Aperture's Blog, page 190

Night Climbing

By Ian Jeffrey

The Ivy Arch, St. John's College, St. John's Street. All photographs © Noël Howard Symington, The Night Climbers of Cambridge/Collection Thomas Mailaender.

Lion chimney (narrow climbing passage), Fitzwilliam Museum.

Note on the verso of the photograph, "The Face of [Gonville and] Caius [College]."

Trinity College, Fourth Court climb.

Back up Garrett Hostel Lane to Trinity Lane.

King's College Chapel (shown: Noël Howard Symington).

Why should Thomas Mailaender, a contemporary artist known for his impudent provocations, want to present us with photographs of students climbing on the roofs and walls of colleges at the University of Cambridge in the mid-1930s?

The Night Climbers of Cambridge was first published in 1937, by Chatto & Windus, a respectable publishing house in London. (The book, illustrated with photographs, was recently reissued by Oleander Press.) Mailaender, attracted by this peculiar venture, bought the original pictures and assembled them as a traveling exhibition. An odd choice, at first sight, but Mailaender has always been attracted by makeshift spoofs and charades. Nothing attracts him more than a tacky stunt where all the seams show. He is at home in the soft underbelly of the Internet, where self-satisfied egotists hog the limelight as they compete for delusional awards. In one noteworthy presentation he features as a beaming prize-winner holding on to outsize checks. He has a fondness for shaky facsimiles and rackety cover versions. His pictures of Algerian vehicles, piled high with possessions and discards, taken at the port of Marseille, look like nothing so much as a Joseph Beuys exhibition chanced upon in transit.

Mailaender is a saboteur. Bathos is his mode. His targets are credulity and complacency. He finds contemporary life, which includes contemporary art, ridiculous, pathetic, and entertaining. Long ago, before the night climbers plied their saucy trade on the walls of Cambridge, he would have been at one with Austrian writer Karl Kraus, who also appropriated pictures. Kraus’s leitmotif, you will remember, was the hanged body of the separatist Cesare Battisti displayed on a board in the moat of the Castello del Buonconsiglio in 1916 as part of a group portrait of executioners and accomplices all happy to be involved. Kraus saw it as a conclusive indictment of the Austrian Empire.

Note on verso of photograph, “Tottering Tower.”

The Cambridge adventurers fit Mailaender’s bill precisely. Maybe they meant no real harm. All the same they were climbing, which was a man’s business carried out regularly and hazardously on rock faces in the Lake District and in Wales—and sometimes in the Alps and on Everest where George Mallory and Andrew Irvine came stylishly to grief in 1924. In this context fooling around on the buttresses of King’s College or St. John’s couldn’t be taken seriously. The night climbers, headed by Noël Edward Symington, were, one might think, asking to be held in contempt.

They weren’t even doing anything very unusual, for any amount of famous names had amused themselves on those famous walls—Geoffrey Winthrop Young, for example, a famous alpinist and author of The Roof-Climber’s Guide to Trinity in 1899. What set the new generation apart was its interest in publicity. They photographed themselves in action, using flash—which drew the attention of passing policemen. They were, that is to say, interested in staged events, and at the time such events were popular in the British press: studio pictures, for instance, of films in the making and of early TV shoots at London’s Alexandra Palace.

“Tottering Tower,” Old Schools, Trinity Lane.

Meanwhile, in the real world the Spanish Civil War was in full swing—Guernica was bombed in 1937. In depressed Britain the government was at its wits’ end and the unemployed were up in arms—the famous Jarrow marches protesting unemployment and poverty also took place in 1937. The night climbers, cheeking the authorities and policemen, played their studiedly inconsequential part in this ghastly montage, and it is on this state of affairs that Mailaender has put his finger.

Ian Jeffrey is an art historian. Among many other projects, he was a major contributor to Thirties, a comprehensive survey of British art and design before the war, presented in 1979 at the Hayward Gallery, London.

Thomas Mailaender will exhibit The Night Climbers of Cambridge this September at Roman Road Project Space, London.

Aperture 212$19.95

Gus the Bear

By Sylvia Plachy

 

This essay was first published in issue 206 of Aperture magazine (Spring 2012).



 

Stop and go: always on some journey. My bounty is a photograph or two. I remember what pulled me, an instant of clarity, a moment of perfection, but where was I? Beyond the edge it often fades to darkness: I don’t always remember the season or the place.

 

But with Gus and Ida, I do remember. It was 1988. They were new residents of the renovated Central Park Zoo, which finally saw the end of those cramped little nineteenth-century cages. Gus was brought from Toledo and Ida from Buffalo. They were both rambunctious and about three years old—preteens, in polar bear terms. I saw them through the glass wall of the pool gliding and frolicking in their white buoyant bulks. What joy! I saw them again in 1992 resting on a rock, quietly locked in an embrace.

 

Almost twenty years passed and then last summer, I read in the paper that Ida had died and Gus was now alone. The morning I went to see him, he was nowhere to be found. I asked a woman standing next to me if she knew where Gus was? “I think he is in mourning,” she said, as though mourning were a place—some dark cave— rather than a state of being.

 



 

When I came back that afternoon, I knew from the commotion and the way the children were squealing that Gus was present. And there he was, a glorious thousand pounds, with eyes half-shut swimming back and forth, as if pacing. Each time he reached the outer edge of the pool, and before he threw himself back again into the water, he pushed himself up, raised his bushy head, shook off the water and took deep whiffs of the air—looking for Ida, I thought. Poor Gus.

 

I tried to find someone who might have known Gus over the years. The zoo officials didn’t know, didn’t care, said they’d call me. The zookeepers were busy and too young. All channels were blocked. I turned to the chatter on the Internet. Through the noise and PR jargon and giddy superficiality, I gleaned that Gus had been depressed before; some called him “the bipolar polar bear.” He had had expensive psychiatric therapy, and occasional relief with toys and distractions. Ida joined him in 1987 and Lily, another female bear from Germany, came a few years later and shared the “enclosure.” Lily is gone, too; she died seven years ago.

 

Time stands still in photographs. Like the guys in John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” the bears remain forever suspended in motion. Gus and Ida’s idyllic underwater dance, my illusion that all was well in some small corner of the world, was the truth only of that one second, a break in hours of tedium. Though there must have been many good moments and many visitors have been cheered, a zoo is a zoo: an enclosure is a prison. Outside, on the other hand, fear and hunger are frequent companions: Nature is not all it’s cracked up to be. Life anywhere is good only in spurts.

 

Now in this new portrait of Gus, he is alone. He is too old, I hear, to get used to yet another bear, his toys are really just plastic buckets, and as he continues his joyless swim at the dark side of the pendulum, he yearns for something—he doesn’t know what— perhaps not just his lost Ida.

 

As I leave the zoo, I read a sign on the fence: “Treat each bear as the last bear.” There is no source, no explanation. I am left with another riddle.

 

All photographs © Sylvia Plachy, 2012

Aperture 206$14.80Self Portrait With Cows Going Home




$50.00



Goings On About Town




$29.95

Juan Garcia de Oteyza (1962–2013)

Juan García de Oteyza at opening reception of Eirik Johnson’s Sawdust Mountain at Aperture Gallery, 2010.

I am sad to report the death of Juan Garcia de Oteyza in Mexico City on Monday, August 26. Juan was director of Aperture Foundation from 2008 to 2010. During his tenure he increased our international presence in Brazil, Mexico, and Spain. He was a superb editor, an excellent diplomat, and a visionary. At the end of his life he was still working with Fundación Televisa and Aperture in editing a book on the French photographer Bernard Plossu.

 

Juan had a great career in publishing, in promoting the arts, and as a diplomat. He was director of Editorial Turner in Madrid (2000 to 2004) and later in Mexico City (2004 to 2007). He became Cultural Attaché of the Mexican Embassy, serving in Washington from 2007 to 2008, when he joined Aperture as director. In 1985 Juan founded Eridanos Press to publish contemporary literature of non-English writers in English. From 1996 to 2000, he was director of the Mexican Cultural Institute in New York. He worked with the Museum of Modern Art on the first retrospective of Manuel Álvarez Bravo and also organized a tribute to the poet and Nobel Prize winner Octavio Paz at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. I worked closely with Juan, and his enthusiasm, knowledge, and charisma will be missed by members of his family, friends, and all of us at Aperture.

 

—Celso Gonzalez-Falla, Chairman of the Board.

Redux: Italo Calvino’s “The Adventure of a Photographer”

By Aveek Sen

Italo Calvino, Paris, January 1984. Photograph by Ulf Andersen/Getty Images.

Italo Calvino, the Italian writer, began his tribute to Roland Barthes in La Repubblica with a horrific image of defacement. Barthes, Calvino noted, had been disfigured beyond recognition by the accident that had killed him on February 25, 1980, lying unidentified for hours in the hospital. This reminded Calvino of the book that he was reading only a few weeks before its author’s death: La Chambre Claire, or Camera Lucida, as it is better known today. Sitting down to write the tribute in April 1980, Calvino was struck by how Camera Lucida was more a book about love and death than about photography. It made him think of Barthes lying dead, “name unknown,” in Salpêtrière, “the frail and anguished link with his own features . . . suddenly torn as one tears up a photograph.”

Most of us find it strangely difficult to tear up a photograph, even when it is of an inanimate object, a landscape, or someone we do not know. We find ourselves stopping short of the imagined violence of the act, finding it much easier to tear up, say, a letter. The flea markets of Europe, as Tacita Dean discovered while making Floh (2001), are full of photographs that have been abandoned rather than destroyed. Yet, the tearing up of photographs as an extreme gesture that fuses madness and violence forms the climax of a story written by Calvino in the mid-1950s. It is called “The Adventure of a Photographer” and became part of Difficult Loves, a collection of finely reflective short stories, or “adventures,” each involving a different figure: a poet, a reader, a traveler, a soldier. Written more than two decades before Camera Lucida and Susan Sontag’s On Photography, Calvino’s “The Adventure of a Photographer” reads, to me, like a far more contemporary parable about the medium than those canonical texts by the Sontag-Barthes-Benjamin trinity that remain mandatory for serious photographers or writers on photography today.

Calvino’s photographer, Antonino, is a “hunter of the unattainable.” Initially reluctant to pick up the camera his friends use so avidly, Antonino’s relationship with photography starts as a pursuit of “life as it flees,” but soon turns into a “passion difficult to put up with”—a state of isolation caught between obsessiveness and a pervasive sense of loss; everything that is not photographed is lost. Antonino realizes very quickly that what lurks in his “black instrument” is nothing but a kind of madness. This madness is a forking path. One path beckons outward, toward the doomed and impossible desire to document everything that exists and happens before it is lost forever. The camera must record all reality, all history; only then would it begin making some sort of crazy sense. The other one leads inexorably within, into the labyrinths from which the eyes, windows of the soul, look at the world outside. Yet, in his studio, as the photographer focuses the camera on his model, her body forced into a sequence of grotesque poses, the two roads, inner and outer, seem to cross again “in the glass rectangle.” It is “like a dream, when a presence coming from the depth of memory advances, is recognized, and then suddenly is transformed into something unexpected, something that even before the transformation is already frightening, because there’s no telling what it might be transformed into.” “Did he want to photograph dreams?” the half-mad photographer asks himself, and the suspicion strikes him dumb.

Italo Calvino, Gli amori difficili (Difficult Loves) (Einaudi, 1970). Courtesy Fondazioni Luigi Einaudi, Turin.

In recording Antonino’s descent into a psycho-pathology of everyday life driven by the camera, Calvino shows how photography could lead, through an obsession with capturing the real, toward the unhinging of the mind from that very reality. It is, paradoxically, the compulsion to document that dooms photography to transgress the limits of the visible, opening up a terrain that belongs to the imagination rather than to empirical certitude. In his tribute to Barthes, Calvino described the capacity of language to speak about things “that are not”: this was its fundamental difference from photography. Yet, in this story, Antonino takes photography close to the inwardness of the imagination unshackled from the real, and to the irreducible logic of memory, dream, and fantasy. This is also the domain of fiction and, dare one say, of art. It is the rigorous unruliness of fiction— rather than the discursiveness of theory, or the objectivity of history—that becomes the mode in which Calvino fathoms the meaning and possibilities of photography. It is fiction that rescues photography from the risk-averse middle path of empiricism by toppling the eye, and the eye’s mind, into the abyss of the invisible. As he lets go of the hope of capturing with his camera the “essence” of the woman he desires, Antonino stumbles upon his art’s most difficult secret: “Photography has a meaning only if it exhausts all possible images.”

Aveek Sen writes usually from Calcutta. In 2009, he was awarded the Infinity Award for Writing on Photography from New York’s International Center of Photography

Outside In

By Prajna Desai

Abelardo Morell, Light Bulb, 1991. All images © Abelardo Morell and courtesy the Art Institute of Chicago.

Photographer Abelardo Morell is a cunning revivalist, or so it would seem from Abelardo Morell: The Universe Next Door. This retrospective at the Art Institute of Chicago juxtaposes work inspired by nineteenth-century cameraless techniques with an impressive assortment of straight photography made over the last twenty-five years. Variety aside, the exhibition is mainly remarkable for the pictures made by camera obscura, the pre-photographic optical principle behind Morell’s most invigorating work since 1991.

On a basic level, the camera obscura operates like the human eye. Light entering a hole in a closed box projects onto the box’s interior an upside-down image of the world. In the case of the eye, the brain realigns the image to conform with reality. Early in his career, Morell built and photographed a camera obscura and the image it projected with a conventional camera placed outside the box. The resulting work, Lightbulb (1991), isolated an important characteristic of his visual vocabulary: an understated surrealism that reconsiders elementary photographic rules by inflecting a single frame with multiple perspectives and affects.

This emphasis on uncanny juxtaposition became more concrete when Morell enlarged the scope of his project and began using natural light. Manipulating a room in his house, this time with the camera inside, Morell shot only the image projected through the pinhole. Camera Obscura: Houses Across the Street in Our Bedroom, Quincy, Massachusetts (1991) required a prolonged exposure of eight hours. In the picture, the lone but massive bed seems to be dreaming. What is it dreaming? Perhaps the image above of several shrunken, dim, and upturned houses. Seminal for Morell, the picture established a symbolic affinity between private or interior space and the camera obscura; for him, both have the power to transform and subdue the outside world. In subsequent years, the camera obscura image invades blank areas, often walls and beds, as if they were screens. Sometimes it even belittles the external world. In Camera Obscura: The Sea in Attic (1994), the projection of the swirling sea becomes a dismal stain on the architectural space, itself self-assured and seductive.

Abelardo Morell, Camera Obscura: The Empire State Building in Bedroom, 1994.

As singular as they are, these camera obscura pictures fit neatly into an overarching view. For Morell, photography is not only a magical realm, as reflected in the exhibition’s title, which borrows from an e.e. cummings poem: “listen;there’s a hell / of a good universe next door;let’s go.” The everyday world is also inherently photographic—that is, ordinary things can unpredictably function as camera lenses. Both of these ideas repeat dogmatically throughout his work. For evidence of his first idea, one might look among his pictures of domesticity that frequently incorporate the silhouette of the classic American house. In Laura and Brady in the Shadow of Our House (1994), Morell’s children loll idly amid scratches in the dirt representing windows, a door, and a picket fence. Here, the shadow-house dignifies the scratched drawing as an architectural elevation, which in turn “house trains” the outdoor space, giving it the intimacy of a real home but the pixie charm of a dollhouse.

Morell’s second idea about lenses embedded everywhere in the world is encapsulated by a different picture made the same year. Shadows During Solar Eclipse (1994) seems fairly ordinary until we learn that the pockmarked silhouettes edged with light and covering the ground are so many pint-sized images of the semicircular sun in eclipse. Hundreds of intervals between the leaves above take up the role of pinholes. Though proving Morell’s argument about the world’s photographic nature, the picture also highlights an unfortunate feature of his work in general. The fascination with optical workings that uniformly infiltrates his oeuvre does not always produce pictures of great visual interest.

In 2005, Morell switched to color film and replaced the pinhole with a diopter lens to shorten exposure time and sharpen focus. A prism located within the camera obscura righted the projection. Upright Camera Obscura: The Piazetta San Marco Looking Southeast in Office (2007) is a later outcome of these modifications, by which the unprecedented clarity of the diopter projection allows the outside world to both dominate and solidify. In Morell’s earlier pictures, the projection of exterior architecture has a spectral quality. Here, it has the robustness of fact. Yet what stands out most is color itself, which saturates every aspect of the image. In Camera Obscura: Garden With Olive Tree Inside Room With Plants, Outside Florence, Italy (2009), color flattens the imaginative difference between the plushness of the natural verdure outside and the greenhouse artifice inside. Thus distracting from Morell’s previous emphasis on the strange encounter between incongruent worlds, color also changes the psychology of his camera obscura format. It goes from eerie fascination, earlier expressed by the tension between grayscale tones, to straightforward pleasure. Put simply, everything now looks equally, ecstatically beautiful.

Abelardo Morell, Tent Camera Image On Ground: View Looking Southeast Toward The Chisos Mountains, Big Bend National Park, Texas, 2010.

In 2010, Morell took the camera obscura outdoors. At Big Bend National Park in Texas, he erected a tent camera fitted with a periscope lens that directed the projected image onto the ground. Whereas nineteenth-century photographers used tent cameras to create precise records of the American West, Morell’s pictures took a pictorially adventurous route. Projecting a colossal elevation at a remove of miles onto the dirt at his feet distorted natural scale. Gravel, stone, and shrub pop out in pictures such as Tent Camera Image on Ground: View Looking Southeast Toward the Chisos Mountains, Big Bend National Park, Texas (2010). They are enlarged protoplasmic blotches among the miniaturized projections of gigantic limestone canyons and mountains. Dust powders the plane as irregular speckles. When Morell staged the tent in the urban outdoors of New York, mildly textured sidewalks or uniformly coarse park ground gave the projections a deliberately stippled appearance. The implied dialogue with late-nineteenth-century pointillism is particularly apparent.

Morell’s photographic wizardry is undoubtedly impressive, particularly in the tent-camera pictures. Yet his tenet of “abiding by the rigor of reality,” which he explains with a Zen saying about going to a tree if you want to write about it, would be admirable if the pictures exceeded the sum of their visual effects. Sadly, the plein-air camera obscura pictures fail to shake this trap; their pictorial highlights are simply equivalent to their optical tricks.

Pranja Desai is a writer of fiction and nonfiction currently based in Mumbai.

Abelardo Morell: The Universe Next Door is on view at the Art Institute of Chicago through September 2. For more information, click here.

Aperture #212 (Fall 2013)—Editors’ Note

Olaf Breuning, Pattern People, 2013. Courtesy the artist and Metro Pictures, New York.

Over the course of her career Helen Levitt found no shortage of off-the-cuff comedy playing out in New York’s streets. It’s fitting then that Tim Davis shared Levitt’s images with his photography students as examples of both levity and joy in the medium. Davis, in a diagnosis in these pages of “ photogeliophobia”—fear of funny photographs—observes that photographers have tended to downplay their sense of humor while responding to a world full of unexpected hilarity. Famously laconic, Levitt didn’t comment much on her work— maybe explanation took the fun away—but she did once admit to “looking for comedy more and more,” a quality she often found by surreptitiously photographing children at play.

This issue is loosely organized around the title Playtime, a nod to French filmmaker Jacques Tati’s brilliant 1967 send-up of the absurdities of modern living. Tati’s signature pokerfaced slapstick is felt across these pages. Erwin Wurm, speaking of his jarringly illogical One-Minute Sculptures and other works, remarks that he views humor as a vehicle to arrive at other meanings, including pathos. With her Drape series, Eva Stenram digitally rewires vintage pinup pictures, performing a kind of détournement that takes the wind out of the original images’ erotic charge. Italian polymath Bruno Munari—who began his artistic career as a Futurist painter in the 1920s—also worked as an illustrator, designer, and inventor, and brought all these talents to bear upon his photographs, which are performative, inventive, and unabashedly fun.

What are games and play without rules? Invented, often arbitrary rules governed the work of the Conceptual artists of the 1960s and ’70s discussed by Robin Kelsey: figures such as John Baldessari and Eleanor Antin, who responded to a tumultuous, uncertain era—and to the machismo and self-importance of “serious” art—by making games and clever gags a purposeful artistic strategy. More recently, Maya Rochat, one of the artists in the portfolio of young Swiss photographers assembled by Bruno Ceschel, suggests that “ non-seriousness is a refusal to fall asleep.” This group of artists exchange austerity and formality for absurdity and humor, freely mixing media to create brash and messy images fueled by a curiosity about how the medium can be stretched and explored. A number of these figures are associated, as instructors or one-time students, with two of Switzerland’s major art academies.

Schools, clearly, can serve as incubators for experimentation, playful thinking, and productive distraction. Over the last few years, James Mollison has photographed the anarchic theater that unfolds each afternoon across the globe’s schoolyards. Campus antics are of course nothing new, as we see in a portfolio from the 1930s showing a group of daredevil students at the University of Cambridge performing a precursor to parkour: scaling the walls and turrets of King’s and Trinity Colleges as though they were alpine slopes. Their dizzying images are reminders of how vertigo can remove us from the everyday, that play is often purposeless—sometimes undertaken primarily for the benefit of a spectator. Jo Ann Callis’s darkly physical images, published here for the first time, suggest a game of what does-this-feel-like? enacted for the photographer.

Central Archway Gibbs building, King’s College, ca. 1937. © Noël Howard Symington, The Night Climbers of Cambridge. Collection Thomas Mailender.

In his 1961 book Man, Play, Games, philosopher Roger Callois noted that “secrecy, mystery, and even travesty can be transformed into play activity.” Sophie Calle, an artist celebrated for her clever, mischievous projects, discusses her new series revisiting the brazen theft of artworks from Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. In her conversation with Melissa Harris, Calle teasingly suggests of her “documentary” project: “Maybe everything is invented. . . . Who knows?” Inversely, Japanese photographer Kazuyoshi Usui offers us admittedly fictional images that appear to be real, spinning Japan’s bygone Showa era into a pink-tinged future that never really happened. Poet Frances Richard speaks with Christian Marclay about his snapshots of found musical notation, repurposed and then literally played by musicians. Marclay notes that his approach to photography “includes a sense of playfulness because you’re not sure what the consequences are going to be.” This inquisitive spirit unites the many guises of play found in this issue—play as games, as fictions, as digital simulations; role-playing, playing music, and so on. The beauty of play, it seems, is that you never quite know where the game will take you.

After this issue, Diana C. Stoll, Aperture’s longtime senior editor, will be moving on to pursue personal projects. We will greatly miss Diana’s endless wisdom, brilliant editing, and impeccable eye. We wish Diana the best of luck in her new endeavors, but we don’t consider this a good-bye as we look forward to having her as a writer in our pages.

—The Editors

PhotoBook Awards 2013: New Arrivals Vol. 2

From College. Photographs by Michael Jang.

From KIEV. Book by Rob Hornstra/The Sochi Project.

From KIEV. Book by Rob Hornstra/The Sochi Project.

From KIEV. Book by Rob Hornstra/The Sochi Project.

From KIEV. Book by Rob Hornstra/The Sochi Project.

From Freeing the Fish. Photographs by Marieke ten Wolde.

From Freeing the Fish. Photographs by Marieke ten Wolde.

From Freeing the Fish. Photographs by Marieke ten Wolde.

From I Love You, Stupid!. Photographs by Dash Snow.

From I Love You, Stupid!. Photographs by Dash Snow.

From Black Sea of Concrete. Photographs by Rafal Milach.

From Black Sea of Concrete. Photographs by Rafal Milach.

From Black Sea of Concrete. Photographs by Rafal Milach.

From Monogatari of Pines. Photographs by Suda Issei.

From Monogatari of Pines. Photographs by Suda Issei.

From Monogatari of Pines. Photographs by Suda Issei.

From Lunar Landscapes - Maasvlakte 2. Photographs by Marie-José Jongerius.

From Lunar Landscapes - Maasvlakte 2. Photographs by Marie-José Jongerius.

From Lunar Landscapes - Maasvlakte 2. Photographs by Marie-José Jongerius.

From USSR 1991. Photographs by Keizō Kitajima.

From USSR 1991. Photographs by Keizō Kitajima.

From USSR 1991. Photographs by Keizō Kitajima.

From USSR 1991. Photographs by Keizō Kitajima.

From Pieces of String. Photographs by Justin Kimball.

From Pieces of String. Photographs by Justin Kimball.

From Pieces of String. Photographs by Justin Kimball.

From Formationen – Formations. Photographs by Samuel Henne.

From Formationen – Formations. Photographs by Samuel Henne.

From Close Out: Retail Relics and Ephemera. Photographs by Brian Ulrich.

From Close Out: Retail Relics and Ephemera. Photographs by Brian Ulrich.

From The Secret History of Khava Gaisanova. Book by Rob Hornstra/The Sochi Project.

From The Secret History of Khava Gaisanova. Book by Rob Hornstra/The Sochi Project.

With just six weeks remaining in the Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards 2013 call for entries, we offer the second in a series of looks at the latest photobook arrivals in each award category. In this installment we present a selection of entries to the PhotoBook of the Year category, which includes recently published books by photographers Rob Hornstra, Keizō Kitajima, Dash Snow, and Brian Ulrich.

 

In case you missed it, take a look back at Latest Arrivals Vol. 1, which highlighted selections from the First PhotoBook category. And stay tuned for more images from the 2013 entry pool, which will be featured on the PhotoBook Awards site and on Instagram (@aperturenyc) in the months to come.

 

Ready to submit? Visit the prize site for FAQ and full entry details.

Economy Class

By Joanna Fiduccia

In fall 2005, as riots surged across the outskirts of Paris, English got a new Gallicism—one that, for once, concerned neither food nor fashion. That word, banlieue, wedged itself between its translation, suburb, which in America signifies a middle-class Elysium, and the peripheral housing blocks where the deaths of two teenage boys had fomented large-scale wide-civil unrest. Yet to go by the insights of Jeanne Haffner’s recent book, the real distinction may lie not in what we call these spaces, but in how we see them. If America, land of the automobile, sees itself through a windshield, France views its cities from the airplane cockpit. From that vantage, the banlieue is not a haven; it is a margin, a banned place.

The View from Above: The Science of Social Space charts fifty years of aerial photography in France, from its early use in military intelligence and ethnographic research to its role in constructing and critiquing the contemporary banlieue. Readers looking for a history of aerial photography, however, won’t find it here. Haffner’s book is a genealogical study not so much of a photographic genre as the discipline it by turns formed and undergirded: the study of social space. Although it parallels new studies in cultural geography and technologies of vision by the likes of Denis Cosgrove and Jonathan Crary, View from Above shifts our attention from the formation of subjects to the birth of discourses.

For Haffner, the “production of space,” in Henri Lefebvre’s phrase, became a viable field of study through the aerial photograph. The view from above gave a motley crew of French sociologists, politicians, theorists, and ethnographers tools to read space as a network of social, economic, and environmental relations. Haffner moves nimbly from outlining the professional utility of aerial photography, which lent a young, interdisciplinary field an air of objectivity and scientism, to describing its political potential as an instrument to analyze economic disparity. In the course of these insights, she unearths a cast of lesser-known heroes of the ether—“human geographer” Pierre Gourou, socialist sociologist Raymond Ledrut, and the proto-urban sociologist Paul-Henry Chombart, who emerges as the book’s central protagonist.

Chombart’s privileged position reflects less the influence of his work than its exemplary nature. Chombart, argues Haffner, hit a disciplinary sweet spot, embracing the scientific promises of the vue d’ensemble while using its findings to advance a humanist agenda. Aerial photography emerges as a fallen Esperanto for urban planners and sociologists, a Tower of Babel of interdisciplinary Marxism struck down by the very field it once structured. In the final chapter, Haffner traces the rejection of aerial photography as the French New Left began to suspect that such distanced views obscured rather than revealed the realities of everyday life. To these intellectuals, Lefebvre central among them, aerial photography signaled an oppressive, technocratic approach to urban planning at loggerheads with a socialist critique of capitalism. While clearly sympathetic to this critique, Haffner doesn’t conceal her dismay at its rejection of the “view from above.” Holistic viewpoints, she urges, are more than ever necessary. The view from above exposes the global consequences of capitalism, social and environmental injustices that can be read on the surface of the world. But few can claim ignorance of those injustices today, with or without the vue d’ensemble. Any larger claim to the significance of aerial photography would seem to depend on the particular moral force of the photographs themselves—a force Haffner does not directly address.

Be that as it may, the aerial view’s charms turn here on the aesthetic of its golden years. The View from Above is richly illustrated with photographs and diagrams, from Marcel Griaule’s low-flying shots of Dogon territory to Le Corbusier’s doodles of Latin American urban organicism—with nary a Situationist collage or satellite image in sight. As Haffner notes, one development behind the left’s rejection of the aerial photograph was a dramatic change in scale, marking not just a different degree of visual information, but a new vantage. The cockpit became the satellite, and with that change came new authorities: the pilot-cum-photographer gave way to state-controlled surveillance. By choosing to narrate the development of a discourse rather than a technology, Haffner neglects to discuss who owned and controlled aerial photography, and how that history might inflect her research.

I suspect such a focus might have displaced the spirit of contradiction in this book—a sign, perhaps, of any good study of modernism. The conflicts here are abundant and intriguing, swinging with a kind of simian agility across political and ontological positions. They occur between the “mechanical objectivity” of the aerial view and its interpretive burden; between its usefulness for critiquing capitalism and its deployment by Vichy-era politicians; and between its capacity to glean the underlying social structure of a culture, and the observation, made by Claude Levi-Strauss, that spatial configurations reflect not the reality of a culture, but the ideals of its elite. This discernment into the limits of aerial photography, however, is muffled by those thinkers—Haffner, perhaps, included—who would see in the technology a means of speaking across disciplines to improve the lot of the many. At times, Haffner herself seems to slip from recounting the early faith in aerial photography’s legibility to adopting that faith herself, and thereby excluding the contemporary critiques. For Lefebvre, in any case, it was the supposed absolute legibility of these methods that allowed them to colonize everyday life. Lefebvre’s own insight, cited by Haffner, is instructive here: “Inasmuch as the act of seeing and what is seen is confused, both become impotent.”

Joanna Fiduccia is a critic, curator, and PhD student in the Department of Art History at the University of California, Los Angeles. She lives in New York.

Jeanne Haffner’s The View from Above is available now from MIT Press.

This another workshop

Tuition: $500 ($450 for currently enrolled photography students and Aperture Patrons)

Do you know where you’re going next with your photography—or where it’s taking you? This intensive weekend workshop will help photographers begin to understand their own distinct way of seeing the world. It will also help photographers figure out their next step photographically, from deepening a unique vision to discovering and completing a long-term project to translating a body of work into books and exhibitions. This is a workshop for serious amateurs and professionals alike, taught by Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb, a creative team who often edit projects and books together, including their joint book and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, exhibition Violet Isle: A Duet of Photographs from Cuba; Alex’s recent Aperture book, The Suffering of Light; and Rebecca’s new book My Dakota. Included in the workshop will be an editing exercise as well as an optional photography assignment or long-term-project review. Participants should be prepared to ask questions, as these concerns will help shape the ultimate direction of the workshop.

Alex Webb is best known for his vibrant and complex color photography, often made in Latin America and the Caribbean. He has published nine books, including Istanbul: City of a Hundred Names, Aperture and Violet Isle: A Duet of Photographs from Cuba (with Rebecca Norris Webb). His latest book, The Suffering of Light, a collection of thirty years of his color work, was published by Aperture (2011). Alex has exhibited at museums worldwide, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; and Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego. Alex became a full member of Magnum Photos in 1979. His work has appeared in National Geographic, New York Times Magazine, Geo, and other magazines. He has received numerous awards and grants.

Originally a poet, Rebecca Norris Webb has published three photography books that explore the complicated relationship between people and the natural world: The Glass Between Us, Violet Isle: A Duet of Photographs from Cuba (with Alex Webb), and My Dakota, which interweaves her text and photographs from her home state of South Dakota. In 2012, My Dakota was selected as a Time, PDN, and Photo-Eye best photography book of the year. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the George Eastman House, Rochester, New York In 2012, My Dakota was exhibited at the Dahl Arts Center in Rapid City, South Dakota, and the Robert Klein Gallery, Boston, and will be exhibited in summer 2013 at the Ricco/Maresca Gallery, New York, and the North Dakota Museum of Art, Grand Forks. Her work has appeared in Time, Orion, and Le Monde Magazine.

WORKSHOP SCHEDULE

Friday, June 21

7:00–8:30 p.m.—Alex and Rebecca’s joint slide talk, book signing, and Q&A, open to the public.

Saturday & Sunday, June 22–23

10:00 a.m.–6:00 p.m.—This weekend workshop will begin with reviews of each participant’s work on Saturday morning, a process that will spark a larger discussion about various photographic issues, including the process of photographing spontaneously and intuitively; how to edit photographs; how to work in cultures different than one’s own; and how long-term projects can evolve into books and exhibitions. The first day will end with a group editing exercise and an optional photography or editing assignment. Sunday will be dedicated to reviewing each participant’s assignments, as well as a series of presentations about bookmaking and exhibitions that will end with an informal Q&A session with the Webbs. Lunch will be served.

Refund/Cancellation Policy for Aperture Workshops

All fees are nonrefundable if you withdraw from a workshop less than one month prior to its start date, unless we are able to fill your seat. In the event of a medical emergency, please provide a physician’s note stating the nature of the emergency, and Aperture will issue you a credit that can be applied to future workshops. Aperture reserves the right to cancel any workshop up to one week prior to the start date if the workshop is under-enrolled, in which case a full refund will be issued. A minimum of eight students is required to run a workshop.

Picking Up the Pieces

By Chris Wiley

Thomas Hirschhorn, Touching Reality, 2012. Courtesy the artist; Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris; and Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York.

Mishka Henner, Unknown Site, Noordwijk aan Zee, South Holland, 2011. Courtesy the artist.

Hito Steyerl, still from Abstract, 2012. Courtesy the artist. Photo: Ray Anastas and Leon Kahane.

Shimpei Takeda, Trace #7, Nihonmatsu Castle, 2012. Courtesy the artist.

Lucas Foglia, Acorn with Possum Stew, Wildroots Homestead, North Carolina, 2006. Courtesy the artist.

Oliver Laric, still from Versions, 2010. Courtesy the artist and Tanya Leighton, Berlin; and Seventeen, London.

Implicit in the purposefully vague title of the third International Center of Photography triennial, A Different Kind of Order, is a sense that some substantial schism has recently taken place, within photography as much as within broader society, and has upset our normal ways of thinking and doing. It begs the question: how? Though the exhibition’s curators—Kristen Lubben, Christopher Phillips, Carol Squiers, and Joanna Lehan—have provided myriad provisional answers by way of an eclectic collection of work produced by a largely interesting assortment of artists, it is telling that the show’s working title was less sanguine: Chaos.

Indeed, chaos rears its head frequently in the show, most notably in the form of strong works that allude to various political and environmental crises. Chief among these is Thomas Hirschhorn’s deeply disquieting, deceptively simple Touching Reality (2012), a looping five-minute video of a woman’s hand scrolling through iPad images that depict the battered, broken bodies of people killed in recent conflicts. These images, which are readily available on the Internet but rarely, if ever, surface in the mainstream media, are unspeakably horrific: brain matter oozing out of shattered skulls, slick viscera flopped on dusty pavement, severed heads decorated with macabre tassels of tendon, vein, and bone. They form a relentless, stomach-churning parade of death and suffering. Incongruously, however, the hand guiding us through this grizzly landscape is slender, pretty, and well manicured. It caresses the glossy surface of the space-age tablet gingerly, lingering on certain images or zooming in on details both terrible and banal, as if conducting a virtual forensic investigation. Just as often, it blithely flips past gruesome scenes as if it belonged to a distracted teenager idly cruising her Instragram feed. In this, the piece vaults past mere agitprop to become a metaphor for our own state of digitized distraction and desensitization, providing a holistic dissection of a particularly fraught aspect of contemporary image politics through an elegant economy of means.

Videos by Hito Steyerl and Rabih Mroué also provide nuanced looks at the intersection of politics and image culture. Steyerl, for her part, presents a pair of videos concerning the death of her friend Andrea Wolf at the hands of the Turkish government, a result of her participation in the PKK, a Kurdish separatist movement. The best, and most well-known, of these videos, November (2004), tracks Wolf’s transmogrification from the ersatz revolutionary that she often played in her and Steyerl’s homemade B-movies into the real thing, and ends with her image’s immortalization by way of protest placards commemorating her martyrdom. The accompanying two-channel video, Abstract (2012), is something of a contemporary take on Brecht’s famous observation about a photograph of a factory revealing nothing of social and political relations that undergird it. It pairs scenes of Steyerl photographing the Berlin outpost of American defense contractor Lockheed Martin with those showing her and a friend being guided around a placid patch of mountainous terrain where Wolf and a group of her compatriots were bombarded with Lockheed-manufactured Hellfire missiles. Mroué’s contribution, the video version of a performance lecture entitled The Pixilated Revolution (2013), operates in a similar vein: the artist delivers a complexly poetic “non-academic lecture” on citizen journalism during the current Syrian civil war, inspired by a friend’s observation that in the absence of official media coverage “the Syrian people are filming their own death.”

Trevor Paglen, The Fence (Lake Kickapoo, Texas), 2010. Collection New School Art Collection. Courtesy the artist; Altman Siegel, San Francisco; Metro Pictures, New York; and Galerie Thomas Zander, Cologne.

Other notable works in the show point to contemporary chaos and upheaval but mostly shy away from self-reflexivity. These include a collection of striking photograms by Shimpei Takeda that resemble rudimentary images of the cosmos, exposed by way of contact with radioactive soil from areas surrounding the Fukushima nuclear disaster; Gideon Mendel’s affecting though slightly stagey images of victims of massive flooding precipitated by manmade climate change; and Lucas Foglia’s more lyrically inflected photojournalistic studies of American secular and religious intentional communities whose pastoralism, in this context, is tinged with an air of the post-apocalyptic.

Of all the politically inflected pieces in the show, however, only two bodies of work—by Mishka Henner and Trevor Paglen—suggest what one aspect of the exhibition’s titular “different order” might be. Both examine the shadowy doings of government. Henner appropriates sections of Google Maps that have been censored in an inadvertently artful, kaleidoscopic manner to conceal sensitive sites. Paglen presents a pair of sublime, horizonless skyscapes intruded upon by the nearly imperceptible presence of unmanned drones. A companion video, Drone Vision (2010), consists of an eerie snippet of drone’s-eye-view footage intercepted from a communications satellite, and an image, created in collaboration with an amateur radio astronomer, of the vast United States government radar system known as “The Fence,” designed to detect foreign spacecraft and intercontinental ballistic missiles. While chaos runs roughshod over the tender earth, these works intimate a new order being instilled from above: a global, high-tech network of surveillance and control whose construction within the United States was aptly characterized by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden as the foundation of “turnkey tyranny”—an architecture that, once in place, could usher in an Orwellian future with a mere flick of a switch.

This, however, is only half the story. The triennial’s secondary, more parochial concern lies not with the fate of the world, but with the medium of photography itself. Of course, taken in the context of an institution whose very existence is predicated on medium specificity, this concern’s parochialism is relative.

Photography, in its traditional incarnations, is at a crossroads. Perhaps paradoxically, at the moment of the medium’s greatest profusion—2012 statistics place the number of photos uploaded to Facebook alone at three hundred million per day—it has begun appearing to teeter on brink of exhaustion. Everything, it often seems, has already been catalogued in the Internet’s vast Borgesian library of images, or soon will be. This sense, whether true or not, appears to have provoked a number of the artists in the show to either high-tail it towards analog processes and hybrid forms (Sam Falls’s ubiquitous fabric fades, the ones here made by wrapping hand-dyed bed sheets around boulders in Joshua Tree and leaving them to blanch in the desert sun) or to engage in self-reflexive analysis of the rapidly shifting image culture in which they find themselves (Oliver Laric’s Versions videos, widely known in Europe, which examine the ontologically destabilizing nature of copies, bootlegs, and remixes).

Rabih Mroué, Blow Up 4, 2012. Courtesy the artist and Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Beirut / Hamburg.

Tellingly, neither Falls’s fades nor Laric’s videos fit comfortably in the traditional category of “photography,” an assessment that could be made about many of the best works in the show. This, of course, is to the curators’ credit, but it raises a serious question for ICP and institutions like it around the world: with the medium chafing against its historical constraints and its boundaries becoming increasingly blurred, isn’t it time, once and for all, to tear down the barriers that have kept photography from expanding its territory? In short: is the “photography museum” necessary?

Chris Wiley is an artist and writer. His work was recently on view in the exhibition Lens Drawings at Marian Goodman Gallery, Paris.

A Different Kind of Order remains on view at the International Center of Photography through September 22.