Aperture's Blog, page 164

Amy Elkins and Jona Frank at De Soto Gallery

Jona Frank, James, Wirral Boxing Club, 2013

Amy Elkins, Ludwig, Age 12, 6th year in the Royal Danish Ballet School, 2012. Courtesy of the artist and De Soto Gallery

Amy Elkins, Lucas, Age 12, 6th year in the Royal Danish Ballet School, Copenhagen, 2012. Courtesy of the artist and De Soto Gallery

Jona Frank, Kyle, Wirral Boxing Club, 2013

An exhibition of photographs by Amy Elkins and Jona Frank at De Soto Gallery juxtaposes images of boy dancers and boxers, as the show’s title suggests, “In Position.” The show examines these small slices of life within specialized sports, as both photographers seek to pinpoint the disciplines’ particular physicality and traditions among young men. Elkins’s photographs come from her Danseur project, in which she documents Danish dancers studying with the top academies, the Royal Danish Ballet and Danse Hallerne. Frank has chosen young boxers as the subject for The Modern Kids, taken at gyms in Northern England.

Ballet represents a high-class entertainment typically embodied by women, while boxing is typically seen as a more masculine, lower class pursuit– but the images, together, aim to present a unified image of young masculinity among those whose bodies define their pursuit, or their art. Both sets of photographs offer alternately vulnerable and defiant portraits of young men wearing the signs and scars of their sport: A boy dancer’s pale blue leotard is dappled with sweat; a young muscular boxer peers out at us certainly from a half-closed black eye. The photographs catch glimpses of the athletes on the edge of adulthood, capturing every detail: from sweat to freckles to a sly smirk with precise detail. Moreover, the portraits present a take on male identity as captured by female photographers. Frank and Elkins (whose “Black is the Day, Black is the Night,” just finished its run at Aperture’s gallery this week) here offer a contemporary look at how young men express themselves both in their physical pursuits and in front of the camera.

 

“In Position” runs through February 28 at De Soto Gallery, in Venice, California. 

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War photographers and reporters on “Telling Afghanistan”

On Wednesday night at the Brooklyn Brewery, a group of photographers and reporters held up a mirror to how and why they report in conflict zones around the world, namely the war in Afghanistan. The panel, moderated by journalist and Restrepo director Sebastian Junger, included novelist and veteran Elliot Ackerman (Green on Blue), reporter Jennifer Percy (Demon Camp), and Magnum photographer Peter van Agtmael (Disco Night Sept. 11). The event was held by Reporters Instructed in Saving Colleagues (RISC), founded after the death of photojournalist Tim Hetherington in Libya in 2011. Though focused on Afghanistan, the panel offered a window into how conflict reporters grapple with the complicated consequences of working in the midst of war.

Junger opened the panel by asking if there’s an inherent attraction to war among those who cover it. Ackerman, who served five tours in Iraq and Afghanistan and drew from his time there to write his new novel, explained the drive to be in extreme situations. “That sense of purpose is like meth,” said Ackerman of young soldiers and journalists in war, who are, “freebasing the crystal meth of purpose.” When it came to attacks, he added, “My biggest fear was that I wouldn’t be there.” Van Agtmael offered perspectives on gathering images in dangerous conditions. “It’s something I can believe in besides its complications,” he said. “Photojournalism is an instinctual path.” Percy spoke about her experience reporting her new book, which tracks the residual effects of war, such as post-traumatic stress disorder. “There’s always that artifice,” she said about her time in the field, “being a spectator, a reporter.”

Van Agtmael offered an anecdote about sending the first edits of his book to a friend, who charged that he had too narrowly focused on American troops. “You see a slender reality as a photographer,” van Agtmael said. “That’s what I had access to, but I was filled with shame that she was right.” The panelists also compared experiences from Iraq and Afghanistan, and embedded versus unembedded reporting in war zones. Van Agtmael described embedded life as being part of “Little America.” Ackerman asked, “Why was I there in the first place? The answer has nothing to do with the political,” later adding, “I regret that I had to make that choice.”

Tickets to the event benefitted RISC to continue training freelance journalists to prepare for potentially fatal situations, free of charge. More information can be found on the RISC website. A video presentation of the event will run on Slate next week.

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War photographers and reporters on “Telling Afghanistan” at the Brooklyn Brewery

On Wednesday night at the Brooklyn Brewery, a group photographers and reporters held up a mirror to how and why they report in conflict zones around the world, namely the war in Afghanistan. The panel, moderated by journalist and Restrepo director Sebastian Junger, included novelist and veteran Elliot Ackerman (Green on Blue), reporter Jennifer Percy (Demon Camp), and Magnum photographer Peter van Agtmael (Disco Night Sept. 11). The event was held by Reporters Instructed in Saving Colleagues (RISC), founded after the death of photojournalist Tim Hetherington in Libya in 2011. Though focused on Afghanistan, the panel offered a window into how conflict reporters grapple with the complicated consequences of working in the midst of war.

Junger opened the panel by asking if there’s an inherent attraction to war among those who cover it. Ackerman, who served five tours in Iraq and Afghanistan and drew from his time there to write his new novel, explained the drive to be in extreme situations. “That sense of purpose is like meth,” said Ackerman of young soldiers and journalists in war, who are, “freebasing the crystal meth of purpose.” When it came to attacks, he added, “My biggest fear was that I wouldn’t be there.” Van Agtmael offered perspectives on gathering images in dangerous conditions. “It’s something I can believe in besides its complications,” he said. “Photojournalism is an instinctual path.” Percy spoke about her experience reporting her new book, which tracks the residual effects of war, such as post-traumatic stress disorder. “There’s always that artifice,” she said about her time in the field, “being a spectator, a reporter.”

Van Agtmael offered an anecdote about sending the first edits of his book to a friend, who charged that he had too narrowly focused on American troops. “You see a slender reality as a photographer,” van Agtmael said. “That’s what I had access to, but I was filled with shame that she was right.” The panelists also compared experiences from Iraq and Afghanistan, and embedded versus unembedded reporting in war zones. Van Agtmael described embedded life as being part of “Little America.” Ackerman asked, “Why was I there in the first place? The answer has nothing to do with the political,” later adding, “I regret that I had to make that choice.”

Tickets to the event benefitted RISC to continue training freelance journalists to prepare for potentially fatal situations, free of charge. More information can be found on the RISC website. A video presentation of the event will run on Slate next week.

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Liz Deschenes at the Walker Art Center

All photographs: Installation view, Liz Deschenes: Gallery 7. Photo: Gene Pittman, 2014. Courtesy the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.

Liz Deschenes’s works exist as photographic objects and understanding of its realization at once. During the last three decades, Deschenes has sought to expand what defines the viewing of a photograph, her work inhabiting a space between image and sculpture. Over the years she has pared down the photograph to its most basic elements– paper, light, and chemical– and amplified them. Now, for a yearlong exhibition occupying the Walker Art Center’s seventh-floor gallery, Deschenes presents a large-scale installation, or “photographic intervention.” Of her work in the 2010 Whitney Biennial, she told BOMB Magazine, “What I am responding to is that photography is a translation of color and tones—a language.” Her aims are more abstract than traditional photography, she explained, often to “enable the viewer to see the inconstancy of the conditions of display, which are always at play but sometimes hard to see.”

In this most recent project, she shifts the contours of the room by letting in natural light and reorienting the layout with rectangular, colored panels, which consist of a combination of silvery photograms and digitally printed blue monochromes. She creates these photograms using a method for which she has become well known, in which she makes use of dim nighttime light on photosensitive paper, to be later washed with silver toner. Much like her new layout of the exhibition space itself, the result of the photograms depends on subtle shifts of light across space, here across surfaces. The other panels represent newer experiments with digital pigment printing on acrylic in various shades of blue. It’s an intervention in that the display’s parts alternately take in and reflect light, same as they intend to rearrange our movements. In that vein, Deschenes uses not just the materials of photography but also its usual setting for viewing– the show title, “Gallery 7,” is the original 1971 name for the gallery space, now called the Medtronic Gallery.

“Gallery 7″ is on view at the Walker Art Center, in Minneapolis, MN, through November 22.

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Matt Johnston on the Photobook Club

My interest and inquiry into photobooks truly began only five or so years ago. Martin Parr, Gerry Badger, and co. had already helped to further (or establish or even destroy, depending on who you spoke to) the economic and cultural value of the photobook, yet I was frustrated with the available discourse. So many works were highly regarded and touted as masterpieces with little thought of genuine discussion. I started the Photobook Club online as a platform for these discussions: a place to ask why The Americans is important, or what exactly it is about Yukichi Watabe’s A Criminal Investigation (2011) that merits a third printing in as many years.

It was evident early on, however, that these discussions of tactile and personal experiences did not always translate well to a digital space. This is not to say we cannot write about bookworks online, but that, for many, the informal round-table discussion of a traditional book group is both more encouraging and more responsive. With this in mind, I ran meet-ups at the university at which I teach, as well as outside the academy in London. As a testament to the desire for this sort of interaction, with support new groups started to form in cities all over the world.

It is within this large and engaged network that I have sent out two boxes of photobooks (one in 2013 and the other in 2014), received and passed on by any clubs or communities who have requested a stopover. The idea is to connect sometimes geographically distant communities through common works—in this case, a selection of chosen books. The distributed authorship of the Photobook Club project means that ownership and responsibility rests with individual groups, which is wonderful for diversity and creativity. I have noticed, however, that sometimes these groups can become satellites rather than nodes, working as standalones rather than seeing and exploiting the benefits of the meta-community of Photobook Clubs.

Although my report from the photobook fields is somewhat rosy, it is incomplete. While we are just now beginning to scratch beneath the surface of the photobook in the twenty-first century, with publications such as The PhotoBook Review as well as the recent opening of the PhotoBook Museum in Cologne, we still operate within a relatively small population. As I look now into the field, there are large voids into which the modern photobook has not ventured: non-arts-based education and mainstream narrative storytelling, primarily. How might books such as Jo Metson Scott’s The Grey Line (2013) be used in schools as an anchor for discussion? I plan now to work towards these needs with the Photobook Club.

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Matt Johnston is a photographer, educator, and researcher based in the UK. He has codeveloped several world-leading open photography classes at Coventry University, as well as working to promote and enable discussion around the physical photobook. He launched the Photobook Club in 2011.

photobookclub.org



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The Photobook Made Public Ramón Reverté in Conversation with Horacio Fernández

Illustration by Simone Rein.

Horacio Fernández can claim to have been one of the first key creators of both the visual vocabulary of books about books, and of an approach to a historiography of the field. Besides his seminal exhibition and book Fotografía pública/Photography in Print 1919–1939 (1999), he is also the author of two highly regarded volumes devoted to photobooks in both Latin America and Spain, as well as a prolific curator. I had the chance to speak to Fernández about how exhibiting photography in the widest sense has changed since his first exhibition, and how he foresees its future. Fernández has been a professor of the history of photography for several decades, which is evident in his candid, educated answers.— Ramón Reverté

Ramón Reverté: Fifteen years ago you curated the exhibition Fotografía pública/Photography in Print 1919–1939 at the Reina Sofía in Madrid. You have been something of a pioneer in the exhibition of photobooks. How has the exhibition of visual books changed since then?

Horacio Fernández: Fotografía pública was a challenge, owing, among other things, to a lack of precedent. The idea was to show photographic images printed in the form of books, magazines, and posters, mostly in glass cases, with covers or double pages on display. The exhibition also had a soundtrack, a collage of excerpts from speeches, music, and literary works put together by Pedro G. Romero. But there was a problem: the books and magazines themselves were not sufficiently visible. The worst thing was that you couldn’t examine the books, appreciate them as wholes, and this remains the principal problem in exhibitions of photobooks.

RR: There has really been a big change since then.

HF: In many exhibitions the photographs are framed like paintings and presented one after another in endless lines. It’s a boring model that only functions in a hallway,which is where photos have generally been hung until just recently. In the rooms of a museum, it is the walls that give the orders. Walls make it possible to separate the images, play with different heights and margins, and manipulate the lighting and the attention of the viewer. But photobooks are not photographs, so in an exhibition of photobooks it is not only space that counts. You also have to think in temporal terms. Reading a book means turning the pages; it’s an activity that involves the passage of time. When only a cover or double-page layout is on display, the experience is static, but what you need to aim for is a dynamic situation. In order to offer an experience with a temporal aspect, you have to deconstruct the photobook, showing it in sequence. For this, various formats are possible, such as using several unbound copies of the book to display consecutive pages, projecting the pages on a video screen, or reproducing them on paper. All of these techniques were used in the exhibitions The Latin American Photobook and Photobooks: Spain 1905–1977.

RR: In the end it is the sequence that defines a photobook.

HF: The sequence of images has to be the main content of the exhibition. If you show just a few photos or pages, you are being unfair to the book and modifying the intentions of the authors: the photographer, the designer, the editor. In the same way, it’s not fair to put a sculpture up against the wall: you need to be able to walk around it to appreciate it.

RR: You work with a lot of resources: books, magazines, photographs, reproductions, audiovisual aids. You also surprise the spectator, by “hanging” books, for example, and putting photos in glass cases. What are you trying to do when you exhibit books and photography?

HF: Museums are public spaces with valuable objects on display, always protected from visitors by panes of glass, guards, and alarms. The reading of a photobook, on the other hand, is a private , close-range activity, difficult to adapt to museum conventions, which tend to transform objects of everyday use into artworks that cannot be used or even touched. In the setup of Photobooks: Spain 1905–1977, a dialectic is established between the wall of the museum and the reading table. At the beginning of the exhibition the photobooks are laid out on glassed-in tables, as if they were documents complementing the photographs and projections on the wall. It seems the main focus of the exhibit is on the walls, but as the visitor continues, there are more and more tables to suggest a private reading experience, while some of the books are hung on the walls, as works of art usually are. Both María Fraile, the architect of this showing, and Jasmin Oezcebi, who did the setup of The Latin American Photobook, have worked to achieve the greatest possible transparency and proximity—not only visual, but tactile: our aim was for the books almost to be touched.

RR: When one is looking at an empty space, it can be difficult to imagine how an exhibition is going to look. Could you explain the procedure of starting from zero and setting up an exhibition in a given space?

HF: The process involved in an exhibition, like that of a book, is a collective task. The curator has to make some decisions, but even the list of works to be displayed has to be agreed on by the museum. In the case of a traveling exhibition, there has to be a flexible model: since each space determines the setup, the exhibition has to be modified again and again. Often the number of books on display needs to be reduced to function in the space. A very crowded exhibition becomes a sort of puzzle, where you can’t see the forest for the trees. In my opinion it is necessary to simplify, to give the viewer a chance to undertake as individual a reading of the works as possible.

RR: Another important question: how do you decide on the texts to be posted in the rooms? What do think of the relation of the object to the spectator?

HF: Some curators seem to think that all the visitors have PhDs in contemporary art and they end up excluding the greater part of the public. I believe the museum is a place for aesthetic experimentation, but also for learning. It is necessary therefore to use accessible language, with firsthand information, such as quotations from the artists themselves taken from their writing or interviews. It is also necessary to put the works in context and evaluate them—that is, to add a bit of art criticism to the information. The textual material should be discussed in detail with the whole team, for it tends to be assailed by some bitter enemies, above all didactic overkill and academic jargon. But oversimplifications are as common as pedantry.

RR: How do you imagine exhibitions of photobooks in the future?

HF: I would like to organize an exhibition devoted to a single photobook which would be at once a presentation and a study. I imagine a showing in which, on the one hand, you could see the entire photobook through a projection, and on the other, reproductions of the images in different sizes, documents related to the creation of the book, dummies and design proofs, monitors showing documentaries or interviews with the author and with critics, as well as other photobooks from before and after . . .

There are now books about books that approach this kind of history, but there has only been one exhibition of this kind, centered on Robert Frank’s The Americans. This will probably be one of the changes: instead of the usual retrospective exhibitions (with the customary whims of authors and curators, such as the curse of unpublished material and new discoveries), there will be coherent exhibitions of equally coherent sets of visual work—which is to say, of photobooks.

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Horacio Fernández is a curator of photography and photobook exhibitions, including Fotografía pública/Photography in Print 1919–1939 (1999–2000), The Latin American Photobook (2012–14), Manuel Àlvarez Bravo: A Cultural Biography (2012), and Photobooks: Spain 1905–1977 (2014)—the catalogue for which was short-listed for a 2014 PhotoBook Award.

Simone Rein is a Los Angeles-based illustrator and has a BFA in illustration from the School of Visual Arts. simonerein.com

 

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Ramón Reverté in Conversation with Horacio Fernández appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

Aperture Congratulates LaToya Ruby Frazier

LaToya Ruby Frazier, whose The Notion of Family was published by Aperture in 2014, has had a remarkable year. Along with being awarded a 2014 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, TED named her aSenior Fellow for 2015 in December; she will appear this year at TED2015, from March 16 to 20 in Vancouver. She has also been selected as a 2014 United States Artist Fellow. The Notion of Family is Frazier’s first book, and offers an exploration of the legacy of racism and economic decline in America’s small towns, as embodied by her hometown of Braddock, Pennsylvania. The work also considers the impact of that decline on the community and on her family, creating a statement both personal and truly political—an intervention in the histories and narratives of the region. Frazier has compellingly set her story of three generations—her Grandma Ruby, her mother, and herself—against larger questions of civic belonging and responsibility.

 

Click here to read more about The Notion of Family.

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Joe Purdy Visits Aperture (Video)

Joe Purdy stopped by Aperture to check in with executive director Chris Boot following his performance with photographer Alec Soth and musician Billy Bragg at our Aperture Open Road Benefit Party and Auction in October. For the multimedia performance, the three traveled along the Rock Island Line with filmmaker Isaac Gale, playing music and photographing along the way.

As they travelled, the group played impromptu shows, performing at each place they stopped, including a benefit held outside of Ferguson, Mississippi. Of the trip, Purdy recalls, “It’s been really inspiring and has sent me on a task of being less lazy as a person. . . . The people and the issues that we found in America have started to really influence my work. You could call it a political stance, but I just think of it more as a human stance.”

The group plans to continue traveling and performing together in 2015.

 

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David Solo on The Grand Tour: A Photobook Travelogue

As a collector, enthusiast, and supporter of photo- and artist books, I want to see and learn as much as I can about what’s being created now, as well as about books from the past. It seems like there are two or three photobook fairs, festivals, or other events nearly every weekend—especially in Europe—so there are lots of opportunities. While it’s certainly possible to find photobooks online these days (and I do), it still doesn’t compare with the fun of handling them; talking to the folks who make, study, sell, and collect them; and adding a few to the collection. Apart from when it’s time to pack the new acquisitions (and when my luggage hits the scales at check-in), it’s a pleasure. Here are a few of my highlights from the past six months:

Stray Books Festival, London, June 2014:

A mini festival held outdoors at Red Gallery and organized by Valentina Abenavoli and Alex Bocchetto of Akina Books. With a focus on self-publishing, the majority of tables were run by artists—a welcome change from larger publisher/seller-driven fairs. There was a very strong selection of material here I hadn’t seen before. straybooks.wordpress.com

Bushwick Art Book and Zine Fair, Brooklyn, June 2014:

The most recent incarnation of Sonel Breslav’s (of Blonde Art Books) event of mostly local artist- and writer-produced books and zines was held this year at SIGNAL, and included a number of interesting photobooks from the folks at Miniature Garden and NoWork. blondeartbooks.com

Kaleid 2014, London, July 2014:

The third installment of this curated event, organized by Victoria Browne, brought together artist-made books from Europe and included the launch of Liane Lang’s photobook object/project. The presence of photobooks at Kaleid has expanded and it’s a great forum to meet with most of the artists involved. kaleideditions.com

Megutama, Tokyo:

Not technically a book “event,” Megutama is remarkable nonetheless. This new cafe in Tokyo has a library of several thousand photobooks, available for browsing while you’re dining. megutama.com

Asia-Pacific Photobook Archive at RayKo Photo Center, San Francisco, August 2014:

A tweet one morning announced that the start of the Asia-Pacific Photobook Archive’s U.S. tour would take place in San Francisco that afternoon. I happened to be there, and it was a delight to see a number of books I didn’t know and meet both the folks from RayKo and from APPA, an Indie Photobook Library-inspired project based in Melbourne, Australia. photobookarchive.com

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David Solo is a Brooklyn-based collector of contemporary Asian art, photography, and especially photo- and artists’ books. He is also actively involved with a number of institutions and projects around these topics in the U.S., Europe, and Asia.

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Yannick Bouillis on Offprint Paris

From the beginning, Offprint Paris—a yearly art-publishing fair featuring books, CDs, records, magazines, zines, and posters by emerging artists, photographers, and graphic designers—has been a success, much like similar book fairs: the New York and Los Angeles Art Book Fairs, PA/PERVIEW Art Book Fair in Brussels, and Miss Read: The Berlin Art Book Fair, among others.

The success of the fair can’t be solely attributed to its organizers (especially since Offprint’s director is notoriously untalented). The popularity of these events begs the question: why has there been such a boom in art book fairs?

What is almost certain is that the growth of publishing in the avant-garde scene should not be understood as a revival of the book form—the attractiveness of printed matter has nothing to do with a desire to deflate the wonders of digital mediums and the Internet. The reason for this boom has more to do with the state of the art world: although artists have less and less control of how their work is sold and exhibited, they can maintain their independence through publishing.

It seems obvious that artists and curators are pressured to fulfill the objectives of governments and cities, and that demanding galleries are no longer able to stand up for young artists in a market that is subject to global capitalism. In other words, when it comes to art nowadays, government and companies speak first. Somewhere between soft-power strategies, economic policies, and the luxury market, art no longer seems able to speak its own name.

In this context, publishing seems to offer an authentic, autonomous space within the art community. Books and other publishing artifacts such as magazines, posters, and tapes are—in comparison to artworks—relatively free from public and market concerns. It is meaningful to note that despite the public and private funding cuts that have affected the art-publishing world over the past few years, artists, photographers, and graphic designers have continued to show a deep interest in publishing, finding alternative routes to creating and distributing art on their own terms.

The success of Offprint and other art book fairs might be found in what they offer publishing today: a resistance to the spectacle of art and its frenetic commercialization. After all, a book is just a book.

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Yannick Bouillis is the founder and director of Offprint Projects. Offprint aims to reevalute the theoretical and practical importance of publishing in the art world as a complement of exhibiting and selling art, through lectures, essays, and fairs. Bouillis currently lives in Arles, France. offprintprojects.com

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