Aperture's Blog, page 159

Publisher’s Note: Lesley A. Martin

The PhotoBook Review 008 coincides with the Summer 2015 issue of Aperture magazine, “Tokyo” (#219), as well as with Shashin, a symposium and festival for Japanese photography that takes place on April 24 and 25 at the New York Public Library. All three have been shaped, in part, through consultation with Our Man in Tokyo and this issue’s guest editor, Ivan Vartanian of Goliga.

Several threads in these pages wend their way back to an event that took place at Aperture Gallery in November 2011, Printing Show—TKY, by the Japanese master bookmaker and photographer Daido Moriyama. This event, organized by Goliga, invited participants to create their own edit from a selection of fifty double-sided, gatefold spreads, and has now been restaged around the world. It was challenging to pull off. We had no idea what to expect. But once the doors opened, with Mr. Moriyama in place at the center of the gallery, surrounded by silk-screening equipment, photocopiers, and a stalwart crew of staplers, paper-runners, and other assistants, the energy was palpable. Four years later, it still resonates with me as a rare and magical occasion during which the usually insular act of bookmaking became a communal, externalized celebration. I’d never seen visitors in the gallery as engaged with the idea of editing a set of pictures, or of selecting, sequencing, and bringing together a collection of printed (in this case, photocopied) pages.

That essential idea—of redrawing the boundaries of the photobook via events and performances, in order to engage audiences at earlier stages of a book’s creation or more inclusively at the time of its launch—has its own history. But it has also become an important part of our present. This issue includes commentary from contemporary artists such as Melinda Gibson, Katja Stuke of BöhmKobayashi, and Jason Fulford, as well as curators and publishers such as Bruno Ceschel and Aron Mörel, on the intersection of performance, bookmaking, and audience engagement. Later in the issue, the critical (and rarely discussed) final component of publishing, which is getting finished books into readers’ hands and homes, is addressed by Mike Slack and Tricia Gabriel, who are both bookmakers and booksellers under the imprint The Ice Plant.

One important targeted audience in the ecosystem of the photobook is the collector. The current state of connoisseurship and the knowledge base regarding in-depth photobook history would not exist without their commitment and obsessions. It is a treat to have the commentary of two veteran collectors in this issue, Ryuichi Kaneko and Manfred Heiting, focusing specifically on their interest in the Japanese photobook. And finally, we are delighted to have a centerfold by the ever-performative Anouk Kruithof, who brings us a long-distance, collaborative reading of Lieko Shiga’s photobooks, in dialogue with that artist.

All of this has come together, as always, with the generous input of time and brain power from our guest editor and many contributors, who we thank for being part of the ongoing experiment that is The PhotoBook Review. Last, but never least, this effort to publish is not yet complete until it is open and in your hands, the PhotoBook Reader. Thank you, as always, for your interest and support.

 

—Lesley A. Martin

Publisher, The PhotoBook Review, and Director of Special Projects, Aperture Foundation

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Zanele Muholi’s Faces & Phases

Eva Mofokeng, Somizy Sincwala, and Katiso Kgope, Parktown, 2014

 

For more than a decade, South African photographer Zanele Muholi created a visual record of black lesbians in her home country. Although South Africa legalized same-sex marriage in 2006, discrimination and violence against queer women remain widespread. In 2006, Muholi began her Faces and Phases project, an ambitious series of bold, undeniably powerful portraits of lesbians made against plain or patterned backgrounds—now numbering around three hundred—and often exhibited in tightly arranged grids. Faces and Phases is the subject of an extensive book, published by Steidl last fall, that forms a monumental chapter in Muholi’s mission to remedy black queer invisibility. Muholi’s work has been exhibited globally and she will have her first large-scale museum exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, Zanele Muholi: Isibonelo/Evidence, on May 1. Last November, Deborah Willis—author, curator, and prominent historian of photography—spoke via Skype with Muholi, who is based in Johannesburg, about photography and activism, her latest series Black Beauties, and her influences. This interview appeared in Issue 5 of the Aperture Photography App:click here to read more and download the app. 

 

Deborah Willis: Let’s begin with Faces and Phases. When and where did this project begin?

Zanele Muholi: It started in 2006 and I dedicated it to a good friend of mine who died from HIV complications in 2007, at the age of twenty-five. I just realized that as black South Africans, especially lesbians, we don’t have much visual history that speaks to pressing issues, both current and also in the past. South Africa has the best constitution on the African continent and, dare I say, world—when it comes to recognizing LGBTI (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Intersex) persons and other sexual minorities. It is the only country on the continent that legalized same-sex marriage in 2006. I thought to myself that if you have remarkable women in America and around the globe, you equally have remarkable lesbian women in South Africa.

We should be counted and certainly counted on to write our own history and validate our existence. We should not feel that somebody owes us these liberties. So, it’s another way in which I personally claim my full citizenship as a South African photographer, as a South African female in this space, as a South African who identifies as black, and also as a lesbian. I’m basically saying we deserve recognition, respect, validation, and to have publications that mark and trace our existence.

Lesedi Modise, Mafikeng, North West, 2010

 

DW: That’s a beautiful introduction to the project, which offers a wonderful way of reading bodies and faces and new identities. When’s the first time you remember seeing a photograph, or knowing a photograph, of a black lesbian in South Africa?

ZM: The early images I remember are black-and-white images of apartheid-era South Africa. Most were captured by male photographers like Ernest Cole or Alf Kumalo. Early images I saw depicted black women crying, images of pain, of struggle. Before black lesbian imagery clouded my mind, the first images I remember are of domestic workers, which were captured mainly by men. I looked at the work of David Goldblatt, who I regard as one of the forefathers of photography in South Africa, and the work of Jürgen Schadeberg. Those are some of the male photographers who captured apartheid South Africa.

I was born at the height of apartheid. I learned about South African women photographers very, very late. A friend gave me a book called Viewfinders: Black Women Photographers (1993), which was produced in America. I liked that book very much.

Tumi Nkopane, KwaThema, Springs, Johannesburg, 2010

 

DW: Viewfinders was written by the photographer Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe.

ZM: Yes, her book changed my life in so many ways. I just thought to myself that photography has to become a lifetime thing in which I deal with my own issues, my own personal issues. I quoted Joan E. Biren (JEB), an American photographer, in my thesis. Her work related to what I wanted to achieve, and it still means so much to me in ways that you won’t believe. You look at Biren’s images and you think that someone has done what I’m trying to capture now, except I’m doing it from a South African point of view.

I understood the South African struggle of being forcefully removed from your own space, a space you thought belonged to you, where women were regarded as working machines. My mom was a domestic worker and the images of domestic workers, and the images of women crying, struggling, with children on their backs, those became my daily consumption.

Teekay Khumalo, BB Section, Umlazi, Durban, 2012

 

DW: Did you start off by photographing your mother, early on?

ZM: I photographed my mom very, very late, around the time she started getting ill. It’s often very difficult for us to confront our own issues. I mention in my film Difficult Love (2010) that it’s a pity we don’t tend to look at ourselves and our immediate spaces and how the outside world becomes familiar and easier for us to deal with than our own personal issues. She had cancer of the liver, and she passed on in 2009. But I do have images that I took of her.

Yonela Nyumbeka, Makhaza, Khayelitsha, Cape Town, 2011

 

DW: How did she feel about the photographs?

ZM: She was always quite supportive of what I was trying to achieve, and I was out to my mom. I delayed the whole process of photographing her and missed her as a beautiful young woman. Looking at our family album, of images that were either dated, without the photographer’s name, or that had some strange names at the back, you think, Who has taken those images? What was their intention? Why are they not captured in this and that way?

The photograph that I eventually took later was of her wearing a church uniform. She was sick but allowed me to take that particular photograph. But I regret very much not having photographed her in her coffin. She looked so beautiful. But that meant negotiating with my family members, who didn’t understand the importance of documentation, so I let go of that photograph. In my imagination, I have this beautiful woman who did not look sick in her coffin.

Zukiswa Gaca, Grand Parade, Cape Town, 2011, Courtesy Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York

 

DW: Your photography has been described as work that “mourns and celebrates.” What do you think about such labeling?

ZM: It depends on the context. I’m reclaiming photography as a black female being. I’m calling myself a visual activist, whether I am included in a show or not, whether I am published or not. That’s my stance as a person, before anything else, before my sexuality and gender, because photography doesn’t have a gender.

Ernest Cole, for instance, captured the men in the mines. The mineworkers were humiliated to nothing, captured naked, discounted to nothing, nameless. He showed an unjust system that dehumanized workers. All we see, all we remember, are those black men and their bodies facing the wall. That was visual activism, but at that time people did not regard it as anything of that sort, even if people at that time were killed and forcibly removed. Today, lesbians in South Africa are brutally murdered. “Curative rape” is used on us. That forces me to redefine what visual activism is. If I were to reduce myself to the label “visual artist,” it would mean that what I’m doing is just for play, that our identities, as black female beings who are queer or are lesbian, is just art. Art needs to be political—or let me say that my art is political. It’s not for show. It’s not for play.

Click here to subscribe to Aperture magazine and read more of Issue #218, Spring 2015, “Queer.”

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Lucas Foglia on “Human-Altered Landscapes”

George Chasing Wildfires, Eureka, Nevada, 2012

Last year, photographer Lucas Foglia published Frontcountry, his second book with Nazraeli Press. Like its predecessor, A Natural Order (2012), Frontcountry chronicles an American community with unusual depth and feeling. Blending portraits, landscapes, and interior scenes, Foglia offers “a photographic account of people living in the midst of a boom in mining and energy development that is transforming the contemporary American West.” Foglia’s work is included in “Human-Altered Landscapes,” a display of landscape pictures made during the past forty years that is drawn from the Cincinnati Art Museum’s collection. The display remains on view in Cincinnati until July 19. –Brian Sholis

This interivew first appeared in Issue 5 of the Aperture Photography App: click here to read more and download the app. 

Brian Sholis: You’ve completed two long-term projects documenting specific American communities. The first, A Natural Order, features photographs of people in the American Southeast who have chosen to live off the grid. The latest, Frontcountry, chronicles people living in the midst of a mining and energy boom in the American West. How did you decide to photograph these people and places, and how did you make initial inroads into these communities?

Lucas Foglia: Both projects started from a friend. In 2006, I visited Doug Elliott and his family in rural North Carolina. They live in a house built into a hillside, grow most of their food, and get their water from a nearby spring. I asked Doug if he knew other families who had left cities or suburbs to live like him, and he drew me a map.

In 2009, I visited Addie Goss, who worked for Wyoming Public Radio. She introduced me to people living in small communities next to the biggest tracts of open land that I had ever seen. I went to the rural American West expecting to meet cowboys. I did meet cowboys, but everyone was talking about jobs in the natural gas fields, or in the gold mines. I went back to visit those areas again and again because I wanted to learn more about the place, and the people I met there. Because I was introduced to the people I photographed by their friends, they trusted me and guided me.

Moving Cattle to Spring Pasture, Boulder, Wyoming, 2011

BS: This daisy-chain progression differs from how we think of photographers on their quintessential American road trips. You’re meeting people and getting to know them, sometimes closely, rather than rolling into town, snapping away, and continuing down the highway. Can you explain how this familiarity shapes the portraits you take? And how does your subjects’ local knowledge affect your choice of locations for your landscape pictures?

LF: I do use roads to get places, but I don’t think of myself as a quintessential road-trip photographer. People I meet tend to know more about their home and community than I do, and so I stay and listen, and look for scenes in everyday life that seem extraordinary.

For instance, a friend of a friend, named Richard, worked as a safety inspector in the natural gas fields in Wyoming. He gave me a red Halliburton helmet and took me out to the drilling rigs on the Pinedale Anticline, where I met Roger. Roger worked as a welder, one of the most dangerous jobs in the country because of the sparks his tools gave off in areas filled with flammable gas. Roger is also a former bodybuilder and United States Army Special Forces soldier. He and the other welders lifted weights in the welding shop tool shed.

Mia and Burgundy, Cokeville, Wyoming, 2010

Or, for instance, I was introduced to an activist named Deb, who drove with me to Thermopolis, Wyoming. Thermopolis is locally famous for its hot springs. Just outside of town we visited a ranch and watched cows drink from a creek. Then we followed the creek up into the Hamilton Dome Oil Field. In an oil field, a good amount of water is pumped out of the ground along with the oil. The water contains salts, oil droplets, chemicals, gases, and bacteria. At Hamilton Dome Oil Field the produced water is discharged, steaming, into the local river system. The pipes and the flood of water from deep underground looked surprisingly beautiful.

Produced Water, Hamilton Dome Oil Field, Owl Creek, Wyoming, 2013

BS: If the affinity you feel isn’t necessarily with road-trip photographers, what do you make of the legacy of the “New Topographics” exhibition featuring Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Joe Deal, Frank Gohlke, Nicholas Nixon, John Schott, Stephen Shore, and Henry Wessel, Jr.? These artists, beginning in the early 1970s, ushered in a new view of the American landscape. Their attention to the ways in which humans used the land, and how a society can be understood from pictures of places, seems congruent with your own careful attention to present-day land use.

LF: Most of the people in the places I photograph know who Ansel Adams is. He had a moral mission to inspire conservation by photographing nature in a pristine form. The photographers in “New Topographics,” on the other hand, were more objective. Their photographs said, “Here is what people are doing; make what you will of it.”

Coal Storage, TS Power Plant, Newmont Mining Corporation, Dunphy, Nevada, 2012

I have a moral mission. I want my photographs to bring attention to people and places that, in my opinion, deserve attention. A wild West is part of our American story, and I think it’s important to conserve the open land we have left. In small towns, agriculture can be sustainable, while mining is boom-to-bust.

I also want my photographs to be complex. I want to compel viewers to think and feel without telling them what to think or feel. I hope Frontcountry is a portrait, not an indictment, of the contemporary, rural American West, because everyone I photographed talked about caring about the landscape they live in.

Surface Mining, Newmont Mining Corporation, Carlin, Nevada , 2012

BS: Your photographs are not only exhibited in galleries and museums, but also often reproduced in newspapers and periodicals. Do you believe these expanded audiences amplify or broaden your “moral mission”? How do such opportunities to present your work in print, as well as online, affect your thinking about what you do?

LF: I love the fact that a photograph can be used in so many different ways. A book, to me, is the sum and the completion of a project. I exhibit editioned prints of my photographs in galleries and museums, and publish the images in newspapers and magazines. I also post the images online, give copies back to the people I photograph, and give copies to local and national organizations to use for advocacy. All are different methods of storytelling. I’m grateful for them, and I think there is art in each of them.

Lucas Foglia, Roger Weightlifting, Jonah Natural Gas Field, Boulder, Wyoming, 2010. Courtesy the artist and Fredericks & Freiser, New York.

“Human-Altered Landscapes” is on view at the Cincinnati Art Museum through July 19.

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Five Photography Exhibitions to See in New York this April

 

William Klein, West Indian Street Parade, Brooklyn, 2013. Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

William Klein + Brooklyn at Howard Greenberg Gallery (through May 2): Simply titled William Klein + Brooklyn, the iconic photographer and filmmaker’s new show at Howard Greenberg Gallery collects nearly 50 photographs taken in the summer of 2013. Commissioned by Sony as part of the corporation’s Global Imaging Ambassadors program—an initiative that unites image-makers around the globe with the aim of storytelling—Klein was asked to explore Brooklyn using a digital camera provided by Sony, a surprising first for the artist, who has preferred film and a wide-angle lens throughout his career. In Klein’s visual interpretation of Brooklyn, the atmosphere is frenzied and confrontational. Presented large scale and unframed, the photographs are mostly displayed in grids, pressed against each other to create one object containing a variety of moments. A quiet shot of the Brooklyn Bridge is sandwiched between a dance performance by children and a street scene of Hasidic men gesturing emphatically to each other in evening light. An extreme close-up of two sunbathers reveals a bright floral swimsuit and a Kate Spade beach bag; right next to it is a photograph of the dilapidated yet still vibrant and bold Coney Island storefronts. Except for some discernible sights, the distinctions between neighborhood and place become secondary; looking at the closely organized grids, the viewer feels all sights and sounds at once, an effect that echoes Klein’s reflections in the accompanying publication by Contrasto: “Brooklyn for me, a Manhattanite, has always been a mystery. This year, it became a photographic discovery.” — Taia Kwinter

Pavel Acosta, Poker Face, from the series Stolen Talent, 2009-10. Courtesy Robert Mann Gallery

The Light in Cuban Eyes at Robert Mann Gallery (through May 23): As the U.S. opens up relations with Cuba, the gallery presents an exhibition devoted to photographs made before and after the country’s “Special Period,” which followed the Soviet Union pullout in the early 1990s. Stark black-and-white documentary photography is complemented by images of untouched landscapes, as in Lissette Solórzano’s epic shots. And there’s ample humor, too, in the posed portraits of Adrián Fernández and René Peña.

Installation view of Alison Rossiter’s Paper Wait, Yossi Milo Gallery.
© Thomas Seely and courtesy Yossi Milo Gallery, New York

Alison Rossiter: Paper Wait at Yossi Milo Gallery (through May 2): In these camera-less photographs, Rossiter uses expired photographic paper that she then augments with liquid developer– but what develops on the film is in fact a visual record of the life of the papers themselves, which date from the 1890s to the 1960s.

Piotr Uklanski, Untitled (Skull), 2000. Courtesy the artist

Fatal Attraction: Piotr Uklanski Photographs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (through August 16): Polish artist Piotr Uklanski was given free rein among the Met’s archives as well in its grandiose entry, and true to form he brings a sense of provocation to the staid institution. For the “Selects” portion of the exhibition, he chose a compendium of objects from the museum’s vast holdings that illuminate his own practice, from Henri Cartier-Bresson to Laurie Simmons to ancient Egyptian relics. His selections complement his own solo show of photographs, bright and glossy imitations of Kodak’s Joy of Photography as well as an excerpt from his infamous series The Nazis (1998), a grid surveying Nazi pop culture. In the main entry to the museum, a diptych of two large-scale banners hang from the ceiling. In the second one, a mass of 3,000 soldiers cloaked in red coalesce to form the word “solidarity” in Polish, calling on the name of the first trade union in a Warsaw Pact country that escaped Communist Party control. Uklanski brings the personal as well as the political into inspiring play.

Barbara Kasten, Transposition 3, 2014. Courtesy Bortolami Gallery, New York

Barbara Kasten: Set Motion at Bortolami Gallery (through May 30):  Kasten’s first solo show with the gallery coincides with the artist’s survey exhibition at the Institute for Contemporary Art, Philadelphia. The exhibition centers on two series of photo-based work: Kasten’s Amalgams–gelatin-silver prints created without a camera where the artist placed objects on photographic paper, then magnified the results–were made in the 1970s. Her new series, Transpositions, presents photographs made with colored sheets of Plexiglas to create sculptural, geometric shapes, inspired by Le Corbusier’s Notre Dame du Haut in Ronchamp, France.

 

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On Holiday

By Mary Panzer

As spring begins we revisit the pages of vintage magazine Holiday, a luxury title launched in the 1950s and became widely known for its ambitious and opulent photographic spreads. In this excerpt from Aperture magazine issue #198, Mary Panzer, a historian of photography and American culture as well as curator, tours us through the history of the former magazine, which featured photo stories spanning everywhere from Japan to Havana, by photographers among the likes of Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Elliot Erwitt. This excerpt first appeared in Issue 5 of the Aperture Photography App: click here to read more and download the app. 

Cover photograph by Slim Aarons

Holiday magazine was launched in 1946 and appeared monthly until 1977. It was the first postwar project of Curtis Publications, publisher of the Saturday Evening Post and Ladies’ Home Journal, and corporate rival of Time/Life. Holiday preserves a clear document of the growth of the American photojournalism in an era of flux. When the magazine started, there was no Cold War, no rock ‘n’ roll, no civil rights movement, and fewer than 10 percent of families in the United Sates owned a television; in just the next fifteen years, that world would be turned upside-down.

Photograph by Slim Aarons

During its best years– roughly 1951-64– Holiday regularly reported on American culture, European recovery, traditional travel spots, exotic places, playgrounds of the rich, and popular culture, including food, movies, and television. Part-Fortune, part–National Geographic, part-New Yorker and Gourmet, Holiday reflected the vision of founding editor Ted Patrick, a self-made man, a risk-taker, and an intellectual who enjoyed the good things in life. Patrick spent his early career in advertising, and served as the director of publications at the Office of War Information (OWI) during World War II before being hired by Curtis. In 1951 Patrick brought in Frank Zachary (also a OWI veteran) to be art director of Holiday. Zachary was a talented writer and graphic designer who, in the 1940s, turned the “how” magazine Minicam into Modern Photography, a lively journal for professionals and serious amateurs. Zachary was also a follower of Alexey Brodovich.

Photographs by Robert Capa

Through Holiday. Patrick promoted his belief that those lucky Americans who had survived the war had a responsibility to make something of their prosperity, productivity, and leisure. As he wrote in the pages of Holiday’s tenth-anniversary issue (March 1956): “We now have the means, money and products by which to achieve the fullest, richest life ever known to mankind, and we now have the unprecedented time of our own, which might be the greatest gift of all. What we do with that gift will decide the quality and the place in history of American Civilization.” Patrick’s confidence in the power and potential of his fellow Americans now seems like a scrap of early science fiction: a bit prescient, a bit quaint, and largely wrong.

Left: photographs by Herbert List; right: photograph by Robert Capa

Despite the magazine’s title, Holiday was not simply a guide to new vacation spots. The articles were meant to educate and enlighten. A story on Wales, for example, included gorgeous scenery, a trip through a coal mine, and a visit to a small village where music formed an important part of everyday life. Patrick seemed unconcerned by the paradox of teaching readers to seek out places and people who were not for sale, while his magazine was supported by ads for luxury commodities like cars, liquor, cigarettes, cruises, and cameras . . .

Photographs by Elliott Erwitt

From the start, photography comprised an essential element of the magazine. Patrick gave photographers generous budgets and deadlines, and very little direction. Photographers Tom and Jean Hollyman, who often worked as a pair, received these typical instructions from the managing editor: “Go to the French Riviera, Portugal, Lichtenstein, and one or two other places (we haven’t made up our minds which). Go in whatever order appeals to you. And let us know what you need in the way of research or dough.” They stayed away for a year. Burt Glinn reported the same casual generosity for his trips to Japan, the Soviet Union, and the South Seas, though his trips were shorter– only four to six months. . . .

In the early years of Holiday, color images were largely conceived and utilized in the same ways that black-and-white pictures of the 1930s had been. After Zachary arrived, the quality of photography and layout grew more sophisticated: bigger pictures, more white space, more telling details, and fewer generic vistas. Outside the magazine’s staff– which included such names as John Lewis Strange, George Leavens, Ray Atkeson, Ernest Kleinberg, Bob Smallman, Ike Vern, and Rosa Harvan– Zachary gave assignments to photographers who had special experience or access: Dan Weiner in South Africa, Bill Brandt in Scotland, Hans Namuth for art world portraits. He incorporated the cartoons of Ludwig Bemelmans, Ronald Searle, and George Giusti. Zachary claims credit for inventing a new photographic genre– the “environmental portrait,” in which a subject poses in the setting from which is power comes– as when Robert Moses stands on a steel I-beam suspended high above New York City, or Edward R. Murrow poses inside a control booth at CBS Zachary’s frequent favorites Slim Aarons and Arnold Newman used this approach on every possible occasion, even to the point of parody, as when an assignment in Africa sent Aarons to photograph white colonial rulers dressed for safari on their luxurious estates, while Newman photographed newly elected African politicians in business suits, or in remote locations, surrounded by their tribal family.

Photograph by Burt Glinn

Ted Patrick met Robert Capa around 1949, and soon after, Holiday became on of the Magnum agency’s steadiest clients. Beginning in January 1951, nearly every issue of the magazine included at least one story by a Magnum photographer. Burt Glinn, Elliot Erwitt, Dennis Stock, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, and Ernst Haas contributed dozens of stories over the following two decades. On the surface, Holiday seems an uneasy match for Magnum’s mythic commitment to justice, the common people, and black-and-white photography. But Holiday suited Capa’s taste for travel and glamour, as well as his determination to create lucrative assignments for photographers. In Patrick he found an ideal patron– and poker partner. Patrick admired Capa, and in fact the entire organization, describing them in the pages of Holiday as “truly international, truly modern men… [who] had the world not only as their beat but as their living room. They were at home, sympathetically at home, wherever they opened their cameras and suitcases.”

—

Mary Panzer is a photography writer and historian. She lives in New York.

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Tokyo Diary

Last December, Aperture magazine’s editors spent three weeks in Tokyo researching and assembling our upcoming Summer issue of the magazine, dedicated entirely to photography from Japan. This is Aperture’s second issue to be researched abroad; regular readers may remember last year’s Sao Paulo issue. Producing an international issue is an immersive process, of collecting information, of listening to local stakeholders—art historians, curators, publishers, and of course photographers—to learn about curatorial work and research underway, as well as which ideas are central to the discourse. In meetings we often ask, “What do you think we should publish, or reflect in our pages?” We then try to distill the most exciting work we’ve encountered. Tokyo’s photography scene is vast, diverse, and a little daunting, like the megalopolis. Here, we introduce some of the behind-the-scenes cast, the experts who, often very literally, sagaciously pointed the way. This article first appeared in Issue 5 of the Aperture Photography App: click here to read more and download the app.

A street in Shibuya, early in the morning, December, 2014.

Ivan Vartanian

Ivan is a former Aperture editor, who has lived in Tokyo for more than eighteen years. As an independent publisher and producer, working under the imprint Goliga, he’s worked with legends such as Daido Moriyama as well as the younger generation of image-makers. Originally our “Tokyo” issue was meant to be a modest article on the city’s independent exhibition spaces. But when Ivan described his plans to organize an ambitious conference, in New York, this spring about photography from Japan this spring, and with a number of major U.S. institutions mounting important exhibitions of Japanese photography around the same time, we knew that it was the right moment for this issue. (A grant from the Japan-United States Friendship Commission made the research-trip possible.)

Ivan, an energetic multitasker with a sardonic wit, opened many doors, sharpened our business-card etiquette, and helped introduce us to key fixtures in the Tokyo scene. While discussing possible content for the issue, Ivan mentioned his interest in Japanese photography magazines from the 1960s and ‘70s (not surprising, since he wrote a book on Japanese photography books of the era era—Aperture’s Japanese Photobooks of the 1960s and ’70s, 2009). Look out for his article in this issue on the secret history of Japanese publishing, as told through tech-minded, and sometimes prurient, vintage magazines. In Japan, photography resides on the printed page.

 

A meeting at the Asahi Camera office. The editors kindly pulled vintage issues for us to review.

 

A spread from a 1969 issue of Asahi Camera, featuring a photograph by Kishin Shinoyama.

Yoko Sawada

Yoko Sawada’s cramped Ebisu office overflows with books and publishing ephemera; a vintage Nobuyoshi Araki exhibition poster welcomes visitors, once they’ve removed their shoes. If we didn’t know better, we might have suspected Sawada was publishing radical pamphlets. Formerly an editor of Déjà-Vu, a seminal photography magazine published in the 1990s, Sawada now runs an imprint, Osiris, which produces excellent photobooks, including those by Mikiko Hara and, of course, the stunning 2010 reissue of Takuma Nakahira’s For a Language to Come. Sawada helped us coordinate two features on Nakahira, in which we explore the influential Provoke-era photographer and prolific writer on images and media.

A Polaroid collage by Nobuyoshi Araki, 2014. © Nobuyoshi Araki and Eyesencia, Tokyo.

Shigeo Goto

Goto runs G/P Gallery, which has two spaces in Tokyo. One more modest space is situated in Ebisu above an excellent bookshop, and a second more capacious space is located in a peripheral warehouse area, where an exhibition of work by rising star Daisuke Yokota was on view when we visited. Goto, who works with a fresh mix of young photographers, spoke at length about photography in Japan, highlighting the idea that schools don’t play a major role in Japan (there’s no equivalent of Yale or Düsseldorf), and walked us through his thinking on photography and animism. Goto emphasized the idea that mutation was a key concept for many Japanese photographers—especially in Tokyo, where the cityscape itself is a shape shifter.

A meeting with Aperture’s editors, Daisuke Yokota, Shigeo Goto, and Ivan Vartanian, at G/P Gallery.

Hisako Motoo

As a publisher, curator, and editor, Motoo is a seasoned player in the Tokyo photo world. She has worked closely with big names like Araki and Daido Moriyama, and recently founded AM Project Space. In this gallery’s dimly lit, cavernous space we saw a dense installation of Araki’s recent collaged Polaroids, featured in the upcoming Aperture issue.

Taka Ishii

Taka Ishii Gallery is a powerhouse in the Tokyo art world, representing an impressive roster of international artists (Christopher Wool, Thomas Demand, and many others) as well as icons of Japanese photography. Ishii generously spent an afternoon with us, pulling books from his library, including a slim red volume on Minoru Hirata, who documented performance-based art in the late 1960s. Hirata’s book got us thinking about Japan’s history of photography and conceptual practice, during an era of student protest and social unrest—an underexplored area in the United States—and led us to commission an article by Yasufumi Nakamori, who has just curated a landmark exhibition For a New World to Come: Experiments in Japanese Art and Photography, 1968-79, for the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, which will, thankfully, travel to New York this fall.

Kotaro Iizawa

We had lunch with Iizawa, a scholar of Japanese photography, in his library/café, an elegant, minimal space built of natural wood that houses a

massive library of thousands of photobooks. Iizawa has been building his collection for decades and it is now open to the public. This incredible resource is really a gift: who needs schools, when you can learn the history of Japanese photography in Iizawa’s café?

The Araki section of Kotaro Iizawa’s photobook library. Photograph by Mie Morimoto.

Mutsuko Ota

As the editorial director of IMA, which publishes a photography magazine as well as books, Ota offered a great deal of helpful advice. We also happened to be in Tokyo at the time when IMA’s concept store in Roppongi was opening Aperture’s exhibition of books short-listed for the Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards. Three photographers from Japan were among the finalists for the prize.

The book is the form for photography from Japan, and there’s no better place to look for books than in Jimbocho, a bibliophile’s dream neighborhood. Among other gems of ink-on-paper, we found, in a store specializing in rare maps, an early edition of Issei Suda’s beguiling, square-format photographs exploring folk traditions in late-1970s Tokyo. This reminded us that Suda, a master who was recently the subject of a retrospective exhibition at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, should be introduced (or reintroduced) to Aperture’s readers.

Issei Suda, Asakusa, 1987. Courtesy Miyako Yoshinaga Gallery.

Shashin: Photography from Japan, a symposium, will be held at the New York Public Library on April 24–25. Aperture’s “Tokyo” issue, and the new issue of The Photobook Review, also focused on Japan, will be available there. Additionally, Aperture will be releasing a series of articles on Japanese photography from our archive in the weeks to come. 

The Tokyo Issue, Summer, Aperture magazine #219, “Tokyo,” Summer 2015 is coming soon. Tap here to subscribe.

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Readings on Photography

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

 

 

 

“What I Talk about When I Talk about Photography” by Melanie Bühler for Still Searching, the Fotomuseum Winterthur blog: “If one thinks about photography in medium-specific terms, digitization actually hasn’t introduced any significant challenges to the essence of the photographic moment.  Cameras and iPhones that produce digital photographs still contain optical lenses that record light from which an image is generated. What has changed, however, is the process of image creation that directly follows from this moment.”

–Michael Famighetti, editor of Aperture magazine

I unearthed The Love of Indoor Plants (Octopus Books, 1973), by Lovell Benjamin, in an outer-borough junk store. It’s an ostensibly practical guide to houseplant care illustrated by what seems to be half stock photos, half images shot for the purpose of the book. (The same lace background pops up again and again.) The layout is clunky and the badly cropped photographs might as well have been culled from a Google image search, but I love its little nods to style: a flash of satin, a glossy pink ribbon, woodgrain, ceramics, decorative rocks. You can, however, have too much of a good thing. In his introduction, Benjamin cautions against plant-hoarding: “So dense are they in some windows that one cannot help wondering whether the rooms inside are equally cluttered up with these beautiful plants. This very thought prompts a warning. If there are too many present, house plants lose one of their most valuable qualities that of giving accent to decor.” Proceed with caution.

–Madeline Coleman, copy editor/proofreader, books, and coordinating editor, The PhotoBook Review

I have not yet gotten my hands on a copy of Charles Simic’s new book of prose, The Life of Images, which contains many writings on photography, but its release this week reminds me of this essay he once wrote for the New York Review of Books website, on the occasion of Aperture’s 60th anniversary. Simic worked at Aperture magazine from 1967 to 1970 doing various odd jobs around the office as its “business manager.” But mostly, he remembers looking at photographs: “I recall rainy afternoons with nothing to occupy me in the office but some photograph by Dorothea Lange, Paul Caponigro, Jerry Uelsmann, or by a complete unknown that I couldn’t stop looking at, because it seemed to grow more beautiful and more mysterious the longer I kept looking. Then, abruptly, a phone would ring with some irate subscriber shouting that his issue arrived damaged in the mail, and the spell would be broken.”

–Alexandra Pechman, online editor

I reread Paul Graham’s essay for the 2009 Yale MFA book [“Photography is Easy, Photography is Difficult”] frequently, when I hate photography and need to be reminded to lighten up and just do it.

–Sarah Goldberg

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My Last Day at Seventeen: Illustrations by Patrick Lynch

Only 3 days left to make a pledge and reserve your copy of My Last Day at Seventeen

Doug DuBois and Irish Illustrator Patrick Lynch talk about their collaboration and the resulting comic that helps tell the story of the community in My Last Day at Seventeen. Lynch created an illustrated comic based on the photographs and experiences DuBois had during his five summers visiting the Russell Heights housing estate in Cobh, Ireland. Royalties from the sale of the upcoming book benefit the Sirius Arts Centre–whose artist residency program allowed DuBois to return to Ireland year after year.

Thank you to all who helped us reach our Kickstarter goal! There’s still three days left to make a pledge and reserve your copy of the photobook.

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Anne Prentnieks on Laurie Simmons at the Jewish Museum

Installation view of Laurie Simmons: How We See © The Jewish Museum, NY. Photograph by: David Heald.

Laurie Simmons has long used photography as a tool for documentation, capturing cagey scenes punctuated with surprise. Unlike her Pictures Generation peers, whose imagery commented on various cultural zeitgeists, Simmons’s pictures summon uncanniness reminiscent of surrealist imagery. From cinematically staged dollhouse scenes featuring the ominously unsettled housewife to the portrait series of a life-sized Japanese sex doll sweetly tucked into bed or inside a bubble bath, her photographs conjure the feeling of a faux déjà vu.

How We See/Tatiana (Pink), 2015

Today, our impressions of strangers and acquaintances alike are as often based on actual encounters as on the optimistic Tinder profile, Facebook account, Instagram upload—a virtual myth that amounts to a sprawling, self-curated, two-dimensional gallery. How We See (all works 2015), Simmons’s most recent series of large-format close-up portraits, suggests that the process of modern identity shaping can be as willfully blind as it is untrue. Here, her lens fixates on the pristinely made-up faces of models whose eyelids are meticulously painted over to create the illusion of larger eyes (and a sexualized, doll-like countenance) à la cosplay (costume play) tradition.

How We See/Ajak (Violet), 2015

The title of each picture—Lindsay (Gold); Ajak (Violet), etc.—references the model by name as well as the vibrant color of her school-picture-day-like backdrop. Edie (Green) shows the transgender model Edie Charles, with her hair in a neat ponytail. (Charles, along with Peche Di, of Peche (Pink), is one of two transgender models included in the series.) A small sketch is embroidered onto the pocket of her white turtleneck: it is a head sprouting a ponytail, a tiny cartoon-detail of the model herself. Simmons worked with fashion designer Rachel Antonoff on the costumes for her models, and these unexpected details (an embroidered cigarette, for instance) subtly adorn the images’ edges, suggesting layers of identity with a humored wink.

How We See/Lindsay (Gold) , 2015

With their actual eyes closed, the models in each picture appear serenely in possession of their redefined personas. The lightly fuzzed texture of their foundation-shellacked faces curiously contrasts with the soft-wilted tissue of painted-over eyelid skin, a stand-in for the glossy surface of an eyeball. Hauntingly, the gaze of the painted pupils is always a bit askew, appearing to follow something invisible beyond the picture plane with an almost ecclesiastical focus. These painted-on eyes focus on a mysterious subject while the models in fact see darkness. In the earlier Kigurumi series (2014), featuring figures dressed up in full-bodysuits inspired by the eponymous Japanese cosplay subculture, Simmons began to explore such situational blindness. The pictures in How We See, also expose two opposing sensibilities: a childlike vulnerability, and a bold embodiment of an alter-ego mentally accessed when one physically exits the real world by darkening their sightline.

Laurie Simmons, How We See/Edie (Green), 2015 © Laurie Simmons, courtesy the artist and Salon 94.

The current exhibition presents a small grouping of the closed-eyed portraits in the stately neo-classical architecture of the Jewish Museum. With its decorated ceilings and French doors, the gallery itself both codifies a natural comparison to traditional portraiture and highlights the images’ temporal reality: they are at once richly photographed paintings as well as relics of a performance. By obliterating scale, Simmons’s camera enhances the dreamlike quality of her subjects; dolls are animated while humans register as dolls. For decades Simmons’s work has variously questioned definitions of place, gender, and role—in the home, inside one’s head, or onstage—but identity is the deeper theme that drives her work. Role-playing reveals internal yearnings, and the works in How We See channel introspection; each portrait shows a unique persona that emerges as the model adopts a foreign façade. In every instance, they mimic an intensely modern phenomenon, of generating identity from a composite of fact and fantasy.

Anne Prentnieks is a writer and critic living in New York.

Laurie Simmons: How We See is on view at the Jewish Museum through August 9.

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On Robert Mapplethorpe’s Polaroids

In 2001, art critic and philosopher Arthur C. Danto (d. 2013) wrote “Instant Gratification: Robert Mapplethorpe’s Polaroids 1970-1976″ for Aperture magazine #163. In these early Polaroids, Mapplethorpe already begins to experiment with representations of his own body and those of others as well as erotic and bondage-based imagery. Danto recognizes this period as the moment when Mapplethorpe became a pure photographer rather than, as Danto calls it, a photographist, who uses photographs to achieve another artistic end. To coincide with the release of Aperture magazine #218, “Queer,” we republish an excerpt of Danto’s article on this brief but fascinating period in Mapplethorpe’s career.

There is a useful distinction to be drawn between photographers, whose end products are photographs, and what I have termed photographists—artists who incorporate photographs into works that have a more complex artistic identity. It is not at all necessary that photographists be photographers in their own right—they can cut photographs out of newspapers or magazines, and combine them in montages or collages or installations. It is central to the meaning of certain of Christian Boltanski’s installations, to use one example, that the photographs he uses in them were found, and made by some anonymous journeyman photographer of persons whose actual identities have become unknown. Part of the aesthetics of post-Modernist art derives from the myriad roles played in daily life by vernacular photographs, or from qualities that certain vernacular photographs possess. The criteria of photographic art are not usually applicable to photographist works.

Robert Mapplethorpe’s career was unusual in that he began as a photographist, and evolved into a photographer, whose works are paradigms of high photographic art. These mature images were produced in a cultural atmosphere defined in part by photographism– an atmosphere in which swank and elegance were mistrusted, and artistic authenticity sough in the snapshot, in the blemishes, accidentalities, and disfigurements of uninflected picture-taking, felt to testify to a kind of honesty. There can be no doubt that Mapplethorpe’s portraits, for example, often reflected the glamour and celebrity of his subjects, which did not always sit well with his critics when the politics of anti-elitism found aesthetic reassurance in scruffiness and grunge. A photographer I knew, at the time working with pinhole cameras, wrote Mapplethorpe off as a pompier—a French pejorative connoting artifice and academicism. But even when Mapplethorpe was a photographist, working with Polaroids, the elements of his refined photographic style were already present in his work, as if he had a kind of perfect visual pitch, whatever means he used.

The transformation took place in the early 1970s, and its narrative can be told with reference to three mentors and four cameras. Mapplethorpe was already a photographist of sorts when, in 1970, he was given the use of a Polaroid camera by the artist Sandy Daley, herself a photographer and a fellow resident in the Chelsea Hotel. He was already a photographer when his patron and lover, the curator and connoisseur Sam Wagstaff, gave him a Hasselblad in 1976. He began to accept his identity as a photographer when John McKendry, Curator of Prints and Photographs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, gave him a Polaroid camera in 1971 as a Christmas gift. He declared a commitment to his calling in 1974 by buying himself a 4-by-5 Graflex with a Polaroid back. Initially, Mapplethorpe rejected the idea of a being a photographer at all, since he did not consider photography a legitimate art. By the time he acquired his Graflex, he not only endorsed its legitimacy, but the concept of photography permeated his vision.

Before meeting Daley, Mapplethorpe had shown no interest in photography whatsoever. Like his companion, Patti Smith, he was driven by extreme and, in terms of his youthful work, a somewhat unrealistic artistic ambition He had left Pratt, in part because he felt that the artistic philosophy of the New York School of painting, which continued to be taught there, had no relevance to being a young artist in the late 1960s. One can get a feeling for Mapplethorpe’s overall aesthetic at the time from the fetish necklaces he put together and sold, made of dice and death-heads, rabbit-feet and feathers, ribbons and claws. But he hoped to win success by means of his mixed-media collages, inspired by the work of Joseph Cornell and Marcel Duchamp, but using a symbolism derived from Roman Catholicism and black magic.

When he first used Daley’s Polaroid, he had begun to incorporate into his collages pictures of young men with attractive bodies, clipped out of magazines addressed primarily to a gay readership. His first thought was that he would use the camera to make his own pictures instead, which he considered more “honest somehow.” Either way, he was practicing photographism, since the pictures were used as collage material. But since the pictures they were to replace carried a sexual charge, his own photographs were also to have a sexual edge, though considerably sharper, as it turned out, than anything he had used before. The Polaroid process enabled him to show himself and others in situations he could photograph with impunity, since there was no need to send film out for development and printing. Mapplethorpe experimented sexually with his own body in front of the lens, to show the way he looked when he trussed his penis, or put it through rings, or mortified other parts of his flesh in accordance with his erotic curiosity. He photographed others in postures of bondage and sexual submission. These early self-images go well beyond what he might have encountered in the magazines sold behind counters in specialty shops in Times Square. But they also have a depth and power considerably in excess of the somewhat vapid images those magazines contained. It is not surprising that he should find his own photographs compelling, whatever his views on photography as such.

Arthur C. Danto was an American art critic and philosopher. He authored about 30 books, including Beyond the Brillo Box and After the End of Art. From 1984 to 2009 he was art critic for The Nation magazine and was a longtime philosophy professor at Columbia University.

Click here to learn more about the Aperture Magazine Digital Archive.

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