krakow Photomonth 2015

Writer Aaron Schuman reports from this year’s edition of Krakow Photomonth, an annual photography festival held in institutions, galleries, and spaces around the city each June. Schuman reflects on this year’s theme of conflict.

Josef Koudelka, Czechoslovakia, August 1968; from the series Prague, 1968.

Established in 2002, Krakow Photomonth has grown from a rather rambunctious and rebellious upstart—packed into disused buildings, artist squats, crowded bars, and burgeoning galleries—into one of the most ambitious and engaging festivals on the photography calendar, now staged in some of the city’s most prestigious museums and exhibition spaces. In recent years, its various programs have consistently presented thoughtful and challenging shows on a wide range of themes, including ruminations on artistic use of a fictional identity, in ALIAS (curated by Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, 2011); to experimental takes on Photography in Everyday Life (curated by Charlotte Cotton and Karol Hordziej, 2012); to investigations into The Limits of Fashion (curated by Paweł Szypulski, 2013); to explorations of the complex relationship between photography and information in Re:Search (curated by myself, 2014). This year’s edition, which ran from May 14 to June 14 and was devised by Wojciech Nowicki, a celebrated Polish essayist, novelist, critic and curator, revolved elegantly and elliptically around the central theme, conflict.

Festival poster for Krakow Photomonth 2015

In part, the seventy-year-old specter of Soviet aggression—resurrected and made real again with the current crisis in neighboring Ukraine—loomed subtly (and at times, not so subtly) over the festival. At Starmach Gallery, a renovated nineteenth-century synagogue that now serves as one of the city’s most distinguished commercial art spaces, Josef Koudelka’s legendary body of work, Invasion Prague 1968, served as a reminder of the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia in August 1968, and the non-violent protests and impassioned resistance that erupted in the streets of Prague during the week that followed, which ultimately failed to prevent the Russians from ostensibly ruling over the country for the next thirty years.

Frederic Lezmi, Taksim Calling (self published), 2013; installation view of TRACK-22: Photobooks on Conflicts at Bunkier Sztuki Gallery of Contemporary Art (photograph by Aaron Schuman)

In Track-22, curated by the publisher and founder of The PhotoBook Museum, Markus Schaden, and held in the imposing 1960s brutalist masterpiece, Bunkier Sztuki, photographic engagements with more recent political uprisings and protests surfaced, including those staged in Istanbul’s Taksim Square (Taksim Calling by Frederic Lezmi, 2013), Kiev’s Independence Square (Maydan: Hundred Portraits by Émeric Lhuisset, Barricade by Julia Polunina-But, and Euromaidan by Vladislav Krasnoshek and Sergiy Lebedynskyy, 2014), and elsewhere. The dynamic installations of these series, and several others, specifically called attention to the potency of contemporary photobooks that deal with such matters, which Schaden argued “counter anonymous and delocalized media coverage . . . have a distinct authorship, and are capable of tracking and witnessing conflict from a genuine point of view . . . through visual dramaturgy and materiality.”

Indre Serpytyte, I, 2009; from the series Forest Brothers

Indre Serpytyte, 7 Margio street, Alytus, 2014; from the series Former NKVD, MVD, MGB, KGB Buildings

At the Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow (MOCAK), a stunning new arts complex that opened in 2010 on the site of Oskar Schindler’s Factory, was 1944–1991 by Indre Serpytyte. Including two bodies of work—Forest Brothers (2009) and Former NKVD, MVD, MGB, KGB Buildings (2009–15)—the exhibition testified in a discreet yet powerful manner to the Lithuanian dissidents and guerrillas who fought against Soviet rule throughout the second half of the twentieth century, despite being subjected to imprisonment, torture, and murder by the Soviet security services.

Joanna Piotrowska, XXIII, 2013–14; from the series Frowst

Elsewhere Nowicki’s take on the concept of conflict stretched well beyond the boundaries of politics and war, offering refreshing possibilities as to what could be deemed “conflict photography” today. “Conflict does not mean only armed clashes,” Nowicki explained in the festival’s introductory statement. “Often, conflicts are played out only in someone’s imagination, and consist of gestures, or even memories, that are difficult to capture.” Such sentiments surfaced in surprising ways in Joanna Piotrowska’s Frowst (2013–14), exhibited at the Ethnographic Museum in Krakow, which portrays suppressed yet discernable familial tensions through the physical contortions and awkward body language of her subjects, all of whom are immediately related.

Zhang Dali, The First Sports Meeting of the People’s Liberation Army, 1952. (from the series, A Second History)

At the Manggha Museum of Japanese Art and Technology, Zhang Dali’s A Second History explored the doctoring of official photographs in Mao-era China, forensically dissecting the menacing and ridiculous ways in which images deemed in conflict with the Party line were manipulated in order to reflect an acceptable Maoist “reality.” The most unexpected interpretations of the festival’s theme came with Paweł Szypulski’s exhibition, Foreign Body, which brought together a trove of materials—ranging from video clips from Nicki Minaj’s Anaconda, to Leni Riefenstahl’s book, The Last of the Nuba, Kodak’s “Shirley” color-test cards from the 1950s to the 1990s, a 1972 Playboy magazine that served as the source of the standard referencing photograph (dubbed “Lenna”) used in testing image compression algorithms, to a YouTube video entitled HP Computers Are Racist, to Eugène Atget’s photograph of the Callipygian Venus (“Venus of the Beautiful Buttocks”) at Versailles, to footage of Josephine Baker dancing the Charleston topless, and more—presenting a stunning example of curatorial choreography in which intriguing histories and uncomfortable relationships between gender, race, photographic technology, and visual culture at large were exposed in the most entertaining and enlightening of ways.

Ultimately, Krakow Photomonth 2015 represented how a photography festival, when given the freedom to embrace ambition, complexity, and experimentation, can offer thoroughly new insights and engage audiences far beyond expectation. The experience was both an inspiring and a dizzying one, raising difficult questions and contradictions, which likely left visitors feeling satisfyingly conflicted—and surely that was the whole point.

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Letters from Sally Mann On Process

The following letters from Sally Mann to Melissa Harris, now editor-in-chief of Aperture Foundation, originally appeared as a part of an interview on Mann’s process in Aperture #138, “On Location,” in 1995. This month, Aperture reissues the paperback version of Mann’s Immediate Family, originally published in 1992, on the occasion of this year’s release of her autobiography, Hold Still. This fall, Aperture Foundation launches the Aperture Digital Archive, giving subscribers access to every issue of Aperture magazine to subscribers.

Sally Mann, Torn Jeans, 1990 © Sally Mann

July 1, 1994, Lexington, Virginia

Dear Melissa,

I sense that there’s something strange happening in the family pictures. The kids seem to be disappearing from the image, receding into the landscape. I used to conceive of the picture first and then look for a good place to take it, but now I seem to find the backgrounds and place a child in them, hoping for something interesting to happen.

In the last picture I took of the three of them together, they are actually just blurs, attenuated by the heat waves from a quenched bonfire. In the foreground the focus is on some determined little mongrel flowers.

Judging by the scrutiny we were subjected to over the last few years, I expect much will be made of the distance springing up in the pictures between the children and me. But, in fact, what has happened is that I have been ambushed by my backgrounds.

They beckon me with just the right look of dispossession, the unassertiveness of the peripheral. These are the places and things most of us drive by unseeing, scenes of Southern dejection we’d contemplate only if our car broke down and left us by the verdant roadside.

I like to think that these are the kind of pictures Eugène Atget would have gotten if he had pivoted his camera away from the monuments and toward the unalluring underbrush. In fact, sometimes I do just that: under the dark cloth I rotate the camera on the tripod and watch the randomly edited scenes pass across the milky rectangle.

But it’s not that they are easy, to take or to look at. Compared to the family pictures, which had the natural magnetism of portraiture, these are uncompelling. Unlike the stare of a self-possessed child, these pictures will not draw you across the bleached parquet.

They’re a little scary that way. The family pictures seemed to strike a powerful chord in people and it’s a chord I could keep plucking as long as I have children and film. But here are a few of the landscapes: see what you think.

Love from everyone.

August 29, 1994, Bequia, St. Vincent

M—

I’ve had you on my mind all these weeks. Why? Because I’ve been taking hundreds (3? 4?) of pictures—and half of them are family pictures. Up close. That kind of blows the theory I wrote to you about the diminution (in number and importance) of the recent family pictures, doesn’t it? Thinking about the landscapes more as an extension of the family pictures than a replacement seems more accurate. After all, they spring from the same source.

xxx to you

August 30, 1994, Bequia, St. Vincent

M—

Thanks for faxing back. I picked it up this morning on my way back from the village clinic. Now that was an experience! I was a little daunted by the line that had formed by the time we got there (8:15, after a 1/2 mile walk down from the cliffs) . . . but our connections were good and the local store owner interceded for us. It turns out Emmett has a ruptured eardrum and an ear infection. He also has a marriage proposal from a toothless 80-year-old widow who insisted, patting the bench next to her, that he sit there wedged up against her. I was happy to give him away to her, I said, provided that she had a big house and we could all come and live with her. She seemed quite pleased with this arrangement and stroked his brown shoulder and sang bold songs to him while we waited. As we left after the appointment, I told her that he was damaged goods and she deserved better. (But if she’d had a big house I might have thrown Larry in to make up for the bad ear and sweeten the deal.)

I love it here. There’s a line in Turgenev’s Virgin Soil . . . it’s a suicide note, and the entire note is “I could not simplify myself.” I think that might have been my note if I had not come here.

Just the picture-taking thing: it’s all different now. I think I was working out my next step when I saw you in Lexington, and the landscapes we looked at were the first sign of new growth. Now I’m freely moving back and forth between the family pictures, some new work with Larry, some self-portraiture and the landscapes. The boundaries of all these projects seem more permeable now—they all feel like family pictures in a way.

The pictures of the children, and, to a degree, the pictures of Larry, come in moments of epiphany, serendipity. The landscape work is a lot more cerebral, less dependent on chance. The landscape is teasingly slow to give up its secrets. There it is, sprawled across our vision, always out there. Just the way the children were there, underfoot, seeming to be so accessible.

But neither of them proved to be: to the contrary, their complexity was Gordian. I wasn’t sure how to puzzle it out. I suppose I could have tried to untie it or cut it, like Alexander. But I chose to look at it, and photograph its defiant intricacy.

Working on the landscapes, I came back to the elemental, basic presentation; the solitary tree, the light-struck noonday field. As a consequence, they are often simple pictures, possessed of a kind of naiveté that I thought I had lost. I am less afraid of that naiveté: as Niall once remarked to me, naiveté in art is like the digit 0 in math; its value depends on what it’s attached to.

I still want to make a beautiful image. Since I’ve been here I’ve read a piece by Dave Hickey in which he applauds the subversive power of beauty. In this article Hickey argues for the use of beauty as a persuasive agent in conveying the artist’s agenda. I find this more Ciceronian approach between agency and agenda far more appealing than the Modernist’s distinction between form and content.

I have found tangible evidence that within this life’s sweet tedium reside certain truths: that nothing attains maximum beauty until touched with decay, that the vulgar and the miraculous can be one. For years I’ve passed this evidence by: it was invisible through overfamiliarity.

I look now at all hours, but I mostly find the pictures in the marginal times of day, that hour of mystery before night. Toning them, and usually printing them dark, gives them more of the feel of the actual moment: in some cases impenetrable and mysterious, but in others crazed with tawny light.

The landscapes need to be seen in context. They are intended to be every bit as revelatory and celebratory as the family pictures. Michael Lesy once wrote that if a picture is taken out of its context of life and love, it will appear enigmatic and void of meaning. But, when restored to its narrative and iconographic context it becomes “the capstone of a pyramid whose base rises from the human heart.” These landscapes belong with the family pictures; they provide the background and the history and the scale. They give them dimension. If the family pictures are flashes of the finite, these landscapes offer them residence in the languid tableaux of the durable.

Warm love,

S.

September 14, 1994, Lexington, Virginia

M—

It occurs to me that since this is an article on process, I might as well tell the rest of the story. It’s true that I shot four hundred negatives. But fifty percent of them were ruined by the humidity. It turns out that the gelatin layer was soft because it was fresh film.

When I got ready to develop them, I noticed that they were stuck together in little pinprick areas and I teased them apart. But the friction of the bond separating caused a microburst of electricity. They look as starry as the night sky. Most of them weren’t good pictures anyway; my usual 2% success ratio was in play, but there are a few beauties that were ruined.

This is process, isn’t it?

Love, as always,

Sally

Click here to find Immediate Family on the Aperture Foundation website.

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Staff Picks: Summer Exhibitions

Aperture editors and staff select the photography exhibitions we’re seeing around New York City this summer, from MoMA to the Guggenheim to Chelsea’s galleries. Follow the Aperture Beat column for the latest on what’s going on inside Aperture Foundation now.

This article originally appeared in Issue 13 of the Aperture Photography App.  

Yayoi Kusama, Mirror Performance, New York, 1968. Photograph by Shunk-Kender © 2015 Yayoi Kusama. Photograph: Shunk-Kender © J. Paul Getty Trust. The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles

Art on Camera: Photographs by Shunk-Kender, 1960–1971 at the Museum of Modern Art showcases works by the photographers Harry Shunk and János Kender, who collaborated under the name “Shunk-Kender.” By presenting the duo’s photographs of artworks and performances by their contemporaries, the exhibition looks at the two photographers’ relationship with the avant-garde, specifically of the 1960s. The relationship is indeed a dynamic one. Sometimes Shunk-Kender acted as a surrogate to the artist; the duo enacted performances as directed by the artist and then immortalized the fleeting moment by documenting it with their cameras. For instance, for David Askevold’s untitled 1971 work from the project Pier 18, the two played a game of hide-and-seek while recording it through photographs. Other times, they were witnesses to scandalous art scenes, as with their images of Yayoi Kusama’s The Anatomic Explosion (1968), a nude performance on the Wall Street. Their photographs are not only a document of the contemporary art scene of the period but also an active participation in it. —Yun Sun Lee, publicity and events Work Scholar

Lorraine O’Grady, Art Is. . . (Cop Eyeing Young Man), 1983/2009. Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates, New York © 2015 Lorraine O’Grady/Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York

There is no shortage of fantastic work up at the Studio Museum in Harlem this summer, ranging from vibrant painting to immersive installations. Lorraine O’Grady’s Art Is . . . uses photo-documentation to take viewers back to a public performance at the September 1983 African-American Day Parade in Harlem. Using large empty frames with the caption “Art is…”, O’Grady turned the parade into a statement about the vibrancy of Harlem’s community and the everyday present of artistic selves. Paraders of all ages stop and pose in front of the fantastical frames, adding exhilarating flare to the day’s festivities. Several images show young black women glaring through the frames at on-duty white police officers; these women stare defiantly, challenging the authoritarian gaze the viewer has come to expect. These photographs archive a powerful event that bleeds public spectacle, performance art, and photography into a fantastic and poignant showcase about one day over twenty years ago in New York City, which proves striking at the current moment. —Joshua Herren, development associate

Storylines at the Guggenheim incorporates the work of contemporary artists, including photographers such as Catherine Opie, Zanele Muholi, and Ryan McGinley, alongside responses from prominent writers, reinforcing the narratives inherent in their work as well as inspiring entirely new tangents. For those who can’t experience the work in the twirling galleries of the Guggenheim, the website offers an equally, if not more engrossing experience. Images float on an open plane where one’s attention can roam freely from work to work within the confines of a screen—after selecting an image, we find Edwidge Dandicat poems paired with Muholi’s Faces and Phases series, or Opie’s Self-Portrait/Nursing (2004) is set off by poems by Denise Duhamel. —Alexandra Pechman, online editor

Meryl Meisler, Jive Guy on Williamsburg Subway, Brooklyn, NY, 1978

I’m hoping to check out Purgatory & Paradise: SASSY ’70s Suburbia & The City at Black Box Gallery in Brooklyn. The photographs are by Meryl Meisler, who has been photographing the New York nightlife scene since the ’70s. This exhibition, on view until October 12, juxtaposes images of her home life on Long Island with some never-before-seen street and nightlife images. This includes shots of Fire Island, the Rockettes, the Hamptons, Go-Go-Bars, punks, CBGB, and even Girl Scouts. —Elena Tarchi, publicity and events associate

Follow the Aperture Beat column for more behind-the-scenes looks at Aperture Foundation.

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Highlights from From Bauhaus to Buenos Aires: Grete Stern and Horacio Coppola

Roxana Marcoci and Sarah Meister as told to Paula Kupfer

Grete Stern, Sueño No. 1: Artículos eléctricos para el hogar (Dream No. 1: Electrical Appliances for the Home), 1949 © 2015 Estate of Horacio Coppola.

When German artist Grete Stern and Argentine photographer Horacio Coppola met at the Bauhaus in Berlin in 1932, Coppola had already made incursions into photography and film while Stern had done the same with typography and graphic design experiments. They became a well-known couple within the intellectual scene of Berlin, but when the Nazi party began to gain power, they departed for London, where they married, and later arrived in Argentina. Intellectual and literary circles in Buenos Aires celebrated their unique visions, and their first exhibition, in 1935, at the editorial office of the magazine Sur, was heralded as the arrival of modernism in Argentina. A current exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, presents their work separately, in keeping with their different practices and careers, but highlights instances of overlap: their collaboration on several books, and their experimental, if short-lived, graphic design and photography studio. After the couple divorced in 1943, Coppola abandoned photography, while Stern continued to make photographs for several decades and surrounded herself with contemporary artists. Here, curators Sarah Meister, who focused on Coppola, and Roxana Marcoci, who researched Grete Stern, offer comments and insights into key works in the exhibition. —Paula Kupfer

This article originally appeared in Issue 13 of the Aperture Photography App.  

Horacio Coppola. Still Life with Egg and Twine, 1932 © 2015 Estate of Horacio Coppola

Sarah Meister: The first pictures by Coppola that I ever saw came in through the Thomas Walther Collection. We thought, that’s funny, an Argentine at the Bauhaus. This was in 2001 and we didn’t really know what to do. . . . We were pigeonholing him with the Bauhaus and not thinking of him as an independent artist. Then I started working with the Latin American–Caribbean Fund, which was helping support acquisitions of Latin American photographers, and with our C-MAP group [Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives in a Global Age Initiative, a global research initiative at MoMA]. I had the opportunity to travel to Brazil, to Argentina, to Mexico, and I started to see who the major figures were. The question became: how do you tell these alternative modernisms that are less familiar to an American public?

LEFT: Horacio Coppola, Untitled (Staircase at Calle Corrientes), 1928 © 2015 Estate of Horacio Coppola; RIGHT: Horacio Coppola, “¡Esto es Buenos Aires!” (“This is Buenos Aires!”) (Jorge Luis Borges), 1931 © 2015 Estate of Horacio Coppola

SM: These are pictures (above and below) from before Coppola’s first trip to London. You already see the modernity. Then he gets a Leica and . . . these are what [publisher] Victoria Ocampo sees and publishes in Sur: “a modern vision of a city.” The problem with previous scholarship was that it put the achievement out there, but until you impose a strict chronology you can’t learn the sources.

Horacio Coppola, Buenos Aires, 1931 © 2015 Estate of Horacio Coppola

This is one photograph that I love (above). I thought this was maybe a 3-by-4 negative, a contact print, since it’s unbelievably precise. I knew he’d borrowed his brother’s camera, but I didn’t know if this was in 1931 before he went to Europe or afterward. But I knew about the wonderful binders he made, of his favorite pictures—he literally took his 35mm-negative contact prints and pasted them in. Then I knew for sure it was a 35mm negative and I could place it in the context; I could see what he made before, what he made after. Like all good art history if you actually do your homework . . . and take the time to piece it together, it’s amazing, like detective work in the most satisfying way.

Installation view of From Bauhaus to Buenos Aires: Grete Stern and Horacio Coppola at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photograph by John Wronn © 2015 The Museum of Modern Art, New York

SM: This wall shows Coppola’s photographs from his seminal book Buenos Aires (1936). I thought I would never in a million years hang this many pictures on a wall but actually . . . there was a moment in the installation where I thought, No, embrace it. Let the obelisk be the loose fulcrum, go from day to night. I knew I didn’t want to do a “day wall” and a “night wall.” I realized a few people might not get it, which is fine.

Installation view of From Bauhaus to Buenos Aires: Grete Stern and Horacio Coppola at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photograph by John Wronn © 2015 the Museum of Modern Art, New York

Roxana Marcoci: For Stern, the show opens with this wall, which establishes the protagonists: we see Coppola, Ellen Auerbach, and Walter Auerbach, and others. Basically, Stern comes to Berlin extremely young, at the age of twenty-three, in 1927. Before that, she had already established a commercial studio in her hometown, and experimented with typography and advertisements; she was extremely precocious. So she comes right then to Berlin—which was the intellectual and cultural capital of central Europe—we’re talking roaring ’20s and the Weimar Republic. She becomes the very first student of Walter Peterhans, and then a year later, Ellen Rosenbach [later Ellen Auerbach] also becomes his student. [Auerbach and Stern] were very progressive. Both had been living with their middle-class, bourgeois families and they went to study and to Berlin. They experiment with film. And they all live together, with their lovers at that time, who eventually become their husbands.

LEFT: ringl + pit, Komol, 1931 © 2015 Estate of Horacio Coppola; RIGHT: ringl + pit, Soapsuds, 1930 © 2015 Estate of Horacio Coppola

RM: Stern’s sense of very close observation brought her to Peterhans—he is about the New Objectivity, the Neue Sachlichkeit strain in the Bauhaus, of very close observation. The other part of her is the sense of experimentation, of whimsicality, that comes through in the advertisements. She and Auerbach decide to form the ringl + pit studio. They are playful—they take [the name] from their nicknames from when they were children—Stern was Ringl, Auerbach was Pit—but also impressed both commercial and avant-garde loyalties. They decide to cosign the work; they spoof the cliché of the “master”—these are women who are working both in front of and behind the camera. For Stern, the whole psychoanalysis aspect in her work, the idea of opposition, of where you stand from and where you take the picture from, is a very feminist idea. While she never was an activist she was always affiliated with feminist and antifascist causes.

In this picture, for instance (above, left), there is this engagement with what is called the “Neue Frau” (new woman): she was considered the first global icon of modernity, as a woman and as an image of a woman. (In France, Coco Chanel was an example, and there’s the American flapper, too.) What’s nice about what they do is that they scramble a lot of gender signifiers and sartorial cues.

And in this one (above, right), they say they can’t even remember who took the picture and who is the hand. So this mix of animate and inanimate, which was dear to the surrealists, is also at play here. Interestingly, this [picture of soap] is one that Christopher Williams, with whom I did a previous show, was looking at. He has a picture of soap, too.

Grete Stern, Autorretrato (Self-Portrait), 1943 © 2015 Estate of Horacio Coppola

RM: This is one of the most revolutionary self-portraits. It’s a self-portrait as a representation in a mirror—she doesn’t even appear in it—and because of the combination of feminine and masculine props, the floral arrangement, which are also in other pictures of her, but also the mathematical instruments and then the mirror and the lens, which are visible in the foreground. Both mirror and lens function as tools of self-analysis.

RM: They [Coppola and Stern] divorced in 1943. They’d built a house, by Vladimiro Acosta, a very progressive architect, in the Ramos Mejía [neighborhood]. Grete kept the house, and it would become a mecca for a whole new group of writers and artists, including Madí.(Madí stands for materialismo dialéctico; they were a leftist group of artists who stood in opposition to Perón.) She designs their logo (above): she takes the existing neon sign for Movado watches and superimposes the three other letters in 3-D fashion, over the obelisk, partly because the obelisk is an abstract signifier and the Madí group was interested in abstraction. This Madí photomontage is the first acquisition that I made a few years ago—before we started working on the exhibition.

Grete Stern, Sueño No. 28: Amor sin ilusión (Dream No. 28: Love Without Illusion), 1951 © 2015 Estate of Horacio Coppola

RM: The last room is dedicated to the Sueños, from 1948 to ’51. Stern starts contributing on a weekly basis to the magazine Idilio. The rest of the magazine is these fotonovelas (photo–soap operas), very kitsch, but her work is very strong. The rubric “Psychoanalysis Will Help You” was written by two sociologists and a psychoanalyst under a pseudonym. She was making the photomontages on the basis of the analysis and the dream. What is interesting is that often her photomontages stand as a form of resistance to their interpretation of the dreams. This is a country where psychoanalysis has such a strong foot. Perón was against all of it; the psychoanalysts were blacklisted. This could only appear in a women’s magazine.

It’s interesting that in all these pictures the main protagonist is a woman, and the situation is always one of conflict; she has this very filmic mode of telling a whole narrative within a frame. This is where [the exhibition] ends, with her Sueños, because here, more than in any other bodies of work, the lessons of the Bauhaus laboratory—obviously advertisement techniques, and even typography—merge with this more Latin American, Borgesian sense of rupture and montage and different type of storytelling. When two cultures meet in this way, you can talk about a transnational modernist culture.

From Bauhaus to Buenos Aires runs through October 4 at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

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