Aperture's Blog, page 20
January 3, 2024
The Women Photographers Who Consider the Dynamics of Being Seen
Sometime around 1987, at the age of seven, I got caught looking. I was curled up on the sofa after school, watching MTV with the volume down low. The channel was all but verboten in our house at the time. At some point, the video for Madonna’s “Open Your Heart” came on, featuring the singer herself as an exotic dancer who—spoiler alert!—ultimately escapes from the peep-show theater in which she performs. I was immediately entranced. I turned the volume lower still, ashamed but unable to avert my eyes. And then, just as Madonna pranced across the screen clad in a black satin bustier complete with gold nipple caps and tassels, my mother walked into the living room. “What are you watching?” she asked, somewhat dismayed to find me mesmerized by the sexualized performance playing out before us. Before I could change the channel, she turned off the TV and proceeded to the kitchen.
Decades later, I still love this music video, which seems rather tame in hindsight. Released amid the Reagan administration’s antiporn campaign, the video was banned by a few channels and became a lightning rod for feminist debate. Some critics viewed Madonna’s portrayal of a sexualized woman subjected to the male gaze as retrograde. Others believed the video helped to destabilize the hierarchy of the gaze, with Madonna unafraid to return the lascivious stare of unsightly, sleazy male patrons. Perhaps the divided opinions in my house mirrored this split among critics. Looking back now, I wonder about my mother’s response. Did she believe I was too young to view anything with an erotic charge or subtext? Should a child not be allowed to conceive of a woman as a sexualized figure, or even as an object of desire? And why had I felt ashamed? Was there some corollary between me and the innocent “presexual” boy in the video, who lingers outside the theater and plays one-way peekaboo with a nude female on a pinup poster until Madonna emerges and skips off with him into the sunset?
This line of inquiry ultimately invites a larger question: Who gets permission to look?
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I found myself asking this same question in 2016, upon my first encounter with the New York–based artist Talia Chetrit’s work. Shown as part of the AIMIA | AGO Photography Prize exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO), in Toronto, the opening wall displayed a provocative diptych: at left, an image of Chetrit’s camera on a tripod held between her bare legs, suggestively angled toward her crotch (which was presumably exposed, but not included in the frame); at right, an image of her lower body, naked from the waist down except for a pair of “invisible” jeans (effectively a waistband with the seams of the excised denim pant legs still attached). I watched the room to see how other visitors were engaging with her photographs, feeling as if I’d unwittingly stumbled into a video store that only stocked adult films. No one else appeared fazed.
Another photograph by Chetrit, Plastic Nude (2016), which I came across later in her 2019 book Showcaller, further complicates the question at hand. In this image, Chetrit photographed herself from head to toe with the aid of a mirror—which, in its reflection, reveals that she is dressed in transparent overalls. While Chetrit’s see-through garment leaves virtually nothing to the imagination, it’s not exactly titillating by default. Perhaps this image is an evocation of the striptease, which, as Roland Barthes characterized it, “is based on a contradiction: Woman is desexualized at the very moment when she is stripped naked.” Then again, is Chetrit nude? As she leans back against a piano, her plastic-wrapped torso and legs all but open to be viewed, I can’t help but be reminded of the beguiling woman dressed deceptively in a flesh-colored body stocking that E. J. Bellocq photographed a century earlier. In each case, the viewer must look closely to determine if the nudity is an illusion.
Tarrah Krajnak, Self- Portrait as Weston/as Bertha Wardell, 1927/2020, from the series Master Rituals II: Weston’s Nudes, 2020© the artist and courtesy Galerie Thomas Zander, Cologne
Talia Chetrit, Plastic Nude, 2016Courtesy the artist; kaufmann repetto, New York; Hannah Hoffmann Gallery, Los Angeles; and Sies + Höke, Düsseldorf
In Plastic Nude, Chetrit’s body remains encased in some kind of PVC layer, akin to a work of art displayed behind glass. Her outfit ultimately says: You can look, but you can’t touch. With this work Chetrit embodies the oft-cited idea that the film theorist Laura Mulvey described in her groundbreaking 1975 essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”: “The determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure, which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness.” And yet, holding a camera in front of her face, she simultaneously reminds the viewer that she—the artist and the sitter—participates in the act of looking while presenting herself as the sight to be looked at.
Since my visit to the AGO, I have noticed something of a vogue among a small but sharp crop of contemporary photographers—all of them women born within a decade of forty-one-year-old Chetrit—for whom self-representation functions as an exercise in “to-be-looked-at-ness.” On the face of things, this is not new. Within the history of photography, there is a rich tradition, particularly in the West, of women photographers’ work disrupting the structures of looking. As the noted art historian Griselda Pollock wrote in 1982, arguing for feminist rethinkings of art history, “creativity has been appropriated as an ideological component of masculinity while femininity has been constructed as man’s and, therefore, the artist’s negative.” Looking across the twentieth century, one can find interwar women photographers such as Gertrud Arndt and Claude Cahun, who made pictures of themselves that countered conventional and patriarchal ways of seeing women. In the 1970s, a particularly fertile moment in this history, feminist practitioners like Jo Spence and Hannah Wilke generated self-representational work that further complicated the objectification of women and addressed what Pollock referred to as “the signification of woman as body and as sexual.” Emerging in their wake in the 1980s, another wave of groundbreaking women photographers—Laura Aguilar, Jeanne Dunning, and Catherine Opie among them—made work depicting bodies (their own) that further deviated from art-historical norms and contemporary conventions of beauty and femininity.
Just as there’s often a need for women to talk to one another for their voices to be heard, there’s an enduring need for us to see each other, too, in all our multiple, complicated selves.
Chetrit and other midcareer photographers consciously deploying self-representational forms today are certainly inspired and informed by this history. Some were even formally educated by women who helped to shape it. But beyond their placement, chronologically speaking, as part of its continuum, how do they relate to the tradition of female photographic self-representation? And how does this seeming trend of soliciting, welcoming, and approving “to-be-looked-at-ness” relate to the present moment in which it unfolds?
By the 1980s, several decades before this latest wave of practitioners began their careers, feminist issues and theory had reached the mainstream, and criticism had strengthened its focus on the problem of “woman-as-image,” as identified by the art historian Abigail Solomon-Godeau. With discussion around the representational politics of gender and the power relations of looking already well underway, younger contemporary photographers have entered into the conversation midstream, arriving with different agendas.
For some, inclusion in the canon of photography and the visibility it brings—the understanding that their bodies will most certainly be looked at—is part and parcel of the impulse to photograph oneself. The Peru-born, Oregon-based photographer Tarrah Krajnak models this approach in her 2020 series Master Rituals II: Weston’s Nudes, wherein she poses in the guise of Edward Weston’s female sitters but, given her Latin American background, challenges what she describes as “the ideal of white female beauty central to Weston’s work and its historical appreciation.” Krajnak incorporates direct references to her predecessors, such as Weston’s one-time wife and model Charis Wilson, by including Weston’s images of them within the scenes she stages, ultimately generating distorted mise en abymes.
Nydia Blas, My Body Has Been Colonized, 2022Courtesy the artist
B. Ingrid Olson, Shuttle, 2015–16Courtesy the artist
Nydia Blas, raised in the predominantly white city of Ithaca, New York, employs photography as a means for creating spaces that celebrate multiracial bodies like hers, which historically have been discouraged if not prevented from representing themselves. In a photograph of her midsection and upper thighs, titled My Body Has Been Colonized (2022), Blas reveals a tattoo in Spanish—the language of her father, which she can’t speak fluently—and stretch marks. She subtly obscures the latter while maintaining her modesty with a handkerchief covered in flowers native to Panama, her father’s birthplace. “Is it possible to reclaim something like sexuality in a photograph where you don’t have clothes on?” Blas asked when I spoke with her recently. “How can you still maintain power?” She admits that while she doesn’t have an answer, there is strength in reclaiming something for oneself in self-representation, in part because, as any photographer knows, it’s devilishly difficult to photograph yourself.
Two other photographers, Iiu Susiraja and Whitney Hubbs, despite the marked differences in their work, both mobilize the trope of the feminine pinup and its associative baggage, employing humor to neutralize it. Hubbs, born in 1977 and based in Syracuse, New York, mocks her own ability to adapt this fetish, partly given her age. Wearing protective knee pads while balancing a watermelon on her back or reclining topless while supported by a chair pad, Hubbs’s stagings evoke something like the grotesque or carnivalesque. In the case of Susiraja, absurd props, occasional bruises, and a deadpan style confound conventional expectations around viewing an image of a seminude body, if not to simply desire, consume, or covet it. According to Susiraja, who lives and works in Turku, Finland, the prospect of acceptance partly fuels the public dissemination of her photographs. In a 2022 interview, she likened her interest in seeking approval through self-representation to how people utilize social media: “I believe when you put self-portraits to Instagram, you look for acceptance and love.”
Iiu Susiraja, Lovely Wife (Ihastuttava vaimo), 2018© and courtesy the artist
How should we think about the apparent increase in self-representational tactics used by women artists today? Can it be seen as a consequence of selfie culture and its aspirational, branded aesthetic? It bears noting that in the past ten years, the decade during which much of the work discussed here was made, social media flourished. Its platforms produced, disseminated, and censored notions of femininity and masculinity, as well as sex and gender. Around 2013, gender-based double standards that permitted censorship of female breasts on social media prompted an advocacy campaign called Free the Nipple. In her series The Greece Piece, from 2019, the Dominican-French photographer Karla Hiraldo Voleau gives a nod to these policies, making self-portraits where she exposes her breasts, which she then covers up with tape on her prints. Gender-based exclusionary practices, likewise, informed the photographs in her contemporaneous project Hola Mi Amol and its eponymous book, which show Voleau close-up and clothed alongside her hypothetical male paramours in the Dominican Republic, whose bodies almost always appear seminude or nude. By way of explaining her motivation to make the project, Voleau asks, “Why couldn’t women stare, gaze, observe, desire, objectify, and look at men the same way they were looked at?”
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Despite her best efforts to shift the power balance between the seer and the sight to be seen, Voleau understands the limitations of her strategy. She remains “woman-as-image” to some observers, acknowledging as much in Hola Mi Amol. The book closes with an image of her lying recumbent in bed, fully clothed, staring back at the reader. Beneath the photograph, she poses the question: “Have I been transformed into the character I was pretending to be?”
In The Desire to Desire, a 1987 book about Hollywood films and female spectatorship, Mary Ann Doane reinforces this sort of conclusion. “It can never be enough simply to reverse sexual roles or to produce positive or empowered images of the woman,” she writes. Photographers Tokyo Rumando and Sophie Thun, another unlikely pair, share an ability to recognize this limitation. Both assume the existence of a putative male gaze whose powers they mock, and try to undermine by assuming the position of the spectator (presumed a man) within their images.
Tokyo Rumando, Orphée, K-1, 2014
© the artist and courtesy Zen Foto Gallery
An erstwhile model for the provocateur Nobuyoshi Araki, widely known (and recently publicly derided) for his explicit depictions of women, the Tokyo-based photographer Rumando reprises the position of subject in Orphée, a series published in 2014. Here, though, Rumando takes control of her representation. She depicts herself beside a round mirror—a proxy for her camera’s lens—that doesn’t directly reflect her likeness. Instead, the mirror acts as a portal that presents another version of Rumando (she plays twenty-six unnamed characters in the mirror, some of them styled to resemble famous figures such as Marilyn Monroe or the writer Yukio Mishima) to enact fantasies, desires, and memories. In an interview published in 2017, Rumando divulged that “the mirror and I are not facing each other directly, which means that the encounter is not a confrontation. Instead, it’s like I’m watching from afar.” Assuming the role of spectator within the composition, she attempts to displace or redirect the gaze of additional viewers who exist beyond the frame. Between these various depictions of Rumando, which collectively function like the reflections in a funhouse mirror, where are we supposed to direct our attention?
Based in Vienna, Thun parlays jobs assisting male artists by utilizing the hotel rooms she occupies during those gigs to create her ongoing series After Hours. This premise allows Thun to unpack notions of “hierarchy and interdependence, because these artists depend on me in a technical capacity, and I am dependent on them financially,” she says. Turning these rooms into makeshift studios at night, she photographs herself naked and, most crucially, often collages her pictures so that she appears twice in the composition, usually in positions that suggest she’s having sex with herself. Like nearly all the other photographers mentioned here, Thun uses a film camera and employs a cable release to photograph herself. The visibility of her devices is essential, communicating her technical skill and, by association, her authority: this is what knowledge and control look like. They are active, as is her body, which refuses to play the art-historical part of passive object of desire. As viewers survey her work, they are confronted by Thun and her double, who address Thun’s camera with an unflinching gaze. But to invoke Doane again: Is that enough of a power play to expose or disturb the status quo?
Karla Hiraldo Voleau, Carlos, 2019Courtesy the artist
Whitney Hubbs, Funny, Ha Ha #4 (detail), 2022© the artist and courtesy M+B, Los Angeles
What if the quality of work that invites looking and commands a certain “to-be-looked-at-ness” also actively chafes against the instinct to gender the body? What if the bodily form in the photograph defies identification within the categories of male, female, or nonbinary? The photographs of the Chicago-based artist B. Ingrid Olson—who identifies as female but appreciates the mystery and possibility of androgyny afforded by her first initial—explores this terrain. In an interview on the podcast Modern Art Notes, she confesses to “making images that allow you to see yourself in the image or make yourself more aware of being a body in front of an image.” But she’s resistant to labeling her work as self-portraiture; indeed, as Solomon-Godeau has noted, self-representation is not always self-portraiture. Olson’s face never appears in her pictures, while the rest of her figure appears so fragmented as to become defamiliarized and nearly inscrutable; it’s difficult to pinpoint what crevice, orifice, or limb she has photographed. To understand what you’re looking at, you have to keep looking.
“It’s okay to look and like looking,” Whitney Hubbs remarked after I told her about my long-ago moment with the Madonna video. “I had a similar reaction while watching [the 1983 film] Flashdance. It was arousing.” It strikes me that this admission reflects another potential rationale behind the rash of self-representational photographs that Hubbs and others are making today: just as there’s often a need for women to talk to one another for their voices to be heard, there’s an enduring need for us to see each other, too, in all our multiple, complicated selves. In a political climate when women are increasingly losing control over their own bodies, such self-made forms of visibility fulfill a particularly useful function. They encourage what the authors of Caught Looking, a book on feminism and pornography, identified as “free discussion of sexuality and its representation [which] is essential to our feminist vision.” They reveal what we otherwise ingest without thinking. They make us want to keep looking.
This article originally appeared in Aperture, issue 253, “Desire.”
December 17, 2023
Aperture’s Must-Read Photography Features of 2023
Aperture was established to advance “creative thinking, significantly expressed in words and photographs.” We continue to pursue these goals in our collaborations with photographers and writers. Here, we look back at a selection of the stories we published in 2023—the dynamic voices shaping Accra’s art scene, the debates around AI and NFTs, the legacy of Joan Didion’s storytelling, and the ways that Asian American photographers envision new possibilities for the future. In these interviews, portfolios, and essays, we see photography’s potential to both witness and connect.
—The Editors
Jump Ahead:
The Year in Interviews
The Year in Portfolios
The Year in Essays
The Year in Interviews
Juergen Teller on Life, Love, and Three Decades in Fashion
A conversation with Alistair O’Neill, from Aperture, issue 253, “Desire”
Over the last thirty years, Juergen Teller has been at the vanguard of fashion photography. His work resists the idea of fashion as the projection of a polished ideal, favoring objective clarity to shine a light through the smoke and mirrors of promotion. Here, on the occasion of his career-spanning exhibition in Paris, the influential photographer reflects on the boundaries between art and commerce.
Reagan Louie on Surviving the American Dream
A conversation with Aleesa Pitchamarn Alexander, from Aperture, issue 251, “Being & Becoming: Asian in America”
The photographer once believed that he had to turn his back on his Chinese culture. Today, his images show what it means to embrace authenticity. “This fusion in using the camera to find my Chinese, non-Western self comes with many obstacles, including adopting its logic and its values,” says Louie.
La Dolce Vita According to Sam Youkilis
A conversation with Chiara Bardelli Nonino
Drawing inspiration from Fellini and Pasolini, the photographer finds a seductive—sometimes humorous—vision of older Italy. “There’s definitely an interesting tension between the sort of romanticized, visually striking, dolce vita Italy, and the overtourism and the more neglected aspects, like a certain hopelessness in the younger generations of Italians,” says Youkilis.
Coco Capitán’s Vision of Youth Culture in Japan
A conversation with Michael Famighetti
For her latest project, the Spanish photographer made portraits of young people in Kyoto who balance the expectations of tradition with contemporary life. “In some ways, Kyoto can feel like it’s stuck in the past,” says Capitán. “There are these very strict customs and I was curious how they were felt by younger people—monks, skater kids, or high school students.”
Tyler Mitchell Stages a Homecoming in Georgia
A conversation with Brendan Embser
In Domestic Imaginaries, an exhibition at the SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah, Georgia, the artist considers the poetics of space, presenting sculptures and photographs that move off the wall. “My work has been informed by narratives of how Black life connects to nature and to the outdoors. This exhibition heightens that to a new degree, I would say,” Mitchell notes. “I like the idea of making images that offer an expanded lens of where Black life can reside.”
A Photography Archive Tells a Story of Feminism in Nepal
Varun Nayar in conversation with NayanTara Gurung Kakshapati and Diwas Raja Kc
For twelve years, the Nepal Picture Library has been building an expansive digital archive of the country’s social and cultural life, amassing more than 120,000 photographs from a variety of sources with the aim of creating a collective sense of historical place in Nepali society. Varun Nayar recently spoke with the curators NayanTara Gurung Kakshapati and Diwas Raja Kc about their new award-winning photobook—and photography’s relationship to historical memory.
Ari Marcopoulos on the Essential Art of Zines
A conversation with Hamza Walker, from Ari Marcopoulos: Zines (Aperture, 2023)
The inveterate zine-maker speaks about his artistic practice, learning under Andy Warhol and Irving Penn, and why “everything is worth photographing.” As Marcopoulos states: “I always believe that the images that I work with are shared experiences, where the viewer might recognize something in their own life.”
How John Akomfrah’s Videos Tell a Story of Migration and Belonging
A conversation with Vanessa Peterson and Lyle Ashton Harris, from Aperture, issue 252, “Accra”
In works that confront stories of complex political histories, John Akomfrah’s practice is a testament to the notion of hybridity. The acclaimed filmmaker, who will represent the United Kingdom in the 2024 Venice Biennale, speaks about the restless ghosts of Ghana’s history.
What It Means to Make Photographs as a Young Artist in Iran
by Amin Yousefi
Over the last century, photography in Iran has often been overshadowed by the country’s social and political conditions and historic flash points. As a result, many photographers, particularly those from the new generation who transcend geographical confines, have received relatively little recognition. In this roundtable, Amin Yousefi speaks with three emerging photographers about the challenges they face—both artistic and political—and the possibility of building new spaces for critique and discussion.
Zohra Opoku’s Evocative Reflections on Mortality and Resilience
A conversation with Ekow Eshun, from Aperture, issue 252, “Accra”
The German Ghanaian artist weaves together archival images, family photographs, and self-portraiture in works that are often inspired by the city of Accra. “I feel like the body is just existing in a particular time of the life span,” says Opoku, “but our soul, our being, is continuing.”
The Year in Portfolios
Kay Kwabia’s Poetic View of Daily Life in Ghana
by Lovia Gyarkye, from Aperture, issue 252, “Accra”
In his landscapes and portraits, the photographer translates city scenes in and around Accra into atmospheric images. “Kwabia focuses on the beauty of quotidian living in Accra and its nearby cities,” writes Lovia Gyarkye, “finding dreamscapes where others might see only harsh realities.”
The Strange and Beautiful World of Deborah Turbeville’s Photo-Novella
by Thessaly La Force, from Aperture, issue 249, “Reference”
The renowned fashion photographer’s previously unseen experimental collages tell the story of a fictional designer who disappears at the height of her career. “Turbeville’s vast body of work . . . is known for its darkness and mystery,” writes Thessaly La Force. “Beauty was, in Turbeville’s imagination, not just bright and happy but melancholic and brimming with travesty.”
Adraint Bereal’s Celebratory Chronicle of Black College Life
by Casey Gerald, from Aperture, issue 250, “We Make Pictures in Order to Live”
The photographer captures the agony and ecstasy of what it is to be a Black college student in the United States. As Casey Gerald writes: “Bereal’s project started from a desire to help his classmates see themselves and celebrate one another.”
An Asian American Family’s Public History and Private Rituals
by Simon Han, from Aperture, issue 251, “Being & Becoming: Asian in America”
In his photographs, Jarod Lew asks his family to reenact scenes from everyday life, invoking stories that wrestle with the tensions between control and care. “Lew’s work resists this pressure: control is also a means to build a protective structure around the living,” writes Simon Han.
Vân-Nhi Nguyen’s Bold Perspective on the Lives of Young People in Vietnam
by Thessaly La Force
Winner of the 2023 Aperture Portfolio Prize, Nguyen casts an intimate gaze upon a generation confronting historical stereotypes. As Thessaly La Force writes: “Under Nguyen’s lens, the flattening stereotypes of Vietnamese culture are never present, even if she is perfectly aware of them.”
Laryssa Machada Captures the Vitality of Life in Brazil
by Fabiana Moraes
In her images of Salvador and its residents, Laryssa Machada engages with issues of race, territoriality, visibility, and memory. “I didn’t imagine being an artist,” Machada says. “That seemed far-off to me. But when my work began to circulate, I thought, Wow, I wish my grandmother, my great-grandmother were able to witness these things happening.”
Jade Thiraswas’s Sensitive Chronicle of Pride and Mourning in the American South
by Jordan Amirkhani
For the Thai American photographer, small beauties and unforgiving travesties are all part of what it truly means to live in Louisiana. As Jordan Amirkhani writes: “Thiraswas’s images work to hold the idyllic at bay to provide a foundation for interrogating the many complexities and tensions of life and living in New Orleans as a young woman, as a daughter, as an immigrant.”
Mary Manning Sees Gifts in the Everyday
by Durga Chew-Bose, from Aperture, issue 250, “We Make Pictures in Order to Live”
The photographer’s collages chronicle friends, family, and community in New York. As Durga Chew-Bose writes: “Mary’s photographs are testimonies, not just of togetherness but of sweet, good-sized customs.”
Alex Webb on Reimagining a Photobook, Twenty-Five Years Later
from Alex Webb: Dislocations (Aperture, 2023)
In a new edition of a long out-of-print volume, Webb draws from photographs across many locations. Here, he considers the act of photography as a form of dislocation in itself.
James Welling Recasts the Ancient World
by Kate Palmer Albers, from Aperture, issue 249, “Reference”
In two recent series, the photographer references fragments of antiquity, pulling the past into the present. “This depth and range of source material manages—seemingly against the odds—to coalesce into an animated moment of recognition,” writes Kate Palmer Albers, “the sense of seeing another human, from another time, conjured before us.”
The Year in Essays
What Do Photographs Tell Us About Joan Didion’s Nervy Glamour?
by Brian Dillon, from Aperture, issue 250, “We Make Pictures in Order to Live”
We have come to think of Joan Didion as a writer whose photographic imago incarnates certain features of her prose, oversensitive but unsentimental, held together in the face of personal or cultural catastrophe—above all, cool. As Brian Dillon writes: “A composer, on the page, of indelible pictures, she was also highly suspicious of image-making as such.”
How Will AI Transform Photography?
by Charlotte Kent
As artists experiment with this fast-evolving technology, they uncover creative opportunity, absurdity, and bias. As Charlotte Kent writes: “Our physical gestures are expressive of internal, psychological states, but AI struggles to process the aesthetic of emotions.”
Charles “Teenie” Harris’s Midcentury Portrait of Black Culture in Pittsburgh
by Tiana Reid, from Aperture, issue 250, “We Make Pictures in Order to Live”
For more than fifty years, the photographer created a vivid record of the city. Now, a major archival project stands to reveal the scope of his vision. “Looking at the subjects in Harris’s pictures,” writes Tiana Reid, “we see people who find comfort and trust in a world where comfort and trust are never guaranteed.”
Toyo Miyatake’s Indelible Record of Life inside the Manzanar Internment Camp
by Ken Chen, from Aperture, issue 251, “Being & Becoming: Asian in America”
During World War II, Miyatake made surreptitious photographs of Japanese Americans incarcerated by the US government. He saw little need to glorify, humanize, or even individualize the prisoners—because he was one of them. As Ken Chen writes: “What did Miyatake, driven by a mission to document an abhorrent experience, decide to preserve?”
How Ghana Became a Homeland for the African Diaspora
by Anakwa Dwamena, from Aperture, issue 252, “Accra”
From Maya Angelou to Todd Gray, writers and artists from around the world have returned to Ghana in the decades since the country’s independence. What were they looking for?
Caroline Tompkins Explores the Territory between Fear and Desire
by Coralie Kraft
In a photobook pairing eroticism with horror, the photographer bluntly foregrounds the psychic agitation that many people associate with arousal. As Coralie Kraft writes: “Bedfellow approaches an uncomfortable question: What happens to your understanding of sex when your early experiences of love and lust are tied to unease and anxiety?”
Eikoh Hosoe’s Mythic Worlds
by Lena Fritsch, from Aperture, issue 250, “We Make Pictures in Order to Live”
In his collaborations with influential literary figures and performers, Hosoe created surreal scenes that invoke the fantastic. “Dramatic and dreamlike, Hosoe’s imagery remains radical, powerful, and moving—it deserves to be discovered by a wider audience,” writes Lena Fritsch.
How Tommy Kha’s Mischievous Portraits Challenge the Idea of Belonging
by Hua Hsu, from Tommy Kha: Half, Full, Quarter (Aperture, 2023)
The artist’s idiosyncratic photographs mark his presence in the world—and tell a story about Asian American identity. “The compositions are gorgeous and meticulous, with Kha masterfully capturing these soothing, garish auras in the naturally occurring colors of our world,” writes Hua Hsu. “But there’s often something a bit off. A flourish—visual jokes, out-of-place expressions, a glimpse of a cutout of his own face—that marks his presence.”
What Was the NFT?
by Chris Wiley
When cryptocurrency was on the rise, entrepreneurial artists and prominent photographers rushed to release NFTs. But is the NFT actually a medium—or merely a medium of exchange? “The mere idea of photography being bought and sold as an NFT is likely to raise the hackles of connoisseurs of fine photographic prints and other members of the photo world’s old guard,” writes Chris Wiley.
Nick Waplington’s Histories from Below
by Alistair O’Neill, from Aperture, issue 250, “We Make Pictures in Order to Live”
From Nottingham living rooms to New York dance floors and Los Angeles’s surf scene, the British photographer has created records of subcultures that brim with life. As Alistair O’Neill writes: “Waplington is committed to the idea of entering communities in order to understand them and, in turn, himself.”
Japan’s Unparalleled History of Photography in Print
by Lena Fritsch, from The PhotoBook Review in Aperture, issue 251, “Being & Becoming: Asian in America”
An expansive new book shows how the magazine format was a major, genre-defining space for Japanese photographers. “The book immerses the reader in the work of internationally famous photographers,” writes Lena Fritsch, “along with figures such as Shōji Ueda and Hiromi Tsuchida, who remain overlooked outside of Japan.”
William Christenberry, RaMell Ross, and the American Crucible of Hale County, Alabama
by Rebecca Bengal
A remarkable exhibition by the two artists charts a visionary path through the landscapes of the South. As Rebecca Bengal writes: “The people in Ross’s photographs are often seen in the midst of doing everyday things within deep time, in the midst of a larger landscape, so that the prosaic becomes almost mythic.”
December 14, 2023
Mary Manning Sees Gifts in the Everyday
This article originally appeared in Aperture, issue 250, “We Make Pictures in Order to Live,” spring 2023.
Mary Manning’s favorite color is green. In the artist’s photographs, we are shown an everywhereness of green. Green is neighborly, the most charitable color, according to Mary. Green is a pile of fallen ginkgo leaves fanning out on a car windshield. Green is the long open legs of a ladder. Green is the color of friends gathering in a beloved New York park, since destroyed by the city. Green is Nicole’s studio T-shirt, Maia’s sweater backstage, little Lucky’s winter coat, Emma’s snail. Even Mel’s denim looks green from Mary’s point of view, or maybe green is what happens to the viewer’s gaze when spending time in Mary’s world. Green is what happens!
Mary’s work takes place at the threshold of joy and recall. The instant is stretched; the instant is what we wait for, like tulips come spring or a clean neck after a fresh haircut. The instant, as authored by Mary, is the first dance at a wedding, and other similar traditions that place an importance on affection and holding on, and how wonderful it feels to get dressed up. Because acknowledged in Mary’s photographs, over and over, is the soft, conversational power of clothing. How a silk slip is so hospitable to that late summer breeze. How a dancer’s arm is so compatible with a cap sleeve. How sneakers recur in Mary’s images—often a record of comfort, wear, color, praise. Yes, praise. What is it about Mary’s photographs that sounds like the words “I like your shoes”?
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In one image, the cast of a play has returned to the stage for the final curtain call. On the right, a pair of audience hands is clapping enthusiastically. Applause and other responses that take place with genuine warmth (hugs, holding hands, smiling with your eyes closed) are all the subject of Mary’s curiosity, which seems especially devoted to varieties of trust and closeness: good company on a coffee break, well-timed portraits of camera-shy friends.
In another photograph, a mother is joined on each side by her two daughters. “Happy Birthday” is being sung, the cake is on its way, and the glow—as seen by Mary—is somehow green. This everyday chronicle of waving your loved ones over and making a wish with a roomful of witnesses is central to Mary’s work. As central as a favorite color.
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“Favorite” holds many meanings for the artist. A surprise enchantment that calms the senses like a swan or someone else’s bookshelves seen from street level. Other favorites might flow from the simplest acts, such as looking down (and seeing beautiful vestibule tile) or looking away from the art (and seeing a child at the Guggenheim who is just tall enough to peer over the edge of the museum’s quarter-mile-of-concrete ramp). No longer needing to stand on one’s tiptoes is a consequential moment in life. It’s also ordinary and easily lost or passed over if you aren’t paying attention. But Mary is. Mary’s work is a document of . . . being. Of being!
Like the mother who asks her daughters to help blow out her birthday candles, Mary’s photographs are testimonies, not just of togetherness but of sweet, good-sized customs (arriving with a bouquet; bringing a big bedsheet to the beach; parents at an art opening). Even—or especially—the artist’s still life imagery favors themes of observance and cheer, and the ways in which nature counsels us, day after day. An ovation of thin trees marks winter’s incoming frost. A variety of rose is called “love.” A single red balloon in the woods seems to say, You’ve arrived. Party’s here! Mary’s poetic sensitivity toward story is full of bewilderment and magic. Everything is right there, up close, and yet a piece of metal wrapped around a pole looks like hidden treasure. Flowers out of focus are friendly ghosts. A New York vanity plate with the word “JOYS” could be read as “New York JOYS,” which is one way of thinking about Mary’s project. “New York Joys” by Mary Manning.
All photographs by Mary Manning from the series Grace Is Like New Music, 2022Courtesy the artist
December 12, 2023
Juergen Teller on Life, Love, and Three Decades in Fashion
Over the last thirty years, Juergen Teller has been at the vanguard of fashion photography. His work resists the idea of fashion as the projection of a polished ideal, favoring objective clarity to shine a light through the smoke and mirrors of promotion and commerce. He has shaped the advertising campaigns of visionary designers such as Helmut Lang, Phoebe Philo (for Celine), JW Anderson (including his work for Loewe), and Vivienne Westwood, as well as his memorable editorials for fashion magazines. Running parallel is Teller’s ongoing commitment to producing photobooks, in a range of sizes and on a range of subjects, which often irreverently refer back to Teller himself, his personal life, and his own body.
This season, Teller’s work is the subject of a major exhibition at the Grand Palais Éphémère, Paris, the cavernous temporary space in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower that replaces the historic Grand Palais, currently under renovation. The exhibition, curated by Thomas Weski, will then travel to the Milan Triennale. By placing Teller’s fashion images into dialogue with his personal projects and published works, the show expresses the full vitality of Teller’s life and artistic world. Some of his best photographs call into question the exact boundaries between the commercial and the private, examining the crossroads of what takes place on set and what happens off to the side. Alistair O’Neill recently met the photographer at his London studio—an award-winning space designed by the British architects 6a—where they spoke among the many maquettes and display tests for the show.
Juergen Teller, JW Anderson calendar, Spring/Summer 2022 campaign, London, 2021 
Juergen Teller, Self-portrait, London, 2023, for Aperture Alistair O’Neill: Your exhibition at the Grand Palais Éphémère is large, and the scale of the space is a challenge in itself. There’s also a catalog and four additional publications, right?
Juergen Teller: Four other artist books, yeah.
O’Neill: Fantastic.
Teller: I’ve made work specifically for the exhibition, and I would say it’s my universe of what I want to show. The title is i need to live. We came to the title because of the way that I planned the exhibition in my head. It starts with a photograph taken by my father of me as a baby. And this is followed by my father’s suicide, represented by a newspaper article with a photograph of the car crash. And then there’s my mother, and then there’s me. It’s not really chronological, but there is a thread from the beginning, and it guides you through it.
But very early on, there will be some pictures of Dovile [Drizyte, Teller’s partner in life and business], which brings in the now within the center of the show. It’s very personal and ends with a series we did called The Myth (2022). For me, this project is very, very special and very beautiful and very romantic. It’s something meaningful, something you can’t photograph.
O’Neill: You said there’s a thread that runs through the exhibition. Is it this idea of a life force in the air?
Teller: Yes. There’s this religious celebration we did in Sicily just now for our first child together. It’s basically this new ball of life. And it means I need to live, I need to be there, I want to be there. And it is the opposite of what my father did. That’s the idea about the whole thing. And then, surrounding this central core, there are different projects that I did and different photographs of people who mean a lot to me, who I have collaborated with. There will be commercial work in it as well as videos. I mean, the Grand Palais exhibition is huge. It’s huge.
We developed it with 6a architects who did my building here. I really like Tom [Emerson] and Steph [Stephanie Macdonald] a lot. We’re friends, and we talk about things, and it was very clear to me that I wanted to ask them to help me with it because the space is like an empty shell without rooms. We came up with something that I’m really proud of.
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O’Neill: They’re really good exhibition designers. The Disobedient Bodies show they did with JW Anderson in 2017 at the Hepworth was fantastic. They designed these fabulous curtain walls, and they used dead-stock fabric from JW Anderson, and they made rooms within rooms because of the very large spaces. It was really clever. Your studio is a great example of their style. I’m happy to hear that you’re working with them again.
Teller: Yeah, and that’s the wall [Teller points toward a large, plywood, self-supporting wall section]. It’s four meters, eighty high and four hundred meters long altogether and will feature a lot of new work. It will be very personal. I will also have fifty vitrines and there will be different facets of my work that I’ll curate in them. New configurations.
O’Neill: Is this about lending weight to printed matter because that’s something you consider important to how your work is communicated?
Teller: Yes, very, very much so. Sometimes it’s just an example of the Marc Jacobs advertising and how it looks. And sometimes, within the vitrine, I will put objects in it.
O’Neill: So, there will be tear sheets, double-page spreads, and magazines as well as the many photobooks, exhibition catalogs, and monographs you published over the years, but also personal possessions and mementos. They’re object-orientated narratives in a way?
Teller: Yes, that’s right.
O’Neill: Is it your intention to let each vitrine display visually breathe so as not to look congested?
Teller: Yes, though some of the vitrines are fuller.
Juergen Teller, Sigmund Freud’s Couch No. 10, London, 2006O’Neill: It seems that, at times, the space and borders around your images, as in your Marc Jacobs advertising campaign, are quite important. The white space that surrounds what is a relatively small printed image in relation to the size of the page magnifies its visual impact and intensifies the color. And you can also see this attention to detail in the layouts of your publications.
Teller: Yes, and I am also doing a new version of the handbag book [Juergen Teller: Handbags]. Since I published that book, in 2019, when I had the museum exhibition in Naples, I’ve photographed lots more handbags. There will be a new book [Juergen Teller: More handbags], but both old and new images will be displayed together on a huge wall.
O’Neill: Great, because I really like what you say in that book about moving on from amassing pictures of models, as in your 1999 book, Go-Sees, to amassing photographs of handbags.
Teller: When I started in fashion photography, I worked with stylists and fashion designers who all thought that the last thing they wanted in the picture was a handbag.
It was all about the clothes, the person, and the mood, to portray a certain coolness or whatever. And nowadays, in every fashion ad, there’s a handbag. Everywhere is a handbag. And this is basically what sells and drives the industry alone.
I’ve made work specifically for the exhibition, and I would say it’s my universe of what I want to show.
O’Neill: That’s really to do with the luxury conglomerates and where they see their profit margin. But it has upended the industry. If you look at Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pierpaolo Piccioli, two of the biggest designers in contemporary fashion, they were accessories designers to start with, and that’s really important to the work they now produce. So, apart from the wall of handbags, will the exhibition also deal with your fashion work in full?
Teller: Yes, yes, yes, yes.
O’Neill: Good, I’m glad.
Teller: And quite proudly so.
O’Neill: Yes, I think it should be unashamed. I really do. Because your work has always expressed itself on a broader canvas. Your fashion photographs never appear as contained exercises in style, as you are often keen to inject a sense of absurdity into them, to expose the unreality of the conditions in which they are made. And while your personal projects reflect the wider sense of your life as it is lived, you remain open about how your commercial work drives it all. You continue to be incredibly prolific as a fashion photographer. Does this work still inspire you?
Teller: Simply speaking, yes. Of course, at certain times you get frustrated, and you get bored of it. But it is just, frankly, exciting to work with somebody like JW Anderson, or Anthony Vaccarello, or whoever the good designer is at that moment.
Juergen Teller, Celine, Spring/Summer 2016 campaign, Tuscany, 2015 
Juergen Teller, Miuccia Prada, Prada Foundation HQ No. 18, Milan, 2016 O’Neill: It seems that the creative conversation is an important driving force for your photography. You choose to work with certain designers you respect or want to speak with.
Teller: I think I only choose people when I have an instinct or feeling that they understand me. Also, I want to have a relationship that is ongoing, not just a one-off. The excitement of working this one time together, and then, this brings you another idea, and it goes further. That’s what I find interesting.
O’Neill: You’ve also been quite loyal to the magazines that you’ve published in. There was a period where you were only publishing in The Face and i-D, and in more recent years, you’ve published consistently in System. Is this a similar kind of relationship?
Teller: Yes. But in the beginning, when I’m approached, I’m thinking, Not really . . . do I really . . . really? And then, they explain an idea to me, and I’ll think, maybe they’re right . . . maybe that’s an adventure. It’s good to be doubtful and think that it could be jumping into the cold water and things could go wrong. Sometimes things don’t show their advantage immediately.
O’Neill: One thing that characterizes the work you’ve done in System is the extended editorial. This is a format that you’ve done before in Arena Homme + or Pop, but in System, it has a different feel.
Teller: In System, it’s restricted to the system of fashion. In the other magazines, it’s entirely my own universe. And, I think, that’s the difference. I like these certain restrictions of having to deal with something commercial, which normally I wouldn’t necessarily work with. But there’s something interesting about that, and I’m happy to explore.
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O’Neill: Your photographs of Miuccia Prada in her office are a perfect example. It’s such a great meeting of your world and her world, in terms of what you picked up on when you were photographing. I really love the detail of that Miu Miu shoe that she’s wearing and the close-ups of her feet. That image got me asking, well, what does desire in a Teller photograph look like? And I thought, that is a good example. Another one is your portrait of Roy Anthony Brown in Hydra.
Teller: It’s quite interesting because when you start at the beginning of each photograph I take, it’s already there, the desire to take that photograph.
O’Neill: Your desire or their desire?
Teller: My desire.
O’Neill: Well, what is interesting about those two images is that the desire is so closed off, it’s almost their desire only. It’s not yours, or that of the person looking at it.
Teller: Right.
O’Neill: But you recognize it in that moment?
Teller: Yes.
O’Neill: That’s a rare skill. Not everyone picks up on those kinds of things.
Teller: You’re right about that.
Juergen Teller, Roy, Hydra, 2010 
Juergen Teller, Vivienne Westwood No. 1, London, 2009All photographs © the artist
O’Neill: I also notice that in a lot of your work you conjure desire in an image by turning the scale, or the volume, up. To call this graphic, in terms of quality of line or kinds of shapes, is a bit reductive. Even though this approach might look brash, it’s actually quite sophisticated in terms of what it’s trying to call attention to, or how it amplifies how people look at things.
Teller: It’s very direct, I guess.
O’Neill: Visual directness is something you’ve spoken about before in terms of your German identity and other German image makers you admire, such as the filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder or the photographer August Sander. But when you bring directness in relation to desire, it becomes quite unexpected. It makes me think of those monumental prints of Vivienne Westwood in your 2013 exhibition Woo! at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London. Are they going to be at the Grand Palais?
Teller: The same size.
O’Neill: Fantastic.
Teller: Yeah.
O’Neill: Such impact.
Teller: Vivienne came to see the show, and then, either somebody from her family, or Andreas [Kronthaler], her husband, or somebody else, I can’t quite recall, said something like, “Do you mind that they’re so big?” And she said, “They could be bigger.” The way she said it, it was just genius.
O’Neill: Because they’re bigger than life-size, aren’t they?
Teller: Yes, yes. They’re very, very big.
O’Neill: You continue to live in London. What is it about the city that resonates with you?
Teller: I feel like people leave you alone to be how you want to be. There are so many good people here and good opportunities to do things. And it’s very international. And you are in the heart of Europe. But I have to say, since Brexit, it’s been a bit different. The whole political climate, and how expensive things are here, that’s just been horrific, really.
O’Neill: I think it’s becoming much harder for London to make a claim to being a creative city because creatives can’t afford to be here anymore.
Teller: Yeah.
O’Neill: But you will continue to stay here?
Teller: I find Monaco visually really exciting, but I would probably get bored there.
This interview originally appeared in Aperture, issue 253, “Desire.” Juergen Teller, i need to live is on view at the Grand Palais Éphémère, Paris, December 16, 2023–January 9, 2024.
December 8, 2023
How Elliott Erwitt Found His Signature Humor and Joy
In fall 2016, Aperture and the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin copublished Elliott Erwitt: Home Around the World, a visual account of the photographer’s sixty-year career, from his early experiments in California to his intimate family portraits in New York and his celebrity and political magazine assignments around the world. Erwitt, who died on November 29, 2023, was renowned for his personal and humorous observations of the street and his irrepressible sense of curiosity. Here, we revisit an excerpt from Stuart Alexander’s essay for Home Around the World, in which the curator considers Erwitt’s early years and influences, his contributions to Life and Harper’s Bazaar, and his friendship with Robert Frank. —The Editors, 2023
Elliott Erwitt, Self-Portrait, Hollywood, California, ca. 1946 
Installation view, Photographs by Elliott Erwitt, Arts and Crafts Club of New Orleans, 1948 Elliott Erwitt is a much lauded and supremely accomplished photographer known for his drily perceptive and witty pictures. But when he first picked up a camera, at the age of fifteen, he was a shy and earnest young man struggling to confront and observe the world with emotion and humility. Nevertheless, his early work, though tentative, contains the seeds of all of his subsequent photographs. This essay traces the development of Erwitt’s rich and varied personal vision from the mid-1940s to 1957, when he reached the level of artistic maturity that continues to distinguish his photographs today.
Much like any self-taught teenage photographer, Erwitt began with subjects that were close at hand: friends, family, still lifes, and even the contents of his bedroom. As he rapidly mastered the medium he experimented broadly, at times even combining multiple negatives. He just as quickly rejected such gimmicky techniques as foreign to his way of seeing. Erwitt was curious about the world and he sought to record it as simply and directly as he could. As a child he had lived in three countries; he was a native speaker of Italian and by the age of eleven had learned English, Russian, and some French. Shuttled back and forth between his separated parents he became remarkably independent. The circumstances of Erwitt’s upbringing encouraged adaptability above all, both personally and professionally. He learned to compartmentalize his life, emotions, and actions, and this helped him as he matured. It was his capacity to devote intense concentration simultaneously to disparate demands that made it easier for him than it was for many of his colleagues to make photographs for himself at the same time that he was making work “for hire.”
In early 1948, at the age of nineteen, he had the opportunity to present an exhibition of forty-two of his prints at the Arts and Crafts Club of New Orleans. Installation views from this showing allow us an opportunity to assess this stage in his development. The prints were all approximately square-format and hung on the walls salon style. The majority of the pictures he exhibited were accomplished geometric compositions without people in them. In one example, a window and its frame take up the upper left quarter of the image. In a pleasing play of light and shadow, sunlight reflects off the frame and the window and creates a triangular shape below. Meanwhile, a photograph of a wall in Erwitt’s Fountain Avenue, Los Angeles, house is a radical inversion of pictorial norms. The work’s central focus is an empty wall, and the traditional elements of an interior—a window, a painting, a lamp, and a bed—are truncated at the edges of the frame. In another picture we see a still life featuring a couple of soiled plates, knives, and a spoon; it is at once an arrangement of forms in a square frame and a portrayal of an adolescent’s scrappy lifestyle. Most of the photographs from that show that do include people have only a single figure, often seen from behind or at an oblique angle, as in Erwitt’s picture of a sunbather in her ruffled swimsuit. There was also a single, frontal self-portrait of the photographer wearing a striped shirt and sitting on a bed with bare, crossed legs, his gaze fixed impassively on the camera. In a dramatic portrait of his friend Bert Meyers, in contrast, we see a man in front of a blurred window. His head is tilted back, and the raking light across his face is all that is visible in the lower half of the frame.
Elliott Erwitt, New York, New York, ca. 1950. Contact sheet 
Elliott Erwitt, New York, New York, ca. 1950 The artist who made these works was a beginner, still figuring out how to manipulate the medium and compose a picture. The viewpoint is relatively cool and dispassionate. It is lacking in the emotional content that Erwitt has since deemed vital. In these straightforward and natural photographs his mastery of a variety of lighting situations is evident, but this is clearly the work of a shy young man who did not yet feel comfortable photographing people. The camera that he used to create his early pictures, a square-format twin-lens Rolleiflex, was adapted to his disposition at the time. He had to look down into the lens at waist level to see and photograph what was in front of him, and this enabled him to approach people unobtrusively. As the contact sheet with his famous picture of a chihuahua at a woman’s feet shows, the camera could also be set on the ground to capture a worm’s-eye view.
Later in 1948 Erwitt moved to New York. There he continued to take whatever small photography jobs he could find, mostly making portraits of authors. In March 1949 he got the chance to return to Europe for the first time since moving to America with his parents as a child. With his girlfriend, Jacqueline (Jackie) Segall, Erwitt was waiting to board the SS Rouen, a Liberty ship bound for Le Havre, France, when he met the Swiss photographer Robert Frank and his sixteen-year-old-girlfriend, Mary Lockspeiser, whom Frank would later marry. There was only room for six passengers, and Mary unsuccessfully attempted to stow away on the ship. Erwitt told her that it was not a good idea. She ended up waving goodbye from the pier. Frank was returning to Europe after two years in New York (and a three-month sojourn in South America). He had been employed by Harper’s Bazaar and was weary of the world of fashion photography. He had exchanged his apartment in New York for a flat in the 14th arrondissement that belonged to the Chinese painter Sanyu. Sharing so many days at sea and with so few people aboard, it was inevitable that Frank and Erwitt would get to know one another. To pass the time, Frank took to photographing life on the ship. At one point he handed over his Leica and asked Erwitt to photograph him sitting on a railing. Thus began a close relationship that would last for several years.
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Elliott Erwitt: Home Around the WorldPhotographs by Elliott Erwitt. Edited by Jessica S. McDonald. Text by Stuart Alexander, Sean Corcoran, and Steven Hoelscher.
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View cart Description Elliott Erwitt: Home Around the World offers a timely and critical reconsideration of Erwitt’s unparalleled life as a photographer.Produced alongside a major retrospective exhibition, the book features examples of Erwitt’s early experiments in California, his intimate family portraits in New York, his major magazine assignments and long-term documentary interests, and his ongoing personal investigations of public spaces and their transitory inhabitants. Essays by photography experts based on extensive new interviews with the photographer consider less-studied aspects of Erwitt’s work: his engagement with social and political issues through photojournalism, the humanist qualities of his very early photographs, and his work as a filmmaker. Home Around the World traces the development and refinement of Erwitt’s unique visual approach over time. With over two hundred photographs, and ephemera including magazine reproductions, advertisements, and contact sheets, this volume is the first to offer a comprehensive historical treatment of Erwitt’s body of work and position in the field.
Copublished by Aperture and the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin Details
Format: Hardback
Number of pages: 312
Number of images: 250
Publication date: 2016-09-15
Measurements: 9 x 10 x 1.4 inches
ISBN: 9781597113694
Elliott Erwitt (born in Paris, 1928; died in New York, 2023) moved to New York City in 1950. He was a member of Magnum Photos since 1953, and served as its president for three years in the 1960s. Erwitt has published dozens of books and his photographs have been featured in publications around the world for over sixty years. He has also directed multiple films and countless photographic and cinematic projects. Balancing journalistic, commercial, and artistic work over a remarkably productive career spanning seven decades, Erwitt has created some of the most celebrated photographs of the past century.
Jessica S. McDonald is the chief curator of photography at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. McDonald received an Ansel Adams Research Fellowship from the Center for Creative Photography in 2011. Previously, she worked as assistant curator of photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where she curated the exhibition Photography in Mexico: Selected Works from the Collections of SFMOMA and Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser.
Stuart Alexander is an independent curator and photo historian based in New York. Recognized as an expert on Post War photography, he has worked with major international institutions on numerous books and exhibitions on such subjects as Robert Frank, Louis Faurer, Josef Koudelka and Magnum Photos.
Sean Corcoran is curator of prints and photographs at the Museum of the City of New York and an established essayist. His previously published essays include “The City as Canvas: Graffiti Art from the Martin Wong Collection” (2013) and a piece written for Aperture’s 2014 title Jeff Chien-Hsing Liao: New York.
Steven Hoelscher is the chair of the Department of American Studies at University of Texas at Austin, where he focuses on Photography, Cultural and Historical Geography; Urban Studies; Memory; Ethnicity and Race. In 2013, he authored Reading Magnum: A Visual Archive of the Modern World (University of Texas Press).
Four years older than Erwitt, Frank turned out to be a good friend and travel companion. He introduced Erwitt to photographers and other contacts and invited him to stay at Sanyu’s apartment, which was not far from the studios of Alberto Giacometti, Henri Matisse, and several other prominent artists. Once they arrived in Europe, Frank went to Switzerland to visit his family. Later in the year, Jackie left Erwitt on his own. When Frank returned to Paris he and Erwitt shared Sanyu’s apartment, and that fall they traveled together to the south of France and to Italy. During this trip Erwitt photographed side-by-side with Frank, and the two even swapped cameras from time to time for the occasional portrait. This allowed Erwitt to observe the differences between his square-format Rolleiflex and Frank’s smaller 35 mm rangefinder Leica, which had an elongated, rectangular format. Shooting with the Leica involved the more aggressive act of holding the camera directly to the eye, which meant that more speed, ruse, or resolve was required in order to photograph people with finesse. Its size also made it easier to manipulate while shooting, and its smaller negatives produced grainier, less sharp images, an effect that further heightened the resulting pictures’ sense of immediacy. Erwitt resolved to acquire a Leica as soon as he could afford one. The more he worked in the streets of Italy, the more he began to overcome his inhibitions about pointing a camera at strangers. Perhaps because he had himself been a child there, he became particularly interested in photographing the beauty and dignity of poor and working-class children in the gritty style of neorealist films—their faces filling the frame of his images.
Elliott Erwitt, Paris, France, 1949 
Elliott Erwitt, Robert Frank at work in Harper’s Bazaar studio, New York, 1950 At some point Erwitt’s father, Boris, had joined him in Europe, and together they returned to New York on the SS Nieuw Amsterdam, arriving on October 19, 1949. With the new perspective brought by his travels Erwitt decided he wanted to live in New York “forever,” and began looking for work. He stayed at Frank’s Eleventh Street apartment, frequently using it as a location for shooting the author portraits he was still producing regularly for the publisher Alfred A. Knopf, among others. When Frank returned from Europe in March 1950, Mary moved in. Erwitt shared the apartment with them when he was in town. Around this time he created six identical copies of a modest, spiral-bound book of thirty of the best 2 ¼-inch-square photographs he had made with his Rolleiflex. The book is a compendium of the variety of styles he had explored from 1946 to 1949 and includes pictures from Los Angeles, New York, France, and Italy. It is more a collection of pictures than a sequence. It is clear that some of the photographs were carefully paired on facing pages, but others do not appear to have any direct relationship.
A comparison of the photographs in the book and those in Erwitt’s exhibition in New Orleans nearly two years earlier is telling. Only two images appear in both venues: his photograph of the train window, now formally titled Train Window on a typed list taped into the book, and the still untitled photograph taken at Fountain Avenue noted above. Overall, the more recent works in the book show an increasing sophistication. His interest in motion and cinema is demonstrated in the pairing of a nearly abstract detail of a carousel, frozen in one frame and blurred with rapid movement in the next. At least half of the photographs include people. Unlike his earlier work, the pictures engage their subjects more directly. There are several photographs of children looking straight into the camera. The book ends with a picture of a boy struggling to peer up toward the camera, the bottom half of his face cut off at the lower edge. Erwitt is not that boy, but here, as in other works, he has found in the face of his subject emotions that he himself feels, seizing them on film to create a kind of self-portrait. This is one of the first examples of a theme that recurs over the next several years. Erwitt gave one copy of the book to Edward Steichen, director of the Department of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), who had acquired at least three of his prints for MoMA’s collection.
Elliott Erwitt, Los Angeles, California, 1964 
Elliott Erwitt, New York, New York, 1953 It was not long before Erwitt was able to buy himself a Leica and increase his use of a rectangular format; he was soon using his square-format Rolleiflex almost exclusively for commercial jobs. The Leica better suited the needs of his personal work, and he was becoming less hesitant about openly pointing a camera at his subjects. A trip through the South offered him one of the first opportunities to try out his new 35 mm camera. Erwitt would later write: “I have a strong attraction to the American South. People there have this marvelous exterior—wonderful manners, warm friendliness— until you touch on things you’re not supposed to touch on. Then you see the hardness beneath the mask of nice manners.” There he documented visible signs of racism, which he found abhorrent. Swiftly and unobtrusively, he photographed an African American man bending down to drink from a crude fountain marked “Colored” while looking toward a refrigerated fountain marked “White”. Less blunt is his photograph of two beat-up cars—one black, and in the roughest condition; the other white—parked side-by-side behind a building that bears a sign for Dixie Beer.
Erwitt was curious about the world and he sought to record it as simply and directly as he could.
Erwitt’s life remained peripatetic throughout 1950. Back in the stimulating milieu of postwar New York, Frank invited Erwitt to the studio/darkroom that he shared with Louis Faurer for occasional jobs he did for Harper’s Bazaar. Faurer was a little older than both photographers and was an inspiration to them. He had a successful career as a fashion photographer while producing tender street portraits of nighttime denizens of Times Square. Erwitt’s photographs of beggars and marginal figures, particularly those around Times Square, share an affinity with Faurer’s personal work. But this fertile period in New York could not last forever. The Korean War had started and Erwitt knew that he would eventually be drafted into the Army. He had been using a variety of addresses—from Los Angeles to New Orleans to New York—conscious that every change of address delayed the draft process. When Roy Stryker, the legendary former director of the Information Division of the Farm Security Administration, invited him to move to Pittsburgh that fall and join a new project to record life in the city during a time of profound change, Erwitt readily agreed. Just a few months earlier Stryker, who was then directing a documentary photography project for Standard Oil, had sensed the urgency of Erwitt’s need for work and impressed him by reaching into his own pocket and paying him an advance of $100 to do a small job at a refinery in Bayway, New Jersey.
In Pittsburgh, Erwitt stayed in suitably transient quarters at the YMCA from September until the draft finally caught up with him in December 1950. The time he spent with Stryker in the meantime was transformative. In July of that year the Allegheny Conference on Community Development had hired Stryker to direct the Pittsburgh Photographic Library. The idea was to create photographs for exhibitions and the press about the city’s evolution as it emerged from its notoriously polluted industrial past to become a cleaner, more modern metropolis suitable for future development. Erwitt was part of a small army of photographers Stryker gathered to document the destruction of entire neighborhoods and their replacement by parks and sleek new buildings. The assignment offered him an unprecedented opportunity to work freely alongside such seasoned professionals as Harold Corsini, Esther Bubley, and Sol Libsohn. Stryker was known for giving his photographers “shooting scripts” with instructions on what to cover, but he gave the young photographer virtually free rein to shoot whatever he wanted. Erwitt shot dozens and dozens of rolls of film, both with his old Rolleiflex and his new Leica. He created rich and varied documentation in the Point area that was being razed, capturing everything from broad vistas of the river to shopfronts, kids in the street, signs and billboards, buses, parking lots, and the shadows of pedestrians.
Elliott Erwitt, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 1950 
Elliott Erwitt, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 1950, Contact sheet During his time in Pittsburgh, Erwitt made photographs for himself that he knew would not be useful to the Photographic Library. This was a habit that he has continued during commercial jobs to this day. In one such sad boy “self- portrait” we see both a boy looking out the side window of a car through the reflection of nighttime city lights and Erwitt’s own reflection mirrored in the window as well. He often found himself surrounded by curious kids in the neighborhoods where he was photographing. One of Erwitt’s most often reproduced pictures is of another young boy in Pittsburgh with a toy gun pointed at his head. It is a disturbing image and one that is open to interpretation; this may explain its popularity and longevity. By looking at Erwitt’s contact sheet, we can see that he spent some time with the boy. He made ten exposures and he selected the second one, in which the boy’s smile is the most extreme. This combination of contradictory elements is one of the hallmarks of Erwitt’s photography. This image later prompted him to remark: “Contradictions are perfect for photographs; they make them interesting.”
Another photograph made around this time in New York depicts a brick wall affixed with two peeling posters. One is for the World Featherweight Championship boxing match held on September 8, 1950, at Yankee Stadium between great rivals Sandy Saddler and Willie Pep. Before thirty-nine thousand spectators, Saddler, who was African American, beat Pep, who was Caucasian. The other is Paul Rand’s poster for Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s No Way Out, a film noir in which a character played by Sidney Poitier gets caught up in a story of racial hatred after becoming the first African American doctor at the hospital where he was trained. Whether Erwitt saw the posters’ racial subtext or simply liked the bleakness of the wall emblazoned with the words “No Way Out” is impossible to say. Perhaps the image is in fact another “self-portrait,” this time commenting on the fact that his number was up and he could no longer avoid being drafted by the Army.
Elliott Erwitt, “Recruits Share Bed and Boredom,” Spread from Life, November 26, 1951The unfettered experience in Pittsburgh was a terrific boost for Erwitt’s creative development, but his stay was cut short. His induction into the Army brought him back to New York at the beginning of 1951. After having his physical exam he checked in with Steichen, who was a retired Navy captain. Steichen, known for his ability to spot and nurture nascent talent, reached out to an official at the Pentagon, urging him to find Erwitt a post that would make use of his photographic skills. Steichen wrote: “He has imagination and originality. He is enthusiastic about photography and just beginning to make a name for himself. The Museum [of Modern Art] has acquired some of his photographs for its permanent collection. His name is Elliott Erwitt and he is just twenty-two years old. I hope you find somebody with the authority and the wisdom to get this boy into photography.” While waiting to depart for basic training in New Jersey, Erwitt stayed briefly at Eleventh Street with Mary and Robert Frank, who had married in 1950.
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After his experience in Pittsburgh, Erwitt was sensitive to the nuances of daily routines and adept at capturing life’s curious moments. His documentation of the tedium of basic training, which he titled Bed and Boredom, won him second prize in the “Story Division” of the Life Young Photographers Contest in November 1951, the only time the leading magazine ever sponsored such a contest. Erwitt’s were among the winning photographs in various categories that were featured on the front cover and more than thirty-two pages in the magazine. Other honorees included Frank, Esther Bubley, Ruth Orkin, Louis Stettner, and Dennis Stock. Among the seven jurors (including the managing editor of Life, Edward K. Thompson) were Steichen and Stryker. The pictures Erwitt submitted are straightforward photojournalistic images of soldiers at rest on their bunks, hanging up laundry, or waiting out the rain. Traditionally, photoessays on basic training concentrate on grueling physical activities, but since Erwitt had to participate in the same exertions, it was only possible for him to photograph the less vigorous periods, and this resulted in his novel approach. One of the jurors described his photographs as “[catching] an essential truth of Army life.” With the $1,500 prize, Erwitt, who was by that time stationed with the Signal Corps in Europe, bought a car he named “Thank you, Henry” as a nod to Henry Luce, the founder of the Time-Life empire.
Elliott Erwitt, New York, New York, 1955All photographs from Elliott Erwitt: Home Around the World (Aperture, 2016). Courtesy the artist/Magnum Photos
Elliott Erwitt, Valencia, Spain, 1952 We do not know how much the fact that he was posted to Europe, rather than to the front in Korea, can be attributed to his language skills, or to the letter from Steichen, or to simple luck (as Erwitt claims), but he did have as near idyllic a time in the Army as possible, first posted to Karlsruhe, Germany, and finally to Orléans, France, not far from Paris. He made routine ID photos and the occasional portrait of an officer. Having his own car to travel around with on furlough and free weekends afforded him extraordinary mobility for someone of his rank. He began to shoot color film, often using two cameras, one loaded with color, the other with black and white. He also did a few commercial jobs. He made frequent trips to Paris, where he met Robert Capa at the Magnum office. Capa told him to check in when he got out of the Army. He also visited Robert and Mary Frank and their son, Pablo, after they moved to Paris.
Erwitt was a romantic young man. His photographs in Paris are attuned to life in the streets and record small but beautiful moments in the city. He engaged with people in the street and the market. And he did not limit himself to Paris. In the provincial town of Orléans, where he was based, he captured the raking light on the cobblestones as a bird takes flight. This photograph’s mood of mystery and promise had a broad appeal; it is one of the most frequently reproduced of his pictures from this period. Later in the summer of 1952, Erwitt drove his car down to visit the Franks, who by this time had moved to Valencia, Spain. He made an intimate picture of Robert and Mary Frank dancing in their kitchen at that time. During the trip he took his car on a boat with them to Mallorca, where he and Frank photographed the seemingly primitive village lifestyle. In Barcelona, still seeing outsiders wherever he went, he caught another sad looking boy hitching a ride on the outside of a tram while a couple looks out from behind the glass. It was also during this time that he fell in love with the woman who would become his first wife, Lucienne van Kan. He made pictures of her and of benches in the parks they visited together in Paris and Italy. He had finally found someone he wanted to live and raise a family with.
This essay is excerpted from Elliott Erwitt: Home Around the World (Aperture, 2016).
A Biennale in Bologna Considers the Role of Games in Art
Museums aren’t usually compared to playgrounds. Such institutions tend to rest on their projection of authority and expertise. In the 1980s, the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam sought to challenge this assumption through a series of group exhibitions devoted to exploring what play might mean in a typically buttoned-up context. One show titled Moves: Playing Chess and Cards with the Museum, curated by the philosopher Hubert Damisch, sought to transform the exhibition space into a chessboard, where visitors could essentially play a game with the collection. This experiment is cited as inspiration by curator Francesco Zanot in an essay accompanying GAME, the sixth edition of the Foto/Industria Biennale, organized by MAST Foundation in Bologna. Founded in 2013, MAST holds a collection of photographs related to the history of industry and features programming on technology, art, and innovation. The organization also runs a grant program for artists. GAME: The Game Industry in Photography, which was on view this fall, comprised twelve exhibitions at eleven venues.
Andreas Gursky, Kodak, 1995© the artist and courtesy Sprüth Magers
Ericka Beckman, Reach Capacity, 2020© the artist and courtesy Galerie Francesca Pia
MAST occupies a sleek glass-and-steel building. An arching reflective sculpture by Anish Kapoor sits outside the ramped entryway, reflecting passersby and the sky. On view was a large exhibition by Andreas Gursky, who for decades has examined the systems and aesthetics of global capitalism. His large-scale, often digitally composited images, feature well-stocked industrial ports, the chaos of a stock exchange floor, jewel-box luxury retail spaces, an Amazon shipping center teeming with a dizzyingly eclectic selection of products, organized by algorithmic preferences. Gursky has wowed audiences by nodding to large-scale history painting to reveal a spectacular world shaped by globalized production and trade. There isn’t much obvious play in these images, aside from that involved in the artist’s own process—where reality is amplified through digital intervention—but the show set the stage as a macroview of consumption, profit, and consumerism. After all, gaming today is a multibillion-dollar industry and gameification of customer experience has become another tool in the marketer’s kit.
Heinrich Zille, Senza titolo, 1900Courtesy Berlinische Galerie – Landesmuseum für Moderne Kunst, Fotografie und Architektur
Making one’s way around Bologna on foot, with its many porticoes, can in itself feel like a game where one must traverse a mazelike urban space. Across the eleven locations, the Biennale offered a range of exhibitions that riffed on the theme. Heinrich Zille (1858–1929) photographed a German fairground, around 1900, an early instance of public entertainment. Presumably this proto–theme park was a place to indulge in carefree fun, but this cannot be taken as a given, as the photographer depicted the games and rides there with an eerie sense of absence. At times, they resemble a noir film or a crime scene.
Public games are also seen in Olivo Barbieri’s early series, Flippers, from 1977-78, featuring pinball machines that he came across in an abandoned warehouse. He photographed not the location, but the details of these machines, decorated with illustrations from film and comics, markers of different cultural moments, designed to transport the player into imagined worlds of space travel or the American West. Ericka Beckman used one of the most iconic board games, Monopoly, as the starting point for a film that addressed real estate greed. Having lost her longtime studio in Tribeca to developers, Beckman channeled her frustration into an analog film with the look of a Devo music video. Of course, much gaming today exists online, or in interactive video games. Danielle Udogaranya’s series looked at bias within these games, and how the videogaming community might address racial inclusivity, and another exhibition featured experiments with automated image making by a group of students from ECAL/University of Art and Design, an art school in Lausanne, Switzerland.
Olivo Barbieri, Flippers, 1977–78Courtesy the artist and Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York
Erik Kessels, Carlo e Luciana, In almost every picture 17, 2021Courtesy Erik Kessels, Sergio Smerieri
Photography naturally lends itself to play. Posing or mugging for the camera are as old as the medium. Playfulness tends to be most visible in photography’s more everyday forms, when the maker isn’t striving to make art or thinking about an audience. For years, Erik Kessels, through his project In Almost Every Picture, has given new life and form to found photography albums, turning them into clever books and installations that follow a single subject, trope, or typology. In Bologna, he presented a series of images made by a husband and wife, Carlo and Luciana, who photographed each other over many years while traveling the world. They pose in the same position as each other, in front of both iconic and ordinary sites: the Eiffel Tower, a nondescript Ibis hotel. The viewer knows that they are together, despite the fact that they always appear to be on vacation alone.
Hicham Benohoud, La salle de classe, 1994–2002Courtesy the artist and Katharina Maria Raab Gallery, Berlin
Between 1994 and 2000, Hicham Benohoud was employed as an art teacher at a school in Marrakech. During that time, he worked with his young students to create an intriguing series of collaborative, performative portraits. In these seemingly simple, black-and-white images, the rules governing a school come undone. Rolls of paper unfurl from a wall. The classroom becomes a studio for improvisation and self-invention. The power of group creativity is unleashed in a kind of DIY theater. Props, costumes, and sets are improvised. Paper-tube appendages, geometrical streamers, precariously stacked desks—there is an art here of photography, but also of choreography and collaboration. The series makes a powerful case for play as the key ingredient in the creative process, and for how games—and arresting photographs—can be crafted from just about anything.
The sixth edition of the Foto/Industria Biennale was on view in Bologna, Italy, from October 18–December 8, 2023.
December 6, 2023
Sam Contis Asks What It Means to Move through the Landscape
This essay originally appeared in Sam Contis: Overpass (Aperture, 2022) under the title “H.”
A desire line is a path made to cut corners. You’ll have seen them—in a field, tracing the most concise route between two gateways, or in an urban park in places where the paving winds the long way around the grass. Many people follow the same shortcut, and eventually a path becomes visible where the vegetation is worn away. Even when there is nobody there, you can see the physical traces of all those people and something they were aiming for, written plainly on the bared ground.
There are similar traces visible in Sam Contis’s photographs of stiles, tracks, and fences, images of human passage in which the human form is notably absent. A stile is a crossing point: a step or narrow gap in a fence, wall, or hedge, designed so that people can pass through but sheep and cattle can’t. It’s an old form: simple and variable. Anything that allows a person to pass over or through a barrier, but which is too narrow or fiddly for livestock, works. Two steps made of cobbles, breezeblocks, or pieces of wood nailed together; a slim gap let into a low stone wall; plastic sacking tied around a barbed-wire fence. All in and around these stiles there are traces of human activity, desire lines in an extended sense: people ’s desires and needs pressed into the places where they’ve been. There are trodden grasses and plants that have been crushed or bent around the worn paths. Cinder blocks, placed in front of one stile to help small legs make it up to the first step. A broken fence has been mended in a makeshift way, a short length of wire looped and twisted to hold a closure, it looks like a bad impression of a cobweb. Elsewhere, vertical posts are cut with a tapering droplet form at the top, narrowing to give the human hand something to hold. There’s a place where three empty lager cans have been dropped on the ground, below a stile at the meeting of a footpath and a road: not long ago, somebody sat on the fence here, drinking. They crumpled the cans and then they moved on.
Looking at these images, I thought of the histories of the English countryside told by Oliver Rackham, an ecologist whose books describe how layers of history materialize in a landscape. Rackham reads terrain as though it was an archive and he finds everything, everywhere crowded with evidence of past lives. Roads commemorate encounters, desires, and obstructions: the route bends here, where a farmer once dumped a pile of trash, and here where a group of kids lit a bonfire, and here, where a woman abandoned her dead horse. Travelers continued to pursue these diversions even after the obstruction was removed, so that the road, as it moved across a landscape, became a “series of wobbles,” each wobble the mark of an event. Barriers have stories too: there are hedges that stand as “the ghosts of woods that have been grubbed out,” a line of trees from the original edge making a lasting boundary between new fields. Perhaps every mark in any landscape is somehow a sign of drive, force, want, or need.
If we were to read the story of one of these stiles, in one of these images, what desires would it document? The stile seen here looks ordinary. A thin plank supported by two greenish posts: a single wooden step, bridging a fence between two sheep pastures in the north of England. A large, flat-faced cobble from the nearby river has been placed on the ground at one side to steady the feet. This stile is almost identical to the stile in the next field … but this one is messier, slightly asymmetrical, because this one began with a bad mood. It was the product of a poor repair job, knocked together one October day in 2004, a little past midday. The farmer who made it would, ordinarily, have been eating, but that day the telephone rang and he left his plate on the table, still half full. He talked, and listened, and the food cooled. It was his sister on the phone. She wanted to discuss their elderly mother’s care. They ended up arguing.
After the conversation, the farmer didn’t feel like finishing his meal. He left the house with his toolkit and went out across the fields to mend the broken stile. He took down the collapsed plank, and tested the posts to check that they were still sound. Then he knelt on the makeshift paving slab to hammer in the new step. One hand gripped the stile, the other pounded in the nails rapidly and hard. As he worked, he was running back over the argument in his mind, thinking of what he should have said to his sister, and the hammer went down on his thumb. Abruptly, he had to stop. Black blood pooled under the nail. He stood and stepped back, folding the fingers of his other hand protectively around the damaged thumb, to look at his work. The stile was unbalanced, the plank extending too far on one side, leaving only a narrow ledge on the other.
There had been stiles like this on his land for centuries, wherever people needed to pass. His parents and grandparents had tended to some, neglected others. Throughout the country are tens of thousands of miles of public footpaths, running across private land. Historically, landowners would see to the upkeep of stiles and gateways along these paths, when it was in their interests to do so. But relatively recently this upkeep was made a legal obligation. Since the Countryside Act of 1968, landowners have been required to maintain the stiles that made free movement possible, and this particular repair was long overdue. Over the years, the stile had taken many forms: its stakes and poles had been erected and knocked over; the stone slabs at its base used, worn, cracked, and carried away; the horizontal planks had been replaced many times.
The new plank that our farmer hammered in that day has its own story. It was Scots pine, swift-grown on timberland in western Scotland in the late 1990s. Tree by regularly spaced tree, the forest was being infiltrated by a poisonous fungus. The fungus didn’t look like much (fingernail-sized, pearly umbrellas growing on the ground below each sick tree), but it could rot live wood before the tree matured. Two square miles of pine were felled young to stop the spread and the timber from these trees, which couldn’t be sold through the usual channels, went cheap. Our farmer purchased green posts and thin planks from the lot, roughly cut and still wet.
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But none of this explains the path. It doesn’t tell us why people were passing through right here, in this place—why they needed a crossing-point here, at this corner of this field, and why there was a stile that our farmer was now legally bound to maintain. We need to travel back again to make sense of it, to see the stories that caused it to materialize here.
Long before the 1968 Act, the English countryside was occupied and worked in common. Landowners held legal and political power, but commoners had the right to grow food, raise animals, or gather fuel from the fields and forests that they lived near. This was no Arcadia: landowners couldn’t have maintained their power without giving the peasants who worked for them some means to feed themselves. But the rights were real and honored. They were written down and lived out for centuries, during which peasants were able to make a living off their local land, right up to the point at which those rights were eroded and in some places eradicated between the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries, during a series of movements known as enclosures. Parish by parish, commoners were decisively deprived of this long-held tenancy of the landscape. Small plots farmed in rotation were ploughed up in favor of rationalized growing systems, with long straight hedgerows dividing large, regular fields. Straight roads, which ran from town to town, were expanded, and the tracks that mazed across fields, connecting every cottage or farmstead, woodland, or pond, faded into the grass. The pathway on which our stile stands was once a highway: a practical route rather than a recreational footpath. It had its deliveries and its commuters. Its placement, right here, made the neatest cut-through for the milkmaid in the early eighteenth century who used to take a pail from the dairy farm to the big house every other day; passing, in the other direction, children sent out by their parents to gather sticks for the fire. Already, then, this crossing had been in use for hundreds of years. Medieval peasants were here, going between their cottages and their strips of land, and occasional travelers exported materials across longer distances, moving stone and timber, lime and metals and chalk and charcoal, from forests and mines, to cities, building sites, shipyards. The crossing had been used for years, decades, centuries before that. Back when the lightly worn path was barely visible on the ground, humans walked here, taking hazels and hawthorn with them when they passed.
Perhaps, looking at the histories that materialize in this ordinary stile, we have to push its beginning even earlier. The environmental activist and writer George Monbiot, among others, has propagated a theory that the British landscape is one that evolved in response to threats that have long since disappeared. The blackthorn spines we see in our hedge evolved to deter rhinoceros tongues. Birch bark, glowing white with dark striations on the edge of this wood, would confuse an ancient elephant’s limited color vision. Monbiot mentions the hippopotamus bones discovered in central London, below Trafalgar Square, and pictures a vision of the whole of Britain as a place adapted to species that no longer live there, “a ghost ecosystem.”
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Or, looking at the river stone that’s used as a rudimentary step, we need to rewind to its moment of creation: boiling seas; molten rock in a volatile atmosphere; eons inside the earth’s crust, millennia on a mountainside, decades of rolling underwater before it was stranded on the riverbank during a late-summer drought when our farmer took it away.
But, no. None of that is early enough. We need to move back further. Thousands and millions and billions of years; the origins of life. Meteors were seeding the planet with lively microscopic forms. Electrified molecules were merging and splitting in a primordial soup. The precise sequence of events is uncertain. The only thing we can say for sure is that things were volatile. Something unstable stuck, and set into being this sequence of events that leads us here, to this crossing-point, in the present.
You can look at any landscape like that, seeing all these things that happened in this place in the past. They’re layered into every tiny area. A fencepost, a cobble, and a footprint in the mud, where ground has been worn bare below the stile, contains the story of last weekend’s rambler, and the evergreen that was cut down thirty years ago, and the primal molecule. You can look at a Peruvian mountainside, its trees and torn ruins, and see the signs of an industrious city. Or stand in Trafalgar Square to see ancient hippopotami wallowing where the waters used to meet. Or watch a harvester mechanically progressing through a soy crop in Kentucky and hear voices singing somewhere inside the field.
All these histories are live, shaping landscapes and affecting bodies in the present, and determining what’s possible in the future. Maybe this is a photography of speculation, rather than documentary, not an archive but a forecast: these images are not testaments to the past, they’re pictures of a future in which alternative forms of experience have a greater force and presence. The term stile comes from a diminutive form of an earlier word for “climb.” You look out with a slight deviation in your perspective. The landscape opens. You step up, placing your foot on the horizontal—the stone step, the wooden cross-beam—and then you see something else.
These images are not testaments to the past, they’re pictures of a future in which alternative forms of experience have a greater force and presence.
When you step down from the stile the ground comes up fast. There are these trippy images of movement, interspersed with the wide, still spaces. The perspective has been shifted, as though the subject is on the move. They give the feeling of descending to finding the ground slightly closer and harder than you’d expected, stumbling. All forms are dappled and blurred, meshed with light that moves unstably in water, earth, branches, or bark. These images are preoccupied with shadows and reflections, the places where branches and walls allow light to pass. Water rushes through the teeth of a barrier that catches flotsam. Barbed wire runs right up to the place where the fence can be crossed, then runs on at the side. Many of these pictures spell out the shape of the letter H: a horizon-line, seen between vertical strokes of trees or fences or walls. Planks, stones, wires, gates, stiles, fences, walls, all arrange a horizontal barrier or bridge that spans two uprights. I typed the lone letter into a search engine and discovered that my inference ran in the wrong direction: it’s not the landscape that recalls the letter, but the letter that depicts a landscape: “H” is derived from a Levantine hieroglyph for fence. A stile is a means of access but it is also a barrier technology, like a subway gate. It selects. It discriminates. It filters bodies.
Looking at these contemporary images, seen through fences and barriers, it’s difficult to ignore what the English landscape leaves out. If we were to follow the story of this stile horizontally, rather than vertically—not moving back through the past, but staying in the present and reaching out across the landscape and the world—what would we see? Starting right here, to watch a couple help one another over the stile one winter afternoon. They’re gray-haired, married, able-bodied, white; dressed, expensively, in Scandinavian waterproofs. Any time you go out for a hike in the English countryside, a gap opens up between the historical and legal fact of the right of access, and the political and geographical realities that determine who actually visits or inhabits any given landscape. The barriers that exist now, through which access to a landscape is granted or denied, have become more sinister because they are concealed. Ancient privileges and dispossessions have gone into hiding but they’re still around. Rural England is overwhelmingly white and right-leaning, and it’s poorly served by public transport. If you live in London or Manchester it’s easier and often cheaper to travel to Amsterdam or Mallorca, than to reach some closer part of rural East Anglia or the Lake District, without private transport. Barriers that sustain inequality in the contemporary world are no longer as simple as the wooden posts and lengths of wire that pen the sheep. Perhaps this is why there was a powerful dreaminess and longing in the way Trump used to fantasize about his wall. The thing that was remarkable, in the way he described it, was that his imagination was so literal—the height and dimensions, the building materials he would use, the itemized bills and who would pay them. The wall manifested a desire that ’s felt by many—not only those who wanted it—to go back into a world in which material force is the first currency, there are none of the receded or virtual barriers and passageways that shape realities now.
Sam Contis: Overpass 60.00 $60.00Add to cart
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Sam Contis: OverpassPhotographs by Sam Contis. Text by Daisy Hildyard. Designed by Julian Bittiner.
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View cart Description Overpass is about what it means to move through the landscape. Walking along a vast network of centuries-old footpaths through the English countryside, artist Sam Contis focuses on stiles, the simple structures that offer a means of passage over walls and fences and allow public access through privately owned land. In her immersive sequences of black-and-white photographs, they become repeating sculptural forms in the landscape, invitations to free movement on one hand and a reminder of the history of enclosure on the other. Made from wood and stone, each unique, they appear as markers pointing the way forward, or decaying and half-hidden by the undergrowth. An essay by writer Daisy Hildyard contextualizes this body of work within histories of the British landscape and contemporary ecological discourses. In an age of rising nationalism and a renewed insistence on borders, Overpass invites us to reflect on how we cross boundaries, who owns space, and the ways we have shaped the natural environment and how we might shape it in the future. DetailsFormat: Paperback / softback
Number of pages: 224
Number of images: 122
Publication date: 2022-11-15
Measurements: 6.75 x 9.75 x 0.94 inches
ISBN: 9781597115391
“The work reveals something subtly subversive about our access to the countryside”—Josh Lustig, The Financial Times
ContributorsSam Contis (b. 1982) lives in California. Her work has been exhibited widely, including at the Barbican Centre, London; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Carré d’Art, Nîmes; and MoMA, New York. She is the recipient of a 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship and the author of Deep Springs (2017) and Day Sleeper (2020).
Daisy Hildyard (b. 1984) is author of two novels—Emergency (2022) and Hunters in the Snow (2013)—and one work of nonfiction, The Second Body (2017). She lives in North Yorkshire.
Moving along the hedgerow and into the fields and woods, we track away from the couple and they disappear on the other side of the stile. A new set of subjects gains presence: small, shadowy, all nonhuman, some barely corporeal. The fencepost to one side of the stile is a growing pole for wild carrot plants, which lean on it as they move towards the light. The stile ’s wet, soft plank is food to the fungus that cover its surface in orange spots. The stake in the fence offers delicious relief for a cow’s itchy back on a hot afternoon. Moss and lichen creep over dank areas on a stone ’s surface. Spaces between loose stones in the wall are tunnels used by field mice and a weasel. A kestrel sometimes lands on the telegraph wire that runs above the stile, where it can see things moving through the opening below. A hole in the wire, low down in the fence, is the place where a lamb tried to climb through; got stuck and struggled, tangling his wool tighter until the barbed edge tore his skin. An elm sapling cranes over the gap in the hedge, its branches extended to catch spare light. Around the stile there ’s a patch of mud where feet have worn away the grass, and this is the fragile place where the rare, specialized, increasingly endangered flora of the footpath thrive in mud, shade, and the pressure of feet. The area below the stile is an underpass for badgers and foxes. The tall stone wall is a barrier to an extended family of rabbits, who make room and clear passage for their exploding population by undermining it.
var container = ''; jQuery('#fl-main-content').find('.fl-row').each(function () { if (jQuery(this).find('.gutenberg-full-width-image-container').length) { container = jQuery(this); } }); if (container.length) { const fullWidthImageContainer = jQuery('.gutenberg-full-width-image-container'); const fullWidthImage = jQuery('.gutenberg-full-width-image img'); const watchFullWidthImage = _.throttle(function() { const containerWidth = Math.abs(jQuery(container).css('width').replace('px', '')); const containerPaddingLeft = Math.abs(jQuery(container).css('padding-left').replace('px', '')); const bodyWidth = Math.abs(jQuery('body').css('width').replace('px', '')); const marginLeft = ((bodyWidth - containerWidth) / 2) + containerPaddingLeft; jQuery(fullWidthImageContainer).css('position', 'relative'); jQuery(fullWidthImageContainer).css('marginLeft', -marginLeft + 'px'); jQuery(fullWidthImageContainer).css('width', bodyWidth + 'px'); jQuery(fullWidthImage).css('width', bodyWidth + 'px'); }, 100); jQuery(window).on('load resize', function() { watchFullWidthImage(); }); const observer = new MutationObserver(function(mutationsList, observer) { for(var mutation of mutationsList) { if (mutation.type == 'childList') { watchFullWidthImage();//necessary because images dont load all at once } } }); const observerConfig = { childList: true, subtree: true }; observer.observe(document, observerConfig); }Contis’s subjects are small but tough: stalks, seeds, pieces of grit, thorns, hairs tangled into the wire fence. I thought of Albrecht Dürer’s Great Piece of Turf, a modest sixteenth-century watercolor of a clump of weeds and grasses. Dürer’s image could easily be described as photographic realism, but his attention amplifies his subject, so that the spent dandelion buds and thin blades of grass become spectacular, hyperreal. Contis’s images are like that: her subjects gain force when seen with this intensity. These are quiet places, but their quietness is suggestive. The worn paths and spaces between walls trace presence. The vegetation is lush, tangled, profuse. Everything leans into everything else, germinating, growing, subsiding, collapsing, and then regenerating. A landscape comes into being through encounters between soils and microbes, birds and chemicals, lichens and moisture, plants and mammals. A million different infrastructures, created by many species and successive climates, all built and perpetually building up into and against one another. You can look at any landscape like that, too: to find the many living storylines that come together in the present. Some are apparent, some are hidden, but they all make it what it is. Between your feet on the sidewalk there is a small basement where young men sleep on rotating shifts. From the top deck of the bus you might glimpse a lonely woman inside the state palace, sitting out long days behind drawn curtains, or the gulls on the palace kitchen roof, waiting for the food waste to be put out. Sunbathing on a suburban lawn on a hot afternoon you can feel, behind the back of your head, disturbed earth where a fox was clawing the ground for worms last night. The stile draws many different environments and experiences together, in the same place: it’s a stile, a scratching post, a gate, and a barrier. It’s a place to find something to eat, a hiding place and an escape route. It’s a gap, brought into sharp focus—emptiness, tended for a human body to pass.
All photographs Sam Contis, Untitled (from the series Overpass), 2020-2022, from Overpass (Aperture 2022)Courtesy the artist
The landscapes themselves, spacious and closely inhabited, pass on too: they extend over the edge of the photograph and beyond the horizon. The plastic bag caught in the hedge here blows into a stream and floats downriver, out into the North Sea, drawn by circulating currents into the Atlantic and then the Pacific, where it joins other plastic bags all floating in an island together through turquoise waters. This tuft of reedy grasses is closely related to the marsh plants that emerge through the snowmelt in southern Siberia each spring. The wire fence that runs on either side of the stile runs on between the posts and away into the distance. The same wire fencing cross-hatches the moors and crosses down into the Dales. It runs through fields. It runs around a prison and a livestock market and runs on through more fields. It runs around migrant detention facilities and gated residential communities. It guards the train tracks at the entrance to the channel tunnel in Kent and resurfaces at its exit in Normandy. The fencing runs, intermittently, across Europe. Where the land meets the ocean there is a gap in the fence, and on the other side of the ocean, right there at the water’s edge, the fencing begins again. This same material—thick, square-hatched wire—runs riot around the freeways and border kiosks where El Paso meets Ciudad Juárez, it divides Syria from Turkey, Ukraine from Russia, Pakistan from Afghanistan, it has a field day on the Gaza Strip and runs on, circumnavigating the planet.
This essay originally appeared in Sam Contis: Overpass (Aperture, 2022).
Sam Contis: Overpass is on view at Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery, New York, October 27–December 16, 2023
December 1, 2023
An-My Lê on Vietnam, the Chaos of War, and the Tangibility of Memory
This interview was originally published in An-My Lê: Small Wars (Aperture, 2005).
An-My Lê was born in Vietnam in 1960 and came to the United States as a political refugee at age fifteen. She received a grant to return to her homeland just after US Vietnamese relations were formally restored. Lê went back several times between 1994 and 1997, creating stunning large-format, black-and-white photographs, expertly printed in a middle-gray scale reminiscent of Robert Adams. These images do not address the war specifically, but rather represent Lê’s attempt to reconcile memories of her childhood home with the contemporary landscape that now confronted her. The war haunts the images in eerie metaphors: dozens of kites double as dive-bombing planes; crop fires and construction sites recall napalm and mass graves.
In 1999 Lê began working with Vietnam War reenactors in North Carolina who restage battles as well as the training and daily life of soldiers—both Viet Cong and American GIs. For four summers, she not only photographed but also participated in battles of the Vietnam War restaged on her adopted American soil. Relating to both documentary and staged photography, the work is aesthetically rigorous and conceptually challenging. Soldiers at rest give themselves up to portraiture, while battle compositions recognizable from classic war photojournalism possess the qualities of a dream. Most recently, Lê has photographed exercises performed by the US military in the American desert in preparation for maneuvers in Iraq and Afghanistan. Lê’s works elucidate the complicated nature of the aesthetics and spectacle of war. But perhaps the most intriguing conceptual component is Lê’s own relationship to the subjects and the landscapes she presents. —The Editors, from Aperture Conversations: 1985 to the Present (Aperture, 2018)
Hilton Als: For Americans born in the 1960s, Vietnam, or, rather, the “issue” of Vietnam—the “problem” of Vietnam—was something that we always lived with: on television, in newspapers, and the rest. But we did not necessarily understand what “the war” in Vietnam was about. Can you provide a thumbnail sketch of the historical and political background of your country, and the effect its invasions—by the French, by Americans—had on you, your family, and your environs?
An-My Lê: My mother’s family—much more dominant in my life than my father’s—was from Thai Binh, a small town near Hanoi. They lived through the Japanese occupation and under Communist rule. My mother grew up in Hanoi but for higher education traveled to Paris in the 1950s. In 1954, while she was still in Paris, my grandmother moved to Saigon when the country was divided at the 17th parallel and the Communists took over the North. My mother met my father and married him in Paris, where my older brother was born. They eventually returned to Saigon, where I was born.
We lived through many political coups, years of fear and uncertainty, as the Viet Cong would shell the city randomly every night. War became a routine, something we accepted as part of our lives, until 1968 when the Communists attacked Saigon during the Tet celebrations. They took over the American embassy and the radio station behind our house. This offensive sent shock waves through the community. We all felt vulnerable. My parents decided we had to leave Vietnam to find shelter, even if it was for a short while. Fortunately my mother received a scholarship to work on a Ph.D. at the Sorbonne. We were able to move to Paris (my father stayed behind) and lived there for five years while she completed her Ph.D. We returned to Saigon in 1973, only to see the country fall to the Communists in 1975. We were fortunate to be evacuated by the Americans that April. In spite of our ties to France, my parents decided to remain in the United States because it seemed to offer more opportunities at that time. For better or for worse, my life and those of the last three generations of my family have been underscored by the complicated political history of Vietnam.
An-My Lê, Untitled, Ho Chi Minh City, 1995, from the series Viêt Nam 
An-My Lê, Untitled, Son Tay, 1998, from the series Viêt Nam Als : Your photographs deal so specifically with ideas of landscape; do you work from your memory of the Vietnamese landscape to examine your feelings about it, or to imagine what its colonizers might have felt about it?
Lê: Over the years, disconnected from the place and with only a handful of family pictures available, I had come to construct my own notions of a Vietnam drawn mostly from memories, but also from photojournalism and Hollywood films. In 1994 when I returned for the first time, I realized that I was not particularly interested in reexamining contemporary Vietnam. Instead of seeking the real, I began
making photographs that use the real to ground the imaginary. The landscape genre or the description of people’s activities in the landscape lent itself well to this way of thinking.
My attachment to the idea of landscape is a direct extension of a life in exile. The sense of home has to do with the importance of food and location, and it is all connected to the land. Vietnam has always been (and still is somewhat) an agricultural society. Its culture and history are deeply rooted in its land. Growing up I did not know much of the country, actually not much outside of the capital and a few other large cities in the South, since it was difficult and unsafe to travel to the countryside during wartime. Especially when we lived in Paris and later in the U.S., I came to fantasize about this traditional agricultural way of life. Through folktales, legends, and many stories I heard from my mother and grandmother, I imagined a life that was truly magical but at the same time real and grounded—a life of hardship, working the land, with threats of war and disease but also the joys of living close to nature in a large, close-knit family.
Vietnamese society and in a way its people (especially in the North but partly in the South as well) have also been deeply scarred by years of immobilization and deprivation during the war and during the earlier part of the reunification. In the meantime, in spite of the destruction, the landscape seems to have recovered and, to someone living in exile, has managed to retain and exude that sense of culture and history that can signal that one has arrived home.
The idea of the landscape and its climate was also such an important topic when the Vietnam War was covered in military analyses, news reports, and Hollywood films. The word terrain was often mentioned: how treacherous it was, how the enemy was better prepared for it and had a greater advantage. Working with the Vietnam War reenactors I became fascinated by the significance of the landscape in terms of its strategic meaning. Every hilltop, bend in the road, group of trees, and open field became a possibility for an ambush, an escape route, a landing zone, or a campsite.
In spite of the influence of Vietnamese culture on my life, I am also a product of colonial attitude, having grown up in a Francophile home and then later having lived in France. Eugène Atget has been a great inspiration—not only his work, which brilliantly captures the notions of change and transition in a place and a culture, but his entire life and working process.
An-My Lê, Untitled, Mekong Delta, 1994, from the series Viêt Nam
var container = ''; jQuery('#fl-main-content').find('.fl-row').each(function () { if (jQuery(this).find('.gutenberg-full-width-image-container').length) { container = jQuery(this); } }); if (container.length) { const fullWidthImageContainer = jQuery('.gutenberg-full-width-image-container'); const fullWidthImage = jQuery('.gutenberg-full-width-image img'); const watchFullWidthImage = _.throttle(function() { const containerWidth = Math.abs(jQuery(container).css('width').replace('px', '')); const containerPaddingLeft = Math.abs(jQuery(container).css('padding-left').replace('px', '')); const bodyWidth = Math.abs(jQuery('body').css('width').replace('px', '')); const marginLeft = ((bodyWidth - containerWidth) / 2) + containerPaddingLeft; jQuery(fullWidthImageContainer).css('position', 'relative'); jQuery(fullWidthImageContainer).css('marginLeft', -marginLeft + 'px'); jQuery(fullWidthImageContainer).css('width', bodyWidth + 'px'); jQuery(fullWidthImage).css('width', bodyWidth + 'px'); }, 100); jQuery(window).on('load resize', function() { watchFullWidthImage(); }); const observer = new MutationObserver(function(mutationsList, observer) { for(var mutation of mutationsList) { if (mutation.type == 'childList') { watchFullWidthImage();//necessary because images dont load all at once } } }); const observerConfig = { childList: true, subtree: true }; observer.observe(document, observerConfig); }Als : When did you begin your career in photography? And why?
Lê: It began by chance. I never felt I had a calling for anything in particular but was fairly good in the sciences, so I chose to study biology in college in preparation for a career in medicine. I was not accepted to any of the medical schools I applied to in my senior year, and it was suggested that I do biomedical research, publish, pursue a master’s degree in biology, and reapply. While completing a master’s at Stanford University, I wanted to take a drawing class to fulfill a nonscience requirement. It was full, so I chose photography instead. To my surprise, the class completely took over my life. If I was not photographing, I was in the darkroom printing until late. I loved every minute of it.
What drew me at first was simply how the camera gave me license to go out and discover more of the world; it taught me about people and places and about myself as well. The immediacy of responding to a situation when you snap your photo, the opportunity to be more analytical later when you edit the pictures, and the blend of the intuitive and the cerebral was very satisfying. Whatever a calling could be, it seemed to me that this was it.
In 1986 I moved back to Paris, where I floundered for a few months until Laura Volkerding, my teacher from Stanford, arrived. She came to document the casting of Rodin’s Gates of Hell that had been donated to Stanford by Gerald Cantor. It was to be cast using the lost wax method at a foundry that belongs to a guild of craftsmen called the Compagnons du Devoir du Tour de France. The guild dates back to the Middle Ages and is comprised of various métiers: metalwork, masonry, stone-cutting, and carpentry/woodwork. These craftsmen were responsible for the construction of most churches and cathedrals in France. Now they do a lot of restoration work.
It turned out that the guild needed a staff photographer, and Laura referred me. I spent the next four years touring France and working for them. I was completely unprepared for the demands of this job; I quickly learned how to use a view camera on my own, how to use color film, how to light a space. I underwent a lot of trial and error. It was a great opportunity for me to travel and learn about the art and architecture of France, but more importantly, working for the guild deeply affected the way I saw things and represented them photographically. It was always about seeing clearly: showing the curve of a stairwell in an unencumbered way, the texture of this marble or that wood, drawing the volume of a vault in the most readable way. I also learned to respect the materiality of things (the nobility of stone, metal, and wood). I developed an appreciation of all things well made and a love for everything about the tradition of the craftsman and his work.
I moved back to the U.S., to New York City, in 1990. I finally realized that I did not want to be a commercial photographer and applied to graduate school. I then went to the Yale School of Art for my MFA. That’s when I began to grapple with the scope of a possible life as a visual artist.
An-My Lê: On Contested Terrain 52.00 The first comprehensive survey of the Vietnamese American artist, featuring works from Lê’s series inlcuding Viêt Nam, Small Wars, 29 Palms, Events Ashore, and more. $65.00 $52.00Add to cart
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An-My Lê: On Contested TerrainPhotographs by An-My Lê. By Dan Leers. Text by Lisa Sutcliffe and David Finkel. Interviewer Viet Thanh Nguyen. Interviewee An-My Lê.
$ 52.00 –1+$65.00 $52.00Add to cart
View cart Description An-My Lê: On Contested Terrain is the first comprehensive survey of the Vietnamese American artist, published on the occasion of a major exhibition organized by Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh.Drawing, in part, from her own experiences of the Vietnam War, Lê has created a body of work committed to expanding and complicating our understanding of the activities and motivations behind conflict and war. Throughout her thirty-year career, Lê has photographed noncombatant roles of active-duty service members, often on the sites of former battlefields, including those reserved for training or the reenactment of war, and those created as film sets.
This publication includes selections from her well-known series Viêt Nam, Small Wars, 29 Palms, and Events Ashore, in addition to never-before-seen images, including recent photographs from the US-Mexico border, formative early work, and lesser-known projects. Essays by the organizing curator Dan Leers and curator Lisa J. Sutcliffe, as well as a dialogue between Lê and Pulitzer Prize–winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen, address the ways in which Lê’s quiet, nuanced work complicates the landscapes of conflict that have long informed American identity.
Copublished by Aperture and Carnegie Museum of Art Details
Format: Paperback / softback
Number of pages: 204
Number of images: 128
Publication date: 2020-06-16
Measurements: 9.25 x 10.5 x 0.8 inches
ISBN: 9781597114813
An-My Lê’s work has been exhibited at such venues as the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Lê has received many awards, including fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts (1996), John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1997), and MacArthur Foundation (2012). She is a professor in the Department of Photography at Bard College.
Dan Leers is a curator of photography at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, and organized the traveling exhibition An-My Lê: On Contested Terrain. Previously, Leers was the Beaumont and Nancy Newhall Curatorial Fellow in the Department of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art, and an independent curator and consultant to the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art (New Paltz, New York), Philadelphia Photo Arts Center, and 2013 Venice Biennale.
Lisa Sutcliffe is the Herzfeld Curator of Photography and Media Arts at the Milwaukee Art Museum. From 2007 to 2012, she served as assistant curator of photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Prior exhibitions include Marking Time in Photography and Film (2013), The Provoke Era: Postwar Japanese Photography, and Photography Now: China, Japan, Korea (both 2009).
David Finkel is a journalist and author whose honors include a MacArthur fellowship and a Pulitzer Prize.
Viet Thanh Nguyen is author of The Sympathizer (2015), which received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, among other awards. He is a recipient of fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and MacArthur Foundation. Nguyen is a professor and the Aerol Arnold Chair of English at the University of Southern California.
Als : After you began photographing, did you immediately establish long-range plans in terms of what you wanted to accomplish with it, such as your studies of the reenactors in “their” recreated Vietnam, or is it all a process of discovery?
Lê: It was all subconscious. I am rather amazed at how the three projects have come together as a sort of trilogy. Going into a project, I never know the photographs I will end up making. It is a process of discovery, and I try to stay as open-minded as possible. For me it is first about learning something about the world, about myself. It is a little frightening starting a project in such a way and not feeling prepared, but so much of it is about problem solving. I am always asking myself what it is I am trying to find out about the situation, about the people: What does it all mean in terms of a cultural and historical context? What are my personal issues here? What is the point? Is it worthwhile? What kind of photographs could attempt to broach and perhaps begin to answer those questions?
The Vietnam project happened in 1993 after graduation from Yale, where I had been encouraged to do work that was more personal and autobiographical. The U.S. was loosening its diplomatic and economic relations with Vietnam. I saw the opportunity to return to Vietnam, which is something we never thought we could do when we left in 1975. The question of war was not central to the photographs I made in Vietnam. Only at the conclusion of this project did I feel ready to tackle that issue head-on. I had to also ask myself: how do you address something that has happened so long ago? I felt stumped; other than working with press images or trying to memorialize the event, what could I do?
Some of what I did in Vietnam, where I learned how to place people in the landscape, prepared me for the subsequent series. I learned that it is all about scale. How far back can you go to get a great drawing of the land, while still being able to suggest the activity of the people?
Als : How did you find out about the “reenactments”? And what was your first response to them? Did you have to go through a great deal of bureaucratic rigmarole to gain access to photograph?
Lê: I had heard about these small, low-key groups of men who reenact the Vietnam War. After some research on the Internet, I found one group based in Virginia and contacted them. It was smaller and more exclusive when I first worked with them than it is now. Gaining an invitation to the first event involved a lot of back and forth emailing with the founder. Once I was there, it became a lot easier because it was clear I wanted to help contribute to the event as best as I could while making my photographs.
An-My Lê, Lesson, 1999–2002, from the series Small Wars 
An-My Lê, Explosion, 1999–2002, from the series Small Wars Als : Did you actually become involved in any of the war games that you documented?
Lê: Yes, that’s the requirement for attending the events, which last three days. The reenactors are obsessed with re-creating a situation that is seamless. So it is crucial that everything—from the erection of Viet Cong villages and GI firebases to a haircut and the smallest details in a uniform—be of the period. To fit in I often played a VC guerilla or North Vietnamese army soldier. I did what I needed to do to find the right VC uniform, sandals, rucksacks, and hammock. To go on the GI side, I would become a “Kit Carson” scout, a turncoat who would inform the Americans.
The reenactors truly enjoyed having me there. I added to the authenticity of the event, and they would often concoct elaborate scenarios around my character. I have played the sniper girl (my favorite—it felt perversely empowering to control something that I never had any say in). I have been the lone guerilla left over in a booby-trapped village to spring out of a hut and ambush the GI platoon. I have played the captured prisoner.
Initially I was terrified at the prospect of spending three days with these unknown men on a hundred- acre private property ten hours from New York City. My friend Lois Connor accompanied me. It turns out the reenactors are straightforward, conservative men who are so dedicated to this hobby. It’s an obsession for many of them—an obsession with collecting and trading all the paraphernalia, meshed with an interest in military history. Reenacting events are an opportunity for them to put their stuff to use, meet other men who share their interest, and live in a kind of virtual reality or travel back in time, all while having an adventure with their buddies.
From many conversations, I also learned that their interest in the military and in Vietnam stemmed from complicated personal histories. These men came from all sorts of professions. A few had been in the military, but rarely did they have experience in a combat situation. Some had missed their calling for the military and were steered by their parents toward law school or business school; some had
lost a brother in Vietnam. I met at least two men whose fathers had distinguished themselves in combat in Vietnam. It seemed that many of them had complicated personal issues they were trying to resolve, but then I was also trying to resolve mine. In a way, we were all artists trying to make sense of our own personal baggage.
Als : How did you develop the topic of the third series?
Lê: In 2002 and 2003 the U.S. was gearing up for the war in Iraq and Afghanistan just as I finished working with the reenactors. I was extremely distressed the day the war began in March 2003. Strangely enough, my heart did not go out immediately to the Iraqi civilians, but to our troops. I first thought of the scope and impact of war on them and their extended families. I am not categorically against war, but I feel the decision makers and policy makers have no idea how devastating the effects of war can be. Remembering my own experience, I also felt completely vulnerable. War just seemed unreasonable and unjustified in this case.
Trying to make sense of all this, I decided I had to find a way to go to Iraq. It was, unfortunately, too late to become embedded. I came across a photograph of the Marines training in the California desert in 29 Palms that looked just like parts of Afghanistan and Iraq. I immediately knew this place held great potential for a new project. Working there would follow with the idea of the reenactment and training for something. I was also drawn by the concept of simulations that are once removed but allow one to see and understand the real thing with clarity and perhaps more objectivity.
Once I began photographing at the Marine Air Ground Combat Center in 29 Palms, it became obvious that my pictures stand in complete opposition to combat photography. We are dealing with parallel subjects, but the outcome—the meaning—is completely different. In the case of combat photography, the die is cast. The photographer is thrown into a conflict where his work is about capturing the action or the aftermath. Chaos, he horrific violence of the moment, and the obvious risk incurred by the photographer in this situation all play into producing an image with a brutal if not blinding immediacy. Conversely, working with the military in training allows for breathing room. What jumps out for me is the way in which the magnitude of the firepower used—from artillery weapons to mortars, C-4 explosives, and air-delivered bombs—and its destructive potential, becomes muted and transformed as it is photographed in these exercises in the middle of a tranquil desert. One can then step back and ponder the larger issues of war. For me the question is not only are we militarily ready, but also are we politically, morally, and philosophically prepared? No, we are not. This project is an impassioned plea for a much-needed consideration of the consequences of war.
An-My Lê, Mechanized Assault, 2003–4, from the series 29 Palms 
An-My Lê, Colonel Greenwood, 2003–4, from the series 29 Palms Als : Have you looked at a great many war photographs? And do you agree with many photography critics when they say that photographs of war “depersonalize” pain? By working with “staged” coups and so on, does that distance Vietnam for you?
Lê: I am a great admirer of the nineteenth-century war photographers, but I also respect the more contemporary ones: Robert Capa, Larry Burrows, James Nachtwey, Gilles Peress, Tyler Hicks. I have studied the work of many North Vietnamese combat photographers. In a way I feel closer to them and the nineteenth-century European photographers because of the importance they give the landscape in their work.
I do think the current photos of war from Iraq and Afghanistan (except for the Abu Ghraib pictures, which were not made by professional photographers) are a lot more tame and feel more glossy than anything ever made in Vietnam, but it’s also true that our hearts are colder these days from having been bombarded with one agonizing and horrific picture after another. In the end I think it is the cumulative effect of the images over time that will have as much effect on us as the single image of the young Vietnamese girl burned by a napalm bomb.
What are the effects of war on the landscape, on people’s lives? How is war imprinted in our collective memory and in our culture?
The more contemporary photographs that capture the immediate moment certainly convey the devastation and pain, but they are usually so horrific one has to turn away in shock—they go more to your gut than to your head. In the end these photographs certainly remind us we are at war, but how thought provoking are they?
I am more interested in the precursor to war and its psychic aftermath. There is something about addressing the preparation for war or the memory of war itself that allows one to think about the larger issues of war and devastation. Again, how prepared are we? And what are the effects of war on the landscape, on people’s lives? How is war imprinted in our collective memory and in our culture? How does it become enmeshed with romance and myth over time (i.e., for Hollywood and for the reenactors)? My concern is to make photographs that are provocative in response to the reality of war while challenging its context.
Als : Of course, all photographs lie. I consider pictures to be metaphors for actual events and the people in them. For me, photographs capture something — an essence — of an event or a person, but selectively. Given the pictorial and emotional scope of your work, how do you set about capturing such a large portion of our collective political history?
Lê: Great landscape photography has a literal but also a metaphorical scope to it (Atget, Robert Adams, etc.). There is something about seeing people’s lives (or the suggestion of it) splayed across a landscape that can be breathtaking and unforgettable. There is no escaping the specificity of photography, but I aspire to achieve a certain lyrical objectivity. It is more about patterns of behavior than the specificity of it, which perhaps allows for a larger understanding of history and culture. August Sander and Judith Joy Ross manage to do this through portraiture. Here it is landscape photography that gives me that opportunity. It allows for descriptive possibilities. You can ascribe character to a landscape; you can suggest its usage. It is like a stage and, most importantly, I try to not let the people and their activities completely take over.
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Shop Now[image error]Als : Why do you shoot in black and white? And what kind of camera do you use?
Lê: I always consider all possible tools at the beginning of a project (color or black-and-white film; small-, medium-, or large-format cameras). But so far, the 5-by-7-view camera has been my tool of choice, in spite of its inconveniences. It provides a great large negative full of details. It allows for a certain clarity and descriptive sharpness. Above all, in an image from 5-by-7 negatives or larger, one can sense the volumes of air moving between things and inside spaces. I tend to prefer black and white because I am very interested in the way things are “drawn.” This is much more apparent in black and white, where the palette is reduced simply to black, white, and various shades of gray. The world as seen in black and white also feels one step removed from its reality, so it seems fitting as a way to conjure up memory or to blur fact and fiction. Most of my memories of the Vietnam War, aside from what I witnessed firsthand, derive from black-and-white television news footage and black-and-white newspaper images.
The 5-by-7 view camera is very clunky because of its size, weight, numerous accessories, and the need for a tripod. You can’t work that spontaneously. All shots have to be somewhat premeditated and directed, especially those involving people, because of slow shutter speeds and delay between framing the image and closing the shutter/cocking the lens/exposing the film. A lot of this accounts for the pictures in all my projects seeming staged. There were situations where I had to photograph what was in front of me, but there were also times when I had an idea and went about constructing the scene from scratch (using the setting and prop of choice, choosing the people, and directing them). Working this way—either planning something from scratch or anticipating something before it happens—feels much more cerebral. We often say that photographers hide behind their cameras. In a way the view camera has provided me with multiple shields from the painful memory of war, while allowing me to come as close as possible to try to understand it.
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Als : Some of your pictures look like film stills; have you looked at a lot of narrative and documentary films about Vietnam in preparation for your work?
Lê: If they resemble film stills, most are more in the vein of the establishing shots—those that situate everything. I have always looked at Vietnam War films. (Well, only starting in the mid-eighties—it was too soon and still somewhat too traumatic before then.) I was interested in seeing how something that I knew so well, something that affected me so deeply, was portrayed on screen. Watching these movies was also the only opportunity to get a glimpse of “Vietnam.” Even when another country or Chinese actors were used as stand-ins, any suggestion of the country, its life, and its people satisfied my curiosity (and tempered my homesickness and yearning). The Anderson Platoon, a documentary by Pierre Schoendorffer, and of course Apocalypse Now, Full Metal Jacket, Casualties of War, Platoon—the first three are my favorites. More recently, I have seen these movies with a completely different interest in mind. I am interested in the Vietnam of the mind. It’s fascinating to me how all these other countries (Thailand and the Philippines mostly) are stand-ins for Vietnam and how the landscape has become a character.
I have been paying attention to how the cinematography is used to conjure up the past. The idea of the period piece is an interesting conceit. Many people find the activities of the Vietnam War reenactors very disturbing. Comparatively, Hollywood’s obsession with the Vietnam War and its numerous, painstaking “reenactments” on film seem completely reasonable. For me the fascination lies in the dialogue these two worlds establish between experience and chaos versus memory and storytelling.
These days, young Americans are first introduced to the subject of Vietnam, the Holocaust, or World War II by movies like Schindler’s List, Saving Private Ryan, or Apocalypse Now, and only later (or maybe never) will they learn the hard historical facts in textbooks in a classroom situation. From the start, there is a blurring of fact and fiction that’s fascinating.
I draw my motivations for these projects from personal memories and from both a fascination and an aversion for anything that has to do with war and destruction, for the military, paramilitary fringe groups. Mix into that an interest in mediated images in popular culture—all of these influence the way my pictures look: they could be as much about my memory of GIs walking down Tu Do street in Saigon as an echo of the depiction of the Air Cavalry machos in Apocalypse Now. I consider my work an inquiry into the literal representation of things vs. depictions that live in popular imagination.
An-My Lê, Infantry Platoon, Alpha Company, 2003–4, from the series 29 Palms 
An-My Lê, Night Operations VII, 2003–4, from the series 29 PalmsAll photographs courtesy the artist
Als : How did you feel at the end of these various projects? Did you feel as if you had “come home” in a sense? Has this work helped you deal with your origins?
Lê: It’s interesting that you ask about “coming home.” I’ve been obsessed with that idea because it applies to the type of fieldwork I do as a photographer as much as it is relevant to the experiences of the refugee and the soldier. Ambiguity and contradictions—the conflict between expectations and memories—these are all built into the experience of coming home for a refugee, for a soldier (whether from a real or virtual battle), or even for a photographer. Whether it is a childhood abruptly ended or a violently murderous week-long siege during the battle of Khe Sanh, some of us are confronted with these intense life experiences. They’re defining experiences that echo throughout one’s life. Whether coming home, returning to the country of origin for the refugee, going back to civilian life for the soldier, one is compelled to construct a story for oneself and hopefully come to terms with what happened. In attempting to construct a coherent narrative, one must negotiate a contentious and sometimes contradictory terrain, reconciling one’s own experience with other people’s ideas of it and against general expectations. It’s about understanding how one’s experience fits into the larger scheme of things and finding a personal equilibrium within that.
And as a photographer, there’s another layer—I have a different relationship to memories than the refugee or the soldier because through the work, there is potential for tangibility. I am the type of photographer who is interested in the way things look and in letting that be my major story-telling device. In that pointed moment it allows one to raise pertinent questions and to ponder the larger issues involved.
Crudely, my work is about reconciling what I thought I was getting myself into and what is actually revealed to me in the field. It’s not about taking a specific stand, or dignifying something that is important to me—nor is it about exalting a specific cause I’m committed to or exploring a subculture in depth. I’m satisfied in simply addressing these subjects: Vietnam, the military and the glamour of war, cultural and political history, and small subcultures. Photography becomes the perfect medium for conjuring up a sense of clarity (if not necessarily the truth) in the midst of chaotic and polarizing subjects.
This interview was originally published in An-My Lê: Small Wars (Aperture, 2005) and anthologized in Aperture Conversations: 1985 to the Present (Aperture, 2018).
An-My Lê: Between Two Rivers/Giua hai giòng sông/Entre deux rivières is on view at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, November 5, 2023–March 16, 2024.
Remembering the Energy, Emotion, and Sensuality of Larry Fink’s Photography
Larry Fink, who passed away at the age of eighty-two on November 25, 2023, was a man of contradictions in the best possible way; he contained multitudes. He was as much an artist and a seer, as a teacher and mentor, a musician, a farmer, Martha Posner’s husband, among many other lives. His work is in the top museum collections, yet he regularly entered the annual juried show for Pennsylvania photographers at the Allentown Art Museum. He was game to be part of the mix. The contrasts suited him. He moved easily between the formal society galas and gatherings of Manhattan’s social elite and the farm life of the Sabatine family, his neighbors in Martins Creek, Pennsylvania. The body of work combining the two, Social Graces, was first published by Aperture in 1984 in an unassuming nine-by-ten-and-a-quarter-inch hardcover for $25. It was his first book, and in the short text—the sole accompaniment to sixty-nine pictures—he mused, “When I walk around in a tuxedo and tap my toes, I’m a fancy dude. When I walk around Martins Creek, I’m a rolling country belly.” Social Graces would go on to become an icon among photobooks and the work that most defined him.
Larry Fink, Oslin’s Graduation Party, Martins Creek, Pennsylvania, June 1977 
Larry Fink, Pat Sabatine’s Eighth Birthday Party, Martins Creek, Pennsylvania, April 1977 
Larry Fink, Studio 54, New York City, May 1977Looking at it again now, in the week after his passing, I’m struck by the gorgeousness of these pictures. All of the things that make a Larry Fink photograph are here: that framing with its push and pull at the edges and vigorous cropping, the flash illuminating and exaggerating the energy, emotion, and sensuality. There’s a real roundness to the printing (produced at the legendary Meriden Gravure) and the physicality that pervades every one of Fink’s pictures comes forward—every wrinkled hand grasping, pursed-lipped smile, rolling country belly. The book begins each sequence in the middle of the party—Peter Beard’s ICP opening and Pat Sabatine’s eighth birthday (both 1977)—and then moves around the edges of the merriment with searing precision. It’s easy to get drawn in. Each picture is captioned simply with the event and year, even the family photos of birthdays and graduations. You can’t escape the truth that the camera stopped time to mark this moment, or the sense of what’s to come when the party’s over or when John and Jeannie Sabatine, already getting on in years in the pictures, pass away. Larry’s daughter, Molly, also appears in the sequence with the Sabatines, as a baby and then a toddler—a visual reminder that time is passing in a personal way for the photographer as well. It’s not that he is thinking of the idea of memory or death, so often touted in relationship to photography. It’s that he’s seeing they’re alive and that photography’s ability to capture this life is miraculous.
Larry Fink, New York Magazine Party, New York City, October, 1977 
Larry Fink, Harlem, New York City, July 1964All photographs from Larry Fink on Composition and Improvisation (Aperture, 2014). Courtesy the artist
Larry Fink, Women on 5th Avenue, New York City, 1961 We worked together on his book for Aperture’s workshop series (Larry Fink on Composition and Improvisation, 2014), which is based on interviews and audio of his insights and teachings. Each visit, Larry would pick me and former colleague Robyn Taylor up from the bus station and drive us to the farm, crossing over the creek and up the winding driveway. And then he would promptly disappear. Where was Larry? He was out talking to a neighbor about a bulldozer or goofing off or in the sauna on the property. When we finally did get to work that first day, we had a magical conversation, talking about the impossibility of using the cold instrument of the camera to convey emotion. But, just as we were both starting to congratulate ourselves on such sparkling, high-minded prose, we realized we had forgotten to hit record. We spent the rest of our time trying to recreate that conversation. It was impossible, but led to other turns and tangents. How good pictures unfold as a question, how the edges of the frame can both enclose and leave open the picture, how to take a picture of water in a way that feels wet or cold, how you had to have a life outside the camera to make meaningful work.
In his singular and elliptical voice, “The goal, I suspect, through harmonies and edges and everything that we have in our command, is to take a dumb two-dimensional picture and make it something that a viewer enters and doesn’t want to leave.” The same could be said about a good book. When a book has been a pleasure to work on, I find myself reluctant to finish it. Even though it is the beginning of the book’s life in the world when it goes to the printer, the process of making it comes to a close. On the workshop book, we were beyond late, and Larry was nowhere to be found when I called the farm to push him again to get through the final layouts. I left a message saying I would give him a prize if he could return it within forty-eight hours—an impossible deadline, but it worked! I wasn’t ready to let the book go then, and I’m not ready to say goodbye now. But I know what Larry would say. We ended the workshop book with: “Photography is not all that there is. You gotta live.”
November 29, 2023
Alex Webb on Reimagining a Photobook, Twenty-Five Years Later
About twenty-five years ago, I was looking at a group of photographs that intrigued and somewhat puzzled me. None of these rather curious stray images had yet found their way into any of my books. It wasn’t just that the photographs didn’t fit the geographic parameters of the recent books I had published on Florida and the Amazon River, but also that they seemed almost placeless. As I selected and sequenced the images—seeing visual links, trying to understand the nature of the work—I began to realize that many of them struck a note of dislocation: inevitably geographically, as they were taken all over the world, but also sometimes emotionally, visually, psychologically, culturally. There was often something just a little odd, a little strange. As I shaped and expanded the sequence, it became clear that they belonged together as a single body of work.
In 1998, I was invited to publish a limited edition artist book of this work by Harvard’s Film Study Center. Dislocations was an experiment in alternative bookmaking—a notion that seems a bit quaint these days, what with the vast variety of photographic books now being produced. Dislocations was printed in an edition of forty with four artist proofs. It was an accordion book with Canon laser prints (then considered state of the art) of some fifty photographs tipped in on debossed pages, with titles that I handwrote. And, it came in a unique collapsible box.
Alex Webb: Dislocations 50.00 Newly reimagined edition of Alex Webb’s now-classic and long out-of-print Dislocations. $50.00Add to cart
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Alex Webb: DislocationsPhotographs by Alex Webb. Text by Alex Webb. Designed by David Chickey.
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View cart Description Newly reimagined edition of Alex Webb’s now-classic and long out-of-print Dislocations.Dislocations presents a contemporary update of Alex Webb’s long out-of-print 1998 book by the same name, which was first published by Harvard’s Film Study Center as an experiment in alternative book making. The book brought together pictures from the many disparate locations over Webb’s oeuvre, meditating on the act of photography as a form of dislocation in itself. Dislocations was instantly collectable and continues to be sought after today.
Webb returned to the idea of dislocation during the pandemic, looking at images produced in the twenty years since the original publication—as well as looking back at that first edition. Dislocations expands a beloved limited edition with unpublished images that speak to today’s sense of displacement. As a series of pictures that would have been impossible to create in a world dominated by closed borders and disrupted travel, it continues to resonate as the world resets. Details
Format: Hardback
Number of pages: 128
Number of images: 80
Publication date: 2023-11-28
Measurements: 11.8 x 10.2 inches
ISBN: 9781597115445
Alex Webb (born in San Francisco, 1952) has published more than fifteen books, including Aperture titles Brooklyn: The City Within (2019, with Rebecca Norris Webb), La Calle: Photographs from Mexico (2016), On Street Photography and the Poetic Image (2014, with Rebecca Norris Webb), and a survey of his color work, The Suffering of Light (2011). Webb has been a full member of Magnum Photos since 1979. His work has been shown widely, and he has received numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2007.
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Featured Alex Webb's La Calle Gives Voice to Mexico's Streets Since creating the first version, I’ve continued to produce other dislocated images. Three years ago, during another kind of dislocation—in sequestration for the coronavirus in the spring of 2020 in Wellfleet, Massachusetts—I started putting together this new, expanded edition on the magnetic walls of my Cape Cod studio. I began selecting images from the more than twenty years since the original publication, as well as work from the first edition and a few earlier unpublished images. This new version of Dislocations—with some eighty photographs made on five continents—incorporates nearly half of the original photographs from the first edition, with the lion’s share comprised of later images.
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Alex Webb and Denise Wolff Discuss “Dislocations”Looking back, perhaps I was drawn to reimagining and enlarging this series during the pandemic in part because it was impossible to create such images in a world dominated by closed borders and disrupted travel.
Alex Webb, Tokyo, 1985 
Alex Webb, Genoa, Italy, 2019 
Alex Webb, Chongqing, China, 2017 
Alex Webb, Lunéville, France, 2000 
Alex Webb, Porto Cervo, Sardinia, 1998 
Alex Webb, Madrid, 1992 
Alex Webb, Milan, 2016 
Alex Webb, Dallas, 1981 
Alex Webb, Madrid, 1992 
Alex Webb, Atlanta, 1996All photographs courtesy the artist
This text originally appeared in Dislocations (Aperture, 2023).
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