Aperture's Blog, page 162

Doug Dubois – My Last Day at Seventeen

Support My Last Day at Seventeen on Kickstarter.

Doug DuBois first went to Ireland at the invitation of Sirius Arts Centre in 2009. What began as a month-long residency grew into a five-year project about youth, Ireland, and an exceptional group of young people from a few blocks of a housing estate in Russell Heights. The resulting photographs are an exploration into the promise and adventure of childhood with an eye toward its fragility and inevitable loss.

DuBois gained entry to the community when two of its residents, Kevin and Eirn (who would later become central subjects of his work), 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. People came and left, relationships formed and dissolved, and babies were born. Combining portraits, spontaneous encounters, and collaborative performances, the images of My Last Day at Seventeen exist in a delicate balance between documentary and fiction. A powerful follow-up to DuBois’ acclaimed first book, All the Days and Nights, this project provides an incisive examination of the uncertainties of growing up in Ireland today, while highlighting the unique relationship sustained between artist and subject.

If this Kickstarter campaign is successful, in fall 2015, the New York-based not-for-profit photography publisher Aperture Foundation will publish the photobook My Last Day at Seventeen. The book incorporates elements of a graphic novel, with stories from the community illustrated by Patrick Lynch.

Along with the photobook, Aperture Foundation hopes to also publish a unique “community edition,” produced especially for the individuals featured in the book, as a way to acknowledge the individual value of members in the community and their integral roles in the making of the project.

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Q&A: Peter Barberie on Paul Strand

Young Boy, Gondeville, Charente, France,1951 © 2014 Paul Strand Archive/Aperture Foundation, Inc.

Last fall a retrospective of Paul Strand’s work at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA) featured 250 photographs by the modernist master. Strand helped establish photography as an art form in its own right, experimenting with abstraction, documentary, and filmmaking, from as early as 1910 through the 1970s. Yale University Press published the exhibition catalogue, edited by Peter Barberie, PMA Brodsky Curator of Photographs, while to coincide with the new survey, Aperture republished Aperture Masters of Photography Series: Paul Strand, with a new introduction and texts by Barberie. The Paul Strand Archive at Aperture Foundation works in partnership with the PMA—the home of the Paul Strand Collection—to preserve and promote Strand’s legacy. Online editor Alexandra Pechman spoke with him last fall about the exhibition, which opens at the Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland, on March 7. This article first appeared in Issue 1 of the new Aperture Photography App: click here to read more and download the app. 

Alexandra Pechman: There are so many thousands of photographs now in the museum’s collection, which, as you talk about in the book give a whole new perspective on the work. What to you is the most interesting aspect of what we couldn’t see about the work before?

Peter Barberie: The place I like to start from is Alfred Stieglitz, who of course is Strand’s great mentor, and who thought in order to understand an artist’s work you have to be able to trace his or her development. Stieglitz of course kept a great body of his work together, and he wanted to show a single artist’s work over time. One thing to say is that it’s a great tribute to that conviction of Stieglitz’s that we’ve assembled examples of Strand’s work from every moment of his career, in one collection.

In terms of what you can see that you couldn’t see before, Strand always insisted on the continuity of his ideas in his work. He insisted on that without really explaining it completely, so it’s always a little enigmatic to see what he meant. But you can, for instance, look at his portraits from 1916 all the way up to the late 1960s and see his ideas about representing individuals.

AP: There’s that quote you mention about [Georgia] O’Keeffe calling him “thick and slow,” as both a compliment and a slight at the same time. Today, that’s probably more on the slight side, given there’s more of an emphasis on speed. Would you say that makes people more inclined or receptive to Strand’s work now, or they should be?

PB: I think we’re at a moment in contemporary art when it seems to me that it’s good to reassess Strand’s later work because a lot of artists are interested in the documentary tradition in photography. A generation ago, Strand’s move away from avant-garde modernism seemed perplexing, at best. And I think today if you think of a figure like Allan Sekula or Susan Meiselas or any number of people, Strand’s turn to a kind of social seeing—that also has a political dimension in that he shows the politics of a place—has a lot of resonance.

AP: Even though at the same time, he never saw his work as photojournalism. How do you reconcile that with his work being a document in that way?

PB: He was clear that his work was not documentary, and, specifically, that it was not photojournalism. He said that making clear his admiration for photojournalism and the high value he placed on it. But it was clear to him that his mode of working was very different than what was required of photojournalism. One way that he put it is that he liked to work slower than that, which was indeed true. If you look back to the 30s and 40s when he was trying to make political art, specifically in his films, one of the painful lessons for him was his approach to working, which he would not let go of because he understood it was integral to his success. He took a long time, both with ideas and with individual pictures, and that’s not really suited to making politicized art.

AP: Then there are also those photographs of his wife, Hazel, taking photographs of him staging the photograph a bit more than one would in a real document.

PB: What’s important about those photographs by Hazel is that he was never secretive about that staging. He saw no reason to be disingenuous about that; he saw it as contradictory to the way he was presenting his work. I think the reception of his work—because we have this go-to idea that we fall back on about “straight” photography, which sometimes gets conflated with how people think of street photography—is that he’s “finding” these moments. But he was really clear that he was making complicated representations of whatever subject he had chosen.

Blind Woman, New York, 1916 © 2014 Paul Strand Archive/Aperture Foundation, Inc.

AP: You mentioned his politics. They’re sublimated in some places and more prominent in others—you talk about in the end of the essay, how it’s kind of convoluted as he’s wavering between leftist optimism, with absolute belief in certain opinions and some conflicting views. What’s your takeaway on his politics?

PB: I have a couple takeaways. Strand was very politically engaged from the 1930s onward. It was clear to him that his political views were distinct from his art. That goes back to what I said earlier: he realized he wasn’t really cut out to be a political artist in the way that John Heartfield was or someone like that. He didn’t want his photographs to be seen as illustrations of his political ideas. A lot of people have a hard time with that, even in reviews of this exhibition. Because he was such a man of the left, people are really stuck on the idea that he was making his photographic projects with a kind of vague yet central political idea. He really wanted to move away from that.

It’s sort of unfortunate because he becomes very reticent about these matters in late interviews in his life. A lot of people have taken that to mean that because of the political climate of the moment, he didn’t really want to talk about it. But I see it as that he wasn’t worried about his politics being discussed: he was worried about his art being discussed as political.

Strand may or may not have been a clear political thinker. When he’s making his art, he’s making it as a reader of literature and poetry. He had strong political commitments that, in my view, were not welded to a certain political party. I think it’s inaccurate to say that Strand is a communist or he’s a socialist. He was on the left and he embraced a wide range of left ideas. That’s about as precise as we can get about his political views. He was absolutely sympathetic to communism, there’s no question, but to say that and leave it at that confuses the matter. I think the way he would have explained it, although he never did, is that his choice of subjects was of course influenced by his worldview and his politics, but his art was about a broader set of issues.

AP: I wonder where in the exhibition, getting this bigger picture of his work, that might be clearer now.

PB: The way I look at his later projects is that he’s more interested in issues of time and history, and certainly the contemporary moment. For instance, in the New England work, I think he’s really interested in American democracy when he makes those pictures, but he’s thinking of American democracy from the beginning until the current moment of the 1940s. His projects in France and Luzzara are very much about the contemporary moment in Europe right after World War II. But in the France work as with New England he looks back to the history of the country, whereas in Luzzara he’s resolutely in the moment of 1953. The heart of these projects, for me, ends up being more about everyday life than about his political views. I don’t want to completely unwind them from each other, because his politics are there, but I don’t think they are the driving force of his ideas.

AP: They are also very poetic. You mentioned that interest as well, in the book, with his use of literature as both in collaborations with Claude Roy and as source material from poets like Whitman– what do you think led to that connection so often? Poetry specifically.

PB: There’s also the folk music traditions of the Hebrides islands [in Scotland] which sparked his interest in going there to some degree. He heard a BBC radio program produced by Alan Lomax about folk music, specifically Gaelic folk songs, in the Hebrides that Lomax had recorded. Strand is interested in the survival of this tradition but he’s much more interested in the broad contemporary moment of these people who live at an extreme edge of Western Europe. So his interest in poetry and music and folk culture is a part of that. In that case, it was an immediate event: he heard the program and wanted to go there.

In other cases, his interest in literature or a certain writer develops for a long time. In Luzzarra in 1953, he finally realizes this long ambition to make a work of art about a single village. This comes from early-twentieth-century American literature, people like Sherwood Anderson or Edgar Lee Masters, where they had fictional works that revolve around the voices of different people in a town. The other thing is that Strand was excited by the aesthetics and the ethics of neorealist cinema and filmmakers in Italy, some of whom were also interested in the same American literary models. So Strand has been thinking for a long time that he’d like to make a work of art about a single village, and then he becomes somewhat close to a group of the neorealists who are making the now celebrated films in Italy. Their aesthetic and sensibility about what they wanted these films to do, which was to speak to a broad and contemporary audience very directly, were perfectly in line with what Strand wanted for his photographs. It’s hard to unravel this question because every time Strand uses a literary model he uses it for different reasons and it merges with what is going on specifically in a given project. But it’s true if you look at his books that many of them do include poetry—in fact, maybe all of them, except Luzzarra, have poems as part of the text.

Collaborating was really important to Strand for his books. He would produce the photographs and then collaborate with a writer who either wrote or selected texts for the book. He saw the two things as very distinct, but I’m sure that he and each writer he worked with influenced each other a lot, in terms of selections of images and texts.

Paul Strand, White Fence, Port Kent, New York, 1916 (negative); 1945 (print). © Paul Strand Archive/Aperture Foundation

I want to say one thing that goes back to your first question. One thing I love about the exhibition is that you can really trace one of the core things about Strand, which is the importance of place and photography’s special ability to record details of time and place. His later work is all about that, what he would call these “portraits of places” where he spends a lot of time and goes in depth to a very deep representation of places that, I think, he always thought of as modern, even if they don’t always look modern in the way that we use the term. If you go back to the beginning of his work, even as early as his Cubist abstractions in 1916, which he made in Connecticut, you see his attention to the details of place. You see it in those abstractions: you see it in the picture White Fence, Port Kent, which was made that same year. He even said later that the picture was the beginning of New England for him.

Then you see it again when he goes to Maine in the summers of 1927 and ’28. It’s pretty clear that he was making those photographs as individual nature studies. I think his idea was to use a very sophisticated and modern machine, his camera, to make pictures of organic and natural subjects, because those were the two elements that he felt had to be in a photographic work of art at the moment. In interviews many years later, he says that looking at those pictures from Maine from those two summers, he realized that they gave a specificity of place, about the coast of Maine for instance, so that you knew you were looking at things that really described that place specifically. It’s a very slow process for him. He’s always interested in this ability to describe place, but he gradually figures out the layered ways that photography does that. By the time that you get to his photobooks, starting with Time in New England, he has a really sophisticated approach to time and place.

AP: Right, and I did want to briefly talk about Mexico as a turning point as well, which was a place where portraiture comes more into Strand’s work and continues into his New England project.

PB: Mexico is really crucial, but I see it as a transitional moment, as I see all of the ’20s and early ’30s as transitional for Strand. He’s making incredible work where he is figuring out what he wants the camera to do: he is incredibly ambitious for photography as an art form, and he wants it to match the achievements of painting. Mexico is a crucible moment for multiple reasons. Things in his personal life have shifted drastically: he hasn’t broken from Stieglitz, but they have come to a very cordial parting of the ways, his marriage to Rebecca fails, and he’s very upset about the Great Depression. It’s clear from reading his letters that, while he was always a man of the left, this is the historical moment when he becomes much more politicized because of the economic inequities that are exposed by the Depression. He’s thinking about all of this while in Mexico, and I think if you look at his street portraits from 1916, that when he resumes portraiture in Mexico that he is going back to that work from 1916. He hadn’t tried to make pictures like that for more than fifteen years, in part because that mode of working was so uncomfortable for him. He was a very methodical artist—we’ve already talked about his deliberate staging—and he couldn’t do that with anonymous focused portraiture.

I see the Mexico portraits as a return to this body of work that he felt was very important and powerful from 1916, although he has a much more sophisticated way of making those pictures in Mexico. In my interpretation he’s much more politicized at this time in his way of thinking and is thinking about the social or economic differences between himself and his subjects, possibly. Where Strand always gets with his portraiture, even in 1916, is that he focuses so intently on details—on people’s expressions, their postures, their clothing—that he brings you right through social documentary to grappling with these subjects as individuals. That’s a very powerful factor of his portraiture from the beginning to the end, and that’s one way that you see how politics aren’t as central as some critics will have it. He has a way of making these portraits that makes you think of these people as ones with histories of their own, which have people shaped by historical events.

AP: Anything else you’d like to add?

PB: I think earlier exhibitions of his work have sometimes been guilty of evading his political views because they are controversial or because curators don’t know what to do with them. Our approach has been to foreground his political views to the extent that they are a part of the story of who Strand was and how he approached the world. But I think political art didn’t work perfectly for him. His way of working was too methodical and slow and had too many layers of literary meaning and narrative that take you outside of politics.

We want the exhibition to be very candid about Strand’s politics. We want his political views, as far as we know them and understand them, to be clear because they did inform his worldview. But I would insist that his later projects are not illustrations of his political ideas: they are much more complicated than that.

Paul Strand – Photography and Film  for the 20th Century runs through May 17 at the Fotomuseum Winterthur, Zurich, Switzerland. 

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6 Photography Exhibitions to See This Month

Wolfgang Tillmans, Book for Architects, 2014. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, New York, Maureen Paley, London, Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris, Galerie Buchholz, Cologne/Berlin

Francesca Woodman, Untitled, New York (N.407), 1979. Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery

Installation view of Shadows, 2014. Courtesy Galerie Lelong

Anonymous, Untitled, Green Hill School, Chehalis, WA. Made by young prisoner. Courtesy Steve Davis

Josh Begley, Facility 492

Willi Ruge, Seconds Before Landing; from the series I Photograph Myself during a Parachute Jump, 1931. Courtesy The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Thomas Walther

 Six photography exhibitions to see in New York in March.

1. Wolfgang Tillmans, Book for Architects, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York:

On view for the first time since its showing at the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale, Book for Architects is an installation made up of ten-years-worth of 450 photographs from 37 countries on five continents. The presentation, however, is less overwhelming than it sounds: the images play in a site-specific, two-channel video shown on perpendicular walls. Through July 5

2. Francesca Woodman, I’m trying my hand at fashion photography, at Marian Goodman Gallery, New York:

For those who can’t have too much of Fashion Week—or perhaps prefer to take a subtler approach—Marian Goodman has mounted a show of Woodman’s experiments with fashion photography. Taken between 1978 and 1980 while she lived in New York City, the photographs manifest style in their quietness, and even their obscurities: cropped frames, blurred faces, bodies sliced by shadow. Through March 13

3. Alfredo Jaar, Shadows, at Galerie Lelong, New York: 

Jaar’s latest exhibition, while not strictly photography, sources from Koen Wessing’s photobook Chili, September 1973, a wordless document narrated by images from the month of Chile’s military coup. Wessing, who died in 2011, was one of only a few international photographers to witness the conflict. The show includes illuminated images taken from the book that lead to a large light installation of two silhouetted figures from one of Wessing’s photographs, the anonymous figures symbolizing the many nameless causalities of war and oppression. Through March 28

4. Vera Lutter at Gagosian Gallery, New York:

Recent photographs by Vera Lutter take New York City as subject, namely the changing views from her apartment, which she turned into a pinhole camera. Projecting the outside world onto photo-sensitive paper, Lutter exposed images for days, weeks, even months, for an aptly temporal rendering of the city. Through March 7

5. Prison Obscura at the New School, New York: 

This exhibition offers glimpses of the world in and around the country’s many prisons. From aerial views of compounds to intimate portraits of inmates, the photographs on view reflect the unseen facets of a system which, while constantly debated, is almost entirely hidden from view. Through April 17

6.  Modern Photographs from the Thomas Walther Collection, 1909–1949, at MoMA:

This sprawling exhibition gathers more than three hundred photographs from perhaps the most experimental moment in photo history, as the street, architecture, abstraction, and figuration played roles in art photography as never before. The private collection of the German-born photography collector is now on view for the first time, with images from the likes of Berenice Abbott, André Kertész, El Lissitzky, László Moholy-Nagy, Aleksandr Rodchenko, Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, Maurice Tabard, Umbo, and Edward Weston, just to name a few. The four-year-long collaborative exhibition sets off the Thomas Walther Collection Project, which includes the extensive research and conservation project Object:Photo, which can be accessed online here. Through April 19

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A Q&A on the 2015 Aperture Summer Open

The call for entries is now open for the 2015 Summer Open, Aperture’s second open-submission exhibition for which all photographers are eligible. Entries for the Summer Open will be accepted until Wednesday, April 8, 2015, at 12:00 noon eastern time. Entrants must bea current Aperture Foundation Member, through April 10, 2015, OR an Aperture magazine print subscriber through the Summer issue, or #219. The theme this year is Black Mirror, and will be curated by Aperture magazine editor Michael Famighetti: he recently spoke with Aperture Foundation’s executive director, Chris Boot, about the inspirations for this year’s theme and the selection process. This article also appears in Issue 1 of the Aperture Photography App: click here to read more and download the app.

Chris Boot: Last year I selected the work featured in what was our first Aperture Summer Open.The exhibition turned out to be very light, and playful, because that reflected the work that was submitted. This year, as curator, you seem interested in the opposite. Tell us where that came from. Do you think the future is dark?

Michael Famighetti: The theme suggests a dark point of view, but there’s plenty of room for playful work. Science fiction is packed with play and humor, even if it’s a gallows humor. The idea came from the show Black Mirror, which I think is a clever take on a future that feels just removed from the present, a time when technology defines our lives in an ominous way. The show’s title is, for me, a photographic reference: The “black mirror” is a screen turned off. I liked that the show got at how ubiquitous screens and images shape our lives today, and, of course, the metaphor of photography as a “mirror” goes back a long way. Is the future dark? I hope not, but the present is certainly strange and troubled. Another reference for the show was an article I read by Rebecca Solnit about now being 30 years beyond Orwell’s imagined 1984 where she articulates how the present feels stranger than societies portrayed in classics of science fiction, like films by Ridley Scott or stories by Philip K. Dick.

CB: Why Black Mirror, specifically? I haven’t seen the British TV show that the title references. Are you hooked on it?

MF: I really saw the show as being about photography, or at least media and an image-based culture. The image, at least in the context of this show, is ingrained in our lives, often in a sinister way. One could certainly submit work even if you’ve never seen the show. The theme is specific but potentially encapsulates a wide range of subjects, which works well for an open call.

CB: What kind of pictures are you hoping to see?

MF: A broad range—this topic can be spun in many different directions and explored through many approaches to photography, whether documentary or more art-based. I would like to see some projects that address the place of technology in our lives, of course, but projects could relate to the economy, social media, surveillance, the environment, time travel and space, or even Edward Snowden. Photographers might look at their work and think, “Oh, I could edit something I have to dovetail with this.” Mostly I’d like to be surprised by what’s submitted and to end up with a selection that captures the strangeness of 2015.

CB: It sounds like what the future looks like in photographs, in your mind, is partly foreboding, but in a way sexy, too. Is that fair? Can you give me some examples of work that you’ve been excited by, out in the world, that fit this theme?

MF: Speculations on the future should be seductive even if they can be disquieting. In terms of some recent work that we’ve published, or that I’ve seen, that could relate to this theme, there’s Thomas Dworzak’s Instagram Scrapbooks; Andrew Norman Wilson’s project on the scanners used to create Google’s library; Lucas Foglia’s documentation of communities gone off the grid; Mishka Henner’s work; and Martin Lange’s pictures of machines in high-tech labs, that are complicated to the point of comedy.

CB: How does this project relate to your work as editor of the magazine?

MF: We’re constantly building out new themes for the magazine and trying to see as much work as possible, so the open call here could help feed future issues of the magazine as well. Even if work doesn’t end up in the show, I hope to uncover things that may make sense for something else down the road. We’ll be closely looking at everything submitted.

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On The Nature of Photographs

Stephen Shore, West Third Street, Parkersburg, West Virginia, May 16, 1974, from Stephen Shore: Survey (Aperture, 2014) © Stephen Shore, courtesy 303 Gallery, New York

The following excerpt comes from a conversation published in Aperture magazine in 2007 (#186) between writer Luc Sante and Stephen Shore, on Shore’s The Nature of Photographs (1998). Today the book is considered a primer for those who wish to read the visual language of a photograph, from negatives to found Polaroids to images on a screen. Their conversation provides an insight into Shore’s thinking behind the original publication with Sante, one of photography’s foremost critics. The photographs that accompany this interview appear in Stephen Shore: Survey, published by Aperture in 2014, which features more than 250 images from Shore’s six-decade-long career, one that serves as an important reference point in the story of photography. This article also appears in Issue 1 of the Aperture Photography App: click here to read more and download the app. 

Luc Sante: I want to ask you about a particular sentence on the first page of the book: “The print has a physical dimension; it is not a true plane.”

Stephen Shore: What I mean is that it’s a piece of paper. The image has a picture plane—but a true plane exists in only two dimensions, and a piece of paper has three dimensions. I wanted to emphasize that it is an object, and that on the object there is an image. The image is an illusion that’s embedded in a physical object.

LS: At one point in the book, referring to Nicholas Nixon’s image Friendly, West Virginia, you write that Nixon solves a picture, rather than composes one. Could you elaborate on that distinction?

SS: “Composition” seems to me to be a term borrowed from painting. A vocabulary was developed in the critique of painting, and then along came a new medium that also takes place on a flat rectangle—and so photography borrowed those terms. The word “composition” comes from the Latin root componere, which means “to put together.” It is the Latin complement of the Greek root of the word “synthesis.” With a painting, you’re taking basic building blocks and making something that’s more complex than what you started with. It is a synthetic process. A photograph does the opposite: it takes the world, and puts an order on it, simplifies it. It is an analytic process.

LS: The propositions in this book are a bit like Zen koans, and sometimes they make me want a little more—as when you contrast an Eggleston picture with your picture of El Paso—and you talk about how one is an open composition and the other is enclosed.

SS: I am talking about framing. In some images, the frame acts as the end of the picture. I may want to take a portrait of you, and I decide where your face is going to go in the picture, and then I’m aware of the frame. The picture simply has to end somewhere, and I make a decision about where that is. But often with the view camera, the frame is not the end but the beginning of the picture. It’s as though the photographer starts with the frame and builds the picture in from the frame.

LS: You include a Japanese print in the book. I’ve been thinking about the Impressionists, specifically Degas, and how he learned from Japanese prints. . . . The Impressionists’ use of the frame seemed to anticipate photography. But obviously, the camera apparatus itself taught photographers with no background about the semi-arbitrary nature of framing.

SS: Degas was also taking photographs—so as an artist, he could have learned both from the Japanese print and from photography. John Szarkowski talks about the Japanese and Chinese scroll tradition: you turn the scrolls to see the image pass by, so you see an infinite number of framings—the way a photographer going out in the world sees an infinite number of framings.

LS: I was surprised by the picture by Thomas Annan in the book—of the alley with the small black square. It seems so startlingly modern: it’s about that small black square, about geometry and texture and plane as well as volume, in a way that’s astounding for a mid-nineteenth-century image. It brings to mind another picture in the book, by Berenice Abbott, Department of Docks, New York City, 1936, which, you say, “uses structural devices to emphasize deep space but has a shallow mental space.” Are you referring to more than simply this kind of imaginary refocusing that we do when looking at certain photographs?

SS: The Abbott is an interesting example, because it clearly depicts deep space from the foreground, maybe eight feet away, to the sky. But when I look at it and, let’s say, move my attention from the man in the suit in the foreground to the building behind him, I know that I’m looking at something farther away, but I don’t have that physical sensation of my eyes changing focus. Also in the book, there is a photograph by Frederick Sommer. The space it represents is only a few feet deep. When I look at that one, I have a tremendous sense of refocusing with my eyes. With Sommer, I would guess that that is a deliberate effect. With the Abbott, I don’t think it’s necessarily deliberate. I think that some photographs, simply by chance, have that quality of refocusing. I also use the Walker Evans picture of the gas station in the book. He’s so conscious of what he’s doing—he’s thinking about how this pole in the foreground relates to this gas station behind it in deep space in the real life, and how they also relate to each other sitting right on the picture plane.

LS: The Evans picture gets me thinking about metaphysics. This image is truly remarkable—it looks like a collage. The sky appears to float on a different plane, as though it were cut out from a different picture. You write: “This collaging appears when there is a difference in the degree of attention a photographer pays the different parts of this picture. For this to happen, the photographer needs to pay intense, clear, heightened attention to one part of the picture but not to another.” Which suggests that something in the physics of the photo-making process responds to desire, or to a kind of telepathy.

SS: I would put it in more matter-of-fact terms. Let’s say you’re going to take a picture of me. You’re aware of my face and my head and shoulders, and you’re deciding where you’re going to put the frame—the frame relates to what you’re paying attention to. But what if you realize that you weren’t paying attention to the room behind me? As soon as you’re aware of what’s behind me, as well as me, you make a different framing decision. The frame resonates off of what you pay attention to. So it’s not exactly metaphysical.

LS: Can you explain what relationship “mental modeling,” as you call it, has to what one might call the “signature style” of an artist?

SS: If the signature style is something genuine, something inherent, as opposed to a stylization imposed on one’s work, mental modeling is simply the natural inclination of that photographer. There has been this idea in photography of pre-visioning (to use Weston’s term), which is having a mental image of the picture. The image an experienced photographer has in mind, whether it be conscious or unconscious, can guide all the little decisions that go into making a picture. It becomes the coordinating factor. With “mental modeling,” I’m talking about making that conscious, becoming aware of it as an image, and not simply seeing out your eyes like out a window.

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Queer Aperture #218 – Editors’ Note

The following note first appeared in Aperture magazine #218, Spring 2015. Subscribe here to read it first, in print or online.

 

Minor White, Tom Murphy, San Francisco, 1948, No. 8 from the series The Temptation of St. Anthony Is Mirrors, sequenced 1948 © Trustees of Princeton University, and courtesy the Minor White Archive, Princeton University Art Museum

Minor White, Tom Murphy, San Francisco, 1948, No. 9 from the series The Temptation of St. Anthony Is Mirrors, sequenced 1948 © Trustees of Princeton University, and courtesy the Minor White Archive, Princeton University Art Museum

 

Why an issue on queer photography? The going narrative states that, after the culture wars of the early 1990s, we moved into an era in which sexual difference mattered progressively less, when the fight against AIDS no longer defined the gay community, and when same-sex marriage had been approved in many parts of the United States and in a handful of countries around the world. But considering the volume of recent photography we’ve encountered that is pointedly engaged with questions of queer identity and experiences—as well as work by curators and writers who are revisiting past figures and projects—it seems that queer is back on the agenda, or rather, that it never left. The public conversation about what it means to be queer (which arguably began with Stonewall in 1969) has evolved and remains not only relevant but also necessary to continue. As photographer Catherine Opie notes, “Queer photographers these days are not necessarily identifying in singular identity terms; they are interested in being part of a political discourse about how radically life has changed over the past three decades.”

One radical difference is globalization. Thirty years ago, in an effort to make her own community visible, American photographer Joan E. Biren traveled the United States and Canada presenting a slide-show history of photography foregrounding lesbians as both artist and subject. Today, Zanele Muholi cites Biren’s groundbreaking project as a key influence on her ongoing work to create a visual record of South Africa’s lesbian community, many of whom have suffered discrimination and violence. Such cross-generational dialogue threads this issue as younger photographers probe the past to engage queer archives and histories. Dean Sameshima appropriates old physique and cruising imagery from a time of secret codes and clandestine existence, a period the artist himself never experienced. This time was one that San Francisco–based photographer Hal Fischer codified in his 1977 project Gay Semiotics, revisited in these pages.

Kevin Moore introduces David Benjamin Sherry’s brashly colored landscapes, which invoke iconic American photographers, including Carleton Watkins, Edward Weston, and Minor White, Aperture’s founding editor. The subject of White’s sexuality was explored in last year’s Getty Museum exhibition that featured the little-known 1948 handmade book, The Temptation of St. Anthony Is Mirrors, an early homoerotic series of White’s student-model. Two images from this project appear above, and on the occasion of this issue, we have republished Moore’s 2008 essay, “Cruising and Transcendence in the Photographs of Minor White,” on our website (aperture.org/minorwhite218).

Queer perspectives continue to offer essential counterpoints to the dominant heteronormative (and patriarchal) paradigm. Vince Aletti sums this idea up best in his contribution when he writes: “Queer doesn’t have a look, a size, a sex. Queer resists boundaries and refuses to be narrowly defined.” This idea is evident in A.L. Steiner’s anarchic collages, which playfully grapple with our moment of economic and environmental crisis, in K8 Hardy’s series of self-portraits that confound gendered tropes and play with conventions of fashion photography, and in Shannon Michael Cane’s survey of queer independent publishing. And working in a very different sociopolitical and cultural context, Ren Hang, a young Chinese photographer whose work appears on our cover, has garnered a following in his country while stirring controversy. In his raw, playful images, nudity is the norm, and sexual preference and gender begin to feel irrelevant. While Hang doesn’t identify as part of a specific queer scene or movement in China (and the term queer doesn’t entirely translate there), his provocative and weirdly beautiful images seem to be emblematic of the contemporary idea that gender and sexuality are fluid—pointing toward a future (and, for some, a present) in which traditional dichotomies of gender and sexuality no longer apply.

—The Editors

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Aperture #218 – Editors’ Note appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

From the Earth to the Moon: Vintage NASA Photographs

Buzz Aldrin, First self-portrait in space, Gemini 12, November 1966. All photographs courtesy Bloomsbury London

James McDivitt, First US Spacewalk, Ed White’s EVA over New Mexico, Gemini 4, 3 June 1965

Edgar Mitchell, Alan Shepard and the American flag, Apollo 14, February 1971

William Anders, First Earthrise seen by human eyes, Apollo 8, December 1968

Walter Cunningham, Florida Peninsula looking East, Apollo 7, October 1968

Clyde Holliday, The first photograph from space, October 24, 1946

Buzz Aldrin, The only clear photograph of Neil Armstrong on the Moon, Apollo 11, July 1969

Harrison Schmitt, Portrait of astronaut Eugene Cernan, explorer of another world, Apollo 17, December 1972

Pete Conrad, Alan Bean with the reflection of the photographer in his visor, EVA 2, Apollo 12 November 1969

Walter Schirra, On-board portrait of astronaut Walter Cunningham, Apollo 7, October 1968

By Paula Kupfer

Since the start of space exploration, cameras have been an elemental carry-on for extraterrestrial voyages, on both manned and unmanned spacecraft. According to Hasselblad, at least twelve Electronic Data Cameras of their manufacture rest on the surface on the moon, taken into space by astronauts and later shed for their weight. The film they contained was brought back to Earth for developing, but despite the wondrous quality of the photographs, many were kept for decades at NASA’s archives, available only to specialized researchers. Many remained heretofore unpublished. Now a wealth of photographic gems from the early decades of space explorations is on view at Bloomsbury London in From the Earth to the Moon: Vintage NASA Photographs, where the over six hundred vintage prints will be auctioned on February 26. The expansive lot includes photographs spanning the Mercury, Gemini, and Lunar Orbiter as well as the famed Apollo missions, and features a vintage gelatin-silver print of the “first photograph from space” from 24 October 1946, taken by a 35-mm camera developed by Clyde Holliday and fitted on the 13th V-2 missile launched from the New Mexico desert. Vintage color prints of astronauts floating in space on EVA (extravehicular activity) from the Gemini 11 and 12 voyages are particularly stunning, as are the collages of lunar craters, mosaics of black-and-white photographs arranged into one “panoramic” view. As Sarah Wheeler, head of photographs at Bloombury Auctions, said, “these photographs are more than merely documentary, many are simply sublime.”

Paula Kupfer is managing editor of Aperture magazine.

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Brian Dillon on Conflict, Time, Photography

Luc Delahaye, US Bombing on Taliban Positions, 2001 Courtesy Luc Delahaye & Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris/Bruxelles

Simon Norfolk, Bullet-scarred apartment building and shops in the Karte Char district of Kabul. This area saw fighting between Hikmetyar and Rabbani and then between Rabbani and the Hazaras, 2003 © Simon Norfolk

Ursula Schultz-Domburg, Kazakhstan. Opytnoe Pole. 2012 Courtesy the artist's studio © Ursula Schultz-Domburg

Jo Ractliffe
On the road to Cuito Cuanavale IV 2009
Hand-printed silver gelatin print
Courtesy the artist

An-My Lê, Untitled, Hanoi, 1995. Courtesy the artist and Murray Guy, New York

Chloe Dewe Matthews, from Shot at Dawn, 2013 © Chloe Dewe Matthews

This article first appeared in Issue 1 of the Aperture Photography App: click here to read more and download the app. 

The title of this conceptual survey of war-derived imagery does not exactly describe a thematic cluster, rather a strict chronology: the event itself, a certain duration, followed by the act of photography. The image is captured at a greater or lesser remove: from two minutes after the fact to a distance of almost a century. The works at Tate Modern were organized according to their immediacy or belatedness: rapid responses at the start of the show, slowing by the end to examples of distant historical recovery or invocation.

In the first room were Toshio Fukada’s photographs of the mushroom cloud at Hiroshima, taken just twenty minutes after the detonation of the atom bomb. They show a raging mass, framed by leaves and branches in the foreground, that is quite unlike familiar test-site imagery. At the furthest temporal remove from historical reference, Chloe Dewe Mathews’s series Shot at Dawn (2013) records the places where soldiers were executed for cowardice or desertion during the First World War: nondescript stretches of misty early-morning countryside, once soaked in blood and shame.

Such extremes might imply that Tate curator Simon Baker’s chronological schema was simply a way of pitching photographic immediacy—the sort of reportorial proximity for which war photographers are often celebrated—against the long, slow translation of catastrophe into memory and monuments. In fact, the curatorial device had the effect of confusing timescales in surprising and resonant ways.

Historical distance may bring greater intimacy: Hitler’s headquarters in occupied Poland reveals itself as a bright and bristling ruin in Jerzy Lewczyński’s Wolf Lair series of 1960. Hiroshima and Nagasaki return time and again in the works of Japanese photographers such as Shomei Tomatsu and Kikuji Kawada, who recast the original trauma in terms of landscape, portraiture or still-life studies from the archaeology of disaster. In the late 1950s, architect and urbanist Paul Virilio photographed the sci-fi wreckage of the Nazis’ Atlantic Wall fortifications; the same structures return, filtered now through the fiction of J. G. Ballard and the history of Brutalist architecture, in large-scale photographs by Jane and Louise Wilson.

For the most part Conflict, Time, Photography dealt in series and not in the single compelling or appalling image. (Exceptions included Don McCullin’s Shell-shocked US Marine, Vietnam, Hué (1968): photographed, as the exhibition’s wall text reminded us, ‘moments later’.) Many of the pictures were drawn from well-known books: Ernst Friedrich’s War Against War (1924), Richard Peter’s Dresden: A Camera Accuses (1949). Between these earlier photobooks and later conceptually minded grids of uniformly formatted images—such as Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin’s blown-up fragments from a Belfast archive in People in Trouble Laughing Pushed to the Ground (2011)—there was a sense of unsettling stasis across the historical span of the exhibition: from the Crimean War to contemporary Iraq and Afghanistan.

It was a textural shock, then, to enter a portion of the show drawn from the holdings of the Archive of Modern Conflict and find that the curators of this vast and eccentric collection had exhibited mostly discrete, often absurd, and energetically salon-hung works. There were German helmets piled by a canal in apparent homage to Roger Fenton’s famous Crimean cannonballs, Frank Capa’s skewed and monstrous studies of soldiers in training, and a hilarious Rolex magazine advertisement featuring none other than Don McCullin, posed in the sort of heroic snapper mode that Conflict, Time, Photography had calmly undermined.

Brian Dillon is UK editor of Cabinet and teaches critical writing at the Royal College of Art. His most recent books are Objects in This Mirror: Essays (2014) and Ruin Lust (2014).

Conflict, Time, Photography runs at Tate Modern through March 15.

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“Photographing the Familiar” by Dorothea Lange and Daniel Dixon

This excerpt from Dorothea Lange and Daniel Dixon’s essay for Aperture magazine #2, from 1952, appears in The Aperture Magazine Anthology.

Photography today appears to be in a state of flight.

This is clearly a harsh judgment. Some will feel it to be a false judgment; others will think it clumsy or ill-considered. But still others may feel it to have merit. They, perhaps less devoutly enlisted in this or that photographic cause, may find in their uncertainties a reason to believe the judgment sound. Themselves in disorder, they may sense some design of a larger disorder. It is an effort to explain that design—and in the conviction that there can be found for disorder a remedy—that we say what we do: that photography appears to be in a state of flight.

But why flight? What in flight from? If in flight, what can be done?

To begin with, photography is still a very young technique—one that has found power and expression in the mastery of its own mechanics. This is not only true of photography. It applies to all young techniques—to the

steam engine and the camera alike. During the early years, all photographers were in a sense inventors, and photography as a field is still infant enough to have undeveloped in it some of the features of invention. Color,

for instance, is beginning now to assert itself as a photographic value; there is excited talk of a new dimension in the motion picture; in an age perhaps more than any other dedicated to techniques, science presents to the photographic technician a challenge more important than any he has had to face before.

But, on the whole, the day is gone when the photographer could find in exploration of his equipment the expression he sought. Settled to a different pace, technical advance has permitted the photographer to catch up. The ranges of technique have been largely conquered; and that exploration ended, the photographer must seek another.

Now it is no accident that the photographer becomes a photographer any more than the lion tamer becomes a lion tamer. Just as there is a necessary element of hazard in one, in the other is a necessary element of

the mechanical. For better or for worse, the destiny of the photographer is bound up with the destinies of a machine. In this alliance is presented a very special problem. Ours is a time of the machine, and ours is a need

to know that the machine can be put to creative human effort. If it is not, the machine can destroy us. It is within the power of the photographer to help prohibit this destruction, and help make the machine an agent of more

good than of evil. Though not a poet, nor a painter, nor a composer, he is yet an artist, and as an artist undertakes not only risks but responsibility. And it is with responsibility that both the photographer and his machine are brought to their ultimate tests. His machine must prove that it can be endowed with the passion and the humanity of the photographer; the photographer must prove that he has the passion and the humanity with which to endow the machine.

This certainly is one of the great questions of our time. Upon such an endowment of the mechanical device may depend not only the state of the present but the prospects of the future. The photographer is privileged that it is a question which in his work he can help to answer.

But does he?

Unfortunately, very often not. For in his natural zeal to master his craft, he has too long relied upon the technical to engage his energies. Now the technical has relaxed its challenge, he is often left with the feeling that there is nowhere to go. He is lost; he is confused; he is bewildered. Accustomed to discovery, now suddenly he is obliged to interpret.

Click here to read more and download the Aperture Photography App. 

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Archive: “Photographing the Familiar” by Dorothea Lange and Daniel Dixon

This excerpt from Dorothea Lange and Daniel Dixon’s essay for Aperture magazine #2, from 1952, appears in The Aperture Magazine Anthology.

Photography today appears to be in a state of flight.

This is clearly a harsh judgment. Some will feel it to be a false judgment; others will think it clumsy or ill-considered. But still others may feel it to have merit. They, perhaps less devoutly enlisted in this or that photographic cause, may find in their uncertainties a reason to believe the judgment sound. Themselves in disorder, they may sense some design of a larger disorder. It is an effort to explain that design—and in the conviction that there can be found for disorder a remedy—that we say what we do: that photography appears to be in a state of flight.

But why flight? What in flight from? If in flight, what can be done?

To begin with, photography is still a very young technique—one that has found power and expression in the mastery of its own mechanics. This is not only true of photography. It applies to all young techniques—to the

steam engine and the camera alike. During the early years, all photographers were in a sense inventors, and photography as a field is still infant enough to have undeveloped in it some of the features of invention. Color,

for instance, is beginning now to assert itself as a photographic value; there is excited talk of a new dimension in the motion picture; in an age perhaps more than any other dedicated to techniques, science presents to the photographic technician a challenge more important than any he has had to face before.

But, on the whole, the day is gone when the photographer could find in exploration of his equipment the expression he sought. Settled to a different pace, technical advance has permitted the photographer to catch up. The ranges of technique have been largely conquered; and that exploration ended, the photographer must seek another.

Now it is no accident that the photographer becomes a photographer any more than the lion tamer becomes a lion tamer. Just as there is a necessary element of hazard in one, in the other is a necessary element of

the mechanical. For better or for worse, the destiny of the photographer is bound up with the destinies of a machine. In this alliance is presented a very special problem. Ours is a time of the machine, and ours is a need

to know that the machine can be put to creative human effort. If it is not, the machine can destroy us. It is within the power of the photographer to help prohibit this destruction, and help make the machine an agent of more

good than of evil. Though not a poet, nor a painter, nor a composer, he is yet an artist, and as an artist undertakes not only risks but responsibility. And it is with responsibility that both the photographer and his machine

are brought to their ultimate tests. His machine must prove that it can be endowed with the passion and the humanity of the photographer; the photographer must prove that he has the passion and the humanity with which

to endow the machine.

This certainly is one of the great questions of our time. Upon such an endowment of the mechanical device may depend not only the state of the present but the prospects of the future. The photographer is privileged that it is a question which in his work he can help to answer.

But does he?

Unfortunately, very often not. For in his natural zeal to master his craft, he has too long relied upon the technical to engage his energies. Now the technical has relaxed its challenge, he is often left with the feeling that there is nowhere to go. He is lost; he is confused; he is bewildered. Accustomed to discovery, now suddenly he is obliged to interpret.

This article first appeared on the Aperture Photography App. Click here to

Click here to read more and download the Aperture Photography App. 

The post Archive: “Photographing the Familiar” by Dorothea Lange and Daniel Dixon appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.