Aperture's Blog, page 22

A Photographer Recasts the Secret Lives of Teenage Girls

In Elizabeth Renstrom’s studio, there are shelves filled with pink goodies: a can of Aqua Net, a fluffy leopard blanket, perfume bottles, pencils, faux fur, the pretty princess phone of 1980s teen-movie bedrooms we wanted to live in as young girls. They’re props, it turns out, in both the literal and metaphorical senses of the word: objects Renstrom uses to stage her images, but also visual representations of narratives we’re given of femininity, consumerism, and bodily autonomy.

Over the years, Renstrom, a photographer and photo editor, has produced significant editorial work for the New Yorker, the New York Times, VICE, and TIME, among others. She’s shot portfolios for TIME and the New York Times, made covers for Salty and Numéro Berlin, campaigns for Dice and Vimeo, and photographed for the book Carnal Knowledge: Sex Education You Didn’t Get in School (2020). For both her editorial and personal work, she arranges her props to illustrate richly complex ideas using vibrant color, nostalgia, and humor.

In her recent series Yummy (2023), now on view at Baxter St at the Camera Club of NY, Renstrom combines still-life photography and AI-generated imagery inspired by the world that women of a certain age inherited—a world women are still inheriting, whether they’re teens now or millennials witnessing the aesthetics of our teen years making a comeback; who were raised on magazines like Seventeen, CosmoGirl, and others; who were sold butterfly clips and low-rise jeans by their Claire’s and Wet Seal ad pages; who listened when they told us how to lose the zits and gain a beach body, or how to be fifteen, flirty, and thriving. 

Elizabeth Renstrom, Flirty Fun, 2023 Elizabeth Renstrom, Beauty Under $10, 2023

Teen magazines from the early 2000s are what initially got Renstrom into photography; she read them growing up in Connecticut. These magazines brimmed with bright, airbrushed, catalog-esque shots of teen models with flowing hair and glossy lips in power poses. Happy, smiling young women leaned with hands on hips, flitted on beaches, washed flawless skin in a bathroom mirror, did crunches for summer in the magazines’ pages, their frosted eyeshadow twinkling as they got into limos for prom.

For Yummy, Renstrom concentrated on this aesthetic, liberally sprinkled with the glory of neon graphics, to remember and comment on their impact. When I visited her studio, she pulled out an issue of the now-defunct magazine YM from October 2002 to show me some of her inspiration for the project. Avril Lavigne is on the hot-pink cover, fake growling in a white button-down shirt, black tie askew. It’s an issue I vividly remember owning.

A child of this era like myself, Renstrom was excited by the possibility of generating her own images using Midjourney, prompting it to reproduce visuals in the style of teen magazines like YM. These appear in three separate branches across the exhibition. The first is a series of three print magazines featuring AI-generated cover stars, advertisements, and editorials. The magazine was designed by art director Elena Foraker, who combed Renstrom’s AI images with editorial sections constructed by the writer Coralie Kraft, also using AI. Stylized with a darkly humorous undercurrent, the publication is called Yummy Teen!—as much a diminutive as a critique of the way young women have often been sexualized within dominant cultural narratives.

Installation view of Yummy, Baxter St, New York, 2023Elizabeth Renstrom, Yummy (Teen Edition), 2023

The second aspect of the project features actual photographs, which Renstrom staged at a friend’s childhood home in Pennsylvania. She cast teen girls to interact with Yummy Teen! magazines at a fictional sleepover, cut and collaged Yummy Teen! onto their walls, and wove the magazines into these girls’ fictional lives. Nail polish drips onto the carpet, rogue Cheetos find their way out of bags, feathery pens wait to be used. A series of brightly shadowed eyes are cut from a pile of faces on the floor and stuck onto a mirror. “We’re remixing these things, but we’re also being really violent with this image,” Renstrom says, referring to the way women’s faces and bodies have been cut apart to create another idealized image. “It reflects how we feel about ourselves when we’re reading it.”

The third aspect is a physical installation in Baxter St of furry, pink beanbags on top of a bright lavender carpet, in front of a wall painted pink. The installation invites visitors to apply custom stickers and images from Yummy Teen! to the wall, just like the girls in the photographs do. For a few moments, Renstrom wants us all to be teen girls, to understand a life even if we never had the occasion to remember it.  

Much about being a teen girl is about longing—having a crush, wishing to lose weight, wanting to fit in with great clothes and beautiful hair. Renstrom captures that by flashing images from the past back to us: the heartthrobs, the perfume ads, the stars we loved and wanted to be. The cover of the June issue of Yummy Teen!, for example, features the AI-generated star Sierra Knight, her blond hair glistening and teeth pearly white, not unlike teens on the Laguna Beach of our youth who were paired with headlines promising to teach us how to “tone up and slim down,” “make HIM ask you out,” and “radiate with confidence!”

Installation view of Yummy, Baxter St, New York, 2023

Yummy lives in the uncanny valley of 2000s girlhood, where all its images and text are just slightly familiar in ways enlightening and jarring. Teen magazines were so prolific in their time and of such a specific style and tone; that AI images and text may be generated from them in the first place is a comment on their ubiquity and uniformity. They look and feel exactly as they did when they were first published, and with such accuracy that I wonder if I’ve seen them before. And, of course, I have. Yummy is as much about nostalgia as it is satire, as much commentary as memory. There’s a certain absurd hilarity to the phrase “Hot Bod!” independent of any context, and especially as it appears on stickers Renstrom made for the exhibition opening.

Renstrom’s experiences with AI reflected the problems in the images that proliferated mainstream print culture during this time period. Her project features a multitude of ethnicities, for example, but she found she had to ask for that specifically when prompting Midjourney; otherwise, a thin white woman was the norm. “I didn’t have to prompt for it to feed me a woman of a certain size,” Renstrom says. “A white woman is often what will be popped out unless you prompt it to give you a different race. There’s lots of aspects of it that are so fucked up and interesting.”

In bold pinks, yellows, purples, and greens, Renstrom tells the story of what it’s like to be a teen receiving these messages—and then an adult woman dealing with their aftermath. “I think we all indulged in these magazines in a really insecure time of our lives, where we’re looking for guidance and advice,” she says. “This project is a tribute to that, but also a critical eye at the way that these magazines play off those insecurities. It’s a lot about the way we talked to women during this time.”

Elizabeth Renstrom, Eye Magic, 2023
All photographs courtesy the artist and Baxter St at the Camera Club of NY

Renstrom’s work is always asking audiences to query what they’re seeing. As Coralie Kraft tells me, Renstrom is “trojan horse-ing” commentary into her work about gender, about femininity, about the way we talk, and have talked, about women, the way we have understood or not understood our relationship to consumerism. There were times, Renstrom says, when her work was dismissed for being too nostalgic, frivolous, glossy, feminine. But those who write it off for its aesthetics are missing the point. “I feel really strongly about my palette and the kind of textures and softness that I bring in,” she continues. “I want it to feel inviting, so that you spend time and look at what I’m trying to say or the media I’m trying to put in front of you.”

The return of Y2K aesthetics has coincided with a cultural reconsideration of how we look at stories of the pop icons whose public lives defined the decade, including Janet Jackson, Britney Spears, and Pamela Anderson. Renstrom’s work lives here, too, in its own reconsiderations of “ordinary teenage girls,” as she says. I think of the writer Olivia Gatwood’s poem “When I Say That We Are All Teen Girls”: Even the men who laugh their condescending laughs / when a teen girl faints at the sight of her / favorite pop star, even those men are teen girls, / the way they want so badly to be so big / and important and worshipped by someone.

Renstrom shows us that the state of the teen girl is more universal than we think, that similar experiences color generations of people confronted by comparison, self-doubt, and fear. What we find in her work is that maybe we’re all hoping for a way out, all hoping to be loved, zits and all.

Yummy is on view at Baxter St at the Camera Club of NY through February 2, 2024.

The Inside Story of Josef Koudelka’s Groundbreaking Career

Born in 1938, the year of the German occupation of his native Czechoslovakia, Josef Koudelka has lived through seminal events in the twentieth century. He grew up under communism, experienced the Prague Spring, saw the collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergence of the Czech Republic, and ultimately the Russian invasion that persists in Ukraine. In Josef Koudelka: Next, Melissa Harris considers his sixty-year-long obsession with photography, from his early interpretation of Czech theater to his expansive project on the Roma culture in Eastern Europe; from his legendary coverage of the 1968 Soviet invasion of Prague to the solitude of exile and the often-devastating impact humans have had on the landscape.

Over the course of nearly a decade, Harris conducted hundreds of hours of interviews with the artist at his home and studio spaces in Prague and Ivry-sur-Seine, outside of Paris, and led ongoing conversations with his friends, family, colleagues, and collaborators worldwide. The deftly told, richly illustrated biography shares stories on Koudelka’s early years as a touring musician and engineering student, his ritualistic repeated visits to favored places and festivals, and his thoughts around adapting to the panoramic format used in his later work. Anecdotes offer new insight into some of his most renowned images, such as accounts of smuggling Koudelka’s film out of the Prague Spring conflict zone, or of a London friend facilitating a membership card to the Gypsy and Travellers’ Council, an organization that advocated for the rights of the Roma, to help Koudelka ease frequent suspicions by police during his limitless itineraries. Last year, Lesley A. Martin spoke with Harris about the process of writing and editing Koudelka’s story.

Josef Koudelka and Melissa Harris on the train to Boskovice, 2014. Photograph by Lucina Hartley Koudelka Hervé Hughes, Olympus OM-2, Josef Koudelka, 1984. Koudelka notes his concerns about camera 5 (“Serge”) to his camera repairer, Hughes, in French; Hughes’s response is in English

Lesley A. Martin: Melissa, tell us a little bit about the genesis of this project. How did you get involved in writing this biography? What was it that appealed to you in particular?

Harris: Susan Meiselas called me up one day and asked me if I would be interested in writing Josef’s biography for a Magnum Foundation biography series conceived by Andy Lewin, who served as its managing editor. I was still working on the first biography I had written about Nick Nichols, and I really didn’t think Josef would say yes. I knew he didn’t like to answer personal questions and said no to almost all interviews. I remember saying to Susan, “Sure, but I don’t think he’ll agree.” And then he did. I think what convinced him was a dear friend of his, Hervé Tardy, teasingly told him that he should do it because if he didn’t do it now, while he was alive, it would happen when he was dead, and people could say whatever they wanted to, and he wouldn’t be there to help get the facts precise. So, if he wanted to have any input whatsoever, and make sure the rest of us didn’t make up things, he should do it now.

Martin: What was interesting to you about taking this on? Was it the work? His life story? What was the most compelling element?

Harris: Josef is fascinating to me. I’d worked with him enough before to know that this was going to mean a big commitment of time and energy on my part, but I also knew that if he agreed to do it, that he’d be all in—that he would totally commit himself. When he says he’s going to do something, he does it. I didn’t know a lot about his life story, but what I knew was compelling to me. And I think the work is superb. I’d worked with him previously on an exhibition of Invasion 68: Prague, his coverage of the Soviet invasion, which Aperture hosted in the gallery in 2008, but it was mostly just about realizing its presentation. I also worked with him on his book Wall (2013).

I knew I would learn so much from speaking with Josef, and I knew that it would be a real challenge. I wanted the challenge, not just in terms of information or content, but the writing as well. Telling his kind of story is complicated, in part because he goes back to projects so often that there’s no way to stick strictly to chronology. For example, his work on the Roma, published as Gypsies (1975; reissued by Aperture, 2011), comes up early on in the book, and then comes up again at different points throughout his career as he returns to that work in different ways. So how do you figure that out? Do you have a chapter on Gypsies and do the whole shebang in one place, or do you allow it to unfold the way his life has unfolded? There were just a lot of puzzles to work out—the kind of structural puzzles that I thought would be interesting for me because I’ve never done anything like that before.

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Martin: It is a real puzzle. How do you prepare to take a project like this, in which you have to understand the entirety of a life—or at least try to? What is the process of research?

Harris: We just started talking. I wasn’t really sure where to start with him, and so I thought I would start personally. He really did not know what he’d gotten himself into. It was brutal, our first meeting: Nobody was unpleasant or anything, but it was just really hard for him to talk about his parents or to talk about certain things about his childhood. Not because he had bad relationships or had been unhappy, but because he is very private, and in his own way, quite shy. At the start, it was mostly about figuring out the pacing and just going slowly, letting him formulate responses to questions he hadn’t been asked before or that he had stealthily evaded.

Henri Cartier-Bresson, Jill Hartley, Lucina Hartley Koudelka, and Josef Koudelka at the home of Cartier-Bresson and Martine Franck, under the tree by which bottles of slivovitz are buried, Céreste, France, 1989. Photograph by Marthe Cartier-Bresson Paul Trevor, Brick Lane, London E1, 1980

Martin: You spoke to so many people in putting the book together—people who knew Josef at different stages in his life, and who weigh in on his life and his work. As a reader, you really develop a sense of the author as a detective in this book, reassembling the story as Josef tells it, but also confirming or adding nuance to it through other perspectives.

Harris: Yes. This is a real reported biography. People think you’re nuts when you tell them you’re working on a biography of a living person, but for me, it’s a pleasure because I don’t really consider myself a historian. Of course, you have to do a lot of historical research for a book like this, when you are writing about somebody who was born in 1938. You have to present and contextualize the very rich history of Central Europe. But for me, the pleasure of the research was the reporting and interviewing process. Not just the interviews with Josef but pretty much everybody who played a key role in his life—those who were still living, obviously. When I started, everybody except for major figures like Anna Fárová, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Martine Franck were still alive.

Josef loves a challenge, a visual challenge. He had not really worked in this way before, where there had to be a clear relationship between text and image.

Writing about Josef’s relationship with those who were deceased was greatly facilitated by Viktor Stoilov, the founder of the Czech publishing house Torst, who kindly made all of the correspondence between Josef and Anna (that Anna had given to him) available to me, as well as all of her texts on Josef for magazines, catalogs, et cetera. It wasn’t the same as talking to her, but it was almost like talking to her. For Martine and Henri—I had known them, which helped—and Josef had kept all of their correspondence, plus there were his diary entries. So between what Josef had and Henri’s own writing, I was able to build certain things. Sheila Hicks, who I spoke with, who is a very dear friend of Josef’s, had very strong memories of Martine, and Hervé and others had memories of Josef and Henri, so there many ways in.

Martin: I do love the idea of a “reported history”—an oral history of sorts. It’s really a portrait of Josef in relation to his community, of the network of people who supported him in different ways, but also of the photo community itself, and especially in Europe at a particular time. Was that a conscious storyline that you pursued, or did it happen organically?

Harris: It was bound to happen because of what happened with Josef and Magnum. I knew that Magnum had helped distribute the Invasion 68: Prague work early on before he was a member, and that was a win-win for everybody: they had this remarkable body of work that nobody else had, and he became connected to this community. And then Elliott Erwitt, Marc Riboud, and Charles Harbutt and others helped Josef enormously. Henri Cartier-Bresson and David Hurn were like brothers to him. That sense of community at Magnum then, and in the photo community at large, was extraordinary.

Pages of Koudelka’s 1971 agenda noting travel schedules, color-coded by country Koudelka’s 2015 agenda

Martin: As you’re describing this process, it also underscores your own engagement and history with the field and with this community of people. You’re very clear in your positioning of yourself as the invested author, and that impacts the structure of the book to some degree. You’ve described how this is not a series-by-series retelling of an artist’s practice—because Josef is digressive in his approach to his own work. But can you talk a little bit more about the different structural approach that you wanted to bring to writing this as a nontraditional biography?

Harris: One thing that I thought, journalistically, is that I had to be completely transparent. In other words, it had to be clear that I had worked with Josef before, that I knew him. That’s why I write in the first person. I also wanted it to be clear when I entered his story. I am transparent about my own work with Josef previously—and also about his daughter Lucina’s presence throughout the book. Right from the start, Lucina was filming our conversations. I used her as a foil of sorts, both to help convey Josef’s emotionality, as well as to establish some chronological anchors.

At some point I also realized that I needed a breath every once in a while throughout the book. I needed a way catch the reader up or say where we were in time, because I wasn’t writing linearly. This is why there are sections I refer to as a “Pause.” It was a way to stop, step back, and say, “Okay, here we are. This is what we’re looking at.” For example, I had to jump ahead a little bit at the beginning, so the reader has an idea of who Josef is and what he’s known for, and then go back, and then move forward again, and then continue, back and forth. It’s like a cha-cha or something. The prologue and the epilogue function the same way.

Then there was my editor Diana Stoll’s suggestion that I write about some of Josef’s key work right at the beginning and just describe it. I preferred to get to the work gradually, but I understood her reasoning. Instead, I talked to Josef about the idea of an overture, where we show a selection of his signature images so that anybody who knows photography is going to immediately understand: “Oh, it’s this guy. The one who made that picture.” Josef called these his “icons.”

Josef Koudelka, Hand and wristwatch, Prague, August 1968 Josef Koudelka, Romania, 1968

Martin: Speaking of the iconography and the mythos of Josef as a figure, were there particular stories, apocryphal or otherwise, that you felt you wanted to really puncture, or bust?

Harris: I just wanted him to be human. The book isn’t a press release for Josef. I think it was Elliott Erwitt who told me that early on at Magnum they called him St. Josef for a while, in part because of the way he lived, and that he didn’t care about money. Josef has always and only cared about having the work the way he wants it, in terms of how it’s published, how it’s presented, how it’s contextualized, all of that.

But I didn’t want him to be godlike. In fact, at some point I got tired of the love fest I heard from people—and I say this with enormous fondness for Josef. For Josef to be interesting, he has to be human, and all of us humans are flawed. I needed to allow for his flaws, along with all the amazing things about him, to really write honestly, as best as I could, about who he is. Josef is difficult sometimes. He’s not the perfect partner for a woman, or the perfect father. He tries very hard to be a good friend. All of these things matter to him, and they’ve mattered more and more as he’s gotten older.

Martin: Was there anything that surprised you as the book evolved, or did your thinking change in any way about Josef or his work?

Harris: It wasn’t even that my thinking changed as much that I came to have an even greater appreciation of his work as I saw more, and understood it better. Projects like Gypsies and Exiles and the 1968 invasion and theater images work beautifully in a book: they’re immediate and intimate. I had found many of the Black Triangle and Ruins photos stunning, but I hadn’t yet wrapped my head around the panoramas as a whole. As I spent the time with them, they became formidable to me. For example, I saw a show in Bologna that François Hébel did at MAST, and I understood so much more; I thought they were so powerful. In Josef’s work, the images often inform or play off each other. They build to something. When you start seeing them together, you get something intense and profound.

Josef Koudelka, Black Triangle region (Ore Mountains), Czechoslovakia, 1991

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Martin: That’s another aspect of the book that I appreciated—how you make these connections by showing some of the panoramic images together in a way that emphasized the geometry and the construction of them, but that is also informed by the context and understanding you build into the narration. We learn about his background as an engineer, and how precise he is, along with all of the other details of what he cares about over time, which leads to a better understanding of the work.

Harris: Exactly. When I started really learning about his work, and especially the Black Triangle, but also his other panoramic commissions, I realized that a lot of what he’s looking at is “the hand of man” on the landscape, and its huge ecological implications. I hadn’t previously thought about it that way in part because a lot of the earliest panoramic projects had been collected and published in a very poetic way, but not really in terms of specific content—by Delpire in Chaos—which is sequenced formally. Looking at the images, you get a sense that at this moment in our Earth’s history, everything is a little out of alignment or out of balance. It’s tremendously evocative. But then to actually go through every project and see all the work that was done in each—no matter what the commission was—you realize that Josef’s not just capturing a changing landscape through industrialization, or a historical rupture, or urbanization, or whatever it might be. I came to understand that he is most often thinking about the ecological or environmental implications of these issues, which was interesting to me. I didn’t expect to go there in my thinking.

Josef Koudelka, Moravia (Strážnice), 1966 Josef Koudelka, Spain, 1971

Martin: Yes—by looking at the long arc of his practice, one really starts to get a sense of an ongoing set of concerns that he returns to time and time again, even if the work seems quite different on the surface.

Harris: I looked at his book Chaos, and I looked at the captions which are in the back. There are, for example, images made in Beirut and Auschwitz, and of the Berlin Wall. They had been organized via their formal composition, which is very much how Josef thinks, and how Delpire thought. The sequence of that book is spectacular. It’s wonderful. But it’s not about content; it’s about form. I needed to think more about content, because in a biography, you have to think about content. You’re thinking about where this guy is, what he’s looking at, and what are the consequences of what he is seeing and considering.

To pull out the picture of the Berlin Wall in what was East Berlin, and to think about him being there, after all these years of not being able to be in that part of Europe—and then to know that he also went to Auschwitz—you can’t help but think about how that would play into his perception of the Wall in Israel when he later photographed there. The benefit of going back into his work from a content-driven perspective was finding certain images that I had only looked at formally before, because that’s how they had been presented to me, then suddenly knowing, “Oh, this is what I am looking at” and understanding the relationship to where he was in time and what he’s photographing now.

Josef Koudelka: Next 50.00 The definitive and only authorized biography of Josef Koudelka—an intimate portrait of the life and work of one of photography’s most renowned and celebrated artists.

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Josef Koudelka: Next

By Melissa Harris. Photographs by Josef Koudelka. Designed by Aleš Najbrt.

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View cart Description The definitive and only authorized biography of Josef Koudelka—an intimate portrait of the life and work of one of photography’s most renowned and celebrated artists.

Throughout his more than sixty-year-long obsession with the medium, Josef Koudelka considers a remarkable range of photographic subjects—from his early theater work, to his seminal project on the Roma and his legendary coverage of the 1968 Soviet invasion of Prague, to the solitariness of exile and the often-devastating impact humans have had on the landscape. Josef Koudelka: Next embraces all of Koudelka’s projects and his evolution as an artist in the context of his life story and working process. Based on hundreds of hours of interviews conducted over the course of almost a decade with Koudelka—as well as ongoing conversations with his friends, family, colleagues, and collaborators worldwide—this deftly told, richly illustrated biography offers an unprecedented glimpse into the mind of this notoriously private photographer. Writer, editor, and curator Melissa Harris has independently crafted a unique, in-depth, and revelatory personal history of both the man and his photography.

Josef Koudelka: Next is richly illustrated with hundreds of photographs, including many biographical and behind-the-scenes images from Koudelka’s life, as well as iconic images from his work, from the 1950s to the present. The visual presentation is conceived in collaboration with Koudelka himself, as well as his longtime collaborator, Czech designer Aleš Najbrt.

Copublished by Aperture and Magnum Foundation Details

Format: Paperback / softback
Number of pages: 352
Number of images: 282
Publication date: 2023-11-21
Measurements: 7.25 x 9.5 inches
ISBN: 9781597114653

Press

“Melissa Harris’s visual biography, intriguingly titled Next, was written with his cooperation, and is a thorough and informative overview of his life and work. Rich in personal ephemera – family portraits, snapshots and glimpses of his many journals – it traces his trajectory from Boskovice, a small town in Moravia, where he had dreams of becoming an engineer, to his status as one of the world’s most revered photographers.”

Contributors

Melissa Harris is editor at large of Aperture and served as editor in chief of Aperture magazine from 2000 to 2012. Since 1990, she has also edited more than forty books for Aperture. Harris curates exhibitions worldwide, and teaches at New York University at the Tisch School of the Arts, in the department of Photography and Imaging / Emerging Media. She served on New York City’s Community Board 5 for several years, is a trustee of the John Cage Trust, and author of A Wild Life: A Visual Biography of Photographer Michael Nichols (Aperture, 2017).
Josef Koudelka (born in Moravia, Czech Republic, 1938) is a member of Magnum Photos and has received the Prix Nadar, Grand Prix National de la Photographie, HCB Award, and Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography. His work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art and International Center of Photography, New York; Hayward Gallery, London; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and Palais de Tokyo, Paris.
Aleš Najbrt studied typography and book design with Jan Solpera at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design, Prague. He was an art director of the influential Czech weekly Reflex and founder of his own magazine, Raut. With Pavel Lev, he cofounded Studio Najbrt.

Featured Content Interviews Koudelka's Prague, Fifty Years Later Featured Revisiting Josef Koudelka’s Photographs of Europe’s Roma Communities

Martin: Working with a living subject as a biographer is difficult. Did you have to establish some kind of ground rules going into it—as much as I understand you were interested in working with Josef and a collaborative approach?

Harris: The text was mine. He knew that. The rules were, at the beginning, I told him he cannot tell people what to say or what to think, and he can’t tell me not to use something because he doesn’t like it, because it was absolutely clear that he was going to be reading as we went along, and that he was going to be very involved in checking the facts. But he understood he couldn’t be censorious at all, and he was not inclined to be. Given the oppressiveness of the period in which he grew up, he does not want to tell people what they can and cannot express. And he was a man of his word. There were times he didn’t like what was said, and there are things he doesn’t like that are in the book, but he never tried to get me to take anything out.  

Figuring out the visuals, however, was always going to be a real collaboration in terms of both the picture research and the layout. For that, we were also working with Aleš Najbrt, his longtime Czech designer and collaborator. I knew this was going to be another type of challenge because I also had discussed with Josef early on that the book wasn’t conceived as a retrospective. He originally thought it would be structured more classically—like one of his retrospective publications: that there’d be an essay and the work would appear more in the order in which he had made it. I told him that, to the contrary, it was going to be text-driven and not always chronological, and that also there would be biographical images. He got excited, because Josef loves a challenge, a visual challenge. Once he understood what I meant, he was very engaged. He had not really worked in this way before, where there had to be a clear relationship between text and image.

Koudelka photographing atop a Soviet tank, Prague, August 1968. Photographer unknown
All photographs by Koudelka courtesy the artist/Magnum Photos Robert Delpire and Koudelka, 1978. Photograph by Sarah Moon
© the artist

Martin: I want to go back to that process of building trust with Josef. Just to mention that one of the other things that no doubt encouraged him to see you as a good collaborator was your prior work with Robert Delpire and his legacy. Can you tell us a little bit about that and if you think that was important?

Harris: With Josef, he likes it when people do what they say they’re going to do—when they’re very clear about what they can do and what they can’t do and why. I learned early on through other people I worked with, too, but especially with Josef, it’s better not to sugarcoat anything. What happened with me and Josef was that he came into Aperture one day. We hardly knew each other. He had done an interview with some magazine in English, and he wanted me to read it and correct it because he’d heard I was “smart.” At that time, he didn’t have a cell phone, and he wouldn’t give me his phone number where he was staying because he didn’t give it to anyone. He didn’t want anybody to call him. I couldn’t reach him. I remember finally saying to Josef, “If I have questions, if I can’t reach you, I can’t help you.” I told him I’d help him, and I did it, finally, and it worked.

After that interview, we were coming up to the anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Prague in 2008. I knew he was doing a book, gathering all of his work from that period for the first time, so I asked him if we could do an interview in the magazine—at that time, I was the editor of Aperture magazine—which he agreed to do. I also asked Josef if we could do a show at Aperture Gallery. At first, he said no. But after we had done the interview, I asked him again, and he said, “Well, maybe.” He’d already curated the show, basically. He’d selected the work, he had a sequence for it, so it became my role to figure out how to present it, install it—to produce it. We pulled certain texts from the book, which were original source materials just from what was going on in Prague at that time, radio reports and all that, and we used the same fonts and typefaces as the book, so there was a clear visual relationship. The installation was very cinematic. Aperture was kind enough to let me paint all the walls black; Josef let me blow up two or three of the works into big murals, which he had never done before, and he just really liked it. And because I kept him in the loop the entire time—showing him a mock-up, samples of the wall text, and everything else—I think we had some trust built up from that.

After that, he decided that I had to meet Robert Delpire. Bob was having this comprehensive show at Arles, which told the story of his work with publishing, exhibitions, advertising, films, and design—everything. Josef felt that that show should come to New York and thought I was the one to do it. So that was the next big thing, which I was able to deliver. I think that also helped with the trust. And then, through working on this book, we got to the point that as much as Josef will trust anyone, I think he trusts me now. At least I hope so.

Josef Koudelka: Next was published by Aperture in 2023.

How Gregory Halpern Found His Voice in Buffalo

Gregory Halpern has been making photographs in Buffalo, New York, the city where he grew up, for the last twenty years. You could say that Buffalo has been his muse. It’s also been his crucible. It’s a place known for pummeling blizzards and buffalo wings (invented at the Anchor Bar), the Erie Canal and the Martin House (designed by Frank Lloyd Wright), and, of course, the Buffalo Bills. (“Where else would you rather be,” the legendary Bills coach Marv Levy chanted back in 1986, “than right here, right now?”) For Gregory, Buffalo has been a fecund site for childhood exploration, and in his photographs, it is a vast stage across which finely etched characters cross for their cameos: bundled up, making out, climbing up a sledding hill, or lying naked in a silty stream. As the introduction to his solo exhibition 19 winters / 7 springs, curated by Phil Taylor and currently on view at the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, puts it, Buffalo is where “the appearance of everyday reality becomes both volatile and marvelous.”

Gregory’s brother, the journalist Jake Halpern, knows something about Buffalo characters too. He can give you a man’s profile in fifty-one words: “Adrian Paisley spends his days hunting for scrap metal: aluminum, brass and (holy of holies) copper. At 42, Paisley, who weighs just 135 pounds, is wiry and muscular. I once saw him move an old refrigerator by himself, hurling it onto his pickup truck as if it were made of Styrofoam.” That’s from Jake’s story for the New York Times Magazine about the scrap-metal industry. Gregory made the photographs. They’ve teamed up a few times, including for Jake’s rollicking Times Magazine article about freegan squatters. Jake has written about a safe house in Buffalo where refugees from around the world await passage to Canada. Welcome to the New World (2020), his twenty-part graphic series about a Syrian family establishing a new life in the US, with illustrations by Michael Sloan, won a Pulitzer Prize.

Installation view of Gregory Halpern: 19 winters / 7 springs, George Eastman Museum, 2023

Gregory and Jake left Buffalo as young men. There was a sense that in order to succeed, you had to leave. Gregory studied with the photographer Larry Sultan at the California College of the Arts. Jake wrote a book about debt collectors and was a Fulbright Scholar in India. Gregory’s photobook ZZYZX (2016)—about a desert town east of Los Angeles—heralded a new vogue for contemporary photography’s lyrical documentary style and won the Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook of the Year Award in 2016. It’s since become one of the most important photobooks of the last decade; the “Halpern effect” is evident in a generation of young photographers who have studied ZZYZX as though it were gospel. But ZZYZX, Gregory says, wouldn’t have been possible without Buffalo and the time he spent there—nineteen winters, to be exact—honing his voice. Selections from the Buffalo work were first published in Aperture’s “American Destiny” issue in 2017 (he also made the issue’s cover). In his interview with the magazine, Gregory notes that “certain people would say the city is dying, but it’s also continually being born.”

19 winters / 7 springs was presented at the Transformer Station in Cleveland before traveling to Rochester, where Gregory now lives and teaches. Last year, just before Christmas, I spoke with Gregory and Jake about the exhibition. They were together at a cabin in the Adirondacks. “It’s kind of like a guys’ trip this time,” Gregory said. They looked at Gregory’s pictures and spoke about Buffalo with both the fondness and distanced critique that comes from being away for so long. “There are things about your home that you feel forever bound to,” Jake, who now lives in New Haven, said. Yet the city calls them back, continually. As I listened to the Halpern brothers speak about their lives and work in Buffalo, I thought perhaps they never really left.

Brendan Embser: I grew up south of Buffalo, on the border of New York and Pennsylvania, but I haven’t actually been to Buffalo in years, so the key images in my mind are probably the most obvious ones, like the Galleria Mall or the Anchor Bar—or Canisius High School, where we used to go for debate tournaments. So, just to start off, I wonder if you could talk about your upbringing in Buffalo and how the city shaped your worldview.

Gregory Halpern: I’ve always found Buffalo kind of magical, which I realize to some people might sound like a ridiculous statement. I often think about when we were kids, exploring buildings. There were some key amazing buildings that I often think about as the source of my interest in where “realism” and “surrealism” come together. When we were teenagers, we would go to the old psychiatric center where you used to be able to just wander into the building. It was abandoned, but you could go in. Or the old central train terminal. They almost felt like pilgrimages to me. We made little documentaries of our explorations, with this old VHS camcorder. Jake, I don’t know if you have the same sort of feeling about those memories?

Jake Halpern: I totally remember that. I feel like we would get a little crew of friends together and then organize a visit.

Gregory: Were those impactful?

Jake: Yeah. To me, it felt like a version of Dungeons & Dragons. The premise of Dungeons & Dragons is that a group of explorers goes to the outskirts of the town where the ruins are and looks for treasures. One time we were in the Buffalo Psychiatric Center, and a sudden rainstorm came overhead, and because the roof was out, the stairwell was turned into roaring rapids. It was crazy. I think that if you’re growing up in a Midwestern town, and all of a sudden you can go to a place that feels like you’re on the set of Stranger Things—even though Stranger Things didn’t exist then—that was the feeling.

Brendan: Did you grow up in Buffalo proper, or the suburbs?

Gregory: We grew up in an area called North Buffalo. It was near Delaware Park, and there were a lot of beautiful old houses. It was definitely a far cry from the kind of places we’re describing. There weren’t like, ruins around us. It took a while to even kind of know that part of the city existed. I don’t think it was until we were teenagers that we could start to find these places that felt on the periphery of our maps.

Brendan: What is your relationship to Buffalo, now that you no longer live there?

Gregory: Growing up, I feel like there was this notion that if you’re going to “succeed,” you should leave. That’s less so now, because the city is having a bit of a renaissance. But I also remember being sort of pulled back there continually—photographically. I felt like I had something to share, or that I knew something about this place. The further away I got from it, the more unique I realized it felt.

Jake: To be honest, my relationship with Buffalo is complicated in the way that people’s relationships with home often are. There are things about your home that you’re eager to get away from, and there are things about your home that you feel forever bound to. I think it’s taken me much of my adult life to sift through those two opposing dynamics.

We moved there as transplants, because my dad got a job at the university there, and so we didn’t have deep roots in the city. We didn’t have any family there. We had friends, but they were friends that we made as we were growing up, and I never felt a deep connectedness when I was younger in the way that maybe some of our friends did. I think that when I left, like many young people who leave their homes, there was a kind of exhilaration and being out in the great world and thinking, Oh, where I come from is very small, and isn’t it great to see the wideness of the world?

I don’t ever feel like a total insider or a total outsider in Buffalo. But I think that’s been key to me—to have both insider knowledge, but also a little bit of distance.

Yet, as I’ve gotten older, I’m often surprised by the fact that the place has more meaning to me than I even admitted to myself, and like Greg, I’ve come back for stories. Many of the stories I’ve written are Buffalo-based stories: my book Bad Paper (2014), about the debt-collection industry; pieces I’ve written in the New Yorker about the refugees coming through Buffalo; the scrap-metal industry written for the New York Times Magazine. I think, in part, as a writer, the world of stories that are New York–based or LA-based or Chicago-based or Miami-based is just overpopulated, and Buffalo is this greatly overlooked place, but one that I think people are also curious about. It’s a place now that I both know and don’t know. But the older I get, the more I realize that it’s not just someplace in my rearview mirror that I left at eighteen and has nothing to do with me.

Brendan: Where did your family move from?

Jake: My dad and my mom were New Yorkers. Even though I was born in Buffalo, I just didn’t feel of that place. Another layer here is that we are Jews. There is a Jewish population in Buffalo, but it’s in the suburbs. I often say at our high school, City Honors, of one thousand people, I would bet there were maybe no more than ten Jews?

Gregory: Oh, I don’t think it was that many.

Jake: Yeah. Not that we were super-religious or anything. But that also added, for me, a slight otherness feeling.

Gregory: Totally.

Jake: We’ve both become tellers of stories, in a way, whose lives are dependent on being able to talk to people from very different walks of life. Greg had that at a much younger age than I did. He had a very easy time crossing barriers of race, class, clique, in a way that’s pretty unusual for high school. I found my small group of people where I felt I belonged in high school, and I didn’t venture out of that. It wasn’t until later on in my life—maybe even the era when I started returning to Buffalo as a storyteller—when I learned both the ability and also the joy of crossing those divides and telling other people’s stories.

Brendan: Did your parents end up feeling rooted in Buffalo?

Gregory: Our parents split up when I left for college. I’m the younger one. Our mom moved back to New York City, and our dad stayed in Buffalo. He’s totally fallen in love head over heels with Buffalo.

Jake: Our mom kept our house that we grew up in on Woodbridge Avenue for many years. Initially, it was nice to have that house, because there was a place to come home to. But she eventually sold it and built another house in western Massachusetts with Paul, our stepdad. Home is a weird idea. You can hold on to the shell of the house, even when it no longer serves a purpose because you’re tethered by all the memories that exist there. Sometimes you hold on to it so tightly because you want it, but it’s not home anymore, and you really need it to be someplace else. I relate to that kind of tug and pull.

Installation views of Gregory Halpern: 19 winters / 7 springs, George Eastman Museum, 2023

Brendan: That presents a fascinating reading of the three-dimensional work in Greg’s exhibition—the houses with the photographs of the solar eclipses on the interior. Greg, do you feel there’s a psychological aspect to this idea of home as both a shelter, but also as a place from which to look out—to dream of other ways of living?

Gregory: I like that reading. A home is where you sleep, and also where you dream. It’s one of those aspects of life that photography sometimes can’t get to. I was also just thinking about the very simple fact that photographs record the surface of things, literally—like light bouncing off the surface of a thing. Metaphorically, sometimes they only do that, and then sometimes they go deeper. I was thinking about those internal worlds, like the inside of a house that you want to know about, or inside of a person’s dream world that you can’t see with photographs.

Brendan: At what point along the many years of this project did you begin making those 3D works?

Gregory: I made the first house, a little tiny one, over ten years ago now. But it was all four sides. It looked cool, but it looked like a miniature, like a toy or a model, and it didn’t really feel like a work of art. Then, somewhere along the line—I don’t know if I was building it or taking it apart—I had to build two walls at a time. I saw a huge gaping hole in the middle of this house. That’s when this idea occurred to me that seeing the inside was maybe more interesting than just replicating the thing around all four sides.

Jake: To a child, your physical house is your world. It is your universe. On the outside, it may just look like clapboard, but inside, the memories of all the things you’ve explored and discovered for the first time, all the holidays, all the foods you’ve tasted—it’s this kind of wondrous space. It is the universe. I thought your sculptures captured that feeling.

Brendan: The exhibition is called 19 winters / 7 springs. Did you sense at the outset that this would be a long-term endeavor?

Gregory: I started the work when I was in graduate school in California. I was really struggling. Larry Sultan was my advisor, and he pulled me aside and he said, “I think you might need a third year.” It was a two-year program, and I wasn’t going to graduate because I couldn’t find anything in California to photograph. I had nothing to say. I had no idea what to do. But the one thing I feel like I’ve got to offer, or to say that I can claim as my own, was going back to Buffalo in winter. So I took a month in between the semesters, sort of in a panic, and I went back and I photographed every day in winter. That was nineteen years ago. That’s what inspired the title. But the oldest pictures in the book came from that winter.

Brendan: And that’s what pushed you over the finish line for graduate school?

Gregory: Yeah. I was able to get my diploma. Although in retrospect, I feel like a third year with Larry would have been great.

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Brendan: As someone from Western New York, my first interpretation of the title was that there were only seven springs, meaning it was so cold for those nineteen years that you only got seven warm seasons.

Gregory: I mean, in a way, yeah, it kind of is that! I first thought of the project as being about Buffalo and winter, because to me, that’s when the city earns its identity, and there’s a really unique feeling there in winter. But then I realized that it was more interesting to mix the other seasons, to create more dynamism in the work.

Jake: I never actually heard you say that, Greg. I didn’t know that when you were out in California, you were struggling to find what your work would be, and you went back to Buffalo. I feel like I’ve done that same thing many times. You want to tell a story, but you ask yourself, What story am I qualified to tell? What story hasn’t been told? When you’re going home to a place, even if you haven’t been there in a long time, there’s some sense of, well, this is my home. I’m not a stranger. When you tell a story, whether it’s through pictures or words, you’re basically an interpreter of place, but you also need to have left that place. I think that’s the commonality between my brother and I—we’re both, in our own ways, interpreters of Buffalo. Which is not to say that we know it better than anyone else. I haven’t lived there in almost thirty years. But maybe what gives me the sense is that I can—or that we can do that.

Brendan: Thanks for saying that. I was also thinking, Jake, about your reporting for the New Yorker on Vive, a shelter in Buffalo that supports asylum seekers. Can you talk about that experience?

Jake: The Vive story came to me through a mutual friend of Greg and ours from high school, Tara Lynch. I was visiting Tara in Austin, Texas, and she said that Vive was almost like an Underground Railroad for refugees. Again, you see the similarity between me and Greg in our worldviews. It felt mysterious and kind of magical, this idea that there’s a secret network that goes through Buffalo into Canada.

Gregory: Jake, you should say a word about who the refugees are. And our family connection to the refugee experience. It’s not related to Buffalo, our family history, but I think it’s related to how we both see the world.

Jake: At the time, Vive was inhabiting an old school building that had been in a significantly abandoned part of Buffalo. These migrants, some of whom were refugees, were hoping to continue to Canada and claim political asylum.

Gregory: Where were they coming from?

Jake: Their paths were incredible. Some could fly to the US on a tourist visa, and they would show up at Vive and get asylum. Others were coming from Eritrea, then ending up in South America, going overland via South America through Central America, showing up at the Mexican border, asking for asylum there, and then coming to Buffalo—all because when they were back in their native land of Eritrea or Mongolia or wherever, someone had told them they could get to this house in Buffalo. That was the part of the story that just blew my mind. But to Greg’s point: Our families were very much immigrants. My great-grandfather stowed away in a boat to come to America. So I think there’s a sense of connectedness to the Vive story, to the sense that an immigrant could end up in a far-flung outpost like Buffalo.

Gregory: Totally.

Brendan: Greg, I’m so intrigued to hear this story about your time in graduate school and your impulse to return to Buffalo. You made a photographic essay over many years about your hometown, but I don’t see it as autobiographical. It’s not full of snapshots or excavations of your family’s past. There’s a lot of restraint in the scenes you chose, and in your decision not to deal with very specific family memories, but to look at Buffalo in the widest possible way. Can you talk about that approach?

Gregory: That’s a great question. I was just looking at the pictures with Jake. There were two pictures that were made, actually, on our high-school playground, that are up now at Eastman, and there are some places and people that we have connections to. But I never wanted to make it specific or personal that way. It just never interested me, and I didn’t think that it would be interesting to others to make it too much about me. I guess it’s about a way of seeing. It’s about feeling my way through the city. In that sense, I feel it’s deeply personal. Somehow, I don’t fully see it until I actually go make pictures of it.

Brendan: It’s like what you said, Jake, about coming back to a place and having a perspective simply because now you’re an outsider.

Jake: There’s one picture in particular that stood out, of a house that’s surrounded by a red-brick building. It’s winter, and the street looks kind of desolate, and there’s snow on the roof. I looked at the photograph, and I did, like, a shiver, like, “Ooh!” It reminded me of this feeling of childhood and Buffalo. There could be, in the depths of winter, this kind of barrenness that not just made you feel cold, didn’t just chill your bones, but made you feel a kind of deep loneliness of trudging through a place that is a little bit forgotten by time.

Brendan: There is something poignant about the way that house seems to be crowded by a school or a municipal building of some sort, but it’s also very clearly a two-family house, because the staircase that’s covered in snow going up to the second floor appears to be the entry to the upstairs apartment. And no one has shoveled out the snow yet, which is a very familiar feeling for Western New York. The other one that struck me is a very modest but lovely little house where there are tulips in front, but also snow on the grass. To me, that’s quintessential Buffalo.

Gregory: I’m so glad you noticed the tulips because I always worry that they get missed. But yeah, that was an amazing moment.

Brendan: Greg, did you feel that the Buffalo work began to give you your photographic language that you later brought to your projects in California and elsewhere? It’s so interesting that you said that you didn’t have anything to say about California, and then you then went on to make XXYZX, an iconic project about a very specific place in California.

Gregory: XXYZX was the project where I finally found my voice. In a way, I’ve kind of continued in that tradition since. That took seven or eight years after I moved to California to figure out that I had something to say, and that’s where ZZYZX came from. I was living back in the East Coast when I did that ZZYZX work, and I was living in California when I started the Buffalo work. I think this gets back to what you were saying, Jake: there’s something really helpful about being both an insider and an outsider. I don’t know if the writing world is like this, but the photography world sometimes has this, I think, oversimplified language. Are you a photojournalist outsider? Or are you an insider making work about an identity or an experience that you can claim as your own? There’s a lot of fascinating and important work that sits somewhere in the middle. I don’t ever feel like a total insider or a total outsider in Buffalo. But I think that’s been key to me—to have both insider knowledge, but also a little bit of distance.

All photographs by Gregory Halpern, Untitled, from the series 19 winters / 7 springs, 2003–2023
Courtesy the artist

Jake: When I saw ZZYZX, I was absolutely blown away because I felt it was a quantum leap forward in your vision and your craft. You basically, to my mind, found a sun-drenched version of Buffalo in Los Angeles. All those themes that were there in Buffalo—the surrealness; the hints of the apocalypse; the biblical, wandering characters with their beards; all this stuff—you found it in this other place. And I had been to LA a lot, but I had never seen it through that lens. This is the lens of Buffalo being trained on some other world, creating some incredible original projection. I think that we both owe Buffalo a lot, in our own ways. It has taught us about the kind of characters and the stories that appeal to us. And it’s really powerful to see what that lens looks like when it’s moved somewhere else.

Gregory Halpern: 19 Winters / 7 Springs is on view at the George Eastman Museum, Rochester, New York, through March 3, 2024.

Nabil Harb Seeks Mystery and Community in Central Florida

In Polk County, Florida, Nabil Harb arranges his calendar around nights when the light turns green at dusk, how the shadows look blue in spring, or how the cicadas start to hum as the temperature reaches a hundred degrees. To live here is to know the feeling of humidity enveloping you like a duvet in July. To know in what oak hammocks you’ll find butterfly orchids blooming by May. And to count the seconds between lightning strikes and thunder in August. More than five and you’ll be fine.

Then, come September, Polk County’s creeks, rivers, and trickling branches of sweet water swell. The Green Swamp at the northern edge of the county collects the remnants of the afternoon storms before that water moves south into the Peace River as it wends its way into the Gulf of Mexico. For Harb, those veins of water that course through Polk County, alongside 554 lakes, form a map he’s been tracing all his life. With a camera, he’s started to draw his own maps, as did William Faulkner in his fictional Yoknapatawpha County, William Christenberry in Hale County, or Zora Neale Hurston next door in Orange County.

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Harb left his hometown three times, living in Boston, New York, and New Haven. And like many Southerners, he returned home three times—putting stakes down between the urban sprawl of Tampa Bay and the edge of the Everglades’ headwaters just south of Orlando. “I moved back because I don’t like being that far from my concerns,” he tells me. Often, folks told him, “You’re gay. You need to move to New York,” as if he couldn’t be himself at home. “I hate that,” he says.

Here, everything is growing, green as ever, always. The live oaks are ancient, the sites of treaties, lynchings, and produce stands. Bends in the river call up Indigenous history, archaeology, and colonialism. In making a photograph, Harb wants you to feel how wet it is, the fog of mosquitoes, the mist rising off the ground. He wants people to better understand what rural places once were and are becoming, to know there’s good and bad in Bartow, taciturn and queer in Eloise, this and that in Frostproof. He wants others “to actually see this place, rather than the stereotypes or easy metaphors.” Beneath the headlines generated by lawmakers’ political ambitions, past the policies that target the most vulnerable and most vital minorities in Florida, Harb gives a nod to the deep well of mystery here, to a place full of people as hopeful as they are complicated.

Nabil Harb, Allegra, 2019 Nabil Harb, Pulse Exterior (Lakeland), 2019

His parents, both Palestinians who left Nazareth, made lives together in Lakeland, Florida, but for Harb, who was raised there, the roads and rivers now seem bound up in his bones. Growing up brown, Muslim, and queer in central Florida set him apart from the good ole boys, but, he states softly, “I am just as much a part of this place.”

A year after the 2016 murder of forty-nine people at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Harb started photographing his local gay bar in Lakeland. The work he made there was the product of questions, or a way to ask them. But as he explains, you arrive with one set of questions and leave haunted by another. These photographs, which began in earnest six years ago, have become inextricably, although not deliberately, engaged with what’s happening in Florida and throughout America today.

And as in the photographs he was making all around Polk County—say, the bugs at dusk in the Green Swamp, or his friend Clay in the cab of a truck painted in mud—he focused on the quieter details inside the bar, capturing gestures, the sense that life was being lived and celebrated. His life. Here were the queens who formed the heart of the performances, but here, also, were the people sitting at the back of the bar, his friends, the ones who lent this building and this part of America its character. As he tells me, “You should see the people.”

Nabil Harb, Dani, 2018 Nabil Harb, J & J, 2019
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Nabil Harb, Vape, 2021 Nabil Harb, Northside, 2020 Nabil Harb, Python, 2022
All photographs courtesy the artist Nabil Harb, Carter Road, 2019

This article originally appeared in Aperture, issue 253, “Desire.”

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, 2016
Courtesy 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, 2022
Courtesy the artist B. Ingrid Olson, Shuttle, 2015–16
Courtesy 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

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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, 2019
Courtesy 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.”

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.”

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, 2022
Courtesy the artist

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, 2006

O’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, 2009
All 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.

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 World

Photographs 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

Contributors

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, 1951

The 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, 1955
All 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 MagersEricka 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, 1900
Courtesy 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, 1977–78
Courtesy the artist and Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York Erik Kessels, Carlo e Luciana, In almost every picture 17, 2021
Courtesy 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, 1994–2002
Courtesy 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.