Aperture's Blog, page 22

The Creative Power of Barbara Ess

Toward the back of White Columns’s outstanding recent exhibition Barbara Ess – Archives—past the photo of a baby whose chimerical eyes interrupt an otherwise glazed expression, past flyers advertising outrageously stacked lineups of bands at legendary New York City clubs—two typed white pages hang on a wall. Each is undated. Each is titled, in capital letters, STATEMENT. The one on the right begins with a one-line paragraph: “The natural subject of photography is voyeurism.” The one on the left repeats the same thing. Except, in Ess’s red pencil, a spiral almost closes itself around the word voyeurism. A circle fully traps the word natural, which Ess also pencils within quotation marks. Another red line leashes it to a large question mark.

Installation view of Barbara Ess – Archive, White Columns, New York, 2023

Words like natural and voyeurism seem germane to the life and work of Barbara Ess. Before her death in 2021, she played a crucial role in establishing downtown Manhattan as both scene and a style. In an ecosystem of big lofts, low rent, and high ambitions, Ess blossomed. That’s her in those band posters; in the feminist trio Y Pants, she and the artist Virginia Piersol and the filmmaker Gail Vachon played Mickey Mouse drum kits and kiddie-size pianos for what was fittingly advertised as “amplified toy rock,” at CBGB and the epochal 1981 Noise Fest—a nine-day marathon at White Columns’s previous location on Spring Street, organized by Thurston Moore in part to debut his new band, Sonic Youth. Ess kept excellent binders of this ephemera and asked the writer and curator Kirby Gookin to hold a parallel, backup archive.

Detail of Barbara Ess – Archive, 2023

The Archives exhibition pins the contents of those binders to the gallery’s walls, which, after all, are flyers’ natural habitat. Certain kinds of people built certain kinds of lives assessing these kinds of layered invitations; the walls of bars were social calendars. Walking past their recreations, I wonder if I would have been invited, would have gone, would have met someone and lost them. At the entrances of the kind of record store that would sell Y Pants’ music, flyers used to pile up like Félix González-Torres mounds, never seeming to lose their mass as if they were themselves alive. All this ephemeral is melancholic. I’m grateful it survived. And I feel I’m somehow eavesdropping.

Details of Barbara Ess – Archive, 2023

Ess made things of what she saw people doing on all those nights out: a publication called Just Another Asshole (JAA). Edited with her longtime partner, the experimental-music linchpin Glenn Branca, JAA quickly became a who’s who of the downtown scene. The pair invited artists—among them Kathy Acker, Barbara Kruger, David Wojnarowicz, Lynne Tillman—to do whatever the hell they wanted on its newsprint pages or within a cassette tape. JAA was a mixed-media zine that could take most any format. In terms of chronology, ambition, and result, you could slip it between publications such as File and Visionaire. At White Columns, a display table offers a 1987 Village Voice review of issue seven by Vince Aletti, which quotes Ess saying that the zines “aren’t about craft, they’re about sensibility.” Aletti eyes the issue’s photographic contributions by Louise Lawler and Laurie Simmons, writing, “The new portraitists use the medium as a distancing device, subverting the notion of sympathetic portraiture by refusing to pierce the façade.” Today, that kind of po-faced posing seems like the birth of a New York style, one that has sympathy for the notion that a facade is as close to the truth as you can get.

Barbara Ess, Portrait of Cookie Mueller, n.d.
Courtesy the estate of Barbara Ess and Magenta Plains, New York

The exhibition presents just one example of the pinhole photography Ess later became known for, as Aperture published a monograph of this work in 2001, and, more recently, Magenta Plains gallery has begun exhibiting the pictures. But this example is a doozy: The undated Portrait of Cookie Mueller centers the writer and actor in a circle of light like a Renaissance saint. Mueller turns over tarot cards for an unseen subject. The inquisitive light of the pinhole makes it all but impossible to look away. Mueller couldn’t have known how soon her own life would be extinguished nor how subsequent generations would take her up as a role model and icon. Perhaps in this pinhole, Mueller is peeping into a similar cult-hero future for Ess.

Detail of Barbara Ess – Archive, 2023. All installation views courtesy the estate of Barbara Ess and White Columns, New York. Photographs by Marc Tatti

And it came true: as AIDS and gentrification ravaged the downtown scene, Ess joined the radical feminist group Women’s Action Coalition (WAC) in 1992. Its mission statement, displayed on a table next to a pamphlet emblazoned with WAC’s eye-catching logo of an eye with the acronym arranged into an iris, reads, in part, “We will exercise our full creative power to launch a visible and remarkable resistance.” WAC taught women and other feminists that what matters isn’t only that you organize, but how you organize. Sensibility is political. Ess spent the next two decades as a professor in the photography program at Bard College. A sample classroom assignment in the show is titled “Tell Us Something About Yourself.” Twenty-six prompts follow, including “Use the photograph to bring us closer. Use the photograph as your mother. Use the photograph as your lover. Use the photograph to keep us away.” Barbara Ess – Archives uses her photographs, uses what she made, to tell us about herself, and how all the playing around downtown became a posture, then a politic, then a pedagogy. She made it feel like a natural progression, and it deserves a look.

Barbara Ess – Archives was on view at White Columns, New York, from September 12 through October 21, 2023.

Sally Mann, Edmund de Waal, and a Dialogue about Formalism

To light, and then return—, an exhibition of photographs by Sally Mann and sculptures by Edmund de Waal at Gagosian’s bookstore gallery on Madison Avenue, is a formalist pas de deux between two old friends. The pair are also both Gagosian artists; they met after a third, Cy Twombly, gave Mann a copy of de Waal’s memoir, The Hare with Amber Eyes (2010). Perhaps nudged by their dealer (Gagosian previously paired Mann with Deana Lawson), each artist presents work specifically inspired by the other’s: Mann has produced gauzy still lifes of small, often indistinct objects, while de Waal, a self-described potter, has emphasized the pictorial presentation of his grisaille porcelain works.

Although the objects Mann photographs aren’t literally de Waal’s pieces, her compositions often hang on ambiguous, shadowy cylinders and paper-thin rectangles, echoing his vocabulary of forms. De Waal has composed groups of upright tubes roughly the size of candle holders, small sheets and blocks of various porcelains and metals, in wall-mounted shadowboxes or on plinths pushed to the wall to limit your view to a “front”—as if anticipating the sculptures’ lives as images.

Left: Edmund de Waal, untitled (an exchange of territory, or world) (detail), 2023. Photograph by Alzbeta Jaresova; right: Sally Mann, Platinum, Stone #10 (detail), 2022. Photograph by Rob McKeever

The two artists also echo one another materially. De Waal has incorporated slivers of platinum and silver, the elements that make Mann’s prints possible, into his arrangements (as well as Corten steel, the stuff of Richard Serra). Mann, through the positive tintype process, invokes a kind of sculptural imperfection: no two tintypes will ever be exactly alike, and where the collodion and silver nitrate have been unevenly applied, the images bear an extra layer of materiality—scratches, blotches, and blooms. Mann approached photo processes with the eye of an object maker; De Waal approached sculpture like an image maker.

For Mann’s part, a career of technical exploration manifests here in two distinct modes: eight still lifes are platinum prints, a remarkably detailed process; another eighteen are tintypes, dim and roughshod. Mann’s early portraits of her children (1984–1992) often used shallow depth of field to highlight details, a stain or a lock of hair, but the glass plate collodion process she employed beginning in 1997 can’t help but evoke death. If you don’t know already, you eventually learn that what looks like a simple wood or clearing or hill is a Civil War battlefield or a graveyard or a waystation for escaped enslaved people. As a reinvigoration of the genre of landscape photography, the misty necromancy of hand-coated negatives and, in the Blackwater series (2008–12), tintypes, is surprisingly effective for Mann’s gothic style of conceptualism.

Crudely speaking, these latest and most abstract, murky pictures of objects complete entwined career arcs of aging and abstraction, from childhood to the grave. Not that Mann is done making images—or objects—but she has moved through the search for subject matter into a search for space within the mediums that constitute classical photography. It almost doesn’t matter what objects Mann’s photographs depict—only that there are in fact objects, bits of marble or a cracked cup, light gilding a broken ring or a swooping edge, variegating the final composition.

Sally Mann, Tintype, Still Life #43, 2020. Photograph by Rob McKeeverEdmund de Waal, salt, axe, stars (for O.M), II (detail), 2023. Photograph by Alzbeta Jaresova

Similarly, de Waal’s frontal arrangements of deep gray ceramics and irregular ingots, with the occasional porcelain flash of white, use objects (actual, physical) to play within and accent a delimited palette. Earlier this year, these same walls exhibited silver and sepia-toned prints by filmmaker Bennett Miller, generated, in a nostalgic mode, entirely by AI.

The tintype process Mann employs, like the glass plate negatives she turned to in the 1990s, has not changed much since the 19th century—and carries its own leaden nostalgia. Many lesser artists have been seduced by “alt process,” where a kind of imprecise, hand-done, even “painterly” mode of printing or making photographs (doing them badly) promises to transform a boring subject into fine art. Mann, obviously, knows what she’s doing. These tintypes are masterful formal studies, sometimes gently pictorial and sometimes washed free of depiction. Most are printed darkly, sometimes to the point of abstraction, and while they are nominally indexical the emphasis falls on their imprecision and mystery. The “flaws” of an unpredictable process add ripples to sometimes bleak and blocky pictures.

Installation view of Edmund de Waal and Sally Mann, to light, and then return—, at Gagosian, New York, 2023. Photograph by Rob McKeever

The abstractions of Mann’s battlefield photos rely on the realization of what they depict—mood only takes you so far—and it’s safe to say that the de Waal–inspired still lifes also benefit from a nod to the friendship that occasioned them. And perhaps it’s de Waal’s stark formalism that pushed the present tintypes to a level of abstraction that exceeds this biographical (historical) underpinning to emphasize process above all. In this sense, more than photos of objects, they are objects themselves.

The platinum prints, meanwhile, are pale, delicate, reveling in high-contrast arrangements of scuffed, off-white forms, often bits of gravestones. In one, a square column rests on a thick sheet of white material; another, particularly finely wrought, centers a dark, brightly striated obelisk. Many of them include what seems to be paper with torn or deckled edges: a particularly elegant work shows a smudged scrap of material leaning against a larger scrap, cropped in a way that flips between micro and macro, two bits of stationary or two chunks of wall. This, too, is a modernist approach to process, since platinum prints are prized for the way the grain lays directly on the substrate (unlike silver gelatin, there’s no gel), and for its subtle tonal range. Again, Mann is depicting the way the medium depicts.

Sally Mann, Platinum, Stone #22, 2022. Photograph by Rob McKeever
All photographs © the artists and courtesy Gagosian

The formal correspondences in the two bodies of work (vertical form here, vertical form there; the recurrence of paper-like forms) stand for the formal correspondence between two friends. There is another degree of correspondence: Several of de Waal’s shadowboxes include slivers of porcelain covered with raised handwriting, apparently a reference to the Emily Dickinson poem that gives the show its title. Again, the backstory is sentimental: the poet wrote these verses on a torn envelope.

to light, and then return—is on view at Gagosian, New York, through October 28, 2023.

A Young Photographer’s Poetic View of Everyday Life in Ghana

The warm orange glow of the streetlight in Early Risers I (2021), the photographer Kay Kwabia’s atmospheric image of daybreak in Sekondi-Takoradi, tipped me off. Its soft emission fused with the incandescent car headlights to illuminate a corner of the dimly lit street. That light, spilling onto the cream-colored building, prompted me to sift through my bookshelves, where I pulled Ayi Kwei Armah’s 1968 novel The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born. In the first scene of the Ghanaian writer’s sharp and cynical debut about a fledgling postcolonial nation, a driver disembarks from a bus and tries to light a cigarette: “The head refused to catch, however; there was only the humid orange glow as the driver resignedly threw away the stick and took out another.”

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Is it a coincidence that Armah and Kwabia, whose image wrested my attention, share not only a home country but a city? Maybe. Still, it feels apt that Armah was born in Sekondi-Takoradi, the twin metropolis where Kwabia, who now lives in Accra, spent his formative years and credits with shaping his visual language. The blues and greens of the port city can be found throughout Kwabia’s mellow representations of Ghana. They are in the awning and trash bins of Early Risers II (2021), taken during a morning stroll. In two pictures titled Play with Your Food (2020), green vibrates from kontomire leaves, which hold drying dandelions resting against a sliced mango in one image and serves as the background for Kwabia’s aunt’s gold earrings in the other.

Kay Kwabia, Early Risers II, Sekondi, 2021

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Kwabia does not live in Armah’s Ghana, which was a transitory space between colonial rule and democratic promise, but his images operate on a similar poetic register as the author’s writing. Compared to Armah, the photographer has a more optimistic view of the nation, now sixty-six years independent. Kwabia focuses on the beauty of quotidian living in Accra and its nearby cities, finding dreamscapes where others might see only harsh realities. In Early Risers II, Kwabia highlights a pair of trees in Sekondi-Takoradi. Backdropped by the water, the woody plants watch the city shake off its slumber.

Kwabia’s way of seeing might have something to do with his early childhood in Kwahu Plateau, where he was surrounded by the natural world. When he started taking photographs on a smartphone in 2013, he was drawn to capturing insects and plants. The switch to more sophisticated digital cameras only clarified his desire to seek out peacefulness and follow his aesthetic sensibilities. Ghana, to Kwabia, is synonymous with beauty, and his relatively young practice makes that clear. Projects are guided by instinct, boredom, and fancy. Earlier pictures experiment with the earth and its tones, while later ones proudly gamble with more vibrant colors. The results, whether staged still lifes, fashion portraits, or landscapes, are always refreshing: they tickle the senses, activate the imagination, and soothe the soul.

Kay Kwabia, Play with Your Food, Koforidua, 2022
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Kay Kwabia, Oba x Essien, Accra, 2021
All photographs courtesy the artist

This article originally appeared in Aperture, issue 252, “Accra.”

The James Webb Space Telescope’s Vision of the Cosmos

In the mid-nineteenth century, William Henry Fox Talbot, one of the inventors of photography, proposed a cutting-edge experiment. Scientists were beginning to study light beyond human vision, light we now describe as infrared and ultraviolet, and Talbot conceived of a way to photograph with these invisible rays. Although photography was less than a decade old, and he never tried the method himself, Talbot was confident that “the eye of the camera would see plainly where the human eye would find nothing but darkness.” Jump forward to the twenty first century, and images from the James Webb Space Telescope deliver on that promise. The telescope, which was launched into orbit in 2021 and relies on methods that echo those proposed by Talbot, observes infrared light with seemingly impressive ease, and its vividly colored, highly detailed images show us what had previously been hidden from view. But to depict what the infrared camera sees plainly requires another jump, a leap from detecting the presence of light to translating it for our eyes.

Hubble Space Telescope, 2014 Hubble WFC3/UVIS Image of M16 (detail), January 5, 2015
Courtesy NASA

With its view of the Pillars of Creation, the Webb revisits a star-forming region in the Eagle Nebula made familiar by Hubble Space Telescope images. But now we see more—more of everything. The three immense columns of gas and dust glow with silvery light, highlighted by areas in brilliant red. With close study, one finds stunningly complex and detailed forms within the columns. These are not monoliths but vast and varied topographies that invite exploration. The sky in the background is decorated with an array of colors: deep blue in the lower left, violets and purples in the middle, and fiery orange along the top. And stars, thousands of points of light in various sizes and hues, speckle the entire field of view.

The appearance of these images depends on careful choices by astronomers and image processors, who adjust contrast, clean up flaws, and choose how to orient the celestial scenes. These decisions help to make evident the scientifically interesting aspects of the observations. They also align these views of distant nebulae, stars, and galaxies with our aesthetic standards and expectations, the visual language we have learned through looking at pictures of our world. The ideal translation then reads in two tongues, as scientifically valid and aesthetically compelling.

James Webb Space Telescope, Pillars of Creation (NIRCam and MIRI Composite Image), November 30, 2022
Courtesy NASA

The delicate balance of science and aesthetics is most evident in the colors. The Webb’s cameras record monochromatic observations, each taken through a filter that registers light at a particular wavelength. To create a color image, astronomers and image processors digitally combine at least three different observations together, assigning a unique hue to each one. The relative wavelengths guide the color choices: typically, blue is assigned to the observation that corresponds to the shortest wavelength of light, red to the one at the longest wavelength, and green to the one in the middle. When image processors follow the convention exactly, colors can make visible the physical properties of the nebula for those who know the key.

However, the translation is often more complex than such a straightforward example suggests. Webb’s resplendent Pillars of Creation incorporates nine observations, and image processors introduced other hues—purple, yellow, cyan, and orange—to distinguish between them. The practice of mapping color and relative wavelength guides the choices, but as the colors multiply and combine, it becomes much more difficult to interpret just by looking. Instead, the Webb images’ rainbow palette delivers something more esoteric: a glimpse, at least in translation, of the unimaginable hues that lie beyond red.

Minor White, Road and Poplar Trees (Vicinity of Naples, New York), October 1955
Courtesy Minor White Archive, Princeton University Art Museum

The photographer Minor White, writing in a journal entry from the 1950s, asked: “How far can camerawork go toward making manifest the invisible? That is its work, but how far can it go?” White experimented with infrared film around the same time, photographing the rural landscapes of upstate New York. In Road and Poplar Trees (1955), a banal, even clichéd scene of a poplar-lined lane becomes subtly and compellingly strange. The leaves of the trees vibrate with an animated brilliance. Dark shadows create unsettling gashes along the pathway. Much like the astronomical images, the representation of light in White’s photograph can be interpreted in multiple ways. It makes the physical presence or absence of infrared light visible and also invites us to see the mysterious in the familiar.

For the Webb images, the translation operates in the opposite direction, bringing the alien and otherworldly down to earth and to our human eyes. Since their first release in July 2022, the telescope’s images have been met with enthusiasm and excitement, especially for how plainly the camera sees. But it’s easy to forget or overlook how far the telescope extends human sight and the strangeness of that experience. Over its lifetime, the Webb will help astronomers address a range of scientific questions. Its images have already responded to another question, one that has engaged photographers as deeply as it has scientists: How to represent what we cannot see?

This article originally appeared in Aperture, issue 252, “Accra.”

Announcing the 2023 PhotoBook Awards Shortlist

Paris Photo and Aperture are excited to announce the shortlist for the 2023 Paris Photo–Aperture PhotoBook Awards—an annual celebration of the photobook’s contributions to the evolving narrative of photography. Now in its eleventh year, the award recognizes excellence in three major categories of photobook publishing: First PhotoBook, PhotoBook of the Year, and Photography Catalog of the Year.

This year, Paris Photo–Aperture PhotoBook Awards received 961 books from sixty-one countries, including stand-out entries from Nepal, New Zealand, Denmark, and Japan. On September 20–22, 2023, the shortlist jury met in New York for three concentrated days of review and deliberation by an international team: Deirdre Donohue, assistant director of the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints, and Photographs, the New York Public Library; Alex Lin, creative director and owner, Studio Lin; Lesley A. Martin, editor at large, Aperture; Renée Mussai, artistic director, the Walther Collection; and Anna Planas, artistic director, Paris Photo.

Anna Planas, artistic director of Paris Photo, and Florence Bourgeois, director of Paris Photo, jointly noted: “The PhotoBook Awards pursue, this year, their long-term commitment and support for photography books. We are very excited to celebrate this year’s exhibition with a selection that offers a source for discovery and enchantment to all photobook lovers. The PhotoBook Awards shortlist will feature thirty-five of the most relevant publications from the past year, giving an international overview of the diversity and richness of today’s production.”

Shortlist jury member Alex Lin added: “As a book designer, I truly appreciate how rare it is for a competition to so carefully judge both a book’s form and content. Having worked on Sasha Phyars-Burgess’s Untitled, the 2021 recipient of the First PhotoBook Prize, I was able to witness firsthand the impact and significance that this recognition gave to both a small publisher and to the photographer. I personally experienced the joy and satisfaction that the Prize can bring to publishers who work with limited budgets but with pure passion.”

A final jury will gather at Paris Photo this November to select winners for all three prizes, which will be revealed on Friday, November 10, 2023. From there, shortlisted and winning titles will be exhibited in Paris, and will tour internationally thereafter.

Below, see the thirty-five selected titles for the 2023 PhotoBook Awards shortlist.

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First PhotoBook

Thaddé Comar, How was your dream?, Mörel Books, London, Design by Sylvan Lanz

Luis Corzo, Pasaco, 1996, Kult Books, Stockholm, Design by Claudia Rubin

Star Feliz, When Eye Land, Printed Matter Inc., New York, Design by Star Feliz with The Uses of Literacy

Liss Fenwick, Humpty Doom, Bad News Books, Wellington, Aotearoa/New Zealand, Design by Stuart Geddes

Christopher Gregory-Rivera, El Gobierno Te Odia, Self-published, Penumbra Foundation, New York, Design by Alejandro Torres Viera

Steve Harries, Octopus, RVB Books, Paris, Design by Studio Mathias Clottu

Samuel James, Nightairs, Fw:Books, Amsterdam, Design by Hans Gremmen

Clifford Prince King, Orange Grove, TIS Books, New York, Design by Carl Wooley

Anu Kumar, Ghar, Perimeter Editions, Melbourne, Design by Narelle Brewer

Jan Mammey and Falk Messerschmidt, Statues Also Die, Kodoji Press, Baden, Switzerland, Design by Helmut Völter

Alejandro “Luperca” Morales, El Retrato De Tu Ausencia (The Portrait of Your Absence), Kult Books, Stockholm, and Los Sumergidos, New York/ Mexico, Design by Fernando Gallegos

Ronit Porat, Hunting In Time, Sternthal Books, Montreal, Quebec, Design by Inedition, Eva van der Schans

Lúa Ribeira, Subida al Cielo, Dalpine, Madrid, Design by Tipode Office

César Rodríguez, Montaña Roja, KWY, Lima, Peru, Design by Vera Lucía Jiménez

Keisha Scarville, lick of tongue, rub of finger, on soft wound, MACK Books, London, Design by Keisha Scarville and Morgan Crowcroft-Brown

Kristof Titeca, ed., Nasser Road / Political Posters in Uganda, The Eriskay Connection, Breda, Netherlands, Design by Rob van Hoesel

Bindi Vora, Mountain of Salt, Perimeter Editions, Melbourne, Design by Narelle Brewer

Carla Williams, Tender, TBW Books, Oakland, California, Design by Paul Schiek

Alice Wong, Painting Photographs, TBW Books, Oakland, California, Design by Paul Schiek

Yao Yuan, 1 2 3 2 1, Self-published, Antwerp, Belgium, Design by Yao Yuan

Previous Next

Thaddé Comar
How was your dream?
Mörel Books, London
Design by Sylvan Lanz

Luis Corzo
Pasaco, 1996
Kult Books, Stockholm
Design by Claudia Rubin

Star Feliz
When Eye Land
Printed Matter Inc., New York
Design by Star Feliz with The Uses of Literacy

Liss Fenwick
Humpty Doom
Bad News Books, Wellington, Aotearoa/New Zealand
Design by Stuart Geddes

Christopher Gregory-Rivera
El Gobierno Te Odia
Self-published, Penumbra Foundation, New York
Design by Alejandro Torres Viera

Steve Harries
Octopus
RVB Books, Paris
Design by Studio Mathias Clottu

Samuel James
Nightairs
Fw:Books, Amsterdam
Design by Hans Gremmen

Clifford Prince King
Orange Grove
TIS Books, New York
Design by Carl Wooley

Anu Kumar
Ghar
Perimeter Editions, Melbourne
Design by Narelle Brewer

Jan Mammey and Falk Messerschmidt
Statues Also Die
Kodoji Press, Baden, Switzerland
Design by Helmut Völter

Alejandro “Luperca” Morales
El Retrato De Tu Ausencia (The Portrait of Your Absence)
Kult Books, Stockholm, and Los Sumergidos, New York/ Mexico
Design by Fernando Gallegos

Ronit Porat
Hunting In Time
Sternthal Books, Montreal, Quebec
Design by Inedition, Eva van der Schans

Lúa Ribeira
Subida al Cielo
Dalpine, Madrid
Design by Tipode Office

César Rodríguez
Montaña Roja
KWY, Lima, Peru
Design by Vera Lucía Jiménez

Keisha Scarville
lick of tongue, rub of finger, on soft wound
MACK Books, London
Design by Keisha Scarville and Morgan Crowcroft-Brown

Kristof Titeca, ed.
Nasser Road / Political Posters in Uganda
The Eriskay Connection, Breda, Netherlands
Design by Rob van Hoesel

Bindi Vora
Mountain of Salt
Perimeter Editions, Melbourne
Design by Narelle Brewer

Carla Williams
Tender
TBW Books, Oakland, California
Design by Paul Schiek

Alice Wong
Painting Photographs
TBW Books, Oakland, California
Design by Paul Schiek

Yao Yuan
1 2 3 2 1
Self-published, Antwerp, Belgium
Design by Yao Yuan

PhotoBook of the Year

Vince Aletti, The Drawer, SPBH Editions, London, Design by Bruce Usher

Frédérique Bangerter, ed., Archivo Nómada Vol. 1: 1975–1981 Alberto García-Alix, Editorial Cabeza de Chorlito, Madrid, Design by Ricardo Báez

Felipe Romero Beltrán, Dialect, Loose Joints, Marseille, France, Design by Loose Joints Studio

Lynne Cohen and Marina Gadonneix, Observatories/Laboratories and Observatories/Laboratories, Atelier EXB / Centre Pompidou, Paris, Design by Jérôme Saint-Loubert Bié

Samuel Gratacap, Bilateral, Poursuite, Arles, France, Design by Grégoire Pujade-Lauraine

Mikiko Hara, Small Myths, Chose Commune, Marseille, France, Design by Chose Commune and Bureau Kayser

Thomas Locke Hobbs, L.A. Vedute, The Eriskay Connection, Breda, Netherlands, Design by Rob van Hoesel

Bharat Sikka, The Sapper, Fw:Books, Amsterdam, Design by Hans Gremmen

Hristina Tasheva, Far Away from Home: The Voices, the Body and the Periphery, Self-published, Bodegraven, Netherlands, Design by Collective Works

Ruth van Beek, The Oldest Thing, Van Zoetendaal Publishers, Amsterdam, Design by Willem van Zoetendaal

Previous Next

Vince Aletti
The Drawer
SPBH Editions, London
Design by Bruce Usher

Frédérique Bangerter, ed.
Archivo Nómada Vol. 1: 1975-1981 Alberto García-Alix
Editorial Cabeza de Chorlito, Madrid
Design by Ricardo Báez     

Felipe Romero Beltrán
Dialect
Loose Joints, Marseille, France
Design by Loose Joints Studio

Lynne Cohen and Marina Gadonneix
Observatories/Laboratories and Laboratories/Observatories
Atelier EXB / Centre Pompidou, Paris
Design by Jérôme Saint-Loubert Bié

Samuel Gratacap
Bilateral
Poursuite, Arles, France
Design by Grégoire Pujade-Lauraine

Mikiko Hara
Small Myths
Chose Commune, Marseille, France
Design by Chose Commune and Bureau Kayser

Thomas Locke Hobbs
L.A. Vedute
The Eriskay Connection, Breda, Netherlands
Design by Rob van Hoesel

Bharat Sikka
The Sapper
Fw:Books, Amsterdam
Design by Hans Gremmen

Hristina Tasheva
Far Away from Home: The Voices, the Body and the Periphery
Self-published, Bodegraven, Netherlands
Design by Collective Works

Ruth van Beek
The Oldest Thing
Van Zoetendaal Publishers, Amsterdam
Design by Willem van Zoetendaal

Photography Catalog of the Year

Casa Susanna: L’histoire du premier réseau transgenre américain, 1959–1968, Isabelle Bonnet and Sophie Hackett, Editions Textuel, Paris, Design by Agnès Dahan Studio

Japanese Photography Magazines: 1880s to 1980s, Ryuichi Kaneko, Masako Toda, Ivan Vartanian, Goliga, Tokyo, Design by Hideki Inaba

Källström-Fäldt, Klara Källström and Thobias Fäldt, Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König, Hasselblad Foundation, B-B-B-Books, Gothenburg, Sweden, Design by Axel von Friesen

Recaptioning Congo: African Stories and Colonial Pictures, Sandrine Colard, Lannoo Publishers, Tielt, Belgium, and Fotomuseum FOMU, Antwerp, Belgium, Design by La Villa Hermosa

The Public Life of Women: A Feminist Memory Project, Diwas Raja Kc and NayanTara Gurung Kakshapati, Nepal Picture Library / photo.circle, Kathmandu, Nepal, Design by Valentina Abenavoli

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Casa Susanna: L’histoire du premier réseau transgenre américain, 1959–1968
Isabelle Bonnet and Sophie Hackett
Editions Textuel, Paris
Design by Agnès Dahan Studio

Japanese Photography Magazines: 1880s to 1980s
Ryuichi Kaneko, Masako Toda, Ivan Vartanian
Goliga, Tokyo
Design by Hideki Inaba

Källström-Fäldt
Klara Källström and Thobias Fäldt
Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König, Hasselblad Foundation, B-B-B-Books, Gothenburg, Sweden
Design by Axel von Friesen

Recaptioning Congo: African Stories and Colonial Pictures
Sandrine Colard
Lannoo Publishers, Tielt, Belgium, and Fotomuseum FOMU, Antwerp, Belgium
Design by La Villa Hermosa

The Public Life of Women: A Feminist Memory Project
Diwas Raja Kc and NayanTara Gurung Kakshapati
Nepal Picture Library / photo.circle, Kathmandu, Nepal
Design by Valentina Abenavoli

The 2023 PhotoBook Award winners will be announced during Paris Photo on Friday, November 10, 2023 at 3:00 p.m. CET.

How Ghana Became a Homeland for the African Diaspora

“Small Rally, Accra.” 1964. Townspeople, watching and listening with rapt attention, sit in a semicircle, oriented toward a speaker just outside the frame. It’s a mixed group: uniformed high-school girls in sleeveless white dresses, men in traditional woven cotton cloth worn toga style, others in long sleeves and slacks with a cigarette clasped between their lips. Children of all ages sit, squat, and crouch on the swept-dust floor. A juvenile rebel stares at the photographer—Paul Strand. A group of women sit on a bench in front. Signs pinned to their headscarves say “C.P.P.”: Kwame Nkrumah’s Convention People’s Party.

The scene is an early glimpse at Nkrumah’s ongoing project of building a modern Ghana, a new country that piqued the attention of seemingly the whole world. Where the Cold War thinking held countries hostage to the narrow interest of Western white powers, Nkrumah and his peers in the so-called third world were putting forward an alternative global vision. Where Western leaders and their security details were cracking down on political protest and minority rights, Nkrumah himself embodied a continuation of the Pan-African struggle forged in the streets of Harlem, Philadelphia, and London.

Paul Strand, Small Rally, Accra, Ghana, 1964
© Aperture Foundation, Inc., and courtesy Philadelphia Museum of Art

It was easy, then, for many Black people in the diaspora to imagine Ghana as a home. Its name harkens back to the idea of a great African empire; its invitation to create a new African presence was compelling. This was the chance for people to go “back” to the motherland, roll up their sleeves, and help build the future. From Richard Wright’s Black Power (1954) and Maya Angelou’s All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes (1986) to Ekow Eshun’s Black Gold of the Sun (2005) and Saidiya Hartman’s Lose Your Mother (2007), writers and artists from the diaspora, having made journeys to Ghana, have composed distinctive travelogues about this possibility of a different world. They came to explore and see where they might fit in. This place of ideal perfection would provide a familial embrace. “We had come to Africa from our varying starting places and with myriad motives, gaping with hungers, some more ravenous than others,” Angelou writes in All God’s Children, “and we had little tolerance for understanding being ignored.”

The potential of a shared political and spiritual struggle stoked the impulse for homecoming, for healing and renewal. This was a society in transition. A society that brought together elements of the traditional and the contemporary, the old and the young, the spiritual and the scientific—all to fashion a modern technological behemoth. This is what Strand would spend four months and ten thousand miles attempting to capture in Ghana: An African Portrait (1976). It’s there in the cold power of the overwhelming metal structures, pipes, and concrete of the Tema Oil Refinery. And in the massive ships docked at the Tema harbor, promising the possibility of benefiting from a coastal proximity that had been a curse not long ago. Deeper inland, Strand preserves the mystery and majesty of ritual dance and incantations in Larteh, and with it, the timeless connection to the ancestors, land, and life force the people have always subsisted on.

Paul Strand, Anna Attinga Frafra, Accra, 1963
© Aperture Foundation, Inc., and courtesy Philadelphia Museum of Art Paul Strand, Cape Coast Fortress, Ghana, 1963
© Aperture Foundation, Inc., and courtesy Philadelphia Museum of Art

Strand, with the blessing of the president, showed the world what Africa looked like. Ghana, he decided, was the best case study. I imagine the project as the first half of a before-and-after comparison, which meant to serve as evidence for awe-inspiring transformation to come. The country’s diversity, economic patterns, and environmental resources at the time adequately reflected conditions in other parts of the continent. But its more recent history—its complicity in the slave trade, supply of materials for the Industrial Revolution, and invaluable role in both world wars—linked it to the modern world. The people in Strand’s photographs appear determined to be exemplars of the “African personality,” demonstrating autochthonous values and characteristics in all their complexities, which would counter long-held racist ideas of the continent’s being a backward place.

“I was black and they were black,” Wright wrote of his experience in Ghana, “but my blackness did not help me.” Many returnees do not know the specific location of their roots on the continent, and their choice of Ghana is often attributable to a sense of ease: the use of English, and the relatively high quality of infrastructure and amenities. Rather than Ghanaians ready to welcome long-lost siblings, seekers met locals who knew little of their plight. The years apart and differing histories had made lasting marks. Culturally, Ghanaians found little in common with the goals of the Black American and British arrivals. Where children of the diaspora sought remnants and an understanding of their historical roots—hopefully untouched by Western elements—they discovered a Ghana detached from a meaningful engagement with the darker elements of its own history, betraying a narrower conception of what connected them. The wound of belonging festered, and as Angelou points out, the disappointed returnees “didn’t want to know that they had not come home, but had left one familiar place of painful memory for another strange place.”

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What made the place strange was the apparent amnesia on the part of Ghanaians about the slave trade. The elephant in the room was the human in the barracoon. At the peak of the slave trade, in the eighteenth century, nearly a million slaves were shipped to the New World from Ghana alone. To Ghanaians like me, the slave trade is often thought of as a tragedy from outside that happened to us. Ghanaian schoolchildren took excursions to the castles at Cape Coast and Elmina to learn about how the white man tricked our ancestors. But, as Hartman points out, the largest slave market feeding the ravenous appetite of the trans-Saharan, transatlantic, and African slave trades was located not in the castles (the domain of Europeans, where returnees and tourists are shepherded to reflect) but, instead, in the town of Salaga, some 250 miles from the coast.

Ghanaian history has always felt to me like a black box. My elementary-school curriculum focused on how Ghana got its colonial name, the Gold Coast (skirting the fact that it exported far more slaves than gold), and extolled the achievements of select individuals, then covered the arrival of Europeans, debating the pros and cons of colonialism. Despite Ghanaians’ repeated citing of the Sankofa ethic to remember the past, it seems our desire has been to look forward, and to silence the sordid history. It is in the work of our artists, and Black artists from the diaspora, that a fuller sense of who we are, and who we have been, remains preserved.

In this vein, thinking “early Ghana” brings up images of Accra in the 1960s and 1970s. Of bell bottoms, high-heeled shoes, and Afros. The smell of Ghanaian printed cloth and heat. No one quite captured the feeling of optimism lighting up Ghanaians like the photographer James Barnor. Beginning in the 1950s, Barnor pictured the sense that everyone had a role to play in building not just the country of Ghana but a free, self-sufficient, and productive Black society. The era is, perhaps, embodied best by the dashing, modern women who stopped by his Ever Young studio, located in the Jamestown area of Accra, adorned in their Sunday finery—hair curled out or flattened and swept into a bun with perfect sheen, opera gloves caressing their arms, their most prized earrings dangling over their shoulders. Following a sojourn in the United Kingdom, where he made fashion portraits and covers for South Africa’s Drum magazine, Barnor returned to Ghana in the late 1960s and set up the country’s first color photography lab.

Barnor’s scenes from his return to Ghana portray the breadth of urban experiences.

Where Barnor’s previous work had been in the studio, the scenes from his return to Ghana portray the breadth of urban experiences. The aspirational images with fanciful, extravagant backdrops are replaced with energetic, unvarnished landscapes of a young nation: the loneliness of an empty bus stop illuminated by a trenchant sun, the vibrancy of a troupe of traditional dancers and drummers performing for a mesmerized crowd, the overjoyed demeanor and gaiety of revelers.

Not long after, the country would fall on hard times. Following a succession of coups and countercoups, Ghana’s economy crashed. The party ended. The state’s attention would turn from the dream of building a Black global capital. Some claim that Ghana was broke because Nkrumah spent all its money trying to help other African countries fight for their independence. Yet a connection to Black culture in the arts worldwide, particularly music and the resilient blues ethos, would in times of desperation serve as a balm for many Ghanaians. Jazz and reggae would inform highlife and hiplife, and Black comedies would inspire the concert parties staged in towns and villages across the country.

James Barnor, Sick-Hagemeyer shop assistant posing in front of the United Trading Company headquarters, Accra, 1971
© the artist and courtesy Galerie Clémentine de la Féronnière, Paris James Barnor, Partying in the seventies. Mr Kotey’s birthday celebration, Accra, 1970s
© the artist and courtesy Galerie Clémentine de la Féronnière, Paris

Throughout difficult economic times and military dictatorships, the natural charisma of the country and this sense of hope and possibility remained. This atmosphere creates for a mysterious, organic feeling that has continued to draw the children of Ghana to itself, over and over again. This is the experience the British Ghanaian writer and curator Ekow Eshun describes in Black Gold of the Sun. In 2002, he decides to visit Ghana, in the hope that it might help him “become whole again.” In London, at the age of thirty-three, he has been experiencing nightmares of lynch mobs chasing him. He wonders if it is the separation from Ghana—the land of his parents, and a place where he lived for part of his childhood—that is causing this pain.

Wherever he looks in Ghana, however, he finds the world from which he is ostensibly escaping. At the cool bars, the songs he hears are the same ones topping the pop charts in London and the United States. The way hip young people dress mirrors the images they see of hip-hop acts and vixens in Western music videos. Far from being a reprieve from the vagaries of the West, he finds that Ghana is actually an integral and key hub in the global exchange of materials and culture. And also history. Eshun’s trip to Ghana is soured when he learns that his great-great great-great-great-grandfather had, around the 1750s, arrived from the Netherlands as a slaver. Worse still, the man’s son, whose mother was a Black local, also became a slave trader when his father returned to Europe. What is this discovery like? “The disgust is overpowering,” he writes. “You wonder what kind of temperament it took to be a slave trader. And whether the responsibility for his actions runs through your blood.”

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The loss and the survival, the mourning and the celebration, the local and the global—how can it all be held together? This is one of the central questions posed by the American artist Todd Gray. For the last seventeen years, Gray has lived between Ghana and the United States, meditating on the painful but strong poetic connection that exists between these places. Gray first visited Ghana as a photographer working with Stevie Wonder. When Wonder suggested that Ghana was their shared homeland, Gray responded that he didn’t even know who his great-grandfather was, so he couldn’t say. And yet, he told me recently, “Stevie made a strong case in the poetic sense that because of the Atlantic passage, and the route from the Gold Coast to the Americas, this was the point of departure for many of us.” He returned on his own and enjoyed the tranquility of being “invisible” in a Black-majority culture. “The vibe and the relationships were different,” Gray says. “When you walk into a place, you are just who you are. I felt at ease.”

Today, as in the late 1960s, there are initiatives from the Ghanaian state promoting return and efforts to encourage people in the diaspora to engage with the country’s history once again. Unfortunately, it all feels like a gimmick—a McKinsey consulting deck estimating how much money the state of Ghana could generate from its “heritage” rather than a meaningful attempt to rebuild and strengthen relationships. Wright or Angelou might be discouraged from making it past the fancy bars and restaurants of contemporary Accra’s Osu neighborhood, where photographs of encounters with celebrities go viral.

Todd Gray, Green Green, 2023

Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York

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Projects such as the new Pan African Heritage Museum are thriving. The long-standing Institute of African Studies at the University of Ghana, and other academic spaces that welcome thinkers from the larger Black world, continues to churn out thought-provoking scholarship on Black futures. Starry-eyed students from historically Black colleges and universities, Black Peace Corps volunteers, and Fulbright participants arrive at Kotoka Airport in steady supply. Courageous and idealistic individuals land on the shores of the country each day with little but the embers of that moment of promise—of an escape from a racist world that holds no hope for them; of a land still entwined with ancient African ways and practices that can nourish the soul. Many have set up charities, schools, or other beneficial initiatives and go on with their quiet presence and enduring work.

From the inside looking out, it’s the return to this vision of what can be that is most important. It’s the reminder from Wright and Angelou, Eshun and Hartman of the dream and what could be possible if we are open to new perspectives. Todd Gray’s photographic sculpture Green Green (2023) provokes such wonderings about envisioning that future with the turbulent present as a starting point. In it, an image on the left of marshy waterways abuts one on the right showing a segment of a wall. The first is along a slave trail leading down to a slave castle. The second is from Elmina Castle. Nevertheless, there is a calming, meditative beauty to the waterway. You imagine the water gliding along in tranquility, and the multitude of creatures put at ease by serene birdsong. In the scene, illuminated as it is by the sun, one senses the fecundity of life, the possibility of a welcome, an Edenic embrace, an opportunity for new beginnings.

You can’t get a sense of Gray’s work if you see it from only one place. “I do that to make the viewer always have to move, to always be making meaning, and to constantly have to appraise,” he says. What does it mean to leave and to return? To change and to see change? At the center of Green Green is a man on a boat, rowing into a grove. He’s going into the past. He’s going into the future. He recalls the ancient African idea of a ferryman taking the dead across to the other side. In Green Green, is this other side a point of arrival or departure? No matter. The vision and hope of the Black Atlantic Future is an undying one. And as Ekow Eshun realizes toward the end of his travels in Ghana, “You never truly leave home. It stays with you even in the worst of times.”

This article originally appeared in Aperture, issue 252, “Accra.”

The Women Behind Accra’s Storied Makola Market

It is often said that if you are unable to locate a particular item in Makola Market, or get assistance from a trader who knows where to find it, then the product does not exist—or it’s not available in Ghana. But only when you go to Makola does this image of a one-stop shop become apparent. Though chaotic at first glance, the market is clearly structured, so you may wind through hawkers and petty traders to lanes of vendors selling imported fabrics and wax prints, or wigs, hair creams, relaxers, and conditioners—sometimes all at the same table. There are stalls, kiosks, and tabletop shops in the market and open-air areas. You may stumble on wholesalers of beauty products, candy, combs, and spare parts, among other goods that reflect the ingenuity of the traders and a complex system of wholesale, retail, and distribution services.

Misper Apawu, Hannah Korkor, tomato seller, 2023 Misper Apawu, Hannah Korkor, tomato seller, 2023

Makola is located in Accra’s central business district, and since being built in 1924 it has been dominated by women. Historically, women from Accra’s indigenous Ga ethnic group, who had been trading since the sixteenth century, made Makola a thriving market. Makola is now a much more diverse place, with women from all over Ghana participating in the trading business. Many, including Winnifred Aku Tetteh, a smoked-fish seller, have been working in Makola for more than thirty years. They supply Accra’s five million residents with fresh produce, household supplies, clothing, and everything else for their daily needs. The women’s success depends on their ability to read cultural shifts and use of a range of marketing techniques while keeping up with global trends. For example, wax print sellers, such as Veronica Agbozo, who source their fabrics and lace from the United States, China, Nigeria, and Togo, among other places, rely on their storytelling skills—beginning with the naming of new patterns to reflect Ghanaian sociocultural realities—to help sell their products.

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Last spring, the Accra-based photographer Misper Apawu made repeated trips to Makola to produce a series of portraits of women traders. Apawu, whose work has often focused on the lives of women in Ghana, claims that her first encounter with photography occurred in a market in Dambai, a town in the Oti region of Ghana, an experience that changed her life. In her childhood, when she used to sell iced water in the market, she watched the women’s faces light up whenever tourists pointed their cameras at them. And when tourists showed the women their pictures, they would beam with delight. The joy Apawu witnessed between the women and the camera inspired her to take up photography as a young adult.

Misper Apawu, Makola Market, 2023

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Women in Ghana’s markets have built and expanded their businesses on centuries-old systems, including apprenticeships. Alberta Koshie Lamptey, a bead seller, and Lydia Owusu, an avocado seller, learned the trade from their mothers. Makola has changed since they took over their stalls more than a decade ago, with an increased number of traders, higher costs of goods, and the lack of a credit system. Like women in markets throughout Ghana, they are grateful for their jobs, financial independence, and the ability to provide for their families. For women such as Elizabeth Darkwa Mensah, Makola has given her not only financial freedom but the opportunity to lead. As president of a wax print sellers’ association in Makola, she is part of a team of market queens who manage market facilities, enforce rules, provide financial support, respond to emergencies, and create networking opportunities. Makola, like other markets, is underfunded and underresourced, but its leaders ensure that it runs smoothly.

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As influential and visible players in the economy, market women bear the brunt of rising prices, which are often caused by inflation and poor fiscal management. During the 1979 economic crisis, both the government and Ghana’s citizens blamed Makola’s sellers for rising prices and shortages of essential goods, and for that the market was demolished by soldiers. Elizabeth Darkwa Mensah still remembers the trauma and the challenges that followed when trading resumed in 1987, and she is thankful that Makola has transitioned into a thriving commercial hub in Accra.

Misper Apawu, Winnifred Aku Tetteh, smoked-fish seller, 2023 Misper Apawu, Alberta Koshie Lamptey, bead seller, 2023 Misper Apawu, Veronica Agbozo, textile seller, 2023 Misper Apawu, Lydia Owusu, avocado seller, 2023

This article originally appeared in Aperture, issue 252, “Accra.”

Aperture Honors Dawoud Bey for 2023 Gala

On October 3, Aperture celebrated the 2023 Gala, its most prominent annual benefit supporting Aperture’s mission and belief that photography can inspire a more curious, creative, and equitable world. The evening signaled a transformational moment for Aperture, with an upcoming move to the Upper West Side, expanding visibility and reach for the seventy-one-year-old nonprofit organization. The Gala also marked a joyous occasion for Aperture supporters and artists to gather in tribute to a beloved force in the field—photographer, educator, and MacArthur Fellow Dawoud Bey. In remarks at the event, Aperture Executive Director Sarah Meister described Bey, who is also an Aperture Trustee, as “a North Star for the organization.” She continued, “If Aperture is dedicated to creating insight, community, and understanding through photography, then there is no one who exemplifies that more than Dawoud.” 

Sarah Meister, Dawoud Bey, and LaToya Ruby Frazier

The Gala was graciously cochaired by Agnes Gund and Aperture Trustees Elizabeth Ann Kahane, Cathy M. Kaplan, Dr. Kenneth Montague, Bob Rennie, and Lisa Rosenblum. Guests arriving at the Ertegun Atrium at Jazz at Lincoln Center were greeted by the cochairs, served sparkling drinks, and had the opportunity to view and bid on works in an auction. 

Live music by the Harlem Renaissance Orchestra welcomed guests into the Appel Room for a seated dinner with an early autumnal menu. Aperture Board Chair and Gala Cochair Cathy Kaplan thanked the many friends and colleagues for their ongoing support and alliance with Aperture, which was followed by a spirited tribute to Dawoud Bey’s legacy as an artist and activist.

For decades, Dawoud Bey (born in Queens, 1953) has made evocative photographs that mine the histories of marginalized Black communities, with works ranging from the side streets and thoroughfares of Harlem, the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, and the dense, unmarked trails of the Underground Railroad. His forthcoming Aperture publication, Elegy (copublished with the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts), assembles the history projects and landscape-based work Bey has made since 2012, and is being published in conjunction with a new exhibition. In admiration ofBey’s impact on modern visual culture, his friend, artist Carrie Mae Weems contributed for the video program: “Thank you for the way in which you’ve brought other photographers forward. You’ve made space for others. You’ve given us something special through your life’s work, and for that I am deeply grateful.”

Gala cochairs: Lisa Rosenblum, Elizabeth Kahane, Bob Rennie, Dawoud Bey, Agnes Gund, Kenneth Montague, Cathy Kaplan, and Sarah Meister

Kwame S. Brathwaite, Colette-Veasey Cullors, Laurie Cumbo, Dawoud Bey, Hank Willis Thomas, Kenneth Montague, and Sarah Meister

Lyle Ashton Harris, Gale Brewer, Dawoud Bey, and Sarah Meister

Natasha Egan, Sarah Meister, Dawoud Bey, An-My Lê, and Lesley A. Martin

Pamela and Lennell Myricks, Sarah Meister, Dawoud Bey, and Tom Schiff

LaToya Ruby Frazier, Dawoud Bey, Carrie Mae Weems, and Sarah Meister

Elizabeth Kahane, Dawoud Bey, and Stuart Cooper

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Additionally in the video tribute, artist Tyler Mitchell and Elisabeth Sherman, curator at International Center of Photography, shared experiences that illustrate Bey’s dedication and practice. On stage, fellow artist LaToya Ruby Frazier admired her colleague’s virtuosic ability to capture both the historic and everyday rhythms of Black life. During her introduction of Bey, Frazier remarked, “To encounter you, is to elevate in confidence, rigor, and thought what it means to be a photographer, what it means to be an artist, the discipline and commitment it takes.”

With performances from the Harlem Renaissance Orchestra, the evening included powerful remarks from Laurie Cumbo, New York City Commissioner of Cultural Affairs, and Gale A. Brewer, New York City Councilmember representing the Upper West Side neighborhood where Aperture will soon establish a new permanent home. Also joining were many artists who have collaborated with Aperture on publications and programs in support of their work over the years, such as Kelli Connell, Sara Cwynar, Angélica Dass, John Edmonds, Awol Erizku, Adam Fuss, Phyllis Galembo, Gail Albert Halaban, Lyle Ashton Harris, Tommy Kha, Justine Kurland, Gillian Laub, An-My Lê, Jarod Lew, Missy O’Shaughnessy, Ari Marcopoulos, Ryan McGinley, Susan Meiselas, Joel Meyerowitz, Philip Montgomery, Matthew Pillsbury, Stephen Shore, Paul Anthony Smith, Rosalind Fox Solomon, Joel Sternfeld, Hank Willis Thomas, Alex Webb, Rebecca Norris Webb, author and curator Nicole R. Fleetwood, and writer Rebecca Bengal.

Dawoud Bey and Elizabeth ShermanVasant Nayak and Sheela MurthyHarlem Renaissance OrchestraRyan McGinley, Marc Domingo, and Awol ErizkuJarod Lew and Sunny YouRemi Onabanjo, Leigh Raiford, and Lucy GallunJon Stryker, Biljana Simic, and Slobodan Randjelović Cathy KaplanRebecca Bengal, Tommy Kha, and Michael FamighettiAri Marcopoulos and Kara Walker

The night also featured a live auction, animated by Sarah Krueger, Head of Photographs at Phillips, with an impressive lot of works by Dawoud Bey, Kwame Brathwaite, Gordon Parks, Gregory Crewdson, and Justine Kurland. A silent auction, hosted on Artsy through noon on October 4, included work by Jamel Shabazz, Joel Meyerowitz, Gail Albert Halaban, Garry Winogrand, An-My Lê, Lillian Bassman, Shirin Neshat, Erwin Olaf, Vik Muniz, and Robert Polidori. A paddle raise to benefit Aperture’s work scholar program which offers invaluable career development and experience in arts and publishing, inspired a swell of contributions from Gala attendees. Proceeds from the Gala and auction support Aperture’s work as a nonprofit leader in the field, including its award-winning publications, educational initiatives, exhibitions, and public programming. Those attending the Gala as well as those reading along in support are encouraged to make a donation of any amount here.

Commissioner Laurie CumboJoel Meyerowitz and Clark WinterElizabeth Gregory Gruen, Kellie McLaughlin, Bob GruenDenise Wolff and Marvin Heifernan

Aperture’s 2023 Gala thanks Founders Agnes Gund, Judy and Leonard Lauder, Lisa Rosenblum, Thomas R. Schiff and Mary Ellen Goeke; Gala Leaders Dawoud Bey, Allan Chapin and Anna Nilsson, Emerson Collective, Goldman-Sonnenfeldt Foundation, Elizabeth and William Kahane, Cathy M. Kaplan and Renwick D. Martin, Melissa and James O’Shaughnessy, and Sean Kelly Gallery. Thanks to those who made the auction possible, including Dawoud Bey, Sean Kelly Gallery, The Gordon Parks Foundation, Kwame S. Brathwaite and the Brathwaite Archive, Michael Hoeh, Gregory Crewdson, and Justine Kurland and Higher Pictures. 

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How Archives Illuminate the History and Culture of Ghana

The first time I heard of a photographic archive in Ghana was in 2009 after returning to Accra following studies in London. I was the editor of Dust, a quarterly love letter to Accra that documented the city’s (then) nascent cultural scene. We were drafting an article about one of our inspirations—the iconic South African magazine Drum (which published photography by the likes of Ernest Cole and James Barnor in the 1950s and 1960s)—when my photo-editor, Seton Nicholas, mentioned the Willis Bell Archive.

Bell, an American photographer who died in 1999, snapped thousands of images during a long residence in postindependence Ghana, including commissioned photographs of Ghana’s first leader, Kwame Nkrumah. Those photographs are currently being restored and digitized by the Mmofra Foundation, a nonprofit organization continuing the work of Bell’s close friend Efua Sutherland, a playwright who was one of Ghana’s first and most prominent cultural activists and advocates for children. Mmofra (which means “children” in Akan) runs a beautiful park on the Sutherland compound, where Bell once lived, and is dedicated to the cultural and intellectual enrichment of Ghana’s children.

Deo Gratias studio, Accra, 2023
Photograph by Francis Kokoroko for Aperture Photographic City, Agbozume, Group of friends photographed at the beach, Volta Region, 2000s
© and courtesy the artist and Saman Archive

There are, of course, other archives in a land as visually compelling as Ghana. Photographs were once a marker of social status here, and many elite Ghanaian families have flocked to places such as Accra’s Deo Gratias, one of Ghana’s oldest photographic studios, to immortalize themselves. Deo Gratias (Latin for “thanks to God”) was founded by the photographer J. K. Bruce-Vanderpuije in 1922. Born to a wealthy family in 1899, he opened the studio after a three-year apprenticeship under the photographer J. A. C. Holm. The firm made portraits of British and Indian families as well as Black professionals, then expanded to cover corporate events. Bruce-Vanderpuije was later joined by one of his sons, Isaac, also a gifted photographer. Deo Gratias, situated in a graceful old building in the heart of Jamestown, one of the city’s first districts, is surrounded by history: it is walking distance from a lighthouse, two colonial-era forts, and a palace. It is run today by Kate Tamakloe, who builds on her father’s and grandfather’s work by scanning and digitizing pictures from old film and glass plates.

Tamakloe considers archives such as Deo Gratias to be vitally important in Africa, where history is often ignored, forgotten, or obscured. The introduction of photography in West Africa in the mid-nineteenth century would ultimately give Ghanaians a better appreciation of the landmark events of independence a hundred years later. The photographs housed at Deo Gratias “prove history, occasion, and even lifestyle,” she says, and, in turn, inspire books, films, and documentaries. One might think that this would make the archiving of photography a national priority, but Tamakloe explains that individual Ghanaians have always been more supportive of photography than any of Ghana’s myriad political administrations.

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That said, one of Ghana’s most important repositories, the J. H. Kwabena Nketia Archives, part of the University of Ghana, benefits, at least indirectly, from government support. Currently run by Judith Opoku-Boateng, the archive is named after Joseph Hanson Nketia, Africa’s foremost ethnomusicologist until his passing in 2019, at the age of ninety-seven. Its contents include music from all over Africa—priceless recordings of vanishing traditions—as well as the Institute of African Studies’ historical records dating as far back as the 1960s, and a large photographic collection of postcolonial Ghana. It is the largest and most systematic set of recordings of any African ethnomusicologist, initially spanning forty years of field research by Nketia and his colleagues, and documents sounds, stories, and songs across the length and breadth of Ghana, along with oral and performance traditions of the numerous peoples within (and sometimes beyond) its borders. Recent initiatives to grow the collection have included the gathering of special historical papers, photographs, and other audiovisual materials from the families of other deceased scholars. Nketia was the first to capture practices passed down for generations through oral tradition. While his association with music means that the archive may be known primarily for its traditional and highlife recordings, it also houses thousands of negatives and prints that capture the lives of Ghanaians of all walks of life at a crucial time in our history.

Jacob Quaye Mensah, Woman photographed at a wedding, Apam, Ghana, ca. 1990s
© and courtesy the artist and Saman Archive Independence Day Parade, Accra, early 1960s
© Mmofra Foundation, Accra, and courtesy Willis Bell Photographic Archive

Although it feeds from the budget allocated to the Institute of African Studies by the University of Ghana, Opoku-Boateng explains that funding is still barely sufficient for the smooth running of the complex equipment and logistics required by the archive. Another challenge is understaffing: besides Opoku-Boateng and two senior research assistants, one of whom is part time, the archive relies on interns. There is also the problem of obsolescence, with much of the information being stored on analog media formats and requiring playback equipment unavailable in Ghana, “leaving the value of these materials totally locked up.”

Photographs are no longer exclusive to high Ghanaian society. I remember how hard it was to get one’s photograph taken while growing up in 1990s Cape Coast, Ghana’s former capital. My boarding-school mates and I would pool together pocket money, and one of us would make a beeline to the nearby photo studio to book an appointment for the following weekend, when we would pose in our best school uniforms. Then we would wait—for as long as a month—for our pictures to be developed and printed. Unlike for today’s middle-class Ghanaians, who grow up capturing their entire lives on mobile phones to share on social media, there are reasons why many in my generation lack the millennial impulse to document the mundane.

Deo Gratias studio, Accra, 2023
Photograph by Francis Kokoroko for Aperture

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Tamakloe expresses skepticism for online platforms such as Instagram and the dominance of digital. “We have lost all the technicalities of a beautiful photograph, even knowledge of the long process of using chemicals in the darkroom,” she says. “Today, it’s plug and play. Once the photo is not blurry, it’s considered ‘a good shot.’” Nevertheless, some do attempt to harness the power of these platforms for the greater good. One such entity is Si Hene—a reference in Akan to the enstoolment of royalty—which was founded in 2020 as a website and Instagram account by Rita Mawuena Benissan, a Ghanaian American interdisciplinary artist who describes Si Hene as “an archive-based collection of images of Ghanaian chieftaincy.” Such work is important in the context of a continent whose royals were reduced from kings and queens to “chiefs” by colonizers whose worldview stopped them from seeing Africans as equals.

When I visited Benissan at Gallery 1957, a contemporary art space and commercial gallery housed in Accra’s Kempinski Hotel, she was preparing for an exhibition at the gallery on the elaborately designed umbrellas that provide more than mere cover from sun and rain to Ghanaian chiefs during royal durbars and festivals. (In Ghana, such umbrellas, as much symbols of royalty as any crown or scepter, are used during sacred traditional ceremonies and festivals.) Benissan tells me that she sees her exhibition and online archiving as extensions of the same work. “People say ‘chieftaincy is dead,’ but it’s not. Literally everything we do is derived from chieftaincy: from our stools to our names to the kente we wear to how we style our hair and present ourselves.  It all comes from the chieftaincy. The photos are a way to bridge that heritage.”

Photography has changed from focusing on members of high society to becoming a people’s visual history.

She has been inspired by others including Amy Sall, founder of SUNU Journal—an independent, Pan-African, postdisciplinary multimedia platform that publishes works dealing with Africa and its diaspora—as well as by Nana Oforiatta Ayim, a Ghanaian art historian, and Deborah Willis, the African American historian of photography who once invited Benissan to a “life-changing” conference on Black portraiture at New York University. Benissan was struggling to find images of royal umbrellas for her US graduate-school research. Out of this frustration Si Hene was born. “Even though I had a lot of books,” Benissan explains, “there were no old images, only pictures of recent chiefs, or images from Benin and Nigeria but not Ghana.” Wanting to find out more about how these umbrellas were designed in the early 1800s and 1900s, she scoured archives at museums, institutions, and universities; family albums; and YouTube and internet resources, including Tumblr, to find the answer. It was hard work. “Sometimes, I could spend five hours looking for a photo and not find anything. But then you change a keyword, an image pops up, and you spend six more hours from that one connection,” Benissan tells me.

Perseverance Photo Studio, Teenage boy photographed with studio backdrop, Anloga, Ghana, 2000s
© the artist and courtesy Saman Archive Portrait of Nana Kofi Yeboah, the Akrofromhene, 1970
Courtesy D. Michael Warren Papers, University of Iowa Libraries Special Collections and Archives, and Si Hene

After the COVID lockdowns lifted, Benissan returned to Ghana and gained access to chieftaincy meetings, where she was guided toward reference materials and archival collections that included pictures, postcards, stamps, and stills. She is seeing a slow rise of chiefs building their own museums, but she wonders whether these are aimed at Ghanaians or visitors from Africa’s diaspora trying to better understand the ancient nations and cultures out of which their ancestors were stolen. It is an important question: Africans in the diaspora have access to museums, universities, and other institutions their cousins in Africa lack. In Ghana, Benissan explains, you have to ask “a hundred people” for that kind of information, you have to wait and seek approval. Accessibility afforded by social media is key, but Benissan also notes that many parents, grandparents, and chiefs are not on Instagram. She describes being introduced to chiefs who appreciate her idea but ask an important question: “How do I see it?” She also faces copyright issues, as Si Hene does not own any of these images. She nevertheless tries to contact as many institutions, curators, and families as she can. Even if some do not respond, others, Benissan says, “seem happy we are providing another accessible way to see their collections.”

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Similar in digital form to Si Hene stands Saman Archive, named after an Akan word that simultaneously means “ghost” and “photographic negative.” Founded in 2015 by the artist and writer Adjoa Armah, Saman began as a repository for the thirty thousand negatives dating from 1963 to 2010 that Armah collected from studios and photographers across Ghana as part of her practice-led doctoral research at the University of Oxford. She considers Saman to be more than just a collection of negatives, stating that the project is a place for “my own photographs and those of my collaborators across the country, recorded conversations with photographers, ephemera, and the research conducted as negatives are being collected.”

Album covers, clockwise from top left: Kelenkye Band, Moving World, 1974; Ogyatanaa Show Band, Yerefrefre, 1975; African Brothers Band (International), Afrohili Soundz, 1973; Canadoes Super Stars of Ghana led by Big Boy Dansoh, Afaa Boatemah, 1985
Images courtesy Bokoor African Popular Music Archives Foundation (BAPMAF) and J. H. Kwabena Nketia Archives The archives at Deo Gratias studio, Accra, 2023
Photograph by Francis Kokoroko for Aperture

Saman stands on the shoulders of giants. As Armah explains, “We never start from zero. The best we can do is honor those who came before us.” She values Deo Gratias and holds particular appreciation for the Nketia Archives’ custodianship of Ghanaian sonic histories, saying, “It’s their work and the work that families do, in which the stories around photographs are central, that really influence me.” In contrast to Si Hene, Saman’s areas of collecting go beyond chieftaincy, and its public face is a website. Noting the way photography has changed from focusing on members of high society to becoming a people’s visual history, Saman is, she says, “interested in what lives looked like beyond the grand narratives that cater toward middle-to-upper-class people.”

Armah surprises me with a “two-hundred-year plan” that includes eventually housing Saman in a physical space. Benissan also dreams of museum and research institutions, where physical images can be better preserved, in all sixteen regions of Ghana. She points out that chieftaincy palaces are ultimately homes and, as such, cannot offer visitors the same levels of exposure as museums. The goal is to balance access to the physical images housed in these spaces with respect for royal privacy. While Deo Gratias already serves as a physical museum, it, too, encounters problems of scaling up, a process that involves, as Tamakloe explains to me, “maintaining the glass plates, digitizing them totally, and making it available virtually to the world to tell the Ghanaian story.” Ghana’s archives are invaluable resources for understanding the nation’s past. Ongoing efforts to preserve and digitize such records—both physical objects and data—are essential for future generations. This work is shaping a collective understanding of history and identity that may otherwise be lost in the maelstrom of modern culture: a thing that is never static.

This article originally appeared in Aperture, issue 252, “Accra.”

Carrie Schneider Unspools a Riddle about Photography and Cinema

In the vast former-factory space of MASS MoCA, a singular, inscrutable, sculptural photograph, titled Madame Psychosis (Joelle van Dyne) (2023) and measuring an astonishing forty inches by eight hundred feet, unfurled in a seemingly endless scroll, pitched in a roof formation at its peak and rippling out over a large plinth. Another work (Infinite Kill, 2023) cascaded across the gallery’s walls. In the adjacent spaces, one room displayed more than a hundred dreamlike, abstract photographs—multiple exposures of images sourced from a litany of artists, films, and social-media feeds of the artist’s friends, layered onto personal images. Lurid with color, all were photographed and rephotographed in dark, transitory, predawn hours. Here, they were installed with little wall space separating each of them, emphasizing their shared connection. And projected in the back room is a 16mm film that exudes a Warholian Screen Tests energy. Composed of stills showing the actor Romy Schneider, the work flickers on the walls so that Romy seems to watch her own image scatter around.

The film is Carrie Schneider’s Sphinx (the answer isn’t man) (2023). Sphinx is also the title of her solo exhibition at MASS MoCA, which was on view from March to September 2023, and featured work that the Brooklyn and Hudson, New York–based artist made beginning in the spring of 2020. All Schneider’s vivid, sometimes gigantically large photographs were made with a room-size camera that she built herself out of industrial plastic and outfitted with a Rodenstock lens. (Some of the pieces have been shown at Candice Madey and Chart galleries in New York.) As in previous series that incorporate self-portraiture, personal traces of and references to the artist were present in Sphinx too. There’s Romy Schneider, who shares the artist’s surname, in the film, and in Infinite Kill, where she appears on a phone screen that the artist cradles in one hand, nails painted bright red, and holds up to the camera. Revenge Body (2022), a floor-to-ceiling photograph of a repeated abstracted still from the 1976 film Carrie, depicts Sissy Spacek’s title character, who shares the artist’s first name, her face dripping with blood.

Installation view of Carrie Schneider: Sphinx at MASS MoCA, 2023. Photograph by Jon Verney

On the surface, the pieces that made up Sphinx represent a radical and monumental shift in scale, material, and conception within Schneider’s practice, but also in thinking about photography itself. This is work that particularly invites and rewards close looking, revealing subtle and surprising connections with many of Schneider’s previous series of photographs and videos, from Burning House (2012–13)—for which she built to scale a small house on a tiny island, set it aflame, and filmed its burning—to her numerous collaborations, including those with the choreographer and dancer Kyle Abraham, artist Abigail DeVille, and composer and musician Cecilia Lopez.

I first met Schneider in 2009, when we were both in residence (in visual arts and fiction, respectively) at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, where Rineke Dijkstra was a visiting master artist. A few years later, I participated in Reading Women (2012–14), comprising immersive photographic and video portraits of a hundred of her women-identifying friends and peers reading books by other women in their homes or studios. There’s a clear path, it seems to me, from Reading Women to Sphinx. As artist and filmmaker Cauleen Smith (who also participated in the former project) wrote in a 2014 essay titled “Carrie Schneider’s Grown-Ass Women: You Better Recognize”: “She sits with her. She lets her be. Like a thermal current on a cool day the condensation of a woman into a being of pure thought, silent and in violent motion at the atomic level offers mad quotients of marvel. A woman reading is not accessible or controllable. We cannot know what she might do. We are left to wonder.”

Unraveling and unfurling their inner selves, reclaiming how they are seen, the works in Schneider’s Sphinx similarly unspool their riddles before us. Recently, Schneider and I spoke about the process of making Sphinx and discussed its influences, ranging from Imogen Cunningham to renowned film theorist Laura Mulvey, author of the landmark essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” and creator of films including Riddles of the Sphinx (1977).

Carrie Schneider, Sphinx (the answer is man), 2023

Rebecca Bengal: Congratulations again on such a brilliant exhibition and catalog—which has stayed so much on my mind since I got to visit earlier this summer. I’m curious how the exhibition changed for you during the span of its run.

Carrie Schneider: Thank you! It was so fresh when I installed the work. My studio is a renovated one-car garage, so there was no way for me to test out these large sculptures. I had been making them in this camera that I built, exposing hundreds and hundreds of feet of this color chromogenic paper—there’s something like 4,600 feet of paper in all in the show—but until we installed, they existed as a plan in my mind of what I wanted to make.

I installed for two weeks straight with a crew of twelve people, and it really extended the way that I thought about the work immediately. It just exploded my brain. I felt like suddenly I had twenty-four arms, and it also really made me think of the next six projects I’ll make. I’m still unpacking what it was like for me to finally see it in this space: I feel like, when it opened, it was so new on the walls, that I really saw it as other people saw it. I’m still in a state of semi-confusion. It still feels very new to me, even though the show itself is almost over.

Installation view of Carrie Schneider: Sphinx, MASS MoCA, 2023

Bengal: It’s true, even some of the first works in the exhibition feel so new in this context. I’m thinking of Deep Like (2020–21), your series of 105 pictures, all around twenty by twenty-five inches, which take up an entire room in the show. How did that work lead to the larger pieces?

Schneider: Those were the earliest kind of experiments. I think of them as being my alphabet for the language that I then develop in the larger works in the adjacent galleries. I was exposing this chromogenic paper through the lens of this camera that I built in my studio in the pandemic, and then I decided I wanted to scale up. So I made larger prints, I built my camera a little bit larger, just further exhausting the motifs. And then I really leaned into using an image that started in Deep Like: really looking at the face of the actress Romy Schneider.

There was a certain moment where I realized that didn’t need to cut the paper. It was coming in these long rolls, shipped to my home during the early pandemic. And instead of cutting the paper in the dark and putting it into my camera, it just dawned on me: I’ll just continue to advance the paper kind of frame by frame or bit by bit, exposing a continuous roll. That was, maybe about a year into making the work, when I had that realization that I wanted to just use the material in this way that was really structural, expanded into hundreds of feet-long photographs. And then I had to figure out how I would show them, how they would become became installations or sculptures, kind of coming off the wall.

Carrie Schneider, Infinite Kill, 2022

Bengal: When and why did you decide to build your own camera?

Schneider: Before the pandemic I’d also been doing a side project where I was figuring out how to expose chromogenic paper through the camera’s lens, and filter it so that if I were to reshoot it as a paper negative, it would faithfully invert—achieving a kind of black-and-white and a neutral tone. And I had been making tests for years using a large-format Deardorff camera that I bought from a mentor.

I was ready for it to move to the next level. I really knew I wanted to scale up, and I’d been shopping around how to get a custom camera built. But the quotes I was getting felt prohibitively expensive, and of course it’s the pandemic, and everything was so demoralizing. One day I’m out on a run and I thought, suddenly, Oh my god, I know how to make a fucking camera! It’s just a light-tight box. It’s just a dark box. It doesn’t have to be beautiful. And that same day, I went to Home Depot with a mask on and bought all that stuff  . . . I think it was something like $110 total. And I went home and I made it, and it completely worked, first try. What I’m working with now is maybe the sixth generation of it. It’s slightly bigger now. I call it my Frankencamera.

Carrie Schneider, Still from Burning House, 2012–13. HD film, 12 minutes, color, soundCarrie Schneider, Still from Burning House, 2012–13. HD film, 12 minutes, color, sound

Bengal: It makes me think about the sculptural aspect of your work, especially projects like Burning House: the idea of a camera as a house.

Schneider: Exactly. They’re actually about the same size. And of course, camera means “room” in Latin.

Bengal: Your approach to this work is so intuitive and original, but I also know there’s some important inspirations for you lurking in its backstory.

Schneider: I really love everything about Imogen Cunningham’s work, but there are these two negative images in particular: one is of a snake, and one is of her friend Roberta. When I first saw that one, Roberta (Negative) (1961), about fifteen years ago, I thought, What is this? I immediately printed it out and put it on my studio wall. I think what she did is she just used a paper negative, kind of like a contact sheet in reverse. I just wanted more things like that to exist in the world.

Bengal: It’s such a cool and incredible picture. What else about it, specifically, drew you in?

Schneider: What I took from it as a kind of a stepping-off point is seeing how an image of a familiar thing in negative produces this really uncanny effect. I think the image of Roberta is just some textures, like plants and her face. It’s just that simple, but when they’re inverted and negative and kind of superimposed on one another, the results are so surprising. So what I took from that is that the magic didn’t really need to be made with much, but to just be open to experimenting with everyday things floating around. I didn’t feel like I had to go too far to find something that might produce something satisfying to me in a similar way.

I don’t know if I’ve made my Roberta (Negative) yet, but I feel it gave me permission to start really simply, just shooting from within a dark room out of a window. Just seeing how the world outside looked in negative. I think it was very, very simple at first, and then pretty soon after that I started getting a little more weird.

Carrie Schneider, Jacob F, 2021

Bengal: With Deep Like, you sourced images from friends’ and others’ social-media feeds, starting when we were all a bit isolated in early pandemic days. Were you actively looking for images at first, or was it born out of mindlessly doomscrolling in that doomy era?

Schneider: I don’t think it was so conscious at first. When I’m teaching, I try to remind my students that it’s okay to work intuitively because you have this whole armature of theory, or the art history you’ve absorbed. In early pandemic no one was watching. I didn’t have any shows lined up. So, in a way, I was totally liberated.

I was working at this really fast clip. I had to work in complete darkness because I’m working with the chromogenic paper, which is totally light sensitive. I wasn’t able to totally black out my studio, and of course I couldn’t even have a safe light, so I had to work at night when there was no sunlight. I’d had some insomnia in the pandemic, and I was going to sleep when my then five-year-old son was, at eight p.m., and then I was waking up at three or four in the morning. This became my prime time. I think it’s really kind of a famous time of day for, like, mother-artists’ work. I think Sylvia Plath called it the blue hour—you know, before anyone wakes up, where you actually have time to yourself. I felt that really viscerally.

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Strange Hours: Photography, Memory, and the Lives of Artists

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Bengal: I love those times. They can be super generative and freeing when the rest of the world is turned off. You have a beautiful artistic relationship to night, too, that’s there in your 2015 series Moon Drawings. Were there other discoveries you made from working these hours?

Schneider: Before I was a photographer, I was a painter, and so when I started this work, I was thinking about Sigmar Polke and the way he just exhausted motifs. He would appropriate something from somewhere and just make hundreds of photocopies of it, and they’d show up in paintings, these serigraphic images. It’s this different sort of engagement with Polke. It’s not like Warhol; it wasn’t a commentary on mass media or anything. It was just the weirdest, most idiosyncratic stuff. It emboldened me to do the same thing, and then there was this moment where I realized, Oh, these images that I’m reproducing, what if I then rephotographed those and those kind of invert yet again, and then I invert them again. I was really immersed in it.  

Carrie Schneider, Choose Well, 2022 Carrie Schneider, tfw, 2022

Bengal: So much of your work is cinematic in feeling and in origin, embodying these ideas that go back to Laura Mulvey, who introduced this idea of the male gaze—viewing a woman’s image as sexual object or giant threat. 

Schneider: I’d had a Zoom studio visit with my friend Sarah, she had also studied with Laura, like I did at the Whitney Independent Study Program. And as we were talking, she said, “Have you read Laura recently? Maybe you should read her again.” And it was like, Oh my god, you’re so right. I mean, I hadn’t, like, in a decade. I went back, and I saw that the new work was illustrating this. It was so bizarre. Obviously, this was part of the armature upon which I’m building this work when I’m working intuitively, but it wasn’t conscious at all. When I reread her texts, I was just smacking myself on the forehead. You couldn’t do that, in a sincere way, to illustrate theory, but it felt so unbelievably parallel that I reached out to Laura and asked her if she’d meet with me on Zoom. We’ve had an ongoing conversation since then. She’s so sharp, and she’s writing about so many other things, too, and also updating texts she wrote that are now, like, forty-five years old.

She was telling me the other day how she was screening Citizen Kane for some people and when she was loading the film, it unspooled. It just spilled everywhere—but it also retained this form of the coil. There’s chaos, but it also somehow retains its form.

Carrie Schneider, Eve of the Future, 2023. Installation view at MASS MoCA. Photograph by Jon Verney

Bengal: Which was surely messy and maybe a little horrifying in the moment. But, as I also see it in the unspooling of your Sphinx, so vulnerable and exciting, to just lay it all bare and be. I think there’s a power in that. I also wanted to go back to something you said earlier, where you described your “alphabet of imagery.”

Schneider: I call it a seed-library impulse. At the start of making this work I was reading Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, as so many people were. So, just the idea of preserving these creative influences, whether they were my peers or mentors or just different canonical works in the history of art, like this very idiosyncratic collection, but kind of preserving them in an analog form, just in case the digital technology could fail. There was something doomsdayish about it.

I also thought about it as, maybe that Mariah Carey clip [present in Schneider’s recent exhibition at Chart, I don’t know her] is, like, the golden record. To preserve some aspect of human culture and make this analog, as if we were sending it out into space. Putting it into a tangible form was a way of making a big statement about wanting to possess it or preserve it in a way.

Bengal: It feels to me also like a reclamation. To make your own camera. To articulate your own language. To take that all into your hands. To repossess those images and retranslate how they are seen. The immense space that the sphinx and Romy Schneider and Spacek-as-Carrie and all these women occupy in these rooms.

Schneider: When I kind of scaled up my camera, I started working in a way that felt much more loose. But also, sourcing these original images, it felt like it was something that could spin outwardly forever into these infinite possibilities, like in the way Agnes Martin could infinitely source a grid. For her the grid was so innocent and pure, like a tree. I felt like there was this really beautiful thing where I thought: I don’t have to go any further. I have it all right here, in this cache of images.

But also: if it is autobiographical, I think about the way Lauren Berlant said that the autobiographical impulse is inherently anxious and ambivalent. I think that’s kind of what drives it, that tension. There’s an element of possession and homage, but also theft.

Carrie Schneider, Madame Psychosis (Joelle van Dyne) (detail), 2023
All photographs courtesy MASS MoCA

Bengal: How did the physical process of making those giant prints affect the way you felt about and understood your own work?

Schneider: The owner of My Own Color Lab, where I printed all of it, and all of the employees—they went out of their way, stayed late, would help me run these massive things through. And just seeing, you know, that they even allowed me to do that is so rad. But also, their excitement about it was so motivating. I think it goes back to using all these technologies that require a lot of material knowledge but then using them in a way that they’re not meant to be used. That spirit of experimentation just made it all possible. The fact that they were even game to let me try to do it and were so psyched about it.

Bengal: There’s this inherent spirit of rebelliousness about that. How far can you extend this idea?

Schneider: What if this could just go on to infinity?

Carrie Schneider: Sphinx was on view at Mass MoCA through September 17. The accompanying catalog was published in 2023 by Hassla.