Aperture's Blog, page 174

Light Writing in the Tropics: The Story of Hercule Florence

In the 1830s, an adventurer and inventor named Hercule Florence sought to score the Amazon’s abundant birdsong. When attempting to print his peculiar manuscript about nature’s sound archive, he also invented an early form of photography.

Portrait of Hercule Florence, ca. 1875. Courtesy Instituto Hercule Florence (Arnaldo Machado Florence Archive), São Paulo

In a letter dated June 1839, William Henry Fox Talbot wrote to a botanist living in Italy that his “photogenic” drawings, as he named his first proto-photographs made with the aid of a solar microscope, would be “a big help to botanists.” In a later letter Talbot insisted that his invention would be “useful especially to the naturalists, since one can copy the most difficult things with much ease, for example crystallizations, tiny parts of plants, etc. etc.” Little did Talbot, largely credited as one of photography’s inventors, know that six years earlier a twenty-nine-year-old man in Brazil, far removed from the conversations happening in Europe about how to fix light and shadow (including French scientist and politician François Arago’s presentation of the daguerreotype at the Academy of Sciences in Paris in 1839, and British scientist Sir John Herschel’s supposed coining of the word photography the same year with his now-famous phrase “picture obtained by photography” at the Royal Society in London), had invented his own form of “photogenic” writing aimed to aid naturalists.

In 1833, Hercule Florence, a Frenchman who settled on the outskirts of São Paulo after surviving a four-year stint as a draftsman for a Russian Naturalist expedition up the Amazon River basin in the 1820s, invented a mode of reproduction that he called photographie (light writing)—the same words Fox Talbot used years later to describe his invention. Florence arrived at his form of light writing somewhat accidentally. In contrast to the narrative typically used to describe photography’s invention in Europe, it was not the joint achievement of nineteenth- century chemists and artists experimenting with light and silver compounds, nor that of Romantic poets desiring to apprehend that unruly living organism called nature. Instead it was the end result of a long search for a mode of printing. Specifically, Florence wanted to print and distribute a transcription method he had developed to organize and systematize the sounds of nature found in the Amazon region.

Florence was twenty when he arrived in the newly proclaimed Brazilian Empire in the early 1820s, living first in Rio de Janeiro, where he worked at a bookstore and printing press, before settling down some years later in the small village of São Carlos (Campinas), outside of São Paulo, for the remainder of his life. He hadn’t been living in his adopted country for long before he responded to an advertisement for an expedition led by Georg Heinrich von Langsdorff and was hired to be the group’s second draftsman (along with the well-known German painter Johann Moritz Rugendas and a younger artist named Aimé Adrien Taunay, although Rugendas would be dismissed before the journey began, after falling out with Langsdorff ). The expedition’s aim was to reach Pará, in the Amazon basin, through a fluvial route, while engaging in botanical, astronomical, and cartographic observations typical of such ventures. Close reading of Florence’s sporadic diary entries from these years reveals that despite his penchant for travel and adventure—a trait that brought him to Brazil—he found the expedition tiresome, describing the journey as a “grueling, anguished, and unfortunate peregrination” and noting time and again that “to see one Brazilian village is to see almost all of them.” These observations are not surprising for a man who often commented on the lack of culture and excess of nature in his adopted homeland. The watercolor views and landscapes that Florence produced as a hired painter bored him. What was the purpose, he asked in his diary, of visually reproducing the natural world, of composing collections that could only imitate existing collections and inventories gathered and archived throughout Europe? Was there nothing uncharted and original left to continue expanding the inventory of the world? Had nature been turned, in this way, into nothing more than a dead still life—obvious and trivial, predictable, lifeless?

Hercule Florence, Photographic copy of pharmacy labels obtained through direct contact with photosensitive paper under the action of sunlight, ca. 1833. The lower left margin reads (in reverse): “Photography by H. Florence, inventor of photography.” © Instituto Moreira Salles

Craving a recording of the natural world that offered infinite uniqueness, singularity, and power, Florence fixated on the idea that while the naturalist expeditions of the first decades of the nineteenth century had created encyclopedic and cartographic knowledge, they never contemplated the possibility of a sonic inventory. “With great zeal we have tried to, and continue to try to, learn everything that is known about animals,” Florence wrote. “Even the most minimal details have not been ignored; for this reason expensive and arduous voyages have been made to almost every point on the globe; collections of animals were thus made at an enormous cost to the museums of the great cities; the descriptions and drawings allow them to become known throughout the world.” Ironically, Florence would have more opportunities to indulge his theories about sound as the expedition ran into grave problems, derailing hopes of becoming the most scientifically important journey of its kind in the region: Taunay would drown crossing a river; the group’s astronomer came down with beriberi, a tropical disease that afflicted many slaves in colonial Brazil; Langsdorff, as well as half of the team, was stricken with malaria and suffered high, debilitating fevers, resulting in his complete insanity and loss of memory. Amid this chaos, Florence sidelined his official work and turned his attentions to the universe of sounds enveloping him. He began a series of notations recording the calls of birds, the croaks of frogs, and noises made by other animals. Of a bird called araponga, Florence writes that “it is beautiful…it makes a sound that imitates well the banging of a hammer on an anvil,” and of the singing of the anhu-póca: “it is big, its voice strong and euphonious; repeats this sound every fourth of a minute.” Florence approximated the corresponding notations to the sounds he heard and then produced musical scores, a method he dubbed zoophonie. The outsized ambition of his desire to catalogue all the jungle’s birdsong was not lost on Florence: “when one considers how much animals’ voices vary to infinity, one tends to think that it is almost impossible to transcribe them without using an infinite number of signs … the method that I am here giving is only a first attempt … .”

In 1831, after returning home from his journeys, Florence attempted to print and circulate his notes and manuscript outlining his zoophonie. The cumbersomely titled text, Research on the Voice of Animals or Essay on a New Subject of Study Offered to the Friends of Nature, detailed his discovery of nature’s potential sound archive and proposed his novel method of capturing and recording the immaterial, enchanted animal sounds of the Brazilian tropical forests. Florence, however, ran into difficulties finding a printer for his manuscript—a struggle that reveals how his experimentation with photography belongs to the story of a fragile, emerging early-nineteenth-century print culture. Few printing presses then existed in Brazil because the Portuguese Crown sought to control the spread of anti-colonial propaganda. But Florence would not be deterred. This obstacle motivated him to find a more accessible and democratic mode of reproduction, one that utilized a resource available to all, sunlight. Unlike the European figures credited with the invention of the medium, Florence used photography to reproduce symbols and written artifacts, not the visible world. His first attempts with the process resulted in a print made around 1833 of pharmacy labels, likely produced for his friend and collaborator Joaquim Corrêa de Mello, a chemist who at the time lived in Campinas, the same village as Florence, and helped him learn the properties of silver nitrate. These six pharmacy labels on a single sheet of paper demonstrate how, for Florence, photography functioned as a mode of reproduction analogous to printing. His method worked much like a modern-day photocopy—and, significantly, these labels reveal how seriality was ingrained in his work, something that standard accounts of photography’s history attribute to the invention of the carte-de-visite decades later. His notebooks and diaries also reveal that he worked on other photographs: a photographic copy of a Masonic Diploma and one of his own hand-drawn designs for a camera obscura and other items needed for the photographic process. Ultimately, Florence did not use this method to print his manuscript, as he finally convinced a printing press in Rio de Janeiro to publish his findings, though there is no record of how his zoophonie was received.

“Equipment used for photography,” originally appeared in Florence’s manuscript, L’Ami des Arts…, 1837. Courtesy Instituto Hercule Florence (Arnaldo Machado Florence Archive)

On May 1, 1839, the Rio de Janeiro–based newspaper Jornal do Commercio announced the invention of what would become known as the daguerreotype, calling the invention a “revolution in the arts of design,” in which “nature appears portraying itself, copying its works as well as works of art…. Light, light itself was the painter.” Six months later, in response to the announcement of Louis Daguerre’s method, Florence published a press release in the São Paulo–based newspaper A Phenix in which he stated that he had already been working on photographic printing methods for nine years and that these experiments led him first to the invention of polygraphy (a form of printing that used sunlight, stencils, and chemistry to reproduce texts or graphics) and then to the “discovery” of “fixing of images in the camera obscura through the action of light.” He continued, “I will not dispute anyone’s discoveries, because one same idea can come to two persons, and because I always considered my findings precarious.” When Florence’s press release was reprinted in Rio two months later, it was prefaced by a journalist’s note stating, “Let the readers compare the dates and decide if the world owes the discovery of Photography, or at the very least of Polygraphy, to Europe or to Brazil.”

Daguerre had received a life pension from the French government, and Florence hoped to obtain the same. He wrote letters and made his case to the French Academy of Sciences but never received any serious response, and his diary entries from this time convey his resentment at being overlooked. “Photography is the wonder of the century. I had also already established the grounds, foreseen this art in all its majesty. I did it [photography] before Daguerre’s process, but I worked in exile. I printed by means of sunlight seven years before photography was first talked about. I had already given it that name; however, all honors to Daguerre.” The French invention caught on and became popular in Brazil; in 1840, fourteen-year-old Pedro II, about to be crowned Second Emperor of Brazil, had the daguerreotype technique demonstrated to him. The young emperor became enamored with the invention, turning into the first promoter of official photography within a monarchy, introducing the title of “Crown Photographer” before Queen Victoria in England.

Hercule Florence, Anhu-póca, n.d. (polygraphic drawing). © Instituto Moreira Salles

A tireless inventor despite lack of fame, fortune, or even credit, Florence continued to experiment with reproduction. In the late 1830s, he purchased a typography machine, obtained the necessary license to operate it, and printed advertisements and the short-lived revolutionary newspaper O Paulista that became the “fuel of the liberal movement” until the anti- monarchical revolt had been squashed, forcing Florence to disappear his machine after printing only four editions. In the early 1840s, about a decade after his first experiments with photography, Florence invented unique and inimitable paper money. The move from photography to money might seem a stretch, but both share an inherent seriality. A banking crisis of 1864 that resulted in a reconfiguration of the banking and commerce system made it evident that money, both paper and coin, were difficult to authenticate. Florence seized on the economic tumult by introducing paper that, because of the “sharpness” it allowed in printing, the “microscopic traces,” and the “indelible” quality of the printed colors and patterns could, as his 1842 advertisement claimed, “guarantee … against forgeries.” But this, too, failed to catch on. Yet Florence never gave up: In 1859 he patented a reproduction technique he called “stereopainting” and, soon thereafter “solar painting,” though we don’t know much about what these intriguing projects entailed. His last known “invention” was what he called “The Sixth Order of Architecture, or Brazilian Order.” This order consisted of columns, pediments, and other architectural details inspired by Brazilian palm trees, already an icon of the country. Greece produced the three known orders of architectural style—the Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian—that symbolized the roots of Western architecture. Florence seems to have wanted to put Brazil on the cultural map by inventing a style or order that reflected the country’s tropical environs.

Hercule Florence, Tête et pate de l’anhu-póca (Head and feet of anhu-póca bird, or Southern screamer), Paraguay river, 1826, from Expedição Langsdorff ao Brasil 1821–1829. Volume 3: Aquarelas e desenhos de Florence (Langsdorff expedition to Brazil 1821–1829. Volume 3: Watercolors and drawings). Courtesy Instituto Hercule Florence, Saõ Paulo, and Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg

Why didn’t any of Florence’s ideas and inventions flourish? Most likely his status as an outsider within the highly structured political and class system in nineteenth-century Brazil, with its strong monarchy and organized cultural centers clustered in Rio de Janeiro and the northern city of Recife, is to blame for his lack of recognition. Though his name would fall into obscurity rather than becoming canonized in photography histories, he seems to have passed his later years rather contentedly in the small town of Campinas, where he fathered twenty children and lived on a beautiful fazenda (ranch).

A century passed before Florence’s remarkable achievements were discovered. In the early 1970s, Boris Kossoy, a Brazilian photographer and photography historian who came across Florence’s “alleged” invention through mentions in specialized Brazilian publications, began his research on what he called the “isolated discovery of photography in Brazil.” To build his case Kossoy traveled to the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, to test, with the aid of technicians, the notations made by Florence about his photographic experiments. His tests proved that Florence had indeed invented a photographic process in 1833. Around the same time his photographic discoveries were being at last acknowledged, his studies of Amazon sounds were also finding new supporters in the emerging field of bioacoustics, or animal communications. In 1978, the world-famous French ornithologist Jacques Vielliard was invited by the University of Campinas, on the outskirts of the city of São Paulo, in Florence’s hometown, to establish what would become the most important bioacoustics lab in the Americas. Vielliard amassed an enormous collection of tropical sounds, creating the “Neotropical Sound Archive,” and in 2005 set up a second archive called the “Amazonian Sound Archive,” housed at the Federal University of Pará.

Page from Hercule Florence’s manuscript Voyage fluvial du Tieté a l’Amazone (Fluvial voyage from the Tieté to the Amazon river), 1831, which included many examples of his zoophonie notations. Courtesy Archive of the Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro, Rio de Janeiro, and Instituto Hercule Florence, São Paulo

More recently, contemporary artists have found Florence a source of inspiration. In the nineties, German sound artist Michael Fahres, working with a group of artists from Russia, Germany, and Brazil, retraced Florence’s journey with the Langsdorff expedition and reinterpreted his zoophonie. Italian photographer Linda Nagler is preparing a multimedia art exhibition around Florence’s many artistic and scientific explorations for the New National Museum of Monaco in 2015. An Argentine trio including writer Pola Oloixarac, photographer Luna Paiva, and composer Esteban Insinger wrote a contemporary opera called “Hercule Florence in Mato Grosso,” which will premiere in Buenos Aires this October. Perhaps Florence was neither a naturalist nor an inventor but rather a conceptual artist who was ahead of his time.

______

Natalia Brizuela is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Fotografia e império: Paisagens de um Brasil moderno (Photography and Empire: Landscapes of a modern Brazil) (Companhia das Letras, 2012) and the forthcoming Uma literatura fora de si. Escrita e fotografia (A literature beside itself: Writing and photography) (Rocco, 2014).

The post Light Writing in the Tropics:
The Story of Hercule Florence appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

Light Writing in the Tropics: The Story of Hercule Florence by Natalia Brizuela

In the 1830s, an adventurer and inventor named Hercule Florence sought to score the Amazon’s abundant birdsong. When attempting to print his peculiar manuscript about nature’s sound archive, he also invented an early form of photography.

Portrait of Hercule Florence, ca. 1875. Courtesy Instituto Hercule Florence (Arnaldo Machado Florence Archive), São Paulo

In a letter dated June 1839, William Henry Fox Talbot wrote to a botanist living in Italy that his “photogenic” drawings, as he named his first proto-photographs made with the aid of a solar microscope, would be “a big help to botanists.” In a later letter Talbot insisted that his invention would be “useful especially to the naturalists, since one can copy the most difficult things with much ease, for example crystallizations, tiny parts of plants, etc. etc.” Little did Talbot, largely credited as one of photography’s inventors, know that six years earlier a twenty-nine-year-old man in Brazil, far removed from the conversations happening in Europe about how to fix light and shadow (including French scientist and politician François Arago’s presentation of the daguerreotype at the Academy of Sciences in Paris in 1839, and British scientist Sir John Herschel’s supposed coining of the word photography the same year with his now-famous phrase “picture obtained by photography” at the Royal Society in London), had invented his own form of “photogenic” writing aimed to aid naturalists.

In 1833, Hercule Florence, a Frenchman who settled on the outskirts of São Paulo after surviving a four-year stint as a draftsman for a Russian Naturalist expedition up the Amazon River basin in the 1820s, invented a mode of reproduction that he called photographie (light writing)—the same words Fox Talbot used years later to describe his invention. Florence arrived at his form of light writing somewhat accidentally. In contrast to the narrative typically used to describe photography’s invention in Europe, it was not the joint achievement of nineteenth- century chemists and artists experimenting with light and silver compounds, nor that of Romantic poets desiring to apprehend that unruly living organism called nature. Instead it was the end result of a long search for a mode of printing. Specifically, Florence wanted to print and distribute a transcription method he had developed to organize and systematize the sounds of nature found in the Amazon region.

Florence was twenty when he arrived in the newly proclaimed Brazilian Empire in the early 1820s, living first in Rio de Janeiro, where he worked at a bookstore and printing press, before settling down some years later in the small village of São Carlos (Campinas), outside of São Paulo, for the remainder of his life. He hadn’t been living in his adopted country for long before he responded to an advertisement for an expedition led by Georg Heinrich von Langsdorff and was hired to be the group’s second draftsman (along with the well-known German painter Johann Moritz Rugendas and a younger artist named Aimé Adrien Taunay, although Rugendas would be dismissed before the journey began, after falling out with Langsdorff ). The expedition’s aim was to reach Pará, in the Amazon basin, through a fluvial route, while engaging in botanical, astronomical, and cartographic observations typical of such ventures. Close reading of Florence’s sporadic diary entries from these years reveals that despite his penchant for travel and adventure—a trait that brought him to Brazil—he found the expedition tiresome, describing the journey as a “grueling, anguished, and unfortunate peregrination” and noting time and again that “to see one Brazilian village is to see almost all of them.” These observations are not surprising for a man who often commented on the lack of culture and excess of nature in his adopted homeland. The watercolor views and landscapes that Florence produced as a hired painter bored him. What was the purpose, he asked in his diary, of visually reproducing the natural world, of composing collections that could only imitate existing collections and inventories gathered and archived throughout Europe? Was there nothing uncharted and original left to continue expanding the inventory of the world? Had nature been turned, in this way, into nothing more than a dead still life—obvious and trivial, predictable, lifeless?

Hercule Florence, Photographic copy of pharmacy labels obtained through direct contact with photosensitive paper under the action of sunlight, ca. 1833. The lower left margin reads (in reverse): “Photography by H. Florence, inventor of photography.” © Instituto Moreira Salles

Craving a recording of the natural world that offered infinite uniqueness, singularity, and power, Florence fixated on the idea that while the naturalist expeditions of the first decades of the nineteenth century had created encyclopedic and cartographic knowledge, they never contemplated the possibility of a sonic inventory. “With great zeal we have tried to, and continue to try to, learn everything that is known about animals,” Florence wrote. “Even the most minimal details have not been ignored; for this reason expensive and arduous voyages have been made to almost every point on the globe; collections of animals were thus made at an enormous cost to the museums of the great cities; the descriptions and drawings allow them to become known throughout the world.” Ironically, Florence would have more opportunities to indulge his theories about sound as the expedition ran into grave problems, derailing hopes of becoming the most scientifically important journey of its kind in the region: Taunay would drown crossing a river; the group’s astronomer came down with beriberi, a tropical disease that afflicted many slaves in colonial Brazil; Langsdorff, as well as half of the team, was stricken with malaria and suffered high, debilitating fevers, resulting in his complete insanity and loss of memory. Amid this chaos, Florence sidelined his official work and turned his attentions to the universe of sounds enveloping him. He began a series of notations recording the calls of birds, the croaks of frogs, and noises made by other animals. Of a bird called araponga, Florence writes that “it is beautiful…it makes a sound that imitates well the banging of a hammer on an anvil,” and of the singing of the anhu-póca: “it is big, its voice strong and euphonious; repeats this sound every fourth of a minute.” Florence approximated the corresponding notations to the sounds he heard and then produced musical scores, a method he dubbed zoophonie. The outsized ambition of his desire to catalogue all the jungle’s birdsong was not lost on Florence: “when one considers how much animals’ voices vary to infinity, one tends to think that it is almost impossible to transcribe them without using an infinite number of signs … the method that I am here giving is only a first attempt … .”

In 1831, after returning home from his journeys, Florence attempted to print and circulate his notes and manuscript outlining his zoophonie. The cumbersomely titled text, Research on the Voice of Animals or Essay on a New Subject of Study Offered to the Friends of Nature, detailed his discovery of nature’s potential sound archive and proposed his novel method of capturing and recording the immaterial, enchanted animal sounds of the Brazilian tropical forests. Florence, however, ran into difficulties finding a printer for his manuscript—a struggle that reveals how his experimentation with photography belongs to the story of a fragile, emerging early-nineteenth-century print culture. Few printing presses then existed in Brazil because the Portuguese Crown sought to control the spread of anti-colonial propaganda. But Florence would not be deterred. This obstacle motivated him to find a more accessible and democratic mode of reproduction, one that utilized a resource available to all, sunlight. Unlike the European figures credited with the invention of the medium, Florence used photography to reproduce symbols and written artifacts, not the visible world. His first attempts with the process resulted in a print made around 1833 of pharmacy labels, likely produced for his friend and collaborator Joaquim Corrêa de Mello, a chemist who at the time lived in Campinas, the same village as Florence, and helped him learn the properties of silver nitrate. These six pharmacy labels on a single sheet of paper demonstrate how, for Florence, photography functioned as a mode of reproduction analogous to printing. His method worked much like a modern-day photocopy—and, significantly, these labels reveal how seriality was ingrained in his work, something that standard accounts of photography’s history attribute to the invention of the carte-de-visite decades later. His notebooks and diaries also reveal that he worked on other photographs: a photographic copy of a Masonic Diploma and one of his own hand-drawn designs for a camera obscura and other items needed for the photographic process. Ultimately, Florence did not use this method to print his manuscript, as he finally convinced a printing press in Rio de Janeiro to publish his findings, though there is no record of how his zoophonie was received.

“Equipment used for photography,” originally appeared in Florence’s manuscript, L’Ami des Arts…, 1837. Courtesy Instituto Hercule Florence (Arnaldo Machado Florence Archive)

On May 1, 1839, the Rio de Janeiro–based newspaper Jornal do Commercio announced the invention of what would become known as the daguerreotype, calling the invention a “revolution in the arts of design,” in which “nature appears portraying itself, copying its works as well as works of art…. Light, light itself was the painter.” Six months later, in response to the announcement of Louis Daguerre’s method, Florence published a press release in the São Paulo–based newspaper A Phenix in which he stated that he had already been working on photographic printing methods for nine years and that these experiments led him first to the invention of polygraphy (a form of printing that used sunlight, stencils, and chemistry to reproduce texts or graphics) and then to the “discovery” of “fixing of images in the camera obscura through the action of light.” He continued, “I will not dispute anyone’s discoveries, because one same idea can come to two persons, and because I always considered my findings precarious.” When Florence’s press release was reprinted in Rio two months later, it was prefaced by a journalist’s note stating, “Let the readers compare the dates and decide if the world owes the discovery of Photography, or at the very least of Polygraphy, to Europe or to Brazil.”

Daguerre had received a life pension from the French government, and Florence hoped to obtain the same. He wrote letters and made his case to the French Academy of Sciences but never received any serious response, and his diary entries from this time convey his resentment at being overlooked. “Photography is the wonder of the century. I had also already established the grounds, foreseen this art in all its majesty. I did it [photography] before Daguerre’s process, but I worked in exile. I printed by means of sunlight seven years before photography was first talked about. I had already given it that name; however, all honors to Daguerre.” The French invention caught on and became popular in Brazil; in 1840, fourteen-year-old Pedro II, about to be crowned Second Emperor of Brazil, had the daguerreotype technique demonstrated to him. The young emperor became enamored with the invention, turning into the first promoter of official photography within a monarchy, introducing the title of “Crown Photographer” before Queen Victoria in England.

Hercule Florence, Anhu-póca, n.d. (polygraphic drawing). © Instituto Moreira Salles

A tireless inventor despite lack of fame, fortune, or even credit, Florence continued to experiment with reproduction. In the late 1830s, he purchased a typography machine, obtained the necessary license to operate it, and printed advertisements and the short-lived revolutionary newspaper O Paulista that became the “fuel of the liberal movement” until the anti- monarchical revolt had been squashed, forcing Florence to disappear his machine after printing only four editions. In the early 1840s, about a decade after his first experiments with photography, Florence invented unique and inimitable paper money. The move from photography to money might seem a stretch, but both share an inherent seriality. A banking crisis of 1864 that resulted in a reconfiguration of the banking and commerce system made it evident that money, both paper and coin, were difficult to authenticate. Florence seized on the economic tumult by introducing paper that, because of the “sharpness” it allowed in printing, the “microscopic traces,” and the “indelible” quality of the printed colors and patterns could, as his 1842 advertisement claimed, “guarantee … against forgeries.” But this, too, failed to catch on. Yet Florence never gave up: In 1859 he patented a reproduction technique he called “stereopainting” and, soon thereafter “solar painting,” though we don’t know much about what these intriguing projects entailed. His last known “invention” was what he called “The Sixth Order of Architecture, or Brazilian Order.” This order consisted of columns, pediments, and other architectural details inspired by Brazilian palm trees, already an icon of the country. Greece produced the three known orders of architectural style—the Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian—that symbolized the roots of Western architecture. Florence seems to have wanted to put Brazil on the cultural map by inventing a style or order that reflected the country’s tropical environs.

Hercule Florence, Tête et pate de l’anhu-póca (Head and feet of anhu-póca bird, or Southern screamer), Paraguay river, 1826, from Expedição Langsdorff ao Brasil 1821–1829. Volume 3: Aquarelas e desenhos de Florence (Langsdorff expedition to Brazil 1821–1829. Volume 3: Watercolors and drawings). Courtesy Instituto Hercule Florence, Saõ Paulo, and Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg

Why didn’t any of Florence’s ideas and inventions flourish? Most likely his status as an outsider within the highly structured political and class system in nineteenth-century Brazil, with its strong monarchy and organized cultural centers clustered in Rio de Janeiro and the northern city of Recife, is to blame for his lack of recognition. Though his name would fall into obscurity rather than becoming canonized in photography histories, he seems to have passed his later years rather contentedly in the small town of Campinas, where he fathered twenty children and lived on a beautiful fazenda (ranch).

A century passed before Florence’s remarkable achievements were discovered. In the early 1970s, Boris Kossoy, a Brazilian photographer and photography historian who came across Florence’s “alleged” invention through mentions in specialized Brazilian publications, began his research on what he called the “isolated discovery of photography in Brazil.” To build his case Kossoy traveled to the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, to test, with the aid of technicians, the notations made by Florence about his photographic experiments. His tests proved that Florence had indeed invented a photographic process in 1833. Around the same time his photographic discoveries were being at last acknowledged, his studies of Amazon sounds were also finding new supporters in the emerging field of bioacoustics, or animal communications. In 1978, the world-famous French ornithologist Jacques Vielliard was invited by the University of Campinas, on the outskirts of the city of São Paulo, in Florence’s hometown, to establish what would become the most important bioacoustics lab in the Americas. Vielliard amassed an enormous collection of tropical sounds, creating the “Neotropical Sound Archive,” and in 2005 set up a second archive called the “Amazonian Sound Archive,” housed at the Federal University of Pará.

Page from Hercule Florence’s manuscript Voyage fluvial du Tieté a l’Amazone (Fluvial voyage from the Tieté to the Amazon river), 1831, which included many examples of his zoophonie notations. Courtesy Archive of the Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro, Rio de Janeiro, and Instituto Hercule Florence, São Paulo

More recently, contemporary artists have found Florence a source of inspiration. In the nineties, German sound artist Michael Fahres, working with a group of artists from Russia, Germany, and Brazil, retraced Florence’s journey with the Langsdorff expedition and reinterpreted his zoophonie. Italian photographer Linda Nagler is preparing a multimedia art exhibition around Florence’s many artistic and scientific explorations for the New National Museum of Monaco in 2015. An Argentine trio including writer Pola Oloixarac, photographer Luna Paiva, and composer Esteban Insinger wrote a contemporary opera called “Hercule Florence in Mato Grosso,” which will premiere in Buenos Aires this October. Perhaps Florence was neither a naturalist nor an inventor but rather a conceptual artist who was ahead of his time.

______

Natalia Brizuela is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Fotografia e império: Paisagens de um Brasil moderno (Photography and Empire: Landscapes of a modern Brazil) (Companhia das Letras, 2012) and the forthcoming Uma literatura fora de si. Escrita e fotografia (A literature beside itself: Writing and photography) (Rocco, 2014).

The post Light Writing in the Tropics:
The Story of Hercule Florence
by Natalia Brizuela appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

Elaine Goldman and Julie Saul Host Aperture Members

Image © Gabrielle Pasternak

Image © Gabrielle Pasternak

Image © Gabrielle Pasternak

On Monday, July 21, Aperture Foundation trustee Elaine Goldman hosted an intimate evening for Aperture Members at the Friend level and above at her home in Greenwich Village, including a private tour of her photography collection as well as a conversation and Q&A session with gallerist Julie Saul. Guests enjoyed learning about personal approaches to collecting, and exchanged ideas on the changing medium and market of photography. A wonderful spokesperson for the medium, Elaine encouraged the nascent collector to have courage, buy with passion, and accept “mistakes” and “successes” as part of the learning process.

A very special thanks to Elaine and Julie for the inspiring conversation!

More than ever before, Aperture is a defining voice in photographic scholarship and criticism, leading the debate about the art and culture of photography for over sixty years.

For more information about Aperture’s membership programs please visit aperture.org/join.

The post Elaine Goldman and Julie Saul Host Aperture Members appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

Recap: Aperture Summer Open Opening Reception

On Thursday, July 17, we welcomed participating photographers and the general public to Aperture Gallery in Chelsea for the opening reception of the Aperture Summer Open exhibition, an open-submission exhibition about the character of photography now, to which all photographers were invited to submit work. The theme of the first Summer Open is photography itself, with the work of ninety-seven photographers selected by Aperture’s executive director, Chris Boot. In addition to the single images selected for display on the wall, thirty-three artists’ full series (ten images each) were selected for digital projection. Before the opening, Chris Boot invited the participating photographers on a tour of Aperture’s gallery and office.

See the full list of photographers included in the exhibition here.

Membership at Aperture is about seeing it first. Engage with our talented photographers, writers, and editors at a variety of events like this by becoming an Aperture Member today! For more information, e-mail membership@aperture.org.

All images © Max Campbell.

The post Recap: Aperture Summer Open Opening Reception appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

Beyond the Decisive Moment by Ellie Armon Azoulay

George Hoyningen-Huene, Henri Cartier-Bresson, New York City, 1935
© Collection HCB/FRM/Magnum Photos

 

The Henri Cartier-Bresson blockbuster retrospective recently on view at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, leaves no doubt that the photographer was gifted with “a velvet hand” and a “hawk’s eye.” His past experience as an amateur hunter equipped him with patience, attentiveness, and precision—skills required to capture the “decisive moment,” the phrase that would become indelibly attached to his work. However, this show, curated by Clément Chéroux, suggests that these qualities were the means to an end, not the photographer’s main achievements and instead strives to convince viewers that there are many faces to Cartier-Bresson.

Livorno, Tuscany, Italy, 1933 © Henri Cartier-Bresson/Magnum Photos

 

The exhibition consists of seven thematic, chronologically arranged sections that each reveals a different character: Cartier-Bresson as a potential draughtsman, as a Surrealist, as a communist in his worldview, as an activist, and even as a Zen Buddhist. Three main time periods frame these sections. The first, 1926–35, is mostly marked by early, Surrealist photographs made during his travels; the second, from 1936 to 1946, is distinguished by his return from the U.S.; and the third period begins with the foundation of Magnum Photos, in 1947, and ends in the early 1970s, when he retired from photography and re-embraced drawing. Most of the prints are small and black-and-white, some vintage, and invite the viewer to step in closely to consider the process involved in the making of each photograph; the effect is to dissuade hurried consideration. While Cartier-Bresson’s most noted and loved photographs are on view, they are accompanied by lesser-known images; for instance, those related to his experiences in filmmaking, first as Jean Renoir’s assistant and second director, and later as a documentary-film director during and after WW2.

First paid holidays, Ile-de-France, 1936 © Henri Cartier-Bresson/Magnum Photos

The exhibition makes clear it was not a coincidence that he was always in what, in retrospect, seemed as to be the right place in the right time. The long-standing focus on his extraordinary ability to capture these moments has implied that it was mainly the fraction of a second that matters. But when looking into Cartier-Bresson’s biography, one can see that he was never a one-night stand photographer. He was never just passing by—in fact, he tended to linger as long as he could. Though he was considered a shy person, it seems that he knew everyone, which enabled him to catch intimate frames of many great people of his time: there’s the photograph from 1961 of Alberto Giaccometti crossing the road in Rue d’Alésia, Paris, while lifting his coat over his head to keep dry from the pouring rain, or the mysterious frame of Jean-Paul Sartre standing with Jean Pouillon on the Pont des Arts on a very foggy day in 1946.

Chéroux’s presentation reveals how he first learned to see the world through the eyes and the philosophy of the Surrealists, whom he encountered in the mid-twenties in Paris. Eugéne Atget and André Breton inspired him to reconsider how he looked at the familiar, and his work from the early thirties shows their influence: dummies and mannequins in shop windows, reflections in vitrines, and expressions of absurdity, irony, and humor. During this time, he also made several series of nude women, some of which might be read today as objectifying but he developed a more respectful approach towards his female subjects in later years.

In 1930, he took his first significant trip to Africa. He stayed a year and traveled throughout Ivory Coast, Cameroon, Togo, and along the Niger River toward the colonized territory then called “French Sudan” (today Mali). Well aware of the common representations of the continent through white-European eyes, Cartier-Bresson tried to avoid them, and in the photographs from that trip one can see his attempt to capture mundane aspects of daily life as well as abstract, or more formal representations of people and their communities. Most of the people who appear in these photographs are shot from afar and are organized around actions, movements, and collaborative work, such as loading bananas from small boats on a port or fixing fishing nets as in an image titled Côte d’Ivoire, Africa (Ivory Coast, 1931).

Ivory Coast, 1931 © Henri Cartier-Bresson/Magnum Photos

Following that trip, Cartier-Bresson continued to focus on people and their living conditions. In Mexico (1934), a disabled woman is seen walking in a large empty courtyard in a poor neighbourhood in Mexico; she is captured from behind at a respectable, non-invasive distance. When documenting children from poor and neglected parts of the world, such as in Seville, Valencia, or Madrid, in the mid-thirties, and later in the sixties, he also managed to photograph in a way that did not degrade his subjects. Rather than focusing on their harsh living conditions, he captured playful behaviour and peoples’ curiosity about his presence and his camera.

Mexico, 1934 © Henri Cartier-Bresson/Magnum Photos

Despite Chéroux’s efforts to broaden our view of Cartier-Bresson’s output and move away from the limitations imposed by the term “decisive moment,” the decision to only focus on the photographer’s activism in the third section of the exhibition, called “Political Commitment,” focusing on Cartier-Bresson’s return from the U.S. and Mexico, is questionable. This is not to say that the works on view do not carry a political tone, but that his work was political before 1934–35. This potentially casts doubt on the photographer’s intentions in other branches of his work; the need to classify by theme runs the risk of generalization, neglecting important nuances. For example, in the second section of the exhibition, “The Attraction of Surrealism,” a large number of photographs are read through the prism of Surrealism, which diminishes their humanistic, social, and political aspects. In one instance, the wall text reads: “the viewer would dearly love to lift the cloth, but the image cannot be unveiled: that is how our desire to see it aroused.” This invocation of the “veiled erotic” seems out of place when applied to photographs such as Livorno, Italy (1933), a picture of poor children who wish to cover their faces in front of Cartier-Bresson’s camera. The same feeling surfaced when looking at another photograph taken in Spanish Morocco in 1933, in which we see a man lying on the ground on a street corner, covered in a dirty piece of cloth. Even with these thematic impositions, the stated curatorial intent to “to trace the history of Cartier-Bresson’s work, independently of the myths and superimposed categorization,” as stated in the exhibition’s catalog, was accomplished, offering fresh ways of thinking about this influential photographer’s work.

 

—

Henri Cartier-Bresson was on view at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, from February 12 to June 9, 2014. It is now at Fundación Mapfre, Madrid until September 7, 2014. Thereafter, the show will travel to the Museo dell’Ara Pacis, Rome, from September 26, 2014 to June 1, 2015.

Ellie Armon Azoulay is a writer, critic and curator based in Paris. For the past five years she has been an art correspondent for Haaretz newspaper, Israel, and also contributes to other art publications.

The post Beyond the Decisive Moment
by Ellie Armon Azoulay appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

@Aiww by Jacob King

Image from @Aiww on Instagram

Images from @Aiww on Instagram

Standing in a long, slow line to buy a ticket for the Ai Weiwei exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, I found myself gazing down at my iPhone, scrolling through Instagram. @Aiww is a prolific Instagram user—as of May 5, he had uploaded 2,551 photographs, and had 63,000 followers—and early that morning, lying in bed, I had browsed through a half-dozen photographs shot at Mr. Ai’s Beijing studio, including one where he was posing with Martha Stewart. The guests at Mr. Ai’s studio—celebrities, curators, artists, students, gallerists, friends—are frequently the subjects of his posts, and they are often photographed sitting around a table in his courtyard. Comments below each image try to disentangle the identities of those pictured: “Who is that?” one person asks, while another answers, “It’s Jens Farschou” (a prominent Danish collector). A comment from @delgrantx on that morning’s Martha Stewart post, however, was more acerbic (perhaps unjustifiably so) and it stuck in my mind: “So strange, is she in China to visit the sweatshops where her crap is made? Then she takes a side trip to someone who is a beacon for the human rights movement.”

Photography has been an integral part of Mr. Ai’s practice for decades, and the Brooklyn Museum exhibition, Ai Weiwei: According to What?, presents a number of his pre-Instagram photographic activities; chief among them is a group of black-and-white photographs shot by Mr. Ai while he lived in New York between 1983 to 1993. Framed and hung down a long wall, these photographs document Mr. Ai’s life and the lives of his Chinese expatriate friends, at first in Williamsburg and then the East Village. From the point of view of outsiders, they visit Coney Island, pose next to the 8th Street subway sign, watch the St. Patrick’s Day Parade, lie around on beds and sofas, and make many pilgrimages to Allen Ginsberg. But more broadly, they show us the city in the decade before Giuliani: the porn theatres in Times Square, the Tomkins Square Park riots, homeless men living on the streets of the Lower East Side, the Pyramid Club, an ACT UP protest at City Hall, a man in the subway holding up the sign: “I have AIDS. Please help,” and ending with a young Bill Clinton campaigning in midtown. Looking at the Brooklyn Museum, I felt close to these photographs; I live near the bodega in front of which Mr. Ai photographed himself in Williamsburg, I recognize the “Ms. Cohen” type with which he photographed himself in the East Village; Mr. Ai isn’t over there, in some foreign land, he was right here, in New York, where I live. But at the same time, the New York of these photographs feels utterly foreign—a bohemian place that existed where today much of downtown resembles a beautified and policed shopping mall.

Mr. Ai’s photographs on Instagram feel at once farther away—coming at me from across the globe—and yet, much closer—these events are happening right now, and appear in the palm of my hand. Like his New York photographs, but without the identifying captions that tell us who and what we are seeing, they show the goings on of Mr. Ai and his friends: the visitors to his studio, his travels in and around Beijing, the peregrinations of his long-haired cats and his young son (who recently has been making ceramics, and who, just this morning, I see gazing down with fascination at a beetle walking across a glass plate). Some are self-consciously “artistic”: compositions of shadows and hands, of the ivy growing on the courtyard wall of his studio, many shots of flowers, numerous black and white photographs of young Chinese with wild haircuts. We see Mr. Ai himself in many of his New York photographs, and on Instagram Mr. Ai’s self-portraits seem to have reached their zenith: the best of these, like those of his cats, or his son, are highly playful and infused with a sense of wonder; he shows us his hairy flesh and bulging stomach in black and white (evoking John Coplans); in one of my favorite recent shots, we see Mr. Ai from below, the bottom of his face covered by white cloth, his eyes looking out to the left, while a purple twisty drinking straw circles around and approaches his forehead like some fantastically strange machine.

The 229 New York photographs were chosen from over 350 rolls of film (more than ten thousand images) shot by Mr. Ai while he lived in the United States, and they were first printed in 2010, for an exhibition at the Three Shadows Photography Art Center in Beijing. As if to draw out a narrative around a decade in which Mr. Ai seemingly carried a camera with him everywhere—absent, he claims, any intention to exhibit the results—many of these photographs are printed like contact sheets, with three or more small, consecutive images on a single sheet of photographic paper. After they were exhibited, Mr. Ai uploaded them to his Google + account, where anyone with Internet access can view or download them. Also on his Google + page is an astounding album of 249 photographs that document the destruction of Mr. Ai’s Shanghai studio complex by the government in January 2011, as well as a group of photographs of rubble and collapsed buildings—one showing a child’s toy crushed beneath bricks—shot after the Sichuan earthquake in May 2008. But the most recent photographs on Google+ date from June 2012, after which it seems Mr. Ai shifted entirely to Instagram (possibly because of difficulty accessing Google in China, a country where both Facebook and Twitter are also blocked.) In a way this is a shame, as retrospectively, the album-based Google+ viewing is far more rewarding and easier to navigate than Instagram’s continuous, small-screen stream. As I scrolled through Mr. Ai’s Instagram feed after visiting the exhibition at Brooklyn Museum, I started to feel depressed and fatigued; there were simply so many photographs, and very few of the quality or poignancy of his New York pictures. Could I really scroll through 2,500 photographs on my iPhone? (It took me an hour just to make it through the past six weeks of his posts.)

Yet there is admittedly a pronounced difference between scrolling through photographs each morning on Instagram (where Mr. Ai’s posts, because of the time difference, generally dominating my morning feed), and a retrospective scroll through one user’s photo stream. Pushing up again the pastness of photography, Instagram functions in the present tense: a photo says that I am here doing this, with this person, right now. Photographs are not shown with the time and date of when they were posted, but rather, each has a shifting frame oriented around the moment of viewing: it was taken “26 seconds ago,” “43 minutes ago,” “7 hours ago,” “5 days ago,” or “14 weeks ago.” It is precisely the temporality of Instagram which Mr. Ai exploits poignantly: an underlying meaning of all his photographs in and around Beijing is that he is being denied his passport and is prohibited from travelling internationally (this is partially why everyone comes to visit him in Beijing). Mr. Ai’s frequent photographs of rows of uniformed soldiers, surveillance cameras, and police cars broadcast a real-time view of the Chinese security state, and the long-haired cats languorously perched in many of his most beautiful Instagram photographs become stand-ins for the artist, representations of his confinement.

Anyone who declaims the waning or obsolescence of photography’s “indexicality” hasn’t spent much time on Instagram, where much of the appeal—as opposed to Twitter, for instance—is the insistent veracity by which posting an image informs the world about what you have just seen. One of Mr. Ai’s most recent photographs shows a museum wall text with parts of it clearly painted over in white, and a hairdryer visible in the frame, while a follower explains in a comment: “Under the pressure of Shanghai Anituities Authority and polic, Shanghair moden art museum has to remove ai’s work and clean his name from the wall, now u are looking the stuff drying the wall with a blower” [sic]. In another series of photographs showing parts of a poster advertising an exhibition at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing, the comments section below each image transcribes a phone conversation between Mr. Ai and the museum’s director, in which Mr. Ai conveys his anger at discovering his work in an exhibition in which he was not listed among artists or mentioned in any of the signage and press materials. Following these conversations is a photograph showing Mr. Ai’s work being removed—at his own insistence—from the museum, wheeled out through the front door.

The Brooklyn Museum exhibition includes much more than the framed New York prints. Among the other photographic works on view are a series of color photographs documenting the construction of Beijing’s Olympic stadium that are tiled and hung like wallpaper from floor to ceiling, and, at the end of the show, a bank of twelve flat-screen monitors scrolling through the 7,277 photographs that had previously been uploaded to Mr. Ai’s blog, before it was deleted by the Chinese government. But aside from this installation—a sort of photographic data dump—the curators make no serious attempt to present Mr. Ai’s “social media” activity, or to trace how the changing frames of his photographic production might affect the content of his images. Instead, as if to make up for this gap, the walls are filled with pseudo-participatory rhetoric and the beguiling term “#Activism.” I was unsure what this was supposed to mean: was it an exhortation to be a digital “activist”? To take photos and to tag them with “#Activism”? Or was it an invitation to find photos shot by Ai Weiwei by searching for the tag “#Activism”? (Did the exhibition have some online component I was missing, and if so, on which application?) Clearly Mr. Ai’s Instagram activity needs be read in the context of his earlier, analog photography, and the vast gap between how we encounter his photographs on Instagram and in the museum only makes this task more necessary. But Instagram, as opposed to the albums on Google+, or framed photographs on a wall, allows for no backwards editing, and I left wondering how such an insistently present photographic practice might be presented within a retrospective frame.

Postscript / #leggun

The above text was written in early May. As of today, in late June, Mr. Ai has uploaded over 3,500 photographs to his Instagram account, and for the past three weeks, Mr. Ai’s Instagram feed has been overtaken by images of people with one leg raised up in the air, toes pointed, aiming like rifle. Showing kids, adults, individuals, groups, in China, Europe, the U.S., Latin America, some of these images seem to be have been shot by Mr. Ai (his studio or familiar Beijing surroundings are recognizable in the background), while many others appear be “crowd-sourced”—photographs which people have uploaded to Instagram and tagged with #leggun, or #aiww, which Mr. Ai has then reposted to his own account. Sometimes dozens a day appear, deluging my Instagram feed and becoming background noise that I scroll through quickly to get to something more interesting. While evoking Mr. Ai’s earlier photographs of his middle finger held out in front of iconic sights (e.g. the White House), the meaning of this leg gun meme is ambiguous, and in interviews Mr. Ai has been vague and noncommittal when asked about the phenomenon he unleashed: Is it a public protest? A way of marking the twenty-fifth anniversary slaughter of students in Tiananmen square? A reference to female dancers depicting soldiers during the Chinese civil war? Whatever the intent, posing in or uploading one of these photographs seems a way of announcing one’s membership in a sort of unofficial Ai Weiwei fan club. A photographic mass performance, the images convey a sense of taking aim—at people, places, statues, images, architecture—declaring, weakly, the outlines of a community, what one user refers to in a comment as “an army of Instagram leg weapons.”

New York, June 26, 2014

—

Ai Weiwei: According to What? will be on view at the Brooklyn Museum until August 10, 2014.

Jacob King is a writer and curator living in New York. His texts have appeared in a number of publications, most recently, Texte Zur Kunst, Mousse Magazine, and May Revue.

The post @Aiww by Jacob King appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

On Remote Sites of War by Diana C. Stoll

Todd Drake, from Looking In, from the Double Vision: Perspectives from Palestine series, 2013. Courtesy the artist

 

In June 2014, as Barack Obama readies to deploy a team of “military advisors” to Iraq, Americans have reason to reflect, yet again, on how distant this conflict and our ongoing war in Afghanistan seem to many of us here at home. The numbness (is it really inevitable?) that dulls our consciousness with regard to news and images of violent atrocities—from wars overseas to shooting rampages at home—is all too familiar, and yet remains beyond comprehension. The exhibition Remote Sites of War, at Western Carolina University’s Fine Art Museum, brings us into the mind of conflict from several oblique angles, looking for ways to puncture the stupor. The show, curated by David J. Brown (the museum’s director), features three protagonists: artist Skip Rohde, and photographers Todd Drake and Christopher Sims.

Skip Rohde, Consultation, from the series Faces of Afghanistan, 2012 (ink on paper). Courtesy the artist

Rohde, a Navy veteran, worked as a consultant with the U.S. State Department in Afghanistan’s Kandahar Province from 2011 to 2012, helping to bolster “Afghan capabilities” in terms of both security and governance. His job required that he attend many shuras—gatherings of Afghan officials and tribal leaders—where he took the opportunity to sketch portraits of attendees. More than fifty of Rhode’s rather classical pen-and-ink and pastel drawings from Afghanistan (and some from Iraq, where he lived from 2008 to 2010) are hung salon-style here, offering an unusual glimpse into the specific human dimension of places we tend to understand largely in terms of statistics.

Todd Drake presents Double Vision: Perspectives from Palestine, which was created in the West Bank and East Jerusalem over the course of three weeks in 2013. In recent years, Drake has traveled and conducted photography workshops in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain; like those trips, his visit to Palestine was at the invitation of the U.S. State Department. The project is in two parts: “Looking In” (photographs by Drake); and “Looking Out” (images by young Palestinians with whom Drake held workshops). “Looking Out” follows in the steps of Wendy Ewald, Eric Gottesman, Zana Briski, and others who have worked with young people in underrepresented communities around the world with a view to “empowering” them with the capability of generating their own photographic narratives (though the practical agency of that power is not always clear).

Here, the resulting images are mixed, of course—some are plainly youthful attempts at polished commercial-style work; others are more raw and more intriguing. Several are accompanied by impassioned texts, as for example Yara’s image of a young child and a birthday cake topped with fireworks, with a poem/declamation about the life of a Palestinian girl living under occupation: “I will keep resisting,” Yara writes. “And resisting/And resisting.” As for “Looking In,” Drake’s images of barbed wire, Israeli settlements, the separation wall, and checkpoints belie the ingenuousness of his statement: “To be in Palestine is to walk inside two visions: that of Zionists seeking a place to come home to, the other of Palestinians seeking to keep olive trees and stones they can call their own, their pasts, presents, and futures seeming to run along parallel tracks.” And yet, as irresolute as Drake’s stated position is, it may be as good a summation as any of the intractable loggerheads of that region: Israel and Palestine have far to go on their “parallel tracks.”

Christopher Sims, Richmond International Raceway, Richmond, Virginia #1, , from the series Hearts and Minds, 2008. Courtesy the artist

The three photo-projects by Christopher Sims in this exhibition take us in directions that are more complex and less trodden. Hearts and Minds is an unsettling look at young people (all boys, as represented here) at a U.S.-military-administered traveling recruitment event known as the Virtual Army Experience. Here, inside massive tents set up at amusement parks, state fairs, and NASCAR races, participants can play virtual-soldier games and engage with other forms of “militainment.” As Sims notes: “The army reveals itself to be a keen reader of American adolescent emotions and passions, and employs this understanding through a brilliantly designed and bloodless simulation of the thrill of the fight.” Indeed, the young men in these photographs are aflush with the intensity of the moment—the fun of it—reminding us of journalist Chris Hedges’s chilling observation that “the rush of battle is often a potent and lethal addiction.”

Far calmer—and disturbing as such—is Sims’s series of images from Guantánamo Bay, where he traveled in 2006 (after more than two years wrangling for U.S. government clearance). Under rigid military restrictions about what could be photographed at Gitmo—no aircraft, no radio domes, no faces of prisoners, etc.—Sims shot scenes that are quite intentionally action-free: worn playground structures, an empty café, desk chairs in anonymous, fluorescent-lit offices. These images serve as an ominous basso continuo, bracing the unknown activities taking place in detention camps just around the corner.

Christopher Sims, Iman’s Bodyguard, Camp Mackall, North Carolina, from the series Theater of War, 2006. Courtesy of the artist.

Finally, Sims’s Theater of War: The Pretend Villages of Iraq and Afghanistan brings us into mock worlds set up within the training grounds of U.S. Army bases in North Carolina, Louisiana, and California. Here, in the pretend tumult of pretend countries (“Talatha,” “Braggistan”), U.S. soldiers can (sort of) see how it feels to interact with people in the Middle Eastern territories with which the United States is engaged. In these staged environments, the “villagers” are often played by recent immigrants from Iraq and Afghanistan—and Sims himself sometimes plays the part of a “war photographer” in these non-wars. While Sims’s photographs inevitably bring to mind the images of war simulations by An-my Lê and Richard Barnes, here we are in full color and full disclosure: there is nothing convincing about these bizarre games.

A former photo archivist at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Sims knows something about the many ways images interact with the monstrous fact of violence. Of his Guantánamo project, he has said: “I became interested in the idea of making war photographs that . . . weren’t about seeing violence, or spectacle, or the things that make people turn away from most war photographs. I began thinking that maybe the thing to do was to try to make a type of war photograph that captured something else.”

In a sense, this is the challenge taken up in each of the projects in Remote Sites of War: they are sneak attacks, intended to poke at, and perhaps reawaken, our exhausted cultural psyches.

_____

Remote Sites of War was presented at the Fine Art Museum, Western Carolina University, Cullowhee, North Carolina, April 10–May 30, 2014.

Diana C. Stoll is a writer and editor based in Asheville, North Carolina.

The post On Remote Sites of War
by Diana C. Stoll appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

Fall Photography Workshops at Aperture

 

 



The Aperture Foundation workshop program continues a valued tradition originating with Aperture magazine’s founding editor and legendary teacher, Minor White. Known for his open-minded, inventive, and insightful approach to teaching, White leaves a legacy that defines the workshop program at Aperture. Join us this fall for the chance to work one-on-one with major figures in the global photographic community in an intimate and immersive classroom.

Talking Pictures with W. M. Hunt

Saturday, September 20, 11:00 a.m.–4:00 p.m.

Image © Martin Schoeller

A one-day workshop intended for photographers wishing to learn from a longtime collector, curator, and consultant who has been teaching for more than two decades. The workshop will focus on influences, how to look at photographs, and considerations for analyzing them.

W. M. Hunt is a frequent lecturer on photography and an adjunct professor at the School of Visual Arts, New York. This summer he organized the exhibition Foule: American Groups before 1950 at Rencontres d’Arles, France, where his show Sans Regards (No Eyes) debuted in 2005. That show toured to the Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne, Switzerland; FOAM, Amsterdam; and the George Eastman House, Rochester, New York, and was the basis for his book The Unseen Eye: Photographs from the Unconscious (Aperture, 2011).

Finding the Universal in Photographic Narratives with Elinor Carucci

Sunday, October 5 & Saturday, November 1, 10:00 a.m.–5:00 p.m. both days

Elinor Carucci, The woman that I still am 2, 2010

A two-part workshop designed as a point of inspiration and constructive criticism for the photographer who wishes to enhance their vision and style while delving deeper into the emotions, layers, and nuances of their images. On the first day, Carucci will give each student an assignment to be completed by the time the class reconvenes four weeks later.

Elinor Carucci (born in Jerusalem, 1971) graduated in 1995 from Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design with a degree in photography, then moved to New York that same year. She has had solo shows at Edwynn Houk Gallery, New York; Gallery Fifty One, Antwerp; and James Hyman Gallery and Gagosian Gallery, both in London, among others. She has also been included in group shows at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and The Photographers’ Gallery, London. Her photographs are included in the collections of institutions such as MoMA, Brooklyn Museum, and Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and her work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the New Yorker, Details, New York, W, Aperture, ARTnews, and many more publications. She was awarded the International Center of Photography’s Infinity Award for a Young Photographer in 2001, the Guggenheim Fellowship in 2002, and a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship in 2010. Carucci has published three monographs to date: Mother (2013), Diary of a Dancer (2005), and Closer (2002). Carucci currently teaches at the photography graduate program at the School of Visual Arts, New York, and is represented by Edwynn Houk Gallery.

Portrait of Place with Gail Halaban

Saturday, October 11 & Sunday, October 12, 10:00 a.m.–5:00 p.m. both days

Gail Albert Halaban, Out My Window, Upper East Side, 1438 3rd Avenue, Families Just Before Dinner, 2008

 

 

 

 

 

 

A weekend workshop that integrates portrait and landscape photography and explores the relationship of New York City to its inhabitants. Following a guided study of historic photographic precedents, Halaban will accompany students as they make new work on location in New York City.

Gail Albert Halaban (born in Washington, D.C.) holds an MFA in photography from Yale University. She has taught at the Art Center College of Design, Pasadena; International Center of Photography, New York; and Yale, among other notable institutions. She has been included in both group and solo exhibitions internationally. Her previous book, Out My Window, was published by powerHouse Books in 2012. Her most recent book, Gail Albert Halaban: Paris Views, will be published by Aperture in fall 2014. She is represented by Edwynn Houk Gallery, New York.

Jason Fulford on Visual Language: How Pictures Speak to Each Other

Saturday, November 15 & Sunday, November 16, 10:00 a.m.–5:00 p.m. both days

Image © Jason Fulford

In this hands-on workshop, participants will discuss and experiment with visual language and the relationship between images. Participants will engage in a series of games and exercises that will teach them conceptual editing tools using found imagery.

Jason Fulford is a photographer and cofounder of J&L Books. He is a contributing editor to Blind Spot magazine and a frequent lecturer at universities. Monographs of his work include Sunbird (2000), Crushed (2003), Raising Frogs For $$$ (2006), The Mushroom Collector (2010), and Hotel Oracle (2013). He is coeditor with Gregory Halpern of The Photographer’s Playbook (Aperture, 2014), and coauthor with Tamara Shopsin of the photography book for children This Equals That (Aperture, 2014). Fulford is also a 2014 Guggenheim Fellowship recipient.

The Portrait in a Community Context with Dawoud Bey

Saturday, December 6 & Sunday, December 7, 10:00 a.m.–5:00 p.m. both days

Dawoud Bey, DeMarco, South Shore High School, Chicago, 2003

Join Dawoud Bey for a workshop on creating compelling portraits within a community context. Aperture will partner with a church, school, community center, or shelter where students will craft engaging portraits of members of the community.

Dawoud Bey (born in New York, 1953) began his career as a photographer in 1975 with a series of photographs called Harlem, USA, which was later exhibited in his first one-person exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1979. He has since had numerous exhibitions worldwide, at such institutions as the Art Institute of Chicago; Barbican Centre, London; Cleveland Museum of Art; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Detroit Institute of Arts; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; National Portrait Gallery, London; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among many others. The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, organized a mid-career survey of his work, Dawoud Bey: Portraits 1975–1995, which then traveled to institutions throughout the United States and Europe. A major publication of the same title was also published in conjunction with that exhibition. Class Pictures was published by Aperture in 2007, and a traveling exhibition of this work toured to museums throughout the country from 2007 to 2011.

The post Fall Photography Workshops at Aperture appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

Announcing Cathy Kaplan New Chair of Board of Trustees

 

Aperture Foundation is pleased to announce that Cathy Kaplan is the new chair of our Board of Trustees. Since her appointment to the Board in 2008, Ms. Kaplan has served as vice chair and head of the Development Committee. She has also been the co-chair of Aperture Foundation’s benefit parties on several occasions, and conceived the annual pre-benefit weekend of studio tours and collection visits, which has become a highly anticipated event among patrons.

Ms. Kaplan is a partner in the New York office of Sidley Austin LLP, a global law firm of approximately 1,800 lawyers. Ms. Kaplan’s practice is focused on a broad range of structured finance transactions, including cross-border financings. She also represents clients in a wide range of art-related transactions.

In addition to her long service as a Trustee of Aperture Foundation, Ms. Kaplan is on the Board of Her Justice, a non-profit corporation that provides legal services for victims of domestic violence. She serves as a member of the Her Justice Executive Committee, co-chair of the Development Committee, and co-chair of the annual Photography Auction and Benefit. Ms. Kaplan is also a member of the Photography Acquisitions Committee of the Whitney Museum of American Art. She serves on the Board of Visitors for Columbia Law School and is a member of the Advisory Board for the Columbia Law School Center on Global Legal Transformation.

After nine years as Aperture Foundation’s chairman, Celso Gonzalez-Falla has stepped down from the role. He will continue to be a member of the Board, and serve as chair of the Development Committee. Mr. Gonzalez-Falla became a Trustee and has served as chairman of the Board of Trustees since 2006. In 2012, the Museum of Contemporary Art Jacksonville organized a traveling exhibition, also presented at Aperture Foundation, titled Shared Vision: The Sondra Gilman and Celso Gonzalez-Falla Collection of Photography and featuring a selection from Mr. Gonzalez-Falla and his wife Sondra Gilman’s world-renowned collection of photography. Active with several non-profit foundations, Mr. Gonzalez-Falla also published a small-edition poetry book in 2011, and My Lost Cuba, his first novel, in 2013.

“I am honored to have been selected as the chair of the Board of Aperture Foundation. I believe that Aperture Foundation represents the best of what a non-profit arts organization can offer: scholarship on photography and the visual arts, education for everyone from students to practicing photographers, discovery and encouragement of new artists, and a community for discourse. I am humbled to follow Celso Gonzalez-Falla in the role of chair. Celso has been a strong and inspiring leader of Aperture through difficult economic times for arts organizations. He is a brilliant collector, with a terrific eye and a deeply humanistic view of photography. I am delighted that he will continue to be my friend, colleague, and advisor on the Board,” says Ms. Kaplan.

Photograph © Peter Freed

The post Announcing Cathy Kaplan
New Chair of Board of Trustees appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

Olivia Bee’s Photographic Love Letters

Olivia Bee, Lovers, 2013

Oliva Bee, Max Jumped Off A Train, 2012

Olivia Bee, Pre-Kiss, 2010

Olivia Bee, Untitled (T-Shirt Weather Heaven), 2013

Olivia Bee, Paris At Sunrise (Poppy), 2013

Olivia Bee, 4th Of July (The Family You Choose), 2013

Olivia Bee, Rivkah, 2013

Olivia Bee, Untitled (Liam), 2011

Olivia Bee, Mayne Island, 2010

Unlike some other young contemporary photographers, Olivia Bee does not play the role of voyeur in her photographs. Her subject matter comes from her own life experiences. Her imaginative photos possess the magic of teetering between childhood and adulthood, and she has an undeniable signature style: a mix of dreamy romanticism and nostalgia. With the release of her limited-edition Aperture print Mayne Island, 2010, we joined Olivia to discuss the role photography plays in her life, and where she’s headed next. Her first solo show in New York, Kids in Love, is on view at agnès b. Galerie Boutique until July 27, 2014.

Aperture: I love the intimacy in your work. It feels like an honest exploration of growing up: there’s both innocence and exploration. Has photography helped you make sense of the last years?

Olivia Bee: Yes. I think photography helps me process things. Sometimes I get really sad and realize I’m having withdrawal from not getting film back for a while. I’m addicted to photography. It helps me process my life, explore things, show people I love and appreciate them, and love and appreciate my life.

A: Congrats on your show Kids in Love at agnès b! What’s it like to see your work presented in a gallery space as opposed to online, especially since you started out posting on Flickr?

OB: It feels amazing. It feels like I’m a real artist. Everything before has existed online or as a Walgreens 4-by-6 print. When I was looking at the show all hung up, I realized that they kind of looked like large drugstore prints, which I really like.

A: Aperture will be selling a limited-edition print of your photograph Mayne Island (2010). The photograph is of your friend Liam’s dad. How have your family and friends responded to your work, since they’re so often featured?

OB: Liam’s mom has one of the earlier editions of this photo actually, which she bought Liam’s dad for his birthday. It feels really special to take photos of the people in my life—to show them to them and get positive feedback. I think you could classify all of my photos as love letters to the people, places, and things featured in them.

A: Let’s talk about love. What, or whom, are you loving right now? 

OB: I’m so blessed to have so many people I love around me all the time. I have the best of friends. My family is amazing. My boyfriend is too. I’m really lucky. I am really lucky to have a really colorful life—even when I hate it at times, I love it.

A: Your photographs are nostalgic and dreamy. How do you translate these feelings into your pictures?    

OB: It’s not something I really think about. I never try to make a photo a certain way, really, especially with my diary work. They just happen.

A: What’s the relationship between your personal and commercial work? Do you approach the two differently?  

OB: I approach them a similar way, with care and respect, but my work for brands I do not consider love letters. I love making [those] images; I think it’s really good practice to work on composition and how to control an image when you are working commercially. But my personal work is my favorite work—like most artists, haha.

A: Back in 2012, you interviewed Joel Meyerowitz for VICE. Which other photo legends would you love to interview? 

OB: Annie Leibovitz. She had such a big influence on me so early. Also Gregory Crewdson. I would love to know how his brain works.

A: You’ve mentioned an interest in film alongside photography. What’s your favorite scene in a movie, and why? 

OB: I love the dream scene in The Virgin Suicides, and also the prom scene and afterwards when she’s left in the field. You feel it so much. And the color and use of light is amazing. Also the opening scene from Paris, Texas, and basically that whole movie. Everything is so precise and beautiful and intentional, but it can be messy at times, which I love. The way characters are spread across the landscape of the desert is something I’m kind of obsessed with.

A: Where are you living these days, and what’s your favorite spot to hang out?

OB: I live in Brooklyn. I don’t have a favorite spot; I feel like I’m still figuring that out in New York City. But I love the Rockaways. I’ve been at the beach a lot lately.

A: What are you excited about this summer? 

OB: Going on a trip with my brother, making a lot of great photos, going home to Portland for a while, going camping in the desert (if I don’t die). Going to LA and driving and listening to music loud.

___

Olivia Bee (born in Portland, Oregon, 1994) has shot campaigns for Hermès and Converse, and is a regular contributor to the New York Times Magazine and ZEITmagazin, Germany. Bee lives and works in Brooklyn.

The post Olivia Bee’s Photographic Love Letters appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.