Aperture's Blog, page 161

Gay Semiotics Revisited

In 1977, San Francisco photographer Hal Fischer produced his photo-text project Gay Semiotics, a seminal examination of the “hanky code” used to signal sexual preferences of cruising gay men in the Castro district of San Francisco. Fischer’s pictures dissected the significance of colored bandanas worn in jeans pockets, as well as how the placement of keys and earrings might telegraph passive or active roles. He also photographed a series of “gay looks”—from hippie to leather to cowboy to jock—with text that pointed out key elements of queer street-style. For Aperture magazine #218, Spring 2015, “Queer,” art historian Julia Bryan-Wilson spoke with Fischer about the origins of Gay Semiotics and how it has aged, excerpted below. This article also appears in Issue 2 of the Aperture Photography App: click here to read more and download the free app.

Julia Bryan-Wilson: You initially trained as a photographer at the University of Illinois. What brought you to the Bay Area, and what impact did that move have on your work?

Hal Fischer: I came here for graduate school in photography at San Francisco State in 1975. I really wanted to study with Jack Fulton, but I didn’t want to pay the money to go to the Art Institute. I figured that I could probably work with him as long as I was here. After I moved to the Bay Area, two pivotal things happened. One was that I began writing for Artweek three months after I arrived, so I immediately got into the fray, so to speak. The second pivotal thing was meeting Lew Thomas [cofounder of NFS Press]. That was incredibly critical.

JBW: What strikes me now about Gay Semiotics is how conceptual it is, how important the photo-text relationship is.

HF: When I applied to State, I applied with traditional photography, gelatin-silver prints mainly of the landscape. Then I got out here, and the first thing I started doing was crazy alternative work, predominantly 20-by-24-inch bleached prints with inked-on text and diagrammatic drawings. But I met Lew through my writing, because I reviewed a show of his, and he was at the center of a movement focused on connecting photography and language.

JBW: What was the Bay Area like in terms of a photography scene in the mid to late 1970s?

HF: There was a huge discourse here. You’d have an opening, and there would be two hundred people there. People talked about photography. They were really interested, and it was passionate.

JBW: Gay Semiotics is an attempt to map some of the discourse of structuralism onto the visual codes of male queer life in the Castro. How did you come to structuralism?

HF: Thanks to Lew Thomas, in graduate school I began reading things like Jack Burnham’s The Structure of Art and Ursula Meyer’s Conceptual Art. Those were two key texts. Of course, structuralism came late to photography, when you consider that Susan Sontag’s Against Interpretation came out in 1966. Reading Burnham, going on to read Claude Lévi-Strauss, all that was crucial. I learned about signifiers, and thought, This is going on all around me.

JBW: In your bibliography for Gay Semiotics, you cite Walter Benjamin, but not Roland Barthes. Who else were you influenced by?

HF: I did read some Roland Barthes, but it’s almost like I read just enough. The signifiers were the first pictures to come out of this thinking. It was like, Oh my God, these handkerchiefs . . . this is exactly what they are writing about. Of course, that made for five pictures, and then I had to figure something out from there.

All photographs by Hal Fischer from Gay Semiotics, 1977 © and courtesy Hal Fischer, and Cherry and Martin, Los Angeles

JBW: You’re doing several things in Gay Semiotics. On the one hand, you’re parsing a signification system that arose out of a nonverbal, erotic exchange, and you’re also deconstructing gay male self-fashioning and photographing “archetypes.” It is thus a photo-project about the history of photography and its long legacy of ethnographic typing.

HF: I can’t say I was conscious of it at the time, but one of the first photographers who influenced me was August Sander. I mean, I LOVED Sander. I still do. I probably was a fascist in an earlier life, because I’m definitely into types, and I’m definitely into archetyping. I don’t really think it’s that awful a thing to do; it can be very informative. I was also interested in the Bechers and the notion of repetition.

JBW: So the work is also about genre.

HF: Yes. It’s also about personal desire; it’s a lexicon of attraction.

To read the full interview, subscribe to Aperture magazine or purchase Issue #218, Spring 2015, “Queer.”

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A Look Inside The Chinese Photobook

 

Aperture’s new exhibition The Chinese Photobook reveals for the first time the richness and diversity of the photobook’s heritage in China, drawing on publications from over a century of Chinese history. From imperial China to the Cultural Revolution to the present day, Chinese photobooks have reflected the dramatic changes of China’s twentieth century. Based on a collection compiled by Martin Parr and Beijing- and London-based Dutch photographer team WassinkLundgren, to be published this spring from Aperture. The Chinese Photobook embodies the dramatic changes in China in the twentieth century. Here, we present a look inside the exhibition with some of the key figures involved in the making of the book, who led a private tour at the Member’s Preview before the exhibition opening on February 11.

The Chinese photobook reveals as much about Chinese photography as about China itself, and the country’s dramatic twists and turns during the last one hundred years. Divided into six sections, the exhibition now on view at the Aperture Gallery in New York, through April 2, chronologically traces the development of the form in China since 1900, from imperial souvenirs, to government propaganda, to the contemporary avant-garde. “Each book is a microcapsule of history,” said Aperture publisher Lesley A. Martin. Just before the exhibition’s opening, three of the book’s contributors— Raymond Lum, Stephanie H. Tung, and Ruben Lundgren—spoke about their contributions to the exhibition. Lum, librarian for Western languages in the Harvard-Yenching Library, wrote about the book’s first chapter, which explores how the imperial agendas in China in the early twentieth century gave way to the People’s Republic of China. For example, French forces sent during the Boxer Rebellion of 1901 took some of the earliest aerial photographs of China, adorned with Art Deco and Art Nouveau flourishes in a loosely bound and “clever” book, as Lum described, which could be taken apart and rearranged.

Slipcase and folio from La Chine à terre et en ballon (Paris: Berger-Levrault & Cie., 1902)

Interior selection from The Living China: A Pictorial Record (Shanghai: Liang You Publishing Co., 1930)

Tung, who is working toward a dissertation on the history of photography in China, spoke about the period between 1931 and 1947, which alternately produced photobooks reflecting more artistic practices as well as the effects of the Sino-Japanese war. Tung highlighted the work of Lang Jiangshan, arguably one of the most famous photographers in Chinese history, who pushed limits of representation in the 1930s and 1940s. Of his layered negatives of landscapes and nudes, Tung remarked that the photographer aimed to evoke the texture of classical Chinese landscape paintings: “He’s trying to express a Chinese essence through photography.” The Japanese occupation introduced some of the first propaganda-style photobooks, in praise of Manchuria, made by Japanese publishers; meanwhile, books of response by Chinese publishers depicted a nation torn apart by war.

Interior selection from Pictorial Review of the Sino-Japanese Conflict in Shanghai (Shanghai: Wen Hwa Fine Arts Press, Ltd., 1932)

Lundgren, of WassinkLundgren, illuminated Chinese Communist propaganda in the post-1943 period that preceded the rise of Mao. Photography remained extremely important to the image of a prosperous China; Mao later had his own personal photographer. Joyous, but largely anonymous, images of progress characterize the period. The Cultural Revolution of 1966 brought about its own unique style of imagery, emblazoned with portraits of the communist leader. “What you’ll see is, I collect these books, all different times of censorship, especially crosses,” Lundgren added, pointing to an image of Mao and another man, who has been cut out of the image. “It’s a very good example of the craziness of its time.”

Interior selection from Chairman Mao is the Red Sun in Our Hearts (Beijing: People’s Fine Arts Publishing House, 1967)

After the death of Mao, these books changed dramatically, even as photographers began to capture scenes of public grief. “You see the first instances of young photographers not working within a particular political ideology, not on political assignments, creating their own photobooks,” Tung said. Also on view is the catalog from China’s first free photography exhibition during this period. “We see photobooks go from completely commercial to experimental to die-hard journalism,” Lundgren added. “It goes in every single direction imaginable.”

Interior selection from No. 223 by Lin Zhipeng (Taipei: Revolution-Star Publishing and Creation Co., Ltd., 2012)

Cover from Dancing Streets by Mo Yi (self published,1998)

The contemporary selection of photobooks in particular gives a sense of the range of what might be uncovered between these photobooks’ covers, from photojournalism that exocitizes the West to the provocative work of Ren Hang. Through the project, Aperture magazine’s editors discovered Ren’s photobooks, which are distributed in cardboard cases warning readers of their content. Not only did the work end up in the pages of the magazine’s new spring issue, “Queer,” but, in an apt reversal, it’s on the cover.

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Artist Talk: Erica Baum

On Tuesday, February 24th photographer Erica Baum gave an artist talk at Aperture gallery. Drawing inspiration from contemporary artists who utilize text, such as Ed Ruscha and Lawrence Weiner, along with documentary-style photographers such as Walker Evans and Eugène Atget, Baum creates what have been called “subliminal narratives” using found words and images from paperback books, card catalogues, and paper rolls from player pianos, among other literary artifacts. Baum’s work is featured in Aperture magazine’s “Lit.” issue.

 

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The Armory Show: 11 Photography Picks

The Armory Show officially kicks off this week at Piers 92 and 94 in Manhattan, with 199 galleries from over twenty-eight countries participating in this year’s edition. Below, we highlight some standout photography from around the fair, ranging from documentary photographs from the Civil Rights movement to abstraction, including a series of portraits featured in the newest issue of Aperture magazine. Be sure to also check out Aperture Foundation at Booth 827 on Pier 94.

 

Duane Michals, Willem de Kooning, 1985

DC Moore Gallery devoted a wall of its booth to the work of Duane Michals, recently the subject of a retrospective at the Carnegie Museum of Art. Among the works featured are Michals’s portraits of artists, from Willem de Kooning to Rene Magritte to Andy Warhol.

Gordon Parks, Outside Looking In, 1956

The presentation at at Howard Greenberg Gallery focused on color photography from the Civil Rights movement as well as the work of prominent African-American photographers such as Gordon Parks, whose work for the Time photo-essay “Back to Fort Scott” is currently on view at the MFA Boston.

Thomas Ruff, ch.phg.06, 2014

In the contemporary wing of the show, David Zwirner Gallery has a major focus on photography at the fair this year, featuring large-scale photographs by Thomas Ruff from his Photograms and Stars series as well as smaller work from his Negatives series. (Read a recent review of Ruff’s exhibition in Düsseldorf.)

Work from Chris McCaw’s Sunburned series.

Yossi Milo also has abstract photography on view, with selections from Chris McCaw’s Sunburned series, for which the artist allows hours of sun exposure onto light-sensitive negatives, causing solarization—they are literally holes burnt into the image.

Photographs by Zanele Muholi at Yancey Richardson’s booth.

At Yancey Richardson, portraits by the South African photographer Zanele Muholi are on view—many of the works appear in the new issue of Aperture magazine, “Queer,” alongside an interview with Muholi about her depictions of the gay and lesbian community in South Africa. She will have her first large-scale exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum in May this year.

 

Alfredo Jaar, Angel, 2007

At Lia Rumma from Milan, Italy, a large-scale Alfredo Jaar photograph dominated the booth.

Alec Soth, Crazy Legs Saloon. Watertown, New York, 2012

Alec Soth, Robert E. “Bob” Waitt. College Station, Texas, 2013

Sean Kelly is showing multiple photographs by Alec Soth, who headlined Aperture’s 2014 Benefit.

Mona Hatoum, Four Birds (Baalback), 1998.

At Alexander and Bonin, Palestinian artist Mona Hatoum’s art and photography rounded out the Armory Focus section, which this year centers on the Middle East, North Africa, and the Mediterranean (MENAM).

Talia Chetrit, parents in the sun #1, 2014

Sies + Höke from Düsseldorf showed the work of Talia Chetrit at their booth. The New York–based artist often repurposes photographs from her family archives, re-cropping, zooming, and rearranging them to create new juxtapositions of past and present.

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In Memoriam: Albert Maysles

In memory of legendary documentary filmmaker Albert Maysles, who died today at age 88, we revisit his tribute to friend Henri Cartier-Bresson, originally published in Aperture magazine issue 191, Summer 2008.

Henri Matisse at his home, villa “Le Rêve” in Vence, France, February 1944 ​© Henri Cartier-Bresson/Magnum Photos

 

This famous photograph by Henri Cartier-Bresson—of Matisse with white doves—is my favorite. Cartier-Bresson was an old friend whom I met through Bruce Davidson. When Bruce invited us both to his studio, he asked me to bring along a projector and a scene from one of my films. The scene I had filmed was of a train coming into the Moscow station, from which trains go off to Siberia. As the train pulled in alongside the empty platform I stood with my camera mounted with an extreme 300mm telephoto lens. As I began shooting—because it was illegal to film in train stations in the USSR—an angry Soviet army officer came rushing over to stop me. I grabbed him by the back of the neck and stuck his eye to the viewfinder. At that moment, with the camera still rolling, the train came to a stop and hundreds of people came rushing out of the doors. With a big smile on his face, the officer congratulated me. He had been converted. When Henri saw the film he too got excited, and leapt up and applauded.

Some years later when I was about to get married, Henri offered any one of his photographs as a wedding present. I chose this Matisse photograph. To me it was as if Henri were expressing in his own way Robert Capa’s advice to get close—get very close. Henri’s special talent in getting close was to stay far enough away to include the doves, which brought the viewer that much closer to the peaceful and sublime nature of Matisse himself—so superior to a shot of Matisse’s face in isolation.

And so film and the photograph brought me that much closer to both Matisse and Henri.

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Archive: “Photography, Pornography, and Sexual Politics”

Interior pages from Aperture magazine #121, “The Body in Question,” 1990

 

The following excerpt comes from Aperture #121, “The Body in Question,” 1990, an issue that explored depictions of the body in photography in the face of “a powerful effort…to define and control expressions of sex and sexuality.” In one of the defining moments of the Culture Wars, conservative politicians sought to defund the National Endowment for the Arts after it supported an exhibition at the Contemporary Arts Center, in Cincinnati, of works by Robert Mapplethorpe that included graphic sexual content. In conjunction with the release of Aperture #218, “Queer,” we revisit a piece written in response to this cultural flashpoint by Carole S. Vance, associate clinical professor of socio-medical sciences at Columbia University, who has written widely on sexuality and human rights. While the Culture Wars happened twenty-five years ago, debates surrounding depictions of the body and sexuality continue today. ​This article also appears in Issue 2 of the Aperture Photography App: click here to read more and download the app. 

The art world was taken by surprise by the furor over the National Endowment of the Arts (NEA) funding of exhibitions containing photographs by Andres Serrano and Robert Mapplethorpe, which began in the summer of 1989, and, more recently, by the indictment of Dennis Barrie, director of the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, Ohio and the CAC itself in conjunction with the opening of Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Moment last April. Observers were then startled to find fine-arts photography the target of attack, called pornographic, even “obscene,” because of its sexual or erotic content. Some wondered if a time-machine had catapulted them back to the late nineteenth century, when moral crusaders assailed museums and galleries for displaying nude statues and paintings. This new campaign against photography and sexual imagery is far from an anachronism, however. It is the systematic extensions of conservative and fundamentalist cultural politics to the world of “high culture,” a domain that had previously been exempt from their carefully organized public crusades.

In the past ten years, conservatives and fundamentalists have crafted and deployed techniques of grass-roots and mass mobilization around issues of sexuality, gender and religion. In these campaigns, symbols figure prominently, both as highly condensed statements of moral concern and as powerful spurs to emotion and action. In moral campaigns, fundamentalists select a negative symbol that is highly inflammatory to their own constituency and that is difficult or problematic for their opponents to defend, for example, exaggerated and distorted fetal images in anti-abortion propaganda. These groups have orchestrated major actions in the realm of popular culture—the protests against Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ motivated by the Reverend Donald E. Wildmon, campaigns against rock music led by Tipper Gore and the PMRC (Parents Music Resource Center), and the Meese Commission’s war against pornography. Ironically, these growing crusades come at a time when fundamentalist victories in electoral politics are decreasing and perhaps signal the conservatives’ recognition that social programs, which could not be attained through conventional politics, could still succeed through more long-term, though admittedly slower, attempts to change the cultural environment.

 

The recent attacks on photography mark the first time that such mobilizations have been so overtly directed at “high” culture. The targeting of photography by right-wing religious and political leaders like Wildmon and Jesse Helms is not accidental: it is probably the weakest brick in the fine-arts edifice. A relatively recent historical arrival, photography does not yet have the prestige surrounding painting or sculpture, and photography’s institutions, also comparative newcomers, have fewer resources and less authority. In addition, a significant amount of photography circulates through galleries, without the imprimatur of museums. Contemporary photographers and their works remain unprotected, since there has been less time in which to develop a consensus about their value—financial, artistic, and cultural.

Photography is also less privileged than other fine arts because of its ubiquity. The proliferation of of photographic images in everyday life and mass culture—in advertising and photojournalism—makes it more difficult to shelter photography, even if one wanted to, under the protective umbrella of seemingly rarified and prestigious high culture. Finally, the realistic quality of photographic representation makes it especially vulnerable to the conservative analysis of representation, which is characterized by extreme literalism. For all these reasons, the choice of photography in a newly launched conservative movement against the fine arts was shrewd. Indeed, it may have been the only plausible target: imagine, for example, public response to a campaign to remove The Origin of the World, 1866, from the Brooklyn Museum’s 1988 Courbet retrospective.

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The 2015 Aperture Portfolio Prize Short List

We’re pleased to announce the four finalists for the 2015 Aperture Portfolio Prize, an international photography competition whose goal is to identify trends in contemporary photography and highlight artists whose work deserves greater recognition. This year, Aperture’s editorial and limited-edition print staff reviewed more than seven hundred portfolios. Our challenge was to select one winner and three honorable mentions from this overwhelming response. Of the following exceptional finalists, one will be selected as the winner of the 2015 Aperture Portfolio Prize, receiving a cash prize and an exhibition at Aperture Gallery in New York:

Lisa Elmaleh

Heikki Kaski

Drew Nikonowicz

Laurence Rasti

The winner of the 2015 Aperture Portfolio Prize will be announced in April. The finalists’ portfolios and statements will be available to view on aperture.org. In the meantime, view past Portfolio Prize winners. 

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Announcing the 2015 Aperture Portfolio Prize Short List

Lisa Elmaleh, Dennis Rhodes, Hawesville, Kentucky, 2013; from the series American Folk

Heikki Kaski, from the series Tranquillity, 2014

Drew Nikonowicz, 2014-10-13 03:43:24 PM 38°56'45.73" N 092°19'33.29" W 0773, 2014; from the series This World and Others Like It

Laurence Rasti, from the series There Are No Homosexuals in Iran, 2014

We’re pleased to announce the four finalists for the 2015 Aperture Portfolio Prize, an international photography competition whose goal is to identify trends in contemporary photography and highlight artists whose work deserves greater recognition. This year, Aperture’s editorial and limited-edition print staff reviewed more than seven hundred portfolios. Our challenge was to select one winner and three honorable mentions from this overwhelming response. Of the following exceptional finalists, one will be selected as the winner of the 2015 Aperture Portfolio Prize, receiving a cash prize and an exhibition at Aperture Gallery in New York:

Lisa Elmaleh

Heikki Kaski

Drew Nikonowicz

Laurence Rasti

The winner of the 2015 Aperture Portfolio Prize will be announced in April. The finalists’ portfolios and statements will be available to view on aperture.org. In the meantime, view past Portfolio Prize winners. 

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Drew Sawyer on Thomas Demand

 

Thomas Demand, Bloom, 2014. All photographs © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn / Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery

Two exhibitions, at Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Matthew Marks Gallery’s Los Angeles location, feature German-born photographer Thomas Demand, who lives and works in Los Angeles. Demand creates models which he then photographs: At Matthew Marks, he debuts new photographs, while at LACMA he shows a work of stop-motion animation. Drew Sawyer, the Beaumont and Nancy Newhall Curatorial Fellow at the Museum of Modern Art, considers the effect the artist’s new relationship to the West Coast has on this body of images.

Thomas Demand’s current multiple exhibitions in Los Angeles, where the German-born artist has lived since 2010, serve as evidence of a subsequent shift in his practice. Since the early 1990s, Demand has produced photographs of seemingly ordinary places and objects: paper-strewn offices, sterile hallways, and modernist staircases. He typically begins with an existing image of political or cultural relevance culled from archives or the media that he then translates into a three-dimensional paper model. He came to this circuitous and labor-intensive method while attending the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf, where he trained as a sculptor with Fritz Schwegler. Though he did not study with Bernd and Hilla Becher, he clearly shares their concern for documenting banal-looking places and structures with deep historical significance.

Atelier, 2014

In an exhibition of new works at both of Matthew Marks’s West Hollywood galleries, Demand presents large-scale photographs of paper models based on photographs. Although the form feels familiar, this new series relates to recent events or art and architectural history, whereas his prior show, in New York, in 2013 to 2014, presented pictures made from casual cellphone snaps. The current exhibition includes images charged with more political and cultural commentary: Backyard (2014) is drawn from a New York Times photograph of Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s home in Cambridge. A thirteen-foot-long photograph, Bloom (2014), focuses on cherry blossoms in the background of the same backyard, further removing the image from its disquieting source material. These photographs are juxtaposed with two images modeled after Matisse’s studio, where added colorful paper scraps on the herringbone floor reference the modernist master’s late cutouts—playfully referencing Demand’s own paper constructions. Demand’s exclusion of human figures—he removed Tsarnaev’s wife from the source photograph in Backyard as well as a wheelchair-bound Matisse in Atelier (2014)—recalls forensic photography, a genre of images from which he often draws. As with his previous photographs, both bodies of work reflect on the circulation of images and the loss of context in the construction of historical memory.

Sidegate, 2014

Other photographs on view push his practice in new conceptual directions. He reimagines the Santa Monica balcony belonging to mob boss and fugitive Whitey Bulger and a gated entrance to the Southern California home of Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, the writer and producer behind the 2012 anti-Islamic video Muslim Innocence. While drawn from the news, these works are not based on existing images. Rather, Demand’s proximity to the locations allowed him to carry out his own espionage, and the images allegorize the themes of privacy and transparency by focusing on visual barriers: a large solid gate or a barred balcony in front of sliding glass doors with drawn curtains. Without preexisting images, we are offered even less access to these places, and even Demand’s own experience of them does not offer much information.

At Matthew Marks’s second space, Demand shows new photographs of architectural models by the Tokyo-based architectural firm SANAA. These images continue his series of models of unrealized structures by the mid-century Californian architect John Lauder, which Demand carried out while a visiting scholar at the Getty Research Institute in 2010. The photographs represent the first time the artist has photographed models he did not build, and push his exploration of representation and abstraction even further.

Pacific Sun, 2012, production still

Demand’s recent film Pacific Sun, a one-hundred-second stop-motion animation based on security footage from a cruise ship dining room during a tumultuous storm off the coast of New Zealand, is also currently on view, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Demand also began the film at the Getty Research Institute, where he and a team of assistants meticulously recreated, in 2,400 photographs of paper models, the violent movement of hundreds of objects from one side of the cafeteria to the other. The result is one of Demand’s most ambitious works to date. His first film Tunnel, from 1999, was a track shot of a thirty-two-meter-long cardboard model of an underpass that evokes the 1997 death of Princess Diana of Wales by car crash. Both films, like his photographs related to the Boston Marathon bomber and the fugitive mob boss, explore our contemporary moment of insecurity and surveillance via the media. In a culture with an excess of images that serve as either means of power or distraction, how does one wrest control of their incessant flow? Demand’s recent photographs and films may not provide the answers, but they are asking the right questions.

Pacific Sun at LACMA runs through April 12.

Thomas Demand at Matthew Marks runs through April 4.

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Inside the Spring Party with Penelope Umbrico

Detail of 350 Mountains (with Smartphone Camera App Filters) for Aperture Spring Party Edition, 2015, from Range: of Aperture’s Masters of Photography

On Friday, April 17, Aperture Foundation will hold its first annual Spring Party. For this inaugural event, Aperture has teamed up with artist Penelope Umbrico to offer each party attendee a unique, signed photograph from Umbrico’s Moving Mountains series. Each print grants access to the Spring Party, which will feature an open bar, hors-d’oeuvres, music, and celebration. Umbrico, whose work has been shown at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and MoMA PS1, New York, frequently engages with the saturation of images in a digitized word, sampling from catalogs, brochures, even Flickr. Online editor Alexandra Pechman asked Umbrico about the inspiration for the series, its recent presentation at Aperture’s gallery, and the changing world of contemporary photography. This article also appears in Issue 2 of the Aperture Photography App: click here to read more and download the app. 

Aperture Foundation: Your series Moving Mountains (1850–2012) began a few years ago when you were commissioned by Aperture to contribute to Aperture Remix, an exhibition for which photographers were invited to choose an Aperture publication and to pay it artistic homage. Why did you choose the Aperture Masters of Photography Series?

PU: I was interested in a converging the two most disparate things, the stability of a masterly photographic practice with the instability of smartphone camera technology.

AF: What attracted you to the mountain photographs within those books?

PU: I had been suddenly seeing images of mountains everywhere (on magazine covers, in galleries, advertisements, etc.), and thinking about the mountain as a symbol of stability, I had a quasi-theory that the more unstable our definitions of photography are, the more images of mountains appear in the photographs of photographers who have something at stake in the medium. So I looked for mountains in the Masters‘ photographs. I liked the parallel relationship of stable object to master photographer: the sense of integrity, history, and timelessness in both.

AF: You rephotographed the Masters photographs with an iPhone using various camera apps and their photo filters, rendering classic works by the likes of Edward Weston, Wynn Bullock, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Manuel Álvarez Bravo as almost entirely different images. What was your thought process behind this?

PU: If I was going to look at the mountains of master photographers, it made sense to rephotograph them with the least stable of photographic technologies—the smartphone camera app. I love that when the camera is pointing down at the books, the gravity sensor of the iPhone can flip a mountain sideways or upside down. This disorienting effect blends with hallucinogenic colors of the camera app filters, where photo grain, dot-screen, pixel, and screen resolution collide in undulating moirés. I was particularly interested in light-leak filters—nostalgic representations of the failures of analog photography, simulated with no light at all, in the vacuum of an iPhone.

AF: When first presented at Aperture Gallery, the photographs played off one another in a cohesive, colorful grid. Did you have an idea of how you wanted the images to look together or did the idea develop as you went along?

PU: I made about six thousand iPhone images in the course of a couple months. The fact that I could make so many, so quickly heightened the contrast between thinking about the inherent multiplicity of analog photography historically, and its limits in relation to current replication and distribution systems. The film/paper photograph becomes quite singular beside digital files and social media. I wanted the installation at Aperture to speak to this—I chose images from the six thousand-plus that would speak to each other as formally contingent parts of a whole. Not all the resulting images work this way: some work best in groups, and some are better on their own or in pairs.

AF: What was the most surprising thing you found going through the original images?

PU: The biggest surprise for me though was that, of the four women represented in the Masters of Photography series, none had images of mountains in their photographs. This solidified an idea about the symbolism of the mountain, and the fact that I, a present-day female, was rephotographing mountain images by male photographers only, by circumstance and not by choice, seemed to fit the symmetrically oppositional logic I had set up. I wrote a text piece that to accompany the work called Masters, Mountains, Ranges, and Rangers, —a progression through various dictionary definitions of those words that points to opposing ideas for each of those words, and questions their assumed cultural values. It’s in my e-book, Moving Mountains, which Aperture produced, and also in the new small book, Range (Aperture, 2014).

AF: Moving Mountains comments on the changing nature of contemporary photography, and was in fact, our first artist ebook when released in 2013 for the exhibition. Now the prints will be sold through Artsy online…and, of course, we’re previewing all this on a brand-new app! What does the pace of digital media today mean to you as an artist?

PU: It’s exciting for me because it’s my material, and therefore these changing technologies become my subject—the more there is, the more I have to work with!

AF: The purchase of one of the photographs gains entry to our first-ever Spring Party, which seems fitting for photographs that celebrate two centuries of photography. What do you hope the effect will be on those who live with this work?

PU: I’d like to think that the issues I address in a body of work are embedded in that work. For Range, (or Moving Mountains as it was called in for the first installation), the register of time, as you say, is quite literally in the work. But also each small piece contains a concentration of a dialogue between the old and the new, distance and proximity, limited and unlimited, the singular and the multiple, the fixed and the moving, the rare and the common, master and disciple, and the master and the copy.

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