Aperture's Blog, page 180

Touching Strangers Launch at Aperture Gallery

On Wednesday, April 2, 2014 Aperture members, Kickstarter backers, and special guests joined Richard Renaldi for the private launch of the Touching Strangers photobook and exhibition at Aperture Gallery. The evening included an exhibition walkthrough with Richard Renaldi, a performance by Queen Esther and J. Walter Hawkes, and DJ sets by Chris Newmyer.

 



 



 



 



 



 



 



 



 



 



 



 

 



 



 



 

Touching Strangers: Photographs by Richard Renaldi is on view April 3 – May 15, 2014 at Aperture Gallery in New York.

 

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

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Touching Strangers




$45.00



Jeromy and Matthew, Columbus, Ohio, 2011




$1,500.00

The post Touching Strangers Launch at Aperture Gallery appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

Songs Left Out of Nan Goldin’s Ballad of Sexual Dependency

To mark the third printing of Nan Goldin’s Ballad of Sexual Dependency we are featuring this piece by Greil Marcus on the soundtrack to Goldin’s original slideshow presentation of the work. Originally printed in Aperture #197 Winter 2009.



We have also assembled a YouTube playlist based on the soundtrack for Goldin’s slideshow, listen here.

Nan Goldin, Ballad of Sexual Dependency, Multi-part slide projection with soundtrack, Courtesy the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Thomas R. DuBrock, photographer

I’ve always been seduced by the title of Nan Goldin’s slide show about her life and that of her friends from the mid-seventies through the mid-eighties, in and around Boston, Berlin, the Lower East Side. “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency”—it comes from The Threepenny Opera, but I didn’t know that when I first encountered Goldin’s work: more than seven hundred color photographs, running in sequences, each image present for three or four seconds, replaced seamlessly by another, with songs from opera, Top 40, downtown New Wave dance clubs, and obscure blues records playing alongside, most often in excerpts of a minute or more—pictures, as they move through the 40 minutes or so of the piece, in which the primary image can seem to be that of a single person lying on a bed—or two people on a bed, neither acknowledging the other.

But to me “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency” was a pop title. I imagined hearing it announced on the radio as the latest hit, and I was seduced by its unlikeliness. “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency.” “The Ballad of Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma.” “The Ballad of Stratigraphic Geology”—I’d listen to anything with a title like that.

Goldin was born in Washington, D.C., in 1953; two central events I her life, as she tells it, took place in 1965, when she was 11. Her eighteen year old sister lay down on the tracks of a commuter train; in Goldin’s words, “In the week of mourning that followed, I was seduced by an older man. During this period of greatest pain and loss, I was simultaneously awakened to intense sexual excitement.” Goldin began taking pictures when she was 18; sold only through a gallery as an art work, in the collection of museums, never available to the public except at film festivals or when a museum chooses to present it, “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency” is, Goldin says, “the history of a re-created family”—and the mission of her new family was to give itself over to “that part of your brain that is only satisfied by love, heroin, or chocolate”; to embrace what she called “a disbelief in the future”; to pursue an escape from the dependencies of ordinary life—on convenience, stability, and predictability—and to seek instead dependency on each other.

What’s most uncanny—uncanny and sometimes disturbing, displacing, confusing—about Goldin’s pictures, about the whole work, is its intimacy. Not necessarily sexual intimacy, though in all versions of “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency” there is repeated nudity and in some there are sequences of sex pictures that are convincing in a way that sex rarely is in photos. What’s uncanny is the way Goldin and the people in her pictures seem to have no borders of privacy, the way their rooms seem to have no walls.

Like anyone in front of a camera, they pose happily for moments of ease or friendship or let’s-remember-this-day, but in moments of sex, misery, estrangement, or despair they don’t seem to be posing at all. There’s no sense of voyeurism. You’re pulled in. Everyone is a witness to everyone else.

Nan Goldin, Ballad of Sexual Dependency, Multi-part slide projection with soundtrack, Courtesy the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Thomas R. DuBrock, photographer

The images don’t flash by; they float. And from Charlotte Rae singing the title song to Petula Clark and “Downtown,” from Maria Callas’s “Casta Diva” to the Velvet Underground’s “I’ll Be Your Mirror,” from Dionne Warwick and “Don’t Make Me Over” to “You Don’t Own Me,” which in Klaus Nomi’s version sounds just like “Don’t Make Me Over,” in those songs and all or parts of 28 more, the music makes the sequence of photos of people alone, together, having sex, dressing for parties, shooting up, embracing, separating, into a drama that moves from isolation to friendship to romance to a repeated isolation greater than the isolation with which the story began.

The images and the music are often attached to each other with a literalism that in other hands might be killing. As you see women who’ve been beaten up, women with black eyes, bruised breasts, a slashed wrist opened up like a flower—and all this almost at the start, before you’ve seen anyone who might have left most of these marks—that is, men—you hear the Creatures’ “Miss the Girl.” You hear Siouxsie Sioux singing “You didn’t miss the girl, you hit the girl, you hit her with the force of steel.” Then comes Yoko Ono’s “She Hits Back” and pictures of women with guns, a female body builder, all proud, strong, empowered.

The approach is corny in description but not as you watch. The brief time on the screen for each image, long enough for each to register, not long enough for any one image to claim the territory of another, the music slipping from one selection to the other, make it all into a movie. It’s a movie made entirely of stills, but the music creates the illusion of a dramatic inevitability—with every cut, you feel as if you’re part of a 40-minute tracking shot. The literalism of the pairings of songs and images dissolves—because it’s not a matter of the way, in a song, the music allows the words the singer is singing to transcend their banality. Here the images are the music, and the songs are the words.

That’s most true at the very end. You’ve heard Ennio Morricone’s “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” and seen a man on a horse, one with a snake, one with a huge blade. You’ve heard James Brown’s “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World” and seen body builders, boxers, men covered with hair, a guy masturbating in a car who looks as if he has his hands around a knife. You’ve watched women getting dressed up to the Velvet Underground’s “All Tomorrow’s Parties,” then seen them alone and half-naked as it fades, as if all tomorrow’s parties have already happened, and life is nothing more than going to the same party over and over and over again— and then, finally, all the pictures yield to death.

You see an older man in a coffin, and a blonde woman, who you’ve come to know from the start, pass in front of it; then you see her in her own coffin. AIDS isn’t depicted, drug overdoses aren’t shown—what’s at stake is a rhythm, the rhythm of connection, isolation, and memory. So Goldin shows a painting on a wall; a heart-shaped frame holding a portrait of a couple; a framed picture of hearts and before it a vase of flowers and a medicine bottle; an empty bed with tangled sheets; a bedroom wall spattered with blood; and then tombstones, a whole forest of mausoleums, then the coffins, and, the very last image, a crude painting on a door of two skeletons fucking standing up.

And all the while, from the first image of this final sequence to the last, you are swept up in lightness, in the syncopation of “Memories Are Made of This,” Dean Martin’s number one hit from 1955. “Sweet, sweet, the memories you gave to me/ You can’t beat, the memories you gave to me,” murmurs the chorus. The simplest chord changes on an acoustic guitar, the bass counting off the last notes with a cadence that spells “That’s all she wrote” more clearly than the actual words ever could—there’s room for the listener, for anyone the song might speak for. And it endows everyone you’ve seen with dignity.

The filmmaker Dennis Potter, with his movies of people bursting into miming performances of great pop songs from all across the 20th century—in “Pennies from Heaven,” “The Singing Detective,” in “Lipstick on Your Collar”—caught how this worked in 1975, talking to Michael Sragow, then the film critic for the San Francisco Examiner.

“I think we all have this little theatre on top of our shoulders, where the past and the present and our aspirations and our memories are simply and inexorably mixed. What makes each one of us unique is the potency of the individual mix.

“We can make our lives only when we know what our lives have been. And drama is about how you make the next moment. It’s like when you’re watching a sporting event, like a soccer game here; when it’s going on, you don’t know what’s going to happen. But all the rules are laid down.

“I don’t make the mistake that high culture mongers do of assuming that because people like cheap art, their feelings are cheap, too. When people say, ‘Oh listen, they’re playing our song,’ they don’t mean, ‘Our song, this little cheap tinkling, syncopated piece of rubbish is what we felt when we met.’ What they saying is ‘That song reminds us of the tremendous feeling we had when we met.’ Some of the songs I use are great anyway but the cheaper songs are still in the direct line of descent from David’s Psalms. They’re saying, ‘Listen, the world isn’t quite like this, the world is better than this, there is love in it,’ ‘There’s you and me in it’ or ‘The sun is shining in it.’

“So called dumb people, simple people, uneducated people, have as authentic and profound a depth of feeling as the most educated on earth. And anyone who says different is a fascist.”

That is precisely what “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency” says.

Nan Goldin, Ballad of Sexual Dependency, Multi-part slide projection with soundtrack, Courtesy the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Thomas R. DuBrock, photographer

I was inspired by Goldin’s soundtrack—I wanted to play her game. So I thought I’d construct my own version, “The songs left out of “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency.’” The Pet Shop Boys’ “Rent,” say. Mott the Hoople “I Wish I Was Your Mother,” which to me caught the will to connect that is Goldin’s true subject more painfully than anything she used herself. The threat in Elvis Costello’s “I Want You,” for the sequence of pictures of men alone, brooding, the posture of each suggesting he’s trying to decide whether or not to kill someone. The Supremes’ “Stop! In the Name of Love,” The Miracles “The Love I Saw in You Was Just a Mirage.” Bobby Bland’s “Lead Me On.”

But that was from memory. Watching the work again, I realized that of course it is what it is. Coming in fragments that fade almost as soon as they appear, can it really be said that anything was left out, that anything’s missing? It’s an obnoxious conceit. The soundtrack is a collection of Goldin’s friends, just as the photos are. The songs are characters as much as the people we see.

But when I remembered the piece, when watched it in my head, and then when I watched it again for real—there was still one song that did, for me, cry to be included—or maybe it was that that one song itself cried out to be included, to be given a home in Goldin’s world.

Because there’s a certain hipster cool that “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency” never surrenders. Because something is missing— some sense of tragedy, something that no song Goldin choses can account for—and what that is can be found in a single note of Lonnie Mack’s “Why.” That’s the song that got me started thinking about the songs that were left out—as if there were more than one.

It’s 1963: Lonnie Mack is 22, he’s pudgy, dorking-looking, really, but he’s had two big instrumental guitar hits, “Memphis” and “Wham!”, so he gets to make an album: “The Wham! of that Memphis Man.” Tucked inside is—along with Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come” and Percy Sledge’s “When a Man Loves a Woman” and the Five Keys’ “Dream On”—the greatest deep soul record ever made: Mack’s own “Why.”

The song is a staircase. After each verse, where he tells us about the woman who left him, it’s the climb of the chorus to the roof, where the singer throws himself off. It’s the surge of intensity, of terror—the singer terrorizing the listener, but more than that the singer terrorizing himself. It’s almost inhuman, how much pain he’s discovered—and the way he’s discovered that he can make it real, something he can all but hold in his hands.

The first chorus comes. “Why,” he sings. And then he screams the word, and it’s nearly unbearable, how far he goes with the single syllable. As James Agee said of the last shots of Charlie Chaplin’s “City Lights,” it’s enough to shrivel the heart. Mack cuts back with the next line, softly: “Why did you leave me this way.” But the echo is there.

The second verse. “Now I’m standing”—and the last word is drawn out, shuddering—“By my window/ I decided”—again drawn out so far—“What I would do”—and you’re sure he’s going to kill himelf—“I would never/ Tell anybody/ How much/ I loved/ You.”

And then the second chorus, the spoken “Why,” then again the same word screamed, then the quiet “Why did you leave me this way”—and then something really terrible: the looming possibility that the singer might go all the way. What if he did? Would he still be standing? Would you? There is a guitar solo. It’s magnificent, but it’s a pause, because what you’re really hearing hasn’t happened yet. It’s what you’re wishing for, what you’re afraid of, the final chorus.

Do it! No, don’t! Please, please, do it! No, no, no!

He brings you back into his drama, and you relax. He tells you he’s writing a letter; it’s stained with tears from his eyes. You can almost savor the coming repetition in the next verse: you can experience again something that you have already gotten through, stood up to, not broken under.

And then the levees break.

Again there is the first “Why,” almost crooned. Then the second, exploding as before. Then the next line, and you can feel the ground shaking beneath the singer’s feet, beneath yours. And then, even out of this maelstrom, the shock of a long, wordless scream, a cry of anguish so extreme you have to close your eyes in shame over witnessing it, because this man is now before you, begging you to save him. And then more, farther, deeper, the now long and tangled line “You know you left me—alone and so empty” twisted into a knot that can never be untangled, that is left behind in the wreckage of the singer’s future. And then, finally, it’s over. Or rather the track ends, and “The Wham! Of That Memphis Man” goes back to another bouncy guitar instrumental.

No, of course it wasn’t left out. It doesn’t belong in “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency.” But there is a need, an absence—a cover- up that art enacts that only art can expose, a criticism of art that only art can make.

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Greil Marcus is a music journalist, cultural critic, and author of the upcoming The History of Rock ‘n’ Roll in Ten Songs (Yale University Press, 2014).

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The Myth of Vivian Maier

Madeline Coleman on Finding Vivian Maier, a new documentary opening in U.S. theaters on Friday, March 28.

Vivian Maier self-portrait from John Maloof and Charlie Siskel’s Finding Vivian Maier. Courtesy of the Maloof Collection.

Woman at the NY Public Library still from John Maloof and Charlie Siskel’s Finding Vivian Maier. Courtesy of the Maloof Collection.

Man being dragged by cops at night still from John Maloof and Charlie Siskel’s Finding Vivian Maier. Courtesy of the Maloof Collection.

African-American Man on Horse NYC still from John Maloof and Charlie Siskel’s Finding Vivian Maier. Courtesy of the Maloof Collection.

The new documentary Finding Vivian Maier offers less satisfying conclusions than the title might imply. Coproduced and directed by Charlie Siskel and John Maloof, it follows the latter’s quixotic search for information about Maier, the woman whose photographs he discovered at an auction in 2007. This visually conventional documentary unravels the life of a secret street photographer, a native New Yorker who grew up in France and died destitute in a Chicago hospital in 2009 after decades working as a nanny to families in that city’s suburbs. She had no children of her own. She never married, had no known lovers or friends. What Maier did have, however, was a camera. She took hundreds of thousands of pictures on the streets of Chicago and on solo trips around the world, none of which she ever published or exhibited. Finding Vivian Maier is an overt bid for Maier’s inclusion in the photographic canon, but its depiction is too simple for such an elusive subject.



The film is structured through interviews with families Maier worked for, testimonies from photographers Mary Ellen Mark and Joel Meyerowitz, and selections from Maier’s photographs and films. Maloof, an earnest, neatly coiffed young man in black-framed glasses who speaks directly into the camera throughout the film, is an amateur historian who first discovered a crate of Maier’s photographs while searching for historical photos of Chicago. When he drew rave reviews from Flickr users after scanning and posting some of these found negatives to the site, he went on the hunt for more. Using Maier’s name, which he had learned from the auction house when he bought the initial box, he was able to amass countless crates and suitcases of negatives; prints; undeveloped rolls of both color and black-and-white film; reels of 8 and 16 mm film; and sundry other belongings. Maloof is in thrall to the photographs and films he uncovered, and they are affecting: Maier was a talented street photographer with an eye for geometry, texture, hilarity, and pathos. She sometimes photographed the children she cared for and took many self-portraits, capturing her own serious image—well-loved Rolleiflex strung around her neck—in shop windows, mirrors, and shadows. One of the few things we do know about Maier is that for decades she never went anywhere without a camera.



Maloof, who admits to not having been particularly interested in photography prior to his discovery of Maier’s work, has campaigned tirelessly to get his collection into museums. He doesn’t seem to have succeeded in that yet, but thanks to his efforts, Maier’s work has now been shown widely in galleries across the U.S. and Europe; her print sales are managed by Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York. But it’s hard to separate the success of these exhibitions from the irresistible myth of the artist’s story: toiling in obscurity for decades until finally, after death, her work is discovered and her genius revealed.



This is where things get complicated. Despite his apparent devotion to Maier’s work, Maloof and his co-director Siskel have devoted the majority of the film to often-damning first-person testimony from the photographer-nanny’s employers. All of them describe her as mysterious and eccentric; some loved her, but some recount a hard and even abusive caretaker, a hoarder who amassed stacks of old newspapers and once force-fed a picky eater by choking her until she swallowed. Maier is remembered as doggedly secretive, bolting the door to her quarters and never revealing anything about her past to the families she lived with.



Through these interviews, the filmmakers put forth the hypothesis that anyone acting as Maier did must have been traumatized or abused. Why else would she avoid physical contact with men and choose to live alone? Who wouldn’t want the good life? At odds with this interpretation is the fact that Maier was political and fiercely independent, taken with documenting the homeless and the poor, as well as interviewing and tape-recording people waiting in line at the grocery store about current events. When one young woman is unable to answer her questions, Maier scolds her: “Well, you should have an opinion—women are supposed to be opinionated, I hope?”



With her insatiable appetite for documentation, newspapers, and politics, Maier was clearly obsessed with understanding her time. And yet despite Maloof’s desire to place her in the canon, this documentary is curiously absent historical and art historical context. (The only time she’s discussed in relation to other mid-century street photographers is in the short interviews with Mary Ellen Mark and Joel Meyerowitz.) There’s no discussion of women’s conditions at the time, although Maier’s options, when she arrived in Chicago in the 1950s, must have been severely limited: she was a single, working-class woman in her thirties with no money, family, or higher education. She rejected the obligation to marry and have babies at a time when such a decision would have been highly unusual. Her story is ripe for a feminist or even queer reading. With a subject who knew it was all about context, the filmmakers owe her that much.



In one of the film reels included in Finding Vivian Maier, Maier tried her hand at her own narrative documentary. She shows a headline on a newspaper: a local babysitter has been killed by her employer. Maier, fascinated, retraces her steps. Film rolling, she visits the store where the girl found the fatal job posting, and follows the newspaper account until finally she arrives at a funeral home. She lingers on the hearses pulling up outside. Throughout Maloof and Siskel’s documentary, the photographer is depicted as an unenviable, isolated, and lonely figure—an unheralded artist, but also an object of pity. This film of hers tells a different story: “there but for the grace of God go I.” After all, Maier survived.



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Madeline Coleman is a copy editor at Aperture Foundation.

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Changing Paris

Mary Panzer reviews the Charles Marville exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, on view until May 4, 2014.

Charles Marville. Banks of the Bièvre River at the Bottom of the rue des Gobelins (Fifth Arrondissement) ca. 1862. © Musée Carnavalet / Roger-Viollet

Charles Marville (1813–79) has long been familiar to historians of photography and French architecture for his rich images of 1850s and 1860s Paris, much of which vanished during the massive redesign of the city organized by Baron Haussmann under Napoleon III. In many ways his success as a documentary photographer long made him nearly invisible as an innovator and artist. The current exhibition at New York’s Metropolitan (a collaborative effort by the National Gallery of Art in Washington; and the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa) is the first large show devoted to Marville’s work, presenting a generous selection of original prints to contemporary audiences.



Marville was a successful illustrator who took up photography in the early 1850s and worked constantly until the end of this life. A year into his photographic career he began working for Louis-Désiré Blanquart-Evrard, whose Imprimerie Photographique was the first successful photography publisher in France. Marville’s skillful use of paper negatives (which allowed for multiple reproductions) rapidly turned him into the publisher’s main photographer. In 1861, he was appointed official photographer for the Louvre and recorded works of painting and sculpture, as well the institution’s architecture. He also photographed for sculptors and architects who sought records of their own work and of the structures that inspired them, including the historic Chartres Cathedral.

Most importantly, Marville worked for the city of Paris from 1862 to 1879: he documented neighborhoods slated for destruction, such as the tanneries on the banks of the Bièvres River; narrow, crumbling streets, some populated by fleeting figures; and epic scenes of destroyed government buildings, like the Hôtel de Ville. His pictures narrate urban transformation and the construction of all manner of new structures: the Opera, the expansive Bois de Boulougne park, as well as street lamps and public urinals (these may now strike us as antiquated but were then considered beacons of modernity). The exhibition also includes Marville’s documentation of the rough neighborhoods that emerged beyond the old city limits, home to the workers and migrants from the countryside who could not afford Haussmann’s modern city. These are the most surprising, and difficult, of the pictures on view. The Carrières d’Amérique (America Quarries) on a hill on the outskirts of the city, now Montmartre, was then a location for thieves, political dissidents, and gypsies—an ideal site for Haussmann’s cleansing plan.

Charles Marville. Top of the rue Champlain, View to the Right (Twentieth Arrondissement) 1877–78. © Musée Carnavalet / Roger-Viollet

Charles Marville. Urinal, Jennings System, plateau de l’Ambigu 1876. © Musée Carnavalet / Roger-Viollet

What makes Marville’s work finally “visible” after remaining hidden in plain sight for over 150 years? Partly, we benefit from post-modernist enthusiasm for all kinds of photographic practices, including Marville’s commercial work. More importantly, we have learned about the way photographers have worked for the archive, creating images to serve posterity rather than solely for exhibition. The diligent, creative researchers who worked on this exhibition, led by Sarah Kennel of the National Gallery in Washington, have uncovered evidence that tells more than ever before about Marville’s assignments from Haussmann. What had been viewed as a clinical record of a rotting city slated for destruction, or a nostalgic look at structures about to vanish, had an altogether different purpose. From Françoise Reynaud, Curator of Photographs at the Musée Carnavalet, Paris, source for many images on view, we learn that Marville’s views of “Old Paris” were commissioned by Haussmann himself, who declared near the start of his modernization project that “the City of Paris must disregard nothing, forget nothing, neglect nothing of its past.” What had been considered visual proof of the need to destroy old buildings and modernize sewers turns out to be a diligent argument for their preservation—at least in the form of photographs.

Here, Haussmann follows the example of the 1851 Commission des Monuments Historiques, in which the French government selected five photographers to survey the nation’s architectural patrimony to determine the need for preservation and restoration. All of these photographers—Gustave Le Gray, August Mestral, Édouard Baldus, Henri Le Secq, and Hippolyte Bayard—have been celebrated for their artistic use of the camera; the project itself was highly romantic, a mournful retrospective focused on the ruins of an ancient civilization. Their salted paper prints, made with paper negatives, were rendered softly—a formal quality that intensified the celebration of the past. Marville himself had used this technology to great effect in his early work. A decade later, however, when he began his Paris survey, his images were meant to support progress and change and preserve the old city in a useful, accurate, and permanent form. Glass plate negatives, capable of rendering vast amounts of intricate detail, provided the right form for his enterprise; the crispness of the resulting albumen prints were widely associated with objectivity and modernity. This evolution is evident in the exhibition: the ninety-eight prints and three albums are organized chronologically and provide a rich, sensuous account of the transformation in photographic medium.

Revisiting Marville elicits questions of the more celebrated Eugène Atget, who carried his own, smaller, view camera through the same streets at another time of civic transformation—the turn of the twentieth century and its first two decades. Did Atget use Marville’s work as a guide? The Met addresses this question with an adjacent small show from the collection, Paris as Muse, in which work by Marville and Atget hangs alongside that of Daguerre, Stieglitz, Kertész, Brassaï, Ilse Bing, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Man Ray. Seen together, these shows correct our view of Atget as a lone artistic genius, at the same time that they elevate Marville from servant to Haussmann to a sympathetic interpreter of the present, with an eye toward posterity.

Eugène Atget. Boulevard de Strasbourg Corsets, Paris 1912. Gilman Collection, Purchase, Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee Gift, 2005

Charles Marville. Rue Estienne from the rue Boucher (First Arrondissement) 1862–65. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Charles Marville. Spire of Notre Dame, Viollet-le-Duc, Architect 1859–60. The AIA/AAF Collection, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington D.C.

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Mary Panzer is a photography writer and historian. She lives in New York.

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The Collectors: Matt Wolf

On the occasion of Matt Wolf’s newest documentary Teenage we are republishing this brief musing by Wolf on his favorite photograph, originally printed in The Collectors column from Aperture magazine, #212 (Fall 2013).

Sommertag auf einer Berliner Dachwiese—das Radio sorgt für Unterhaltung (Summer day on a rooftop lawn, with a radio for entertainment), Berlin, 1926. Photographer unknown © 2005 bpk—Bildagentur für Kunst, Kultur und Geschichte, Berlin

I’ve always been obsessed with images of women listening to records. My favorites are scenes from Fassbinder films. At the conclusion of his first feature, Love Is Colder Than Death (Liebe ist kälter als der Tod, 1969), a female gangster lies on the floor in a stark white bedroom in front of a turntable. The motif repeats in his 1975 television movie Fear of Fear (Angst vor der Angst). A housewife named Margot suffers from inconsolable postpartum depression. In the film’s climax, she locks her oldest daughter out of the apartment, lies on the floor, and blares a pop record.

I recently finished making a film called Teenage about the birth of youth culture. In that process, I saw thousands of archival images, including this remarkable photograph of 1920s German teenagers listening to the radio on a green roof. The photographer is unknown, but I found the image in an incredible book called Wir wollen eine andere Welt (We want another world) by Fred Grimm. When Fred learned about my film last year, he sent me his book, and it hugely inspired me.

In the early twentieth century, young people endured incredible oppression from their parents, governments, and the police. Pop culture and friends were their refuge, and teenagers struggled to create their own private world. This image is like a dream, and it conveys the transporting, hypnotic power of music.

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Matt Wolf is the director of Wild Combination (2008), about the avant-garde cellist and disco producer Arthur Russell, and Teenage, which premiered at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival. He is a 2010 Guggenheim Fellow.

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Matthew Pillsbury: City Stages (Video)

On March 10, 2014, we joined Matthew Pillsbury for a walk-through of his exhibition City Stages, followed by a signing of his recent monograph of the same name. Over the past decade, Pillsbury has built several extensive bodies of work—Screen Lives, Time Frame, and City Stages—that deal with different facets of contemporary metropolitan life and the passage of time. Working with black-and-white 8-by-10 film and long exposures, Pillsbury captures a range of psychologically charged experiences in the urban environment, from isolation—tuned into the omnipresent screens of our tablets, laptops, televisions, and phones—to crowded museums, parades, cathedrals, and even protests. The City Stages monograph and exhibition gather selections from all three bodies of work for the first time, spanning ten years of the artist’s output.



View “Matthew Pillsbury: City Stages” Part 2 and Part 3 on Vimeo.

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Robert Heinecken: Paraphotographer

Robert Heinecken. Cybill Shepherd/Phone Sex. 1992. The Robert Heinecken Trust, Chicago; courtesy Petzel Gallery, New York. © 2014 The Robert Heinecken Trust

Robert Heinecken. Are You Rea #1. 1964–68. Collection Jeffrey Leifer, Los Angeles. © 2013 The Robert Heinecken Trust

Robert Heinecken. Periodical #5. 1971. Collection Philip Aarons, New York. © 2014 The Robert Heinecken Trust.

Los Angeles-based conceptualist Robert Heinecken (1931-2006) worked primarily with photography but rarely used a camera. His cross-disciplinary work employed found images culled from mass media that were then reanimated through a variety of materials and techniques—gelatin-silver prints, collage, photo-sculpture, canvases covered with photographic emulsion, among them. A self-described “paraphotographer,” Heinecken’s expanded notion of photography is evident in his oft-cited comment: “The photograph is not a picture, but an object about something.” A comprehensive exhibition of Heinecken’s output, spanning the early 1960s through the 1990s, has just opened at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Aperture asked artist Arthur Ou to speak with Eva Respini, curator of Robert Heinecken: Object Matter, about this restless artist’s pioneering work and how his capacious definition of photography feels especially relevant today.

—The Editors

Arthur Ou: Why a Robert Heinecken show now?

Eva Respini: I realized that there hadn’t been a large-scale Heinecken retrospective on the East Coast since 1976, at the George Eastman House. He’s certainly been in group and gallery shows. He’s one of these figures with a cult following. But there are many people that don’t know his work, especially on the East Coast. It seemed like a good opportunity to show the larger scope of his career. Even if people know some of the work, they certainly don’t know everything.

AO: His career overlaps with many other art historical movements, such as the Pictures Generation. Can you speak to those connections and how his influence may have been delayed? Are you trying to bring his work into the present discourse on image making?

ER: Yes, I definitely am, or I do hope that the show will bring his practice with images more into the dialogue of contemporary art. In the Los Angeles area he’s known because of his legacy in teaching, which is very important, but I think where people don’t know him is in the realm of contemporary art. A lot of what he was doing in terms of using found images from magazines, newspapers, and television, certainly predated what we now call the Pictures Generation, but it also came out of the context in which he was working, post-Pop in Los Angeles, under the specter of the film industry. He certainly wasn’t alone. Think of Wallace Berman. You can go even further back to Warhol and Rauschenberg.

Robert Heinecken. Lessons in Posing Subjects/Matching Facial Expressions, 1981.
© 2014 The Robert Heinecken Trust

AO: What kind influence did he have on his students and the Los Angeles photography community?

ER: I think he was a huge presence. He was a deeply respected teacher. He was also an outsized personality and, from anecdotal accounts, a gregarious kind of guy. And I think it’s a testament to him that his former students are diverse in their practice; he didn’t just turn out many Heineckens. He seemed to encourage critical thinking about images, but that didn’t necessarily mean working in the way that he did. In fact, many of the students (especially the early ones) that I spoke to weren’t even aware of his practice and how pioneering or experimental it was (that he basically never made his own images, or used a camera in the traditional sense). Now, of course, things are different with access to the Internet; everybody knows immediately what you’re doing.

. Robert Heinecken. Periodical #5, 1971. © 2014 The Robert Heinecken Trust

AO: What was it like working with his archive? Was it challenging to construct a narrative that would make sense as a portrait of an artist?

ER: Well, it was really fun, sort of like archaeological work. But it was certainly a challenge, because one of the things that defined how Heinecken thought about making artwork was his training as a printmaker. All of his work exists in multiple iterations: one set of images were made as lithographs, then he would make them as gelatin-silver prints, then he would use the same source material and put that on photo emulsion on canvas, then he would use some of that as a preparatory work in collage form, and it goes on and on. So the challenge was deciding, well, what is the work?

And after some time, I realized that’s actually the wrong question to ask about Heinecken. He wasn’t an artist who would make one masterpiece, one that is clearly the work that we should have in the show. Obviously, we have very important works in the show that were influential in their time and continue to be influential now, but he was very iterative in his thinking and art-making; there are moments in the exhibition where we also accumulate a number of works that are related, where you see this iterative process and see him literally working through different materials. It is a way of working that was very much against the fine-art tradition of photography. If you think about that tradition and giants of West Coast photography, like Edward Weston or Ansel Adams, there is one master print. Heinecken worked completely against that idea.

With this realization, my work became less challenging. But there’s a lot of material out there and he was very prolific, working until the end of his life, even though he was ill. It’s amazing how much he produced.

AO: Variation, or multiple iterations of one work, seems to connect with our digital experience of photographs now.

ER: It’s a very contemporary idea that an image can be anything and be translated into any medium. Now we think, “oh yeah, it’s an image on my phone, it’s an image on my screen, it’s an image on the wall, it’s an image in a magazine.” He was just thinking of photography in the mediums of his time period. But the attitude, I think, is utterly contemporary.

Robert Heinecken. Figure in Six Sections, 1965. © 2014 The Robert Heinecken Trust

Installation view, Robert Heinecken: Object Matter, The Museum of Modern Art, March 15 – September 7, 2014. Photograph by Jonathan Muzikar. © The Museum of Modern Art.

AO: Throughout his career he was continually drawn to the female figure. Could you speak about that aspect of his work?

ER: When you see the whole body of work this is a consistent thread, not just the female figure but female sexuality. He was very interested in addressing sexuality in mass media and pornography, and how sex was basically used to sell practically anything. In the late 1970s and early ‘80s, his use of pornographic material becomes quite problematic and he was attacked by a number of feminists. Martha Rosler famously dismissed his work as “pussy porn.” There was a push back to his brazen use of the pornographic image. Even though he intended it as a critique, it wasn’t necessarily read that way. Hopefully, this show will be an opportunity for us to reassess that work. Our relationship to pornography is now very different than it was, even in the ‘80s, just because pornographic images are so much more widely available. And when I look at the images he was using, they seem very tame by today’s standards. In conjunction with the show, we’re having a panel on art and pornography. I’ve invited a number of artists who have dealt with related issues in their work to speak, and I plan to be quite open about my own issues with Heinecken and the subject, which is not 100% resolved for me.

AO: There will be interesting overlaps with the Heinecken show and MoMA’s two concurrent shows: the retrospective exhibition of Sigmar Polke, who worked across media, including photography, and A World of One’s Own: Photographic Practices in the Studio, Quentin Bajac’s survey exhibition of photographers working in the studio environment.

ER: We’re all looking forward to having all three on view. It’s great when these things happen, and they’re not always planned. Schedules in the museum are a very complicated thing. But when these synergies happen, it’s really great, because looking at Heinecken with Polke, it’s sort of what I was saying in the beginning here, where what I hope the show will do is to place Heinecken within a larger discussion of art since the ’60s.

—

Arthur Ou is Assistant Professor at Parsons the New School for Design.

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Live Stream: Bearing Witness, hosted by SFMOMA

 

Given the power and pervasiveness of photography in both art and everyday life, what is the significance of the rapid and fundamental changes that the field is undergoing? How have social media, digital cameras, and amateur photojournalism altered the way photographs capture the everyday, define current events, and steer social and political movements? How have photographers responded to these shifting conditions, as well as to the new ways in which images are understood, shared, and consumed? How have our expectations of photography changed?

 These questions, central to the conversations presented in the current issue of Aperture magazine, “Documentary, Expanded”, will be explored this weekend during a one-day symposium hosted by SFMOMA, assessing the ways in which photography matters now more than ever.



“Bearing Witness”, organized by Erin O’Toole, SFMOMA associate curator of photography and Dominic Willsdon, SFMOMA Curator of Education and Public Programs, will be streaming live from the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater, Sunday, March 16, 2014, 10 a.m. – 5 p.m.



Participants include Pete Brook, editor of prisonphotography.org, blogger for Wired, freelance writer and curator; Mike Krieger, cofounder, Instagram; Benjamin Lowy, photographer; Susan Meiselas, photographer, Magnum Photos; Margaret Olin, senior research scholar, Yale University; Doug Rickard, artist and founder of americansuburbx.com and theseamericans.com; Kathy Ryan, director of photography, The New York Times Magazine; Zoe Strauss, artist, Magnum Photos; and additional participants to be announced.





Tune in on Sunday for a free live stream of the sold out event (RSVP to add your name to the waitlist), and follow the conversation on Twitter with #bearingwitness.



—

The Spring 2014 issue of Aperture magazine, “Documentary, Expanded”, guest edited by Susan Meiselas, is now available.

Aperture 214$19.95

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Subversive Desires

Isabel Stevens on the Whitechapel Gallery’s retrospective exhibition of Dadaist artist Hannah Höch, on view in London until March 23, 2014.

Kleine Sonne (Little Sun), 1969. Landesbank Berlin AG

In the early twentieth century, photo and text snippets could be found everywhere, from film posters and political propaganda to magazine covers and artworks. Dadaists were most taken with intervening with photography specifically: photomontage was the closest thing to visual anarchy and in their eyes, the perfect tool for satire and social commentary. With so many artists mocking society with scissors and scalpels, what makes the photo scraps of German artist Hannah Höch so radical, even now, ninety-odd years later?

As the Whitechapel Gallery’s outstanding retrospective makes clear, she too was a provocateur, intent on destabilizing dominant viewpoints and opinions: she took aim at bankers’ collusion with the military and ridiculed politicians. In Heads of State (1918–20), Weimar president Friedrich Ebert is seen in trunks at a fantasy beach resort; in Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada Through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany (1919–20), she fuses his head with the body of a topless female performer. While fellow Dadaists treated figures in a more forensic, impersonal manner, Höch’s delicate assemblages have people at their center, and addressed especially women and their role in society. Collage was her act of liberation: images of women in traditional feminine roles were rescued from fashion weeklies and given subversive desires and identities. Her most challenging series, From an Ethnographic Museum (1924–30), questioned narrow definitions of beauty by mixing together pale and dark-skinned bodies (although her gleeful appropriation of tribal objects demonstrates an uncomfortable fascination with exoticism).

Staatshäupter (Heads of State), 1918-20. Collection of IFA, Stuttgart

Feeling and emotion in Höch’s work also set it apart. Yes, there’s humor, particularly in her more Surrealist human-animal hybrids. But many of her figures from the ’20s and ’30s possess a melancholy air, their large, out-of-place eyes (one of Höch’s favorite body parts) full of longing and life-weariness. The many screaming faces she assembled convey an acute sense of anxiety and desperation. It’s easy to trace a lineage from Höch to contemporary photo-compositors like John Stezaker and Wangechi Mutu.

Although her work was reappraised during her lifetime, none of the recent retrospectives have taken place in the United Kingdom, where many male avant-gardists of the 1920s have been the subjects of recent major solo exhibitions (Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Alexander Rodchenko, Kurt Schwitters, and Theo Van Doesburg among them). Indeed, had some of Höch’s male Dada colleagues had their way, her work would have been totally forgotten: the artist herself recalled how they often regarded her as a “charming and gifted amateur” (Schwitters and Van Doesburg were the exceptions). Many, including rather shockingly her one-time lover Raoul Hausmann, excluded her from their memoirs of the Dada years. “A good girl” was Hans Richter’s patronizing description while George Grosz and John Heartfield opposed her inclusion in the First International Dada Fair in 1920. She responded with her largest photo collage, at 44.9 x 35.4 inches (114 x 90 cm), Cut with the Kitchen Knife through the Beer-Belly of the Weimar Republic (1919–20), where the heads of Grosz and fellow Dadaist Wilhelm Herzfelde appear skewered onto women’s bodies. The one disappointment of the show is that only a small study of this massive work is on view.

Für ein Fest gemacht (Made for a Party), 1936. Collection of IFA, Stuttgart.

Ohne Titel (Aus einem ethnographischen Museum) (Untitled [From an Ethnographic Museum]), 1930. Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, Hamburg. Photo: courtesy of Maria Thrun.

Ohne Titel, aus der Serie: aus einem ethnographischen Museum (Untitled, from the series: From an Ethnographic Museum), 1929. Federal Republic of Germany - Collection of Contemporary Art. Image: bpk / Kupferstichkabinett, SMB / Jörg P. Anders.

Rohrfeder Collage (Reed Pen Collage), 1922. Landesbank Berlin AG

The Whitechapel exhibition makes clear that Höch was not interested in photomontage as a means to an end, but as a craft, “a new magical territory” that she experimented with throughout her life. In 1934, as many artists abandoned the technique, Höch created a long, loose personal collage of sorts called Album. This scrapbook is one of the exhibition’s highlights, including expected motifs such as posed starlets and distorted body parts, but also architectural forms and aerial landscape views that demonstrated her growing interest in abstraction.

Of her work in the post-war decades it is not her abstract collages but the psychologically charged fantasies, often made with images of nature or everyday household objects, that are most beguiling: a flying sea serpent made of photographs of leaves, images of water lillies soaring through the sky like alien spaceships. Flight and escape were perpetual concerns. Höch spent the war living as a recluse on the outskirts of Berlin hoping that the Gestapo would never discover her hidden collection of misshaped women, dreamy beings who had no place in Nazi Germany. After seeing her world fall apart, she built strange, imaginary replacements, testaments to her unwavering faith in the power of art to unsettle, and her belief that you should “never keep two feet on the ground.”

Flucht (Flight), 1931. Collection of IFA, Stuttgart

—

Isabel Stevens works at Sight & Sound magazine. Her writing on film and photography has appeared in numerous publications, including The Guardian, Icon, Source, and World of Interiors. Follow her on Twitter @IsStevens

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The Fine Art of Making Things

In The Photobook Review 005, Guest Editor Darius Himes and Publisher Lesley Martin spoke to a handful of people who have collectively (and many, individually) spent decades working with artists to help manifest, in physical form, the ideal book that is in their imaginations. For ease of discussion, three micro-stages have been identified: the consideration of materials, preparation of files, and what happens (or goes wrong) on press, when the images are finally made real.

Part C: Putting Ink on Paper

The on-press experience

Do you think it is critical for someone to oversee the printing to achieve a successful photobook? Should an artist go on press?

Kimi Himeno (AKAAKA): Yes, it is definitely important. Printing is a critical component that determines how the images are presented to an audience. I work as both a publisher and a production expert; in relation to the artist, I am a kind of me- dium between them and the photobook—I try to channel their needs. In order to translate the creativity and originality of the work itself into an object (a photobook), I develop an intense dialogue with the artist. Sometimes my ideas can be more extreme than the artist’s. I think it is useful for the artist to be on press in most cases. Many Japanese artists continue to think of the photobook as the best way to show their works. From this view, having someone oversee the printing can be the key to the success of the final work.

Maggie Prendergast, Production Illustrations, maggieprendergast.com

Danny Frank (Meridian Printing): Artist, production expert, curator, publisher—all of these roles contribute to the success or lack of success of any photobook. I have worked with the least “knowledgeable”—in the technical sense—clients who have contributed the most to the overall quality of the book. The professional roles people have are often less important than their particular vision. If an artist wants to be on press, then I always encourage them to come. It is always surprising to me when artists don’t want to see what happens when their work is translated into ink. My role is to understand what the artist is expecting and then to come up with the appropriate technical solutions.

David Skolkin (Skolkin + Chickey): Critical, no. Preferred, yes. Often the ability to go on press is dictated by the budget the book has. Simply stated, in my experience, I have always found that being on press produced a better book. Being there gives me the chance to fine-tune the images, troubleshoot anything that may come up, and work closely with the pressmen, which often adds that touch of magic that really allows the book to sing. It can make a good-looking book a great-looking book. I have long and good relationships with printers I like to work with, so I often feel confident that when budget or schedule doesn’t allow I will still get a good result. But, when possible, being on press is the best way to go. I really like to have the artist with me. Not only can it be tremendously helpful when a decision needs to be made instantly, but it also adds so much to the whole “texture” of the press check.

Matthew Harvey (Aperture): Printing is a constant push and pull, always taking one thing in exchange for another. For photography, printing in CMYK is like translating language. The two languages might not always share the same words, but a good translation can express the sense of the original words. The decisions that are made on press about that translation are never made by one person, but are a collective effort made with a group of (usually) incredibly skilled and perceptive pressmen. For me, having the photographer involved in that conversation makes all the difference. It is ultimately their work that is being reproduced and they have the most intimate knowledge of the images, but it’s my job to help them get to that translation.

How much control does one have over the final result at the printing stage?

Frank: Offset printing is still not “scientific.” Perhaps the question should be how little control one has at the final stage. The basic decisions have already been made. You are not going to change the design, paper (although that has happened), number of colors, or type of separations. However, final interpretation of the separations and proofs can vary greatly from one person to another. Whatever the proofing system being used, there is never an exact match to what has been approved. Looking at wet ink, in various lighting conditions, in your particular state of mind, will change the decisions you make. The same applies to the pressman, who may have no artist or production person present.

Maggie Prendergast, Production Illustrations, maggieprendergast.com

I remember working with Richard Avedon during the printing of The Sixties at Meridian. Initially the printing was being supervised by the studio manager, who didn’t have any experience with offset printing. The manager noticed an almost imperceptible tonal break in the highlights. He refused to let us continue printing because of something that you could only see with a hight-powered loop. I called Avedon and explained to him that the quality of the book was going to be compromised because all our efforts were being directed to something that wasn’t really a problem. Avedon took the train up here, looked at the sheet in question, and told the studio manager to go home so we could continue printing. He was not interested in the tiniest electronic blip. He just wanted his images to look right.

Nicole Katz (Paper Chase Press): You have very little control at the final stage. You can make slight overall shifts in color or density, but anything specific will require resubmitting files and/or creating new plates. This can very quickly eat through a project’s budget and your patience!

Your time is best spent working with your printing com- pany’s prepress department to ensure files are submitted correctly, and definitely get an accurate printed proof to make corrections from. We did a project recently with a big corporate client of ours. We’d just finished getting the press up to color to match their proof when our client arrived for his press check. Instead of approving the press sheet as we thought he would, he showed us the artwork on his cell phone and said the color didn’t match! He (mistakenly!) thought that viewing the image on his phone was more reliable than our printed proof, so he hadn’t bothered making changes to the proof when it had arrived in his office the week before. It all worked out in the end, but that’s not the ideal way to achieve the results we all wanted!

Himeno: One of our recent books, Jin Ohashi’s Surrendered Myself to the Chair of Life, is A3 size (16 1⁄2 x 11 1⁄2 in.) and four hundred pages—a monster book. We spent thirty-eight days (and nights) printing it. Actually, the printing machine broke down during the process, so, including its maintenance, the printing took about two months! I can tell you that our printer (Onoue Printing) is one of the best in Japan, but, still, it took so much time and energy (even before going on press, we had conducted tests of many different types of paper and many proofs). Even though we had at least one person on press at all times, we ended up having to reprint 20 percent of the pages. One of the issues was that printing at such a large size frequently incurs small roller marks—streaks of ink on the pages. It was a serious problem on this book. The printing house decided to change all the rollers to brand-new ones just to try to keep this from happening. I remember that a man from Heidelberg, the press manufacturer, spent nights adjusting the machine. I can’t thank everybody enough!

—

Contributors include: Xavier Barral, Publisher and designer, Éditions Xavier Barral, Paris; Alexa Becker, Acquisitions editor, Kehrer Verlag, Heidelberg, Germany; Danny Frank, Project director, Meridian Printing, East Greenwich, R.I.; Tricia Gabriel, Publisher, The Ice Plant, Los Angeles; Matthew Harvey, Production manager, Aperture, New York; Kimi Himeno, Publisher, AKAAKA, Tokyo; Nicole Katz, Cofounder, Paper Chase Press, Los Angeles; Christina Labey, Cofounder, Conveyor Arts, Hoboken, N.J.; Michael Mack, Publisher, MACK Books, London; Sue Medlicott, Founder, The Production Department, Whately, Mass.; Thomas Palmer, Separator, New Haven, Conn.; Paul Schiek, Photographer and publisher, TBW Books, Oakland, Calif.; David Skolkin, Cofounder, Skolkin + Chickey Design and Radius Books, Santa Fe, N.Mex.; David Strettel, Owner and publisher, Dashwood Books, New York

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