Aperture's Blog, page 192

Back In Black

By Fred Ritchin

Sergio Larrain, Main Street in Corleone, Sicily, 1959. © Sergio Larrain/Magnum Photos

Sitting under a hot sun at one of the several outdoor cafés in the Place du Forum, surrounded by photographers, curators, tourists, and an occasional waiter, one cannot but reflect on the recent changes in the world of photography through the lens of this pioneering festival—now over forty years old. While there are numerous exhibitions saluting older or deceased (nearly all male) heroes from the field (Gordon Parks, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Jacques Henri Lartigue, Arno Rafael Minkkinen, Daido Moriyama, and Sergio Larrain, among others), there are comparatively few shows that give a sense of the medium’s possible futures. It feels, in a sense, like a convention of nineteenth-century oil painters—this is, after all, Van Gogh territory—who are still confused and somewhat in shock over the invention of another new medium (in their case, photography) that challenges the primacy of their own. This year’s theme, in fact, is “Arles in Black,” a nod to the glory days of black-and-white photography of the last century, a moment when photographic artists and documentarians were clearly ascendant. (It may also be, unconsciously or not, a title that acknowledges a certain amount of mourning.)

There are highlight exhibitions, including a nostalgic, finely curated display of photographic albums by Erik Kessels (much more interesting than an adjacent room containing one day’s worth of photographs uploaded to Flickr, a conceptual piece which he had previously shown at Foam in Amsterdam); the superb Gordon Parks retrospective, situated at a distance from the town’s center in the old Atelier area, which forcefully documents decades of American racism and also his varied gifts as an artist; and a viscerally disturbing, well-printed black-and-white standout show of photographs by Michel Vanden Eeckhoudt, which explores the acute, rasping agony of animals in captivity and the simultaneous spiritual decline of humans.

One of the best of the outdoor evening projections, a group project called Transitions that focuses on the deteriorating social landscape in South Africa, features work by a dozen photographers (half South African, half French and Belgian). It was at times extraordinarily moving in its depiction of the havoc caused by fracking and gold and diamond mining, including the dislocation of entire mountains in search of precious metals. Raphaël Dallaporta’s zig-zagging color aerial photographs made with a drone and Alain Willaume’s eerily compelling, subtle images of dust storms were standouts, as were Zanele Muholi’s color images of young South African women at a Zulu ceremony. Unfortunately, the prints hung on the wall from the same project looked more like a school exhibit, lacking the grandeur and the tonalities of the images projected onto the large screen.

Zanele Muholi, Untitled, 2013.

Alfredo Jaar’s retrospective felt somewhat dated: critiquing Newsweek and Life is less pertinent than it once was, given the diminished stature of these and other magazines. Nonetheless, it emerges as one of the only thought-provoking, politically engaged exhibitions at the festival. Located in a medieval church, the Église des Frères Prêcheurs, Jaar installed the work so that there remains something of the sacred about it—a welcome change from the commercial underpinnings of the gallery. His public conversation about the media landscape with veteran curator and writer Christian Caujolle needed to be amplified with many other such conferences engaging the changing contexts for photography.

The star of this edition of the festival is undoubtedly Chilean photographer and Magnum member Sergio Larrain, who had largely disappeared from public view for many years. Upon his death a few years ago it has become easier to display his work, both his photographs and his mystically oriented notebooks. It is a confused legacy—he comes across as both a passionate seeker of peace and enlightenment and a bit of a self-involved crank. His decades-old black-and-white photographs from Valparaiso, Chile, and elsewhere remain powerful, lyrical depictions of the spiritual life of people who happen to be poor. But featuring him for three straight evenings during the nighttime projections in the outdoor ampitheater may have been too much. His rediscovery is more than laudable, but so many issues he raised are being pursued by others who might also have benefitted from the spotlight of the stage.

A highlight: running into a young Dutch woman who is part of a group of five embarked on a project to diminish the number of images in the world. It is called “ED: Restoring the Value of Photography Through Editing.” They are planning to present the results of their endeavor this September at Unseen, the Amsterdam festival. Surrounded by the fifty exhibitions on view here and the many young artists showing portfolios, their project gives one pause: in our media-saturated world, less may well be more.

The exhibitions at Les Rencontres d’Arles run through September 22, 2013. For more information, click here.

Anonymous photographer, undated. Included in Erik Kessels’s exhibition Album Beauty.

Sarah Charlesworth (1947–2013)

By James Welling

Sarah Charlesworth with Princeton students in her Introductory Photography course, fall 2012. Photo: M. Teresa Simao.

 

 

We shared a sun-filled office in the Lewis Center and I saw Sarah every week this past fall. I taught on Tuesdays and Wednesdays; Sarah on Wednesday only. Many weeks I stayed over, so I’d be in the office when Sarah rolled in. She’d give me a big smile and a hug. The smile said, “Can you believe we’re doing this, Jim? Isn’t this the greatest? We’re both at Princeton.”

Sarah was my big sister last fall. We’d walk over to Prospect House for lunch, discuss the department and our students, and Sarah would fill me in on what I needed to do.

Sarah was tickled to be at Princeton. She was a direct descendent of Jonathan Edwards, a philosopher and theologian who became president of the university in the eighteenth century. Like Edwards, who died only weeks after coming to Princeton, Sarah’s time at the university was painfully short.

I preferred to take the train back to New York but I drove back with Sarah once in November. We wanted to attend a MoMA panel on abstraction, so we began our afternoon classes thirty minutes early. We got in Sarah’s black Volvo station wagon, which was full of wicker baskets she’d bought up in Connecticut. She moved some around for my suitcase of books to squeeze in. We took a melange of turnpikes and surface streets and were making good time until we got to the Lincoln Tunnel. Crawling along the helix entrance to the tunnel for an hour, we talked about New York versus Los Angeles, digital versus film, Princeton, how bad the traffic was.

Sarah Charlesworth with Princeton students in her Advanced Questions in Photography course at David Zwirner Gallery. Photo: Matt Lange.

When we got to the panel, we were so late we drew attention to ourselves. I was asked a question and mumbled some sort of evasive answer; Sarah received a quick follow-up. She answered with typical Charlesworthian poise. She was more burned out than I was, but she quickly sized up the discussion and offered her nuanced yet opinionated thoughts on abstraction.

After the panel we toasted each other with plastic cups of white wine. And she gave me that smile: “Can you believe we were just at Princeton? And now this.”



And now this.

James Welling is an artist based in Los Angeles. James Welling: Monograph was recently published by Aperture.

Rinko Kawauchi on Ametsuchi (Video)

On the occasion of the her recent book launch at Aperture Gallery, Japanese photographer Rinko Kawauchi sat down with us to discuss the origins of Ametsuchi, her latest volume of photography.

In this video, Kawauchi describes the genesis of her journey to photograph at Aso, a city and volcanic mountain region in southern Japan, whose image first appeared to her in a dream years ago. Ametsuchi brings together images from her exploration of the area’s landscapes, distant constellations, and tiny figures lost within land—as well as her observations of a traditional style of controlled-burn farming (yakihata), Buddhist rituals, and other religious ceremonies.

Kawauchi also discusses the title of this new volume, whose multiple meanings (“heaven and earth,” “top and bottom”) have been translated into a moving physical object by Dutch designer Hans Gremmen. We spoke with Gremmen earlier this spring about the choices surrounding Ametsuchi’s unique form in an online-only interview that can be read here.

—

Ametsuchi: Photographs by Rinko Kawauchi is now available.

Ametsuchi




$80.00



Illuminance




$60.00

Out of Nowhere: Photography in Cambodia

This post comes via Creative Time Reports. It is written by Leeza Ahmady and Erin Gleeson. For more on Creative Time Reports, click here.

 

Following photography’s invention in the mid-1800s, colonizers and travelers photographed and disseminated images that portrayed Cambodia as an exotic land. It was only at the outset of the independence years (1953–70) that the country began to record itself, but this practice was interrupted, and its archive mostly destroyed, by war. Concerned by the lack of physical documentation of the stories, traits, and monuments specific to the country’s past and present, Cambodian photographers and artists are devising new ways of showing and telling. Below is a selection of landscape photographs, taken in both a literal and symbolic sense, that draw on historical as well as contemporary events.

Sovan Philong, born 1985

Both images above: Sovan Philong, Violent Scenes from a Rice Paddy, 2011. Courtesy of the artist and Asia Motion.

One early morning in June 2011, 250 villagers of Stock Slat village in Kampong Speu Province took up arms and blocked the path of 300 police officers who had arrived to evict them. Cambodia’s Supreme Court had awarded their 160 acres of farmed rice paddies to a foreign company. The English-language daily that first printed these images reported that concerned residents had stayed up all night to prepare for the eviction, transporting beds and entire houses to block the authorities’ path. The police forced their way through the makeshift barricades. The villagers fought back with whatever tools they could grab, including sticks and farming tools. Blood was shed on both sides. Sovan Philong recorded the events on the front line, risking his safety to capture and share photographic evidence of the conflict. In a political climate where national media are cautious about reporting on land evictions, images such as Sovan’s are particularly important. Often circulated internationally and spread through social media networks, they help to foster engagement with these issues.

The paragraph above has been adapted with permission from an essay on Sovan Philong by artist and curator Vuth Lyno.

Vandy Rattana, born 1980

Vandy Rattana, Takeo, from the series Bomb Ponds, 2009.

Vandy Rattana, Kompong Cham, from the series Bomb Ponds, 2009.

“You can hear something a thousand times and not know it; yet if you see it with your eyes just once, you know.” —Khmer proverb

For his acclaimed Bomb Ponds series, Vandy Rattana confronted the physical and psychological scars left by the American carpet-bombing of Cambodia, a campaign that lasted from 1965 to 1973 but is largely unknown even within Cambodia. Visiting the ten most affected Cambodian provinces bordering Vietnam, Vandy photographed the craters left by bombs, most of which are now filled with water. Recognizing the contradictions between the violent history and the current serenity of the landscapes, and questioning the photographs’ ability to speak beyond the silence, Vandy interviewed villagers who had lived through the bombing. (The artist presents their stories in a gripping one-channel video accompanying his photo series.) While Bomb Ponds brings attention to the lack of documentation of these unwarranted acts of violence undertaken by the United States, it also pays respect to the resilience of the land and the survivors. The intense distance between experiential, written, and oral history provoked a shift in the artist’s beliefs about the relationship between historiography and image making. Following Bomb Ponds, for Vandy, photography and history itself became fiction.

Lim Sokchanlina, born 1987

Lim Sokchanlina, Wrapped Future/Phnom Penh. Cambodia. 2012: Olympic Stadium, East Side, 2012.

Lim Sokchanlina, Wrapped Future/Phnom Penh. Cambodia. 2011: Independence Monument, 2011.

With heightened urban construction since 2009, various fences and makeshift enclosures have come to define much of Phnom Penh’s topography. Lim Sokchanlina has been photographing such partitions for over four years with special attention to contentious sites. Concerned with divisive development launched in the name of a “New Phnom Penh,” Lim scrutinizes these newly erected borders, portraying the physical and psychological effects of their separation of public and private, past and future, and the known and unknown. “The land enclosed is no longer a presence, as if what was displaced or destroyed at these sites no longer matters,” the artist declares. “Memory has been traded for development. These fences are wrapping the future, standing in place of what was forgotten or never even known.” Lim’s corrugated color fields flatten the imposing fences into mundane facades. Arrested expanses of color, patterns, and markings invite painterly reflections, while his titles record what was where, and when. Isolated from their bustling surroundings and rescued from their impending fate, the fences are photographically preserved as landmarks. The above images document the enclosure of two revered architectural icons by Cambodian architect and urban planner Vann Molyvann: Independence Monument (1958) and Olympic Stadium (1964).

Khvay Samnang, born 1982

Khvay Samnang, Newspaper Man, 2011. Courtesy of the artist.

An alien figure, the titular “Newspaper Man,” stands alone in the center of a surreal, light-washed urban landscape: a sand-filled lake in central Phnom Penh. Khvay Samnang has engaged this site many times in recent years; in this iteration, he responded to a historical moment absent in local media reportage with a performance documented by the above photograph and a single-channel video. Blinded by newspapers wrapped around his body, Khvay clumsily walked along a contrived shoreline, tripping over the few remains of the homes lost by thousands of families evicted and relocated from this site. A panorama of developments lines the horizon while excavators are seen at work. As “Newspaper Man,” the artist calls attention not only to the land and its recent history but also to the role of Khmer-language journalism in neglecting to cover a matter of deep environmental, infrastructural, and humanitarian concern.

Pete Pin, born 1982

Pete Pin, from the series Cambodian Diaspora, 2011. Courtesy of the artist.

Pete Pin, from the series Cambodian Diaspora, 2011. Courtesy of the artist.

Part of his ongoing work with the Cambodian diaspora in the United States, the two above images by Cambodian-American photographer Pete Pin show a cautious engagement with space in an attempt to translate his subjects’ stories about “navigating life in the context of the very hard, and at times violent, realities of adapting to a new homeland.” A daunting view of a tenement-building row reflects the intimidating landscape of the Bronx as experienced by numerous refugees who relocated there from Cambodian refugee camps throughout the 1980s. A windshield frames a gloomy landscape and standard motifs of Cambodian tourist photography: pigeons, which abound at the Royal Palace, and palm trees, seen throughout the countryside. However, not being in Cambodia is an emphasis of Pin’s work to date.

Taken while driving in Long Beach, California, home to the largest community of Cambodians in the United States, the photograph’s edge features Pin’s hand at the wheel. Behind the palm trees is a canal referred to by neighborhood residents as “The Ditch.” It was the meeting space for many Cambodian and Hispanic gang members, a site that took the lives of countless young men who, ironically, were the children of survivors who fled Cambodia. Pin notes this “generational transfer of trauma” as a central motif in his work.

Khiang H. Hei, born 1968

Khiang H. Hei, from the series The Highlands Crossing, 2013. Courtesy of the artist.

Khiang H. Hei, from the series The Highlands Crossing, 2012. Courtesy of the artist.

For two decades, Khiang H. Hei has regularly traveled the Ho Chi Minh Trail to document life on this historic pathway, which physically connects China, Laos, Vietnam, and Cambodia to the legacy of the U.S.-Vietnam War. While Hei’s vast archive focuses on the resourceful appropriations of military waste by the indigenous minorities living near the trail, the artist has also turned his lens to the land itself. Northeastern Cambodia’s highland communities are the focus of his recent work. Increasingly over the last decade, native lands have been stolen or sold under pressure to an array of local and international investors. Dense and diverse forests have been cleared. Various hill tribes, whose members commune with forest spirits in everyday rituals and funerary rites, are forced to work the land in opposition to custom. “Without forests they are without hope,” says Hei, who lives and labors with villagers during his travels. The ongoing “Highlands Crossing” series reveals challenging realities for minority tribes. The first image above shows a rare plot where healthy, centuries-old slash-and-burn practices continue, while the image below reveals a logged site where the barren red earth, well known to this region, is now prepared to become a rubber plantation.

Kong Vollak, born 1983

Kong Vollak, from the series Leaving, 2007. Courtesy of the artist.

Kong Vollak, from the series Temple, 2010. Courtesy of the artist.

Kong Vollak handcrafts models of architectural sites and cityscapes in various media. Best known for his ominous black-and-white charcoal drawings of both the real present and imagined future of Phnom Penh, Kong also uses photography as a tool for mapmaking. His light drawings from rudimentary pinhole cameras echo the shadows, smudges, and scratches of his charcoal works, while mimicking the gritty areas of the city itself. He welcomes flaring from extraneous light, while his fingerprints mark the surface from intentional handling. The low-tech effects of Kong’s Leaving and Temple series hint at previous times and unknown places. Leaving, in particular, recalls the eerie state of the capital, emptied by the Khmer Rouge in 1975; however, the above image was actually taken in 2007 at Phnom Penh’s old ferry port on the Tonle Sap River. The Leaving series captures transportation hubs on national holidays, when most of the city’s two million residents temporarily migrate to their countryside homelands. Another pinhole series, titled Temple, considers Phnom Penh’s Buddhist architecture. This particular image, taken in 2010 at the north side of Tul Tumpung Temple on Mao Tse Tung Boulevard, pays homage to one of the many imitations of Angkorean architecture in today’s pagoda gateways.

David Galjaard, Cristina de Middel at PhotoIreland 2013

Throughout the month of July the photo world will turn its eye to PhotoIreland, the international festival of photography and image culture dedicated to promoting dialogue on photography in Ireland.

 

In July 2012 visitors to the festival’s Books & Magazines Fair got an early glimpse of Dutch photographer David Galjaard’s first self-published photobook, Concresco, which later earned him the Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Award in the First PhotoBook category. This year during PhotoIreland, Galjaard will present a solo exhibition of images from the Concreso series at The Copper House Gallery in Dublin. The show will be on view July 14–August 2.

 

The series paints a picture of development in Albania through photographs of the landscape, where more than 750,000 aboveground bunkers built during the dictatorship of Enver Hoxha serve as physical reminders of the country’s struggles for security during the Communist era. You can read more about David Galjaard and his Concresco series in an interview we conducted with the photographer last fall following the announcement of his First PhotoBook prize.

 

Cristina De Middel, from the series The Afronauts.

 

Also on view at the Copper House Gallery will be documentary photographer, artist, and PhotoBook Awards finalist Cristina de Middel’s first self-published book The Afronauts. The volume is a subjective reimagination of the failed 1964 initiative to launch the first African space program in the country of Zambia.

 

The now sold-out book, which was shortlisted for the Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation First PhotoBook Prize, is comprised of Middel’s staged color photographs, sequenced alongside manipulated documents, drawings, and reproductions of original texts that documented this now anecdotal moment in Zambian history. Known for her play with reconstructions that blur the border between reality and fiction, Middel’s The Afronauts recontextualizes these elements to create a fictional portrait of that national dream.

 

Both Concresco and The Afronauts will be on view at the Copper House Gallery, Dublin, July 14–August 2, 2013, as part of PhotoIreland Festival 2013.

 

Featured image: David Galjaard, from the series Concresco.

Ahae, The Extraordinary within the Ordinary

© Ahae

The Korean photographer Ahae has just opened The Extraordinary within the Ordinary, an exhibition of 220 recent photographs in specially constructed galleries at the Orangerie Hall of the Palace of Versailles, near Paris. The show, on view through September 9, is part of the Versailles estate’s celebration of the four-hundredth anniversary of the birth of landscape architect André Le Nôtre, who designed the palace’s grounds. Ahae, who shoots all of his photographs from a single window, captures pristine natural forms and the animals that pass through or inhabit them. Ahae works from dawn to dusk, and in all seasons, and the photographs he creates distill the landscape to moments of movement, shadow, and light.

This is the artist’s second exhibition in France, after a successful presentation last summer at the Jardin des Tuileries in Paris. For more information about The Extraordinary within the Ordinary, please click here. For more information about Ahae, please click here.

© Ahae

Interview with Lorna Simpson

A retrospective of Lorna Simpson’s work opened to the public on May 28 at the Jeu du Paume in Paris. In the words of curator Joan Simon, Simpson’s work can be argued “to be built on the juxtaposition of gestures and reenactments.” Reenactments of the past, that is, of memories that form part of an American twentieth-century psyche as well the artist’s own childhood experiences. Black-and-white and tinged with gold, her art often employs era-specific clothes and hairstyles, materials found in second-hand shops, and old photographs and postcards, calling forth memories of the past. She supplies the props and the gestures, a short text or melody, and beckons the viewer to relate these to cultural inheritance and personal experience.

 

This conversation took place via e-mail and in person in April and May 2013.

Lorna Simpson, still from the video Cloudscape, 2004. Courtesy the artist; Salon 94, New York; and Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris and Brussels. © Lorna Simpson/Centre national des arts plastiques.

Lorna Simpson, 1957–2009 (detail), 2009. Renne Collection, Vancouver. Courtesy the artist; Salon 94, New York; and Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris and Brussels. © Lorna Simpson.

Lorna Simpson, Chandelier, 2011. Courtesy the artist; Salon 94, New York; and Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris and Brussels. © Lorna Simpson.

SM: Your first European retrospective has just opened here in Paris at the Jeu de Paume. Given that much of your work is informed by an American history of race and gender relations, did you or the curators make any decisions about the show based on the audience?

LS: I feel that the history of British and European colonialism in the Americas, Africa, and India involves many of the same issues. Of course, there are different ways to approach the concept of audience. The exhibition spans about twenty-seven years of work, and was put together by curator Joan Simon in collaboration with Marta Gili of the Jeu de Paume and Okwui Enwezor of the Haus der Kunst in Munich, both of whom I have worked and exhibited with in the past, in different European countries. We all viewed this exhibition as an opportunity to present a wide scope of the work; I personally did not give consideration to tailoring the presentation to any preconceived idea about the audiences in different countries—that would be an improbable touring package. This exhibition operates as a vehicle to introduce viewers to my work in a comprehensive manner. The European context is explored more in depth by art critic Elvan Zabunyan in the accompanying exhibition catalog.

SM: Do you have a favorite work in this exhibition’s survey?

LS: Well, I like what’s new! [Laughs.] Since it’s an installation, you don’t quite get to see it until it’s up. This is really the first time I’m seeing the most recent pieces in this way.

SM: It makes a huge difference. For instance, watching Cloudscape (2004) in a darkened room is strangely hypnotic. Was that hymn being whistled by the man covered in smoke composed specifically for the video? Does the melody have a title?

LS: Terry Atkins is the artist and musician in the film. In a thrift shop, I found a songbook of American compositions and turn-of-the-century hymns. A lot of them sound like American spirituals from the 1800s. What we were looking for was something that wasn’t completely recognizable but at the same time—

SM: —nostalgic and familiar?

LS: Yes. And with a melodic element that would be interesting when played in reverse as well, but with a short and not overly complicated phrasing, so that it would make sense as a video piece. We went through it little by little, reflecting on what this or that tune would sound like if whistled, played backwards, etc.

Lorna Simpson, 1957–2009 (detail). Renne Collection, Vancouver. Courtesy the artist; Salon 94, New York; and Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris and Brussels. © Lorna Simpson.

SM: Several African-American visual artists use jazz improvisation as a point of reference for their work. Is it also important to you?

LS: Music is a big part of the American historical and cultural experience. Jazz is the music I grew up with: lots and lots of John Coltrane, Miles Davis, and Charlie Parker, to name a few.

I just completed a new video project for the show that involves a collaboration with and filmed performance of Jason Moran. We have been trying to do something together for a while and I am really excited—it was a great opportunity to work with him.

SM: Within this exhibition, which largely comprises black-and-white photographs and videos, the section in which gold and fabric are used really stands out. Could you tell me about the use of the color and felt?

LS: It’s from a re-creation. The monitors playing the videos in front of the felt and the gold prints are all from a piece called Momentum (2010), which is based on a childhood performance at Lincoln Center. I was ten or eleven years old at the time, dressed up in gold body paint and a gold Afro, and on pointe. Daytime (2011), Daytime Gold (2011), and Chandelier (2011) were all made from late-1960s-era found postcards, printed with gold glittery ink, that documented the early years of Lincoln Center.

The other “gold” pieces in that room are from Public Sex (1995–98), a series of works printed on felt. The text in those works is about how a public space is transformed during different times of the day by the people using it, and the kind of sex they might have there. By using felt and found postcards, the room is meant to represent the fifteen-year period I’ve spent working with those materials and the different ideas in play during that time.

SM: You’ve mentioned that this childhood performance was important because it made you realize that you would rather be the audience than the performer. Now, however, we see you stepping into the center of your own works in 1957–2009 (2009) and again in the Chess video projections (2013). What brought about this change?

LS: I started really stepping in front of the camera with 1957–2009, which was painful! Every day I was in a bad mood and I just wanted to get through it. [Laughs.] I was suffering through that. It’s very artificial: I was imitating a woman’s body that is different from mine, a woman’s body that is more agile—I think she was slightly double-jointed and I’m not. I was less self-conscious, though, because my aim was to mirror her. But even then, I hated it at the beginning. Toward the end of the project I became more comfortable and it became less of a horrible chore.

SM: Was it just as excruciating to get in front of the camera for Chess?

LS: No, actually—that was a few years later and was, in a way, capping off that body of work. I felt more comfortable by then.

Lorna Simpson, still from the video Momentum, 2010. Courtesy the artist; Salon 94, New York; and Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris and Brussels. © Lorna Simpson.

SM: Did you want to be a photographer growing up, or was this an interest that developed later on?

LS: From a young age, I was immersed in the arts. I had parents who loved living in New York and loved going to museums, and attending plays, dance performances, concerts. They would take me with them. Their appreciation was free and open; they did not think that they had an artist in the making. The High School of Art and Design introduced me to photography and graphic design. At the School of Visual Arts, where I got my BFA, I became interested in photography and the history of New Wave cinema. When I was in grad school, at University of California, San Diego, I focused more on performance and conceptually based art.

SM: So your foundation was in photography, but you now incorporate other elements into your work, like sculpture and performance. Why is this?

LS: When I was growing up in photography, photography departments and their views of photography were very narrow. Photography was something that went in a frame, was kept to a certain scale, and didn’t have text or any other element. A lot of the support for my early work came from institutions that focused on painting and sculpture, or institutions that didn’t insist on the separation between genres.

My foundation in photography allows me to think about things in terms of film and video, because I can imagine things and know how to communicate them by working with a DP, for example. It’s kind of hard not to have a background in photography and have an interest in film, especially if you’re interested in what is happening in front of the camera.

That said, my practice as an artist does not work out of a single viewpoint of photographic practice. I experiment with many different mediums for the sake of coming to experience different processes. Conceptually, I enjoy working in different mediums—outside my comfort zone and range of experience—and how that exploration expands the content of my work.

SM: During an interview last year with artist Deana Lawson, she mentioned that getting to know your work was an epiphany for her own development, as it was the first time she had an African-American female role model. Are you aware of your own trailblazing, so to speak? Who were your role models when you were a student?

LS: When I was a student, the work of artists from varying cultural contexts was not as broad as it is now. I think of the work of David Hammons, Adrian Piper, Bill T. Jones, and many of the artists in Kellie Jones’s 2011–2012 exhibition Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960–1980, presented at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and MoMA PS1 in New York.

Lorna Simpson, still from the video Chess, 2013. Courtesy the artist; Salon 94, New York; and Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris and Brussels. © Lorna Simpson

From time to time, when I teach or mentor students, I am reminded how much the work is appreciated. I am always surprised because I feel there are so many people—other artists who were around when I was in my twenties—who I really loved and appreciated, and who deserve the same attention and opportunity, like Howardena Pindell or Adrian Piper. There are tons of them. It is about race and being African American, but it’s also about gender—and there are just so many women who either should be given more credit or have more vibrant careers for having paved the way. It’s a little bittersweet. Things should be better. But then, that’s just where we are.

Interview with Karol Hordziej, Art Director of Krakow Photomonth

Since 2006, Karol Hordziej and his team have transformed Krakow, Poland, into an international destination for photography. Andrea Hill conducted this conversation with Hordziej, about the 2013 edition of Krakow Photomonth and the future of photography festivals, in person and over e-mail.

Above and below: Installation views of Krakow Photomonth 2013 exhibitions. Courtesy Krakow Photomonth.

Andrea Hill: Why have you chosen to focus the 2013 festival on fashion? Is fashion more or less relevant today as a tool for investigation than it was during the historical moments chronicled in the exhibitions?

Karol Hordziej: The decision had several motivations. One of them was a will to embrace fashion photography and show it as part of a larger context. Fashion photography is usually presented in fashion ghettos, outside of the artistic debate.

The only part of the program fully devoted to “real” fashion photography is an exhibition from the F.C. Gundlach collection. German photographer and collector Gundlach points out that for decades, fashion photography was able to capture the spirit of the times more effectively than photojournalism. It depicted dreams and hopes, while photojournalism focused on facts and events.

But fashion photography was not the center of our interest. We have focused on clothing and the cultural meaning of what we wear and how we wear it—without dividing everyday street clothing from haute-couture fashion. It’s more about a very broad definition of fashion that makes it such an interesting tool for the investigation of culture.

AH: Can you speak about the evolution of Photomonth during your tenure as art director and some of the past themes this festival has touched on?

KH: In 2006, when our team took over the festival, we began working with very general themes like “Youth” and with different guest countries like the UK and Poland. During these years we also produced several projects based on the idea of the artist as curator. Theaters of War by Mark Power was presented at the former Schindler’s Factory (where the Museum of Contemporary Art is currently located). In 2011, we invited Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin to be the guest curators of the entire main program, which resulted in the project Alias, which was based on the concept of exhibiting only fictional artists.

Alias was a turning point for the festival since it pushed the limits of what a photography festival could be. It garnered very positive feedback from the international art press but was too demanding for many visitors. After this edition we decided to establish a new arm of the festival called the Experimental Section, through which we could continue in this direction. The inaugural Experimental Section, in 2012, was advised by Charlotte Cotton and took form as the interactive, monthlong exhibition Photography in Everyday Life, which invited the audience to participate in its creation.

For future editions of Photomonth, we have decided to work with professional curators. For Photomonth 2014, we have invited Aaron Schuman to be the curator and I’m happy to confirm his participation!

AH: The medium of photography itself has experienced more change in the past decade than any other, what with the advent of digital methods of production and distribution. How has Photomonth responded to photography’s existential issues?

KH: The changes in photography related to the digital revolution were visible in our program mostly through specific art projects. In 2012, Jason Evans made an installation called Pictures for looking at and sculpture for photography. The audience was invited to interact with his sculptures, make their own photographs, and upload the images online. It was in the same gallery space where we exhibited Masao Yamamoto’s unique handmade prints several years earlier. I think that both shows are very relevant to the analog/digital discussion.

In general, our response has been channeled through an overall awareness of the material print and the physical experience of prints. Since you can now see so many great photographs online—and for free—it’s important that the experience of attending the festival be different. I believe that we get much more from images if we use not only use our eyes but all of our senses—when we have to move our bodies to look at an image.

The whole analog/digital discussion gets really interesting when it enters our daily lives. Yoachim Schimd stopped collecting pictures from the street because people no longer throw away pictures they don’t want anymore; they just delete them. At the same time, we all collect tons of images and are losing the skill to select what is really important. At Krakow Photomonth this year, we welcomed people to participate in our shows by bringing images from their own family archives. The most important factor in this participatory event was to teach people how to choose one image and tell a story. It sounds very banal but I believe it’s an important issue.

AH: Returning to the subject of broadening definitions, what are the wider possibilities for what a photography festival might be?

KH: I think there are many ways for photography festivals to go and it’s important that different models exist. I expect festivals to propose long-term ways of thinking. For example, it took us a few years to break down the wall between the contemporary art and photography audiences in Poland. We were also looking for models that work as year-long projects instead of singular events. We have formalized a part of the festival, which previously selected the best submitted artist projects, into ShowOFF, a new section intended to incubate young Polish photographers. In ShowOFF, five jury members choose ten artists to develop a project with them that will be produced for the festival, and we continue to promote the artists after the festival concludes. Since it’s very easy to travel between the various festivals, it makes sense to be attentive to current and local issues. I was speaking earlier about a participatory element. This is also crucial in the development of photography festivals. But of course the traditional role of the festival is to be an exhibition space and an international meeting place.

Andrea Hill is a New York–based curator and creative director of Paddle8, the online auction house for museums and non-profits.

The eleventh edition of Krakow Photomonth ran through June 16.

Richard Renaldi’s Touching Strangers on Kickstarter

Through August 5, 2013, backers can pre-order Richard Renaldi’s forthcoming special-edition photobook, Touching Strangers, exclusively on Kickstarter.

 

Since 2007, photographer Richard Renaldi has worked on a series of photographs for which he asks complete strangers to physically interact while posing together for a portrait. Working on the street with a large-format 8-by-10 view camera, Renaldi encounters his subjects in towns and cities all over the United States.

 

Renaldi’s objective was to introduce an unpredictable variable into a traditional photographic formula, and to create spontaneous and fleeting relationships between complete strangers. The portraits are extremely difficult to make, involving complex negotiations with the participants that push them past comfort levels into a physical intimacy normally reserved for loved ones or friends. Touching Strangers creates intimate and ephemeral relationships that exist only for the moment of the photograph. The images are beautiful and strange, crossing out of the zones of safe physical intimacy with strangers and into deep emotional landscapes never photographed before.

Tari, Shawn & Summer, from the series Touching Strangers. © Richard Renaldi.

Sonia, Zach, Raekwon & Antonio, from the series Touching Strangers. © Richard Renaldi.

In Spring 2014, through the support of backers on Kickstarter, Aperture will publish Touching Strangers as a photobook, including new photographs from Renaldi’s shoots this summer in Albuquerque, Chicago, New York, and Southern California.

Chris Boot, executive director of Aperture, says, “We think these great photographs have something positive to say about human connection . . . about a diverse society in which people have been taught not to touch each other but in which we can and do transcend the boundaries set around us. In seeking support to make the book possible, we want to ask you—strangers—to help us. This makes this Kickstarter campaign—Aperture’s first—part of the work itself, a way for strangers to connect with each other. We hope this project touches you, and that you’ll want to participate with us in bringing this book to the world.”

Pre-order Touching Strangers: Photographs by Richard Renaldi now on Kickstarter (funding period: June 21–August 5, 2013).

—

Aperture published Richard Renaldi’s first monograph, Figure and Ground: Photographs by Richard Renaldi, in 2006.

In October 2013 Richard Renaldi will host Strangers in New York: Photographing People, a two-day intensive workshop for students wishing to sharpen their skills making portraits of strangers. Register here.

Figure and Ground




$45.00





Richard Renaldi: Strangers in New York: Photographing People Workshop




$500.00





Christine, 2003




$600.00

Aperture #211—What Matters Now?

Photographs as Things

Photograph by Andrew Blum’s three-year-old daughter. Courtesy Andrew Blum.

 

Photographs, especially personal ones, have always served as physical manifestations of memory. Held between fingers or hung on a wall, photographic prints had a direct material connection to their subjects, from light to lens to film to paper. Today, of course, our photographs are born digital. Their power as images remains, gloriously so; but their reality as objects is often lost.

 

In my house, these two ideas collide in the small hands of my three-year-old daughter, compulsively snapping photographs with a phone snatched off the table. She has amassed hundreds of them (mostly of fingers and floors). They are not merely weightless, but evanescent. So in an effort to fix them in the most literal way, we bought a sixty-nine-dollar wireless printer. The effect was strange: a photograph taken with one magic box was magically transferred through the air to another magic box, out of which a photograph (on paper!) slowly emerged. Up it went on the refrigerator door. The images themselves are beside the point. What I am grasping for, perhaps foolishly, is the sense of a photograph as a thing, an object of value—something to be cared for in the physical world, as we care for each other.

 

—Andrew Blum, journalist and author of Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet (Ecco, 2012)

 

CIA Torture Tapes

Production still from the film Zero Dark Thirty, 2012 (dir. Kathryn Bigelow). Photograph by Jonathan Olley. © Zero Dark Thirty, LLC. All rights reserved.

 

For the past several years I have been obsessed with images I’ve never seen. They were recorded and destroyed. These images document torture. In their absence, fictitious images have emerged.

 

Jose Rodriguez, the man who in 2005 ordered the destruction of ninety-two videotapes of torture committed by the Central Intelligence Agency, claims: “I was not depriving anyone of information about what was done or what was said. I was just getting rid of some ugly visuals that could put the lives of my people at risk.”

 

Rodriguez, a high-ranking intelligence officer, made the decision to destroy the torture tapes in response to the public reaction to the Abu Ghraib photographs in 2004. It is often forgotten that the abuse at Abu Ghraib was made “public” before those images were released. Four months before the publication of the photographs, the U.S. military issued a press release saying they were investigating claims of prisoner abuse in Iraq. The announcement received little media coverage or interest. Had the photographs not been leaked to the New Yorker and 60 Minutes, Abu Ghraib would likely have disappeared from history.

 

Without visual evidence of CIA torture, history is being written by Hollywood. In Zero Dark Thirty, the CIA torturers are the heroic protagonists. Can we imagine this happening with Lynndie England, the woman holding the end of a dog leash around the neck of a naked prisoner at Abu Ghraib? Or Sabrina Harman, who gives the “thumbs up” sign over the dead body of Manadel al-Jamadi, a man killed during a CIA interrogation?

 

If the CIA’s torture tapes had been made public, how would history be told differently?

 

—Laura Poitras, documentary filmmaker and MacArthur Fellow, whose work includes The Oath (2010); My Country, My Country (2006); The Program (New York Times Op-Doc, 2012); and Death of a Prisoner (New York Times Op-Doc, 2013)

 

North Korea’s Gulag

Screenshot of a Google Maps view of the Yodok Gulag in North Korea, 2012.

 

After Hurricane Sandy last year, photographer Iwan Baan captured an iconic shot of Manhattan, half in blackout: it is a photograph that will haunt our collective memory for a long time. At the same time, Google Maps recently added North Korean coverage by means of a clever juxtaposition of aerial shots, satellite imagery, and clandestine on-the-ground documentary photos by daring locals and visitors alike, giving us firsthand views of this notoriously media-shy country and its equally notorious death camps. With this ostensibly minor extension of its mapping service, everyone’s favorite search engine entered the political arena—and Google deserves great credit for this unexpected advance. In the end, this “citizen documentation” of actual gulags on North Korean ground is more likely to unsettle the restrictive regime than any international sanctions.

 

Both Baan’s image and Google Maps in North Korea have reignited my appreciation for straightforward reportage that channels and politicizes key issues via powerful visual records. When I think about Vietnam, the Cold War, or space-age advances—as well as events that occurred before my lifetime—I consider those times and events through iconic press shots that strike a mental, emotional, and sociopolitical chord. Images help us to contextualize topics, ideas, and historical events. Great press photographs trigger desires, anger, compassion: they get me going. I expect photography to play a powerful part in developing my political agenda. I believe that the decline of quality news outlets goes hand in hand with a decline in empathy, political involvement, and democratic engagement. We are ready for a new breed of earnest and enthusiastic photojournalists who can produce those shots that capture our hearts and minds.

 

—Robert Klanten, founder and publisher of Gestalten, Berlin

 

Possibilities of Pleasure

Maha Maamoun, El-Sayyida Park #02, 2006. © Maha Maamoun.

 

A favorite image from the past few years is by Maha Maamoun. What is depicted is a children’s playground in a Cairo park, dominated by an aging tubular metal slide, which is painted in the bright colors of the flag of the Arab Republic of Egypt and bears an inscription in Arabic that translates to: “Baby Land Welcomes You!” Two small girls and a toddler boy are about to climb the stairs to the top of the slide, while a young woman in gray veil is helping another woman, in a black niqab, who just slid down, to emerge from the industrial-looking orifice at the bottom of the slide.

 

The image, which is humorous, sad, and indicative of a certain psychosis, brings to my mind a 1920 drawing by Max Ernst called The Hat Makes the Man, which is full of colorful tubular forms and men’s black hats, and bears a cryptic inscription: “seedcovered stacked-up man seedless waterformer [edelformer] well fitting nervous system also tightly fitting nerves! (the hat makes the man) (style is the tailor).” Like Ernst’s drawing—which suggests a kind of an alchemical-industrial transubstantiation of masculinity— Maamoun’s photograph delicately charts a cosmology of women’s lives and the possibilities of pleasure within a certain conveyor-belt religious order.

 

—Anton Vidokle, artist and co-editor of e-flux journal