Aperture's Blog, page 172

Announcing The Paris Photo-Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards 2014 Short List

Todd Hido, photographer and photobook maker greeted an eager crowd at the New York Art Book Fair on Friday, September 26 to announce the thirty-five outstanding photobooks short listed for the 2014 Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards, supported by Amana / IMA Magazine.

Initiated in November 2011, by Aperture Foundation and Paris Photo, the Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards celebrate the photobook’s contribution to the evolving narrative of photography, with two major categories: First PhotoBook and PhotoBook of the Year. This year, the Awards introduced a brand-new third category, Photography Catalogue of the Year. In 2013, First PhotoBook was awarded to KARMA by Óscar Monzón (RVB Books/Dalpine), and PhotoBook of the Year went to A01 [COD.19.1.1.43] — A27 [S | COD.23] by Rosângela Rennó.

This year’s short list selection was made by Julien Frydman, director of Paris Photo; Todd Hido, Lesley A. Martin, publisher of the Aperture book program and of The PhotoBook Review; Mutsuko Ota, editorial director of IMA magazine; and Anne Wilkes Tucker, photography curator at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

The ten short listed titles for PhotoBook of the Year are:

The Big Book

Photographer: W. Eugene Smith

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Rich and Poor

Photographer: Jim Goldberg

Publisher: Steidl

Disco Night Sept. 11

Photographer: Peter van Agtmael

Publisher: Red Hook Editions

Marrakech

Photographer: Daido Moriyama

Publisher: SUPER LABO

Photographs for Documents

Photographer(s): Vytautas V. Stanionis

Publisher: Kaunas Photography Gallery

Ponte City

Photographers: Mikhael Subotzky and Patrick Waterhouse

Publisher: Steidl

Vertigo

Photographer(s): Daisuke Yokota

Publisher: Newfave

Imaginary Club

Photographer(s): Oliver Sieber

Publisher: Editions GwinZegal/BöhmKobayashi

The Winners

Photographer(s): Rafal Milach

Publisher: GOST

The Arrangement

Photographer(s): Ruth van Beek

Publisher: RVB Books

The twenty short listed titles for First Photobook are:

everything will be ok

Photographer: Alberto Lizaralde

Publisher: Self-published

Synonym Study

Photographer: Nico Krijno

Publisher: Self-published

The Meteorite Hunter

Photographer: Alexandra Lethbridge

Publisher: Self-published

Father Figure: Exploring Alternative Notions of Black Fatherhood

Photographer: Zun Lee

Publisher: Ceiba

19.06_26.08.1945

Photographer: Andrea Botto

Publisher: Danilo Montanari

Miklós Klaus Rózsa

Photographer: Christof Nüssli and Christoph Oeschger

Publisher: Cpress/Spectorbooks

ED IT: The Substantial System for Photographic Archive Maintenance

Authors: Ola Lanko, Brigiet van den Berg, Nikki Brörmann, Simone Engelen, Sterre Sprengers Publisher: Self-published

Back to the Future

Photographer: Irina Werning

Publisher: Self-published

Inventio

Photographer(s): Yann Haeberlin

Publisher: Self-published

Euromaidan

Photographer(s): Vladyslav Krasnoshchok and Sergiy Lebedynskyy

Publisher: Riot Books

Silent Histories

Photographer: Kazuma Obara

Publisher: Self-published

Hidden Islam

Photographer: Nicoló Degiorgis

Publisher: Rorhof

Sequester

Photographer: Awoiska van der Molen

Publisher: Fw: Books

The American Series

Photographer: Oskar Schmidt

Publisher: Distanz

Fractal State of Being

Photographer: Sara Skorgan Teigen

Publisher: Journal

Spasibo

Photographer: Davide Monteleone

Publisher: Kehrer Verlag

Red String

Photographer: Yoshikatsu Fujii

Publisher: Self-published

War Porn

Photographer: Christoph Bangert

Publisher: Kehrer Verlag

Jannis

Photographer: Alma Cecilia Suarez

Publisher: Self-published

Photograph

Photographer: Yuji Hamada

Publisher: Lemon Books

The five short listed titles for Photography Catalogue of the Year are:

Photobooks: Spain 1905–1977

Photographers: Multiple

Publisher: Editorial RM

Christopher Williams: Printed in Germany

Photographer: Christopher Williams

Publisher: Walther König/David Zwirner

Christopher Williams: The Production Line of Happiness

Photographer: Christopher Williams

Publisher: Art Institute of Chicago

Dark Knees

Photographer: Mark Cohen

Publisher: Le Bal/Éditions Xavier Barral

Tsunami, Photographs, and Then: Lost and Found Project

Photographer: Munemasa Takahashi

Publisher: AKAAKA

The Catalogue Box

Photographers: Multiple

Publisher: Verlag Kettler/The PhotoBook Museum

The thirty-five selected photobooks will be exhibited at Paris Photo in the Publishers Space. After Paris Photo, the exhibition will travel to Aperture Gallery in New York from December 13, 2014–January 29, 2015 and will tour after to the IMA Concept store and gallery in Tokyo from December 9, 2014–January 18, 2015, as well as other venues to be determined.

They short listed books will also be profiled in issue 007 of The Photobook Review, Aperture’s biannual publication dedicated to the consideration of the photobook, to be released in November 2014 at Paris Photo. Copies will be also be available at Aperture Gallery and Bookstore, as well as distributed with Aperture magazine and through other distribution partners.

The short list is also available at Aperture Foundation’s web site at www.aperture.org/photobookawards/ and Paris Photo’s web site at www.parisphoto.com.

A final jury in Paris will select the winners for all three prizes, which will be revealed at Paris Photo on November 14, 2013. The winner of First PhotoBook will be awarded $10,000.

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PhotoBook Awards 2014 Short List appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

Revisiting the Sequence: Minor White at the Getty Center

Diana C. Stoll in conversation with Paul Martineau, curator of Minor White: Manifestations of the Spirit at the J. Paul Getty Center, Los Angeles

Minor White, Self-Portrait (West Bloomfield, New York), 1957. © Trustees of Princeton University

 

Aperture magazine was founded in 1952 by a group of luminaries that included Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, Barbara Morgan, and Beaumont and Nancy Newhall. But the figure who truly breathed life into the new journal was photographer, teacher, critic, poet, and spiritual thinker Minor White. As the editor of Aperture during its first twenty-three years, White established the magazine’s identity as a crucial forum for contemporary art photography. His decisive influence was also disseminated through classes and workshops, and of course through his own work in photography—a medium he saw as nothing less than a vehicle toward transcendence.

Minor White: Manifestations of the Spirit, the first museum exhibition of White’s work to be presented in a quarter of a century, is on view at the J. Paul Getty Center in Los Angeles through October 19. I recently spoke with Paul Martineau, the show’s curator and the author of its accompanying catalog, about White’s work and its reception, and the thinking behind the exhibition.  —Diana C. Stoll

Diana C. Stoll: Minor White is a perennially interesting and complicated subject. How did you come to take this on as a project?

Paul Martineau: I have liked Minor White’s work for a long time—and although the Getty has an outstanding holding of modernist photography, I was surprised to learn that there were only three prints by Minor in the collection. I had the idea to do a show with the hope of obtaining more of his work for the museum. We were very fortunate to have the support of Los Angeles–based philanthropists Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser, who helped us to acquire the sequence Sound of One Hand and have promised to donate a significant number of photographs by White to the Getty Museum. In three years, when all the gifts have come in, we’ll have seventy-five!

Also, it had been twenty-five years since Minor’s last major exhibition [Minor White: The Eye That Shapes, organized by Peter C. Bunnell, opened in 1989 at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and traveled to Portland, Minneapolis, San Francisco, Rochester, Boston, and Princeton]. I realized it was time.

DCS:   Let’s talk about that twenty-five year gap. The subtitle of your show is Manifestations of the Spirit. The idea of Spirit was central to Minor’s work—but do you think it might be one of the reasons why he’s not been focused on in all these years?

PM: Yes. When I was planning this exhibition, I looked into all the past exhibitions and books on Minor—and I thought about how difficult it seemed to come to an understanding of what Minor was all about. I realized that what was needed at this time was a project that made Minor’s life and work more accessible.

DCS:  Certainly the public’s understanding of homosexuality has changed, too—since the 1989 exhibition, and even more since Minor’s own lifetime. Does this give us a new way to talk about his approach?

PM:  It’s key to understanding what he’s about. Imagine trying to understand Alfred Stieglitz without his photographs of Georgia O’Keeffe, or Edward Weston without his photographs of Tina Modotti or Charis Wilson.

DCS:  But as heterosexuals, Stieglitz and Weston didn’t face the quite same thing in their work. In his 2008 essay “Cruising and Transcendence in the Photographs of Minor White,” critic Kevin Moore talks about the idea of sexual frustration being central to the meaning of Minor’s work. For Stieglitz and Weston—and many others, of course—sexuality was important, but I don’t think they felt thwarted in finding the means to express it.

But I wonder if someday Minor’s angst will seem almost historical to us—like the fury of pre-civil-rights artists in the United States . . . we can understand where their anger and frustration were coming from, but it feels distant. Will Minor’s frustration—if that word applies—seem foreign to people as generations go by, and as sexual variations are taken for granted?

PM:   Right. I learned recently that Facebook now has fifty-one different gender designations to choose from—and the British branch of Facebook added fourteen more! It shows you how far things have come.

One of the clues to how Minor thought about homosexuality is in a letter that he wrote to photographer Edmund Teske. [In 1962, Teske sent White some two hundred photographs in the hopes that he would make a selection from them for publication in Aperture. Teske’s sexual interest in men was clear to White, who responded with a very emotional letter saying that Teske needed to “universalize” his imagery, so that his feelings wouldn’t be so obvious and the work would have a broad appeal.]

Minor White, Rochester, New York, 1963. Courtesy of the Minor White Archive, Princeton University Art Museum

 

DCS:   When I was working as an editor at Aperture magazine, many decades later, that was still the central question: how does the work communicate to the reader? The magazine has to function as a mediator between the artist and the public—and it was Minor who set up that dynamic for Aperture. How does an artist take this intensely personal thing and universalize it so that people will get it on the other end? As an editor, Minor understood: the magazine brings it to the reader, and the reader in turn has to be able to take it and go with it.

I’ve had the opportunity to talk to Peter Bunnell about Aperture’s early years, and how Minor fell into the job of being the editor. But boy, he took to it like a fish to water!

PM:   Yes. And Aperture became a sort of a Bible for insiders. But by the time the ’70s rolled around there was some reaction against Minor and his powerful influence. People were becoming interested in new things, photographically and otherwise—such as New Topographics.

DCS:  And of course sociologically, the world was changing, too. All that very important and influential stuff that Minor was disseminating with his workshops—the mystical, the esoteric, the spiritual. . . .

Minor White, The Sound of One Hand Clapping, Pultneyville, New York, 1957. Courtesy the Minor White Archive, Princeton University Art Museum

 

PM:  It was part of that period, and then it subsided.

DCS:  In a similar way, Minor was wonderfully presumptuous in what he expected of viewers—both for his own work and for other people’s photography—he demanded a kind of “heightened awareness.” He wanted you to bring your full self to the process of looking. One wonders how well later generations will be able to do that. Will they do it at all?

PM:   Today, of course, we’re constantly bombarded with images—on the sides of buses, on our cell phones. This show, however, calls on people to slow down and study the pictures. To spend time with them.

DCS:   One of White’s great contributions to photography was the idea of sequence: a body of images that is somehow greater than the sum of its parts—he used the term “cinema of stills.” But in the 1989 show, Bunnell did not include any sequences at all, because (as he says in a footnote in the exhibition catalog): “In a public gallery, crowded with people, the necessary state of concentration cannot be achieved by a viewer to properly engage the works as White intended.”

PM:   I think that might make sense for someone who has devoted a life to the study of photography . . . which is different from the average museum-goer. I think it’s a disservice to Minor and to the viewer not to include any sequences because of the fear that people might approach it in the wrong way.

Installation view of Minor White’s series Sound of One Hand. Courtesy Getty Center

 

DCS:   How are you presenting Minor’s sequences in this show?

PM:   The only sequence that I have in its entirety, in the original order, is Sound of One Hand (sequenced in 1965). Ten of the photographs are hung closely together on one wall with the eleventh nearby in a floor case. I placed a text explaining what a sequence is, and how Minor would want you to approach reading it, on the adjacent wall. So visitors are able to experience it the way Minor intended, if they want to. Some people won’t read it and maybe they’ll go backwards, but that’s up to them.

DCS:   In the exhibition catalog, you show The Temptation of St. Anthony Is Mirrors [thirty-two images centered on White’s student and model Tom Murphy, sequenced in 1948] in its entirety. I believe there are only two copies of that sequence, right? Minor had one, and Tom Murphy had the other.

PM:   Yes, both copies are now in the Minor White Archive, thanks to Peter Bunnell’s efforts. Hardly anyone knew about this album before we published it.

DCS:   What kind of light do you think this sequence sheds on his work?

PM:   It’s a wonderful pilgrimage of sorts through Minor’s various mental and emotional states, from anguish to ecstasy. The alternating rhythms of stillness and movement feel like a kind of a dance, as you page through the album.

DCS:   Clearly Minor considered this a private project—but there is certainly meaning to be drawn from it. It’s an interesting balance: how understanding Minor affects the understanding of his work, versus being able, as a viewer, to pull from yourself and relate to his images.

PM:  It’s the two-way street; you benefit by being able to travel both ways. If you know more about Minor, certain things come to the fore that you would probably not have realized on your own. But you can still appreciate and enjoy the power of the work without any knowledge of what Minor was about.

DCS:  Minor’s body of work—as well as his work with Aperture, and as a teacher—was very much about challenging the viewer to rise to the occasion of looking: to bring your all to the experience.

PM:   That was one of his lifelong challenges: he wanted people to study the work and bring their own associations to the viewing of it. I think a big clue to Minor’s approach is the title of Sound of One Hand—from the Zen koan that asks “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” Everyone is going to come up with a different answer.

Minor White, Tom Murphy, San Francisco, from the series The Temptation of St. Anthony Is Mirrors, 1948 © Trustees of Princeton University

DCS:  And what about the title The Temptation of St. Anthony Is Mirrors?

PM:  It refers to Anthony the Great, the mystic who helped spread the concept of monasticism and lived as hermit. When he was alone in the desert, he was continuously tempted by the Devil. And Minor believed that every portrait he took was a self-portrait—a mirror image of his desires and fears. . . . I think in all his pictures, there are these two issues: he presents himself as someone who has desires for men, but doesn’t act on them—and channels that energy into something of great beauty and power. He didn’t always live up to his ideals, but he tried to.

DCS:   Minor said at one point: “A love of God can grow out of a love for the flesh.”

PM:   Yes. Minor was hard on himself. That is part of the struggle that you can feel in some of his work.

DCS:   It’s interesting how some photographers can benefit from their challenges. All these things nourished Minor’s work.

PM:  For me, Minor’s best work was made from 1958 to 1963—that really represents the apex of his career, when I feel he was applying all the things he was learning from his study of Eastern religions to the work, and doing things that no one else was doing. Although he had been teaching for many years already, this was also when he was really starting his workshops. He liked the workshop format because it enabled him to be more experimental. He didn’t have to answer to anyone. He even studied hypnotism and used it in some of his workshops in the 1960s. That might not have gone over so well in an academic setting!

The photographer John Upton, who studied with Minor, told me that he used Minor’s relaxation techniques in an experiment that he did with two groups of students. He had them all read photographs, and the group that had completed the exercises came up with much more profound insights and reactions to the photographs.

DCS:   And what else about Minor’s legacy? What things have come down to us from him, in terms of both photography and teaching photography?

PM: At the outset, I thought it would be interesting to create a kind of genealogical tree that would show Minor and his students, and their students. Then I realized that such a project would take years to develop! Minors students are legion—Minor’s army! There are so many people who studied with him and then, in turn, taught other people

DCS:   Are there photographers today who had no contact with Minor but have been obviously touched by him?

PM: Abelardo Morell comes to mind. I don’t think he knew Minor, but he has definitely been influenced by his writing and ideas. I remember him quoting Minor at one point, about metaphorical photographs.

DCS:   Minor said: “To look at things to see what else they are.” It’s about photographing and understanding meaning on at least three levels, and probably more. He took Stieglitz’s idea of equivalency all the way to the end-point.

PM: Right. There’s nothing else to be uncovered in that theory while remaining connected to reality.

And Paul Caponigro, who was a student of Minor’s, said something I think is very important: that Minor White showed everyone, in word and deed, what it is to live a life completely dedicated to photography.

Minor White, 72 N. Union Street, Rochester, 1960. Courtesy the Minor White Archive, Princeton University Art Museum

_____

Paul Martineau is associate curator in the Department of Photographs at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.

Diana C. Stoll is a writer and editor based in Asheville, North Carolina. She was the senior editor of Aperture magazine from 2000 to 2013, and co-edited Peter C. Bunnell’s 2012 book Aperture Magazine Anthology—The Minor White Years, 1952–1976.

 

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Minor White at the Getty Center appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

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The Call For Entries for the 2015 Portfolio Prize is Now Open!

The entry period for the 2015 Aperture Portfolio Prize opened on Wednesday, October 1, 2014. To be eligible, entries must be received by Tuesday, December 2, 2014, at 12:00 noon EST.

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Recap: The New York Times Magazine Photographs Opening Reception

On Wednesday, September 17, Aperture Members and friends were the first to view The New York Times Magazine Photographs exhibition at Aperture Gallery. Guests were joined by the show’s curators, Kathy Ryan, director of photography at the New York Times Magazine, and Lesley A. Martin, publisher of Aperture’s books program, for a tour of the exhibition.

The exhibition has been traveling internationally for over two years and is on view at Aperture Gallery through November 1, 2014. The accompanying publication, The New York Times Magazine Photographs, was published by Aperture in 2011.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images © Max Campbell and Katie Booth.

 

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Emmanuelle Alt: Conversation with Penny Martin

 

Inez & Vinoodh, Emmanuelle Alt, 2014 © Inez & Vinoodh and courtesy Gagosian Gallery, New York, and The Collective Shift

Fashion photography can be a nostalgic business, but Emmanuelle Alt’s appetite for the unexpected and glamorous keeps her in the vanguard of taste. A forty-seven-year-old stylist who learned her trade at French Elle, Alt is celebrated for reinvigorating the industry’s tired ’70s fashion clichés with surprising, sporty modernity since joining its most prestigious magazine, Vogue Paris, as fashion director in 2000.

Taking over from Carine Roitfeld as the publication’s editor-in-chief three years ago has demanded a more global view of making a magazine, shifting Alt’s focus away from styling and aesthetics alone. She may not now enjoy the luxury of being on set with Mario Testino, David Sims, 
and Inez & Vinoodh every week, but Alt still has the knack of intuiting exactly what a photographer needs to make a truly great picture. Penny Martin, editor of the women’s title The Gentlewoman, interviewed Alt at the Vogue Paris offices on Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré this past May.

 

Penny Martin: Let’s start in the present. Emmanuelle, tell me about your most recent shoot—how did it come about?

Emmanuelle Alt: I was just in St. Barths with Inez & Vinoodh, shooting for our June/July issue. I’ve known them for about twelve years, so we’ve developed an easy way of working. We all love the same period of photography. And it’s not only the images; it’s the whole culture—a certain time of models, clothes, a certain time in music.

PM: I gather you started off in music videos?

EA: Yes, when I started styling, videos were very important. It was the era of Jean-Paul Goude and Jean-Baptiste Mondino, a totally new medium.

PM: Was this while you were at Elle?

EA: Yeah, I was working as a production assistant at the same time. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to be a director; I was just fascinated by images, I think. I assisted on some Mondino videos; at that time he was fashion photography’s God. The stylist was Ray Petri. It was a brilliant team.

PM: So that was the golden age for you?

EA: Yes, for me, probably the beginning of the ’80s, the end of the ’70s . . . I think your first music and visual influences stay with you forever. My group all listens to Bowie; there’s nothing better. You live with what was around when you first became curious.

Vogue Paris, December 2013. Cover photograph by Inez & Vinoodh © Inez & Vinoodh/Vogue Paris

 

PM: When it comes to initiating a shoot, then, are those common influences even mentioned between collaborators of the same age?

EA: Well, this story began with Inez and me exchanging images by e-mail. Sometimes it comes from almost nothing; it might just be a color. When you’re shooting in the sun—you know that strong blue sky in St. Barths—you need a contrast. So I might say, “What do you think about red and white?” And Inez is like, “Oh, yeah, sure!” I’ll send a picture of a red shoe and a René Gruau illustration, which is full of red, and just a silhouette or a little sketch. It’s not always photographs—often it’s a painting or a frame-grab from a YouTube film. Very quickly, we’ll start to build up an image of a woman, and then we can discuss the casting. Some photographers will keep changing their casting or think they need a stronger idea. But Inez isn’t someone who hesitates. It’s like three phone calls and everything is booked.

PM: Do you ever have preproduction meetings with photographers in person?

EA: Unfortunately, everything is done over phone and e-mail since no one is in Paris. Of the bigger photographers we work with, I think Peter Lindbergh is the only one. Besides, at this time of year, we need to shoot overseas for the light. And unless photographers have made a career out of studio photography, like Penn or Avedon, I think most of them get bored if they’ve been stuck in there all year.

PM: The studio is all about control—leaving very little to chance so an idea can be executed exactly as imagined.

EA: Whereas outside you’re looking for accidents. I’m going on a trip with David Sims in a few weeks—once a year we take him on location. For a studio photographer like him, who controls the lighting, everything, he has to face a lot of unexpected things outside. Suddenly, rain makes a fantastic picture or there’s a dog in the street. The only thing is it costs a lot of money to fly photographers and their teams out there. We’re far from the days of Helmut Newton traveling with one assistant, one person doing hair and makeup, the model, and a fashion editor. Five people: it was nothing.

The following first appeared in the Fall 2014 issue of Aperture magazine, “Fashion”. Subscribe here to continue reading.

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Sebastião Salgado: Genesis

Sebastião Salgado at the International Center of Photography.

Sebastião Salgado's exhibition Genesis, on view at the International Center of Photography.

Sebastião Salgado's exhibition Genesis, on view at the International Center of Photography.

Sebastião Salgado's exhibition Genesis, on view at the International Center of Photography.

Sebastião Salgado's exhibition Genesis, on view at the International Center of Photography.

Sebastião Salgado's exhibition Genesis, on view at the International Center of Photography.

Sebastião Salgado's exhibition Genesis, on view at the International Center of Photography.

The timing for the opening of Sebastião Salgado’s eight-years-in-the-making, epic project Genesis, on view at the International Center of Photography from September 19 to January 11, 2015, could not be more ideal or inspiring. With both a UN Climate Summit and a People’s Climate March (expected to include an unprecedented number of participants) also taking place in New York within the next week, Salgado’s exhibition, curated by his wife Lélia Wanick Salgado, is a call to action. Salgado—who has focused on poverty and starvation in his work in the Sahel, child refugees and migrants in The Children (Aperture, 2000), the struggle of the landless peasants in Brazil in Terra (1997), the end of manual labor in Workers (Aperture, 1993), and the displacement of the world’s people at the end of the twentieth century with Migrations (Aperture, 2000)—does not consider himself an activist. Rather, he said to me simply, “I am a photographer. Photography is my life, and my way of life.”

And yes, he is first and foremost a photographer, committed to rendering our quickly evolving world as he experiences it. His view is infused with empathy and a deep engagement with his subject. With Genesis, which was published as a book last year, for the first time he has focused on animals and the landscape, as well as people who are still living as they lived for centuries. In his new book, From My Land to the Planet (2014), Salgado writes of Genesis: “I wanted to recount the dignity and the beauty of life in all its forms and show how we all share the same origins. . . . For me, it has nothing to do with religion, but indicates that harmony in the beginning that enabled the diversification of the species: this miracle of which we are all part.”

Speaking with him for thirty minutes or so during the final stages of the exhibition’s installation, his sense of wonder and his belief in the planet’s resilience resonate passionately. His prognosis for humanity? Well, he’s more circumspect . . . but still hopeful. What follows are a few excerpts from our conversation.

—Melissa Harris, September 17, 2014, New York

Melissa Harris: I’m looking at the reforestation project you and Lélia did in Brazil through your [non-profit organization] Instituto Terra on the land your parents gave you, where you planted over 2.5 million trees and really reestablished the whole ecosystem. Were you thinking about ecosystems with Genesis?

Sebastião Salgado: These are macro ecosystems. These are huge regions of the planet that are, in a sense, with a certain equilibrium. In this section of the show, all this is Africa. Africa we cannot say is just one ecosystem. But it is a macro region of the planet. If you go from one ecosystem to the other, to the other, to the other, it creates a huge movement of ecosystems—and so you understand it in a more macro way. I made nine trips to Africa in order to get these pictures, working from the desert in the south of Africa to the Sahara Desert in the north of Africa, and working in between in Ethiopia, in Zambia, in Botswana, in Namibia . . .

We had another chapter in the north of the planet with an entirely different group of ecosystems, because I worked in the Kamchatka in Russia; worked on Wrangel Island, north of Siberia; worked with the movement of reindeers in the north of Siberia also, in the Yamal Peninsula; worked in the Brooks Range in Alaska; worked in Canada, the border of Canada and Alaska on the Pacific side; worked in the United States in the Colorado Plateau.

MH: What happened to you in this process? Did you experience something you hadn’t experienced before?

SS: Incredible. For me, it was incredible, this thing. I did eight years of trips, eight months a year. I went to thirty-two regions or countries. But the big trip that I did was inside myself. I discovered that I am part of all this, that I am part of the animals. That we are part of everything alive in the planet. We are part of this huge equilibrium. You know? For me, it was the most important thing.

We came out of the planet. We must go back to the planet. And I went back to the planet. I thought before, being human, that I was part of the only rational species. That’s a big lie. Because each species is deeply rational inside its own species. We are all—the mineral species, the vegetable species, the animal species—we are all the same. We have the same life. We are all alive.

Once I was with a scientist here in the United States in this incredible chain of mountains—the Rocky Mountains. The guy tells me, “Sebastião, these are young mountains.” I said, “You are lying; these are billions of years old.” He said, “Yes, but this is the second generation of the Rocky Mountains, because the one that was there before was eroded to the ground zero, and the new one is young because she is growing still.” The Rocky Mountains are still growing! Incredible!

I’ll show you a picture of a mountain in Africa that is two days old. When we were in front of the mountains here, that are billions of years old. In these I discover all that we are . . . we are part of all this. We are not important. We give too much importance to ourselves. The life of this land is as important as we are, and we are part of it. I was astonished. You see, [in this picture] a volcano is going off, and it projected this new material, this new mountain. But I had to keep lifting my feet up and down as I photographed, or my shoes would start to melt.

It was amazing. To see these stones when they have just come out of the oven. It was so amazing. So amazing to discover these things.

And working on Galápagos, that was . . . I can show to you a cactus, one cactus, that you can touch—it has no nails that hit you. So soft. So small. But this cactus, born in the middle of these stones that came out of a volcano which created these lives!

I remember once I was working in Alaska. I was in the Brooks Range. I had a small plane that drove me to a point, and left me there, and came back for me one week or ten days later. Because in Alaska, you cannot fly always. It was June. You have the cold air coming from the Arctic and hot air from inside Alaska, and they meet over this Brooks Range, over this mountain, and it creates a lot of microclimates. In June, I had a lot of snow, a lot of rain—hot, cold, everything happened there. The plane sometimes was forced to leave me there. I’m sitting there all day long in front of the mountain. You are the planet; you are part of all this together. And you see how the wind cuts at these mountains like a knife, and it creates sand that will create soil, and you see all the vegetation, the small vegetation fights to survive. It’s amazing.

You see, that is the important thing. No? Even before, I photographed all one species, and with Genesis I became so open to every other species.

MH: Do you feel differently about Man now?

SS: Completely different about Man. If you consider the history of it: our earth, it started here—the beginning of this wall. At the end of this wall came the animal, then the human. We arrive in the last millimeter here. That’s the important idea. All of this lived before us. All this creation was happening. All these relations, linked to evolution, creating this kind of huge intelligence and evolution that was born from all these things. This for me was fantastic, so great.

MH: Is there still such a thing as “wild,” Sebastião? Is it possible to find something that is pristine and wild?

SS: There are places where no one from Western civilization has gone; there are humans who still live like we lived fifty thousand years before. There are a lot of groups that never made any contact with anyone else. They are the same as us. There is still a percentage of the planet that is in the state of genesis.

MH: That’s extraordinary.

SS: What we think is no more, what has been destroyed, is true—but it is not the whole thing. In the desert, in the Arctic, in the Amazon.

Yes, a good half of the planet—where we built our farms, where we built our agriculture—we destroyed. It’s ecologically destroyed. But a good half is there, and we must hold on to this if we want to survive as a species. Because we are not a danger to the planet; we are a danger to ourselves. It will be the end of our species. Because the moment that we go, the planet renews itself in five hundred years or a thousand years. It’s always done that. The forests come back. The planet can renew quite quickly. It’s not that damaging for the planet. It’s damaging for us. If we want to survive as a species, we must change our behavior.

These chemicals introduced to the planet with war or poison or anything damaging are the chemicals of the planet that we put in concentrated portions through here or through there. But the planet has a capacity to absorb all these things in the long term. Now we live longer lives. And we live outside of nature. We are the only species that has a real consciousness, I believe, that we will be dying. The others just live. And this consciousness that we’ll be dying happens in this modern urbanization. Because when you work with the Indians in the Amazon, they use their body. They have their body to be used. If they cut, they cut. If they break a leg, they break a leg. If they become old, they separate from the others, they go to the forest . . .

If we don’t change our behavior, we’ll disappear very fast. We’ll disappear as a species. You see, we have species that lived for 150 million years. They were much more strong than us. The dinosaurs. They’re gone 100 million years ago. And we are here after a few hundreds of thousands of years, no more than this. We are cutting the trees at a very high speed. They could help save us, and we are destroying the trees.

If we go, there are a lot of species that will go with us. But there are a lot of species that will not go—that will stay. For example, the species inside of the ocean will stay. The process can start again. In billions of years, the humans can come back again.

I believe at least that we must try to go back to the planet, probably not to live more inside the forests—that won’t happen. But we must, at least spiritually, go back into the planet. Feel that we are part of the planet. Add to the beautiful part of the planet, not destroy it. We have money, we have technology; we must have a spiritual comeback to the planet, being part of the planet. If we do this, we can control a majority of the carbon emissions that we have. If you control the quantity of the emissions, we can reduce them. We can use solar energy. We can use the movement of the world, the wind, so many things, to produce energy. We can change our concept of consumption.

MH: Are you sure you’re not an activist?

SS: No, it’s not activism. This is a way of life. It’s different. It’s my life. Activists are putting people in the street. We are planting the trees. I chose the word “genesis” just to say we live here with the beginning of life. That is also the planting—the beginning of life.

MH: Sebastião, was it different to photograph landscape and animals?

SS: You must respect people. You must respect nature. This [photograph of a giant tortoise] was one of my first pictures in Genesis. To make her portrait was at first impossible. She was afraid. In a moment, I was so tired that I put myself on my knees. When I put myself on my knees, by chance, I was at her level and it happened. I lay down. I started to work with her like this [gestures crawling, using his knees and elbows]. She came to me! And I moved back a little bit, to show her that I was respecting the territory, and she was as curious of me as I was of her. I stayed two hours with her, because she wasn’t afraid of me. It’s fantastic, our planet, and we are just a micro part of this huge life.

MH: What did you read? Were you reading Darwin? Were you reading poetry?

SS: I read Darwin, absolutely. I came to start at Galápagos because Darwin finished all his trip up with the Beagle, his boat. It is here that he finalized all the research to create the theory of evolution, and I came here trying to understand what he understood. I had all the writings. I went to exactly the same place Darwin came.

MH: So now what are you going to do? What’s next?

SS: Now I am working on another story. After last year, I started to do a story with the Indian movement in the Amazon. I want to do a story about the Amazon Indians and the Amazon Forest, link the two.

MH: Man and nature, and the nature of man. Is it complicated to get access?

SS: It is. I am working with the National Foundation of Indians, the Ministry of Justice. You must get authorization to be accepted by the Indians. It’s a long preparation. Now we were in Brazil this past winter for them to get three authorizations for the next year. I go to three different tribes next year.

_____

Sebastião Salgado (born in Brazil, 1944) was initially an economist, and began his photographic career in Paris in 1973. He worked with the Sygma, Gamma, and Magnum Photos agencies until 1994, when he and his wife Lélia Wanick Salgado founded Amazonas Images, dedicated exclusively to his work. He has traveled to more than a hundred countries for his photographic projects, which—after being published in the press—are mainly presented in books including Sahel, l’homme en détresse (1986), Workers (Aperture, 1993), Terra (1997), The Children (Aperture, 2000), Migrations (Aperture, 2000), and Genesis (2013). Traveling exhibitions of his work have been presented throughout the world. Salgado has been awarded many prizes, and is a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador and honorary member of the Academy of Arts and Sciences in the U.S.

Melissa Harris is editor-in-chief of Aperture Foundation.

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Billy Bragg Visits Aperture

For The Open Road Aperture Foundation Benefit Party and Auction, we commissioned Alec Soth, Billy Bragg, and Joe Purdy to take a road trip and create a live performance of music, photography, and video. They drove from Rock Island, Illinois, to Little Rock, Arkansas, performing and gathering material along the way. This week, Billy Bragg stopped by Aperture Gallery and spoke to executive director Chris Boot about the trip.

The Open Road Aperture Foundation Benefit Party and Auction, an evening of art and entertainment in tribute to Robert Frank, will take place October 21 at Terminal 5 in New York City. Purchase your ticket here. 

 

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Remembering Charles Bowden, 1945–2014

Courtesy of Molly Molloy

 

The December 1996 issue of Harper’s had just come out and within days, I received an unprecedented cluster of phone calls about one article. The anticensorship lawyer Burt Joseph and photographers Lynn Davis and Sally Mann each called to say that I had to read a devastating piece by a journalist named Charles Bowden. Bowden had focused on a group of young, unknown, Weegee-like Mexican photographers, risking their lives in Juárez to confront and combat corruption (including in the government and police forces), narcotraficantes, and the exploitation and murder of women. “It’s your kind of story,” the three of them said—and they were correct. Along with exceptional reporting on an issue most turned away from, it also placed front and center photography’s sometimes singular, searing ability to insist that attention must be paid.

Chuck was prescient, as always. It was years before Juárez as a place and as an issue would be covered regularly, before it would enter into the public eye, and he was remarkably courageous—physically, and in terms of his at-times unpopular convictions. And he was bilingual, understanding both words and images and how they may brush up against each other, sometimes realizing a power together that neither might have otherwise achieved alone.

His article resonated with urgency. I wanted to do a book with him and these photographers immediately, so I called him up. Fortunately, his number was listed in Tucson, Arizona, where the contributor’s bio indicated he lived. His signature sonorous voice at the other end of the line—deep, gravelly, yet kind of laid-back—said something along the lines of: “I was waiting for your kind to call.” He was wary at first. He knew of Aperture, but didn’t see this as a typical Aperture book. I reassured him we could do it fearlessly and with integrity, then sent him what turned out to be our ace in the hole: Eugene Richards’s Cocaine True, Cocaine Blue (Aperture, 1994). This blew his mind. It convinced him that Aperture had the chops to make a book with him on Juárez.

Charles Bowden, Juárez: The Laboratory of Our Future (Aperture, 1998), winner of the 1999 ICP Infinity Award for best publication.

 

Juárez: The Laboratory of Our Future (Aperture, 1998) includes photographs by Javier Aguilar, Jaime Bailleres, Gabriel Cardona, Julián Cardona, Alfredo Carrillo, Raúl Lodoza, Jaime Murrieta, Miguel Perea, Margarita Reyes, Ernesto Rodríguez, Manuel Sáenz, Lucio Soria Espino, and Aurelio Suárez Núñez, as well as a preface by Noam Chomsky and an afterword by Eduardo Galeano. It happened because Patrick Lannan and the Lannan Foundation also had a vision and came in as an instant supporter and advocate. It is one of the more brutal and raw subjects I’ve ever worked on. It is also one of the books I’ve edited that matters most. Chuck’s honesty and passion as a mission-driven, willful, open-minded, and brilliant investigative journalist, combined with his free-spirited pleasure in defying givens, was an exhilarating provocation to take a stand, to make a difference. Along with this, his certainty that images and words could coexist with parity—that one did not have to illustrate or be subservient to the other—made him an extraordinary collaborator and ally. Juárez, at the time, was one of the few books Aperture had ever done where the images and the text carried equal weight, and together drove the narrative. It presented a great challenge to me and to its designer, Wendy Byrne. Chuck’s mind was constantly racing in so many directions, drawing on such a breadth of knowledge and experience, conversations always kept me on my toes—which was an incredible tonic. He was viscerally, uncompromisingly awake.

When, in 1999, Michael Hoffman, Yolanda Cuomo, and I were working on the reconceptualization and redesign of Aperture magazine, Chuck was my pen pal and coconspirator, having been a magazine editor himself with strong opinions. A few days after he saw the first issue of the “new” Aperture in 2000, an unsolicited, “rough promotional manifesto” for the reconceived magazine appeared in my inbox.

“The camera may lie, cheat, and steal,” he wrote, “but it never has to stay home. Let’s team the fresh eyes with the best writing and let them play like musicians in an after hours club. Let’s have harmony, dissonance. Let’s improvise. Let’s have no rules or schools or borders. Let’s take the white gloves off. Let’s be happy, let’s be riveted, let’s be sad, let’s be the ocean blue, and let’s be alive to what light and film can do to our souls.”

To say Chuck was prolific is the understatement of the centuries. He wrote tirelessly and relentlessly; there were always projects. But along with his books and magazine articles, he offered, with typical generosity, to lend a hand in getting the word out about Aperture’s new iteration. We were thrilled!

In the twelve years that I was the editor of Aperture, I commissioned eight articles by Chuck. Or really, I had a couple of ideas, and he had multiple. Woven through all of his pieces were sensuous considerations of time, life, death, love, and beauty, and the extraordinary wonder in being.

You can read two of these articles here. One, “The Other Life of Photographs”, I asked him to write for Aperture magazine’s fiftieth anniversary in 2002; the other, “The Lives of the Saints,” he sent to me in 2011 to have my way with.

Courtesy of Molly Molloy

When Yolanda Cuomo first met Chuck, she called him a cowboy: tall, in blue jeans, longish hair, rugged, sun-baked. A friend of his I knew called him “walking testosterone.” He was charismatic in that Sam Shepard sort of way, but not macho. And he was exceptionally kind, supportive, talkative, private, and the person you’d definitely want in your lifeboat. Conversations might engage ideas, ranging from the border to corruption to the death penalty, to humming- and other birds, a beloved tortoise, a cherished dog, Hoyt Axton, red wine, a new recipe, night-blooming cactus, long desert walks, and his dear friend and partner in crime, Edward Abbey.

Chuck was a dreamer, a visionary, a sensualist, a doer, a lover, an intense and luminous individual with an inimitable voice and an unrivaled social conscience. He had no patience for conformity, no interest in power except to effect change. He often wrote of an “is-ness”—a word that I’ve stolen several times. I took that to mean a kind of presentness and in-the-worldness that made everything vital and electric. And that was Chuck.

“Look,” said Chuck, “you have a gift, life is precious, and eventually you die. All you are going to have to show for it is your work, and whether you did a good job or not.”

Chuck Bowden died in his sleep on Saturday, August 30, in Las Cruces, New Mexico, where he lived with his partner, Molly Molloy. He was sixty-nine. The loss of his voice, his presence, his originality, his mind, his heart, and his friendship is immeasurable. As a friend of his wrote of Chuck’s last moments, “I hope he heard the birds singing.”

—Melissa Harris, September 9, 2014

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