Aperture's Blog, page 175
July 9, 2014
Bárbara Wagner: The Maracatu by Agnaldo Farias
The following first appeared in Aperture magazine #215 Summer 2014. Subscribe here to read it first, in print or online.
Bárbara Wagner, Águia Dourada (Golden eagle), 2010. Courtesy Galleria Extraspazio, Rome
Bárbara Wagner, Cambinda Brasileira (Brazilian cambinda), 2009. Courtesy Galleria Extraspazio, Rome
Bárbara Wagner. Courtesy Galleria Extraspazio, Rome
Bárbara Wagner, Estrela Brilhante (Shining Star), 2008. Courtesy Galleria Extraspazio, Rome
Bárbara Wagner, Cambinda Brasileira (Brazilian cambinda), 2009. Courtesy Galleria Extraspazio, Rome
Bárbara Wagner. Courtesy Galleria Extraspazio, Rome
Bárbara Wagner. Courtesy Galleria Extraspazio, Rome
Bárbara Wagner. Courtesy Galleria Extraspazio, Rome
Bárbara Wagner. Courtesy Galleria Extraspazio, Rome
Bárbara Wagner. Courtesy Galleria Extraspazio, Rome
Since the early eighteenth century, Afro-Brazilian performance groups known as Maracatu have descended onto the streets of Recife and other cities in the interior of Brazil’s northeastern state of Pernambuco during Carnival and other festivals. There are two groups: the urban form, the Maracatu nação (nation), devote their dancing and singing—set to the mesmerizing rhythms of the musical style called batuque—to the coronation of the Rei do Congo (King of the Congo). Their rural counterparts, the Maracatu rural, have their origins in the sugarcane mills, an environment with a history of authoritarianism and oppression.
The name Maracatu derives from an amalgam of sources—maracas, the American Indian percussion instrument; catu, which means “beautiful” in the Tupi language; and marã, Tupi for “war” or “confusion.” Their complex background is also evident in the processional standard-bearer of the Maracatu nação, who dresses in the style of Portugal’s Louis XV and is followed by an entourage of ornately styled performers and representations of religious imagery, centering around a dead queen attended by various courtesans. The layered imagery of this ritual performance, which has metamorphosed over centuries, reflects a fusion of African, indigenous, and European elements.
Today, these groups have become seamlessly incorporated into the popular festivities of Pernambuco and involve the participation of all types of people, regardless of racial origin or socioeconomic background, in a nation that still suffers from discrimination and segregation. During Pernambuco’s Carnival, Maracatu groups are distinguished by a unique dance style characterized by formalized frolicking and a subtle choreography of mythic origin related to the dances of the syncretic religion known as Candomblé. Brazilian author Mário de Andrade described this unique dance as follows: “Intoxicated by the percussion, the dancers proceed almost lethargically, slightly reeling on each quarter note, with an almost undetectable trot, and without any visibly formal footwork.” The generally hypnotic nature of a Maracatu procession contrasts with the frenetic rhythm of other dance groups participating in Carnival, most notably the fiercely syncopated Frevo, whose musical style also originated in Pernambuco. The Frevo and the Maracatu reflect a sense of momentary collective elation. For a few days of the year, they don lavish costumes, spend their scant savings to enjoy themselves in the festivities, and parade proudly through the streets of the city. Official government tourist photography often turns to these festivities to highlight the “gold” of Brazilian racial democracy.
Bárbara Wagner became interested in what lies beneath this false gold veneer and began documenting the dancers’ rehearsals. Her series on the Maracatu offers a portrait of the people who make up the “joyful” faces of this northeastern Brazilian group as they practice their dance. The photographs delve into who the maracatuzeiros actually are when they are not involved in festival performances, and how their days are spent in the run-up to Carnival and afterward. The series looks beyond those brilliantly colored costumes and the atmosphere of celebration flowing almost anarchically through the darkened streets to reveal the dancers as they wait to share their tradition with others for a few moments.
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Agnaldo Farias is a critic, curator, and professor of architecture and urbanism at the College of the University of São Paulo.
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by Agnaldo Farias appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.
July 8, 2014
Workshop: Talking Pictures with W. M. Hunt
Photo © Ethan Hill
“Hunt uses language clearly, colorfully, and intelligently. His stories—along with the whys and wherefores—were extremely valuable.”
“Hearing Mr. Hunt talk about his relationship to photographs and the pictures he likes was enlightening.”
- Past workshop students
Join W. M. (Bill) Hunt for a one-day workshop intended for photographers wishing to learn from a non-photographer who has been looking at and talking about images for forty years. Hunt is a longtime collector, curator, and consultant who has been teaching for more than two decades. Participants are asked to put together a portfolio of at least five great photographs made by others—images they believe reflect their taste, are influential to them, or provoke them. The workshop will focus on influences, how to look at photographs, considerations for analyzing them, and tips for being articulate about 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).
Tuition: $500 ($450 for currently enrolled photography students and Aperture Members at the $250 level and above)
Register here
Contact education@aperture.org with any questions.
Refund / Cancellation Policy for Aperture Workshops
All fees are non-refundable if you should choose to withdraw from a workshop less than one month prior to its start date unless we are able to fill your seat. In the event of a medical emergency, please provide a physician’s note stating the nature of the emergency, and Aperture will issue you a credit that can be applied to future workshops. Aperture reserves the right to cancel any workshop up to one week prior to the start date if the workshop is under-enrolled, in which case a full refund will be issued. A minimum of eight students is required to run a workshop.
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Jo Ann Callis: Other Rooms (Video)
On June 17, 2014, we joined artist Jo Ann Callis for a conversation with Lesley A. Martin and Amelia Lang, publisher and managing editor of Aperture’s book program. Callis discussed the evolution of her work, which began under the instruction of Robert Heinecken, whose work was recently exhibited in a retrospective at MoMA, and developed through her own exploration of tactile elements and experiences. Callis also discussed her mid-1970s investigation of the nude body and sexuality, featured in her new Aperture book Other Rooms. In that work, the artist’s playful, evocative use of constrictions and overlays on the human form, including twine, belts, tape, and other everyday materials, is both humorous and fraught. It offers an intensely personal assessment of the variable meanings of pleasure, eros, and the female nude as a staple of fine art photography. After her discussion, Callis took questions from audience members.
Watch “Jo Ann Callis: Other Rooms” Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4 on Vimeo.
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Preview: Aperture Summer Open Exhibition
Jill Frank, Un Homme et un Femme; from the series Romance, 2013
Hiro Tanaka, Florida; from the series Dew Dew, Dew Its, 2009
Antoine Bruy, Les Maquis
Claire Rosen, Rosy-Faced Love Bird; from the series Birds of a Feather, 2012
Supranav Dash, Master Band-Party Boys, $6 on assignment, 2011; from the series Marginal Trades, 2013
Melissa Eder, from the series Can You Dig It? A Chromatic Series of Floral Arrangements, 2014
I am honored to have had the opportunity to select work for Aperture Foundation’s first Summer Open exhibition.
We’ve initiated the Summer Open project as a way to show a wider group of photographers on our walls, and to build and enhance our membership program. As our first open submission exhibition, we had simply no idea what to expect. We are thrilled that 860 photographers presented work—all of whom submitted photographs of a universally high standard. The work of ninety-one photographers was selected for exhibition. In addition to the single images by each photographer selected for display on the wall, the full series (ten images each) of thirty-seven artists were selected for digital projection.
As well as choosing the “best” of the work submitted (of course, flavored by my own taste—the “best” could never be an objective criteria), the aim of this project was also to take the temperature of contemporary photographic practice. Here, the breadth of approaches wasn’t necessarily as wide as I imagined it might be—few photojournalists submitted work, for instance. Perhaps that’s not so surprising; the submissions were “very Aperture,” with most work reflecting a clear relationship to the photography that we are publishing. In this respect, the resulting exhibition reflects a particular bandwidth of contemporary practice, rather than the complete spectrum of the medium. In the end, this helps the exhibition make a clear statement about what concerns serious photographers today, in the range between art and documentary practice.
Some very clear themes emerged, or tropes, which I have turned into a structure for the exhibition: the Forest as Idyll, which seems to be a major thread of what interests photographers; Flowers, a longstanding photographic subject, now being reinvented with a contemporary edge; Ice and Wallpaper, among others; and there’s a section called Reading Faces that features various approaches to portraiture (where I borrowed the section title from a series by featured photographer, Qiren Hu). Some may find my “tagging” of photographs this way overly playful. I certainly could have divided the work in other ways: lots of submissions deal with LGBT and gender issues; many play with photographic spatiality—flatness, and depth; much of the documentary work warns against being taken literally, alerting viewers to read pictures as myth, or fantasy, rather than reality. Each of these could have merited their own sections. I hope the outcome gives some focus to the patterns and preoccupations at work in contemporary photography, and my tagging system is in keeping with the playfulness of much of the work featured.
Photography has become such a sophisticated medium. We all know now how to read influences. Viewers will detect the inspiration of many other photographers who have forged distinct paths in contemporary photography—Alec Soth, Daniel Gordon, and Robert Polidori, to name three particularly visible figures (each of whose practices can of course be traced to figures before them). In this respect, the work selected provides a commentary on the concerns, concepts, and stylistic approaches that define this moment in the medium’s story. Most of the work submitted is highly sophisticated, and self-aware. Compared to a few years ago, it’s clear that the volume of sophisticated work being produced has grown phenomenally—something that speaks in particular to the advances in photographic education. The level of sophistication among the submissions also caused me look in the other direction. I found myself seeking, and in some cases choosing, moments of what I perceive to be photographic innocence—pictures made, apparently, without self-consciousness, driven by more basic visual or compulsive instincts. Innocence is becoming a rare, and desirable, commodity in a medium now characterized by such sophistication.
The work submitted for the exhibition left me with one overwhelming impression that caught me by surprise: that serious photography today, for all its self-awareness and sophistication, is characterized above all by a sense of joy. Serious photography used to be, well, serious—about itself, its place in the world, its social and aesthetic agendas. When did it free itself of these constraints and become so playful? Even the work engaged with complex personal or social issues seems marked by an evident sense of playfulness and pleasure—the creative pleasure of making photographs, delight in the particular characteristics of the medium, and the pure joy of visual articulation. The work on show suggests that photography is at ease with itself in a new way, and its place in the world: full of pleasure, and enjoying every advantage of its freedom.
—Chris Boot
Executive Director
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July 2, 2014
Revisiting the Winogrand Archive: Philip Lorca diCorcia in Conversation with Leo Rubinfien
Garry Winogrand, New York ca. 1960. © Estate of Garry Winogrand and courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
Garry Winogrand, Grand Central Terminal, New York, 1964. © Estate of Garry Winogrand and courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
Garry Winogrand, Point Mugu Naval Air Station, California, ca. 1979. © Estate of Garry Winogrand and courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
Garry Winogrand, New York ca. 1963. © Estate of Garry Winogrand and courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
Garry Winogrand, State Fair, Dallas, Texas, 1964. © Estate of Garry Winogrand and courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
Garry Winogrand, La Guardia Airport, New York, 1968. © Estate of Garry Winogrand and courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
Garry Winogrand, Centennial Ball, Metropolitan Museum, New York, 1969. © Estate of Garry Winogrand and courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
Garry Winogrand, Wyoming, 1964. © Estate of Garry Winogrand and courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
Garry Winogrand, Los Angeles, ca. 1980–83. © Estate of Garry Winogrand and courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
Garry Winogrand, New York, ca. 1960. © Estate of Garry Winogrand and courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
For many years, an aura has surrounded the Garry Winogrand archive. The photographer, who died in 1984 at age fifty-six, left behind more than
six thousand rolls of unedited film and numerous photographs that had been marked on his proof sheets but never printed. Over the past three years, photographer Leo Rubinfien has been working for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., as guest curator of the first Winogrand retrospective since the mid-1980s, re-editing these materials—in collaboration with curator Erin O’Toole (SFMOMA) and Sarah Greenough (NGA)—and supervising the printing of many never-before-seen images, some of which appear in the accompanying pages. The exhibition Garry Winogrand—accompanied by a major publication—began in March last year at SFMOMA, subsequently traveled to the NGA, and recently opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (it will later travel to the Jeu De Paume, Paris, and the Fundación MAPFRE, Madrid). Here, photographer Philip-Lorca diCorcia (known as PL) speaks with Rubinfien about the complexities of Winogrand’s work, which has often been mischaracterized as “street photography,” the legacy of curator John Szarkowski, and the new meanings we may discover today by revisiting this influential photographer.
— The Editors
Philip-Lorca diCorcia: As someone who went to Yale in the late 1970s and had Tod Papageorge as a professor, I resisted Garry Winogrand. By ’78, he was a cult; there was an orthodoxy around him at that time.
Leo Rubinfien: There was certainly a circle of people associated with Winogrand—mainly photographers, but not exclusively. They had intense convictions about the value of his work—and other people’s work, too—and also about how photography should be thought about and discussed, but to say that a cult formed around him seems harsh to me. These were thoughtful, intelligent people, and each one had reasons for being present. Did an orthodoxy develop? Maybe so, but slowly. The photographers connected with Winogrand in the 1960s were drawn at least partly by the sense that there was more freedom in his approach to photography than they could find anywhere else. Later, they had to defend themselves and if there was some dogmatizing, that was only human.
PL: Of course, the arbiter of photographic quality at that time was the Museum of Modern Art. There was a pantheon there, and Winogrand was one of them. With that pantheon came certain attributes—for instance, black-and-white work. I remember going to MoMA and the only color photography that was up at that time was by Irving Penn.
LR: When MoMA showed the color work of Eggleston and Stephen Shore in the mid-1970s it was news, although I’m not sure that noncommercial photographers were doing a vast amount in color before that, anyway before C-printing made it affordable. As a matter of fact, though, one component of MoMA’s famous 1967 New Documents exhibition was a slide show, in color, by Winogrand. It’s true of course that Winogrand was openly supported by John Szarkowski and the Museum of Modern Art, and that Szarkowski had his own case to make, and didn’t compromise it. He dismissed a lot of work, and that made many people resentful. But if somebody asked: “What’s the simplest explanation you can give of what Szarkowski did?” I would say that it was to move photography out of the world of journalism and into the world of the fine arts. The old picture magazines were dying. They had dominated the practice and the dissemination of photography for three decades, and now their culture and their mode of thinking were fading away. Szarkowski didn’t just bring a gang of photographers across the street from the Time-Life building to the Museum of Modern Art; he replaced one set of values with another, one way of looking at photographs with another. Journalism had demanded pictures that explained the world “clearly,” in well-accepted ways, but Szarkowski said that photographs explain almost nothing, and that this was not a defect, but a virtue. And Winogrand’s work demonstrates that the ambiguity of photography can be one of its great strengths.
Garry Winogrand, New York, ca. 1960. © Estate of Garry Winogrand and courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
PL: In terms of the legacy in museums, the Szarkowski world is disappearing. The Museum of Modern Art has a new director of photography, Quentin Bajac, who has nothing to do with that world. Is this major project about Winogrand— one of the core figures of that school—in some way marking the end of that era?
LR: I didn’t work on the Winogrand retrospective to make a statement about MoMA, but to better understand Winogrand. Although it’s true that since shortly before Szarkowski’s death, his prime protégés have been having retrospectives—Arbus, Friedlander, Eggleston, Robert Adams—and that these have inevitably re-evaluated Szarkowski’s work. The SFMOMA Winogrand project is the most recent one. Is it the end of something, or the beginning of something else? Maybe it’s both. Today, the debates of the Szarkowski years have mostly expired, or turned into other debates, so maybe an artist like Winogrand can now be set free of them. The SFMOMA book and show say: “Let’s go back and look again at what Winogrand did.” It’s particularly interesting to do this because he died young and until now his work has never been thoroughly explored. A lot of what’s in SFMOMA’s book and show has never been seen before, or has rarely been seen, and it presents a somewhat different Winogrand from the one we thought we knew.
PL: There was presumably a reason that so much work was left behind, unprocessed and unedited. Is there any sense that that was the way it should have been left?
LR: Well, I didn’t think the work should be left in the closet or I wouldn’t have undertaken SFMOMA’s project. The unfinished work was unfinished because Winogrand died not only young, but suddenly, and he had no time to prepare anything for posterity. In December 1983 he thought he had years to live. In March 1984 he was gone. There are many reasons why he didn’t edit and print more of his work, and they’re all interesting. But would those pictures be better left unseen? We’re speaking of one of the finest photographers there has been, and of work that changes the way we understand him. It’s work of great beauty and depth that will nourish anyone who lets it in. So no, I think it would be arbitrary, rigid, and shortsighted to hide it away.
PL: Every epigram that is attributed to Winogrand seems to be an evasion of a question. It’s hard to say, when someone’s work has an aspect of evasion and alienation in it, whether this is social commentary or an expression of an artist’s own feelings. But the man obviously was not comfortable with the world and with himself. Do you think his investigation of class was a manifestation of his own insecurities? In his pictures at the Whitney and the Metropolitan Museum you can’t help but think that he’s being judged by the same people that he’s photographing. And there’s his own not-too-subtle criticism in most of those images.
LR: Winogrand was often combative and sometimes defensive, and his evasiveness sometimes expressed this. But more importantly, he understood how untranslatable a photograph is, how it says something that can’t be said in speech. I think that the main reason he resisted explaining himself was that he didn’t want to smother under a pile of words that special, poetic ambiguity that makes a photograph beautiful. I don’t believe that he felt himself an outsider in the way that The Americans suggests that Frank did. The world in Winogrand’s photographs is his own world. His pictures from the streets of Manhattan in the early ’60s—the beautiful women, the businessmen, and so on—to me they describe a world that Winogrand is contemplating joining, or that he is in the process of joining even if he’s horrified by many things he sees. Beauty and ugliness, order and chaos, are inextricable in Winogrand’s work.
Garry Winogrand, Wyoming, 1964. © Estate of Garry Winogrand and courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
PL: Was he carpet-bombing the visual realm—shooting everything in sight? Why settle for one frame when you can have twenty?
LR: The idea that he was an extraordinarily prodigious shooter, a “carpet-bomber,” is actually a myth. I didn’t know that until I worked on SFMOMA’s project. From the time he started up until 1971 (twenty-one years—and most of his best pictures were from that period), he was shooting five hundred rolls of film a year on average, which is not very much: a roll-and-a-half a day. The large numbers came much later. In fact, when they did come, that’s when the quality of the work fell off sharply—almost as if Winogrand knew that he was weakening and was struggling furiously against it.
PL: Winogrand’s narratives are so elusive that they sometimes seem quite modern. But some of his work was almost corny, in the “tale told” way. I think as his picture structure started to fall apart, so did the conclusions to be drawn from the suggested narratives. And that’s where, for me, he becomes really interesting and surreal.
LR: He began in the world of magazine journalism, where pictures were functional and illustrative. But he resisted this from very early on, and by the ’60s he was working in an anti-narrative way and arrived at a kind of ambiguity that he found enlightening and beautiful. He would ultimately say: “There is nothing as mysterious as a fact clearly described,” as if the picture might stand in front of you like an apparition. It would be strange. It would be surprising. It would be disconnected from the rest of the world as you knew it, and from whatever story you expected it to tell. In the late work, in the 1970s and the early ’80s, there’s not only no narrative, there’s almost no event. The pictures are about the way faces look. They’re about space. And you could say that he learned how to find beauty in a picture in which you can’t tell what’s happening at a moment in time—the 1960s—when the entire American nation couldn’t tell what was happening in life itself. And so his way of picture making came to speak not just for him but for a vast collective experience.
PL: The street provides a constantly changing set of possibilities. The pushback that the world throws at you when you attempt to wrangle from it some sort of meaning with a camera is significant.
LR: In one way, Winogrand’s work is all about how the world coalesces, and then dissolves, about how chaos threatens to overtake order again and again. He often talked about himself and his work in relation to photography in general. He’d say: “I’m interested in the problem that a piece of material sets for the medium,” or “I’m interested in the contention between content and form.” Szarkowski, too, among others, argued that Winogrand was saying various things about photography itself with his work. But another aspect of his work is a ferocious attention that I associate with portrait making more than with most photography of the street, even though Winogrand brought it to the street, to crowds of people in motion. He looks at those people with a fierce grip, and he asks, What’s that hat you’re wearing? and Why does your foot turn the way it does? and Who are you? At one point he said: “You could say that I’m a student of photography, and I am, but really I’m a student of America.” At another time, he said to a close friend of his: “You know why your pictures are no fucking good? Because they don’t describe the chaos of life.” These two comments are the best guides I can think of to what Winogrand’s work is about. In the end, I think the street was just a site. The point was what he saw in the street—and what he saw there was a great many pieces of evidence that teach us serious things about the character of American people, about the evanescence of seeing, about the transience of life itself.
PL: There’s a reductiveness to photography, of course—in the framing of reality and the exclusion of chunks of it (the rest of the world, in fact). It’s almost as if the act of photography bears some relationship to how we consciously manage the uncontrollable set of possibilities that exist in life. I think that, more than any other photographer, Winogrand expressed the fact that everything is held together by the thinnest of threads. Strangely, I doubt that anybody in a photo program right now thinks of Garry Winogrand as their prime motivation, although the current practice of photography does have a certain relationship to his work, which could now seem outmoded. I think part of what he did, which is today a process in contemporary photography and art, was to break assumptions.
LR: Well, maybe that’s one reason why people should look at him again now. The work is very free, and it remains fresh. It’s powerful but it refuses to make grand declarations—it’s powerful partly because it refuses to do that. It’s only outmoded if one thinks that art progresses in a linear way, and that this year’s art disqualifies last year’s. But I don’t believe that there is any such progression. That kind of thinking is a fiction of certain criticism and of the art market. If a work of art is alive, it is alive, no matter when it was made. There is something tremendously open-ended about Winogrand’s work. It’s there picture by picture, and in the overall body of work. It’s a quality of Winogrand’s, but it was a quality that artists often sought in the 1960s. Fellini once said: “To make a movie that has an ending is immoral.” It’s immoral. It’s to lie to the audience. Because life has no endings; life is all flux and discontinuity.
Philip-Lorca diCorcia’s work is the subject of many books, including Eleven (Damiani, 2011), Thousand (Steidl/Dangin, 2007), A Storybook Life (twin palms, 2003), Heads (Steidl, 2001), and Hustlers (Steidl/Dangin, 2013).
Leo Rubinfien is the author of A Map of the East (Godine/thames & Hudson, 1992) and Wounded Cities (Steidl, 2008), and co-author of Shomei Tomatsu/Skin of the Nation (SFMOMA/Yale university press, 2004). The book accompanying his Winogrand exhibition was be co-published by SFMOMA and Yale university press.
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June 26, 2014
Aperture Magazine Live: “The São Paulo Issue” (Video)
On June 3, 2014, in conjunction with the release of The São Paulo Issue, Aperture magazine presented a night of presentations and conversations about contemporary photography from Brazil. Featured speakers included three leading Brazilian photographers: Caio Reisewitz, whose work is currently the subject of a solo exhibition at the International Center of Photography; Bárbara Wagner; and Mauro Restiffe. All three use photography to engage questions of Brazilian history, architecture, urban space, and the politics of the landscape. The three photographers’ presentations were followed by a panel discussion led by issue guest editor Thyago Nogueira, curator of contemporary photography at São Paulo’s Instituto Moreira Salles and editor of Zum, a key Brazilian photography magazine.
Watch “Aperture Magazine Live: ‘The São Paulo Issue’” Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4 on Vimeo.
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June 24, 2014
Robert Capa in Color: the Photographer Inside Life
Roberto Saviano, author of the bestselling title Gomorrah, comments on the color work of Robert Capa in Capa in Color, an exhibition on view at the International Center of Photography January 31–May 4, 2014. This review first appeared in La Repubblica on April 13, 2014.
Robert Capa, [Capucine, French model and actress, on a balcony, Rome], August 1951. © Robert Capa/International Center of Photography/Magnum Photos.
NEW YORK – As a young boy, in contests to see who could hold their breath the longest, he got as far as three minutes. It’s a mental discipline, and if you succeed in holding your breath, in not giving in to the tyranny of the diaphragm, then you also succeed in controlling your emotions.
I arrive at the International Center of Photography in New York and breathe in through my nose, inhaling all the air I can, filling my lungs. Faced with images that, piece by piece, have constructed my worldview, I really don’t know if my vital functions will remain unaltered. Encountering Robert Capa’s photographs is like standing before work by Raphael or Caravaggio. All the images in your mind of the Second World War, of the American troops in Italy, of the war in Spain, of the Jews who survived the concentration camps, of the bombed out cities, in other words all those images hidden in some far-off corner of your memory, live within you because Robert Capa lived. A photojournalist who almost always had his camera handy and who never released the shutter without receiving an advance for an assignment.
At this point his most famous shots belong to our collective memory: the anarchist militiaman shot to death in the Spanish Civil War, perhaps his most cited photo; the mothers in mourning around the coffins of children from the Liceo Sannazaro who were killed fighting the Germans during the Four Days of Naples; blurry images of the Normandy landing, which inspired Spielberg for the opening sequences of Saving Private Ryan. These are, by definition, black and white photography, and this is why “Capa in Color,” the ICP exhibition that commemorates the one-hundredth anniversary of the photographer’s birth, delivers a sort of visual shock.
First of all there is the incredible image of Capucine, the stunning and unfortunate woman who committed suicide at age sixty-two. Incredible because you get so close to her, you feel the breath from her nostrils. Her chin resting on her hand, the light of Piazza di Spagna, her red shirt: this shot seems to already contain everything about her fate, and it offers proof that Capa’s art, with his eye, with his unique gaze, lays the foundation for a literary genre.
Robert Capa, [Young visitors waiting to see Lenin’s Tomb at Red Square, Moscow], 1947. © Robert Capa/International Center of Photography/Magnum Photos.
My education, everything I have written, everything written by the authors who have influenced me, derives directly from him. Literary, iconographic and cinematographic neorealism all draw on Robert Capa. His biographers describe this photographer, barely five feet three inches tall, as an indomitable lover, someone who would punctually disappear when the object of his love indicated that she wanted to tie him down, to share a life with him. He had also loved Ingrid Bergman, and indeed it was he who had introduced her to Rossellini, the Italian Neorealist filmmaker. The latter was inspired by Capa’s esthetic rigor, whereby he not only sought to unearth drama, but also its dangerous communicative beauty, in order to enable that drama to transform the observer. This is Capa’s most profound lesson for cinema. His work not only allowed us to construct an extremely personal and sumptuous mosaic. No, Capa did much more: he created literature and communication, in the most modern sense of the terms.
His way of shooting is neither denunciation nor indignation, nor an artistic choice; it is all three together. And this is true only because his glance – immersed in life, drenched in and sullied by life – implicates. Someone who is not afraid of life, not afraid of people. “If your photographs aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough,” according to his most well-known maxim. Getting inside things. This is precisely what Capa’s color photographs reveal: that he is not at war, but inside war, among the soldiers, so close he puts his own life at risk. And this is true for all his photography. Even when he shoots Truman Capote in Ravello, or Martha Gellhorn walking amid the ruins of the temple of Ceres in Paestum. He gets inside everything he photographs. Inside all the people he photographs.
His shots cost him eternal, deep hatred. He was never forgiven for the photograph of the anarchist militiaman, the authenticity of which has been questioned by an entire body of literature. Likewise he has never been forgiven for his color photographs of the Stalinist USSR, published with texts by John Steinbeck, detested by the communists because they are anti-communist and by the anti-communists because they are pro-communist. Whatever photos he shot, he knew that he would stir up instinctive reactions. He liked capturing images of the world and transforming the way people looked at the world.
Robert Capa, [Skier sunbathing in front of the Matterhorn, Zermatt, Switzerland], 1950. © Robert Capa/International Center of Photography/ Magnum Photos.
But the photographs I am seeing not only change my way of looking at the world; it is as if they were giving birth to an urgency, as if they were setting off an alarm: go back to looking at the world and don’t limit yourself to merely copying it, to extracting from everyday life some image or another in order to put it back in circulation, to bombard people with useless stills that saturate the glance but go no further. In fact, it isn’t enough to see these shots by Capa, it isn’t sufficient to look at them and then move on; one needs to stop and read them. In Holiday magazine Capa wrote: “I went back to photograph Budapest because I happened to have been born there; I was able to photograph Moscow, which is impossible for most people to do; I photographed Paris because I lived there before the war; London because I lived there during the war; and Rome because I was unhappy I had never seen it and instead would have liked to live there.” There are photographs of American families in Switzerland, in glossy tourist magazines, or those that were disseminated at travel agencies. There is Magnani during the shooting of Visconti’s Bellissima. Capa photographs everyone in every sort of situation, famous people and unknowns, without snobbery, because he wasn’t interested in playing a role — for him, the priority was to get inside life. He knew that observation entailed getting involved, and this didn’t scare him off.
He had learned from Gerda Taro, his companion. Gerda died at twenty-seven, struck by a “friendly” tank of the Republican Popular Front. She was looking into her camera while standing on the running board of a military vehicle. Hit, she fell and ended up beneath the wheels. In 1954, in Indochina, Robert Capa was also looking into his camera. He had decided to wait for a French military column that was advancing. He went up an embankment. Retreating, he stepped on a landmine. Gerda and Robert never distanced themselves from their subjects. And this getting inside, inside the eyes of the people in front of you, their muscle structure, the landscapes, the creases of a model’s glance, the pride and dissatisfaction of a bourgeois entrepreneur: all this is research. Capa photographs with an awareness that it is precisely when you begin to believe that life is shutting you out, that there is no point in seeking the truth, that you have lost the only chance to be truly alive, to be able to make an impression on this world. As soon as you decide to take one of the possible shortcuts, in order to mimic life, you have already lost. Robert Capa’s secret does not lie in the end product, but in the search, in the voyage, which cannot exist without completely implicating himself. The only salvation lies in getting inside what you want to understand. Getting inside life.
(Translated from the Italian by Marguerite Shore.)
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Roberto Saviano is an Italian journalist and writer. He is the author of numerous publications, including Gomorrah (Mondadori, 2006), La bellezza e l’inferno (Beauty and the Inferno, Mondadori, 2009), and most recently Zero Zero Zero (Feltrinelli Editore, 2013). He is a regular contributor to La Repubblica.
Capa in Color will be on view at Fundación Mapfre, Madrid, June 28–September 7, 2014, and Museo dell’Ara Pacis, Rome, September 26, 2014–June 1, 2015.
The post Robert Capa in Color: the Photographer Inside Life appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.
June 20, 2014
The Sochi Project: in Conversation (Video)
On June 3, 2014, we joined Rob Hornstra and Arnold van Bruggen at Aperture Gallery to discuss The Sochi Project: An Atlas of War and Tourism in the Caucasus. The project, on view until July 30, offers an alternative perspective and in-depth reporting on the remarkable Sochi region, which sits at the combustible crossroads of war, tourism, and history. Hornstra and van Bruggen have returned repeatedly to this region since 2009 as committed practitioners of “slow journalism,” establishing a solid foundation of research on and engagement with this small yet incredibly complicated place before it found itself in the glare of international media attention. Their book The Sochi Project was published by Aperture in 2013.
See “The Sochi Project: Rob Hornstra and Arnold van Bruggen in Conversation” Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4 on Vimeo.
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June 13, 2014
Groupshot: Mídia Ninja
The following first appeared in Aperture magazine #215 Summer 2014. Subscribe here to read it first, in print or online. Return to Ronaldo Entler’s introduction to the Groupshot feature here.
Mídia Ninja, Barricade protesting the FIFA Confederations Cup Brazil, Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, 2013, part of the project Ruas de Junho (June Streets) Courtesy Mídia Ninja
During the 2013 protests, Mídia Ninja became one of the most instrumental collectives to provide on-the-scene coverage: Several videos posted on Twitcast reached as many as one hundred thousand viewers. With a huge portfolio documenting conflict situations, they were able to confront major news providers whose coverage had been critical of the protests, forcing some to adjust their content and provide a more nuanced portrayal that included not only scenes of vandalism on the part of protesters but also scenes of police violence.
Ninja (a Portuguese acronym for Independent Narratives, Journalism, and Action) was formed in 2011 as a sideline of Fora do Eixo, a collective network created in 2005 to organize independent music festivals in several Brazilian cities. Part of Mídia Ninja’s know-how and strategy is a result of its work with these festivals. While Bruno Torturra, Pablo Capilé, Filipe Peçanha, and Rafael Vilela are some of the members who most often appear in public to discuss their projects, the collective estimates that there are nearly one hundred regular members and a network of as many as two thousand collaborators who can be mobilized across the country. Although known for their use of camera phones, many collaborators have, in fact, had solid audiovisual training.
Though made under a banner of independent journalism and media activism, work by the collective members has often been featured by mainstream news outlets, where it has been the subject of debate: Critics question whether their informal coverage qualifies as legitimate journalism. According to Vilela, Ninja’s projects have been funded primarily by social organizations that support the same causes. “We’re not looking to be impartial,” Vilela asserts, “what distinguishes us from the major platforms is the transparency with which we present points of view.” The group’s images are available for free downloading on Creative Commons and have been published in newspapers around the world. Aside from the alternative channels that they explore, the works produced by Ninja have also begun to exert a presence within the art circuit and are often featured in photography exhibitions and collections. Mídia Ninja is an evolving project. Its core membership recently relocated to Rio de Janeiro from São Paulo. With the World Cup approaching, Rio will be packed with tourists and journalists, as well as militants keeping an eye out for the social unrest that is often unleashed by such major events— and the collective will be well-positioned to witness, record, and disseminate.
Mídia Ninja, Monument occupied during popular protests, 23 de Maio Avenue, São Paulo, 2013, part of the project Ruas de Junho (June Streets) Courtesy Mídia Ninja
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Ronaldo Entler, a researcher and photography critic, is a professor at the School of Communication of Armando Alvares Penteado Foundation (FAAP), in São Paulo, where he is also the graduate coordinator of the school’s masters of photography program. Read his introduction to the Groupshot section of the issue here.
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Groupshot: SelvaSP
The following first appeared in Aperture magazine #215 Summer 2014. Subscribe here to read it first, in print or online. Return to Ronaldo Entler’s introduction to the Groupshot feature here.
Drago, A hurt military police officer fends off attackers during the second protest against the bus-fare hikes in São Paulo, June 2013 © Drago/SelvaSP
SelvaSP, meaning São Paulo jungle, formed in 2012 with an entirely aesthetic objective: the revitalization of street photography. The group’s manifesto recalls the work of classical photographers and questions why critics have decided to view this genre as archaic. The collective, which still considers itself in a formative phase, currently has twelve members: Gabriel Cabral, Victor Dragonetti (Drago), Leo Eloy, Francisco Costa, Syã Fonseca, Gustavo Gomes, Paulo Marinuzzi, Rafael Mattar, Lucas Mello, Gustavo Morita, Padu Palmério, and Hudson Rodrigues.
Gustavo Gomes, from the series Plástico (Plastic), 2013 © Gustavo Gomes/SelvaSP
According to Gabriel Cabral, despite the group’s coverage of the 2013 protests, their photo essays are defined more by trying to capture everyday life in the city—neighborhood identities and the gestures and expressions of people on the street—than by urgent reporting on fast-breaking events. SelvaSP produces tightly edited photo essays, not the news.
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Ronaldo Entler, a researcher and photography critic, is a professor at the School of Communication of Armando Alvares Penteado Foundation (FAAP), in São Paulo, where he is also the graduate coordinator of the school’s masters of photography program. Read his introduction to the Groupshot section of the issue here.
The post Groupshot: SelvaSP appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.
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