Aperture's Blog, page 197

Cihad Caner Wins the Photographic Museum of Humanity 2013 Grant

Cihad Caner, from the series Remaining, 2012

Instanbul-based photographer Cihad Caner has won the Photographic Museum of Humanity 2013 Grant for his documentary series Remaining, which tackles the ongoing civil war in Syria through portraits and environmental photographs. From March 2011 to the present, over sixty thousand people have died in the Syrian civil war, and seven hundred thousand have taken refuge in other countries. The individuals who remain in the region are the focus of Caner’s series, for which the photographer captures black-and-white portraits with Polaroid film, as well as images of surrounding landscapes, anonymous interiors, and urban decay. “This series is not about the explosions, neither about the conflicts, nor dead people, but about the effects of war,” says the twenty-three-year-old photographer. “It shows the relationship of the remaining people with the remaining places and their environments.”

Cihad Caner, from the series Remaining, 2012

A prestigious jury formed by Magnum photographer Martin Parr; Kira Pollack, director of photography at TIME; and Young Reporter of Perpignan 2012 winner Sebastian Liste selected Caner’s series from a pool of over one thousand one hundred international submissions. Of Caner’s winning series, Parr commented, “Cihad offers a very fresh approach to dealing with the tired and depressing Syrian problem. By taking a side view and combining these elegant portraits and urban decay with text, he brings a fresh perspective that is most welcome.”

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Currently in its inaugural year, the Photographic Museum of Humanity Grant is an international photographic contest organized with the aim of providing financial support for talented photographers and discovering new talents. For more on Cihad Caner and the Remaining series, visit Cihad’s Photographic Museum of Humanity Grant 2013 portfolio page.

Interview with Greg Allen

Greg Allen, a writer and filmmaker in Washington, D.C., has organized Exhibition Space , an exhibition at apexart in New York that revisits images, objects, and perspectives from the early days of the Cold War space race. Included in the show are a ten-foot-diameter re-creation of a Project Echo satelloon and two photographic series created for utilitarian purposes that blur the lines between science and Conceptual art. The exhibition is on view through May 8. For more on the overlaps between science, exploration, and photography, subscribe now to Aperture magazine in order to receive the forthcoming Summer 2013 issue on the theme of “Curiosity.” —Brian Sholis

Photographer unknown, Echo I over South Dakota, August 31, 1960.

NGS-POSS1 Plate E-161 showing NGC-5792, a spiral galaxy, observed 27 Apr 1957, 00h44 - 01h40.

Unknown photographer, Project Echo Inflation Test, Weeksville, N.C., April 1960.

NGS-POSS Plate O12, taken November 18, 1949.

Photographer unknown, Edwin Hubble at Palomar Observatory's 48-inch Oschin Schmidt Telescope, ca. 1948.

Brian Sholis: Your exhibition uses scientific, press, and amateur photographs to demonstrate a shift in Americans’ conception of outer space, a shift conditioned in part by the escalation of the Cold War. Will you elaborate on this idea and tell us whether you see a connection to more explicit links between culture and Cold War propaganda, such as those uncovered by Frances Stonor Saunders [in her book The Cultural Cold War]?

Greg Allen: The short answer is yes, I do see links to the cultural Cold War, though I was originally drawn to these things largely for their aesthetic value. I was looking at how these scientific and astronomical artifacts might bear on the art historical discussion, in particular, of the beginnings of conceptual photography and minimalism.

Despite having written on my blog many times over the years about both the NGS–Palomar Observatory Sky Survey and NASA’s Project Echo, I had never considered either of them in terms of each other, nor of the Cold War, which was the overriding political dynamic of their time. Project Echo figures only marginally in it, but I found Walter McDougall’s 1986 book The Heavens and The Earth: A Political History of the Space Age, to be really useful for understanding how space became a site of political conflict.

BJS: How did that understanding of space evolve?

GA: In some real way after World War II, space became “the next frontier,” the natural successor to the American West, the landscape onto which American dreams of expansion and dominance were projected. But after the launch of Sputnik in 1957 and a few years of US failures and setbacks, space was seen as “the next front,” a site of Cold War conflict where US supremacy was uncertain or faltering. While there were direct military and technological implications for the space race, there were also significant propaganda impacts when space-related achievements were considered alongside cultural production as evidence of the superiority or failure of national ideological systems.

Saunders has a great analysis of how the US-Soviet ideological rivalries and de-Nazification efforts in occupied Germany laid the groundwork for the Cold War’s cultural competition. That’s the same milieu in which the Allies were each scrambling to secure for themselves as many German V-2 rockets and rocket scientists as they could. The US shipped back parts for hundreds of V-2s, as well as Wernher von Braun. NASA’s own official Project Echo histories don’t mention him at all, but von Braun was the first and most prominent advocate of the US launching a one-hundred-foot inflatable satellite into space for unabashedly propagandistic purposes. He called it “The American Star,” and he was confident it would sway the hearts and minds of Asia (i.e., China and India) toward the US cause.

McDougall makes a persuasive case that the US space program, led by civilians at NASA interested in science and exploration, was itself an ideological refutation of the Soviets’ attempted militarization of space. This also provided public cover, he argues, for an entire military/intelligence shadow space program, including the development of ICBMs and missile targeting systems, and the deployment of surveillance satellites. Though Project Echo satellites served multiple nontrivial roles in this evolution, I didn’t discover until working on the show that their propagandistic mission—to be seen by the entire world—wasn’t a side point: it was the main point.

Photographer unknown, Beacon satellites on display in the US Pavilion at Expo67, Montreal, 1967.

BJS: I want to pick up on your initial impetus to research these images, which shouldn’t be lost in the discussions of scientific and political imperatives. How might these photographs be understood as predecessors to Conceptual photography and Minimalism? Were you able to uncover any evidence that these images, which were widely distributed, impacted the thinking of artists whom we now consider part of the photographic and sculptural canon?

GA: In several years of archive diving I did find some connections between these projects and images and various postwar and contemporary artists, but no Rosetta Stone–style revelations. In the 1980s Chris Burden created a little-known proposal called The Moon Project that was basically a restaging of Project Echo as art, only bigger.

But I was really motivated more, I think, by the desire to question or expand the photographic and sculptural canon, not just to add to the footnotes of the stories that were already being written.

BJS: These photographs deserve consideration as aesthetic objects—

GA: —In the most basic sense, these prints and satellites are indeed extraordinary objects, extraordinarily made. They embodied the characteristics of and exerted major influence on the culture of their day. It’s not just coincidence that they happen to look like art, or rather, that art soon emerged that looked like them. Considered on their own terms and in their own contexts, these projects can bring a lot formally, aesthetically, conceptually, and ideologically to art discourse.

Take the Palomar Observatory Sky Survey, which is an archetype of the non-subjective, anti-aesthetic scientific photography that informed Bernd & Hilla Becher beginning in the mid-1950s. Indexicality, typology, obsolescence, mankind’s place in the world—these are all central elements of both POSS and the Bechers’ work. The timing is such that I don’t think the Bechers could have known or seen POSS in the 1950s. But I shouldn’t have been surprised to learn that it was overseen at Caltech by a German refugee astronomer, and thus shared the same socio-political foundation, 1930s German objectivism, that the Bechers consciously sought out. Maybe it’s the photographic equivalent of how Québécois forked from Old French, thus preserving some of its structure and vocabulary. And that’s all without really addressing the issues of seriality or the grid. And on a completely different plane, of course, there’s the sheer ambition and folly of deciding to take a picture of the entire universe. I mean, what artwork can measure up to that?

BJS: Douglas Huebler would announce his intention to do just that in the early 1970s.

GA: Yes. And the Echo satellite, meanwhile, even though it predates Judd’s and Morris’s concepts by almost a decade, seems like a “specific object” to me. It’s not—or not just—a case of “this looks like that.” Walking back the history of Project Echo, it turns out that visibility—direct experience with the object itself, in its space—was a the central point of the endeavor. Echo was an object made to be seen—and photographed—in space, from everywhere on earth. And on top of all that, the idea was first promoted by none other than Wernher von Braun as pure, unabashed propaganda.

Rather than influence, it’s context, and Echo makes me think of critic Michael Fried and Robert Smithson’s exchange over Minimalism’s theatricality and atemporality. Smithson wrote, “What Fried fears most is the consciousness of what he is doing—namely being himself theatrical,” an internally conflicted position that applies equally well to Echo’s spectacle. It’s funny, and kind of a bummer, actually, because though my affinity for Minimalism and Smithson was what drew me to Project Echo in the first place, the more I discovered about its history and politics, the more problematic Minimalism’s claims of objectivity became for me. I just kept thinking, “Man, they had to have known about all this.”

Thomas Ruff: Photograms for the New Age

For more than thirty years, German photographer Thomas Ruff has investigated the grammar and structures of photography, through his many celebrated series, Sterne/Stars (1989), maschinen/machines (2003), and cassini (2008)—to name just a few. After turning away from straight photography in the mid-1990s, Ruff has worked mainly with found imagery culled from a variety of sources—from print catalogs and scientific negatives to the Internet, from which he purloined pornographic images for his nudes series, which he began in the 1990s. More recently,
 he has turned his attention to 3-D imaging software to continue his investigations
of the medium. For his newest project, Ruff has taken up a study of the photogram, updating the form for the digital era by creating his works in a 3-D digital studio environment and outputting the resulting images in the large scale he tends to
favor. Michael Famighetti spoke with 
Ruff, who is based in Düsseldorf, by phone in February as he finished work on this new series in preparation for its debut
 at New York’s David Zwirner Gallery
. That exhibition is on view now through April 27.

This article is included in the Summer 2013 issue of Aperture, which is organized around the theme of “Curiosity” and which hits newsstands on May 21. Click here to subscribe to Aperture magazine. Ruff is also featured in The Düsseldorf School of Photography (Aperture, 2010).

Thomas Ruff, phg.02, 2012. Courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner Gallery, New York and London.

Thomas Ruff, phg.10, 2012. Courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner Gallery, New York and London.

Thomas Ruff, phg.04, 2012. Courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner Gallery, New York and London.

Thomas Ruff, r.phg.s.03, 2012. Courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner Gallery, New York and London.

Thomas Ruff, r.phg.03, 2012. Courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner Gallery, New York and London.

Thomas Ruff, phg.06, 2012. Courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner Gallery, New York and London.

Thomas Ruff, phg.s.01, 2012. Courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner Gallery, New York and London.

Michael Famighetti: Can you tell us about the process behind this new body of work? What were you after when you decided
 to produce photograms in a digital studio?

Thomas Ruff: The decision was quite simple. I have two photograms by Art 
Siegel in my collection and I passed by
them again and again. Two years ago, I had the idea to begin making some of my own photograms. When I started analyzing how these photograms were made, I realized that it would be quite complicated; photograms are limited to the size of the paper and to the limitations of the black-and-white darkroom. You don’t have much color—only a brownish or bluish tone. And the other thing was if you put objects on the photographic paper and remove them, and then realize that these objects would have been better shifted to the left or the right, you have to start over again. You need a lot of luck to get a good photogram, so I considered how could I do it in a different way. I had already been working with a 3-D software on my series zycles, so I thought, maybe this is the right tool to try with the photograms. I developed a virtual setup: the paper on the bottom, and the objects—lenses, chopsticks, spirals, paper strips, all kind of objects—I put on the paper. There is a camera above, recording the paper, and then I set the lights with different colors.

MF: You have continuously investigated a range of mostly representational photographic types: the jpeg, the nude, the scientific image. What attracted you to the photogram as a form?

TR: The photogram is a kind of “pencil of nature.” It’s cameraless photography—you don’t see the objects but only shadows, which reminds me of Plato’s cave. It’s a very vague photography; you can’t recognize things very clearly but you recognize something. Soon I realized if I use too much color, it doesn’t look like a photogram, it just looks strange and abstract.

MF: The images here are reminiscent of László Moholy-Nagy’s experiments with color photograms from the 1930s. How active did you want such historical references to be?

TR: The goal was really to make a kind
of “new generation” of the photogram.
 So it still should look like a photogram, 
but not old-fashioned. I tried different types of photograms: some with lenses, some with spirals. I want to experiment more with the possibilities of this kind of software to create different kinds of images. I can imagine that Moholy-Nagy would have been absolutely glad if he could have used my technology! You can do so much more than with the limitations of the analog darkroom. I am sure he would have loved the software.

MF: The “types” of photograms here are entirely determined by the objects?

TR: Yes, mainly by the objects. If you look
 at Moholy-Nagy’s photograms they show different typologies within the photograms. I wanted to make variations of these different types.

MF: Photograms are usually quite small—they are limited to the size of the paper available, as you mentioned. Will these images be on par with the usual large scale of your work?

TR: Yes, they will be really big.

Thomas Ruff, phg.06, 2012. Courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner Gallery, New York and London.

MF: Why is large scale important?

TR: First of all, I wanted to break the world record of the size for the photogram! [laughs] The early photograms, from the 1920s and ’30s, are quite small, more postcard size. Photograms from the New Bauhaus school—by Art Siegel and his colleagues, for example—are approximately fifty by sixty centimeters. I work with the large format; I like the physical presence of the big size.

MF: You mentioned the connection between this new body of work and 
your zycles series, computer-generated abstract line drawings based on algorithms. Tthroughout your career you have worked in strictly delineated series. Is it common for one series to bleed into the next?

TR: Yes and no. I am using the same software, the same techniques—but one series doesn’t emerge from the other. It’s more like you have a Leica, and then you have a Linhof: a 4-by-5 camera, and then an 8-by-10 camera. They are just different tools, or cameras,
 or techniques. The output looks completely different.

MF: Much of your work investigates “systems” and the role of genre in photography. You’ve worked with many forms of found photography, from catalog to online imagery. Considering how much photography has transitioned in recent years—this explosion of imaging—do you see new systems and genres emerging?

TR: I see photography as a very classical medium, with of course all kind of genres—portrait, abstract, science photography, and so on. What I am also interested in right now is the negative, since it seems that it is going to disappear soon. When I ask my nine-year-old daughter, “What’s a negative?” she can’t say, as she knows only digital photography.

“Polaroid? What’s that?” she asked me some time ago. What interests me is the outcome of all these different kinds of photography and how they change our lives and our perception of the world. I just turned some photographs that I own into negatives, and they look strange. My interest in this process comes from working on the photograms—I make reverse photograms. And you still have these strange, old-fashioned darkroom techniques, like solarization, which I now also practice in the photograms series.

MF: How do you see photograms, or abstract images, shaping our perception of the world?

TR: The photograms are not so much about the perception and influence of photography in our daily lives. Maybe I just want to recall that artists used techniques in photography that enabled them to make completely artificial and abstract photographs and that these techniques are, unfortunately, nearly forgotten.

MF: You’ve taught at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where you also studied.
 How does your interest in the history and evolution of photographic technologies come into play in the classroom?

TR: I’ve used a lot of different photographic techniques in the past thirty years. I realize there isn’t just one way to take a photograph, there are a thousand different ways—and that’s what I’ve taught the students. They should not insist on their beautiful Leica, or their Hasselblad, or whatever they use. The technique must result from the idea that you have—and you may have to develop your own technology to bring
out the images. I’m not much interested in “straight” photography anymore. It has been practiced for more than 150 years, and most of it is too conventional. I’ve always wanted to go beyond the limits.

MF: But you are interested in photographic conventions. Why?

TR: I think photography is still the most influential medium in the world, and I have to deconstruct these conventions.

Thomas Ruff, phg.s.01, 2012. Courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner Gallery, New York and London.

MF: Do you ever take pictures, in the traditional sense?

TR: The last photographs that I took in 
the traditional way, with an 8-by-10 camera and negative film, were architectural photographs of my studio some months ago. And, of course, if an idea for a new series requires a traditional analog photograph, 
I will use the camera again.

MF: Could you talk about the role of research in your work? Where does a project begin?

TR: If I see an image that attracts, upsets, or astonishes me—one that stays in my mind for a long time—I begin working. This is the starting point of the research: 
I try to find out how the image was created and in what context—historical, political, or social—the image belongs. After clarifying these questions I begin to create “my own” image, the image I have in my mind, the image that was triggered by the image I saw. Sometimes it can be done in a straightforward way, with
 a camera, but sometimes you need to reflect on how you can manage to make this technically. For example, when I had the idea of photographing the night sky, I realized that with my small telescope, I had no chance of getting high-quality images of stars, so I looked for an observatory with a big telescope where 
I could take the photographs myself. 
But they wouldn’t let me in. So I had to give up the idea of being the author of the photograph, and worked with large-format negatives from the observatory’s archive.

MF: It’s been written that when you were in high school you wanted to be either an astronomer or a photographer. Your cassini series connects the two occupations.

TR: I have an affinity for astronomy, so
 from time to time astronomical issues show up in my work. The cassini series consists
 of images of Saturn, its moons and rings, taken by a machine camera within the Cassini spacecraft. They are black-and-white photographs with an abstract quality that 
I really like. To highlight the abstraction,
 I colored these photographs so that they resemble a kind of “post-Suprematist” image.

MF: You’ve spoken of your interest in the writings of Vilém Flusser, whose ideas about imaging, written in the 1970s and ’80s, feel prescient today.

TR: [Flusser’s 1983 Towards a Philosophy of Photography] is a book I read twenty years ago. He was writing about the shifting of photography. There are a lot of different photographs, and different photographs have different intentions. Fine art, medical, propaganda, and of course the most influential image-production machine is advertisement. This transformation, let’s say, of the scientific photography into the art world, or advertising photography into politics (as seen in the last U.S. election)—this modification of images from one intention to another brings about interferences. The image, and the meaning of the image, changes.

MF: This notion of shifting contexts—and thereby shifting meanings—is central to your work. This is true with your nudes series, your first using Internet imagery. How does your image-collecting process work?

TR: I have a particular curiosity; I see things, I collect them, with no intention or without knowing what to do with them. I just keep them, because they trigger something within myself. A couple of years later, maybe even ten years later, these things appear in my mind again and lead to a new body of work. There’s no straight line or conscious scheme of collecting. It could be any kind of image—it’s just that I’m attracted to it.

MF: Does the medium continue to surprise you?

TR: No, not really. But of course I’m always happy when I see a new, never-before-seen example of a photograph. An image is just an image—it all depends on what you do with it.

Interview with Owen Kydd

Owen Kydd is a Los Angeles–based artist who has recently garnered attention for his “durational photographs,” video works that run four to six minutes and explore the interstitial space between still photography and cinema. Curator Charlotte Cotton discussed Kydd’s work in her article “Nine Years, A Million Conceptual Miles,” published in Aperture’s Spring 2013 issue. Here, Kydd speaks with Aperture about his work and its relation to still imagery, experimental cinema, and technology. The interview is one of a series of online-only texts commissioned to accompany the Spring 2013 issue, “Hello, Photography,” which examines the state of the medium in a time of great change. —The Editors

Owen Kydd, Excerpt from Canvas Leaves, Torso, and Lantern, 2011, video on forty-inch display screen

Aperture: How did you arrive at the concept of “durational photographs”?

Owen Kydd: I was thinking about the differences between cinematic moments with photographic qualities and static images with time added and decided that “durational” applied more to the latter. The idea of duration as “incomplete time” seemed to be a way of categorizing a flow of pictures without relying on models drawn from cinematic discourse. It was not a direct challenge to the definition of cinema—my work would likely fall into a strict definition of that category—but a way of proposing the possibility of undoing the time signature of the photograph. Whether a snapshot or a tableau, a photograph denotes the flow of time by its very lack of duration. It reveals the possibility of two types of time, one that is frozen and one that is always mobile. I am trying to reverse the typical effect of the still photograph, to ask people to think about creating stillness out of duration. It’s a performance of photography that I don’t think occurs so readily in the narrative activity of cinema.

AP: Photography’s evolution has always been determined by technology and your work reflects the fact that many cameras can now shoot both stills and video.

OK: That’s exactly it. I started making this work in 2006, when still cameras began to include decent video options. It seems so normal now, but I think when we look back at this development it will be seen not only as a democratization of filmmaking, but also as a considerable marker in the history of still images. In addition to these hybrid cameras, flat screens with resolution that made video look photographic became affordable. Before this people had to rely on projectors, which meant a darkened room, and, even in the gallery space, that’s cinema. It was really in about 2005 or 2006 that technology allowed duration to be a constant variable. I was hoping my project would retroactively define certain conditions of still photographs while actively reversing the absolute time of the photograph.

AP: Can you talk more about what you wanted to explore about “the conditions of still photographs”?

OK: I was looking for a set of “static” conditions that would make something look like it was in the middle of being photographed, even when in motion. That’s a difficult effect to categorize, and I decided that instead of directly trying to reproduce a set of photographic circumstances, I should start by confronting things that I found limiting in photography. I guessed that I might find this in the some of the clichés of the medium; for example, I started with straight or documentary photographs because they were problematic for me as still images. I wanted to know if adding time could allow me to avoid some classic presumptions associated with the documentary form yet still make good pictures. I was asking questions: if the subject of a photograph moves, can I say I’ve captured something decisive? And if not, can I create an image that continues to hold this type of charged moment?

Owen Kydd, Excerpt from Two-Way Polyester Flowers (For L.B.), 2012, video on forty-inch display screen

AP: What was problematic to you about documentary images?

OK: It’s a big category and difficult to define, but I could say that certain photographs which claim to report the real have always had difficulties on some level. But luckily all photographs contain cells that eventually disrupt the certainties that were originally ascribed to them. I wondered if I could accelerate this process by changing the temporal status of the image enough to create a tension, or distance, between subject and viewer that would make us think about documenting in a more fluid form. The snapshot street image seemed like a good place to start because it is understood as the most instantaneous type of photograph.

AP: But many of your works are well-planned still lifes, not snapshots taken on the street. How does duration relate to the still life form?

OK: There were instances I felt like I was creating a camera-based “street” picture without a decisive moment, where I found a version of stillness that expressed an event. But there were other times when I felt duration trapped the subject in a succession of static moments that mimicked a more traditional search for the “essential” and did little to create the tension I was seeking. Ultimately though, I was learning about what made durational photographs work—different things that resisted the need to close the shutter just once. These were found in subtle temporal and atmospheric effects such as the movement of air and light, or materials and surfaces I was using—plastics, inorganic reflective surfaces, objects that had a trompe l’oeil or ambiguous appearance on the video screen. I brought back a collection of these elements to the studio to be assembled and filmed.

The most important thing for me, aside from the instrumental control that a studio offers, is the way it introduces a present tense. The studio erases temporal markers. I wanted to record the present-ness of the studio, possibly to ensure that there was even less chance of interning an event, but perhaps also to confuse the experience of viewing. I have been asked if my studio images are live feeds from another location, which I hope is a clue that something irregular is occurring.

AP: There is a sense of “crime scene” in some of the images—the atmosphere, the sense of oddity …

OK: I am both documenting and remaking storefronts from Los Angeles as a way of performing classic photographic subject matter; storefronts have been a consistent subject for wandering photographers like Atget, Walker Evans, or Lee Friedlander. I found window displays on Pico Boulevard that clearly hadn’t changed in years and that were lit all night, which is mostly when I filmed them, without pedestrians and only the traces of headlights in the glass. It wasn’t quite clear what many of the stores were selling—a florist selling party supplies and trophies, for example, and stores with the word “museum” in their name. Maybe it’s also the imagined history of L.A., but instead of Atget–like scenes, these locations took on a noir effect, meaning they still felt like the crime hadn’t been committed. A key to noir is the separation of subjects from the world around them through the contrast of light and dark, and this contrast helps create sense of distance in the picture, providing a tableaux effect.

Owen Kydd, installation view of Color Shift, 2013, Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, New York. Courtesy of the artist and Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, New York.

AP: In terms of the concentrated looking and observation involved in your durational photographs, I’m wondering about how experimental filmmakers—people such as Michael Snow, Peter Hutton, or Andy Warhol—have been a point of reference for you.

OK: I am in debt to expanded cinema and works like Empire, Wavelength, or James Benning’s films, and the last eight minutes of Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’eclisse, for making moving images appear as if they contain still photographic moments. But with most of those films, the viewer is always located in the same space as the work; there is a projector behind you, and a beam of light that situates you physically within the process of forming the image on the wall in front of you. And I should make the point here that even if you are able to watch these films on an LED screen today, they were initially constructed for projection in a darkened room. I chose flatness as a parameter in my work, and am thus bound to a form of picturing. Fiona Tan’s monitor portraits and David Claerbout’s slide shows, even though they are mostly projected, operate in a similar field. Essentially, I think that if the photographic instant has been aligned with the conditions of modernist pictorial space, then its inverse performance should share similar concerns with surface, distance, and time.

Matthew Pillsbury: City Stages

Matthew Pillsbury City Stages prints on display.

Aperture Trustee and host Michael-Hoeh speaking at City Stages cocktail reception.

Photographer Matthew Pillsbury speaking at City Stages cocktail reception.

Kurt Locher, Barney Kulok, Elaine-Goldman, and Lesley A. Martin at City Stages cocktail reception.

Anne Stark, Kathy Ryan and Bill Hunt at City Stages cocktail reception.

Dennis Powers, Michael Hoeh and Andrew Lewin at City Stages cocktail reception.

Photographer Mary Ellen Mark at City Stages cocktail reception.

Gallerists Deborah Davis and Emily Jane Kirwan at City Stages cocktail reception.

Fabiola Alondra, Balarama-Heller at City Stages cocktail reception.

David and Jane Walentas, with Gabby Pasternak at City Stages cocktail reception.

Aperture Magazine Spring 2013 issue on display.

Matthew Pillsbury City Stages prints.

Guests celebrating at the art collection of Michael Hoeh.

On Tuesday, March 19, nearly fifty photography collectors, gallerists, and Aperture donors gathered at the art collection of Aperture Trustee Michael Hoeh to celebrate the upcoming release of Matthew Pillsbury’s monograph City Stages. The proposed cover image for the publication, High Line, was on display, as was a 30” x 40” limited-edition print Matthew created exclusively for project supporters. If you are interested in supporting Matthew’s monograph, please e-mail development[at]aperture.org or call 212.946.7103.

Bonni Benrubi Gallery will contribute ten percent of all Matthew Pillsbury print sales to Aperture through May 15. When making a purchase at the gallery, please let the staff know that you are supporting the book project.

The New York Times Magazine Photographs




$75.00

The Edge of Vision Interview Series: Bill Armstrong

In this 2009 interview photographer Bill Armstrong discusses his work Mandala #450 within the context of the Aperture exhibition The Edge of Vision: Abstraction in Contemporary Photography, as well as his Infinity series, for which he photographs printed source material with his camera’s focus ring set to infinity. Going through his work since the 1980s, Armstrong explains why he uses blurring as a process, as well as his “painterly approach to photography.” At the end, he also introduces his newer video work.

 

This clip is part of an interview series produced on the occasion of The Edge of Vision: Abstraction in Contemporary Photography, curated by Lyle Rexer, which showcased the work of nineteen international contemporary photographers—including Bill Armstrong, Michael Flomen, Manuel Geerinck, Barbara Kasten, Chris McCaw, Penelope Umbrico, and Silvio Wolf—who base their practice in some form of abstraction from highly conceptual to more documentary approaches. The works explore diverse aspects of the photographic experience, including the chemistry of traditional photography, the direct capture of light without a camera, temporal extensions, digital sampling of found images, radical cropping, and various deliberate destabilizations of photographic reference. This abstract use of photography often combines other mediums such as painting, sculpture, drawing or video. All artists join a broad contemporary trend to look critically and freshly at a medium commonly considered transparent.

 

—

The exhibition was accompanied by The Edge of Vision Limited-Edition Portfolio, as well as the book The Edge of Vision: The Rise of Abstraction in Photography by Lyle Rexer (Aperture, 2009).

Related article: Interview with Bill Armstrong

Related video: Thinking In Color: A Conversation with Bill Armstrong and W.M. Hunt

The Edge of Vision




$49.95



The Edge of Vision Limited-Edition Portfolio




$3,000.00

Joel Meyerowitz Reads from “The Gravity of Time”

After a lifetime of working on a series of “collective portraits” in far-flung places such as Mexico; Ghana; Italy; Tir a’Mhurain, Scotland; and his adoptive country, France, an aging Paul Strand decided to concentrate on still lifes and the stony beauty of his own garden at Orgeval, France, as a site in which to distill his discoveries as a photographer. The work that constitutes Paul Strand’s The Garden at Orgeval (Aperture, 2012) is marked by close and careful study of the forms and patterns within nature. While the images bear the same directness and precise vision that is quintessentially Strand, the work also reflects a growing metaphorical turn.

Here, renowned photographer Joel Meyerowitz reads from “The Gravity of Time,” a personal essay included in Paul Strand: The Garden at Orgeval, in which the photographer addresses his first encounters with Strand’s work, returning to nature as an enduring subject, and growing old.

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Aperture published Paul Strand: The Garden at Orgeval in fall 2012.

Paul Strand: The Garden at Orgeval




$45.00

Joel Meyerowitz Reads from The Gravity of Time

After a lifetime of working on a series of “collective portraits” in far-flung places such as Mexico; Ghana; Italy; Tir a’Mhurain, Scotland; and his adoptive country, France, an aging Paul Strand decided to concentrate on still lifes and the stony beauty of his own garden at Orgeval, France, as a site in which to distill his discoveries as a photographer. The work that constitutes Paul Strand’s The Garden at Orgeval (Aperture, 2012) is marked by close and careful study of the forms and patterns within nature. While the images bear the same directness and precise vision that is quintessentially Strand, the work also reflects a growing metaphorical turn.

 

Here, renowned photographer Joel Meyerowitz reads from “The Gravity of Time,” a personal essay included in Paul Strand: The Garden at Orgeval, in which the photographer addresses his first encounters with Strand’s work, returning to nature as an enduring subject, and growing old.

—

Aperture published Paul Strand: The Garden at Orgeval in fall 2012.

Paul Strand: The Garden at Orgeval




$45.00

Video: Thinking in Color – A Conversation with Bill Armstrong and W.M. Hunt

On March 18, 2013, acclaimed art photographer Bill Armstrong and collector, curator, and consultant W. M. Hunt presented “Thinking In Color,” a lively conversation on color photography. Taking inspiration from the book I Send You This Cadmium Red, which features correspondence between critic John Berger and artist John Christie, Hunt and Armstrong have initiated a dialogue about color in photography. Starting with Armstrong’s technical overview of color photography and its history, as well as Hunt’s observations about color and its empathic power, the exchange was a means for the longtime friends to challenge each other through their ideas.

 

Throughout their conversation at Aperture, Armstrong and Hunt offered thoughts about how color behaves, read from some of their written exchanges with each other, and took the audience on an unexpected and fresh journey through interpreting color in photographs.

 

Watch Part 2 of Thinking in Color: A Conversation with Bill Armstrong and W.M. Hunt

 

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In 2011, Aperture published The Unseen Eye: Photographs from the Unconscious, a catalog of anti-portraiture amassed over the course of thirty years by W. M. Hunt, which includes works by masters such as Richard Avedon, Diane Arbus, Imogen Cunningham, William Klein, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Robert Frank.

 

Bill Armstrong’s work was featured on the cover of The Edge of Vision: The Rise of Abstraction in Photography (Aperture, 2009), author Lyle Rexer’s examination of abstraction at pivotal moments in photography.

Related article: Interview with Bill Armstrong

The Edge of Vision




$49.95



The Edge of Vision Limited-Edition Portfolio




$3,000.00



The Unseen Eye




$75.00

Video: Hank Willis Thomas Artist Talk

On March 12, 2013, Aperture Foundation, in collaboration with the School of Art, Media, and Technology at Parsons the New School for Design, was pleased to present an artist talk with Hank Willis Thomas, a photo-conceptual artist working with themes related to identity, history, and popular culture. Appropriation and juxtaposition are two of many strategies with which Thomas orchestrates his interdisciplinary practice. In this video excerpt, Thomas discusses his series Branded (2011), which adopts a commercial vernacular to decry the commodification of African-Americans, both in contemporary sports and in the historical slave trade. A basketball player dunks into a noose, for example, or a Nike swoosh is branded onto a man’s head. Thomas’s images confront our difficult history through the universal legibility of advertising.

 

In Part 2, Thomas discusses his series Unbranded (2008), which uses advertisements lifted from the pages African-American-interest magazines; Thomas subtly reworks them, removing key text, logos, and/or products. The skeletal remains betray immediately the subliminal prejudice common throughout consumer culture.

 

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In 2008 Aperture published Pitch Blackness, Hank Willis Thomas’s first monograph, which includes selections from his series Unbranded (2008), and several others.

Pitch Blackness




$35.00