Aperture's Blog, page 191

Harold E. Edgerton—”Doc” Edgerton and His Laboratory Notebooks

By Jimena Canales

Front cover of notebook 31, in use January 11, 1973–August 17, 1975.

Page 88 from notebook 8, in use June 1, 1937–April 16, 1938.

Page 47 from notebook 1, in use June 18, 1948–February 7, 1950.

Page 122 from notebook 7, in use April 28, 1936–May 27, 1937.

Page 79 from notebook T-3, in use January 20–July 13, 1932.

Page 100 from notebook 9, in use April 18, 1938–June 12, 1939.

Page 3 from notebook 10, in use June 13, 1939–September 17, 1940.

Page 42 from notebook 9, in use April 18, 1938–June 12, 1939.

Page 73 from notebook 25, in use April 29, 1938–May 14, 1960.

Page 78 from notebook EE, in use December 8, 1948–April 8, 1951.

“Let a cannon-bullet pass through a room, and in its way take with it any limb or fleshy part of man.” This dramatic scenario was envisaged by the great Enlightenment thinker John Locke in 1689. The bullet, he reasoned, “must touch one part of the flesh first, and another after, and so in succession.” But the action would happen so instantaneously that no one would be able to “perceive any succession, either in the pain or sound of so swift a stroke.” Our rational minds tell us that rapid events occur in a certain order, even though this order cannot be perceived. Since Locke’s early speculations, generations of researchers have worked hard to understand an increasingly fast-paced world. With the help of electronic flash, photographers were able to arrest Locke’s imagined projectile in midair: in the 1930s, Harold E. “Doc” Edgerton, working at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, captured a rifle’s bullet flying at the vertiginous speed of 2,700 feet per second. The first use of flash is usually attributed to one of the inventors of photography, William Henry Fox Talbot. In 1851 Talbot used a simple electric spark to illuminate a moving target—a page of the London Times that was pinned on a rapidly rotating wheel. To his amazement, the resulting photograph was legible. At the turn of the century, the British physicist A. M. Worthington used sparks to illuminate splashing drops, and in France during the 1920s the Seguin brothers developed the “stroborama”— a machine made first with mercury and then with neon arc lamps. As scientists extended the field of flash illumination beyond the spark, they increased the range of their visual studies.

Edgerton’s first announcement of strobe technologies appeared in a 1931 issue of the journal Electrical Engineering. James R. Killian, a young science writer (later president of MIT and one of Dwight Eisenhower’s most trusted scientific advisors), was immediately fascinated by strobe lights. For more than forty years, Edgerton and Killian worked as a team: one taking the photographs and the other writing about the “meaning of the pictures.”

Page 151 from notebook 26, in use May 14, 1960–January 18, 1962.

In 1932 Edgerton’s images were published in Technology Review, a student-run MIT journal edited by Killian, who also wrote the preface to Edgerton’s first book about strobe technology, the handsomely illustrated Flash! Seeing the Unseen by Ultra High-Speed Photography (1939). When the United States joined World War II, Edgerton went on active duty; his night-reconnaissance work (using a 40,000-watt-per-second xenon flash) won him the Medal of Freedom. Upon returning home, he cofounded a highly lucrative defense-contract business from which he and his partners made a munificent living. Among their many endeavors, they developed a shutterless “rapatronic” (“rapid” and “electronic”) camera that was able to photograph the first stages of superfast nuclear explosions. In 1954 Killian and Edgerton republished Flash!. The original 1939 edition had included a photograph of a golf club hitting a ball; in the later volume this image was replaced with one of an atomic bomb explosion. While much had changed during a decade and a half of war and Cold War, Killian’s preface to the book was unaltered. Edgerton was, Killian noted there, “first of all a scientist and an electrical engineer, investigating, measuring, seeking new facts about natural phenomena.” Nonetheless, Killian also insisted that “these pictures are not only facts, but new aesthetic experiences,” which he compared to Edward Weston’s cypress trees and rocks, Edward Steichen’s sunflowers, and Alfred Stieglitz’s clouds and hands. He described Edgerton’s images as “literal transcriptions” of nature, broadly fitting within a realist theory of representation. They were, Killian asserted, “scientific records” written in a “universal language for all to appreciate.”

For Edgerton himself, strobe photographs were something else: records of the unforeseen and the unexpected. As he would put it decades later: “A good experiment is simply one that reveals something previously unknown to the student.” Many aspiring young engineers arrived at his MIT Strobe Lab believing otherwise: “Some students expect the results to prove the initial assumption, but I have always empathized with the student who sees new discoveries and knowledge that were not anticipated flowing from the laboratory.” According to Edgerton, there was “no such thing as a ‘perfect’ result or a complete study of the phenomenon.” His laboratory notebooks, filled with notes, handscrawled diagrams, and snapshots documenting his work, reveal the flowing stage of production—often referred to as “science in action”—which belies the static, “ready-made” outcome presented at the end. In contrast to the published photographs, those in his lab notebooks show a different behind-the-scenes spectacle: most interestingly, scientists (including Edgerton himself) working their machines. Killian was not concerned with the production process of science or with unexpected results that could suddenly surface in real time. For a number of like-minded thinkers—including Aristotle and Albert Einstein—time was as predictable as space. Edgerton’s machines “manipulate time as the microscope or telescope manipulates space,” Killian wrote. Modern science “ enabled us to see and understand by contracting and expanding not only space but time.”

Edgerton was not as optimistic as Killian. “Although I’ve tried for years to photograph a drop of milk splashing on a plate with all the coronet’s points spaced equally apart, I have never succeeded.” But he was hardly disappointed: “In many ways, unexpected results are what have most inspired my photography.”

Page 46 from notebook 19, in use June 18, 1948–February 7, 1950.

Edgerton expected the unexpected. In 1952 came an ultimate case in point: in approximately ten nanoseconds, one of the handheld cameras he and his associates had developed captured the initial stages of the first hydrogen bomb explosion, which obliterated Elugelab Island, part of the Enewetak Atoll in the Marshall Islands of the Pacific. Even those who had witnessed atomic tests were stunned by the bomb’s capacity for destruction: the explosion was more than twenty times the size of the Hiroshima fireball. Not only was Elugelab vaporized, but life on the surrounding islands was destroyed. Radiation blanketed most of the atoll, and hundreds of natives expelled from the island were left with nowhere to return to. As in Locke’s seventeenthcentury description, the pain on the ground did not match with the knowledge of the succession of events—this time on a scale never before imagined.

Jimena Canales is associate professor of the history of science at Harvard University. She is the author of A Tenth of a Second: A History (University of Chicago press, 2010) and numerous articles on the history of science, film, photography, art, and architecture.

All images courtesy MIT Libraries, Institute Archives and Special Collections, Harold Eugene Edgerton Papers, Cambridge, Massachusetts. All rights reserved.

Sneak Peek: Aperture Magazine’s Fall Issue

Here’s a first look at the Fall 2013 issue of Aperture magazine. These images were taken on press this summer at Optimal Media in Röbel, Germany. The Fall issue, which is loosely organized around the theme “Playtime,” features work by Christian Marclay, Sophie Calle, Erwin Wurm, and Saul Leiter, among others, plus contributions by artist Tim Davis, photo historian Robin Kelsey, film director Mike Mills, and many more.

Not yet a subscriber? Sign up before July 29 to receive the Fall issue in your mailbox this August. The issue’s full table of contents, with selected articles available to read for free, will be placed live on the website in August.

All images courtesy Scott Williams, A2/SW/HK

Video: The Fine Art Photo Market from Birth to Today

Last April, the Association of International Photography Art Dealers held a series of panel discussions in conjunction with its annual AIPAD Photography Show. Among the topics discussed was “The Fine Art Photo Market from Birth to Today.” Noting that the transformation of photography in recent decades has been nothing short of revolutionary, the panel explored how developments in the field have been driven by the marketplace.

 

Speakers on the hourlong panel, which you can watch in its entirety in the video above, included Catherine Edelman, of Catherine Edelman Gallery, Chicago; Celso Gonzalez-Falla, chairman of the board, Aperture Foundation; Duane Michals, artist; and Susanna Wenniger, senior specialist, photography, Artnet. The moderator is Jill Arnold, director, business development, AXA Art Insurance Corporation.

David Horvitz’s Sad, Depressed, People

Installation view at Recess, New York.

Attention New Yorkers: Are you feeling sad? Depressed? Even if not, can you plausibly fake it? If so, you may wish to visit Recess, the artists’ workspace located in Soho at 41 Grand Street. Artist David Horvitz is in residence there through tomorrow at 1:00 p.m. He’s shooting portraits of people “acting out stock depictions of sadness and depression” as a continuation of the project collected in his 2012 book Sad, Depressed, People. As the artist says: “This is a fake sadness. It is a superficial depression. One sold on stock sites. A sadness that has been hijacked and auctioned off….”

Even if you can’t make it in time to pose, the show remains on view through August 10, and Horvitz will present a 35-mm slide show of the images in the series he has made to date. Paired with Horvitz’s presentation is a related project by artist Penelope Umbrico. For more information, visit the Recess website.

Video: Richard Renaldi, Chris Boot on Touching Strangers

Richard Renaldi spoke with Chris Boot last week on the recent progress that has been made on the Touching Strangers project, upcoming plans to shoot in New Mexico, Arizona, and Los Angeles, and the impact of the overwhelming support—via Kickstarter and elsewhere—on the growth and future of the series, which includes expanded plans for the photobook and an exhibition at Aperture Gallery.

 

Richard also offers a look at the 17-by-22-inch print Jeromy and Matthew, 2011, which will be available exclusively to Kickstarter supporters who pledge at the $1,500 level and above before August 5.

Jeromy and Matthew, 2011, Columbus, OH, from the series Touching Strangers. Available in a limited edition of 15, exclusively through Kickstarter.

Embedded Images

By Susie Linfield

Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, An Iraqi boy celebrates after setting fire to a damaged US vehicle that was attacked earlier by insurgents, Baghdad, April 4, 2004. © Ghaith Abdul-Ahad

Julian Stallabrass describes his anthology Memory of Fire: Images of War and the War of Images as comprised of “pairs of loosely associated essays and interviews.” Stallabrass is an unusually thoughtful photography critic, but this is an overly generous description. Reading this anthology—many of whose pieces date from 2008, and some of which were previously published—is like trolling through a flea market looking for gems. The book mounts no sustained argument, or arguments; instead, it covers—in a fairly haphazard fashion—such issues as the role of embedded photographers; the use of torture in the wars in Afghanistan and, especially, Iraq; and the ways in which technological changes are affecting the reception of photojournalism and the work of photojournalists. Still, I like flea markets, and there is enough of value in this volume to make it worthwhile to anyone interested in the contemporary challenges of war photojournalism.

The best parts of this book are its surprises. Rita Leistner, a co-author of the 2005 volume Unembedded, mounts a surprising defense of the much-maligned practice of embedding, which she has practiced; she also notes, though, that she always felt “queasy and a little dirty” watching checkpoint interrogations of Iraqi civilians by American troops. Ashley Gilbertson, who for years has taken extremely powerful images from Iraq and Afghanistan for the New York Times, bluntly defends the practice—and the importance—of showing these wars from all sides, including that of American soldiers. Embedding, he explains, is not “anything different from what we normally do. The reason to embed is . . . for the access, for that intimacy, to see what they see and to feel what they feel.” Another surprise is Welsh photojournalist Philip Jones Griffiths—author of the canonical, 1971 anti-war book Vietnam Inc.—revealing that he “distrusted” the anti-war movement. As for the Vietnamese, he observes: “I was struck throughout the 1980s by the way the Vietnamese cared for one another and were kind to each other in a way that I never saw during the war years.” So much for the nobility of war.

The inadequacy of photography to portray the anguish of war is a theme that runs, if somewhat haphazardly, throughout this book. Stallabrass opens the volume by discussing “the apparent failure of photojournalism to describe the new circumstances of war and occupation,” and sets an exigent moral tone by noting how “easy [it is] to forget that bloody subterranean murmur”—the continuing carnage in Iraq and Afghanistan—“which should stain our whole experience.” Geert van Kesteren—who turned to Iraqis’ cell-phone pictures as a way of presenting and understanding the war from their perspective—rues the gap between photograph and experience, especially in his own work: “the stories that people were telling me were so extreme and the pictures I could take so mundane.” Similarly, Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin remark that the images they took of wounded British soldiers “failed and would always fail to represent any of the trauma.” But the helplessness that is sometimes expressed is, I think, exaggerated. The critic Sarah James complains that “the technological nature of today’s warfare has resulted in a war that is nearly impossible to document as it happens” and wonders if “the terror of death can no longer be photographed.” Yet she never makes clear why, when it comes to the wars discussed here, the sorrow is deeper and the meaning more occluded; photojournalists—at least thoughtful ones—have struggled with the gap between suffering and image almost since the medium’s inception. In fact, some of the photographs in this book—and elsewhere—refute James’s claims, which she states but does not substantiate. And why does she describe “today’s globalized, technological warfare” as “unfathomable”?

When it comes to technology, Memory of Fire throws a nice cold splash of water on the illusions of the techno-utopians. Trevor Paglen, who has photographed hidden military installations, warns against “equating Google Earth and Google image search with political transparency.” He’s refreshingly humble, too; his work, he explains, is an attempt to answer the question: “How do I . . . engage with . . . something that I don’t quite understand? The answer often has to do with trying to represent . . . that moment of incomprehension.” Gilbertson notes that the 24/7 news cycle created by digital cameras, laptops, satellites phones, etc. has become a nightmare for photojournalists: “I was told by mast-head editors at The Times. . . . ‘We’ll now judge you by what you put on the website and the blog’—which is crap.” The demand for immediacy has resulted in more—but, often, less thoughtful—images.

Memory of Fire addresses “images of war and the war of images” almost entirely in relation to the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq: the wars sometimes (though I think too lazily) described as “imperialist.” Stallabrass is not interested, for example, in the carnage in Pakistan, where the Taliban continues to murder secularists, women, girls, Shias, and assorted other civilians; or with the long-running conflict in the Congo (dubbed “the world’s worst war” by the New York Times last year), where an estimated five million people have died from war-related causes and hundreds of thousands of women and girls have been raped; or with mass murder in Darfur and other parts of Sudan. The choice to focus on Afghanistan and Iraq is defensible: one can argue that, politically, these are the stories of our time. But even within this relatively narrow prism, the political analysis put forth—if implicitly—by Memory of Fire is inadequate. Comparisons are sometimes attempted between these recent wars to the one in Vietnam. But the history and politics of that country have virtually nothing in common with either Afghanistan or Iraq; and so when, in a group interview, van Kesteren asks Griffiths about the similarities, he is basically swatted away. “There are more parallels, paradoxically, with the Algerian war where the FLN discovered very quickly that there was no way to beat the French army but they could create a civil war with huge numbers of deaths so that people related all their problems to the invaders,” Griffiths explains—a devastating analysis whose implications for Iraq are ignored. Stallabrass quickly raises another topic.

Similarly, the murder of journalists and photojournalists by the Iraqi “resistance”—something the Vietnamese certainly did not practice—isn’t fully understood by Stallabrass. “We’re targets, we’re infidels,” Gilbertson explains to him. “We’ve got communiqués from [Abu Musab] al-Zarqawi [leader of Al Queda in Iraq] himself that say, ‘We’re going after the Western press.’ . . . They don’t want to reach out to us. In the case of Al-Qaeda, they just want us finished.” But Memory of Fire never places these attacks within the larger context in which they have occurred. The murder of journalists and photojournalists—one of the distinguishing characteristics of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—can’t be separated from the murder of United Nations workers, humanitarian aid providers, schoolgirls, secularists, doctors, lawyers, teachers, intellectuals, feminists, Christians, Kurds, and anyone, including fellow Muslims, belonging to an “infidel” group. The Iraqi “resistance” recognized the humanity of no one other than itself; though Stallabrass briefly mentions this at one point, his book heavily emphasizes American-caused violence. (Leistner’s chapter is called “Embedded with Murderers.”) This violence surely needs to be documented, analyzed, and morally reckoned with. Yet Stallabrass’s emphasis places him, in 2013, in an awkward position; he never answers, or even broaches, the obvious question: Why has the Iraqi “resistance”—which Stallabrass describes as “a natural reaction to the savagery of the invasion and the occupation”—continued to murder fellow Iraqis, in appalling numbers, even after the U.S. withdrawal? Who or what is it resisting? Nor does describing sectarianism as a colonialist trope seem to adequately describe what is happening in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan—or, now, Syria.

Wissam Al-Okaili, Iraqi youth gather around a pool of blood left behind following a bomb blast in the Shiite neighborhood of Sadr City, Baghdad, October 30, 2006. © Wissam-Al-Okaili

What of the images in Memory of Fire? Though most if not all have been published before, they remain startling, horrifying, and moving—and refute the commonly voiced claim that repeated viewing hardens us to the pain of others. There is Griffiths’s frightening black-and-white photograph, taken in 1967 and reproduced from Vietnam Inc., of a group of Vietcong suspects—roped together at their necks, like animals or slaves—being led through a windswept field by two American soldiers to probable torture or death; and a much quieter photograph from 1981 of a Vietnamese woman, her face grotesquely scarred from napalm, beside the beautiful, smooth-skinned girl she adopted. We see Simon Norfolk’s 2003 photograph of Shalal Moussa Al-Zubeidi’s remains, which amount to a sad little heap of bones. (Al-Zubeidi was executed in Abu Ghraib by Sadddam’s regime in 1993; after Saddam’s overthrow, his family dug him up so they could move him to a proper grave.) There are Coco Fusco’s disarmingly simple, cartoon-like color drawings depicting the creepily intimate relationship between sexuality and torture, including one of a blonde, female interrogator—dressed in fatigues and a black bra—smearing menstrual blood on the face of a kneeling, handcuffed Iraqi prisoner in an orange jumpsuit. There is Gilbertson’s 2004 photo, taken from the vantage point of an American soldier, showing his huge gun pointed at a small Iraqi boy holding a white flag (actually, a little scrap of drooping cloth) and the older, frightened man next him: a succinct exposition of American power and Iraqi vulnerability. There is van Kesteren’s happier image, circa 2005–2007, of a Muslim Iraqi family celebrating Christmas in Baghdad: smiling forthrightly at the camera, they wear red-and-white Santa Claus hats. Despite the potential danger, the family insisted that “it would be a total insult if you did not show our faces.” (This image originally appeared in van Kesteren’s 2008 book called Baghdad Calling, a riveting document that depicts—and discusses—the violence in Iraq with greater complexity than Memory of Fire.)

And Stallabrass shows us, more than once, the torture photographs from Abu Ghraib; indeed, he opens the volume with one of these. It is several years since I have seen these pictures, but they have lost none of their power: to alarm, to repel, to shame. The smiles of the American soldiers remain as disgusting as the humiliation of, and attacks on, the terrified Iraqi prisoners; indeed, there is no better illustration of Rita Leistner’s apt observation that atrocity photographs “say more about the perpetrators than the victims.” It is the well-fed, well-clothed American soldiers—not the naked Iraqis—whom these pictures strip and, at the same time, so glaringly reveal.

Susie Linfield’s The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence has recently been translated into Italian and will soon appear in Turkish. She directs the Cultural Reporting and Criticism program at New York University.

Memory of Fire: Images of War and the War of Images is available now from Photoworks.

Another New York at Barclays Center in Brooklyn

Another New York installation view.

Another New York installation view. Photo: Aaron Rezny.

Another New York installation view. Photo: Aaron Rezny.

Another New York installation view. Photo: Carl Gunhouse.

Another New York installation view.

Aperture is happy to announce the recent unveiling of Another New York, a public exhibition on the construction hoardings surrounding the Barclays Center that features the work of fifteen Brooklyn-based photographers. Curated by artist Mickalene Thomas and Humble Arts co-founder Jon Feinstein from an open call, the show offers these photographers’ distinct visions of the enormous metropolis they call home. “We selected work that we feel gives us a new perspective on such a heavily photographed terrain,” said Thomas. The featured artists are Timothy Briner, Nathan Lee Bush, Maureen Drennan, Adam Frezza, Darren Hall, Curtis Hamilton, Jayson Keeling, Paul Raphaelson, Barry Rosenthal, Niv Rozenberg, Irina Rozovsky, Matthew Schenning, Luke Swenson, Wendy Whitesell, and Jason John Würm. Aperture is pleased to be the media sponsor for this public presentation, which will remain on view for several months. To learn more about the exhibition, visit the Artbridge website.

PhotoBook Awards 2013: Latest Arrivals Vol. 1

From Sensible Heat. Photographs by Jürgen Schmidt.

From Sensible Heat. Photographs by Jürgen Schmidt.

From Sensible Heat. Photographs by Jürgen Schmidt.

From Feminist. Photographs by Catrine Val.

From Feminist. Photographs by Catrine Val.

From Feminist. Photographs by Catrine Val.

From Feminist. Photographs by Catrine Val.

From Odes. Photographs by Taca Sui.

From Odes. Photographs by Taca Sui.

From Odes. Photographs by Taca Sui.

From I Don't Warna Grow Up. Photgraphs by Sean Vegezzi.

From I Don't Warna Grow Up. Photgraphs by Sean Vegezzi.

From I Don't Warna Grow Up. Photgraphs by Sean Vegezzi.

From Selections from the Joint Photographic Survey. Edited by Adam C. Ryder.

From Selections from the Joint Photographic Survey. Edited by Adam C. Ryder.

From Selections from the Joint Photographic Survey. Edited by Adam C. Ryder.

From Dew Dew, Dew Its. Book by Hiro Tanaka.

From Dew Dew, Dew Its. Book by Hiro Tanaka.

From Dew Dew, Dew Its. Book by Hiro Tanaka.

From Ubatama. Book by Hayata Daisuke.

From Ubatama. Book by Hayata Daisuke.

From Ubatama. Book by Hayata Daisuke.

From Salaryman Project. Photographs by Bruno Quinquet.

From Salaryman Project. Photographs by Bruno Quinquet.

From Salaryman Project. Photographs by Bruno Quinquet.

You can enter the Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards now through September 13, 2013. Dozens of submissions have already arrived in our New York office. Here, we highlight a selection of the latest arrivals in the First PhotoBook category.

 

Stay tuned for more images the latest arrivals in the news section of the PhotoBook Awards site and on Instagram (@aperturenyc).

 

Visit the prize site for FAQ and full entry details.

Horst Ademeit: Secret Universe

By Lynne Cooke

Horst Ademeit, Untitled (03.06.1992), 1992. All photos courtesy Galerie Susanne Zander/Delmes & Zander, Cologne.

Horst Ademeit, Untitled (11.03.1994), 1994.

Horst Ademeit, Untitled (27.09.1990), 1990.

Horst Ademeit, Untitled (27.05.1992), 1992.

Horst Ademeit, Untitled (19.02.1994), 1994.

Horst Ademeit, 4883 (29.07.2002), 2001.

Horst Ademeit, 3570 (14.12.1998), 1998.

Horst Ademeit, 490 (10.02.1992), 1992.

Secret Universe is the title of the exhibition series under which, in 2011, the late Horst Ademeit’s work was first presented to a museum audience. It was a fitting choice for an exceptional corpus of Polaroid (and later digital) photography that was neither conceived as an artistic project nor intended for public exposure. Compiled over some fifteen years, beginning around 1990, these images were made for strictly personal, utilitarian ends.

Trained as a textile designer, Ademeit entered Joseph Beuys’s class at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in the late 1960s. When his work was rejected as too conservative—too academic—he left not only Beuys’s class but the art world at large. Thereafter Ademeit supported himself primarily as a manual laborer in the building trade. He took up photography in order to contend with a mounting concern: his belief that he was increasingly subject to the deleterious effects of what he referred to as “cold rays” and invisible radiation, emanating from electrical sockets and fittings in his apartment. To contain and counter the harmful yet undetectable rays, Ademeit photographed their sources at home, and, by extension, in his neighborhood, notating his feelings and impressions— as well as detailed data from electricity meters, thermometers, clocks, and other devices—in the narrow margins of his Polaroid prints. While capitalizing on the ease and immediacy offered by this particular process, Ademeit may also have valued the fact that, exceptionally among photographic media, the Polaroid camera produces a unique and unrepeatable image. On the evidence of those few among his six-thousand-plus Polaroid shots made public to date, it seems, however, that the making of the image— the pointing, shooting, transfixing, and hence warding off of the feared effects— took priority over the character of what was produced. The more rudimentary his methods, and the more seemingly happenstance his compositions, the greater the charge generated by the resulting images—as if something had, indeed, been caught on the fly. In short, these works are compelling almost in inverse relation to the degree of attention lavished on their production. Ademeit’s oeuvre has been likened by critics to a Conceptual art project of the kind that fueled the practices of On Kawara and Hanne Darboven. It might equally well be compared with works by certain individuals who have felt themselves subject to the wiles of what Viktor Traub (an associate of Freud) termed “influencing machines”: that is, machines that appear, in the words of the psychoanalyst, “a s an outer enemy, a machine used to attack the patient.” Among the most haunting precursors to Ademeit’s murky testimonials, the annotated drawings of Hugo Rennert, Jakob Mohr, and Robert Gie sometimes depict their authors entangled in the immaterial coils emitted by unidentifiable contraptions, and sometimes simply record the pathways traversed by sinister impulses. Had Ademeit picked up pencil and paper, in place of a camera, while grappling with his infested environment, he too would likely be identified as an Outsider artist. Fortunately, photography has not been subject to the same disciplinary distinctions as the other visual arts: it largely eschews hierarchies between what is produced by the marginal and/ or self-taught for leisure and utilitarian ends and the panoply of artifacts produced by mainstream professionals of various ilks. In photography’s short history, conventions based on notions of center and periphery, of accredited and amateur, are less determinant than they are in the discourses attending painting, sculpture, and the graphic arts. Indeed, one measure of the strength of Ademeit’s singular endeavor is that it can be viewed through multiple lenses.

Curator and art historian Lynne Cooke is currently Andrew W. Mellon Profesor at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. She recently curated Rosemarie Trockel: A Cosmos, at the New Museum, New York.

Penelope Umbrico Moving Mountains ebook

In October 2012, Aperture presented Penelope Umbrico’s Moving Mountains (1850–2012) as part of Aperture Remix, an artist commission and exhibition. For the project, a select group of contemporary photographers were invited to choose an Aperture publication and to pay it artistic homage. The works that each artist created for Aperture Remix—incorporating new images made in response or interventions with the original publication itself—comprise a way of mapping the enduring influence of Aperture’s publication history as it relates to contemporary practice.

Umbrico worked with the Aperture Masters of Photography series, focusing on the mountain, a classic and long-standing subject of photographers as symbolic of the idea of mastery. Using a series of camera apps and filters on her iPhone, she created new photographs of the mountains that appear throughout the series, drawing on images from Edward Weston, Wynn Bullock, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Manuel Álvarez Bravo, and others. For the exhibition, Umbrico arranged a grouping of over eighty new images side-by-side with vintage prints of each of the images that she had re-photographed from the pages of the Masters series. In doing so, the expansive and elastic nature of contemporary photography was neatly illustrated—from the original, stable object of the masters, to the to the ever-mutating, fluctuating digital iterations possible today.

A limited-edition book created for the exhibition, drawing on the format and design of the Masters Series, included over seventy-five images out of the hundreds created as part of her process; subsequently, Umbrico has created an ebook containing over one hundred images and downloadable for free—in many ways, the optimum manifestation of the project.

Moving Mountains is Aperture’s first artist’s ebook—and first free publication! Click here to visit the iTunes store and download the ebook.

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Aperture published Penelope Umbrico’s first monograph Penelope Umbrico: Photographs in 2011.

Penelope Umbrico: Photographs




$65.00