Aperture's Blog, page 196

Pablo Ortiz Monasterio on Mexican Portraits

Mexican Portraits, co-published by Aperture and Fundación Televisa, includes more than 350 portraits by over eighty anonymous and well-known photographers, including Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Agustín V. Casasola, Romualdo García, Graciela Iturbide, and Enrique Metinides. In this short video, Mexican Portraits photographer and editor Pablo Ortiz Monasterio discusses the process of selecting and sequencing the photographs to tell a history of Mexico, and reflects on Mexican identity, both individual and collective.

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Mexican Portraits is now available.

Mexican Portraits




$85.00

COMPILATION TOKYO: REMIX

On April 6–7, 2013, a screen-printed publication was created during a live event in Tokyo. Self Publish, Be Happy and GOLIGA created a Fluxus-style atelier on the first floor of the venue Harajuku VACANT. For two days, eleven young photographers had a silkscreen workshop facility to create and print their photography as part of a limited-edition publication, COMPILATION TOKYO. Each photographer prepared and silkscreen-printed his or her own work, making the publication an entirely handmade production. During the workshop, all digital production, preparation of printing plates, and silkscreen printing happened in full view of the public.

 

On April 30, 2013, artist Charlie Engman worked in-situ at Aperture Gallery in New York to create a new artist zine by remixing COMPILATION TOKYO. Engman cut apart, re-photographed, and digitally modified photographs in order to create an entirely new body of work. These new works were printed and photocopied on site to create a new, original limited-edition artist publication. In this video recap of the event, Bruno Ceschel, founder of Self Publish, Be Happy, discusses the project.

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Compilation Tokyo: Remix is now available.

Compilation Tokyo: Remix




$25.00

COMPILATION TOKYO: REMIX (Video)

On April 6–7, 2013, a screen-printed publication was created during a live event in Tokyo. Self Publish, Be Happy and GOLIGA created a Fluxus-style atelier on the first floor of the venue Harajuku VACANT. For two days, eleven young photographers had a silkscreen workshop facility to create and print their photography as part of a limited-edition publication, COMPILATION TOKYO. Each photographer prepared and silkscreen-printed his or her own work, making the publication an entirely handmade production. During the workshop, all digital production, preparation of printing plates, and silkscreen printing happened in full view of the public.

 

On April 30, 2013, artist Charlie Engman worked in-situ at Aperture Gallery in New York to create a new artist zine by remixing COMPILATION TOKYO. Engman cut apart, re-photographed, and digitally modified photographs in order to create an entirely new body of work. These new works were printed and photocopied on site to create a new, original limited-edition artist publication. In this video recap of the event, Bruno Ceschel, founder of Self Publish, Be Happy, discusses the project.

—

Compilation Tokyo: Remix is now available.

Compilation Tokyo: Remix




$25.00

Reflections On the Concrete Mirror

By Barney Kulok

Charlotte Perriand and Fernand Léger, La France Agricole (Agricultural France), 1937. From the book Le Corbusier and the Power of Photography. Courtesy of the Charlotte Perriand Estate.

Spread from Le Corbusier and the Power of Photography.

Pavillon Philips, Exposition Universelle, Brussels, 1958, exterior view. From the book Le Corbusier and the Power of Photography. Courtesy of Fondation le Corbusier/2012, ProLitteris, Zurich.

Spread from Le Corbusier and the Power of Photography.

Spread from Le Corbusier and the Power of Photography.

Lucien Hervé, contact sheet of photographs taken during the film of La Cité radieuse (The Radiant City) by Jean Sacha, 1952. From the book Le Corbusier and the Power of Photography. Copyright Lucien Hervé and the Research Library at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles.

Resist whatever seems inevitable.

Resist any idea that contains the word algorithm.

Resist the idea that architecture is a building.

Resist the idea that drawing by hand is passé.

Resist the claim that history is concerned with the past.

—Lebbeus Woods, excerpts reordered from Architecture and Resistance

Anyone interested in photographs and buildings, or how the two intersect, might have noticed a recent spate of books devoted to the subject. I count at least two dozen, published in the first three years of this decade, devoted to the work of significant architectural photographers, photographic projects for which architecture is the main subject, collections of architectural photographs, or more focused studies of individual architects’ relationship to photography (in this case Le Corbusier and The Power of Photography, the first of three to come out this year addressing the architect’s relationship to the medium). In addition to the recent books, panel discussions have been organized and exhibitions have been mounted—and several more of each is forthcoming. (Le Corbusier: An Atlas of Modern Landscapes, a major exhibition of the architect’s work in various mediums opens at MoMA in June 2013.) This fact alone is not such a surprise; the question of how to represent architecture in two dimensions has engaged artists for centuries, and photographs of buildings are as old as the medium itself. Photography was born in the lap of architecture: the first chemically fixed photographic view, made from an upstairs room and framed by a window, depicts the slanting roof of a barn on Joseph Nicephore Niepce’s Burgundy estate. The history of photography is so tightly intertwined with architecture and the built environment that one wonders if this recent burst of attention is even worth noting. If it is not simply a coincidence, a question to consider might be, why now?

Le Corbusier and the Power of Photography is an excellent example of the recent intensification of interest in this topic. The book includes six essays by a diverse group of scholars and curators, encompassing the many ways the architect engaged with photography throughout his lifetime. The graphic design is bright and energetic; there is plenty of text, but it is primarily a book of images. Tim Benton writes about the young Charles-Edouard Jeanneret’s early experiments with a camera on his travels from 1907 to 1911, and the films and photographs he made when he returned to photography in the 1930s after abandoning his camera for a pencil and paper. Reproduced within this essay are many of the architect’s own photographs and stills he made with a moving film camera. Catherine de Smet lays out Corbusier’s masterful use of photographs in the design of his books and reproduces detailed mockups of many pages from Une Petite Maison (A Little House). Arthur Ruegg describes the photo-based murals Le Corbusier called “photographic frescoes” and the photo collages he designed for traveling exhibitions. Catherine Boone persuasively portrays Le Corbusier as a media-savvy propagandist, pioneering in his oversight of the manner in which his work was portrayed in pictures. He was so strictly controlling of the depiction of theUnité d’Habitation in Marseille that he restricted access to the construction site, forbade the publication of any photographs without his approval, and eventually produced a promotional film about the project for which he specified the film stock, wrote the script, and chose the camera angles, the dialogue, and even the music. In “Through Many Lenses: Contemporary Interpretations of the Architect’s Works,” Jean-Christophe Blasér, a curator at the Musee de l’Elysee in Lausanne, Switzerland, stumbles through an essay about Le Corbusier and contemporary photography, getting some facts wrong and concluding with a convoluted claim that architectural photography has “contaminated” contemporary practice and led to a decline in “humanist” photography. Lastly, Klaus Spechtenhauser catalogs the many candid and staged photographs of the architect himself, looking (seemingly always) stylish and serious, intense and focused on whatever he was drawing, smoking, pointing to, or driving—even holding up a small pig. This final chapter leaves no doubt that Le Corbusier was clearly aware of the presence and power of the camera.

Final scene of Jean Sacha’s film La Cité radieuse (The Radiant City), 1952. From the book Le Corbusier and the Power of Photography. Courtesy Editions René Château.

Architecture is big news and big business. Contemporary architects are major players on the world cultural stage and, following Le Corbusier’s example, most in the public eye have learned to carefully craft their image and exert some control over how their work is represented in the media. In the art world, it seems like every major museum is either adding a new wing, abandoning one space to set up shop somewhere else, or sometimes, tearing one building down to build a new one. This fact alone is not inherently problematic, although there are unfortunately few examples of expansion programs that challenge the prevailing conventions of museum design, which recently seem to prescribe little more than neatly tailored square footage for staging fundraising events; notable exceptions include Steven Holl’s addition to the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City, Missouri, and Peter Zumthor’s proposal for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s (LACMA) future campus. Over the last four years the Whitney Museum, Kimbell Museum, Art Institute of Chicago, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, LACMA, and three Harvard Art Museums have either added new wings or are currently constructing new buildings, all of which were designed by the office of Renzo Piano. The building boom in the museum world is of course just a side note to the construction boom happening all over the world. Cities are built practically overnight in China, and between 2010 and 2013 while all these books were being printed and published, the world record for tallest residential tower was broken three times. In one city. (Dubai.)

In the same three-year period a century ago, buildings in various corners of the world were designed and built by Antoni Gaudí, Adolf Loos, Frank Lloyd Wright, Cass Gilbert, and Walter Gropius, and the original Pennsylvania Station in New York, designed by McKim, Mead, and White, opened to the public. Frank Furness and Nadar died, and Eero Saarinen, Helen Levitt, Robert Capa, and Ray Eames were born. In a factory in Detroit, Henry Ford introduced the first moving assembly line, and while Europe was on the brink of World War I, engineers in Germany built the first prototype of the 35 mm Leica camera. In Paris, Igor Stravinsky premiered The Rite of Spring in the newly built Theatre des Champs-Elysees, an early example of reinforced concrete construction designed by architect Auguste Perret. (Le Corbusier had worked for Perret only a few years earlier.) Big machines for living and small machines for seeing were changing the way we experienced the world; the stage was set for a long affair between photographs and buildings, and Le Corbusier was squarely at the center of it.

Architecture in the modern movement developed in tandem with photography. The two disciplines, while fundamentally different, complimented each other perfectly. Buildings and photographs are both products of the convergence of art and science; even at their most ordinary and utilitarian, they each express the trace of some human ambition. If modern architecture provided photography with a perfect surface on which to project its own self-reflexive questions, photography gave architecture the perfect instrument to promote its image and safeguard its history. The parallel trajectories of photography and architecture in the twentieth century might explain their divergence in the beginning of the twenty-first. The argument can be made that photography was the most powerful force to shape our cultural memory of the twentieth century; indeed one underlying fact that unifies the books I have noted is that almost all of them address architecture of the previous century, even if the actual photographs were made in this one. Perhaps it is simply a matter of distance (even just over a decade) that could explain the recent surge of interest. Or maybe something has fundamentally changed about the way architects engage photography and the way photographers see architecture.

Olivo Barbieri, Interior of the chapel at Notre Dame du Haut, Ronchamp, France. From the book Le Corbusier and the Power of Photography. Courtesy Olivo Barbieri.

The “crisis” of the digital in contemporary photography has a parallel in discussions about recent architecture. Last September the architect Michael Graves wrote an op-ed in the New York Times entitled “Architecture and the Lost Art of Drawing.” He opened the piece with the statement, “It has become fashionable in many architectural circles to declare the death of drawing.” If declaring drawing “dead” is fashionable among architects, in the photography world it has become practically a professional obligation among curators and academics (and some artists) to proclaim and then celebrate or mourn not just the death of film but also the death of photography. Photography, of course, is still very much alive, more so in fact with the proliferation of new technologies and varied platforms; more photographs are made now than at any point in history, and they are being made by a more diverse group of people, in more places, than ever before. Forecasts of the digital revolution dismantling the medium as we know it have proven to be greatly exaggerated. Photography, after all, has always been a technology on the brink of transformation; its history is demarcated by the failed experiments and technological innovations that constitute its evolution. When daguerreotypes were displaced by tintypes and ambrotypes, which later fell out of use in favor of paper prints, there was both a gain and a loss. The same thing can be said for the invention of smaller, faster, hand-held cameras that liberated photographers from the unwieldy, tripod-mounted view cameras to which they had been bound. The transition from film to digital is not so different. It is also a notable fact that as one technology edged out another, the displaced processes remained largely available to any photographer willing to spend a little more time (and, often, money) in the darkroom (see Aperture’s recent publication of Chuck Close’s daguerreotypes, or any of the books on the work of Sally Mann).

Architecture begins on the page and strives to become a thing in the world: each phase of the design process adds a layer of complexity to a project as it moves closer and closer to becoming a real building. Photography begins with the world: a photographer selects a view; the camera simplifies it, transforms it into a digital file or negative; and, after further editing and interpretation, a positive impression of that image reenters the world. Today pictures are less and less likely to ever escape the confines of the screen. While technologies have changed the way both architects and photographers see and study buildings, it is the dematerialization of the photographic print that has most significantly changed the way we consume pictures. In the architecture world several notable figures have voiced concern over the increasing digitalization of design and the corresponding disappearance of drawing in schools and among young architects. Back to Graves, who wrote, “Drawings are not just end products: they are part of the thought process of architectural design. Drawings express the interaction of our minds, eyes, and hands.” Drawing, as part of the making and studying of architecture, has no parallel in photography. When learning how to use a camera, regardless of whether the image is projected onto a digital sensor or a piece of film, there is no better way to learn than by making and looking at lots and lots of photographs. Historically, photographs have been effective tools to illustrate and study architecture; they can describe surfaces and imply volumes, and they can highlight the spatial and geometric complexities of an architect’s design; but most importantly, especially for photographers and students of architecture, they travel well. Photographs of buildings act as stand-ins for the things themselves. As curator Joel Smith points out in another recent book, “A photograph preserves a sectional outtake of the past—the core sample of a moment in Alexandria or two minutes in Spain. When the camera’s subject is an enduring structure, the photograph accomplishes a kind of tunneling-through of space-time.” While pictures will never replace the multi-sensory experience of the body moving through space, photographs can carry the image of buildings through time.

Stéphane Couturier, Secretariat no. 3, from the series Chandigarh Replay, 2006–07. Courtesy Stéphane Couturier. From the book Le Corbusier and the Power of Photography.

The camera became the most powerful and effective mechanism to advance and diffuse the image of modern architecture in the twentieth century, and Le Corbusier was the first architect to recognize and harness the power of photography. Lucien Hervé was the photographer Le Corbusier turned to to provide the most vivid and flattering vision of his work; architects have followed his example and employed photographers to maximize the impact and reach of their buildings. New design tools have offered architects many options for drawing and rendering hypothetical spaces from different vantage points (including impossible ones); like virtual-fly-through animation, the camera view has become just one more tool in the architect’s expanding toolkit. Architects can virtually “photograph” their buildings before they are even built (3-D renderings of apartments are often listed on real estate brokers’ websites in place of photographs). These new technologies have many critics who, understandably, worry about the growing distance between architects and the world. Putting aside the voices of those who naïvely think that architecture can march into the future with no regard for the past, and the symmetrical bias of those who reject all the new digital models and technologies without thought or consideration, most would agree that the new technologies are undoubtedly changing architectural practice. Is it possible that the recent outpouring of interest in the relationship between photography and architecture is a reaction against the increasing digitalization of both? Is this a moment of collective longing for a not so distant past, or is it evidence of a desire to reconsider photography’s ongoing exchange with architecture? Are we looking to create a different kind of relationship between photographs and buildings, in the face of the relentless onslaught of images?

A few blocks from my studio in Long Island City there is a public park that was recently built along the Queens waterfront. Paid for in part by developers to attract residents to a new luxury housing project, the park lies in the shadow of the neighboring towers. There are some nice things about it, but above all I appreciate it as a generous seat from which to view Manhattan. This park is the third point in an important architectural triangle; to the northwest, at the southern tip of Roosevelt Island, is the newly built FDR Four Freedoms Park designed by Louis I. Kahn and directly across the river to the west are the United Nations Secretariat and General Assembly buildings, designed by Le Corbusier, Oscar Neimeyer, and others. The park, unfortunately, does not live up to its geographic potential.Something about it feels off. Maybe it is the uniformity of the undulating backs of the built-in lounge chairs, the height and shape of the brushed-steel lampposts, or the curves of the paths encircling the central lawn. Something about the perforated metal backing of the benches and bulging lines of the Cor-ten steel planters reads as computer-generated and cold, soulless. Even the trees look fake; planted awkwardly along the pixelated tile paths they feel like paper cutouts in an architect’s scale model. Crossing the wide avenue at the edge of Queens and entering the park, it feels as if you have left the city, and indeed the world, behind. The park stretches out before you like a life-size, but lifeless, AutoCAD rendering. At least that is how it looks, and feels, to this photographer. Nonetheless, when walking along the wide boardwalk or sitting and watching the city stand still, it is easy to forget about such things. The sky opens up at just that point along the coast in a way that feels unusual, and expansive, in this city of splintered skies. The view of Manhattan from the park is more vivid and exciting than any I know looking out from the island itself. Key architectural monuments line up across the river like they are posing for a class picture: The Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, the UN Headquarters, and, in the distance, the new World Trade Center. Soon a new public library, designed by Steven Holl, will be built at the edge of the park, and it promises to offer some relief to those of us, in this corner of the city, who have wished for a more thoughtful and exciting space to visit. What architecture gives us, after all, is more than just buildings to look at; it provides the framework for a set of accumulated experiences.

Barney Kulok is a photographer who lives and works in New York. He has presented solo exhibitions at Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, New York, and Galerie Hussenot, Paris, and is currently included in the group exhibition Traces of Life at Wentrup Gallery, Berlin. His book Building: Louis I. Kahn at Roosevelt Island was published by Aperture in 2012.

Building:




$75.00

Scenes from Paris Photo Los Angeles

Photo courtesy Stacey Clarkson

Photo courtesy Stacey Clarkson

The Aperture booth at Paris Photo Los Angeles, on the Paramount Pictures Studios' New York Street Backlot

The Aperture booth at Paris Photo Los Angeles, on the Paramount Pictures Studios' New York Street Backlot

Doug Rickard book signing at Paris Photo Los Angeles

Zoe Crosher studio visit during the Paris Photo Los Angeles Patrons Trip

Shaun Caley Regen of Regen Projects during the Paris Photo Los Angeles Patrons Trip

An Aperture patron stands in front of a work by Marilyn Minter at Regen Projects. Photo courtesy Susan Ressler

Photo courtesy Susan Ressler

A behind-the-scenes tour of Regen Projects with gallery owner Shaun Caley Regen

Catherine Opie studio visit during the Paris Photo Los Angeles Patrons Trip

The PhotoBook Review 004 launch party at Paris Photo Los Angeles

The PhotoBook Review 004 launch party at Paris Photo Los Angeles

Paris Photo Los Angeles at Paramount Pictures Studios

Paris Photo made its debut in Los Angeles this spring and Aperture Foundation offered exclusive opportunities for patrons and guests. These included studio and gallery tours with Zoe Crosher, Sam Falls, Phil Chang, Catherine Opie, Marco Breuer, and Shaun Caley Regen of Regen Projects, as well as unique behind-the-scenes tours of the J. Paul Getty Museum and the LACMA Department of Photographs, a celebratory dinner, and a special private-collection visit.

Check out the sights, both on the Paramount Studios lot and throughout Los Angeles!

Announcing the Six Finalists for the 2013 Aperture Portfolio Prize

Akihiko Miyoshi, Abstract Photograph, 2011.

Eva Stenram, Drape VII, 2012.

Bryan Schutmaat, Ralph, 2011.

Clare Carter, Zanele Jonas, New Brighton, Port Elizabeth, 2011.

"Zanele was playing pool in a bar near her home in Port Elizabeth in April 2011. Shortly after stepping outside for a cigarette she was abducted by the uncle of a close friend. He told her, "I am going to show you what it is to be a woman." He had brought with him a pool cue, which he used to repeatedly penetrate her with. Zanele reported the case to the police but they have made no progress in the hunt for her rapist."

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Pacifico Silano, Denim Selection, 2013.

Corey Escoto, House of Cards, 2012.

Aperture is pleased to announce the six finalists for the 2013 Aperture Portfolio Prize. This year, Aperture’s editorial and limited-edition-print staff—twelve members and fourteen work scholars in all—reviewed more than 800 portfolios. Our challenge was to select one top prize and five honorable mentions from this overwhelming response. We are delighted to announce the following finalists, one of whom will be selected as the winner of the 2013 Aperture Portfolio Prize:

Clare Carter

Corey Escoto

Akihiko Miyoshi

Bryan Schutmaat

Pacifico Silano

Eva Stenram

Stay tuned! The winner will be announced in June 2013, at which time all of the finalists’ portfolios and statements will be presented here on Aperture.org. The winning artist will receive a cash prize of $3,000 and an exhibition at Aperture Gallery in fall 2013. The winners of past Aperture Portfolio Prizes can be found on the Portfolio Prize homepage.

Interview with Sara VanDerBeek

For her first solo exhibition at Metro Pictures, on view through June 8, New York–based artist Sara VanDerBeek made photographs at museums of antiquity and archeological sites in several European cities. These images have been given unique frames and are paired with cast-concrete sculptures similar to those VanDerBeek photographed for her earlier work. Brian Sholis, who wrote about VanDerBeek’s work in Aperture #202 , spoke with the artist by phone.

Installation view, Metro Pictures, New York, 2013. Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York.

Sara VanDerBeek, Black Nude, 2013. Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York.

Installation view, Metro Pictures, New York, 2013. Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York.

Installation view, Metro Pictures, New York, 2013.

Sara VanDerBeek, Temple, 2010. Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York. [Note: This work is not included in the present exhibition.]

Brian Sholis: In recent years you’ve made work in several US cities—Detroit, New Orleans, and your hometown, Baltimore. What are some of the differences you noticed when working in cities like Paris, Rome, and Naples?

Sara VanDerBeek: One big difference was in the way I navigated them. In America I chose to walk around and respond to the outdoor environment. I chose sites and spaces that resonated with the life of the city, or an impactful event in its recent past; for example, I made images of building foundations in the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans. But in Europe I worked mostly indoors, in various museums and collections. I’m not sure whether my familiarity with American cities allowed me to explore them with more confidence, or whether it was in part because I traveled to Europe with the specific purpose of exploring some of these pre-eminent collections of sculpture.

I will say, however, that I feel like history—as a larger, more abstract idea, as something taught and learned—suffuses European cities and museums, whereas a more specific and tangible history is present in the surfaces of American cities. That’s part of why I chose to focus on the ancient and neo-classical sculptures that are the subjects of some of the photographs in this exhibition. I wanted to explore figures that are already iconographic. Although they are three-dimensional, I think of them almost as images. I did engage and connect with the contemporary life of these European cities—I met and befriended a number of young artists and curators, and was very intrigued by their perspective on both the current and historical nature of their cities. But something about this whole endeavor led me to become focused on certain aspects of the past as they connected to the present. As I was photographing these sculptures and visiting different sites, I considered the changing depictions of the body, and how those depictions reflected larger changes in the cultures of their creation. The repetition of the figures was very intriguing to me, too. Most of all, I was interested in discovering, through the arrangement of the objects and the images in the show, a way to create an experience that in some way translated my original experience of visiting these sites.

BJS: Were you cognizant of being under the spell of these environments? Did you try to respond to them in terms other than those handed to you by art history books?

SV: I think “under the spell” is a good phrase. I was very inspired, or even mesmerized, at times. Sometimes the environments were dreamlike; at the very least they are different from what I have experienced of American institutions. Smaller collections in Rome, for example, allowed me extended time alone with the objects. I felt a connection to these figures, could begin to make sense of their gravitational force; I was able to move around them and study them intently. I was able to slow down, and I spent lots of time with each object so that my idea of them was formed out of direct observation and the camera’s view.

BJS: You also were not encumbered with a lot of equipment.

SV: I had a camera, but no tripod, and I used existing light. I tried to embrace the specific qualities of the objects emphasized by their environments, to understand how they were lit and staged. The tableaux are fascinating. However, after working in the museums, I did a lot of things during the printing and framing processes to alter the colors in the imagery, to try and re-create the imaginative, dreamlike way I experienced them.

I really enjoy the simplicity of this way of working. It was just me, with my camera, out in the world—I was trying to be present in the moment. This initial phase is the most exciting and invigorating part of the process; it’s when I get the ideas from which everything evolves, the sculptures, the overall installation, and the quality I hope to achieve in the final printed image.

Sara VanDerBeek, Roman Woman I, 2013. Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York.

BJS: Let’s talk briefly about the presentation at Metro Pictures. The show marks the first time you’ve exhibited a large number of your sculptures in New York. You have also made very specific decisions regarding framing. The show can be understood as an exploration of the relationship between images and objects. Though you were working simply, you are not presenting straight, “documentary” photographs.

SV: When I began exhibiting the sculptures I had previously used only for my studio-based photographs, I was encouraged to further consider the photograph as an object. I have often thought about how prints themselves fluctuate between image and object, and I wanted my photographs to have some other, possibly three-dimensional quality.

I had been exploring these questions during the last year, but hadn’t worked out the details until I began thinking about how classical sculptures had at one point been painted. They were themselves a meeting of image and object. The paint, its colors, was a means of communication, a literal and symbolic adornment. Today we see these figures without most of their color. They have changed over time, and to see them now is to be able to contemplate those differences.

Coloring the photographs by placing them behind semitransparent Plexiglas emulates the original act of coloring the sculptures. The Plexiglas I chose is quite a dark, deep blue. The figures become more like shapes or apparitions; they are semi-abstract textures and forms, though still legible as figures. I have also used mirrored glass for the larger, abstract photographs I’m presenting in one room at Metro Pictures. With them I’m trying to create a fleeting, ephemeral experience, one that mirrors what I felt while trying to capture particular moments in these sites. I wanted images that would change and fluctuate. Your reflection in the mirrored glass does that, but the color and texture you can see behind it will change, too. I keep going back to notions of dreams, of dreamlike images. Dreams, too, are specific but not fixed.

BJS: You mentioned earlier that this careful calibration of works in Metro Pictures’s three separate galleries is an attempt, on some level, to re-create your experience of these museum collections in Europe. Can you explain that further?

SV: I tried to take into account shifts in scale, and the viewer’s relationship to the objects and photographs as he or she moves through the galleries. Some objects are composed of human-scale modules, while other sculptures are a little bit larger than human scale, as were the figures I saw in Naples, at the National Archeological Museum. I was surprised to discover how large some of the classical sculptures were—in particular the figures that had adorned the Baths of Caracalla in Rome. I had never seen classical figures that large, and I hope that in my exhibition you get a sense of the proportion and mass that I felt when viewing these sculptures, as well as the quality and changes in your sense of scale as you move around them.

I have always been interested in how photography affects the reading of scale, time, and place. It can be disorienting or confusing to encounter a photograph of something, but it can also usefully enlighten some little-perceived aspect of real-life experience.

Sara VanDerBeek, Metal Mirror I (Magia Naturalis), 2013. Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York.

BJS: It was sometimes difficult to discern the actual size of the studio-based constructions you photographed earlier in your career. Can you speak about the contrasts between your early work, which was primarily in the studio, and your recent work, which has mostly taken place out in the world?

SV: I enjoy mixing different ways of working. Working out in the world involves a level of reactiveness, of being open to chance, that wasn’t as much a part of my earlier practice. When shooting in these European museums and gardens I was moving fairly quickly, responding to the qualities of light I encountered. Despite this dependence on context, the process can be as gestural as creating and staging tableaux in the studio. And it has changed my work in the studio, as well. Today when I create still lifes in the studio, I often work with natural light, shoot fewer frames. And I’m more open to trying alternate vantage points. For the early photographs of layered assemblages, made circa 2005 or 2006, I would shoot rolls and rolls of film. I’ve become a little bit more focused now, and I think that has come from lessons learned while shooting out in the world.

The studio now functions for me in a manner similar to my understanding of these classical figures: it’s a meeting point of different times. I take images, print them out, bring them into the studio, and consider them alongside sculptures or other, earlier photographs—it creates a “still life” of various pasts in the present. We all recognize that the present is imbued with the past; what I hope is that the exhibition itself communicates a sense of the feedback loops I experience while working, whereby sculptures generate images and images generate sculptures. That loop is itself a metaphor for the continually evolving process of thinking, making, and interpretation that is any artist’s or individual’s experience in life. We are continually trying to understand and process our past as we address ongoing issues. I feel these works are representative of that kind of grappling, of coming to terms with the foundations on which we build.

Coming Soon: The Paris Photo—Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards 2013

Next month Aperture and Paris Photo will launch the second annual Paris Photo—Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards, celebrating the book’s contribution to the evolving narrative of photography. This year’s call for entries will run May 6 through September 13, 2013, with winners to be announced at Paris Photo, November 14–17, 2013, and in The PhotoBook Review issue 005.

Stay tuned! More information and details for entry will be made available at the beginning of May.

New York Times Magazine Photographs in Santiago, Chile

Installation images courtesy of Stacey Baker and Annette Booth.

The latest installation of The New York Times Magazine Photographs is on view at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, in Santiago, Chile, through June 15, 2013. The exhibition, curated by New York Times Magazine photo editor Kathy Ryan and Lesley A. Martin, consists of 126 works by thirty-five artists, including Lynsey Addario, Gregory Crewdson, Mitch Epstein, Nan Goldin, Annie Liebovitz, Mary Ellen Mark, Steve McCurry, and more.

For more details, and a full list of future venues for The New York Times Magazine Photographs, visit our traveling exhibitions page.

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 Aperture published The New York Times Magazine Photographs, edited by Kathy Ryan, in fall 2011.

The New York Times Magazine Photographs




$75.00

Canon Rebels

Light from the Middle East: New Photography was on view at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, from November 13, 2012, to April 7, 2013. For more information, click here.

Hassan Hajjaj, Saida in Green, 2000. Copyright and courtesy the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, Wonder Beirut #13, Modern Beirut, International Centre of Water-Skiing, from the series Wonder Beirut, 1997–2006. Copyright the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, courtesy the artists and CRG Gallery, New York and In Situ / Fabienne Leclerc, Paris.

Jowhara AlSaud, Airmail, from the series Out of Line, 2008. Copyright and courtesy Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Mehraneh Atashi, Bodiless I, from the series Zourkhaneh Project (House of Strength), 2004. Copyright and courtesy the British Museum, London.

Youssef Nabil, detail from the series The Yemeni Sailors of South Shields, 2006. Courtesy and copyright the British Museum, London.

Shadi Ghadirian, from the series Qajar, 1998. Copyright and courtesy the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

From images of fists and banners in Tahrir Square to photos of resistance fighters in Syria to silhouettes of burkas amidst the ruins in Kabul, in recent years no area has been so recorded and defined by media photographs—whether hazy phone snaps or photojournalists’ work—as the Middle East.

Tampering with and staging photographs is common practice for artists today. As Light from the Middle East: New Photography at the Victoria and Albert Museum demonstrated, rebelling against the medium’s ability to represent reality, and the ensuing visual stereotypes, is even more relevant for photographers from the region. Regardless of whether the images were found in the “recording,” “reframing,” or “resisting” sections of exhibition, many are abstracted, distorted, redacted, burnt, or manipulated to resemble mid-century studio portraits. Fictive back stories for the images are imagined, or their subjects and scenes are minutely choreographed. In the exhibition’s best moments, nothing is what it first appears to be.

Very few of the photographs have a straightforward genesis, and those that do seem out of place. For his series Sufis: The Day of al-Ziyara (1995–2006), Syrian photographer Issa Touma spent ten years gaining the trust of Sufi pilgrims in order to photograph their annual procession and flesh-mortification ritual from the midst of the pilgrimage. His fish-eye lens revels in the spectacle. No challenge to the medium is mounted here, nor in Magnum alumnus Abbas’s images of militants, protests, and morgues during the 1979 Iranian revolution, a photojournalist’s diary that can hardly be considered contemporary. Such documentary records are powerful—testimonies taken by photographers immersed in the moments they capture. But their inclusion here simply highlights what most of the selected artists aren’t doing, and points to the fact that this is not merely an exhibition, but selections from a collection, and the needs of the two don’t necessarily correlate.

Newsha Tavakolian, from the series Mothers of Martyrs, 2006. Copyright and courtesy the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Up until this point, the V&A’s collection of Middle Eastern photography ended in the 1970s with Western views of the region, such as surveys of Iran by Henri Cartier-Bresson and Mary Ellen Mark. Recent funding, shared with the British Museum, has sought to correct this, and the institutions’ joint acquisitions make up the show. Yet while Abbas’s Iran Diary—and traditional forms of photojournalism—play a vital part in updating the collection, they feel tangential in the context of the exhibition. Abbas Kowsari, a photo editor at Tehran’s Shargh newspaper who worked previously at ten Iranian newspapers that have since been shut down, is a more fitting example of a photographer pushing the boundaries of photojournalism. Sadly he is only represented here by one image, a tightly composed close-up of a Kurdish combatant wearing a Bryan Adams T-shirt. The gaze of the Canadian singer is fixed on the weapons stuffed in the miltant’s belt, with Kowsari musing on the unlikely conflation of warfare and Western pop culture.

Elsewhere, however, manipulated images do not necessarily yield interesting results: often, the photographers fall too readily upon obvious symbolism or one-note juxtapositions. Sükran Moral’s Despair (2003) leaves viewers in no doubt about the desperate plight of a group of migrant workers huddled in a boat, even had the Turkish photographer not digitally perched nightingales on their shoulders and arms. Just in case we missed the disjunction between the symbol of hope and freedom and the wingless workers, the birds are gaudily colored in comparison to the black-and-white men. Meanwhile, Newsha Tavakolian’s scenes of elderly mothers clutching photographs of their young soldier sons killed in the 1980–88 Iran-Iraq war are poignant, tender protest images, but also rather familiar ones.

Too often ambiguity and subtlety are in short supply, or the theme or subject of a photograph too literally echoes its manner of execution. Amirali Ghasemi rebels against photography and the Iranian authorities by redacting snapshots of Tehran’s partying youth; John Jurayj’s images of blistered buildings, concocted by burning holes onto enlarged, found photographs and filling them with red Plexiglas, rather glaringly highlight the brutality of war.

Far more intricate and intriguing is a neighboring set of images from Lebanese artist duo Joana Hadjithomas and Kahlil Joreige, which takes as its starting point idyllic tourist postcards of pre-civil-war Beirut that are then stretched and abused. Their distorted and damaged but glossy and still seductive vistas quiver between dream and nightmare, past and present. The couple’s invention of an imaginary photographer commissioned to take the images, and the story that he burnt them during the civil war to reflect the destruction around him, adds another layer to the works.

Nermine Hammam, The Break, from the series Upekkha, 2011. Copyright and courtesy the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Authorship comes further under fire in excerpts from Walid Raad’s fabricated log of car bombs used during the Lebanese Civil War. (Raad lurks under not one but two fake monikers: the Atlas Group, proprietors of a photographic archive, and the historian Dr. Fakhouri.) Similar questions arise in relation to Taysir Batniji’s Bernd & Hilla Becher–inspired views of Israeli watchtowers, the latter series bearing a particularly curious relationship to its original inspiration. Just as the German photographers highlighted design similarities and singularities, so too does Batniji, yet his blurred, spontaneous snaps are anything but celebratory or carefully composed. They also are far more political: Batniji was forced to commission a local photographer to catalog the watchtowers, as the Gaza-born Palestinian is forbidden to travel to the West Bank.

Indeed, investigations of landscapes and architecture provide the show with its most memorable, most enigmatic images: Israeli photographer Tal Shochat’s lush but bizarre views of fruit trees at night, preened and lit as if they were models in a studio; Yto Barrada’s views of rubble and partially built homes in Tangier’s suburbs; and, most poignantly, Iraqi-born, London-based artist Jananne Al-Ani’s ghostly, hypnotic video Shadow Sites II (2011).

Taking Desert Storm–esque aerial photographs, Al-Ani challenges the long-propagated Western myth of the uninhibited Iraqi desert by gradually advancing in on these monochrome abstracted landscapes to reveal signs of human civilization. A sense of both lyricism and strangeness prevails: these settlements and traces are only visible when the sun is at its lowest point and shadows delineate their contours. Yet as soon as the markings are on the cusp of being decipherable, she dissolves to another shot. Al-Ani here succeeds in musing on photography—its reliability and legibility—where others around her falter. Her calling card is mystery.

Until recently, the few Middle Eastern artist-photographers celebrated in the West were Iranian (Abbas, Kaveh Golestan, Shirin Neshat, Shirana Shahbazi). The exhibition strives to correct this, and to update the collections of two major institutions. The problems plague this exhibition are those that plague every geographical survey: the pressures of covering every corner of the area; limitations on the number of prints from each photographer. But they were exacerbated here by a selection of artists that was often less than inspired.

Isabel Stevens works at the film magazine Sight & Sound and writes on photography and film for a variety of publications, including Source and The Wire.