Aperture's Blog, page 165

Review: Andrea Josch on Luis Weinstein

Luis Weinstein

Esto ha sido

Self-published

Santiago, Chile, 2014

Designed by Carolina Zañartu

9 x 11 7⁄8 in. (23 x 30 cm)

44 pages

35 black-and-white photographs

Paperback

luisweinstein.com

Luis Weinstein, the editor-in-chief of the South American photography magazine Sueño de la Razón and cofounder of the Festival Internacional de Fotografía en Valparaíso, Chile, has spent more than thirty years recording different aspects of everyday life. (Full disclosure: I work with Weinstein at Sueño de la Razón.) His documentary images capture these happenings not in terms of the decisive moment, but rather in the tranquility of our sociocultural surroundings. It is as if his black-and-white photographs were the representation of a silent gaze, for which infinite possibilities of ordering the world exist through images. One of the subjects most frequently explored by Weinstein is street life: a human geography teeming with narratives which, taken all together, configure the contemporary landscape of Latin America.

Esto ha sido, Weinstein’s most recent book, invites us to revisit the nearly seventeen years of Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile, forty years after the coup d’état on September 11, 1973. His account begins with the front page of the newspaper on September 13, 1973, with its headlines announcing the takeover by the military junta and the suicide of Chilean president Salvador Allende. It ends with a ballot from the referendum held on October 5, 1988, that leaves no doubt as to the photographer’s political stance. The book can be read from the subjective vantage point of someone who personally experienced the story told in it. The notion of esto ha sido, or “that-has-been,” was formulated by Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida to describe the singular motivation of photographic discourse. As regards the relationship of a photograph to its referent, we can read it here as the ineluctable connection to what was there in the view of someone who has constructed, by means of visual annotations, his own life.

The book contains several important visual quotations, starting with the photograph of the Pasaje Bavestrello in Valparaíso, made famous in an image from 1952 by the legendary photographer Sergio Larrain; Weinstein captures it from the opposite angle, establishing a dialogue with the history of the image. Then comes the double title/headline on a photographed newspaper, “The Diary of the Guerrilla Fighters,” to whom this book is definitely dedicated: those anonymous citizens who struggled and resisted. And finally the lament of that blind accordion player, singing to a paint stain, in allusion this time to the resignification of the documentary photograph and as a quotation of the video-art action Oil Change carried out by Eugenio Dittborn in 1981: the Chilean artist poured out 350 liters of burnt motor oil in the Tarapacá desert. There are also self-quotations, such as the incorporation of two photographs originally published in Ediciones económicas de fotografía chilena (May 10, 1983), which establish links with Weinstein’s own personal archive.

If there has been a recurring feature of notable Chilean photobooks and visual publications since the 1970s, it is the fragility and delicacy of their material qualities. Esto ha sido is a book which, through a revisited visuality, achieves a density of layers and readings in both its narrative fabric and its articulated network of intertexuality and visual connections.

_____

Andrea Josch is a photographer, researcher, and independent photography curator with a master’s degree in cultural management. She is currently the academic director of the Visual Arts School at UNIACC University, and founder and editor-in-chief of the magazine Sueño de la Razón (Dream of Reason). suenodelarazon.org

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The 2014 Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards Exhibitions

The following photographs by Max Mikulecky © Aperture Foundation

The following images courtesy IMAgallery, Tokyo

The 2014 Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards Short List is now on view at two exhibitions, in New York and Tokyo. The New York presentation at Aperture Gallery opened December 13 and will remain on view until January 29, while a simultaneous exhibition in Tokyo at the Ima Concept Store runs through January 18. Both exhibitions offer in-depth looks at the winning titles of the Photobook Awards, given out by Aperture Foundation and the Paris Photo art fair since 2011.

Here, at Aperture’s own gallery, visitors can page through the books in a presentation in a small, intimate gallery setting, where they can also find free copies of The PhotoBook Review, Aperture’s biannual publication dedicated to the photo book, which features in-depth profiles of each listed book. At Ima Concept Store’s one-month exhibition in Roppongi, Tokyo, the 95 selected books selected for the shortlist during the past three years appear alongside a showing of prints from inside their pages. Click through the slideshow above for installation views of the Aperture exhibition, then at the Ima Concept Store.

The Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards celebrate the photobook’s contribution to the evolving narrative of photography, with prizes in three categories. The initial short-list selection was made by Julien Frydman, director of Paris Photo;Todd Hido, photographer and photobook maker; Lesley A. Martin, publisher of the Aperture Foundation book program and of The PhotoBook Review; Mutsuko Ota, editorial director ofIMA magazine; and Anne Wilkes Tucker, photography curator at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. The short list was first announced by Hido at NY Art Book Fair on September 26, 2014.

 

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Gordon Parks “Back to Fort Scott” Opens at MFA Boston

Gordon Parks, Husband and Wife, Sunday Morning, Detroit, Michigan, 1950. Courtesy and © The Gordon Parks Foundation. Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Gordon Parks, Untitled, Columbus, Ohio, 1950. Courtesy and © The Gordon Parks Foundation. Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Gordon Parks, Railway Station Entrance, Fort Scott, Kansas , 1950. Courtesy and © The Gordon Parks Foundation. Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Gordon Parks, Untitled, Chicago, Illinois, 1950. Courtesy and © The Gordon Parks Foundation. Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Gordon Parks, Untitled (Outside the Liberty Theater), 1950. Courtesy and © The Gordon Parks Foundation. Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Gordon Parks, Tenement Dwellers, Chicago, Illinois , 1950. Courtesy and © The Gordon Parks Foundation. Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

 

An exhibition of photographs by Gordon Parks at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, revisits a highly personal, yet never-published photo essay he developed for LIFE magazine in 1950. In 1948, LIFE assigned Parks, the magazine’s first African-American photographer to be hired full time, to do a story about segregation in American education. Parks centered on what happened to his former friends and classmates at the all-black grade school in Kansas he had attended. The results were intimate portraits of African-American families that had set out to cities across the Midwest—Chicago, Detroit, and Columbus, Ohio—as well as scenes of small-town life from where Parks grew up nearly twenty years prior. (The story, however, never ran, for reasons still unknown.) The premise lends the exhibition, which opens this Saturday, its title: “Back to Fort Scott.”

The idea for the exhibition developed when Lane Curator of Photographs Karen Haas realized that the date on a Parks photograph from the museum’s collection was probably incorrect. The image, of an African-American couple standing in front of a small suburban movie theater, was dated 1949, a time when Parks was working in New York City. The Gordon Parks Foundation clued Haas in that this photograph was part of the LIFE photo essay, and suggested the idea for a highly concentrated exhibition about the project. Haas made it her goal to piece it together from the written archives in Wichita, Kansas, and the photo archives at SUNY Purchase. “The challenge was matching the pictures which aren’t identified to the memos,” Haas explained. She tried to track down any family members in the images who might still be alive, and, with the addresses she found in the archives, went on a road trip to find out if any of the actual structures in the photographs remained. “We wanted to see what buildings were standing,” she said. “We were looking for any sign of what the houses looked like.” She described Parks’s project as “a sort of modeling after American Gothic. He had this idea he would photograph these people in front of their houses, not as people in dire straits.” But as Haas found out, none of the original homes remain, as demographics have shifted dramatically in the decades since the series was shot.

“My dream is that people will see their photographs, or photographs of friends and we may find some of these people and they’ll be able to tell their story,” Haas said. “That someone will come forward and say, ‘I’m that boy, or that little girl.’”

“Back to Fort Scott” runs through September 13 at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. A concurrent exhibition titled “Segregation Story” runs at the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, through June 7.

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Aperture Magazine Live at the National Arts Club: the Lit Issue

On Tuesday night at the National Arts Club in New York, Aperture magazine hosted three photographers who appear in the Winter 2014 “Lit.” issue of Aperture magazine—Gus Powell, Erica Baum, and Moyra Davey—as each gave a presentation on how photography harnesses the tools of language and literature in their own work. The “Lit.” issue itself was born out of a conversation with contributor David Campany about Flaubert’s influence on Walker Evans, which became Campany’s essay that appears in the magazine.

Similarly, Powell described his book The Lonely Ones, also featured in the issue, as a kind of cover album of the original 1942 book of drawings by William Steig. (The original impulse to photograph everyday scenes, too, came out of a kind of cover project of Frank O’Hara’s book Lunch Poems, as Powell experimented with photographs on his lunch break.) To him, its most compelling image was that of a ripped-up letter at a mailbox, subtitled, “Change of heart.” “Somehow, it completely gripped me,” Powell said. Like Steig, Powell said he wanted a “delivery system” that delayed the pathos or humor of an image for added effect, and so he added captions in the vein of Steig’s, but accentuated them with gatefold pages that revealed photographs underneath. “I miss you” describes a man stretching on a sunny boardwalk; “I do this on the side,” says a yellow school bus stranded in a tawny desert; “A change of heart” reveals a woman standing across the street from a mailbox.

Baum spoke about her Card Catalogue series of photographs, which zero in on the quiet, outdated modes of organizing libraries with typed or handwritten categories. Like Powell, she deploys ample humor in her work; a typewritten note on a folder in one photograph reads “Apparitions.” Of another series, Dog Ear, she explained how she composes poetic fragments out of page folds. “The material was jammed,” she said of her method, in which she reassembles the words of writers like Clarice Lispector. “It all feels like it’s talking about this process,” she added. In her Naked Eye series, she photographs the slices of images between the warped and painted pages of softcover books. “I’m trying to give you the feeling of a person in their own thoughts,” she said, noting, like Powell, how this series makes use of the delay or pause between seeing and understanding, a device perhaps more natural in literature than photography.

Davey, whose work appears on the “Lit.”  issue cover, spoke of her series in which she photographed details of written materials from the lives of Mary Wollstonecraft, her daughter Mary Shelley, and Mary Shelley’s stepsister Claire Clairmont, and clustered together the close-ups of their letters and first editions, mailed and dotted with colored tape as in much of her work. In exhibition, she placed these alongside her own early photographs taken when she was the same age as the young Mary Shelley and Claire Clairmont in the featured letters. That project, she explained, led to her series Subway Writers, images of people writing on the New York subway, who she saw on her way to the New York Public Library. A writer herself, Davey’s work often skirts the literary, revealing books, passages, and her own words as narration in her video work. One image, of a book she tore in half, she revealed to have actually been inspired by an editor: “They saw my cut-up books and said, ‘You have to photograph them.'”

Find Issue #217, Winter, “Lit.” here and subscribe to Aperture magazine for future issues. 

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Walker Evans & the Written Word by David Campany

The following note first appeared in Aperture magazine #217, Winter 2014, “Lit.” Subscribe here to read it first, in print or online.

How did Flaubert, Baudelaire, Proust, and other writers inform the creator of “documentary-style” photography?

Walker Evans, Self-Portrait Seated on Floor Against Wall with Dark Cloth Around Neck, 1930–31 © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art via Art Resource, New York

 

Of all the various practices of photography—advertising, industrial imaging, family albums, and the rest—it is perhaps photojournalism that brings together word and image most often and most necessarily. Usually it involves two people—a photographer and a writer—collaborating, ideally. Sometimes the photographer writes, but this is less common than the writer who photographs. In an economic climate that is challenging for photojournalism (to put it mildly) it seems easier to get a writer to photograph than it is to get a photographer to write. But there have been a handful of individuals who wanted and were able to do both. One of the most remarkable was Walker Evans.

Evans’s first calling was the written word. At college he studied French literature and was an avid reader of the cutting- edge literary journals of the 1920s, when fussy Victorian prose was giving way to the lucid and fragmentary language of modern life, and James Joyce and T.S. Eliot were idolized. During a year in Paris (1926–27) Evans also read Flaubert, Baudelaire, Proust, and others. He attempted to write, in the form of short and intense prose pieces, but the ambition was crushing: “I wanted so much to write that I couldn’t write a word,” he recalled at the end of his career. Returning to New York in 1927, he sensed the camera might offer the descriptive and expressive power that had eluded him in words, but he never lost the desire to write.

In August 1929, at the age of twenty-five, Evans was first published. A new magazine titled Alhambra carried two unrelated contributions: a typically modernist photograph of soaring cranes constructing the Lincoln Building on Manhattan’s East 42nd Street, and an accomplished translation from the French of an extract of Moravagine (1926), Blaise Cendrars’s delirious novel about a psychotic killer. Evans’s image was too deferential to

the city’s spectacle but Cendrars’s language came close to the frank but equivocal description that would come to define Evans’s photography.

While perfecting what he came to call “documentary-style” photography, Evans produced sequences of images to sit along- side texts by other writers: Carleton Beals’s political exposé The Crime of Cuba (1933), the experimental journalism of James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: Three Tenant Families (1941), and Karl Bickel’s documentary travel book The Mangrove Coast: The Story of the West Coast of Florida (1942). Rather than being smoothly integrated in the manner of populist books and mainstream magazines, in each case Evans’s images sat apart from the text, obliging the reader–viewers to actively negotiate their own response.

Evans did take commissions from magazines, and sometimes this led to interesting work. In 1937 Fortune magazine published “Six Days at Sea,” Evans and James Agee’s sly observation of a tourist cruise to Havana (an assignment conducted entirely incognito). Evans worked with the journalist Katherine Hamill to produce a report on slum clearance and social housing in 1939 for Harper’s Bazaar. In 1943 he landed a job as a writer at Time, reviewing films, books, and exhibitions. Agee was on the staff, as were James Stern and Saul Bellow. With a little help from Agee, Evans soon mastered Time’s concise, urbane, and witty house style. He drew readers’ attention to gems of popular culture and obscure treasures: the Krazy Kat cartoon strip, children’s art, the little-known sculptures of Edgar Degas, Winston Churchill’s paintings, anatomical drawings, and self-portraits.

Two years later Evans became the only staff photographer at Fortune. This offered the chance to get more involved in the form his work might take on the page. But the real breakthrough came in 1948 when he was made Fortune’s special photographic editor. Part of his task was to advise on the magazine’s visual style, but in answering directly to the managing editor rather than the art director, Evans was able to set his own assignments. With a degree of autonomy unheard of in magazines before or since, he would shoot, edit, write, and design his pages.

Opening page from “The Pitch Direct,” Fortune, October 1958

 

To accompany his photographs Evans cultivated a style of writing that was rich in rhetorical flourish, vernacular expressions, literary quotations, obscure historical references, pithy facts, and adjectives of baroque splendor. There were also moments of high polemic. Although these texts were rarely longer than a few hundred words, he crafted them tirelessly. He also kept a close eye on the typesetting, with a poet’s sensitivity to the placement of line breaks. In a 1971 interview, he recalled: “The writing wasn’t easy for me to master. But I was determined to be my own editor, so I worked hard on it. Any test met is part of one’s development.” He understood the deep connections between photography and literature. “Photography seems to be the most literary of the graphic arts,” he reflected in his chapter written for Louis Kronenberger’s anthology Quality: Its Image in the Arts (1969). “It will have—on occasion, and in effect— qualities of eloquence, wit, grace, and economy; style, of course; structure and coherence; paradox, play and oxymoron.” Indeed, the cool sobriety of his great literary heroes had far less effect on his prose than on his photography:

I wasn’t very conscious of it then, but I know that Flaubert’s esthetic is absolutely mine. Flaubert’s method I think I incorporated almost unconsciously, but anyway used in two ways: his realism and naturalism both, and his objectivity of treatment; the non-appearance of author, the non-subjectivity. That is literally applicable to the way I want to use a camera and do. But spiritually, however, it is Baudelaire who is the influence on me.

Evans’s lifelong interest in the commonplace things that modern progress deems trivial or forgettable was thoroughly Baudelairean. In society’s rejects and refuse we may find its truth. Fortune’s ethos was to champion the new, but Evans looked to the outmoded or the enduring. Fortune celebrated the world of work; Evans reflected on unemployment or idle pleasures such as wandering. Fortune heralded steel-and-glass construction; Evans cherished endangered vernacular buildings of wood and stone that improved with age and patina. While Fortune announced the new modular office, Evans looked at reliable establishments, such as local insurance firms, run by “men who cannot possibly put in a honest day’s work while clad in a razor-sharp two hundred dollar suit of clothes.” (“Vintage Office Furniture,” Fortune, August 1953). Fortune celebrated department stores; Evans looked to the sidewalk displays of small shops.

Pages from “Imperial Washington,” Fortune, February 1952

 

Pages from “Imperial Washington,” Fortune, February 1952

 

His images of everyday objects and life in the slower lane anticipated by decades the American color photographers of the 1970s (William Eggleston, Stephen Shore), while his words were ironic but affectionate. Take, for example, this from “The Pitch Direct” (Fortune, October 1958):

The stay-at-home tourist, if his eye is properly and purely to be served, should approach the street fair without any reasonable intention, such as that of actually buying something […] Does this nation overproduce? If so, one can get a lot of pleasure and rich sensual enjoyment out of contemplating great bins of slightly defective tap wrenches, coils upon coils of glinty wire, and parabolas of hemp line honest and fragrant. A man of perfectly good sense may decide after due meditation that a well-placed eggplant (2 for 27 cents) is pigmented with the most voluptuous and assuredly wicked color in the world.

At times Evans’s captions would deliberately change the meaning of, or undermine, his pictures. His article “Imperial Washington” (Fortune, February 1952) resembles a simple tourist’s survey of the capital’s stately architecture—which is really showbiz:

The last, large burst of classicism struck Washington as a direct result of the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893. So successful was the midwestern creation in plaster that its chief architects and planners moved on to the capital almost to a man and forever froze the face of the city into its Roman Renaissance expression.

Across the 1950s and ’60s Evans’s photography grew increasingly Flaubertian—simple, direct, and incisive, while his words grew poetic and arch. To do it the other way around, with plain text introducing florid images, would risk pretention, like a gallery of grandstanding pictures. The last thing Evans wanted for his magazine pages was Art. He was making resistant journalism, countering the values and conventions of the mainstream. He produced more than forty photo-essays for Fortune and several for other titles. “Color Accidents” (Architectural Forum, January 1958) was a suite of square compositions picked out from weathered walls of a New York street. The writing compares but distances them from abstract painting, then at its popular height:

The pocks and scrawls of abandoned walls recall the style of certain contemporary paintings, with, of course, the fathomless difference that the former are accidents untouched by the hand of consciousness. Paul Klee would have jumped out of his shoes had he come upon the green door below.

Evans’s photographs of these colors and marks are consummate formal exercises. However, the text suggests that what’s important are the walls themselves and that his photographs are, in the first instance, documents of things worth noticing in the world. These were not pictures for exhibition: they were elegant reports fashioned for the page.

Pages from “Faulkner’s Mississippi,” Vogue, October 1948

 

Opening pages from William Faulkner’s “Sepulture South: Gaslight,” Harper’s Bazaar, December 1954

 

At times Evans’s love of literature became explicit. In 1948 he was commissioned by Vogue to photograph the Southern landscape depicted in the novels of William Faulkner. He admired the writer, who was about to break six years’ silence with the publication of Intruder in the Dust. Faulkner’s novels were set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, so, strictly speaking, it could not be photographed. Evans’s languid and haunting six-page response is almost devoid of people. A cemetery, rail tracks, wood-frame houses, shacks, and fading mansions—these are spaces where something has or could happen, as if each photograph might preface a chapter.

Evans does something similar with “The U.S. Depot” (Fortune, February 1953), in which a survey of single-building railroad stations seems more like a set of locales for short stories once we read the introductory paragraph. “And what is on that green-paper note handed up on its looped stick to the engineer as the 3:52 brakes to a stop? Does it say ‘Train five Engine eight four nine six delayed at Millerton hot journal box,’ or does it say ‘Tell Jeanie I’ll get pork chops’?”

Pages from “Along the right-of-Way,” Fortune, September 1950 Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

 

The following year, 1954, Faulkner saw a photograph by Evans of a cemetery plot (Woodbridge Family Monument, Mansfield, Kentucky, 1945), inspiring him to write the short story “Sepulture South: Gaslight.” It was published in Harper’s Bazaar alongside the imposing image. It’s a Proustian remembrance, part fact, part fiction, of the funeral of Faulkner’s grandfather. The narrator returns to the gravestones, “stained now, a little darkened by time and weather and endurance, but still serene, impervious, remote, gazing at nothing, not like sentinels, not defending the living from the dead by means of their vast ton-measured weight and mass, but rather the dead from the living ….” Seen from the rear, Evans’s stone family now appears to be turning away from time itself.

Evans’s enduring reputation, endorsed  by museums world- wide, is that of an artist operating in the guise of a documentarian. His magazine work complicates this casting. It is clear he was interested in making independent and resistant photojournalism that really only worked when image, text, and design came together on the page. A photojournalist can, of course, be informed by art and literature. Such influences certainly made Evans’s work better. The finest illustration is perhaps “Along the Right-of-Way,” an eight-page piece from 1950 on the simple pleasures of gazing from train windows. The opening photograph is as good as any painting by Edward Hopper or Charles Sheeler. And his text is a minor miracle of reported fact, remembrance, suggestion, allusion, flight of fancy, and even physics. All in three short, sublime paragraphs.

_____

David Campany is a writer and curator. He teaches at the university of Westminster, London, and recently published Walker Evans: The Magazine Work with Steidl. Campany’s The Open Road: Photography and the American Road Trip was published by Aperture this fall.

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by David Campany appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

Genevieve Allison on Martin Schoeller at Hasted Kraeutler

By Genevieve Allison

©Martin Schoeller, Cate Blanchett; Universal City, CA , 2006. Courtesy of Martin Schoeller/AUGUST

©Martin Schoeller, Cesar Millan with his Dogs; South Central Los Angeles, CA , 2006. Courtesy of Martin Schoeller/AUGUST

©Martin Schoeller, George Clooney with Mask; Brooklyn, NY , 2008. Courtesy of Martin Schoeller/AUGUST

©Martin Schoeller, Sean Combs Painting; New York, NY, 2010. Courtesy of Martin Schoeller/AUGUST

©Martin Schoeller, Tony Hawk with his Family; Carlsbad, CA, 1999. Courtesy of Martin Schoeller/AUGUST

If, according to Charles Dickens, there are only two genres of portraiture, the serious and the smirk, then both exist conterminously in each of the 30 large-format archival pigment prints presented in “Portraits,” a major retrospective of Martin’s Schoeller’s photographs. His bold style of portraiture, cultivated over more than a decade as a staff photographer for the New Yorker, can be direct and penetrating or canny and constructional—or all, at the same time. Excluding works from famed series such as “Twins” and “Female Body Builders,” the exhibition instead concentrates on his celebrity portraits, which expose a more playful side of his practice. Jay Z, Bill Murray, and George Clooney are just a few notable examples of stars who have sportively sat for the German-born artist’s sensational, but not-always flattering pictures.

Whimsical pictures of the very famous prepossess appeal but seldom are they realized with Schoeller’s flare for exposing the undercurrents of a personality. This is achieved most subtly and poignantly in the black-and-white photographs he has reproduced from his commercial career, which tend to be more sober and documentary [documentarian/?] yet express his talent in bringing out the character of the sitter, not just with subtleties of lighting or the choice of attitude and expression, but by an artfully struck balance of candidness and staging. In one particularly striking  image, Bill Clinton appears chipping putts in the Oval Office with a facial expression that in that exquisite moment betrays equal volumes of calculation and bonhomie. Such pictures exemplify the artist’s preference for capturing moments of unmannered repose, when the sitter isn’t acutely aware that he or she is still being photographed.

In more staged portraits, the quality of honesty turns on what can be an unforgiving focus when it comes to matters of the finer topographical details of the face. His gossamer lens captures everything in its presence with intimacy and suspension– even the most discreet articulation of the skin.This might not be as apparent with youthful subjects like Little Kim and Lady Gaga, but discerning head shots of Brad Pitt and Johnny Cash so intently describe the aging male form that, initially, they suggest a meditation on retiring beauty or power– or at least of a truthfulness in its depiction. And certainly this theme appears again in the mutually striking yet contrasting pictures of Clint Eastwood and Geoffrey Rush: Eastwood is braced and unflinching, Rush resigning and impassive.

Despite the aforementioned and the potential for reading emotional responses  between the sitter and picture taker, Schoeller’s approach to his subjects is characterized by a sense of fun and unyielding proximity, not sentimentality. This can be perceived in every aspect of production– from the mood achieved by his direct, hyper-lit gaze to the eccentrically conceived narrative devices he tailors to each character. The set designs and props work for the most part to impose a wry reflexivity on the subject: Marina Abramovic flanked by naked people in the subway; Steve Carrell wrapped in cellotape. What is truly remarkable  and testament to Schoeller’s skill as a portraitist, are the imprimaturs of the subjects themselves, allowing fun to be made of, and from, their images.

Genevieve Allison is on the editorial staff at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. 

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Isabel Stevens on Chris Marker’s “Petite Planète”

By Isabel Stevens

In an online-only story for Aperture magazine #217, Winter, “Lit,” a look at the little-known series of travel book series directed by Chris Marker.

Throughout his 60-year career, Chris Marker combined words and images like no one else: in sci-fi photo-films (La Jetée), epistolary cine-travelogues (Letter from Siberia), essay films (A Grin Without a Cat), photobooks (Coréennes, Les Dépays, Staring Back), a CDrom (“Immemory”), a virtual world (“Second Life”), a television series (The Owl’s Legacy) and multi-screen installations (Zapping Zone, Silent Movie). Into his 90s, he was ever abreast with the latest technology, even creating YouTube shorts (such as his voyage through film history, “Kino,” posted under the pseudonym Kosinski). Rewind to the start of his career though, and in parallel to his nascent experiments with moving images, he also used montage for a more commercial endeavor: a series of travel books.

Little has been written about the “Petite Planète” guides Marker initiated and directed from 1954-58 while working at the Paris-based publisher Éditions du Seuil. Exhibited at Whitechapel Gallery’s recent Marker retrospective in London, the collection of 19 books, each dedicated to a different country, are normally referenced and then passed over in favor of his early films—1956’s Sunday in Peking, 1958’s Letter from Siberia, or Statues Also Die, Marker’s collaboration with Alain Resnais, a blistering 1952 tirade against colonialism.

In the green Michelin Guides of the 1950s, travellers were enticed to visit holiday locations, from the Cote d’Azur to Italy, by picturesque pencil landscapes on the covers and detailed descriptions on everything from ancient sites to restaurants within. In contrast, the “Petite Planète” books featured a close-up of a woman’s face on the cover (each a native of the country) and would finish with an exuberantly colored– but hardly accurate or practical– illustrated map on its back spread.

“Not a guidebook, not a history book, not a propaganda brochure, not a traveller’s impressions, but instead equivalent to the conversation we would like to have with someone intelligent and well versed in the country that interests us” was Marker’s interpretation. Nearly a decade after World War II, foreign locales seemed tantalizingly within reach, Éditions du Seuil introduced the books rather charmingly as “the world for everyone”. The series cemented Marker’s interest in the essay format and in collaboration—he commissioned a different writer for each book and gathered photography from a variety of sources. While Marker didn’t author any of the essays himself, one can see his influence on their unusual subjects from the violence of history (Spain) to the melancholy of the Atlantic (Portugal). The books on Japan and Greece—countries that would feature into his later work—are two of the most idiosyncratic. As the focus began to include more far-flung destinations (Greece, Tunisia), the layouts become more adventurous, with imagery integrated into the text in exciting and radical ways. Each spread differs from its predecessor. Illustrations creep over the essays, which are broken up with quotes, poems, and song lyrics. Above all, the books demonstrate Marker’s sophisticated pairings of words and pictures, with photographs used at varying sizes throughout: taking over spreads, jostling against blocks of text or color, and arranged in lively sequences of small images. Marker, in a rare instance when the media-shy artist discussed his work, called the “Petite Planète” books “ersatz cinema.”

The photography is often startling, particularly as Marker leaves tourist agencies behind and starts to incorporate his own photographs as well as those of contemporary figures: Henri Cartier-Bresson, Inge Morath, Robert Capa, David Seymour, Elliot Erwitt, his friend the filmmaker Agnes Varda (who started out as a photographer), and William Klein. Unusual street photography features heavily: shop windows made abstract with multiple reflections (one courtesy of Brassai); lonely nighttime city squares, busy restaurants, and pavements with people bursting into the frame from William Klein; unaware and entirely ordinary passers-by caught mid-gesture by Cartier-Bresson; and haphazard snapshots of architectural snippets scavenged from photo agencies such as Roger-Viollet.

Often the selections show Marker’s whimsical side: a man in a crowded Irish street with a white rabbit on his head, another later on with a monkey perched on his shoulders, signs in the Greek mountains pointing to nowhere, people napping on benches. And then there are the faces, an obsession he never grew out of. The most beautiful film in the world, according to Marker, was Carl Theodore Dreyer’s 1928 The Passion of Joan of Arc with its torrent of close-ups of Maria Falconetti’s face. The ghostly women that stare out from the Petite Planète book covers no doubt sowed the seeds for his later photobook and exhibition Staring Back.

Marker still contributed photographs to the “Petite Planète” books into the early 60s, even after he stopped directing them (the series continued until 1981, but the confrontational female cover stars were replaced with bland travel photography in the 1970s ). The female subject of Marker’s 1964 film, The Koumiko Mystery, fronts the first edition on Japan. Looking through the various books, one can often guess which photographs he authored: overlooked statues were a perennial favorite subject, as were melancholy-looking passersby absorbed by something beyond the frame. Later, similar divorced onlookers would populate Staring Back. Amid the cornucopia of high and low culture, fragments of paintings, films, and advertisements, a familiar motif in “Petite Planète” is that of people with their backs to the camera starring at paintings, transfixed like the onlookers gazing at African artworks in Statues Also Die or like Madeleine with Carlotta’s portrait in another of Marker’s favorite films, Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958).

Despite the fact that Marker later dismissed all his pre-1962 work as rudimentary, the series provided a vital playground for Marker, and not just one that funded his filmic travelogues. References to the books turn up in surprising places in the artist’s biography. Look closely at Alain Resnais’s 1956 portrait of Paris’s Bibliotheque Nationale Toute la mémoire du monde and the book being admitted into this labyrinthine archive of words and images is a fake “Petite Planète.” The country? Mars. When William Klein couldn’t find a U.S. publisher for Life is Good for you and New York, he came to Éditions du Seuil after being impressed by the “Petite Planète” series. Three pages into the photobook, published by Éditions in 1956 after Marker threatened to quit if they refused, just before the title page, you’ll see the sub-heading “Album Petite Planète 1.”

Isabel Stevens works at Sight & Sound and writes on film and photography. She thanks Chris Darke, Tamsin Clark, Richard Bevan and Richard Hollis for all their help with the article.

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Larry Sultan “Here and Home” at LACMA

Larry Sultan, My Mother Posing for Me, from the series "Pictures from Home," 1984. All photos: © The Estate of Larry Sultan. Photo courtesy the estate of Larry Sultan

Canal District, San Rafael, from the series "Homeland," 2006

Discussion, Kitchen Table, from the series "Pictures from Home," 1985

Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel, Untitled, from the series "Evidence," 1977, printed 2013. © The Estate of Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel. Photo courtesy the estate of Larry Sultan

Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel, Untitled, from the series "Evidence," 1977, printed 2013. © The Estate of Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel. Photo courtesy the estate of Larry Sultan

Sharon Wild, from the series "The Valley," 2001

Boxers, Mission Hills, from the series "The Valley," 1999

 

The first retrospective of the work of iconic California photographer Larry Sultan, “Here and Home,” features more than 200 photographs and five major series’, displaying his keen eye for subversive detail, framing, and context which made him one of the most genre-pushing purveyors of the medium. Sultan died suddenly five years ago, after producing more than 30 years of photographs that mostly centered around long-term projects that explored authorship, Conceptualism, and California identity and culture.

His “Evidence” series, made with Mike Mandel from 1975-77 , repurposed internal imagery science, industry, and government as art photography. The 59 black-and-white archival photographs– of a canyon explosion, of an abstracted head in a hardhat, of bare footprints across a wet stone ground– are reconsidered as scenes of life captured by an auteur: it is widely considered one of the first Conceptual photography projects. In his solo work, Sultan looked closely at Southern California, where he grew up, as well as Northern California where he studied and later taught. His interest in place, reflected in the exhibition title, is perhaps nowhere as apparent as in “Pictures from Home,” for which he photographed his aging parents for years among the furnishings of their California-kitsch home and on their impossibly green lawn. But beyond sense of place, Sultan measured the distance between photographer and subject, and the objective space the photographer continually takes up and cedes.  “What drives me to continue this work is difficult to name,” he wrote in a statement on the work in 1992. “It has more to do with love than with sociology, with being a subject in the drama rather than a witness.  And in the odd and jumbled process of working everything shifts; the boundaries blur, my distance slips, the arrogance and illusion of immunity falters.”

Later photographs look more objectively at place, as in “Homeland,” in which he posed migrant workers in the in-between places of suburban life, and “The Valley,” a documentation of the suburban homes where pornography is filmed. In the later, he often obscures the most provocative action, or the obvious, in favor of highlighting the obliquely personal, such as a sloppy floral arrangement left by the home’s actual tenants. As he said in a 1990 interview with BOMB of the series, “All the photographs raise the issue of voyeurism—it’s unavoidable. I mean, no one believes in photographs, right? We’re much too sophisticated. Yet, in fact, we do.”

“Here and Home” is on view through March 22. 

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Words vs. Images

The following note first appeared in Aperture magazine #217, Winter 2014, “Lit.” Subscribe here to read it first, in print or online.

What kind of pressure does photography place on the written word today? Aperture recently spoke with contemporary fiction writers Teju Cole, Mary Gaitskill, Rivka Galchen, Tom McCarthy, and Lynne Tillman about photography and the role of the image in their writing process.

Tom McCarthy

Maxime du Camp, The Great Sphinx and the Pyramids of Giza, Egypt, 1852 © HIP/Art Resource, New York

 

I’ve become very interested recently in the idea of the negative and how this photographic concept is relevant to fiction. Almost the very first image in my next novel, Satin Island, is of a picture looming into view from noxious liquid in a darkroom, like some kind of fish approaching through murky water; I use it as a metaphor for thinking or remembering. So the mechanism of photography stands for me as a kind of analogue for what it is to bring data, memories, or whatever into a coherent image— and ultimately, for what it is to write.

In my novel Remainder, which is all about trying to reproduce an ideal, if mundane, scenario (walking down a staircase, exchanging words with a neighbor, etc.), the hero is, in a sense, making a print of a negative of something that was never based on reality. The negative really is a negative. It’s a memory of something that never existed. So, like a photographer, he’s trying to bring this reality of the image out of the darkroom. He’s trying to actualize this picture, or world, from the darkroom of his mind—and it never quite goes right.

Like many writers, I take lots of photographs and work from them. When I was writing Remainder, I walked around Brixton in South London (this was back in 2000) with a camera and a Dictaphone. I photographed the texture of the sidewalk, the reflections in puddles, the letters from the gas and electricity holes, and other markings in the street. But I was also recording running commentary, because ultimately, as a writer, you’re dealing with words. Even if those words carry or generate images, words are still your currency. So I was using the Dictaphone to say, “Here in the street is this, and you can see the a and r of airports reversed in this puddle.” I typed it all up, word for word, even the “umms” and “ahs” and repetitions, and pinned it all to my wall—the photographs as well. More recently, with C, my last novel, which is set a hundred years ago, I looked at lots of old photographs—of Alexandria, Egypt, and London in the 1920s—and again transcribed them, turned them into words. I was reading Flaubert’s accounts of going up the river in Egypt with the photographer Maxime du Camp, an amazing piece of writing. Flaubert says, “this is all fake; we’re just in some panorama.” There’s one passage detailing the bright sunlight falling on the black skin of their servants against this silvery rock. It’s an incredibly photographic description.

Perhaps in the end the difference between image and word isn’t relevant. Because ultimately it’s all scriptural: things such as light or ink mark and are recorded on surfaces, and that’s an event of writing. I also don’t think there’s a massive categorical distinction between digital and analog photography, or digital writing on a laptop and writing on a typewriter or by hand. We live in what Michel de Certeau calls the “scriptorium.” Everything is written. We’re within a set of networks of archiving, recording, transmitting, and making visible, or hiding and eavesdropping. This is totally anticipated in Greek literature and Hamlet. The advent of the NSA or of the Internet doesn’t change that. It just builds on a situation that’s already there. I recognize this is a very writerly vision, because everything else ultimately becomes inscription. So yes, maybe for me, photography is a branch of writing.

Tom McCarthy’s novels include Remainder (2006), Men in Space (2007), and C (2010), which was shortlisted for the Man Booker prize. His next novel, Satin Island, is forthcoming from Knopf in February 2015. McCarthy writes on literature and art for the New York Times, the London Review of Books, and Artforum, among other publications.

Mary Gaitskill

John Stezaker, She (Film Portrait Collage) II, 2008. Courtesy the artist and Petzel, New York

I take pictures with my phone if it’s something beautiful and I want to remember it, or if it’s something interesting. Recently I was having a very emotionally fraught conversation with someone—we were quarreling, actually—and then the quarrel sort of ended and I went for a walk down the road to  clear my mind while he took a shower. We were staying at someone’s house in the country and there were these incredibly beautiful animals, which I thought were cows. One of them was staring at me and when I stared back it trotted up to the fence. It was a bull, a very young bull. There were two of them. They were beautiful, bulls with the eyes of Bambi, blue eyes. And there was also a little miniature donkey in the field, which came up to check me out too, and I was so excited by this. I went back to the house, and I said, “You’ve got to come out; there’s these beautiful animals.” So we completely forgot about the quarrel, and I took pictures of the animals, which were sweet but also primal. Something like that I like to keep on my phone.

I have some books of photography, mostly books that people gave to me. One of them is a book of photographs of Nabokov and his family that I like very much. I get pleasure out of looking at pictures of him and of his wife and relatives. I like looking at pictures of women, actually. What I like to do most with photographs of people is to cover one half of the face with my hand and look at it, and then do the same with the other half. Most of the time one side of the face wears a different expression than the other. The face is usually bifurcated. It’s rare that you have somebody who looks the same on both sides of their face— I think Hitler actually does look the same, or maybe it was Stalin; it was some psychopathic leader. In some people the difference is really extreme; it looks like two different personalities. If I look at photographs of myself, there is some version of this going on. One side of my face looks quite young, wholesome, like a cheerleader, and then the other half looks positively lunar, like someone who is not part of the world. Many people are like that. They have a strong personality show up in one half of their face and another personality show up in the other half. It’s weird. But it’s weirder or at least more unusual when there is no difference— at least in my casual explorations of photographs.

For my novel Veronica, I made a puzzling underuse of photographs. I don’t know why. Considering the narrator is a model, I don’t think there are any descriptions of what she looks like in pictures. I think there’s one instance in which she describes herself in a picture with another woman, but she mostly describes the other woman. It seems like she might have a picture of herself, framed and up on a wall, and I kept thinking I should put that in there, but it just intuitively never interested me. It’s kind of odd. For research on being photographed, I went on stories I heard from women who had been models, but the better stories were from stylists and assistants who would describe things more bluntly. I also had the experience of being photographed by a fashion photographer; it was a book-jacket photograph taken by a former fashion photographer—he was the most bullying person I’ve ever had my picture taken by, just incredibly aggressive. He wanted to constantly keep me off balance. It’s a very good picture, though, so it works. He did a good job. Maybe he was looking for tension and drama in the picture, and I do look frightened and horrified—what’s funny is that people who don’t know what happened think I look frightening or intimidating! I guess fear can be frightening. But I would never work with him again.

I don’t especially feel pressured as a writer by the presence of images. I guess this is because I’m a very visual person and tend to express ideas and feelings with images, sometimes kooky images. The thing I dislike about a lot of images, say, online or otherwise present in culture, is that they tend to be flat and unimaginative, yet they have a strong visceral impact— and because they’re so omnipresent, people expect to be “talked to” in that language and it seems like they aren’t as open to a more individual vision. It even seems scary and weird to them maybe. But maybe that’s always been true. I don’t know.

Mary Gaitskill is the author of the novels Two Girls, Fat and Thin (1991) and Veronica (2005), which was nominated for the 2005 National Book Award. She is also the author of the story collections Bad Behavior (1988); Because They Wanted To (1997), which was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1998; and Don’t Cry (2009).

Teju Cole

Mishka Henner, Noordeinde Palace, The Hague, South Holland, 2011. Courtesy the artist

In a response to a recent article on “seeing machines” by a contemporary photographer I really like (Trevor Paglen), another contemporary photographer I really like (Mishka Henner) wrote something intriguing. Paglen’s piece was about the expanded reality of photography in the present time. So much of this photography, Paglen argued, was about a given machine following a certain script to do a particular kind of seeing. In his thoughtful response, which agreed with and tried to think through the implications of Paglen’s arguments, Henner described the result as follows: “a world with no auteurs, one where style and the single viewpoint are irrelevant, and where poetry and lyricism are mere follies.”

This caught my attention. I am ready to let the auteurs go, and in the age of Instagram and drone photography, the single viewpoint has indeed been taken off its pedestal. But: are “poetry and lyricism” truly “mere follies”? I hope I’m not misreading Henner here. I do feel that his work with Google Maps, like Paglen’s on secret sites and the American security apparatus, are part of the great work being done that help us visualize the New World Order. My question, then, is: what about the old world order? This still lives on in quite a powerful way inside all of us. It’s not all motherboards and circuits and optical recognition software. We may be on our way to becoming androids, but we are not there yet: we still have a hunger for poetry and lyricism, an intense hunger that is difficult to satisfy. I think this, in part, is why Paglen and Henner and other photographers don’t limit their works to the theoretical. Yes, they have great ideas. But they turn these ideas into prints, editions, shows, books. Many of them still center their work on the tactile elements of paper, ink, and binding. The stuff could be really far out conceptually, but much of it still ends up in a frame on the wall of a gallery. And I think that’s great.

So that’s what I think of when I take or look at photographs: I want images that address the predicaments of the present moment, in a political sense, but that also allow for poetry and lyricism. In any case, those things may not be necessarily divorced from each other: paper has to come from somewhere; the equipment used to make a camera is made from materials that are traded on the world market, including materials that come from conflict zones. Machines have lyricism (once we learn to see it) and poetry comes at a cost (if we are willing to admit it). The connection this has to my writing? I try to apply those same goals (of politics and poetry) to the written word, too. So, we may be awash in images and words these days, but poetry still matters. It is still as elusive as it ever was, and, just as ever, it is still worth chasing down.

Paglen’s text and Henner’s response can be read here: blog.fotomuseum.ch/2014/03/ii-seeing-...

Teju Cole is a photographer and the author of two works of fiction, Every Day Is for the Thief (2014) and Open City (2011), for which he won the PEN/Hemingway Award. Cole wrote the introductory essays for On Street Photography and the Poetic Image, by Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb, and Touching Strangers, by Richard Renaldi, both published by Aperture.

Lynne Tillman

Found photographs. Courtesy Lynne Tillman

Found photographs. Courtesy Lynne Tillman

I started writing my new novel, Men and Apparitions, because it’s said we live in “a glut of images” and also because of the belief that there’s a crisis in art photography, with cellphones and everyone taking pictures all the time. I began to think: What does that mean? How would you narrate that story? How do you make characters who are based in images, in some sense, or whose lives seem to be based on images?

My protagonist in the novel, Zeke, is a cultural anthropologist, an ethnographer, not a photographer himself. His field is photography, family photography in particular. As a child I was very interested in our family photographs. My father shot a lot of 8mm films, too, before I was born, and I would take out the projector when I was eight or nine, very young, and all by myself watch these home movies, which, as I think about it now, seems funny. In part it was because I was the baby of the family and quite a bit younger than my sisters, so there was an already established family I’d entered. Seeing these films, I guess, gave me some sense of family history. I am not using these for the book, but I’ve found some family albums at flea markets and borrowed friends’ found photographs. In the novel, I do want to do some analyses of photographs.

Zeke, my character, goes off theoretically in some wild directions—the novel form allows me to do everything I can think of. It allows me to be unaccountable, also—unaccountable to so-called “facts.” Some of what Zeke thinks about photography and cultural anthropology is credible, and, I think, there’s some interesting theory about images, but some of what he comes up with is wack. If I were writing a straight essay, I couldn’t do that, and it wouldn’t be as much fun to write.

I don’t usually take photographs for what I’m writing. But if I go to an art exhibition and I think that I’ll want to remember something, I’ll take a picture of the work if I can, or of the way the work has been installed, if the security guards let me (though never with a flash), as an aide-memoire. But I don’t do that for writing. I still might write notes, use words to remember, because I’m working with words. They’re my medium. Mostly I rely on my memory—it’s a memory game I play with myself, and sometimes lose.

To photograph is to step out of the moment. When we photograph, we are objectifying. We look at something, shoot, and it becomes a kind of object. It may be a picture of an event, a tree, a person. But in the end you have a representation, just that. It is an abstraction. I think photography, like writing, is a translation, from the impossible Real to the page. I think of translation and representation as being close kin. Taking a photograph, like a selfie, is a way to record a moment, and to proclaim Being, which writing also does, in a sense. People think writing, especially fiction, has been subsumed, even vanquished, by picture making. But fiction is another form of image making. Words are images too. I’m hoping to finish the novel at the end of this fall. If not, I’ll shoot myself. I will use a camera.

Lynne Tillman is a novelist, short-story writer, and critic, whose most recent book, her second collection of essays, What Would Lynne Tillman Do?, was published last spring. She is currently working on a novel titled Men and Apparitions.

Rivka Galchen

Karl May as“Old Shatterhand,” n.d. © Jan Sagl/Anzenberge

I don’t particularly think of photography as an inspiration or as a constraint. And yet photography is so enormously powerful and pervasive, to think it has no effect would be like thinking the shape of a guitar doesn’t affect the sounds made with it. Even though I love both personal and professional photographs, I don’t use them as part of my writing process. It’s as if they obliterate something for me. I did once take some video footage for a piece that I was writing about an annual festival in Germany around the work of Karl May, who wrote many adventure tales in the late nineteenth century about a German among Native Americans in the American West, even though he had lied about having ever visited America. But I didn’t use the video footage, or the snapshots. My notes had done the essential culling, a kind of thinking, and the images just flooded that thinking away.

Photographs, though, are better at communicating some things that I once would have tried to put into words. When I want to communicate with my family, say, in a postcard kind of I’m-thinking-of-you way, I just send a smartphone photo of, probably, my daughter. Words now gravitate to where they’re most ideal, in a certain way, and this has pushed language toward two different, not very related places: the contract and the joke. There are no pictogram contracts. Of course words are still good at ordinary communication, but they are irreplaceably good, at least for now, in the contract and, well, maybe joke is not quite the right label, but in a very particular kind of entertainment. For example, think of how often headlines in the Onion rely on a kind of half-rhyme with some clichéd phrase, like, “Loved Ones Recall Local Man’s Cowardly Battle with Cancer”—the effect here can only be produced by the way we process language.

Where does all this leave the novel? The novel must remain ideal for something, right? Though I don’t think we know what, yet. It seems best to keep our noses down and let the abstractions reveal themselves in time. Prognostications can be fun, but are best understood as fictions. If I were going to guess where the novel will go, and what it will become uniquely capable of, it seems to me that it may drift toward more genuinely private spaces and, at the same time, more political spaces. Private in the sense of inner dialogue; political in the sense of legal language, or nation naming… it’s telling how a bill on, say, small dairy farms, requires four hundred pages not just of pork but also fine specification. Novels can play with the way language has moved into these realms, or they can rebel, but, either way, language is their medium, and where the medium has moved matters. The form will surely continue to document the external world, as it always has, but that aspect may become less essential. Though maybe the pressure the image has placed on literature, compressing the field into a smaller country, will paradoxically allow for an opening up into something unforeseen, an unexpected vastness. It’ll feel like those dreams of terraforming Mars.

Rivka Galchen is the author of the novel Atmospheric Disturbances (2008), and a collection of short stories, American Innovations (2014).

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Prajna Desai: “Constructing Worlds” at Barbican Art Gallery

Thomas Struth installation images, Barbican Art Gallery © Chris Jackson / Getty Images

Walker Evans, Frame Houses. New Orleans, Louisiana, 1936
Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection © Walker Evans Archive, the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Julius Shulman, Case Study House #22, 1960 (Architect: Pierre Koenig) © J. Paul Getty Trust. Used with permission. Julius Shulman Photography Archive, Research Library at the Getty Research Institute

Nadav Kander, Chongqing IV (Sunday Picnic), Chongqing Municipality, 2006. © Nadav Kander, courtesy Flowers Gallery

Bas Princen, Cooling Plant, Dubai, 2009. Courtesy Bas Princen

The 18 photographers in “Constructing Worlds” collectively represent how “photography which takes architecture as its subject matter has the ability to communicate wider truths about society,” according to the show’s curatorial statement. The exhibition is organized across two levels of linked solo displays, each contributing to a chronology that begins in the 1930s and ends in 2012. The format makes for luxurious, immersive viewing. Navigating a sequence of independent displays that propel one through time gives the sense of having travelled smoothly through history, ending up in the present day looking into the future.

The show aptly begins with Berenice Abbott and Walker Evans. Although both were attracted to architecture, Evans ultimately forged a new photographic approach to architecture’s relationship with its surroundings and the people that inhabit it. He focused on the design and composition of building facades in small towns tucked away in the American Deep South still reeling from the Depression-era economy. The profusion of detail in his tight, frontal shots of timber churches, gas stations, storefronts, and frame houses in which buildings and figures stand in stark contrast to one another are all captured with deadpan candour. Ironically, Evans’ intentionally blunt commentary, which happened to make various types of buildings a primary expressive device, ended up excoriating the effects of modern society in vernacular America. Its new products, insistence on variety, and false sense of abundance had made of life something cruel, unfair, and without charm, his photographs seem to say.

The following displays verify this view of photography as more than a document. Julius Schulman’s postwar color photographs– advertisements for a new variety of residential buildings designed by Richard Neutra, Charles and Ray Eames, and Pierre Koenig in California– revisit a central lesson from Evans. These intimate, transparent images of the buildings draw attention away from the artist’s sensibilities to the subject of architecture as an agent of social change and cultural identity. Elsewhere, Lucien Hervé exposes the meta qualities of Le Corbusier’s architecture, and both Stephen Shore’s and Thomas Struth’s concentrate on ordinary architecture including nondescript streets: all appear as witting or unwitting heirs to Evans’s work. However, they somehow seem to lack Evans’s empathy with the human protagonist. People in this work appear either rarely or not at all.

Up through Struth, this narrative of photography’s relationship with architecture proceeds so seamlessly that the show’s second half feels bewilderingly confused. Suddenly, in the midst of highly formalist work by Hélène Binet, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and Luisa Lambri, we confront photographs of hot zones: sites of titanic economic power, new post-revolution cities, post post-colonial cities, and post-apocalyptic war zones. These types of scenes are present in work by four of the most dramatic photographers featured in this section, namely Simon Norfolk, Nadav Kander, Iwan Baan, and Bas Princen. In tone and subject, their work serves to dramatize the show by its overtly political stance, and rightly so.

In Simon Norfolk’s Former Soviet-era ‘Palace of Culture’, Kabul, 2001-2002, for example, bombed out structures in Kabul are bathed in golden light. In Nadav Kander’s Chongqing XI, Chongking Municipality, 2007, and Fengjia III (Monument to Progress and Prosperity), Chongking Municipality, 2007, an incomplete bridge and a lone building that resembles a defunct Transformer respectively serve to frame industrialized China, as if positing the evolution of a somewhat eerie if sublime new landscape. Elsewhere, Iwan Baan’s images of squatters in an aborted and abandoned commercial complex in downtown Caracas attempt to record how ordinary people, originally evicted from their own homes, used the aftereffects of the 1994 Venezuelan banking crisis to their advantage. Torre David façade, 2011 and Small businesses like this can be found throughout the building, 2011, offer a sampling of the condition Baan’s images reveal.

When juxtaposed with the curatorial premise, this body of work seems less related with architecture and architect per se than with existing political or social conditions: the structures depicted seem to be more of products than agents. In Hervé’s photographs of Corbusier’s buildings, for example, people ambling across a building look like quirks in an otherwise abstracted geometry. On the other hand, the upscale residents in Schulman’s pictures of designer homes are as integral to the architectural design and its social value as actors are to a theatrical stage set.

But in Kander, Baan, and, to a lesser degree, in the work of Princen, context is everything. For this reason, including these photographers, despite their sophistication, feels like a compulsion to “color” the exhibition with a somewhat forced global history. Unlike say, Sugimoto, Lambri, or Binet, and their rather modish fascination with architectural form and its aura, this newer work is fueled by the desire to tell a story about the future world fallen into ruin even while it’s being constructed.

Their inclusion also cleaves the exhibition along undeniably racial lines. The new cities of world are not filled with the typically crass but shiny building projects that mainstream media represents of developments in Dubai or Cairo. Rather, in this show, these cities appear populated by the wreckages or ghosts of an architectural imagination that is variously arrogant, jerry-built, and gone awry in every instance, possibly because it lacks the traditional impetus of Western architectural thinking, its goals, and its dazzling names. This is the conclusion to draw if one believes that the subject of the photographs by Norfolk, Kander, Baan, and Princen, is in fact buildings and architecture, rather than a picture of a world gone mad.

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