Aperture's Blog, page 189

Call for Participation: Collaboration – Revisiting the History of Photography

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Aperture Foundation, New York

Saturday, December 7, 2013

Curated by Ariella Azoulay, Wendy Ewald, and Susan Meiselas, in association with graduate students at Modern Culture and Media Department, Brown University

 

We invite the public to participate in our effort to create a complex and rich timeline of collaboration in photography. On December 7, 2013, we will present at the Aperture Gallery a first draft of the timeline based on our research conducted with graduate students from Brown University who will have participated in a seminar on “Collaboration and the Event of Photography,” as well as from the input collected as responses to this call (see the guidelines for submission below). The public is invited to send in advance references to existing collaborative projects from different times and places for eventual inclusion in the timeline. At this point, we are especially interested in projects from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. The projects constituting the timeline will be displayed through archival documentation and small reference prints in a laboratory mode, and will be open for discussions and changes on the opening day. The curators reserve the right not to include all the submitted projects. The timeline shaped during this process will be used in the next phase of the project.

 

In this project we seek to reconstruct the material, practical, and ideological conditions of collaboration through photography and of photography through collaboration. We will seek ways to foreground—and create—the tension between the collaborative process and the photographic product (which does not necessarily bear visible traces of this process) by reconstructing the participation of others, usually the more “silent” participants. We will do this through the presentation of a repertoire of types of collaborations, those which take place at the moment when a photograph is taken, or others that are understood as collaboration only later, when a photograph is reproduced and disseminated, juxtaposed to another, read by others, investigated, explored, preserved, and accumulated in an archive to create a new database.

 

Our first assumption is that a certain degree of collaboration is implicit in photography. This may become explicit when the collaboration between photographers and photographed persons is continued by their transformation into spectators, spectators among others. Against the prevalent practice and the entrenched notion of the photographer as a figure who arrives at an unfamiliar place, takes pictures and vanishes with the photographs that s/he will show elsewhere, in collaborative projects, the duration, attention, and exchange are negotiated differently.

 

The second assumption is that revisiting the history of photography through the notion of collaboration should be done collaboratively with others who are familiar with different times, places, and contexts.

 

Guidelines:

Please send a short description of the collaborative project that you want to suggest for the timeline including photographer’s name, title of the project, production year, location, and 2–3 photos.

Submissions can be sent to collaboration.timeline@gmail.com until October 1, 2013.

The curators reserve the right not to include all the submitted projects. Research for the selected projects should be completed by mid-November. Each project will be displayed in the timeline in a condensed way through up to five hundred words and 3–5 photos. The text should foreground the various aspects of the collaboration, indicating (if known): name of the photographed people and other participants, type of camera used, process of viewing and displaying the photographs, a description of the process of collaboration, and 3–5 photos, and any additional material should be sent to collaboration.timeline@gmail.com.

Selected projects will have the opportunity to participate in the working session to create the timeline on December 6 for public viewing on December 7.

Topics that we are currently working with include but are not limited to:

● The Archive belongs to the Community (e.g., Palestine Remembered, Kurdistan - Susan Meiselas, We are all children of Algeria, Nicholas Mirzoeff)

● The Exhibition as an Image of Community (e.g. Negro Exhibit- W.E.B. Du Bois’, American Alphabets – Wendy Ewald)

● Resistance / Advocacy – Conversations with the Dead – Danny Lyon

● Intimacy, Violation, Exposure (e.g. Alfred Steiglitz and Georgia O’Keefe)

● Inventing the archive – Akram Zaatari, Walid Raad

● The Invention of the Photographed Person (e.g. Pierre-Louis Pierson and Countess di Castiglione, Suffragists)

● Forced Collaboration (e.g. Femmes Algeriennes – Marc Garanger, Secret Police, IDF search practices)

● The Child as Model/Author/ Full Participant (Wendy Ewald, B’tselem)

● The Icon Claims Subjectivity (eg Sharbat Gula, ‘the Afghan Girl,’ eg Kim Phuc, ‘the napalm girl’)

● The Resistance of the Photographed Person (eg Dorothea Lange and Florence Owen Thompson, Neji Bensalah)

● Documenting the Body at Risk (e.g. Eugene Richards and Dorothea Lynch)

● Woman As Muse and other fantasies of collaboration (e.g. Jessie Mann and Len Prince)

● The Photographed Person becomes His/Her Own Spectator (e.g. People of San Francisco – Jim Goldberg)

● Prison, Hospital, and Camera (Nhem Ein, Chanarin & Broomberg, The Center for Investigative Reporting)

We’re Now Closed for Entries, but Stay Tuned!

 

The 2013 Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards are now closed for entries. Thank you to all who submitted and participated!

 

The thirty titles shortlisted for the awards will be announced by Alec Soth next Friday, September 20, 2013, at the New York Art Book Fair. All shortlisted titles will be featured in the forthcoming issue of The PhotoBook Review and exhibited at Paris Photo, November 14–17, 2013. The winners of each category will be announced at the fair on November 15, 2013.

 

Be sure to stay tuned to PhotoBook Awards news, streaming images, and video via Twitter (@PhotoBookReview) and Instagram (@aperturenyc) in the months to come. Also, subscribe to Aperture magazine to receive your copy of The PhotoBook Review, featuring the thirty shortlisted entries.

Visit Aperture at EXPO CHICAGO

Andrea Galvani, Death of an Image #4C, 2005/2012. Available at the Aperture booth at EXPO Chicago and online.

Photograph by Richard Misrach. Courtesy of Robert Mann Gallery, New York.

Photograph by Alec Soth. Courtesy Weinstein Gallery, Minneapolis.

Photograph by Joel Sternfeld. Courtesy Luhring Augustine, New York.

Photograph by Angela Strassheim. Courtesy Andrea Meislin Gallery, New York.

Photograph by Shomei Tomatsu. Courtesy Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo.

Visit Aperture at booth 101 at EXPO CHICAGO, which will feature selections from the limited-edition print program by Jason Evans, Andrea Galvani, Richard Mosse, and James Welling, as well as a collection of new book releases. The fair is open from Thursday, September 19, to Sunday, September 22.

On September 22, join Aperture for a talk with artist LaToya Ruby Frazier and Karen Irvine, curator and associate director of the Museum of Contemporary Photography (MOCP) at Columbia College Chicago.

Many exhibitors at EXPO CHICAGO will feature photography. Among the artists whose work will be on view are Shomei Tomatsu (at Taka Ishii Gallery), Joel Sternfeld (at Luhring Augustine), Angela Strassheim (at Andrea Meislin Gallery), Christopher Williams (at David Zwirner), and Alec Soth (at Weinstein Gallery).

Photography exhibitions and events will take place throughout the city during the fair weekend, including a Kenneth Josephson exhibition at Stephen Daiter Gallery For more information, visit EXPO CHICAGO‘s website.

The Form of the PhotoBook (Video)

 

More than six hundred photobook submissions have filled Aperture Foundation’s shelves over the past twenty-one weeks, and we expect yet more to arrive as we approach the final days of the Paris Photo—Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards call for entries.

 

On this occasion, Lesley A. Martin, publisher of Aperture’s books, sat down to discuss selections from the submission pool, the details that compel a juror to spend time with a book, and thoughts on the form of the photobook in relation to the images within.

 

Ready to submit? Visit the prize site for full entry details through Friday, September 13, 2013.

 

Stay tuned to PhotoBook Awards news and streaming images via Twitter (@PhotoBookReview) and Instagram (@aperturenyc) in the months to come.

Site Specific: Introduction by Christopher Phillips

site specific_ROMA 04 from Site Specific. All photographs © Olivo Barbieri and courtesy of Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York

Olivo Barbieri is one of the world’s most restless photographers. Between 2003 and 2012, while working on his Site Specific series, he photographed more than forty of the world’s cities from a helicopter hovering in midair. The geographic scope of the project took him to every corner of the planet; his artistic ambition prompted him to employ an unprecedented range of photographic techniques in making his images. Temperamentally, Barbieri has never really been a documentary photographer, and he has never been convinced that straight-forward images can fully convey the hallucinatory qualities that he finds in modern urban spaces. During the first five years of the Site Specific series, he used a special tilt-and-shift lens that enabled him to drastically alter perspective and scale within his photographs. Later, he used digital post-production techniques to modify the color balance, tonal relations, and even the pixel structure of his images. If Site Specific provides an almost anthropological commentary on the human drive to create and inhabit densely layered urban environments, it is simultaneously a stylistic tour de force that takes photography’s visual language far beyond its customary boundaries.

 

An engagement with the built environment and a need to expand photography’s expressive means have characterized Barbieri’s work since he began seriously photographing in the early 1970s. Living and working in the vicinity of Modena, in Italy’s Emilia-Romagna province, he was in his early twenties when he met Luigi Ghirri (1943–1992), one of the most significant Italian photographers of his era. Ghirri made it his mission to introduce younger Italian photographers to the heritage of classic photographers such as Eugène Atget and August Sander, but he also made them aware of vital contemporary directions, such as the new explorations of color photography being carried out in the 1970s by figures such as William Eggleston and Stephen Shore. Barbieri’s early familiarity with photography’s past and present, and his fascination with modern painting, prepared him to recognize that his own sensibility was not well matched to the documentary style of even so sophisticated a practitioner as Walker Evans. He was drawn instead to the dreamlike visual spaces created by painters like Giorgio di Chirico and photographers like Man Ray. “I started out from classical photography,” Barbieri has recalled, “from an attempt to describe the world around me as objectively and aseptically as possible. It turned out the results of this approach showed a world which seemed absolutely phantasmagoric and unreal.” 

···

From the outset, Barbieri felt that the aim of Site Specific was not to produce an objective document of the world’s cities but to somehow push photography’s language into new territory. He was captivated by a vision of the twenty-first-century city as a kind of site-specific installation—temporary, malleable, and constantly in flux—and he sought a photographic corollary for the radical mutations of urban form that he saw taking place. By using a medium-format camera outfitted with a tilt-and-shift lens, he found that he was able to register enormous quantities of precise visual information and at the same time throw whole sections of the image disorientingly out of focus. The resulting photographs made modern cities appear to be reduced-scale architectural models—a vision, as Barbieri put it, of “the city as an avatar of itself.” He was also keenly aware of the deadly events of September 11, 2001, which had revealed the shocking vulnerability of such architectural monuments as New York’s twin towers. “After 9/11,” he observed, “the world had become a little bit blurred because things that seemed impossible happened.”

···

In Rome and Las Vegas Barbieri used his tilt-and-shift lens technique to bring an air of unreality to his images of those cities, but for Site Specific SHANGHAI 05 he decided that a different approach was called for. “Shanghai,” he said, “is so much like a model that it was not necessary to use the lens.” Surprisingly, he paid little attention to the most celebrated buildings, making no photographs of the lavishly renovated neoclassical buildings along the Bund, nor of the thicket of glass-and-steel towers crowding the new Pudong business district. Instead Barbieri presented Shanghai as an immense, amorphous terrain packed with clusters of indistinguishable twenty- and thirty-story residential high-rise developments. These mega-complexes, built to house Shanghai’s eighteen million inhabitants, spill over the city’s peripheries and stretch as far as the helicopter-borne eye can see. From this vantage, Shanghai suggests what Barbieri called a barely controlled “biological experiment”—an organism whose pure expansive energy was pushing relentlessly up to the heavens and out to the horizon.

 

Olivo Barbieri, site specific_SHANGHAI 04.

Such a wildly sprawling urban form, which represents one of the latest turns in the evolution of the modern city, can be grasped fully only from the air. It has been described by the architectural historian Kennneth Frampton as marking the transition from the age of the metropolis to that of the “megaform.” This is Frampton’s term for the city type produced by the contemporary urban explosion set off by the unleashed social forces and vast accumulations of capital in Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East, sending waves of new built structures sweeping over entire regional landscapes. Barbieri’s decision to extend the Site Specific series beyond his original plan was made in part to allow him to photograph such emerging centers as São Paulo, Istanbul, Bangkok, and Mexico City. The transformative dynamic that he found in the developing world also prompted him to revisit and photograph a number of cities in his native Italy, such as Milan, Florence, Genoa, Venice, and Naples. In the recent changes he discovered there, he could now perceive echoes of larger processes occurring around the world.

 

Because Barbieri never regarded the Site Specific series as documentary in intent but as part of his continuing effort to enlarge photography’s visual language, he continued to seek out new means of picturing the cities that he scrutinized from his aerial perch. He was quick to notice that new, Web-based imaging technologies were providing fresh ways to portray the world we inhabit. Google Earth, for example, began in 2005 to put on-line high-resolution satellite views of much of the planet’s surface. Google Street View, launched in 2007, offered interactive panoramic photos of virtually every block in most world cities.

···

Olivo Barbieri, site specific_HOUSTON 12.

The boundless visual inventiveness of the Site Specific project ultimately masks a cautionary message, as Barbieri himself acknowledges. “Today,” he said, “we humans are surprised at how good we are at doing impressive construction. But we’re also a little afraid of what we’ve done. We’ve created a new kind of urban sublime that combines the elements of awe and fear, just as the nineteenth-century sublime regarded the great mountains of the Alps.” In the end, his successive reimaginings of the look of the twenty-first-century city teach us to regard it in the distanced manner as an architect or city planner: as a set of essentially impermanent, transformable spaces awaiting the imperious intervention of the urban designer. It is this calculated ambivalence, which lies at the heart of the Site Specific project, that makes it something more than a decade-long exercise in photographic virtuosity. “I’ve never been interested in photography,” Barbieri says, “but in images. I believe my work starts when photography ends.”

—

This piece is excerpted from a longer essay included in Site Specific: Photographs by Olivio Barbieri (Aperture, 2013).

Writings by, and an interview with, Christopher Phillips are also included in Aperture magazine issues #184 and #191.

Site Specific




$75.00



Aperture 184$14.80Aperture 191$14.80

Shelby Lee Adams Workshop Recap

Photo by Elli Trier

Photo by Anne Connor

Photo by Linda Cicero

Photo by Shelby Lee Adams

We are pleased to report the success of Shelby Lee Adams’s environmental portraiture workshop, held on July 13 and 14. The course exposed students to the varying psychological and technical faculties of portraiture through the study of images and an on-location shoot in New York’s Tompkins Square Park. The resulting photographs stand as testament to the tenacious and astute observations made by this group of students over the course of the workshop.

From the students:

“This workshop exceeded my expectations. I had questions answered that I didn’t even know I had. . . . I will go home with many things to practice and dissect.”

“I never shot with studio lighting because I thought it would be too difficult. The workshop helped to ease that fear, and now I feel confident.”

From Adams:

“Tompkins Square Park was great and we had good weather. People were willing to pose for photos and a diverse range of people were present. The quality of the students was good, with at least three professional photographers, an economics professor, a published author of architecture books, a nationally recognized documentary filmmaker, an Appalachian photographer from West Virginia, and two people who flew in from Madison, Wisconsin. All eleven participated to the end.”

 

To find out more about workshops & classes at Aperture, click here.

About Face

By Diana C. Stoll

Man Ray, Solarized Portrait of Lee Miller, ca. 1929. The Penrose Collection; courtesy the Lee Miller Archives.

In his 1963 autobiography, Man Ray considers his long career and observes: “I photographed as I painted, transforming the subject as a painter would—idealizing or deforming as freely as does a painter.” This was a pragmatic freedom, which this versatile artist exerted also in his films and sculptural objects, indeed throughout his remarkably influential body of work.

Man Ray: Portraits, organized by Terence Pepper, curator of photographs at London’s National Portrait Gallery, is the first museum exhibition to focus on the artist’s photographic portraits, which constitute a hefty share of his creative output. With more than one hundred fifty prints, the show is divided into chronological segments that follow Man Ray’s career from 1916 to 1968, from New York to Paris to Hollywood and back, and from the artist’s earliest Dada-inflected experiments to images of society figures and movie stars, playful masqueraders, and a legion of artists, friends, and lovers.

Born Emmanuel Radnitzky in 1890, brought up in Brooklyn, Man Ray was eighteen and a student of painting when he first found his way to Alfred Stieglitz’s 291 Gallery, where he encountered the work of many of the most important and radical artists and photographers of the era. In 1915 he and Marcel Duchamp struck up a friendship that would lead to countless collaborations over the years, including many photographs by Man Ray of the French troublemaker in different guises—among those in the Portraits show are a 1916 image of Duchamp seated in a wicker chair, very much the upright, pensive young artist; the tiny, well-known shot of the back of his head shaved to reveal a shooting star; and a classic rendering of the mysterious and eternally straight-faced travesti known as Rrose Sélavy.

Man Ray left the United States in 1921 (complaining to his friend Tristan Tzara: “Dada cannot live in New York”)—following Duchamp and irresistibly drawn to what was then the vertex of the artistic universe: Paris. There his circle of acquaintances grew over the following two decades to include a stunning host of luminaries, and the Portraits exhibition is understandably weighted toward this period. Among the celestial litany featured here: Antonin Artaud, André Breton, Jean Cocteau, Salvador Dalí, Peggy Guggenheim, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Dora Maar, Henri Matisse, Arnold Schönberg, Igor Stravinsky, and the full panoply of Surrealists, whose ranks Man Ray joined. (Particularly striking is the Johnny-Rotten-eyed Yves Tanguy, photographed in 1929.) The model Kiki de Montparnasse was Man Ray’s companion through most of the 1920s and the subject of hundreds of his photographs, including what may be his most famous, Le Violon d’Ingres (1924), in which her curvaceous back is transmogrified into a cello. (The inclusion of this and a few unnamed nudes in the exhibition may stretch the notion of “portraiture,” but the show’s rhythm is enhanced by their presence.)

Many of Man Ray’s portraits were made on commission for journals, both avant-garde (New York Dada, Minotaure, Cahiers d’art) and mainstream (Vanity Fair, Harper’s Bazaar, even Ladies’ Home Journal). Pepper examines the artist’s interactions with these outlets in his catalog essay, and the exhibition sheds light on the degree of experimentation that was not only tolerated but apparently invited back then in the pages of even the most popular magazines. The forward-thinking editor of Vanity Fair, Frank Crowninshield, for example, published several of Man Ray’s innovative works in the early 1920s—among them a portrait of society maven Luisa Casati, her massive kohl-rimmed eyes blurred and doubled by a mistaken exposure (1922); the stolid Gertrude Stein at home in her Paris salon (1922); and a natty Pablo Picasso, looking into the lens with fathomless intelligence (1923). (Crowninshield also featured the artist’s rayographs—“A New Method of Realizing the Artistic Possibilities of Photography”—in 1922.) For Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar Man Ray provided society portraits, images of the literati (Virginia Woolf, the Sitwells, a dour Aldous Huxley), and performers (including the seductive 1926 image of cross-dresser Barbette, with dark bee-stung lips), as well as never-quite-conventional fashion shots. For a time, according to the artist’s biographer Neil Baldwin, “it was considered obligatory to stop in Man Ray’s studio and have yourself ‘done’ by him.”

Man Ray, Babette, 1926. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.

The American model-turned-photographer Lee Miller came into Man Ray’s life in 1929 and made an indelible mark. She sought him out as a mentor in photography, and soon they became lovers. Together—through accident and experiment—they discovered the process of photographic solarization, which Man Ray would put to use in some of his best-known images, including the magnificent ca. 1929 profile portrait of Miller that serves as this exhibition’s centerpiece. His other photographs of Miller are by turns tender, elegant, creepy (particularly a 1931 picture of her sitting like a child on her stone-faced father’s lap), and profoundly sensuous. In a trio of images from 1930 she stands by a window, the dappled light streaming through it onto her half-naked body in an undulating grid. Even in this most classical of modes—the study of the female nude—Man Ray’s eye is restlessly inventive.

The artist moved to Hollywood in 1940 and stayed for a decade; he was surprised and disappointed that in the United States his reputation was based largely on photography alone—his work in painting, sculpture, and film had received far less attention. Many of his subjects from this period (Ava Gardner, Paulette Goddard, Dolores del Rio) are shown with the whipped-creamy, disaffected glam that was characteristic of the time and place. It seems clear that Man Ray was losing interest, or at least some of the visual potency that had energized his earlier images. He returned to Paris in 1951 and for the rest of his life focused more on painting than photography.

But the Portraits exhibition attests to the primacy of photography in Man Ray’s career. It was a medium that—particularly in the 1920s and ’30s, when he was at the height of his imaginative powers—allowed him great leeway, perhaps precisely because it had not yet been deemed one of the Lofty Arts. A supremely inquisitive and multitalented artist, in his photographic portraits Man Ray was not above engaging with editorial or fashionable conventions of his day—conventions that, in turn, were still capable of being shaped by him and others. He also had the temerity to toss protocol aside when the occasion was right, to “transform the subject,” blazing a path that was new, and entirely his own.

Man Ray: Portraits was presented at the National Portrait Gallery, London, February 7–May 27, 2013; it is on view at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh, through September 22; and will be on view at the State Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow, October 14–January 19, 2014.

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

Revisiting The Edge of Vision (Video)

From the beginning—The Edge of Vision author Lyle Rexer asserts—abstraction has been intrinsic to photography, and its persistent popularity reveals much about the medium. First printed by Aperture in 2009, The Edge of Vision: The Rise of Abstraction in Photography examines abstraction at pivotal moments in photography’s history, showcasing photographers who base their practice in some form of abstraction—from highly conceptual to more documentary approaches.

 

On the occasion of the 2013 reprint, Lyle Rexer recalls The Edge of Vision’s role in setting a historical context for abstraction, and the centrality of its rare and previously unpublished texts in illustrating the diversity of thinking that has gone on around issues in photography.

 

—

Join Lyle Rexer Monday, September 9 for The Edge of Vision Revisited: New Voices, a panel discussion with contemporary photographers Jessica Eaton, Niko Luoma, Yamini Nayar, and Mitch Paster, which will assess the growing importance of abstract practices, especially among younger photographers.

The Edge of Vision




$35.00

PhotoBook Awards 2013: New Arrivals Vol. 3

Entering the black box. Photographs by Jos Jansen.

Entering the black box. Photographs by Jos Jansen.

Entering the black box. Photographs by Jos Jansen.

Entering the black box. Photographs by Jos Jansen.

Anti-Accent. Photographs by Gabriel Orlowski.

Anti-Accent. Photographs by Gabriel Orlowski.

Anti-Accent. Photographs by Gabriel Orlowski.

Anti-Accent. Photographs by Gabriel Orlowski.

Anti-Accent. Photographs by Gabriel Orlowski.

Live Through This. Tony Fouhse & Stephanie MacDonald.

Live Through This. Tony Fouhse & Stephanie MacDonald.

Live Through This. Tony Fouhse & Stephanie MacDonald.

Live Through This. Tony Fouhse & Stephanie MacDonald.

Mittelland. Photographs by Michael Blaser.

Mittelland. Photographs by Michael Blaser.

Mittelland. Photographs by Michael Blaser.

Personal Effects. Photographs by Roy DiTosti.

Personal Effects. Photographs by Roy DiTosti.

Personal Effects. Photographs by Roy DiTosti.

Personal Effects. Photographs by Roy DiTosti.

Mapping. Photgraphs by Kim Boske.

Mapping. Photgraphs by Kim Boske.

Mapping. Photgraphs by Kim Boske.

Mapping. Photgraphs by Kim Boske.

Mapping. Photgraphs by Kim Boske.

Sur Les Chemins Du Réel. Photographs by Jacques-Aurelien Brun.

Sur Les Chemins Du Réel. Photographs by Jacques-Aurelien Brun.

Sur Les Chemins Du Réel. Photographs by Jacques-Aurelien Brun.

Sur Les Chemins Du Réel. Photographs by Jacques-Aurelien Brun.

Sur Les Chemins Du Réel. Photographs by Jacques-Aurelien Brun.

Falling from a height. Photgraphs by Martijn Berk.

Falling from a height. Photgraphs by Martijn Berk.

Falling from a height. Photgraphs by Martijn Berk.

Falling from a height. Photgraphs by Martijn Berk.

Falling from a height. Photgraphs by Martijn Berk.

Overnight Generation. Photographs by Italo Morales.

Overnight Generation. Photographs by Italo Morales.

Overnight Generation. Photographs by Italo Morales.

Seul Aux Monstres. Book by Brice Chatenoud & Fedora Parkmann.

Seul Aux Monstres. Book by Brice Chatenoud & Fedora Parkmann.

Seul Aux Monstres. Book by Brice Chatenoud & Fedora Parkmann.

Seul Aux Monstres. Book by Brice Chatenoud & Fedora Parkmann.

Seul Aux Monstres. Book by Brice Chatenoud & Fedora Parkmann.

Hay lugares en mí en los que nunca dejé que me visitaras. Photographs by Kemê Alicia Pellicer.

Hay lugares en mí en los que nunca dejé que me visitaras. Photographs by Kemê Alicia Pellicer.

Hay lugares en mí en los que nunca dejé que me visitaras. Photographs by Kemê Alicia Pellicer.

Hay lugares en mí en los que nunca dejé que me visitaras. Photographs by Kemê Alicia Pellicer.

We’re about to enter the final week of the Paris Photo—Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards 2013 call for entries, which remains open through Friday, September 13.

 

Here’s another chance to size up the photobook competition with a fresh selection of new arrivals in the First PhotoBook category, which includes recent publications by Kim Boske, Tony Fouhse & Stephanie MacDonald, and Misha Pedan.

 

Ready to submit? Just eight days remain. Visit the prize site for FAQ and full entry details.

 

Stay tuned to PhotoBook Awards news and streaming images via Twitter (@PhotoBookReview) and Instagram (@aperturenyc) in the months to come.

Survey Says

By Sarah James

Humphrey Spender, Ashington—Washing in road between terraced housing, 1937–38. © Bolton Council, from the collection of Bolton Library and Museum Services; courtesy of the Mass Observation Archive.

Michael Wickham, The Kew Yead (Cow's Head), from Britain Revisited, 1960. © Wickham Estate; courtesy of the Mass Observation Archive, University of Sussex.

Humphrey Spender, Graffiti (This Is Your Photo), 1937–38. © Bolton Council, from the collection of Bolton Library and Museum Services; courtesy Humphrey Spender Archive.

John Hinde, Ellis Cook, Ringmaster, with Trixie, the leader of the Liberty horses, from British Circus Life, 1948. © National Media Museum

Michael Wickham, MO surveys being taken outside the Britain Can Make It exhibition, 1946. © Wickham Estate; courtesy of the Mass Observation Archive, University of Sussex.

As was proclaimed in 1937, the year of its inauguration, Mass Observation (MO) was in part established to create an “anthropology of ourselves.” Understood as a radical experiment in social science, art, and documentary form, the MO was established by ornithologist and explorer Tom Harrisson, the journalist and poet Charles Madge, and the filmmaker Humphrey Jennings, soon accompanied by the photographer Humphrey Spender and later on by the less well-known photographers John Hinde and Michael Wickham. It sought to unpack both the banalities and mythologies of pre-war British life—with a problematic, but nevertheless utopian, desire to bring together science and art in the exploration of everyday experiences. It soon constituted a vast archive of collected data which ranged from anecdotal evidence gleaned in pubs and then meticulously recorded to questionnaires about the arrangement of ornaments on mantelpieces or the popularity of various pin-ups.

The MO’s expanding archive was conceived as a kind of vernacular museum of sounds, smells, foods, clothes, advertisements, newspapers—one largely created through texts, questionnaires, records, diaries, documents, and, of course, photographs. The current exhibition across two floors of the Photographers’ Gallery is dedicated to examining the role played by the latter in this archive. Indeed, while photographic documents were to wreak havoc with the rigorous and aestheticizing regimes of the traditional museum, the medium of photography and its messy complexities played a far more generative role in the sprawling, contradictory collections of MO. The first gallery relays this through the presentation of a jumble of photographic series, documents in vitrines, and other ephemera that focuses on life in rural England, Bolton, Blackpool, and London from 1937 to 1948. This includes a series of Spender’s black-and-white prints of working-class subjects made on the streets of Bolton in 1937–38. Spender’s characteristically surrealist eye alighted upon children’s chalk graffiti and provocative posters declaring “Truth Is Stranger than Fiction.” It’s a line that could also be taken as the photographer’s own manifesto. Indeed, exhibition curator Russell Roberts proposes this show in part as an attempt to grapple with the MO effort to produce “a new kind of realism.” The tensions between leisure and surveillance or between surrealism and sociology—certainly at the heart of artistic realism in the 1930s—have also come to be understood as dictating the central contradictions of the failed dream of MO: its instrumentalizing yet unscientific attempt at an anthropology from below.

Taken from Present Giving and Receiving, 1998. © The Trustees of the Mass Observation Archive; courtesy of the Mass Observation Archive; reproduced with permission of Curtis Brown Group Ltd, London, on behalf of the Trustees of the Mass Observation Archive.

The MO project was also plagued by the obvious tensions between a group of largely middle-class observers and their working-class subjects. This is made clear at various points in the exhibition, but the potentially progressive aspects of MO are also highlighted in an engaging vitrine that brings together documentation of the establishment of art history classes by Northumberland miners and demonstrates the possibilities of working-class art education. The exhibition is most interesting when it tries to do more than neutrally illustrate such tensions. Too often it seems to skim these issues superficially, rather than historicize, critically examine, or politicize them. Despite the investment in presenting the unruly archive, there is also a latent aestheticization of some of its objects. For example, artist Julian Trevelyan’s shambolic suitcase, stuffed with various artistic materials, is presented very near the art-education vitrine (described above) as a kind of installation, nullifying any specific social tensions in favor of a rather poetic embrace of MO’s own mythologizing.

Alongside a careful investment in untangling photography’s role in the early history of MO, the major focus of this exhibition is to make concrete connections between the 1930s and the present day. In 1981, Mass Observation was re-inaugurated by the anthropologist David Pocock, and material from this new incarnation dominates the second-floor galleries. Volunteer participants’ photographic and textual responses to various “directives” from 1987 to 2012—encompassing their homes, gardens, and gift-giving habits, among other subjects—are presented on shelves behind Plexiglas screens. These include many fascinating images and offer social insights. They also suggest obvious connections between the kind of tensions that emerged between the public and private in the MO archive and those now endemic within social media and social networking. But it is not made clear enough that these later initiatives began after the original founders of the MO disbanded and the project was effectively privatized and transformed into a market research company. Such a critical examination of the MO might have required more ambition and a full three floors.

Taken from The Garden and Gardening, 1993. © The Trustees of the Mass Observation Archive; courtesy of the Mass Observation Archive; reproduced with permission of Curtis Brown Group Ltd, London, on behalf of the Trustees of the Mass Observation Archive.

As it is, so much more could have been done with the earlier material. For example, it would have been fascinating to know more about the fallout between Madge and Harrisson because of the latter’s decision to collaborate with the Home Intelligence Department of the Ministry of Information; or photography’s displacement in favor of graphic design in the frenzied desire to relay complex information in abstract form. (This is briefly alluded to in the show via diagrams by the bizarre Isotype Institution founded by Austrian émigrés Otto and Marie Neurath.) Further, so much is left unsaid about the unfolding exchange between photojournalism and the MO, or the relationship between psychoanalysis (also key to the MO) and photography. Both issues were central to the radical and reactionary new realism of the MO, as they must be to any attempt to properly reengage with its legacy.

Sarah James teaches in the History of Art Department at University College London. She writes frequently on photography and art for magazines including Frieze, Photoworks, and Art Monthly. Her book Common Ground: German Photographic Cultures Across the Iron Curtain was recently published by Yale University Press.

Mass Observation remains on view at the Photographers’ Gallery, London, until September 29.