Aperture's Blog, page 167

The Call for Entries for the 2015 Portfolio Prize is Now Closed!

Thanks to all who entered! Stay tuned for the announcement of our winner and runners-up in March 2015.

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Erwin Olaf: Volume II (video)

Erwin Olaf’s approach to storytelling is enticingly ambiguous. Erwin Olaf: Volume II is a presentation of his most recent work, through which he expands on his established style of highly polished and stylized color studio images. This new volume showcases Olaf at the height of his powers as an artisan of atmosphere and a craftsman who uses high polish to both perverse and seductive effect. Here, Olaf gives us a virtual tour of the series included in Erwin Olaf: Volume II, and gives insight on his thought process and inspiration for each.

Erwin Olaf: Volume II




$65.00

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Workshop Instructor Profile: Elinor Carucci (Video)

We sat down with photographer and instructor Elinor Carucci on November 1 to discuss her two-part workshop at Aperture Foundation, “Finding the Universal in Photographic Narratives”. The workshop reflected what motivates Carucci both as a photographer and as an educator. Spanning two weekends, the workshop led students to discuss the concepts and elements of personal narrative within their images, along with ideas and suggestions for how to make compelling edits and intriguing image sequences. Four weeks after the first meeting, Carucci gathered with students to view their new work, encouraging them to listen to their work, and allow it to grow.

“Elinor is a great photographer and a warm person who can look at your work with a critical eye while also being supportive.”

“You will be spending time with a master. There is much to learn even beyond your own work.”

—Workshop participants

 

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Anne Collier at MCA Chicago

Anne Collier, Developing Tray #2 (Grey), 2009. Courtesy the artist; Anton Kern Gallery, New York; Corvi-Mora, London; Marc Foxx Gallery, Los Angeles.

Anne Collier, Negative (California), 2013. Courtesy the artist; Anton Kern Gallery, New York; Corvi-Mora, London; Marc Foxx Gallery, Los Angeles.

Double Marilyn, 2007. Chromogenic print. Collection of Dean Valentine, Los Angeles.

Cut (Color), 2009. Chromogenic print. Collection of Pauline Karpidas, New York

Untitled (This Charming Man), 2009. Chromogenic print. Collection of Anton Kern, New York.

8 x 10 (Lynda), 2007. Chromogenic print. Courtesy the artist and Anton Kern Gallery, New York.

Anne Collier, Open Book #7 (Light Years), 2011. Courtesy the artist; Anton Kern Gallery, New York; Corvi-Mora, London; Marc Foxx Gallery, Los Angeles.

Woman With A Camera (The Last Sitting, Bert Stern), 2009. Chromogenic print. Collection of Martin and Rebecca Eisenberg.

Eye (Enlargement of Color Negative), 2007. Chromogenic print. Collection of Randy Slifka, New York.

Last week Anne Collier’s solo show opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, the photographer’s first major museum exhibition, surveying her work since 2002. In Collier’s work, the camera itself becomes an object that must be examined through photographs, often leading her to photograph photographs, whether they are her own or from others. She often isolates commercial images to point out their sublimated politics. Her longstanding “Woman with a Camera” series reverses our gaze on ad-happy models or recognizable actresses like Cheryl Tiegs posing with cameras. By making these images the still-life subjects of photographs, Collier forces us to reconsider who is looking at whom as well as confound the object and the observer. She makes sly use of visual language by allusion, as in her image Cut, a photographic representation of the notorious eye-slicing scene of Un Chien Andalou: a photograph of the photographer’s eye is bisected whilst trapped in a paper cutter. In her recurring images of eyes, often also presented as photographs of photographs, she places the act of seeing at the forefront of her work, in a kind of Russian-doll effect. The exhibition, which runs through March 8, 2015, is aptly titled Anne Collier, in the same self-reflexive impulse that characterizes her photographs.

 

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Deadline Extended for the 2015 Portfolio Prize!

The call for entries for the 2015 Portfolio Prize has been extended to Friday, December 5.

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LaToya Ruby Frazier’s The Notion of Family (Video)

We sat down with LaToya Ruby Frazier to discuss the realization of her first book, The Notion of Family, which offers an incisive exploration of the legacy of racism and economic decline in America’s small towns, as embodied by her hometown of Braddock, Pennsylvania.

More than 12 years in the making, the work compellingly sets a story of three generations—her Grandma Ruby, her mother, and herself—against larger questions of civic belonging and responsibility. Since beginning the work as a teenager, Frazier has enlisted the participation of her family—and her mother in particular. These images acknowledge and expand upon the traditions of classic black-and-white documentary photography, and are themselves transformative acts, resetting traditional power dynamics and narratives, both for those of her family and those of the community at large.

 

The Notion of Family




$60.00

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The Islamic State and Photography

Image of Unknown IS fighter from Twitter. Location Unknown. July, 2014.

 

Sam Powers is a social media analyst who has spent time working in private intelligence, focusing on the threat posed by foreign terrorist organizations. For the past year, he has been monitoring the growing threat posed by The Islamic State (IS), tracking the group’s media strategy and outreach to Western audiences on social media. Before his career in intelligence and social media, Powers was a documentary filmmaker . Here, he considers the strategies and visual imagery of IS from a photographic standpoint. 

As The Islamic State attempts to recruit new members, their use of photography and imagery has arguably become more advanced than any other terrorist group in history. The group’s most deliberate imagery, made with high-quality cameras and using editing techniques similar to major Western media outlets, has come under scrutiny by news agencies as well as the intelligence community for its ability to capture both jarring battle footage and the group’s quotidian activities. In fact, IS has created an entire industry comprised of private groups, staffed by journalists and former government employees, all of whom are dedicated to sifting through IS media releases and analyzing the message and effect on a predominantly Western audience.

IS runs various media offices, with its largest known as Al-Hayat (meaning life in Arabic). This outlet releases a slick, online multilingual magazine called Dabiq, named after a religiously significant Syrian town. Within the pages of this magazine and through official media handles on Twitter, IS presents its carefully choreographed vision to a global audience. As their reports attempt to mimic the production values of Western media outlets, IS sympathizers on Twitter grow at an alarming rate. Currently there are tens of thousands of Twitter users who either claim that they are fighting with IS or are sympathetic to the group’s mission. 

 

Two recent covers of Dabiq magazine, the IS online periodical. September, 2014.

The images that follow are sourced from these various media platforms as well as from IS supporters on Twitter. Many are screenshots from videos distributed by IS on hosting websites including JustPaste.it, a Polish website used for sharing large files. While the authenticity of these images cannot be independently verified, the mass dissemination of the photos in this article as well as their endorsement by known jihadist ideologues and media officials suggest that the images are genuine. The pictures are of high quality and capture everything from battle footage to IS efforts to maintain support amongst their constituency in Iraq and Syria.

 

Image from Black War Training Camp, unknown location in Syria. September, 2014.

A battle photo taken from a Dabiq magazine release. Location Unknown. September 2014.

 

Photo of IS stronghold Ar Raqqah, Syria, using long exposure. October 2014.

Much IS imagery captures the mundane, often with the clear intention of attracting a Western audience. From rides in the back of tanks to images of local cuisine alongside Coca Cola or other comfort foods, these pictures show IS’s attempt to present jihad with a human face. Such images of daily life are usually of lower quality, clearly taken with devices like smart phones by fighters on the ground. They offer a distinctly different aesthetic when compared with the more sophisticated images taken with higher-quality DSLR cameras that appear in IS propaganda magazines.

 

A foreign fighter enjoying a kebab at a post-battle celebration in Iraq. September 2014.

IS fighter handing out candy during Eid Al-Fitr celebrations in Nineveh province, Iraq. July, 2014.

Another prominent category of imagery surfacing on Twitter is personal images that evoke allegiance to IS and demonstrate a pledge of faith (Bayah in Arabic). These are often the first images displayed by a Twitter user once he becomes a member of IS. Established members often re-tweet images of new members pledging faith by holding up their index finger, an allusion to the tawhid, or the oneness of god. Unaware of what they are being asked to swear allegiance to, children of fighters are often pictured in the same position, sometimes brandishing automatic weapons.

A child pledging allegiance to IS. Location Unknown. August, 2014.

Alongside pledges of faith, the use of images of dead brothers in arms, referred to by IS as “martyrs,” have become increasingly popular since the US-led coalition targeting the group began. These images are often placed alongside a fighter’s personal profile on Twitter to commemorate the dead and to encourage continued fighting against the West.

 

Image from a propaganda page of a dead suicide bomber and his explosive laden truck. Iraq. October, 2014.

 

With carefully crafted magazines displaying how and why to join the jihad and video using advanced film techniques, IS has reached a large global audience. While the United States and other countries have attempted to counter the group’s vast media output, such efforts have not degraded IS’s ability to tap into the heart of a minority of susceptible young Muslims, from the West in particular, who are increasingly attempting to travel to Iraq and Syria to join the militant group. Some have argued that government alone cannot be the sole voice online against IS, particularly when dealing with sensitive topics of Islamic faith.

Efforts including the State Department’s Digital Outreach team (found on Twitter under the handle @DSDOTAR) lack IS’s propagandist’s production values and wide reach. For example, when compared to the tens of thousands of followers maintained by IS’s most well known sympathizers, referred to by some in the intelligence community as “power users,” @DSDOTAR maintains just over one thousand followers, many of whom appear to be IS fighters and sympathizers themselves who trail the handle, most likely to gain information on US government practices online.

Image from @ThinkAgain_DOS Twitter Page. October, 2014.

While other initiatives, including the State Department’s (DOS) “Think Again Turn Away” (found on Twitter at @ThinkAgain_DOS), maintain a large following and emphasize that IS is a brutal, anti-Muslim organization, the government has been criticized for its use of imagery on social media. The image produced below highlights how DOS is attempting to apply a moral argument to delegitimize IS, while using jarring imagery to back up their statement. Some have argued that a US-sanctioned Twitter page, producing anti-IS imagery, merely serves as a beacon of attack for IS fighters themselves. As seen in the image below, IS fighters and sympathizers often use these government handles to make anti-US remarks and attempt to justify violence. With this in mind, it seems that those who want to counter IS’s sophisticated use of media and imaging to garner a following will need to create an equally seductive alternative narrative and take the fight to IS online.

Image from @ThinkAgain_DOS Twitter page with a comment from an IS sympathizer.

 

 

 

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Events Ashore: An-My Lê Artist Talk (Video)

On November 4, 2014, we joined artist An-My Lê for a talk and book signing of her highly anticipated second book, Events Ashore. In this body of work, Lê continues her exploration of the American military, a pursuit both personal and civic. Events Ashore began when Lê was invited to photograph U.S. naval ships preparing for deployment to Iraq, her first in a series of visits to battleships, humanitarian missions in Africa and Asia, training exercises, and scientific missions in the Arctic and Antarctic. Lê took attendees through Events Ashore from beginning to end, explaining the intentions behind the individual images as well as the book’s design.

Events Ashore




$89.95



Add to Cart

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The Living Library Markus Schaden on the Opening of the PhotoBook Museum

On August 19, 2014, the PhotoBook Museum, Cologne, opened the doors to its temporary Carlswerk space, a former industrial site now filled with containers full of photobooks; a smorgasbord of exhibitions of individual “PhotoBook Studies”; a book research lab run by Dortmund University; workshop areas; and even an almost-to-scale replica of Café Lehmitz, made famous (or infamous) by Anders Petersen’s book of the same name. (This first version of the Museum closed October 12, but it is looking for a more permanent home.) Markus Schaden, photobook evangelist and museum founder, reports back on the opening events, his inspiration, and its future.

There were approximately five thousand visitors to the PhotoBook Museum in the first week—a lot of photobook and photography fans, but also local people interested in an exciting event and people who have nothing to do with photobooks, which, for me, is the most exciting.

My experience with photobooks comes out of the book trade, as a bookseller and buyer. I missed being in touch with the average reader, not just someone already immersed in the field. Every photographer wants to make a book, so they are interested, and then you have the collectors, the freaks, the nerds; they love to have a book all signed, editioned, etc. But I think we need readers outside of these niches to make the market healthier. As Wolfgang Tillmans said a few weeks ago in the Guardian, pictures are replacing words, for young kids especially. We have to take care to educate, to show kids and others the possibilities of good visual culture in book form. I think we have to develop this kind of visual literacy—not just fetishize the book by discussing paper, special bindings, whatever.

A good example of this can be found in one of the PhotoBook History sections of the museum: Chargesheimer: Köln 5 Uhr 30. A Book-History Reconstructed: Photokina 1970, in which a 1970 exhibition is reconstructed. This exhibition—and the book it accompanies—presents the photographer’s manifesto and statement about Cologne, and the changes the city landscape was undergoing at the time. Using this work, I want to have a discussion with people from the city about traffic patterns, post-war architecture, and living in Cologne today. If a book can really get into life and change it, or at least change your view of the world, that is the best a photobook can do. For sure, everyone has to take care to think about the form, the production. But this is not the real item. The real item is the story, the message. For me, a book is an idea in a physical form.

Another of my goals was to explore a new relationship between a collector, a collection, and a museum. As I was planning, one of my questions was: do I need to buy a collection? Maybe not; maybe it would be nice to partner with others who are already building specialized collections. They could continue to collect, and we could make an agreement for how best to use those collections. For example, Hilla Becher has an amazing library that she and Bernd created. The great thing is that it’s not just about photography, it’s about their research: books about steel and about the German construction industry and architecture. I think this is the real library for Becher studies! Or, for example, one of the first collections of Japanese books I ever saw, in 1999, was in the bathroom of the Kodoji Bar in Tokyo, where Araki famously hung out. In this tiny bathroom of this tiny bar were all these masterpieces of Japanese photography. The bathroom also had pens on hand, and the books were all inscribed by other photographers—Tomatsu writing something to Moriyama, for example! I thought to myself, wow, this is the perfect research library.

In the long run, we want to find a permanent residence for the museum. I would love to be here in Cologne, but it is not absolutely necessary. I know how difficult it is to set up a museum in terms of money, of funding, and finding a building especially, so my whole strategy was to turn the planning steps around to start with what is basically a dummy version of the museum. After this site-specific manifestation, we’ll put everything online and make documentation of it available to more people. Then we can go on tour with a shipping container, the cargo version. We can pack up parts into individual shipping containers; it can travel to festivals, other museums, fairs, wherever. Maybe other people will take over the idea. The dream is that in ten years, we might have three or four PhotoBook Museums around the world. Even if I can’t do it, and other people take over the idea, it would be great.

_____

Markus Schaden is the founder of the PhotoBook Museum and the Schaden.com publishing house. He is based in Cologne, Germany. The PhotoBook Museum’s first catalogue is nominated for a 2014 PhotoBook Award. thephotobookmuseum.com

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Markus Schaden on the Opening of the PhotoBook Museum appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

Review: Christopher Anderson on Peter Van Agtmael

 

Peter van Agtmael, Disco Night Sept. 11

This book was short-listed for a 2014 Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Award.

Peter van Agtmael

Disco Night Sept. 11

Red Hook Editions

Brooklyn, 2014

Designed by Yolanda Cuomo Design

8 1/2 x 10 1/2 in. (21.59 x 26.7 cm)

276 pages, including 19 gatefolds

188 color photographs

Clothbound hardcover with tip-on

redhookeditions.com

 

 

I really don’t want to look at another picture from a war. For such a visual subject to photograph, so little seems to come from war photography that means much of anything at all. Some of it is done “better” or “worse”; sometimes there is a more powerful moment here, or better light there. But rarely does any of it add up to something more than a horrific accounting of a daily score. One of the reasons (there were many) I no longer function as a “war photographer” is that I couldn’t find a path to reconciling this for myself. I could not give myself a satisfactory answer to the question, “What is the point?”

It was always so. But now and then (once in a generation?) a body of work comes along that answers this question with thunder and poetry. Vietnam Inc. by Philip Jones Griffiths (1971) comes to mind. Farewell to Bosnia by Gilles Peress (1994) is an obvious example. With his book Disco Night Sept. 11, Peter van Agtmael might have answered that question for his generation of war photographers—and for himself. 

Disco Night moves over vast territory, both geographic and emotional. Layers are stitched together to equal meaning that is bigger than the sum of its parts. The images float back and forth from Afghanistan to Iraq to America. We meet soldiers and civilians and families. But van Agtmael’s camera serves not to report their stories as much as communicate his experience among them. As with Tim Hetherington’s video, Diary (2010), van Agtmael deals with the dissonance between war and home and the gray areas in between: one day a firefight in Afghanistan, the next a view from his own childhood window. But the introspection is ambient noise; he is not consumed by it. The central characters are those trying to make sense (or not) of what war has brought them. The striking thing in this book is the humanity with which van Agtmael introduces us to this material. Humor and tragedy are not easily untangled in the real world.

The design and size of the book walk a fine line between understatement and gravitas. It is elegant without being pompous, simple without being shallow. The photography is loose and subtle, so it needs a bit of size to register. Apart from van Agtmael’s poignant introduction and diary-like entries sprinkled in (thank goodness he didn’t add some insufferable academic essay about what war photography is), lengthy captions accompany the images. In a lesser book, this might easily suck out all the poetry, but here it works coherently in the service of its overall power.

I should note that Peter is a friend and colleague of mine at Magnum, so in the spirit of objectivity there has to be some criticism. So, here goes: photography in and of itself is not very interesting to me. Visual wizardry and compositional fireworks are just tricks. With some shining exceptions, the pictures in Disco Night are not what one would describe as “good” in that mundane sense of photography. But because they are not “good” pictures, they are great pictures: pictures full of confusion, frustration, fear, excitement, anger, horror, and sorrow. For me, this is where photography becomes interesting. These are not just pictures about war. They are pictures about us—us as Americans, Afghans, Iraqis; as soldiers, civilians, journalists, innocents, savages. It doesn’t seem trite to call Disco Night Sept. 11 an important book. It will fit perfectly on your shelf somewhere between Michael Herr’s Dispatches (1977) and Gilles Peress’s Telex Iran (1983).

_____

Christopher Anderson has been a member of Magnum Photos since 2005. He is the author of five photography monographs, including Capitolio (Editorial RM, 2009), Son (Kehrer, 2013), and Stump (Editorial RM, 2014). Presently he is the first-ever photographer-in-residence at New York magazine.

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