Aperture's Blog, page 158

Inside the Aperture Spring Party

Jeffrey Kane of LTI/ Lightside Photographic Services. Photo by Max Mikulecky

The Aperture Spring Party: Moving Mountains drew more than 250 guests to the Aperture Foundation in Chelsea, New York on Friday, April 17 during the AIPAD Photography Show New York.

Aperture teamed up with photographer Penelope Umbrico (Range, Aperture 2014 and Penelope Umbrico: Photographs, Aperture 2011) to offer party attendees a unique, signed photograph from Umbrico’s Moving Mountains series.

Aperture published Umbrico’s first monograph in 2011, and this recent series takes the Aperture Masters of Photography Series as a jumping-off point, which Umbrico rephotographed using various camera apps and filters, re-rendering classic works by the likes of Edward Weston, Wynn Bullock, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Manuel Álvarez Bravo as almost entirely different images. (The series was recently featured in the New York Times Magazine’s new photography column by Teju Cole.)  The event was co-chaired by Aperture trustees Elaine Goldman and Michael Hoeh, and featured a DJ set by Zachary Cole Smith of DIIV.

Prints from Umbrico’s 2015 Moving Mountains limited-edition series are available for purchase on Artsy. Print sale proceeds help to support all of Aperture Foundation’s free and low-cost public events and education programs as well as publishing a diverse roster of photobooks and internationally touring exhibitions. For questions, contact springparty@aperture.org or (212) 946-7103/7146.

Umbrico’s exhibition Shallow Sun is currently on view through October 25, 2015 at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum.

The Aperture Spring Party was generously supported by lead sponsor Stribling. Additional event support was provided by:

Espolon Tequila

Hotel Americano

LTI/ Lightside Photographic Services

Patrick McMullan Company

Pinch Food Design

Additional party photos are on www.patrickmcmullan.com.

Event co-chair and Aperture trustee Michael Hoeh with Steve Houck. Photo by Max Mikulecky

Dublin and Gabrielle Wallace. Photo by Adair Ewin

Aperture Board of Trustees chair Cathy Kaplan with fellow Aperture trustees Jessica Nagle, James O’Shaughnessy, and Melissa O’Shaughnessy. Photo by Max Mikulecky

The Cleveland Museum of Art’s curator of photography Barbara Tannenbaum, guest of honor Penelope Umbrico, and photographer Simen Johan. Photo by Max Mikulecky

Photographer Hannah Whitaker and Aperture trustee David Solo. Photo by Max Mikulecky

Photographer Richard Renaldi and Aperture Paul Strand Circle Member Kate Cordsen. Photo by Max Mikulecky

Zachary Cole Smith of DIIV. Photo by Anna Kamensky

Tim Doody and guest. Photo by Adair Ewin

Angela Ledgerwood, Erin Allweiss, and Ella Marder. Photo by Adair Ewin

Liz Grover, Lori Grover, Josh Rosen, and Harrison Grover. Photo by Max Mikulecky

Gallerist Yancey Richardson with Museum of Fine Arts, Boston curators Karen Haas and Anne Havinga. Photo by Adair Ewin

Spring Party guest with gallerist Lexing Zhang, and Aperture trustees Stuart Cooper and Rebecca Besson. Photo by Max Mikulecky

Aperture Spring Party atmosphere. Photo by Max Mikulecky

Photographer Rose Marie Cromwell, Aperture magazine’s managing editor Paula Kupfer, and Zara Katz. Photo by Adair Ewin

The post Inside the Aperture Spring Party appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

London Exhibitions of Photographers’ Collections

by Isabel Stevens

Installation view of Simon Fujiwara’s curated section at Hayward Gallery, History Is Now: 7 Artists Take On Britain. Photograph: Linda Nylind

 

Two exhibitions in London currently highlight collections of art and oddities that belong to some of the most prominent photographers today. Magnificent Obsessions at the Barbican presents the objects belonging to photographers such as Martin Parr and Hiroshi Sugimoto while the Hayward Gallery’s History is Now: 7 Artists Take on Britain has four photographers—Hannah Starkey, Jane and Louise Wilson, and Richard Wentworth—acting as curators of various section. Writer Isabel Stevens examines the theme. This review first appeared in Issue 6 of the Aperture Photography App: click here to read more and download the app. 

“You know how a collector is. He gets excessively conscious of a certain object and falls in love with it and then pursues it…And it’s compulsive and you can hardly stop.” –Walker Evans

The obsessive hunt of the collector is an activity and state of mind the photographer knows all too well. Walker Evans, who walked away with many of the flotsam, signs, and tools he gathered with his lens, and who was a life-long collector of picture postcards, regarded the two pursuits as “almost the same thing.” For isn’t the tendency to collect deepest ingrained in photographers and the nature of their medium? Consider conceptually-inclined artists with one-track minds fixed on subjects such as water towers (Bernd and Hilla Becher); photo-collagists from Hannah Höch to John Stezaker; archive rummagers such as Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel; Alec Soth and his shot lists of subjects to scavenge (suitcases, snow, unusually tall people); and, of course, Susan Sontag’s famous statements “To photograph is to appropriate the thing being photographed” and “to collect photographs is to collect the world.” When, in 1920, Eugène Atget remarked that “the collection has today almost completely disappeared,” he wasn’t just referring to his negatives, but the content of them—the curious façades, statues, fountains, and street vendors of old Paris.

Martin Parr, Venice, Italy, 2005 © Martin Parr/ Magnum Photos/ Rocket Gallery. From Magnificent Obsessions: The Artist as Collector

 

Two exhibitions in London currently highlight photographers’ foraging acuities and their collecting habits. At the Barbican, Magnificent Obsessions presents artists’ personal collections, including Martin Parr and Hiroshi Sugimoto. Meanwhile the Hayward Gallery’s History is Now: 7 Artists Take on Britain has four photographers— Hannah Starkey, Jane and Louise Wilson, and Richard Wentworth—acting as curators refracting moments and themes in Britain’s seventy-year postwar history through art works, artifacts, and archival documents.

These exhibition strategies are far from a new phenomenon. Sugimoto’s collection has been aired before (just not in the UK), and Parrworld, at the Jeu de Paume in 2009, showed off many of the photographer’s acquisitions, ranging from the bizarre (Saddam Hussein watches) to the banal (boring postcards). Similarly, both the Barbican and Hayward exhibitions have a Wunderkammer feel to them: vitrines and piles of unexpected, disparate objects and images.

50 Glass Eyes, 1811–88 Collection of Hiroshi Sugimoto, from Magnificent Obsessions: The Artist as Collector

 

While exhibitions generally present finished artworks and reference influences, an artist’s selection opens up the creative process and offers a view of sources of inspiration. In this case, showing a collection or curating a show becomes an act of self-portraiture, or even advocacy. Where an artist takes the role of a celebrity curator, he or she can introduce unknown artists to wider audiences in the ways that regular curators often can’t. In the case of photography, the opportunity it provides for rediscovery is particularly pertinent as the medium was looked down upon for so much of the twentieth century, and, as a result, offers historical gaps to fill. Martin Parr’s championing of photographers such as Tony Ray-Jones stands in a long tradition, reaching back to Berenice Abbott’s salvaging of Eugène Atget’s work.

Flying postcard, 1960–90. Collection of Martin Parr © Martin Parr Collection/ Magnum Photos/ Rocket Gallery. From Magnificent Obsessions: The Artist as Collector

At the Barbican, Parr’s Soviet space-dog memorabilia isn’t nearly as fascinating as the early, pre–World War II postcards on show, which commemorate idiosyncratic sights and occasions such as giant bonfires and hailstones, car crashes and factory-smoke-filled landscapes that resemble miniature, monochrome Turner paintings. Beyond their salacious and strange everyday obsessions, which chime with Parr’s own, Parr also uncovers their artistry, particularly the elaborate, morbid collages of W. Gothard, which record and pay tribute to disasters.

While Parr’s collection offers the thrill of discovery, Sugimoto’s hardly raises an eyebrow. The aged optical curios in glass cabinets and ordered anatomical drawings lined on the wall, which at close quarters look almost abstract, are exactly what we might expect a photographer fascinated with perception, time, and surrealism to be attracted to. Ditto the most entrancing segment of this studied and austere presentation, Sugimoto’s fossils of sea creatures that call to mind the cyanotypes of Anna Atkins, who collected botanical specimens to preserve. Sadly, the William Henry Fox Talbot images from his collection aren’t on show. Those eager to know what other photographic treasures lie in his possession will have to wait for Sugimoto’s museum, the Odawara Art Foundation, scheduled to open in spring 2016. His sleek art complex is an enticing proposition, but you do hope that there’s also a future for dusty old museums.

Just as Sugimoto’s assemblage at the Barbican is too much of a scattershot self-portrait, so too is Jane and Louise Wilson’s display at the Hayward. It explores social unrest in British history, but too often through the prism of their own work. However, it does bring to light two female photographers who each explored the situation of women in the 1970s: Penelope Slinger, whose surreal collages blend her body with a deserted country mansion (the messy, eerie juxtapositions standing out over the neat, obvious ones); and Christine Voge, whose intimate documentation focuses on daily life in the first women’s refuge in the UK—including children, and registering both troubled, confrontational gazes and moments of carefree abandon.

Installation view of Hannah Starkey’s curated section at Hayward Gallery, History Is Now: 7 Artists Take On Britain. Photo Linda Nylind

 

Voge also figures in Hannah Starkey’s more daring arrangement investigating gender and visual culture, sifted from the Arts Council’s under-appreciated photography collection. Voge’s image of a child crying, contorting her body away from the prying lens, is matched with images by other photographers of children’s bodies arrested in strange positions. Starkey’s battle cry for intelligent images, and tender, inquisitive representations of people and their situations, is a familiar one, but feels fresh, as social reportage and fine art are all mixed up in a display ordered by motif as much as intellectual inquiry.

Installation view of Jane and Louise Wilson’s curated section at Hayward Gallery, History Is Now: 7 Artists Take On Britain. Photograph: Linda Nylind

 

At the Hayward, Richard Wentworth’s messy scrapbook approach to curating and collecting offers the clearest challenge to the white-walled status quo—and is furthest removed from Sugimoto’s Barbican stockpile. “True to the experience of being alive,” he calls it. Just as the makeshift urban assemblages he chances upon in his ongoing photographic series Making Do and Getting By make you look at street scenes twice, here his arrangements alter the way you look at and behave in a gallery: peer up at book covers, facedown on a glass shelf above; bend down and assume almost the same pose as the female cleaners at the feet of officers in photojournalist Bert Hardy’s record of Downing Street in the grip of WWII—and later, as the soldiers kneeling in the sand in Robert Capa’s blurred documents of the D-day landings.

Looking at Capa’s grainy records, which very nearly didn’t survive, you realize one more reason why “the collecting gene,” as Parr terms it, is so engrained in photographers: to collect is to keep things safe, and photography is so very fragile.

Isabel Stevens works at Sight & Sound and writes on film and photography.

Magnificent Obsessions at the Barbican runs through May 24.

History is Now at the Hayward Gallery runs through April 26.

The post London Exhibitions of Photographers’ Collections appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

Review: On London Exhibitions of Photographers’ Collections

by Isabel Stevens

Installation view of Simon Fujiwara’s curated section at Hayward Gallery, History Is Now: 7 Artists Take On Britain. Photograph: Linda Nylind

 

Two exhibitions in London currently highlight collections of art and oddities that belong to some of the most prominent photographers today. Magnificent Obsessions at the Barbican presents the objects belonging to photographers such as Martin Parr and Hiroshi Sugimoto while the Hayward Gallery’s History is Now: 7 Artists Take on Britain has four photographers—Hannah Starkey, Jane and Louise Wilson, and Richard Wentworth—acting as curators of various section. Writer Isabel Stevens examines the theme. This review first appeared in Issue 6 of the Aperture Photography App: click here to read more and download the app. 

“You know how a collector is. He gets excessively conscious of a certain object and falls in love with it and then pursues it…And it’s compulsive and you can hardly stop.” –Walker Evans

The obsessive hunt of the collector is an activity and state of mind the photographer knows all too well. Walker Evans, who walked away with many of the flotsam, signs, and tools he gathered with his lens, and who was a life-long collector of picture postcards, regarded the two pursuits as “almost the same thing.” For isn’t the tendency to collect deepest ingrained in photographers and the nature of their medium? Consider conceptually-inclined artists with one-track minds fixed on subjects such as water towers (Bernd and Hilla Becher); photo-collagists from Hannah Höch to John Stezaker; archive rummagers such as Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel; Alec Soth and his shot lists of subjects to scavenge (suitcases, snow, unusually tall people); and, of course, Susan Sontag’s famous statements “To photograph is to appropriate the thing being photographed” and “to collect photographs is to collect the world.” When, in 1920, Eugène Atget remarked that “the collection has today almost completely disappeared,” he wasn’t just referring to his negatives, but the content of them—the curious façades, statues, fountains, and street vendors of old Paris.

Martin Parr, Venice, Italy, 2005 © Martin Parr/ Magnum Photos/ Rocket Gallery. From Magnificent Obsessions: The Artist as Collector

 

Two exhibitions in London currently highlight photographers’ foraging acuities and their collecting habits. At the Barbican, Magnificent Obsessions presents artists’ personal collections, including Martin Parr and Hiroshi Sugimoto. Meanwhile the Hayward Gallery’s History is Now: 7 Artists Take on Britain has four photographers— Hannah Starkey, Jane and Louise Wilson, and Richard Wentworth—acting as curators refracting moments and themes in Britain’s seventy-year postwar history through art works, artifacts, and archival documents.

These exhibition strategies are far from a new phenomenon. Sugimoto’s collection has been aired before (just not in the UK), and Parrworld, at the Jeu de Paume in 2009, showed off many of the photographer’s acquisitions, ranging from the bizarre (Saddam Hussein watches) to the banal (boring postcards). Similarly, both the Barbican and Hayward exhibitions have a Wunderkammer feel to them: vitrines and piles of unexpected, disparate objects and images.

50 Glass Eyes, 1811–88 Collection of Hiroshi Sugimoto, from Magnificent Obsessions: The Artist as Collector

 

While exhibitions generally present finished artworks and reference influences, an artist’s selection opens up the creative process and offers a view of sources of inspiration. In this case, showing a collection or curating a show becomes an act of self-portraiture, or even advocacy. Where an artist takes the role of a celebrity curator, he or she can introduce unknown artists to wider audiences in the ways that regular curators often can’t. In the case of photography, the opportunity it provides for rediscovery is particularly pertinent as the medium was looked down upon for so much of the twentieth century, and, as a result, offers historical gaps to fill. Martin Parr’s championing of photographers such as Tony Ray-Jones stands in a long tradition, reaching back to Berenice Abbott’s salvaging of Eugène Atget’s work.

Flying postcard, 1960–90. Collection of Martin Parr © Martin Parr Collection/ Magnum Photos/ Rocket Gallery. From Magnificent Obsessions: The Artist as Collector

At the Barbican, Parr’s Soviet space-dog memorabilia isn’t nearly as fascinating as the early, pre–World War II postcards on show, which commemorate idiosyncratic sights and occasions such as giant bonfires and hailstones, car crashes and factory-smoke-filled landscapes that resemble miniature, monochrome Turner paintings. Beyond their salacious and strange everyday obsessions, which chime with Parr’s own, Parr also uncovers their artistry, particularly the elaborate, morbid collages of W. Gothard, which record and pay tribute to disasters.

While Parr’s collection offers the thrill of discovery, Sugimoto’s hardly raises an eyebrow. The aged optical curios in glass cabinets and ordered anatomical drawings lined on the wall, which at close quarters look almost abstract, are exactly what we might expect a photographer fascinated with perception, time, and surrealism to be attracted to. Ditto the most entrancing segment of this studied and austere presentation, Sugimoto’s fossils of sea creatures that call to mind the cyanotypes of Anna Atkins, who collected botanical specimens to preserve. Sadly, the William Henry Fox Talbot images from his collection aren’t on show. Those eager to know what other photographic treasures lie in his possession will have to wait for Sugimoto’s museum, the Odawara Art Foundation, scheduled to open in spring 2016. His sleek art complex is an enticing proposition, but you do hope that there’s also a future for dusty old museums.

Just as Sugimoto’s assemblage at the Barbican is too much of a scattershot self-portrait, so too is Jane and Louise Wilson’s display at the Hayward. It explores social unrest in British history, but too often through the prism of their own work. However, it does bring to light two female photographers who each explored the situation of women in the 1970s: Penelope Slinger, whose surreal collages blend her body with a deserted country mansion (the messy, eerie juxtapositions standing out over the neat, obvious ones); and Christine Voge, whose intimate documentation focuses on daily life in the first women’s refuge in the UK—including children, and registering both troubled, confrontational gazes and moments of carefree abandon.

Installation view of Hannah Starkey’s curated section at Hayward Gallery, History Is Now: 7 Artists Take On Britain. Photo Linda Nylind

 

Voge also figures in Hannah Starkey’s more daring arrangement investigating gender and visual culture, sifted from the Arts Council’s under-appreciated photography collection. Voge’s image of a child crying, contorting her body away from the prying lens, is matched with images by other photographers of children’s bodies arrested in strange positions. Starkey’s battle cry for intelligent images, and tender, inquisitive representations of people and their situations, is a familiar one, but feels fresh, as social reportage and fine art are all mixed up in a display ordered by motif as much as intellectual inquiry.

Installation view of Jane and Louise Wilson’s curated section at Hayward Gallery, History Is Now: 7 Artists Take On Britain. Photograph: Linda Nylind

 

At the Hayward, Richard Wentworth’s messy scrapbook approach to curating and collecting offers the clearest challenge to the white-walled status quo—and is furthest removed from Sugimoto’s Barbican stockpile. “True to the experience of being alive,” he calls it. Just as the makeshift urban assemblages he chances upon in his ongoing photographic series Making Do and Getting By make you look at street scenes twice, here his arrangements alter the way you look at and behave in a gallery: peer up at book covers, facedown on a glass shelf above; bend down and assume almost the same pose as the female cleaners at the feet of officers in photojournalist Bert Hardy’s record of Downing Street in the grip of WWII—and later, as the soldiers kneeling in the sand in Robert Capa’s blurred documents of the D-day landings.

Looking at Capa’s grainy records, which very nearly didn’t survive, you realize one more reason why “the collecting gene,” as Parr terms it, is so engrained in photographers: to collect is to keep things safe, and photography is so very fragile.

Isabel Stevens works at Sight & Sound and writes on film and photography.

Magnificent Obsessions at the Barbican runs through May 24.

History is Now at the Hayward Gallery runs through April 26.

The post Review: On London Exhibitions of Photographers’ Collections appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

Lynne Tillman on Brush Fires in the Social Landscape

David Wojnarowicz, Seeds of Industry II, 1988–89

For the new twentieth-anniversary edition of Brush Fires in the Social Landscape, Aperture invited writers and artists to examine the lasting effects of the work and life of David Wojnarowicz. In this excerpt, writer Lynne Tillman reflects on discovering his work, its contemporary interpretations, and his influence on future generations of artists and writers. This excerpt appeared in Issue 6 of the Aperture Photography App: click here to read more and download the app. 

I’m almost certain Kiki Smith introduced me to David Wojnarowicz. I knew about him, his Rimbaud pictures were pasted on walls and stenciled on sidewalks in the East Village. In my mind’s eye, we’re on a sidewalk, maybe on Houston Street; it’s windy, late fall or early winter, and Wojnarowicz is standing behind Kiki. Consciousness superimposes scenes from the present onto the past, or mixes one distant moment with another; memory has forever been photo-shopped. The technology replicates a natural, involuntary default position in the brain, or a human inclination to fuse events. Photo-shopping can deliberately distort or corrupt historical events; human memory is distorted, first, by subjectivity or point of view, then by the passage of time. Was it a dream, a photograph, did I hear the story, did it actually happen? The clock marks seconds, minutes, hours; the calendar, days, months, and years—these human productions divide now from then, and from the future. The unconscious doesn’t obey time, which also confuses memory, and can make days feel endless or too short. Maybe that’s why people invented what Shakespeare, in Richard II, called time’s “numb’ring clock.” I picture Wojnarowicz with his head down; he was tall, I’m short, which would influence how I saw him, and he me. He might have been looking sideways, and appeared shy or elusive. He had a long face, uneven features, and a smoker’s raspy voice. Other adjectives pop up: gangly, rawboned, intense, weirdly funny, restless, sad, sensitive, vulnerable. But this isn’t a portrait of the artist as a young man. Wojnarowicz’s portrait was, in a profound sense, shot by his time.

David Wojnarowicz, Where I’ll Go After I’m Gone, 1988–89

Wojnarowicz knew he was homosexual before the word gay took its place; he came of age with Stonewall and the movement it incited—gay liberation. Then, an individual’s “coming out” was a revolution of great and intimate proportions, a public and private declaration of startling consequence. Wojnarowicz’s art and writing were born and nurtured before, but fomented in and exploded during, the AIDS crisis. Artists and writers are often very different from their work. They work with and against their education, fear, anxiety, hope, angst, values, to build characters, find words or concepts, build structures or images that defeat or deny these things their power, or sometimes to venerate them. The gap between person and artist can be inexplicable, but people, including artists, often conflate the two. Art historians and critics might merge them, judging the work by the person or the person by the work. But history judges what history also produces.

David Wojnarowicz, Untitled (Eye with Ant), 1988–89

What is now called “history” was Wojnarowicz’s lifetime, his present, which insidiously produced what mattered to him. His best talents were made furious use of during the 1980s until his death in 1992. His impassioned writing became a powerful voice of the AIDS epidemic, his blunt-force-trauma art a singular and passionate face. Wojnarowicz’s work, I believe, even without the exigent circumstances, or influence, of AIDS, would have been knife-sharp and arresting. Without the consequences of AIDS, though, there would have been time for him to mature as a person and an artist, to have a future. Consequence and influence share territory. They can’t be predicted or entirely comprehended, since the two radiate from a myriad of sources and will settle without foreknowledge and, usually, without acknowledgment. Mostly, people don’t get to choose an influence, unless they’re conscious adults, and by then the wish to be influenced—to absorb—means that a person has been, in a sense, prepared. The preparation for influence develops independently of consciousness, while simultaneously creating it. In the 1980s, being infected by HIV and developing AIDS was an unchosen, horrific fate, fatal. People were very frightened, and felt hopeless. Not every artist or writer responded as Wojnarowicz did. His responses were unique, thoroughly felt, and driven by an urgent necessity. In his time, his work was extraordinarily moving—it stunned. It will never be experienced again as it was then, in that very dark moment. Contemporary artists sympathetic to Wojnarowicz’s work, who say his work influenced them, find meanings in it that have been profoundly useful to them. They are a diverse group, their work dissimilar in appearance from his, and from each other’s. Some of the artists might say: “His work gave me courage.” Or “Wojnarowicz was a courageous artist.” Courage in an artist or writer is different from the courage of firefighters, who rescue people and risk their own lives. Artistic courage might be conceptualized as an internal drama about overcoming rules or inhibitions, dicta of all kinds, the art a manifestation or result of a multitude of processes. Art won’t save people from burning buildings, but not all risks are the same or equal, and they shouldn’t be measured by one ruler. During his time, Wojnarowicz’s work might have sprung from rage, fear, and compassion or been inspired by them, his approach or sense of form enabled by and called to address them. An abiding necessity to save himself and others arose. A cruel disease had suddenly and quickly made helpless victims of an already stigmatized group. The tragic waste of the disease, and also the injustice of stigma, probably urged Wojnarowicz toward a kind of overcoming. To have his life be meaningful, he would keep living by doing his work. He would rage on.

David Wojnarowicz, I Feel a Vague Nausea, 1990

 

 

Artists are not mythical beings or romantic heroes. In their chosen fields and in a certain time, they make aesthetic, intellectual, conceptual decisions; they may react variously to social and political questions and to concerns central to their mediums and practices. As artists, they evolve from and are influenced by not just other artists, but also their own psychology, religion, race, economic background, and more. Influence is everywhere, and they take chances, too. Everyone who lives sometimes does, everyone sometimes has to. That curious notion of character also comes into play: existentially, artists and writers become who they are, and make what they do, in the moment they act.

David Wojnarowicz, Arthur Rimbaud in New York (on subway), 1978–79

Sometimes an artist’s work opens up a space. I’ll call it a “mental space,” a space for themselves and others, where random thoughts, images, ideas germinate and occur—these might have consequence. When that happens, when an artist’s choices do that, an artist might be called courageous. Something that was broken got metaphorically fixed; something that was blocked breaks through. A solution arrives to a problem no one ever mentioned. Some will notice that in the work, and it helps them. Shannon Ebner, Wade Guyton, Henrik Olesen, Adam Putnam, Emily Roysdon, Zoe Strauss, and Wolfgang Tillmans, among many other artists who mention Wojnarowicz’s influence on them, probably recognized, reacted to, or internalized something they gleaned in his work; usually they mediate it so thoroughly, a viewer wouldn’t spy it. Or, because it was an idea for them, an idea, say, without materiality, it never materializes in their work. Harold Bloom theorized that influence produced anxiety and troubled poets who turned to writing poetry after reading other poets. Bloom studied the Romantics, but wrote The Anxiety of Influence (1973) under the sign of Modernism. Ezra Pound’s call was “make it new” (though Dante shaped his poetics). Influence from that purview was a staining or tainting, an inhibiting or retarding, of an artist’s originality. To rejig the concept of influence as an actor-agent in the work of artists and writers, to make influence newer, the computer must be restarted with another program. Influence occurs, in this register, because an artist perceives in another’s work a space, or opening. Maybe it’s whimsical, inchoate, wishful, a fragment of a fragment. Rarely a direct taking, more like the flow of information. Rarely “stealing,” as Picasso said great artists do rather than borrowing. Instead, something is shown, intimated or associated, noticed, and it feels true or right or necessary. A diffusion is transmitted and received. Influence reconceived would be a heuristic device, an emboldening or an encouragement.

David Wojnarowicz, Untitled (Sometimes I come to hate people), 1992. All works © the Estate of David Wojnarowicz, Courtesy P.P.O.W Gallery, New York

One artist can and often does encourage another. One artist’s courage in making, or what another perceives as such, becomes another’s space to take up. Courage and encourage have a similar root: in Latin, cor means heart. To have a heart is to give heart. To give heart is to embrace and charge others with a kind of love.

Lynne Tillman is the author of five novels, three collections of short stories, one collection of essays and two other nonfiction books. She collaborates often with artists and writes regularly on culture, and her fiction is anthologized widely.

Tap here to find Brush Fires in the Social Landscape on the Aperture Foundation website.

The post Lynne Tillman on Brush Fires in the Social Landscape appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

Issue 6 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. Inside Issue 6 our readers can find:

● An excerpt from the new edition of Brush Fires in the Social Landscape by Lynne Tillman

● A first look at the upcoming Summer 2015 “Tokyo” Issue of Aperture magazine

● An interview from The PhotoBook Review on collecting Japanese photobooks

● A 1990 interview between David Wojnarowicz and Nan Goldin

● A review of two exhibitions in London about photographers’ collections

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! 

The post Issue 6 of the Aperture Photography App is Now Available appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

Nakahira’s Circulation

By Matthew S. Witkovsky

A mythical figure in the story of Japanese photography, Takuma Nakahira is a founder of Provoke (Purovoku), the short-lived experimental magazine that featured photographers like Daido Moriyama working in the are, bure, boke (grainy, blurry, out-of-focus) style of the late 1960s. His extensive writings explore photography’s capacity to probe the shape-shifting contours of postwar Japanese society. Nakahira destroyed his own negatives in 1973, and he suffered a traumatic loss of memory in 1977, events that have contributed to his relative obscurity outside of Japan. In the Summer 2015 issue of Aperture magazine, “Tokyo,” which will be available next month, we offer two perspectives on this vital figure: scholar Franz Prichard introduces Nakahira as a photographer and writer; and curator Matthew S. Witkovksy, who is currently planning a major exhibition on Provoke-era photography, unpacks Nakahira’s landmark photo-installation Circulation, staged at the 1971 Paris Biennale. Here, we feature an excerpt from Witkovsky’s article. 

This excerpt first appeared in Issue 6 of the Aperture Photography App: click here to read more and download the app. 

On the afternoon of September 28, 1971, when Japanese critic and photographer Takuma Nakahira set foot (several days late) in the seventh Paris Biennale, he felt nothing so much as “hollowness” and “despair.” Reporting these sensations for the Japanese weekly Asahi Journal that December, Nakahira explained his dissatisfaction with the state of contemporary art and, indeed, with his own activities as a creator and commentator on art. The laudable artworks on view mostly attacked a social system from which their makers pretended to keep some distance; Nakahira observed that, in fact, this art could only be the very face of such a system, which created a sort of play area for artists to vent futile opposition to the forces of capital flow and authoritarian control. Those forces had a vested interest in shoring up authorial ego when, in fact, it was the art goods and their exchange value that really mattered: individuality was a commodity construct. Yet his own contribution to the Paris Biennale, which he described at length for Asahi Journal and again for the photography magazine Asahi Camera the following February, allowed him guarded hope that art and art criticism could still have a purpose in the world. What was it about Circulation: Date, Place, Events, Nakahira’s piece for the 1971 Biennale, that gave grounds for optimism?

Takuma Nakahira, who got his start in photography and criticism only around 1965, had by the end of that decade already become one of the most influential figures in contemporary culture in Japan. Nakahira’s incisive writing cut apart standing views in literature, film, politics, and especially photography, and he published both articles and photographs at a feverish rate. He wanted a relation between these two activities that could come closer than complementarity— a joint force of action, perhaps. The intended effect of that joint action might be “illumination,” to quote a word favored by prewar German critic and theorist Walter Benjamin, whose essays were first anthologized in English as well as in Japanese in the late 1960s: searing, flashbulb-like insights afforded by a photograph or fragmentary phrases. Provoke: Provocative Materials for Thought—the short-lived photography journal that Nakahira helped to found, which blazed its trail across the Tokyo cultural scene in those years—took its name from such intertwined desires. Writing and photography should illuminate the world, explosively, and they should set each other ablaze as well. Nakahira’s epochal photobook, For a Language to Come (1970), pushed even more insistently at an overhaul of word-image relations. Yet Nakahira remained dissatisfied and, worse, fatigued by his efforts to develop a productive analysis of contemporary culture.

“Has Photography Been Able to Provoke Language?” Nakahira asked in March 1970, around eight months before his book appeared. “Only through human use can a language be given life,” he asserted, for without a subjective viewpoint, language exists as mere symbols and generalities. But to shake a language awake, to deploy it, is also to risk damaging one’s psyche: “This kind of ‘exploding language’ is a language that has been fiercely lived here and now by a single person.” Just such “fiercely lived” insights were what Nakahira sought to produce and circulate, operating calculatedly on the verge of madness. (Prichard has translated that essay and others in the recent reprint of For a Language to Come, as well as in Circulation: Date, Place, Events; issued by the Tokyo house Osiris, both books also have keenly written afterwords by cultural critic Akihito Yasumi.)

In the view of many who have encountered it then or since, For a Language to Come eminently fulfilled Nakahira’s hope for pictures that would give concrete meaning to words while threatening language overall as a system of convention and control. The word tree is general, but a photograph of any tree will be specific, Nakahira argued, with catlike stealth, before pouncing on the surprise conclusion: that close comparison of a single tree in image and word “causes the concept and meaning of tree to disintegrate.” How? Through sentences that leap and dart, and pictures that careen between heavy grays and blinding whites; through sequences of haunting images that overtake the reader, as if the setting for Nakahira’s photographs—the city of Tokyo—were a mental space in which one staggered from desire to trauma, a solitary ego shattered by passion and rage.

The effort of making For a Language to Come left Nakahira spent and temporarily uninterested in further photographic projects. One year later, the commissioner for Japanese entries in the Paris Biennale, fellow Provoke veteran Takahiko Okada, convinced him to travel there only after much debate, “at least to do some sightseeing,” as Nakahira disarmingly recalled upon his return. Yet the very fact of Nakahira’s repeated and extensive commentary on his Paris piece suggests the sense of renewal it brought him. Circulation was not only the title of this piece but also its ambition and modus operandi. More literally than did For a Language to Come, the fleeting work raced with an illuminating flash of brilliance through the early 1970s art scene.

Circulation was, in essence, a performance piece in which photographs were the engine of the performance rather than a record of it. This quality is the greatest guarantor of the work’s uniqueness in photographic terms, but there are other reasons to reassess its meanings today. (New prints from the original negatives were shown in New York in 2012 and feature currently in an exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.) Rather than send existing pictures to Paris, Nakahira wished to create something “live” during the run of the exhibition. He would hang only pictures taken and printed that very day, making a photo-diary of his Parisian experiences that would cover his Biennale wall in stages. By circulation Nakahira meant his own movements around Paris, the movement of his pictures from darkroom to display, and the perambulation past his evolving piece by visitors to the Biennale, whom Nakahira photographed for this installation as well.

All photographs: Takuma Nakahira, Untitled, 1971, from the series Circulation: Date, Place, Events
© 1971 Takuma Nakahira and courtesy Osiris, Tokyo, and Yossi Milo Gallery, New York

The prints themselves would be “mere remnants” of these circulatory patterns. Nakahira’s description of his procedure, from the February 1972 article in Asahi Camera, suggests a determined resistance to fixity: “To put it concretely, I set myself to photograph, develop, and exhibit nothing but the Paris that I was living and experiencing. My project … was born from this motivation. Every day I would go out into the streets of Paris from my hotel. I would watch television, read newspapers and magazines, watch the people passing by, look at other artists’ works at the Biennale venue, and watch the people there looking at these works. I would capture all of these things on film, develop them the same day, make enlargements, and put them up for display that evening, often with the photographic prints still wet from the washing process.”

Aperture magazine #219, “Tokyo,” (Summer 2015) is coming soon. Tap here to subscribe!

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Doug DuBois: The Intimate Photograph

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

 

 

 

 

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

—Doug DuBois

 

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

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

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

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

 

Tuition: $500 ($450 for currently enrolled photography students and Aperture Members at the $250 level and above)

 

Register here

 

Contact education@aperture.org with any questions.

 

General Terms and Conditions

Please refer to all information provided regarding individual workshop details and requirements. Registration in any workshop will constitute your agreement to the terms and conditions outlined.

Aperture workshops are intended for adults 18 years or older.

If the workshop includes lunch, attendees are asked to notify Aperture at the time of registration regarding any special dietary requirements.

 

Release and Waiver of Liability

Aperture reserves the right to take photographs or videos during the operation of any educational course or part thereof, and to use the resulting photographs and videos for promotional purposes.

By booking a workshop with Aperture Foundation, participants agree to allow their likenesses to be used for promotional purposes and in media; participants who prefer that their likenesses not be used are asked to identify themselves to Aperture staff.

 

Refund/Cancellation Policy for Aperture Workshops

Aperture workshops must be paid for in advance by credit card, cash, or debit card. All fees are non-refundable if you should choose to withdraw from a workshop less than one month prior to its start date, unless we are able to fill your seat. In the event of a medical emergency, please provide a physician’s note stating the nature of the emergency, and Aperture will issue you a credit that can be applied to future workshops. Aperture reserves the right to cancel any workshop up to one week prior to the start date, in which case a full refund will be issued. A minimum of eight students is required to run a workshop.

 

Lost, Stolen, or Damaged Equipment, Books, Prints Etc.

Please act responsibly when using any equipment provided by Aperture or when in the presence of books, prints etc. belonging to other participants or the instructor(s). We recommend that refreshments be kept at a safe distance from all such objects.

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Late April Readings on Photography

Penelope Umbrico’s photographs installed at Aperture’s Spring Party on April 17. Photograph by Max Mikulecky

Editors and staff at Aperture Foundation share what we’ve been reading recently.

“The April issue of Frieze has two compelling articles on contemporary photography by two Aperture magazine regulars: curator Brian Sholis unpacks Lucas Blalock’s beguiling still lifes, and writer Aaron Schuman looks at a cohort of photographers, who, like Blalock, playfully experiment with picture making. Yes, yes, we may be close to reaching a saturation point on the recent discourse about process-based photographs and pictures about pictures, but Sholis and Schuman, both insightful writers eager to engage a broad spectrum of photography, offer unique insights. The issue’s cover, featuring a neat stack of glinting red hot dogs—an image by Blalock—will make readers hungry for the conversation, or send them searching for a different meal.”

–Michael Famighetti, editor of Aperture magazine

“I’m currently reading ‘In the Holocene,’ the catalog released on the occasion of the exhibition of the same name held at MIT List Arts Center from October 19, 2012, to January 6, 2013. The catalog features essays from an intergenerational groups of artists, exploring art as an ‘investigative and experimental form inquiry, addressing or amending what is explained through traditional scientific or mathematical means: entropy, matter, time (cosmic, geological), energy, topology, mimicry, perception, consciousness, etc.’ The reference to ‘Man in the Holocene,’ drew me in first, it refers to the novella written by Max Frisch, which traces the trials of a man prone to categorize thunder types into a taxonomy out of boredom.”

–Sarah Dansberger, assistant archivist

“I read Teju Cole’s New York Times Magazine article ‘A Visual Remix’ — it’s an interesting discussion of our culture’s surplus of digital imagery and the increasingly common artistic practice of collecting, cataloging, and arranging these images. As our processes of creating and viewing photographs change, so does the idea of reappropriation. He also discusses Penelope Umbrico, who headlined last week’s Spring Party, as well as my new favorite Instagram project, ‘Craigslist mirrors.'”

–Taia Kwinter, Aperture magazine Work Scholar

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Announcing the New Issue of The PhotoBook Review

The latest issue of The PhotoBook Review, Aperture’s biannual journal dedicated to the consideration of the photobook, is out now. PBR 008 launches this coming week on both coasts: in New York at Shashin, the festival of photography from Japan, and at Paris Photo Los Angeles. Subscribers to Aperture magazine will receive it with the Summer issue, “Tokyo,” or you can pick it up for free in New York at the Aperture Gallery and Bookstore.

PBR 008 was guest edited by Ivan Vartanian, a Tokyo-based independent curator and author, as well as the founder of the imprint Goliga. In concert with Aperture magazine’s “Tokyo” issue, this issue of PBR focuses on both the young and established photographers making books in Japan today. It also shines a light on the connections between two seemingly independent areas of art production: photobook-making and performance. As Vartanian writes in his Editor’s Note, “I am driven by the questions of what defines a photobook and how those parameters can be stretched to the point that ‘book’ may no longer be an appropriate appellation for thing in question.”

Inside this issue:

Photobook as Performance as Photobook: Artists, curators, and publishers Bruno Ceschel, Sebastian Hau, Melinda Gison, Aron Mörel, Katja Stuke, and Anouk Kruithof on the relationship between photobooks and performance—whether they’re making a book or expanding upon one

If You Came Here to Have Fun, You Will: Denise Wolff interviews Jason Fulford—artist, publisher, and master of the experimental book launch—about “the parallel lives of a book through its events,” and more

Collecting the Japanese Photobook: Conversations with curators and photobook collectors Ryuichi Kaneko and Manfred Heiting, on the evolution of both the Japanese photobook and the photobook market

A centerfold by Anouk Kruithof, in collaboration with Lieko Shiga

 Photobooks After 3/11: The 2011 tsunami, its aftermath, and how Japanese photographers—and those from the West—responded to the disaster via the photobook 

Profiles of designer Yoshihisa Tanaka and Tokyo-based publisher Sokyusha

How to Move a Book: Publishers and distributors Tricia Gabriel and Mike Slack of The Ice Plant get real about what it takes to get a photobook out of the warehouse—or your garage—and into the hands of the people you want to see it

Plus reviews of books by Nobuyoshi Araki, William Klein, Ryuichi Ishikawa, Bohnchang Koo, Takashi Homma, Philip Gefter, and Max Pinckers

Read the Publisher’s Note from Lesley A. Martin and the Editor’s Note from Ivan Vartanian.

Double your fun: The PhotoBook Review is free with every Summer and Winter issue of Aperture magazine—but only if you subscribe. Click here to subscribe now.

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Editor’s Note: Ivan Vartanian

Jane Mount, Ideal Bookshelf #845: Ivan Vartanian, 2015

In 1995, I began an editorial internship at Aperture. (Just one week before, Lesley Martin had started one, too). While I was there, Daido Moriyama sent in a copy of his publication Hysteric Daido. It was the most bizarre specimen of a photobook I had ever seen: large and softcover, with magazine-like paper, black ink everywhere, and a putrid purple bar on the cover. The images were presented in a scattershot fashion, running into the gutter carelessly without white margins, captions, or any other type of structure. It did not in any way, shape, or form resemble the organized bookmaking style I had been exposed to until then. I had no clue what I was looking at. And I was hooked! That wibbly-wobbly book seemed so alive to me, and completely beguiling.

Seeing that book that day eventually led me to look at more photobooks from Japan, like those of Nobuyoshi Araki, Eikoh Hosoe (including the 1985 Aperture edition of Barakei, originally published in 1963), and Shomei Tomatsu. To my good fortune, about a year later I was given an opportunity to work in Tokyo. What was supposed to be a one-year sojourn working for a Japanese publisher, Korinsha, turned into a permanent move.

The components of this issue of The PhotoBook Review reflect the last eighteen or so years of my time in Japan. The books appearing in my Ideal Bookshelf, for example, are a partial representation of my work anthologizing and translating writing by Japanese photographers, which evolved into Setting Sun: Writings by Japanese Photographers (2006). Immediately after that book was completed, I turned my attention to the photobooks I had scoured to find those texts, which led me to meet and work with Ryuichi Kaneko. I am deeply indebted to him, my guide to Japanese photo history and the books that tell its story. To honor that massive influence and represent the heart that goes into serious scholarship, an interview about his collection was essential for this issue. Sitting with him once again in his warehouse, surrounded by his collection, rain pouring down outside, I felt transported again to that time when I first encountered photobooks from Japan and was gobsmacked by the sheer intensity and alienness of the images, and by their accompanying texts.

I am driven by the questions of what defines a photobook and how those parameters can be stretched to such a point that “book” may no longer be an appropriate appellation for the thing in question—which we consider in a section on the relationship between photobooks and performance. Many of the ideas that I am dealing with now germinated in the research I did for Japanese Photobooks of the 1960s and ’70s (2009). It taught me this: research leads to experimentation; looking back leads to making something new. Much of that material was more contemporary and synchronous with my everyday life than many of the photobooks I was looking at in the early 2000s.

As Lesley mentions in her Publisher’s Note[link to pub note], this publication is a companion to both the “Tokyo” issue of Aperture magazine and the Shashin Festival, held in New York this April. My goal and involvement in each of these activities is to present photography from Japan to the widest possible audience. It is my hope that this assemblage of activity will serve as an entry point for many more to enjoy the wide spectrum of the exciting photography, writings, and design that I have been fortunate enough to savor all these years.

 

 

Ivan Vartanian is a writer, curator, and publisher based in Tokyo. Under the imprint Goliga, he has collaborated on and produced many projects—books, exhibitions, installations, performances, events, and limited editions—with Japanese photographers. Vartanian is the coauthor of Japanese Photobooks of the 1960s and ’70s (Aperture, 2009) and Setting Sun: Writings by Japanese Photographers (Aperture, 2006). He is the founder and program director of the Shashin Festival: Photography from Japan. Vartanian is also the director of the Amana Collection. goliga.com

Jane Mount (illustration) published My Ideal Bookshelf, a collection of the favorite books of one hundred creative thinkers, with Little, Brown in 2012. idealbookshelf.com

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