Aperture's Blog, page 156

On Japanese Photography Magazines

Camera Mainichi, November 1968, photograph by Kishin Shinoyama

Camera Mainichi, December 1967, photograph by Haruo Tomiyama

Asahi Camera, October 1969, photograph by Kishin Shinoyama

Asahi Camera, June 1969, photograph by Daido Moriyama


Asahi Camera, January 1976, photograph by Masahisa Fukase

Asahi Camera, January 1976, photographs Nobuyoshi Araki

Shashin Jidai, March 1983, photograph by Daido Moriyama

Shashin Jidai, September 1982, photograph by Keizo Kitajima.

Shashin Jidai, November 1981, photographs by Nobuyoshi Araki

Camera Mainichi, April 1965, photograph by Yoshihiro Tatsuki

By Ivan Vartanian

Is the history of Japanese photography also a history of magazine publishing? In the new issue of Aperture magazine, Tokyo-based curator Ivan Vartanian offers a look through the pages of the popular technical and erotically minded magazines of the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s, revealing some the most significant photography produced during those decades. He writes, “In 1950, in the midst of Japan’s postwar economic recovery, the Ricohflex III premiered on the market. The world’s first mass-produced twin-lens reflex camera was met with phenomenal sales and catalyzed what would become a prolonged boom market for cameras. Magazines like Asahi Camera (1949–present) and Camera Mainichi (1954–85) emerged to educate this new demographic of photo-enthusiasts. While the bulk of content consisted of articles on technique, equipment reviews, and pictures submitted by amateur snappers, these magazines also published some of the most important photography of postwar Japan. Editorial stories by Shomei Tomatsu, Kishin Shinoyama, Daido Moriyama, Yutaka Takanashi, and Issei Suda may not have driven sales, but these photographers effectively challenged established ideas about the nature of the medium. Through their work, they argued that photography had the power to provoke thought and possibly exceed written language in its capacity to communicate.” Here we feature a selection of images from Asahi Camera , Camera Mainichi, and Shashin Jidai (1981-87), which is also discussed in the article. This article also appears in Issue 9 of the Aperture Photography App, a new biweekly publication from Aperture: click here to download the free app.

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Issue 9 of the Aperture Photography App 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 9:

● Tokyo-based-curator Ivan Vartanian offers a look inside Japanese photography magazines from the 60s, 70s, and 80s

● Mary Ellen Mark’s life and work is remembered by her collaborators, colleagues, and friends

● A report from the newly opened Shanghai Center of Photography

● From The PhotoBook Review 008, Kira Josefsson on Philip Gefter’s Wagstaff: Before and After Mapplethorpe

● A look at the redesigned and expanded version of  Berenice Abbott: Aperture Masters of Photography

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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Review: On Max Pinckers’s Will They Sing Like Raindrops or Leave Me Thirsty

Max Pinckers

Will They Sing Like Raindrops or Leave Me Thirsty

Self-published, 2014

Designed by Jurgen Maelfeyt

8 1/4 x 11 1/2 in. (21 x 29 cm)

232 pages

140 color images

Paperback with flaps

maxpinckers.be

“Cops joined kin’s hunt for lovers,” declares the ragged-edged headline of a newspaper article slapped into Max Pinckers’s lush, layered Will They Sing Like Raindrops or Leave Me Thirsty. Providing context for the images that come before and after, the article serves as an entry point into Pinckers’s beautiful, poetic, and occasionally simplistic exploration of love as experienced by the Indian subcontinent.

To open the book is to fall into the middle of a mystery. Comprised of documentary-style photographs, staged compositions, reprinted e-mails, newspaper clippings, and digitized photo backdrops (where fall foliage and spring tulips form a literally impossible landscape), it pivots between the fantastic, the lurid, and the disarmingly real. In one recurring series, a powder-blue room holds couple after couple within its walls, their cuddling and smiles a poignant counterpoint to their confinement. They are, in fact, fugitives; press clippings on that same blue wall and reprints of desperate e-mails lead to the understanding that these couples’ lives are in the hands of the Love Commandos, an NGO dedicated to assisting couples whose families—for reasons of caste, religion, or economic status—forbid their marriage. Just how far certain families will go to forbid a union is made clear with more clippings: “Bro beheads sister,” for example, and “For honour, man kills pregnant daughter.”

Max Pinckers, Will They Sing Like Raindrops or Leave Me Thirsty

 

This is a deftly layered book, each page a “clue” propelling the viewer past marriage podiums and portraits, past the unique synthesis of myth, history, and Bollywood spectacle that comprise modern India’s relationship to love. Pinckers’s best works read as beautiful hybrids, the spontaneity of documentary combined with the painterly sense of color and composition found in staged shots. He excels at catching emotion between lovers, whether they stand apart on a rocky shore or hide their connected heads under a saffron chunni. In one particularly heartbreaking set, a young couple lies shoulder-to-shoulder and fully clothed on a safe-house bed, moving from serious conversation to smiles, to laughter. The affection between them is so palpable that one can’t help but feel frustrated by anything that would keep them apart.

 

But here the book reaches too easily for an answer, and finds itself in familiar Western territory, with its predictable assessment of arranged marriage. Presented as a malevolent specter—the dark force of familial will waiting to put an end to true love—the photographer’s view toward the tradition comes through in both composition and juxtaposition: a photograph of a bloody hand on the same spread as the clipping that reads “Bro beheads sister”; an older man with one hand on a young woman’s neck, preceding “For honour, man kills pregnant daughter.” Marriage portraits with the faces cut out further emphasize that any sense of identity vanishes within these unions.

Hans Theys’s essay in the book identifies Pinckers as having been born in Belgium but raised in Asia, and asserts that, “the beauty of [his] approach is that he takes no stance. He doesn’t make a statement, he tries to show us things.” It’s an assessment that overlooks the fact that fictionalizing—that is, choosing the details of a story—is inherently a stance. Placing a photograph of a burning kameez across from a clipping of divorce announcements is a statement, as is having the argument for arranged marriage exemplified by reports of violence and a singular, poorly spelled e-mail. The country’s more complex tension between arranged marriage and romantic love—and the prevalent Indian view that the first can easily lead to the second—is vastly ignored here, in favor of a centuries-old storyline that paints the West as custodians of identity and passion, the East as fear-bound followers. In this, one can’t help regret the blindness of an eye keen on seeing so much. But while the misstep detracts from what might be a more nuanced reflection, it does not rob these pages of their dense, intriguing, visual glory.

_____

Mira Jacob is the author of the critically acclaimed novel The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing (Random House, 2014), which was short-listed for the Tata Literature Live! First Book Award; honored by the Asian/Pacific American Librarians Association; and named one of the best books of 2014 by Kirkus Reviews, the Boston Globe, Goodreads, Bustle, and the Millions. She teaches fiction writing at New York University.

mirajacob.com

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Review: Mira Jacob on Max Pinckers’s Will They Sing Like Raindrops or Leave Me Thirsty

Max Pinckers

Will They Sing Like Raindrops or Leave Me Thirsty

Self-published, 2014

Designed by Jurgen Maelfeyt

8 1/4 x 11 1/2 in. (21 x 29 cm)

232 pages

140 color images

Paperback with flaps

maxpinckers.be

“Cops joined kin’s hunt for lovers,” declares the ragged-edged headline of a newspaper article slapped into Max Pinckers’s lush, layered Will They Sing Like Raindrops or Leave Me Thirsty. Providing context for the images that come before and after, the article serves as an entry point into Pinckers’s beautiful, poetic, and occasionally simplistic exploration of love as experienced by the Indian subcontinent.

To open the book is to fall into the middle of a mystery. Comprised of documentary-style photographs, staged compositions, reprinted e-mails, newspaper clippings, and digitized photo backdrops (where fall foliage and spring tulips form a literally impossible landscape), it pivots between the fantastic, the lurid, and the disarmingly real. In one recurring series, a powder-blue room holds couple after couple within its walls, their cuddling and smiles a poignant counterpoint to their confinement. They are, in fact, fugitives; press clippings on that same blue wall and reprints of desperate e-mails lead to the understanding that these couples’ lives are in the hands of the Love Commandos, an NGO dedicated to assisting couples whose families—for reasons of caste, religion, or economic status—forbid their marriage. Just how far certain families will go to forbid a union is made clear with more clippings: “Bro beheads sister,” for example, and “For honour, man kills pregnant daughter.”

Max Pinckers, Will They Sing Like Raindrops or Leave Me Thirsty

 

This is a deftly layered book, each page a “clue” propelling the viewer past marriage podiums and portraits, past the unique synthesis of myth, history, and Bollywood spectacle that comprise modern India’s relationship to love. Pinckers’s best works read as beautiful hybrids, the spontaneity of documentary combined with the painterly sense of color and composition found in staged shots. He excels at catching emotion between lovers, whether they stand apart on a rocky shore or hide their connected heads under a saffron chunni. In one particularly heartbreaking set, a young couple lies shoulder-to-shoulder and fully clothed on a safe-house bed, moving from serious conversation to smiles, to laughter. The affection between them is so palpable that one can’t help but feel frustrated by anything that would keep them apart.

 

But here the book reaches too easily for an answer, and finds itself in familiar Western territory, with its predictable assessment of arranged marriage. Presented as a malevolent specter—the dark force of familial will waiting to put an end to true love—the photographer’s view toward the tradition comes through in both composition and juxtaposition: a photograph of a bloody hand on the same spread as the clipping that reads “Bro beheads sister”; an older man with one hand on a young woman’s neck, preceding “For honour, man kills pregnant daughter.” Marriage portraits with the faces cut out further emphasize that any sense of identity vanishes within these unions.

Hans Theys’s essay in the book identifies Pinckers as having been born in Belgium but raised in Asia, and asserts that, “the beauty of [his] approach is that he takes no stance. He doesn’t make a statement, he tries to show us things.” It’s an assessment that overlooks the fact that fictionalizing—that is, choosing the details of a story—is inherently a stance. Placing a photograph of a burning kameez across from a clipping of divorce announcements is a statement, as is having the argument for arranged marriage exemplified by reports of violence and a singular, poorly spelled e-mail. The country’s more complex tension between arranged marriage and romantic love—and the prevalent Indian view that the first can easily lead to the second—is vastly ignored here, in favor of a centuries-old storyline that paints the West as custodians of identity and passion, the East as fear-bound followers. In this, one can’t help regret the blindness of an eye keen on seeing so much. But while the misstep detracts from what might be a more nuanced reflection, it does not rob these pages of their dense, intriguing, visual glory.

_____

Mira Jacob is the author of the critically acclaimed novel The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing (Random House, 2014), which was short-listed for the Tata Literature Live! First Book Award; honored by the Asian/Pacific American Librarians Association; and named one of the best books of 2014 by Kirkus Reviews, the Boston Globe, Goodreads, Bustle, and the Millions. She teaches fiction writing at New York University.

mirajacob.com

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On Nick Waplington/Alexander McQueen: Working Process at Tate Britain

 

Tate Britain’s first-ever exhibition to focus on a living photographer features the work of Nick Waplington, who documented the late designer Alexander McQueen as he created his Autumn/Winter 2009/10 collection, which would be his last before his death in 2010. Since the 1980s, Waplington has worked in a wide variety of photographic mediums on diverse subjects, and has been particularly notable for his treatment of the photobook as an art form, and McQueen specifically commissioned him to create one about his process. Fashion, however, has hardly ever featured into Waplington’s work that is usually documentary in nature, such as in the projects Living Room (Aperture, 1991); Weddings, Parties, Anything (Aperture, 1996); and Other Edens (Aperture, 1994). Here, Alistair O’Neill, a senior research fellow at Central Saint Martins in London, examines how the unlikely pairing of a fashion designer and photographer unfolds across Tate Britain’s galleries. The show runs in tandem with the V&A Museum’s presentation of McQueen’s designs in the exhibition Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty. This article also appears in Issue 8 of the Aperture Photography App, a new biweekly publication from Aperture: click here to download the free app.

In line with the Victoria and Albert Museum’s staging of Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty in London, is a revealing exhibition at Tate Britain displaying a body of work by British photographer Nick Waplington, commissioned by British fashion designer Alexander McQueen to document the process of building his Autumn/Winter 2009/10 collection, Horn of Plenty. If Savage Beauty makes use of McQueen’s extraordinary showpieces and sense of spectacle for exhibits and scenography, then Waplington’s exhibition Working Process relies on an examination of the processes that lie behind the craftsmanship and staging inherent to McQueen’s work, conveyed through documentary photographs.

When commissioning Waplington, McQueen asked, “Can you make me something dirty and messy like your photobooks?” To which the photographer replied, “. . . This is fashion. I don’t think it’s very dirty and messy, but we can try.” What is captured is neither dirty nor messy in literal terms, but is rather a visceral and textured rendering of fashion being made. From this tight focus (a collection rather than a career; photographs on display instead of fashion) springs a richly articulated and detailed account of the designer at work.

This is informed and inscribed by the words of fashion journalist Susannah Frankel, who worked closely with McQueen (and features in a number of the photographs), and Waplington himself. Her words adorn the walls of the exhibition and are also available as audio on a free mobile resource via Tate WiFi, bringing us closer to the creativity the photographs document, and investing journalist and photographer as both witness and guide.

Horn of Plenty was inspired by the visual sign for cornucopia, but in McQueen’s hands the symbol was reworked to point to the excesses and spoils of late capitalism, assuming a cynical starting point as he returned to his archive and reassessed his career. For the fashion show, McQueen’s team made a black bonfire of all the props he had used in his fashion shows to date, as if a pyre for a black mass to sustainability. Waplington contributed to the theme by offering photographs taken in an East End landfill site to sit among those taken in McQueen’s Clerkenwell studio. In the exhibition, these juxtapositions relate bound bales of recycled paper to the gridded baste stitches that underpin embellished fabrics. Waplington also compares a mound of ground-up glass with the shimmering effect of hand-sewn sequins, linking the transformation of everyday materials with the glimmer of fashion’s visual effects. Frankel’s commentary reminds us that these are not themes born out of interpretation, but ones woven through the collection from the outset: “There was an irony to the recycling element of the collection. The clothes that are supposed to look like they are made of bin bags are actually made from the finest, most expensive silks.”

All photographs, Untitled, by Nick Waplington, from the series Alexander McQueen: Working Process, 2008–09 © Nick Waplington

 

Such transformations are also delineated by the use of photographic images in McQueen’s studio as part of the fashion-design process. An outfit in toile is photographed back, front, and side, then printed and tacked to a board before its skirt is redrawn with two lines of marker pen: from A-line to tulip shape. Mood boards force the mid-century Dior woman into company with the racetrack attendees of My Fair Lady and a ragbag of Felliniesque clowns and vamps. Through McQueen’s working process in cloth, they reappear, altered, as an army of models that shift and shape, look by look, until they document the fashion show’s outfits and runway order. There is a strong dexterity in using images: they slice and reassemble in the McQueen studio like scissors into cloth. Working Process offers a remarkably intimate portrait of the designer at work and a fitting portrayal of fashion design as craftsmanship.

Working Process ran at Tate Britain from March 10 to May 17.

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Remembering Mary Ellen Mark, 1940–2015

Mary Ellen Mark , Bali, 1973 (photo by Jack Garofalo)

Mary Ellen Mark and Raja, Great Gemini Circus, Perintalmanna, India, 1989 (photo by David Liittschwager)

Mary Ellen Mark with Ram Prakash Singh and his elephant, Shyama, Great Golden Circus, Ahmedabad, India, 1990 (photo by Farrokh Chothia)

Mary Ellen Mark, Oaxaca, Mexico 2013 (photo by Cristina Llerena Navarro)

Two Children, Izmir, Turkey, 1965

Girl Sifting through Ashes at the Burning Ghats, Benares, India, 1989

Husband and Wife, Harlan County, Kentucky, 1971

Shadow on a Wall, Shanti Nagar Leprosy Hospital, Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity, Bengal, India, 1981

Mother Teresa Feeding a Man at the Home for the Dying, Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity, Calcutta, India, 1980

Three Acrobats, Vazquez Brothers Circus, Mexico City, 1997

Pinky and Shiva Ji, Great Royal Circus, Junagadh, India, 1992

Performing Dogs, National Circus of Vietnam, Lenin Park, Hanoi, Vietnam, 1994

Laurie in the Bathtub, Ward 81, Oregon State Hospital, Salem, 1976

Amanda and Her Cousin Amy, Valdese, North Carolina, 1990

The Damm Family in Their Car, Los Angeles, 1987

Crissy, Dean, and Linda Damm, Llano, California, 1994

Twelve-Year-Old Lata Lying in Bed, Falkland Road, Bombay, India, 1978

Kamla Behind Curtains with a Customer, Falkland Road, Bombay, India, 1978

Gibbs Senior High School Prom, St. Petersburg, Florida, 1986

François Truffaut Directing Catherine Deneuve on the Set of Mississippi Mermaid, Grenoble, France, 1969

Federico Fellini on the Set of Satyricon, Rome, 1969

The Cast of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest Posing, Oregon State Hospital, Salem, Oregon, 1974

Dennis Hopper on the Set of Apocalypse Now, Pagsanjan, Philippines, 1976

Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy, Los Angeles, 1978

Tim Burton and a Trained Squirrel on the Set of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, London, 2004

Heather and Kelsey Dietrick, Twinsburg, Ohio, 2002

Teresa Merriweather, Bruce and Brian Kuzak, Tillie Merriweather, Twinsburg, Ohio, 2001

Samantha Monte and Khalil Samad, Staten Island, New York, 2006

Adam Johnson and Carley Gunter, Austin, Texas, 2008

Tiny in Her Halloween Costume, Seattle, 1983

Rat and Mike with a Gun, Seattle, 1983

Tiny in the Bathroom with Rayshon and E’Mari, Seattle, 2003

Tiny and J’Lisa on the couch, Seattle, 2014

Streetwise, published by Aperture in 1992

American Odyssey, published by Aperture in 1999

Twins, published by Aperture in 2003

Mary Ellen Mark on the Portrait and the Moment, forthcoming in the Photography Workshop Series by Aperture in June 2015. Mary Ellen Mark died on May 25, 2015. She had completed all the work on this book in the weeks before, and it had just printed at the time of her death.

Tiny: Streetwise Revisited, forthcoming by Aperture in September 2015. Mary Ellen Mark died on May 25, 2015. She had completed all the work on this book in the weeks before, and it had just printed at the time of her death.

Mary Ellen (holding Keanna), Martin, and Tiny, 1990

“I was thinking about how fleeting and how precious life is and the choices that you make in life, the luck of being born in the right bed, to parents who support and help you, and who love you. That doesn’t always happen—and then, what happens when that doesn’t happen?” —Mary Ellen Mark, from the afterword to Tiny: Streetwise Revisited

It was early this past winter, and Mary Ellen and I were discussing the afterword she would write—based on interviews I was doing with her—for her forthcoming book, Tiny: Streetwise Revisited. How she would encapsulate her thirty-plus years photographing Tiny, whom she had first met and photographed when Tiny was thirteen, and living with a group of homeless teens on Pike Street, in Seattle? Mary Ellen was sick, but refused to be a slave to her illness. Willfully, determinedly, and at times ironically, she confronted it, without compromise—and with the strong, candid, loving, and intelligent support of her husband and partner, the filmmaker Martin Bell.

Our meetings were squeezed in between the Oaxaca workshops she taught, photographing in Seattle for the final chapter of Tiny: Streetwise Revisited while Martin filmed, teaching in California, accepting awards, and working on another book with my Aperture colleague Denise Wolff.

“There was a time when the sight of Mary Ellen Mark’s number on my phone could raise my blood pressure,” says Wolff. “Whether it was a photographer she wanted me to meet or the time she called to say she wanted good-looking caterers at her fundraising cocktail event—who wouldn’t?!—or something more important, she was relentless when she wanted something.”

Wolff had always heard that Mary Ellen was a wonderful teacher and when Aperture created The Photography Workshop Series, she knew that she wanted to publish a book of her teaching. Mark said yes, but insisted that Wolff travel to her ten-day workshop in Oaxaca, Mexico, to work on the book and meet her students. Aperture’s director, Chris Boot, asked Wolff to persuade Mark that she could gather enough material here in New York or that we could hire an editor we all knew from Mexico to go instead. “Of course, that didn’t work,” says Wolff. “She wanted to do the book, and I had to come to Oaxaca. That was that. Even after I bought the flight, I don’t think she believed I was really coming until I arrived. She had her driver, Tomas, waiting to pick me up at the airport. He had been driving for her in Oaxaca as long as she had been teaching the workshop [over fifteen years]. I told him the story of how I came to be there. He laughed knowingly, ‘Mary Ellen is an easy person to say yes to.’”

Mary Ellen didn’t so much as teach, as much as push her students—to go further from wherever they were at that moment. “Just try to be a better photographer; that is enough,” she would say. She was highly intuitive with her students, with everyone, notes Wolff. She understood immediately who they were and could spot their strengths and also what was holding them back. “Don’t try to illustrate what happens; interpret it,” she would say. She was a tough editor; an “almost” picture was always a miss.

Wolff had worked with her before on her book of film stills (Seen Behind the Scene) but had never had the opportunity to see this side of her—the way she looked for the best in her students and how she championed them. And, how funny she was. At the workshop, a long-time student, Laurie Rae Baxter, was telling Mary Ellen about a man in the street who tried to spit on her when she was photographing. Mary Ellen asked, “Did you get his picture?!” Laurie laughed, no. “Coward,” Mary Ellen joked, “I would have taken his picture.”

Knowing that Mary Ellen was in poor health, for all of us the Workshop book as well as Tiny: Streetwise Revisited took on a different meaning and urgency. For the Workshop book, she poured over the text—“I don’t want to talk about creativity here, I want to talk about connection”—cutting to the heart of the matter. For both books, she didn’t put things off. Says Wolff: “We worked when she was tired, when she was busy, when she was not well, when she shouldn’t have been working. She saw the book through, adding new people to thank, to the day it went on press. I know she would be happier knowing that others will be reading her words and looking at this book, especially her students, than she would be in seeing it herself.” Both books were finalized first and signed off on by Mary Ellen a few weeks before she died. Sadly, she did not get to see them printed and bound.

Mary Ellen Mark’s first book with Aperture, and our first project together, was the facsimile reprinting of Streetwise in 1992. In 1997, her work in India was critical to Aperture’s publication and exhibition in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of India’s independence. This was soon followed in 1999 by the retrospective of her work photographed in the United States, American Odyssey—also a traveling exhibition that began at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and went to the International Center of Photography in New York, among other venues. Laser-focused, she was an excellent, sometimes unyielding, collaborator—impassioned, opinionated, open-minded at times, and single-minded at others. I also regularly featured Mary Ellen’s work in Aperture magazine when I was its Editor-in-Chief.

Mary Ellen was a force of nature, and her relationships reflected that intensity and engagement as well as an unwavering generosity. I always thought she’d be one of the people I’d want in my lifeboat. At her and Martin’s studio, she was supported by two remarkable individuals who define grace under pressure—Meredith Lue, Library Manager, and Julia Bezgin, Studio Manager, whose dog, Cooper, accompanies her to the studio every day, which delighted Mary Ellen. The studio always seems a flurry of activity, with Martin in the back space, working on his films: most recently, Tiny, which is to come out with Mary Ellen’s book in the fall.

If you were a young photographer in whose work Mary Ellen found something of merit—you could be certain she would call everybody she knew who might be able to help you. I say this having been on the receiving end of these “you must see” calls for twenty years. And, even if I had wanted to, it was impossible to say no to Mary Ellen. If you didn’t like the work that was one thing—you were just wrong—but not to look: that was not tolerated. She had a wonderful eye and was an extraordinary teacher.

Letizia Battaglia, whose work demanding justice in mafia-plagued Sicily moved and impressed Mary Ellen, remembers: “I have deeply loved Mary Ellen Mark since about 1975. And then her photos of the psychiatric hospital [Ward 81, 1979] and all the others were a model for me, an example of elegant and sincere reportage. . . . I respect her work, but also the delicacy of her way of living. I remember that in Arles, perhaps the first year there was an Arles [photo festival]; she was a teacher there. I didn’t have the money to pay for the workshop and, keeping it a secret from the organizers, she brought me into her group.”

If you were Tiny and her ten children, it meant receiving Christmas gifts for the kids, for thirty years. And, after Aperture’s Executive Director and Publisher, Michael Hoffman, unexpectedly died in 2001, Mary Ellen, with Lynne Honickman, put together a stunning collection of photographs in his honor, which was donated to the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

One could not have a more vital, more sensitive friend. And her fierce loyalty and generosity extended as well to animals—she loved elephants, pigs, chimps, goats, donkeys . . . and especially dogs.

If you were a stray dog, wandering around Oaxaca, at risk of going to the pound, Mary Ellen was mission-driven. Her first rescue was Gringo—much beloved, and still living with her close friend, Diana Haas, who met the puppy while taking one of Mary Ellen’s workshops. When I interviewed her for her book, Man and Beast, Mary Ellen told me: “Since the success with Gringo, I’ve taken it upon myself to find dogs for my Oaxaca workshop students, to convince my students to adopt dogs. And several of them do, and they have happy lives. I follow up. There are a lot of stray dogs in Oaxaca, and the dogcatchers go after them. After I had a couple of fistfights with dogcatchers in the Zócalo, they now let me take them.”

Mary Ellen also loved Cholo, the Mexican hairless dog of her dear friends in Oaxaca, the painter, Francisco Toledo, and his wife, the Danish weaver, Trine Ellitsgaard. Trine wrote me the other day: “I am so very sad, she was my most special friend ever, and a kind of lifesaver for me and my children, always. We are doing a show of forty prints beginning Saturday in Centro Fotográfico here in Oaxaca, in memory of all that she has done for Oaxaca. I will tell you something strange that for me and Francisco has been so connected to Mary Ellen: We had two dogs who Mary Ellen loved very much; she always brought them presents and dog sweets from New York every time she came, and always asked about their being. They both passed away a few days before Mary Ellen. Francisco and I like to believe that they left to be there, on the other side, to receive her . . . It is overwhelming to lose my three loved ones together, but I can excuse my dogs if their plan was to be with Mary Ellen.”

Mary Ellen also found a home for a neglected dog belonging to the Damm family, a family, as with Tiny’s, who she photographed repeatedly—the first time when they were living in their car in the late 1980s. With this shattering revelation, she created one of the many iconic images of her life, and in the life of the medium itself.

And then there was the annual, much anticipated, “Doggy Christmas.” Dozens of often dubious dogs, chaperoned by excited friends and colleagues, poured into the SoHo studio, both to party and to have their portraits taken. Sometimes the dogs were costumed by theme, or there were props or backdrops or characters, but inevitably, the dog would sit on the platform—the studio set up as it might be if Mary Ellen was photographing any politician or actor—while assistants scurried about. If Mary Ellen was not satisfied by the composition, she’d instruct the unsuspecting beagle or Lhasa apso or greyhound to move “stage right” and “upstage,” along with other, non-doggy directions.

Mary Ellen loved India and Mexico, and more recently, Iceland, as does Martin, and created signature stories in all places—including her 1981 color work on the prostitutes of Falkland Road in Bombay, where she embedded for six weeks and with a muted, but striking palette conveyed a ravaged and sensual world, without sentimentality. About her work on the Indian circus, John Irving, who spent some time with Mary Ellen when she was photographing there, wrote in his foreword to that book, “The Indian circuses reflect an atavistic and compassionate life, which Mary Ellen has depicted with disturbing honesty and compelling affection.”

With the circus projects, in India and later in Mexico, she told me that she was “looking for the anthropomorphic things in animals.” When photographing children, on the other hand, she was looking for the “beast.” “There’s an innocence sometimes in children, which is similar in animals. But I rarely look for the innocence. Children are ‘Man.’ They can be very cruel. They’re tiny humans. That’s what I try to look for in children. I’m looking for the things they do that reveal their true nature.”

She also did quite a lot of work on Mother Teresa. Although slightly more sympathetic, I believe she ultimately concurred, more or less, with Christopher Hitchens’s take on Mother Teresa as expressed in his book, The Missionary Position. At the time, Mary Ellen could not reconcile the vast amounts of money Mother Teresa was able to raise, with the shabby and ridiculously low-tech condition of her hospitals: she seemingly could have afforded to build the most modern, high level medical facility for the suffering people she was so committed to helping. Still, Mary Ellen’s work on Mother Teresa tenderly and respectfully declares her as a force to be reckoned with. On the willfulness front, they were certainly well matched.

In 2002 when the beatification of Mother Teresa transpired, Mary Ellen and I thought, wouldn’t it be great to tie the pub date of a potential book, into her potential sainthood? So, I called art director Yolanda Cuomo, who I knew had friends in high places. Yo called up her pal, Monsignor Michele Prattichizzo, who works at the Vatican in what we referred to as the Department of Saints. At the time, Mother Teresa had realized most of the requirements, but there were still some miracles pending. We decided to wait for the miracles.

Mary Ellen’s portraiture went through a transition when she started to use the Polaroid 20 x 24 camera. Entirely set up, although there was no longer the spontaneity of context, movement, or angle, she achieved a different kind of directness by virtue of being literally so close, and needing to direct her subjects more than she had chosen to do previously. Martin made films for both the Twins project (the book was published by Aperture in 2003) and Proms, first published in Aperture magazine, and then as a book in 2012 by J. Paul Getty Museum, and also exhibited at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, as well as, in part, at the LOOK3 Festival of the Photograph in Charlottesville, Virginia, including to the public’s excitement, the Charlottesville prom. There is a poignancy and frankness to both projects, and humor that comes across especially in the films.

Mary Ellen asked me to go on two shoots for Proms to help Martin with the interviewing process for his film. The first was a Staten Island high school prom held at Chelsea Piers in New York. Mary Ellen was gleeful that the previous year, the graduating students must have behaved so badly that the Pierre Hotel would not allow this year’s class back at any price. The second was a high school prom in Ithaca, New York, that she somehow convinced me entailed just a two-hour drive. Six hours later, interviewing these students on the cusp of life part two, and watching Mary Ellen, witty and kind, unintimidating, gently bossy give them the first degree as she positioned them—“So, are you two having sex? Do your parents know?” Or, “Are you in love?”—this behind-the-scenes experience afforded me exceptional insight.

Michael “Nick” Nichols, who “amazed” Mary Ellen because of how he conveyed “the intimate side of the lives of animals,” wrote: “I’m sixty-two and have been around a while. Mary Ellen was one of the first photographers whose work I admired, and who had an influence on me and so many others. She never stopped working. When I was able to see her actually working on Proms in Charlottesville, it all became clear. The camera was not there, it was MEM looking a stranger in the eye, and getting exactly what she wanted to come through. Finally she was so tough on herself, and the whole system, and she was never satisfied with her place in the publishing and Art world. But as a giver and teacher outside that world, she was endlessly generous. I will miss her. In no way was I ready for her to leave. She slipped away.”

Watching her relate to her subjects, so visually goal-oriented, but with such honesty, and almost feral alertness—spotting when she had triggered something, and then going there graciously, sympathetically, sometimes aggressively, I understood how her work may suggest something about her subjects’ interior lives which even they have yet to understand.

Donna Ferrato, whose reportage and advocacy on behalf of battered women Mary Ellen believed in, and found so powerful, states: “What made Mary Ellen Mark a strong photographer was her vulnerability. She allowed herself to feel things and to express them, and she genuinely loved and cared about the people she was photographing. She had the gift of a truly great photographer: the gift of being able to sense and to put into a photograph not only what she felt, but what the people on the other side of the camera felt, as well. Mary Ellen hated the term ‘woman photographer,’ and always said she was ‘a photographer first.’ But to me, it was her strength as a woman, her willingness to be vulnerable, her fighting spirit, that made her exceptional; she was a warrior, a lioness, and I always trusted her.”

Mary Ellen never exploited a situation, never exploited someone else’s pain or difficult conditions. Her work was simultaneously uninflected and deeply inflected. That is, she got you to feel, without telling you what or how to feel. She was passionate and compassionate. Life mattered. Animals mattered. People mattered.

Eugene Richards, the photographer with whom Mary Ellen felt perhaps the closest kinship, and whose often wrenching work got under her skin, and moved her enormously, wrote me of Mary Ellen’s death, and the recent loss of another dear, extraordinarily present, brilliant friend of his and mine: “I don’t know if it’s appropriate to be relating the recent loss of one deeply creative friend with the loss of another deeply creative friend. But I can’t help it. To my mind, you see, Mary Ellen and the great writer Chuck Bowden, who died last August, were not in fundamental ways dissimilar. Both were relentless workers, both provocative presences, meaning that when they entered a room, they by force of personality dominated the room. Both loved and hated the magazine world that they toiled in; both chose their own artistic paths, had distinctive voices, and only seldom wavered from them. Both were, at times, scarily intense and self-occupied, while capable of deeply heartfelt personal revelations and emotion. And, not to belabor the comparison, both of them lived their lives out in big ways, while giving a lot back.”

There was rarely, if ever, ambiguity with Mary Ellen. There was minimal gray area. She was empathetic, kooky sometimes, tempestuous at other times, always attentive, always intense, and you always knew how she felt, where she stood, where you stood, and why. And as photography editor Laurie Kratochvil wrote to me, “Mary Ellen did not suffer fools gladly…” In her darker moments, Mary Ellen could have a piercing disdain for the art/photography world, and for the decline of the editorial possibilities for documentary photographers in magazines, and at times—very unfortunately—felt slighted by them, no matter how hard one tried to dissuade her. And yet, this would pass, and then recur like a turbulent thunderstorm.

One afternoon this past winter when I was at the studio working with Mary Ellen and Martin on the Tiny: Streetwise Revisited texts, Mary Ellen drifted away from the work at hand to tell me about a poem by Robert Frost, “Birches,” that Martin had read to her that morning. She especially loved the final passages:

So was I once myself a swinger of birches. / And so I dream of going back to be. / It’s when I’m weary of considerations, / And life is too much like a pathless wood / Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs/ Broken across it, and one eye is weeping / From a twig’s having lashed across it open. / I’d like to get away from earth awhile / And then come back to it and begin over. / May no fate willfully misunderstand me / And half grant what I wish and snatch me away / Not to return. Earth’s the right place for love: / I don’t know where it’s likely to go better. / I’d like to go by climbing a birch tree, / And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk / Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more, / But dipped its top and set me down again. / That would be good both going and coming back. / One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.

Then, Mary Ellen added: “I remember when I must have been around four years old, I had been very ill, deathly ill. And then I woke up one morning and I was feeling better. It was spring. I looked out a window in my grandfather’s house. It was on the second or third floor. And this tree, with these beautiful flowers—apples maybe, or magnolias—they were flowers that smelled so sweetly on the breeze: warm wind, and the flowers moving. I remember being so happy and grateful for life.”

Mary Ellen Mark died on Monday May 25 from pneumonia, a result of lowered immunity from myelodysplastic syndrome, a disease affecting bone marrow and blood. She was seventy-five.

I keep thinking of Mary Ellen’s long, signature braids, flowing clothes with sweeping scarves, uniquely intricate silver jewelry—often made by friends. I remember Tiny calling her “exotic” when we spoke some years ago. Mary Ellen had such presence. She and her images influenced and are loved, respected, and admired by so many. The world feels lesser without her.

—Melissa Harris, May 31, 2015

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Behind the Scenes of Emmet Gowin at the Morgan Library and Museum

Joel Smith as told to Alexandra Pechman

Emmet Gowin, Edith, 2004 (Rain Droplets in a Web). Gold- toned salt print on gelatin coated paper. Collection of Emmet and Edith Gowin. © Emmet and Edith Gowin, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery.

 

Throughout his prolific career as a photographer, Emmet Gowin has threaded together seemingly disparate subjects: his wife, Edith, and their extended family; American and European landscapes; and aerial views of environmental devastation. In 2013, Aperture copublished a long-awaited survey publication, Emmet Gowin, in conjunction with a related exhibition organized by Fundación Mapfre, Madrid. On May 22, the Morgan Library and Museum opened Hidden Likeness, a show of Gowin’s photographs from throughout his career paired with selections he made from the museum’s vast holdings of ancient Near Eastern seals, medieval books, music manuscripts, and prints and drawings, as well as photographs. Online editor Alexandra Pechman spoke with Joel Smith, Richard L. Menschel Curator and Department Head, Photography, during a tour of the exhibition during its installation in early May. In June, Aperture Foundation Members at the Patron level will have a private tour of the exhibition led by Smith. What follows are a few selections from Smith’s commentary on how the Gowin show came together. This article also appears in Issue 8 of the Aperture Photography App, a new biweekly publication from Aperture: click here to download the free app.

On the Exhibition’s Beginnings

If you look at an artist’s work and say, “What other work would help to explain their work or bring out themes?” in Emmet Gowin’s case, it would need to be a very rich, long list of things precisely because of the range of things that he does and the depth of each. I’ve known about his great love of William Blake as well as Dürer and Old Masters, so that knowledge infected my eye in looking at his work. What I really wanted to do was to leave those relationships to speak for themselves—not to come up with thematic categories that he had to fit into, but to really have a free-flowing visual relationship between his body of work and the kinds of things that the Morgan has. . . . Emmet started coming in last spring for a day at time, and I made appointments with the curators [in other departments]. Based on their conversations, we could pull things to show. So we wound up with a group of a couple hundred objects and cut down from there to about fifty as we talked about which pieces of his own he wanted to include. In terms of his work, we were trying to choose a large number of [photographs] that had maybe been shown only once, as well as a few that are the anchors that people know.

(Left) Emmet Gowin, Edith and Elijah, Danville, Virginia, 1968. Gelatin silver print. Collection of Emmet and Edith Gowin. © Emmet and Edith Gowin, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery. (Right) Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn (1606–1669), Woman with a Child Descending a Staircase, ca. 1636. Pen and brown ink, brown wash. Purchased by Pierpont Morgan, 1909, The Morgan Library & Museum.

 

Edith

She is a common thread that runs throughout his career, so she appears a number of times in the show. Those portraits you see in combination with, for example, Frank Albert Rinehart’s portrait from an 1898 Indian conference in Omaha, Nebraska [Eneas Michel, Flatheads, 1898], a photograph that I acquired just a couple of years ago. Emmet loved the way the man maintains his dignity even in this totally imposed, unnatural context that’s determined by the photographer…he saw [this] as a common element with Edith. There are portraits of Edith from 1967 all the way up to 2009, paired with Gauguin, Rembrandt, Degas. Happily there is this picture [top] of Edith that is a “hidden likeness”: it’s actually a photograph of a photograph. Emmet made pictures of Edith that he took traveling with him, as a way of bringing Edith along. There had been a rain shower outside on his porch in Pennsylvania, and when he looked out he saw a spider web that had droplets of rain in it and a leaf. He went back in the house and got his camera as well as one of those portraits, and he just slipped it behind the spider web. The web disappeared, and there’s nothing but the water which becomes this veil over her face. So the photograph of her is from maybe ten or twelve years earlier, though this photograph is recent.

(Left) Emmet Gowin, French Guiana, Insect Movement, 2010. Archival digital inkjet print. Collection of Emmet and Edith Gowin. © Emmet and Edith Gowin, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery. (Right) Johann Hartlieb (active 1450), Die Kunst Chiromantia (The Art of Chiromancy). Augsburg: Georg Schapf, ca. 1475. Ink and wash on paper. Purchased with the Bennett Collection, 1902, The Morgan Library & Museum.

 

Relationships between objects

There are artistic relationships and surprises in the show: there’s a very early Lyonel Feininger academic study that has nothing to do with what he did later as an artist but is formally so beautiful. . . . These fit with the image of the paths of moths and droplets of water on a tent surface in the jungle, from when Emmet was photographing moths in the rainforest [above]. He made a few of these and, in the booklet, we paired this with a palm from a very early printed book. Some of these [moth path] images have never been shown: the cloth of the tent gets wet at night in the rainforest, soaked, and then you can see the moths land on it, droplets of water run down it, you can see the feet of the moth—I love where this one walked in a circle.

(Left) Emmet Gowin, Copper Ore Tailing, Globe, Arizona, 1988. Toned gelatin silver print. Collection of Emmet and Edith Gowin. © Emmet and Edith Gowin, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery. (Right) William Blake (1757–1827), Behemoth and Leviathan (illustration for the Book of Job), ca. 1805–10. Pen and black and gray ink, gray wash, and watercolor, over faint indications in graphite. Purchased by Pierpont Morgan, 1909, The Morgan Library & Museum.

 

Terrible Beauty

William Blake is a favorite of Emmet’s, and I wanted to get [Emmet’s] aerial photographs in from the beginning. These two images [above] are paired at the beginning of the show and both have this demonic beauty to them. . . . We will have an event later in the run of the show on September 10 called “Terrible Beauty,” where Emmet will speak on the subject of beauty in catastrophe. The beginning of [the idea of terrible beauty] can be seen in his views of Matera, Italy, made in 1980, a couple years after an earthquake that made parts of the city uninhabitable. Around the same time he was photographing Mount St. Helens, where he was beginning to have that almost aerial perspective. It was in the course of doing the aerial work that he flew over Hanford [Nuclear Reservation near Richland, Washington] and realized there’s this whole nuclear story in the U.S. to be told through photographs.

The title (Hidden Likeness)

[At the] Morgan, we have not only works of art but all of these other things like books, musical manuscripts, and objects such as Coptic bindings, that are really not there for their visual characteristics at all, but for their historical significance. Those are things I just knew Emmet was going to respond to, and I wanted to do something that would bring out the richness of what the Morgan has; he was an ideal instrument to get at that depth. This title, Hidden Likeness, came about because I asked Emmet if I could look through his old notebooks where he had written quotations down and so on. It was actually the transcript of a talk in which he said, “Jacob Bronowski [biologist, mathematician, and author of The Ascent of Man] would have called this a hidden likeness,” and I didn’t even know what it referred to, but I liked the phrase. It wound up explaining very nicely what I saw here: in the range of what the Morgan has and in the range of what Emmet does, there’s a likeness that nobody meant to produce but was there waiting to be found.

 

Size and intimacy

Another element of likeness is simply one of scale. The largest thing Emmet has ever created as a photographer is about [handheld] size, and that’s the kind of range in which the Morgan’s collection exists—we don’t have a painting collection, we don’t have sculptures in any great number. There was something about that human scale that felt like an affinity as well. Photography is all sorts of different things now, and for some photographers it’s something electronic and for some it’s something monumental, but Emmet really does work in a tradition that speaks historically to the kind of tradition that the Morgan is about. He works toward a piece of paper, or the size of something you might hold in your hand. That kind of intimate feature of the objects is something I hope that people will experience by seeing the show.

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Kikuji Kawada in conversation with Ryuichi Kaneko

G.I. and a Woman at Ueno Park, 1953

Kikuji Kawada is one of Japan’s most celebrated postwar photographers. In 1959, Kawada—along with Shomei Tomatsu, Eikoh Hosoe, Ikko Narahara, Akira Sato, and Akira Tanno—founded the influential VIVO cooperative, which championed an expressive approach to documentary photography. He is perhaps best known for his now-iconic 1965 book The Map (or Chizu in Japanese), a disquieting exploration of the trauma of World War II. The book, designed by Kohei Sugiura, features images of stains burnt into the walls 
of Hiroshima’s A-Bomb Dome (now the Hiroshima Peace Memorial), as well as images related to the iconography
 of the American occupation. Kawada’s subsequent projects continued his interest in connecting the present with historical touchstones, and shift between realism and abstraction. Kawada, now eighty-two, continues 
to attract a wide international audience. His photographs were featured in
 the 2014 exhibition Conflict, Time, Photography, curated by Simon Baker, for London’s Tate Modern, and MACK Books has recently released a volume 
of The Last Cosmology, Kawada’s project on astrological phenomena. This past January, at Aperture’s request, Kawada met with Ryuichi Kaneko, an influential historian and a major collector of Japanese photography books, at Tokyo’s Photo Gallery International. They discussed 
the arc of Kawada’s six-decade-long engagement with photography for the Summer 2015 “Tokyo” issue of Aperture magazine. The following is an excerpt of their conversation that focuses on Kawada’s early career and the making of The Map. This excerpt also appears in Issue 8 of the Aperture Photography App, a new biweekly publication from Aperture: click here to download the free app.

Ryuichi Kaneko: I’d like to start by asking what made you become a photographer. What inspired your first forays into photography as an art?

Kikuji Kawada: People ask me all the time what made me decide to be a photographer, but I have to say, I’ve always found it hard
 to put my finger on it. It was more like one thing led to another, really. I got my first camera in high school. The first time I used it, I got on my bike and rode way out into the mountains, out where no one was around, and ended up taking pictures of some dry grass I found out there. Thinking back now, I have no idea why I did that. I was born in a little town called Tsuchiura—really rural. You could get on your bike
 and end up in the mountains right away 
or wander around amid the rice fields.

RK: Most people think of a camera, first and foremost, as a tool for taking pictures of those closest to them. But your first instinct was to go out where there weren’t any people at all.

KK: I liked doing things in secret—maybe not the healthiest predilection, now that 
I think about it [laughs]. I was interested
 in playing with mechanical things in secret; it felt like I was accessing the heart of the mechanism that way, its essence. Discovering its secrets.

RK: In the 1950s and ’60s you published frequently in photography magazines; Shincho Weekly, Nippon Camera, and Photo Art—those magazines were your mainstay. Looking back at the photographs you published early on—Yaizu and Fishing Port at Yaizu (1957–59), or The Bar Abandoned by the Boom (1957), or even, to a certain extent, the Base photographs (1953)—did these first run in Shincho Weekly?

KK: Many photographs were taken for magazines but didn’t end up published. They were too strange. Shincho Weekly wanted less edgy themes for the spreads—though some were things I shot on my own time, when inspiration struck. I would stop to shoot something on the way back from an assignment, for example.

Pages from the maquette for The Map (1965) showing the A-Bomb Dome.

RK: [By the late 1950s] you’d become a member of the postwar generation of photographers, and your work was getting a fair amount of attention. But there’s one series I really must ask you about from this time: when you went to Hiroshima. That was with Domon, right? [Ken Domon, the influential documentary photographer of this period.]

KK: It was. I’ve talked about this ad nauseam over the years, but long story short: I proposed a trip to Hiroshima to the editorial board of Shincho Weekly, a documentary shoot, and it was approved. I was excited at the prospect of going, but it was decided that it would have to be a special issue, and in that case it should be Domon
 who went. That was an order from the top. So, my hopes were dashed in an instant. The people who ended up going were Domon and [freelance journalist] Daizo Kusayanagi. They were charged with gathering evidence under the auspices of the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission. It became a huge special issue. And Domon ended up going back and forth to Hiroshima many times during the process of shooting what would become the book Hiroshima (1958). The editor at Shincho was paying for these trips out of his own pocket, and 
at one point he said to me that he knew I’d been the one to propose the project but that I’d never gotten a chance to go, so he was going to send me along as an assistant. So, it was as Domon’s assistant that I ended up going. That was my first trip to Hiroshima.

RK: How many times did you end up going with him?

KK: Just once. Domon liked the finer things. He wanted to stay at the very best place 
in town, so we ended up in a new hotel 
and would walk to the Peace Park and the A-Bomb Dome, which were nearby.
 We would go together, but then I’d slip away and walk around on my own. And that’s when I found them: the stains on the walls of the rooms beneath the dome that became the subject of the Stain series. I would just slip away, secretly, without a word to Domon.

Pages from the maquette for The Map (1965) showing the Stain series
.

RK: So, there were rooms underground, beneath the dome?

KK: When the place was destroyed, there were about thirty people—I think it was around eight in the morning or so, but at
 any rate, in the morning—these people had arrived for work and ended up vaporized. The place had a horrible atmosphere. Just looking at it was overwhelming. And you couldn’t see very well; there were no lights, no electricity. So, I left and gathered up a big camera and some bulbs and headed back.

RK: So, that’s how you first discovered that place?

KK: Yes. This was going to be my Hiroshima. I could take so many kinds of pictures there. This was no longer assistant’s work; I was preparing my own project. I wasn’t thinking about anything else.

 

RK: You said you brought back a big camera. Do you mean a 4 by 5? And lights to illuminate the rooms?

KK: It was a 4 by 5, yes. But I didn’t use lights; I shot in natural light. Back then, we could go in and out of the dome as we liked. In the Tate Modern book [Conflict, Time, Photography, 2014], there’s that famous photograph of Kiyoshi Kikkawa, who was called genbaku ichi-go [bomb victim number one]. He ran a souvenir stand right next to the dome.

 

RK: I’ve heard you talk before about discovering those “stains” beneath the dome, and when I think about how they may be all that was left of people who were vaporized in an instant, all the 
hair on my body stands on end. You hear about things like that: people explain what happened as carefully as they can—this happened, that happened, like that. But there’s no comparison to seeing it as one image. It has so much power.

KK: The hard part becomes how to organize that kind of material, how to convey its enormity.

RK: You published some of those photographs in Nippon Camera under the title The Map: Stain. That was August 1962. Was that their debut?

KK: I think so. After the Eyes of Ten exhibition (1957), there was another show, NON, at the Matsuya Ginza Gallery (1962). I showed many of the Stain pictures there—about ten pieces in all, I think. That was the first time I’d put together a fair amount of them as one exhibition. Eikoh Hosoe debuted the first of his Ordeal by Roses photographs there, too. We had a lot of people coming to that show including Yukio Mishima, of course, since he was Hosoe’s model. I overheard him asking, “What kind of ‘stains’ are these? Stains left by what?” I was a bit contrary back then, you know. I said, “That’s for you to imagine, sir” [laughs]. Though I did think you should be able to tell just by looking.

 

RK: When looking through The Map, the first thing that makes an impression is of course the A-Bomb Dome photographs—the Stain photos—and then the other images of what you might call “scars of war.” But there are other images, too, like the spiral lathe left for scrap in a factory or a wanted poster related to a heinous crime, or a bank of television screens—all sorts of images. So, history is brought into direct contact with the present.

Pages from the maquette for The Map (1965)

KK: An image taken of the “present,” whenever that is, is so strong—vivid in hue, aspect, substance—because it’s
 a document. I seek even now to explore new forms for documentary to take. When you layer things in the way we’ve been discussing, the layers produce meaning, metaphors emerge as you go deeper into the juxtapositions that arise, and the ways of seeing the image multiply. Not because it’s a collage, because you have layers, like this [indicates the accordion shape of a camera bellows].

RK: I understand that when it came time to actually make the book, there were a lot of complications on the road from the dummy version to its final form. You were unable to put it out as you first envisioned it, in two volumes, and instead everything had to be layered physically into one volume.

KK: That was the plan proposed by our fantastic designer, Kohei Sugiura—to split The Map in two. On the one hand, there were the Stain photographs; they added
 up to a good proportion of the whole. Then there were the other photographs, the Hinomaru flag photograph, the monuments, the more symbolic stuff. We split these photographs into two volumes—half in one, half in the other—and we’d put them in one case. So, the viewer would have to take them out and look at one volume, then open the other. So, it was only in their heads that the whole “map” ever existed. It was so creative, this idea. But I thought it was too hard to understand. Someone buying the thing would have to realize that he has to look at one volume and then another just to figure out what’s going on. It’s too much trouble.

Pages from the maquette for The Map (1965). Photographs © Kikuji Kawada and courtesy Photo Gallery International, Tokyo; maquette spreads courtesy Spencer Collection,
The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations

Anyway, to skip to the end of the story, it was decided that the thing was too big—it would be too expensive—so we had
 to make it smaller. To make it smaller, we decided it should fold out on every page—Kannon-style [referring to the Buddhist goddess of mercy], they call it, with the hinged doors. Sugiura asked how many pages we should make that way. I thought, if we go that way, we should go
all the way. With a triptych, when you fold the sides over a central image, what’s hidden becomes a sacred icon. That’s the meaning of that design—exactly what the Japanese term means, like opening an altar to view an image of Kannon. So, we redesigned every page that way, and it took about a year or 
so to do it.

RK: The Map came out in 1965, on the twentieth anniversary of the end of the war, and it was talked about quite a bit. Though, I gather it didn’t sell that well?

KK: I was afraid it might be passed over entirely, so I took a copy to each publication that ran real criticism. I took the book physically to their offices, right to the writers. I remember one guy, Hiroshi Iwada, the poet. He wrote something in the newspaper Nihon Dokusho Shimbun. And then there was Tatsuhiko Shibusawa [a novelist and critic]; 
I got him to write something somewhere, too. So, word trickled out like that, and
 as far as critical opinion was concerned, people thought it was a pretty great thing.

RK: You called the work you did before The Map “symbolic documentary,”
 Ikko Narahara’s Human Land photographs were eventually called a “personal document,” and Eikoh Hosoe called Kamaitachi a “memory document.” Shomei Tomatsu never used the term, but in the end, it seemed to me that this generation of photographers considered all photography to be “documentary.”

KK: We had no strong consciousness of it. I mean, we never debated things in those terms, but I know what you’re saying. Now that I hear you say it, I can’t help but think, Yes, that’s exactly it!

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Issue 8 of the Aperture Photography App Now Available

The new issue of the Aperture Photography App is now available to download on your iOS device. Inside issue 8, our readers can find:

● A conversation between celebrated Japanese photographer Kikuji Kawada and historian of the Japanese photobook Ryuichi Kaneko, on The Map

● A review of Tate Britain’s first-ever exhibition to focus on a living photographer, Nick Waplington’s photographs of Alexander McQueen, Working Process

● From the latest issue of The PhotoBook Review: Max Pinckers’ Will They Sing Like Raindrops or Leave Me Thirsty

● A look inside Richard Misrach’s new book, The Mysterious Opacity of Other Beings 

● A behind-the-scenes look at Emmet Gowin’s exhibition at the Morgan Library and Museum

Every issue of the Aperture Photography App is free. Select articles later appear here, on the Aperture blog. Click here to download the app today! 

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If You Came Here to Have Fun, You Will

Jason Fulford is known not only for his work as a photographer and publisher of J&L Books, but also for going beyond the standard format of a book talk or signing and creating, instead, live performances or happenings that are playful and memorable. Denise Wolff, an editor in Aperture’s books program, has worked with Fulford on two recent books: The Photographer’s Playbook and This Equals That, both Aperture, 2014. Over the course of a year, Fulford and Wolff organized a series of events that involved activities, games, merchandise, flags, a live show, pancakes, and even a debate—all to bring new dimensions to the books themselves. If you ever receive a packet of mushrooms, a letter from the past (or future), or a ticket in the mail with no other explanation, it probably has Fulford’s telltale Scranton, Pennsylvania, return address. Do not discard it; event information will follow. Fulford has a letterpress in his basement and makes much of the ephemera and mailings himself, and with his wife, Tamara Shopsin. These are all part of the experience. For the new issue of The PhotoBook Review 008, Spring 2015, Fulford and Wolff discussed the parallel lives of a book through its events, and the event as intersection of artist and viewer. This article also appears in Issue 7 of the Aperture Photography App, a new biweekly publication from Aperture: click here to download the free app.

Photogram and letterpress card from the In the Dark and Behind a Wall event at Dexter Sinister, New York, March 26, 2011—the second installment of The Mushroom Collection after the Amsterdam storefront. Visitors passed small objects through a slot in the wall. The objects were converted into light and passed back through the slot.

Denise Wolff: I’ve never known you to do a standard artist talk or panel. Have you?

Jason Fulford: I give talks at universities about four times a year. I don’t like panels though. My talks are scripted so I can put in a lot of information. Then we do Q&As after. I want the audience to get their money’s worth. When I’ve been on panels in the past, I’ve left thinking the audience got cheated somehow. I’ve seen a few good panels though, where personalities clashed, and that is good content.

Hotel Oracle key tags from the New York City event at the New Yorker Hotel, October 2013. The event took place in the Tesla Room, number 3327 on the thirty-third floor, where Nikola Tesla—an inventor, electrical and mechanical engineer, and futurist—lived for the last ten years of his life.

DW: Maybe we should talk about a few of your favorite events. These are the ones I remember: the J&L variety show, the Mushroom Collector darkroom with Dexter Sinister, the Hotel Oracle world tour, the This Equals That pancakes and game, and of course, the Photographer’s Playdate festival of assignments. Are there one or two you can walk us through in particular?

JF: When my book The Mushroom Collector came out in 2010, Lorenzo de Rita, my editor and publisher of the Soon Institute, rented a storefront space in Amsterdam for one month. Our idea was to transform the book into four dimensions, bringing it into time. The space became a cross between a store and a period room. We channeled the anonymous mushroom collector who took the vintage pictures that appear in the book, and imagined what his or her workspace would feel like. Every night something in the room changed, similar to the way mushrooms appear overnight. Over the course of the month, we programmed talks and screenings and music events with different artists.

Engraved translucent plexiglass triangles that appeared overnight in the Mushroom Collection storefront space in Amsterdam, 2010. Each triangle is an optical illusion. Most people read this arrangement of words as “I love Paris in the springtime.” Look again.

Back in New York, Dexter Sinister invited me to present the book in their basement space on Ludlow Street. We turned the basement into a one-day darkroom, and built a Malevich-inspired wall. Visitors were invited to bring an object and pass it through the wall, where I converted it into light and removed one dimension by making a photogram. Each visitor received the object back in its new form: a matte barite print. I made about 150 prints that afternoon. We were really sweating behind the wall, listening to Mississippi Records and eating Clif bars.

Around the time Hotel Oracle came out in 2013, Lorenzo and I were having a conversation about the French writer Georges Perec. He wrote an essay describing the perfect Parisian apartment. Each room was in a different neighborhood, in a different type of building, on a different floor, etc.—each location well-suited to the function of the room. It occurred to us that the Hotel Oracle exists all over the world, in pieces, like Perec’s apartment: the room in New York, terrace in Paris, game room in Tokyo, bar in Krakow, laundry in San Francisco, pool in Los Angeles, shuttle van in Philadelphia, and wine cellar in Milan.

Button worn by the eighty-year-old “Future Jason” at the Hotel Oracle pool event in Los Angeles, February 2014. Participants were sent on a self-guided tour through time and asked to find Fulford three times in the historic, ten-floor Los Angeles Athletic Club. The three Jasons were different ages—ten, forty, and eighty—and each signed the book with a different date: 1983, 2014, and 2053.

DW: These events and happenings take a lot of planning, work, and imagination. Why do a book event this way? It seems to be about more than selling and promoting the book. Is it about creating a live experience of the book for an audience? Is it more of an excuse to have a good time? How did the event madness begin?

JF: The Mushroom and Oracle events began as book parties. But wine and cheese and stacks of books are boring. I want the events to be custom-made for the books—to take ideas from the books, and turn them into experiences. In this way the events become supplementary to the books. They’re like appendixes. They’re parallel to the book. They feel like the book. They’re also an excuse for me to play with other materials—architecture, sound, objects. They’re a chance for me to meet my readers one-on-one, which hardly ever happens otherwise.

DW: I really like the idea of the author and reader meeting each other. What was really odd is that, even though I know you, when I “met” you at the Hotel Oracle events in New York and San Francisco, I felt it was an encounter with—well, not quite a stranger, but someone else: the oracle. Did you feel you became an oracle for the event?

JF: That’s great. I’m glad it felt that way. One thing I learned about being an oracle is that equal work is done by the people who receive the message. They are the ones who bring meaning to it. I think that’s also the ideal situation when someone reads one of my books. I want the readers to think about their own lives—not mine.

Hotel Oracle drink coaster from the bar event in Krakow, Poland, June 2014. The Hotel Oracle is a phantom building that appeared in various parts of the world between October 2013 to June 2014—as a room in New York, a bar in Krakow, a terrace in Paris. The events in each location explored themes from the book (such as myth, time, travel, existence, and the supernatural) through performance and interaction. As of June 2014, the hotel is closed.

DW: Do you have a good story or two about meeting your readers? Were there tears? Laughter?

JF: During the San Francisco Oracle event, I met visitors one-on-one in a dark room lit with a red bulb. I asked each person to think of something that was happening in their life at that moment, then to pick from a pile of cards. The message on the card would then relate to the thing they were thinking about. Almost all of the exchanges were intense. Some people left happy, and others more somber. In New York and Paris we did a similar exchange, but with a slide image instead of a card. The slide related to their thoughts. I’ve seen some of the people a year later, and they still remember their fortune.

DW: I remember my slide fortune was about a place called Taco Land. I do feel it was perfect for me and fit well for the whole of 2014. Long live Taco Land! What the hell was that a picture of any way? Can you reveal?

JF: That’s a teletype machine I shot at the Pavek Museum of Broadcasting outside Minneapolis.

The Mushroom Collector mailing that went out in advance of the book’s release in 2010. The Mushroom Collection project began with a set of photographs of wild mushrooms found at a flea market.

DW: Do you want to say anything about the mail? This seems to be part of the fun, and is a bit mysterious (kind of like the events themselves). Do you have more to say on this?

JF: I think we’re OK, but maybe you could mention getting the ticket in the mail?

DW: I received the ticket, which said, “If you came here to have fun, you will!! If not, you won’t!!!”, along with a single sheet of Hotel Oracle stationary. I don’t think it said what it was for or who it was from, but I knew you were behind it and that the information would follow. It was inevitable that I would go to something involving a mysterious ticket received in the mail. Who could resist? The rest is Taco Land history. Maybe I should also ask: what do you think makes a great event?

JF: It’s fun and it makes you think. Maybe you go away with something (physically). And maybe it doesn’t fully make sense until the next day or later.

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