Aperture's Blog, page 19

What Photobooks Does the Metropolitan Museum of Art Collect?

An experimental collaboration between a legendary Japanese graphic artist and novelist, a book of decorative glass panes, and another with a slipcase in the shape of a cigarette pack. The diversity of books at the Thomas J. Watson Library at the Metropolitan Museum of Art reveals the flexibility of the form, one that can accommodate endlessly inventive designs and meanings. Home to more than a million objects—which span centuries and include historically significant volumes, contemporary photobooks, and inventive artists’ books—the library’s shelves are full of surprises. As collections librarian, Jared Ash oversees its encyclopedic holdings and works with his team, online and offline, to create a wider appreciation for what a book can be.

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Russet Lederman: The Watson Library has a rich assortment of artists’ books. How was the collection formed?

Jared Ash: The Watson Library is as comprehensive as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, maybe even more so, because it’s a lot easier to acquire a book than it is a work of art—and storage is a lot less expensive! For a long time, individual departments, like Drawings and Prints, selectively collected artists’ books, but twentieth-century and contemporary examples weren’t well represented. About eight years ago, a defined collection of artists’ books was formalized to fill this gap.

Lederman: You often share books on your Instagram feed, @MetLibrary. Can you discuss some of the treasures you have highlighted?

Ash: Instagram is an exceptional calling card for us. Our account features unusual materials, especially photobooks and artists’ books that don’t fall squarely within a specific curatorial department’s range, such as object-like books that have inventive formats or include atypical elements made from textiles or glass. By the Piece (2016), by the artist, typographer, and researcher Tabea Nixdorff, is a good example. Printed in a limited edition of twenty copies, it evolved from her research at the Chicago Historical Society and is centered on Agnes Nestor, an early twentieth-century glove-maker and suffragette, who was also a labor rights activist.

Spread from Clarissa Sligh, What’s Happening with Momma? (Women’s Studio Workshop, 1988) Slipcase for Thomas Sauvin, Until Death Do Us Part (Jiazazhi, 2015)

Lederman: How does a book like Nixdorff ’s come into the collection?

Ash: We acquire works through different means: about a third are gifts and two-thirds are purchases. Nixdorff and her fellow students were in the city for Printed Matter’s New York Art Book Fair, and we invited them to visit the Watson Library. We shared some books from our collection, and they showed us some of the works they were exhibiting at the fair. When objects stand out, like Nixdorff ’s book, we see an opportunity.

Lederman: What are some other acquisitions that cross boundaries?

Ash: Sandra C. Davis’s Queen Anne’s Lace (2006) is a small-scale book composed of cyanotypes on handmade Japanese paper, overlaid with hand stitching. A play on words, it tells the history of the wildflower, embellished with lace thread and a real bloom. Clarissa Sligh’s What’s Happening with Momma? (1988), published by the Women’s Studio Workshop, is cut in the shape of a house and illustrated with screenprinted photographic images from a family album. Sligh is an exceptional artist whose biography includes work at NASA and Goldman Sachs alongside her social- justice-focused art practice. In this volume, she explores notions of domesticity and class, elucidating childhood memories through texts printed on folded sheets of paper that drop down like sets of stairs.

Lederman: More recently you acquired the Beijing-based photographer Thomas Sauvin’s Until Death Do Us Part (2015), which is distinctive for its slipcase that looks like a cigarette pack.

Ash: Yes, I believe you could buy this book either individually or by the carton! Inside is a board book of found photographs, sourced from the Beijing Silvermine archive of salvaged negatives from a Chinese recycling plant, celebrating a Chinese wedding tradition where the bride lights a cigarette for each male guest and the couple plays smoking games that include stuffing as many cigarettes in one’s mouth as possible and then lighting them all at once. We value books that challenge people’s perceptions of what a book is.

We value books that challenge people’s perceptions of what a book is.

Lederman: Some of the books in your collection did not start as fine-art objects, such as a trade catalog of cast-glass samples that is nearly one hundred years old.

Ash: As part of the twenty-one departmental libraries that are centralized through the Watson Library, we have a substantial collection of trade catalogs. They show how art movements like Art Deco, Art Nouveau, and Constructivism found their way into everyday life, whether on wallpaper patterns or baby carriage designs. This notion of art into life and life into art is important for us.

The Album des principaux modeles de verres: produits spéciaux en verre coulé (1913), a.k.a. “The Glass Book,” is a trade catalog from a French firm, Manufactures des glaces & produits chimiques de Saint-Gobain, Chauny & Cirey, that has made glass for centuries, including for the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles. From the outside, the book doesn’t look like much, but inside are pages filled with more than a hundred samples of multicolored decorative glass panes, including the glass that Hector Guimard used for the Paris Métro. It’s a good example of how ordinary materials can be beautiful and inspire wonder. I also really like the backstory of how this book came to us. It was delivered to the library on New Year’s Eve by a book dealer who transported it on his bicycle!

Irina Popova, If You Have a Secret (Dostoevsky Publishing, 2017) Spread from Tadanori Yokoo and Renzaburo Shibata, Ezoshi Urotsuki Yata (Yata, the Vagabond; Shueisha, 1975)
All photographs by Elizabeth Legere. Courtesy the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Lederman: More contemporary yet equally inspiring is Irina Popova’s If You Have a Secret (2017). What is its design and concept?

Ash: This book’s inventive design requires activation to discover its message. In this second printing of If You Have a Secret, Popova, a Russian photographer now living in the Netherlands, interweaves personal and public images taken in her former homeland with poems and vignettes printed on semitranslucent, half-cut sheets to reflect on her past life. Most of the text appears on the front of each page, but in several instances, words or lines of type are printed on the reverse side of the sheet— forcing the viewer to hold the book up to the light to read the full text and understand its deeper meaning.

Lederman: Radically different, but just as inventive, is Ezoshi Urotsuki Yata (Yata, the Vagabond; 1975), a collaboration between the designer Tadanori Yokoo and the novelist Renzaburo Shibata.

Ash: I think our Yokoo holdings are a good example of how the Watson Library is a study collection. In this case, we’ve collected an artist in-depth, providing a comprehensive collection for research. During the New York Art Book Fair, a dealer from Japan had nearly an entire booth filled with books by Yokoo, which made us realize our lack. We wound up buying about fifteen books from the dealer, Ezoshi Urotsuki Yata among them. Even without knowing its fablelike narrative, the work can be appreciated for its experimental visual elements and dynamism alone. It never fails to wow people.

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Lederman: With so many to choose from, I imagine it is hard to have a favorite book, but if you had to pick one, which would it be?

Ash: The collection that I feel closest to is a series of zines that evolved from Teens Take The Met!, a free, museum-wide public program that we co-organize every year with community partners. For several of these events, the Watson Library partnered with Endless Editions, who brought a Risograph machine that the teens used to make zines. We had a group of Russian teens from Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, this past May, right before Mother’s Day, and one of them made a zine about piroshki that is a tribute to his babushka. Every year, program participants include kids from all over the city, many speaking different languages. These are our future visitors, and this event lets them know that this space exists for everyone.

This article originally appeared in Aperture, issue 253, “Desire,” in The PhotoBook Review.

Young Photographers in Myanmar Express a Nation’s Anxiety

In the early hours of February 1, 2021, Myanmar’s military began knocking on the doors of dissidents. The Tatmadaw, as they are officially known, had launched a brutal coup that swiftly overthrew the democratically elected government. Within weeks, the military transformed the country into a full-fledged dictatorship, suppressing peaceful protests with lethal force and arresting anticoup activists. The move was reminiscent of the junta that had ruled Myanmar in various forms from 1962 to 2011, evoking a familiar horror for those who had lived through previous takeovers. For the younger generation, which had come of age in a relatively democratic and free Myanmar, the coup represented an existential crisis. Due to the junta’s ongoing efforts to repress citizens’ freedom—including enforced disappearances, long prison sentences, and executions—the majority of Myanmar’s population remains opposed to the military regime.

Sai, from the series Trails of Absence, 2021–ongoing

Sai [Redacted], a multidisciplinary artist who works under a partially redacted pseudonym (sai means “mister” in a Shan dialect) for his family’s safety and to highlight Myanmar’s censorship of its citizens, was in the former capital, Yangon, when the military arrived at his family home in the country’s Shan State. His father—a chief minister and senior member of the National League for Democracy party—was promptly arrested, forcing Sai into hiding. In May 2021, the artist secretly returned to his home, where his mother had been placed under house arrest. After a brief reunion, he fled again to avoid possible arrest, as military intelligence was keeping the family members of detained leaders under close watch.

His series Trails of Absence (2021–ongoing) uses a physical gap to portray family trauma, fear, and the void left by his father’s imprisonment. The artist stages portraits where he and his mother appear with a string running between them. Their faces are obscured by pieces of fabric woven in the style of a traditional Shan carpet. These fabrics, originally worn by those being held—and effectively disappeared—in Myanmar’s notorious prisons after the February 2021 coup, were given to Sai through personal connections. “I asked to get some sort of evidence that can represent their existence,” he told me recently. “They gave me their clothes.”

For those in Myanmar who oppose the coup, there has been a lot of frustration over the Western media’s coverage. Despite the fact that ordinary citizens are subjected to daily armed violence and arbitrary detentions, the focus has seemed to remain on high-profile political figures. In 2022, Sai’s father was sentenced to twenty years of imprisonment and hard labor. “The series is a call to action for the world to take notice of political prisoners in Myanmar,” the artist says. “Can the world still sweep us under the carpet if we become the carpet?”

Ri, Statues on a large monument that represents the three branches of the military; Army, Navy, and Air Forces, Nay Pyi Taw, 2019, from the series Soulless City, 2019Ri, A replica of Hkakabo Razi mountain from Kachin state, an armed conflict prone area in Northern part of Myanmar, Nay Pyi Taw, 2019, from the series Soulless City, 2019

For the photographer Ri—who also works under a pseudonym—Myanmar’s political present is both deeply personal and historically bound. While her previous images focused on community, queer relationships, and Myanmar’s landscape, after that February’s events, she felt the need for a change. While photographing anticoup demonstrations in Yangon in 2021, Ri wanted to move beyond a documentary approach and instead explore the historical power structures perpetuating oppression. “I felt like I had a responsibility to do something when the coup happened,” she tells me. “It was partly because of survivor’s guilt.”

In her multimedia piece What We Remember, When We Remember (2021–ongoing), Ri uses archival imagery, original photographs, and collage to explore the impact of nearly half a century of military rule on the country’s collective psyche. She spoke with a range of subjects—those who have embraced the Tatmadaw along with those who fear and despise them—asking, “When did you learn to hate or be afraid of the military?” One issue that came up often was money. The previous military, led by the dictator General Ne Win, instituted a swathe of policies, including the devaluing of select banknotes from Myanmar’s currency, ultimately weakening the cash-based national economy. Ri’s mother, who worked in a state-owned factory then, was affected by these changes, losing all of her life savings. In one piece from the series, two defunct coins cover the former dictator’s eyes, a commentary on the economic stresses placed on ordinary people.

Zicky Le, Late Pyar (Butterfly), Yangon 2021 Zicky Le, from the series I Don’t Trust These Dreams, 2021 Zicky Le, from the series We Are Who We Are, 2022
All photographs courtesy the artists

Despite broad national resistance to the coup, Myanmar’s population is far from a monolith, with more than 135 ethnic groups across several states. Currently living between Bangkok and Yangon, the photographer Zicky Le is half Burmese and half Karen, an ethnic minority with a long history of conflict with Myanmar’s governments that dates back to the country’s independence from British rule in 1948. Zicky has been a fashion and editorial photographer for nearly a decade, with work published in Vogue Italia and the Madrid-based Sicky magazine. The series We Are Who We Are (2022) expresses his frustration with how queer people are portrayed—often, with mockery—in Myanmar’s popular culture and mainstream media. In response, Zicky photographs his queer friends with vibrant color and lighting to celebrate their beauty, diversity, and truth. “I want to contribute to a cultural revolution that overthrows sexism, transphobia, and homophobia,” Zicky says. “Representation is not the end of liberation but a means.”

Young artists such as Sai, Ri, and Zicky have grown up in the shadow of two Myanmars, belonging to a generation that has experienced both partial democracy and dictatorship. Like them, many artists in the country have begun to self-censor their endeavours under a junta-ruled Myanmar. Some, also using pseudonyms, have worked exclusively with foreign institutions or exiled outlets. Several photographers have fled to neighboring countries, including Thailand, while others have joined the armed revolt. In their own context, each has contributed to the creation of informal communities of support that challenge the political systems and ideologies inherited from decades of military rule. For these artists, photography is a crucial tool for solidarity, resistance, and visibility—and it is one of many.

This article originally appeared in Aperture, issue 252, “Accra,” under the column Dispatches.

A Photographer’s Record of New Year Celebrations in Northern China

In 2018, the Chinese photographer Zhang Xiao received the Robert Gardner Fellowship in Photography, which supports an artist’s photographic project about the “human condition anywhere in the world.” Past winners have included Yto Barrada, Chloe Dewe Mathews, Alessandra Sanguinetti, Dayanita Singh, and Guy Tillim, some of whom have published a monograph or presented an exhibition at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University.

For his project Community Fire, Zhang takes a local, hometown look at Shehuo (社火), a Chinese Spring Festival tradition celebrated in rural Northern Chinese communities that includes temple fairs, dragon dances, and storytelling. Shehuo—literally, “community fire”—is devoted to the worship of land and fire, and boasts a history of many thousands of years. During the festival, people hold ceremonies, pray for the next year’s good harvest, and confer blessings of peace and safety on all family members. However, what was once a heterogeneous cultural tradition with myriad regional variations has largely become a tourist-facing, consumption-oriented enterprise. 

Zhang Xiao, A girl waits, in the early morning, to change into her costume, Huanghuayu Village, Shaanxi Province (Shaanxi series, No. 1), 2007 Zhang Xiao, Shehuo performers walk in procession, Huanghuayu Village, Shaanxi Province (Shaanxi series, No. 3), 2007

Zhang’s extraordinary exploration of Shehuo docu­ments the changes this ancient tradition has undergone over the course of a decade of modernization. Taken during a series of vis­its to the Shaanxi and Henan provinces from 2007 to 2019, his photographs ask us to consider how the medium of photography—in its ready availability for the straightforward documentation of singular moments—can evoke not only the vestiges of other times, but also the political and economic forces that bridge the past and the present. The painterly tones and muted focus in his early photographs of Shaanxi, beginning in 2007, offer insight into the sev­eral millennia of history upon which Shehuo rituals have been built. Participants costumed in traditional clothing passed down across centuries blend with the misty, mystical aura of the artist’s compositions, scenes that gesture to the piety and gravity of their ancestors through the makeup, facial expressions, and perfor­mance styles inherited from previous generations. Zhang’s method of “sleepwalking”—as he calls it—alongside the perform­ers suggests an empathetic connection with the practitioners of this tradition.

In contrast, Zhang’s photographs taken one decade later illustrate the popularization and commercialization of a new, tourist-facing Shehuo performance, one that nonetheless con­verses with the histories of performance and belief that endure in villages across Northern China. He composes sharply focused, portrait-like images of the new mass-produced costumes and props, highlighting their disconnect from historically accurate portrayals of the rituals they will be used for. With a touch of humor, Zhang reveals the almost absurd-looking elements of mass production: stacks of plaster faces piled high in a desolate room; masks in plastic shopping bags hanging off tree branches; a multitude of identical, ill-fitting costumes the per­formers’ ancestors could never have imagined.

Zhang Xiao: Community Fire 65.00 In his project Community Fire, the photographer Zhang Xiao takes a local, hometown look at Shehuo (社火), a Chinese Spring Festival tradition celebrated in rural Northern Chinese communities that includes temple fairs, dragon dances, and storytelling.

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Zhang Xiao: Community Fire

Photographs by Zhang Xiao. Text by Ilisa Barbash and Zhang Xiao.

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View cart Description In his project Community Fire, the photographer Zhang Xiao takes a local, hometown look at Shehuo (社火), a Chinese Spring Festival tradition celebrated in rural Northern Chinese communities that includes temple fairs, dragon dances, and storytelling.

Shehuo— literally, “community fire”—is devoted to the worship of land and fire, and boasts a history of many thousands of years. During the festival, people hold ceremonies, pray for the next year’s good harvest, and confer blessings of peace and safety on all family members. However, what was once a heterogeneous cultural tradition with myriad regional variations has largely become a tourist-facing, consumption-oriented enterprise. In the early 2000s, Shehuo received an “intangible cultural heritage” designation from the People’s Republic of China, resulting in increased funding in exchange for greater government involvement. While altering the practitioners’ relation to Shehuo, this change expresses itself most visually in the way costumes and props have been replaced with newer, cheaper products from online shopping websites.

Zhang’s colorful and fantastical photographs capture how these mass-produced substitutions have transformed the practice of Shehuo. Community Fire—with essays in English and Chinese—is a dynamic visual exploration of one of China’s oldest traditions.

Copublished by Aperture and Peabody Museum Press Details

Format: Hardback
Number of pages: 192
Number of images: 150
Publication date: 2023-08-08
Measurements: 7.1 x 9.25 x 1 inches
ISBN: 9781597115452

Press

“Zhang’s work explores the extent to which ancient folk beliefs and rural society can sustain themselves amid modernization, and how they can weather the effects of an industrialized and digitalized economy.”—Faith Sutter, The Harvard Gazette

“Captured in sepia tones and darkened vignettes, theatre performers wander through a drab winter village in flamboyant makeup and fantastic costumes, looking like deities from ancient folklore.”—Yuwen Jiang, ArtReview Asia

Contributors

Zhang Xiao (born in Yantai city, Shandong Province, China, 1981) graduated from the department of architecture and design at Yantai University in 2005. He was a photojournalist for Chongqing Morning Post from 2005 to 2009. He won the Prix HSBC pour la Photographie in 2011, the Three Shadows Photography Award in 2010, and the Hou Dengke Photography Award in 2009. Zhang has participated in several solo and group exhibitions, including at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing; Fotostiftung Schweiz, Winterthur, Switzerland; Lianzhou Photography Museum, Guangdong Province, China; Shanghai Center of Photography; Musée du Quai Branly, Paris; and A4 Art Museum in Chengdu City, Sichuan Province. His books include Shanxi (2013), Coastline (2014), They (2014), The River (2017) and A Hometown (2021). Zhang currently lives and works in Chengdu. He is the 2018 winner of the Robert Gardner Fellowship in Photography from the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University.

Ou Ning (born in Suixi, Guangdong province, China, 1969) is the director of the documentaries San Yuan Li (2003) and Meishi Street (2006). He was chief curator of the Shenzhen and Hong Kong Bi-city Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture (2009); jury member of 8th Benesse Prize at the 53rd Venice Biennale (2009); member of the Asian Art Council at the Guggenheim, New York (2011); founding chief editor of the literary journal Chutzpah! (2010–2014); founder of the Bishan Project (2011–2016); visiting professor at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation (2016–2017); and senior research fellow of the Center for Arts, Design, and Social Research, Boston (2019–2022). His most recent book is Utopia in Practice: Bishan Project and Rural Reconstruction (2020).

Ilisa Barbash is curator of visual anthropology at Harvard University’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. She is codirector of the films In and Out of Africa (1992) and Sweetgrass (2009). Barbash is the author of Where the Roads All End: Photography and Anthropology in the Kalahari (2016), which was awarded the John Collier Jr. Award for Still Photography.

In his most recent photographs, shot between 2018 and 2019, we discern traces of alienation and hints of ennui in some of the performers, as they casually rest, or take a smoke break. We see an array of whimsical festive lanterns once illuminated by candles and now with electricity. The newfound commerciality of Shehuo is brightly revealed through the flatness of a selection of online web advertisements, which present an overwhelming vari­ety of products, all available, anywhere, for any purpose, and out of their original context.

Zhang’s response to Robert Gardner’s call for fellows to “document the human condition” is a portrait of a rapidly changing rural Chinese society. His work explores the extent to which the ancient folk beliefs and self-organization of folk society will sustain itself amid the advancements of modernization, and how it will weather the government-mandated changes to tra­dition, as brought on by “intangible cultural heritage” designations and the effects of an industrialized and digitalized economy. It is human nature to change and adapt. Through his photography, Zhang shows how a tradition that was once heterogeneous in its practice and individually expressive can undergo homogenization and mechanization, illuminating the effects of modernity upon rural life. Further, it inspires us to contemplate the essence of perfor­mance and the visual expressions of communal belief, to ponder their origins and notice how they have been transformed, in so many places, at an accelerating speed.

Zhang Xiao, Ensemble of Blood Shehuo performers, Yanjiaan Village, Shaanxi Province, 2018 Zhang Xiao, Villagers wearing a lion dance costume for two performers, Huozhuang Village, Henan Province, 2018 Zhang Xiao, Unfinished dragon head props, Huozhuang Village, Henan Province, 2018 Zhang Xiao, Partly finished dragon heads, Huozhuang Village, Henan Province, 2019
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Zhang Xiao, Shehuo performer riding a donkey, Xunxian County, Henan Province, 2019 Zhang Xiao, Two red lion performers in costume, Huozhuang Village, Henan Province, 2018 Zhang Xiao, Huo Guanghui in his office, Huozhuang Village, Henan Province, 2019 Zhang Xiao, A luminous dragon dance prop lies in the grass on the outskirts of the village, Huozhuang Village, Henan Province, 2018
All photographs courtesy the artist

This piece is adapted from Zhang Xiao: Community Fire (Aperture/Peabody Museum Press, 2023). Shehuo: Community Fire is on view at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, through April 14, 2024.

13 Photobooks that Highlight Black Lives and Artistic Visions

Samuel Fosso, ‘70s Lifestyle, 1975–78
Courtesy the artist and JM.PATRAS/PARIS

As We Rise: Photography from the Black Atlantic (2021)

In 1997, Dr. Kenneth Montague founded the Wedge Collection in Toronto in an effort to acquire and exhibit work by artists of African descent. As We Rise features over one hundred works from the collection, bringing together artists from Canada, the Caribbean, Great Britain, the US, South America, and Africa in a timely exploration of Black identity on both sides of the Atlantic.

From Jamel Shabazz’s definitive street portraits to Lebohang Kganye’s blurring of self, mother, and family history in South Africa, As We Rise looks at multifaceted ideas of Black life through the lenses of community, identity, and power. As Teju Cole describes in his preface, “Too often in the larger culture, we see images of Black people in attitudes of despair, pain, or brutal isolation. As We Rise gently refuses that. It is not that people are always in an attitude of celebration—no, that would be a reverse but corresponding falsehood—but rather that they are present as human beings, credible, fully engaged in their world.”

Collect a special vinyl LP, As We Rise: Sounds from the Black Atlantic , featuring a celebratory collection of classic and contemporary Black music made throughout the Diaspora.

Dawoud Bey, Irrigation Ditch, 2019
Courtesy the artist

Dawoud Bey: Elegy (2023)

In the artist’s most recent volume, Elegy, Dawoud Bey focuses on the landscape to create a portrait of the early African American presence in the United States. Renowned for his Harlem street scenes and expressive portraits, Bey continues his ongoing work exploring African American history. Copublished by Aperture and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Elegy focuses on three of Bey’s landscape series—Night Coming Tenderly, Black (2017); In This Here Place (2021); and Stony the Road (2023)—shedding a light on the deep historical memory still embedded in the geography of the US.

Bey takes viewers to the historic Richmond Slave Trail in Virginia, where Africans were marched onto auction blocks; to the plantations of Louisiana, where they labored; and along the last stages of the Underground Railroad in Ohio, where fugitives sought self-emancipation. By interweaving these bodies of work into an elegy in three movements, Bey not only evokes history but retells it through historically grounded images that challenge viewers to go beyond seeing and imagine lived experiences. “This is ancestor work,” Bey tells the New York Times. “Stepping outside the art context, the project context, this is the work of keeping our ancestors present in the contemporary conversation.”

Kwame Brathwaite, Model wearing a natural hairstyle, AJASS, Harlem, ca. 1970
Courtesy the artist and Philip Martin Gallery, Los Angeles

Kwame Brathwaite: Black Is Beautiful (2019)

Kwame Brathwaite’s photographs from the 1950s and ’60s transformed how we define Blackness. Using his photography to popularize the slogan “Black Is Beautiful,” Brathwaite challenged mainstream beauty standards of the time that excluded women of color.

Brathwaite, who passed away in 2023, was born in Brooklyn and part of the second-wave Harlem Renaissance. Brathwaite and his brother Elombe Brath founded the African Jazz-Art Society & Studios (AJASS) and the Grandassa Models. AJASS was a collective of artists, playwrights, designers, and dancers; Grandassa Models was a modeling agency for Black women. Working with these two organizations, Brathwaite organized fashion shows featuring clothing designed by the models themselves, created stunning portraits of jazz luminaries, and captured behind-the-scenes photographs of the Black arts community, including Max Roach, Abbey Lincoln, and Miles Davis.

Black Is Beautiful is is the first-ever monograph of his work, showcasing Brathwaite’s riveting message about Black culture and freedom. “To ‘Think Black’ meant not only being politically conscious and concerned with issues facing the Black community,” writes Tanisha C. Ford, “but also reflecting that awareness of self through dress and self-presentation. . . . [They] were the woke set of their generation.”

Ernest Cole, Untitled 1968–71
Courtesy the Ernest Cole Family Trust Ernest Cole, Untitled 1968–71

Ernest Cole: The True America (2024)

After fleeing South Africa to publish his landmark book House of Bondage in 1967 (reissued by Aperture in 2022) on the horrors of apartheid, Ernest Cole became a “banned person” and resettled in New York. Supported by a grant from the Ford Foundation, Cole photographed the city’s streets extensively, chronicling daily life in Harlem and around Manhattan. In 1968 he traveled across the country to cities including Chicago, Cleveland, Memphis, Atlanta, Los Angeles, and Washington, DC, as well as to rural areas of the South, capturing the activism and emotional tenor in the months leading up to and just after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. These photographs reflect both the newfound freedom Cole experienced in the US and the photographer’s incisive eye for inequality as he became increasingly disillusioned by the systemic racism he witnessed.

Cole released very few images from this body of work while he was alive. Thought to be lost entirely, the negatives of Cole’s American pictures resurfaced in Sweden in 2017 and were returned to the Ernest Cole Family Trust. The True America marks the first time these photographs have been brought together in a major publication. With more than 260 previously unpublished images, this compilation redefines the scope of Cole’s work.

Awol Erizku, Moon Voyage (Keep Me in Mind), 2018–20
Courtesy the artist

Awol Erizku: Mystic Parallax (2023)

Awol Erizku’s interdisciplinary practice references and reimagines African American and African visual culture, from hip-hop vernacular to Nefertiti, while nodding to traditions of spirituality and Surrealism. Mystic Parallax is the first major monograph to trace the rising artist’s career. Spanning over ten years, the volume blends together his studio practice with his work as an in-demand editorial photographer, including his conceptual portraits of Black culture icons such as Solange, Amanda Gorman, and Michael B. Jordan.

Throughout his work, Erizku consistently questions and reimagines Western art, often by casting Black subjects in his contemporary reconstructions of canonical artworks. “I always think about my work as a constellation, and a new piece is just another star within the universe,” he asserts in his wide-ranging conversation with curator Antwaun Sargent, included in the book. “This goes back to the idea of a continuum of the Black imagination. When it’s my turn, as an image maker, a visual griot, it is up to me to redefine a concept, give it a new tone, a new look, a new visual form.”

Deana Lawson, Oath, 2013
Courtesy the artist

Deana Lawson: An Aperture Monograph (2018)

Deana Lawson has created a visionary language to describe identities through intimate portraiture and striking accounts of ceremonies and rituals. Using medium- and large-format cameras, Lawson works with models throughout the US, Caribbean, and Africa to construct arresting, highly structured, and deliberately theatrical scenes. Signature to Lawson’s work is an exquisite range of color and attention to detail—from the bedding and furniture in her domestic interiors to the lush plants and Edenic gardens that serve as dramatic backdrops.

Aperture published the artist’s first book, Deana Lawson: An Aperture Monograph, in 2018. In 2020, Lawson became the first photographer to be awarded the Hugo Boss Prize. One of the most compelling photographers of her generation, Lawson portrays the personal and the powerful. “Outside a Lawson portrait you might be working three jobs, just keeping your head above water, struggling,” writes Zadie Smith in an essay for the book. “But inside her frame you are beautiful, imperious, unbroken, unfallen.”

Collect a limited edition of Deana Lawson: An Aperture Monograph featuring a special slipcase and custom tipped-on C-print.

Tyler Mitchell, Untitled (Twins II), New York, 2017
Courtesy the artist Quil Lemons, South Philadelphia, 2018
Courtesy the artist

The New Black Vanguard: Photography between Art and Fashion (2019)

In The New Black Vanguard, curator and critic Antwaun Sargent addresses a radical transformation taking place in fashion and art today. The book highlights the work of fifteen contemporary Black photographers rethinking the possibilities of representation—including Tyler Mitchell, the first Black photographer to shoot a cover story for Vogue; Campbell Addy and Jamal Nxedlana, who have founded digital platforms celebrating Black photographers; and Nadine Ijewere, whose early series title The Misrepresentation of Representation says it all.

From the role of the Black body in media to cross-pollination between art, fashion, and culture, and to the institutional barriers that have historically been an impediment to Black photographers, The New Black Vanguard opens up critical conversations while simultaneously proposing a brilliantly reenvisioned future. “Often in this culture, when we think about the work of Black artists, we almost never think about, How do we celebrate young Black artists? And I wanted to change that,” Sargent states. “I wanted to say that what was happening right now with these very young artists is significant. It has shifted our culture, it has shifted how we think about photography, and it has shifted who gets to shoot images.”

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Zanele Muholi, Senzekile II, Cincinnati, 2016
Courtesy the artist and Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town/Johannesburg, and Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York

Zanele Muholi: Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness (2018)

South African artist Zanele Muholi is one of the most powerful visual activists of our time. Muholi first gained recognition for their 2006 series Faces and Phases that documents the LGBTIA+ community, creating ambitiously bold portraits in an attempt to build a visual history and remedy Black queer erasure. From there, Muholi began to turn the camera inward, beginning a series of evocative self-portraits brought together in their 2018 monograph Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness.

Muholi’s self-portraits are radical statements of identity, race, and resistance. Using props and materials found in their immediate environment, Muholi crafts starkly contrasted frames that directly respond to contemporary and historical racisms—while also providing a platform for self-discovery. “I am producing this photographic document to encourage individuals in my community to be brave enough to occupy spaces—brave enough to create without fear of being vilified,” Muholi states. “To teach people about our history, to rethink what history is all about, to reclaim it for ourselves—to encourage people to use artistic tools such as cameras as weapons to fight back.”

Zora J Murff, Kenny at 19, 2013
Courtesy the artist and Webber Gallery, London

Zora J Murff: True Colors (or, Affirmations in a Crisis) (2022)

Zora J Murff’s photographs construct an incisive, autobiographic retelling of the struggles and epiphanies of a young Black artist working to make space for himself and his community.

Since Murff left social work to pursue photography over a decade ago, his work has consistently grappled with the complicit entanglement of the medium in the histories of spectacle, commodification, and race, often contextualizing his own photographs with found and appropriated images and commissioned texts.

True Colors (or, Affirmations in a Crisis) continues this conversation, examining the act of remembering and the politics of self, which Murff describes as “the duality of Black patriotism and the challenges of finding belonging in places not made for me—of creating an affirmation in a moment of crisis as I learn to remake myself in my own image.”

Ming Smith, Sun Ra Space II, New York, 1978
Courtesy the artist and Aperture

Ming Smith: An Aperture Monograph (2020)

Ming Smith’s poetic and experimental images are icons of twentieth-century African American life. Smith began experimenting with photography as early as kindergarten, when she made pictures of her classmates with her parents’ Brownie camera. She went on to attend Howard University, Washington, DC, where she continued her practice, and eventually moved to New York in the 1970s. Smith supported herself by modeling for agencies like Wilhelmina, and around the same time, joined the Kamoinge Workshop. In 1979, Smith became the first Black woman photographer to have work acquired by the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Throughout her career, Smith has photographed various forms of Black community and creativity—from mothers and children having an ordinary day in Harlem to her photographic tribute to playwright August Wilson, to the majestic performance style of Sun Ra. Her trademark lyricism, distinctively blurred silhouettes, and dynamic street scenes established Smith as one of the greatest artist-photographers working today. As Yxta Maya Murray writes for the New Yorker, “Smith brings her passion and intellect to a remarkable body of photography that belongs in the canon for its wealth of ideas and its preservation of Black women’s lives during an age, much like today, when nothing could be taken for granted.”

Hank Willis Thomas, The Cotton Bowl, 2011, from the series Strange Fruit
Courtesy the artist

Hank Willis Thomas: All Things Being Equal (2018)

Throughout Hank Willis Thomas’s prolific and interdisciplinary career, his work has explored issues of representation, perception, and American history. At the core of his practice is the ability to parse and critically dissect the flow of images that comprise American culture, with particular attention to race, gender, and cultural identity.

Since his first publication, Pitch Blackness (Aperture, 2008), Thomas has established himself as a significant voice in contemporary art. His collaborative projects include Question Bridge, a transmedia project that uses video to facilitate conversations among Black men, and the artist collective For Freedoms.

In 2018, Aperture and the Portland Art Museum copublished All Things Being Equal, the first in-depth overview of the artist’s extensive career. Featuring over 250 images from his oeuvre, the volume highlights Thomas’s diverse range of visual approaches and mediums—from advertising and branding, civil-rights and apartheid-era photography, and sculpture, to public-art projects and more.

Mickalene Thomas, Le leçon d’amour, 2008
Courtesy the artist, Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong and Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Muse by Mickalene Thomas (2015)

Mickalene Thomas’s large-scale, multitextured tableaux of domestic interiors and portraits subvert the male gaze and assert new definitions of beauty. Thomas first began to photograph herself and her mother as a student at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut—which became a pivotal experience in her creative expression as an artist.

Since then, throughout her practice, Thomas’s images have functioned as personal acts of deconstruction and reappropriation. Many of her photographs draw from a wide range of cultural icons, from 1970s “Black Is Beautiful” images of women to Édouard Manet’s odalisque figures, to the mise-en-scène studio portraiture of James Van Der Zee and Malick Sidibé. Perhaps of greatest importance, however, is that Thomas’s collection of portraits and staged scenes reflect a very personal community of inspiration—a collection of muses that includes herself, her mother, her friends and lovers—emphasizing the communal and social aspects of art-making and creativity that pervade her work.

Aperture 223: “Vision & Justice ” (Summer 2016)

The art historian, curator, and writer Sarah Elizabeth Lewis guest edited Aperture’s summer 2016 issue, “Vision & Justice,” a monumental edition of the magazine that sparked a national conversation on the role of photography in constructions of citizenship, race, and justice. The issue features a wide range of photographic projects by artists such as Awol Erizku, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Lyle Ashton Harris, Deana Lawson, Jamel Shabazz, Hank Willis Thomas, Carrie Mae Weems, and Deborah Willis; alongside essays by some of the most influential voices in American culture, including Vince Aletti, Teju Cole, and Claudia Rankine. “Understanding the relationship of race and the quest for full citizenship in this country requires an advanced state of visual literacy, particularly during periods of turmoil,” writes Lewis. “It is the artist who knows what images need to be seen to affect change and alter history, to shine a spotlight in ways that will result in sustained attention.” In 2019, Aperture worked with Lewis to create a free civic curriculum to accompany the issue, featuring thirty-one texts on topics ranging from civic space and memorials to the intersections of race, technology, and justice. Taking its conceptual inspiration from Frederick Douglass’s landmark Civil War speech “Pictures and Progress” (1861)—about the transformative power of pictures to create a new vision for the nation—the curriculum addresses both the historical roots and contemporary realities of visual literacy for race and justice in American civic life.

var container = ''; jQuery('#fl-main-content').find('.fl-row').each(function () { if (jQuery(this).find('.gutenberg-full-width-image-container').length) { container = jQuery(this); } }); if (container.length) { const fullWidthImageContainer = jQuery('.gutenberg-full-width-image-container'); const fullWidthImage = jQuery('.gutenberg-full-width-image img'); const watchFullWidthImage = _.throttle(function() { const containerWidth = Math.abs(jQuery(container).css('width').replace('px', '')); const containerPaddingLeft = Math.abs(jQuery(container).css('padding-left').replace('px', '')); const bodyWidth = Math.abs(jQuery('body').css('width').replace('px', '')); const marginLeft = ((bodyWidth - containerWidth) / 2) + containerPaddingLeft; jQuery(fullWidthImageContainer).css('position', 'relative'); jQuery(fullWidthImageContainer).css('marginLeft', -marginLeft + 'px'); jQuery(fullWidthImageContainer).css('width', bodyWidth + 'px'); jQuery(fullWidthImage).css('width', bodyWidth + 'px'); }, 100); jQuery(window).on('load resize', function() { watchFullWidthImage(); }); const observer = new MutationObserver(function(mutationsList, observer) { for(var mutation of mutationsList) { if (mutation.type == 'childList') { watchFullWidthImage();//necessary because images dont load all at once } } }); const observerConfig = { childList: true, subtree: true }; observer.observe(document, observerConfig); }

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13 Photobooks that Envision Black Lives and Artistic Visions

Samuel Fosso, ‘70s Lifestyle, 1975–78
Courtesy the artist and JM.PATRAS/PARIS

As We Rise: Photography from the Black Atlantic (2021)

In 1997, Dr. Kenneth Montague founded the Wedge Collection in Toronto in an effort to acquire and exhibit work by artists of African descent. As We Rise features over one hundred works from the collection, bringing together artists from Canada, the Caribbean, Great Britain, the US, South America, and Africa in a timely exploration of Black identity on both sides of the Atlantic.

From Jamel Shabazz’s definitive street portraits to Lebohang Kganye’s blurring of self, mother, and family history in South Africa, As We Rise looks at multifaceted ideas of Black life through the lenses of community, identity, and power. As Teju Cole describes in his preface, “Too often in the larger culture, we see images of Black people in attitudes of despair, pain, or brutal isolation. As We Rise gently refuses that. It is not that people are always in an attitude of celebration—no, that would be a reverse but corresponding falsehood—but rather that they are present as human beings, credible, fully engaged in their world.”

Collect a special vinyl LP, As We Rise: Sounds from the Black Atlantic , featuring a celebratory collection of classic and contemporary Black music made throughout the Diaspora.

Dawoud Bey, Irrigation Ditch, 2019
Courtesy the artist

Dawoud Bey: Elegy (2023)

In the artist’s most recent volume, Elegy, Dawoud Bey focuses on the landscape to create a portrait of the early African American presence in the United States. Renowned for his Harlem street scenes and expressive portraits, Bey continues his ongoing work exploring African American history. Copublished by Aperture and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Elegy focuses on three of Bey’s landscape series—Night Coming Tenderly, Black (2017); In This Here Place (2021); and Stony the Road (2023)—shedding a light on the deep historical memory still embedded in the geography of the US.

Bey takes viewers to the historic Richmond Slave Trail in Virginia, where Africans were marched onto auction blocks; to the plantations of Louisiana, where they labored; and along the last stages of the Underground Railroad in Ohio, where fugitives sought self-emancipation. By interweaving these bodies of work into an elegy in three movements, Bey not only evokes history but retells it through historically grounded images that challenge viewers to go beyond seeing and imagine lived experiences. “This is ancestor work,” Bey tells the New York Times. “Stepping outside the art context, the project context, this is the work of keeping our ancestors present in the contemporary conversation.”

Kwame Brathwaite, Model wearing a natural hairstyle, AJASS, Harlem, ca. 1970
Courtesy the artist and Philip Martin Gallery, Los Angeles

Kwame Brathwaite: Black Is Beautiful (2019)

Kwame Brathwaite’s photographs from the 1950s and ’60s transformed how we define Blackness. Using his photography to popularize the slogan “Black Is Beautiful,” Brathwaite challenged mainstream beauty standards of the time that excluded women of color.

Brathwaite, who passed away in 2023, was born in Brooklyn and part of the second-wave Harlem Renaissance. Brathwaite and his brother Elombe Brath founded the African Jazz-Art Society & Studios (AJASS) and the Grandassa Models. AJASS was a collective of artists, playwrights, designers, and dancers; Grandassa Models was a modeling agency for Black women. Working with these two organizations, Brathwaite organized fashion shows featuring clothing designed by the models themselves, created stunning portraits of jazz luminaries, and captured behind-the-scenes photographs of the Black arts community, including Max Roach, Abbey Lincoln, and Miles Davis.

Black Is Beautiful is is the first-ever monograph of his work, showcasing Brathwaite’s riveting message about Black culture and freedom. “To ‘Think Black’ meant not only being politically conscious and concerned with issues facing the Black community,” writes Tanisha C. Ford, “but also reflecting that awareness of self through dress and self-presentation. . . . [They] were the woke set of their generation.”

Ernest Cole, Untitled 1968–71
Courtesy the Ernest Cole Family Trust Ernest Cole, Untitled 1968–71

Ernest Cole: The True America (2024)

After fleeing South Africa to publish his landmark book House of Bondage in 1967 (reissued by Aperture in 2022) on the horrors of apartheid, Ernest Cole became a “banned person” and resettled in New York. Supported by a grant from the Ford Foundation, Cole photographed the city’s streets extensively, chronicling daily life in Harlem and around Manhattan. In 1968 he traveled across the country to cities including Chicago, Cleveland, Memphis, Atlanta, Los Angeles, and Washington, DC, as well as to rural areas of the South, capturing the activism and emotional tenor in the months leading up to and just after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. These photographs reflect both the newfound freedom Cole experienced in the US and the photographer’s incisive eye for inequality as he became increasingly disillusioned by the systemic racism he witnessed.

Cole released very few images from this body of work while he was alive. Thought to be lost entirely, the negatives of Cole’s American pictures resurfaced in Sweden in 2017 and were returned to the Ernest Cole Family Trust. The True America marks the first time these photographs have been brought together in a major publication. With more than 260 previously unpublished images, this compilation redefines the scope of Cole’s work.

Awol Erizku, Moon Voyage (Keep Me in Mind), 2018–20
Courtesy the artist

Awol Erizku: Mystic Parallax (2023)

Awol Erizku’s interdisciplinary practice references and reimagines African American and African visual culture, from hip-hop vernacular to Nefertiti, while nodding to traditions of spirituality and Surrealism. Mystic Parallax is the first major monograph to trace the rising artist’s career. Spanning over ten years, the volume blends together his studio practice with his work as an in-demand editorial photographer, including his conceptual portraits of Black culture icons such as Solange, Amanda Gorman, and Michael B. Jordan.

Throughout his work, Erizku consistently questions and reimagines Western art, often by casting Black subjects in his contemporary reconstructions of canonical artworks. “I always think about my work as a constellation, and a new piece is just another star within the universe,” he asserts in his wide-ranging conversation with curator Antwaun Sargent, included in the book. “This goes back to the idea of a continuum of the Black imagination. When it’s my turn, as an image maker, a visual griot, it is up to me to redefine a concept, give it a new tone, a new look, a new visual form.”

Deana Lawson, Oath, 2013
Courtesy the artist

Deana Lawson: An Aperture Monograph (2018)

Deana Lawson has created a visionary language to describe identities through intimate portraiture and striking accounts of ceremonies and rituals. Using medium- and large-format cameras, Lawson works with models throughout the US, Caribbean, and Africa to construct arresting, highly structured, and deliberately theatrical scenes. Signature to Lawson’s work is an exquisite range of color and attention to detail—from the bedding and furniture in her domestic interiors to the lush plants and Edenic gardens that serve as dramatic backdrops.

Aperture published the artist’s first book, Deana Lawson: An Aperture Monograph, in 2018. In 2020, Lawson became the first photographer to be awarded the Hugo Boss Prize. One of the most compelling photographers of her generation, Lawson portrays the personal and the powerful. “Outside a Lawson portrait you might be working three jobs, just keeping your head above water, struggling,” writes Zadie Smith in an essay for the book. “But inside her frame you are beautiful, imperious, unbroken, unfallen.”

Collect a limited edition of Deana Lawson: An Aperture Monograph featuring a special slipcase and custom tipped-on C-print.

Tyler Mitchell, Untitled (Twins II), New York, 2017
Courtesy the artist Quil Lemons, South Philadelphia, 2018
Courtesy the artist

The New Black Vanguard: Photography between Art and Fashion (2019)

In The New Black Vanguard, curator and critic Antwaun Sargent addresses a radical transformation taking place in fashion and art today. The book highlights the work of fifteen contemporary Black photographers rethinking the possibilities of representation—including Tyler Mitchell, the first Black photographer to shoot a cover story for Vogue; Campbell Addy and Jamal Nxedlana, who have founded digital platforms celebrating Black photographers; and Nadine Ijewere, whose early series title The Misrepresentation of Representation says it all.

From the role of the Black body in media to cross-pollination between art, fashion, and culture, and to the institutional barriers that have historically been an impediment to Black photographers, The New Black Vanguard opens up critical conversations while simultaneously proposing a brilliantly reenvisioned future. “Often in this culture, when we think about the work of Black artists, we almost never think about, How do we celebrate young Black artists? And I wanted to change that,” Sargent states. “I wanted to say that what was happening right now with these very young artists is significant. It has shifted our culture, it has shifted how we think about photography, and it has shifted who gets to shoot images.”

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Zanele Muholi, Senzekile II, Cincinnati, 2016
Courtesy the artist and Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town/Johannesburg, and Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York

Zanele Muholi: Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness (2018)

South African artist Zanele Muholi is one of the most powerful visual activists of our time. Muholi first gained recognition for their 2006 series Faces and Phases that documents the LGBTIA+ community, creating ambitiously bold portraits in an attempt to build a visual history and remedy Black queer erasure. From there, Muholi began to turn the camera inward, beginning a series of evocative self-portraits brought together in their 2018 monograph Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness.

Muholi’s self-portraits are radical statements of identity, race, and resistance. Using props and materials found in their immediate environment, Muholi crafts starkly contrasted frames that directly respond to contemporary and historical racisms—while also providing a platform for self-discovery. “I am producing this photographic document to encourage individuals in my community to be brave enough to occupy spaces—brave enough to create without fear of being vilified,” Muholi states. “To teach people about our history, to rethink what history is all about, to reclaim it for ourselves—to encourage people to use artistic tools such as cameras as weapons to fight back.”

Zora J Murff, Kenny at 19, 2013
Courtesy the artist and Webber Gallery, London

Zora J Murff: True Colors (or, Affirmations in a Crisis) (2022)

Zora J Murff’s photographs construct an incisive, autobiographic retelling of the struggles and epiphanies of a young Black artist working to make space for himself and his community.

Since Murff left social work to pursue photography over a decade ago, his work has consistently grappled with the complicit entanglement of the medium in the histories of spectacle, commodification, and race, often contextualizing his own photographs with found and appropriated images and commissioned texts.

True Colors (or, Affirmations in a Crisis) continues this conversation, examining the act of remembering and the politics of self, which Murff describes as “the duality of Black patriotism and the challenges of finding belonging in places not made for me—of creating an affirmation in a moment of crisis as I learn to remake myself in my own image.”

Ming Smith, Sun Ra Space II, New York, 1978
Courtesy the artist and Aperture

Ming Smith: An Aperture Monograph (2020)

Ming Smith’s poetic and experimental images are icons of twentieth-century African American life. Smith began experimenting with photography as early as kindergarten, when she made pictures of her classmates with her parents’ Brownie camera. She went on to attend Howard University, Washington, DC, where she continued her practice, and eventually moved to New York in the 1970s. Smith supported herself by modeling for agencies like Wilhelmina, and around the same time, joined the Kamoinge Workshop. In 1979, Smith became the first Black woman photographer to have work acquired by the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Throughout her career, Smith has photographed various forms of Black community and creativity—from mothers and children having an ordinary day in Harlem to her photographic tribute to playwright August Wilson, to the majestic performance style of Sun Ra. Her trademark lyricism, distinctively blurred silhouettes, and dynamic street scenes established Smith as one of the greatest artist-photographers working today. As Yxta Maya Murray writes for the New Yorker, “Smith brings her passion and intellect to a remarkable body of photography that belongs in the canon for its wealth of ideas and its preservation of Black women’s lives during an age, much like today, when nothing could be taken for granted.”

Hank Willis Thomas, The Cotton Bowl, 2011, from the series Strange Fruit
Courtesy the artist

Hank Willis Thomas: All Things Being Equal (2018)

Throughout Hank Willis Thomas’s prolific and interdisciplinary career, his work has explored issues of representation, perception, and American history. At the core of his practice is the ability to parse and critically dissect the flow of images that comprise American culture, with particular attention to race, gender, and cultural identity.

Since his first publication, Pitch Blackness (Aperture, 2008), Thomas has established himself as a significant voice in contemporary art. His collaborative projects include Question Bridge, a transmedia project that uses video to facilitate conversations among Black men, and the artist collective For Freedoms.

In 2018, Aperture and the Portland Art Museum copublished All Things Being Equal, the first in-depth overview of the artist’s extensive career. Featuring over 250 images from his oeuvre, the volume highlights Thomas’s diverse range of visual approaches and mediums—from advertising and branding, civil-rights and apartheid-era photography, and sculpture, to public-art projects and more.

Mickalene Thomas, Le leçon d’amour, 2008
Courtesy the artist, Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong and Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Muse by Mickalene Thomas (2015)

Mickalene Thomas’s large-scale, multitextured tableaux of domestic interiors and portraits subvert the male gaze and assert new definitions of beauty. Thomas first began to photograph herself and her mother as a student at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut—which became a pivotal experience in her creative expression as an artist.

Since then, throughout her practice, Thomas’s images have functioned as personal acts of deconstruction and reappropriation. Many of her photographs draw from a wide range of cultural icons, from 1970s “Black Is Beautiful” images of women to Édouard Manet’s odalisque figures, to the mise-en-scène studio portraiture of James Van Der Zee and Malick Sidibé. Perhaps of greatest importance, however, is that Thomas’s collection of portraits and staged scenes reflect a very personal community of inspiration—a collection of muses that includes herself, her mother, her friends and lovers—emphasizing the communal and social aspects of art-making and creativity that pervade her work.

Aperture 223: “Vision & Justice ” (Summer 2016)

The art historian, curator, and writer Sarah Elizabeth Lewis guest edited Aperture’s summer 2016 issue, “Vision & Justice,” a monumental edition of the magazine that sparked a national conversation on the role of photography in constructions of citizenship, race, and justice. The issue features a wide range of photographic projects by artists such as Awol Erizku, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Lyle Ashton Harris, Deana Lawson, Jamel Shabazz, Hank Willis Thomas, Carrie Mae Weems, and Deborah Willis; alongside essays by some of the most influential voices in American culture, including Vince Aletti, Teju Cole, and Claudia Rankine. “Understanding the relationship of race and the quest for full citizenship in this country requires an advanced state of visual literacy, particularly during periods of turmoil,” writes Lewis. “It is the artist who knows what images need to be seen to affect change and alter history, to shine a spotlight in ways that will result in sustained attention.” In 2019, Aperture worked with Lewis to create a free civic curriculum to accompany the issue, featuring thirty-one texts on topics ranging from civic space and memorials to the intersections of race, technology, and justice. Taking its conceptual inspiration from Frederick Douglass’s landmark Civil War speech “Pictures and Progress” (1861)—about the transformative power of pictures to create a new vision for the nation—the curriculum addresses both the historical roots and contemporary realities of visual literacy for race and justice in American civic life.

var container = ''; jQuery('#fl-main-content').find('.fl-row').each(function () { if (jQuery(this).find('.gutenberg-full-width-image-container').length) { container = jQuery(this); } }); if (container.length) { const fullWidthImageContainer = jQuery('.gutenberg-full-width-image-container'); const fullWidthImage = jQuery('.gutenberg-full-width-image img'); const watchFullWidthImage = _.throttle(function() { const containerWidth = Math.abs(jQuery(container).css('width').replace('px', '')); const containerPaddingLeft = Math.abs(jQuery(container).css('padding-left').replace('px', '')); const bodyWidth = Math.abs(jQuery('body').css('width').replace('px', '')); const marginLeft = ((bodyWidth - containerWidth) / 2) + containerPaddingLeft; jQuery(fullWidthImageContainer).css('position', 'relative'); jQuery(fullWidthImageContainer).css('marginLeft', -marginLeft + 'px'); jQuery(fullWidthImageContainer).css('width', bodyWidth + 'px'); jQuery(fullWidthImage).css('width', bodyWidth + 'px'); }, 100); jQuery(window).on('load resize', function() { watchFullWidthImage(); }); const observer = new MutationObserver(function(mutationsList, observer) { for(var mutation of mutationsList) { if (mutation.type == 'childList') { watchFullWidthImage();//necessary because images dont load all at once } } }); const observerConfig = { childList: true, subtree: true }; observer.observe(document, observerConfig); }

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Rediscovering Hisae Imai’s Otherworldly Vision

Never has Ophelia looked so playful. In Hisae Imai’s 1960 Ophelia, the character blooms not as Hamlet’s betrothed but as a Japanese girl, tinted blue, patiently stuffing leaves into her mouth. Her hair, curling in the wind, looks alive. Her nails are bejeweled. “Poor Ophelia,” the King laments in Shakespeare’s Hamlet when Ophelia, having gone mad, drowns in a brook, “divided from herself and her fair judgment.” In Imai’s visual renderings, this division is not within Ophelia but in how we might interpret her face and expression. Is that two dabs of glitter on her cheek, or a tear? Are we interrupting the most unthinkable time in a life—the necessary solitude of the seconds before death?

Hisae Imai, Ophelia, 1960 Hisae Imai, Ophelia, 1960

In Imai’s recasting, we do not see Ophelia’s long hair submerged into a brook—a moment of incapacity made exquisite in Sir John Everett Millais’s 1851–52 painting of the same scene. Instead, shorn and ear-length, the hair and the petals seem to be simultaneously part of her. Her expression is opaque—partly because the image is in negative—and a form of beauty confounds the viewer’s gaze. “After Ophelia went mad, she didn’t believe anything, and wasn’t afraid of death. I thought that must’ve been a lovely place,” Imai once wrote. It is this lovely calm that Imai’s many pictures of women transmit, amid the blurring of human boundaries. They appear still and absorbed elsewhere, feeling the breeze rather than confronting a gale, seemingly listening to a song we cannot hear.

Imai’s life and work embodied a kind of imaginative ambiguity. Her story reveals the most intimate seams between artifice and longing, ecstasy and tragedy. Throughout the late 1950s and the 1960s, she produced a staggering array of experimental imagery, for both personal projects and fashion commissions, establishing herself as the young darling of Japan’s avant-garde photography scene. Born in 1931, in Tokyo, she studied painting at Bunka Gakuin College, becoming entranced by Surrealist art during her studies with designer Souri Yanagi and through conversations with the prominent Surrealist Shuzo Takiguchi. Other giants of the movement, including Man Ray and Jean Cocteau, would also influence her. Imai began casually working with photography while still in art school, after being given a Rolleiflex camera by her father, who ran a photography studio. By her mid-twenties, she was his apprentice and had converted her small room into her personal studio. In 1956, she opened Daydreams, a solo exhibition at Matsushima Gallery, located in Tokyo’s Ginza area, where she presented evocative images of vases, photographed through burlap and buffeted by wind, edges fraying, suggesting otherworldly forms. The show drew the acclaim and interest of prominent critics and artists who had also shown there, including the photographer Eikoh Hosoe, then a pivotal figure. (Hosoe would marry Imai’s sister.)

Hisae Imai, Daydreams/The Wind A(K1), 1956 Hisae Imai, Work with models, 1960s Aperture Magazine Subscription 0.00 Get a full year of Aperture—the essential source for photography since 1952. Subscribe today and save 25% off the cover price.

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Imai surrounded herself with young, cutting-edge artists. She developed a friendship with Shuji Terayama, the famous theater and film director known for leading the angura (underground) movement, and she was in close proximity to the short-lived but groundbreaking VIVO cooperative, which included Hosoe, Ikko Narahara, and Shomei Tomatsu, among others. The group emphasized the role of subjectivity over the medium’s ability to objectively portray reality. Imai would also take part in a 1962 group exhibition organized by the art critic Tatsuo Fukushima called NON, which stood for “non-tradition, non-section,” at the Matsuya Ginza department store, featuring VIVO members and highlighting new approaches to photographic expression.

Hisae Imai, A Donkey, the King and Myself, 1959 Hisae Imai, Model and North Wind, 1961

We can feel the sensibility of her peers, and the bold, experimental ethos of the era, in Imai’s use of double exposure, mirrored bodies, and collage. But her photographs stand out for their unique approach to the depiction of the female body, often fragmenting and abstracting form. Her series Memories of Summer (1958) includes a torso with ample breasts. In one photograph, the figure is made out of thin bark, curling and peeling; in another, it is carved out of wooden blocks; in yet another, it is formed from tendrils of hair. The figures resemble a mannequin, doll, or robot in the process of being dismantled or slowly torn apart. Three years later, she would return to this idea, the split female body—but one that is no longer headless—in a solo exhibition at Gekko Gallery in 1961, titled Model and North Wind. The series appears to shift from considering what the models are—taking apart the women and seeing what they are made of—to considering where they exist, which is somewhere pitch-black. These figures float in fields of darkness, immaculately made-up in thick-winged eyeliner, split from context or even clothing.

At this time, Imai was building a successful career in fashion and her photographs were regularly published in magazines. The “fashion,” however, in many of these images seems to be the models’ hair, styled to dramatically undulate, reflect, and absorb light. Hair appears as both a living organism and a person’s dead, ornamental boundary. “Always her hair grows thick, like an unknown plant,” the poet Shuntaro Tanikawa noted, writing about Imai in the June 1961 issue of Camera Mainichi. “Today, as ever, the wind wafts in spores of dreams.”

Hisae Imai, Model and North Wind, 1961

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The strong desire to present women in vivid, almost unearthly ways is also visible in Imai’s 1962 photographs of the lingerie designer Yoko Kamoi, who was pictured as a sorceress in a solo exhibition called Sea-born Fantasy. Kamoi had revolutionized women’s lingerie in the 1950s, encouraging Japanese women to wear color instead of white, to be bold, to flaunt themselves. She championed the idea of transforming underclothes from simply practical things—to support, to shape, to cover the body—into garments of feminine pleasure. Kamoi was interested in not simply showcasing the female form but considering the gendered assumptions behind notions of use and uselessness, frivolity and practicality. Imai shared the same spirit. In the stills from the film component of Sea-born Fantasy, Kamoi is surrounded by discarded wigs and beheaded pink doll heads; in another, she compares her height, perched on her tippy-toes, to that of a blond mannequin.

Imai’s photographs stand out for their unique approach to the depiction of the female body, often fragmenting and abstracting form.

By the early 1960s, Imai was ascendant. A profile in the fashion magazine Soen crowned her “No 1. of female photographers.” The article offers every telltale touch of potential for this rising prodigy. Then, one day in the late spring of 1962, all of that changed in an instant when a taxi Imai was in crashed headlong into traffic. For nearly a year, she was blind. Her life entered a tunnel, and the world of artistic ambition fell temporarily dark. The details of this year are scant, but she would eventually recover her sight—and the traumatic accident would significantly alter her life and career trajectory.

Hisae Imai, Fantasy: Eyes and Teeth, 1963 Hisae Imai, Yoko Kamoi, 1950–60s

In a photograph from the series Fantasy: Eyes and Teeth (1963), made during her recovery, we see, through the shadow of an outstretched hand, what looks like an X-ray, or a plaster cast, of a clenched jaw with a string of beads held between its teeth. The scholar Masako Toda, who has researched and written extensively on Imai, asks us to pay particular attention to the physicality of these photographs, which deliver a visceral charge. “There is probably a close relationship between her experience of almost losing her sight due to the accident and these painful-looking works of eyes and teeth,” Toda writes. “This series of photos is very physical, and possesses an intimate feel.” What is most affecting is not just the clenched jaw, or the forensic feeling, but the addition of the beads—the decorative ornament added, or grasped for, right when the X-ray turns a person into an image of yet another body to be operated on.

After her accident, the human body would concern Imai less and less, replaced by a newfound interest in the natural world, horses in particular. The story goes that on a bright day in 1963, her vision finally restored, Imai walked into a movie theater and watched David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia, the three-and-a-half-hour epic in which the most prominent four-legged animal is a camel, not a horse. But there was something about the horses featured in the film that stirred her; she left her photography studio behind to work in stables and open fields.

Hisae Imai, The Season of White Flowers, 1965–75 Hisae Imai, Ophelia, 1960
All photographs © the artist and courtesy the Third Gallery Aya, Osaka

“Do I go out to see horses because it hurts to wander around, so aimless?” Imai asked in her 1977 photobook Hippolatry: Enchanted by Horses. For the last forty years of her career, trekking from Hokkaido to the Isle of Man, Imai would relentlessly, and beautifully, photograph racehorses. She became a visual poet of jockeys emerging from a haze, of the starched rituals and clamor of a race track, of the curve of a foal’s neck. She immersed herself in the rush and quiet of a life lived among horses. For her, the animals represented not the primal overcoming of a frontier, like they do
in a Western, nor the pedigreed lure of cultural capital, as they do in Ralph Lauren advertisements, but the evocation of a threshold, the feeling that they can bring us over to another world. In one photograph, a white horse angles out of pitch darkness—in another, horses are brown dots racing against a sky of yellow grain. To these images, she added odd textures and color—not glitter or shine or rose petals, as she did to her female figures. Here clouds are streaked, variegated into pinks and blues. Manes are tinted with color and mists evoke an otherworldliness that Imai must have felt they contained.

Her photographs, through all their range and experimentation, dare viewers to consider what it means to have a second life, and to consider the selves that can be discovered in dreams, summoned in solitude, or encountered outside in the world. The gallerist Aya, of the Third Gallery Aya, who recently exhibited Imai’s work, emphasized in a conversation with me the importance of the “after,” such as in After Ophelia. In a 1962 essay she wrote about her collaborations with Imai, Kamoi asked: “Was her work a longing for a glimpse of the afterworld, or was it a challenge or protest against this world, the world of the living?” The women and horses of Imai’s photographs hover at this threshold and, in their lush metamorphoses, ask how we might disentangle longing from flight, the living from those who come after.

This article originally appeared in Aperture, issue 253, “Desire.”

A Photographer Recasts the Secret Lives of Teenage Girls

In Elizabeth Renstrom’s studio, there are shelves filled with pink goodies: a can of Aqua Net, a fluffy leopard blanket, perfume bottles, pencils, faux fur, the pretty princess phone of 1980s teen-movie bedrooms we wanted to live in as young girls. They’re props, it turns out, in both the literal and metaphorical senses of the word: objects Renstrom uses to stage her images, but also visual representations of narratives we’re given of femininity, consumerism, and bodily autonomy.

Over the years, Renstrom, a photographer and photo editor, has produced significant editorial work for the New Yorker, the New York Times, VICE, and TIME, among others. She’s shot portfolios for TIME and the New York Times, made covers for Salty and Numéro Berlin, campaigns for Dice and Vimeo, and photographed for the book Carnal Knowledge: Sex Education You Didn’t Get in School (2020). For both her editorial and personal work, she arranges her props to illustrate richly complex ideas using vibrant color, nostalgia, and humor.

In her recent series Yummy (2023), now on view at Baxter St at the Camera Club of NY, Renstrom combines still-life photography and AI-generated imagery inspired by the world that women of a certain age inherited—a world women are still inheriting, whether they’re teens now or millennials witnessing the aesthetics of our teen years making a comeback; who were raised on magazines like Seventeen, CosmoGirl, and others; who were sold butterfly clips and low-rise jeans by their Claire’s and Wet Seal ad pages; who listened when they told us how to lose the zits and gain a beach body, or how to be fifteen, flirty, and thriving. 

Elizabeth Renstrom, Flirty Fun, 2023 Elizabeth Renstrom, Beauty Under $10, 2023

Teen magazines from the early 2000s are what initially got Renstrom into photography; she read them growing up in Connecticut. These magazines brimmed with bright, airbrushed, catalog-esque shots of teen models with flowing hair and glossy lips in power poses. Happy, smiling young women leaned with hands on hips, flitted on beaches, washed flawless skin in a bathroom mirror, did crunches for summer in the magazines’ pages, their frosted eyeshadow twinkling as they got into limos for prom.

For Yummy, Renstrom concentrated on this aesthetic, liberally sprinkled with the glory of neon graphics, to remember and comment on their impact. When I visited her studio, she pulled out an issue of the now-defunct magazine YM from October 2002 to show me some of her inspiration for the project. Avril Lavigne is on the hot-pink cover, fake growling in a white button-down shirt, black tie askew. It’s an issue I vividly remember owning.

A child of this era like myself, Renstrom was excited by the possibility of generating her own images using Midjourney, prompting it to reproduce visuals in the style of teen magazines like YM. These appear in three separate branches across the exhibition. The first is a series of three print magazines featuring AI-generated cover stars, advertisements, and editorials. The magazine was designed by art director Elena Foraker, who combed Renstrom’s AI images with editorial sections constructed by the writer Coralie Kraft, also using AI. Stylized with a darkly humorous undercurrent, the publication is called Yummy Teen!—as much a diminutive as a critique of the way young women have often been sexualized within dominant cultural narratives.

Installation view of Yummy, Baxter St, New York, 2023Elizabeth Renstrom, Yummy (Teen Edition), 2023

The second aspect of the project features actual photographs, which Renstrom staged at a friend’s childhood home in Pennsylvania. She cast teen girls to interact with Yummy Teen! magazines at a fictional sleepover, cut and collaged Yummy Teen! onto their walls, and wove the magazines into these girls’ fictional lives. Nail polish drips onto the carpet, rogue Cheetos find their way out of bags, feathery pens wait to be used. A series of brightly shadowed eyes are cut from a pile of faces on the floor and stuck onto a mirror. “We’re remixing these things, but we’re also being really violent with this image,” Renstrom says, referring to the way women’s faces and bodies have been cut apart to create another idealized image. “It reflects how we feel about ourselves when we’re reading it.”

The third aspect is a physical installation in Baxter St of furry, pink beanbags on top of a bright lavender carpet, in front of a wall painted pink. The installation invites visitors to apply custom stickers and images from Yummy Teen! to the wall, just like the girls in the photographs do. For a few moments, Renstrom wants us all to be teen girls, to understand a life even if we never had the occasion to remember it.  

Much about being a teen girl is about longing—having a crush, wishing to lose weight, wanting to fit in with great clothes and beautiful hair. Renstrom captures that by flashing images from the past back to us: the heartthrobs, the perfume ads, the stars we loved and wanted to be. The cover of the June issue of Yummy Teen!, for example, features the AI-generated star Sierra Knight, her blond hair glistening and teeth pearly white, not unlike teens on the Laguna Beach of our youth who were paired with headlines promising to teach us how to “tone up and slim down,” “make HIM ask you out,” and “radiate with confidence!”

Installation view of Yummy, Baxter St, New York, 2023

Yummy lives in the uncanny valley of 2000s girlhood, where all its images and text are just slightly familiar in ways enlightening and jarring. Teen magazines were so prolific in their time and of such a specific style and tone; that AI images and text may be generated from them in the first place is a comment on their ubiquity and uniformity. They look and feel exactly as they did when they were first published, and with such accuracy that I wonder if I’ve seen them before. And, of course, I have. Yummy is as much about nostalgia as it is satire, as much commentary as memory. There’s a certain absurd hilarity to the phrase “Hot Bod!” independent of any context, and especially as it appears on stickers Renstrom made for the exhibition opening.

Renstrom’s experiences with AI reflected the problems in the images that proliferated mainstream print culture during this time period. Her project features a multitude of ethnicities, for example, but she found she had to ask for that specifically when prompting Midjourney; otherwise, a thin white woman was the norm. “I didn’t have to prompt for it to feed me a woman of a certain size,” Renstrom says. “A white woman is often what will be popped out unless you prompt it to give you a different race. There’s lots of aspects of it that are so fucked up and interesting.”

In bold pinks, yellows, purples, and greens, Renstrom tells the story of what it’s like to be a teen receiving these messages—and then an adult woman dealing with their aftermath. “I think we all indulged in these magazines in a really insecure time of our lives, where we’re looking for guidance and advice,” she says. “This project is a tribute to that, but also a critical eye at the way that these magazines play off those insecurities. It’s a lot about the way we talked to women during this time.”

Elizabeth Renstrom, Eye Magic, 2023
All photographs courtesy the artist and Baxter St at the Camera Club of NY

Renstrom’s work is always asking audiences to query what they’re seeing. As Coralie Kraft tells me, Renstrom is “trojan horse-ing” commentary into her work about gender, about femininity, about the way we talk, and have talked, about women, the way we have understood or not understood our relationship to consumerism. There were times, Renstrom says, when her work was dismissed for being too nostalgic, frivolous, glossy, feminine. But those who write it off for its aesthetics are missing the point. “I feel really strongly about my palette and the kind of textures and softness that I bring in,” she continues. “I want it to feel inviting, so that you spend time and look at what I’m trying to say or the media I’m trying to put in front of you.”

The return of Y2K aesthetics has coincided with a cultural reconsideration of how we look at stories of the pop icons whose public lives defined the decade, including Janet Jackson, Britney Spears, and Pamela Anderson. Renstrom’s work lives here, too, in its own reconsiderations of “ordinary teenage girls,” as she says. I think of the writer Olivia Gatwood’s poem “When I Say That We Are All Teen Girls”: Even the men who laugh their condescending laughs / when a teen girl faints at the sight of her / favorite pop star, even those men are teen girls, / the way they want so badly to be so big / and important and worshipped by someone.

Renstrom shows us that the state of the teen girl is more universal than we think, that similar experiences color generations of people confronted by comparison, self-doubt, and fear. What we find in her work is that maybe we’re all hoping for a way out, all hoping to be loved, zits and all.

Yummy is on view at Baxter St at the Camera Club of NY through February 2, 2024.

The Inside Story of Josef Koudelka’s Groundbreaking Career

Born in 1938, the year of the German occupation of his native Czechoslovakia, Josef Koudelka has lived through seminal events in the twentieth century. He grew up under communism, experienced the Prague Spring, saw the collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergence of the Czech Republic, and ultimately the Russian invasion that persists in Ukraine. In Josef Koudelka: Next, Melissa Harris considers his sixty-year-long obsession with photography, from his early interpretation of Czech theater to his expansive project on the Roma culture in Eastern Europe; from his legendary coverage of the 1968 Soviet invasion of Prague to the solitude of exile and the often-devastating impact humans have had on the landscape.

Over the course of nearly a decade, Harris conducted hundreds of hours of interviews with the artist at his home and studio spaces in Prague and Ivry-sur-Seine, outside of Paris, and led ongoing conversations with his friends, family, colleagues, and collaborators worldwide. The deftly told, richly illustrated biography shares stories on Koudelka’s early years as a touring musician and engineering student, his ritualistic repeated visits to favored places and festivals, and his thoughts around adapting to the panoramic format used in his later work. Anecdotes offer new insight into some of his most renowned images, such as accounts of smuggling Koudelka’s film out of the Prague Spring conflict zone, or of a London friend facilitating a membership card to the Gypsy and Travellers’ Council, an organization that advocated for the rights of the Roma, to help Koudelka ease frequent suspicions by police during his limitless itineraries. Last year, Lesley A. Martin spoke with Harris about the process of writing and editing Koudelka’s story.

Josef Koudelka and Melissa Harris on the train to Boskovice, 2014. Photograph by Lucina Hartley Koudelka Hervé Hughes, Olympus OM-2, Josef Koudelka, 1984. Koudelka notes his concerns about camera 5 (“Serge”) to his camera repairer, Hughes, in French; Hughes’s response is in English

Lesley A. Martin: Melissa, tell us a little bit about the genesis of this project. How did you get involved in writing this biography? What was it that appealed to you in particular?

Harris: Susan Meiselas called me up one day and asked me if I would be interested in writing Josef’s biography for a Magnum Foundation biography series conceived by Andy Lewin, who served as its managing editor. I was still working on the first biography I had written about Nick Nichols, and I really didn’t think Josef would say yes. I knew he didn’t like to answer personal questions and said no to almost all interviews. I remember saying to Susan, “Sure, but I don’t think he’ll agree.” And then he did. I think what convinced him was a dear friend of his, Hervé Tardy, teasingly told him that he should do it because if he didn’t do it now, while he was alive, it would happen when he was dead, and people could say whatever they wanted to, and he wouldn’t be there to help get the facts precise. So, if he wanted to have any input whatsoever, and make sure the rest of us didn’t make up things, he should do it now.

Martin: What was interesting to you about taking this on? Was it the work? His life story? What was the most compelling element?

Harris: Josef is fascinating to me. I’d worked with him enough before to know that this was going to mean a big commitment of time and energy on my part, but I also knew that if he agreed to do it, that he’d be all in—that he would totally commit himself. When he says he’s going to do something, he does it. I didn’t know a lot about his life story, but what I knew was compelling to me. And I think the work is superb. I’d worked with him previously on an exhibition of Invasion 68: Prague, his coverage of the Soviet invasion, which Aperture hosted in the gallery in 2008, but it was mostly just about realizing its presentation. I also worked with him on his book Wall (2013).

I knew I would learn so much from speaking with Josef, and I knew that it would be a real challenge. I wanted the challenge, not just in terms of information or content, but the writing as well. Telling his kind of story is complicated, in part because he goes back to projects so often that there’s no way to stick strictly to chronology. For example, his work on the Roma, published as Gypsies (1975; reissued by Aperture, 2011), comes up early on in the book, and then comes up again at different points throughout his career as he returns to that work in different ways. So how do you figure that out? Do you have a chapter on Gypsies and do the whole shebang in one place, or do you allow it to unfold the way his life has unfolded? There were just a lot of puzzles to work out—the kind of structural puzzles that I thought would be interesting for me because I’ve never done anything like that before.

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Martin: It is a real puzzle. How do you prepare to take a project like this, in which you have to understand the entirety of a life—or at least try to? What is the process of research?

Harris: We just started talking. I wasn’t really sure where to start with him, and so I thought I would start personally. He really did not know what he’d gotten himself into. It was brutal, our first meeting: Nobody was unpleasant or anything, but it was just really hard for him to talk about his parents or to talk about certain things about his childhood. Not because he had bad relationships or had been unhappy, but because he is very private, and in his own way, quite shy. At the start, it was mostly about figuring out the pacing and just going slowly, letting him formulate responses to questions he hadn’t been asked before or that he had stealthily evaded.

Henri Cartier-Bresson, Jill Hartley, Lucina Hartley Koudelka, and Josef Koudelka at the home of Cartier-Bresson and Martine Franck, under the tree by which bottles of slivovitz are buried, Céreste, France, 1989. Photograph by Marthe Cartier-Bresson Paul Trevor, Brick Lane, London E1, 1980

Martin: You spoke to so many people in putting the book together—people who knew Josef at different stages in his life, and who weigh in on his life and his work. As a reader, you really develop a sense of the author as a detective in this book, reassembling the story as Josef tells it, but also confirming or adding nuance to it through other perspectives.

Harris: Yes. This is a real reported biography. People think you’re nuts when you tell them you’re working on a biography of a living person, but for me, it’s a pleasure because I don’t really consider myself a historian. Of course, you have to do a lot of historical research for a book like this, when you are writing about somebody who was born in 1938. You have to present and contextualize the very rich history of Central Europe. But for me, the pleasure of the research was the reporting and interviewing process. Not just the interviews with Josef but pretty much everybody who played a key role in his life—those who were still living, obviously. When I started, everybody except for major figures like Anna Fárová, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Martine Franck were still alive.

Josef loves a challenge, a visual challenge. He had not really worked in this way before, where there had to be a clear relationship between text and image.

Writing about Josef’s relationship with those who were deceased was greatly facilitated by Viktor Stoilov, the founder of the Czech publishing house Torst, who kindly made all of the correspondence between Josef and Anna (that Anna had given to him) available to me, as well as all of her texts on Josef for magazines, catalogs, et cetera. It wasn’t the same as talking to her, but it was almost like talking to her. For Martine and Henri—I had known them, which helped—and Josef had kept all of their correspondence, plus there were his diary entries. So between what Josef had and Henri’s own writing, I was able to build certain things. Sheila Hicks, who I spoke with, who is a very dear friend of Josef’s, had very strong memories of Martine, and Hervé and others had memories of Josef and Henri, so there many ways in.

Martin: I do love the idea of a “reported history”—an oral history of sorts. It’s really a portrait of Josef in relation to his community, of the network of people who supported him in different ways, but also of the photo community itself, and especially in Europe at a particular time. Was that a conscious storyline that you pursued, or did it happen organically?

Harris: It was bound to happen because of what happened with Josef and Magnum. I knew that Magnum had helped distribute the Invasion 68: Prague work early on before he was a member, and that was a win-win for everybody: they had this remarkable body of work that nobody else had, and he became connected to this community. And then Elliott Erwitt, Marc Riboud, and Charles Harbutt and others helped Josef enormously. Henri Cartier-Bresson and David Hurn were like brothers to him. That sense of community at Magnum then, and in the photo community at large, was extraordinary.

Pages of Koudelka’s 1971 agenda noting travel schedules, color-coded by country Koudelka’s 2015 agenda

Martin: As you’re describing this process, it also underscores your own engagement and history with the field and with this community of people. You’re very clear in your positioning of yourself as the invested author, and that impacts the structure of the book to some degree. You’ve described how this is not a series-by-series retelling of an artist’s practice—because Josef is digressive in his approach to his own work. But can you talk a little bit more about the different structural approach that you wanted to bring to writing this as a nontraditional biography?

Harris: One thing that I thought, journalistically, is that I had to be completely transparent. In other words, it had to be clear that I had worked with Josef before, that I knew him. That’s why I write in the first person. I also wanted it to be clear when I entered his story. I am transparent about my own work with Josef previously—and also about his daughter Lucina’s presence throughout the book. Right from the start, Lucina was filming our conversations. I used her as a foil of sorts, both to help convey Josef’s emotionality, as well as to establish some chronological anchors.

At some point I also realized that I needed a breath every once in a while throughout the book. I needed a way catch the reader up or say where we were in time, because I wasn’t writing linearly. This is why there are sections I refer to as a “Pause.” It was a way to stop, step back, and say, “Okay, here we are. This is what we’re looking at.” For example, I had to jump ahead a little bit at the beginning, so the reader has an idea of who Josef is and what he’s known for, and then go back, and then move forward again, and then continue, back and forth. It’s like a cha-cha or something. The prologue and the epilogue function the same way.

Then there was my editor Diana Stoll’s suggestion that I write about some of Josef’s key work right at the beginning and just describe it. I preferred to get to the work gradually, but I understood her reasoning. Instead, I talked to Josef about the idea of an overture, where we show a selection of his signature images so that anybody who knows photography is going to immediately understand: “Oh, it’s this guy. The one who made that picture.” Josef called these his “icons.”

Josef Koudelka, Hand and wristwatch, Prague, August 1968 Josef Koudelka, Romania, 1968

Martin: Speaking of the iconography and the mythos of Josef as a figure, were there particular stories, apocryphal or otherwise, that you felt you wanted to really puncture, or bust?

Harris: I just wanted him to be human. The book isn’t a press release for Josef. I think it was Elliott Erwitt who told me that early on at Magnum they called him St. Josef for a while, in part because of the way he lived, and that he didn’t care about money. Josef has always and only cared about having the work the way he wants it, in terms of how it’s published, how it’s presented, how it’s contextualized, all of that.

But I didn’t want him to be godlike. In fact, at some point I got tired of the love fest I heard from people—and I say this with enormous fondness for Josef. For Josef to be interesting, he has to be human, and all of us humans are flawed. I needed to allow for his flaws, along with all the amazing things about him, to really write honestly, as best as I could, about who he is. Josef is difficult sometimes. He’s not the perfect partner for a woman, or the perfect father. He tries very hard to be a good friend. All of these things matter to him, and they’ve mattered more and more as he’s gotten older.

Martin: Was there anything that surprised you as the book evolved, or did your thinking change in any way about Josef or his work?

Harris: It wasn’t even that my thinking changed as much that I came to have an even greater appreciation of his work as I saw more, and understood it better. Projects like Gypsies and Exiles and the 1968 invasion and theater images work beautifully in a book: they’re immediate and intimate. I had found many of the Black Triangle and Ruins photos stunning, but I hadn’t yet wrapped my head around the panoramas as a whole. As I spent the time with them, they became formidable to me. For example, I saw a show in Bologna that François Hébel did at MAST, and I understood so much more; I thought they were so powerful. In Josef’s work, the images often inform or play off each other. They build to something. When you start seeing them together, you get something intense and profound.

Josef Koudelka, Black Triangle region (Ore Mountains), Czechoslovakia, 1991

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Martin: That’s another aspect of the book that I appreciated—how you make these connections by showing some of the panoramic images together in a way that emphasized the geometry and the construction of them, but that is also informed by the context and understanding you build into the narration. We learn about his background as an engineer, and how precise he is, along with all of the other details of what he cares about over time, which leads to a better understanding of the work.

Harris: Exactly. When I started really learning about his work, and especially the Black Triangle, but also his other panoramic commissions, I realized that a lot of what he’s looking at is “the hand of man” on the landscape, and its huge ecological implications. I hadn’t previously thought about it that way in part because a lot of the earliest panoramic projects had been collected and published in a very poetic way, but not really in terms of specific content—by Delpire in Chaos—which is sequenced formally. Looking at the images, you get a sense that at this moment in our Earth’s history, everything is a little out of alignment or out of balance. It’s tremendously evocative. But then to actually go through every project and see all the work that was done in each—no matter what the commission was—you realize that Josef’s not just capturing a changing landscape through industrialization, or a historical rupture, or urbanization, or whatever it might be. I came to understand that he is most often thinking about the ecological or environmental implications of these issues, which was interesting to me. I didn’t expect to go there in my thinking.

Josef Koudelka, Moravia (Strážnice), 1966 Josef Koudelka, Spain, 1971

Martin: Yes—by looking at the long arc of his practice, one really starts to get a sense of an ongoing set of concerns that he returns to time and time again, even if the work seems quite different on the surface.

Harris: I looked at his book Chaos, and I looked at the captions which are in the back. There are, for example, images made in Beirut and Auschwitz, and of the Berlin Wall. They had been organized via their formal composition, which is very much how Josef thinks, and how Delpire thought. The sequence of that book is spectacular. It’s wonderful. But it’s not about content; it’s about form. I needed to think more about content, because in a biography, you have to think about content. You’re thinking about where this guy is, what he’s looking at, and what are the consequences of what he is seeing and considering.

To pull out the picture of the Berlin Wall in what was East Berlin, and to think about him being there, after all these years of not being able to be in that part of Europe—and then to know that he also went to Auschwitz—you can’t help but think about how that would play into his perception of the Wall in Israel when he later photographed there. The benefit of going back into his work from a content-driven perspective was finding certain images that I had only looked at formally before, because that’s how they had been presented to me, then suddenly knowing, “Oh, this is what I am looking at” and understanding the relationship to where he was in time and what he’s photographing now.

Josef Koudelka: Next 50.00 The definitive and only authorized biography of Josef Koudelka—an intimate portrait of the life and work of one of photography’s most renowned and celebrated artists.

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Josef Koudelka: Next

By Melissa Harris. Photographs by Josef Koudelka. Designed by Aleš Najbrt.

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View cart Description The definitive and only authorized biography of Josef Koudelka—an intimate portrait of the life and work of one of photography’s most renowned and celebrated artists.

Throughout his more than sixty-year-long obsession with the medium, Josef Koudelka considers a remarkable range of photographic subjects—from his early theater work, to his seminal project on the Roma and his legendary coverage of the 1968 Soviet invasion of Prague, to the solitariness of exile and the often-devastating impact humans have had on the landscape. Josef Koudelka: Next embraces all of Koudelka’s projects and his evolution as an artist in the context of his life story and working process. Based on hundreds of hours of interviews conducted over the course of almost a decade with Koudelka—as well as ongoing conversations with his friends, family, colleagues, and collaborators worldwide—this deftly told, richly illustrated biography offers an unprecedented glimpse into the mind of this notoriously private photographer. Writer, editor, and curator Melissa Harris has independently crafted a unique, in-depth, and revelatory personal history of both the man and his photography.

Josef Koudelka: Next is richly illustrated with hundreds of photographs, including many biographical and behind-the-scenes images from Koudelka’s life, as well as iconic images from his work, from the 1950s to the present. The visual presentation is conceived in collaboration with Koudelka himself, as well as his longtime collaborator, Czech designer Aleš Najbrt.

Copublished by Aperture and Magnum Foundation Details

Format: Paperback / softback
Number of pages: 352
Number of images: 282
Publication date: 2023-11-21
Measurements: 7.25 x 9.5 inches
ISBN: 9781597114653

Press

“Melissa Harris’s visual biography, intriguingly titled Next, was written with his cooperation, and is a thorough and informative overview of his life and work. Rich in personal ephemera – family portraits, snapshots and glimpses of his many journals – it traces his trajectory from Boskovice, a small town in Moravia, where he had dreams of becoming an engineer, to his status as one of the world’s most revered photographers.”

Contributors

Melissa Harris is editor at large of Aperture and served as editor in chief of Aperture magazine from 2000 to 2012. Since 1990, she has also edited more than forty books for Aperture. Harris curates exhibitions worldwide, and teaches at New York University at the Tisch School of the Arts, in the department of Photography and Imaging / Emerging Media. She served on New York City’s Community Board 5 for several years, is a trustee of the John Cage Trust, and author of A Wild Life: A Visual Biography of Photographer Michael Nichols (Aperture, 2017).
Josef Koudelka (born in Moravia, Czech Republic, 1938) is a member of Magnum Photos and has received the Prix Nadar, Grand Prix National de la Photographie, HCB Award, and Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography. His work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art and International Center of Photography, New York; Hayward Gallery, London; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and Palais de Tokyo, Paris.
Aleš Najbrt studied typography and book design with Jan Solpera at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design, Prague. He was an art director of the influential Czech weekly Reflex and founder of his own magazine, Raut. With Pavel Lev, he cofounded Studio Najbrt.

Featured Content Interviews Koudelka's Prague, Fifty Years Later Featured Revisiting Josef Koudelka’s Photographs of Europe’s Roma Communities

Martin: Working with a living subject as a biographer is difficult. Did you have to establish some kind of ground rules going into it—as much as I understand you were interested in working with Josef and a collaborative approach?

Harris: The text was mine. He knew that. The rules were, at the beginning, I told him he cannot tell people what to say or what to think, and he can’t tell me not to use something because he doesn’t like it, because it was absolutely clear that he was going to be reading as we went along, and that he was going to be very involved in checking the facts. But he understood he couldn’t be censorious at all, and he was not inclined to be. Given the oppressiveness of the period in which he grew up, he does not want to tell people what they can and cannot express. And he was a man of his word. There were times he didn’t like what was said, and there are things he doesn’t like that are in the book, but he never tried to get me to take anything out.  

Figuring out the visuals, however, was always going to be a real collaboration in terms of both the picture research and the layout. For that, we were also working with Aleš Najbrt, his longtime Czech designer and collaborator. I knew this was going to be another type of challenge because I also had discussed with Josef early on that the book wasn’t conceived as a retrospective. He originally thought it would be structured more classically—like one of his retrospective publications: that there’d be an essay and the work would appear more in the order in which he had made it. I told him that, to the contrary, it was going to be text-driven and not always chronological, and that also there would be biographical images. He got excited, because Josef loves a challenge, a visual challenge. Once he understood what I meant, he was very engaged. He had not really worked in this way before, where there had to be a clear relationship between text and image.

Koudelka photographing atop a Soviet tank, Prague, August 1968. Photographer unknown
All photographs by Koudelka courtesy the artist/Magnum Photos Robert Delpire and Koudelka, 1978. Photograph by Sarah Moon
© the artist

Martin: I want to go back to that process of building trust with Josef. Just to mention that one of the other things that no doubt encouraged him to see you as a good collaborator was your prior work with Robert Delpire and his legacy. Can you tell us a little bit about that and if you think that was important?

Harris: With Josef, he likes it when people do what they say they’re going to do—when they’re very clear about what they can do and what they can’t do and why. I learned early on through other people I worked with, too, but especially with Josef, it’s better not to sugarcoat anything. What happened with me and Josef was that he came into Aperture one day. We hardly knew each other. He had done an interview with some magazine in English, and he wanted me to read it and correct it because he’d heard I was “smart.” At that time, he didn’t have a cell phone, and he wouldn’t give me his phone number where he was staying because he didn’t give it to anyone. He didn’t want anybody to call him. I couldn’t reach him. I remember finally saying to Josef, “If I have questions, if I can’t reach you, I can’t help you.” I told him I’d help him, and I did it, finally, and it worked.

After that interview, we were coming up to the anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Prague in 2008. I knew he was doing a book, gathering all of his work from that period for the first time, so I asked him if we could do an interview in the magazine—at that time, I was the editor of Aperture magazine—which he agreed to do. I also asked Josef if we could do a show at Aperture Gallery. At first, he said no. But after we had done the interview, I asked him again, and he said, “Well, maybe.” He’d already curated the show, basically. He’d selected the work, he had a sequence for it, so it became my role to figure out how to present it, install it—to produce it. We pulled certain texts from the book, which were original source materials just from what was going on in Prague at that time, radio reports and all that, and we used the same fonts and typefaces as the book, so there was a clear visual relationship. The installation was very cinematic. Aperture was kind enough to let me paint all the walls black; Josef let me blow up two or three of the works into big murals, which he had never done before, and he just really liked it. And because I kept him in the loop the entire time—showing him a mock-up, samples of the wall text, and everything else—I think we had some trust built up from that.

After that, he decided that I had to meet Robert Delpire. Bob was having this comprehensive show at Arles, which told the story of his work with publishing, exhibitions, advertising, films, and design—everything. Josef felt that that show should come to New York and thought I was the one to do it. So that was the next big thing, which I was able to deliver. I think that also helped with the trust. And then, through working on this book, we got to the point that as much as Josef will trust anyone, I think he trusts me now. At least I hope so.

Josef Koudelka: Next was published by Aperture in 2023.

How Gregory Halpern Found His Voice in Buffalo

Gregory Halpern has been making photographs in Buffalo, New York, the city where he grew up, for the last twenty years. You could say that Buffalo has been his muse. It’s also been his crucible. It’s a place known for pummeling blizzards and buffalo wings (invented at the Anchor Bar), the Erie Canal and the Martin House (designed by Frank Lloyd Wright), and, of course, the Buffalo Bills. (“Where else would you rather be,” the legendary Bills coach Marv Levy chanted back in 1986, “than right here, right now?”) For Gregory, Buffalo has been a fecund site for childhood exploration, and in his photographs, it is a vast stage across which finely etched characters cross for their cameos: bundled up, making out, climbing up a sledding hill, or lying naked in a silty stream. As the introduction to his solo exhibition 19 winters / 7 springs, curated by Phil Taylor and currently on view at the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, puts it, Buffalo is where “the appearance of everyday reality becomes both volatile and marvelous.”

Gregory’s brother, the journalist Jake Halpern, knows something about Buffalo characters too. He can give you a man’s profile in fifty-one words: “Adrian Paisley spends his days hunting for scrap metal: aluminum, brass and (holy of holies) copper. At 42, Paisley, who weighs just 135 pounds, is wiry and muscular. I once saw him move an old refrigerator by himself, hurling it onto his pickup truck as if it were made of Styrofoam.” That’s from Jake’s story for the New York Times Magazine about the scrap-metal industry. Gregory made the photographs. They’ve teamed up a few times, including for Jake’s rollicking Times Magazine article about freegan squatters. Jake has written about a safe house in Buffalo where refugees from around the world await passage to Canada. Welcome to the New World (2020), his twenty-part graphic series about a Syrian family establishing a new life in the US, with illustrations by Michael Sloan, won a Pulitzer Prize.

Installation view of Gregory Halpern: 19 winters / 7 springs, George Eastman Museum, 2023

Gregory and Jake left Buffalo as young men. There was a sense that in order to succeed, you had to leave. Gregory studied with the photographer Larry Sultan at the California College of the Arts. Jake wrote a book about debt collectors and was a Fulbright Scholar in India. Gregory’s photobook ZZYZX (2016)—about a desert town east of Los Angeles—heralded a new vogue for contemporary photography’s lyrical documentary style and won the Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook of the Year Award in 2016. It’s since become one of the most important photobooks of the last decade; the “Halpern effect” is evident in a generation of young photographers who have studied ZZYZX as though it were gospel. But ZZYZX, Gregory says, wouldn’t have been possible without Buffalo and the time he spent there—nineteen winters, to be exact—honing his voice. Selections from the Buffalo work were first published in Aperture’s “American Destiny” issue in 2017 (he also made the issue’s cover). In his interview with the magazine, Gregory notes that “certain people would say the city is dying, but it’s also continually being born.”

19 winters / 7 springs was presented at the Transformer Station in Cleveland before traveling to Rochester, where Gregory now lives and teaches. Last year, just before Christmas, I spoke with Gregory and Jake about the exhibition. They were together at a cabin in the Adirondacks. “It’s kind of like a guys’ trip this time,” Gregory said. They looked at Gregory’s pictures and spoke about Buffalo with both the fondness and distanced critique that comes from being away for so long. “There are things about your home that you feel forever bound to,” Jake, who now lives in New Haven, said. Yet the city calls them back, continually. As I listened to the Halpern brothers speak about their lives and work in Buffalo, I thought perhaps they never really left.

Brendan Embser: I grew up south of Buffalo, on the border of New York and Pennsylvania, but I haven’t actually been to Buffalo in years, so the key images in my mind are probably the most obvious ones, like the Galleria Mall or the Anchor Bar—or Canisius High School, where we used to go for debate tournaments. So, just to start off, I wonder if you could talk about your upbringing in Buffalo and how the city shaped your worldview.

Gregory Halpern: I’ve always found Buffalo kind of magical, which I realize to some people might sound like a ridiculous statement. I often think about when we were kids, exploring buildings. There were some key amazing buildings that I often think about as the source of my interest in where “realism” and “surrealism” come together. When we were teenagers, we would go to the old psychiatric center where you used to be able to just wander into the building. It was abandoned, but you could go in. Or the old central train terminal. They almost felt like pilgrimages to me. We made little documentaries of our explorations, with this old VHS camcorder. Jake, I don’t know if you have the same sort of feeling about those memories?

Jake Halpern: I totally remember that. I feel like we would get a little crew of friends together and then organize a visit.

Gregory: Were those impactful?

Jake: Yeah. To me, it felt like a version of Dungeons & Dragons. The premise of Dungeons & Dragons is that a group of explorers goes to the outskirts of the town where the ruins are and looks for treasures. One time we were in the Buffalo Psychiatric Center, and a sudden rainstorm came overhead, and because the roof was out, the stairwell was turned into roaring rapids. It was crazy. I think that if you’re growing up in a Midwestern town, and all of a sudden you can go to a place that feels like you’re on the set of Stranger Things—even though Stranger Things didn’t exist then—that was the feeling.

Brendan: Did you grow up in Buffalo proper, or the suburbs?

Gregory: We grew up in an area called North Buffalo. It was near Delaware Park, and there were a lot of beautiful old houses. It was definitely a far cry from the kind of places we’re describing. There weren’t like, ruins around us. It took a while to even kind of know that part of the city existed. I don’t think it was until we were teenagers that we could start to find these places that felt on the periphery of our maps.

Brendan: What is your relationship to Buffalo, now that you no longer live there?

Gregory: Growing up, I feel like there was this notion that if you’re going to “succeed,” you should leave. That’s less so now, because the city is having a bit of a renaissance. But I also remember being sort of pulled back there continually—photographically. I felt like I had something to share, or that I knew something about this place. The further away I got from it, the more unique I realized it felt.

Jake: To be honest, my relationship with Buffalo is complicated in the way that people’s relationships with home often are. There are things about your home that you’re eager to get away from, and there are things about your home that you feel forever bound to. I think it’s taken me much of my adult life to sift through those two opposing dynamics.

We moved there as transplants, because my dad got a job at the university there, and so we didn’t have deep roots in the city. We didn’t have any family there. We had friends, but they were friends that we made as we were growing up, and I never felt a deep connectedness when I was younger in the way that maybe some of our friends did. I think that when I left, like many young people who leave their homes, there was a kind of exhilaration and being out in the great world and thinking, Oh, where I come from is very small, and isn’t it great to see the wideness of the world?

I don’t ever feel like a total insider or a total outsider in Buffalo. But I think that’s been key to me—to have both insider knowledge, but also a little bit of distance.

Yet, as I’ve gotten older, I’m often surprised by the fact that the place has more meaning to me than I even admitted to myself, and like Greg, I’ve come back for stories. Many of the stories I’ve written are Buffalo-based stories: my book Bad Paper (2014), about the debt-collection industry; pieces I’ve written in the New Yorker about the refugees coming through Buffalo; the scrap-metal industry written for the New York Times Magazine. I think, in part, as a writer, the world of stories that are New York–based or LA-based or Chicago-based or Miami-based is just overpopulated, and Buffalo is this greatly overlooked place, but one that I think people are also curious about. It’s a place now that I both know and don’t know. But the older I get, the more I realize that it’s not just someplace in my rearview mirror that I left at eighteen and has nothing to do with me.

Brendan: Where did your family move from?

Jake: My dad and my mom were New Yorkers. Even though I was born in Buffalo, I just didn’t feel of that place. Another layer here is that we are Jews. There is a Jewish population in Buffalo, but it’s in the suburbs. I often say at our high school, City Honors, of one thousand people, I would bet there were maybe no more than ten Jews?

Gregory: Oh, I don’t think it was that many.

Jake: Yeah. Not that we were super-religious or anything. But that also added, for me, a slight otherness feeling.

Gregory: Totally.

Jake: We’ve both become tellers of stories, in a way, whose lives are dependent on being able to talk to people from very different walks of life. Greg had that at a much younger age than I did. He had a very easy time crossing barriers of race, class, clique, in a way that’s pretty unusual for high school. I found my small group of people where I felt I belonged in high school, and I didn’t venture out of that. It wasn’t until later on in my life—maybe even the era when I started returning to Buffalo as a storyteller—when I learned both the ability and also the joy of crossing those divides and telling other people’s stories.

Brendan: Did your parents end up feeling rooted in Buffalo?

Gregory: Our parents split up when I left for college. I’m the younger one. Our mom moved back to New York City, and our dad stayed in Buffalo. He’s totally fallen in love head over heels with Buffalo.

Jake: Our mom kept our house that we grew up in on Woodbridge Avenue for many years. Initially, it was nice to have that house, because there was a place to come home to. But she eventually sold it and built another house in western Massachusetts with Paul, our stepdad. Home is a weird idea. You can hold on to the shell of the house, even when it no longer serves a purpose because you’re tethered by all the memories that exist there. Sometimes you hold on to it so tightly because you want it, but it’s not home anymore, and you really need it to be someplace else. I relate to that kind of tug and pull.

Installation views of Gregory Halpern: 19 winters / 7 springs, George Eastman Museum, 2023

Brendan: That presents a fascinating reading of the three-dimensional work in Greg’s exhibition—the houses with the photographs of the solar eclipses on the interior. Greg, do you feel there’s a psychological aspect to this idea of home as both a shelter, but also as a place from which to look out—to dream of other ways of living?

Gregory: I like that reading. A home is where you sleep, and also where you dream. It’s one of those aspects of life that photography sometimes can’t get to. I was also just thinking about the very simple fact that photographs record the surface of things, literally—like light bouncing off the surface of a thing. Metaphorically, sometimes they only do that, and then sometimes they go deeper. I was thinking about those internal worlds, like the inside of a house that you want to know about, or inside of a person’s dream world that you can’t see with photographs.

Brendan: At what point along the many years of this project did you begin making those 3D works?

Gregory: I made the first house, a little tiny one, over ten years ago now. But it was all four sides. It looked cool, but it looked like a miniature, like a toy or a model, and it didn’t really feel like a work of art. Then, somewhere along the line—I don’t know if I was building it or taking it apart—I had to build two walls at a time. I saw a huge gaping hole in the middle of this house. That’s when this idea occurred to me that seeing the inside was maybe more interesting than just replicating the thing around all four sides.

Jake: To a child, your physical house is your world. It is your universe. On the outside, it may just look like clapboard, but inside, the memories of all the things you’ve explored and discovered for the first time, all the holidays, all the foods you’ve tasted—it’s this kind of wondrous space. It is the universe. I thought your sculptures captured that feeling.

Brendan: The exhibition is called 19 winters / 7 springs. Did you sense at the outset that this would be a long-term endeavor?

Gregory: I started the work when I was in graduate school in California. I was really struggling. Larry Sultan was my advisor, and he pulled me aside and he said, “I think you might need a third year.” It was a two-year program, and I wasn’t going to graduate because I couldn’t find anything in California to photograph. I had nothing to say. I had no idea what to do. But the one thing I feel like I’ve got to offer, or to say that I can claim as my own, was going back to Buffalo in winter. So I took a month in between the semesters, sort of in a panic, and I went back and I photographed every day in winter. That was nineteen years ago. That’s what inspired the title. But the oldest pictures in the book came from that winter.

Brendan: And that’s what pushed you over the finish line for graduate school?

Gregory: Yeah. I was able to get my diploma. Although in retrospect, I feel like a third year with Larry would have been great.

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Brendan: As someone from Western New York, my first interpretation of the title was that there were only seven springs, meaning it was so cold for those nineteen years that you only got seven warm seasons.

Gregory: I mean, in a way, yeah, it kind of is that! I first thought of the project as being about Buffalo and winter, because to me, that’s when the city earns its identity, and there’s a really unique feeling there in winter. But then I realized that it was more interesting to mix the other seasons, to create more dynamism in the work.

Jake: I never actually heard you say that, Greg. I didn’t know that when you were out in California, you were struggling to find what your work would be, and you went back to Buffalo. I feel like I’ve done that same thing many times. You want to tell a story, but you ask yourself, What story am I qualified to tell? What story hasn’t been told? When you’re going home to a place, even if you haven’t been there in a long time, there’s some sense of, well, this is my home. I’m not a stranger. When you tell a story, whether it’s through pictures or words, you’re basically an interpreter of place, but you also need to have left that place. I think that’s the commonality between my brother and I—we’re both, in our own ways, interpreters of Buffalo. Which is not to say that we know it better than anyone else. I haven’t lived there in almost thirty years. But maybe what gives me the sense is that I can—or that we can do that.

Brendan: Thanks for saying that. I was also thinking, Jake, about your reporting for the New Yorker on Vive, a shelter in Buffalo that supports asylum seekers. Can you talk about that experience?

Jake: The Vive story came to me through a mutual friend of Greg and ours from high school, Tara Lynch. I was visiting Tara in Austin, Texas, and she said that Vive was almost like an Underground Railroad for refugees. Again, you see the similarity between me and Greg in our worldviews. It felt mysterious and kind of magical, this idea that there’s a secret network that goes through Buffalo into Canada.

Gregory: Jake, you should say a word about who the refugees are. And our family connection to the refugee experience. It’s not related to Buffalo, our family history, but I think it’s related to how we both see the world.

Jake: At the time, Vive was inhabiting an old school building that had been in a significantly abandoned part of Buffalo. These migrants, some of whom were refugees, were hoping to continue to Canada and claim political asylum.

Gregory: Where were they coming from?

Jake: Their paths were incredible. Some could fly to the US on a tourist visa, and they would show up at Vive and get asylum. Others were coming from Eritrea, then ending up in South America, going overland via South America through Central America, showing up at the Mexican border, asking for asylum there, and then coming to Buffalo—all because when they were back in their native land of Eritrea or Mongolia or wherever, someone had told them they could get to this house in Buffalo. That was the part of the story that just blew my mind. But to Greg’s point: Our families were very much immigrants. My great-grandfather stowed away in a boat to come to America. So I think there’s a sense of connectedness to the Vive story, to the sense that an immigrant could end up in a far-flung outpost like Buffalo.

Gregory: Totally.

Brendan: Greg, I’m so intrigued to hear this story about your time in graduate school and your impulse to return to Buffalo. You made a photographic essay over many years about your hometown, but I don’t see it as autobiographical. It’s not full of snapshots or excavations of your family’s past. There’s a lot of restraint in the scenes you chose, and in your decision not to deal with very specific family memories, but to look at Buffalo in the widest possible way. Can you talk about that approach?

Gregory: That’s a great question. I was just looking at the pictures with Jake. There were two pictures that were made, actually, on our high-school playground, that are up now at Eastman, and there are some places and people that we have connections to. But I never wanted to make it specific or personal that way. It just never interested me, and I didn’t think that it would be interesting to others to make it too much about me. I guess it’s about a way of seeing. It’s about feeling my way through the city. In that sense, I feel it’s deeply personal. Somehow, I don’t fully see it until I actually go make pictures of it.

Brendan: It’s like what you said, Jake, about coming back to a place and having a perspective simply because now you’re an outsider.

Jake: There’s one picture in particular that stood out, of a house that’s surrounded by a red-brick building. It’s winter, and the street looks kind of desolate, and there’s snow on the roof. I looked at the photograph, and I did, like, a shiver, like, “Ooh!” It reminded me of this feeling of childhood and Buffalo. There could be, in the depths of winter, this kind of barrenness that not just made you feel cold, didn’t just chill your bones, but made you feel a kind of deep loneliness of trudging through a place that is a little bit forgotten by time.

Brendan: There is something poignant about the way that house seems to be crowded by a school or a municipal building of some sort, but it’s also very clearly a two-family house, because the staircase that’s covered in snow going up to the second floor appears to be the entry to the upstairs apartment. And no one has shoveled out the snow yet, which is a very familiar feeling for Western New York. The other one that struck me is a very modest but lovely little house where there are tulips in front, but also snow on the grass. To me, that’s quintessential Buffalo.

Gregory: I’m so glad you noticed the tulips because I always worry that they get missed. But yeah, that was an amazing moment.

Brendan: Greg, did you feel that the Buffalo work began to give you your photographic language that you later brought to your projects in California and elsewhere? It’s so interesting that you said that you didn’t have anything to say about California, and then you then went on to make XXYZX, an iconic project about a very specific place in California.

Gregory: XXYZX was the project where I finally found my voice. In a way, I’ve kind of continued in that tradition since. That took seven or eight years after I moved to California to figure out that I had something to say, and that’s where ZZYZX came from. I was living back in the East Coast when I did that ZZYZX work, and I was living in California when I started the Buffalo work. I think this gets back to what you were saying, Jake: there’s something really helpful about being both an insider and an outsider. I don’t know if the writing world is like this, but the photography world sometimes has this, I think, oversimplified language. Are you a photojournalist outsider? Or are you an insider making work about an identity or an experience that you can claim as your own? There’s a lot of fascinating and important work that sits somewhere in the middle. I don’t ever feel like a total insider or a total outsider in Buffalo. But I think that’s been key to me—to have both insider knowledge, but also a little bit of distance.

All photographs by Gregory Halpern, Untitled, from the series 19 winters / 7 springs, 2003–2023
Courtesy the artist

Jake: When I saw ZZYZX, I was absolutely blown away because I felt it was a quantum leap forward in your vision and your craft. You basically, to my mind, found a sun-drenched version of Buffalo in Los Angeles. All those themes that were there in Buffalo—the surrealness; the hints of the apocalypse; the biblical, wandering characters with their beards; all this stuff—you found it in this other place. And I had been to LA a lot, but I had never seen it through that lens. This is the lens of Buffalo being trained on some other world, creating some incredible original projection. I think that we both owe Buffalo a lot, in our own ways. It has taught us about the kind of characters and the stories that appeal to us. And it’s really powerful to see what that lens looks like when it’s moved somewhere else.

Gregory Halpern: 19 Winters / 7 Springs is on view at the George Eastman Museum, Rochester, New York, through March 3, 2024.

Nabil Harb Seeks Mystery and Community in Central Florida

In Polk County, Florida, Nabil Harb arranges his calendar around nights when the light turns green at dusk, how the shadows look blue in spring, or how the cicadas start to hum as the temperature reaches a hundred degrees. To live here is to know the feeling of humidity enveloping you like a duvet in July. To know in what oak hammocks you’ll find butterfly orchids blooming by May. And to count the seconds between lightning strikes and thunder in August. More than five and you’ll be fine.

Then, come September, Polk County’s creeks, rivers, and trickling branches of sweet water swell. The Green Swamp at the northern edge of the county collects the remnants of the afternoon storms before that water moves south into the Peace River as it wends its way into the Gulf of Mexico. For Harb, those veins of water that course through Polk County, alongside 554 lakes, form a map he’s been tracing all his life. With a camera, he’s started to draw his own maps, as did William Faulkner in his fictional Yoknapatawpha County, William Christenberry in Hale County, or Zora Neale Hurston next door in Orange County.

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Harb left his hometown three times, living in Boston, New York, and New Haven. And like many Southerners, he returned home three times—putting stakes down between the urban sprawl of Tampa Bay and the edge of the Everglades’ headwaters just south of Orlando. “I moved back because I don’t like being that far from my concerns,” he tells me. Often, folks told him, “You’re gay. You need to move to New York,” as if he couldn’t be himself at home. “I hate that,” he says.

Here, everything is growing, green as ever, always. The live oaks are ancient, the sites of treaties, lynchings, and produce stands. Bends in the river call up Indigenous history, archaeology, and colonialism. In making a photograph, Harb wants you to feel how wet it is, the fog of mosquitoes, the mist rising off the ground. He wants people to better understand what rural places once were and are becoming, to know there’s good and bad in Bartow, taciturn and queer in Eloise, this and that in Frostproof. He wants others “to actually see this place, rather than the stereotypes or easy metaphors.” Beneath the headlines generated by lawmakers’ political ambitions, past the policies that target the most vulnerable and most vital minorities in Florida, Harb gives a nod to the deep well of mystery here, to a place full of people as hopeful as they are complicated.

Nabil Harb, Allegra, 2019 Nabil Harb, Pulse Exterior (Lakeland), 2019

His parents, both Palestinians who left Nazareth, made lives together in Lakeland, Florida, but for Harb, who was raised there, the roads and rivers now seem bound up in his bones. Growing up brown, Muslim, and queer in central Florida set him apart from the good ole boys, but, he states softly, “I am just as much a part of this place.”

A year after the 2016 murder of forty-nine people at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Harb started photographing his local gay bar in Lakeland. The work he made there was the product of questions, or a way to ask them. But as he explains, you arrive with one set of questions and leave haunted by another. These photographs, which began in earnest six years ago, have become inextricably, although not deliberately, engaged with what’s happening in Florida and throughout America today.

And as in the photographs he was making all around Polk County—say, the bugs at dusk in the Green Swamp, or his friend Clay in the cab of a truck painted in mud—he focused on the quieter details inside the bar, capturing gestures, the sense that life was being lived and celebrated. His life. Here were the queens who formed the heart of the performances, but here, also, were the people sitting at the back of the bar, his friends, the ones who lent this building and this part of America its character. As he tells me, “You should see the people.”

Nabil Harb, Dani, 2018 Nabil Harb, J & J, 2019
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Nabil Harb, Vape, 2021 Nabil Harb, Northside, 2020 Nabil Harb, Python, 2022
All photographs courtesy the artist Nabil Harb, Carter Road, 2019

This article originally appeared in Aperture, issue 253, “Desire.”