Aperture's Blog, page 201

101 Tragedies of Enrique Metinides

Mexico City, September 19, 1985 © Enrique Metindies, Courtesy 212berlin

Chapultepec Park, Mexico City, 1995 © Enrique Metindies, Courtesy 212berlin

Mexico City, 1977 © Enrique Metindies, Courtesy 212berlin

Mexico City, April 29, 1979 © Enrique Metindies, Courtesy 212berlin

Curated by Trisha Ziff, 212berlin

101 Tragedies of Enrique Metinides is Enrique Metinides’s choice of the key images from over fifty years of photographing crime scenes and accidents in Mexico for local newspapers and the nota roja crime press. Accompanying the images are Metinides’s own accounts of the characters and life of the streets, the sadness of families, the criminals, and the heroism of emergency workers—which reveal much about himself as well. Selected photographs are also paired with their original newsprint tearsheets, collected by Metinides. The photographs have been compiled by Trisha Ziff, a filmmaker and curator who has collaborated with Metinides on this project for over five years and who contributed an essay about his life, work, and personality to the accompanying publication, 101 Tragedies of Enrique Metinides (Aperture, 2012). Though Metinides’s photographs have been exhibited and published internationally, this is the first selection of images chosen by the photographer himself, and which offers his own account of his life’s work.

A limited‐edition portfolio featuring Metinides’s latest photographs is available through Aperture. In this series, Metinides has re‐constructed and created fictional rescue scenarios for crime scenes photographed early in his career, using his collection of over ten thousand toy firemen and medics. These recent pictures are a new twist on an extraordinary career. The prints were made at the artist’s local Costco in Mexico City, and are offered in the paper Costco bags in which he picked them up.

Enrique Metinides (born in Mexico City, 1934) worked as a crime photographer for over fifty years, capturing murders, car crashes, and catastrophes for the nota rojas, Mexico’s infamous crime magazines. He has won numerous prizes and received recognition from the Presidency of the Republic, journalists’ associations, rescue and judicial corps, and Kodak of Mexico. In 1997 he received Mexico’s Espejo de Luz Prize (Mirror of Light), awarded to the country’s most outstanding photographer. His work as been shown internationally, including at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Les Rencontres d’Arles festival, France; and the Photographers’ Gallery, London.

Trisha Ziff is a curator of contemporary photography, a filmmaker, and a Guggenheim Fellowship recipient. She has produced and directed several award-winning documentary films that deal with photographic subjects, including Chevolution (2008) and The Mexican Suitcase (2011).

    

 

James Welling: Monograph

Monograph, a career-spanning survey of photographs by James Welling, opened at the Cincinnati Art Museum last Saturday. The exhibition, organized by curator James Crump, synthesizes Welling’s disparate photographic series, which range from abstract photograms to documentary-style portrayals of the New England landscape.
Aperture has published James Welling: Monograph to accompany the exhibition, which will also travel to the Fotomuseum Winterthur in Switzerland. This volume is now available for purchase in our online store. Below are two short excerpts from Museum of Modern Art curator Eva Respini’s conversation with Welling, one of four extensive texts included in the book. The conversation took place on March 27, 2012, in New York.

 

Eva Respini: You refer to yourself as a photographer rather than as an artist. Why is it important for you to self-identify as a photographer?

James Welling: No one in my generation called themselves photographers, even if they were doing photography exclusively. But, for me, it was an acknowledgment that I wanted to think of my work in the context of the history of photography as well as the art world.

ER: You’ve acknowledged Paul Strand as a key influence. The modernist tradition of photography is antithetical to the use of photography in conceptual art and in the work of your teachers at CalArts [California Institute of the Arts], such as John Baldessari. You are self-taught in photography, yet now you’re one of the most influential artists and teachers of photography. How did you make that leap?

JW: I got to Strand because I was totally enamored of Hollis Frampton’s writings and films. In the early 1970s, Frampton wrote on the work of Edward Weston and Strand in Artforum. So, here was a structural filmmaker thinking seriously about Strand. When I moved to LA in 1972, I saw the Strand retrospective at LACMA and that blew my mind. A year later, I stumbled upon his Mexican Portfolio in the CalArts library. His pairings of religious sculpture with portraits seemed strikingly contemporary.

When I was a graduate student at CalArts I wasn’t making my own photographs. I was interested in media images, mostly portraits, and for my 1974 thesis show I made photo collages from books and magazines. After I graduated, I spent about a year and a half trying to figure out what to do. It was 
a hard time. I read a lot, and I made small watercolors and photo collages. In December 1975, Matt Mullican and I were hiking in Connecticut. Frustrated by my confusion about what to do, he joked, “You’re always talking about photography—you should just get a camera like Ansel Adams and take photographs.” I had borrowed my sister’s Minolta at the time, and Mullican’s admonition got me thinking seriously about photography. It never occurred to me until then that I could think of myself as a photographer.

ER: You’re self-taught in the history of photography, too. You absorbed images mostly through reproduction, which is, of course, a big part of how the medium 
is disseminated. You have no signature style and work in a variety of genres with different cameras and processes. Do you think your self-taught beginnings have allowed you to be open and experimental with the medium?

JW: Being self-taught in photography has allowed me a certain freedom. There’s a way in which I explore some aspect of the history of photography with each project, although this is unconscious and not at all systematic. Early on, I worked with Polaroids. I made a camera out of a shoe box and then moved to a four-by-five view camera. More recently, I’ve worked with photograms and trichromatic color.

Hollis Frampton wrote about the “knight’s tour,” a chess fantasy where the knight can occupy every position on the chessboard. For Frampton, his knight’s tour would be a tour of all possible films from the beginning of the medium till now. The idea of a creative tour around photography is very compelling to me.

21, 2006, from Flowers. Copyright © James Welling. Courtesy Cincinnati Art Museum, David Zwirner Gallery, New York and Regen Projects, Los Angeles.

9-7, 2005–06, from Torsos. Copyright © James Welling. Courtesy Cincinnati Art Museum, David Zwirner Gallery, New York and Regen Projects, Los Angeles.

[ ... ]

ER: When you were making the Glass House pictures, you held filters and gels in front of the camera. I imagine you’re juggling camera, gels, prisms—it’s almost 
a performance.

JW: I think every photograph has performance built 
into it on a couple of levels. There’s the performance of the photographer making a picture. Converging on a spot, various preparations, getting lucky—all of this involves performance. Then you have the performance of printing the photograph. My Glass House photographs accentuate the performance
 of their making by intervening with things that I put in front of the camera. I started out with a few colored filters and then gradually added more filters, then curved Mylar, clear and colored glass, and finally a scientific diffraction grating.

ER: In a lot of your pictures, there’s a scrim, a screen, or a texture that’s in front of the lens.

JW: I’ve always found the idea of the scrim or the screen compelling as a stand-in for the photographic process. In Light Sources, one of the first images I made, Meriden, shows the sun peeking through tree branches. I thought of it as looking up at the light source of the photographic enlarger from the point of view of the negative. In the Andrew Wyeth photographs, there’s an image I made, in Maine, of the moon in a cloudy sky between pine trees. The idea is similar to Meriden: we’re looking at a light source, which is partially obscured.

ER: Is chance attractive to you? When you were at Carnegie Mellon, Merce Cunningham and John Cage were in residence.

JW: They were on campus for a week. Seeing Cunningham rehearse and dance for a week and talking to Cage, both were life-changing for me. I read a lot of Cage, and I studied modern dance for a year at the University of Pittsburgh.

ER: Of course, in photograms there’s chance. But yet there is a side of your practice that seems rigorous and meticulous, with little opportunity for chance.

JW: With New Abstractions, I became interested
 in thematizing the darkness of photography, the part of the medium where you can’t see what you’re doing. With that work, I started by randomly dropping strips of Bristol board onto photographic film in total darkness. It’s as though 
a dark curtain is pulled around the act of making the work. Photography has to be created in darkness, both literally 
and figuratively. It’s a very special and unpredictable medium. I think this gives way to a desire for control or mastery in the way some photographers try to plan everything in the picture.

Last week in my senior studio class, we were talking about things that are unplanned. The problem is this: you don’t want to be working completely in the dark, but if you have 
too much control, then nothing works out well. There’s a great quote by the filmmaker Jean Renoir: “You control everything, you plan everything, but you always leave a door open for chance to enter.” I try to let in the unexpected as I’m working like mad to control it.

—

Eva Respini is associate curator at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. She has organized numerous exhibitions on contemporary art and photography at MoMA, including the recent, critically acclaimed Cindy Sherman retrospective, Boris Mikhailov: Case History (2011), Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography (2010), and Into the Sunset: Photography’s Image of the American West (2009).

James Welling: Monograph




$80.00




FDB9, 2009-12




$1,200.00

Alex Webb & Rebecca Norris Webb: Exploring Your Vision Workshop

Interview with Laura Letinsky

The photographer Laura Letinsky has explored the expressive possibilities of still-life photography for fifteen years. A survey of these photographs is on view at the Denver Art Museum through March 24, while a selection of images from her most recent series, “Ill Form and Void Full,” is being presented at the Photographers’ Gallery  in London through April 7. Brian Sholis spoke with Letinsky about genres, cannibalizing one’s own work, and bodily intelligence.

Untitled #54 from the series Hardly More Than Ever, 2002 © Laura Letinsky

Brian Sholis: How did you shift from your early photographs of people to the still lifes for which you are now best known?

Laura Letinsky: For a long time I’ve asked myself questions about what a photograph is. While I was taking photographs of couples in the 1990s I began thinking about love, and about how photography relates to love, how it can functions within a kind of circuitry of production and consumption. We produce photos that show us what love is supposed to look like, then we enact in our everyday lives the conventions depicted in visual media. I wanted to break out of that cycle, and to break out of the conventions of the genre in which I was working. I love portrait photographers like Philip-Lorca diCorcia and Rineke Dijkstra, but I felt stifled by the inescapability of romance. I also wanted to switch from an omnipotent point of view to something that felt more immediate, more first-person.

Still lifes increasingly drew my interest. It interests me as a genre in the same way that concepts of love interest me—its association with the feminine, its characterization as “less important,” its affiliations with domesticity and intimacy. There seemed to be potential there, room for exploration. I realized that still lifes were a vehicle to explore the tension between the small and minute and larger social structures. For the last fifteen years I’ve explored this realm, increasingly weaving in questions about perception, about how we see and understand the world around us, and about how photography conflicts with and constrains our sense of our environment by reinforcing certain ideas we have about perception.

BJS: You’ve spoken in the past about your interest in the corporeal aspects of your subjects, the inference of a bodily presence. In your most recent still lifes you’ve introduced your own previous work. How does this “cannibalism”—the consumption of a “body” of work—build upon this notion?

Above: Untitled #49 from the series Hardly More Than Ever, 2002. Below: Untitled #31 from the series Ill Form & Void Full, 2011 © Laura Letinsky

LL: I do like the idea of ingestion and consumption and photography. You could say that my work is in part about the relationship between looking at something and other bodily experiences. Pictures can induce sensations: You can see something in a photograph and it might make your mouth water, or it might stimulate other wants, desires, regrets, or needs.

Using images already in the world, including my own earlier works, is akin to using objects in the world. It’s all raw material ripe for the picking, so to speak. Alongside its ability to provoke sensations, photography has a way of homogenizing experience. A piece of schmutz and a Tiffany diamond become the same thing once they’re photographed—they become photographs. I have a love/hate relationship with this power of the camera to flatten difference.

Subjecting my own work to this process, whether old test prints or reproductions from books—makes all images, anything and everything, fair game from which to cull. And images are promiscuous; they are everywhere, and they don’t care what we do with them, or how they circulate.

BJS: And yet you’re very careful about the scale and presentation of your work …

LL: I am very invested in printing my work at a certain scale and in not having glazing between the photograph and the viewer—I want to offer a sense of proximity and the experience of the picture’s materiality. This new work especially called for this treatment. When I’m making pictures, I try to deal with the demands of the picture, what it needs to get my idea across. It’s a question of form and content, not one or the other. I’ve become much more freewheeling about how to satisfy this question. I draw from, dare I say, intuition as well as the huge image world—including scanning or downloading objects and images to insert into my photographs. What’s the difference? They all end up as a picture.

Above: Untitled #3, 2011 Below: Untitled #18, 2011. Both from the series Ill Form and Void Full. © Laura Letinsky. Courtesy of the artist and The Photographers’ Gallery, London

This new process has manifested itself as a way of dealing with the slurry of images. I have two or three tables in the studio laden with piles of objects and images. Sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly, groupings emerge. Once I’ve found a way to begin an arrangement, I often have to wait for the light to be right, or I have to pull parts out and rearrange until the picture reaches the level of precariousness that feels right. I wanted to be a painter when I first began making art, and now I work in a manner similar to how I imagine painters work in their studios.

BJS: Despite your description of accumulations in the studio, your pictures have a remarkable visual economy. Can you speak about how you determine what’s necessary to depict versus what’s unnecessary and therefore left out?

LL: I want to keep the images on a precipice but it’s not one I can easily explain with words. Artists are increasingly encouraged to be able to explain their working processes, and yet it’s a nonverbal intelligence that often leads you to make a decision.

I teach at the University of Chicago, and when a colleague was going through the tenure process she described one aspect of her work using the word “intuition.” She made no excuses for it, and did not try to explain that aspect of her artwork further. And she was right to do that.  Some of the decisions I make in the studio are very conscious, and I use words to think about them. But when I make pictures I also do a lot of “grunting”—“ooh”s and expletives included; I use a kind of visual thinking that just can’t be articulated. Morandi paintings, for example, resist textual description. I love them but it’s difficult to explain why. Maybe it’s like love—try explaining why you love someone. It defies such definition. Some might say it’s emotional, but I think of it as bodily—or rather, that the body and the mind are inseparable. The body does have intelligence.

How can you legitimize the body’s intelligence? Think of people with refined palates, or designers who consistently make pitch-perfect decisions. It is in this realm that a lot of pleasure and discomfort resides. It’s an important component of the experience of art, and one that is often left behind in today’s overly intellectualized, airless conversations around art. The sensation of my child’s body, or the experience of food, sex, or pain—photography can help access these feelings that are intrinsic to being human.

—

Brian Sholis is a member of the editorial staff of Aperture Foundation. He writes frequently on photography, landscapes, and American history.

INTERVIEW: Scott Williams of A2/SW/HK

The London-based graphic design studio A2/SW/HK (Scott Williams and Henrik Kubel) is responsible for Aperture magazine’s dramatic redesign. We asked Scott a few questions about process and inspiration.

Henrik Kubel and Scott Williams

Aperture: What’s your font-making process like? Do you start with historical samples? Your own sketchbook?

Scott Williams: It really depends on the project and context. Some of our typefaces are inspired by historical forms, others originate through sketching by hand, and others are created with a particular production method or outcome in mind (neon, laser-routing, weaving, etc.). In the case of the Aperture suite of fonts, our starting point was a work-in-progress sans-serif typeface that was inspired by the hot metal fonts Futura and Memphis. This modern, geometric typeface echoes the Aperture logotype and also acknowledges the original incarnation of the magazine from the early 1950s. By contrast Aperture Serif, developed parallel to the redesign of the magazine, is rooted in the classicism of the sixteenth century and has been designed to contrast and complement Aperture Sans across multiple weights and to offer another flavor to the pages of the magazine. The process of designing typefaces, and working with them, is one of trial and error, of testing various typefaces and weights with one another, across various point sizes. You’re searching for an optimum interline space and line length, hoping to arrive at a point were it just looks “right” and creates a balanced “color” when printed.

Aperture: How did the two of you meet, and how did you begin working together?

SW: We met as post-graduate students at the Royal College of Art in 1998, and started working together, informally, on various projects almost immediately. We opened our design studio in London in 2000.

Aperture: How do the two of you work together? Does it start with a conversation, is a file passed back and forth, or does one partner shepherd a project while another focuses on something else?

SW: It’s like cats and dogs! Only joking!

Aperture: You’ve designed many art magazines and journals as well as several book series. Can you talk about the difference between designing for a single project (like a book) and designing for a series or multi-issue publication?

SW: There is a unique rhythm to working on magazines and multiple-series publications, particularly periodicals. Natural lulls, between issues, are punctuated by intense periods of work as teams of people focus on what seems to be a “moving target.” The sheer pace and intensity of working this way can be exhilarating, though a little stressful, too!

Aperture: Name a dream future project for the studio.

SW: A newspaper redesign would be a challenge, but one that we’d embrace.

Aperture: How has your practice changed (if at all) since websites and digital publications have become more prevalent?

SW: Technology has changed, but our design process remains largely the same. Our focus is still upon crafting design for specific purposes, whether that takes the form of print, screen, or interiors.

Aperture: How do you stay inspired?

SW: Reading.

Aperture: Name three things you must have when you’re working.

SW: Clients, calm, and caffeine.

Aperture: Are there any past or existing designers that you look up to?

SW: To choose a favorite designer, working in any discipline, is difficult. But if I have to choose one, it would be Yves Saint Laurent for his groundbreaking work, creative flair, sensational use of color, and longevity.

Dayanita Singh: File Museum

By Isabel Stevens

Dayanita Singh, Installation view, 2012. Courtesy of the artist and Frith Street Gallery, London

Ever since she left photojournalism behind, Dayanita Singh has wandered India, digging under the stereotype of a bustling, teeming nation to catalog absence. Few humans intrude into her luminous sodium nightscapes or deserted industrial sites, but in her new photographic installation File Museum, on view at Frith Street Gallery, London, until January 26, the sense of emptiness is more acute than ever. Archives are her subject. Not the digital-data sort growing in India’s gleaming technological hubs, but the crumbling, cavernous kind—windowless subterranean interiors crammed full of old paper.

Most of the 140 photographs on display show similar scenes: functional but rusty shelving units channel our vision to the point where darkness subsumes them, or where more shelves block our gaze. Files, sacks, trunks, and boxes contest for space. Cupboard doors are forced open by their contents. Shelves lean like dominoes under their loads. Empty chairs (the subject of an earlier series of Singh’s) come under siege from the piles surrounding them. Small patches of wall are only occasionally visible. At times, the floor is taken over with paper towers.

Dayanita Singh, Installation view, 2012. Courtesy of the artist and Frith Street Gallery, London

In a sense, people are absent and everywhere here. The bulging records, bursting out of the frame, chronicle snippets of millions of lives, both past and present, though what exactly the endless deluge of files contains remains oblique. Despite the chaos, handwritten signs in both Hindi and English can be spied (Secret F, 1908, September hints at one). Some of the archives she’s peering into are clearly locked away and classified; others, Singh’s images seem to suggest, are relics, buried underground and forgotten.

Most artists and photographers who are interested in archives (think Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel, or the Atlas Group) highlight the contents of the idiosyncratic collections they find, and are often suspicious of the power systems that generate them. They take the archive out of its context. Singh, however, is determined to bring the archives themselves to light, to show us the haphazard but very human organizational systems at these forlorn and increasingly anachronistic places. Singh’s choice of subject is reminiscent of the many abandoned, ruined sites that artists Jane and Louise Wilson, for instance, are drawn to. Her approach, however, and particularly her use of black-and-white film, is more akin to the repetitive monochrome cataloguing of Bernd and Hilla Becher, albeit with a more tender, elegiac eye. The technological vision India wants for its future is a long way from here.

Singh always experiments with the display of her images, calling herself a “bookmaker who works with photography.” Here she has made a huge rectangular teak storage system for the contents of File Museum—an archive of archives, if you like. It stands in the middle of the gallery like a giant tome, with one side of its moveable exterior open as if it were a book cover—a cover you could endlessly redesign, since the forty images displayed on the outside are interchangeable with the many stored within.

Pristine and neatly packed with frames, it feels like the opposite of the chaotic archives it houses, particularly within the ordered, rigid environment of the white cube, which doesn’t quite encourage interaction. Compared to Singh’s previous delicate and fragile publishing ventures, among them concertinaed books and a collection of postcards, it’s more monumental and contrived.

On a nearby wall are the images of the custodians themselves. While File Museum is far more straightforward than Singh’s previous works, which are often tinged with mystery and lyricism, with these portraits her elegy hits its most forceful note. Here women and men are lost in activity, sorting, retrieving, or rummaging; their heads are dwarfed, peeking over mountains of files or framed by gaps in piles. Compared to the empty archives, they are not so uniformly captured. Some are proud and smiling. Others are alert, pen-poised. A few are pensive or tired. A couple seem wary, used to being cataloguers, not being catalogued.

They may be an afterthought, slightly out of step with the rest of the installation, or with what we have come to expect from Singh. But these far more traditional images are the real highlight. It’s possibly no coincidence that there are just enough to cover the entire exterior of her giant teak “book.”

Dayanita Singh, Installation view, 2012. Courtesy of the artist and Frith Street Gallery, London

—

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

Daido Moriyama: Vintage Prints

Mt. Daibosasu (No. 2001), 1981 © Daido Moriyama

In recent years, Japanese photographer Daido Moriyama has been the subject of increasing curatorial and critical interest, a trend that culminated with large survey exhibitions of his work at the National Museum of Art in Osaka, Japan, in 2011 and, with photographer William Klein, at London’s Tate Modern until January 20. Now on view in Zurich is an exhibition of vintage prints at Galerie Bob van Orsouw. In addition to Moriyama’s familiar themes—close-up views of women seen from behind; light reflecting on cars; blurry shots of people passing through public spaces—the show also includes lesser-known landscape views. Moriyama’s high-contrast printing gives an almost hallucinogenic quality to the sea seen from above, the choppy water appearing like the hide of an enormous beast. The sunlight streaming around a giant sunflower nearly burns the edges of the image.

Guardrail (No. 2231), 1983

Memory of a Dog 2 (No. 2044), 1982 © Daido Moriyama

How to Create a Beautiful Picture 14: Zushi (No. 2735), 1988 © Daido Moriyama

How to Create a Beautiful Picture 1: View from the Window (No. 2608), 1986 © Daido Moriyama

New Japan Scenic Trio 2: Ueno Terminal Station, 1982 © Daido Moriyama

A Journey To Nakaij 1 (No. 2364), 1984/2003 © Daido Moriyama

Mt. Daibosasu (No. 2001), 1981 © Daido Moriyama

Aperture has enjoyed a fruitful relationship with Moriyama, which includes the publication of two books—the limited-edition TKY, in 2011, and the brand-new Labyrinth—and the re-creation of his 1974 performance Printing Show at our New York gallery. For more about Moriyama, see this interview, originally published in Aperture magazine issue 203.

The exhibition at Galerie Bob van Orsouw in Zurich remains on view until February 23, 2013.

Remembering Shomei Tomatsu (1930-2012)

We at Aperture mourn the death of Japanese photographer Shomei Tomatsu, which was announced last week. He was eighty-two years old. Aperture’s relationship with Tomatsu spanned decades, and we were honored to include him in Black Sun: The Eyes of Four: Roots and Innovation in Japanese Photography (1986; also published as Aperture 102), Setting Sun: Writings by Japanese Photographers (2006), and Japanese Photobooks of the 1960s and ’70s (2009). Reprinted below is an article on Tomatsu’s photographs depicting the American occupation of Japan by Aperture books publisher Lesley A. Martin. It originally ran in Aperture 208 (Fall 2012). Click here for Sean O’Hagan’s obituary in the Guardian. For those who read Japanese, click here for an extensive interview with Tomatsu conducted in August 2011. At the time of Tomatsu’s death, Aperture was in the process of working with editors Leo Rubinfien and John Junkerman on a monograph comprised entirely of his series Chewing Gum and Chocolate, which has never before been gathered in a single volume. The book is slated for release in spring 2014.

Shomei Tomatsu and John Junkerman, May 2011.

“Shomei Tomatsu: Occupation Okinawa,” by Lesley A. Martin

Shomei Tomatsu’s work served a critical purpose at a transitional moment in Japanese postwar photography: as a catalyst toward the rejection of a classic photojournalistic approach. As members of VIVO, a photographers’ collective formed in 1959, he and his colleagues were inspired, in part, by Magnum and the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Capa—yet determined to move beyond what they considered to be the reductionist humanism of war-era reportage, finding greater affinity with the work of William Klein and Robert Frank. VIVO, with Tomatsu at its core, defined and defended a “subjective documentary” approach, producing work that hovered between pure description and an expressionistic use of stylized printing techniques, dramatic angles, and carefully embedded symbolism. While the collective was ultimately short-lived (it disbanded in 1961), many of the VIVO photographers produced bodies of work that attempted to narrate their own memories and experiences of war, the dramatic shifts of postwar Japanese society, and the shattering impact of the atomic bombs and defeat on the Japanese landscape and psyche. Among the most powerful of these artistic responses is Tomatsu’s own Nagasaki—11:02 (1966), a meditation on the lingering effects, both psychological and physical, of that city’s bombing.

In the late 1950s Tomatsu initiated a major series focusing on the American occupation in Japan, committing to photograph many of the U.S. bases on Japanese soil. While the U.S. occupation officially came to an end in 1952, the presence of American forces remained a major influence on the social landscape into the 1970s—and indeed, it is still a point of contention today. Tomatsu’s pilgrimage culminated in a 1968 visit to Okinawa, which remained officially off-limits for Japanese nationals until its reversion to Japanese sovereignty in 1972. Published sporadically as series, titled Occupation and Chewing Gum and Chocolate, the work encompasses themes of the friction between American and traditional Japanese mores; the alien-presence of white and black soldiers in an otherwise homogeneous society, with a particular focus on the impact of U.S. soldiers’ presence on traditional Japanese gender roles; and the profoundly changed nature of Japanese society at large—in a word, its Americanization. Or, as Tomatsu identified it in some of his extensive writings at the time, the “Coca-Colonization” of the world, and especially of Japan.

Untitled (Kadena), 1972 © Shomei Tomatsu

While these issues were pervasive in much of postwar Japan, Okinawa came to hold particularly compelling interest for Tomatsu. A chain of islands off the southernmost tip of “mainland” Japan, Okinawa has a charged history—as a site of epically brutal and intense fighting during the war, and then as a captive territory with a slow and controversial reversion back into Japanese hands. Additionally, its heavy use as a staging area for bombing runs to Vietnam in the late 1960s and early ’70s solidified Okinawa’s role as a symbol for the abuses of American power.

Untitled (Okinawa City), 1979 © Shomei Tomatsu

Equally critically, however, Okinawa holds a semi-sacred place in many Japanese minds—despite the mainland’s own fraught history of colonization of the islands—thanks to its unique, Polynesian-influenced native culture and history. In this era, many came to see Okinawa as a repository for the native roots of Japanese culture, then under attack from modernization and Westernization—not unlike the American Indian and Hawaiian cultures, which took on similar symbolic value in the United States during that same time.

As such, Okinawa has long been a crucial point of reference for Japanese protest and for photographers—the subject of many politically and sociologically concerned books. Included in this roster are several by Tomatsu, such as the renowned Okinawa, Okinawa, Okinawa (Shaken, 1969), a politically driven book deeply obsessed with the presence of the American air force, which he published after his first extended visit to the islands. In fact, from that very first visit, Tomatsu was enamored with Okinawa—which was paradoxically one of the areas most impacted and defined by the presence of the U.S. military and yet also a refuge of sorts from what he considered the anathematic if inexorable mutations of Japanese society. It is this circulation between critique and celebration of the Okinawan urban landscape, marked by clear signs of both pop Americana and a cheery South Seas palette, that gives Tomatsu’s work tension and form—in particular in his more recent color photographs. (The selection in these pages includes images taken as early as 1971, when he first began to use color film; he continues to shoot primarily in color today.) To a large degree, the photographer credits his switch to color photography as a response to Okinawa’s color- saturated landscape, writing in his 1975 book Taiyo no empitsu (The pencil of the sun): “In Okinawa, it seemed a natural step to switch to color photography . . . but even after returning to Tokyo, I did not go back to monochrome . . . I realized later that this was because my fixation on America had weakened. America flashes into and out of view in black and white. In color, America’s presence is diminished” (translated in his 2004 retrospective survey, Skin of the Nation, from Yale University Press).

Untitled (Okinawa City), 1972 © Shomei Tomatsu

The images reproduced here and in the original article comprise a selection from Tomatsu’s earlier work alongside some of his more recent photographs. In 2010, after several extended stays interrupted by stints of living on mainland Japan, Tomatsu retired permanently to the main island of Okinawa, where he photographed until his death in December 2012.

–

Lesley A. Martin is publisher of the Aperture book program and of The PhotoBook Review, a newsprint journal dedicated to the evolving conversation surrounding the photobook.

Philip Gourevitch: Varieties of the Apocalypse

For What Matters Now, a regular column in the new Aperture, our editors ask leading thinkers, scholars, and artists to explain new developments and examine pressing matters in photography. Below is journalist Philip Gourevitch’s contribution to the Spring issue; for the other four, subscribe now or pick up the magazine when it launches on February 26.

Jonas Bendiksen, Klo, Norway, 2012. Courtesy Jonas Bendiksen.

 

Long before the words “climate change” were part of daily discourse and our understanding of our destiny, Robert Frost wrote a short poem that told us what to expect: “Some say the world will end in fire, / Some say in ice.” Those lines leapt to mind when I saw this fantastic picture—at once operatic and existential—and got to thinking about how Jonas Bendiksen harnesses Instagram, the most to-the-minute smartphone technology, to depict indelibly the primal line humankind is walking (individually and as a species) between varieties of apocalypse.

He reminds us beautifully, too, that “man-made” is also natural, and he makes us ask if perhaps that means it is natural for us to be destroying nature.

—Philip Gourevitch, a longtime staff writer at the New Yorker, is the author most recently of The Ballad of Abu Ghraib (originally published as Standard Operating Procedure, Penguin, 2008)

Everything Was Moving: Photography from the 60s and 70s

By Isabel Stevens

Li Zhensheng, Several hundred thousand Red Guards attend a “Learning and Applying Mao Zedong Thought” rally in Red Guard Square (formerly People’s Stadium). Harbin, Heilongjiang province, September 13, 1966

The Barbican’s ambitious survey of photography from the 1960s and ’70s offered up a dual portrait of the times. On one hand, it was an exhibition about history, charting the seismic shifts occurring all over the world in those decades. Its itinerary took in Apartheid-era South Africa, the American civil rights movement, post-colonial Mali, the Vietnam war, China in the grip of the Cultural Revolution, and more, exploring the myriad ways such events could be captured through a lens. Compare Li Zhensheng’s records of Maoist China in the early ’60s—spectacular, stitched-together panoramas of epic rallies—with Ernest Cole’s tender but damning sketches of township life under Apartheid for an example of two photographers both recording vital, chilling moments furtively, under oppressive regimes, and at the same point in history but in utterly contrasting styles.

On the other hand, the exhibition delved deeper into the medium’s own history, including figures such as William Eggleston, Boris Mikhailov, Shomei Tomatsu, and even the Pop artist Sigmar Polke, who were all trying to wrestle photography away from documentary and the “decisive moment” during these years by experimenting formally and conceptually. This gave a largely successful insight into photography’s splintering form and status at that time. Tomatsu’s conjuring of the horror of Nagasaki from only a bizarre, enigmatic shot of a melted bottle, and Eggleston’s infamous Los Alamos series, in particular, bring a welcome sense of ambiguity and the unreal, although these aesthetic experimenters do feel outnumbered at times. The mindset that dominates throughout is definitely a documentary one—the photograph as evidence, or, as in many cases here, as protest song.

Boris Mikhailov, Yesterday’s Sandwich / Superimpositions, late 1960s–late 1970s. Courtesy Galerie Barbara Weiss, Berlin © Boris Mikhailov, DACS 2012

With so many historical excavations, the exhibition occasionally felt too expansive, but such a refreshing, revisionist stance on photography’s Western-oriented history threw up novel, intriguing cross-global juxtapositions and moments of unexpected simultaneity. (Remarkably, of the twelve photographers included in the exhibition, Western figures were in the minority—there were even more African than American photographers on show.)

Oppositions came into play where violence is concerned. Although Larry Burrows’s close-up testimonials of soldiers’ suffering never slide into glorification, Polke’s grainy glimpses of animal fights in Afghanistan make them seem even more monumental, more in awe of warfare. Differing attitudes towards America’s infiltration of foreign cultures was also evident. Whereas Malick Sidibé’s portrait of burgeoning Bamako youth culture high on James Brown welcomes it, Tomatsu remains wary, capturing fragmented views of postwar Japan on the fringes of American military bases.

Four unlikely companions came together here: Raghubir Singh with his rebellion against the monochrome colonial view of India; Eggleston and his dye-transfer transformation of the American South; Burrows and his dramatic action tableaux, which brought the hues of Vietnam’s mud and blood alive on the pages of Life; and Mikhailov and his surreal “sandwiches,” darkroom concoctions which deliberately abuse the techniques of Soviet social realist montage—all are linked by their bold rejection of black and white at a time when color wasn’t allowed in photography’s vocabulary.

Above: Raghubir Singh, Below the Howrah bridge a Marwari bride and groom after rites by the Ganges, 1968 © 2012 Succession Raghubir Singh. Below: Bruce Davidson, Black Americans, New York City. From the series ‘New York (Life)’ From New York, 1961-65 © Bruce Davidson / Magnum Photos

Unexpected connections surfaced elsewhere. Stylistically, there’s not much common ground between Graciela Iturbide’s lyrical portraits of Mexico’s indigenous peoples (sadly a little squeezed here) and Bruce Davidson’s first-hand account of the civil rights movement, but their methodology binds them: both photographers were roaming outside their comfort zones, daring to choose intimacy over detachment. Davidson’s troubled landscapes also infect Eggleston’s survey of the same terrain only a few years later, highlighting the sense of unease lingering in Eggleston’s peculiar, off-kilter snapshots of empty diners and motels.

The show’s most powerful instance of synchronicity was also its most harrowing, and was plucked from another segregated landscape. Ernest Cole and David Goldblatt both prowled the streets of Johannesburg—the latter able to wander and photograph where he pleased, the former forced to record Apartheid’s stark and cruel divisions illicitly, only able to work as a photographer after somehow convincing the authorities he was “colored” and not “black.” Yet they were both drawn to the same subjects—in particular, that anomalous, caring relationship between black nannies and white children. Goldblatt pictures a young boy standing, his hand resting on his seated nanny’s shoulder in a quiet moment of affection, but the boy’s unsettling, paternalistic pose also doesn’t go unnoticed. Cole meanwhile meets the gaze of a boy as he twists away from the faceless nanny who tightly grips his hand. Small, subtle gestures they may be, but they’re devastating in their condemnation of a society that would make such a loving relationship so fleeting. Indeed, lesser-known agitators such as Cole and Li are the show’s heroes, providing some of the most shocking images. Both were snapping furtively, Cole concealing his camera in a paper bag, Li his negatives under floorboards. Cole’s fate was impoverished exile; while at the height of the cultural revolution, Li spent two years in a labor camp.

Ernest Cole, Handcuffed blacks were arrested for being in white area illegally, from House of Bondage, ca. 1960–1966. The Ernest Cole Family Trust, Courtesy of the Hasselblad Foundation, Gothenburg, Sweden

This was an ambitious marathon of an exhibition—one that pressed “pause” at a tumultuous time in history, offering myriad glimpses into different societies all over the world, drawing together a truly global selection of photography’s pioneers and protesters who are rarely exhibited side by side.

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