Aperture's Blog, page 160

Archive: 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.

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Sophie Hackett on Queer Looking

Three decades ago Joan E. Biren, an American photographer, crisscrossed the country presenting a continually changing slide show that told an alternative history of photography, one with lesbians as central protagonists, called Lesbian Images in Photography: 1850–the present (also known as the “Dyke Show.”) Sophie Hackett, associate curator of photography at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, wrote about Biren’s groundbreaking, if under-the-radar, project for Aperture magazine #218, Spring, “Queer.” This article first appeared in Issue 4 of the Aperture Photography App: click here to read more and download the app. 

Brassaï, Lulu at the bar, ca. 1930 © Estate Brassaï – RMN and courtesy Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto

From 1979 to 1985, American photographer and activist Joan E. Biren (JEB) traveled across the United States and Canada delivering an ever-evolving slide show, Lesbian Images in Photography: 1850–the present, more affectionately known as the “Dyke Show.” Over the course of two and a half hours, JEB narrated and presented more than three hundred images to women who gathered in church basements, community centers, women’s bookstores, and coffeehouses, eager for, as Carol Seajay, cofounder of San Francisco’s Old Wives Tales feminist bookstore and publisher of Feminist Bookstore News, put it in an early review, “Images I had never seen before, images I had seen and not perceived. Images on which to build a future.” The slide show was designed to grow over the years, as JEB added new pictures by contemporary photographers and participants in the photography workshops that she led wherever she appeared with the show. It eventually included 420 images. What began as a way to distribute and give context to JEB’s self-published monograph, Eye to Eye: Portraits of Lesbians (1979), became a vocation. She ultimately presented the slide show at least eighty times in more than sixty places.

Berenice Abbott, Princess Eugene Murat, 1929 © Berenice Abbott/Commerce Graphics/Getty Images and courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

JEB structured the Dyke Show in six sections that presented historical photographs by figures such as Lady Clementina Hawarden, Frances Benjamin Johnston, Alice Austen, and Berenice Abbott, alongside a range of contemporary portraits, erotica, and documentary photographs of the early gay liberation movement, her own work, and that of her peers, including Cathy Cade, Tee Corinne, Diana Davies, and Kay Tobin. She laid out for her audiences a new visual history, one with lesbians at its center. In line with lesbian and feminist consciousness-raising sessions of the 1960s and 1970s, JEB used the slide shows as a collective exercise in reading photographs to highlight the paucity of the visual record for lesbians and to impart a new way of looking, a queer way of looking.

She did this in two ways. First, she identified historical photographers who, in her view, rebelled against social norms and narrow expectations for women and, in their work and in their lives, embodied a sense of strength, freedom, autonomy. Hawarden, Johnston, Austen, and Abbott formed the focus here. In a recent email, JEB wrote, “Because relatives and others destroyed the evidence of lesbian lives, and because many photographers had to stay closeted in order to survive or make a living in prior times, there wasn’t a lot of overt evidence. That’s why I felt it was necessary to ‘read between the lines’ of the existing biographies to interpret the images myself given my own experience and instincts.” JEB suggested that there is something in the photographs by these women that can be “read” against biographies that may have suppressed or omitted details about their relationships and sexuality. The photographs supplied a different kind of evidence, discernible perhaps only to those who knew what they were looking for.

Joan E. Biren, Photographers at the Ovular, a feminist photography workshop at Rootworks, Wolf Creek, Oregon, 1980 © 2014 JEB (Joan E. Biren)

Frances Benjamin Johnston’s 1896 cigarette-smoking, beer stein–toting, ankle-revealing self-portrait is a strong case in point: Johnston’s playful self-presentation in this photograph defied the more demure, ladylike norms of her time. Offering information about Johnston’s life as a successful photographer—she is described in the 1974 monograph A Talent for Detail as an “eccentric,” “bohemian” woman who never married—JEB hinted during her slide show that Johnston may have been a lesbian. Though not able to offer clear evidence of Johnston’s sexuality, JEB nonetheless felt that assuming Johnston was heterosexual was equally tenuous.

Second, JEB sought to forge what she now describes as a “lesbian semiotics” (though she admits she learned the term much later and was not aware of Hal Fischer’s 1977 book Gay Semiotics). She detailed what she calls the “triangle” of interactions between the photographer, the muse (subject), and the viewer. (She elaborates on this further in her article “Lesbian Photography—Seeing Through Our Own Eyes,” published in Studies in Visual Communication in 1982.) She contrasted photographs made by straight photographers and those made by lesbians. And, in a section called “The Look, the Stance, the Clothes,” JEB attempted to identify more concretely the visual elements that might characterize a lesbian photograph.

Frances Benjamin Johnston, Self Portrait, 1896 Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C.

For example, she identified a direct look as the product of a certain rapport between photographer and subject, as in Berenice Abbott’s portraits of Eugene Murat, Jane Heap, or Janet Flanner. “There’s a look here that’s passing between a lesbian muse . . . and a lesbian photographer, something direct about it, without being confrontative [sic], it’s open in a certain kind of way, there’s a presence there behind the eyes,” she stated during a 1982 slide show at the Women’s Building in San Francisco. JEB found this directness lacking in other portraits of these women, indicating that they didn’t “look as powerful.” Or she characterized certain postures (slouchy) or clothing (pants, creatively fashionable garb) as more lesbian than others.

fierce pussy, “Special Right?” 1991–95 © fierce pussy and courtesy the International Center of Photography (ICP), New York

Such a project may feel quaintly essentialist today when queer images are so much easier to find. Audience comment cards reveal that not everyone embraced JEB’s approach even then—some felt she was replacing one set of stereotypes with another. Queer looking was just evolving. However, it is important to note how radical it was to even publicly contemplate a question like Is there a lesbian aesthetic? at the time, as that generation of queers fought for basic civil rights, built communities, and embraced their distinctiveness. JEB proposed a new relationship to photography to her audiences, one that would empower them as creators and interpreters of their own image. “Understanding you have a place in history and in the present day with others like yourself is what gave people the courage to take the risks that coming out in those years demanded,” she explained in a recent email.

Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan, In the Life, 1995 (cover) Courtesy the artists and Special Collections, E.P. Taylor Library & Archives, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto

JEB’s grassroots campaign is best understood as one of the projects that developed alongside the LGBTQ rights movement from the 1960s on, whose larger aim was greater visibility as a path to greater acceptance: the production of a visual record. In a 2004 interview as part of Smith College’s Voices of Feminism Oral History project, she declared, “I dredged up all these images, which may or may not have been lesbian images. I decided to talk about why I thought they were lesbian images from history. Because this void, this emptiness, this blank of history drove me crazy.”

Sophie Hackett is associate curator of photography at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto.

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

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Ruben Lundgren / WassinkLundgren, on The Chinese Photobook

The Chinese Photobook, Coming Soon

An interview with Ruben Lundgren of the photography team WassinkLundgren, cocurators of the exhibition The Chinese Photobook, which is currently on display at Aperture Gallery in New York through April 2. Also curated by Martin Parr, this exhibition is based on a collection Parr compiled with the Beijing- and London-based Dutch photographers. The selection of books includes key volumes published as early as 1900, as well as contemporary volumes by emerging Chinese photographers. Each and every featured photobook offers a new perspective on the complicated history of China, from the beginning of the twentieth century onward.

See the exhibition at Aperture Gallery, New York, through April 2

Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing

April 3–May 31, 2015

The Photographers’ Gallery, London

April 17–July 5, 2015

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On Aperture Magazine Collector’s Subscription Series

Starting with issue #218, Spring, “Queer,” Aperture magazine will launch its Collector’s Subscription Series, an exclusive opportunity for photography collectors to own work published in the pages of the magazine. Subscribers to the Collector’s Series will receive four signed and numbered limited-edition prints, one from each issue of the magazine published in 2015. The prints will be limited to an edition of 30. From issue #218, we offer Time Past and Time Future,

Utah (2014) by David Benjamin Sherry, a Los Angeles-based photographer who has garnered significant acclaim for his vibrantly colored images of the American West that often reference canonical figures of modern American photography, from Minor White to Edward Weston. Aperture magazine editor Michael Famighetti spoke to Sherry about how his work plays with historical references as well as his interest in process and vibrant color. This article first appeared in Issue 4 of the Aperture Photography App: click here to read more and download the app. 

Time Past and Time Future, Utah, 2014

Michael Famighetti: The exaggerated, almost psychedelic, color of your prints is very distinctive. Could you tell us a little bit about how you think about color in relationship to your subject, the landscape of the American West?

David Benjamin Sherry: I am interested in our rapidly deteriorating environment, primarily that of the American West, as it coincides with the end of film-based photography. Also, as a gay man, I’m compelled to “queer” this historical genre of landscape photography that has been tied up to this point so closely with the straight white male perspective, by virtue of its most celebrated practitioners.

I use deep and saturated color (or no color at all) as a way to imbue the image with intense or even sexualized feeling about a place. I’m interested in the way photography and memory are inextricable and permeable. The darkroom is as important to my process as is taking the picture, and I use the darkroom time to experiment with analog techniques, color relationships, print size, and other manipulation. My exploration in darkroom printing is born out of a pure fascination with light, image, and chemistry. As the medium crosses over into a digital realm, I’m interested in exploring the uncharted analog areas and creating something new within this process.

Geothermal Antisocial Network Earth Explosion, Utah, 2014

MF: Each of your prints are made using an analog color darkroom. How do you achieve these wild colors? Can you give readers a sense of how they are made?

DBS: My photographs are exclusively analog, meaning they are made completely without the use of digital technology. I use a large-format camera loaded with 8×10 film and, as I’m printing my photographs in the darkroom, I push the photographs color to its tipping point (just before it begins to lose shadow detail and exposure), which overwhelms the other colors and creates a monochrome. In color darkroom photography, there are three colors that make up the spectrum– cyan, magenta, yellow– and you add or subtract these three colors in varying degrees of 0–200 to reach your desired color. When studying color darkroom photography we are taught to print natural and real color, which I did for many years. After feeling frustrated with the limitations this element of real or natural imposes, I began to experiment. I found there are countless combinations depending on the film exposure and amount of time the light exposes the paper.

Wilderness of Mirrors, Idaho, 2014

MF: Your images are usually absent of humans, as if we’re back in the days when Carleton Watkins lugged his big camera into the remote wilderness. But some of your photo-locations are in places, like Yosemite, that aren’t devoid of people. Do you work to ensure that people don’t enter the images?

DBS: Its funny you mention this. I am very conscious of it and work hard to ensure that people don’t enter the pictures, yet most of my landscape work is often about human impact on the environment – so one would think that I may embrace human presence– but I don’t. Sometimes I find myself waiting for hours to let hikers pass or other photographers enter and leave my frame while also waiting for the right light or clouds. I find myself waiting most often for people taking selfies; I hate that word and the idea of it– too many humans obsessed with themselves and their lives. But, it’s not always about selfies. For instance, I was photographing El Capitan in Yosemite to find later when I was printing that there were rock climbers holding on to the rock– they are extremely small but if you look close they are there. I enjoy this element. So I guess it depends on what it is, but I do like to control the human presence in my work.

Waves of Ocean Acidification, Capital Reefe, Utah (For Minor White), 2014

MF: Let’s go back to your comment about the environment: the color here does feel reminiscent of science fiction—or like we’ve entered a moment after some kind of collapse has been experienced. There’s a hint of post-disaster?

DBS: The color does hint at a kind of collapse. I use color as a vehicle. It allows me to lay down more content within the subject of landscape. At times, the landscape acts as the background and I think of the color as an emotive force, I try to capture a feeling that is romantic yet tragic. I’m interested in tragedy and often feel that as a photographer, I am a direct witness to the collapse of our society and planet. The landscape in my photographs is a metaphor yet it is what it is – it’s the once-pure land that we have destroyed and now have to re-evaluate how to live on it. The color can be transformative and it is a reaction.

Spirit Infinity, Death Valley, California, 2014

MF: I’ve contacted you with these questions while you’re in the midst of shooting, in what I gather is a remote location. Where are you now? What’s next for you?

DBS: Yes! I don’t usually go on email while I’m out on the road. I like to feel pretty disconnected and focused on what I’m encountering on daily basis while traveling and shooting. I’m just ending a three-week trip shooting throughout California, Nevada, and Utah. I’m ending now in Death Valley, California and headed home to Los Angeles to start printing all this new work. I’ll be doing a solo booth of pictures at Paris Photo LA in early May and then I’ll begin work for my next solo show at Ohwow gallery in Los Angeles, which opens in October.

David Benjamin Sherry, Deep Blue Sea Rising, Oregon, 2014 Courtesy the artist and Salon 94, New York

Tap here to learn more about the Aperture Magazine Collector’s Subscription Series.

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Archive: On Physique Magazine Photography

In Aperture magazine #187, from 2007, writer Vince Aletti reflected on early twentieth-century physique magazines, a genre of men’s fitness publications that became a de-facto source of gay erotic photography as early as the early 1900s. During a time when homosexuality was considered scandalous and American obscenity laws prevented the publication of provocative photographs, physique magazines served as a veiled source of homoerotic imagery, serving a largely closeted audience. To coincide with the release of Aperture magazine #218, “Queer,” we republish an excerpt of Aletti’s look at this overlooked, and in some cases, purposefully obscured, area of photographic history. This article first appeared in Issue 3 of the Aperture Photography App: click here to read more and download the app. 

The magazines on these pages were produced for an audience that their publishers never named and rarely acknowledged; in a sense, they were as closeted as many of their gay readers and even more vulnerable to discrimination and attack. Muscle magazines like Vim, Superman, Strength & Health, and La Culture Physique, some of which date back to the early 1900s, were the first to feature photographs of nearly naked men, but they were all professional and amateur bodybuilders, and their display was intended to inspire sportsman-like admiration and emulation, not prurient interest. Although the physique magazines that began appearing in the mid 1950s—including Art & Physique, Physique Artistry, Men and Art, Body Beautiful, and Adonis—also printed photographs of Mr. America contestants, the emphasis shifted, ever so subtly, from sport to sex. But if these new, pocket-sized magazines were more frankly erotic than their muscle-builder peers, they weren’t about to admit it.

Most of them covered their metaphoric asses with statements announcing their high-minded intentions. A note in a 1954 issue of Physique Pictorial claimed its collection of preening male nudes was “planned primarily as an art reference book and is widely used in colleges and private schools throughout the country. . . . Several psychologists and psychiatrists have told us that books such as Pictorial often have a highly beneficial effect on negative, withdrawn patients who become inspired by the extrovert enthusiasm and exuberance of healthy, happy athletes.” Other publications prided themselves on combining self-improvement and art appreciation: articles titled “Are Bodybuilders Oversexed?” and “Sex Fears Probed!” and rudimentary exercise instruction appeared alongside photographs of Greek and Roman statuary and “art studies” of handsome young men wearing the polyester equivalent of the classic fig leaf. Still, it’s hard to believe these magazines ever passed for straight; they certainly didn’t fool their queer readers.

To be fair, physique publishers weren’t being cowardly, merely circumspect. Despite an incipient movement for gay liberation and visibility (the Mattachine Society’s magazine, One, began publishing in 1953), homosexuality was still a scandal in the 1950s, and American obscenity laws tended to keep its photographic representation either furtively underground or heavily coded. Photographers and publishers could be arrested if a model’s pubic hair was not sufficiently airbrushed out of the picture or the bulge in a posing strap was too clearly defined, and any hint of affectionate contact between men was strictly policed.

The look of physique work from this period wasn’t entirely a matter of wary self-censorship, however. Many photographers in the field (some of whom had begun their careers in muscle mags) had a keen eye, a refined sense of their craft, and strikingly individual styles. Surely most of them were aware of the artistic precedents set by Thomas Eakins, Eadweard Muybridge, and F. Holland Day, and more contemporary examples of male nudes by Edward Weston, Herbert List, Minor White, Imogen Cunningham, and George Platt Lynes would not have been hard to come by. (Lynes’s most frankly homoerotic work wasn’t published until after his death, and it springs from the same hothouse atmosphere of repression and rebellion that inspired the headiest physique photographs.) Much more obvious precedents were the turn-of-the-century photographs of Wilhelm von Gloeden, Guglielmo Pluschow, and Vincenzo Galdi, whose sepia-toned pictures of Italian peasant boys posing with panpipes and classical drapery were widely circulated in the gay underground. The American studios tended to cling to an equally mannered, obviously commercial tradition as much from an impulse to idealize and romanticize the nude as from a need to redeem it.

Physique photographers used props that evoke the classic nude—fluted columns, elegant drapery, “marble” pedestals—in order to nudge their teenage bodybuilders, amateur athletes, and tattooed Marines into the realm of Art even as they hovered on the brink of pornography. To update the classical ideal, they drew on the conventions of Hollywood glamour photography (the dramatic lighting, the prominent prop, the “thoughtful” stare into space), the standard muscleman posing repertoire (including the requisite gloss of body oil), a butched-up version of the vocabulary of gesture and attitude found in fashion magazines, and pieces of the hyper-masculine wardrobe fetishized in the same period by Tom of Finland: denim jeans, motorcycle boots, leather jackets, jockstraps, hard hats. The resulting images were at once stylized and subversive, way over the top and just under the radar.

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

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Seth Curcio on Janet Delaney: South of Market

Second at Market Street, 1986.

Janet Delaney: South of Market gives a glimpse of a bygone San Francisco, before Silicon Valley and soaring rents defined the small metropolis, and now-chic neighborhoods such as South of Market were made up of working-class families, the city’s gay community, and young artists such as Janet Delaney herself. At the de Young Museum in San Francisco, a group of forty-five photographs by the Bay Area–based photographer depict scenes from the late 1970s and early 1980s, documenting her friends and neighbors, city life, and the changes taking place on the SOMA streets. Seth Curcio,  associate director of Pier 24 Photography in San Francisco, looks at how such urban renewal began to change the diverse community around Delaney before her eyes.

Russ Street Apartments, 1981.

For a city that has grown alongside the development of the camera, San Francisco’s lineage of change is widely documented. Photography has played a pivotal role in capturing the city’s evolution, recording the influx of pioneers in the mid-to-late nineteenth century, the aftermath of the 1906 earthquake, the building of its bridges and port, and the rise of various counterculture movements.

View of the Financial District from South of Market Street, 1980.

As San Francisco is amid yet another period of rapid physical, cultural, and economic transformation, the photographs in Janet Delaney: South of Market, an exhibition on view at the de Young Museum in San Francisco, provide a unique opportunity to revisit the city’s transitional past. The selection of forty-five works, all made between the late 1970s and mid-1980s, focus on an area of slightly less than one square mile just south of Market Street, San Francisco’s main dividing thoroughfare.

Hamburger Mary’s, 1582 Folsom at 12th Street, 1980.

When Delaney was a resident of South of Market (SOMA), thirty-something years ago, the area featured countless warehouses alongside hotels and old Victorian houses. The neighborhood was home to blue-collar workers and immigrant families, as well as the city’s burgeoning gay community. It was also a period of drastic renewal: the city was in the process of constructing a large convention center, which resulted in the displacement of nearly five thousand residents and seven hundred businesses. Bearing witness to the rapid cultural shift caused by this redevelopment, Delaney took to the streets, nearby apartments, and local businesses with her large-format camera and color film, engaging in a process of documentation that was slow and deliberate, an act that afforded her the opportunity to further connect with her community.

Artist in Her Studio, Project One, 10th at Howard Street, 1980.

While traces of the past that Delaney captured can still be found throughout the area, new high-rise condos, office buildings, and restaurants have replaced many of the district’s former structures and residents. Delaney’s photograph Saturday Afternoon, Howard Street between 3rd and 4th (1981), serves as a stark reminder of this transformation, depicting a portion of the city that completely changed. The photograph shows a single figure walking down the middle of the road in a desolate streetscape. A crane in the distance, on the right side of the frame, echoes the loneliness of the silhouette on the street, and serves as evidence of change on the horizon.

Bulk Natural Foods, Russ at Howard Street, 1980.

The leading image in the exhibition, 10th at Folsom (1982), bears a different tone. It presents a view down a dense street, with only the tops of the buildings visible and a succession of auto body repair signs dominating the façades. A large billboard in the foreground pictures an eager young couple in business attire alongside the slogan “We’re changing.” While the message is direct, this large photograph foreshadows the irreversible transformation of the neighborhood, setting a disquieting mood for the additional works in the show.

Mercantile Building, Mission at Third Street, 1980.

Installed rather traditionally on warm gray walls, the arrangement of the pictures highlights the range of Delaney’s subjects. Oscillating seamlessly between street scenes, interiors, and environmental portraits, the viewer is confronted with images of a community on the brink of change, and reminded of the consequences and complexities of gentrification. Photographs like Mercantile Building, Mission and 3rd Streets (1980) provide an eagle-eye view of the neighborhood, showing what appears to be the last remaining housing structure amidst a sea of freshly bulldozed lots. Meanwhile, Helen and her husband at the Helen Café, 480 6th Street (1980) offers a sense of intimacy, placing the viewer directly at the restaurant’s counter. The warm expressions of Helen and her husband are open and honest and the location inviting, creating a sense of closeness with the subjects and the place. Delaney’s choice to photograph in color––a process that was rarely employed by fine art photographers of the time––creates a profound and celebratory connection to the time, place, and people.

Helen and her Husband at the Helen Café, 486 Sixth Street, 1980. All images courtesy the artist. © 2014 Janet Delaney

Delaney is no stranger to photographing in urban areas; over the past several decades the artist has made bodies of work in Delhi, Beijing, Zhengzhou, and New York City. However, for this Bay Area–based photographer and educator, the images created in San Francisco are full of intimacy and careful consideration that make evident her deeply personal engagement with this place. The exhibition generates lingering questions about the pursuit of progress and its effect on community. The photographs on view, along with a large vitrine full of activist ephemera relating to the series and neighborhood, remind us that while the gentrification plaguing so many American cities is often cyclical in nature, an active engagement with community is key if we are to maintain a rich sense of diversity and culture as our cities progress. While nearly forty years have passed since Delaney first photographed South of Market, the pictures continue to be a powerful reminder of the social responsibility that we all maintain in creating the history, and future, of our neighborhoods.

The exhibition Janet Delaney: South of Market is on view at the de Young Museum in San Francisco through July 19.

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Richard Meyer On the Term “Queer”

Untitled (Pier, David Wojnarowicz project), 2001–07

For the “Queer” issue, Aperture magazine asked Vince Aletti, Richard Meyer, and Catherine Opie to reflect on the term queer and its relationship with photography. Here, we run an excerpt from Meyer’s response, in which the Robert and Ruth Halperin Professor in Art History at Stanford University discusses Emily Roysdon’s restaging of David Wojnarowicz’s photographs as well as German aristocrat Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden’s carefully crafted scenes of classical homoeroticism. Tonight, Meyer will moderate Aperture’s panel discussion “Queer Genealogies” at the New School, with writer and critic Vince Aletti, associate curator of photography at the Art Gallery of Ontario Sophie Hackett, and artist K8 Hardy. The panel will explore how contemporary photographers have cast their attention backward to draw upon and engage the visual record of gay, lesbian, trans, and nonnormative sexualities. This article first appeared in Issue 3 of the Aperture Photography App: click here to read more and download the app. 

Although it may seem hopelessly “nineties” to some, the word queer continues to provide a crucial means of opposition. In the recent book Art and Queer Culture, written by Catherine Lord and myself [Richard Meyer], we wrote, “We have chosen the term “queer” in the knowledge that no single word can accommodate the sheer expanse of cultural practices that oppose normative heterosexuality. In its shifting connotation from everyday parlance to phobic epithet to defiant self-identification, “queer” offers more generous rewards than any simple inventory of sexual practices or erotic object choices. It makes more sumptuous the space between best fantasy and worst fear.” The last line of this passage was a reference to an early 1970s gay liberation slogan proclaiming “I am your worst fear. I am your best fantasy.” By citing this slogan within a book on queer art published in 2013, Lord and I suggest that recursive power and expansive history of queer culture.

For many years the work of queer photographers has been necessarily—if sometimes unwittingly—indebted to the sexual and subcultural imagery long preceding it. In some of the most exciting examples of such work, the photographer’s debt to queer history is openly, at times even extravagantly, acknowledged. For example, in 1991, Canadian photographer Nina Levitt partially erased a reprint of an 1891 picture by Staten Island–based amateur photographer Alice Austen of two female couples embracing, one of which includes Austen herself. The title of Austen’s original picture, That Darned Club, parrots the voice of an exasperated man excluded from the women’s intimacy while alluding, however lightheartedly, to the damnation of late nineteenth-century women who rejected the company and authority of men. Retrieving the photograph a century later, Levitt asks us to consider the visual record of lesbian life: what has been submerged that might yet be excavated or allowed to emerge. Like Levitt’s image, titled Submerged (for Alice Austen), the history of lesbian culture hovers between visibility and erasure, resolution and apparition.

Artist Emily Roysdon has initiated an equally vivid dialogue with the photographic work of a queer predecessor, in this case the late David Wojnarowicz. Across a series of twelve photographs, Roysdon both reimagines and restages Wojnarowicz’s Rimbaud in New York series (1978–79) in which a man wearing a face mask of fin-de-siècle poet Arthur Rimbaud surfaces at different locations in 1970s New York City—riding the subway, shooting up at the piers, outside an X-rated movie theater in Times Square. Although many assume the project to be self-portraiture, in fact Wojnarowicz asked a friend to wear the Rimbaud mask and then followed him to different sites throughout the city. Wearing a paper mask bearing the likeness of Wojnarowicz, Roysdon produces a touchingly inexact restaging of Rimbaud in New York. Where, for example, the original series featured “Rimbaud” masturbating on a hotel bed, we now see Roysdon pleasuring herself with a dildo. Untitled (David Wojnarowicz), 2001–2007, bespeaks both an embodied lesbian difference and a desire to create queer art across the divides of both gender and generation. Central to the logic of Roysdon’s “surrogacy” of the earlier series is the double displacement Wojnarowicz performed in the late 1970s—asking a friend, masked as a queer poet from the previous century, to stand in for the photographer’s own journey through the urban landscape.

Throughout the history of photography, queers have sought out real or fictive archives on which to base—and from which to stage—their own sexual imaginings. Living in Sicily at the end of the nineteenth century, German aristocrat Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden, for example, choreographed scenes of classical homoeroticism by photographing toga-clad (and unclad) adolescent boys and young men among fluted columns and other faux-antique props. Von Gloeden’s photographs— collected by the writer Oscar Wilde, the sexologist Alfred Kinsey, and later, the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe—reveal as much about the homoerotic imagination of the late nineteenth century as about the sexual culture or customs of Greco-Roman antiquity.

Emily Roysdon, Untitled (Three Girls, David Wojnarowicz project), 2001–07. Courtesy the artist

Von Gloeden’s photographs are now hawked on the Internet as representing a lost “golden age of pornography.” Mapplethorpe’s interest in Von Gloeden was part of the former’s broader embrace of the history of pornography. Before Mapplethorpe took up photography exclusively, he was over-painting pages from gay (and occasionally straight) porn magazines. In some cases, Mapplethorpe would impose a bull’s-eye over the figure’s genitals or a black rectangular bar over the eyes, thereby referencing the criminalization and censorship of homoerotic desire as well as its persistence in the face of such threats. In other cases, such as the heretofore unpublished collage . . . the over-painting functions to focus the viewer more insistently on points of sexual exchange and homo-affection. Although Mapplethorpe’s early collages remain little known, they reflect the queer archival imagination that helped launch his photographic career.

Queer photographers working today are likewise mining the long history of gay, lesbian, trans, and otherwise nonnormative sexualities. That history reaches back to the practice of photography from its earliest moments in the nineteenth century and further still, to premodern histories of art and sexuality. As contemporary photographers continue to experiment with new forms of affiliation and technologies of representation, they simultaneously return to and reimagine the visual archives of the queer past.

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

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Doug DuBois on Kickstarting My Last Day at Seventeen

Mary, Cobh, Ireland, 2011

This month Aperture launched a Kickstarter campaign to ensure the publication of My Last Day at Seventeen by Doug DuBois. When DuBois first went to Ireland, what began as a month-long residency grew into a five-year project about an exceptional group of young people from a few blocks of a housing estate in Russell Heights, in Cobh, Ireland. DuBois gained entry to the community when two of its residents took him to a local hangout spot, opening his eyes, “to a world of the not-quite adults, struggling—publicly and privately—through the last moments of their childhood.” Over the course of many summers, DuBois returned to Russell Heights to make portraits and capture spontaneous encounters and collaborative performances. If the related Kickstarter campaign is successful, in fall 2015, Aperture Foundation will publish My Last Day at Seventeen as well as a unique “community edition,” produced especially for the individuals featured in the book. Robyn Taylor, editorial consultant to the Aperture books program, spoke with DuBois about the project and how he plans to make the book a reality. This article first appeared in Issue 3 of the Aperture Photography App: click here to read more and download the app. 

 

Robyn Taylor: For those of us who don’t know, can you give us a little background on how this project began?

Doug DuBois: I came to Ireland in 2009 at the invitation of the Sirius Arts Centre in Cobh. The director of the arts center, Peggy Sue Amison, connected me with a group of young people who were interested in photography and during the course of my stay we made a Blurb book together.

A few weeks into my residency, I asked the group of kids to take me to their neighborhoods and show me around. One couple, Kevin and Eirn, who were inseparable at the time, offered to take me to “the steps,” which, as it turned out, was a drinking spot frequented by underage kids that goes back generations. Later that night, I wound up at Kevin’s house in Russell Heights, a working-class housing estate only a short walk up the hill from the steps.

I went back to Russell Heights every day after that night. I was met with a mix of curiosity and disdain; occasionally the local Garda were called out to check my ID. Since Kevin and Eirn could vouch for me, I was never seriously considered a threat or a nuisance—but that first summer was a little rough. Years later, I asked Kevin’s sister, Roisin, what people thought of me that first summer—she laughed and said. “We all thought you were a perv.”

Lenny on the Steps, Cobh, Ireland, 2009

RT: How long did it take to build a level of trust that would allow you to return each summer? Have your intentions for the project always been clear to both you and your subjects, and at what point did you decide the work should be made into a book?

DD: Kevin and Eirn were born one day apart and at the end of that first summer in Cobh, I was invited to their eighteenth birthday party. The night before, I took some photographs of Eirn in her parent’s back garden wearing a new dress—a birthday present from her father. She said at one point, “It’s my last day at seventeen,” and I knew then I had a title for the project.

When I left the party, I told everyone I’d come back the next summer with the photographs. I doubt any one expected me to live up to that promise, but when I appeared the following year with stacks of prints, a tenuous sense of trust began to develop. When people asked me what the photographs were for, I always told them there would be an exhibition at the Sirius Arts Centre and, if I was lucky, maybe a book.

Jordan up the Pole, Russell Heights, Cobh, Ireland, 2010

RT: All the images in the My Last Day at Seventeen were taken during your summer residencies. Did you ever feel like you were missing pivotal moments in the community or the kids’ lives throughout the rest of the year? How did it feel returning each year?

DD: The book depicts an eternal summer—there’s no school and the weather is mostly sunny and warm. I never set out to document, in the traditional sense of that word, the life of the community. My idea was to contemplate the threshold that marks the time between childhood and the advent of adult responsibilities. While this somewhat lyrical framework involves, at least in part, creating a portrait of these kids and their community, the end result, like an eternal summer, makes use of the fictions and metaphors about youth and coming of age.

I was excited and anxious when I returned each year—nervous, I think, for the inevitable time when I would wear out my welcome. Some of the kids changed so much from one year to the next that I didn’t recognize them; and others, who were happy to be photographed the previous summer, made it clear they had had enough.

Padjoe in his Father’s Kitchen, Cobh, Ireland, 2011

RT: Instead of a traditional text, the book will contain a short comic by Dublin-based illustrator Patrick Lynch. Can you explain how this idea came about and what you think it adds to the project? What has been your experience of working with an illustrator?

DD: I originally wanted to commission a short story from an Irish author to accompany the photographs. After I complained about getting turned down by several writers, [Aperture publisher] Lesley Martin suggested a short, graphic novel instead. I did a little research and discovered Paddy Lynch, who runs a small press and writes and illustrates these wonderful stories of life in Dublin. Nothing much happens, which I liked, but they hold a world of detail and emotional nuance.

Paddy came up to Russell Heights with me last summer to record stories as people looked at the book maquette. He made sketches and I made photographs for him to take home to Dublin. We promised everyone involved that we would combine and change details so no one person is easily recognized through their story. There are only two, unnamed characters in the comic—simply, “the girl and the boy.”

My hope for the comic is, more or less, the same as for the short story: to create a narrative that runs parallel to the sequence of photographs. The trick is to avoid any direct, illustrative relationship that shuts down or limits meaning in and between the photographs and the comic.

Doug DuBois, Dean Shows his Tat, Russell Heights, Cobh, Ireland, 2009 © Doug DuBois

RT: In the Kickstarter video, you talk about the book as being a final stage in the exchange or “gesture” of giving something back to the community. Can you talk a bit more about the importance of this gesture and how readers can help to make it a reality?

DD: Every summer, we were routinely mobbed the first day we appeared in the neighborhood with boxes of prints. We’d see them later in the summer taped up on bedroom walls and occasionally blowing about the alleys.

In the fall of 2012, I had an exhibition of the work, as promised, at the Sirius Arts Centre. There wasn’t a framed photograph in the gallery that hadn’t been given back to the person in the picture, but many people were hesitant about coming to the opening. I got questions, like “will there be posh people there?” and “will they laugh at us?” It’s one thing to look at your photograph alone or with family and friends, but it’s another to see it in public.

At the opening I taped small prints from photographs made that previous summer under the framed photographs. People who came that night could take a print off the wall and bring it home. The opening was packed with people from Cobh, Cork, Dublin, and even Belfast, but enough made the walk down from Russell Heights that most of the small prints were gone by the end of the evening. There was a steady stream during the weeks that followed —Roisin came three or four times to show off in front of her picture, and Eirn did a walkthrough at the gallery for Irish TV.

The community edition of the book is like the photographs I gave away every summer: it’s just for them to keep and share with friends, safely attached to the meanings, stories, and memories that make sense to them—no posh people allowed. The book jacket is designed to hold a single unique print, so everyone in the book gets to be on the cover.

Doug DuBois has worked as a photographer since the mid 1980s. DuBois is best known for his first monograph All the Days and Nights (Aperture, 2009)—a twenty-five year project examining the complex realm of family. He has photographed for magazines including the New York Times Magazine, Time, Details, and GQ. Doug teaches in the College of Visual and Performing Arts at Syracuse University.

Robyn Taylor is an editorial consultant to the Aperture books program. Hailing from Bristol, England, she holds a BA in Documentary Photography from the University of Wales, Newport.

Tap here to support My Last Day at Seventeen on Kickstarter.

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Aperture Beat: Aperture magazine “Queer” Issue Launches with Ren Hang Solo Show

Ren Hang at Capricious 88, Photograph by Max Mikulecky

Ren Hang, whose work is featured on the cover of Aperture magazine #218, Spring 2015, “Queer,” is one of the most provocative young photographers working today in China. His photographs capture playful scenes of naked, intertwined bodies arranged into odd but elegant forms, and often his subjects’ gender is not only ambiguous but often feels beside the point. Ren Hang has published a series of photobooks that are distributed in cardboard cases that warn Chinese audiences in loud type of their explicit content. “Prominently featuring red lips, black hair, and supple flesh, his photography creates a world where sex, desire, and the joy of voyeurism create a visceral effect,” writes Stephanie H. Tung in the text accompanying his portfolio in Aperture magazine. Ren Hang is now garnering international attention and he recently opened his first exhibition in New York at Capricious 88, where Aperture also celebrated the release of Issue #218. Online editor Alexandra Pechman spoke to Ren Hang at the March 6 opening. This article first appeared in Issue 3 of the Aperture Photography App: click here to read more and download the app. 

 

Ren Hang at the opening of “Night and Day” at Capricious 88. Photograph by Max Mikulecky

Ren Hang’s first New York solo exhibition, Night and Day, may seem ironically titled, as distinctions such as darkness and light, male or female, human or landscape, often melt away in his tightly composed images of bodies at play. Limbs blend into limbs, and bodies into water, grass, or trees. In these bright, high-contrast images of hands over genitals and heads stacked on backs, Hang gives little indication of the world outside the pictures, neither physically nor politically. For the show, the gallery Capricious 88 made a selection of the Beijing-based photographer’s prolific output of untitled works, which continually gather a large following on Instagram; so continually, in fact, that despite the routine deletion of his accounts for graphic content, he currently has nearly five thousand. The opening on March 6 gave a sense of that popularity as more than a hundred gallery-goers packed the Lower East Side gallery for the dual opening and launch for Aperture magazine’s Queer issue, which features Ren Hang’s work on the cover. (At one point during the event, a broken elevator caused a line to form around the block.)

Courtesy of the artist and Capricious 88

Ren Hang was born in 1987, in northern China, and as an advertising student in Beijing, he started taking pictures of his friends. Though his photographs can often appear spontaneous— for instance, a nude man squatting animal-like in a field, a nude woman hanging off a branch while balanced on a man’s back—they are anything but. “I control the models and I tell them what to do,” Ren Hang explained at the opening, referring to his carefully directed images in which he poses and places flora and human bodies alike. He pointed out, for example, the staging the exhibition’s main image, of a naked man laying balanced on the edge of a white building, about to tip into darkness. While his models find themselves in unlikely positions as directed by the photographer, he’s developed a sense of trust with friends and strangers alike. “In the beginning when I was photographing it was all my friends,” he said. “Then when I started photographing people I didn’t know, after I had been photographing them for a while they became my friends anyway. It’s all good.”

Courtesy of the artist and Capricious 88

Such uninhibited views of friendship, sexuality, and youth are often not well received in China, where Ren Hang’s work risks censorship and obscenity charges. He has been harassed online on blogs and in person, at galleries where his exhibited works were also vandalized. This, however, doesn’t faze him. “I don’t have any particular feelings about taking photographs in China,” he said. “They limit me, but it’s not a lot. Even if they try and limit me, I’m still going to take pictures. Because I don’t care, I don’t feel it as much when I’m photographing.”

Courtesy of the artist and Capricious 88

Although bodies crowd the frame, often with bright red lips and nails, contorted, hanging, or piled on top of one another, he says he lets the images happen organically. “I never really have an idea,” Ren Hang said. “When I click, I see it, and it becomes real to me.”

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

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Sama Alshaibi: Sand Rushes In

Sama Alshaibi talks about her newest book, Sand Rushes In. Alshaibi’s lyrical multimedia work explores the landscape of conflict: the ongoing competition for land, resources, and power in North Africa and West Asia, and the internal battle for control between fear and fearlessness. Alshaibi uses the desert, borders, and the body as overarching symbols of the geopolitical and environmental issues and histories linking the Arab-speaking world.

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