Aperture's Blog, page 24

August 17, 2023

Toyo Miyatake’s Indelible Record of Life inside the Manzanar Internment Camp

The week after Trump won the presidential election, I attended an Asian American community meeting in Manhattan where one of the attendees told me the following story. The day after the election, he ran into a senior partner at his work, jubilant about the results. Now, the older man said, we can finally round up the gays, the Muslims, and the immigrants. Shocked by this brazen declaration, my new acquaintance pointed out that he was gay himself, and the children of immigrants. When he returned to his office, he saw an email. It was not an apology. The partner wrote that Korematsu v. United States—the 1944 Supreme Court decision justifying the Japanese American prison camps—was still good law.

This senior partner wasn’t alone. I remember waiting for a flight at an airport and watching Fox News pundits suggest that the prison camps provided a precedent for us to register and imprison Muslims. Then ICE started taking children who had traveled across the border and throwing them in Fort Sill in Oklahoma, which once imprisoned some seven hundred Japanese Americans. I thought the camps were ancient history, an Asian American friend bemoaned to me at a coffee shop. But they weren’t.

Toyo Miyatake, Manzanar Food delivery crew making delivery to the mess hall, ca. 1942–45

Toyo Miyatake, Internee-run beauty salon under the Manzanar Cooperative Enterprise, ca. 1942–45

In 1942, Toyo Miyatake left his studio in Los Angeles’s Little Tokyo and brought his wife and four children to the Manzanar concentration camp in the central Californian desert. Cameras were prohibited, so Miyatake snuck in a lens and fashioned a wooden box into a body for his surreptitious camera. “As a photographer, I have a responsibility,” he told his teenage son Archie. “I have to take all the pictures in Manzanar to keep a record of what’s going on here.”

An unusual candidate for incarcerated auto-ethnographer, Miyatake had been a well-known Pictorialist before the war: a friend of Edward Weston’s, a collaborator of the cinematographer James Wong Howe, and winner of an award from the International Photography Exhibition in London. His métier consisted of poetic abstractions. His landscapes captured no humans, just the delicate shadows of bushes, falling like brushstrokes over snow-covered hills. The figures in his Little Tokyo cityscapes exist only as silhouettes. His dancers, gestures of shadow and motion. But there was another Miyatake: the much less expressionistic professional photographer who ran a commercial studio. He courted his wife by taking her picture, yet his most libidinous portrait shows Michio Ito, the charismatic performer who danced alongside Martha Graham and inspired W. B. Yeats’s Noh theater experiments. In Miyatake’s portrait from 1929, Ito seems capable of conveying modernist ferment through just a hairstyle and a glance. His hair hides his face in a center part, but even this obscured gaze communicates an erotic recalcitrance. He looks like he’s arrived from the future, the way silent-film actors sometimes do—or at least from the grungy glam 1990s of the actor Leslie Cheung.

What did Miyatake, driven by a mission to document an abhorrent experience, decide to preserve?

In 1942, Ito was deported to Japan as an enemy alien, and Miyatake banished to Manzanar, a dreamy aesthete and studio portraitist in a prison wasteland. When viewing the colonial archive, we often search for how oppressed people understood their own predicament. For life at Manzanar, we can simply look at Miyatake’s photographs. What did this man, driven by an ethical mission to document an abhorrent experience, decide to preserve? A baseball batter readying for the pitch. Children cradling their dolls, borrowed from a toy loan center. Smiling majorettes twirling their batons in the air. When I’ve taught the literature of the Japanese American imprisonment, it is precisely these details that trip students up—the sense that daily life continues, even in a concentration camp. In Farewell to Manzanar (1973), Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston describes her brother’s playing in a prison swing band. In Citizen 13660 (1946), Miné Okubo writes that the prisoners at the Topaz camp in Utah “went wild with excitement” over a snowball fight. Why, my students essentially asked, wasn’t everyone constantly miserable?

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Obviously, we shouldn’t undersell the camps’ fundamental crappiness. These permitted types of recreation were ways of assimilating prisoners into American nationhood (baseball!). When Miyatake was at Manzanar, sewage tainted the drinking water with E. coli. Residents died in the sweltering 110-degree heat. Military police fired on a rioting crowd, killing two. “Manzanar was a devil’s playground,” said Fukiko Elisabeth Komatsu, imprisoned with her mother and siblings, “and the dust storms came through at 60-miles an hour to make our lives even more harsh and miserable.” Nor did Miyatake live at the Tule Lake concentration camp, the prison for the radicals, which Konrad Aderer’s documentary Enemy Alien (2011) calls the Guantánamo Bay of the Japanese American incarceration experience. There, prisoners were shackled in the camp stockade, shot at by battalions of tanks, or simply executed in broad daylight. We might describe these prisons using the work of the theorist Giorgio Agamben, who writes that during crises such as the Third Reich and, arguably, post-9/11 America, groups can become stripped of their legal status and reduced to what he calls “bare life.” My students were essentially asking, “Why weren’t the prisoners diminished into pure abjection?” The answer is that Agamben was wrong. The men locked up at Attica prison wrote poetry. People in refugee camps, which activists wryly call the most permanent form of architecture, still find ways to care for one another, make art, and live life. Miyatake photographed women getting their hair done.

“Although Miyatake lived in the hothouse environment of simmering anger, fear and suspicion that some Manzanar chroniclers have described,” the author Nancy Matsumoto writes, viewers may be “disappointed,” because “his photographs bear no signs of violence or anger.” The enigma of his images is their mundanity, which we can better understand if we compare them to those of Manzanar taken by two of America’s most famous photographers, Ansel Adams and Dorothea Lange. A landscape photographer uninterested in portraiture or politics, Adams wanted to show that the prisoners weren’t terrorists but smiling schoolgirls, Norman Rockwell–esque nuclear families, and proud men in uniform. What did Adams omit? Any cultural difference, as well as the barbed-wire fences and guard towers.

Toyo Miyatake, Three-generation family, son enlisted in the US Army, ca. 1942–45

Dorothea Lange called Adams’s efforts “shameful.” Her photographs, which were censored and impounded by the military until 2006, depict Manzanar as a stark, perpetually dusty prison. As in her migrant portraits, she displays a novelistic ability to capture her subject’s gaze, the solemn look or glance cast slightly askew, insinuating some private turmoil. While Lange’s images are generally seen as better than Adams’s, both had one thing in common. They took photographs of their own projections. Adams saw the prisoners as model Americans, Lange as people experiencing injustice. Miyatake did not understand the Japanese Americans as political idealizations—and that is exactly what perplexes us about his work. He saw little need to glorify, humanize, or even individualize the prisoners. For he was one of them.

One Miyatake photograph shows a crowd facing the monument at the center of the Manzanar cemetery. The obelisk fills the left third of the image, a white geometry, its paleness continued by the flecked outline of the Sierra Nevadas. Aside from a girl looking toward the camera, we cannot see any of the mourners’ faces. Their bodies form a black mass barely recognizable as people. They turn away from us. They will not tell us what they know.

Avoiding the poles of didacticism and aesthetics, Miyatake documented outside such binaries. “Not yes or no, it could be maybe,” the artist Hirokazu Kosaka says in the 2002 documentary Toyo Miyatake: Infinite Shades of Gray. “It’s not white or black but infinitesimals of gray. That’s what Miyatake was trying to create.” Some of his images lack any people, depicting Manzanar as a barren environment. Barracks tile and recede to the background, but instead of a horizon opening to a broader world, the foreground is encased by Mount Williamson. Not unlike in Hokusai’s prints of Mount Fuji, the peak is a spectral crystal, a gargantuan mass always visible but never foregrounded, the inescapable reality of imprisonment banished to the unconscious.

Toyo Miyatake, Three Boys Behind Barbed Wire, 1944<br />All photographs courtesy Toyo Miyatake Studio

Toyo Miyatake, Three Boys Behind Barbed Wire, 1944

All photographs courtesy Toyo Miyatake Studio

It is not necessarily that Miyatake preserved some authentic truth. Another photographer who once worked at his studio, Jack Iwata, composed similarly quotidian photographs of daily life in these prison camps, but his images occasionally suggest more emotional range, both stark drama (American soldiers holding bayonets as cars enter Manzanar, black smoke rising up in plumes from a fire at the Tule Lake camp) and joy (a woman wearing a crown declaring her the Queen of Manzanar). Seen beside them, what emerges in Miyatake’s photographs is a meticulous reticence, a refusal of the evocative flourishes he once adopted as a Pictorialist. He became the diarist of a society, one who, whether because of personal temperament or camp surveillance, did not photograph the violence of the prison. Instead, he documented weddings, graduations, newborns entering the world in a prison. Both he and the photographer Corky Lee were forced by Pacific wars and spatial segregation into becoming community archivists, but they traveled in opposite directions. Lee had a flair for adventurism and famously captured Chinatown protestors brawling with cops. Miyatake spent the Manzanar riot in his barrack. Lee was a radical who gradually adopted expressive and inventive forms of mise-en-scène, but Miyatake left behind his lavish romanticism and the formal poses of his portraits. Unlike Lange’s brooding depiction of ruminating prisoners, what is most mysterious about Miyatake’s photographs is that we do not know how to make them available for our own emotional use.

Unlike Lee, Miyatake rarely took photographs that overly implied a political message, but there are exceptions. In a photograph for the 1944–45 Manzanar yearbook, a hand holds up pliers, positioned as if to sever the barbed wire slicing the background. His most famous photograph, Three Boys Behind Barbed Wire (1944), shows three boys considering the steel fencing that diagonally intersects the frame. A guard tower stands behind them. Unlike Miyatake’s more quotidian portraits, this image vibrates with implied psychology and the sense that these imprisoned children also serve as symbols of some sort. There is a less famous version of this photograph in which only one of the boys touches the wire. He bends back slightly, his shoulder tucked back awkwardly, and connects a single finger to the wire, as if feeling for the prick of the barbs. In the more well-known image, two of the boys raise their hands and almost lean on the wire, like dancers lined up on a ballet barre. They are testing the boundary.

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While it is tempting to reduce Miyatake’s photographs to documentation, Three Boys Behind Barbed Wire was more constructed than it appears, the scholar Jasmine Alinder writes: the boys actually stood outside the camp and looked in. Many prisoners found the incarceration experience too terrible to talk about, so perhaps we can read the photographs as not only describing the implied barbarism of locking up children but representing their future selves wondering how to probe the repressed past. Akemi Ookas, the daughter of one of the boys, reconvened the three subjects, now in their eighties, for the 2017 documentary Three Boys Manzanar, a project not unlike Lee’s 2014 restaging of Andrew J. Russell’s 1869 golden spike photograph—taken in Utah to commemorate the completion of the transcontinental railway—to include descendants of Chinese rail workers.

If the boys stood outside looking in, this meant Miyatake positioned himself inside the prison. When the war ended and the camps opened, some, rather counterintuitively, did not want to leave. They may have had nowhere to go. The push toward incarceration had been driven by corporate agribusinesses, which seized more than a quarter of a million acres of Japanese American farms. Leaving meant relinquishing the community of the prison camps for the very racist world that had imprisoned them. Consider a man named Joe Takeda, who returned from the Gila River prison to his San Jose pear orchard, where assailants poured gasoline on his home and shot at his car. Miyatake did not leave immediately. He stayed and documented those who lingered. Ralph Merritt, Manzanar’s director, warned the now-free residents against “crowding into the seven southern counties of California” and creating “another Japanese problem.” Miyatake did the opposite. He spent the remainder of his life photographing Little Tokyo. With both the Pictorialist movement and his fine arts career having molted away, he trained his camera on the weddings, families, births, and deaths of those who lived there. “So, the ancestors are looking down. / The poet, and/or his poem, is looking up,” writes the poet Brandon Shimoda, whose family members were imprisoned in Utah, Montana, and Wyoming. “We are in between.”

This article originally appeared in Aperture, issue 251, “Being & Becoming: Asian in America.”

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Published on August 17, 2023 14:16

August 8, 2023

Japan’s Unparalleled History of Photography in Print

Not long ago, Daido Moriyama told me that his favorite way of encountering photographs is in a book or magazine. Nobuyoshi Araki has emphasized that “the photobook—not too big—is still the best way to show photographs.” And Tomoko Sawada has proclaimed that her photobooks are “works of art in their own right.” Indeed, many Japanese photographers understand books, as well as magazine features, as the ideal means of presenting their artistic output, often putting them on par with framed photographs on a wall. The importance of the printed page to Japanese photography cannot be overemphasized.

Over the last twenty years, images by a growing number of Japanese photographers have been shown in exhibitions worldwide. Simultaneously, the international photography community has begun to accept the photobook as a valid form of artistic expression, discovering, in the process, the innovativeness and significance of Japanese publishing. Yet there are still few comprehensive English-language books that consider the history of and specific sociocultural context for Japanese photography. Publications such as the 2003 exhibition catalog The History of Japanese Photography, by Anne Wilkes Tucker, Dana Friis-Hansen, Ryūichi Kaneko, and Joe Takeba, and my own book Ravens & Red Lipstick: Japanese Photography since 1945 (2018) include select photobooks and periodicals but do not focus on them. The short-lived but influential 1960s journal Provoke was examined in a 2016–17 touring exhibition and related catalog. Even so, the history of Japanese photography magazines has remained largely underexplored.

Cover of Front, Volumes 1 and 2, 1942, and spread from Front, Volumes 10 and 11, 1944, with photographs by Ihei Kimura

Japanese Photography Magazines 1880s–1980s (Goliga, 2022; 500 pages, $100), by Ryūichi Kaneko, Masako Toda, and Ivan Vartanian, sets out to change this by investigating one hundred years of photographic history in Japan, told through carefully chosen issues of camera and photography magazines. The book unfolds with an introduction describing the authors’ approach and objectives. As an exhaustive overview is impossible, they aim to convey “one story of Japanese photography through the printed pages of periodicals . . . intentionally avoiding a western-oriented approach to ideas of photography, authorship, reading, and the relationship of images.” It offers readers a chance to “see Japanese magazines within a Japanese context.” Some selection criteria are explained. The stories and features highlight significant moments within the history of Japan and its photography scene, shedding light on the connection between magazines and photobooks as well as the roles of photographers and editors. Nude photographs—apart from those of women who were active participants in the creation of their photographs—were excluded, whereas camera advertisements that provide an indication of how technology developed over the years were deliberately left in. Linguistic and design challenges, such as having Japanese spreads, which are read top to bottom and right to left, reproduced in an English book, are addressed in an honest way, conveying the authors’ awareness of their role in presenting Japanese photographic culture to “Western” readers.

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This comprehensive volume is divided into three parts, eight chapters, and twenty- four thematic subsections in roughly chronological order. Starting with the first camera-related publications of the nineteenth century through to those released at the end of the golden age of Japan’s camera industry in the 1980s, the book immerses the reader in the work of internationally famous photographers, along with figures such as Shōji Ueda and Hiromi Tsuchida, who remain overlooked outside of Japan. The selection makes visible the diversity of Japanese imagery and approaches while also showing how magazines were a male domain that mostly excluded female photographers.

Spread from Asahi Camera, November 1936, with photographs by Nakayama Iwata

Spread from Camera Mainichi, September 1977, with work by Issei Suda

The authors have also compiled photographers’ writings that accompanied their images in the magazines, ranging from the realist master Ihei Kimura’s descriptions of his documentary approach toward photographing farming villages in Akita to an imagined, humorous dialogue, with erotic undertones, between a photographer and his subject by Araki. Often translated into English for the first time, these texts reveal how words were often significant components of the visual layouts.

The book immerses the reader in the work of internationally famous photographers, along with figures such as Shōji Ueda and Hiromi Tsuchida, who remain overlooked outside of Japan.

Reproductions from difficult-to-access early magazines that appear in the book are particularly valuable. Hanzai Kagaku, from 1932, features captivating montages that were created collaboratively. An editor provided photographers with a theme: for example, “evoke the atmosphere of the train terminal” using specific motifs, such as a “bustling train platform.” The resulting photographs were published as artistic collages with the editor’s original prompts, creating a fascinating interplay of image and text, of assignment and photographic interpretation. The 1940s war propaganda magazine Front contains striking photographs by Kimura and designs by Hiromu Hara. It is also refreshing to see iconic photographs from the 1960s to 1980s in their original context, including Araki’s first major work, Sacchin, from 1964, Takuma Nakahira’s Fūkei (1970), Masahisa Fukase’s Ravens (1976–82), and Kikuji Kawada’s series Los Caprichos (1972).

Spread from Camera, October 1949, with work by Shōji Ueda
All photographs from Ryūichi Kaneko, Masako Toda, and Ivan Vartanian, Japanese Photography Magazines 1880s–1980s (Goliga, 2022)

The idea for Japanese Photography Magazines was born when Kaneko and Vartanian collaborated on an earlier project about 1960s-to-1970s Japanese photobooks. Vartanian realized that “a discussion of photobooks required a considerable understanding of photography magazines, because that culture was the context and system through which the photobooks from Japan were greatly informed.” Japanese Photography Magazines, a seven-year undertaking, is a well-researched, balanced, and sensitively designed book that provides a compelling story and convincingly presents the magazine format as a major, genre-defining space.

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Japanese Photography Magazines is also the last major contribution by the legendary Kaneko, whose death in 2021 shocked the Japanese photography community. In addition to being thirty-second in the lineage of monks in charge of the Tokyo Buddhist temple Shogyo-in, he was a pioneering historian, teacher, and curator of Japanese photography, and an avid collector of magazines and books. Without Kaneko’s expertise and collection, this impressive publication would not have taken shape. It will, hopefully, contribute to more in-depth research on overlooked Japanese photographers and Japan’s unparalleled photography culture, beyond the “fetishizing” of vintage prints and photobooks as collectors’ items.

This article originally appeared in Aperture, issue 251, “Being & Becoming: Asian in America,” in The PhotoBook Review.

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Published on August 08, 2023 11:44

August 4, 2023

Reagan Louie on Surviving the American Dream

In the 1970s Reagan Louie moved to San Francisco to take a teaching job. The city still had a countercultural flair, and Louie, who at the time considered himself something of a rebel, began documenting the streets and vibrant businesses of its Chinatown. He later traveled to China, connecting to his family’s history and capturing the country’s rapid pace of change. By now, he has spent more than fifty years exploring issues of migration, cultural transformation, and intergenerational dialogue through photography.

As the son of immigrant parents, Louie’s decision to take an art path was a bold one. He studied with such major figures as Robert Heinecken and Walker Evans, and considers Chauncey Hare, the photographer-activist who famously abandoned the art world to focus on the plight of workers, a mentor, even though technically Hare was Louie’s own student. Louie also often felt estranged from the art world. After graduate school at Yale, he almost gave up on art, taking odd jobs digging sewers before pushing himself to return to photography so that he could pursue his original “intent to understand and discover the world.”

In 2022, Louie’s work was included in one of three inaugural exhibitions related to the Asian American Art Initiative (AAAI) at the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, an ongoing initiative dedicated to the study of Asian American art. Here, Louie speaks with Aleesa Pitchamarn Alexander, codirector of AAAI, about his artistic journey and the stakes today for Asian American visibility.

Reagan Louie, San Francisco Chinatown, Henry Chong Rice Shop, 1979

Reagan Louie, Jiao, Hefei, China, 1980

Aleesa Pitchamarn Alexander: Let’s talk about this particular moment we’re in, which is both difficult and celebratory for Asian Americans.

Reagan Louie: Yes. Our talk is taking place at the beginning of the Lunar New Year and a few days after two mass shootings by Asian American men. For me, it represents the kind of ultimate American assimilation—these two men shot and killed as Americans, not as Asians. The tragedy illustrates a lot of things that I felt. They were unseen and isolated. That reveals to me this irony of the promise of the American dream, which can never be fully realized by people of color. They can never become white. For Asians, that foreclosure is double, because we’re still perceived as being quite exotic and inscrutable, and, therefore, forever alien.

This is, I think, what my work is about—being both Asian and American. It’s kind of like a Venn diagram, where the Asian circle and the American circle overlap. That union between the two circles of identity is what matters. Perseverance is the hallmark of my life, a quality I share with all Asian American artists, if not all artists. I’m not really sure where it comes from. But surely it has to do with survival, this profound need we have, or I have as an artist, and the success, if I’ve had any successes—I’ve had some—has been accompanied by many moments of feeling unseen and marginalized. In fact, I first believed that I had to turn my back on my Chinese culture to achieve the American dream, to be successful.

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Alexander: You’re reflecting on your more than fifty-year-long career from a certain vantage point. In the early phases of your career, how much do you feel these factors of identity, both from your position as an Asian American and from how you and your work were seen, impacted the way that you moved through school or the art world? I’m thinking, of course, of your early experiences with Robert Heinecken and, later, Walker Evans, both of whom you studied with. To what extent did these questions come up then for you?

Louie: Almost never. Because at that time, it was all about formalism, and any other conversation was irrelevant. In the 1970s, there was no interest, like there is now, in any of the other questions, particularly around identity. There was always this struggle going on between my Asian side, which was almost the opposite sometimes of American behavior and values, which had privilege over your Eastern ideas or values or culture. You had to be extroverted, boisterous in America, not stoic. Hubris always triumphs over humility, and individualism over the collective. So these were all dynamics that were internal in the work I did.

Until college, I was a pretty indifferent student. I wasn’t your typical model Asian American student. I nearly flunked all my math and science classes. But somehow, in my first year, I took an art class as a gut course. But I was enchanted. It opened me up to new ways of looking and being and understanding the world, a new way of communicating, and I developed a curiosity that has remained to this day. This was a moment when the world was changing. I’m a child of the 1960s, and there was a bit of a rebel in me. I was seeking truth and light and beauty and all that. I was a romantic. I still am in a lot of ways.

This fusion in using the camera to find my Chinese, non-Western self comes with many obstacles, including adopting its logic and its values.

Alexander: That also makes me think about going back even further into your life—your mother and your father, and their roots, and how you came to be.

Louie: There was no precedent for becoming an artist. Growing up, I recall going to a museum only once. My family didn’t have time or interest in cultural matters, really. They were too busy making a living, like most people in that generation. So when I decided to become an artist, and not become a lawyer or a doctor, or at least a pharmacist, and studied art instead, I really knew deep down I had to abandon my family for the moment. Abandon those obligations, familial obligations of being the oldest son, and all those expectations that come along with it. I had to turn away from my Chinese self. I mean, literally, physically. I just didn’t see them for a while.

I chose this tool, photography, which is the quintessential Western invention, a paradox that both estranged me from my Chinese self and my family but also gave me a way back to discover and to integrate those two selves. This fusion in using the camera to find my Chinese, non-Western self comes with many obstacles, including adopting its logic and its values, the machine logic, which you kind of resist.

There’s a critical divide that needs to be recognized, or reckoned: immigration to America before 1965, and after. I’m a boomer. My generation’s experiences are more connected to that first wave of Chinese immigration that began in the nineteenth century. But I’m somewhere in the middle if we consider that the Chinese American experience is a continuum from the 1800s until now. My father was born in China. Even though I’m fourth generation on my mother’s side, which is very unusual, I identify as a second-generation citizen because my mother’s family really grew up in isolation, away from the surrounding communities. My first language is Cantonese. We lived in a pretty enclosed world. Both waves of Chinese immigrants came for the same reasons—for a better life for their families, for themselves. But we faced very different kinds of receptions. The pre-1965 immigrants faced open hostilities, physical violence, whereas the post-1965 generation was welcomed, albeit with more subtle forms of racism and suspicion.

Reagan Louie, San Francisco Chinatown, Golden Dragon Restaurant, 1979

Alexander: We see that continuing through today, especially during the pandemic. So, in order to pursue photography, you essentially had to turn away from your family. But then, it comes back around that your work is, in many respects, largely about your family—and family in general. I wonder if you might share a little about that process, from arriving at your subject matter in San Francisco’s Chinatown in the earlier part of your career to how you ended up in China.

Louie: There was no way I could explain, even to myself, why I wanted to be an artist—and especially to my family. They took comfort that I went to good schools, and then later on, I became a professor—so that’s how they saw me. Art? They just couldn’t figure it out.

It was only when I came with my father to China in 1981, into his village that he had left when he was nine years old, that my photography made sense to them. That’s when the circle closed, and I really understood for the first time what my work meant to me, what I was trying to do. Eventually, I reconnected with my family.

I moved to San Francisco to accept a teaching job at the San Francisco Art Institute in the 1970s. San Francisco was a beautiful place then. It was still basking in the afterglow of the ’60s. I began photographing in San Francisco’s Chinatown really out of convenience. I lived there, and it looked exotic. I lived around the outskirts, the border of Chinatown and North Beach, in this alleyway called Fresno Alley. Its claim to fame was that my building was the location of a Woody Allen film. It was still really boho life there. You saw the North Beach poets still wandering around, trying to channel Ginsberg.

Reagan Louie, Aunt in SRO, San Francisco Chinatown, 2005

Reagan Louie, San Francisco Chinatown, Jackson Street, 1979

While I began photographing there out of convenience, it was also a place of my ancestors and memories. Many of my family members, including my grandfather and father, lived and worked in Chinatown initially. I deployed a nineteenth-century stand camera, 4-by-5. I wanted to contrast the incredible detail that camera renders with the motion blurs of people’s movements. I saw them as my ancestors, as ghosts.

Chinatown led to China. In 1980, I answered an ad in a Chinese newspaper to study in China. That’s when I began my forty-year odyssey. Unbeknownst to me, what I was doing was attempting to find another way, a truer life. Again, finding your cultural roots, or even thinking about that as a source for your art, wasn’t heard of then in high-art circles. That was taboo, really. I thought that’s what I was doing, but I didn’t tell myself that was the goal. In fact, I said the opposite: I was taking my educated eyes to picture this new exotic world. I couldn’t really acknowledge the real reason for going to China, my need for some kind of authenticity.

Alexander: Why do you think it is that it took both you and your father going to China for him to understand your practice more fully?

Louie: It was less what we spoke about than our actions. Toisanese especially, and my family in particular, are very laconic. My dad, me, my son, we’re all men of few words. So what spoke to me was watching him become a nine-year-old again. He had tears in his eyes most of the time. I saw his gentleness, which I had never seen, because to survive as an Asian male at that time, when I was growing up (and still, maybe), you had to be a tough guy.

With the two eras of Chinese immigrants, the work that’s produced by the artists of those eras really manifests their time, the conditions they faced. The art made in internment camps, photographically—like the pictures made by Toyo Miyatake—is a declaration that they were here. Right? They weren’t going away. I feel really strongly about that. Whereas the work being made now, which is wonderful and celebratory, it’s about living life out loud.

Reagan Louie, Vegetable Garden, Wing Wor, 1983

Reagan Louie, Betelnut Stand, Taiwan, 1997

Alexander: Why do you think it was difficult for you to acknowledge that the need for authenticity was a primary driving force for you to go back to China?

Louie: Again, I drank the Kool-Aid. It was all about formalism and nothing else.

Alexander: Many of the early Chinese immigrants to the United States came from a specific province, Guangdong. This is to say, there are many distinct provinces in China with their own dialects, mores, and histories. Yet here, sometimes, there’s a tendency to view China, this massive country, as a kind of monolith.

Louie: Before I began working in China, I vaguely knew that China was vast and diverse, filled with different dialects and cultural practices. But I didn’t realize to what extent until I got there. I really detest anything pan-Asian right now. I don’t even like the word Asian American.

Alexander: Speaking of the term Asian American, we got to know each other through the Asian American Art Initiative, a project I codirect. Your work was included last year in the exhibition At Home/On Stage: Asian American Representation in Photography and Film, curated by my colleague Maggie Dethloff at the Cantor. I recall that you wrote beautifully in a private note to Maggie and me about what it means to be included in an exhibition like that, even when you don’t love the term Asian American.

Louie: I was struck by how much art in the exhibition came from suffering pain and grief, which I could identify with. We know the pain and suffering caused by internment, or the history of violence directed at Asian Americans, which continues to this day. But equally important for me was the daily pushing against grief and loss that we face, that’s faced by every Asian American every day—racism and discrimination, not being fully seen, just those daily microaggressions against people of color. But in the exhibition, we see Asian American artists pushing back against all that discrimination and hate; from their pain and hardship they made tremendous meaning. Art that gave them solace. Which is why all the work for me is filled with healing joy. It was never bitter. The art in the show reminded us that beauty and grace can arise from pain and loss. It’s that irrepressible human spirit.

Reagan Louie, Beijing, from the series Towards a Truer Life, 1987

Reagan Louie, Chengdu, 2002

Alexander: Recently there’s been a lot of critique of the racially specific exhibition model. From your perspective, working all these decades both within and on the perimeter of the art world, what’s your thought on this kind of model of inclusion in the museum space?

Louie: Super complicated question. I refuse to do this, to perform our Asian-ness. Right? I think it’s great that museums and institutions are recognizing that we’re coming from a different place than just formalism. But I am skeptical sometimes about putting in one or two pictures of an Asian American artist, or whatever. How much difference does that really make? Is it really transformative? I’ve seen too many instances where it’s not. In fact, it’s reductive. It diminishes the work of that artist, seen in that context. If you truly want to make a statement, you’ve got to make the big move. Turn the entire museum inside out. Not just one or two pictures but an entire show. That’s what’s going to pull in new audiences.

Maybe this is a good moment to give you an example of an experience I had with all this in the ’70s. I was a photographer during the very beginning of photography as a fine art. At the top was MoMA, in New York. The museum had a generous portfolio-review policy. The drill was you’d drop off your portfolio and return to pick up the work a few days later. The first time I dropped off the work, it was a tray of color slides I’d made while I was in California that year after I’d returned. They were of places around Sacramento, where I grew up, and they were very formal, beautiful pictures—and I was surprised when I was invited to come in and speak with the curators. They thought the pictures had a sweet quality and asked me to keep them updated. But the reception for my work made in China was much chillier. I couldn’t articulate what it meant.

I’m embracing values that I once rejected. Inclusion, not exclusion. Authenticity, not artificiality.

As I’ve talked about, I didn’t know why I had gone back to China. And there were awkward silences with the curator when the conversation veered away from formal aesthetic issues. At one point, I remember I was trying to talk about my feelings, to try to communicate what was at stake for me. The curator was dismissive. He said he didn’t care about my feelings, only his. It just shut down that conversation. I was really pondering whether I had what it took to be an artist. I was really dejected after that encounter. I tried to step away from art and tried to quit. I applied to business school. I was convinced I didn’t measure up. And I was also tired of always being in debt.

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Fortunately, no business school accepted me. But I didn’t know what else to do. Art was the only thing I knew. So, I rolled the dice again. I went into more debt and moved to Beijing, a decision that wreaked havoc on my marriage. I photographed with crazy, wild abandon. Every day, I would wake up as early as I could and stay out as late as I could, taking as many pictures as I could. I shot over three thousand rolls of film that year, 1987. I tried to find aspects of my Chinese self in them, especially the men. I was unknowingly trying to find my Chinese soul that could coexist with my American self. That year something had shifted. I really felt I had broken new ground.

I returned to MoMA with my portfolio, having no expectations. This time, it was even worse—the receptionist just returned the portfolio with no comment. But then, one of the curators at MoMA left a message that said, “We returned your portfolio by mistake. Could you please come back tomorrow with the portfolio?” Which led to, the following year, in 1988, the show at MoMA—New Photography 4: Patrick Faigenbaum, Reagan Louie, and Michael Schmidt.

Reagan Louie, Olympic Park, Beijing, 2008
All photographs courtesy the artist

Alexander: So, in the end, the result was positive. But it still gives me tremendous unease, as I’m sure it gives you—this unstable and unproductive ground of constantly thinking about or relying on forms of validation from predominantly white institutions. And yet, we want to forge careers in the arts. What do we do? What should we do to not be beholden to these types of external forms of validation when that is the most obvious path to mainstream success?

Louie: We have to take nonobvious paths. We’re in a much better place than when I was coming up. Back then, there was so much power concentrated in one institution, almost in one person. It kind of was mimicking, maybe, the time of Abstract Expressionism, when you had Clement Greenberg or Harold Rosenberg creating a school of painting.

Alexander: When we first came into contact, I know you were at a difficult moment in your life, and you were feeling like that was the end of your artistic career, essentially. And yet, here you are in a moment when there has been increased interest in your work. What does it mean for you to step into that reception rather than recede from it?

Louie: It’s been a struggle. I’ve found new allies, new communities. It really pulled me back from the brink. When we first met, I was just realizing the price I had paid, the price we have to pay to succeed in this country, to be a Chinese American. I was in a very dark void. I really thought I was finished and would disappear. But now, I’m embracing values that I once rejected. Inclusion, not exclusion. Authenticity, not artificiality. Heart values, not head values. And joy, not suffering. I’m not fully there yet. But I can see that these are options. And I’m trying to get back to work.

This article originally appeared in Aperture, issue 251, “Being & Becoming: Asian in America.”

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Published on August 04, 2023 08:58

July 29, 2023

Jade Thiraswas’s Sensitive Chronicle of Pride and Mourning in the American South

There are many signals to the start of spring in southeastern Louisiana. By early March, during a season of festivals and parades, city and country begin to overflow with creeping vegetation, boats leave their docks on the levee to become floating social spaces, clothes get thinner and lighter, mornings and evenings open and close with the thick smell of blooming jasmine. The air, not yet oppressive with humidity, presents opportunities to be outside and in community with others. Crawfish boils, carnivals, krewes, and second lines signal the arrival of a weekend and time in the garden organizing wild plants into submission becomes urgent maintenance work. Suddenly, for a few brief weeks, a region dominated by the tidal forces of water and weather allows human and climate to enact a short, soft truce. Hurricane season remains in the future, leaving just enough room for those of us who live in this challenging place to fall in love with New Orleans anew.

For the photographer Jade Thiraswas, the opportunities provided by the return of spring in Louisiana as explored in her recent series Tiger Balm (2023) are rendered more complex. While dark murky waters, Spanish moss, and the gentle curvatures of the bayous all make appearances, they are not left to their own devices to run wild—something small, but significant interrupts the urge to let Louisiana trade on its usual tricks of unbridled revelry and nature devoid of conflict. Across the series, Thiraswas’s images work to hold the idyllic at bay to provide a foundation for interrogating the many complexities and tensions of life and living in New Orleans as a young woman, as a daughter, as an immigrant.

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Thiraswas forms a multivocal, fragmented narrative of life as a Thai American in the South, and the cultural and political entanglements experienced by the many diasporas of immigrants that have settled in the curving crescents of the Mississippi River. “I wanted to take notice of what the American Dream looks like here,” she says, “to see the ways in which public celebration, different forms of pride, and at times, mourning all exist together.” In her community, Southeast Asian and Southeast Cajun cultures share these landscapes and embroider upon one another, moving the photographic tropes and expectations of the American South (and southeastern Louisiana, specifically) into an arrangement of home as inseparable from the effects of colonial violence, precarity, and systemic inequities.

Tiger Balm brings together sequences of landscapes, domestic interiors, and social gatherings taken in and around Thiraswas’s family home in Mandeville, the Tchefuncte River, and across Louisiana’s southeastern river parishes. Scenes of folks of all ethnicities and ages competing in a local crawfish boil, a delicacy beloved in Cajun and Asian communities alike, offer a proposal of difference as integrative and celebratory. Other images do not resonate as symmetrically: a wide shot of young high school baseball players warmed by sweat, sunset, and fairground lights ambling toward the camera tells a story of white male youth’s uncertain swagger; an image of an older Southeast Asian woman, resplendently dressed in the glowing golds and yellows of traditional Cambodian garb, turns away from our gaze as if holding onto or protecting something for herself. An abandoned boat half sinking in muddy waters, lost to time and neglect, rubs up against an image of a small black sign celebrating private property rights and warning against trespassing, its angry insistence nearly defeated by glossy green foliage. Nighttime images cover the watery environs in a flat, thick darkness. Across this series, Thiraswas reminds us that the landscape is not so smoothly or equitably traversed, that there are quiet, dark things lurking.

Thiraswas’s portraits of her father and the interior rooms of her parents’ home are striking for their emotion. At ease in front of his daughter’s camera, Thiraswas’s father, Paul, tends lovingly to his outdoor arboretum and tinkers with a vintage car in his garage—familiar activities of an older, Southeast Asian patriarch committed to caretaking and industriousness. This cycle of spring-cleaning aches against the tender images of his late son Ty’s bedroom and personal space. Ty was lost to the opioid epidemic in 2021, and a table filled with action figures, high school graduation ephemera, burnt CDs, and childhood photographs seizes upon the bounty and possibilities inherent in a life cut short and the individual tragedies experienced by so many—too many—families living, working, surviving, and making do far away from another place. For Thiraswas, these small beauties and unforgiving travesties are all part of what it truly means to live here in Louisiana—to acknowledge the jasmine blooming despite or alongside so much lack and loss.

Jade Thiraswas’s photographs were created using a FUJIFILM GFX50SII camera.

All photographs by Jade Thiraswas from the series Tiger Balm, 2023, for Aperture

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Published on July 29, 2023 08:33

July 21, 2023

The Photographer Searching for Freedom in Palestine

Adam Rouhana has visited Palestine every year of his life. Some of his earliest memories unfold under his grandparents’ grove of lemon and apricot trees, where Rouhana and his cousins would play hide and seek. His family lives on the slopes of Mount Carmel, near Haifa, overlooking a river valley—“a wadi,” he recently told me—with the Mediterranean Sea shining in the distance. “I remember laying in my room in my grandparents’ house, listening to a Radiohead CD my brother gave me,” Rouhana says. “I didn’t really understand what occupation meant at that point.”

Rouhana grew up in Boston and now lives between London and Jerusalem. According to his family’s oral history, his ancestors immigrated to Palestine four hundred years ago from what is now Lebanon. “But,” he adds, “Israeli policy explicitly denies that the land where I’m from, and where my Palestinian ancestors have lived for centuries, is my homeland.” Rouhana has been taking pictures in Palestine since he first picked up a camera at twelve, and he now works under the guidance of Gilles Peress, a Magnum photographer known for covering conflicts such as the Troubles in Northern Ireland and the 1979 Iranian Revolution. Rouhana’s photographs reject state-sanctioned narratives and instead oscillate between moments of quiet beauty and brutal scenes of colonization, providing a contemporary Palestinian view of life under Israeli occupation.

In 2008, in a prerecorded address shown at the inaugural Palestine Festival of Literature, the critic John Berger noted, “Time passes, but what makes sense of human lives stays the same.” Berger then read “Letter from Gaza” by Ghassan Kanafani, a Palestinian Marxist author. In Kanafani’s epistolary short story, an unnamed protagonist visits his thirteen-year-old niece, Nadia, in a hospital. Shaken by what he sees, he writes to his childhood friend and pleads for him to return to Palestine: “But you, return to us! Come back, to learn from Nadia’s leg, amputated from the top of the thigh, what life is and what existence is worth. Come back, my friend! We are all waiting for you.” In the video recording, Berger’s lips tremble as he reads the last line. He puts his head in his hands, and the screen fades to black.

Rouhana’s photos of Palestine search for this idea of “what life is and what existence is worth.” In one image, a young boy closes his eyes, pressing watermelon flesh into his face. The pulp shines red against the dusty background. In others, Rouhana joins thousands of Palestinians crossing one of the heavily militarized checkpoints on their way to work. The flash of his Leica illuminates a sea of Palestinian faces interrupted by sharp metallic barriers. In yet another image, young twin girls in matching floral dresses stand in front of the Israeli Qalandia checkpoint, the primary access point for Palestinians between Jerusalem and the West Bank. The image is blunt, beautiful, absurd even. To exist in this landscape is to be devoured by this machine—a machine with surveillance-camera eyes, barbed-wire teeth, a body made of shabby concrete and sharpened steel.

Rouhana hopes to formulate “new Palestinian representations” while simultaneously questioning his position as a Palestinian American behind the camera. He recognizes his privileged position as both an American citizen and a white-passing Palestinian. He can take pictures where others cannot. “The reason I take photos is to understand and ask questions,” he says. “I want to make images where the viewer can make up their own mind.” These photographs provide alternatives to the stereotypical images of the country: explosions, funerals, Israeli bulldozers, and protests in the streets. While this type of documentation provides value, Rouhana orients his pictures toward the future. “Photography has the productive ability to break the system by imagining something else, by seeing something else,” he says.

Over the past five years, Rouhana has actively sought community among other Palestinians. “Only other Palestinians know what it’s like to be oppressed by Israel in the way that we are,” he says. He studies the ways that other subaltern populations can understand and inform Palestinian liberation. “Ruth Wilson Gilmore says freedom is a place,” says Rouhana, referring to the African American activist, scholar, and prison abolitionist. “I would add that freedom is a place you can call home.” In Kanafani’s novella Return to Haifa, one of the characters, Said, says, “I’m looking for the true Palestine, the Palestine that’s more than memories, more than peacock feathers, more than a son, more than scars written by bullets on the stairs.” Rouhana will return to Palestine this year, like every year, and he will continue to look for a homeland he has always known but remains out of reach, like a gated pool under the hot sun. One day, he hopes, he will find it.

All photographs by Adam Rouhana from the series Before Freedom, 2022–ongoing
Courtesy the artist

Read more from our series “Introducing,” which highlights exciting new voices in photography.

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Published on July 21, 2023 10:18

How Gina Osterloh’s Photographs Flirt with the Limits of Recognition

In Gina Osterloh’s photographs, there are subjects but no faces. Bodies are pitched at sly angles or obscured by sundry materials, boxed into sparse rooms with impossible vanishing points. These abstract scenes and their solitary figures are usually staged more as tableaux than conventional portraiture, but even to wonder at which point the former arrangement becomes the latter is to ask: Where, in this image, does the subject end and the world begin?

If visual abstraction is about flirting with the limits of recognition, testing our ability to name what we see, in Osterloh’s work it becomes a way of questioning how we parse identity at such thresholds of perception. Her interest in what she has called “the flickering between legibility and illegibility” is informed by her experience as a mixed-race Filipinx American raised in Ohio, but her images rarely contain overt markers of identity. Only those in the series Somewhere Tropical (2005–6), one of which is on the cover of this issue, exhibit any cultural specificity: figures clad in denim and camouflage assert the textiles of Americana against a saccharine sunset in the frond-filled tropics.

Gina Osterloh, Blind Rash, 2008

Made during graduate school at the University of California, Irvine, Osterloh’s early images from Somewhere Tropical introduce her fascination with camouflage as a way of testing boundaries—of an unsteady self, of a subject’s racial legibility. She’s drawn to the edges of physical materials, where one texture guards its unity against another; she has been animated by a “desire to intimately press and touch photographic space itself,” she told me recently. Perhaps it’s unsurprising that she first came to art making through performance and installation, modes to which she occasionally returns.

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Paper has long been Osterloh’s material of choice: in the piece Rash Room (2008), it is used as an epidermal extension, a “membrane, a kind of second skin,” the artist says. It becomes a textural surface for mark making, too, pushed to abstraction in her many drawing series or entwined with performance in installation projects including Group Dynamics and Improper Light (2012). Even as Osterloh cycles through more tactile modes of practice—recently, steel sculptures—what persists is her use of photography as a tool for staging visual contradictions, a strategy for playing with the perceptual mysteries of depth and flatness.

Gina Osterloh, Group Dynamic, 2012

Gina Osterloh, Pressing Against Looking, Fixed, 2019
All photographs courtesy the artist and Higher Pictures, New York

In Holding Zero (2020), for instance, a gridded backdrop invokes constraint while its freehand lines tease at sketchy disorder. Centered in these pictures is another paradox: Osterloh’s figure is anonymized and doubled, one mummified in black tape and reinserted in the frame as a printed mount while the other hides behind its monstrous duplicate, an absence that becomes a kind of shield. Here, Osterloh wanted her entire body facing the camera, “cloaked in refusal but also wrapped in something that is protecting it, preserving it,” she explains.

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This, she reminds me, is what photography does: it flattens, captures, regulates—but also protects, preserves. What riper medium is there for exploring such perceptual borderlands, when the very act of framing is also a kind of touch, a means of pushing subjects and forms into one another and seeing what they can withstand? The photographs in Pressing Against Looking (2019) are perhaps the keenest expression of this approach: Osterloh’s figure, sitting fully frontal, bars her vision with a long pole in each hand, two stark vectors slicing up the frame. Eyes pressed against their blunt heft, she thwarts her own vision along with the viewer’s, denying us the intimacy of seeing her seeing. The camera and its frame might press her into a structure of visibility, but she, too, presses, against its gaze and our insistence on making her legible.

This article originally appeared in Aperture, issue 251, “Being & Becoming: Asian in America.” Gina Osterloh: Mirror Shadow Shape is on view at the Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, Ohio, through October 8, 2023.

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Published on July 21, 2023 10:15

July 18, 2023

An Artist Sees the Potential for Healing in the Aftermath of War

On the third floor of the New Museum in New York, the elevator doors part to reveal a series of framed photographs in which uniformed soldiers stare stoically at the camera, a groom wraps an arm around his smiling bride on their wedding day, women and children pose for formal studio portraits, and extended families gather around dining tables eating and laughing. It’s easy to imagine the mix of black-and-white, sepia, and color prints in the background of someone’s living room, rather than hanging on a gallery wall. These moments, spanning several decades, represent generations of the Vietnamese Senegalese community in Dakar, whose stories have often gone untold or have been deliberately suppressed.

Installation view of Tuan Andrew Nguyen: Radiant Remembrance, New Museum, New York, 2023. Photograph by Dario Lasagni

In Radiant Remembrance, Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s first solo exhibition in a US museum, the Vietnamese artist expands the possibilities of collective memory and storytelling through film and video installations, as well as archival material and sculptures. While research remains integral to Nguyen’s practice, he also understands its limits. “I would go out on a limb and say that the archive is quite useless,” he tells the exhibition’s curator Vivian Crockett in a conversation for the accompanying catalog. He clarifies that he’s referring to official records, which often preserve only one side or a partial version of history. Nguyen explains, “I use the archive as a counterpoint to what I’m doing, creating a counternarrative and working with people that are marginalized or have been disregarded in the dominant narrative to bring their stories to the forefront.”

Still from Tuan Andrew Nguyen, The Specter of Ancestors Becoming, 2019 Video still from The Specter of Ancestors Becoming

Still from Tuan Andrew Nguyen, The Specter of Ancestors Becoming, 2019

In addition to connecting with families in Senegal who sent him the archival photographs installed at the exhibition’s entrance, Nguyen collaborated with the descendants of the Senegalese soldiers who, during the 1940s and ’50s, were sent by the French to fight anticolonial uprisings in Southeast Asia, and the Vietnamese wives they brought back home with them. He captures their complicated legacies in The Specter of Ancestors Becoming (2019), a “metafictional” project, first shown at the Dakar Biennale in 2022, that features imagined conversations narrated over four video channels. In one of three stories, a woman silhouetted in profile, speaking into a microphone, recounts a memory in French; the English subtitle reads, “I remember you stood in front of a rifle in Indochina to save a black man.” Timeworn portraits flash across an adjacent screen, showing a younger version of the grandmother whom the speaker is addressing and the Black man in question, her grandfather. The reenactment of a granddaughter combing her grandmother’s hair appears on a different screen, while on another a woman faces the camera directly and mouths the words heard in the narration: “Did the black soldier return?” The immersive approach brings to life the anecdotes hidden within family photos while simultaneously acknowledging the gaps for what may never be known.

Installation view of Tuan Andrew Nguyen: Radiant Remembrance, New Museum, New York, 2023. Photograph by Dario Lasagni

Because No One Living Will Listen / Người Sống Chẳng Ai Nghe (2023), Nguyen’s most recent film to examine Vietnam’s postcolonial history, takes an even greater speculative turn. As with the previous project, the two-channel video relies on an imagined conversation, this time by way of a woman’s letter to her father who died after defecting from the French army during the same anticolonial uprisings fought by Senegalese soldiers. In this case, her father was one of many Moroccans sent to Vietnam, who left behind a monument: the Moroccan Gate in Hanoi. The structure appears throughout the film, ultimately becoming a surreal portal that connects father and daughter, who says to him: “If I find you, I’ll bring you back to Morocco. But if I can’t find you, I’ll bring Morocco to you.” On the second screen, the portal erupts into flames as the woman fades away. Accompanying the film is Letters from the Other Side (2023), two wall hangings embroidered with text lifted from propaganda leaflets, which were intended to persuade the North African colonial soldiers to the Vietnamese cause.

Color photograph of the Morocco Gate in Vietnam

Tuan Andrew Nguyen, Moroccan Gate, Ba Vì, Viet Nam, 2023

Found objects and sculptures become physical embodiments of the traumas explored in the single-channel video The Unburied Sounds of a Troubled Horizon (2022). The film, a work of fiction grounded in historical events, follows a character named Nguyệt who makes art out of junkyard scraps and weapons leftover from when the US bombed the Vietnamese province of Quảng Trị. Those pieces take the form of Alexander Calder–inspired mobiles, which Nguyen cast from a brass artillery shells and unexploded ordnances. A Rising Moon through the Smoke (2022) reflects fragments of the video projection on its hanging mirrored surfaces, emphasizing the relationship between the film and the “testimonial object”—a concept Nguyen borrows from scholar Marianne Hirsch. Another sculpture, Unexploded Resonance (2022), reconfigures an M117 bomb, previously dropped from an American B-52 plane, into a temple bell. Further drawing upon the film’s Buddhist imagery, Shattered Arms (2022) features a found Quan Yin carving whose missing hand and fingers Nguyen replaced with new appendages also cast from brass artillery shells. This act of restoration and transformation echoes the real-life stories depicted in the film, such as that of Hồ Văn Lai, whose encounter with an unexploded landmine as a child resulted in the loss of his limbs and an eye.

Video still from The Unburied Sounds of a Troubled Horizon

Still from Tuan Andrew Nguyen, The Unburied Sounds of a Troubled Horizon, 2022
All works courtesy the artist and James Cohan, New York

Together, Nguyen’s multimedia works consider the potential for healing in the aftermath of colonial violence and war. By incorporating pieces of historical “evidence” alongside first-person accounts, the artist reminds us how large-scale events reverberate through interpersonal stories and vice versa. The process of remembrance similarly unlocks the complex lives captured in those family photographs. Even then, Nguyen’s art only begins to scratch the surface of the many entangled global histories that have been overlooked, perhaps, but not forgotten.

Tuan Andrew Nguyen: Radiant Remembrance is on view at the New Museum, New York, through September 17, 2023.

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Published on July 18, 2023 14:13

Rineke Dijkstra’s Captivating Videos Portray the Gestures of Youth

A young ballerina attempts to perfect a dance routine, a schoolgirl draws an artwork, gymnasts practice exercises: the Dutch artist Rineke Dijkstra is masterful at filming her models so the viewer never forgets that her sitters know they are being watched. In Dijkstra’s well-known photographic portraits, this is obvious because her subjects look directly at the camera. In her videos, though, they rarely do—unless their gaze crosses it because of their movements. Still, the models in Dijkstra’s videos act as if they are keenly aware of the camera’s presence, without ever being theatrical. I See You, Dijkstra’s current exhibition at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie (MEP) in Paris, highlights this aspect of her work, displaying four video projections alongside a few supplementary photographs, all of which depict the actions of mostly girls: ballerinas, gymnasts, and schoolchildren. Each work is a study of self-presentation where the camera is an interlocutor. In these videos, Dijkstra’s models command attention by showing the viewer what they are capable of, whether it is a particular skill, the completion of a task, or an opinion of an artwork. Their absorption possesses the same presence that the outward-looking subjects of Dijkstra’s photographs have.

Video still of a young girl in a gray sweater sitting on a floor and drawing

Still from Rineke Dijkstra, Ruth Drawing Picasso, 2009

Known for her portraits of adolescents and young adults, Dijkstra, who has exhibited for over thirty years, has been the subject of major solo retrospectives at museums such as Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum, the Guggenheim Museum in New York, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Unlike in the works of other contemporary photographers such as Collier Schorr or Roe Ethridge that incorporate the language of advertising, Dijkstra’s synthesis, a result of her starting out as a commercial photographer, is at first less easy to spot. Her best-known work is a series of teenagers at beaches (in Poland, Ukraine, Croatia, and the US), in which she merges two different approaches to portraiture: traditional studies of specific individuals with the more sociological samples of populations. Influenced equally by August Sander and Diane Arbus, her work exhibits a productive tension between her early commercial training and the fine-art documentary tradition.

Dijkstra simultaneously makes the camera feel neutral and active, a tool through which her subjects are encouraged to present themselves.

Dijkstra has stated on many occasions that she gives her models minimal direction, wanting to let them present themselves naturally. And yet, not everyone could manage to elicit such personality or ease out of her models. In the video Ruth Drawing Picasso (2009), for example, a nine-year-old girl sits on a museum floor sketching the modernist painter’s infamous The Weeping Woman (1937). For all six minutes, the camera remains at floor level, focused on Ruth as she attempts to recreate the painting. She concentrates, she sketches, she hums and haws, she passes a crayon to a classmate sitting on the floor just outside of the frame. Much of this young girl’s willful character comes through in the faces she makes while she works; as the video began to cycle through one complete screening, I found myself smiling because of how charming she is. At a certain point, though, I wondered if her completely natural-looking concentration came from knowing she was being filmed. “Life,” writes the French filmmaker Robert Bresson, “cannot be rendered by photographic recopying of life, but by secret laws in the midst of which you can feel your models moving.” Instead of making a portrait feel less natural, awareness from the model becomes a vessel through which their character is transmitted. In a playful gesture, Ruth’s drawing of The Weeping Woman is displayed in a vitrine in the museum’s hallway adjacent to the screening room. It is titled, dated, signed, and dedicated: “For Rineke.”

Installation view of three-screen video by Rineke Dijkstra

Installation view of Rineke Dijkstra, I See a Woman Crying (Weeping Woman), 2009, MEP, Paris, 2023. Photograph by Quentin Chevrier

In I See a Woman Crying (Weeping Woman) (2009), a three-channel video that forms a sort of diptych with Ruth, a mixed group of schoolchildren wearing the same uniforms look at Picasso’s Weeping Woman, which is again outside of Dijkstra’s frame. The children describe the painting and discuss what they think it is about: what has happened to her, why she is crying. The responses, which range from projections of trouble at home to fantasies about video games and money, are charming, hilarious, and sometimes heartbreaking. It becomes a sort of collective work of criticism on the infamous portrait of Dora Maar from the perspective of children from northern England, and they clearly enjoy giving their opinions.

Their ease seems to come from Dijkstra’s filming method. She simultaneously makes the camera feel neutral and active, a tool through which her subjects are encouraged to present themselves. She creates an awareness, a certain visual reciprocity, between the viewer and model. There are little to no religious connotations in Dijkstra’s work, particularly non-Western ones, but while watching the videos, I couldn’t help but think of the Sanskrit word darshan. The word can translate very simply as “worship.” More literally, it means “glimpse” or “view,” implying visual interrelatedness between the human and the divine, and a sense of simultaneously seeing and being seen. Dijkstra’s models hold themselves in a way that manifests a secular version of this concept. Each model behaves as if they believe they can transmit themselves through the camera, not simply be captured by it.

Video still of a young girl in a pink dress in a ballet pose

Still from Rineke Dijkstra, Marianna (The Fairy Doll), 2014

The final two of the works that visitors encounter in I See You, Marianna (The Fairy Doll) and The Gymschool, were originally produced for Manifesta in 2014, the year the biennial took place in St. Petersburg. (Watching these works within the context of the ongoing invasion of Ukraine by Russian forces feels both unsettling and poignant, particularly because Dijkstra also shot in Ukraine in the 1990s.) In Marianna, a young ballerina practices The Fairy Doll, taking instructions from her off-camera teacher. As the instructor drills her further and further, for nearly twenty minutes, the girl maintains her resolve and concentration, although as the video reaches its end, she clearly attempts to ward off strain or even frustration from appearing on her face. In the accompanying photograph, the only large-scale one in the exhibition, Marianna and Sasha, Kingisepp, Russia, November 2, 2014, the ballerina and her instructor look directly at the camera, the former maintaining her poise and determination. This leads to a hallway with smaller-scale photographs of gymnasts, which introduce a video in the next room. Each figure is in mid-pose, their eyes capturing those of the viewer.

Video still of a young girl in a ballet pose

Still from Rineke Dijkstra, Eva, The Gymschool, 2014
All works courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, Paris and New York

In Gymschool, the final three-channel video, a cohort of young girls at the Zhemchuzhina Olympic School in St. Petersburg practice a particularly Russian form of training that combines gymnastics, body contortion, and ballet. The girls, ages eight to twelve, present a range of accomplishment. At the beginning of the video, the younger ones learn some of the routines, at times with an aid, such as a ball, while the older ones have mastered each of the body contortions and practice them effortlessly. While none of them look at the camera (as they do in the preceding photographs), they seem proud to display their accomplishments. As the video ends, the eldest gymnast completes a seemingly impossible contortion. Her gaze passes the camera and lands somewhere just beyond it. She smiles lightly.

Rineke Dijkstra — I See You is on view at MEP, Paris, through October 1, 2023.

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Published on July 18, 2023 14:12

July 11, 2023

An Asian American Family’s Public History and Private Rituals

Context is rarely tidy. Even as it clarifies, it confounds. Consider this: in 1982, Vincent Chin was beaten to death by two Detroit autoworkers on the night of his bachelor party. In the aftermath, he became an enduring icon of the Asian American civil rights movement. Thirty years after Chin’s murder, the photographer Jarod Lew discovered that his mother had been the one engaged to him. If this is context, I wondered, viewing Lew’s family portraits in his series In Between You and Your Shadow (2021–ongoing), what to do with it?

In one photograph, Lew’s mother hides her face behind a bouquet of bright spring flowers. In another, two vacant chairs sit against the wall of his aunt’s Chinese restaurant in Metro Detroit. I admit I tried to make such images carry the loss of a man the photographer never knew, could never know, his absence making it possible (though who knows) for Lew to be here in the first place. Forking paths and multiverses, they’re in the air, imbuing our traumas and silences with the infinite weight of context—not just the past, present, and future but the what if. Yet if conveying such weight is a maximalist project, Lew’s portraits interest me because they’re deliberately uncluttered.

Jarod Lew, Untitled (Cutting Flowers), 2023

Jarod Lew, Untitled (Yellow Chairs), 2023

Still figures are neatly framed between window shutters, an open car door, shadows, light. In the restaurant, plastic tulips take the spotlight next to a Michigan Chinese mainstay, almond boneless chicken. At home, Lew’s now retired father sits in his socks and his old work uniform. One can draw a straight line from the lamp in the background, to the United States Postal Service logo, to the floor vase in the foreground—the symbol of an American institution floating between two objects that could have been acquired by googling “oriental decor.”

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Not so, Lew tells me. He grew up in this house, with that lamp and vase. After coming home from the post office, his father would sit at that ottoman to decompress and chat. Lew has his family reenact everyday rituals, from the trimming of flowers to his mother slipping food to his brother before he drives off. There’s a private intimacy here, from which the photographs also provoke a more public meaning. The lamp, the vase, the logo, the father, the socks—are the relationships among these elements complementary? Contradictory? Depends who’s looking.

Jarod Lew, Untitled (Dad the Mail Carrier), 2023

Jarod Lew, Untitled (Red Flower), 2023

Set mid-meal, mid-chat, some of the images also indicate an interruption. The subjects look back, as if aware of our looking. But these, too, are replicated scenes, the usual motion of spontaneity channeled into the stillness of control. To be aware of such control is to question the very connections that you can’t help but make.

“The connection I have for Vincent Chin was through the documentaries that I watched, based on so much pain. I can’t fully embed myself into that,” Lew explains. I question, too, the line that we feel compelled to draw from Chin to more recent incidents of violence toward Asians, from the Atlanta spa shootings, to the assaults on Asian elders, to the Monterey Park and Half Moon Bay shootings, committed by Asian male elders. As though a line would make all this tragedy more meaningful. As though there were such a thing as more meaningful.

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Lew’s work resists this pressure: control is also a means to build a protective structure around the living. When posing for the camera, Lew’s mother felt, at first, as though she were playing a character; now she’s happy playing herself. Afterward, Lew shows her the pictures on his camera, a method of instant collaboration that was one of the reasons he switched to digital from his usual film. If these photographs obscure a larger context, they do so as an act of care. I think of Grace Paley’s short story “A Conversation with My Father,” in which a writer tells her dying father different versions of a sad tale, to mixed results. “How long will it be?” he finally asks her. “Tragedy! You too. When will you look it in the face?”

The story ends on that question. But perhaps Lew’s portraits pick up the thread. Look or don’t look, they say. I’ll listen all the same.

Jarod Lew, Untitled (Mom and Jake), 2023

Jarod Lew, Untitled (Family Restaurant), 2023
All photographs from the series In Between You and Your Shadow (2021–ongoing). Courtesy the artist

This article originally appeared in Aperture, issue 251, “Being & Becoming: Asian in America.” Jarod Lew’s photographs are a continuation of his commission for Creating Stories for Tomorrow, a series produced in partnership with FUJIFILM.

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Published on July 11, 2023 08:37

July 7, 2023

Madame Yevonde’s Color Revolution

In the early 1910s, while looking through the suffragette newspaper Votes for Women, Yevonde Philone Cumbers came across an advertisement seeking a photography assistant. Her curiosity was piqued: she had been determined to find a career, believing it would aid the women’s movement, and photography was an important tool in creating suffragette propaganda. Soon, Cumbers (or Madame Yevonde, as she was called) was studying under the tutelage of Lallie Charles, at the time Britain’s most commercially successful woman portraitist. In 1914, she set up her own studio in London, in a building shared with the Women’s Institute, thus beginning a photography practice that would span over six decades.

Initially motivated by the women’s movement to pursue photography as a profession, Madame Yevonde became enamored with the craft. The first color photograph was created in 1861, but it didn’t take a foothold until much later in the twentieth century. Thus, while compositionally Madame Yevonde is an adept photographer, it’s her unconventional use of color and fantastical sets with dreamlike, mythological themes in the 1930s that makes her work so distinctive. This summer, the National Portrait Gallery (NPG) in London reopened its doors, after three years of renovations and with a new initiative to spotlight women artists, with Yevonde: Life and Colour. The exhibition serves as both a retrospective of Madame Yevonde’s work and a broader exploration of the origins of fine art color photography.

Madame Yevonde, Self-Portrait with Vivex One-shot Camera, 1937 Madame Yevonde, <em>Margaret Sweeny (Whigham, later Duchess of Argyll)</em>, 1938″> </div> <div class=

Madame Yevonde, <em>Margaret Sweeny (Whigham, later Duchess of Argyll)</em>, 1938″> </div> <div class=

Madame Yevonde, Margaret Sweeny (Whigham, later Duchess of Argyll), 1938 Madame Yevonde, <em>Dorothy Gisborne as Psyche</em>, 1935″> </div> <div class=

Madame Yevonde, Dorothy Gisborne as Psyche, 1935

Color photography was “vilely expensive” and “very complicated,” Madame Yevonde wrote in her 1940 autobiography, In Camera. Nonetheless, she became a pioneer of the Vivex process, a trichrome-printing technique developed in the late 1920s that required three color-pigment sheets, eighty steps, and twelve hours to complete. Soon after, in 1935, Kodachrome hit the market, making color photography much more accessible. This development prompted Madame Yevonde to push against the tedium of infinite blacks, grays, and whites. “‘Be original or die’ would be a good motto for photographers to adopt,” she said in an address to the Royal Photographic Society in 1936. “Let them put life and color into their work.”

Many photographers of that era held a disparaging view of color, considering it unartistic and relegating it to the realm of advertising. “It didn’t provide the lovely rich blacks and the chalky whites that artistic photography could,” says the NPG’s associate curator of photographs Clare Freestone, who organized the exhibition. William Eggleston, a proponent of color photography whose 1976 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York helped permanently shift color into the photography world, said that Henri Cartier-Bresson once dismissively told him that “color is bullshit.” (Cartier-Bresson himself did shoot in color, albeit rarely.) Madame Yevonde wasn’t deterred by the negative perceptions and forged ahead with Vivex prints. The resulting work is so vividly hued that it’s hard to believe it was made almost a century ago.

Despite the successes in her time, Madame Yevonde’s pioneering work has been overshadowed in history by her male compatriots—as is often the case for many women artists.

The exhibition will undoubtedly serve as an introduction to Madame Yevonde’s work for most visitors, but she wasn’t unknown during her time. In 1932, she had her first solo exhibition at the Albany Gallery in Mayfair, London, which was met with warm reception. Five years later, MoMA included two of her images in a photography survey: color pictures documenting the construction and interior decoration of the ocean liner RMS Queen Mary. The composition of one of these works, RMS Queen Mary, Funnel (1936), is strikingly modernist, with geometric lines and forms reminiscent of Alfred Stieglitz’s The Steerage (1907)—if The Steerage were richly saturated with shades of red.

Madamde Yevonde, RMS Queen Mary, Funnel, 1936

Madame Yevonde, Mask (Rosemary Chance), 1938

Some of the most striking images on view at the NPG hail from Madame Yevonde’s series Goddesses (1935), in which she portrays society women as figures from classical mythology. One portrait features Lady Campbell as Niobe—who, as the legend goes, wept for the deaths of her fourteen children at the cruel hands of Apollo and Artemis. Foregoing the elaborate sets she created for some of her other “goddesses,” Madame Yevonde photographed her sitter so closely that the entirety of her face isn’t in frame, just the pearlescent tears streaming down her cheeks, her agony palpable.

Madame Yevonde, Lady Dorothy (‘Dolly’) Campbell as Niobe, 1935

A particularly fascinating image in the exhibition is a portrait of the actor Joan Maude, photographed in color and later inverted into a negative image, in which Maude’s skin is rendered a shimmering cobalt blue and her hair a blinding white. “She was experimenting still,” says Freestone, who chose to present the inverted print as well as separation negatives and solarizations to demonstrate the breadth of Madame Yevonde’s work. These brilliantly-hued experimentations are the stars of the show: her black-and-white imagery, taken after the war when color film was less available, misses some of the magic that those Vivex prints hold.

Despite the successes in her time, Madame Yevonde’s pioneering work has been overshadowed in history by her male compatriots—as is often the case for many women artists. The auction and museum worlds have historically played a part in diminishing the contributions of women artists: a 2019 study showed that between 2008 and 2018, women artists accounted for only 11 percent of major museum acquisitions in the United States, and even fewer have received exhibitions dedicated solely to their work.

Yevonde: Life and Colour seems to signal a shifting tide. After acquiring her negatives in 2021, the National Portrait Gallery pulled Madame Yevonde’s existing prints from its archive, where they have mostly laid dormant since the artist herself donated them in 1971, and dedicated a show to her. It’s a clear response to a growing desire among audiences to see more historically underrecognized artists, and with this ethos, the National Portrait Gallery has reopened with a bang—and, as Madame Yevonde put it, a “riot of color.”

Yevonde: Life and Colour is on view at the National Portrait Gallery, London, through October 15, 2023.

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Published on July 07, 2023 10:37

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