Aperture's Blog, page 202

Vik Muniz Studio Visit—01.10.13

Artist Vik Muniz in his studio. Photo courtesy of Sb Cooper.

The artist speaks to event attendees in his studio. Photo by Sammy Marrus.

Artist Vik Muniz in his studio. Photo courtesy of Sb Cooper.

Artist Vik Muniz in his studio. Photo courtesy of Sb Cooper.

Artist Vik Muniz in his studio. Photo courtesy of Sb Cooper.

Artist Vik Muniz with his wife, Malu Barreto and their daughter, Dora. Photo courtesy of Sb Cooper.

Artist Vik Muniz signing books in his studio. Photo courtesy of Sb Cooper.

Artist Vik Muniz signing books in his studio. Photo courtesy of Sb Cooper.

Vik Muniz with Aperture patrons in his studio. Photo courtesy of Sb Cooper.

Artist Vik Muniz in his studio. Photo courtesy of Sb Cooper.

Glimpse of the artist. Photo courtesy of Sb Cooper.

A photo gallery highlighting the January 10 Vik Muniz Studio Visit 

Patrons, board members, and supporters joined Aperture in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, for an exclusive tour of Vik Muniz‘s studio. Muniz is an American artist of Brazilian origin that uses unconventional materials—like chocolate sauce or spaghetti marinara—to create artful images. Muniz discussed his multiple projects with Aperture and signed copies of his book Reflex: A Vik Muniz Primer (Aperture, 2005). Following the tour, the group enjoyed lunch at a popular Brooklyn restaurant, The General Greene.

This tour was the first in a series of events exclusively organized for Aperture Patrons. Aperture Patrons support the organization with a $1,000 annual contribution and receive a number of benefits including invitations to private openings, discounts on Aperture published books and photographs, a complimentary subscription to Aperture magazine, and much more!

For more information on Aperture Foundation’s Patron Program please visit our website.

Reflex




$39.95

Remembering Gigi Giannuzzi

The end of 2012 was a sad one for the photography community with the loss of Trolley Books publisher Gigi Giannuzzi. (Read the Guardian’s obituary here.) The photobook community is small and passionate, and Gigi was a true maverick within it. He was a courageous publisher, known for championing hard-hitting projects that challenged viewers. He was also a maverick character—in a passionate, mad-genius kind of way. No matter the subject or the photographer, Gigi knew how to make a beautiful book. As chaotic and larger-than-life as his persona and presence were, his books provide a quiet place of ordered and nuanced complexity. The selection, the sequencing, and the pacing of his books are flawless. There are never too many pictures, and the books achieve a kind of simplicity that looks easy but is incredibly difficult to pull off. He knew how to shape a story and to engage viewers page to page over a sustained period of looking. The books he published continue to unfold over multiple readings. His talent as a bookmaker and especially his belief in photography and photographers will be missed. He leaves behind an important and lasting legacy. Here is a selection of a few of our favorite books he helped bring into the world.

–

Denise Wolff is senior editor of Aperture’s book-publishing program.

Gentlemen of Bakongo, Photographs by Daniele Tamagni

Trolley, London, 2009

A Million Shillings: Escape from Somalia, Photographs by Alixandra Fazzina

Trolley, London, 2008

Homeland, Photographs by Nina Berman

Trolley, London, 2008

Double Blind: Lebanon Conflict 2006, Photographs by Paolo Pellegrin

Trolley, London, 2007

iWitness, Photographs by Tom Stoddart

Trolley, London, 2004

Phil and Me, Photographs by Amanda Tetrault

Trolley, London, 2004

Purple Hearts, Photographs by Nina Berman

Trolley, London, 2004

Ghetto, Photographs and text by Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin

Trolley, London, 2003

Open Wound: Chechnya 1994–2003, Photographs by Stanley Greene

Trolley, London, 2003

Agent Orange: "Collateral Damage" in Viet Nam, Photographs by Philip Jones Griffiths

Trolley Books, London, 2003

The Chain, Photographs by Chien-Chi Chang

Trolley, London, 2002

Aperture Portfolio Prize 2013

Aperture Magazine’s 2013 Relaunch

On the cover of Aperture’s Spring 2013 issue (#210) is a detail from an untitled 2012 photograph by Cologne- and Amsterdam-based artist Christopher Williams. The image is part of a new series of pictures he has taken of an East German Exakta camera, notable for the placement of shutter release, aperture dials, and other important components on the left-hand side of the camera body.

The issue’s theme is “Hello Photography,” and offers articles on a broad selection of concerns for photography now. Beginning today, each week we will offer an exclusive insight into the design, production, and contents of the newly reconceived and redesigned Aperture. Stay tuned! The magazine launches on February 26.

Click here to subscribe to Aperture magazine.

The Brighton Photo Biennial 2012

Agents of Change: Photography and the Politics of Space

By Jason Oddy

Corinne Silva, Plastic Mountain I, plastic recycling plant, from Badlands, 2008–11.
© Corinne Silva

To Londoners, the seaside town of Brighton is synonymous with crowds, fun-fair rides, and ice cream. Close enough for a day trip, the very idea of it shimmers carefree. On the train there, perusing the brochure for the Brighton Photography Biennial, I’m reminded that away from the beach and the jauntiness it is also an enclave of progressive values, counterculture, and dissent.

Addressing some of the most pressing issues of the past few years, Agents of Change: Photography and the Politics of Space appears to be a biennial at the right time in the right place. Its title suggests the belief that photography can make a difference. Ranging over the financial crisis, street-level poverty, the Arab Spring, the domestic war on terror, the rich-poor divide, the effects of globalization, drone warfare, and Occupy and other protest movements, a total of fourteen shows consider how the camera, rather than just being an instrument of mediation, might sometimes take hold of reality instead.

The exhibition Uneven Development pairs the work of two photographers who examine ways the division of space creates and reinforces inequalities. In his extended photo essay Cairo Divided, published in the Guardian in 2011, Jason Larkin documents the construction of new gated suburbs around Cairo. Distributed in Egypt as a free newspaper, Larkin’s work, accompanied by the Guardian’s Jack Shenker’s text, is a first-rate example of nuanced, deep-digging journalism.

For her series Imported Landscapes, Corinne Silva pasted her own photographs of Moroccan landscapes across billboards in southern Spain. By compressing the landscapes of these neighbouring countries into a single frame, Silva forces attention onto their interwoven histories, economies, and geographies. The theme of shifting boundaries brought on by globalization runs through her conceptually beguiling work. Making unashamed use of the local Mediterranean light, her pictures are compositionally flawless. Next to them, Larkin’s journalistic aesthetic looks almost out of place.

Above: Trevor Paglen, Large Hangars and Fuel Storage; Tonopah Test Range, NV; Distance approx.18 miles; 10:44 am, 2005. Below: Trevor Paglen, KEYHOLE 12-3 (IMPROVED CRYSTAL) Optical Reconnaissance Satellite Near Scorpio (USA 129), 2007 © Trevor Paglen

A short walk away, The Beautiful Horizon is a photographic collaboration between artists Julian Germain, Patricia Azevedo, Murilo Godoy, and a group of young Brazilian street people. The results, adroitly presented in a church-turned-gallery, provide an unexpurgated glimpse into the lives of some of the planet’s most disadvantaged citizens. The project, like many others, attempts to give a voice to the dispossessed, though whether, as the catalogue claims, “the project demonstrates how photography can intervene in the urban landscape” remains open to question. True to the spirit of the biennial, The Beautiful Horizon is predicated on a Panglossian faith in photography: a hope that it can make things better. For without hope, what remains?

Perhaps the answer, if there is one, can be found in the work of Trevor Paglen, an artist who specializes in what has been termed counter-surveillance. Using astronomical lenses with focal lengths of up to 7,000 mm, he photographs secret U.S. military installations as far as sixty-five miles away. The grainy pictures show Predator drones skulking in their hangars. In perhaps the most arresting image the tiny silhouette of a drone is pinned, insect-like, against the clouds. For his series The Other Night Sky, Paglen tracked classified military intelligence satellites as they passed overhead. The results, reminiscent of photographs of outer space, are as beautiful as they are chilling.

Returning power’s gaze is a theme that runs throughout the biennial. Edmund Clark’s Control Order House is another project in which photography becomes a battle zone. After months spent negotiating with the United Kingdom’s Home Office, Clark was finally allowed to take pictures of the interior of a house where a terrorist, suspect subject to a Control Order, was living. Rather than being arrested, a “controlled person” is obliged to live in government-designated accommodations and must follow a strict set of rules. Similarly, the photographs Clark was permitted to take reveal nothing about either the suspect or the house’s true identity. The resulting images are bland—impersonal rooms with no distinguishing features—visual counterparts of the existence that controlled persons are obliged to lead. Compulsory immersion in English suburban life may be one way of dampening the fires of jihadism, but consider that alongside this forced relocation you also live under constant surveillance. With cameras possibly everywhere, hemmed in by myriad regulations, the controlled person must internalize authority’s gaze, self-correcting at every step.

Above Images: Omer Fast, from 5000 Feet is the Best, digital film, 30 minute loop, stills by Yonn Thomas, 2011. © Omer Fast

While such an exercise of power might be far-reaching, it is Omer Fast’s film about the effects of drone warfare that truly demonstrates the camera’s full force. If we can all imagine how drone strikes impact upon their targets, then Five Thousand Feet Is Best also focuses on the drones’ operator-pilots, splicing together restaged and documentary interviews alongside fictionalized scenes. In voiceover narration, we hear an ex-pilot complain how after his first “kill” he began to suffer from “virtual stress,” bad dreams and loss of sleep, brought on not only by the disconnection that characterizes such remote assassinations, but perhaps also by the overload of grisly information furnished by the powerful cameras on the drones. “What it does is lock on those pixels,” he says, talking of a target, seemingly unaware that a job like his would probably lock him into the same pixel zone. An update of Michael Powell’s 1960 film Peeping Tom, Fast’s Five Thousand Feet Is Best exposes the camera as a weapon. Nowadays it’s hard to escape the feeling that we’re all caught in the crosshairs of this irresistible image world.

––

Jason Oddy is a photographer and writer. His exhibition A Is for will be at the James Hockey Gallery, Farnham, England from February 1–March 13, 2013. His book Notes From The Desert will be published in France by Grasset later in 2013.

––

Corinne Silva, Plastic Mountain I, plastic recycling plant, from Badlands, 2008–2011.

© Corinne Silva

Trevor Paglen, Large Hangars and Fuel Storage; Tonopah Test Range, NV; Distance approx.18 miles; 10:44 am

C-type print, 30” x 36”, 2005.

Courtesy of Galerie Thomas Zander, Cologne, and Altman Siegel Gallery, San Francisco,

© Trevor Paglen

KEYHOLE 12-3 (IMPROVED CRYSTAL) Optical Reconnaissance Satellite Near Scorpio (USA 129), 2007

C-Print 60 x 48 in. (152,4 x 121,9 cm)

Courtesy of Galerie Thomas Zander, Cologne, and Altman Siegel Gallery, San Francisco,

© Trevor Paglen

Omer Fast, from 5000 Feet is the Best, digital film, 30 minute loop, still by Yonn Thomas, 2011.

Courtesy of the artist, Arratia, Beer, Berlin, and gb agency, Paris, © Omer Fast

Omer Fast, 5000 Feet is the Best, digital film, 30 minute loop, still by Yonn Thomas, 2011.

Courtesy of the artist, Arratia, Beer, Berlin, and gb agency, Paris, © Omer Fast

Omer Fast, 5000 Feet is the Best, digital film, 30 minute loop, still by Yonn Thomas, 2011.

Courtesy of the artist, Arratia, Beer, Berlin, and gb agency, Paris, © Omer Fast

Call for Entries: Aperture Portfolio Prize

 

 

Artists are invited to enter the Aperture Portfolio Prize 2013 contest, an international photography competition.

Through the Aperture Portfolio Prize, we aim to identify trends in contemporary photography and highlight artists whose work deserves greater recognition. When choosing the first-prize winner and runners-up, our editorial and curatorial staff look for innovative bodies of work that haven’t been widely seen in major publications or exhibition venues. The first-prize winner receives $3,000 and has his or her work exhibited at Aperture Gallery. The winner and up to five runners-up are featured on Aperture’s website, accompanied by a brief statement written by Aperture’s staff. Previous winners and runners-up include Sarah Palmer, Thibault Brunet, David Favrod, Alexander Gronsky, and Andrew McConnell.

Entries for the 2013 Aperture Portfolio Prize can be submitted from Monday, January 7, through Thursday, February 28, at 12:00 noon EDT, at callforentry.org. The winners and runners-up will be announced in July. For specific details, see the Guidelines and FAQs pages.

Please stay tuned for more details about our other competition, the Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation Book Prize, to be announced in April 2013. 

The Bomb (Also) is a Flower, 2010




$700.00

Interview with Okwui Enwezor

By Brian Sholis

This is the last weekend to view the exhibition “Rise and Fall of Apartheid: Photography and the Bureaucracy of Everyday Life” at New York’s International Center of Photography, which closes on January 6. The show, curated by Okwui Enwezor with Rory Bester, examines the manifold legacies of the apartheid system through some five hundred photographs, films, books, magazines, newspapers, and other archival documents. The densely packed exhibit offers insights into many aspects of South African society during the second half of the twentieth century. Aperture spoke with Enwezor about the exhibition, the relationship between the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa and the civil rights movement in the United States, and about how this exhibition aligns with other shows on African themes he has presented at New York institutions.

Greame Williams, Nelson Mandela with Winnie Mandela as he is released from the Victor Vester Prison, 1990. Courtesy the artist. © Greame Williams.

Brian Sholis: The exhibition’s title, Rise and Fall of Apartheid, is fairly self-explanatory, but for people who haven’t seen the exhibition, the subtitle, Photography and the Bureaucracy of Everyday Life, might benefit from a little bit of explanation. Can you elaborate on it?

Okwui Enwezor: Apartheid necessarily had to be constructed in order to be woven into the fabric of everyday life. Structures of regulation, structures of invigilation, structures of control, as well as the reformulation of identity, citizenship, the ability of people to circulate through space—the entire geography of apartheid, in a sense, was conceived purely to change what was a legislative document into a normative construct. Bureaucracy was key to these linked developments. The goal was to make sure everyone understood very clearly that if you were white, you lived in a particular neighborhood, while if you were black you lived in another, and if you were colored you lived in yet another. Each provided its own set of amenities: buses, trains, sidewalks, etc. There came to be an understanding across all of South Africa’s social, cultural, and political life that these orders of regulation had become the orders of everyday life.

Photography, in a sense, was a core instrument for making all of these new things normative. It was a way to document, to make visible, that which was about to be disappeared into a kind of normative experience. But let me make one important point that is essential to understanding the relationship between photography and the bureaucracy of everyday life, and to how we understand apartheid: South African photography was invented more or less on the eve of the juridical apartheid state. It accompanies the shift away from the colonial space…

BJS: …the anthropological space…

OE: Yes, away from the anthropological approach of depicting African life.

BJS: While the majority of the photographs in the show depict resistance to this new normative structure, you make a point of including depictions of white society. These are the people who are on top in this society, who enjoy the greatest freedoms. How important was it for you to include such scenes?

OE: We wanted to be careful, so far as was possible, to avoid a narrative of victimhood. I don’t think the exhibition is about victims and oppressors, but is rather about modes of subject formation, modes of production, modes of subjectivity. The deracination of subjectivity was at the very core of the apartheid regime.

It’s also important to remember that resistance to apartheid was a multiracial effort. The people who were most dispossessed in that society would most fear gathering on the barricades, you know, while those who were not victimized by the regime could still be angry with it. The movement to end apartheid reflected the intricacies and complexities of life in South Africa, and our exhibition hopefully reflects them with equal nuance. Apartheid was a society-changing event for both whites and blacks, so in that sense it was very important to be able to present all of its dimensions in the show.

Alf Khumalo, South Africa goes on trial. Police and crowd outside court. The whole world was watching when the three major sabotage trials started in Pretoria, Cape Town and Maritzburg. Outside the palace of Justice during the Rivonia Trial, 1963. Courtesy of Baileys African History Archive. © Baileys African History Archive.

However, the exhibition is not limited to protest pictures. The corrosiveness of the system affected other areas, and is reflected in other photographic genres—in landscapes, for example, and the absences and silences that haunt the spaces captured by photographers’ lenses. Consider David Goldblatt’s images of the destruction of District Six, or Roger Ballen’s pictorial essay on the small towns of South Africa.

BJS: The events that might be most familiar to American viewers—such as the Sharpeville Massacre, the Soweto Uprising, and the end of the system from 1991 to 1994—do not dominate the show in the way they dominate the public consciousness outside of South Africa.

OE: We all know that photography is an instrument crucial to the production of icons, and there are iconic moments that are etched into our collective consciousness. War is one of those moments. But I think that, for example, the Sharpeville massacre also resonated because it occured in the midst of the American civil rights movement. Albert Lutuli, president of the African National Congress, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1960, and he cosigned a letter with Martin Luther King, Jr. that outlined the links between the African-American struggle in the United States and the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa. So it makes sense that we have focused inordinately on those iconic markers.

But I think the epic trajectory of the anti-apartheid movement can be found in the little stories, in small events. Taken cumulatively, everyday acts of resistance, by people now obscure to history, create real change—and it’s these kinds of stories I wanted to encourage viewers to explore. There is the subject of a picture, and then there is the background or periphery; we were extremely curious to learn what kinds of narratives or ideas are embedded in photographs.

One of the things we discerned has to do with the idea of hand gestures. You can tell the story of resistance through the evolution of hand gestures. In the 1950s, the thumbs-up was a way of expressing solidarity. It was a moment in which people still believed in the power of nonviolence, in negotiation. And then Sharpeville happens in 1960, and this gesture of solidarity turns into one of defiance: the clenched fist. The more oppressive the apartheid regime became, the more defiant the resistance became. The clenched first becomes the raised weapons of self-defense. And then, of course, in 1994 everything transitions once again and we see the “V” for victory, the peace sign. These kinds of micro-narratives are lodged within the photographs. Another has to do with funerals: you can see in the settings of funeral photographs the ways that these ceremonies were deployed as ideological communication, both to the community of South Africans and to the world at large.

Jurgen Schadeberg, The 29 ANC Women’s League women are being arrested by the police for demonstrating against the permit laws, which prohibited them from entering townships without a permit, 26th August 1952. Courtesy the artist.

Peter Magubane, Sharpeville Funeral: More than 5,000 people were at the graveyard, May 1960. Courtesy Baileys African History Archive.

BJS: I would like to return to the relationship of the anti-apartheid movement and the civil rights movement. Scholars like Maurice Berger have been reassessing the visual culture of the civil rights movement in recent years. Given that this show is being presented in America, what other lessons, if any, might be found in this exhibition that can help us understand the visual culture of the civil rights movement?

OE: Well, first of all, I think the civil rights movement should be seen alongside and as part of African de-colonization movements. Together they comprise the key development of the middle of the twentieth century. This goes back to issues of subjectivity, as these movements represent both a belief in the modern category of the self and tensions between subjecthood and citizenship. It is these tensions, between subject and citizen, which most strongly link the two movements. There were, of course, great differences. In America the civil rights movement was linked to the church, whereas in South Africa anti-apartheid was almost entirely secular—and was even linked to the Communist party, something that would have been unimaginable in the United States.

BJS: That was certainly not possible in the mid-1950s to the late ’60s.

OE: So perhaps the anti-apartheid movement was a little bit more revolutionary, in terms of its political spirit and its identification with proletariat identities. But visually, in terms of iconographic depiction, the two movements are uncannily similar—right down to the way people dress. The pressed suit, the need to project an image of respectability . . . . I always wonder who was the creative director of the protests organized by the Black Sash Women. They must have had one, and a copywriter for all of their protest signs, and a choreographer for their movements, and a stylist—it’s such a complete performance. Think, too, of the American notion of linking arms, singing protest songs and spirituals…

BJS: It’s counterintuitive to think that a mass movement would be so image-conscious, but on both sides of the Atlantic, protesters seemed to know that visual media could be an assistive technology.

OE: And on the other hand, the apartheid state’s media consciousness was very crude; the political regime was unable to manage the deployment of propaganda extolling its virtues. Hendrik Verwoerd, prime minister from 1958 to 1966, said that the very term apartheid had been misunderstood, and emphasized that in Afrikaans, his language, it means “good neighborliness.” [Laughs.] The powers-that-be could not compete with the anti-apartheid movement in terms of its image consciousness and media savvy. The charismatic, smiling Mandela became an icon of an entire generation in part because he was a good salesperson, better than the dour, unsmiling, unattractive politicians in power. He had star quality, even in his rough moments.

Greame Williams, Right-wing groups gather in Pretoria’s Church Square to voice their anger at the F. W. de Klerk government’s attempts to transform the country, 1990. Courtesy the artist.
© Greame Williams.

BJS: I have a final question about the exhibition itself and how it fits into your chronology and your experience as a curator. Many of us in New York remember Snap Judgments (2006) and Archive Fever (2008), both presented at the International Center of Photography. Some who have been in the city longer will remember The Short Century, presented at MoMA/PS1 back in 2002. Will you situate Rise and Fall of Apartheid in the context of these earlier projects?

OE: Well, this isn’t meant to be the third of a trilogy at ICP, but rather the second. The archive show was a kind of anomaly.

Snap Judgments was very much about the new century, and the ways in which contemporary photographers and artists were trying both to think through the idea of Africa with their images, and to counteract Western constructions of the continent and its people. Rise and Fall of Apartheid is the second show, looking at the twentieth century. The original idea was not to limit it to a case study, but to make it Africa-wide. The final piece of the trilogy was supposed to engage with the nineteenth century; it was to be titled Sun In Their Eyes: Photography and the Invention of Africa. What I was interested in, or what I am interested in, since the show—or a book, or something—is still to be made, is examining the first hundred years of photography in Africa. The project will examine different types of photographic depiction, from Walker Evans to Paul Strand in Ghana to Désiré Charnay in Madagascar to Augustus Washington, the African-American photographer who worked in Monrovia, Liberia, during the 1850s.

Let me end by saying that The Short Century was the genesis of many of these shows. I am still walking down the path I started with that exhibition. There are many things I wanted to do in that show that couldn’t happen, and I am still engaged with them intellectually.

–

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

Five Most Popular Interviews of 2012

Aperture’s five most popular conversations and interviews of 2012:

Richard Misrach and Kate Orff Discuss Petrochemical America

Melissa Harris talks with Richard Misrach and Kate Orff about the process of depicting and unpacking the complex ecologies of Louisiana’s industrial corridor for their latest project, Petrochemical America.

Alec Soth: On Influence, Summer Nights, and Allen Ginsberg

When asked to participate in Aperture Remix, Alec Soth chose to pay artistic homage to Robert Adams‘s Summer Nights. Soth spoke with Aperture Remix curator Lesley A. Martin about Adams, Summer Nights, and the influence of other artists on his work.

Anders Petersen: Finding a Fever

From Aperture 198, Anders Petersen and JH Engström discuss the work that would become Petersen’s City Diary, which was awarded PhotoBook of the Year in this year’s PhotoBook Awards.

David Galjaard: On Concresco

Dutch photographer David Galjaard won the First PhotoBook Award this year for Concresco. Thomas Bollier spoke with Galjaard about photographing in Albania, the design process, and self-publishing his first book.

Daido Moriyama: The Shock From Outside

From Aperture 203, Daido Moriyama speaks with Ivan Vartanian about vision and motivation, context and information, color and black and white, and the unending newness of photographs.

Aperture Patrons’ Weekend – Slideshow

Guests at William Wegman's studio.

William Wegman

Barbara Goodbody, Minny Lee, Elizabeth Levine, Charles Gilman, and Aperture Chief Financial Officer Mary Colman St. John at William Wegman's studio.

William Wegman's studio

One of William Wegman's Weimaraners.

William Wegman

Kasper and Celso Gonzalez-Falla

David Levinthal's studio

Denise Wolff and Nina Cheney

Sondra Gilman and David Levy

David Levinthal's studio

Photographer Matthew Pillsbury and publisher of the Aperture book program Lesley A. Martin

Graphic designer Yolanda Cuomo's studio

Patrons at the Aperture Gallery

Chris Boot and Aperture patrons at Elliott Erwitt's studio

Elliott Erwitt's studio

Guests at the Patron Ticket and Table levels at Aperture Foundation’s Sixtieth Anniversary Gala Dinner & Photography Auction were invited to attend specially arranged visits to the studios of major New York–based photographers, including Elliott Erwitt, David Levinthal, Mary Ellen Mark, Matthew Pillsbury, and William Wegman, and a cocktail reception at the home of Aperture trustee Willard Taylor and his wife Virginia Davies.

Check out a slideshow of photos from the weekend’s visits.

Zoe Crosher: Stage Manager

By Carmen Winant

The Los Angeles–based photographer Zoe Crosher has had quite a big year. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art featured her work in a show called Figure and Form after purchasing it for the museum collection; she had her first solo show at Perry Rubenstein Gallery in Los Angeles; and she is included in New Photography 2012 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
In each of the exhibitions, Crosher has worked with, intervened in, and re-presented the self-portraits of one woman, Michelle duBois. It’s an archive comprised of over one thousand images of the same woman over the course of her life. In appropriating it, Crosher has tapped into the most American kind of fantasy, at once tragic and aspirational, fictional and sincere, and, above all, reliant on its own photographic documentation. Aperture’s relationship with Crosher predates these exhibitions; in 2011 and 2012, she worked with the organization to complete a four-volume, print-on-demand, limited-edition artist’s book using the duBois archive. I spoke with Crosher in late October.

Mae Wested no.3 (Crumpled) from the series 21 Ways to Mae Wested, 2012

Carmen Winant: This has been a very busy year for you, participating in exhibitions at LACMA and MoMA and presenting a solo show at Perry Rubenstein. Also, last year you won the Art Here and Now award, and the California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Arts. My first question to you is a practical one. How do you manage your time?

Zoe Crosher: Well, it helps to know that it is a finite period. One of the great things about being able to work with a fantastic gallery is the infrastructure. I have an incredible team, and a lot of my job at this point has become efficient delegation. I have a main assistant, plus the archivist and registrar at the gallery, along with three separate production teams. I had wanted to work this way for a while—I knew I would have to in order to realize specific, long-standing ideas—but didn’t quite have the support. Perry [Rubenstein] gave me the opportunity to work within a much larger production model, and that has been essential.

CW: How does being a manager suit you?

ZC: It’s one thing I like about being an artist; you can wear a lot of different hats at different moments. Of course, I am totally obsessed with every detail, the quality of every part of the production.

CW: And you are quite pregnant. I can only imagine that adds to the workload.

ZC: Right, I am going to retreat for a few months when the baby is born. I will start working on a new body of work after that break, so in some ways the timing has been ideal. But when it first happened, I looked at my calendar and thought, How the hell am I going to do this? I had pretty difficult morning sickness, so my functional hours diminished during the day.

To tell you the truth, I didn’t inform anyone for a very long time that I was pregnant because of the professional stigma. People can be very dismissive. I also didn’t think it that it was anybody’s business. When I was at the Dallas Contemporary, the work got a write up in Artforum’s “Scene & Herd” section, which was great. But I was described as a “pregnant Los Angeles artist.” I was shocked!

duBois’ Triple Vision Fantasy Landscapes (Sunset)

CW: You worked with the duBois archive for the above-mentioned shows in Los Angeles and New York this year. How much overlap—conceptually or materially—was there between the three? Was that something that you were trying to indulge or resist?

ZC: The duBois project is all about curation, and that shifts intentionally from show to show. The Aperture books really represent this quality of continually re-telling, of the re-writing of the fantasy archive, so maybe we could start there. The first book is titled The Reconsidered Archive of Michelle duBois, and it is full of what I call “Auto-portraits”—images that she planned, executed, and kept—along with all of her “companions.” The second book is about the physicality of the archive, looking at the backs of the photographs, the antiquated language of Kodak film and the front of the albums. The third book is The Unveiling of Michelle duBois. It concentrates largely on her collection Japanese objects, like kimonos, umbrellas, and dolls. She had over one hundred and fifty Japanese dolls! She also travelled to Asia and made a lot of tourist photographs, “collecting,” on some macro-level, the sites as she went. The fourth book, The Disappearance of Michelle duBois, concentrates on the physical disintegration of the archive, the final manipulation of the images into objects. A lot of works from that final grouping are in the MoMA show, and they play with a certain denial of visibility—images of duBois with her head turned away. Beyond that, I crumple and re-photograph the image with a flash, further imposing a sense of distance upon the images. The metaphor stands as an escape from a singular, conclusive, totalizing effort.

The whole project is about the relationship of fiction and the archive, and the impossibility of knowing oneself even after the accumulation of thousands of images. Simultaneously, the arc is about the end—and breaking down—of analog photo technologies.

No.9 from The Additive Dust Series (GUAM 1979) from The Disappearance of Michelle duBois

CW: Can you talk a little bit about these “wall” installations you’ve been creating? The work, which is hung in strategic clusters, often reads as one collective body.

ZC: I’ve worked this way in both the LACMA and MoMA shows, and in both cases it’s been very specific to the institutional wall. Those I’ll call the Disbanding of Michelle duBois. Both of the projects were focused mostly on The Disappearance of Michelle duBois. I was interested in her gaze darting back and forth, as well as the physical inability to see her. So, I come up with various versions, and then create them site-specifically for institutions.

LACMA bought the piece after I won the Art Here and Now award in 2011, and I didn’t ever imagine that they would show the whole thing. I wanted to make a flexible exhibit, so that one could mix and match it based on the surrounding works. The wall was really specific to the space, and the decisions made about the way that the work was hung happened during the installation, through conversations with the curators. Wolfgang Tillmans is in that LACMA show as well, on an opposite wall, and it occurred to me that we have an opposite approach in that regard. His work was choreographed—down to the millimeter—in its display. Conceptually, my overarching structure is consistent, but how it manifests is completely relative. It’s almost site-specific in that sense. I’m not married to a specific vision.

Tilt of her Head, Over Analog Time (from the series The Disbanding of Michelle Dubois), 2001–11

CW: It’s interesting how these shows relate specifically to the books. Almost as if the books were roadmaps.

ZC: The books are a critical component. They act as guides for both the viewer and for me. The intention of the whole project, books and installations included, is to interrupt our expectations of looking. At first she looks like a sexy blonde lady; once people look a little longer, that idea becomes stilted. In contrast to being about the story that surrounds the work (she was a friend of my aunt, she was a prostitute, anything else), the duBois project is about all of the elements that make up the gestalt. It resists narrative.

CW: Do people think it’s you?

ZC: All the time. I see it a lot on blogs. This is not a biopic! Even though it is from the archive of a real person, this is about fantasy. Both her fantasies and the fantasy of photography itself.

The Other Disappeared Nurse no.7 from The Vanishing of Michelle duBois, 2012

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Carmen Winant is an artist and writer currently based in Brooklyn. She is a regular contributor to Frieze magazine, Artforum.com, X-TRA Journal, and The Believer magazine, and is a co-editor of the online arts journal The Highlights.

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All images courtesy of the artist and Perry Rubenstein Gallery, Los Angeles. © Zoe Crosher

Mae Wested no.3 (Crumpled) from the series 21 Ways to Mae Wested, 2012

Digital C-Print

36 x 36 inches

Edition of 6 + 2 AP

duBois’ Triple Vision Fantasy Landscapes (Sunset)

2012 Digital C-Print

84 7/8 x 41 7/8 inches

Edition of 6 + 2 AP

No.9 from The Additive Dust Series (GUAM 1979) from The Disappearance of Michelle duBois

2012 Archival pigment print

13 x 19 inches

Edition of 6 + 2 AP

Tilt of her Head, Over Analog Time (from the series the Disbanding of Michelle Dubois), 2001-2011, by Zoe Crosher

(Nine) Photography and Mixed Media

Modern and Contemporary Art Council, 2011 Art Here and Now Purchase

© Zoe Crosher/ZC International 2012

Photo © Museum Associates/LACMA

The Other Disappeared Nurse no.7 from The Vanishing of Michelle duBois, 2012

Pigmented Ink on Museo Silver Rag

29 7/8 x 23 3/8 inches

Edition of 6 + 2 AP